Crazy Town
With equal parts humor and in-depth analysis, Asher, Rob, and Jason safeguard their sanity while probing crazy-making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we’re all deluding ourselves.
Crazy Town
It Was Never Your Democracy Anyway: Thomas Linzey on Rethinking the Constitution
Democracy and environmental protection have two things in common: (1) they’re both supposed to be enshrined in the laws of the United States and (2) they’re both under severe attack right now. Asher speaks with Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights to uncover how the source code of the U.S. Constitution and the body of environmental laws that follow it are actually designed to allow corporations to override the will of the people. After pinpointing the problem, Thomas explains what can be done, especially at the local level, to reach sustainable and just outcomes that provide wellbeing for people and ecosystems.
Originally recorded on 4/2/25.
Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.
Sources/Links/Notes:
- Bio for Thomas Linzey
- Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights
- Matt Wuerker's cartoon: "The Closed-Door Constitutional Convention"
Melody Allison
Hi. This is producer Melody Allison. Thanks for joining us in Crazy Town where Jason, Rob, and Asher tackle crazy making topics like climate change, overshoot, runaway capitalism, and why we're all deluding ourselves. Here's a quick warning, sometimes this podcast uses swear words (Language!). Now, onto the show.
Asher Miller
I'm Asher Miller, one of the hosts of Crazy Town. I am losing my mind about what's happening legally, politically, in this country right now. So, I thought I'd turn to a lawyer who probably is losing his mind more than me, considering the state of things. Thomas Linzey is here. Thomas, nice to see you. Thanks for joining us.
Thomas Linzey
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Asher Miller
Just as a quick introduction, Thomas serves as Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, known as CDER sometimes for short. He's widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary community rights movement, which maybe we can talk about, which has resulted in the adoption of hundreds of municipal laws across the United States. He's also drafted the very first rights of nature law in the world in Ecuador. And is the author of a couple books that are relevant, I think, for folks. One is, "Be The Change: How to get what you want in your community and "On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability." Two things that might be a little bit more risky these days than they might have used to be. So Thomas, I appreciate you taking time to have a conversation with me. Let's say, I'm going to date this, because things seem to be happening very quickly in the world. Not sure exactly when we're gonna get this out the door, but we're recording on April 2nd, and I was just listening to, reporting on some of the folks who have been rounded up recently and sent to some scary prison in El Salvador, who turn out to be, as far as we know right now, innocent of, you know the things they're accused of. But sent away anyway, and now the government is saying, "Oopsie. There's nothing we can do about it." So I am one of many people who are concerned about what's happening right now in this in this country, not just politically, but in terms of the attacks on the rule of law in the country. Lots of concerns about constitutional crises either happening already or, you know, on the horizon if, for example, the Supreme Court rules against the Trump Administration and they decided not to honor their ruling. But you know, we were together, Thomas, a few weeks ago in California. And you went on this beautiful rant about the Constitution, about the things that actually we hold, we tend to kind of hold sacrosanct. Here we are, like, I would say, people that are concerned about the attacks on the Constitution and are like trying to uphold it as this, you know, document that we must preserve at all costs, which I kind of feel. But there's some issues, right, even with the Constitution, with the way that the legal system has been set up in this country in the first place. And particularly, how that impacts local communities, which I know you've been focused on a lot. So this is all a long preamble to turning it over to you to kind of go where you want to go, and to help our audience understand just how bad things really are.
Thomas Linzey
Yeah, thanks for that. The things are bad. Nobody's contesting that at this point. The question is, you know, kind of, why have we ended up in this place that we have. Kind of this concentration of power and kind of waking up in the morning not knowing what happened the next day. And things are definitely worse now than they were, you know, four years ago, during the Obama administration. You know, we can keep going on with that. But some things are the same, they're just more obvious during things like the Trump Administration. And so, I think it's weird sometimes to start talking about the Constitution itself because it kind of comes out of context. And most people are raised to think, you know, that we live in a democracy and we have a constitution and the two were equated. That we must have a democracy because we have a constitution. People forget, of course, that China has a constitution, North Korea has a constitution, Russia has a constitution. It doesn't make them democracies. But we have a constitution. That doesn't mean we're an actual democracy. But we've kind of based it in this myth that we live in a democracy. We've been taught it since elementary school. And we're taught that democracy equates to one person, one vote, and being able to elect our representatives, and that's how the system works. We got our start in a slightly different place, which was trying to actually apply democracy to grassroots activism. So, you know, coming out of law school, long story short, I created a law firm to provide free legal services to community based environmental groups. So these are, you know, grassroots groups that get together around their kitchen table to stop a fracking project or a 20,000 head hog factory farm that's proposed for their community.
Asher Miller
Why did you get into that work? Like, were you an environmentalist yourself, or was it just more coincidence that you heard from folks?
