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Followed from
sojo.net to Orion, found: an excellent article about civil community and
activist groups, local municipalities standing up to ‘corporate personhood’
lawsuits, and the applications that citizens can take from these practical
lessons opposing international trade agreements (GATT and FTAA cited). There are also some very interesting
connections here to current political-environmental battles and legislation
underway to protect corporations from lawsuits in the still-to-be passed Energy
Act of 2003. I highly
recommend this essay, for content and clarity. Jeffrey Kaplan: Consent of the Governed, the reign of corporations and
the fight for democracy @ http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/03-6om/Kaplan.html CORPORATE
POWER, largely unimpeded by democratic processes, today affects
municipalities across the country. But in the conservative farming communities
of western Pennsylvania, where agribusiness corporations have
obstructed local efforts to ban noxious corporate farming practices, the commercial
feudalism de Tocqueville warned against has evoked a response that
echoes the defiant spirit of the Declaration of Independence. In late 2002 and early 2003, two
of the county's townships did something that no municipal government had ever
dared: They decreed that a corporation's rights do not apply within their
jurisdictions. The author of the ordinances,
Thomas Linzey, an Alabama-born lawyer who attended law school in nearby
Harrisburg, did not start out trying to convince the citizens of the heavily
Republican county to attack the legal framework of corporate power. But over
the past five years, Linzey has seen township supervisors begin to take a stand against expanding
corporate influence -- and
not just in Clarion County. Throughout rural Pennsylvania, supervisors have
held at bay some of the most well-connected agribusiness executives in the
state, along with their lawyers, lobbyists, and representatives in the
Pennsylvania legislature. Linzey anticipated none of this
when he cofounded the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a
grassroots legal support group, in 1995. Initially, CELDF worked with activists
according to a conventional formula. "We were launched to provide free legal services
to community groups,
specifically grassroots community environmental organizations," Linzey
says. "That involved us in permit appeals and other typical regulatory
stuff." But all that soon changed. …“DESPITE THEIR ENORMOUS RAMIFICATIONS,
most international trade agreements remain a mystery to the average American.
At the core, they are simple. GATT
and NAFTA cover the trade of physical goods between countries. They can be used
to override any country's protection of the environment, for example, or of
workers' rights, by defining relevant laws and regulations as illegal
"barriers to trade." They provide for a "dispute
resolution" process, but the process routinely determines such laws to be
in violation of the agreements. In the case of GATT, a WTO member
country can sue another member country on behalf of one of its corporations, on
the grounds that a country's law has violated GATT trade rules. The case is
heard by a secret tribunal appointed by the WTO. State and local officials are
denied legal representation. If the tribunal finds that a law or regulation of
a country -- or state or township -- is a "barrier to trade," the
offending country must either rescind that law or pay the accusing country
whatever amount the WTO decides the company had to forgo because of the
barrier, a sum that can amount to billions of dollars. In short, practitioners
of democracy at any level can be penalized for interfering with international
profit-making. Through this process, WTO
tribunals have overturned such U.S. laws as EPA standards for clean-burning
gasoline and regulations banning fish caught by methods that endanger dolphins
and sea turtles. The WTO has also effectively undermined the use of the precautionary principle, by which practices can be banned until proven safe -- in
one recent instance superseding European laws forbidding the use of growth
hormones in beef cattle. A WTO tribunal dismissed laboratory evidence that such
hormones may cause cancer because it lacked "scientific certainty."
On similar grounds, the U.S., on behalf of Monsanto and other
American agribusiness giants, recently initiated an action under GATT
challenging the European Union's ban on genetically modified food. Under NAFTA, which covers Canada,
Mexico, and the U.S., a corporation can sue a government directly. The case
would also be heard by a secret tribunal, such as when Vancouver-based Methanex
sued the U.S. over California's ban on a cancer-causing gas additive, MTBE. The
company, which manufactures the additive's key ingredient, claimed that the ban failed to consider
its financial interests. Since
July 2001, three men -- one former U.S. official and two corporate lawyers --
have held closed hearings on the thirteenth floor of World Bank headquarters in
Washington, D.C., to decide whether, in this instance, a democratically elected
governor's executive order to protect the public should cost the U.S. $970 million in fines. The FTAA, recently fast-tracked for negotiations to put it
into effect by 2005, would extend NAFTA's provisions to all of Latin America. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Please contact me if you want a reader’s
version of this essay, 60 KB. |
