Standing Up To Corporations One Town At Time
In 1819, the Supreme Court declared for the first time that corporations are entitled to protection under the Constitution. That case started in New Hampshire. Since then, corporations have been granted virtually all the rights constitutionally guaranteed to human beings. They use those rights to site polluting feedlots, dump toxic sludge, build big-box stores, and take municipal water to sell, all whether citizens want them to or not.
Now, New Hampshire townspeople are fighting to turn that around and put people, not corporations, in charge. What manner of revolutionaries are these? The kind you should expect in the United States: laborers, mothers, farmers, businessmen, and other ordinary citizens. They are people like Gail Darrell, a New Hampshire native who, 25 years ago, moved with her husband to the little town of Barnstead to raise their children in a rural environment. They are people like Barnstead Select Board member Jack O’Neil, a Vietnam veteran and George Bush voter.
What’s These People’s Problem?
Barnstead is located just south of New Hampshire’s lakes region. The Suncook River runs through town, and four lakes are within the town limits. It’s a water-rich community sitting on a big aquifer.
Which puts it in the crosshairs of corporate water miners. As bottled water has become a “must have” commodity generating nearly $10 billion a year in consumer spending, corporations have descended on communities like Barnstead and set up pumping operations. They extract hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day, bottle it, and ship it out for profit. Taking that much water raises the specter of lowered water tables and dry wells, infiltration of pollutants or saltwater, and damage to wetlands. The townspeople lose control of one of the necessities of life.
Barnstead residents watched as nearby Barrington and Nottingham fought to block multinational corporation USA Springs from taking their water. They saw those communities work through the state regulatory system and, after years of labor and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs, find themselves without a remedy. Corporations, they were told, have constitutional rights that limit what regulators can do with zoning or other land-use controls.
Gail Darrell and Diane St. Germaine, another Barnstead resident, didn’t want their town to face the same expensive battle. They already had experience with the regulatory system, having worked to get the town to ban local dumping of Class A sewage sludge. Once that ban was in place, the corporations shipping the sludge simply got it reclassified as Class B biosolids, and the town was back to square one.
“That was my first introduction to the regulatory process which actually does not allow citizens to say ‘No’ to anything,” Darrell says. “All corporations have to do is change a word and they get their way.”
The Trouble with Site Fights
One-at-a-time regulatory battles over a single project-whether sludge dumping, a Wal-Mart, or a nuclear power plant-are called “site fights.” They are sometimes successful, although only about one time in 10. Even then, defeated corporations are free to try again, as Wal-Mart frequently does when citizens defeat its siting plans.
The problem is that the system isn’t set up to protect the rights or interests of the average human. Rick Smith of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) says that when people realize that corporate rights override community rights it’s “shocking to them.”
That the rights of a legal fiction, the corporation, trump the rights of human beings is the result of years of work by corporations to bend legislation and court rulings in their favor. Since the Supreme Court first cracked the constitutional door in 1819, it has steadily opened it wider, giving corporations virtually every protection in the Bill of Rights.
The Court, for instance, held that corporations have First Amendment rights to free speech and, in a later case, said that free speech includes spending money on political campaigns. Corporations have acquired full due process rights, a right to Fifth Amendment compensation for governmental “takings,” and a right to require search warrants, even for OSHA safety inspections. (See Historical Scorecard)
Those rights come in handy in fighting governmental regulation. As long ago as the 1920s, the Supreme Court ruled that Pennsylvania could not require coal mines to leave enough coal in the ground to support the earth overhead, even if that meant that people’s houses might be damaged or destroyed. Making corporations sacrifice that coal, the court said, would be an unconstitutional “taking” of property.
If corporations don’t get the results they want in court, they can take the more direct approach of tailoring their own legislation. In a world where politicians depend on money to get elected, having a constitutional right to write big checks gains valuable access. Having a say in federal legislation is particularly useful since the Commerce Clause of the Constitution says that federal law trumps state law on matters of interstate commerce.
Beyond Site Fights
With the deck stacked against local control, what are citizens to do to step outside the regulatory game and take back power? Some bold communities have banned specific corporate operations, not based on regulation, but on a declaration that human beings have the right to control their local resources, and that corporations are not people and not entitled to rights the Constitution grants to humans.That happened first in Pennsylvania when farmers and small-town residents tried to resist the encroachment of corporate feedlots and the dumping of sewage sludge from other states.
