tonight we're going to well we're going to talk about this this measure of this initiative we're thankful that you showed up at some of things we're going to do is we're going to share our steve and myself and jeff are going to share a bit of why we got involved with this but then we also want to give you an opportunity to do that as well why have you come and jeff is kind of the brains behind it and so if you're a i am i my assumption is you've got a lot of questions about how this works is this legal what's go yeah i'm here i'm here for several reasons but quickly into the point is young fifty five years old and my growing disillusionment with the capacity of our political parties to initiate the kind of change that conforms to the kind of values i have and the kind of america i want to see and a city i want to see and i've been increasingly frustrated about that and i get really frustrated with protest marches that seem to go nowhere and what's the follow through and i got really excited about occupy i mean it's one of the you know finally people seem to wake up and there was energy and and i'm still hopeful  but in all of that a couple years ago through jeff i went to a democracy school and the democracy school was talking about deep structural change that if you really if you really want to incorporate your moral values into the way that we live in as a pluralistic society you've got to wrap your mind in your hands around the law law one of the laws that shape how we live and govern how we live and so out of  that out of out of that i began to think a little differently about what would be effective and what is not effective in terms of change i have been very disillusioned with the the increase of corporate power  in this country and the literal bribing of the political process and i've come i've come to a belief that corporations themselves corporate power this notion of a corporate person is about as anti american as it gets it's and i also believe it's anti human in my tradition and in a biblical tradition the new testament tradition these kind of entities are called principalities and powers and i think in the hebrew scriptures these would be this is what the prophets would talk about when they talked about idolatry and the notion of creating a fictional corporate person is no different than building a tower of babel or setting up a statue of an idol in worshipping at it has no human feeling all it knows is the price of lunch to use bruce  so if we are now moving in a direction we're going to be governed by entities that aren't flesh and blood and bone entities that are mortal like we are mortal i think we're moving into a very dangerous time of human history so jeff jeff and i were talking and jeff is the jeff is the genius i think behind us and he began to talk about well you know let's begin to organize people around  limiting and ending corporate rights and ending corporate personhood and there's lots of groups around seattle that are involved in that and and we wanted to too that we asked ourselves the question what can bring us together  what's the you know what's a what's a match that can light a fire to to get the whole town talking about this in an organized way and who knows what would come out of that conversation so how do you even begin the conversation and that's  when at least for me is my interpretation different might have a different one that's when we began to realize we have to change the deep structures and part of the deep structures and jeff will be able to tell us some some more about what happens when people like ourselves normal everyday people who don't have millions of dollars and don't have it we don't have our own person who are political person that we can by and will do what we asked them to do what can we do as a people to change the way we think about how we govern ourselves and so for me when the measure measure one of the three is an opportunity to push to put the ball on the field and begin to push it and no matter where it goes i see nothing but good coming from it because i think it will be a call to people of similar values my hope is that we will gather the signatures hope is that it will be on the ballot my wild hope is that it could possibly win but what i'm ready what i personally am willing to sell for is to put the ball in the field of play so that we can begin to call people of similar better word i'm told but it took forty years for the fascists to dismantle our democracy and have their coup d'etat in our country and i think it will take a while to get it all back but limiting corporate rights i think is a stop in the right direction so that's why i'm here and that's why i appreciate your interest in coming  similarly so that's why i'm on board with one of three because it would restore my voice i think that if we love anyone then we will use our voice to make the world a fairer and cleaner place for the people we love so it makes sense to me that people would use our voice to support taking away these judge made corporate rights and we the people would support a police force that actually serves and protects us and doesn't just pepper spray our pastors when they feel like it so we saw something like initiative one of the three working in pittsburgh where they banned fracking in the entire city and that gives me a lot of hope fracking so  yeah hammering away at the earth to get gas in pittsburgh so they did that and they came really close on their second try and spoke and maybe some of y'all saw there that was it like forty nine percent lost by a thousand votes in spokane this last time so it's doable it's getting close and wouldn't it be great if we did it in seattle on the cusp of this change and replenish democracy here in our own backyard so to quote the amazing poet june jordan we are the ones that we've been waiting for so i let it thank you you stephen thank you rich i'm jeffrey from an and despite what rich told you i'm actually the beauty of the operation but that's obvious you know you can believe your ears or you