[CRNMC] Scope of our work?

[agnes at mcn.org]

Hi Charles,
        I read your"scope of our work" and I was glad to see you mention
the need for home rule. Several of us in crn are also in the 
Mendocino County Public Banking Coalition which has a County
Charter we hope to get on the 2016 ballot, which would give us
home rule.
        We have worked on updating a slide show. Robin has finished the
power point presentation explaining Why We Need a Mendocino County
Public Bank and what it would entail. We of the MCPBC have been
having conference calls  since the first of October.  As soon as
Robin sends me the pp we could show it to the crn group as long as
we have a room with dimmed light and a white wall on which to
project it. After we show it perhaps crn might opt to support us
in the effort of educating the gen public in the time we have
before the election in 2016.

Sincerely,
Agnes

Hello community rights friends,
>
> Now that we have passed Measure S, I suggest that it is time to (1) take
> an inventory of where we are now, (2) define where we're going from here,
> and (3) clearly describe why we are going in those directions. I sense a
> grave danger, and that is that we could easily get scattered, and the
> amazing positive energy, momentum, and goodwill that we have built would
> accordingly be dissipated, and thus become ineffective in the future.
>
> Our community rights network was spawned out of the work of Paul
> Cienfuegos, Thomas Linzey at the Community Environment Legal Defense Fund
> (CELDF), and Shannon Biggs at Global Exchange. It is focused on giving
> people back the rights that have been taken away from them by both
> governments and corporations. As I understand it, it's focus is on
> changing the laws so that citizens can protect not only themselves and
> future generations, but also the biosphere (animals, trees, insects, soil,
> water, etc.). Measure S absolutely fits within this scope. Other community
> rights groups across the country also focus in this specific area.
>
> I suggest that this community rights (legal) focus is a very important
> type of foundational work. I suggest that we (CRNMC) stick with this
> foundational work as the limited scope of our efforts. Such foundational
> work opens up the possibility that the larger Mendocino County community
> is then able to undertake the work that needs to be done now. The
> County-wide work that needs to be done now includes, but is certainly not
> limited to, the work that Tammy and Agnes suggest (food security plans,
> public bank, alternative currency systems, community public safety
> network, etc.). The work that needs to be done now also includes
> setting-up alternative transportation networks (that are not reliant on
> cars and trucks), assisting local businesses that provide our essential
> needs to get established, and many other important endeavors.
> Realistically we (CRNMC) cannot possibly do all of these things.
>
> But we can clear the way for these things to happen. We can make it legal
> to sell raw milk, we can make it legal to require full disclosure of
> ingredients in food, we can make it legal to set up an ethanol or
> biodiesel plants, etc. Existing business interests and governments are
> stopping us from becoming a locally-based, ecologically sustainable, and
> largely self-reliant community. They want to force us to be dependent on
> their unreliable (and often dangerous) centrally-sourced products and
> services. I suggest our focus should remain on clearing the way legally,
> so that people in this county can go on and do what is needed now.
>
> There is a misconception that we need to confront directly, and that is
> that we must have a grand plan for all the transition work that must be
> done now. This misconception is for example manifest in the preparation of
> "community-wide energy descent plans." Many of us think we cannot take
> constructive steps because we need a centralized approach, and this is a
> viewpoint which is encouraged by both corporations and government. We have
> been led to believe (brainwashed into believing?) that a centralized
> approach is the way to go because it validates their monopoly control of
> business activity, and it also fosters the legitimacy of their approach to
> providing products and services. To the contrary, as nature reveals
> through mutations in genes, the most resilient and adaptive approach is to
> both legally allow and encourage many different people, to take many
> different steps, to work on many different projects, so that our community
> becomes more resilient, sustainable, and local.
>
> We don't know exactly what the future will look like, because we have
> never gone through all the simultaneous major changes that we are now
> going through. I am talking about getting off of fossil fuels, watching
> our government bankrupt itself and destroy the money system through it's
> printing of money and outrageous debt levels, getting away from
> chemical-related agriculture and moving to organic farming, reclaiming our
> news media so that they print the truth instead of propaganda and trivial
> stories, etc. We have no idea how all these changes are going to
> collectively show up in the future. If we did have a clear idea, it might
> be possible to put together a grand plan that integrated all these things.
> The fantasy of this central planning approach is laid thead-bare by the
> failures of the former Soviet Union, which used centralized planning, or I
> should say at least attempted to do so.
>
> So realistically we don't know what the new local, sustainable, and
> resilient future will look like. So we can't put together any sort of a
> useful plan for that future, at least a plan that would be helpful. What
> we do know now is that there are laws that are restraining our ability to
> adapt, to make the changes that need to be made now. We (CRNMC) should
> focus on changing those laws so that the people of this great County can
> then go on to make the changes that are needed. Thus I suggest that the
> scope of CRNMC effort should be exclusively on the removal of the laws
> that get in our way, on the removal of the laws that prevent our rapid
> evolution so as to be compatible with both the present reality and the
> future reality.
>
> An example would be for Mendocino County to become a "home rule county,"
> which has more power to go its own way, which is not dictated to by
> Sacramento the way other California counties are.
>
> /s/ Charles
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> crn mailing list
> crn at lists.mcn.org
> http://lists.mcn.org/mailman/options/crn
>