Thomas Linzey
Yeah, it's always a tough question to answer. But I grew up in a family of biology professors, so academics, and they did wildlife rehabilitation in their spare time. And sometimes I think it all just goes back to values that you're raised with. And, you know, we raised three raccoons for a couple years running around the house.
Asher Miller
Raccoons in the house?
Thomas Linzey
In the house, yeah. For three years before we released them into the wild. So it was kind of a unique upbringing and kind of gave you an appreciation for life. And I think wanting to find some way to give back, some way to be useful and meaningful. I was a marine biology major and decided that that was too much work.
Asher Miller
And so you went to law?
Thomas Linzey
Yeah, went from marine biology to pre-law, and then into law school. You know, in law school, they teach you a bunch of things about environmental law. One of the biggest things is that we have the best environmental legal protection system in the world. And in fact, they teach you that it's so good that we export our environmental laws and regulations to other countries. USAID was actually a big part of sending lawyers to other countries to help them replicate US environmental regulatory structures around environmental law. And so, growing up, you know, going through law school, you basically come to the realization that, well, the laws aren't the problem because we're the best. We're the best of the best of the best. And so, laws aren't the problem. The problem is that the laws must just not be enforced. You know, we don't have enough pro bono lawyers in the environmental field to enforce the laws. That must be the reason why things are so bad. Because you could look at the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act on one hand, then look out the window on the other, and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to understand that things were bad then and worse now in many ways. And so we said, okay, the laws aren't the problem. It must be lack of environmental lawyers. And so, we opened up a firm right out of law school to provide these free legal services to environmental groups. Specifically, the ones on the ground where a frack well is coming in next door. Or, you know, generations old farmers who were contesting this company coming in to put in this hog factory farm or a toxic waste landfill. I mean, water withdrawal, it could be anything. You know, industrial water bottling plant. You know, the thousands of different issues that grassroots activists deal with every day. Because in the end, capitalism, you know, this kind of sucking out of stuff has to happen on the ground.
Asher Miller
And we're not talking about rabid, you know, enviro-activists in many cases. We're talking about people who are being impacted. They don't see themselves as activists, right? They're just trying to protect their community.
Thomas Linzey
No. And I would say 90% of the people that we dealt with in those first 10 years were first time activists who would not even like the label activist. And in Pennsylvania, which is where I went to law school, you know, we had this old joke that was told by James Carville, which he said, Pennsylvania has Pittsburgh on one side, Philadelphia on the other, and Mississippi in the middle. And that's where our work was. It was in that rural between in Pennsylvania. Because as a politician running for statewide office, you never have to set foot anywhere else other than Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. That's where the votes are. And you can ignore the middle and that's where all the stuff goes. So that's all the sludge from Philadelphia, the fracking wells. . . That's where they're set up. I mean, they don't get set up outside the McMansions in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. It's in middle of the state. And most of those areas are Republican red. I mean, like redder than red. And so, that's where we got our start was actually assisting groups in that red area of the state. And a lot of it came down less to, environmental impacts were, of course, important, but a lot of it came down to self-determination. You know, our community should have the right to say what this place is going to look like and not a corporation coming in from a thousand miles away to say that you're going to get a vertically integrated hog factory operation, hog factory farm operation. And so there was this weird melding of kind of, you know, blue tinged environmental concerns about impacts with a red tinge of, this is our place. This is our home, and we're the ones that should be able to make the rules here. And you know for about 10 years we had 300 clients across the state of Pennsylvania, 300 community groups across the state of Pennsylvania. And we had a firm belief in democracy. That if a community didn't want something, if a majority of that community came together and said, "We don't want it," that should hold the day. That 90% of people in the community that don't want something, they should have the power to say no to it.
Asher Miller
Are you telling me that didn't work?
Thomas Linzey
That didn't work. And it took us 10 years to figure that out, but we would end up trying to enforce conventional environmental laws. Because the way this works, of course, is a corporation comes in, they apply for a permit to put the facility in, they apply for a permit to the state environmental agency, and then environmental lawyers come in and try to argue that it was a mistake that the permit was issued. That there was a gap, an omission, a deficiency. There was a signature that it wasn't given, a bond that wasn't posted, something missing. That's what environmental lawyers do.
Asher Miller
The technicality stuff.
Thomas Linzey
Absolutely. Yeah, it was all about attacking the permit application and trying to argue that the agency did the wrong thing. And a lot of times we would win. The judge would say, you know, you're right. On page eight, line 16, there should have been a signature of the CEO, instead the treasurer signed, and it wasn't good enough, and I'm throwing this thing out. And then we would have the community group come back, come to us and say, " Oh my God. We won! That's great." And they would have a victory party at their house, at one of their houses, and then they would call us and we would have food and drinks. And everybody had each other on the back say, "We're not going to get the hog factory farm." Well, what would happen is 60-90 days later was that the corporation would come back and they would essentially say, thank you for finding the gaps, emissions and deficiencies. I had lawyers from the biggest law firms in the United States come up to me after the hearings where we had won and thanked me.
