"How can we build sustainable and democratic communities when large corporations wield so much power over them?"

The Corporations and Democracy Program is focused on the following major initiatives:

• Working with municipal governments and communities to remove core corporate constitutional privileges at the municipal level to enable local governments and grassroots groups to build sustainable and democratic communities;
• Working with municipal governments and communities to adopt Ordinances which assert local control over sewage sludge and waste management corporations;
• Working with municipal governments and communities to draft and adopt Home Rule Charters that take municipal law-making out of the hands of state legislators and recognizes the citizens in their communities as the legitimate local governing authority;
• Working with municipal governments and communities to adopt anti-corporate farming Ordinances to prevent corporate agribusiness ownership and control of farms, and working with groups and officials to oppose legislative efforts to strip away local control from municipal governments to control factory farm and sludge corporations;
• Working with municipal governments and communities to adopt anti-“Big Box Store” Ordinances to prevent giant retail operations from exercising illegitimate corporate “rights”, and working with groups and officials to enact local Ordinances that assert the community’s right to deny permits and operating privileges to any corporation;
• Providing legal and strategic guidance to municipal governments and communities seeking to assert democratic decision-making as the preferred and natural tool for creating and protecting the kinds of communities that people aspire to live in; 
• Drafting model legal Briefs questioning the legitimacy of claimed corporate rights; these Briefs can be used by communities and lawyers across the United States to argue for the removal of constitutional privileges from corporations;
• Building a network of local government officials to work with CELDF to customize and adopt local Ordinances, and to provide a united voice on behalf of local, elected officials struggling to build sustainable and democratic communities by asserting local control over corporations;
• Providing assistance to State Attorneys General for their use of corporate charter revocation statutes against corporations which have violated environmental statutes and regulations;
• Assisting organizations in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Colorado, California, Texas, and Oregon with the assertion of community control over corporations through the drafting of municipal resolutions, binding Ordinances and referenda, and comprehensive amendments to State Corporation Codes; and
• Building non-corporate alternatives to the industrial food production system in South-Central Pennsylvania as a model to be replicated in other localities across the United States. This work involves establishing a counter economic model to illustrate the deficiencies of corporate industrial livestock production.

Program Need

For decades and generations, communities and people across the United States have been forming groups and organizing themselves to lessen corporate assaults against their communities. Those groups have confronted incinerator corporations, power corporations, waste management corporations, factory farm corporations, sludge corporations, and others. While those efforts have led to some increased regulation of the adverse impacts caused by corporations, they have failed to fundamentally challenge the power that corporations wield against communities.

Over the past few years, many of the organizations and communities working on a range of single issues have begun to question why their organizing has failed to result in the preservation of the natural environment, an improved quality of life, and increased community control over corporations.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund's Corporations and Democracy Program works in partnership with communities and organizations in an attempt to answer that fundamental question, and to fashion remedies that assert community control over corporations.

A Different Strategy

Corporations today act in the capacity of governments. Energy corporations determine our nation's energy policies. Automobile corporations determine our nation's transportation policies. Military manufacturing corporations determine our nation's defense policies. Corporate polluters and resource extraction corporations define our environmental policies. Transnational corporations determine our trading policies. And the wealthiest among us - with their wealth deeply rooted in corporations - determine our tax policies. "We the People" has become a hollow phrase in an age characterized by the supplanting of local, democratic decision-making by un-elected corporate Boards of Directors located hundreds and thousands of miles away from communities directly impacted by their actions.

Across the country, activists and communities have struggled to correct the symptoms of this systemic usurpation through their use of the regulatory system - a system that, in effect, serves as nothing more than an "energy sink" for activists attempting to control corporations. Indeed, regulations aimed at lessening corporate harms may actually serve to actually work against that goal. For example, in an attempt to confront corporate factory farms, many states and localities have imposed new regulations that create greater financial impacts on family farmers than on the factory farm corporations targeted by the regulations. That process serves only to eliminate those farmers most likely to practice sustainable agriculture, thus assisting the "deep pocket" agribusiness corporations to monopolize the industry.

In addition, corporate interests have captured many state and federal regulatory agencies, and attempts at citizen enforcement result only in the squandering of scarce grassroots resources and a trail of meaningless permit appeals. A new approach - and one that focuses on direct citizen-driven democratic control over corporations - is necessary if citizens are to make real the promises of democracy and environmental sustainability.