Ruth Caplan, of the Alliance for Democracy’s “Defending Water for Life” program, tells how a Pennsylvania coalition including the Sierra Club, the Farm Bureau, unions, and the Democratic governor responded by getting legislation passed limiting pollution from corporate feedlots.
“The farmers in rural Pennsylvania were furious,” about the new law, Caplan says, “because they didn’t want less pollution. They didn’t want those corporate farms in their area. Period.”
Lawyer Thomas Linzey, founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), started getting calls from those outraged farmers. Linzey, Caplan says, had been working within the regulatory system, but he and the Pennsylvania farmers realized that they needed a new strategy. Linzey drafted model ordinances asserting community rights to self-governance and banning corporations from damaging operations in townships. More than 100 Pennsylvania townships have adopted those ordinances.
Linzey and CELDF began offering “Democracy Schools,” intensive weekend programs presenting the history of corporate power in the United States, and the history of successful movements, such as the abolitionists and suffragists, to overturn settled law. Caplan attended one of those schools. It was “a real wake-up call for me,” she says, “because most of the work we’ve done has been through the regulatory system, with some success. But it’s not leading toward a fundamental change between corporations and the rights of people and nature.”
Caplan took her newfound knowledge to a U.S.-Canadian meeting on the problem of bottled water. There she met activists from New Hampshire who subsequently introduced her to Darrell and St. Germaine. Caplan told them of CELDF’s work, and offered to work with them and the people of Barnstead on the water issue.
Darrell and St. Germaine made presentations to the town’s Select Board, which had earlier passed a “Warrant Article” declaring the town’s intention to protect its water. Ultimately, they invited CELDF to make a presentation to the Board. At the end of that presentation, the Board asked Linzey to draft an ordinance similar to the ones in Pennsylvania. Linzey told the group that they needed to understand that they would be taking on settled law, Caplan says.”Well, Mr. Linzey, we understand that, and we’re ready to walk point for you,” Jack O’Neil replied, using a Vietnam-era term for being out front on patrol.
Reclaiming Rights
CELDF’s model ordinances go beyond zoning or other efforts to control corporate behavior. They ban corporations from specific operations altogether, citing the Declaration of Independence, international law, state law conferring rights on citizens, and the general rights of human beings to govern themselves and take care of their own communities.
Darrell says that she and St. Germaine spent the next year educating Barnstead residents about the proposed ordinance. “We talked to people about water rights everywhere we met them-at the dump, in parks. We told them why we needed to have this ordinance be unanimous and in place before corporations came to town.”
People were receptive to the idea but curious why the ordinance needed to cite such a broad range of law. “There was a lot of education about why we needed to deny corporate personhood,” Darrell says, “People don’t understand how we’ve gotten to this point and how corporations have gotten so much power.” Darrell credits CELDF’s Democracy Schools with giving her the information she needed to provide that education.
In March 2006, the ordinance came before the town meeting. After final discussion, Barnstead took its vote: 136-1 in favor. The one “No” vote, Darrell says, was not in general opposition to the measure, but was cast by a person who felt declaring that corporations are not persons went too far.
Now Barnstead is walking point, the first town in the nation to ban corporate water mining within its limits.
One Town at a Time
The fight to take back power from corporations continues. Across the country in Humboldt County, California, the people passed a referendum banning outside corporations from participating in elections and declared that corporations are not recognized as people there. Blaine Township, in southwestern Pennsylvania, outlawed the destructive practice of longwall coal mining. People in Montgomery County in rural Virginia are fighting the taking of farmland to build a giant railway terminal.These are admittedly radical steps, although, as Ruth Caplan points out, they are being carried forward by people who are not radicals. “These are not liberals, not progressives, not activists. But they don’t want corporations to tell them how they should run their community.”
The courts have not yet ruled on these measures. If they are challenged, no one knows what the outcome will be. But these new activists point to the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements. They were radical. They challenged well-settled law. They lost repeatedly, until the public saw the truth of their position, and the law changed.