Asher Miller
You're doing that work for them.
Thomas Linzey
Yes, because then they could bill additional hours to the corporation to fix the permit application with the deficiencies we had found.
Asher Miller
It's a beautiful economy.
Thomas Linzey
Right. We were basically making money for the firms. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, there were structural issues at stake, which are that the monies that the corporation spent on defending the permit appeals under the tax system is tax deductible. It's a reasonable and necessary business expense under the tax code for the corporation to defend its permit.
Asher Miller
They just write it off.
Thomas Linzey
Yet the monies that the community was spending, you know, on photocopies and all that, that was not tax deductible. And so there was a structural thing there, and I was dumb enough to do it for 10 years, banging my head against the wall trying to make it work. But there was a woman, Jane Anne Morris, at that time, she has passed from us now. But she billed herself as kind of a corporate historian, and she said something that resonated with me for a long, long time. She said, "The only thing that environmental regulations regulate are environmentalists."
Asher Miller
Wow.
Thomas Linzey
Because they make us predictable as to how we fight when these battles come in. And before we even get on the site, the industry has written the regulations already that govern the issuance of the permanent. So why would the corporation put provisions in that allows the community to actually veto the project?
Asher Miller
So they went way upstream. They basically, you know, rigged it?
Thomas Linzey
Absolutely and so when you arrive, it's in the baseball analogy, it's the ninth inning, you know, one hand, two hands tied behind your back, there's almost nothing to be done. And what was worse than losing those because the community would come back to us and say, "Okay, we need you to do that jiu jitsu again to get this newest permit application out," because the corporation would come back and resubmit. And we said, "Well, we can't do anything now because they filled in the gaps, emissions, and deficiencies that we had found." And then the community would get the hog farm or whatever else they were fighting. It was, I would say, the worst part of all that was that is wasn't just the corporation that was running roughshod over the community. It was progressive groups like environmental organizations who have made careers out of perfecting their role within the regulatory system. So they would come in and say, we'll give you experts to testify on this or that in front of the agency. We'll help you do the permit appeal stuff. But basically like cattle to slaughter kind of. It's not only the corporation sending the community down into that point where, you know, in the slaughterhouse, you get the bolt shot into your head. But progressive environmental groups are doing the same thing, which was validating the whole permit regulatory system and driving people down.
Asher Miller
They're reinforcing the system that was totally unequal and kind of rigged.
Thomas Linzey
Absolutely. Ad so after about 11 years of doing this work, I quit. I said, we're not going to do this anymore and was looking at other jobs, basically, to do something else other than law. And at that point, I ran into a guy named Richard Grossman who was a historian and known for setting up a group called the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy. And he was looking at this whole regulatory system as mechanism of control over us because it makes us predictable as to what we do, and it's no surprise that we're losing. The whole system operates as a giant hamster wheel. It basically relegates communities to then becoming fundraisers for the lawyers, even though the lawyers said the case can't be won. And so, it's no surprise we are where we are. But I had never heard someone taking a systemic kind of, what's the structural problem here? It's not just that we don't have enough money or signs, or, you know, markers or white boards, or we didn't get enough people to the demonstration. You know, it doesn't matter that we do all those things because we're nibbling around the edges. It's a script that's been written for us, and we follow it very obediently. And the environmental community, more than others, has done that. And so we kind of left that arena and decided to do something else. And that's when the community rights movement was born. And the community rights movement kind of asked the question, why don't we have democratic control at the local level to say no to these things that are going to harm us? And that meant beginning to write local laws. Moving out of the regulatory permit appeal defensive system and beginning to assist communities to write laws that recognize a legal right to clean air, or a legal right to clean water. Something that was enforceable, not just a sentiment or a resolution -- wouldn't it be great if you had this? People think we have a right to clean air and clean water in the United States, but we don't outside of several small municipalities that have done this work.
Asher Miller
So the federal law doesn't -- How is that not applying?
Thomas Linzey
They're not rights based. They're basically parts per million and permitting certain things. I mean, the Clean Water Act said we would phase out all external emissions into waterways by 1972. And instead of that, we have this whole permitting system that's come into play. So none of it is rights based and in fact, worse than that, getting back tothe constitutional stuff, Congress doesn't have the legal authority to pass environmental laws in the first place. And that always sounds weird to say, but when Congress passes environmental laws, they do so under something called the Commerce Clause. Because you can flip through the U.S. Constitution, and you'll never see the word environmental or nature. You won't see organized labor, for that matter. You won't see any of that stuff. What you see is a very, very narrow grounds that Congress can act on, pretty much. And one of those is the Commerce Clause, which says that Congress is the only entity that can regulate interstate commerce.
