Prophets of old VINDICATED!

The disastrous results of the Port of Coos Bay’s 1987 ELECTION FRAUD – and how we may be able to fix them.

“Prophets” may not describe them well, nor does the word “prophecies” do justice to their warnings. Nope; since the dire predictions they published in 1987 have entirely come true, they deserve the title “forecasters” for their accuracy, for they performed even better than our local weatherman (You know: “Chance of rain today”, while it’s pouring buckets outside). Abandoning our right to elect the Coos Bay Port Commissioners in order to have the governor appoint them, they warned back then, would turn into a catastrophe – and they were completely right. But their reasoning was simple: being already familiar with the Port’s malice, mismanagement and misconduct, they figured that without local control, things could only get worse. The Port knew it too – which is why their real agenda behind that 1987 election was to get a free pass, forever. Come on, Port Commissioners! Act imperiously, and ignore the public! Mess up everything, again and again! There will be no more consequences; the voters won’t be able to get rid of you!

All the Usual Suspects

Those who forecast the impending disaster in 1987 were a mere handful of Port critics, cranky and old and all dead now except me; the most prominent ones were Lorance Eickworth and Jim Ellis. Warning against abandoning our civil rights and “giving away our Port”, those patriots published letters and ran many small ads, using their own money. But the local ecodevo mafia supported the plan as they have supported every other idiotic notion promoted by the Port, so this time calling themselves “The Coos Comeback Coalition”, they outspent my forecasters by a hundred to one. The Coalition’s money came from all the usual suspects: A.W. Sweet from Western Bank, the ILWU, the Associated General Contractors, CH2MHill (a consultants’ firm that has done many millions of dollars’ worth of studies for our public agencies), plus a lot of contributions from the lumber industry, altogether $9,300 of which the Comeback Coalition only spent $7,100. In big ads and pamphlets the Comebackers shouted all the tired, worn out clichés we are still hearing today. It was a “now or never” opportunity: Vote YES for Progress, New Jobs, and the Future of our Port!”

“This will be the one and only election to decide whether we accept the state’s offer of greater support for our port. Approval will send the message to Salem that we accept Governor Goldschmidt’s offer . . . to help develop the port of Coos Bay to its full potential. A no vote says we reject that offer and don’t want to benefit from the Oregon Comeback. . . . This is the first time in (the) history of Oregon that the governor and Legislature have recognized us as a valuable, world-class, state resource, in the same class as the port of Portland.”

In reality, as I explained in an earlier article on Mary’s Blog (The inside story of the Port of Coos Bay’s ELECTION FRAUD), the whole thing was a big scam, cooked up by the scam artists at the Port and their conniving buddies in Salem. There WAS NO OFFER of more money from Governor Goldschmidt; all he was willing to do was appoint the Port Commission, so he could reward his political friends. And the Port’s Salem buddies, with our former State Senator Bill Bradbury out front, assured the legislature that the propaganda blasted at the Coos Bay aborigines about more State support (meaning more State money) was not to be taken seriously; the legislators would not be held to such promises, since they were not part of the bill. Finally, thoroughly confused, the lawmakers passed the bill as a referendum, meaning that the Coos Bay Port District voters would have the final say-so during the next election. If not for that, said one legislator clearly exhausted by the bottomless blather of Bradbury and Port officials, he would not have voted for it.

But were the Port’s voters capable of perceiving the scam? That question goes to the very nature of scams, which are ingeniously designed to sell you something while you think you’re buying something else entirely, since the scammers – I mean the sellers –go to great lengths to hide the truth, much like illusionists. In this case, as soon as the legislature had done its reluctant part, the Comeback Coalition went into frantic mode to get the voters’ approval, burying them under brazen lies and crass mawkishness, in roughly equal amounts. Comeback Coalition ads promised “jobs and progress”. It was “the chance of a lifetime, for us, for you, for our kids”. And on this occasion labor and business, often reluctant bedfellows, were faithful partners in crime. While the unions and the Democratic Central Committee gave ringing endorsements, the dens of dunces who pretend to practice free enterprise, including the Chamber of Commerce, beseeched people not to miss “a golden opportunity” to obtain lots more state money for the Port which they described as an incredible asset capable of restoring Coos Bay to its former glory – if only people marked their ballots correctly. It looked too good to be true – and it was.
Adding to the nonsense bubbling up all over, the newspaper contributed a bucketful of editorials urging voter approval, including one on the day when most people were expected to receive their mail-in ballots.

What’s the First Amendment for, anyway?

