CELDEF comm env legal def

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congrats , target, see sis nodes

omg slapp

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ben & jerry greenfield?

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below ref to 1993 report:

http://web.archive.org/web/20210506031644/https://www.afj.org/assets/resources/resources2/Justice-for-Sale.pdf

The Workbook, Vol. 18, No. 3 Fall 1993 raticle

Review and Commentary

:{by Richard L. Grossman

Justice For Sale: Shortchanging the Public Interest for Private Gain

Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Justice, 1993

93 pp. $15, paper}:

Justice For Sale describes a "multi-faceted, comprehensive, and integrated campaign" coordinated over the past 20 years by large corporations and "ideologically-compatible foundations" to create tax-payer subsidized law firms, to change the civil justice system, to shape law school curriculum, to organize and reward law students, to affect the minds and decisions of sitting judges.

The goal of this "relatively quite but significant effort" was "to rewrite American jurisprudence. . . advanc[e] their agenda before judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and government policy makers. In addition, by focussing extensively on law schools and the next generation of lawyers, they have sought to assure control over the future direction of the law."

In 1971, Virginia attorney (later Supreme Court Justice) Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the United States Chamber of Commerce. As Justice For Sale describes it, Powell warned against zealous environmentalists, consumer activists and others who "propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it." It was time, Powell said, "for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it."

A successful corporate counterattack, in Powell's view, would require broad-based and coordinated activism on campuses, in the media, in political arenas and -- most importantly -- in the courts: "Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change," Powell wrote.

Among Powell's recommendations, Justice For Sale notes, was to establish a business-sponsored legal center that would promote business interests and not hesitate to "attack the Naders" and others who "seek destruction of the system."

Soon the California Chamber of Commerce would propose what would become in 1973 the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit set up in Sacramento, California, from seed money raised by J. Simon Fluor of the Fluor Corporation. And in 1975, the National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI) was formed "to assist in the establishment of independent regional litigation foundations dedicated to a balanced view of the role of law in achieving economic and social progress."

NLCPI helped create seven more such firms around the country, six of which operate today with money from the Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and Smith Richardson Foundations. In courts around the nation, they are challenging Superfund/hazardous waste programs, environmental regulations. and rent control statutes -- all of which they regard as grave challenges to economic freedom. They are also designing litigation around "takings" -- the doctrine that some government regulations constitute takings of private property without due process and just compensation, thereby violating the Fifth Amendment. With this tactic, they are seeking not merely to invalidate specific laws or to argue interpretations of laws. Rather, they are seeking to eradicate categories of laws by changing prevailing legal theory and establishing new precedents.

These legal foundations claim they are expanding the property rights and resource access rights of persons. But because the corporation under law is considered to be a person, with every victory they actually expand the property and resource access rights of corporations.

Olin Foundation president William Simon, a former Treasury Secretary, has been a major player in these efforts. He is quoted in Justice For Sale: "Funds generated by business . . . must rush by multimillions to the aid of liberty . . . to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty."

Simon and many others have orchestrated and coordinated "sophisticated media offensives, academic research, and advocacy efforts" with lavish funding from Aetna Life And Casualty Corporation, Exxon Corporation, Pfizer Corporation, RJR Nabisco Corporation, General Electric Corporation, Dow Corporation, Monsanto Corporation and other legal fictions chartered in our names in our several states.

Corporate money has also been rushed by multimillions to corporate fronts such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Insurance Information Institute, the Product Liability Coordinating Committee, and the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA). (The ATRA is made up of corporation trade groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association -- thus giving corporations a decoy and accomplice group two full steps removed from their board rooms.) Judge Robert Bork, Irving Kristol, and law schools at Stanford, Yale, Columbia, George Mason, Chicago and Virginia universities have also been beneficiaries of this corporate largess.

Corporate money created the Federalist Society in 1982, helping it to gather 10,000 members at 120 law schools. "Dedicated to purging law schools and the legal system of the `orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society,'" declares Justice For Sale,

the Society is now the principal organization for recruiting, educating and mobilizing conservative students on law school campuses and showcasing conservative legal scholarship. . . . The group's influence is perhaps best exemplified by the success of its three co-founders. As a member of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, Lee Liberman was considered the "ideological gatekeeper for the Bush Administration's process for selecting judges." David McIntosh served as Executive Director of Vice President Quayle's Council on Competitiveness, and Steven Calabresi, now a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, was a special assistant to Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese.

