[Occupymendocino] [Fwd: Re: Pennsylvania judge ruled that corporations are not people]

[agnes at mcn.org]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: Pennsylvania judge ruled that corporations are not people
From:    "Jessie VanSant" <vjessielee at gmail.com>
Date:    Wed, April 3, 2013 2:45 pm
To:      "Elaine and Ed" <elained at mcn.org>
Cc:      "Wodetzki Tom" <tw at mcn.org>
         "Carrie Durkee" <CDurkee at mcn.org>
         "Agnes Woolsey" <agnes at mcn.org>
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YAHOO!!!!!	Gradually - what Ghandi is purported to have said First they
ignore us, then they mock us, then they fight us, then we win!!!  One at a
time until the damn is broken and we flow FREE again!!

Thank you Tom
Love
Jessie Lee
On Apr 3, 2013, at 2:10 PM, Elaine and Ed <elained at mcn.org> wrote:

> Yaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> Thanks Tom,
>
> Ed
>
> On Apr 3, 2013, at 12:22 PM, Wodetzki Tom wrote:
>
>>> "In a landmark ruling, President Judge Debbie O’Dell-Seneca of the
Washington County Court of Common Pleas denied the corporation’s
request on the basis that the Pennsylvania Constitution only protects
the rights of people, not business entities."
>>>
>>> A New Civil Rights Movement: Liberating Our Communities from Corporate
Control A Pennsylvania Judge Holds That Corporations Are Not “Persons”
>>> Under the Pennsylvania Constitution
>>>
>>> By Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq., CELDEV Executive Director
>>> March 28, 2013
>>>
>>> To protect small and family farms from industrial factory farms, over
a decade ago a handful of Pennsylvania townships picked a fight with
some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations. Recognizing
that the state and federal government, rather than protecting them
from factory farms, were in fact forcing them into communities, the
townships took the unprecedented step of banning corporate farming
within their borders.
>>>
>>> Thus began the journey to spark a new civil rights movement – one
aimed at elevating the right of communities over the “rights” of
corporations to use communities for their own ends.
>>>
>>> In a departure from the usual David and Goliath story, with one tiny
community battling a giant corporation, today there are over 150
“Davids” in eight states that have followed the lead of those
Pennsylvania townships. Community by community, they’ve banned
corporate “fracking” for shale gas, factory farming, sludge dumping,
large-scale water withdrawals, and industrial-scale energy projects.
>>>
>>> But they’re not intent on simply stopping the immediate threat of
fracking or factory farming. Rather, they’re adopting Community Bills
of Rights that ban such projects as violations of the community’s
right to a sustainable energy and farming future. And to protect those
Bills of Rights, they are legislatively overturning a slew of
corporate legal doctrines – like corporate “personhood” – that have
been concocted over the past century to keep communities from
interfering with corporate prerogatives.
>>>
>>> These communities believe that if ten thousand other localities do the
same, that those tremors will begin to shake loose a new system of law
– a system in which courts and legislatures begin to elevate community
rights above corporate rights, and thus, begin to liberate cities and
towns to build economically and environmentally sustainable
communities free from corporate interference.
>>>
>>> Last week, a Pennsylvania county court gave this new movement a boost
– declaring that corporations are not “persons” under the Pennsylvania
Constitution, and therefore, that corporations cannot elevate their
“private rights” above the rights of people.
>>>
>>> The ruling was delivered in a case brought by several Western
Pennsylvania newspapers which sought the release of a sealed
settlement agreement between a family claiming to be affected by water
contamination from gas fracking, and Range Resources – one of the
largest gas extraction corporations in the state. Range Resources
argued that unsealing the settlement agreement would violate the
corporation’s constitutional right to privacy under the Pennsylvania
Constitution.
>>>
>>> In a landmark ruling, President Judge Debbie O’Dell-Seneca of the
Washington County Court of Common Pleas denied the corporation’s
request on the basis that the Pennsylvania Constitution only protects
the rights of people, not business entities.
>>>
>>> In the ruling, Judge O’Dell-Seneca declared that “in the absence of
state law, business entities are nothing.” If corporations could claim
rights independent from people, she asserted, then “the chattel would
become the co-equal to its owners, the servant on par with its
masters, the agent the peer of its principals, and the legal
fabrication superior to the law that created and sustains it.”
>>>
>>> She further found that “the constitution vests in business entities no
special rights that the laws of this Commonwealth cannot extinguish.
In sum, [corporations] cannot assert [constitutional privacy]
protections because they are not mentioned in its text.”
>>>
>>> Judge O’Dell-Seneca cited sections of the 1776 Pennsylvania
Constitution in support of her contention that corporations were never
intended to be constitutionally protected “persons.” She declared that
“an even more dubious proposition is that the framers of the
Constitution of 1776, given their egalitarian sympathies, would have
concerned themselves with vesting, for the first time in history,
indefeasible rights in such entities. . . that language extends only
to natural persons.”
>>>
>>> Finally, she tackled the very nature of corporations by declaring that
“it is axiomatic that corporations, companies, and partnerships have
no ‘spiritual nature,’ ‘feelings,’ ‘intellect,’ ‘beliefs,’ ‘thoughts,’
‘emotions,’ or ‘sensations,’ because they do not exist in the manner
that humankind exists. . . They cannot be ‘let alone’ by government,
because businesses are but grapes, ripe upon the vine of the law, that
the people of this Commonwealth raise, tend, and prune at their
pleasure and need.”
>>>
>>> The court records unsealed by the ruling reveal that Range Resources,
and the other corporations which were the subject of the complaint,
paid out $750,000 to settle claims of water contamination caused by
fracking.
>>>
>>> The ruling represents the first crack in the judicial armor that has
been so meticulously welded together by major corporations. And it
affirms what many communities already know – that change only occurs
when people begin to openly question and challenge legal doctrines
that have been treated as sacred by most lawyers and judges.
>>>
>>> It is that disobedience – of entire communities sitting at lunch
counters demanding to be served – that is our only hope of salvation
in a world increasingly commandeered by a small handful of corporate
decisionmakers intent on remaking the world as their own.
>>>
>>> A revolution that subordinates the powers and rights of corporations
to the rights of people and nature now waits in the wings. Perhaps
now, we’re ready to move it to center stage.
>>
>

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