can believe your eyes  if i'm the brains were in trouble so i'm going to tell you just a brief story about why i'm here and then a minute talk to you more in detail about the new initiative and i'm also going to answer questions while a lot time for questions and then i hope that you'll stay in mingle to talk with each other and meet each other so i used to work at microsoft i came to seattle about twenty years ago i got to work at microsoft for eight years when it was a very small company been very fortunate and it's allowed me to to it's supported me in doing my activism around two thousand and four i had studied journalism and i pitched an article to the seattle weekly  microsoft and one of the articles i wrote for them was what kind of citizen is microsoft and in investigating that story we found out that microsoft had been recording about half of their revenue in nevada to avoid a tax we have here in washington called the royalty tax and at the time microsoft was going around talking about how they care about education and how they were going to get more involved in the state and state affairs because they have such a prominent role here and i found out that they were saving about forty to seventy million dollars a year in tax savings and that the state possibly could be cracking down on this and that was kind of then a few years went by and i think it is about two thousand and nine that we started to have a a two and a quarter billion dollar budget here in the state and cuts were being made to education so i started tabulating the numbers like how much money has microsoft saved in all these years they've been doing this tax dodge out of nevada since one thousand nine hundred eight so it had been about ten or eleven years and i found out that was over a billion dollars that the company had saved and as i investigated the legal aspects i saw that actually the department of revenue here probably could make a case to collect that money so i started a blog which is what some of us technology people and journalist people do and it's called microsoft tax dodge dot com and i started telling everyone i know and in washington i thought you know wow you know we have a two billion dollars budget and microsoft saved a billion dollars in taxes and they have earned four hundred eighty billion dollars in profit during this time period and so this seems like a no brainer to me and microsoft they keep saying they care about our community and they care about education so they want to do the right thing and i sent letters to the legislature and i told them about what i had found and i shared my data and everything was open and transparent so everybody could see this and what happened is that the chair the finance committee of the washington state legislat r a democrat named ross hunter changed the royalty tax so that instead of being a tax on sales to worldwide customers it's now just a tax on sales to washington state customers so this tax  microsoft had been dodging on this much of their revenue was now a tax just on this much of their revenue so essentially they're not really dodging the tax anymore and then shortly after that the governor appointed another ex microsoft employee to run the tax department i actually used to work with her and so what that taught me about the legislature and about the state government here is that even though we tend to think we have a great government here and a great democratic party here when it comes to issues of tax fairness how we collect money from people and how we spend money on things that matter like education social services that state government wasn't going to help us  wasn't going to do the right thing and i realized that i had to take a different approach and also during this time i had been studying with thomas lindsay and going to their democracy schools and learning about their group their community environmental legal defense fund and how they were approaching change and their theory of change and they'd sort of given up on the federal government as a way to make change they sort of see congress and as well the state legislatures as entities that have been bought out by corporate influence and can't be depended on any longer for change and so that's what led me here tonight and that's what the spirit and like what i've learned and what they've learned and what's behind sort of the thinking in this initiative process that will be talking more about so i want to thank you all for coming because i bet that each of you are here because you have a feeling about corporate power as having grown to be too much that you feel that something's wrong in our state in our city larger in our country and that things need to change and probably you feel like you're not seeing a good solution so that's essentially where we start tonight which is that we're trying to take a new approach so what initiative one o three would do is it takes we've written an ordinance that's based on the work of thomas lindsey's group it's very similar to ordinances that other groups are working with similar to the group in spokane invision spokane that has twice tried to pass this at the ballot as stephen was alluding to they only lost by a thousand votes in november and we're trying to gather enough signatures in seattle to place our ordinance on the ballot and what this ordinance would do it would start by taking on corporate personhood it would make corporate personhood essentially illegal in seattle and it would ban spending on elections by corporations in seattle so for example when we talk about the liquor privatization initiative costco spent twenty one twenty two million dollars last year to get that passed they pretty much so a few years ago we tried to pass a plastic bag ban in seattle the american chemical chemistry council the lobbyist for them they spent i think one point four million to defeat that initiative in seattle none of that would be able to happen anymore if we passed this initiative it would ban lobbying by corporations in seattle except in public forms so if