Be the Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community

Great book. Very inspirational and very realistic. Great resource for anyone disgusted with what our corporately co-opted government has gotten us and a straight-forward manuel for how to get what we want in our communities nation-wide. Democracy at its finest. I'd recommend this to anyone fed up with going through the traditional channels or anyone who has given up hope that we can get our governing bodies to do what we want them to do. The book teaches you loud and clear: down with corporations and down with corporate personhood! It's time to stand up and fight!

Kudos to authors Anneke Campbell and Thomas Linzey for their uplifting book, which examines how local communities can take back their power. The key, according to the authors, is bold self-governance, whereby citizens openly challenge corporate power to assume the reigns themselves. As a community leader, a congressional candidate in California's 36th district, I was most interested in reading about Spokane's campaign to rewrite the city's Home Rule Charter - "to drive legally enforceable rights for neighborhoods, people, and nature directly into the structure of the city government itself." During these challenging economic times, when so much of our taxpayer money is drained to pay for counter-productive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is refreshing to read a book that discusses how cities can address the urgent needs of their citizens to breathe clean air, work in healthy environments, and protect their open space. Towards the end of the book, the authors explore the undermining of constitutional rights by corporations granted private power, as though these business entitites are persons, not corporations. Perhaps if enough Americans read Be the Change, we can turn this notion of corporations as individual private actors around and set our country on a sustainable course. I recommend Be the Change for anyone thinking about getting involved in their community. Well-done! Marcy Winograd