Colorado Politicians and industry reps work to keep citizens from defending rights and challenging corporate power.
Polis, Hickenlooper and the Anadarko Act
By Cliff Willmeng
“(3) Preemption.
(a) A LOCAL GOVERNMENT REQUIREMENT THAT IS DETERMINED
TO BE AN OPERATIONAL CONFLICT IS PREEMPTED.”
On Friday, June 6, the doors opened on the closed meetings of Colorado Governor Hickenlooper, Congressman Jared Polis, other selected politicians, and the oil and gas industry reps from Anadarko Petroleum. The stated purpose was to avert any number of speculative ballot initiatives threatened by Polis, that could amend the Colorado Constitution to purportedly protect communities from oil and gas development currently being forced upon them. When the doors opened on Friday, the politicians and industry had come to an agreement on the future of Colorado’s people—people who were not invited to attend or participate.
And with this foreseeable contract between government and industry, the script for us, the people that are raising families, working, and living our lives in Colorado, the target for massive oil and gas industrialization, is now written. What we will be told to think is that the politicians have once again thoughtfully “Compromised,” that our wellbeing was considered, and that now we can return to our lives separate from the political process that was always the property of experts, or as Colorado House Majority Leader Dickey Lee Hullinghorst intellectually calls them, “Stakeholders.”
There is only one snag.
As far back in January, before any initiative calling itself “Local Control” was ever submitted, a grassroots group known as the Colorado Community Rights Network introduced ballot initiative number 75, the Colorado Community Rights Amendment. Problematic and quite outside the script of industrial/governmental relations, ballot initiative number 75 reads far more like the Declaration of Independence than the talking points of politicians and national environmental groups. Initiative 75 clarifies, in times of growing democratic uncertainty, that “All power is vested in and derived from the people.” It goes on to state that it is the right of people and communities to enact laws to define and protect their health, safety and welfare. It spells out that corporations interfering with those rights could be stripped of their legal superiority over people and communities, something quite unnerving to the participants in the Governor’s negotiations.
Ballot initiative 75 went through three levels of state review, and was found to meet all legal requirements by the Colorado Supreme Court on May 23. This means that the people of Colorado are now gathering signatures to place the measure to a democratic vote on the November 2014 ballot, independent and free of all politicians and CEOs.
Behind it are the ideas that we all learned in elementary school and that corporations and their friends in government find impossible to allow. We are the people, each of us is born with inalienable rights, and we establish government to protect these rights.
When government and industry cannot exist in a democratic society, it is industry, not the people, that must change. And regardless of the sweet-sounding talking points that will emerge after this week’s newest compromise, the conflict between corporate power and the living people of Colorado can no longer be confused. The movement to remake our system in the image of its citizens and communities is only in its most preliminary form. It will grow to create fundamental changes to our system—changes necessary to our democratic and economic sustainability. And it will build as a movement similar to those that established women’s suffrage and that ended segregation.
The talks between Polis, Hickenlooper, and Anadarko were a transparent, obvious, attempt to keep people outside of decisions and subservient to a defunct system of corporate law. The time has long come to remind the powerful that we will not so easily be cast aside. Ballot initiative 75, the Colorado Community Rights Amendment makes that powerful assertion with no compromise. Our fundamental rights are not negotiable, and the movement to secure them is just underway.
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