microsoft things they have an important initiative they can talk about it in public they just like we have to line up to speak at our council meetings they get to line up and speak at  meetings and maybe this will lead to changes me they can still have meetings with councilman but maybe they'll be broadcast over the internet and scheduled ahead of time so that it's open and transparent the other thing that this ordinance does is it  es a floor of rights for our community and these rights are all related to protecting rights to fair elections rights to clean government and rights for nature  which the environment in the puget sound area has been gradually declining despite efforts by a lot of different groups and despite laws that we have on the books so what rights for nature does it it actually gives us a way a legal way to protect the environment it gives actual police accountability for citizens stephen was alluding to pastor rich was pepper sprayed at a democracy rally or was it last or early this year it would provide constitutional rights for workers in the workplace  it would give neighborhoods the rights to approve zoning that may affect them it would give us guarantees around internet access so if you've heard the term network neutrality it would prevent  broadband providers from essentially shutting down small publishers like bloggers like me by charging big publishers money for the fastest delivery all of these really rights are related to democracy how having government operate transparently having people's rights elevated above corporate rights all these things work together to ensure that we make decisions in our government in a better way  so in order to get this initiative on the ballot we need about twenty thousand six hundred signatures over the next five months and i think that's very doable but i want to talk about our goals like rich that we may not win and spokane has done this twice and they've lost twice but in the process they've generated discussion about the issues of democracy corporate influence on our government in our community how to protect the environment what we're trying to do and by you being here tonight is to elevate the issue of corporate influence on our communities to a high level of discussion in and around seattle so if there's anything that you leave here tonight with is hopefully knowledge that you've gained or excitement to go and talk to more people about this if we do get this on the ballot it will be a whole nother challenge to get people to vote for it and it really right now although we're focusing on is to build as broad a base as we can to gather the signatures and to raise awareness about these issues because these issues aren't going away i don't believe that the way we run our city the way we run our state where our country is sustainable and i think we see this in a lot of the problems that are happening around us things have to change and this is one way that we can make law well let me let me read to you first how many have you heard about the montana state supreme court passing putting down a decision that challenge citizens united a lot of you so actually all they're challenging is a very small part of citizens united but i want to read to you a couple of paragraphs from one of the judges in that case his name is the honorable james nelson he says and this is the dissenting opinion so he actually disagreed with challenging citizens united lastly i am compelled to say something about corporate quote personhood while i recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in the law i find the entire concept offensive corporations are artificial creatures of law as such they should enjoy only those powers not constitutional rights but legislatively conferred powers that are concomitant concomitant with their lead legitimate function the being limited liability investment vehicles for business corporations are not persons human beings or persons and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people human beings to share fundamental natural rights with soulless creations of government worse still while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct decency and morality and they are not held equally accountable for their sins indeed it is truly ironic that the death penalty and how are reserved only to natural person regardless of my disagreement with the views of citizens united is majority the fact remains that the supreme court has spoken it has interpreted the protections of the first amendment corporate political speech agree with its decision or not montana's  elected officers are bound to accept and enforce the supreme court's ruling in the same way that this court demands of beatings to its ruling like them or not i disagree with the court's decision to parse citizens united in a fashion so as to quote send a message or to be the next quote test case before the supreme court in my view this approach is disingenuous citizens united as the law of the land and this court is duty bound to follow it when this case is appealed to the supreme court as i expect it will be a summary reversal on the merits would not surprise me in the least so essentially what he's saying he totally disagrees with corporate personhood it offends him and as a supreme court judge of the state of montana he feels powerless to do anything about it we are not powerless here in seattle we have the right to write an ordinance to gather signatures for it to get it on the ballot to convince our neighbors to vote for it and to pass it and make it law so if the citizens of seattle say that we believe that corporate personhood and corporate rights should not be greater or more powerful than people's rights we have the right to do that and no one in seattle in our city can tell us differently so that's the organizing approach to what we're doing the mechanics of what we're doing and why i hope that you've come in to help us tell people about this effort the occupy movement in seattle and around the world has raised awareness for the corporate