An original essay by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) posted on June 29th, 2018.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, it was the work of many hands. Thomas Jefferson gets the credit, but the people of more than ninety towns and counties throughout the colonies had sent instructions to the Continental Congress calling for separation from England and enumerating a list of grievances to justify independence from the empire. Among the thirty or so listed complaints, the very first mentioned in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is the preemption of local laws:

“HE [the king as symbol of the empire] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good….”

One thing we know for sure: The revolutionaries were not talking about state or federal laws. There were no “states” and there was no nation. It was the usurpation of the people’s right to enact and enforce local community laws that had them up in arms.

History repeats itself

Today we find ourselves in a situation at least as dire as what the American revolutionaries faced. State agencies routinely issue charters and licenses to wealthy corporations and then “permit” to legalize industrial damage to our communities. The permit is necessary because the “regulated” activity is self-evidently harmful to communities and nature, and the corporations need a legal shield against liability for the damage. In this way, the state makes it legal for corporations to violate unalienable rights. What it cannot do directly, it does indirectly through the corporate actor.

None of this is accidental or unintended, nor to be remedied by a quick fix, an enlightened court decision, or better regulations. It’s taken time and clever manipulation of the law for the privileged minority controlling corporate property to pin unalienable rights to the mat. To understand how the right to local community self-government has been disrespected, cordoned-off by procedural barriers, subordinated to the privileges of wealth, and nullified by judicial fiat, we need to look into the hidden history of the United States of America. MORE…