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<h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message"
data-ft="{"type":"msg"}"><span
class="UIStory_Message">Pittsburgh becomes first city to ban
natural gas drilling by directly challenging corporate 'rights'
and 'personhood'.</span></h3>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://paulcienfuegos.com/node/65">http://paulcienfuegos.com/node/65</a><br>
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<strong><a href="http://paulcienfuegos.com/" title="Home" rel="home">Paul
Cienfuegos </a> </strong>
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<h1 class="title">Open Letter to Communities Working to
Stop Fracking (November 16, 2010)</h1>
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<div class="submitted"> Submitted by Paul on Sat,
11/20/2010 - 22:19 </div>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;">This
morning, the Pittsburgh City Council became the
first municipality in the United States to ban
natural gas extraction within its boundaries.
The ordinance isn’t just a ban – it consists of
a new Bill of Rights for Pittsburgh residents
(which includes a right to water along with
rights for ecosystems and nature), and then
proceeds to ban those activities – including
natural gas extraction - which would violate
those rights. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">But it doesn’t stop
there.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">The ordinance seeks to
undo over a hundred years’ worth of law in the
United States which gives corporations greater
rights than the communities in which they do
business. Those rights come in two primary forms
– first are corporate constitutional rights and
powers (including court-bestowed constitutional
rights of persons, or “personhood” rights), and
second, are corporate rights that have been
codified by statewide laws (like Pennsylvania’s
Oil and Gas Act), which liberate the corporation
from local control in individual issue areas.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">When a community makes
a decision which runs afoul of either of those
corporate rights frameworks, corporate
decisionmakers use the courts to throw out the
community’s decision. If a municipality bans a
State-permitted activity, it gets sued for
“taking” the corporation’s property as a
constitutional violation. If it attempts to
legislate in an area in which the State has
created a regulatory program which permits the
activity, the community then gets sued by the
corporation for violating preemptive state law.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">And why wouldn’t they?
After all, corporate lawyers created the very
rights-frameworks that they use the courts to
enforce, concocting many of those doctrines
precisely to restrict community lawmaking as far
back as the late 19</span><sup><span
style="font-size: small;">th</span></sup><span
style="font-size: small;"> century.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">In fact, those
frameworks have been so effective that we rarely
even dream about what our communities would look
like if we actually called the shots. We even
question ourselves as to whether we should have
that power or not.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">And so we turn away
from that grim reality, and instead attempt to
use other tools that have been given to us which
respect and incorporate those rights-frameworks.
We attempt to use zoning laws to ban certain
activities and learn that banning through zoning
violates corporate constitutional due process
rights. Turned back on that front, we then
negotiate with the corporation - and beg and
plead with state regulators - so that the
corporation causes a little less harm to our
communities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">As second-class
citizens, our rights made secondary to the
privileges of corporations, we look for
solutions to the ignoble status we’ve been
relegated to. Our work plays out within a very
small box of “allowable activism” bounded on all
sides by rights-frameworks which protect a
relatively small number of corporate
decisionmakers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">What does this have to
do with fracking in the Marcellus shale
formation? Everything.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">The rationale behind
the Pittsburgh ordinance is a simple one. If we
respect and comply with those frameworks of law
– playing within the sandbox that has been
constructed for us - we’ll get drilled. It’s as
straightforward as simple arithmetic.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">Which brings us to
another logical conclusion: if we want to stop
the drilling, we must therefore undo those false
corporate rights frameworks.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">Over a hundred other
municipal governments across Pennsylvania have
joined Pittsburgh in reaching that revelation –
that the only way to stop agribusiness factory
farms, sewage sludge dumping, corporate waste
disposal, and natural gas extraction is to
frontally and directly challenge those layers of
corporate law which have removed any vestige of
community self-government.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">As with the passage of
similar ordinances by municipalities in
Pennsylvania over the past several years, which
have dealt with an array of issues, the
Pittsburgh ordinance will result in a lot of
hand-wringing by statewide environmental groups,
which have made long careers out of not coloring
outside of the lines.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">As they see it, their
job is to work within existing law and do their
best to limit environmental damage. That’s why
they call for more zoning laws (even though
horizontal drilling defeats the purpose of
zoning the placement of drilling pads, for
example), or a severance tax (which ironically,
encourages even more drilling to produce more
revenue). It’s why they talk about “responsible”
drilling and natural gas as a “bridge” to a
sustainable energy future. It’s why they’ve
talked themselves into seeing drilling as
inevitable, and that the best we can do is
simply to endure it. In doing so, they’ve
condemned our communities to the same kind of
damage that the gas corporations are forcing
upon us.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">They may be nice
people, but they’re not our friends in this
mess. They’re too obedient in a situation that
demands widespread disobedience.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">Stopping the drilling
means coming face-to-face with the reality that
this country isn’t what we thought it was. That
the rights-frameworks claimed by the
corporations are not just a tragic mistake, but
are the underlying reality demonstrated by our
existence in a system in which the legal system
serves corporate production but not community
democracy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">These local ordinances
intend to turn that structure upside down –
subordinating corporate “rights” and corporate
production to local self-governance and the
rights of nature, rather than the other way
around.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">For that reason, if we
truly believe in economic and environmental
sustainability, variations of the Pittsburgh
ordinance must spread to a thousand other
communities in the path of the Marcellus shale
drillers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">And then it must
spread to a thousand more.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">More importantly,
perhaps, communities need to jettison corporate
lawyers and lobbyists from their municipal
meeting rooms. We need to stop listening to
environmental lawyers who tell us that there’s
nothing that we can do. We need to take a
collective stand to reject corporate-imposed
energy policies and replace them with local ones
of our own making.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">We then must be
prepared to disobey courts and legislatures who
inform us that we can’t have sustainability
because it interferes with corporate
prerogatives.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">It’s time. After all,
what’s left? After ripping up our communities,
there will be a new scheme to extract something
else, and another one after that. It’s time to
shut down the machine. It’s time to use our
municipalities to engage in collective civil
disobedience through community lawmaking.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">As Frederick Douglass
wrote over a hundred years ago -</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><em><span
style="font-size: small;">If there is no
struggle there is no progress. Those who
profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate
agitation…want crops without plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and
lightening. They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters. . . Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never
did and it never will. The limits of tyrants
are prescribed by the endurance of those whom
they oppress.</span></em></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">It’s time to use our
municipal governments to demand an end to all
activities and policies that are harmful to our
communities and the natural communities upon
which our lives depend. It's time to undo a
structure of law that authorizes corporate
minorities to run roughshod over community
majorities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><span
style="font-size: small;">Isn’t that what
democracy is supposed to be about?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 14pt;"><em><span
style="font-size: small;">From The Staff of
the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
(CELDF.org)</span></em></p>
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