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Michael Waggoner 7 November 2011 Is Our Government Keeping Us From Being Green? It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. Ansel Adams Communities are doing something radical to create sustainable environmental policy in their local communities. They are stepping outside the existing paradigms that make us believe we are powerless to stop corporate assaults on our communities and environments. The communities as a whole are refusing to abide by threats from corporate lawyers, State Attorneys General and State Governors telling them they do not have the legal authority to pass laws to conserve their natural resources. They are committing community-wide acts of civil disobedience and are openly breaking existing laws, daring corporate, and government officials to stop them. Communities across the country are taking on a more audacious form of action to create a sustainable future, and to grapple the control of our country from corporate rule, while raising awareness of corporate personhood and the barriers this creates to a truly sustainable future. Citizens all over the United States are coming together with their communities, their Mayors and their City Councils to fight a common enemy. This is an enemy who strips the land of natural resources and leaves windswept fields in the place of old growth forests. One who breaks open the land with toxic chemicals that stay in the ground and infiltrate the drinking water of the citizens. A monster so evil and so corrupt that profit is its only goal. Money is always their goal and their process goes something like this. Move into a local community strip the natural resources in the most violent, quick, profitable way possible and sell those resources as products, leaving

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behind the waste and the pollution, only to move on to a new area to find more resources and more land to corrupt. Who is this demon? Corporations were granted personhood, rights really designed for flesh and blood people. How could something like this happen in a free country where people have inalienable rights and freedoms to be at peace with their environment? Doug Hammerstrom explains: Corporations, on the other hand, hijacked the Fourteenth Amendment and have used it to consolidate their power in the U.S. and the world. Corporations have gained many of the inalienable rights of humans guaranteed by the Bill of Rights with their status as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. Through their right of free speech, they have captured our legislatures and regulatory agencies. They have used the key to the courts that the

Fourteenth Amendment provides them to invalidate legislation that might have slipped through their control of the legislative process.

Americans want to protect their natural resources from corporate gluttony, and have the freedom to be at peace with their environment and their economy. They are now coming together in large numbers across the United States and letting the government know; the corporations and the governments time has come. Occupy America corporate resistance movement started in New York City on Wall Street. People filled the streets in defiant protest with posters declaring their problems ranging from corporations polluting our environments to colluding in the middleclass economic disaster and creating problems over the division of power and being the 99%. This is

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having no effect on the laws or the legislation or the power division in the country. In fact, as of September 17, 2011, what they are doing had been determined to be illegal and they are now subject to arrest. However, nothing has changed. Single-issue activism is not working. Corporate personhood has brought about our current political predicament whereby corporate agents exercise government-backed rights to undermine the will of the citizens working through democratic processes to protect their families, their communities, their natural environment, and their republican form of

government. (Bok 246) There is a right of local self-government and communities are starting to enforce it. In the city of Mt. Shasta California, a town of 3500 residents, the populace had gathered enough signatures to add an initiative to their November 2010 ballot. This initiative restricted corporations from engaging in activities such as removing of the local water from their aquifers to be exported for resale beyond the city of Mt. Shasta. However, a last minute bureaucratic shuffling of paperwork kept this off the ballot and was thusly removed from the voters scrutiny. In Spokane Washington, the same self-governing type of action was attempted in 2009 with the addition of a Community Bill of Rights to their ballot that would have allowed for some protection for the local natural resources including the Spokane River. This did make it to the ballot, however, the amount of money raised by the corporate and political opposition made the amendment seem detrimental to the environment if passed. On January 1, 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, a lobbying group that masquerades itself as a champion for peoples rights, but in truth, it is a corporate legal entity pursuing and extending corporations rights

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in almost every state. The U.S. Supreme Court has now created a political world dominated by corporations willing to dip into their profits to directly advocate for candidates who back their agenda or threaten foes with unlimited millions in negative advertising if they do not agree with their agenda. From 1907 until this decision, corporations and unions could neither give directly to federal candidates nor fund expansive campaigns around a federal election. Corporations have used their personhood to achieve this myriad of legal decisions. Corporations began their relentless effort to convince the courts that the word person in the Fourteenth Amendment also applies to corporations from the time of adoption in 1868. Between 1868 and 1900, of the approximately 300 cases filed asserting Fourteenth Amendment protections, corporations filed 288 and AfricanAmericans filed only 12. In the context of Citizens United, it is important to note that with reference to corporate speech, I am not referring to management speaking on behalf of a corporation. I am referring to the corporation actually speaking itself! How did the courts arrive at the conclusion that corporations could speak and therefore are entitled to First Amendment protections? The answer is that for over a hundred years, corporations have been recognized as natural persons and accorded protections under certain amendments to the Constitution. As a result of this

corporation/natural person judicial creation, the ability of the state to regulate the activities of corporations has been seriously hampered. (Rubin 10)

