the genesis of this cafe is the notion that it started as i was looking at the occupy movement and was asking how do we expand that how do we grow how do we develop that what are the next steps of that and how do we as a community have a civil civic discussion about issues that are important to us and so we have a seven week series and that series is this series is kind of an experiment where we just kind of want to tweak the thing get the wrinkles out here back from you on the left hand side over there there's a little basket and it has the the the word ideas on it so i'm very much open to any of your ideas of how to make these cafes better what we're going to do this summer is we're going to paint an redesign in here a little bit but i'm also thinking about how to structure the conversation so if you have ideas that's a wonderful gift you could give me is  just let me know what you think and about how to make this this better is it is it ok i'm just not talking close enough is as a better you know when you're a preacher you get so used to the sound of your voice it doesn't matter if there's a microphone any more you just rattle on rattle on people have the same glazed over look in their eyes glaze lard make him stop and then faith faith comes out of it he stopped  so but the seven weeks have a theme and the theme is corporate power and its impact on democracy and the seven weeks has a direct action theme and that is that we're we're promoting initiative i want all three  jeff i think we'll get up in a few minutes and say a few words about that but none of our speakers are here for that all of our speakers are independent of the initiative and our speaker tonight will be craig salans and he is fresh off of and i want to congratulate you on a wonderful organizing job where you pull together a bunch of folks a bunch of citizens in seattle brought forward a resolution to our seattle city council about citizens united and limiting its impact on our life it's a resolution these are happening across the country and so seattle now also has that resolution which is a great building and you can talk about that more it's a great building block i think of it as a springboard and it's one of those necessary steps that we have to take in this country if we're going to actually limit corporate power and take back our democracy and so craig's done some great work on that great organizing work in the city and so i didn't when i asked you on may seventeenth to come i didn't realize the date would be so close but so you're fresh off of that victory and so it's a victory let's give the man some appl it's nice to see people willing to be inside anyway when when rich first asked me to do this a few weeks ago i asked him if if i couldn't have a topic a little broader then you know money and politics and saving democracy but he said no because he didn't want to interrupt the future things about you know tax reform war and peace health care and all of that so i'm limited to just saving democracy i'm sorry o tonight in some some that i don't know but i thought that you know what we should do you know and i'll make some remarks about what's broken what i think we need to do talk about where there are further resources and so forth and then a little later when we break up  small groups can talk about whatever but it occurred to me that it wouldn't hurt if we talk about when we each can do and what we can do together to educate our self our  neighbors our coworkers figure out how to mobilize and speak up and also how we can support this movement and that slide will appear a little later in the lineup if i did it right this is kind of interesting some of  have seen this you know robert reich who of course was secretary of labor under clinton and now is the chairperson of common cause nationwide sum this up and you can read it i don't have to read it why isn't government working because it's been bought off and then bill moyers of course until we get clean money and get clean elections we can kiss goodbye to government as we knew it as we know it this is another quote by robert reich that i thought was pretty interesting the unprecedented concentration of income and well folks the twin issues you know we all know this the imbalance the inequality of income and wealth is connected to how government lawmaking has been for sale we're losing our democracy to  all right let me just make some comments on some things and some of this is really talking to all of us here tonight you wouldn't be here if you didn't know a lot of these things already i really want to underline some things and suggest what i think we need to do as organizers and as change agents and a couple of points in order to really fix anything we first of all have to know what's broken and i think in our organizing being able to pinpoint what is it about our democracy about lawmaking that's not broken and i'm going to say a little more about that in a little bit i think we have to acknowledge that this that what's happening now money in politics is not new it's been going on for a long time it's getting worse also fixing getting control of our democracy back in the hands of people instead of money is fundamental to every issue that we care about i think we all know that in here that more and more many of us myself included drifted into this to clean elections and trying to get corporate power out of the way because we were first concerned about other issues for me it was single payer health care and we asked ourselves the question why is it for over fifty years on the floor of the united states congress there has never been in actual vote on the floor bringing about what we really need in this country which is health care for all and at an affordable price personally i stumbled across a transcript of a talk that was being given by journalist bill moyers in california this was back in two thousand and six where he was traveling up and down california talking about the clean elections program i had never heard about it astonishingly maybe some