The Corporations and Democracy Program of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund has worked with activists and local, elected officials across the United States to explore and discuss why - after decades of valiant citizen resistance, along with regulatory laws galore - corporate assaults have not been stopped, nor has governing power shifted to people and communities. Through this Program, the Legal Defense Fund has begun to explore with communities what people can do to establish direct community control over corporations, and has concluded that communities, organizations, and municipal governments can make real the nation's founding principle - often mouthed but long disdained by most business and political leaders - that all political authority is inherent in the people.

To do such work, activists and communities must challenge today's culturally accepted corporate supremacy over values and public policies. That requires organizations engaged in individual anti-corporate struggles - against sweatshops, toxics, clear-cuts, exploitation of communities of color, global corporate rights agreements masquerading as trade agreements, genetic engineering of seeds and foods, etc. - to rethink their campaigns, and with the help of history, begin to directly challenge corporate dominion over lawmaking, jurisprudence, elections, education, ideas, culture, self-governance, and democracy.

Unless these communities, groups, and municipal governments shift their focus from regulating corporate activities - seeking to lessen corporate harms - to asserting local, democratic control over corporations, attempts to build sustainable communities and protect the natural environment will be for naught.

The Corporations and Democracy Program of the Legal Defense Fund has become the principal legal advisor to community groups and municipal governments struggling with this transition - working with them to produce a series of legal tools that assert local, democratic control over corporations.

In recent years, CELDF has focused on stopping the corporatization of agriculture in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The organizing tools developed in that project are now being applied in communities suffering from other corporate indignities (See: Giant Retail Stores and The Rights of Communities). The primary tool developed by the Legal Defense Fund to check the corporatization of agriculture is the anti-corporate farming Ordinance, which has been adopted by municipal governments across the state. That Ordinance (Southampton Anti-Corporate Farming Ordinance) bans agribusiness corporate ownership or control of farms, and is modeled on legislation that has been successfully used in the Midwest to protect a family farmer-based agricultural system. (See: Anti-Corporate Farming Laws in the Heartland ; also see: FAQ: Southampton Anti-Corporate Farming Ordinance).

Recently, that work has expanded - at the invitation of activists and municipal governments - to New York and North Carolina. The goal of CELDF's work in the agribusiness arena is to reframe local corporate factory farm issues into ones which raise the fundamental question of whether corporations or communities should rightfully determine how food is produced in a region.

That work has partnered the Legal Defense Fund with scores of grassroots organizations working to oppose factory farms across Pennsylvania. It has also led to coordination between the Legal Defense Fund and organizations in the Midwest that originally spearheaded this direct approach to controlling factory farms and the corporations that run them.

In response to the effectiveness of the anti-corporate farming laws in Pennsylvania, the Legal Defense Fund has been asked to give presentations to groups and communities across the United States. The Daniel Pennock Democracy School has been expanded beyond its Pennsylvania roots, and is now offered in locations nationwide.

CELDF is continuing this important work by expanding our Ordinance drafting assistance to other local governments, and by continuing to service the growing national network of groups working to exercise governing powers over corporations.

CELDF has also worked to reframe the issue of the land application of sewage sludge into one focused on freeing communities and rural municipal governments from the power wielded by sludge corporations. In August of 2002, the Legal Defense Fund hosted the first ever Pennsylvania statewide Sludge Forum, which featured speakers from the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the Pennsylvania Environmental Network (PEN), State Representatives, and the parents of a child who died after being exposed to land applied sludge. The Forum was framed to transition anti-sludge activists away from regulatory tools towards more effective approaches to community control over corporations.

The Legal Defense Fund's sludge work has resulted in the creation of two local Ordinances Sewage Sludge Ordinance, Sewage Sludge Land Application Registration Form (*PDF File), that prevent the land application of sewage sludge. Those Ordinances have been adopted by scores of municipal governments across Pennsylvania.

CELDF's work continues to focus on building sustainable communities in partnership with grassroots groups and local governments, by reframing traditional environmental and social justice single issue struggles into ones focused on restoring democratic control to communities (see: CELDF Local Ordinances and Home Rule Local Constitutions). Eventually, the end goal of this work is to begin the process of fundamentally removing corporate constitutional privileges at the municipal level.

In 2005, the Legal defense Fund launched a new project to assist communities and local governments fend off the siting of “big box” stores. Using the organizing model that has succeeded in rural townships to transfer decisions about corporate farming out of the boardrooms and into the communities where they belong, a project to implement a “rights-based organizing model to stop the siting of big-box stores” was launched. For more details on this project, go to: Giant Retail Stores and The Rights of Communities.

