A Revolutionary New Coalition Stands for Community Rights in Colorado
A Revolutionary New Coalition Stands for Community Rights in Colorado
Saturday, 05 September 2015 00:00
By Simon Davis-Cohen, This Changes Everything | Interview
In Colorado, local governments cannot raise the minimum wage, pass rent control laws, or ban fracking. A system of state "preemption"—a favorite tool of the fossil fuel industry—stands in their way.
Local activists have long been outspoken about this legal barrier to keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Now, a coalition embodying a range of economic and environmental justice fights is coming together to directly challenge the basis for state preemption: On August 17, a statewide initiative was launched by Coloradans for Community Rights to do just that. It may be the first time that anti-extraction and workers' rights movements have allied behind a concrete political tactic in modern US history.
The "Colorado Community Rights Amendment," which needs some 99,000 signatures to qualify for the 2016 ballot, disrupts preemption by granting local governments a constitutional right to raise state standards—empowering them to boost the minimum wage, bolster environmental protections, and strengthen tenant rights, for example. It would recognize the authority of local governments "to enact local laws that protect health, safety and welfare by recognizing or establishing rights of natural persons, their local communities and nature." (A similar community rights initiative was proposed in 2014, but did not collect enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.)
Crucially, the proposed amendment also elevates local lawmaking above "competing rights, powers, privileges, immunities, or duties of corporations." This means that if a local law conflicts with a corporations' constitutional "right," the local law would prevail—in direct contradiction to our current legal structure, which allows corporations to sue local, state, and federal governments that restrict property rights. The amendment doesn't read like a manifesto, but it could be revolutionary.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32607-a-revolutionary-new-coalition-stands-for-community-rights-in-colorado
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