of you had or not i read that transcript and i thought this is it why didn't we know about this of course public financing of campaigns it's a way to recapture our democracy well we went to work on this and a lot of you know that clean elections or public financing of campaigns is actually working in about seven states in a couple of cities but then it and we got some law passed in washington state the local option law that allows cities and counties now if they want to to establish public financing of campaigns but as soon as the ink was dry on that bill down in olympia here comes the economic crash followed shortly by even more court decisions in the federal courts that made it impossible for us to really do that just a quick side story some of you may know there was a young gal i don't know or but debbie simpson was a waitress in maine single mom used to talk to her customers about civic affairs and they would say debbie you should run for office and she thought well you know what on my tip money i don't think so now there's this program it's called the clean elections program and if you gather one hundred fifty signatures from voters in your district you can get a check from the state which is anough money to run a competitive campaign she did it she ran she won she became the chair of the of the state of maine legislature judiciary committee where they were writing law about single moms who had been on welfare she was reelected four more times until tw ten citizens united super pacs huge amounts of money they took out debbie simpson and a bunch of other folks that had run on clean elections because candidates could still run against them the old fashioned way the point public financing works but we have got to overturn the court rulings in the laws that have now allowed unlimited funding by super pac and corporations and so forth so i just wanted to tell that little story i think you all know a couple of the other points obviously some of the fixes that we've got to support are complex i don't think it's complex where our friends and neighbors can understand them but we need to know that there's a lot of moving parts to what we have to do i get asked all the time well what if we recapture the airwaves or what if we just declare that corporations are not people you know will any one of these things fix it by itself answer i don't think so we've got to do it all and we should have i don't bet on the horses but you know i understand it's a good strategy to you know bet on every horse you know push them all right and see which ones are going to win i think we have to address the question of how do we get some of these changes to happen we are tackling nothing short of overturning corporate power in america i mean hello i don't think that the accomplish by saturday it's going to be a big under you know question and so forth and here's another thing some of you heard me say this ok craig you think we ought to rewrite the constitution to declare that corporations are not people money is not speech we in this room are probably political junkies let's face it it's not fatal that's just what we are many of our good friends and coworkers and neighbors do not get up in the morning and think gee today i think i'll work with the reverend richard lang and craig sale and's and and frank and everybody on rewriting the constitution instead they get up and they say just got laid off on my job now what or my son or my daughter's bill just came in for their two wish and which is going up sixteen percent a year or we just moved in now we've got a house in love canal a cancer alley and so how are we going to survive it's these daily kitchen table concerns that most people wake up worrying about war and peace do i have to go off to iraq or afghanistan right i think as organizers we have to get good at connecting the dots we've got to talk with folks about how if you care about affordable health care you have to care about public financing of campaigns and you have to care about stopping corporate power because that's standing in the way of getting what we really want in terms of full employment health care for all and all that so it's connect the dots prepare for stayin wrote a memo to a friend of his who was then at the u s chamber of commerce laid out in the powell memo a whole strategy of how business and right wing could basically take over think tanks in the media and voter everything ok what we are seeing today is the result of that strategy the point we've got to be in this in a sustained man for a long time and it's going to take some tough nationwide organizing i think we're up to it but we would lie to ourselves if we didn't admit that that's what we have to do and then some another point the only real fix durable fix to maintaining democracy in america is to have an electorate voters people residents of our country who get civic affairs who understand it i think when i graduated from high school you know it took a course in government you know if you could cite the three branches of government you got in they they never told me in that class that how it really works is some of our good friends down in the limpia who are we all democrats here this is not a partisan issue but you know if you're in office and you're in a safe district you get given a quota you have to raise a certain amount of money even if you don't need it to get reelected in your district and the excess gets given to the caucus and the caucus is under control of the caucus and then that money is used in swing districts to elect people who might not win otherwise so that the party can stay in power so that the party platform may be can actually be enacted into law folks that's how it works it's not good it's not bad it just is and this is part of diagnosing how law making happens here's another one i you probably didn't know but frank is a u s senator he's going to vote in committee next tuesday on a that's going to tweak the tax code he's up for reelection this year in some state and so and i'm a lobbyist and