In sum, paying for and orchestrating law and economics professors and curricula at the nation's elite schools, sponsoring conferences, Continuing Legal Education workshops, legal research and theoretical writing, as well as for massive advertising and strategic litigation, these corporation initiatives "to make conservative economic theory the cornerstone of legal decision making," documents Justice For Sale, have set up an "institutional network that will advance and sustain their cause well into the future. Integrated and intergenerational, this infrastructure includes representatives from all segments of the legal establishment -- judges, scholars, practitioners, and young apprentices hailing from the Federalist Society."

Justice For Sale is a frightening report, meticulously documented with references to the professors, theorists, and foundations behind this campaign. "Intended to provoke debate" and "instigate true reform of the legal system," it should be a catalyst for public debate and strategizing. Read it.

Readers, however, should consider this report in a broader political and historical context than the one the Alliance establishes for its hue and cry.

For example, as former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed out decades ago, the history of constitutional law is "the history of the impact of the modern corporation upon the American scene." But Justice For Sale interprets current corporate efforts as seeking "to shift the law from its traditional foundations of public justice and equity . . . to elevate corporate profits and private wealth over social justice and individual rights as the cornerstones of our legal process." Alas, such shifts and elevations were engineered by the forbears of today's corporations over a century ago and steadily extended ever since.

Justice For Sale also posits as our public policy choices only government regulation, on the one hand, and unregulated markets on the other. It makes no mention of alternatives to private corporations -- public ownership of enterprises, cooperatives or worker- and municipally- owned businesses -- well within American traditions.

The report does not discuss how corporations shaped and dominated the operations of (to cite only a few) the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Employment Act of 1946, the Taft-Hartley Act, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Atomic Energy/Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the latest Clean Air Act Amendments. We must therefore inquire, after Morton J. Horwitz (The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 [1977]): what evidence is there for this report "characterizing most forms of government activity as a promotion of the public interest?"

Lastly, this report stops far short of where its own internal logic clearly points: the need for major, coordinated, well-funded citizen counter strategies directed at the public, law schools and the courts, and for strategies that challenge the legitimacy and existence of today's corporations.

From a strategic perspective, it is vital to understand that Justice Powell wasn't just whistling Dixie when he counseled the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 that "the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change." As Professor Horwitz has observed in his book on legal history from the ratification of the Constitution to the Civil War:

A major transformation of the legal system took place . . . it enabled emergent entrepreneurial and commercial groups to win a disproportionate share of wealth and power in American society. . . . [T]he law had come simply to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produced. . . . [T]he American judiciary -- especially aggressively procommercial [and not-elected -- RG] federal judges -- managed to overthrow earlier economic commercial legal rules. . . . [A]s political and economic power shifted to merchant and entrepreneurial groups . . . they began to forge an alliance with the legal profession to advance their own interests through a transformation of the legal system . . . to create legal doctrines that simply mirrored the market.

Despite such accomplishments, the judiciary did not rest from its labors. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, appointed judges gave privilege after privilege to corporations. They invented new doctrines such as freedom of contract, substantive due process and managerial prerogative, which they used to overturn state laws asserting even limited citizen sovereignty over corporations, and to bestow upon corporations constitutional authority over investment, production, and the organization of work.

According to Professor Martin J. Sklar, by establishing "new trends in legal doctrine and political-economic theory" allowing "the corporate reorganization of the property-production system," the Supreme Court helped to sabotage blossoming social protest movements against corporate power and corporate harms. [See The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, The Law and Politics (Cambridge University Press 1988).]

So the law had already been stacked on behalf of corporations when attorney Lewis Powell penned his memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 and when former Treasury Secretary William Simon started soliciting corporate millions. Justice For Sale describes what is only the latest in a long history of corporate efforts to use judges and the law to shape legal doctrines governing investment, production, natural resources, the rights of workers, the rights of stockholders, the liabilities of corporations and their executives. Simon's initiative is but another corporate campaign to limit citizens' constitutional rights, to close off the courts as a means of redress against concentrations of capital.

By virtue of their claimed right to influence the electoral process (upheld by the courts under the doctrine of "commercial free speech"), corporations have been major opponents of citizen referenda and initiatives to stop corporate harms, and major proponents of referenda and initiatives to shape government intervention in the economy. Via contributions to House and Senate candidates, they have bought the best Congress money can buy. Via campaign contributions to state legislators and with help from the American Bar Association and state bar associations, they have been rewriting corporation, tort, contract, property and liability laws. Never known for thinking small, they are today unabashedly writing such laws for former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries -- places where these same corporations are seeking natural resources, cheap labor and vast markets.

