Corporate attorneys with their colleagues on federal courts have perverted the law at every level. They've won legal decisions making corporations legal "persons" with due process, equal protection, free speech, search and seizure and other protections from the government and the public. This has enabled the corporate invasion of the body politic in Ohio and across our nation -- of our health care, workplace, environment, education, news, food, entertainment and politics -- to continue with constancy and rapidity.
There are currently two general political responses to corporate usurpation of local laws and corporate "personhood."
Locally, communities are asserting their right to decide -- claiming that corporate claims to frack, spew, dump, and subvert local environments and economies violates a local community's basic powers and rights to protect their health, safety and welfare. These basic rights to promote community self-preservation are often enshrined in local governing charters (constitutions). Pittsburgh, Buffalo and other communities on the issue of fracking have passed legally binding bans or prohibitions. Not legal regulations of this risky practice. Not general lacking any teeth resolutions against it. But outright bans. Several Ohio communities are considering such actions. Complementary campaigns are also underway to call for a moratorium on the fracking until complete health and environmental assessments can be completed.
Hydraulic fracking needs to be opposed on its own environmental and human health merits. Actually, more like demerits. But the political reasons (its preemption of local control in Ohio and elsewhere by corporations claiming and abusing their political rights) for opposing fracking are just as crucial. The political reasons -- corporations shouldn't have more power than people and communities -- are the same reasons other activists are struggling on other issues in other places.
All of this calls us as socially concerned humans to work simultaneously in two differing but supplementary arenas:
- To protect and/or promote whatever community, group of people, natural place, alternative structure or condition under assault by corporations and their supporters, and
- To work at shifting the relationship between citizens and corporations to one where people are in charge, making the rules, deciding their own futures.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