Darrell and her fellow townsfolk are working on amendments to strengthen their ordinance if a challenge does come. If they’re defeated in court, she will continue to work to make humans more important than corporations. She’s in it, she says, “to have a clear conscience. I did what I could after I got educated. I can tell that to my kids. It’s my duty. I’ll take that charge and do the best I can.”
Doug Pibel is managing editor of YES!
© 2007 YES! Magazine
I intend to raise this issue of corporate personhood at our next township supervisors’ meeting where I live here in Central Pennsylvania, which of course is a leading hotbed of conservatism. I am in fact the area’s token progressive. Just imagine the possibilities of this issue being brought to the fore in municipalities all across the country. Borders on revolutionary, which of course will not be televised.
One way to make sure that people are first is to prohibit anyone from making a financial contribution to any candidate or ballot issue unless the contributor is able to cast a vote for or against that candidate or issue. That would take corporations out of every election and take national movements out of local elections. Everyone would benefit.
ppeters: One way to make sure that people are first is to prohibit anyone from making a financial contribution to any candidate or ballot issue unless the contributor is able to cast a vote for or against that candidate or issue. That would take corporations out of every election and take national movements out of local elections. Everyone would benefit.
Oh, be careful - that might lead to corporate voting rights
This article is one of those keys to changing things as they are to how they ought to be.
PPeters–I like both the simplicity and elegance of your solution.
Daveg–I want to see the comercials for “corporate voting rights” and more importantly exactly who supports them. I’ll bet there are more of “us” than there are of “them”. 8
Restrict the “rights” of corporations as long as you do the same for unions, coops, neighborhood associations, political parties, any other entity where PEOPLE have joined together for a common purpose. That’s what a corporation is. It’s every single one of the stockholders, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands.
The company executives join together to form a Corporation to shield themselves from the misdeeds of the corporation. See Society Anonymous. This is opposed to a Commonwealth.
So what say you, Humans?
Are you ready to do without? Even if for only a short time?
That’s what fighting the corporation will mean: doing without. I doubt you/we will find many Americans ready to do without a second, cheap dvd or mp3 player for the wife’s car, let alone see the economy take even a brief roll through the crapper. There’s too much off-roadin to do. Football season is upon us again and that means we can gamble our credit rating every saturday and sunday!!! (Go Broncos)
Unfortunately, we’ll need to swirl perilously close to the drain before we’ll discover a desire stronger than our desire for cheap, plastic shit. The Corpos have us by the remote control and we can’t separate ass from couch….
The truth is we will all find that desire. The question is, will the MAJORITY find the desire in time to make a difference?
That’s a tough sell, brothers and sisters.
May the revolution be as swift as it is peaceful.
The best way to stand up to corporations may be to outcompete them. By incorporating We the People, we will be the richest and most powerful corporation. Instead of having an administration that works for Halliburton, we could have one that works for US as equal shareholders of non-transferable stock.
ezeflyer has the right idea. If there was a corporation of We the People, it would get those of us willing to do all that happystead mentions together (and we might be very happily surprised by our numbers), and then we could start working on those who either don’t know what’s going on - how can they when the only thing on the boob tube is Paris, and the other young hollywood drunks or druggies?
With the corporations also controlling the government, going after the corporations is like killing - make that knocking out two birds with one stone.
“One way to make sure that people are first is to prohibit anyone from making a financial contribution to any candidate or ballot issue unless the contributor is able to cast a vote for or against that candidate or issue. That would take corporations out of every election and take national movements out of local elections. Everyone would benefit.”
I agree completely but would add that restrictions on contributions should apply similarly to political parties. It is understood that this prohibition would include unions and PACs as well as corporations. However, this still might not stop individuals and groups from engaging in election related activities outside of a party’s or candidate’s own organization. In that case, it might be reasonable to include a prohibition against messages that mention a candidate or party by name.
The problem with these straight forward, non-partisan and sensible ideas is that they run up against First Amendment free speech rights. The courts have determined, illogically, that money is equivalent to speech and thus cannot be completely restricted. This decision ranks with the “corporation as a person” concept in its perversity. Possibly what will be needed is a Constitutional amendment dealing with financing of elections.
Ultimately, campaign finance reform is the single most important issue facing the nation. We will never have a true democracy as long as private money is part of the electoral process.
