Standing Up To Corporations One Town At Time

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/30/3514/
Published on Thursday, August 30, 2007 by YES! Magazine
Standing Up To Corporations One Town At Time
by Doug Pibel

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.”
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/30/3514/

of virtually every critical problem facing this nation and the planet . . .

- the war in Iraq? . . . driven by "defense" contractors, arms dealers, and the new, for-profit mercenary armies -- and, of course, oil companies . . .

- the healthcare crisis? . . . driven by insurance companies and HMOs whose profits increase in proportion to the number of claims denied . . . and which contribute NOTHING to the actual provision of healthcare to you and me . . .

- environmental devastation and global warming? . . . pollution of our air and water, misuse of our land, extinction of species, all the result of irresponsible corporate greed and lack of government regulation of their activities . . .

- rigged elections? . . . electronic voting machine companies, with the imprimatur of our government . . .

- job outsourcing? . . . virtually every major industry is at fault . . .

- collapse of our manufacturing base? . . . ditto . . .

- providing the citizenry with infotainment and calling it news? . . . the near complete control of the media by large corporations -- including major "defense" contractors like General Electric . . .

and the list goes on . . . and on, and on, and on . . .

corporate control of Congress, the lack of effective government regulation and oversight, and the legal requirement that corporations place increasing profits for shareholders above all other considerations are collectively sending us into a downward social and economic spiral from which there may be no escape -- or recovery . . .

and do our candidates address these issues and put them at the forefront of political discourse, where they belong? . . . not hardly . . . and those who DO even mention the "crisis of corporate control" (Kucinich, Edwards) are marginalized by the corporate media . . .

the ONLY way effective change is ever going to happen is if we return control of corporations to the people . . . until this problem that underlies all other problems is addressed through corporate re-regulation, taxation, and control, no substantive changes of any consequences will take place . . . what we need are populist candidates who understand this crisis and are willing to take on the corporate behemoths . . . what we are given are corporate candidates whose campaigns are largely funded by the very corporations at the root of our national crises . . .

more about restoring citizen authority over corporations can be found at

ReclaimDemocracy.org
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/ . . .

among the many interesting articles/pages that can be found there . . .

Our Hidden History of Corporations in the United States
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html

Corporate Personhood
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/

Corporate Accountability
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/

Global Corporatization
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/global_corporatization/

Food, Health & Environment
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/food_and_health/index.html

disclaimer: I have no connection to this website . . . I just think that the information they provide and what they're trying to accomplish are vitally important if we want to save our democracy . . .

want to effect real change in this country? . . . take on the corporations and strip them of their power . . . get our candidates talking about that issue -- and vote for those who understand the problem and are committed to REAL change . . .

and I believe we have more people in prison in the "land of the free" than any other nation on the face of the Earth, maybe this is just a coincidence, but I doubt it.

spreading its corruption ever sense.

not to mention the salivating over the privatization of the educational system, social security, etc, etc....

PS - thanks for the links.