so i go to see him and all of my clients are really well heeled you know wall street you're with me on this and so i say hey senator frank you know i sure hope that you'll vote to make that little change we talked about on line thirty two page nine you know of the bill because you know i know that your voters may not really want you to do it but nobody's going to notice you can blame it on the caucus right and that'll keep you in office for all the other good stuff because senator i'd sure hate for my clients you know i like you but i sure he for my clients on wall street to decide that they want to put their money behind somebody else to take you out right so thank you for what we think you will be doing next tuesday in committee where nobody's looking that's how it works that's why even though we have a democracy in this country ask ourselves this question how can it be that everybody in america pretty much gets to vote but the result of that voting and the result of that law making and all is that the top one tenth of one percent own a third of the wealth how can that be i'll give you a clue it's not just part of the laws of the universe ok this stuff is manmade and we should be talking to our friends and neighbors about this this is why we have to recapture our democracy all right did i put on there advocacy organizations need support how many of you think we can make real serious change without organizations to do it i don't see any hands going up that i mean we think that the eight hour day could have been brought about without the labor movement you know it's over that's on so we if  to we need support an organization ok the rest of this rich is going to go pretty listen i got some new facts just before coming here i didn't have when i did the slide day any of you know the estimated spending on the presidential election this year when to holler it out anybody i've i've heard numbers like likes like two and a half to three billion right spending by super pacs just went to open secret stock org to now twelve thousand six hundred fifty five in two thousand and eleven the amount of money that was spent on lobbying last year all told anybody know you guys come on you didn't do your homework three point three two billion let me tell you something i didn't know this a while ago why public financing of campaigns is essential but it's not the only fix is because it is simply the hammer no not the hammer it's a tool standing behind my ability to get senator frank's attention ok it's the tool that lets us threaten to take him out if he doesn't vote our way but most of them do vote our way because they don't want to be threatened so we don't have to use all the money on all of them we just have to let them know that we will a bully on the school yard only has to beat up one kid all the rest of them fall in line get it ok so the other thing where law making really happens is behind closed doors the lobbying and so forth we all know what happened in two thousand and nine when the health care bill was being debated and if you track the amount of lobbying cash and lobbyists that were working that year it goes up by like double or triple from pharmaceuticals in the insurance industry and then the bill passed not fully to our liking that better than nothing and then it all went back down again ok money buys that influence on congress i know none of you knew that ok listen this is some interesting stuff we don't have to spend a lot a long time on  how many of you have heard of this book winner take all politics if you have not i highly recommend it they posed the question of how can it be that we have a democracy but we don't really have democratic decision making and the whole rest of the book answers the question in detail folks it is a fascinating book i highly recommend it but among the things they point out is that working on down the value of control in congress has gone up and up and up over the years that's part of the reason why we're seeing more and more money in politics these days here's another look down under campaign cos increasing a friend said to me the other day will craig get money out of politics that's what we're for right i said well we're really talking about changing the source of money that buys politics campaign costs are probably not going to go back down again even if we wish they would consultants these days working for campaigns can do databases right down to the local precinct or the street they know for a voter what kind of car the voter drives where they shop what magazines you subscribe to how you voted in the last forty seven elections and so forth that kind of crunching the numbers costs money and if you want to win elections you gotta do it so that's a cost media costs are going up we already talked about quotas for political parties independent electioneering is happening there's been a huge shift lately from money in campaigns to money around the outside edges of campaigns so for all these reasons this is how money is working its will and the reason that money is willing to be spent is this there is a huge return on investment the money that was spent a couple of years ago to create a tax holiday for corporations and they spent something like sixty five or seventy million dollars lobbying for that tax holiday that returned billions of dollars i mean it was like a twenty two thousand percent return on investment if you want i'll send you the new york times story about all that so the value of the controlling congress has gone up and there's a supply of  money ok this is some of the money that was found in two thousand and ten by groups making top expenditures and then there were a couple of other slides some of this is on our website wash dot org this one is we posted last year the year before it's an excellent excellent article you can link to it of how the financial services industry spent over three point four billion dollars plus one point seven and basically got deregulation over a ten year period of time these were these were the some of the