Election 2012: Initiative 103 ‘meetup’ in West Seattle

Much of the time, you don’t find out much about an initiative till signature gatherers show up on corners and outside businesses, asking you to take a look and consider signing. The group behind proposed Seattle Initiative 103 – meant as a counter to the so-called “corporate personhood” ruling – is organizing meetups in neighborhoods around the city, and sent word of one set for May 21st in West Seattle – read on:

Initiative 103 Informational & Volunteer Meetup

5/21 6:30-8:00 PM at C&P Coffee 5612 California Ave. SW.

Learn about Initiative 103, get questions answered about the ordinance and get involved. For more general information about Initiative 103, visit http://i103.org.

Sign up and find out about additional meetings at http://www.meetup.com/initiative103/

Envision Seattle is holding a series of community based ‘meet-ups’ where people can learn about Initiative I-103, which elevates the rights of residents over those of corporations. The meet ups will provide information on how peoplecan help get the measure onto the Seattle ballot. Over 20,000 signatures are required to get the measure before the voters.

‘I -103’ is Seattle’s offering within a grass roots, nationwide strategy to counter the effects of the recent Supreme Court “Citizens United” decision granting ‘personhood’ to corporations. The proposed Seattle initiative bans corporate spending on elections within the city, creates a citizens bill of rights, and protects air and water quality by giving ‘rights’ to nature in law. Similar ordinance campaigns are underway in Bellingham, Spokane and Portland, and have been successful in other cities such as Pittsburgh PA and Dryden, New York.

To learn more about the initiative and read the proposed ordinance, go to http://envisionseattle.org. For more about the community rights movement see http://CELDF.org

18 Replies to "Election 2012: Initiative 103 'meetup' in West Seattle"

  • 33Pete May 10, 2012 (1:12 pm)

    I-103 is one of the most half-baked ideas ever. Really, we all understand concerns regarding the power of corporations, and I for one understand that their powers need to be checked.

    That said, this bill is ridiculous (not to mention facially unconsitutional). Frankly, its more unfocused than the Occupy movement (which I likewise sympathize with in terms of the general tenets, but find unpalatable in practice due to both its messengers and inability to effectively articulate its message).

    Simply put, half-baked, anti-corporate sentiment transformed into an ill thought initiative that was drafted without regard to either its legality or affect on other laws or interests.

  • Jeff May 10, 2012 (1:16 pm)

    You can also RSVP on Facebook here:
    https://www.facebook.com/envisionseattle/events

    Thanks for sharing this with your readers!

  • Jeff May 10, 2012 (1:23 pm)

    33Pete, this article may be helpful to you – it discusses how Spokane, Bellingham and Seattle (as well as Portland soon) are all signature gathering for these grass roots initiatives which push back against federal overreaching.
    http://envisionseattle.org/2012/04/pacific-northwest-emerging-as-a-stronghold-for-a-new-kind-of-activism.html

    This is how laws change:

    These efforts mirror the women’s suffrage movement: “In addition to the strategy to obtain full suffrage through a constitutional amendment, reformers pursued state-by-state campaigns to build support for, or to win, residence-based state suffrage. Towns, counties, states and territories granted suffrage, in full or in part, throughout the 19th and early 20th century.” These local battles played out for fifty years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. “By 1920 when women got the vote nationwide, Wyoming women had already been voting for half a century.”

    It’s also worth noting that 65% of Dems and GOP voters disapprove of Citizens United and that Supreme Court approval is at a 25 year low:
    http://envisionseattle.org/2012/05/supreme-court-approvals-drop-to-25-year-low-65-percent-disapprove-of-citizens-united.html

  • Karen May 10, 2012 (1:27 pm)

    I hope 33Pete will take the time to visit the CELDF.org link and learn more about the actual legal scholarship and impact elsewhere of ordinances like that i103 is designed to create. This is a radical new legal approach developed by Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Why not read about it? Why not give it a try — it’s not like other things are working so well, are they?
    So while you are certainly entitled to your opinion, your last paragraph is just factually inaccurate. Visionary lawyers have been working on this legal approach for quite awhile.
    Further, this proposed ordinance does quite a bit more than express anti-corporate sentiment. It protects the environment and provides Seattle citizens with the power to stop environmental harms through the courts. Currently citizens do not have the power to sue on behalf of the environment and so the corporate polluters always win. Check out the recent decision about the wind farms in Eastern WA, in the Seattle Times today.
    i103 is designed to shift power in many ways so that local citizens have local control.
    And it is designed to change our frame of reference, to start a new conversation, and to change that conversation in the courts. It is doing that — in Pennsylvania, Vermont, New York, and California, so far. Again — check out CELDF.org.