Asher Miller
Right. So anything that crosses a state border, basically.
Thomas Linzey
That's right. And so the Endangered Species Act and the Waterfowl Acts that have been passed, they've all been based, and I shit you not on this -- In the Supreme Court, there's something called a reasonable bird rule, which is that if a bird flying between the states would land on a waterway after crossing the state line, then therefore that waterway is subject to regulation because it's part of the interstate commerce power within the Constitution. And again, I shit you not. This actually exists. People should look it up.
Asher Miller
Can we just pause for one second? So, we've spent a lot of time talking about how in economics, nature, the planet, is viewed as a subset of the economy, which is, completely ass backwards, right? It's doesn't make any sense. And what you're telling me is that the same thing is applying here because environmental laws are effectively federal ones, right? Are part of commerce, right? So commerce is the overarching, you know, container for the environment in a sense.
Thomas Linzey
Yes. It always sounds crazy to say that, but all you have to do is go back and look at the preamble to the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act. It all talks about commerce. Because when Congress was writing the laws, they had to make the case that it was under the Commerce Clause of constitution. So that's one really fucked up piece. When people were in front of the Supreme Court lawyers arguing for desegregation of interstate travel facilities, they were arguing that Congress had the power to prohibit segregation of those travel facilities because it was interstate commerce. And then African Americans were essentially moving within, they were commerce themselves, moving within those interstate lines. It's a weird, weird area, but it makes sense from one perspective, which is that the conservatives have always been about pulling back Commerce Clause authority to pass those types of laws. So whether it's violence against women, gun laws, all that stuff is pinned to the Commerce Clause. So they know that if they sever the commerce clause from the substance of those laws, that they can eliminate the laws. And so it makes sense on one very high 30,000 foot playing field where these guys live and we don't, you know, progressives don't live there. The progressive community works on this model of activism as political pressure. We don't really have any power levers to control. All we can do is operate over here and build enough people to try to put pressure on the system that operates. Meanwhile, the corporate boys are working within that system itself.
Asher Miller
That's why there's a Project 2025 blueprint and there's nothing on the left that's ever been the equivalent of something like that.
Thomas Linzey
That's right. And when we talk about the need to change the constitution, whether that's rewriting it, something from scratch, whatever, people go ape shit. Because they say, well we can't do that today because it would be horrible what would come out the other side? And I'm like, well yeah, what we have is pretty horrible right now. And getting to the Constitution finally because we came to the understanding that working with these communities, passing these laws, they would run up against certain hurdles. And those hurdles were not hurdles because of a bad person in Congress, or a bad person was elected to the state legislature, or here was a bad regulator somewhere. These hurdles were structural and they fell into four categories. One was corporate rights. You know, it's become sexy, so some people know it now, but corporations have constitutional rights. They've been defined as persons under the law. And a lot of that sounds academic, but it's not because they use it to sue communities when communities violate those rights. And so when we were passing these community rights laws, we would get lawsuits from the corporations that would lay out these four grounds about why communities didn't have democratic authority to say no to something coming in -- because it was their constitutional right as a non-entity. That is correct. So corporate rights are a big piece of it. Preemption is another piece where, of course, the federal preempts the state, the state preempts the local. We all know that. But it gives almost unharnessed authority to state legislatures to move at the behest of certain industries and corporations to override local fracking bans or bans on agribusiness activities, whatever that may be.
Asher Miller
We've seen that again and again.
Thomas Linzey
Absolutely. And then there's this little-known thing called Dylan's Rule, which is the flip side of preemption, which is the legal theory that if the state legislature hasn't specifically allowed you to pass a certain law that you automatically don't have that authority anyway. And so it's like, you know, these are the these are the kinds of things that come up. And then the fourth one, which a lot of people talk about is censorship of the brain. We just don't -- we can't even imagine. We're confused by our own confusion. We can't even imagine having power. Like the football game where the other side has had the ball for like 800 years, and we're happy just to be on the field. That's usually how the progressives talk about it. We're on the field and they can't imagine advancing the ball at all even, you know? They're all moving backwards.
Asher Miller
We're just trying to do defense better.