Justice For Sale has correctly identified a major strategy of large and powerful corporations to undermine citizen efforts to protect worker rights, community rights, constitutional rights, biological diversity, and the earth itself. But if we intend to "instigate true reform of the legal system and a return to a process that seeks to secure justice for all," we must go well beyond this report's recommendations.

Three hundred years ago, the corporation was understood to be a convenience devised by monarchs. merchants, explorers and men of wealth. It was a legal device to gather up resources and hold property, to exploit and dominate people. After the American Revolution, it was generally understood that the people were -- and desired to remain -- sovereign over corporations. Accordingly, Americans limited corporate existence to a set number of years and spelled out rules each corporation had to follow.

Today, the 15 largest global corporations have gross incomes greater than the gross domestic products of over 120 countries.

The 100 largest global corporations have incomes greater than half the member nations of the United Nations.

The havoc such corporations cause -- documented in every issue of The Workbook, combined with the research reported in Justice For Sale -- make clear that people must again extend our inquiries, political debates and active citizenship beyond "government regulation," on the one hand, and "the free market" on the other.

We can challenge the legitimacy -- and the existence -- of large corporations doing harm. As Paul Hawken, a founder of Smith and Hawken Corporation, recently offered as a first step toward a sustainable world economy [Utne Reader, Sept/ Oct 1993]:

Take Back The Charter. . . . Although corporate charters may seem to have little to do with sustainability, they are critical to any long-term movement toward restoration of the planet. . . . Corporations are chartered by, and exist at the behest of, citizens. Incorporation is not a right but a privilege granted by the state that includes certain considerations such as limited liability. Corporations are supposed to be under our ultimate authority, not the other way around. The charter of incorporation is a revocable dispensation that was supposed to ensure accountability of the corporation to the society as a whole. . . . We should remember that citizens of this country originally envisioned corporations to be part of a public-private partnership, which is why the relationship between the chartering authority of state legislatures and the corporation was kept alive and active. They had it right.

Justice For Sale concludes by reiterating that the direction in which the legal system is moving and the corporate forces propelling it raise "troubling and provocative concerns." In order to protect academic freedom, as well as our system of justice, the book's authors maintain, there must be "informed debate within law schools" and "full disclosure." Further, legislators, judges, and juries must "apply exacting scrutiny to the message and messengers of the so-called `civil justice reform' movement," and any "fine-tuning" of the civil justice system must depend on "accurate. relevant data." Finally,

the litigation strategy pursued by the business-funded public interest law firms,' complemented by the scholarship flowing from law schools and think tanks . . . mandate a corresponding vigilance of their actions in the courts, in judicial seminars,' in the law schools and in the legislatures.

Troubling and provocative concerns? Full disclosure and informed debate? Exacting scrutiny? Fine-tuning? Accurate, relevant data? Corresponding vigilance? Well, yes, of course.

But fantastically wealthy and powerful corporations have a 20-year head start on expanding the legal rights and powers they usurped over the previous 150 years. So we the people need ambitious, well-planned, coordinated, public counter strategies in each of the realms the report details, plus the real money to extend and expand these strategies over several decades.

We need law professors, law students, tacticians and organizers, unions and environmental groups, civil rights and consumer groups, garden clubs, students and enlightened business people, plus the growing locally based movement for environmental and economic justice here and around the world, to organize an array of coordinated short- and long- term efforts.

The Alliance For Justice and other organizations should convene meetings to plan for more than fine-tuning the law, for more than restoring the legal system to what it was in 1970. Starting with denying the corporation personhood under the Constitution and reformulating managerial prerogative and liability, we need to reverse the transformation of the law that corporations accomplished over a century ago.

These counter-strategies also need to redesign the corporations -- which throughout U.S. history have been rewriting the rules of their own existence -- to redefine in fundamental ways those legal fictions that Thomas Hobbes labeled, "worms in the body politic."

[Order Justice for Sale from Alliance For Justice, 1601 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20009.]

Richard L. Grossman was director of Environmentalists for Full Employment from 1976-1984. He, is the co-author, with Frank T. Adams, of the recent pamphlet, Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation, which may be ordered for $4, plus 52 postage (bulk rates available), from Charter Ink./CSPP, P.O. Box 806, Cambridge, MA 02140.

