Democracy is Dead. What's Next?

Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.

For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.

On May 19th, voters in Lane County, Oregon failed to pass Measure 20-373, the Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights, a CELDF-drafted “rights of nature” law that would have established legal rights for local watersheds and recognized residents’ rights to clean water throughout this part of Western Oregon.

Organizers blamed the failure primarily on the flood of “dark money” spent by corporations, writing:

“Large corporate polluters and industrial interests flexed their financial power to win the election, dramatically outspending the all-volunteer grassroots campaign in support of the measure. Supporters raised roughly $35,000, while opponents raised over $434,000. Opponents included large timber interests, industrial agriculture, the oil and gas lobby, the chemical lobby, and even the Koch brothers, represented by Koch Government Affairs.

‘Opponents outspent us at least 12 to 1, and waged a campaign of misinformation unlike anything that our team had ever seen or expected,’ said Rob Dickinson, one of the organizers on the campaign. ‘Opposition messaging was on TV, radio, social media, and in numerous full- size mailers that blanketed the county. They were spreading really egregious false claims about the measure and its impacts on the County. We did our best to counter the fear-mongering, but ultimately, the disinformation campaign carried the day.’

Michelle Holman, friend of CELDF and one of the main organizers for Measure 20-373, wrote in a letter to the editor:

Measure 20-373 didn’t lose — it was overwhelmed by a well-funded disinformation campaign financed by corporate interests that profit from the degradation and pollution of our environment.

We agree. When Community Rights Lane County (CRLC) says they didn’t lose the election, but rather that it was bought, they are right. Everyone understands that the wealthy elite and corporate forces shape our lives in many different ways, including via the ability to fashion politics and therefore the law itself to their liking.

Research supports this idea, showing that regular people have basically no political power in our supposed democracy.

The Watershed Bill of Rights for Lane County, if it had been adopted, would’ve recognized legal rights for the rivers, wetlands, and other water bodies in the county such that practices like clearcutting and toxic chemical spraying by industrial timber corporations would’ve been rightfully targeted. However, when a truly grassroots group, despite having broad public support, comes up against those who benefit from the current system (because it has been designed to benefit them), they will pull out all the stops.

The powerbrokers do this not because they fear that the law — in this case advancing rights for watersheds — would actually have survived a legal challenge; they do it to save money and undermine democracy.

First, it is cheaper to wage a political campaign to stop a law like this from being adopted than it would be to litigate it. Going up to the appellate level and possibly the state supreme court level would mean attorney’s fees perhaps double what they spent on their propaganda campaign. And propaganda isn’t bound by the same ethics and rules as a legal case. In fact, they can outright lie, which they did, and not be held to account. The few investigations that do examine legal and ethical violations around political campaigns rarely result in serious penalties, and if a ruling is handed down it comes 18 months or so after an election is over. The corporate gang understands that.

The second reason is one we all need to understand: powerful elites and corporations attack efforts to restrict their power and privilege because they understand that any advancements in democracy, equity, and justice is a direct assault on their near monopoly hold of power.

That power is sacrosanct and efforts like this one from Lane County are seen as uprisings that need to be put down immediately, swiftly, and as brutally as possible. A sister effort in Lincoln County, Oregon to ban aerial spray of pesticides not only brought out a similar disparity in campaign spending between the citizen’s group and corporate timber/big ag/industrial chemical companies, but it also triggered a multimillion dollar propaganda push prior to the vote as a means to snuff out what they called “brushfires” by the firm who was hired by an industry group called CropLife America (made up of all the big chemical companies).

Despite this, the measure in Lincoln County did pass, which then triggered a multi-year legal case. The dollar tally between the propaganda work, the dirty anti-rights campaign, and the legal case (which they won against the people and ecosystems) most likely cost those corporations over $3 million dollars. As satisfying as it might be to have them have to shell out that kind of money, they have plenty more, and their destructive timber practices have not stopped.

The stifling of democracy is darker than “dark money.” In Lane County’s case it came in the form of repeated ballot-access legal cases over a ten year period; whenever Community Rights Lane County qualified to put a measure on the ballot, corporate opposition took legal action to keep the greater democracy and challenges to their privilege off the ballot. For a decade, it worked.

In states like Ohio where CELDF has worked with numerous communities over the years on similar ballot measure campaigns, legal actions were also taken to stop innovations in law that would favor rights and protections for people and nature over corporate exploitation. Those came in the form of challenges from boards of elections, with cases going to the state supreme court and the eventual decisions sometimes falling in favor of the citizens and other times the corporations.

It happened so many times that CELDF published a book entitled Death by Democracy to document these constant challenges to direct democracy and the lengths to which corporate power will go to hang on to their power.

In states like Washington and Colorado where CELDF has also assisted numerous communities, actions were taken through the courts and legislative bodies to make it virtual impossible for the people to use the citizen initiative process. Corporate power is fully aware that if real democracy were to actually emerge, grow, and take hold they would no longer be in charge and in most cases they would no longer exist. To them these efforts, like what just transpired in Lane County, are not isolated, limited to a specific corporation, or something they could adapt to; they are genuinely in a war room situation were the threats aren’t just being monitored but the weapons of money, political power, lawmaking influence, and physical force are dispatched without prejudice.

Physical force is a topic worth discussing. In a place like Lane County, where members of Community Rights Lane County spent decades trying to stop all kinds of harmful corporate practices through conventional means, and now the last 14 years doing to in unorthodox ways that are nonetheless still linked to the system of law — what is left but to pursue resistance work? When the system smacks you down, what is left but to say “to hell with your rules, we are taking over the game”?

For years CELDF has said the system is not broken, it is fixed. This isn’t our discovery; many have noted that our system of law, therefore the governance and economics shaped by those laws, is designed to function to advantage property and commerce over that of health, safety, and welfare. CELDF’s partner-advisor Camila Vergara wrote a book on this called Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic.

What must break is our allegiance to these fixed systems. Their time has passed. Our indoctrination must end. The question is how we go about creating the fracture points necessary to dismantle this system.

Community Rights Lane County, the people of Lane County, and communities everywhere face a choice: continue to show up inside the venues owned by a corrupt system, or tear that corrupt system down.

Kai Huschke is the Executive Director of CELDF, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Max Wilbert is CELDF’s Director of Community Resistance and Resilience.

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