Thomas Linzey
We're just happy to be here kind of thing. Like at the Oscars when you're nominated for the first time. We're just happy to be here. But we have to build a movement of some kind that not only understands the need to be on that field and understand what the real variables are that are being played. Because there's a thumb on the side of commerce and property in corporations that's in the source code, the Constitution itself. So when we talk about corporations having rights, a lot of progressive people say, "Oh my God. That's crazy. Corporations shouldn't have rights. That must be a mistake." It's not a mistake. English law, prior to the Constitution, had corporations having rights. Church corporations had rights. Some trading corporations had rights. We're recognized as persons or legal entities. The founders kind of you know, in shorthand, we built a constitutional structure, the DNA, the source code of this country, in kind of the same mold, which was to recognize property and commerce as the end all be all kind of thing. Because after all, this was the late 1700s and we were at risk of being invaded. In fact, we were invaded in 1812 by the English. So they were looking at imminent things that were happening, and they said to themselves, we need to grow as quickly as possible. We need to exploit our natural resources as quickly as possible. We need to grow asbig as possible so that we're not at risk of being invaded, and we're going to write a governing document that does just that. And they did it. You know, the "Founding Fathers," quote unquote, didn't know anything about deforestation, or ocean acidification, or limits to growth, or ecology, or any shit like that. We have an operating system that's basically a 1.0 at this point. It's like Word 1.0. And it s stuck back in that time frame, in the 1780s. And it's all about property and commerce. And it's all about who wrote the damn thing as well. Because at the time it was written, and some estimates vary, it's between 4% and 17%. Only 4% to 17% of the entire public was covered by the protections of the Constitution from the beginning.
Asher Miller
Interesting. At that time.
Thomas Linzey
At that time. Because it was white males with property. Those are the only people that were people under that thing.
Asher Miller
Other than corporations. Corporations were people. Sure, yeah.
Thomas Linzey
That's correct. So Matt Wuerker, the famous cartoonist, did a cartoon one time that showed the founding fathers in their wigs, and of course, some of them had slaves outside washing their underwear and stuff like that. But in the window, you know, it had African Americans looking in, and Indigenous Americans looking in, and women looking in. That cartoon is actually wrong because nobody even knew the thing was happening. People didn't even know the thing was happening. And the people within Philadelphia at the hall, their first rule that they wrote was that the doors have to be locked in the morning and unlocked at night, and no copy of what we're doing can be circulated outside of the Hall during the time that we're here. Nobody knew what was happening except for those guys inside. They were writing a document that protected a very small slice of the humans in the in the United States at that time. And so I'm like, hey, we didn't write, you know -- I'm a white male with property so I'm in the know. But you know, indigenous peoples, women, white males without property, African Americans, the vast majority of the public were not involved in writing the damn thing.
Asher Miller
And we're not even talking about the more than human world, right? Forget it. I mean, that's even beyond.
Thomas Linzey
Forget about the beavers, and the forests, and the mountains, and the valleys, and everything else had no say in the thing either. I think it's time for us to write one. Like I think it's time to write one that actually reflects our value systems because that sucker doesn't. And progressive activists for the last 200 years, but more you know intimately for the last60 years, have pretended that we can use the Constitution anyway. We just need to add things to it. And it makes us an easy target for the conservative end of things because they can say it was never intended to be used that way. And they are right. It was never intended to be used that way, which puts us in a weird position of trying to argue for the Constitution without arguing for the Constitution.
Asher Miller
And so the fight is basically, in some ways, how you interpret the Constitution now, right? Because you have these originalists who are, I mean, that's their playbook is to try to say this wasn't in a part of the initial intention. And progressives or liberals try to say, oh, it could be read this way.
Thomas Linzey
Yeah. We're stuck arguing over things like penumbral rights, like right to privacy is not written into the Constitution. Right to abortion is not written into the constitution. We get it from stitching together different things, right? We're over here with a sewing machine and we're expending huge amounts of energy to try to make it into something it's not. Meanwhile, over on the other side, these guys already have it. They have what it is. They just trying to make judges honest, to stick to the original intent. But what I'm trying to say, what I've tried to say, is that that sewing machine stuff only works for so long. You can only patch the jeans so much before there's more patches than jeans. And at some point it becomes easier just to envision what a new world looks like and a new constitution might look like, rather than continuing to try to patch it together.
Asher Miller
So I've got a few questions for you. Let me just name them and then maybe we could try to tackle them. One is just a question around, there has been a movement towards trying to get enough states to agree to having a new constitutional convention, right? And that does seem to have been powered more from the right than the left. So I want to talk about that because is there opportunity and risk there? What does that look like? The other that I really want to talk about is, well what does that mean for local communities in the context of the fact that this is the constitution we have. This is the political reality we have. And then the third is just, and maybe we don't talk about it, but it would be interesting to note that what we're seeing is from the Trump Administration, apparently an attempt to basically say that some of the articles in the Constitution don't apply anyway, right? Like, you know, the right of Congress, for example. You know? So it's like they're trying to attack it, even though it's been kind of working for the right. So I don't know which one of those you want to tackle first.
