I am wondering why I attempted to tackle such an issue on this beautiful day. It is a big one. But I spent my Saturday night watching a documentary film called THE BLACK WAVE that haunted me since then. It demonstrated to me two major issues about the Gulf of Mexico disaster:
- Just how important the success of President Obama securing the 20 billion fund is to begin to compensate the people of the Gulf
- Just how far we have to go.
I worry that in 20 years from now, we still won't be there.
I watched The Black Wave with my 10-year-old Saturday night, in an effort to show him what happened with another disasterous oil spill in Alaska from the Exxon Valdez on March 24th, 1989.
I explained to him that when he is a dad, with his own children, he will be explaining the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to them, the same way I was trying to show him what happened with the Exxon Valdez. I hope his story has a better ending than the one I showed him last night.
As I watched this documentary, I learned so much more than I knew about the Exxon Valdez spill. It sickened me to think that I am watching nearly the same story unfold before my eyes every day in the Gulf of Mexico.
I am comforted to think that President Obama was successful in securing the $20 billion from BP, but I realize there is a long way to go. If you watch The Black Wave, you may understand more of why I am comforted by the President's measure, and also more about why there is so much more to address.
A common voice in both the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP geyser is a woman named Riki Ott.
Riki Ott, PhD, is a community activist, a former commercial salmon "fisherm'am," and has a degree in marine toxicology with a specialty in oil pollution. She experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill—and chose to do something about it.
She is the author of Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill and Not One Drop: Promises, Betrayal, and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (Chelsea Green, 2008). She is also the founder of three nonprofit organizations that deal with lingering harm from man-made environmental disaster.
Riki lives in Cordova, Alaska.
I had learned of Riki Ott in detail only recently, as she is a regular guest on Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, and her observations about the spill in the Gulf of Mexico have been alarming to me. My gut leads me to listen to people like her, who sound alarms and ring bells in situations like this. In my experience, they are usually right. It turns out, I am probably wise to listen to Riki Ott, she has good reason to ring bells and sound alarms.
For twenty years, Riki Ott and the fishermen of the little town of Cordova, Alaska have waged the longest legal battle in U.S. history against the world’s most powerful oil company – ExxonMobil. They tell us all about the environmental, social and economic consequences of the black wave that changed their lives forever. This is the legacy of the Exxon Valdez.
That is from the introductory page for The Black Wave.
When I watched the Exxon Valdez documentary, it was surreal to hear snippets like:
We will consider whatever it takes to keep you whole. You have had some good luck and you don't realize it. You have Exxon....
Exxon experimented with different clean-up methods...
Still now, 20 years later, I am getting phone calls from people who are still sick....
...upper respiratory illness claims...
When the storm came up, it took the oil...out into the Gulf of Alaska...
They all trusted me....my biggest regret is they are all sick now. Many have probably died...
...from $150,000 a year to where I just couldn't make it financially...
Exxon was not forthcoming in paying off damages...
We ended up going to trial in 1994 with mandatory class action...
$5 billion judgement against Exxon...
Exxon will not pay a single penny of this judgement until they have exhausted every legal remedy...
Oiled residue of the Exxon Valdez 18 years later...
If you step back and look at the sound as a whole ...it's like looking at a patient who has cancer and saying, look, most of the patient is okay. It's just this little cancer that's the problem...
I know the day that things changed here...
Reading the story of the Exxon Valdez provided on the documentary's website was surreal too, like seeing a movie again that I'd seen as a kid, but forgotten the details.
BLACK WAVE - The legacy of the Exxon Valdez Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, marine biologist Riki Ott and the fishers in the town of Cordova, Alaska remind us that the biggest environmental catastrophe in North American history is still with us. Over time, its consequences have become all the more apparent and painful. The spill has profoundly altered the lives of tens of thousands of people, reducing them to poverty and despair.
On March 24th 1989, shortly after midnight, the supertanker Exxon Valdez runs aground in Prince William Sound, a pristine area immensely rich in marine life. A significant part of the crude oil carried by the tanker spills into the sea. The black wave. Most of that oil will never be recovered.