power the wealth and some of these issues and so now is an opportune time to be talking to our friends and neighbors about corporate power and corporate harm so i hope that you will leave here and help in connecting more people to this effort in helping us in gathering signatures and helping us place this on the ballot and in the process of that we're going to become kind of a lightning rod of attention for this issue it's likely that at some point the seattle media will take know about what we're doing and talk about this and raise this issue for discussion and then probably the national media if we get this on the ballot that and the advantage of that is that other communities will start to do this too because they also know that things need to change in portland they're talking about doing an initiative just like this in spokane they're continuing to work on an initiative just like this in bellingham some of you may have heard about the no the coal train there's a ton of coal in the ground in montana that the property owners want to sell to china and in order to do that they not only have to build a deep water port in bellingham but basically they have to have round the clock around the clock trains coming through bellingham and some of them will come to seattle and so there's a group in spokane or in bellingham that has written an ordinance to ban this practice and strip corporations of their personhood rights and other federal privileges that they often use to overturn community rule so we're not alone the northwest is becoming a center of power building around this issue when we talk to people about this this stuff is radical we're so immersed in a culture of corporate influence corporate power corporate fashion and money consumption it's hard for people to even see it and if you will find that people want to grieve with you when you talk to him about this they won't like the way that you did this in seattle we have a very educated city with we're very blessed with microsoft and boeing and amazon and all these great biomedical companies as well so we have an incredibly talented pool of people who are very well educated and they are taught to poke holes in every idea in every new idea and so as you talk to people about initiative one of three they will tell you what's wrong with that but what they're really doing is they i mean they may have valid concerns about this or that but it's also a way to keep their distance from some of the harms that corporations are doing in our community so  that we can't we don't have any laws on the books to help protect the species of puget sound ten species in puget sound are endangered or soon to be listed as endangered it breaks my heart when i see  there's a homeless man when i drive down a road towards danny he has tattered pants and often i see him with his head and torso tucked into a vent on the hotel there to stay warm and you can almost see the shadow of the new gates foundation headquarters casting over the where this guy stands and it bothers me that we can't do anything very easily to help him so when microsoft has been tied to this tax dodging and  in the last couple years our state budget has grown to four billion it bothers me and it upsets me that we still have all these social problems when the foundation gets to privately decide how to spend the profits that microsoft has saved i think that's wrong so ways i want to talk briefly about ways that you can help and get involved and then we'll open it up to questions first of all the petition and how it works if you haven't seen over in the corner my housemate career over here has petitions that you can sign tonight if you're a seattle registered voter and she'll be taking pictures if you're ok with that and we'll be putting them on face k you can download the petition and printed out from the website i want to read or legally the petition page has to include the full text of the ordinance and so that's why it's on the back here and it has to have all of this legal tax as well so we have three different petitions that you can download one is for people who just want to do a little bit they can i hope all of you can get ten people together five signatures at the very least so we have a five signature form we also have a ten signature farm so if you're feeling more ambitious that's probably a great size for you we also if you just want to save paper and you're going to gather a lot of signatures we were able to fit fourteen and you can download any of these it's also really important just to share the website i want to three dot org so if you have an e mail list of family friends colleagues please when you get home in mail this to them tell them something emotionally that you care about about our community and corporate influence that might be harming something in our community because i think it's too easy for people to i think if you want to reach people you have to speak from the heart you have to talk to them about what matters to you about why you're concerned about what brought you out tonight we also have a facebook page that you can get to from the website and that's another great way to share this with people so they learn about it we our effort is really just building awareness and getting as many people involved in this as we can in the back we also have petitions for you to take home and we have these commitment cards that if you're willing to commit tonight to recruiting a certain number of people to gather signatures and are willing to write that down that would be great or if you're willing to gather a certain number of signatures yourself make a commitment to that and let us know make sure you put your e mail address on that card so we can get in touch with you and keep track of the people's commitments and with that i mean open it up to questions and i'm glad to talk more about the initiative more about the process or any other questions that you have and maybe stephen it could also come up if you want to help field question elizabeth sure i think that's a great