  • fauntleroy fairy May 10, 2012 (1:53 pm)

    Thank you 33Pete, I couldn’t agree more! I-103 is a complete waste of time and a waste of the valuable resource it will be printed on.

  • Tuesday May 10, 2012 (2:43 pm)

    Citizens United did not grant personhood to corporations. It’s hard to move forward in self-righteous indignation if you don’t even care enough to get the facts straight. One more manipulative political platform. You can’t trust anyone anymore.

  • 33Pete May 10, 2012 (4:33 pm)

    Thank you for the biased and largely uninformed links. My position is not grown out of a lack of understanding, but rather out of a robust understanding of the issues, as opposed to the clearly inadequate thought given to the initiative by its authors and supporters.

    Look, I have no doubt you are well intentioned, and I am sure the union bosses love you for taking away the power of corporations to lobby, while preserving the right for unions (who spend just as much money and are arguably far more manipulative than any corporation).

    While you try to align your position with the women’s suffrage movement, it is clearly more akin to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where slaves were proposed as being only counted as 3/5 persons for purposes of apportionment in Congress.

    Moreover, the purported “visionary lawyers” are doing nothing radical whatsoever – its basically Tim Eyman from the left, in which activist groups try to get slanted initiatives on the ballot, with little to no forethough or holistic vision.

    And you yourself obviously have no understanding of the law, private citizens can and do take action to enforce the environmental laws.

    Quite frankly, the only people I see supporting this initiative are: (1) people who have no undertanding of its implications; or (2) plainitff’s attorneys.

    One small case in point – the provision stating “Employees shall possess United States and Washington Bill of Rights’ constitutional
    protections in the workplace within the City of Seattle, and workers in unionized workplaces shall possess the right to collective bargaining.” This provision is either wholly duplicative of rights that already exist (which is not how it would likley be interpreted given the cannon of construction against such duplicity) or it basically says, you can do whatever you want at work without reprecussions – like, tell your boss to F-off and die and call him a Nazi F-ing pig. Apparantly, if you do those things and are fired, you can now sue your employer for violation of your first amendment rights. Sounds like a great way to run a business.

  • 33Pete May 10, 2012 (4:53 pm)

    “Why not give it a try — it’s not like other things are working so well, are they?”

    Well, lets see, for one, I think the City of Seattle has a lot better things to spend its money on than enacting a law that facially violates federal law and then paying an army of lawyers to fight the federal government in court (particularly given the significant liklihood it would be a losing effort).

    I also think our businesses have a lot better things to do than have to respond to more frivilous lawsuits that would be encouraged by this initiative – particularly given the one-way attorneys’ fees provision. Hey – sue any corporation or government you want without any potential downside. Sounds great for all the anti-corporate/anti-government folks out there. Oh wait, you’ll tell me we will rely on those folks to exercise restraint and to act reasonably, just like, say the recent example we saw on May day.

  • jeff May 10, 2012 (5:31 pm)

    33Pete … this is clearly very upsetting to you. The best course of action I can recommend to you is to not attend the meetup and not to sign the petition.

    For the rest of you, we’d love to see you at C&P and we can have a more constructive dialog about I103 and our theory of change in person!

    We also have a 7 week series of Common Good Cafe meetups in the University District with various speakers from around town – it begins tonight and continues every Thursday evening through June 21!
    http://envisionseattle.org/2012/04/common-good-cafe-schedule-thursdays-7pm.html

    -Jeff

  • Karen May 10, 2012 (5:38 pm)

    You say –“And you yourself obviously have no understanding of the law, private citizens can and do take action to enforce the environmental laws.”

