WHAT IF TREES COULD SUE? THE LEFT'S ATTACK ON CORPORATIONS AND CAPITALISM

 HOW THE LEFT IS GOING AFTER CORPORATIONS, CAPITALISM AND ENERGY PRODUCTION UNDER THE GUISE OF GRANTING 'EQUAL RIGHTS TO NATURE'

The left-wing organizations working on the erosion of our property rights in the United States have been actively pushing their agenda in North and South America.  

If someone asked you, "What if trees could sue because their rights are being violated?"  What would you have thought or said?  After the initial, 'yeah right,' I imagine you would have thought this was just a silly joke.  

Well, this is a reality.  We are seeing our country taken over by the UN Agenda 21 that has embedded itself throughout the country under the guise of 'sustainable growth.'  In fact, what it will do to your local governments is hand over controls of your rights to an unelected group of 'councils of governments' that will dictate land, water, and energy usage in your area. 

Not that long ago, I thought this was just a conspiracy.  Today, I realize it is a reality and am actually finding this cancer in my own back yard.  Our city has signed up for this garbage. I don't know if they understand what they are doing and are blindly going along or if they are oblivious as I was and don't understand.  Either way, our local Tea Party has been very active in bringing it to our local governments attention but it seems to be falling on deaf ears.  

We need to make more people aware so we have more standing in front of these facilitators of the destruction of our liberties.  I will be posting some information and videos about Agenda 21 and would encourage you to educate yourself and check your area to see if your local government has joined hands with this anti-American, unconstitutional, U.N. agenda. 

For now, I want to focus on the issue of the left's movement to grant nature constitutional rights.

What is  this movement?  

To understand what they are pushing, let's look at a failed attempt to pass The 'Community Bill of Rights' in 2009 in Spokane Washington. This would have required a change to their constitution. 
The following is taken from an article from Yes! Magazine Nov. 4, 2009. 

A Community Bill of Rights:

'In the spring of 2008, grassroots organizations, labor unions, neighborhood councils, and other groups across the city began meeting together as part of a coalition they called Envision Spokane. Over the spring and summer, they drafted a series of ideas for addressing the needs of residents, workers, neighborhoods, and the environment. These ideas formed a draft “Community Bill of Rights” for the city.

During the winter, Envision Spokane held a series of 12 Town Halls across the city to engage the community in a conversation about the proposed Bill of Rights.

Taking the community’s feedback, the board of Envision Spokane revised the Bill of Rights and, in March of 2009, began to collect signatures. Despite opposition from the Spokane City Council and a concerted effort by business interests to block the Bill of Rights from reaching the ballot, Envision Spokane collected over 5,000 signatures from voters, successfully qualifying the Community Bill of Rights for the November ballot.

The Community Bill of Rights proposed nine amendments, written to address some very real needs in Spokane, to the city's Home Rule Charter. By recognizing broad rights instead of proposing specific legislation, the amendments were written to change the fundamental structure of Spokane’s legal system so that it would prioritize the protection of the local environment, economy, neighborhoods and residents.

• First. Residents have the right to a locally-based economy. Recognizes the rights of residents to protect their local economy by denying permits to big-box and chain stores.
• Second. Residents have the right to affordable preventive health care. Creates a fee-for-service program for the thousands of Spokane residents who lack health insurance and currently rely on the emergency room for health care.
• Third. Residents have the right to affordable housing. In response to the loss of thousands of units of affordable housing in Spokane over the past few years, the city would have been obliged, through incentives or other measures, to ensure that an adequate supply of affordable housing is available for those most in need.
• Fourth. Residents have the right to affordable and renewable energy. Requires the city and local utilities to make renewable energy accessible to residents.
• Fifth. The natural environment has the right to exist and flourish. Under current law, nature has no legal standing—to prove environmental damage, a person has to prove that he or she has been harmed. The Fifth Amendment would have protected the Spokane River, one of the most polluted in the nation following years of mining and toxic dumping, would have been protected under the Bill of Rights.
• Sixth. Residents have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods. Patty Norton and her neighbors—and other residents of Spokane—would have been able to enforce their decisions about what’s best for them. (The condominium complex hasn’t been built yet, but it is approved. The Sixth Amendment would have done what years of protesting haven’t been able to: allow the residents to say, “No.”)
• Seventh. Workers have the right to be paid the prevailing wage and to work as apprentices on certain construction projects. As skilled labor leaves Spokane, the Bill of Rights would have protected workers’ right to competitive wages and created apprenticeship opportunities so that young people could learn a trade and stay in the city.
• Eighth. Workers have the right to employer neutrality when unionizing, and the right to constitutional protections within the workplace. Workers would have been free from interference by employers when seeking to form a labor union, as well as from having to attend “captive audience” meetings.
• Ninth. Residents, workers, neighborhoods, neighborhood councils, and the city of Spokane shall have the right to enforce the Community Bill of Rights. For the first time, residents would have the legal authority to enforce their own                    decisions.

