It's Time for the Maine Legislature to Challenge Corporate Personhood
by Randall Parr
At the Rockland Forum lecture series, Mary Zepernick, historian and
corporate rights authority from the Center for Democracy and the
Constitution, wore a t-shirt that said: "Slavery is the legal fiction that a
person is property; corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property
is a person." In Thomaston's St. John Church, she was energizing citizens
to counteract the threat of corporate personhood. Under this principle,
corporations can nullify laws on the premise that corporations are people
entitled to civil rights provided by the U. S. and State Constitutions. Like
citizens, corporations may have the rights to freedom of speech, freedom
from unnecessary search and seizure, rights to equal protection under the
14th amendment, and many others.
A number of things have happened in Maine during the last year to bring the
corporate power issue to the forefront. Oakhurst Dairy was sued by Monsanto,
which alleged that Oakhurst's marketing campaign that touts its milk as
being free of artificial growth hormones was misleading; Canadian farmer
Percy Schmeiser regaled audiences throughout Maine with the story of how
Monsanto sued him because some of its bio-engineered seed was found in a
ditch near his farm; citizens in Westbrook took Wal-Mart, the world's
largest retailer to court, fighting a re-zoning of land from industrial to
commercial; and the movie, "The Corporation" which examined the far-reaching
repercussions of the corporation's increasing preeminence, showed in Maine
theatres.
The next step is up to the Maine legislature. Will it challenge corporate
power? Two well- known corporate personhood issue experts addressed this
topic recently: Sponsored by Brunswick PeaceWorks, Peter Kellman of the
Program on Corporations Law and Democracy (poclad.org) spoke at the Curtis
Memorial Library on March 4; and Jeff Milchen of Reclaimdemocracy.org spoke
at Pineland Conference Center in Pownal on March 5.
In 1994, Vermont passed a law requiring the labeling of milk from cows that
had received a bio-engineered bovine growth hormone; in 1996 the federal
courts overthrew that law, saying that the mandated disclosure violated a
corporation's First Amendment right "not to speak." Four years later, a
Pennsylvania township tried to use zoning laws to control the placement of a
cell-phone tower; the telecommunications company sued the township and won,
citing a nineteenth-century civil rights law designed to protect newly freed
slaves.
Until recently, these incidents might have been seen simply as aberrations
of "corporate abuse." But an increasing number of Americans have begun to
consider a whole range of single-issue cases as examples of "corporate
rule." The role that government has played, in their view, is merely that of
a referee who enforces the rules defined by corporations for their own
benefit rather than the public's.
It was this perception that motivated Pennsylvania townships to take their
stand. But their successes in halting factory farming and sludge
applications within their borders didn't prevent corporations from
attempting to press their case in the courtroom.
In 2000, the transnational hauler Synagro-WWT, Inc. sued Rush Township,
claiming its anti-sludge ordinance illegally preempted the weaker state law
and violated the company's constitutional right of due process. It also sued
each supervisor personally for one million dollars. In response, one
township supervisor asked, "What ... are the constitutional rights of
corporations?" A year later a Pennsylvania agribusiness trade group, funded
its own suit against the factory farm ordinance on similar constitutional
grounds.
It was only after those suits had been filed that two townships took the
historic step of passing ordinances to decree that within their townships,
"Corporations shall not be considered to be persons' protected by the
Constitution of the United States," a measure that effectively declared
their independence from corporate rule. For Mike Robertson, the issue is
simple: "Those rights are meant for individuals." He and his two fellow
supervisors later revised their ordinance to also deny corporations the
right to invoke the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause; Porter
Township is considering a similar amendment. Several other townships are
preparing their own versions of the corporate rights ordinance, according to
Pennsylvania attorney Tom Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal
Defense Fund, a legal support group.
Now, when a corporation claims that an anti-sludge ordinance violates its
rights, the townships can simply say those rights don't apply here. The
corporation would then be forced to defend corporate personhood in a legal
battle. That hasn't happened yet, but Linzey and his allies energized a
statewide coalition that vowed to contest the issue all the way to the
Supreme Court, raising awareness along the way about a basic question of
sovereignty: By what authority can a conglomeration of capital and property,
whose existence is granted by the public, deny the right of a sovereign
people to govern itself democratically? Linzey predicts that such a suit
could happen within the decade.
Growing support for these issues was put to the test in 2002, when
agribusiness interests, angered by the spread of ordinances prohibiting
factory farming, began prodding the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass
an even more severe bill than the 1997 one. This time there was no
disguising it as waste-disposal regulation. The 2002 bill had one explicitly
stated purpose: to strip away a township's right to control agriculture —
including sludge applications — within its borders. When it stalled in a
senate committee, the Pennsylvania legislators renumbered the bill and
rammed it through before their constituents noticed. By the time CELDF found
out about the bill, it was up for a vote in the house. "We ignited
opposition almost overnight," Linzey recalls. "We were working with over 100
townships already. All we had to do was notify them."
Within two weeks, the coalition included 400 local townships, five
countywide associations of township officials, the Sierra Club,
small-farmers groups; Common Cause, and the United Mine Workers, whose
members had been sickened by sewage sludge applied on mine reclamation
sites.
Because the issue had been defined as protection of a community's right to
self-determination, the bill became unpopular and was tabled indefinitely.
On Thanksgiving Eve 2002, it met its end when a mandated voting period
elapsed. Astonishingly, the coalition had won.
Portland Representative Ben Dudley has started a similar counter-strike. His
initiative LR 2050 will deny human constitutional rights to corporations. A
platform amendment prohibiting corporate personhood passed without
opposition at the Maine Democratic Party's convention last summer. But it is
one thing to have a plank in the Democratic platform and another to put it
into law. To see this effort through, a growing coalition of local groups
opposed to corporate abuse of power is organizing in Maine. Angry that laws
regulating corporations can be nullified by the legal personhood fiction,
corporate power study groups have formed in Rockland, Camden,
Bath-Brunswick, Blue Hill and Portland. Their yet-to-be-named coalition has
been joined by the Maine Progressive Caucus, the Maine People's Alliance and
other citizens.
For further information on Corporate Personhood you may contact. Christopher
Miller, 208 Portland Road Gray, ME 04039 cfm@mainecaucus.net 207-657-4963 or
visit the web sites: peoplefirst.maine.com, mainecaucus.net and
maineprogressive.org for further information.
Randall Parr was responsible for a plank in the Democratic platform that
called for removing the rights of persons from corporations. He now works
with the coalition promoting the Maine Corporate Responsibility Act, LR
2050.
Back to Peace
Talk Index, Spring 2005