Mission Statement: Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County (DUHC) educates citizens about the illegitimate seizure of our authority to govern ourselves. We design and implement grassroots strategies that exercise democratic power over corporations and governments. We seek to create a truly democratic society by provoking a non-violent popular uprising against corporate rule in Humboldt County that can serve as a model for other communities across the United States.

DUHC has been active in Humboldt County California since 1997 doing outreach and education and running campaigns. The past ten years laid the groundwork for us to run a revolutionary ballot initiative. Measure T makes it illegal for out-of-county corporations to put money into our local elections, and prohibits them from claiming constitutional rights to over turn the law. In June of 2006 Humboldt County passed this binding ordinance, which challenges corporate constitutional rights. Humboldt has about 128,000 residents; Apart from statewide bans on corporate agriculture, this is the largest jurisdiction in recent history to pass such a law.

The courts have ruled that money equals speech for corporations; the result has been that communities across the country face large multinationals trying to restructure towns and cities through the ballot box. With DUHC’s recent victory we are able to do outreach to other communities to help them strategize to challenge corporate rule, as well. Our experience lets us offer other communities strategies for crafting campaigns that demand rights, as well as running campaigns democratically so that organizing capacity gets built and we can walk our talk.

The biggest challenge facing our movement is that many people believe that we currently have democracy. Others believe that we don’t have a right to democracy or that it isn’t attainable. The truth is that we live under a system of corporate rule. Unelected and Unaccountable CEOs make the fundamental decisions that affect our lives, from our foreign policy to what gets defined as food. Corporate Rule is enshrined in law through the legal doctrine of corporate constitutional rights.

We propose a non-violent democratic uprising against corporate rule. There used to be many restrictions that kept corporations subordinate to the will of the people. For example, corporations could be stripped of any rights, prohibited from owning other corporations, limited to operation and ownership within certain localities, and charter revocations could be made possible. Altering our relationship to corporations is not enough to completely change our culture for the better; we need alternatives in every aspect of our lives to the neo liberal offerings. Alternative structures such as Community Supported Agriculture, community currencies and worker-owned cooperatives could be implemented.

DUHC takes a holistic approach to strategies for social change, heavily borrowed from Johanna Macey’s Great Turning. We need to be fighting harms, but linking them with a bridging analysis to systemic change, doing culture-shifting work and promoting alternatives to the corporate capitalist system that to build a new system of meeting social and economic needs.

The particular strategy that our workshop will highlight is creating a “Crisis of Jurisdiction.” A small government such as a city or county passes a law that shifts rights to the people. When the law is challenged the coalition of folks supporting the action is broadened, as it becomes evident that the struggle is not just about a single issue, such as stopping a big box development, but about who has sovereignty. Another strategy is that of running democratic campaigns. Through doing campaigns cooperatively we teach others how to do democracy, and actually start shifting the culture through peoples’ personal experience.

We will engage participants through telling the story of Measure T in Humboldt County; throughout the workshop we will use that experience as a reference point. We will use a variety of formats to facilitate attendees applying the content to their communities, including small group discussion, brainstorming, and role-plays.

We want participants to come away from this workshop seeing themselves as part of a global movement for democracy and part of a community rights movement in the United States. We want participants to feel empowered to take action. We want them to have an over-view of how corporate power devastates communities, and how the fact that corporations have been illegitimately granted rights allows harms to continue and go unpunished. We hope to impart the elements of a successful grass roots campaign and how to run a campaign in a democratic manner. We also want them to be able to identify a corporate harm or issue in their community and articulate how it is connected to the bigger systemic problem of corporate rule. They should take away the rudiments of how to craft a rights-demanding campaign that not only stops the immediate harm but also changes the rules of the game.

Our event will be a four-hour workshop, entitled, “Asserting Community Rights: Local Campaigns to Challenge Corporate Rule.” There will be two presenters, both of whom are women and twenty-six years old. Both are cultural workers, who have facilitated many workshops that use elements of popular education, and both have been through George Lakey’s Training the Trainers workshop on facilitation. “Asserting Community Rights” best fits into the Saturday June 30th, strategizing category. A group of between twenty and fifty participants would be ideal. Our workshop will be conducted in English.

Our workshop connects to the USSF crosscutting themes in the following ways:
*IDENTIFYING AND ANALYZING ROOT CAUSES OF PROBLEMS AND OPPRESSIONS IN OUR WORLD

When talk about corporate rule, it is the same as neoliberalism. Our Mission and Program areas reflect our commitment to systemic analysis. Because our world is in such crisis it is essential that we strive to deal with the roots of problems, even as we deal with the branches. We have identified the legal doctrine of corporate constitutional rights as a keystone issue. It is a tangible place where neoliberalism touches down in the United States and affects us, as well as people the world over.

*LEARNING FROM HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES AND BUILDING INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY

We have researched the early restrictions that U.S. citizens once put on corporations, and the law that we modeled Measure T on was actually on the books in Wisconsin until 1953. History tells us that it is possible to use law to define our relationships with economic institutions, rather than permit them to do a certain amount of harm, as is done today through regulatory law. We take inspiration from peoples’ movements across the globe, and attempt to become part of the tapestry of movement history, by providing a model for social change in our own time and place. International institutions, such as the World Bank squelch the rights of living beings in favor of the rights of property. Much of this way of thinking is enshrined in law, and it is up to us in the U.S. to fight against the Supreme Court rulings that hold property over people. This is an act of international solidarity when it is seen as part of the global justice movement.

*ENVISIONING ALTERNATIVES: ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

The law passed in Humboldt County is an example of how another world is possible. A small county has stood up to the legal doctrine that grants rights to entities of amassed capital. It is our goal to reflect on our action through sharing it with others. While we know that one size does not fit all, there are strategies that we used, and analysis behind our actions that can benefit other communities who are organizing and ready to take action for community rights themselves.