While Spokane is the largest city to attempt these legal changes, and the first whose adoption would have meant a change to a city constitution, other communities have already succeeded in securing similar rights. Towns in Maine, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Virginia have passed ordinances recognizing the rights of nature, prohibiting corporate mining and water extraction, and stripping corporations of constitutional protections and the right to contribute to political campaigns.'

The board of directors of Envision Spokane recognizes that fundamental change doesn’t come easily or quickly, and will be meeting in the next few weeks to discuss how to continue the work that they’ve started. Other communities are now reaching out to learn from Spokane about how they might do something similar.

 SOURCE: YES MAGAZINE

EXCUSE ME? WHAT DOES A CORPORATIONS CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS OR CONTRIBUTING TO A POLITICAL CAMPAIGN HAVE TO DO WITH THIS?  OBVIOUSLY, THE AGENDA IS NOT PROTECTING ANYTHING  AT ALL.  IT'S ALL ABOUT TRYING TO DESTROY CORPORATIONS AND CAPITALISM.  IT'S ALSO ABOUT DESTROYING OUR ENERGY PRODUCTION.

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Now fast forward to today. Chalk one up as a win for this insane movement to grant nature rights that would surpass human rights.  

This is a real and present danger to our property and personal liberties that we need to be aware of in order to understand it when it comes to our area.  

It may be masked as "community bill of rights" or sustainability or even saving our planet, but it will really be an attack on our liberties.  

This movement is ultimately an attack on corporations and capitalism.  The parties behind this are well-known Communists, Marxists and Socialists...or better known as Progressives. Recently there were elections in our area that had to do with water conservation....it did not pass because we knew it was not TRULY for the betterment of our city...it was more of a power grab that we were able to thwart...for now.

BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR GRANT EQUAL RIGHTS TO NATURE: IS 'WILD LAW' A CLIMATE SOLUTION?

Published: Monday 21 November 2011
“Bolivians hope that this will give their country the power to hold mining companies accountable and force them to adhere to stricter environmental standards.”

The concept of “a wild law,” which grants equal rights to nature, is based on the idea that humans do not have an explicit right to destroy our natural environment. Under wild law, natural ecosystems’ rights supersede the interests of any one species (including humans). Obviously, this idea can be incredibly controversial. Even in Bolivia, where they’ve amended their constitution to give nature equal rights to people, they are still working out the details.

Bolivia amended its constitution after pressure from its large indigenous population who places the environment and the earth deity, Pachamama, at the center of all life. But what this means in practical terms, such as how to address the serious environmental problems caused by mining for raw materials in the Andean nation, is yet to be determined. Bolivians hope that this will give their country the power to hold mining companies accountable and force them to adhere to stricter environmental standards.


Research by glaciologist Edson Ramirez of San Andres University in the capital city, La Paz, suggests temperatures have been rising steadily for 60 years and started to accelerate in 1979. They are now on course to rise a further 3.5-4C over the next 100 years. This would turn much of Bolivia into a desert.


Most glaciers below 5,000m are expected to disappear completely within 20 years, leaving Bolivia with a much smaller ice cap. Scientists say this will lead to a crisis in farming and water shortages in cities such as La Paz and El Alto.