If, instead of regurgitating the dunces’ underhanded propaganda, The World had bothered to report what went on in Salem, the paper could have done us a good turn, the kind of turn the drafters of the First Amendment hoped for but rarely seem to get for their trouble. Jerry Baron, the then-editor of The World, promoted the “State Port” scam as he had all the preceding ones, this time waxing ineloquent about “renewing the belief that this port does have a future”, and about “developing the economic potential of the great natural resource represented by this harbor”. The bad English (although his own was not much better) suggested that he was repeating verbatim the emissions of Frank Martin, the then-Port Manager who had cooked up the plan. Martin had learned his trade in Chicago, where corruption and crooked politics are endemic and the local voters get to decide as little as possible; the notoriously crooked Chicago political machine does it for them. That he plied his craft in Coos Bay with either dyslexia or illiteracy was a minor fault given that he also was a compulsive liar, a con man and a sociopath. But he’d been hired, promoted and praised endlessly by the same crowd that was now pushing his latest scam.
In his editorials Baron assured his readers that under the new arrangement, the Port would never abuse its power to squeeze more tax revenues out of the voters, since the Port had never done such things before. That was beyond laughable; the Port had been doing it for years, with Martin persuading the voters to approve a special levy and a higher tax base in exchange for promises of new jobs that never materialized. And the Port had been doing the same thing WITHOUT voter approval too. For years the Port had covered its past-due bills by selling “Emergency Bonds”, each of which obligated the taxpayers to cough up $50,000 over and above their regular tax levy, but this time without their vote – and usually without their knowledge. By state statute, port districts were allowed to sell up to $100,000 annually of such bonds without having to ask for voter approval. So for years, whenever the Port’s till was empty again because of its own blunders, the Port Commissioners would pass an ordinance declaring that an “emergency” existed, and that E-bonds must to be sold “for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety.” No one seems to have challenged their understanding of the public peace, health and safety, but in their defense I should point out that they appeared movingly anxious about those things. Anyway, while other Oregon Ports had too many scruples for such moves, the Port of Coos Bay had gotten away with them for years. But there were limits to the E-bond shenanigans. While the Port could sell up to $100,000 a year, only $150,000 of E-bonds could be outstanding (meaning not repaid) at any one time. This sometimes caused the funds from the next E-Bond sale to be delayed, a nuisance that was partly remedied by selling “tax anticipation bonds” – the Port’s equivalent of a payday loan. But the “State Port” scam would take care of that little problem too. An obscure clause in the bill would increase the Port’s E-bonding authority ten-fold, and without most of the voters knowing it. Why should they? Not even their local paper knew it, or cared. What it amounted to was that the taxpayers, besides losing their vote, were being sweet-talked into stealing from themselves.

As often happens in politics, the few with a clear view of the politicians’ real agenda were ignored by the great mass of voters whose opinions rested on little more than ignorance, sloth and greed, all fervently enabled by the Comeback Coalition. On September 15, 1987, Port District voters approved the State Port measure that was not a State Port measure, by 7,487 to 2,985. According to Frank Martin, it was “a mandate to the governor that the community is serious about moving forward in reaching the potential that this port has as quickly as possible.” Martin also announced he would immediately ask the state for money. There was much whooping and hollering in the paper. But Lorance Eickworth and Jim Ellis found little to whoop about. Jim Ellis concluded that Coos Bay had just dumped on the Founding Fathers: “I wonder what the framers of our Constitution would say if they knew what we did to that great document Sept. 15. They sacrificed with their blood and life [to give us the] means whereby we could always protect our freedoms, the right to vote . . . I’ll bet if our forefathers could see what we are doing to our Constitution today, they would sit down and weep.”

“We are not here to make friends.”

The voters who thought the Port would gain “State” status and State money lost their vote, the Port did NOT gain State status and none of the promised financial benefits materialized; in fact, for the next several years the Port’s taxpayers paid twice as much in taxes as the State gave to the Port, and even that level of State funding was less than BEFORE the election. But the scam had enabled the Port to become even more dictatorial, arrogant and secretive. (On the positive side, they did not become any more incompetent, but that was since they had already maxed out that opportunity.) We’ve all noticed the symptoms: at their meetings the Commissioners will listen stone-faced to citizens objecting to their plans, only to go right ahead without so much as a reply. They actively interfere in elections. They will refuse to supply public information, or charge unaffordable fees for it. They will top off an already-bloated bureaucracy by hiring a public relations specialist to write cloying articles for the paper. In short, they behave like a bunch of Chicago thugs.