A primary tool developed towards that goal is CELDF's Anti-Corporate Personhood Ordinance, which seeks to remove constitutional privileges from corporations at the municipal level. As of 2005, two local governments have adopted this Ordinance, and if it is challenged by corporate lawyers it may serve as a vehicle for an eventual appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of claimed “personhood” rights of corporations. In 2006, the Legal Defense Fund began incorporating the corporate rights elimination language of this Ordinance into other local laws.  

CELDF continues to produce legal tools that can be used by lawyers nationwide to challenge the current legal framework that gives corporations constitutional privileges. That work has included the comprehensive updating of a Model Brief to eliminate corporate "personhood" rights, updating and revising a Model Corporate Code for the amendment of existing state corporate codes, and circulating a model Pennsylvania Constitutional Amendment to eliminate corporate constitutional rights. The goal of this work is to provide legal models that can be used by grassroots community groups to collectively act to implement statewide controls over corporations. Ongoing work within the Program also includes the provision of continuing assistance to State Attorneys General and citizen organizations working to revoke the charters of corporations possessing criminal histories. (See: A Citizen's Guide to Corporate Charter Revocation Under State Law)

The Legal Defense Fund is the only organization in the United States that possesses the unique capacity to combine organizing activities with on-the-ground legal assistance to draft local and statewide laws that assert local, community control over corporations.

Additional Projects

In addition to drafting Ordinances and defending those Ordinances, the Legal Defense Fund continues to raise the larger issues of corporate control over local governments in Pennsylvania. That work involves the hosting of meetings with groupings of elected officials, frequent presentations to community groups, and the drafting of new Ordinances that deal with the fundamental powers that corporation wield against local governments.

An Ordinance drafted in 2002, titled the "Corporate Personhood Ordinance", seeks to remove constitutional privileges from corporations at the municipal level by declaring that corporations are not "persons" under the law. It is anticipated that at least one municipal government in Pennsylvania will adopt that Ordinance by the end of 2002, and the Legal Defense Fund will defend any challenges to that Ordinance.

The Legal Defense Fund is taking the lessons learned and strategies developed at Democracy School into the communities, begining in Pennsylvania, with the creation of one-day County Democracy Schools for citizens actively working and organizing in their communities.

To provide an organizational framework for municipal officials working on these issues, the Legal Defense Fund has created the "Quality of Life and Local Control Caucus" of municipal officials. The Legal Defense Fund publishes a quarterly newsletter for those officials - the Community Solicitor, which provides them with the latest information about CELDF Ordinances and litigation. The purpose of the Caucus is to work within the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors (PSATS) to protect and defend local autonomy to build sustainable and democratic communities.

As a complement to the work done by the Legal Defense to prevent agribusiness corporations from establishing themselves across Pennsylvania, the Fund has also concentrated on building community-based agricultural systems in the region. In early 2000, the Legal Defense Fund launched the South-Central Farmers' Market Association (SCFMA), whose goals include building several farmers' markets across the region, assisting with the transition of farmers from corporate agriculture to organic and sustainable agricultural alternatives, and investigating new direct retail sales outlets for local farm produce.

The Southgate Farmers' Market, formed by the SCFMA in Spring of 2000, has produced over $100,000 in revenue for the ten family farm vendors that participate in the market. That market was unique in that it was established in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania - and one in which the only supermarket in the area closed in 1999. Thus, the market not only provides organic and sustainably grown produce and meats to the Chambersburg community, it also provides a necessary outlet for residents of the area to obtain groceries.

In 2001, the South-Central Farmers' Market Association (SCFMA) opened a new farmers' market in Shippensburg, and is currently supplying a local restaurant with organically grown vegetables, breads, and meats from local producers. Plans are being made to open a third farmers' market in the Greencastle area.

The SCFMA also continues to support local family farmers with the formation and continued operation of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) facilities. These CSA's provide weekly pickups for consumers, who purchase a share in the CSA prior to the growing season. In this way, the subscriber shares in the risk or bounty of the production with the farmer, and the process builds invaluable relationships between producers and consumers. Currently, Franklin County CSA's are producing organic beef, poultry, eggs, and produce for area subscribers. A Winter CSA, producing poultry, baked goods, and greenhouse vegetables, began operation in 2000 with the assistance of the Association and the Legal Defense Fund.

In 2001, the Legal Defense Fund began working with a new south-central Pennsylvania creamery, which purchases milk solely from local farmers, bottles its dairy products in glass bottles, and focuses on supporting the local farm community.

These efforts - to create a non-agribusiness corporate model of food production - complement the Legal Defense Fund's efforts to prohibit agribusiness corporations from owning or controlling farms.

"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." -- Thomas Jefferson to Horatio Gates Spafford, 17 Mar. 1817, cited in Papers 14:221