steps that occurred so i threw these slides in there because it's just an example of how money is buying influence on in congress what was the result hey our friend david stockman we all know who he is right reagan's budget director pointed out that in one thousand nine hundred five the net worth reported by the top five percent in this country a trillion it went up five fold in twenty five years up to forty trillion and some of you have seen some of the charts that show that the top one tenth of a percent you know the amount of income they're hauling down and so forth we already said this this is the laws of men  laws of the universe ok so what's broken public policy is for sale financing government services tax policies budget priorities i think dwi campaigns it's also election results i mean median issue as and so forth the very bottom one voter opinion how many of you have seen on voter opinion how many of you ever  catch cable t v or whatever have you seen that ad that's being run over and over again by the american natural gas institute why are they running ads they're not up for election oh yes they are they have laws in the congress that they want to influence here's how to do it shape voter opinion if you can shape voter opinion enough you don't have to buy a congressman the voters in his or her district will lean on the congressm i'm getting near the end here so why do we need a constitutional amendment in a course the flipside is can we really do it i think you know in this room but we need to talk with our friends when this u s supreme court issues a court ruling like they did in the citizens united ruling you know the one that said that corporations can spend unlimited amounts there just like people congress can't overturn the court because the court just overturned the congress the only way to fix that is literally to have let me back up when they issue a ruling based on a constitutional interpretation which they did they interpreted first amendment as applying to corporations the only way to fix that is to literally write different language into the constitution that's why if we want to overturn the citizens united decision we're going to have to support a constitutional amendment no matter how long it takes a lot of us of thought i used to think cheese how often you d amend the constitution right kind of a steep hill to climb it is a steep hill to climb we have to climb it climb it because that's the only way to stop the courts the federal courts from continuing to issue rulings that get in the way of what we really need which is public financing of campaigns and control of the airwaves and a lot more it may take five six seven eight years along the way will probably get you know collateral good things happening with consolation prizes and so for those on what is interesting is pressure is building nationwide and last monday seattle added its voice good there are now dozens and dozens of states but by the way it was many of us who worked on that and thank you all who helped to get that through the seattle city council there are now dozens and dozens of cities and some counties and three state legislatures that haven't acted resolutions calling on the congress to get about amending the constitution when a legislature does it it's really significant because that signals the congress that if and when a constitutional amendment is proposed that those legislatures are poised to actually ratify it right that's why we're on a glide path in this state to get our state legislature next january to adopt a joint memorial resolution saying the same thing that as did hawaii new mexico and recently vermont so to amend the constitution and reset the court by the way here's another thing you may or may not know the court messed around with the clean elections program in arizona in most states they had a feature of clean elections called rescue funds ok you're running on public financing you get outspent by private candidate once that private candidate spends more than you got in your check to run your program dollar for dollar you get more money to keep up with them you follow me that's called rescue funds it's capped at like two or three times the you know what you got before the u s supreme court stepped into arizona last year in the middle of an election candidates were running and had money in their campaigns and ruled rescue funds and out of order actually it was a local federal judge overturned by the ninth circuit the ninth circuit was overturned by the u s supreme court getting rid of rescue funds that's why we have to reset the court and i don't think it's going to happen in the same way that you know that  fictional in case i'm on tape here you know in the pelican brief you know the the movie in the caution if you really think so the only durable fix is a constitutional amendment ok sort of  wrapping up we need fair elections now public financing we need laws that can regulate spending outside of campaigns electioneering we need tough disclosure laws let me tell you something the u congress could pass a disclose act now the supreme court did not rule against disclosure they said disclosure is possible but in both the house and the senate there's not been an appetite to actually pass a disclose act yet so we get money we need to push for that we need to recapture airwaves we need to do some of this at the local in the state level so hey i stuck this in here r if you if you have not done it google f d r second bill of rights and read it folks it is stunning when we think back what f d r had the guts to do you know right after his last inaugural he called the reporters into his office maybe it's not ending capitalism capitalism in america but you know that document if that were to become the law on the policy of the land we'd be far ahead because it calls for full employment housing for all affordable health care so for them so on it's really it's really a great thing so rich i thought and to all of us these could be some questions that  we discussed tonight i'm