by David Moritz
Chairman, Alachua County Environmental Protection Advisory Committee
April 2019
These articles were originally posted on David’s Facebook page. We think they deserve a wider audience. They have been very lightly edited and are reprinted with permission.
ONE
This is what is happening in Toledo, Ohio, where a grassroots effort by Toledo citizens to clean up Lake Erie has met with resistance from those who fear that losing their right to pollute the lake will cost them money:
If you think that we all have the right to clean air, water and soil free from the toxins poured into them by large corporations whose only interest seems to be their profits, think again.
Our rights are as nothing when compared to the rights corporations have in the USA. If you are like me, you may wonder why with so many of us struggling to protect our environment, it appears to be impossible to make any real progress.
The truth is that corporations have been around for hundreds of years and they have used their wealth to influence and guide the development of our legal system into one that serves their goals.
This war between the citizens of Toledo and the corporate juggernaut is just beginning. The citizens have, surprisingly, won the first battle, but the war is far from over and I will be watching and reporting on the battles that are sure to come.
TWO
It is time for all of us to decide whether we are going to continue to sit on the sidelines, allowing for the destruction of our planet, bit by bit, piece by piece, nation by nation or instead if we are going to summon all of our courage and dedicate ourselves to changing the world from one which works only for a few of us to one which works for the many.
The greater war which is being fought daily all around the planet is not one that can be won with weapons and violence, although there are certainly those who will stop at nothing to protect their ill-gotten gains.
The madness must stop. The raping of Earth for profit must stop. I cannot and will not sit by idly while <our> Mother Earth is being abused.
NOW is the time for us to realize that the “Line in the Sand” was crossed hundreds of years before we were even born; we didn’t miss the event – but we were lied to by those who revise history to make it say what they wish it to say.
THREE
I will start this essay with a quote from Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s (CELDF’s) “Statement on Efforts to Amend the U.S. Constitution following Citizens United” (January 2012).
“Corporations must be governable, and they must be governed by the people potentially affected by their actions.”
If you agree with the above statement, then you may be surprised to discover that it is NOT generally supported by the U.S. Constitution and U.S. case law.
When the Sabal Trail Natural Gas Pipeline came to Florida, it was opposed all along its chosen path. Florida did not need another pipeline we told them, but the pipeline got its permit and was built nevertheless. It would have been illegal for counties and municipalities along the way to try and stop the pipeline.
When Florida Rock submitted plans for a cement plant in Newberry around 2004, it was opposed by those living near the site. Vibrations from the plant were being felt miles away and there was concern that the level of mercury, estimated to go up to 65 pounds a year, would be hazardous to residents’ health. But neither the City of Newberry nor Alachua County could do anything about the emissions. As City Attorney Scott Walker warned the Newberry City Commission, air quality emissions are under the jurisdiction of the State and if the commission attempted to limit them, they could be sued by the company.
Time and again, corporations establish businesses which those living in the community do not want, but those communities are powerless to prevent them once they have the state and or federal permits they need, many of which are little more than rubber stamps from industry-friendly agencies.
Refusing these corporations the local permits they need to do business would place counties and municipalities (a town, village or city) at risk of being sued for huge sums of money—and all too often, the courts rule in favor of the corporations. You see, business corporations have rights that municipal corporations do not, and it is very rare for a local government to even attempt to exercise governance over these corporations to fulfill their duty to protect their citizens.
Where we are at this point in time in history is that corporations are in reality not governable. Corporations call the shots by making donations to our state & federal legislators’ election coffers and receive preferential treatment when it comes time for legislatures to pre-empt local ordinances, assuming they aren’t already pre-empted.
Now let’s go back in time a way, to the early part of the 19th century before the Civil War. We all know that was a period in time when slavery was legal and women did not have the right to vote. What most of us don’t tend to think much about is that at that time, slaves and women were both considered property and not people. Let me repeat that: slaves and women were not considered people under the U.S. Constitution. Beating a slave, or even raping or killing them, was legal. At worst, a man guilty of raping another man’s slave might be charged with trespassing. And until the 11thor 12thcentury, even the rape of a virgin <white> woman was considered to be a property crime against the father or husband.
It wasn’t until after the Civil War and the passing of the 14th Amendment that granted citizenship and equal rights to anyone born or naturalized in the U.S. that the laws regarding slaves changed. And it wasn’t until after the women’s suffrage movement and the passing of the 19thAmendment in 1919 that women received the right to vote.
Even today, there are still attempts each election cycle to nullify the vote of blacks, indigenous Americans and other disenfranchised groups.
The point I wish to make regarding these two major changes to the U.S. Constitution—and subsequently to our legal system—is that it wasn’t until after many years of struggle against the laws of the day, during which some laws were openly violated, that the Constitution was amended to recognize the “personhood” of blacks and women and the relevant laws were changed.
It wasn’t until blacks sat at restaurant counters where they were denied to sit and showed up to attend classes on the steps of all-white schools that the wholly legal actions used to restrain them were seen as obscene that Americans changed their attitudes regarding segregation. And it wasn’t until after millions of women banded together and protested for years to get the vote that the male-dominated Congress and President Wilson finally relented.
Both the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements were non-violent in nature. They had to be or they would have failed. Their successes depended on winning the hearts and minds of the public and in both cases that was done by demonstrating the inherent unfairness of not granting them equal rights.
We still have a long way to go in both of those arenas, but now I invite you to consider another area that is worthy of our consideration—saving ourselves from those who are destroying the environment for profit.
Those who pollute the air, water and soil do so legally for the most part. What they know that most of us do not realize is that environmental law is not designed to protect the environment; it is designed to give rights to corporations wishing to abuse it. Look at the Clean Water Act, which effectively exempts the oil and gas industry from its control.
Just try to pass a local ordinance to keep a polluting industry from opening its doors in your community, and you will find that local government is pre-empted every step of the way by state and federal laws. And if you do manage to pass a law against them, your community’s government will be hit with a lawsuit for “taking” the profits the corporation feels it might have made if their right to do business wherever they want had not been refused. And the scary part is that courts will almost always rule in their favor!
In the next installment, I will cover the mechanism that corporations use to get their way. It is based on the fact that as corporate people with equal rights to natural people but with a LOT more money, they have taken control of our state and federal legislatures and are able to use their constitutional rights to roll over any public corporation (county or municipality) that attempts to stop them. After that I will propose methods that can be used to defeat the great corporate juggernaut that now stands as a clear and present danger to our health, our way of life and ultimately to the very existence of Planet Earth.
FOUR
“PGE will seek hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Township, claiming that it suffered harm because the company has been prevented from dumping frack waste in a residential area next to the Township’s sole source of drinking water.” See:
This is what our legal system allows. U.S. law is a tool that works for the corporations, but not for communities who oppose actions corporations take within them.
Grant Township in rural Pennsylvania, with a population of 741, is such a community. Since 2012, the citizens of Grant Township have been fighting for their lives against the oil and gas industry that wishes to dump their fracking waste there.
The attorneys who work for Grant Township have been sanctioned by the federal court just for defending the township’s right to protect their drinking water!
FIVE
Don’t Tread on Me!!
Here is the response of Grant Township, Pennsylvania to the federal court’s sanctioning of the attorneys who are representing them against the oil and gas industry corporation that plans to dump 30,000 BARRELS/month (1 barrel = 31.5 US gallons) of fracking wastewater in their township for 10 years.
https://celdf.org/2018/01/grant-township-pa-sanctions-lawyers-badge-courage/