Thomas Linzey
Yeah, so I think we start with the community level stuff. Which is, you know, we can't pretend that we live in a world that we don't. We can't pretend that we're all sitting around in circles talking about how to write a new constitution. We're not. And in fact, at in this day and time, most of what we're forced to do is hand to hand combat. You know, how do we reinstate 80,000 employees at the VA? How do we get a court order trying to get this guy back from El Salvador and how do we enforce that? A lot of energy and resources have to go into wartime kind of planning, which is where we are now. So I'm not saying we don't do that stuff. But what I am saying is that we need a strategy, and the progressive community hasn't really had a strategy to actually get what we want and what we need for the past 50 years. It's all been hand to hand and then trying to stitch something together from the hand to hand, which hasn't worked. And so, I kind of gave up on progressive activists at some point which was I was tired of having arguments with them. Because there's a myth. The myth is that we live in a democracy, and all we have to do is mobilize enough people and then we'll get what we want. Well, that hasn't worked. It's not just me saying that. Look out the window at climate change and destruction of ecosystems. I mean, reality is that the numbers are not in our favor, and we are now in a worse environmental situation than we were 40 years ago when the major environmental laws were passed. And so this is kind of it. So we have to find a way to do both at the same time I think. Which is getting some resources into that area where people are doing some thinking with their noggins about what stuff looks like. I think any attempt to do a constitutional convention or rewrite from the top down is a losing proposition because we, like I said before, we're at the bottom level. Everybody's confused by their own confusion at this point. There's no clear understanding of the problem. People are designing solutions without understanding what the problem is, that the problem is structural, that it's not just about truck traffic. You know, when a frack well comes in or something, it's not just about the increase in truck traffic or odor. It's about the fact that community doesn't have self-determination. And why is that? Then we have to do a deeper dig into why and then figure out what the real problem is, and then begin to solve that. I, for one, think that, you know, the system that we have, capitalism, whatever we want to call it, has to touch down in different places, tens and thousands of places a day for it to expand, for it to shrink stuff out of the earth.
Asher Miller
For it to operate itself.
Thomas Linzey
For it to operate itself. And that's that is the weakest spot for them. That's the place where the resistance and the revolution has to grow from. How do we organize those communities in ways so that they're not focused on truck traffic, or how much liquid manure is being produced daily or whatever else. That the look at that local level has to be a level of civil disobedience done through municipal law making that begins to peel away each of these doctrines that are enforced by the constitutional structure. Kind of a velvet gloved revolution in which people think that we have certain rights and they're just putting them into law. And then when courts begin to peel them back on the basis of corporate rights and constitutional stuff, that it wakes enough people up to join hands across seemingly different issue areas to eventually give birth to a constitutional movement that begins to rewrite the source code.
Asher Miller
So, can I spit it back to you how I understand what you just said? Because I feel like this is really key. So, the municipal law making is not so it's not done from your standpoint, from the belief that it actually will work, right? It's from forcing the system to make itself known for being as corrupted at the source code as it is. So these efforts will effectively fail in court, right, because corporate rights, you know, state jurisdiction over, federal jurisdiction over, will undo these things and that will create that moment of crisis and recognition on the part of local communities. Is that a fair way of describing what you're saying?
Thomas Linzey
I think it's close. And some have won because a company or corporation doesn't want to, doesn't want to get into a fight with something new at the grass level. And they'll go someplace else. So in a bunch of places the laws have worked.
Asher Miller
Got it.
Thomas Linzey
And in fact, there have been some judges that have filed opinions. We had this great one in western Pennsylvania a number of years ago where she said, "Corporations are just like vines, grapevines that can be pruned by the people at will." I mean this great judicial decision that came up. You never know when the right judge in the right place will actually begin to agree with some of this stuff. In some ways, it's like the MAGA movement, which has done a very good job of peeling back these different layers to become real. And so I think some of that will happen, but a lot of it is about picking that bigger fight. And the product is not necessarily the ink that makes up the ordinance or the law. The product is the people who have come to an understanding of what their country actually is and then begins to radicalize them towards a much different kind of vision.
Asher Miller
So it's a trial by fire means of engagement. It's true democracy, or whatever, citizen participation in action/
Thomas Linzey
Yes. And it's also people beginning to have agency again. So moving towards seeing themselves as lawmakers, law adopters, law enforcers. The great news is the perfect storm in the U.S., at least, is that 30 states have direct ballot citizen initiative laws which allow people to go over their local government. Because a lot of this is too controversial, too confrontational for local government officials. So they can collect signatures. In New Hampshire you need 10. 10 signatures -- -- to put something onto a town meeting warrant that then becomes law if you adopt it at the town meeting. These options are available in a bunch of different places. And in fact, the vertical column that you can build is the local law making. But some states have the ability to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot as well. And a constitutional amendment for the ballot at the state level could join these entities within each state to drive towards state constitutional change. That state constitutional change could eventually give birth to a federal constitutional change movement. You know, the women's rights, the suffrages, they started in western states, which granted women the right to vote, long before the passage of the 20th amendment gave women the right, the suffrage right, nationally. So I think it's about those bite size pieces building up to something and then changing something higher up. I've been doing this for 25 years. I've seen it happen. I've seen the potential for it. I've been in rooms where 300 residents out of a population of 500 have called for resignations of their local government officials for not passing a law, and then brought pre signed resignation, or, you know, with the signature line ready to go.I've seen that happen in different places. But unfortunately, the resources have never been there to actually drive that model as a larger organizing model. Because most of the resources in the progressive end go to prop up this progressive regulatory environmental organizing and don't go towards real movement building stuff. That's a whole separate issue.