not sure there's any one answer to this but here's some questions you know which are these are core problems which of them are solutions that would fix everything ending corporate personhood regulating cambs campaign spending just on those two the proposals that have been filed already in congress there are thirteen of them proposals amendments to the constitution that have been proposed in the congress in the last three or four months there's actually a summary of them on our washed clean website some of them go directly at corporate personhood some of them go at regulating a proposed amendment that calls for mandatory public financing of all federal campaigns and makes it illegal to not take public financing that's tennis because senat proposal right so there's a bunch of them i think one signet what is significant about that is the fact that those proposals have been filed at all because six or eight months ago none of them had been filed actually one was that the others not yeah the most recent was what year was it it was to lower the voting age nationwide to eighteen and of course that was motivated by vietnam war and body bags which i think makes the point that the constitution can be changed and when that happens it's because there's a tsunami of public opinion behind it and so that was in one nine hundred seventy one i believe or somebody may know it was early sevent anyway i think that ending corporate personhood alone won't fix everything we had a problem with money and politics even before the citizens united decision but we also have had a problem with corporate power for a long time ok and if you notice you know this guy in in las vegas who gave five million dollars to you know a bunch of times to gingrich ok he wasn't a corporation he was just a rich guy so we also have to attack money you know undue money in politics  yes so the question what we are what we are actually doing right now we all of us advocates is getting cities and then and counties and hopefully state legislators to adopt a resolution calling for the overturn of citizens united or in the case of legislators to essentially pledge their support to vote for that next year so that was the resolution that was passed by the city council this last monday and we're going to be asking the county council to take up that resolution real soon at the same time we are asking legislators to sign what we call a joint legislative letter it's a little letter it's basically that same resolution and i'm real pleased to announce that to date we have fifty two legislators that have signed that joint legislative letter and some of them have not even been some of them who have not signed yet have not yet been asked they didn't know of yeah yeah yeah thank you thank you right so so to to basically urge the congress yeah thank you to urge the congress to propose a constitutional amendment which would then come back to the states for ratification which anything ect would overturn the citizens united decision yeah and i might just add one other quick thing i think many of us know that the level of alarm and anger among voters on this issue of money and politics of und influence by money and politics that pressure is building that pressure is really building a friend said the other day to me it's like people are starting to sharp their sharpen their political i think that by this november many voters all across this country are going to be so disgusted at the amount of money that has been flying around to influence elections that the day after  november's election they are going to be clamoring for the congress and the state legislatures to do something about it if so we need to be poised with some answers to that so that we capture that momentum here's what i found find a lot of them don't and so i say citizens united they say was not a good thing you know united citizens and i say no it was the supreme court's decision to let corporations  unlimited funds and then they often say to me old yeah of course that that there has been some nationwide polling on that which says that between seventy five and eighty percent between seventy five and eighty percent of those polled disagree with that decision now they're not lawyers but they disagree with the decision so there you go great question and two parallel answers one is i think we have to change it through language somehow in a constitutional amendment otherwise the court will keep ruling that way and secondly is it's not going to be easy i think i think the i think the drafting of a final constitution proposed constitutional amendment if and when it gets that far whenever we get to that is going to be a huge nationwide fight and debate in the congress as it probably should be so it won't be easy what i think that we all around here and nationwide need to do this spring and summer and fall is say to our legislators and to candidates running for office and to those that are running for office look money and politics has just gotten out of hand and no matter what please don't do nothing about it please know that this is a big issue i think we need to push this issue onto the front burner of this year's elections because at least then we will start to have more and more conversation about it and some of the debate over the language of an eventual amendment but but the short answer to the question you know the u s does i think the constitution has to say something like you know undue influence of money in elections is just can't do it i just add one thing i've got a lot of friends in the a c l u i've you know i've been an a member some of you may know that the national a c l u came out in support of how the citizens united ruling was decided because they felt that first amendment rights to speech don't even begin to go down the slippery slope you know denying that so i don't know if that fully yeah exactly and  so you might want to take all of you you may want to take a look at the proposals that have been filed already if you go to wash clean dot org and then you go to the