There is a Clean Money bill in California - AB 583 - that would provide for publicly funded elections. Similar bills have passed in Maine and Arizona. As robgo2 observes, this is the single most important issue, and bills like these are the most important legislation to support.
manchild…
Before your next township supervisors’ meeting, you might want to familiarize yourself with www.poclad.org/.
Also, there’s an excellent book by Thom Hartmann called Unequal Protection - The Rise of Corporate Dominance and The Theft of Human Rights. There’s a section at the end titled “Model Ordinances to Rescind Corporate Personhood”. It might prove useful after the initial shock of your fellow supervisors wears-off. and they realize the answer to all of their dilemmas is right before their eyes.
Another useful website to examine is: www.reclaimdemocracy.org/ .
Best of luck! Let us know how things progress…
Jefferson’s G, thanks for recommending the Hartmann book. It is an excellent resource for understanding this issue, particularly because it points out that the opening sentence of this article is actually false:
“In 1819, the Supreme Court declared for the first time that corporations are entitled to protection under the Constitution.”
Actually, they did not. An unusual word choice in the way the decision was recorded has been misinterpreted for the past 188 years as corporate personhood.
If corporations want to claim legal personhood, then they should bear not only the same rights but the same responsibilities as legal persons. For example, if I, through negligence, cause someone else to be maimed or killed, I can be convicted of negligent homicide and put in prison for a good long time. Many corporations have caused untold death and injury for decades, the Murray-owned mine collapse in Utah is just the most recent example. Said corporations may be fined for their behavior. They are never legally hindered from continuing business as usual, as a person would be, and never subject to the death penalty, as a person would be. The states have the legal right to dissolve corporations for misbehavior, but it has never been done.
Maybe corporations would be a little less excited about maintaining their “personhood” and exercising their right to “free speech” by spending money if they faced the same penalties persons do for their misbehavior.
nwfisher…
QUOTE… Restrict the “rights” of corporations as long as you do the same for unions, coops, neighborhood associations, political parties, any other entity where PEOPLE have joined together for a common purpose. That’s what a corporation is. It’s every single one of the stockholders, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. UNQUOTE
As I mentioned on another post yesterday, it’s a known and unfortunate fact that large corporations (multinational corporations, for the most part) have inherited rights that only “We the People” were intended, when the framers originally crafted the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights. Without going into a long, detailed, and complex discussion regarding “corporate personhood” and the meaning of democracy, let it suffice to say that over the last 130 years, or so, corporations have gained unequal protection through a various court decisions. These include, but are certainly not limited to: (1) unequal uses for several amendments; (2) unequal regulation; (3) unequal protection from risk; (4) unequal taxes; (5) unequal responsibility for crime; (6) unequal privacy; (7) unequal citizenship and access to the commons; (8) unequal wealth; (9) unequal trade, and of course the most apparent one of all; (10) unequal media and influence.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your inclination), corporate personhood has not been extended to the other groups you mention (unions, cooperatives, home associations, etc.), yet.
Please don’t confuse the meanings. When the term corporate personhood is used, it means exactly that. That entity, the corporation itself, has been granted most of the same rights and privileges (due to erroneous judicial decisions) that YOU have, as a natural-born person, under the Constitution of this country. It’s not talking about the individuals that make up the corporation. That’s a given.
Now, if you still feel that’s okay, please READ the Constitution of this country - very closely. Corporations, or any other “artificial persons” for that matter, are never mentioned as being protected by the Bill of Rights. Only YOU are — you, a natural-born person — not organizations borne of man.
Please read more about it. (See my previous post, above)
To Bobbi Dykema Katsanis…
You’re very correct, and I agree. I believe the actual date was 1886. The case was Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
It’s been downhill since then.
Thanks for the input. It seems to be a difficult concept for people to grasp. No wonder, we’ve been indoctrinated all our lives to think it’s right.
It’s not!
nwfisher…
QUOTE… Restrict the “rights” of corporations as long as you do the same for unions, coops, neighborhood associations, political parties, any other entity where PEOPLE have joined together for a common purpose. That’s what a corporation is. It’s every single one of the stockholders, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. UNQUOTE
No, it is not! A corporation is not an organisation where people have a say,
it is an organisation where MONEY has a say.
