“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” - The Declaration of Independence of the United States.
With these words Colonial America swept away English culture and law and began a new chapter, a new experiment in American self government. Or so they thought.
But the experiment only lasted a little more than a decade before it too was swept away in 1787 in the counter-revolution put in place by our founding fathers as the Second Constitution of the United States.
These are NOT, of course, the words that we read in school. We are still taught – and most of us still believe – that we live in the Democracy described by those famous words. But if those words were in fact the law of the land, how could our courts allow corporations to pollute our land, our water and the air that we breathe? Why is it that we can’t prevent this destruction of the very ecosystems upon which life as we know it depends? Why is it that we, as residents of counties, townships and municipalities are powerless to prevent agri-business corporations from starting Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or applying sewage sludge to farm lands in our localities? Why is Nestle Water able to pump hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day from our local aquifers? How is it that the property rights of the handful of corporate shareholders prevail over the interests of hundreds or thousands of residents in our localities?
I first heard these ideas at the annual Bioneers convention in October, 2006 when Tom Linzey, co-founder of CELDF (The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund), mesmerized the 3,000 people in the audience with his story of the work that CELDF was doing. He described how his work with townships in Pennsylvania had developed, and how CELDF was helping them prevail in court against agri-business corporations. He also described how CELDF had started teaching Democracy Schools to help people understand why American ‘Democracy’ is just a myth – a cover for the Corporate State that we actually have become. I found Linzey’s work so compelling that two-months later I was sitting in a CELDF Democracy School in Santa Fe, and as soon as the opportunity arose, I attended the Lecturer training in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in early 2009 to become Democracy School Lecturer.
The Democracy School arises from sixty excerpts from journal and newspaper articles, books and legal briefs and opinions copies of which fill 336 pages in a large notebook. The Democracy School is not these materials. But it arises from them when the ideas adumbrated in each selection are connected to form the patterns which reveal the Democracy School lessons.
For example I learned that The Declaration of Independence was assembled from hundreds of similar documents created in 1775-6 in many towns throughout the colonies. in reading the U.S. Constitution, I could see how its language had reverted from the human-rights based language of the Declaration of Independence to the property based language of English Law that was prevalent in 18th century. I also learned that all of the men who wrote the Constitution were land owners; that the convention was a closed meeting – as Adrienne Rich says in the preface to a new edition of Madison’s Notes on Debates in the Federal Convention:
...the grueling work of the delegates to the Convention had been carried on under strict rules of secrecy. . . . Hardly a year passed from the Convention ‘til Madison's death that he was not urged to publish the notes he had taken. His unvarying response was that he would not publish them until all the framers had died.
Why was this a secret meeting? Why were Madison’s notes not published until 1840? The Framers designed this second constitution to protect their interests. Their counter-revolutionary intent is revealed in Madison own words:
“…our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support their invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” (Italics added.)
We looked at how the Contracts and Commerce clauses of the Constitution have been used by the courts to give preferential rights to Corporations – while at the same time taking rights away from ‘we the people.’ In 1819 the Supreme Court declared that the Contracts clause covered the charter for Dartmouth College. It established a precedent that corporations have a contract with the state issuing their charter and is different from the relationship the state has with localities.
We saw that this ruling was later used to say that municipalities – because they have no incorporators – have a subservient relationship with the state issuing their charters. By the mid-nineteenth century this became known as Dillon’s Rule, which defines the relationship between States and Localities as a Parent to child relationship. It declares that residents of a locality are tenants NOT citizens, and by extension says that they have NO rights. Thus it is that a corporation wanting to start a CAFO in a locality has rights that preempt the rights of the residents of that locality.
Forty-three states allow local governments to elect to go ‘Home Rule’. Home Rule allows a locality to write its own charter, and it changes the relationship of that locality to the State. In effect it converts the residents of that locality into citizens, and it allows localities to write their own ordinances.
This last week I spoke with Ben Price – a CELDF organizer – about Home Rule in Colorado where he has recently done some work. “What surprises me is that the folks in Colorado have not bothered to use the tools that are in front of them to challenge things like oil and gas drilling. The Constitution of the State of Colorado actually declares that laws set up under Home Rule are superior to state law dealing with the same subject. Now why wouldn’t you choose to use that option?” Ben feels that people are reluctant to challenge state and federal laws. They don’t feel that they are qualified, and in fact psychologically they’ve been brainwashed into thinking that they are not competent to govern themselves. A very different knowing from that of our colonial forbearers. This kind of attitude underscores the need for Democracy Schools – to teach people the history and – more importantly – what others are currently doing around the country.
I also spoke with Mari Margil, the Associate Director of CELDF, who has been active in Spokane’s effort to pass a Community Bill of Rights. Spokane is a Home Rule city, but it has not taken advantage of that status to gain rights for its residents. Envision Spokane spent most of 2008 and 9 organizing a ballot initiative – Prop 4 – to append the Bill of Rights to the city’s charter. Prop 4 would have given Spokane’s Natural Ecosystems the right to exist and flourish and given its neighborhoods the right to determine their own futures. I asked Mari how she felt about getting only 25% of the vote. “We were pleased that we got 25% of the vote. We touched a lot of people and began an important conversation and we were outspent five to one. Making these kinds of changes doesn’t just happen. It takes a lot of work.”
CELDF has been working with Pennsylvania communities for nearly ten years teaching Democracy Schools and helping communities to frame rights-based ordinances. This February CELDF held its first statewide meeting of citizens from more than a dozen counties to initiate plans for a grassroots Peoples Constitutional Convention (PCC) in Pennsylvania. In Ben’s words “to figure out how are we going to go beyond fighting this battle one municipality at a time.” CELDF has scheduled another meeting of this Community Rights Network (CRN) for May 1st to include yet more communities. The plan is to begin to change the culture through education and to bring pressure on local governments to pass a resolution supporting the CRN and the PCC and to appoint a delegate to a committee to draft new language for a state constitution. Once the new constitution is written, the hope is that the Community Rights Network will have developed enough clout to force the legislature to put the new rights-based constitution on the ballot.
This would bring Pennsylvania full circle, replacing the property-rights based language of its current constitution and laws with the natural and human rights based language like that of the 1776 Declaration of Independence.
Similar meetings are also being held now in New Hampshire and more are planned for Massachusetts and Maine. CELDF is hoping to fan these grassroots flames into a nationwide movement to drive natural and human rights language back into the constitutions of all states and then into the Constitution of the United States.
Tom Riesing, Ph.D., taught at the Harvard Business School. He has an engineering degree from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in economics, finance and cognitive psychology from M.I.T.