resources and downloads page there  and that's a link from the home page there's a seven page summary where we literally have printed all thirteen of the proposals that have been filed so far in congress not just as we when i say a summary of them we've printed what the proposals are they're all short let me just stick and one other thing about that the federal courts have ruled consistently over many many years that there's a concept i'm not a lawyer but there's a concept called compelling state interest if something is deemed to be compelling state interest that allows the courts to say that trumps some other law so here's what they said it is a compelling state interest for any law that prevents corruption or the appearance of corruption so if there's so when the mccain feingold law was passed which limited spending and all of that the courts said ok they gave a green light to that because they said it prevents corruption and or the appearance of corruption here's what they have not ruled in favor of leveling the financial playing field the courts have said leveling the financial playing field is not a compelling state interest so that was the basis in which they knocked down the rescue funds feature they said rescue funds may be a good idea but it's not a compelling state interest and so they knock that down now maybe financial level playing field doesn't matter so much if you're you know norway or denmark or somewhere where nobody makes that much more money than anybody else but when we get this huge tilt between wealth and poverty in this country then a level financial playing field starts to be a real issue that's why i bring it up yeah yeah but you know folks this is an unusual year i think we all know it and not only because it's every four years a presidential election year now a lot of people are on the ballot but boy i don't remember in  election in my lifetime where the issues of wealth and poverty money in politics corporate self interest all this stuff has been so on the front burner and you all think that and  think i would be embarrassed to be running for office this year if i did not have a position on some of those things and i think that we should be i think the way to create political wind for change to create depp a little wind is for us to show up the candidate appearances and so forth and ask them say paid candidate senator you know what your position on that or just what do you think about you know the influence of money and in law making here's why it makes a difference we've got fifty million people in this country did it not have health care we've got people that can't find a job not because they're lazy but because there are not enough jobs we've got budgets being cut and teachers laid off so what sent i don't want to get on you all know this you know ok we've got twenty percent unemployed and we've got a bunch of work that needs doing and we can't figure out how to put the unemployed to work doing the work you know last time i checked we want to have a country that creates a job for everybody and you know basic housing and health care so and like i said earlier these are you know connected to money in politics so i think it's a legitimate question to ask candidates i see a lot of hands on and you know just folks i want to tell you building sort of on your comment or your question this is sort of the notion that a river is made up of a bunch of streams if you know where i'm going with this or spit it out grades there are number of different constituencies in the state that i end up working with and talking to because it's my temporary job working with washed clean some of them really want to deal only with corporate personhood some of them don't want to deal with corporate personhood at all but they do want to overturn citizens united others are a c l u and all that my political views or how i handle that is look i don't think we know for sure what the what the viewpoint of the country will be by november or december because it is changing so a couple things let's agree to just pay attention and see where things are going a little bit but if there are several groups that agree i'm going to use an analogy here to ride the same bus up to eighty fourth knowing that when you get to eighty theft some are going to go left and some are going to go straight and some are going to go right and that's ok we don't have to agree what we're going to do after eighty fifth let's just ride the bus together for now so what i say to move to amend and to some of u folks and to the free speech for people folks and some of the tea party and some of the republicans and some of the democrats is if we can at least agree on this piece of this advocacy if you follow me on this let's ride that bus together because if we argue amongst you're not saying this but if i'm just telling you it's out there ok if we let those of us who mostly agree with each other focus on the two or three percent where we don't agree who wins are the forces that we all disagree yeah so i think the i think the short answer to that question for now is there is undue influence going on and it's pretty bad and standing in the way of lawmaking that would benefit the vast majority of main street america so let's no matter what let's at least address that issue that's probably what it is and i'm sensing the music beginning to on a direct action and a wonderful springboard because again in partnership working together there's a resolution that the seattle city council has passed and what jeff and i have been working on and others are now working on this initiative one o three is actually about legislating law so what the city council just made a resolution what we're trying to push is ok let's make that seattle law which gives it a little more binding arbitration so it's a little nuance and i'll have jeff just talk about that just for a few minutes and then and then we'll just chat together and craig will be here as well thanks rich and thanks everyone for staying i think next time craig has a rally to