5 Years Fighting

I'm going to try to start writing the history of the Colorado fracking war from my experience and involvement beginning five years ago.

On June 2 the fifth year anniversary of my own involvement in the struggle against hydraulic fracturing passed. It has been such a whirlwind for all that time that despite my best intentions, I have not been able to significantly place all of the events, developments, and deep lessons into writing. This is primarily due to the enormous task of fighting an industry that enjoys 150 years of legal precedent, Constitutional powers greater that then people, two full political parties and the entire government they occupy, and the ongoing campaign to keep us all confused, disenfranchised, irrational hopeful in the system and cooperative with the destruction of our land and the poisoning of the people.

It has been a steep learning curve for myself and all people and communities that have fallen into the shadow of 21st century oil and gas development.


So much has transpired. Losses, wins, maneuvers, mistakes, political lies and hoaxes, opportunism, spills, explosions, fires and tragic loss of human life. I'm going to hope to write regularly about all of this from this moment on. If I do it right, we will be left with a complex and dynamic story of what happens to people when they square off against the most powerful industry in the world.

One thing that I have to point out. Back in the first days when I felt the greatest panic and fear of our wonderful little town being turned into a toxic oil field I remember turning to my wife Mary trying to be upbeat about our task ahead. "I think we are about to meet 1500 of the coolest people in Colorado", is what I said, imagining the process that we would enter and in many moments lead.

I think I may have been conservative in that number. There is a lot of caring people out there and we have to remember this at the moment the Boulder County Commissioners seem most ambitious in bringing the anticipated 2000 wells not our County. For five years we have prepared, and the real fight is about to begin.

With love, strength and gratitude,
Cliff

The System Isn’t Broken, Its Fixed

The System Isn’t Broken, Its Fixed

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

This is not a quote relating to Governor John Hickenlooper or the CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. In fact, it is the first listed grievance in the American Declaration of Independence against the King of England, something the colonies would eventually go to war over, and win. 

Now that the Colorado Supreme Court has decided that the laws protecting our communities and people from fracking are invalid, the administrators around these communities will do everything within their power to enforce that decision. We will be told that the scenario is unfortunate, but that we are collectively powerless and the only role we can play is to choose the terms of our own environmental destruction. This is the line you are already hearing from a political system that favors the opinion of seven robed individuals over the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and you shouldn’t buy a word of it.

We have come to a point in our history of full spectrum disenfranchisement. The people making decisions are not doing so on our behalf, and the rules of the game are being written to keep us at an ever-increasing distance from basic self determination. This is by design, and entirely so that policies grossly threatening to human and natural life can be forced upon us with a minimum of effort.

The politicians at every level are the embodiment of this divide, as they can no longer represent any common person and carry out the policies of the corporations at the same time. The dominant political parties and what is being described as a democratic process to find new rulers has become a farce playing out one state after another in plain view for all to see. The rich and powerful are becoming prolific authors of new rules, from stripping us of ballot initiative rights to enacting broad international corporate pacts that will carry power to ever greater and more invisible heights.

We, as families, parents, workers, and community members are under no moral obligation to a system of law that we did not write, that has no consideration with what is best for our children and environment, and that will only cause harm to everything we value. We do not owe the Colorado Oil and Gas Association our health and land, and we owe nothing to the politicians that are asking us to submit both to this toxic, corrupt, and brutal industry. We are not the subjects of the corporations, Governors, judges or the rich, and we have no reason moral or otherwise to hear or obey them.

As we move into a fuller disillusionment with this farce of a democracy, let’s make some decisions of our own. Let’s begin a history where the laws of capitalism are broken and the laws of the people are upheld. Let’s disturb the peace and refuse a negotiated surrender to politicians and industry. Bring your kids, your coworkers and your neighbors and let’s start a revolution of our own.

We No Longer Have to Accept This

We No Longer Have to Accept This

Standing Rock Camp, North Dakota

As desperate as the world situation is today, I'm finding it more difficult to feel hopeless. I believe that the forces of the people and the planet are beginning to find their resolve. For so long we have been kept submissive, divided, distracted, afraid and confused, holding on to the superficial moments while the big wars are lost in sequence. One can begin to feel those constraints weakening. 