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1 22 cit united panel system collapse

philena Farley- National Media Co-Chair & Black Caucus Officer - Green Party of the United States (fdr MTA?) ohio david cobb
Chad Nicholson - Community Organizer - Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF)

Grant township PA? sued by corps andby state (regulator?)for trying to limit fracking

Lawrence Abbott- Labor Organizer and California Move to Amend Affiliate Coordinator
Jessica Munger- Move to Amend Programs Director, Toward a People's Constitution Organizer
Dr. Daniel Lee- James Lawson Institute Project Manager, Mayor of Culver City, CA https://jameslawsoninstitute.org/about/

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WE’VE HAD CORPORATE PERSONHOOD FOR A DECADE…WHAT ABOUT ECOSYSTEM PERSONHOOD?

Oil and gas companies are getting nervous about an increased push worldwide for laws governing the rights of nature.

Amy Westervelt / April 10, 2021

https://celdf.org/ primer rts of nature

https://publicherald.org/invisible-hand/

https://publicherald.org/

https://drillednews.com/weve-had-corporate-personhood-for-a-decade-what-about-ecosystem-personhood/

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https://www.alternet.org/local-peace-economy/can-community-rights-save-great-lakes

Imagine for a moment, putting the rights of nature into public policy: Your town charter, your state constitution, or even federal law.}:

Imagine, for a moment, giving the Great Lakes—the world’s largest source of fresh water—the right to exist and evolve naturally, to be free from pollutants that could contaminate and harm the lives that rely on it.

Imagine that we, as Americans, have the right to lawfully stop anything that violated the rights of the Great Lakes. That means the right to stop anything that would cause harm to the ecosystem.

That ecosystem provides tens of millions of people with the fresh water they use to drink, bathe, cook, and farm.

The idea is called community rights, and it’s popping up around the world and across the country, and it is meant to stop anything causing an adverse effect on the ecosystem.

Ecuador has it enshrined in their constitution. Here in the U.S., when the community can see the harm being caused by, for example, fracking, the community can say, “this is harmful, and the polluting company doesn’t have the right to do that.” Pittsburgh did just that.

A company might have a permit to allow them to emit, dump, or otherwise pollute, but with community rights, the community has the right to protect themselves from legalized harm.

And it’s not just fracking waste that it can stop. Dumping from farms, oil drilling, and factories too—basically anything causing an adverse effect on the ecosystem and life, the community can say, “this is harmful, and they don’t have the right to do that.”

It’s about communities passing laws to create a society you want your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in.

And that is exactly what activists in Toledo, Ohio, are seeking to do. The western basin of Lake Erie has experienced extreme toxic algae blooms that have contaminated the drinking water of nearly half a million people in the region, sometimes causing citizens of the Midwestern city to go days without fresh water. The algae blooms are attributed to nutrient runoff in agriculture and sewage.

Of course, agriculture is permitted to use nutrients. There are “harms we allow, and they are within the allowable limits. Even with all these permits and permissions, we are still seeing the harmful effects,” says Markie Miller, an organizer with Toledoans for Safe Water. “Something’s not working.”

In August, Toledoans for Safe Water turned in petitions to put a community rights-based initiative on the ballot, with over 10,000 signatures. It’s called the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, and if implemented, would recognize the right of Lake Erie “to be healthy and free from pollution that today is killing the Lake and depriving surrounding communities of safe water.”

Miller says she studied environmental studies and environmental science in college. The emphasis in those programs was on getting a job working on regulations, or in companies to comply with regulations. That seemed to sidestep the real issues of environmental justice, so Miller turned to the community rights movement.

Miller is tired of the messaging around environmental disasters. “We don’t want to put up with allowable harm,” she continues. “We don’t just want to be prepared for algae.” That mentality, Miller explains, is reactive. “We want something proactive.”

She and fellow activists connected with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, CELDF, a public interest law firm operating with communities across the U.S. and rights of nature work in other countries. Together they drafted the Lake Erie Bill of Rights and started collecting signatures and talking about it.

Tish O’Dell, Ohio Community Organizer for CELDF, initially got involved in the movement because her community of Broadview Heights, Ohio, was threatened by oil and gas drilling.

It was here she and her fellow community members passed a Bill of Rights in 2012. Despite the Bill of Rights being appealed, the community sued by the company, and ultimately losing, the company hasn’t drilled since the bill was originally passed.

“They started drilling and getting people to sign leases, promising wealth beyond imagine,” O’Dell explains. “Oil spilled in a creek outside people’s homes. The fire department would evacuate people. We had an elementary school, and something broke on a well next door, and it spilled oil on the playground at recess. That woke people up. Then when people started going to city council and saying, ‘This is BS. Stop this,’ they said, ‘we can’t do anything, the state has control over this.’ Then the obedient citizens we are, we went to the state.”