Ecuador, which has a large indigenous population, has also amended its constitution to grant rights to nature. But like in Bolivia, the law has not stopped oil companies from destroying their natural landscape.


Even though these laws are mostly abstract, their existence helps elevate a debate about the relationship between people and nature. Bolivia’s Foreign Minister, David Choquehuanca, puts it well:


“Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values.”


It’s hard to imagine such laws adopted en masse today — particularly in the U.S. But the concept has gained traction. In recent years, numerous conferences have been held on how to apply wild law to climate change mitigation efforts.


To hear more about the concept, watch the video below featuring Cormac Cullinan, an environmental lawyer and leading wild law intellectual, who recently addressed the World People’s Summit on Climate Change in Bolivia.


Wild Law - Cormac Cullinan speaks at the World People's Summit on Climate Change (Bolivia)

Environmental lawyer, Cormac Cullinan speaks at the World People's Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The only way we can continue to live on this planet, Cullinan suggests, is by re-educating ourselves about our natural environment.


SOURCE: NATION OF CHANGE

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Bolivia Grants Nature Historic "Bill of Rights"

Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed on by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.


Read the full story here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/10/bolivia-enshrines-natural-w...

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Well, take a look behind the curtain and you will find the ususal suspects involved in this eco terrorist scam.

Former Obama Czar Van Jones Behind UN Push to Grant Mother Nature Same Rights as Humans…

By George Russell

Published April 25, 2011

FoxNews.com

Van Jones, the Obama administration's controversial former "green jobs czar," has found a new calling: helping to push for a new, global architecture of environmental law that would give Mother Nature the same rights status as humans.

The new movement is almost certain to be showcased at a U.N.-sponsored global summit on “sustainable development” to take place in Rio de Janeiro in May 2012, when similar issues of “global environmental governance” are a major focus of attention.

Jones is taking up the challenge as one of the newest board members of an obscure San Francisco New Age-style organization known as the Pachamama Alliance, which has been creating a global movement to make human rights for Mother Nature an international reality — complete with enforceable laws — by 2014. The Rio summit will create an important midpoint for that campaign.

Jones joined the alliance's board last December, shortly after the organization announced creation of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature to carry the concept around the world—and install it not only in international law but in the statutes of communities and municipalities across the U.S.

He resigned from the administration in September 2009 after making public apologies for some of his past actions, including the signing of a 2004 petition that questioned whether the Bush administration had deliberately allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to happen, and his previous affiliation with a self-described communist organization, the Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM).

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature “is working to build a movement of millions of educated and inspired individuals, with thousands of successful cases of enforceable Rights of Nature legislation having been enacted at local and national levels, by the end of 2014,” according to the Pachamama website.

The group also is running a parallel media campaign, called "Four Years. Go.," to build enthusiasm for the same rapid environmental change, using “personal communication, social media and a rich web presence to inspire a movement of people who recognize the urgency, and the opportunity, of this time and stand for using the next four years, through 2014, to literally change the course of history.”


Organizing and advocating just such a radical “green” restructuring of the U.S. economy is the skill set that brought Jones to the Obama White House staff as a “green jobs czar” in the first place.


Jones has continued to advocate those ideas since leaving the administration, as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely associated with financier George Soros, and at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Center for International Affairs.


Now, his green community organizing skills apparently are going global, along with the Pachamama Alliance’s rights-for-nature campaign. Telephone calls and emails to Jones, his assistant and the institutions where he now works as a fellow, as well as to the San Francisco offices of the Pachamama Alliance, had not been returned before this article was published.

The movement that Jones has joined shares its goals with some of the more radical governments represented at the United Nations, notably Ecuador and Bolivia, both nations with substantial territories in the Amazon Basin, and both with close ties to the socialist government of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

Bolivia last week sponsored an “interactive dialogue” on “Harmony With Nature” at the United Nations that included promotion of the same notion of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights for Mother Nature. By no coincidence, the U.N. debate was scheduled immediately prior to this year’s April 22 Earth Day celebrations—renamed “Mother Earth Day,” at the United Nations.