concern and i've heard that question before also to repeat the question elizabeth is asking she's concerned about the neighborhood approval portion of the ordinance that gives neighborhoods the opportunity to vote on major zoning changes and she's concerned that this may prevent important facilities from being built around like halfway houses or treatment centers or homeless shelters that sort of thing  with that and low income housing yeah so if you actually read the ordinance around this closet says that neighborhood majority should have the right to approve all zoning changes proposed for their neighborhood involving significant non governmental commercial industrial or residential development so i believe that there is space in the ordinance for the council to package zoning changes around these nongovernmental purposes that would be excluded from the ordinances impact but what this is really written to prevent is let's say a huge group of big box stores want to put a mom parking lot in a residential community that they shouldn't be able to do that without the neighbors having a say and i would also go so far as to say that because i hear this a lot we either believe in democracy or we don't believe in democracy and i think that it's important to bring communities into the mix of these kinds of decisions and so sometimes it takes a long time to make these decisions but we need to have a really compelling arguments on why these things are important and we need to sell communities on them so i both believe that the ordinance protects some of the things that you're concerned about and i also believe that we have to respect that community should have some say in what happens in their neighborhoods i also this is come up like around the roosevelt transit center that's going in because i know th people who want increased density there this ordinance would radically change how things are done in our city and a lot of decisions have already been made using our current model of decision making and so it's sometimes hard to imagine like if this law was in place when we planned the light rail route for example like it's possible that communities that don't want high density transit in their neighborhood we might have routed the light rail differently we might not have we might have made decisions differently if the laws on the books were different when we were planning those things so i think it's also important to remember how how things might be different if a law like this with the way that we operated in this city does not answer your question  so we're talking about the wording of the ordinance do you feel that that doesn't account for it sure it's this isn't easy and if this ordinance passes it will be subject to interpretation it can be changed in the future the council will have to write more laws around this to flesh it out and there will be opportunity for people to be heard about how they would like to see this implemented across the city yeah that lisa ok yeah so if i can restate your question you're asking is there an organizing framework for people sort of involved in leading this and making decisions that may come up over the next six months and then also do we have a strategy in place for responding tactically to say if this hits the media and is misinterpreted or if something needs to be addressed yeah so we're going to be setting up meet up like every two weeks that will move around the city to reach different people and then we'll also be having regular organizing meetings that you're welcome to attend and we haven't really started out the location yet one more time just to add one more that i'm working on actually in probably using this very space that you're in and that is i'm wanting to get together a continual series of folks who will come in here who will talk about corporate rights people's rights versus corporate rights so for example you know a friend of mine a person who i like a lot and i think many of you might know john burbank in the economic opportunity institute or craig salans to have folks come in here so that there can be a place for ongoing conversation about what what the role of corporations are in our society and campaign of collecting signatures there's also going to be opportunities for ongoing education which i think is hugely important because i have a hard time getting my mind around the legalities i know my in like the boundaries for neighborhoods and whether someone might manipulate that so the ordinance doesn't speak to neighborhood definitions in seattle we have a pretty strong history of neighborhood definitions and boundaries already and the ordinance relies on that assumption is that those boundaries wouldn't change or and so you know we can be sure the council wouldn't try to gerrymander but that's not something that we've tried to restrict against or to you know that isn't something we've addressed in this ordinance but based on the history of seattle neighborhoods we believe that ok so we have filed this ordinance together and now we're starting a citizens effort to gather signatures to place it on the ballot and that's pretty much the extent of our of our organization yeah absolutely so let's let's talk about what's been done so the question was do we have a plan to get other individuals other organizations involved in this effort to expand the number of resources working on getting this on the ballot and getting it passed so let's see  so we will definitely want to hear from people who want to be involved in the leadership and this meeting is an opportunity to to meet us and to connect and to network and expand we're also doing a lot of events so i've started doing house events where i'm talking to more people and hopefully some of you will do house events where you're talking to people we've approached organizations and we're continuing to approach organizations in seattle but i will tell you that until this effort has a certain amount of momentum from the citizens and grassroots efforts i think involvement by traditional non profits