get the city council to do something we should have him speak of three with rich so today is actually may seventeenth is the anniversary for brown versus board of education is a supreme court decision that outlawed segregation which in one thousand nine hundred fifty four overturned reversed plessy versus ferguson eight hundred ninety six and it's an example to remind us that the supreme court often reverses itself over time so a lot of people come up to me and say oh well past initiative one of three and it'll overturn citizens united for like a week before someone will file a suit in the supreme court will just squash us so i've been doing research about this and it's it's kind of interesting when we look at brown versus board of education basically what the court ruled is  violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment and they said that separate facilities are inherently unequal and it's actually the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment that corporations used to gain personhood so it's pretty disgusting that the whole basis of corporate personhood corporate speech and the accumulation of corporate power through the supreme court has been based on the hard work of abolitionists who were fighting to free slaves so something that was meant to be a civil rights victory has been turned to oppress all of us through corporate power and i just want to outline for you this is this is just a quick summary of how corporations have gained human rights through the supreme court and this is there's a model brief that the community environmental legal defense fund has written and i'll be publishing this with links if you want to look into it more but basically in eight hundred nineteen indictment college regulatory system is used sometimes the government is asking corporations for information about how are these drugs are leaking out into the environment showing up in the water supply and the corporations are saying oh well we can't tell you that  eight first national bank of boston versus below the grants for the first time first amendment rights to corporations and of course this is expanded upon by citizens united so that's how corporations have expanded these rights now i want to tell you something hopeful because state and federal government to establish labor rules minimum wage requirements and it went on for forty years the court was basically supporting the industrial revolution and it was actually a washington minimum wage law washington state law that was challenged by a chamber maid at a hotel in one that she wear and i love this guy love wiki pedia she was paid well she was supposed to be paid under the minimum wage law fourteen dollars and fifty cents for a week of work and a week consisted of forty eight hours of the time and she wasn't being paid that so she went to court and ultimately it made its way all the way up to the supreme court and in the case west coast hotel versus parish parish was the tamer made the court sided for the first time ending the lochner and establishing a foundation for minimum wage laws and so that have been here in washington state and that's an a very hopeful example that if we initiative one of three in seattle and say that corporations are not persons and that they don't have rights to speeds and spending money in elections and they don't have rights to lobby in private that we could be actually the springboard to a foundation  stripping and pulling back this expansion of these bizarre personhood rights and these constitutional rights for corporations so on that note around some of your chairs there are some blank petition if each of you a couple of you could pass those out i have more if you need if each of you would want to take one home and bring it back to the church at some point either to another cafe or you can just drop it off here we would appreciate that over the next there's a guy fred miller here who's been volunteering with us fred got me on the bandwagon that we're going to qualify initiative one of three in time to be on the november ballot so how many of you would like to see initiative one of three on the ballot in november that's a lot of you so really early july there's some flexibility depending on how supportive the city council is because they have forty five days to put it to turn it over to king county elections so basically over the next twelve days with the street fair and folk life i want to collect ten thousand signatures and so we have a variety of volunteers who are getting out into the street with us to gather signatures and i'd like to invite all of you to either come out for an hour or two hours join us or ask some friends of yours to join us and see if we can hit this ten thousand signature milestone and in two weeks we'll tell you how we did if we don't have that milestone we have till september to qualify but we wouldn't be on a ballot until next year so it's not a huge deal but if we want to like craig said there's all this momentum building for november we'd like to be a part of that so we need your help this is not going to happen without each of you going home and getting a couple people to participate so  if you go to the i want to three website there's a big volunteer boughton it's really simple for me just give us your name and contact info and we'll get in touch with you yeah know but it's a big milestone for us going into june that i'd like to hear so and we'll see if we can't do that in the next twelve days that i don't think we'll be able to qualify in time for november will qualify after i think so from twenty thousand six hundred valid signatures so valid means that they actually the king county elections actually checks every signature or a sample of the signatures to make sure that they're registered voters in the city of seattle and so awesome awesome so so anyway it's getting late i just thank you for your time and i'll be around if you have more questions and i would love it if you have questions about gathering signatures with us love to see out there