* A large corporation could have 100 shareholders, and one of the shareholders
owns 60% of the shares, that person controls the corporation. The
corporation is not really a manifestation of the humans, it is a
manifestation of the MONEY.
* A single person can create and own as many corporations as she wants,
now supposedly, every one of these corporations have the same rights
as a human. No, not only does the rich man have the same rights as a
human, his DOLLARS have the same rights as well! The rich man, in
effect, gets LOTS of rights.
If you think about it, this is the key factor that underlies most problems in
the USA today. The parliament is beholden to the media barons and the campaign
donors. They too, in effect, represent the DOLLARS and not the people.
And again with the courts. America has the best legal system that money can
buy. That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with our legal system (unfortunately)
. A justice system that favours those who can afford better lawyers is not
justice at all.
Giving the same rights to corporations as to humans is, in effect, giving the same
rights to DOLLARS. Personally, I would prefer to give rights to animals, than
to the corporate dollar.
Don’t buy a g.d. thing on 9-11, or longer! This whole “corporate rights’” thing is over the edge idit? BTW I’ll walk point on this thing in my community of Oregon.
“Capitalism is admittedly an incredibly productive system that has created a flood of goods unlike anything the world has ever seen. It also is a system that is fundamentally (1) inhuman, (2) anti-democratic, and (3) unsustainable. Capitalism has given those of us in the First World lots of stuff (most of it of marginal or questionable value) in exchange for our souls, our hope for progressive politics, and the possibility of a decent future for children.
In short, either we change or we die — spiritually, politically, literally.”
braithwa842, Dr Zimmerman;
Also keep in mind that “ownership” in corporations is highly suspect. Very few shareowners have ever contributed one cent to the corporation they claim to own. If they bought the stock in the “market” they were simply gambling that it would increase in value. None of their “investment” went to the corporation. It simply went to the entity selling previously owned shares. (Unless the stock was purchase as an IPO.)
But that so-called “ownership” entitles the new, temporary share owner to all of the “rights and benefits” of the corporation into which that investor has contributed nada. Such a deal!
Educate, educate, educate folks in our communities about corporate personhood and human rights (including those of future generations) to clean water, clean air, agricultural land; sustainability; the direct link between some consumer choices and outright harm — vital information CEOs
and Madison Ave. fail to tell us. Still, these efforts require citizenry leadership, creativity and initiative at the local level.
A few preliminary suggestions for resources:
Movie: “The Corporation” — see www.thecorporation.com
Book: The Great American Jobs Scam (corporate tax dodging and the myth of job creation) by Greg LeRoy
Links:
(www.poclad.org — as was mentioned in one of the other comments)
Democracy School
www.celdf.org/DemocracySchool/tabid/60/Default.aspx
Responsible Shopper: http://www.coopamerica.org/programs/rs/
Food and Water Watch:
www.foodandwaterwatch.org
Stopping mountaintop removal by coal companies
http://www.ohvec.org/
Reclaiming our lives and communities
www.solari.com
This is all so beautiful! Thanks to YES! Magazine for their insistance that people can do something about corporate power, thanks to everyone for all the resources in this thread.
Funny, i kind of expected poor Mtn Goat to be attempting to intrude in this thread…
Corporations are considered as persons with the rights and not the responsibilities of being good citizens.
Corporations usually don’t accept personhood. When a refinery murders people by blowing up or a mine murders people the corporations are allowed to continue their activities instead of being executed as they should be. The owners and executives conspired to cut costs and ignore safety. They actually conspired to murder people, but they are not held accountable. Why not?
I say give them persondhood and then let them go to court and have some real, unbought by corporations people be their judges.
John F. Butterfield you have said what Ihave thought plenty of times. Take that mine owner and his board of directoras and executive management tema and put them down in the mine and then blow it. Ditto for the Bhopal gang from Union Carbide, Love Canal courtesy of Dow Chemical, etc.
Take the CEO and board and all th executives from businesses like Enron, World Com, Bear Stearns, Soloman Brothers, and all those slick operators who filled the world with ARM worthless paper and confiscate all their assets to help restore liquidty to pensions and pay off debts incurred.
But of course that would defeat the entire purpose of corporations which is to provide a shield against civil liability on the part of its directors and executives.