But the very worst part, beyond doubt, is their continuing obsession with re-industrializing Coos Bay, which has achieved no more than handouts of corporate welfare that generate political support from those on the take. So, time after time, the Port of Coos Bay has divided our community by promoting yet another atrocious industrial scam while taking on the attitude that the people be damned. During Frank Martin’s tenure they promoted building a chromium smelter on their North Spit land, directly upwind from our population centers. That got a lot of people worried about smelter pollution, which is notoriously bad, but the Port verbatim repeated the promises of no pollution that were emitted by the smelter promoter, who in the end turned out to be a con man himself. A couple of years after the 1987 election we found out that the Port had been scheming to site a foul-smelling Kraft pulp mill, again on the North Spit. Port President John Stephens announced that it was going to happen, no matter how many objections people had: “We are not here to make friends,” he diffidently told a large crowd opposed to the Port’s plan. Fortunately, although the Port District voters could no longer vote Stephens out of office, they still had the power to vote for an initiative that outlawed pulp mills on the port’s land. It passed by a large margin, proving that pulp mill opponents represented most of Coos Bay/North Bend. But in the end, my research showed that despite his overbearing bluff Stephens, supposedly a man with intimate knowledge of the wood products industry, was as ignorant and naive as they come. The pulp mill plan was never serious; the company had merely used the rubes in Coos Bay to obtain a better deal (meaning corporate welfare) elsewhere. In the meantime the Port had thrown away a couple of million for useless water supply studies for the mill.

But as could be expected, the voters’ inability to fire the Port Commissioners ensured that the Port soon got back to promoting environmental threats, from Nucor Steel to LNG terminals. Even though none have come to fruition so far, their combined effect was to turn Coos Bay into the only economically shrinking part of western Oregon. Stupid industrial plans by vain authoritarians, even if they never happen, have consequences. They block alternative, friendlier developments and they discourage people from settling in our beautiful area. Such people end up buying homes elsewhere on the Oregon coast, generating growth everywhere except in the Coos Bay Port District.

And that, dear readers, sums up the Port of Coos Bay’s achievements of the last thirty years. But . . . prior to that disastrous, civil-rights-destroying vote in 1987, Jim Ellis of Coos Bay had warned: “If we lose control of our port, will we have a voice about the caliber of industry that goes in on the North Spit or any port property?” History has given us the answer: “No you won’t, unless you’re willing to make an unusually large effort.”

“It would only take a local vote to dissolve”

Prior to the “State Port” election some people had wondered if, in case they didn’t like the results of their “Yes” vote, they could ever take their voting rights back. Jim Ellis had looked into that, and he didn’t think so. But as on so many occasions, before and since, the pulp mill craze brought out the passionate progress preachers, competing in loudness and mendacity. At one such feverish revival, of the Democratic Central Committee, M.J. Leonard of North Bend had observed that people who questioned the “State Port” idea were “treated very rudely and shouted down.” He had also concluded that a reversal of the measure would be next to impossible. Returning the voting privilege to the port’s taxpayers could only occur through the legislature or through a statewide ballot initiative. The latter was even more unlikely than the former: a statewide initiative would require petitions with more signatures than there were people in Coos county. At that same boisterous meeting Jim Ellis had confronted Port Commissioner Chris Short, a woodworkers’ union boss, about that same question. Both Short and Allan Rumbaugh, who would later become Port Manager, assured Ellis that the port would “remain under local control” – whatever that meant. After the meeting Short checked into the matter anyway and called Ellis, saying “My God, Mr. Ellis, I found out what you said was true.” But the old booster boys went to work on him, and a few days later Short announced his readiness to re-join the Coalition campaign.

But Ellis and Short and Leonard had been contradicted by Frank Martin, the Port manager and author of the State Port scheme. While he was out stumping for approval, Martin had been asked: “Will a ‘yes’ vote mean the port district residents have no recourse should state agency status prove not to be beneficial?” The paper had reported his answer, no doubt because they believed him:

“We checked with the attorney general and by state law it would [only] take a local vote to dissolve [our relationship to the state],” Martin said. (The World, August 29, 1987)

In the spring of 1990, while the pulp mill ferment was at its peak, two Coos Bay residents, John Craig and Scott Partney, filed an Initiative petition at the County courthouse that would terminate the Governor’s power to appoint the Coos Bay port commissioners, so the port’s voters could start electing them again – or recalling them again, whichever applied. It would also dismiss the serving appointed commissioners.