Almost instantly, dramatic images of the accident crisscross the planet. Agonizing birds flap their wings, covered in oil. Dazed sea lions take refuge on a marine buoy. Seals gasp on a rocky beach. An enormous, gooey black wave rolls forward and swallows 2,000 kilometers of wild beaches that have not been disturbed since the dawn of time.
The media find a culprit. It is Joseph Hazelwood, whose blood alcohol content shows he is seriously intoxicated. But Hazelwood is a scapegoat who obscures the fact that the accident was preventable. Exxon and its sister oil companies in Alaska have a long history of breaking safety promises. By March 1989, Riki Ott and many fishers in Prince William Sound believe there is a major supertanker accident waiting to happen.
When it happens, Exxon launches a spectacular cleanup operation paired with an unprecedented public relations campaign. Exxon comes off as a responsible corporate citizen doing its best to repair the damage caused by one irresponsible individual – Captain Hazelwood.
Only when journalists go home do the consequences gradually surface. An important part of the oil has been blasted, with pressurized hot water, under the surface sands. Birds, fish, mammals will eat contaminated food for years to come. Certain species, like herring, will never recover, creating a permanent economic crisis for the fishermen of the Sound. And as bankruptcies begin, a wave of social problems like alcohol, divorce and even suicide engulfs small towns all over the Sound.
A class-action suit involving 32,000 people seems to end in a huge victory. A jury orders Exxon to pay five billion dollars. But battalions of lawyers commanded by Exxon engage in a drawn-out judicial war that slows the legal system down to a crawl. When the case finally ends up before the U.S. Supreme Court, it brings the award down to one tenth of the original amount. The decision, a victory for ExxonMobil, constitutes a bitter defeat for the people of Cordova.
Toward the end of their judicial saga, Riki Ott and the fishers of Cordova ask if corporate values have trumped human rights and community values in the United States today. And they look for ways to rebuild their lives.
Riki Ott has been calling for respirators for those working in the Gulf. In The Black Wave, we see why. There were dispersants used in the Valdez spill too.
Beach applications of dispersants were tried in several locations. Corexit 7664 was applied on Ingot Island, followed by a warm water wash. No significant change in oil cover or the physical state of the oil was observed as a result of the treatment. Some ecological impacts were observed in the treated areas. It appeared that the effects were largely due to the intensive washing more than to the use of Corexit 7664, and were evident in intertidal epibenthic macrobiota.
In addition, the dispersant BP1100X was applied to a test area on Knight Island. Toxicology studies indicated that the upper and lower intertidal biota were different from pre-application communities the day after dispersant application, and returned to pre-treatment levels after seven days.
In May of 1989, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Exxon conducted bioremediation trials at two test sites on Knight Island in Prince William Sound. On the basis of these tests and other trials later in the summer, Exxon recommended the use of the bioremediation enhancement agents, Inipol (Inipol EAP22—manufactured by Elf Aquitaine of France) and Customblen (Customblen 28-8-0 —manufactured by Sierra Chemicals of California), and subsequently treated over 70 miles of shoreline in Prince William Sound with these agents.
The film devotes a pretty good chunk to the health effects being suffered by the folks who worked on the cleanup, and highlights the Inipol EAP22 specifically.
Please Share with Your Doctor, these FOUR chemical Ingredients of the chemical Inipol EAP 22 which was first used Aug, 1989 during the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Clean up And used extensively in 1990. *
Also, if you were aboard any ships used by Exxon to deliver this chemical to the beach sites/workers or if you handled the product in any way...or if you handled any equipment that could have been touched by this chemical...
By the way, Inipol EAP22 isn't made any longer according to the EPA.