O’Dell says the state sent them to EPA, and then to the state Department of Public Health. “No one would take responsibility. It was like the scarecrow pointing in different directions.”

O’Dell says they were told the drilling was safe and that it would bring jobs.

CELDF helped them draft a bill of rights, for clean air, water, and soil. It passed. Then, it became, “Our law says your permit violates our law, so we’re not going to recognize your permit in our community,” she says.

“We don’t have the kind of government we thought we did,” says O’Dell of the lost court battles that ensued.

Now, the local board of elections in Ohio has the right to keep citizen initiatives off the ballot based on content, “which shouldn’t be happening,” says Miller, “whether or not someone agrees with the content. We have a city charter, and we should be able to take it to the people and let them decide. Our local board of election should not be the gatekeeper for something like that.”

And yet, it is. The local BOE kept the Lake Erie Bill of Rights initiative off the ballot, and the Ohio Supreme Court blocked the initiative on appeal. Toledoans for Safe Water said they are filing a motion to reconsider.

“It was devastating to be without water for 3 days in 2014. This is worse,” Crystal Jankowski, an organizer for the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, said in a press release. “To know that the Lake and my children are at risk because it is legal for the polluters to pollute us, while our own government makes it illegal for us to propose a law to protect the Lake and our children, is beyond devastating. It is the realization that we not only have a water crisis, but we also have a democracy crisis.”

“We the people are following laws written by corporations for their benefit. It’s greed,” says O’Dell.

“They’re using our communities as resource colonies,” she added.

No matter what happens, the battle over local control of the natural environment won’t end here in the Ohio Supreme Court. The health of future generations—the very water they drink—depends on what communities can do today to protect themselves and those to come in the future.

Learn more about community rights, Ohio community rights, and CELDF.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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:{https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/17/community-environmental-legal-defense-fund-:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{pennsylvania}::{-grant-township-fracking-waste-ban}:

In early January, a federal judge ordered the nonprofit law firm Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to pay $52,000 to an oil and gas exploration company for defending a rural Pennsylvania township’s ban on underground injections of frack waste.

This sanction comes at the request ofPennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) and the Pennsylvania Independent Oil &Gas Association, but is part of a growing trend to prevent municipalities across the nation from pushing back against state and federal attempts to overrule them.

Starting in 2012, PGE proposed aninjection wellwhich, according to Grant Township’s Board of Supervisors, “would receive 30,000 barrels [1.26 million gallons] of frack wastewater per month for 10 years.” The board of supervisors for this small community near Pittsburgh warns that the injection well “threatens to subject every resident of Grant Township to a slow poisoning, and threatens thousands more who depend on Grant Township’s watershed for clean water.”

The community’s law, they go on, bans the injection well “as a violation of our basic civil rights.” PGE operates multiple gas-extraction wells in the township.

Rights of Nature, Local Governance

CELDF, which has defended Grant’s efforts to prevent waste injection wells for over three years, has worked with some 200 municipalities in the United States to defend local laws challenging similar corporate projects. The group aims to drive state constitutional change to bolster the rights of local residents and ecosystems against what it calls regressive state preemption and corporate personhood.

Grant Township, for example, is elevating a “right of self-government,” rights “to clean air, water, and soil” and “ecosystem rights” above corporations’ “rights” to inject waste from oil and gas extraction in the township.

These types of local laws often face substantial legal pushback from private corporations and states which claim authority over issues such as fossil fuel production. Along with the sanctions against CELDF, PGE is suing Grant Township itself, population 741, for damages that would likely be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Among its claims: The injection well ban violates the corporation’s rights as a “person” under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments; the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the Contract Clause and Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Grant Township is the fourth local government CELDF has defended in federal court.

‘Frivolous’ Legal Arguments

At the heart of the court’s decision awarding PGE sanctions against the legal nonprofit (the company originally asked for $500,000) is an argument that the sanctions are justified because CELDF’s legal arguments are contrary to “settled” law and therefore “frivolous.” This reasoning asserts that corporate personhood and Pennsylvania’s authority over municipalities on issues affecting drinking water and fossil fuel development is settled, and therefore CELDF’s defense of Grant’s claim to the contrary is “clearly unreasonable.”

Grant Township, the court writes, “seeks to disavow constitutional rights afforded corporations so as to prevent PGE from the lawful exercise of its right to pursue gas extraction related activities within its borders.” On top of all this, Grant’s law recognized legal rights for a local ecosystem. CELDF’s attempt to represent that ecosystem in court, the judge ruled, violates the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a set of rules that govern how legal proceedings take place in United States district courts.