by unions is going to be limited simply because this is too radical for most of them and the way that they operate so i'm hopeful that they will come on board but i have not seen their ability like they are focused on lobbying the state legislature mostly they are focused on the old model of change and i don't believe that model works and i don't have the energy or resources to work on those organizations and changing them to a more effective model and so we are citizens who think that making this law this way it is is one approach we may be wrong if we fail we may have to start over we may have to approach this differently but this is where we feel like we're putting a stake in the ground we're going right to the core of corporate power and trying to raise awareness for these issues in party next week the green party is a very leftist group and they may decide to get on board i'm going to be attending the occupy may day strike i'm going to be trying to talk to their organizers we've reached out to them we hope that this is something that appeals to them those are very left organizers i've been talking to unions i've been talking to non profits i have meetings set up all month as people hear about this i will have more means i will go have coffee with anyone i love i will go visit these places and talk to i talk to independent high school yesterday i'll talk to anyone and i hope that as our leadership gets involved that they'll go talk to people but what i'm saying is that we have seen a strong conservative streak in seattle organised seattle nonprofits they are tied to a model of organizing that i don't believe has been effective over the recent history and they are not structured well to approach something brand new and so i'm going to talk to anyone that will hear me i don't i'm not going to i'm not going to leave the success of this initiative to convincing organizations to change their strategy ok so you had your hand up or so bill's question was how can we get nonprofits unions other organizations that might traditionally support and in corporate personhood to really put their organizational might behind it so let me just do a brief exercise with you why are you here what do you care about what brought you here so you know washed clean the group so rich was he's with a group washed clean i think they'll be at the green party event they have been working on public campaign finance reform for over a decade i've actually volunteered with them in oregon in the past it would be great to have their support  i'm not sure they're not there yet so people like you going to talk to them and saying that i'm concerned about spending on elections i'm concerned about lobbying i think that this ordinance is a way to change that in seattle i think that this is a model that's different talking to them that you care about that i think they need to hear from people like you in washington maybe i'm just singling them out as an example but all of you here if you have issues you care about and organizations you work with i would encourage you to give them a call tomorrow if you've donated to them giving them money given them time volunteered tell them about this and tell them you care about it tell them that you think it's a new approach tell them what you think they should listen and consider getting involved definitely so tom lindsey who is here a few months ago he runs community environmental legal defense fund and has been doing this work around the country and actually he's the person i went down to ecuador and help them put rights for nature in their new constitution he talks a lot about how groups like the sierra club have turned into their biggest enemies in certain areas where they've tried to organize because the sierra club is works in a strategy that works at the federal and state legislatures which works in a system that often the odds are against us as community organizers because those systems are have so much financial leverage from corporate power so i would love to work with every grassroots and nonprofit in seattle and if and  talk to anybody i'm not going to close the door on anyone but we don't have to get this on the ballot we need twenty one thousand valid signatures which means maybe twenty five to thirty thousand signatures and we can do that in the next six months just amongst citizenry and so i'm not trying to take on additional battles but i would really love your help in spreading the warning and bringing those people on board and the way you start by doing it is being a stakeholder and telling them that you care telling them why you care because you're not going to win with intellectual arguments you're going to win by talking to them emotionally from the heart you to me ask her for she was yeah sure what's your name  so the first question was will we have talking points and a simplified version for signature gathers to be able to more easily interact with people they're recruiting or talking to get signatures correct so on the website we already have a frequently asked questions page which is pretty detailed and then we will be creating a talking points page pretty soon and there's also a bullet point summary of what's in the initiative and so we that's definitely on our list the second question was are we ways that corporations can overturn democratic rule there's and i won't lecture here but there's things like the the contracts and commerce clause of the constitution there is the ability of corporations to use licenses and permits to overturn a community rule so that's one of the reasons why this ordinance has some additional language in it for and for stripping corporations of rights and it's based on the community environmental legal defense experience of the last decade in terms of your question about are we trying to overturn citizens united this makes it illegal for corporations to spend money on elections in seattle and in that way it directly confronts settled federal law around those issues so yeah we're  definitely trying to give the voters of seattle a chance