By David Moritz
Chairman, Alachua County Environmental Protection Advisory Committee
May 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.
I have been writing about how our legal system is dominated by corporations, in part because they have the power that comes from the combined wealth of those who own the corporations or have invested in them, but primarily because the courts have chosen to interpret the U.S. Constitution in a way that has allowed them to find corporate rights in it, whether or not those who wrote the Constitution and its amendments intended for those rights to be bestowed on corporations or not.
There is NO mention of corporations in the U.S. Constitution, so it seems to me to be a stretch for the courts to have found corporate rights in all of the places the courts have discovered them.
Corporations do need to be seen as some kind of entity with the rights to sign contracts, and I can see where they have the need to be recognized in some way by courts so that they may do much of the business required of them. What I strongly object to is the acceptance of business corporations as “people,” with all of the constitutional rights granted to natural people and some that even natural people and municipal corporations (counties, townships, boroughs, towns, villages and cities) do not have. It is from this situation that so many of the ills of our society have erupted and it is this situation that we must control before corporations grow even more powerful than they already are.
Corporations are NOT people and it is long past time for Congress to fix the grave injustices that are being perpetrated by those who are misusing these wrongfully granted corporate rights to further their own selfish desires.
Again: Corporations are NOT people, but all too often they are run by people who misuse the power they have by way of the corporations they control.
I believe that our failure to keep corporations properly regulated will one day make slaves of us all, after they have taken full control of our government and destroyed the last vestiges of democracy.
I realize how apocalyptic that sounds and it is intentional. Using their First Amendment rights and wealth, corporations are able to influence public opinion by hiring advertising agencies and purchasing newspaper, magazine, radio and television space to promote their candidates and points of view. No private citizen can do this and what we are finding is that when presented with enough advertising, whether true or untrue, these political stories tend to be accepted if they are seen and heard enough times.
Once elected, the candidates supported by these corporations then tend to listen NOT to the people, but to the corporations and their representatives and industry groups. We can see that this is true just by examining the amount of money the corporations are spending on advertising and lobbying. If that tactic were not effective, these corporations would not be spending their money in this way. After all, they are good businessmen and women and know how to get value for their investments.
But what has happened is killing democracy. In order to keep the huge sums of money needed to continue winning future elections, our legislators carefully follow the plans laid our for them by their corporate owners and even submit and pass bills into law that were written by corporation lawyers. The resulting laws remove regulations protecting the public, the environment and the corporations’ competitors.
At the very time I am writing this, there is a law being considered in Tallahassee that will make it much harder for voters to approve citizen-initiated amendments to the Florida Constitution. This law is NOT for the benefit of the public; its sole purpose is to take away the power the people have to participate in our state’s legal and political systems.
I don’t really understand why the legislature feels the need to do this. It’s not as if they feel obligated to abide by the state constitution. Look at the amendment we passed with over 74.96% approval of the Florida electorate in 2014, “The Florida Water and Land Conservation Initiative,” which was Amendment #1 on the ballot. The Florida Legislature ignored this amendment for the longest time, and when it did start to spend the money set aside by the amendment, it was for just about everything EXCEPT what the amendment intended. To be honest, the amendment’s wording was such that it easily lent itself to intentional misinterpretation, but the intention of the amendment was clear and many of our legislators had even said before the amendment was passed that they would not follow it—and to this day, they haven’t. Their attitude couldn’t be clearer if they stood en masse and gave all Floridians who voted for the amendment the finger!
But it’s important to remember to whom “our” legislators report—the corporations who finance their elections.
Another thing we see from our legislators are laws pre-empting genuine home rule. Look around Florida and we see case after case of corporations engaged in businesses that are destroying our springs, streams, rivers and lakes. Our drinking water is becoming increasingly filled with nitrogen and phosphorus-bearing chemicals and the toxic algae that feed upon those nutrients. All the while, our state fails to adequately regulate agriculture or the residential use of fertilizer and has no real plan to deal with the pollution that comes from animal and human waste—pollution that is leaking into the state’s water.