I can’t help but feel that there is growing courage beginning to be born. Of course all of the elements leading to what could be a first major victory won't join at once. But the binds are coming off and the grit and fighting power that were always there are starting to be felt. And they are being acted upon. 

Boulder County, Colorado Fracking Hearings

The country has seen the dogs that were sent after the people of the Standing Rock Reservation this week. We have to remember when the system comes at us with threats, with dogs, guns, prisons, or the simple implied loss of our job that we need to feed our family, what they are doing is attempting to take away our will to fight. They are trying to convince us to repress our own hearts and our basic connection with each other and the planet we live on. They are attempting to weaken the best parts of our humanity so we will submit to a situation and a system that has nothing to offer us and forces only the most destructive and hopeless future. 

Ferguson, Missouri

But our opponent also has to maintain a will to fight, to drill, to imprison, to pull the trigger. When that will is broken, whether it be in Ferguson, in North Dakota, in Boulder County, Chicago or anywhere we are opposing the machine of this impossible system, we will make an undeniable victory and send the enemy into retreat. And this will create the foothold of the next victory. The tide will begin to turn and our strength and resolve and convictions will return to us. This is why they have to achieve an unbroken chain around us. One weak link is all that it will take to begin the removal of all its weight. 

We are starting to test them now and the whole world will vacillate between fear and confrontation. It is impossible to see where it will all lead, but one thing is certain. Sitting motionless will become the most impossible thing in the times to follow. 

For Immediate Release:

Lafayette Citizens Launch Class Action Lawsuit to Protect Community Rights Ban on Fracking

Contact:

Cliff Willmeng 303 478 6613

East Boulder County United: EastBoCoUnited@gmail.com

Lafayette citizens have filed a class action lawsuit against the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, the State of Colorado, and Colorado Governor Hickenlooper, requesting immediate enforcement of the Lafayette Community Rights Amendment to Ban Fracking. The Community Rights Amendment was enacted in November of 2013 by a 60% majority of Lafayette voters, who asserted their rights to protect the health, welfare, and safety of Lafayette residents. It is the position of the Lafayette citizens that the oil and gas industry, aided by Governor Hickenlooper and the State of Colorado, interferes with those fundamental rights, that are described and protected by the charter amendment and the Colorado and United States Constitutions.

Following the passage of the Lafayette Community Rights Amendment, the city of Lafayette was sued by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, who claims that their powers under the Colorado Oil and Gas Act are superior to the democratic will of Lafayette people, and that do not recognize people’s right to self determination. The local organization, writing and successfully campaigning for the Lafayette Community Rights Amendment, East Boulder County United, attempted to join that lawsuit. They were rejected from becoming part of that lawsuit after the court determined that arguments about people’s fundamental rights were extrinsic to that court case.

Long time Lafayette resident and East Boulder County United member Ann Griffin stated, “I stand with the people of Lafayette who voiced their support for this charter amendment by an overwhelming majority. What is democracy without this voice?”. Ann worked on the campaign for enactment of the Lafayette Community Rights Amendment, and currently enjoys its provisions detailing her right to clean air and water, the right to self-determination, and the right to be free from chemical trespass. In a city that neighbors the thousands of oil and gas wells in Weld County, the Community Rights Amendment is what stands between a massive industrialization of her community and the preservation of quality of life and public safety.

“Lafayette will take enforcement action on their fundamental rights, which are being directly threatened by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association”, said Cliff Willmeng, registered nurse, Lafayette resident and father of two. “We had to take action to protect this community, its families and property, and will continue to establish our rights to health, safety and welfare. These are not subordinate to corporate privilege, and they are not the property of the Governor or the State of Colorado to either give away or to overrule.”

Cliff Willmeng is also a proponent on ballot initiative 75, the Colorado Community Rights Amendment, The Amendment, which is in its signature gathering phase, will clarify Colorado’s community’s right to local self government, and a community’s authority to protect its fundamental rights from corporate and industrial interference.