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America's legal system has been forced to grapple with the meaning of corporate personhood more thoroughly than other countries' courts have done, because the constitution is so specific about the rights it bestows on people. In addition, and for the most part, the Supreme Court has been generous in extending the rights of flesh-and-blood people to artificial persons, which include trade unions and other collectives as well as corporations. (Economist 78) What about our Constitution and Bill of Rights? Wont they protect us, or at least help us protect our natural resources? It may seem that these documents give us as a people rights but it really outlines private property rights and the free flow of commerce. Corporations having personhood gives them this protection, which they are all too ready to abuse. James Madison once said the primary role of government was to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. James Madison was one of the main authors of the Constitution and it should be well known that men like Madison and Jefferson and Washington were men who founded our Nation; however, all of them were businesspersons in the early stages of corporate personhood. Most people have never heard of corporate personhood, however, that is part of their control mechanics. The corporations have enormous amounts of money to spend on creating a system that works the laws into their favor. Corporations have been working on this for 125 years and we have been left in the dark but it started something like this: This rigid artificial entity theory softened into a second approach that focused on corporations as possessing the aggregate rights of their shareholder-owners. . . . The evolving conceptualization of corporations has facilitated, in part, the trend to extend constitutional protections to such entities. Today, corporations enjoy

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the protection of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments. (Tucker 501 - 503)

There are Legal barriers to being green. Corporations have been working with governments and lobbying with their profits, thereby abusing the power granted to them by allowing personhood to them and their activities. There is a commerce clause in the US Constitution that gives corporations the ability to sue local and state governments in order to overturn laws that have been made to protect health, safety, and welfare of people and communities. Here is just one example from an editorial written by a citizen in Spokane Washington, where corporations pollute the river and have lobbied laws to their favor: Since the Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court over a year ago, there seems to be more attention being paid to the rights corporations have to influence not only our elections, but our governing and lawmaking as well. That decision gave corporations the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, wiping out congressional efforts to rein in corporate spending. The court said such limits interfered with the corporations First Amendment free speech rights rights intended for natural people. Citizens United is just one of many decisions by the courts over the past 200 years granting corporations constitutional rights and powers. In addition, the effect is clear: Corporations are able to

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decide who is elected, which laws are passed, and what happens in our community. Community rights have become subordinate to corporate rights. Thus when a big development is proposed for one of Spokanes neighborhoods that is incompatible with that neighborhood, the corporations right to site the development overrides our rights as residents to say no to it. (The Spokesman-Review September 13, 2011) Critics of removing corporate personhood say the economy would stop completely in its tracks if businesses were not allowed to have these legal protections, however, the vast majority of business in our country is small business and they support and employ most of the people and do less of the polluting of our environment. Corporations, on the other hand, only employ a single digit of the employment in our country and create most of the pollution as a by-product of their manufacturing process. Small businesses do not receive any benefits from corporations having personhood. Can we punish corporations the same way we punish people. No, corporations have a complex set of rules in place that mostly make their punishments monetary. People have a problem distinguishing between corporations and people; they sometimes just want a scapegoat for an incident as described in the Journal of Law and Policy; Psychology research argues that individuals are motivated to personalize responsibility by finding an individual to hold singularly accountable for complex events. . . . Research suggests that people

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are especially motivated to assign responsibility to either an irresponsible, negligent, or an evil person. This is likely because blaming a person is more psychologically fulfilling than blaming an impersonal set of organizational or situational forces. (Tyler, Tom R., and Avital Mentovich 214) The United States Senate and the House of Representatives was created as a check and balance for our countrys own good. Now that corporations have entered the game with money, it changed the paradigm of running for elected offices. Anybody could run, and as Derek Bok who has studied big government explains, By 1998 many contenders for House seats were spending more than $1 million to get elected, while contenders for the Senate frequently spent more than $10 million. To amass these sums, sitting legislators had to spend more and more time soliciting donations, while able challengers were often forced to withdraw entirely because they could not raise enough money to compete effectively. How capable are Americans of self-government and can we create a plan to sustain our local environments and local economies. There are 210 communities across the United States have already adopted rules making corporation interests below the interests of the environment and the people who live in them. There is a growing trend for communities to reclaim their local democracy from the grip of corporate rule, to take back democracy and put it where it belongs, in the hands of the people, flesh and blood people not corporations. Ansel Adams was in love with nature and the beauty it gives to our souls, I would like to end this paper the way it started; with his

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wise and becomingly famous words: It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

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Work Cited Bok, Derek. The Trouble with Government. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2001. Editorial. The Spokesman-Review Sept. 13, 2011 Hammerstrom, Douglas. The Hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment. Web. 3 Nov. 2011. http://reclaimdemocracy.org/. Rubin, Dale F. "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: Corporate Personhood v. the Regulatory State." Administrative & Regulatory Law News 35.3 (2010): 10-12. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. Schumpeter. "Peculiar people." Economist 398.8726 (2011): 78. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. Shever, Elana. "Engendering the Company: Corporate Personhood and the Face of an Oil Company in Metropolitan Buenos Aires." PoLAR: Political & Legal Anthropology Review 33.1 2010: 26-46. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. Unknown. Sept. 13, 2011. Editorial. The Spokesman-Review. Tucker, Anne. "FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS: A CORPORATE LAW ANALYSIS OF FREE SPEECH AND CORPORATE PERSONHOOD IN CITIZENS UNITED." Case Western Reserve Law Review 61.2 Oct. 2011. 2011: 497-550. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 26

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Tyler, Tom R., and Avital Mentovich. "PUNISHING COLLECTIVE ENTITLES." Journal of Law & Policy 19.1 (2010): 203-230. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 26 Oct. 2011.