Local Governments Sanctioned Across US

CELDF is not alone in facing sanctions for challenging so-called settled law on similar issues. Defend Local Solutions is a campaign led by Tallahassee’s Mayor Andrew Gillum which is aimed at expanding the powers of municipalities in Florida. The campaign says at least seven states have “super preemption” bills on the books that sanction local officials who dare challenge specific state preemption bills that rescind powers from municipalities.

In Florida, for example, Gillum personally faced the threat of sanctions after he refused to repeal a local law that banned fire arms in public parks (even though the ordinance wasn’t being enforced).

New bills, such as Texas’s highly controversial “show me your papers” and sanctuary city preemption bill (SB4), also include punitive language for municipalities pushing back against state and federal authority.

Texas’s bill would fine local officials and employees $25,000 per day or even remove them from office if they defy the law, according to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Parts of this section of the law, however, are hung up in court. However, the court ruled that local officials can be sanctioned if they outright ban police from asking for people’s immigration papers, and other sections of the bill are in effect, including a section that threatens punishment for local jail officers. The concept of economic retribution for noncompliance is spreading.

Georgia’s 2017 bill, HB37, removes funding from any private college that “prohibits or restricts officials or employees … from communicating or cooperating with federal officials or law enforcement officers with regard to reporting [immigration] status information.” And in 2016 Arizona passed a bill which withholds state funds from localities that enact policy that challenges the state’s claimed supremacy.

In CELDF’s sanction case, the court acknowledges that sanctions can have the effect of “chilling novel legal or factual arguments.”

Thomas Linzey, CELDF’s director and one of the two attorneys being personally sanctioned, says “that’s exactly the point. For years, the oil and gas corporations believed that they could stop the community rights movement by suing municipalities to overturn their local laws; but having failed to do so, they’re now coming after the lawyers who are helping those communities to stop drilling. In many ways, the industry’s filing for sanctions against us is just proof of how strong the community rights movement is becoming.”

In court records, CELDF points to Brown v. Board of Education (which overturned “separate but equal” schools for Black and White students, 1954), courts striking down bans on gay marriage, and other novel legal arguments as evidence that sanctions against lawyers who challenge “settled” law could set a dangerous precedent.

“We understand that the real problem isn’t the injection well, but the system of law that keeps trying to shut us down,” the Grant Township Board of Supervisors said in a statement. “We’re not going anywhere.”

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https://www.alternet.org/local-peace-economy/no-more-united-states-fairy-tales

Here’s one final New Year’s resolution: let’s stop lying to each other.

Let’s stop lying about the state of the planet and what it will really take to fix it. Let’s stop lying about who the “founding fathers” were and what kind of constitution they wrote. Let’s stop lying to each other that we can fix everything by electing better people to office.

We live in a bubble of myths. They scramble our brains. They make it difficult for us to see the forest, rather than just individual trees; especially when the most powerful forces within our system whisper those myths incessantly in our ears.

While it’s certainly easier to blame the latest president for our state of affairs, the reality is much more troubling—that we have a system of law and government which poses as a working democracy while guaranteeing the destruction of the planet. In other words, it’s the hardware, not the software. It’s a faulty system.

Here’s what we believe:

We believe that the planet is in bad shape, but that we can fix it by recycling, buying electric cars, and taking shorter showers.
We believe in the “founding fathers,” the “rule of law,” and our constitution, and that we need to “strengthen” our democracy, which assumes we had one to begin with.

As they say, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Suicide economics

Let’s start with our planet, the planet Earth. Almost all major ecosystems are in various throes of decline; climate change-caused catastrophes have now become the norm; and our very own life support systems are all under siege.

We are rapidly turning the planet into one giant Superfund site, and we show no signs of putting on the brakes.

Yet with one unified voice, democrats and republicans alike call for more economic growth, even though more “growth” means more destruction of the planet. Smart growth, green growth, sustainable growth—it doesn’t matter what you call it; it’s all about the belief that we can continue to consume without causing more damage to the planet.

When was the last time a politician called for “less” rather than “more?” When was the last time a government called for “negative growth” or a “reduction in GDP” as necessary for survival?

The only thing that believes in endless growth, other than our politicians, is a cancer cell. And we all know what eventually happens to the host.