TECHNICAL PRODUCT BULLETIN #B-10 USEPA, OIL PROGRAM CENTER ORIGINAL LISTING DATE: JULY 9, 1985 REVISED LISTING DATE: JANUARY 11, 1996 "INIPOL EAP 22" PRODUCT NO LONGER MANUFACTURED EPA HAS NOT RECEIVED UPDATED CONTACT INFORMATION FOR THIS PRODUCT AS OF 12/01/08
In 2009, Democracy Now! sat down with Riki Ott, to look back at the 20-year-legacy of the Exxon Valdez. I thought it would be good to include the transcript of the interview with her here (consider a donation to Democracy Now! for providing the transcript for free on its website):
AMY GOODMAN: Today marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the worst environmental disasters in history. It was March 24th, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker struck a reef off the coast of Alaska. The ship’s captain, Joseph Hazelwood, was legally intoxicated at the time, had surrendered the wheel to his subordinates when it slammed into the reef. This is the distress call he made where he says the ship was "leaking some oil."
JOSEPH HAZELWOOD: We’re hard aground, north of Goose Island off Bligh Reef. Evidently, we’re leaking some oil. And we’re going to be here for a while.
AMY GOODMAN: The Exxon Valdez spilled between 11 and 38 million gallons of crude oil into the fishing waters of Prince William Sound. The spill contaminated more than 1,200 miles of Alaska’s shoreline, killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine animals. It also dealt a staggering blow to the residents of the local fishing towns, and the effects of the disaster are still being felt today.
A report marking the twentieth anniversary of the spill has found oil still persists in the region and, in some places, quote, “is nearly as toxic as it was a few weeks after the spill.” The report was put together by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, which oversaw restoration efforts. It states, quote, “At this rate, the remaining oil will take decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely.”
AMY GOODMAN: And twenty years after the disaster, litigation against Exxon continues to drag on. In 1994, an Alaskan jury found Exxon responsible and ruled the company should pay $5 billion in punitive damages to some 33,000 plaintiffs. Exxon appealed. In 2006, the 9th US Circuit Court cut the award of punitive damages in half to $2.5 billion. Then, in a 5-to-3 ruling last June, the Supreme Court cut the amount of punitive damages again and ordered Exxon Mobil to pay just $500 million in punitive damages, one-tenth of the original jury’s ruling. That equates to about four days of Exxon Mobil’s net profits.
Most of the plaintiffs in the suit were from the small Alaskan fishing town of Cordova. Back in 1989, four days after the spill, the residents of Cordova held a town hall meeting to address the cleanup. They invited Exxon spokesperson Don Cornett. This is some of what he said:
DON CORNETT: You think you feel bad about this? We feel awful about it. But that doesn’t help to tell you that. I’m here to tell you what we’re going to do about it. Another contingency plan was deployed. And that—
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That is patently untrue!
RIKI OTT: May I get a word in here, please? Just a second, folks. Let me—if you don’t mind. My name is Riki Ott. Why wasn’t that full material loaded onto our fishing boats and taken out?
DON CORNETT: I think that’s a real good question. I’m not aware of that.
RIKI OTT: Yeah, right.
DON CORNETT: First of all, we don’t have any boats. We rented local boats. I’m here to tell you what we’re going to do about it. And I’m going to show you what we’re doing about it. And we’re doing the best job that’s ever been done on an oil spill. And watch. Just watch. You have had some good luck, and you don’t realize it. You have Exxon, and we do business straight.
AMY GOODMAN: Exxon spokesperson Don Cornett. The woman you heard question him was Cordova resident Riki Ott. She’s joining us here in our firehouse studio, a community activist, a marine toxicologist, a former commercial salmon fisherma’am and author of two books on the spill. Her latest is Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Spill.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
RIKI OTT: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: So, where are you twenty years after the spill? Where were you March 24th, 1989?
RIKI OTT: I was in bed, and I heard this knocking on my door at 7:00 in the morning. And I thought, “What in the world?” because I live half a mile up—had to hike—people actually had to hike in. And I went rushing down, and there was the acting director of the fishermen’s union. And he just said, “We’ve had the big one.” And I knew exactly what he meant.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you doing then? What was your job?
RIKI OTT: I was working. I was on the board of the fishermen’s union, and I was assigned the oil issues.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were in Cordova?