    Not really true- only if they have “standing” – a rather complex legal issue that you and I don’t have if we want to protect Puget Sound from pollution or the air in Ballard from the coal train.

  • redblack May 11, 2012 (6:26 am)

    I am sure the union bosses love you for taking away the power of corporations to lobby, while preserving the right for unions (who spend just as much money and are arguably far more manipulative than any corporation)

    .
    pete: that sentence right there tells me that you don’t know even half of what you claim to know about campaign financing.
    .
    and that you inveigh “union bosses” tells me exactly what part of the political spectrum you hail from.

  • 33Pete May 11, 2012 (7:36 am)

    “. . . and that you inveigh “union bosses” tells me exactly what part of the political spectrum you hail from.”

    Yes, I am from the left side of the political spectrum. Funny how you pigeon hole people and think that if you don’t toe the union line you must be from the right. Pretty small minded of you.

    That said, I am not a knee-jerk liberal. Rather, I believe in intellectual honesty – something so lacking on BOTH sides of the spectrum. And that is why I think the I-103 effort is so misguided. It takes a rather extreme and constricting view and tries to mask it as reasonable. Like I said, largely Tim Eyman 2.0 from the left. If you don’t see that, then you are already too deep. Those who don’t see what the other side has to offer often find themselves going further and further to their preferred side of the political spectrum, and just can’t understand where others are coming from. They get self righteous and condescending – kind of the bluster we see on the I-103 website.

    The truth is, most people’s belief’s fall somewhere in the middle and are generally happy with their current place in life – hence the tendency for what can be perceived as apathy. We long for a political process and candidate that can take more of a cafeterian approach to the issues instead of being beholden to traditional party positions. We long for a candidate who sees the value in what the other side has to offer – NOT one who resorts to villification – which is EXACTLY what I-103 is all about – characterizing the problem as big evil police and big evil corporations.

    So tell me, by the way, where I am wrong in terms of union influence on elections? You are so quick to denounce their manipulative influence, yet provide nothing to back it up. Why? Because you can’t.

  • fauntleroy fairy May 11, 2012 (10:47 am)

    Again….Bravo 33Pete!

  • redblack May 12, 2012 (8:56 am)

    you’re wrong in your assessment that unions have anywhere near the amount money or influence on elections that corporations do. it’s not even close. unions only represent about 12% of the work force, and we’re not rich people.
    .
    and we don’t have “union bosses.” we have democratically-elected representatives. and, yeah, we back democrats, because all republicans want to do is break us down.
    .
    and, for the life of me, i can’t think of one interest that i have in common with corporate america.
    .
    i’m not “denouncing [unions’] manipulative influence.” i’m denying altogether that it’s anywhere near as much of a factor as corporate money or influence. i wish unions were as influential as corporations, but they’re not.
    .
    because if they were, for one thing, we wouldn’t be seeing these attacks on public employee unions.
    .
    furthermore, if all that the other side has to offer is more union-busting, privatization, budget-cutting, austerity, and voodoo economics, i’m not interested in talking to them.

  • Paul Felix Schott May 12, 2012 (9:40 am)

    The very many Men and Women that have and are serving this Nation are doing it For GOD Family and then Country not for the Wicked.

    Our GOD Has A Name you Know Not and the Day will come Obama when our LORD GOD and Savior JESUS CHRIST will say i know you not. This is sad and all should tell Obama to read the Lord’s Word from the Bible. As all of the founding fathers of this One Nation Under GOD did. To Get Our Independence from the Wicked and ungodly.

    The Mexico border must be open to all the wicked, anyone can do what ever they want Drugs go to the USA and Money and Guns go to Mexico. Anyone gets in their way then kill them. Do you think the wicked leaders that let this go on think no one can see. It is about time all on both sides really do some thing about it for the good Of All. Not the pocket book of the wicked.

