EARTHKEEPING
NEWS
A NEWSLETTER
OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY
Volume Fifteen, Number One
January / February 2006
The Reign Of Corporations
Describing the United States of the 1830s in his now-famous work Democracy in America, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville depicted a country passionate about self-governance. In the fifty years since sovereignty had passed from the crown to the people, citizens of the new republic had seized upon every opportunity “to take a hand in the government of society and to talk about it.... If an American should be reduced to occupying himself with his own affairs,” wrote de Tocqueville, “half his existence would be snatched from him; he would feel it as a vast void in his life.” At the center of this vibrant society was the town or county government. “Without local institutions,” de Tocqueville believed, “a nation has not got the spirit of liberty,” and might easily fall victim to “despotic tendencies.”
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.
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