RIKI OTT: I was in Cordova.
AMY GOODMAN: So what did you see when you went outside?
RIKI OTT: I flew. I had to fly over. It was about seventy miles away. And we flew in this plane, and it was a surreal scene. It was just drop-dead gorgeous, March, sunrise, pink mountains glistening with the sunrise. And all of a sudden we come on the scene, where there’s this red deck of this oil tanker that’s three football fields long; flat, calm water, dark blue; and there’s this inky black stain that’s just stretching with the tide.
AMY GOODMAN: What did you do?
RIKI OTT: We did a marine mammal survey right off the bat. We knew it wouldn’t be calm weather very long. We went to Valdez to refuel. And that’s when it hit me. What am I going to do about this? And I remember this question popped in my mind. I know enough to make a difference. Do I care enough? And I decided that, yes, I did care. This was my home. I had lived there for four years already. I had totally fallen in love with the area, the people, the lifestyle. And I decided to step up and make a difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Did Exxon send people right away to clean up?
RIKI OTT: There were people pouring into Valdez. It was not only Exxon; it was the Coast Guard, the State of Alaska, media from around the country, scientists, the federal government, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration folks. And, I mean, it was clear that, I mean, this was a huge spill. And how were we going to get our voice out in what mattered to us, which were the fish coming back.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re a marine toxicologist. Explain the extent of the devastation.
RIKI OTT: Marine toxicology is the study of pollution, marine pollution. And the fishermen went, “OK, here come all these scientists and experts, and we have Riki.” And I’m like, “Oh, man.” We were worried that the oil—the killing would not stop in 1989, the scientists. It was a huge devastation. I couldn’t even go out on the beaches initially. I couldn’t take the emotional hit. People came back, the fishermen, and they said they had sat down on what they presumed was rock to cry, and it turned out to be like an oiled sea otter or something that was dying. There were just bodies everywhere. The oil in some of the bays was over three feet thick. You couldn’t even hear the sound of the waves crashing on the shoreline; everything was muted. Some of the oil, with the storm that came through—there was a huge storm that came through, and it just smeared oil up to forty feet high on some of our coastline—was in the trees. I mean, it just took animals out, and it was very, very quiet.
AMY GOODMAN: How many animals died?
RIKI OTT: There was up to half a million seabirds, up to 5,000 sea otters, 300 or so harbor seals, billions of young salmon and herring fish eggs and young juvenile fish. And this was a problem, because it created a delayed impact. I mean, when you take out eggs, you don’t really see the impact until those eggs should have become adults and joined the adult population. That’s what we saw with herring. The crash didn’t happen until 1993, four years later, when the young of the in ’89 failed to materialize.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what happened to the herring industry? How extensive was it?
RIKI OTT: Well, the salmon and the herring both collapsed, because they were spawned on these beaches, these oiled beaches. Salmon—and this was ’92, ’93. This is delayed, delayed harm. Salmon gradually came back, but herring never did. And this is a huge problem, not only for the ecosystem, but also for the economy. Herring are the main forage fish of the ecosystem of the Prince William Sound, so whales, sea lions, seabirds, everything depends on herring. Without herring, realistically, we can’t expect the sound to recover. And what the scientists are saying now is they have no idea how long it will take for herring to recover. Meanwhile, the herring fisheries are closed indefinitely. Indefinitely. So the permits that—we pay a limited price for a limited entry permit. It’s kind of like buying a home. It’s a big price, and you take out a debt, a loan, and then you pay it back every year based on your fishing income. And zero—it’s zero income for herring fishermen. So they have incurred a huge debt on this permit. And it’s really the debt that’s eating us alive now—$300,000. And these permits are worth now about $15,000. I mean—
AMY GOODMAN: The mayor committed suicide?