The democracy myth

In our “federal” system, the federal government reigns supreme—that means that laws passed by Congress legally override laws adopted by any state or municipal government. Given that supremacy, the ability of people to elect people who will govern in the public interest would seem to be the determiner of whether we have a democracy.Then there’s the belief that we live in a democracy. Democracy literally means that the people govern themselves. In a democratic republic, people elect other people who are then supposed to govern in the interest of those who elected them. You know, “of the people, by the people, for the people” and all that jazz.

Want to get elected to Congress? Just reach into your pocket and pull out the $2 million average cost to be competitive; or the $5 million it takes to be competitive for a Senate race. For the House, that means raising $2,700 a day—and that’s after you decide to sell your soul to one of the major parties to have a shot at moving to Washington.

Elizabeth Warren raised over $42 million to win her seat. That means raising over $19,000 a day for six years!

Couple this with theCitizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court (and the multitude of cases that came before it, recognizing constitutional “rights” for corporations), in which the Court guaranteed that corporations can dump unlimited amounts of cash into races for candidates that they prefer, and it’s no surprise that both parties scout for millionaire candidates that can self-finance campaigns. Either way, the parties are completely dependent on those with the financial ability to support their candidates.

How does an average, ordinary person, who knows what it’s like to miss a mortgage payment or an electric bill, run for office?

They don’t. Which means that the people elected at the federal level have no clue what it’s like to be the other 99 percent, and their decisions are guaranteed to be out of whack with the average American. And yes, occasionally a Paul Wellstone sneaks through, but that doesn’t change the underlying calculus: One salmon breaking through ain’t enough to spawn.

Protest culture (in reverse)

People will perfect sign-making, marching routes, letters to the editor, and rally agendas targeting one single issue like removing funding from a government agency or shrinking national monuments, but many seem incapable of moving from defense to offense. I call it the “protest culture”— one in which we define our activism almost entirely by what we’re against.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, however, that we’re stuck in this mode because we’re so used to not having power that we’ve done the best we can to leverage whatever obstructive power we have left.

What would it look like if corporations were on the permanent defense? What if corporate executives were forced to make signs and march down the street in response to a bill or governmental decision? What if the owners of the largest corporations in this country were relegated to “free speech zones” at international trade conferences?

What do we have to do to make that happen? How do we create a system of law and government that isn’t placed in service to the wealthiest players in that system? Shouldn’t that be the question that we ask, rather than the color of the marker that we should use on our latest protest sign?

We may not know what else to do. But it’s time we learn if we are going to survive on this planet.

No more fairy tales

This belief that we live in a democracy is most clearly tested when we come face-to-face with threats to our own communities.

Let’s actually face it. Even our own towns, cities, counties, villages—you name them—are utterly overwhelmed when a big corporation squeezes into town. Not only are they mismatched in resources against a new corporate hog farm project, or toxic waste incinerator, but they find themselves on the wrong end of the law.

Because corporations have constitutional “rights,” if a community makes a decision to stop a bad project that has been permitted by the state or federal government, a corporation has the ability to sue the community to force its project into the town.

There’s no self-government at work here. Our communities aren’t even recognized by our own constitution, and courts have gone so far as to say that our towns, cities, counties, and villages only have the powers that the state legislature has deemed to give them. That means that we are all rightless within our own communities, and that corporations automatically have more rights than the people who live in these places.

In some ways, because we all continue to reinforce these myths about how our country works, we’re just as guilty as those who benefit directly from the way the system works.

That means that the well-meaning organizations that work to “tweak” the system may well be more of a problem than the corporations operating within it. “If only this were changed, or that,” they say, “Everything would be okay.”

I, for one, have stopped telling that fairy tale to people. Perhaps if enough of us stop telling it to each other, we can begin the hard work of building a new operating system—from scratch.

One Final New Year’s Resolution for 2018 was first posted on the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s website and is reposted on Rural America In These Times with permission. CELDF has partnered with nearly 200 communities across the country, “spearheading a movement to establish rights for people and nature over the system that control them.” For more information, click here.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/fracking-waste-laws-2526588629.html

Fracking Waste Lawsuit Highlights Dangerous Trend of Corporations Targeting Community Rights Defenders

By Simon Davis-Cohen

In early January, a federal judge ordered the nonprofit law firmCommunity Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) to pay $52,000 to an oil and gas exploration company for defending a rural Pennsylvania township's ban on underground injections of fracking waste.

This sanction comes at the request of Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) and the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association, but is part of a growing trend to prevent municipalities across the nation from pushing back against state and federal attempts to overrule them.