This year, the global celebrations also start an unofficial countdown to the U.N.-sponsored global summit in Rio de Janeiro next year.


The summit, known in U.N. shorthand as Rio + 20, is intended as a 20th anniversary successor to the famous Earth Summit of 1992, which gave enormous stimulus and legitimacy to the global environmental movement. This time, its aim is to produce new efforts at “global environmental governance,” meaning a strengthened international regulatory framework for environmental issues, and to provide new momentum for a global “green economy.”

Next year’s summit may also offer the “Rights of Nature” movement a chance to unveil at least a draft version of such a universal declaration, a prospect welcomed by the Bolivian sponsors of the April 20 debate at the U.N.

“Rio + 20 is a good opportunity to have that step forward,” said Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. “It would be like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”


Salon sees such a declaration as the kickoff to a longer-term campaign to create legislative reinforcing the new Nature rights, and he noted in an interview with Fox News that the Bolivian government asserts it is the first country to give the rights of nature equal status with human rights in its legal system. Bolivian President Evo Morales has frequently said that “the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism.”


Salon also told Fox News that his country is working with an offshoot of the Pachamama Alliance, known as the Pachamama Foundation, on its nature rights campaign, but emphasized that the Pachamama group is “one of many networks” Bolivia is working with on the issue.


Among other things, the Pachamama Alliance claims that through the Pachamama Foundation—a “sister organization” it created in 1997 among native peoples of the Amazon Basin -- it was instrumental in helping to install the same “fundamental rights for nature” it espouses into the constitution of Ecuador in 2008.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/25/obama-adviser-van-jones-helping-push-rights-mother-nature/#ixzz1eTOwqNpO

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Communities Take Power

The Citizens of Barnstead, New Hampshire, Used Local Law to Keep Corporate Giants Out of Their Water 

by Doug Pibel

posted Jul 29, 2007

The environmental movement, with its army of professional advocates, lawyers, grassroots campaigners, and dedicated funders, has been around for decades. Yet nearly every biological indicator shows a planet in crisis—and poised to unravel faster as climate change disrupts already-shaky ecosystem functions.


Mari Margil, associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) believes it's time for different tactics. The nonprofit agency used to work within the body of existing environmental law—helping impacted residents file lawsuits or appeal corporate permits—to protect communities from environmental damage. But a series of blocked efforts, often made worse by the very agencies meant to protect the environment, convinced the group that more fundamental changes were necessary.


"Our system of environmental laws and regulations don't actually protect the environment," says CLEDF's Mari Margil. "At best, they merely slow the rate of its destruction ... We weren't helping anyone protect anything."


The organization has since changed its goals, working with citizens from all over North and South America to literally rewrite local laws in ways that allow people to speak up for their communities, watersheds, forests, and air.


According to Margil, anemic environmental laws spring from the fact that nature has no constitutional rights. CLEDF has taken a local approach to reversing this structural blind spot, drafting ordinances for townships from New England to Pennsylvania to Washington State that:

• Give communities legal authority to say "No" to unwanted corporate activities;
• Recognize the rights of nature;
• Strip corporations of their constitutional rights.

In one landmark victory, the town of Barnstead, New Hampshire, voted 135 to 1 to ban the privatization of their freshwater by encroaching corporate interests—the first community in the nation to do so. Other towns have followed, stripping corporations of the rights of personhood and recognizing the rights of communities to self-govern. In 2008, with legal advice from CELDF, Ecuador recognized the right of nature to exist and persist in its national constitution.


PART 1



PART2

PART 3

This video was produced by Bioneers, a nonprofit organization that provides a forum and hub for social and scientific innovators.


Related Stories:


U.N. Will Spend Wednesday Debating Whether “Mother Earth” Deserves Human Rights Status…
Tree Huggers Rejoice! UN Treaty Will Give “Mother Earth” Same Rights as Humans…
The Obama File-Cass Sunstein 
Giving Nature Its Constitutional Rights
What if Trees Could Sue?

RELATED LINKS:
GIVING NATURE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS???
COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND
COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND BLOG
PLANETIZEN
DRAFTING NATURE'S CONSTITUTION
BIONEERS