Partney was a former port employee. Craig ran the local office of the Army Corps of Engineers, which supervises dredging, regulates dock building, and involves itself in other port-related projects. This placed Craig in a somewhat awkward position. But he felt that the port needed local voter control, and he was a voter too. While Craig and Partney had mixed feelings about the pulp mill issue, they felt that the upheaval had clearly shown that the appointed port commission had no credibility. In the Port’s own best interest, they must be answerable at the ballot box. To nobody’s surprise, the Port didn’t see it that way.

Partney and Craig called themselves Citizens for Local Control, or CLC. Given the fact that during the pulp mill controversy the voters were already beating the Port establishment on other matters, there could be no doubt that the CLC initiative would pass – if it could get on the ballot. But if it was kept off, it could not pass. And in that case, the sleeping dragon of Election – and Recall – would not stir, so the Port would not need to change its stripes. And it soon became clear that the murky convolutedness of the 1987 State Port referendum would be very helpful to the Port.

It’s the principle of the thing

In special-purpose taxing districts like the Port, groups seeking to place an initiative on the ballot must first collect signatures amounting to 15 percent of the votes cast in the most recent election, but statewide and countywide initiatives require only 6 percent. The actual number is decided by the elections officer at the County courthouse. After they had first been given the ballot proposal, Craig/Partney were told that they would need to collect signatures of 6 percent of the district voters, which would be 880. Elections officials, in Coquille and in Salem, explained that the reason CLC only needed 6 percent was because the law they sought to change, pertaining to the selection of the port commissioners, was a State Statute; the 1987 State Port measure, approved by the port’s voters, was now part of Chapter 777 of the ORS (Oregon Revised Statutes). Since Oregon election law provided that initiatives to change state laws required signatures equal to 6 percent of the state’s voters, the officials had set the requirement for the measure at 6 percent, though not of the entire state of Oregon but of the port district; hence the 880 signatures, which would have been an easy goal for the initiative promoters. The office of the Secretary of State, which supervises elections, agreed. But Port Manager Paul Vogel did not. He said he had “problems” with the Port’s voters “repealing state legislation”, explaining: “This is a state-wide issue and should be decided as such.” Vogel asked the Attorney General’s office to review the decision of the Elections Officials. He promised to appeal any ruling that didn’t go his way.

During his attacks on the various anti-pulp mill Initiatives of those days, Vogel displayed massive concern for “constitutionality”, to the point of warning the port commissioners that “they would not be upholding their oath” of office if they didn’t fight their political opponents at every step of the way. With regard to the CLC initiative, Vogel argued that the “State Port” bill had originally been passed by the Legislature, not the Port Commission, so if it were to be changed by initiative, the statewide signature requirement should apply because all of the voters of Oregon, not only those living in the Port District, should vote on it. The principle was arguable; as a general rule, state laws should be passed or amended either by the legislature or by a statewide vote, not by a few people living in some corner of the state. But one could also use Vogel’s own reasoning to attack him.

In the first place, neither the 1987 State Port bill nor this initiative was of real statewide interest. The complicated way in which the 1987 law had been passed looked more and more like a ploy to block future input from the port’s voters. If it had not been concocted with that intent, it certainly was being used that way. And the Port was clearly scheming to continue denying the voters their rights.

It could also be argued that the Legislature had never passed any bill pertaining to the port of Coos Bay in the first place. They had merely passed a bill to be decided by the local voters, in other words, a referendum of local interest whose adoption was entirely up to a few thousand people in Coos Bay.

The reason why the Legislature had made that arrangement could be explained by the fact that statewide politicians don’t like to step on local toes, but also because it was of no real interest to anybody outside Coos Bay. In fact, State Law required this to be the case. Unfortunately, while this law (ORS 250.095) allowed the legislature to create a local referendum to be decided locally, it said nothing about the right of the voters to undo it later. According to Vogel, the only way it could be undone was by the legislature or by all the voters of Oregon.

When Vogel called on the Attorney General to see things his way, his real motive, of course, was that a statewide Initiative would call for the collection of 63,000 petition signatures, an impossible job for CLC. There weren’t that many people living in the port district, let alone voters. To get their measure on the ballot, CLC would have to send signature gatherers all over the state. And even if they succeeded, their next task would be to convince a majority of the state’s voters to approve a measure in which they had scant interest; and the history of statewide initiatives and referenda in Oregon strongly suggests that when voters don’t care about a measure, they vote NO. John Craig thought 63,000 signatures would be “unconstitutional.”
It’s interesting to speculate what might have happened if CLC had asserted from the outset that the port was not a State Port, and the 1987 law they sought to change was not really a State Law. It was just a port ordinance, which for some weird reason had been placed in the state’s law books. After all, the Coos Bay port’s voters had not acquired any special rights; they had given up their right to elect their port commission, a right possessed by voters in all other ports except Portland. If the Coos Bay port’s voters simply repealed what they had been given authority to approve earlier, the port would once again be subject to Chapter 777 as it was before. There was no statewide interest in preventing that.