RIKI OTT: One of our mayors, right after the spill, he did, and it was 1993, when the fish runs were collapsing. And I literally—I call that year as bad as it gets. Up to that point, we had been victims. We had been waiting for Exxon to pay us. Exxon promised to make us whole. You know, “You’re lucky you have Exxon.” We hadn’t even gone to court by 1993. We had fish run collapses, bankruptcies, divorces, suicides, you know, domestic violence spikes, substance abuse spikes. The town was just unraveling. And we were waiting for somebody to help us: the State of Alaska, the federal government, the court system, Exxon. Nobody. And—
AMY GOODMAN: There were 33,000 plaintiffs.
RIKI OTT: There are 32,000 claims, 22,000 plaintiffs. Some people had multiple fishing permits, so salmon fishing, herring fishing, so they would have two claims. And these are people all through twenty-two communities and even as far out as Bristol Bay, because the effect—the price dropped, and there was a price-tainting effect.
So what we did was—the mayor, in our dark hour—it really was our darkest hour—committed suicide. And what we did after the fish run collapse is we did a community-wide act of civil disobedience: we blockaded Valdez Narrows, help up oil tanker traffic. This was to bring attention to Prince William Sound. Everything was collapsing. Seabirds, marine mammals, fish.
And this got the attention of President Clinton, and he said, “What is it that you fishermen want?” And we said, “We don’t want to be fined for civil disobedience. We’re desperate. And also, we want ecosystem studies. We want the scientists to connect the dots between the seabirds, the marine mammals, the fish, the beaches. What happened to Prince William Sound?”
Those ecosystem studies began in 1994, really too late for our trial. They didn’t get completed until about 2004—I’m talking about published papers now. And those studies show, sure enough, the oil that’s remaining on our beaches is still causing harm.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me see. You have brought a little jar. This is Exxon Valdez oil, Smith Island, Prince William Sound. This is one year ago. This is not from—
RIKI OTT: This is July 2nd last year, not even a year.
AMY GOODMAN: This is astounding.
RIKI OTT: That’s what we think, too. I take children out on the beaches now who were born after the spill and say, “This is your legacy.”
AMY GOODMAN: It’s just covered in oil.
RIKI OTT: The oil specifically is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAHs. This is actually coming out the tailpipes of our automobiles. It’s the fine soot. That’s kind of the codeword for it. And this is linked with genetic harm, not only in animals, but in people, as well, respiratory harm, reproductive impairment, cancers. Very low levels of this oil, these PAHs, cause incredible harm to people.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said that is not just an environmental disaster, but a crisis in democracy.
RIKI OTT: It is a democracy crisis. The question we started asking as our lawsuit went on and on and on, and we didn’t get paid, was how did corporations get this big, where they can manipulate the legal system, the political system? What happened here? And I thought that was a really good question, so I went to answer it. And that became the final chapter of Not One Drop.
And I learned from other people’s work that there’s actually two ways to amend the Constitution. One is formally, through people-made law, which we’ve done twenty-seven times. And one is informally, through what Thomas Jefferson called the engine of consolidation, the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court.
And in 1886, the Supreme Court made sort of a seminal decision, where it granted a railroad corporation equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, which is, of course, a civil rights amendment for due process and equal protection for African American men. For the first forty years after that passed, there were 307 lawsuits brought, nineteen by African American men, the rest by corporations.
And at that point, when the Fourteenth Amendment passed to corporations, this thing called a corporate person arose. And that corporate person, in the eyes of the law, is able to access our rights, human rights, the Bill of Rights, constitutional protections. This is wrong. The word “corporation” never appears in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
This is how we’ve lost freedom of speech. We still—we, as people, still have the First Amendment, but so do corporations. Free speech equals money. Those with more money have more speech. Pretty simple. So I began to understand that the legal system is broken. The election process is broken, all because of the same reason, this corporate personhood.
AMY GOODMAN: Where has Sarah Palin, the Governor, stood on the Exxon case?
RIKI OTT: She has never seen an oiled beach. She’s been protected from that. She stood with the fishermen at the Supreme Court. We had a hearing and talked. But it’s easy to stand with people. It’s a whole ’nother thing to stand against the corporations. And we haven’t seen that. We haven’t seen her claiming—asking Exxon, for example, to pay its $92 million outstanding to clean up that oil that’s still on our beaches.