The problem is so bad that our state’s discharges into the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico have exacerbated huge blooms of toxic algae and the red tide organism, resulting in gigantic fish kills and a large number of other aquatic animal deaths including sea turtles, dolphins, manatee and even whales.
Still, our governor and legislature do nothing to fix the causes of our problem, choosing instead to spend billions of taxpayer dollars putting band-aids on spurting arteries!
What about the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP)? FDEP is the agency tasked with regulating the amount of pollution corporations and the rest of us are allowed to put into the environment and they don’t seem to know how to say “NO!” to anyone. Under our former governor, the policing arm of the FDEP was all but closed down and the whole process of policing polluters was changed to one that claimed to prefer education to enforcement. What it really was, instead, was an invitation for polluters to have at it! The state’s enforcement agents were effectively told to cover their eyes and see no evil. Then some time later, the state proudly announced that pollution events were “down” and the new policy of education was lauded for being more successful than the old enforcement policy. Huh? WTH!! Who in their right mind ignores enforcement opportunities and claims it’s because there are fewer events needing enforcement? Plain and simple: this is what happens when you put regulated industry in charge of regulating itself.
Before I go on, let me make something clear. I am neither anti-business nor anti-corporation. Not ALL corporations are evil or do evil things. Some are owned and run by good people of conscience who follow the laws of the land and genuinely try to be good neighbors, but there are too many who regularly misuse the rights found in laws that I am confident they were never meant to participate in.
The power that a democratic government wields (and our republic IS a democratic form of government) comes from We the People. Therefore the people must be able to regulate corporations—it’s insane when it’s the other way around and corporations govern what the people can do.
And yet, industries time and again dictate to government what it will do, even supplying the written laws which are designed to control citizens while preventing themselves from being regulated. How many people really believe that Floridians want their water and the beauty of our state destroyed by strip mining for phosphate, pollution with nitrates, nitrites, phosphate, animal wastes and the plethora of toxic chemicals that result from oil drilling and fracking, all of which are having a chilling effect on tourism, the primary driver of Florida’s economy!
If you doubt that there are industries whose corporations strongly influence and even outright run our government at various levels, consider this: the Clean Water Act, passed by Congress in 1972, excludes regulation of the oil industry from its requirements. And current policy being promoted by POTUS is prioritizing the use of all public lands—originally set aside for recreation and to protect wildlife, clean water and public health—for oil drilling. You have to wonder how much money POTUS has invested in the oil and gas industry!
Remember Grant Township, Pennsylvania, that I discussed in a previous post? The citizens of Grant Township, after hearing about fracking water finding its way to surface water in rivers in other parts of the state, decided they weren’t willing to risk their drinking water to the wastes PGE wanted to pump into the ground in their township. The citizens of Grant Township simply wanted to protect themselves and their children from the cancers that such chemicals bring everywhere they go, so they did their due diligence and a large number of them attended meetings with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to let that agency know they did not want 945,000 gallons per month of toxic death pumped into the ground beneath their homes and schools and churches.
After consideration, the EPA and State of Pennsylvania approved PGE’s permits. Floridians witnessed a similar thing when we were trying to protect our water from a large cattle ranch with the pleasant name of “Adena Springs.” We witness similar situations every time we try to stop one of the great phosphate behemoths from reaching out and destroying yet more of our precious Florida. Our current laws prohibit us from stopping any of these companies from doing their business and that sounds like what my neighbor lets his dog do on my little 3-foot wide lawn, and he doesn’t clean that up either.
But you know what? I’m tired of being told there is nothing we can do. It wasn’t that long ago that blacks and women weren’t considered people either and people stood up to FIX those grave errors of government. And NOW it’s time for us to fix this!
In my next and last essay, in the series, I will reveal a (non-violent) plan that will one day allow us all to take back our nation, our United States of America, from those who have usurped it from its rightful owners, We the People.