    DO NOT TRUST A ONE OF THEM EVER. TRUST IN OUR LORD GOD AND SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST. The best counsel on all of Earth is the Bible. Tell all to read it daily.
    The next time you vote do not vote for a promise vote a man that will tell the
    world his LORD and Savior is JESUS CHRIST, and that he will serve him, family then Country. For with out GOD and Family we will have no Country!
    And will tell all this on a Bible the truth of what was and is to come from are Lord GOD.
    Read the Bible and tell the lost to do so to. The Bible the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
    So help you GOD He will send his Son to Judge all.

    All Taxes need to be lowered cut in half or there will be a lot more Poor and needy and not in just other countries. This 2012 year the World will see hunger like never before. More then 100 million will be sick from malnutrition going with out food and safe drinking water, many will die. Taxing the poor and taking there Land away from them is Wicked. Very soon the Rich will become the Poor.

    If your Legislature will not lower Taxes vote them out of office and VOTE in someone that will Lower your Taxes. If your Son or Daughter was raised in a Christian Home we need them in our Government as Leaders.

    May our Lord Jesus Christ and GOD the Father that is in Heaven,
    Guide and Watch over us.

    In this time of TRIBULATION, Strengthen your Faith, and encourage
    all to Pray for their souls. The strong in the word of our Lord will Now
    Help the World and be the disciples of our Lord’s Word. It is time to
    gather the lost sheep while you can and there still is so little time.
    Daniel 12:3

    The Governments of all Nations need to read.
    John 14:6 Jesus said ……….

    United We Will Always Stand That
    In GOD We Trust
    True Patriots

    The Lord’s Little Helper
    Paul Felix Schott

    P.S.
    Many a Nation have fallen from taxing their people to Death. You want Prosperity and for thing to Flourish and grow lower all taxes. You want thriving, success, or good fortune for only a few, keep over taxing all.

    Solar, Wind and Renewable Energy Freedom from OIL. The Humanitarian thing to do. Solar Energy.

    Why let the Wicked in office in our Nation if they do not believe in GOD and the Bible vote them out of office.

    United We Will Always Stand In GOD We Trust
    George Washington and Johann Paul Schott 12/24/1776. 3:45AM
    In GOD We Trust
    The United States of America’s Motto July 30, 1956.
    King David’s Motto 3,000 years ago.
    Soon all the World will Pray to Our Lord GOD and Savior Jesus Christ.
    Sad for many HE will say I know you not.

  • redblack May 14, 2012 (6:22 am)

    well. there you go.

  • I-103 enthusiast May 16, 2012 (9:04 am)

    33Pete: I am one who is gathering signatures for I-103. And it is quite beyond my abilities to foresee all the legal implications of the initiative should it pass at the ballot. This might be beyond the ability of anyone, after all, I-103 takes no position on any particular issue, but lays a foundation upon which to build court decisions. This uncertainty doesn’t put me off, for I believe it is what makes something “visionary” rather than narrowly prescriptive.

    I appreciate your critique, as it will help hone my own understanding of the potential effectiveness and impact of the initiative. Interesting that you call it “Tim Eyman from the left”. I likewise have reservations about the way the initiative process opens law-making to what John Ralston Saul calls “false populism,” that is change aimed at the self-interest of the individual, versus “real populism” which is change made by the citizen for the sake of the public good.

    How to judge I-103 by this standard? It seems to be a non-partisan strategy, that is, it provides rights that could be used by the spectrum of political persuasion. For this reason alone I believe it is about strengthening democracy by encouraging citizen participation across the board. It seems to be genuinely about enabling the voice of the citizen to be heard in the law, not to be about an “anything goes” approach to behavior.

    As to your example of telling your employer to “f__ off” as a form of free speech. Well, this provision gives an individual no more leeway than they already have under U.S. constitution. It seems unlikely a judge would interpret the spirit of the law in this way.

  • I-103 enthusiast May 17, 2012 (8:17 pm)

    Tuesday: I haven’t heard any of the campaigning for I-103 state that “Citizens United granted personhood to corporations”, although it is an understandable confusion. Yes, Citizen’s United was the 2010 supreme court decision that effectively removed a cap on corporate spending on political campaigns as a form of free speech, and yes it comes on the heels of 150 years of case law that incrementally expanded corporate rights into the legal (and socially devastating) weirdness of “corporate personhood.” Why not be part of the process of reversing that?

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