AMY GOODMAN: 1994, the jury rules you get $5 billion. What happened?
RIKI OTT: The jury—it took three weeks to come up with that decision. They didn’t just pull it out of the air. The jury asked the question: how do we holding a corporation this large accountable to people? And the jury decided they had to tie profit to punishment. So, at the time, 1994, that was one year’s net profit for Exxon, $5 billion. And that way, you can hold—you know, big corporation, big punishment.
What the Supreme Court did was they severed that link, and they instead linked profit to damages. Well, there’s a problem. We are still incurring ongoing damages in Prince William Sound, because we’re not fishing herring, for example, so we didn’t get all of our damages. Meanwhile, this one-to-one ratio of punitive to damages sets—is a problem now for everybody in America. We all lost our ability to hold big corporations accountable. This was the threat of unlimited liability. Just the mere threat held these corporations accountable to consumer safety laws, public health laws, environmental protection laws. We’ve lost that now. What we need is Congress to, what I call, overturn this by taking up the issue of punitive damages and asking the question: how do we hold these large corporations accountable?
AMY GOODMAN: What kind of relief have you gotten at this point, Riki Ott? What have your communities gotten? What has Exxon Mobil paid out?
RIKI OTT: We have gotten ten cents on the dollar. Most of my friends have been able to claim—to receive seven to ten percent of what they have actually lost. At this point in time, twenty years later, I even have some friends whose individual share of that punitive damage award is not—it’s less than what they will have to pay their bankruptcy lawyer.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned about another spill, twenty years later?
RIKI OTT: I am forever concerned about another spill. It’s not just US waters. I just came back from South Korea, where they had a spill, a big spill, a year ago. The problem is that the oil companies, despite all the safety precautions—we now will have double hull tankers, and there’s a number of other precautions, mostly all citizen-driven. Oil still gets away. We can’t clean up in ice, so we have no business drilling offshore in the Arctic. Once oil spills on land, we have no way to clean it up. So this whole Alberta tar sands is nonsense. It’s making a big mess. We have no way to clean up these spills.
AMY GOODMAN: Where we get much of our oil, the Alberta tar sands.
RIKI OTT: Well, I think tar sands projects should be shut down. There should be a moratorium worldwide. This is way too energy-intensive. It’s taking water. I mean, come on, water’s got to be more valuable than oil. We’re squandering our gas and our water to get out this sticky substance that emits tons more, three times as much, greenhouse gases than conventional crude.
AMY GOODMAN: Riki Ott, I want to thank you for being with us. She has written the book Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. I thank you for joining us.
RIKI OTT: Thank you. And I’m advocating the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to strip corporations of human rights. Thank you.
I want to highlight this paragraph again, what Riki Ott said about coporations becoming "persons" with the same protections under the law.
And at that point, when the Fourteenth Amendment passed to corporations, this thing called a corporate person arose. And that corporate person, in the eyes of the law, is able to access our rights, human rights, the Bill of Rights, constitutional protections. This is wrong. The word “corporation” never appears in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
And how that application of corporate rights trumped their efforts to get themselves 'whole' again.
What the Supreme Court did was they severed that link, and they instead linked profit to damages. Well, there’s a problem. We are still incurring ongoing damages in Prince William Sound, because we’re not fishing herring, for example, so we didn’t get all of our damages. Meanwhile, this one-to-one ratio of punitive to damages sets—is a problem now for everybody in America. We all lost our ability to hold big corporations accountable. This was the threat of unlimited liability. Just the mere threat held these corporations accountable to consumer safety laws, public health laws, environmental protection laws. We’ve lost that now. What we need is Congress to, what I call, overturn this by taking up the issue of punitive damages and asking the question: how do we hold these large corporations accountable?
So you see, President Obama getting the $20 billion is a fantastic accomplishment. But we also have a long way to go. With no consequence, there is no deterrent to not spill, poison, destroy again. Riki Ott has a pretty good idea on how to begin to strip corporate power and return it to the people, and I would hope you would consider supporting it.