Starting in 2012, PGE proposed an injection well which, according to Grant Township's Board of Supervisors, "would receive 30,000 barrels [1.26 million gallons] of frack wastewater per month for 10 years." The board of supervisors for this small community near Pittsburgh warned that the injection well "threatens to subject every resident of Grant Township to a slow poisoning, and threatens thousands more who depend on Grant Township's watershed for clean water."

The community's law, they added, bans the injection well "as a violation of our basic civil rights." PGE operates multiple gas-extraction wells in the township.

Rights of Nature, Local Governance

CELDF, which has defended Grant's efforts to prevent waste injection wells for over three years, has worked with some 200 municipalities in the U.S. to defend local laws challenging similar corporate projects. The group aims to drive state constitutional change to bolster the rights of local residents and ecosystems against what it calls regressive state preemption and corporate personhood.

Grant Township, for example, is elevating a "right of self-government," rights "to clean air, water, and soil" and "ecosystem rights" above corporations' "rights" to inject waste from oil and gas extraction in the township.

These types of local laws often face substantial legal pushback from private corporations and states which claim authority over issues such as fossil fuel production. Along with the sanctions against CELDF, PGE is suing Grant Township itself, population 741, for damages that would likely be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Among its claims: The injection well ban violates the corporation's rights as a "person" under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments; the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the Contract Clause and Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Grant Township is the fourth local government CELDF has defended in federal court.

'Frivolous' Legal Arguments

At the heart of the court's decision awarding PGE sanctions against the legal nonprofit (the company originally asked for $500,000) is an argument that the sanctions are justified because CELDF's legal arguments are contrary to "settled" law and therefore "frivolous." This reasoning asserts that corporate personhood and Pennsylvania's authority over municipalities on issues affecting drinking water and fossil fuel development is settled, and therefore CELDF's defense of Grant's claim to the contrary is "clearly unreasonable."

Grant Township, the court wrote, "seeks to disavow constitutional rights afforded corporations so as to prevent PGE from the lawful exercise of its right to pursue gas extraction related activities within its borders." On top of all this, Grant's law recognized legal rights for a local ecosystem. CELDF's attempt to represent that ecosystem in court, the judge ruled, violates the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a set of rules that govern how legal proceedings take place in U.S. district courts.

Local Governments Sanctioned Across U.S.

CELDF is not alone in facing sanctions for challenging so-called settled law on similar issues. Defend Local Solutions is a campaign led byTallahassee's Mayor Andrew Gillum which is aimed at expanding the powers of municipalities in Florida. The campaign said at least seven states have "super preemption" bills on the books that sanction local officials who dare challenge specific state preemption bills that rescind powers from municipalities.

In Florida, for example, Gillum personally faced the threat of sanctions after he refused to repeal a local law that banned fire arms in public parks (even though the ordinance wasn't being enforced).

New bills, such as Texas's highly controversial "show me your papers" and sanctuary city preemption bill (SB4), also include punitive language for municipalities pushing back against state and federal authority.

Texas's bill would fine local officials and employees $25,000 per day or even remove them from office if they defy the law, according to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Parts of this section of the law, however, are hung up in court. However, the court ruled that local officials can be sanctioned if they outright ban police from asking for people's immigration papers, and other sections of the bill are in effect, including a section that threatens punishment for local jail officers. The concept of economic retribution for noncompliance is spreading.

Georgia's 2017 bill, HB37, removes funding from any private college that "prohibits or restricts officials or employees … from communicating or cooperating with federal officials or law enforcement officers with regard toreporting [immigration] status information." And in 2016Arizona passed a bill which withholds state funds from localities that enact policy that challenges the state's claimed supremacy.

In CELDF's sanction case, the court acknowledges that sanctions can have the effect of "chilling novel legal or factual arguments."

Thomas Linzey, CELDF's director and one of the two attorneys being personally sanctioned, said "that's exactly the point. For years, the oil and gas corporations believed that they could stop the community rights movement by suing municipalities to overturn their local laws; but having failed to do so, they're now coming after the lawyers who are helping those communities to stop drilling. In many ways, the industry's filing for sanctions against us is just proof of how strong the community rights movement is becoming."

In court records, CELDF pointed to Brown v. Board of Education (which overturned "separate but equal" schools for Black and White students, 1954), courts striking down bans on gay marriage, and other novel legal arguments as evidence that sanctions against lawyers who challenge "settled" law could set a dangerous precedent.

"We understand that the real problem isn't the injection well, but the system of law that keeps trying to shut us down," the Grant Township Board of Supervisors said in a statement. "We're not going anywhere."

Reposted with permission from our media associate DeSmogBlog.