Last Saturday I attended The Daniel Pennock Democracy School. It was the most fascinating day I have ever spent. Ben Price and Shireen Parsons taught the one day class where I learned things about my country I never knew before. Here are just a few examples:
- The Declaration of Independence, those beautiful words speaking about what wonderful rights we all have, is not considered law by the Supreme Court; it is merely a “revolutionary” document.
- This country, the original thirteen colonies, were chartered. Simplifying it, that means they were formed as corporations.
- Although corporations are considered “persons” under the law, individuals in the corporation are protected and cannot be directly sued, something I knew, but it didn’t really hit home until after listening to Ben and Shireen for the day.
- The Articles of Confederation, the first United States Constitution, makes no mention of “commerce”, no mention of a bicameral legislature, no executive branch and no judicial system. State laws superceded federal law. No standing army, no federal taxation and term limits. All of this was later written into the Constitution, mostly by the Federalists, who believed the best form of government was a monarchy. It put the federal government over the states and took the people out of the picture almost completely. The Constitution was really written to take power out of the hands of we the people.
- The Supreme Court is like a limited monarchy: appointed for life, they are the law of the land, They define the laws and there is no appeal.
- We do not really own our property, we are merely tenants of the state corporations. And yes, they can seize your land without recompense.
-We need to write the “defining law” not the “regulatory law”. Regulatory law is what we usually fight when we fight a corporation; it’s all about administration – how much pollution is too much, not the fact that we don’t want any pollution. That’s the defining law. The defining law talks about corporate codes, bankruptcy and insurance laws, etc.; it spells out what the laws are and what they encompass.
We have been denied our fundamental rights, as a community, to decide for ourselves what is right for the community. Even when we fight a corporation, such as my community is doing and my friend in West Virginia and her community are doing, such as communities all over the US are doing. We are told the corporation has the right to do whatever it is planning on doing and we have no right to impede commerce. So in exchange for corporate profits, our communities get pollution and crime and sickness and disease that we must pay for, because the corporation is not responsible. In essence, corporations have rights, we don’t, not really, not where it matters most.
But the biggest thing I learned is that if we want to fight for our rights or claim our rights, for clean air, clean water, clean soil, if we want to protect our environment and stop global warming, we need to write the laws. We need to spell out, in the broadest terms possible, that we will not stand for corporations killing our planet. No matter how many times we are sued, no matter how many losses we incur, we will not stop fighting for our planet, for all species and for all future generations. Profits be damned. Corporations be damned. We won’t give up.
And if enough of us stand up for what is right and what is needed, things will change for the better.
For more information please visit the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund website, www.celdf.org.
A bit of a clarification–although some people wanted to offer George Washington a crown as king or President-for-life, the Federalists as a whole did not favor monarchy, but rather a strong central government. The CONfederation, under the Articles of Confederation, pretty much disgusted everyone by how ineffectual the central government was, since most powers resided in the states–a deficiency shared by the later Confederate States of America. Beyond its modern coded meaning, the insistence on “states’ rights” above the federal government is a recipe for disaster.
The Constitution was not written to take power out of the hands of the people, but rather to define the powers of a new central government, which powers were left to the states, and the checks and balances the branches of the three-branched central government had on each other to prevent sole rule by any one branch. It was based on a model by a Frenchman, le baron de Montesquieu (so much for French put-downs). However, a contemporary criticism did agree with your precis that the document left no room for the rights of individuals since that was not its purpose. George Mason pressed the writer of the constitution, James Madison, to amend the document to address these concerns and so the Bill of Rights came into being.
The government’s right of eminent domain, whether federal or state, is not derived from their status as corporations, but is a holdover from feudal law, where only the monarch owned land outright and everyone else was merely a tenant. Seizure can only be done by compensating the landholder according to the Fifth Amendment.
Actually, many of the Federalists did want a monarchy, however, having just fought a war against one, they deemed it an inappropriate time to try to form one. As for the Bill of Rights, at the time of the Federal Convention, the Federalists did not have enough votes to pass the Constitution. They made a deal with the anti-Federalists that if they voted for the Constitution, a Bill of Rights would be added to protect the rights. However, of the original 50 rights the anti-Federalists sought, after having ratified the Constitution, these were whittled down to a mere ten.
Although the Constitution does not in and of itself necessarily take the power out of the hands of the people, in effect and for all intents and purposes, it has and does and continues to do so as the laws are defined by the Supreme Court.
Lastly to your point about seizures, compensation does not always occur as we are but mere tenants on the lands we pay mortgages, taxes and insurance on.