The Campaign to Legalize Democracy Join the Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood We are calling to amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish the legal doctrine of "Corporate Personhood," which we define simply as the illegitimate notion that a corporation can claim political and civil rights to overturn democratically enacted laws. We are building a broad-based, multi-partisan democracy movement in the United States to address the reality that the federal courts have made democracy impossible. It's time to change the rules!
CITIZENS across the country have expressed their outrage over the Citizens United v. FEC decision, which allows unlimited corporate campaign spending and negates campaign finance reform laws. This decision was based on the misdirected – really, ludicrous – notion of Corporate Personhood, the idea that corporations are entitled to the same constitutional rights as human beings. Many have written us asking, “What can we do?”
Riki Ott, director of Ultimate Civics, recently teamed up with David Cobb from Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD) to deliver a powerful message on how citizens can fight to restore democracy in our nation.
“There are two ways to approach social movements,” says Ott. “We can work within the existing power structure for ‘compromises’ to make things a little less bad, or we can work to create the community and culture we want by building a social movement.” In their tour, Ott and Cobb stressed the need for a grass roots effort to create a cultural shift in our society. “The Abolitionists certainly didn't go to Congress and ask for a Slavery Protection Act.”
In keeping, Ultimate Civics and POCLAD have joined the Campaign to Legalize Democracy in a concerted effort to amend the US Constitution and restore democracy in the United States. This grassroots campaign identifies four objectives to achieve this goal:
-To firmly establish that money is not speech
-To affirm that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
-To guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
-To protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments.
Motion to Amend (there's a petition to sign)
"We the corporations" On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule. We Move to Amend.
We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to: Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count. Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments.
Sign the petition and take more ACTION today:
-Donate to the cause!
-Join the Move to Amend Facebook Page
-Write a letter to the editor
-Spread word via radio talk shows
-Let folks know about this website!
-Meet with the local chair of your political party
-Call, email or visit your elected officials
-Contact or meet with your state and federal representatives.
-Go to candidate forums and ask "Do you support the opinion that corporations are persons and therefore have the rights of free speech under the First Amendment?
-Help send the message every time you email by linking MoveToAmend.org in your signature.
-Watch for Candidate Survey soon with a series of questions you can ask all candidates in your local/state elections in 2010.
-Hold a Funeral: Mourn American democracy.
-Do you live in the hometown or attend the alma mater of one of the Corporate Five?
Organize a rally/circulate a petition and send a press release to the media declaring your town/college is disowning the Justice as an embarrassment and disgrace to democracy. Send the Justice a "Certificate of Disownment".
Samuel Alito Trenton, New Jersey (born) Hamilton Township, New Jersey (childhood) Princeton University (undergrad) Yale Law School
Anthony Kennedy Sacramento, California Stanford Univerity (undergrad) Harvard Law School
John Roberts Buffalo, New York (born) Long Beach, Indiana (childhood) Harvard College (undergrad) Harvard Law School
Antonin Scalia (Trenton, New Jersey (born) New York, New York (childhood) Georgetown University (undergrad) Harvard Law School
Clarence Thomas Pin Point, Georgia (born) Savannah, Georgia (childhood) College of the Holy Cross (undergrad) Yale Law School
-Present a Corporate Megaphone Award "for Calling the Shots"
-Pass a Democracy Resolution at the local level
-Take a small group and visit with each elected official of your municipal council, town board, or county board.
-Urge your local elected officials to sponsor a Democracy Resolution for your local government for discussion and passage in response to the Citizens United v. FEC ruling.
Think you can take on any of these ideas? Details, links and more information on all of these actions can be found right HERE.
I have looked for a re-broadcast date of The Black Wave, but don't see one. There is a DVD available at the film's website, maybe consider organizing a screening at your local theatre or commmunity center.
I think it is important that we all see how bad things can be so we are inspired to fight harder, smarter, and stronger this time. We may not be able to end our dependence on oil today. But we can begin to get the power back from corporations at this very moment.