to say whether or not the citizens of seattle think our community is better off with corporate personhood and with corporate speech in elections or not and when people sign i'll also make this point there's nothing in the law that says that every signature gather has to tell the people signing everything about the ordinance i mean it could take you know ten minutes a person your job is to tell them you know to get to ask them whether they think this issue is important enough to put on the ballot no one's passing a law question is she's heard that this is worked in pennsylvania and that the legislature has been recently taking steps to sort of fade back in to overturn the work of the communities so the seldom if the community environmental legal defense fund they've over  fracking ban in pittsburgh was passed unanimously by the pittsburgh city council and so what the lobbyists have done is the corporate lobbyist working with the state legislature they've actually gotten the state legislature to pass a bill it's called act thirteen or measure thirteen and what it does is it makes it illegal for communities to pass laws that regulate resource extraction and so this is a much longer discussion but the theory of change behind this work is that you know we either live in a democracy or we don't and so when we frame issues in a simple form like initiative one o three says that people's rights should be elevated abo corporate rights and that we have the right to if fair elections and clean government free from corporate influence that that's either a right that we expect in seattle or not and so when you frame it really simply for voters when the state or if you think it's fastest if other powers come in and try to take that away from a community once they've already decided that they wanted a certain way that is a really opportune organizing moment it's a really opportunity to moment now in pittsburgh they have not passed this at the ballot so the people of pittsburgh have not said they don't want fracking the city council their representatives and said that's one of the things that special about this ordinance is that we're taking it to the people of seattle and giving them the opportunity to say whether or not they think corporations to be able to spend money on elections here so i think who else has been waiting sure kristen so for people watching at home what christina saying is that if we were to connect the that the efforts that these organizations have undertaken in our community for a long time that they're very valuable and make a big impact and that we need to if we're going to work with them we need to talk about our values and meet them from that place and that there isn't more than one method to changing the system and that all of these different options may be valid options and so does that fairly and like next week at the green party event you know here's where on the same side there's like four different groups doing parallel kinds of tracks and only really interesting you know there's no right or wrong then i'm the first person to say i don't know if this is the right approach we may fail the first time and have to rewrite it and start over but but this is the effort that we've decided to step forward with now because we feel like it takes it right to the heart of the issue and to rise raise discussion around the heart of the issue now did you have a question as well to beyond did you want to make a second ok well i'm really glad to see here it's really appreciative that you came in in our state and  our city we as citizens have the right to write law and try to pass it and make it law in our communities through the ballot and that's what we're doing and we face so we believe that when you take corporate personhood and corporate rights out of the equation and you take their spending on elections out of the equation that our community will be healthier and more sustainable and then we're trying to put that on the ballot for citizens to decide so we're trying to give th seattle a chance to weigh in on this issue and that's the way it works legally we have the right this is nonviolent reform change you know when the constitution was written the word corporation doesn't appear in the constitution slate we legislated slavery and women did not have the right to vote and the way that changed was a lot of time turmoil and efforts and law making and that's what we're trying to do here now secondarily do we think that this country probably could use more discussion that's well rounded around corporate influence and power share certainly and we hope to both in the city and beyond the city use this as an opportune we also hope other cities start to use this organizing approach as is happening around the northwest already so it's not gimmicky like we really are making law here that would outlaw these practices that are we believe are harming our communities but it also has these opportunities for change and the way that this would work its way through the legal system is through more court challenges and cases and that's ok someone you know i'd much rather have ten court cases fighting over rights for nature and protecting the environment than ten cases of pollution going under unseen and unreported so i'd much rather have that happening transparently in a court of law  it does count are citizens united in the city of seattle in that corporations would not have personhood rights and would not have the right to spend money on elections which is what citizens united decision says that they do does that make sense  so that would actually probably be illegal under this ordinance so costco was advertised spent twenty two million on a statewide campaign and they spent a lot of that money in seattle they probably wouldn't be under this ordinance if it passed they probably wouldn't be able to advertise in the seattle media market that would probably be illegal so the question was if we did get it on the ballot which we hope to well the opposition do who will they be and what tactics god i