From Stark
BELLINGHAM—Ever since the plans for SSA Marine’s coal shipping terminal at Cherry Point became public, city officials have been saying that they would have no direct control over the coal trains that would pass through the city if Gateway Pacific Terminal is built.
A new citizens’ group plans to change all that, but they seem to face overwhelming legal odds.
Rick Dubrow, owner of A1 Builders, is one of the key organizers of a new political action committee called No Coal! On Jan. 26, Dubrow said the group will make public its draft of a proposed new city ordinance that would prohibit any transport of coal through Bellingham by rail or any other means.
In conventional legal terms, that doesn’t seem to make much sense. The federal government regulates the interstate rail system, and Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. has a legal right-of-way through the city. BNSF spokeswoman Suann Lundsberg said federal law requires the railroad to ship coal and other legal cargoes that shippers want to move via rail.
But Dubrow and Stony Bird, a former corporate attorney working with the Bellingham group, say they are setting out to establish some new legal groundwork that would put the rights of communities and ecosystems on equal or greater footing with the rights of railroads and other corporations.
They are taking their cue from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which was involved in a successful 2010 effort to get the Pittsburgh, Pa. City Council to ban fracking for natural gas within the city limits.
Cutting-edge citizen’s rights initiatives never seem to make too much sense when compared to the status quo.
But one can imagine every community on the coal route doing the same and then the fight won’t seem so silly.
Better to have a full-on vote on whether Whatcom county should host the dump in the first place
even if it’s just an advisory message to SSA and the next Governor.
A few questions:
1) When the rights of “ecosystems” are violated, who gets the money from the settlement? (And why do I get the feeling it would be those leading the fight for these “citizen’s rights”?)
2) What are A1 Builders’ financial interests regarding the Gateway Pacific Terminal? What are their competitors’ financial interests regarding it?
Scott… leave your suspicion at the curb. Rick Dubrow, from what I know of him, has a business and runs it in a responsible and evironmentally-sensitive fashion. My bet is he has NO financial interests. Can you fathom a citizen simply opposed to a bad idea?
Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.
Incorporation is a legal construct granted by the government. There was a time when a corporate charter would only be granted when a corporation would serve the public good. Nowadays the only “public good” a corporation has to do is make money for its stockholders, a concept that has been upheld by the Supreme Court. However, that concept needs to be challenged because corporations are rampantly poisoning the environment for profit. It’s good to see such a bold step being taken.
Wow, Rick! How many jobs are you going to antie up in the place of those that you champion to shut down. Nothing is black and nothing is white, and nothing is simple. Altruism might make your mortgage, but does it have the horsepower to make a couple of thousand? Seems to be a fair and topical question to ask.
Why don’t you just write Warren Buffet a nice letter, asking him to curtail the trains because you think it’s a good idea?
That would be at least as effective.
Wow Mark; China has enough work already . Big picture- global warming, sea level up .
Commissioner Onkels is right on the money – this initiative is a nice polite and legal letter to BNSF to take their coal elsewhere.
Signed and endorsed by every citizen so inclined.
I’ll raise a mug to toast Dubrow and Bird. The downsides of these megacoal shipments are obvious from global warming to coal dust, and our jobs are what we choose to make them if we exercise our democratic responsibilities. We have allowed society to be organized around fossil-fuels and corporate cultures because we let the oligarchs dominate decision-making at all levels to maximize cash flow into their accounts. The more the 99% can get back control from the 1% the better for all of us and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants.
I wonder how much of this is a response to dusty coal trains running through B’ham and how much is activists who are flat out against burning coal anywhere, even in China. It seems that this proposed law would even ban coal cars that were enclosed or spray coated to eliminate any dust. If (and it’s a big if) the dust could be contained, I have to come down on the side of local jobs over burning coal in China.
Large national and multinational corporations are the paramount institutions of our time, and in the U.S., they fully enjoy most of the constitutional rights of natural born citizens. In addition, very many state and federal laws have been enacted over the decades that directly favor corporate interests, often at the expense of local interests, labor, or the commons. The collective economic, social, and political power that is wielded by the cabal of corporate interests in the ruling classes supersedes that of many nation states. Indeed, it would seem that the state has become an instrument of corporate power.
Today, many of our largest corporations no longer serve the welfare of the people. Instead, more often than not, people have become servants of corporations. Corporations normally serve the interests of their masters in the ruling class at the peoples’ expense, and corporations often exploit the masses. Corporations are now a means of systematically transferring massive amounts of wealth from the broad base of society into the hands of a tiny elite.
For over 130 years, members of the ruling class have used the corporation to attain a position of great power at the apex of our society, by securing monopoly control over entire segments of our economy: energy, raw materials, rail transportation, pharmaceuticals, the armaments industry, and especially, the financial sector, which thanks to debt, now comprises a large portion of the entire economy.
When you couple three decades of stagnant wages with high gas prices, usurious credit card interests rates, predatory sub-prime mortgages, the highest per-capita healthcare costs on the planet, outrageous cell phone charges, exploding insurance rates, exorbitant television cable fees, and the interest on a huge national debt (much of which was from buying arms or fighting wars), there is little wonder the U.S. has the highest income inequality and the largest wealth gap between the rich and poor of any industrialized nation on earth.
When it comes to fighting coal trains in little ol’ Bellingham, the expression “you can’t fight city hall” comes to mind, but in this case, I think the odds may be much less favorable, because it is more akin to fighting the Union Pacific. However, people love a mismatched fight on the scale of David vs. Goliath, and they often root for the underdog.
In this case, I applaud No Coal’s efforts. Fighting corporate abuse of the commons is a noble cause, and CELDF has a novel approach to achieve an objective that has suffered in the Northwest, ever since the white man landed on the shores of Bellingham Bay and began industrial scale logging and fishing.
The arguement that Burlington Northern has the legal right to run coal trains through the Northwest doesn’t give them the right to pollute the environment as they see fit. The release of thousands of tons of cacinogens into the atmosphere to satisfy corporate greed is simply a bad idea.
Would we allow trains to transport radio-active waste in open gondolas? Of course not! We must draw the line in favor of the health of our citizens as opposed to the wishes of corporate greed.
Isn’t this this same old story of Industry trying to impose it’s will over the rights of the citizens. Where is it written that we must knuckle under to Wall Street and suck in their toxins while the fat cats live in some air conditioned Eden abroad.
It’s bad enough having to put up with polluters like the Koch Brothers without having it dumped on our doorstep.