Submitted by David W. Lewit, Jul 27, 2007 22:26

Thanks, Channing, for writing up environmental defense with local folks taking responsibility to drive out the chief offenders---corporate dumpers. But aren't you going a bit overboard by saying, in your opening line, that citizens are "declaring the Constitution null and void"? It was not the Constitution that gave corporations the rights of persons, but rather a clerk of the Supreme Court who in 1886 wrote the introduction to the Court's ruling in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. He identified the Company as a legal person, and the Justices let that stand as they nullified a law that took corporate property without "due process of law", as if the corporation were a person protected by the Fifth Amendment. And thereafter corporations used the "personhood" argument and courts thereby often ruled in their favor. The Constitution never defined "person" in that way, and never uses the concept or word "corporation".

Those were the days---the late 1800s---when Social Darwinism was a popular creed, especially the notion of "survival of the fittest". People likened the corporation to a highly productive creature which had evolved into a dominant species entitled to deceive, pollute, and exploit with impunity until some plaintiff with similar resources could take them to court and prove them guilty of illegal harms. That was a hundred years ago. Social Darwinism is dead, but corporations have grown to be king of our economic and political jungle.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, about which you write, started by helping people in rural townships in Pennsylvania get rid of corporate factory farms which were poisoning earth, air, and water. Mere regulation didn't help. They had to drive the creature out.

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