If the state officials had agreed with this line of reasoning, CLC would have had to collect signatures amounting to 15 percent of the Port District’s voters, but that was still a feasible task. Collecting six percent statewide was an impossibility.

If they had taken this approach, the situation would have been confusing enough to get the Attorney General’s office or the courts involved. There’s a chance that a legal ruling would have exploded the claims about “State Port” status, and in consequence the need for a statewide vote. But John Craig was careful to maintain that his Initiative would not make the port lose “State Port” status. Whatever “State Port status” was. He didn’t know; and it’s a shame he didn’t pursue it because later legal rulings have determined that the Port is NOT a state agency.

The attorney who had drafted the Initiative for CLC thought he had a reasonable chance of getting the AG’s ruling reversed. For a flat fee of $1,500, he offered to argue the case in the Court of Appeals. Through a so-called Writ of Mandamus, he would have asked the Court to order the Initiative to proceed as a District measure, with the 15% signature requirement.
I’m not putting this in the proper legal terms, but his basic argument would have been that since the Legislature had, on two occasions, left final decisions about the port commission up to the port’s voters, they should be allowed to reverse their previous action by local Initiative. And why not? All this maneuvering to keep the port’s voters from exercising their rights could be seen as a violation of the State Constitution, which says:

“We declare .. that all power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority . . . and they have at all times a right to alter, reform, or abolish the government in such manner as they may think proper.”
A suit to assert the voters’ rights would have been an excellent investment in the cause of liberty, to recover what they had squandered for a siren song. But the Citizens for Local Control were out of money, and this is where the matter was left.

No Hope, No Change

In any case, having the governor appoint the Coos Bay port commission has been a disaster. To begin with, Oregon’s governors have looked at the gift they got from the Coos Bay Port District voters as another patronage opportunity: jobs for the boys. This is how we ended up with at least two port managers who had been campaign managers for one of our governors: Paul Vogel back in 1990, David Koch today, and there may have been more. I suppose such people come equipped with some knowledge of politics, but what Coos Bay needs is not more politics but a clearheaded look at the accumulated mistakes of the past so we can clear the deck and make space for real, sustainable development; and we’ve had plenty of opportunities to observe that politicians would rather repeat the mistakes of the past than do something entirely different. That’s because officials, including governors and bureaucrats and campaign managers, like to cater to conventional opinion; it’s a source of safe votes. And conventional opinion in Coos Bay, among the dunces who have always served as the Port’s cheerleaders, is that the Port of Coos Bay still has a fabulous future as a global shipping hub and an industrial center. We just need to keep doing the things we’ve been doing for nearly forty years, even if they have never achieved anything, even if they drag the town down further, and on some glorious day the breakthrough will come; you’ll see. It’s a lot like the leaders of those religious cults that keep predicting the end of the world. When it fails to happen on the announced date they just make a new prediction, the most astonishing result being that most of their congregation continues to believe.

To wrap up this sojourn into the past, chances that anybody except dimwitted retreads will serve on the port commission are negligible under the present arrangement; you need voters for that, preferably voters who’ve had it up to here with the status quo. But no matter how it is tried, any attempt to take back the vote will bump into the dull determination of all the dunces. And it won’t get any help from Coos Bay’s present representatives in the legislature, either. They are far too invested in the status quo. This is why a new approach is needed.

The Community Rights approach

Fortunately Coos Bay is not alone. The recognition that the combination of ever-more powerful government and corporations rides roughshod over local communities has awakened from coast to coast. The issues may be different, varying from opposition to fracking to factory pig farming and eminent domain abuse for private interests; the problem is the same. Corporations have too much power, not least because they have deep pockets to fund politicians, but also because they’ve been given “rights”; and government regulators, even if they are not already in some corporation’s pocket, consider themselves obliged to grant the corporations’ wishes as long as all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed on their paperwork. In the process local concerns, such as the people’s wish not to have hazards or nuisances in their neighborhood, are ignored. The power to decide has moved too far away from the American people who went to a lot of trouble to assert their right to pursue happiness, way back when.