don't know i mean i can make some guesses  but it's an election year and there's a lot of issues and a lot of spending on a lot of different campaigns and in that sense that there is some value that they won't have the band with necessarily to organize quickly around this that it's likely that this wouldn't be on the ballot till early next year and so you know your question is a great question i would just be speculating if i answered it you can bet that there will be a lot of money brought to bear in ways that after this ordinance passes would no longer be legal so it would be their last ditch effort i think is organize we have to use the energy that they bring to the campaign and the awareness that they build to to to cat to raise awareness in the community about these corporate harms about the harm of corporate spending but came in from out of state in the last election cycle the first time actually that ran in two thousand and nine and actually the city council because bookends fairly conservative the city council one of the tactics they used was they put three other propositions on the ballot and one of them what i want to give our opponents too many ideas but basically just to confuse the voters yeah did you have a question back there let me let me address those two questions so what is your name again ron  asked there's so many there's so many specific provisions to this ordinance that i think you are saying that some people may be hasn't to sign it and that it's hard to explain and then the second question you asked was is it possible that this would be overturned by the courts because we have a single subject initiative rule in washington state is that right ok so this question comes up a lot  there's several ways to think about it firstly let me take the single subject issue first because it's a legal question i recently put a post on our blog if you're interested where i wrote out a longer response to this but basically the city attorney gets to summarize our initiative in a ballot title and the ballot title is actually on every signature page and the city attorney also believes that this is one single subject he he they wrote measure number one  concerns local rights and restrictions on corporations to achieve those rights so he agrees with us that this is a group of rights that are organized to restrict corporate power and elevate and to protect those restrictions  so it i've also done some research it turns out that the courts in washington have been had a wide deference to the single subject rule they've only reject ninety one percent of cases are decided in favor of the ordinance so they rarely throw out ordinances unless they're wildly just staying in there in there for their topics so we believe that this complies and spokane has run this initiative a similar initiative twice and that was really a non issue for them and honestly it doesn't matter until this gets passed by the voters and we would then be defending it in court so the second question is how do you explain this to people and and i think kristen's point about speaking from the heart and my point about you don't have to explain everything all you're asking people to do is you know do you feel that corporate power in seattle is hurting our community do you feel that corporations should be able to spend money on elections do you feel that corporations should be able to lobby our government in seattle would you be willing to sign this the voters of seattle have a right to decide these issues for themselves i think trying to keep it simple is important and then i'd also like to say that i don't know if combining these things was the right approach i may be totally wrong we may be wrong we may regret combining them but i think that there's an opportunity that there's a lot of people in the community that may care about neighborhood rights that may care about worker rights that may care about rights for nature that if we had just done a really small narrow thing that just took away corporate personhood that it might be too sterile for people and its impact wouldn't really protect communities these things work together and so that's the thinking behind it i can't  can't say for sure but that's that's the i think that's my best answer design to your question so anyone else have a burning question or can we wrap up and let everyone the formal media strategy that in fact i haven't reached out to the media yet at all next week i'm going to be in court on wednesday afternoon to ask the judge to change the ballot title so that i think it i believe the current valid title the attorney gave us isn't quite accurate and so so it's possible that once that decision comes down we might start reaching out to the media to let them know about that court decision but honestly i'm just focused on let's get people to know about this let's get people talking about it i want everyone in seattle to have heard about i want to three to be talking about corporate power and whether it's a good or bad thing and i believe that this ordinance makes a law that really changes things and i don't see other tactics that are changing the law and so that's why i'm so passionate about this so with that i just want to say thank you to rich for hosting this and continuing to say that the beauty of this operation and feel free to stay and chat with each other and again the web say is i want to three dot org we have petitions over here that you can sign and we're taking photos of people signing with a little sign that says i signed i want three and we'll put those on facebook and we have these commitment cards over here if you want to commit to getting ten people to a house event or ten people to gather signatures a signature page or if you want to commit to gather them yourself here yeah and there's a couple other people and terry here from different groups that have events coming up that they wanted to share with people so they may come up and talk to you and they have some handouts as well so thank you so much for caring about this issue and coming to