Thomas Linzey, who co-wrote this article, does some great work with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and the Democracy Schools. I would definitely recommend anyone and everyone interested in furthering one’s understanding of how and why we have reached this current situation in our nation’s political environment, and what are some of the ways people can organize to address it.

The expansion of corporate rights and privileges under the law has been deliberate, beginning nearly two hundred years ago with the Dartmouth decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that private corporations had rights that municipal corporations—governments composed of “we the people”—did not.

For the past two centuries, new court decisions have only expanded corporate rights and privileges.  For those who think that the way to stem this tide is to find the perfect lawsuit, stop looking. It doesn’t exist, for there is no magic bullet.

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Today’s structure of law gives corporations a spectrum of legal and constitutional rights which they routinely wield against people, communities, and nature. Corporations have more rights, for example, than the communities in which they seek to do business. They can and do use those rights to lobby Congress, impact elections, and to decide for us what we eat, whether mountaintops are blown off or not, whether there are fish in the oceans, and on and on. Their constitutional and other legal rights, together with their wealth , guarantee that they can define the debates that lead to the adoption of new laws—and often write the laws themselves.

Thus the context for understanding today’s decision is that we have a minority set of corporate interests, empowered by government to wield their rights against a majority. It is the history of this nation. The abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil rights movement all built movements of people in order to drive rights (for slaves, for women, for African Americans) into law—which necessarily meant eliminating rights for a minority, such as the slaveholder. In the end, it is our constitutional structure of law that purposefully places the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities, and nature. History shows that strong peoples’ movements can make change by changing the legal structure itself.

Read the rest of this article from YES! Magazine, and go to www.celdf.org for more information on how to organize in your local community.