As I see it, to fix our problems the people of Coos county, and of the Port District, need a three-pronged approach.

• One prong will be to recover the voting rights that were fraudulently taken from us; if we have any hope of changing the Port, the Commissioners have to be answerable at the ballot box again. This can be achieved by launching a voter initiative. Inevitably the ecodevo establishment will attack it the way Paul Vogel did in 1990, so we need to be prepared, first of all to explain publicly the sordid process that caused us to lose our vote. This in itself may put the brakes on the Port’s opposition, because it is bound to arouse a lot of people upset by their conniving and their highhandedness. But we also need also to be prepared to make our case in court, arguing that since this is a purely local matter, it should be decided locally. Speaking for myself, I would be willing to contribute money for such an endeavor. But it also may be possible to get free legal help through the “Community Rights” movement, mentioned below.

• The second prong will be to cut back the Port of Coos Bay’s tax base, since the money we are giving them has gone to their heads and is being used against us. (The tax base is the amount of money a public entity can levy each year. A new tax base has to be approved by the people, but after that the public agency can increase it by up to 6 percent without a vote. Should the agency want a larger tax base, or should it want to sell bonds to make capital investments not covered by its tax base, those things also need to be approved at the ballot box.)

In 1983 the Port’s tax base stood at about $150,000 annually. The following year the voters raised it to half a million, as usual with all kinds of promises by con man Frank Martin about creating jobs that never materialized. Thanks to the statutory, automatic 6% annual growth rate, 1984’s half million has tripled, to $1.5 million annually. It’s no wonder the Port keeps on hiring new managers with pay and benefits totaling well over $100,000 a year. They even employ a full time public relations official – as if the Port ever did anything else. Its tax base must be reduced to cut the fat, but also to reflect its negligible achievements and its modest place in the hierarchy of our needs. I propose that we reduce its tax base back to the half million we gave it back in 1984, since time has proved that even that was too much.

• Finally, the third prong should be an assertion of community environmental rights, probably countywide, that prohibits the storage or transportation of large amounts of flammable gases or liquids. Citing our local risk factors, especially the near-certain 9.0 earthquake and tsunami during the next few decades, this initiative would be written so as to make the Jordan Cove terminal as well as LNG tanker traffic uneconomical, while exempting current transportation and storage practices of such things as gasoline, diesel, bunker oil, propane etc. It would also exempt natural gas brought in through the 1-foot county-owned pipeline, but not through any new privately-owned pipeline. If this were done, we would not need to address the potentially outrageous abuse of eminent domain to build a big new pipeline for a purely private venture with the potential of incinerating most of Coos county.

These initiatives will raise legal questions, which are bound to be exploited by the usual suspects to block them. Personally I see the fewest problems with the second one; since port district voters still have the authority to vote on more taxes for the port, they should also be able to reduce taxes. The first measure, restoring our voting rights, is far more likely end up before a judge, but I have already described some of the legal aspects that give it a good chance in court.
And, while with the first initiative we may get legal help from “Community Rights” attorneys, that is a virtual certainty with the third one.

Look on YouTube for the “Community Rights” videos by people like Paul Cienfuegos to get an idea of what can be done and where this may lead. As Cienfuegos describes where we are already:

“In 160 communities in nine states, we’ve been passing rights-based ordinances that strip corporations of their constitutional so-called rights; that enshrine the right of a local community to govern itself by community majority; and ban specific activities which are legal but which the community considers harmful.”

All this may seem like a novel approach, but historically it is not. Through the centuries there have been many movements to assert rights and to create new ones. Consider the history of the British Parliament asserting itself against the king; consider our Founding Fathers who wanted their own government and got it; consider the history of slavery, of civil rights, and of many other social issues. These things CAN be made to happen, even though at first they raise a big hue and cry about lawlessness. As Community Rights organizer Paul Cienfuegos notes, strictly speaking all those legal achievements of the past were considered illegal, but: “They’re direct frontal assaults to unjust law, which is how real social change happens,”
This article is based on Wim de Vriend’s recently published book “The JOB Messiahs – how government destroys our prosperity and our freedoms to create jobs.”

“The JOB Messiahs” is available for sale at the Blue Heron restaurant in Coos Bay, at Farr’s Hardware in Coos Bay, and at Books-by-the-Bay in North Bend. “The JOB Messiahs” (2nd edition) retails for $35. Needless to say, as a reference work documenting forty years of failed economic development which took twenty years of writing and research, it is worth a great deal more.