 

Coalition of Politicians and Corporations Moves Statewide Effort to Ban Democracy in Colorado.

By Cliff Willmeng

April, 2014

Undaunted by the power and special interests of nearly five million Colorado citizens, a coalition of politicians and industrial and corporate leaders are steadily advancing a bold campaign to ban democracy and community rights in the hotly contested state. Democracy, a long-debated idea between multinationals and common human beings, has increasingly become a household discussion in the mountain state, giving rise to corporate fears that perhaps the concentrations of democratic decision making statewide may pose too great of a risk to vulnerable living standards of CEOs and shareholders. Through their statewide campaign, the grassroots network of State and corporate interests will seek to protect what they consider their fundamental rights, and move beyond the regulation of democracy, so as to eliminate it from public life altogether.

The industrial movement has added incentive and urgency this year, as controversial state ballot measure number 75, the “Colorado Community Rights Amendment”, heads ever closer toward the signature gathering effort needed to place it to a direct vote of the Colorado people in 2014.  The measure, advanced by regular, unpaid citizens, threatens the very fabric of corporate power, and goes so far as to grant communities and individuals, “…the power to enact local laws protecting health, safety, and welfare by establishing the fundamental rights of individuals, their communities, and nature...”. The measure goes further, and grants these same individuals and communities, “…the power to enact local laws establishing, defining, altering, or eliminating the rights, powers, and duties of corporations…”, an assertion seen a contradictory to the established interests of CEOs and their friends in government.

For industry, the perceived threats to corporate rights have recently been on the rise in the Colorado. Exemplified by the incursion of front-range communities in the most recent elections, people and communities took advantage of Colorado law using local ballot measures to delay or prohibit the relatively powerless clientele of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association from drilling within their city limits. Prior to the elections of November, 2013, the Colorado Mining Association found itself under similar threat, as Summit, Gilpin, Conejos, Castillo, and Gunnison Counties all enacted local laws prohibiting the use of cyanide in mining there. In the view of these small but passionate corporations, it was only the determination and leverage of the Colorado Supreme Court that could restore justice and right the situation. In the case of Summit County, the ban on cyanide was found offensive to State authority, and in a 2009 ruling, was fully overturned. Attempting to build on that victory, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association has filed similar lawsuits against the communities of Longmont, Lafayette and Fort Collins. The results of that litigation are still pending.

  Among the major concerns for today’s CEOs is what they believe to be a direct relationship between democracy and community rights, a belief they feel is exemplified by opposition documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the speeches of the powerful Martin Luther King Jr..  Drawing from historic examples, industry leaders point to what they consider to be America’s dark past, where the freedoms of wealthy entrepreneurs and individuals came under perceived threat by efforts ranging from the abolitionist movement to strikes and marches by fringe elements like working people in the 1930s. If left to themselves, the CEOs and politicians contend, people may eventually have the power to make informed decisions, and communities may eventually grow so bold as to create entire sustainable economies, all at the cost of the common Goldman Sachs Chief Economic Officer, or even Wall Street itself.

  House Majority Leader Dicky Lee Hullinghorst, D – Boulder was quoted by the Denver Post on January 21^st of this year, speaking to the growing problem of democracy in her state. “When you do things at the ballot box, I think you frequently make a lot of mistakes that create difficulties in the future.” This view was shared by some of the founding fathers themselves like John Adams, for example, who stated that democracy is, “the tyranny of the majority”, and James Madison who asserted that government, “…ought to be constituted so as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”. These are the traces of a true Corporate Rights Movement, according to transnational organizers, who seek to embody its historical traditions.

  These are truly days of shifting and dynamic politics in the State of Colorado, and only time and the changing grounds of political allegiance will tell what is next on the Forture 500’s horizon. Organizers say that regardless of the power of common people, and the relatively unpopular idea of a full Corporate State, they will forge on, overturning local ordinances, consuming vast sections of the environment and economy, and keeping the commoners far from any perceived rights to health, safety, welfare, self determination or other such inherently dangerous ideas.