Asher Miller
Crazy stepping back to the larger strategy, I mean you said it earlier, acknowledged that there has to be a lot of defense still playing. Like we can't give up on resistance of things that are happening because it's not like the other side, quote unquote, "the other side" is sitting pat, right? They are being extremely aggressive, more aggressive probably than we've ever seen, right, at least in modern times, in terms of administration trying to seize control of things and tip things. So there has to be that work, and that work has to be funded. But it can't be limited to that because that's just us being happy to be on the playing field again or trying to, like, play defense.
Thomas Linzey
Yeah. Right now, about 100% of all the money, let's say 98.5%, of the time and money is spent doing that defensive stuff. And we need to pry out more time and resources to do the long time strategic, long term, strategic thinking about where we want to be in 20 years. Where do you want to be in 20 years? Do we want to still be doing the defensive side fights. You know, playing within regulatory systems that corporations have built for us to play within. Like a sandbox? Or do we want to be in a much different place, where we're envisioning things like rights of nature, which the Ecuadorians put into their national constitution. This is, you know, it's not unheard of for these types of things to move forward in other countries. It's just a question in the U.S., we treat the Constitution as a sacred cow. Kind of can't touch it. And progressives especially, we're so happy just to be here that we don't even think about trying to build our vision into law. We just don't. It's hard to even have that conversation with folks. But everything's there that's needed to do that movement building piece. It's just nobody takes it seriously. It's like, oh, that's just a city or town initiative. We don't take that seriously. We work at the federal level. Okay, well how is that working for you? Or we work at the state level. Okay, well how's that working for you? So there needs to be something else. And we just got tired of having conversations with progressives who have no clue, which is natural that progressives are where they are because thee progressive movement came out of the efficiency reform movement of the early 1900s. That's where the progressive activists come from. They were not against the corporate workplaces. They were about making the corporate workplaces more efficient. So there's efficiency experts of the early 1900s and again, not us saying this is history of the progressive movement. That's where the progressive movement comes from. It is about how do we make the system work, but carve the edges off of it so that it works better. But if you look at the regulatory system, that's how it works. It's about shaving off maybe some of the rough edges. But the project is coming in whether you want it or not.
Asher Miller
Still barreling ahead.
Thomas Linzey
Right.
Asher Miller
I'd like to end talking about what you'd recommend to folks, you know, listening to this or watching this who are based locally. For before we do that, though, I guess I'll just share a thought that I have. And that is, you know, another trend I've seen kind of in liberal, progressive environmental circles, is we're at the 11th hour. You know, look at the climate crisis and the severity of it and how close we are to potential tipping points and crossing certain thresholds of like, you know, degrees warming and such. Leading I think a lot of folks who say, well, we have to embrace technological solutions. We've got to work with corporations to deal with this. We have to operate at the highest think scale possible because we have to, you know, remove so much CO2, or reduce so much CO2 from going out there. And so they abandon the cultural shift. They abandon, you know, the systemic kind of reorientation of people, the value shift. They abandon the local stuff because their argument is that there isn't time to invest in those things which take time, right? And in some ways, I feel like we could see the same thing happening when it comes to what's happening about rights or legal protections and that kind of stuff. Because doing that local organizing, you know, it's piecemeal, it's diffuse, it's not, quote, unquote "efficient." And I think the response of both of those is like, one you had said, "Well, how's it working out for you?" And the other is, this comes back to fundamental, structural, and systemic forces that are unsustainable and unjust. They have to be addressed at some point, right? And that can only be done, in a sense, by supporting people to work oftentimes at that local level. And the other argument, I would say, for this approach as well is that stitching together of connection and community that when we're actually feeling the consequence of so much of what's happened already, climate change, other forms of environmental degradation. What we're seeing now actually with things that are happening in terms of economic impacts of globalization, and then globalization being, you know, halted in a really cruel way, or crude way, with tariffs and everything, is how vulnerable we are. And so it's about that mutual aid and that connection and connectivity to people in our community is going to be really key, both to address the systemic stuff, but also to get through the consequence of all the things that have happened. So that's a long way me saying completely thumbs up on the local front. And I guess the question I'd ask for you, that I bet listeners are asking, which is what would you say to somebody who's not an activist, they're not a lawyer, you know, like, what would you say to them in terms of how they could be part of this kind of movement?
