A Radical Guide has teamed up with Move to Amend (MTA), Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), Liberty Tree, and Pachamama Alliance to host an online Peoples Movement Assembly: Towards a Peoples Constitution.
This will be a two-day event to come together to imagine what a constitutional renewal could look like in the United States. We expect people from coast to coast to join this event.
When:
Day 1: Saturday, October 24th 10am-3pm Pacific / 1pm-6pm Eastern
Day 2: Sunday, October 25th 10am-1pm Pacific / 1pm-4pm Eastern
This two-day event will include panel discussions, small group breakouts, planning, community building, and most of all mapping out the path needed to create a U.S. Constitution that works for all people and that honors nature, and values life over profits and property.
This People’s Movement Assembly: Towards a Peoples Constitution is a process designed for those who are ready to imagine a better world and a constitution that protects People and Planet, not corporations and profit.
This is not a space to debate if we should renew the constitution, but rather, what’s our vision for a Peoples’ Constitution. The following assumptions are the starting point for this PMA.
Please join us if you are at least mostly in agreement with these assumptions.
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- The United States is not now, nor has it ever been a functioning democracy.
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- The United States was founded on stolen land and built using stolen labor from enslaved people.
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- The U.S. Constitution was created by and for the wealthy elite of the era – excluding most people living on the land at the time of its crafting. Specifically, the Constitution was written to protect and represent white men with money and/or land.
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- The U.S. Constitution is a property rights document, not a human rights document.
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- The U.S. Constitution was used to perpetuate and legalize attempted genocide, white supremacy and racism, male domination over women, and class oppression. It took mass social movements—broad, deep, conscious, organized, and educated—to make marginal improvements in this country. With each hard-won expansion of suffrage, the governing elite devised mechanisms to shrink what effect the vote could have.
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- Any movement that wants to actually create a new world must create new institutions (including new legal institutions) that meet people’s needs without destroying the planet that we depend upon for life itself.
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- All law should be contingent on and subordinate to the highest laws — unalienable rights shared equally by all. Because “unalienable rights” are /should be the things most highly valued by society and immune from regulation/limitation. The establishment, protection, and enforcement of Unalienable Rights must be the constitution’s reason for being and should direct freedom to govern in all things, in the hands of each community, except wherein a law would limit or violate anyone’s Unalienable Rights.
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- The constitution of any country at its best reflects its collective inspirations and aspirations. It defines the legal framework of how people structure their society — politically, economically, and socially. Moreover, constitutions are moral or ethical documents — designating what is right and wrong — with profound implications on literally every aspect of the lives of people, their communities, country, and the natural world.
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- The U.S. Constitution should be renewed or rewritten to account for new generations and circumstances and should exist as a living document that reflects the challenges and opportunities of the times.
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- To move towards new systems and a new foundational document, we must be bold and visionary in imagining a better world.
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- The ultimate goal of mass movements is not only to change the culture, but to codify movement demands into laws and, more importantly, rights.
What is a Peoples Movement Assembly?
The Peoples Movement Assembly is a participatory process that came to the US out of the World Social Forum and has been used by many communities and assemblies for generations.
The assembly is multiracial, multigenerational, multi-ideological, and multi-gendered. The assembly brings all the voices together in a circular fashion and engages the thinking, experiences, and visions of all the participants to synthesize and collectively agree on action steps.” – PeoplesMovementAssembly.org