Thomas Linzey
Yeah, so every community has an issue I've come to learn. Whether it's public safety build rights kind of around, you know, minority communities not having a say in how policing is done within a community in some of the larger cities, you know? Rights based organizing kind of applies to everything, you know, right to safety or right to clean water. It's not just environmental issues. It's social justice issues, like a right to housing. You know, there was a community on the West Coast doing eminent domain to take housing to provide it for low-income housing stuff. There's all kinds of unique remedies out there. Zero waste. We've been talking about zero waste for 20 years. We're not really anywhere closer to zero waste. How do we actually turn these policies into reality by anchoring them to a right and then arguing that communities can actually pass these rights-based laws to get to that point. But I agree with you. I mean, the fact is that tech isn't going to save us. This whole system is built on, you know, Richard Gresham used to say, my mentor, used to say that the whole system is built on the endless production of more stuff. That's the underlying thing. The endless production of more stuff. And the Constitution is really a charter for how to get there. You know, it's how to protect the mechanisms of production to actually achieve that goal of the belief of endless production of more stuff. And until we deal with what's causing the issue, rather than what is the after-effects or externalities of that system functioning, then we're all cooked. And if someone had started this 20 years ago, we wouldn't be in the place that we're at. I feel that sense of emergency as well that we are coming to the end of our time here. But the fact is, is that unless we deal with the structural underpinnings. You know, it's like a marriage. You know, you get structural underpinnings of a relationship and you're just patching stuff every day, eventually the marriage is going to fail. And so --
Asher Miller
Not if you have more and more kids, Thomas. That's the answer, more and more.
Thomas Linzey
Or pets.
Asher Miller
Or pets. Yeah, sure.
Thomas Linzey
And so we're in that place where we have to deal with the demons that were built into this from day one. And the longer we wait, the worse it gets. That's just where we are.
Asher Miller
You said, 98.5% you know, of the resources are going to, you know, just trying to do things that just keep us on the on the field, so to speak. Considering that there isn't a real infrastructure in place for this, what would be the recourse for somebody who's like -- the first thing that I heard from you is like, sort of, identify what the issues are in the community, understand those. And that might be a way of trying to help organize people. But it's not like there are a ton of legal resources or whatever. What would be the recommendation for somebody to try to move that forward?
Thomas Linzey
Well the easiest thing is get in touch with us because that's the kind of work that we do. And we're happy to help out and provide templates and things like that. But in the end, you know, the resource issue comes to haunt us because the fact is that we're all low on capacity. And that capacity has to grow, which means more money has to be given to the deeper stuff. We're just now seeing some of this reimagining philanthropy kind of movement towards funding different things that has to speed up. But there was, what was it? $80 million spent on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race this past year. That's $80 million. I mean, our budget never even approached anywhere near that kind of number. And so to me, what $80 million could do -- A relatively small investment in the bigger scheme of things -- would be extraordinary. It's just a question of those resources have never come face to face with the reality that we have to do that deep digging. Kind of how deep do you have to go to dig the cancer out? And very few people can actually imagine having a new constitution, or more realistically, a movement that would yield a new constitution. But all the pieces are there. It's just a question of resources. We've basically done proof of concept, which is, you can do it, community is capable of doing it, capable of getting to court, capable of making the arguments. All that stuff is there, and the ballot initiative stuff is there ready to be taken. If you only need 10 signatures to put something on the ballot, you know? I mean, that's like, why aren't we doing that? That's what keeps me awake at night. Why aren't we doing the kinds of stuff that we need to do to blueprint what that eventual constitutional change looks like and build these pockets that eventually combine and then build up to do something bigger. That's the question to me. I think one of the places that we could start is maybe storytelling some of these, you've talked about, some of these wins, some of the different approaches people have taken. I think even just sharing some of those stories can be inspiring for others and serve as a bit, not a blueprint, but as sort of a model, you know, an inspiration for people to take things on. And the other is just helping people understand what you've described, which is like, this is the source code, and we have to address that, yeah. So maybe we begin there. Yeah. I just finished a memoir of sorts that goes through all of these battles that we've done over the past 30 years, and kind of lessons learned from those battles. And I think maybe one of my last gifts out is kind of the, this is what has happened, this is where we are, this is what's needed kind of thing. But in the end, without a different kind of grassroots activism that's not focused on playing within the rules that somebody else has set for us, something that moves outside of that, I think we're pretty much cooked.
Asher Miller
Well, I don't want to be cooked, so let's get to work on this stuff and see what we can support. Thanks, Thomas. Really appreciate all the work that you've done over decades and for helping our audience here understand that we live in Crazy Town in a way that maybe we didn't realize with this legal stuff. Okay, thanks so much. Take care.
Thomas Linzey
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Melody Allison
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app, or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much-needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.
