Legal Defense Fund Takes Community Training

To Rural Counties Across Pennsylvania

Contact: Ben Price, Project Director

If you take no other training this year, do the Democracy School. It is a superlative unfolding revelation of how corporations have hijacked democracy. It meticulously deconstructs the historical arc that brought us to this precipice. But most importantly, it then departs into the highly pragmatic and inspiring work now underway that is slowly turning the tide . . . This Second American Revolution may be the most important political work going on anywhere in the country or the world.

-Kenny Ausubel ‘05, Founder and Co-Executive Director, Bioneers

Democracy School was a mind-blowing experience. During the School, I was forced to come to grips with the understanding that I really knew very little about the true structure of law that controls our activism. Democracy School is a must for everyone who seeks to be liberated from our defensive, after-the-fact reactive organizing strategies.

-Krishnaveni Gundu, ’05, Calhoun County (TX) Resource Watch

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is bringing its Daniel Pennock Democracy School to Counties across Pennsylvania for special one-day training sessions designed to prepare citizens, neighbors, farmers, municipal officials and activists to take the strategic offensive by asserting local decision-making with the force of law in order to protect against the destruction of community-based businesses, family farming, and the natural environment.

Communities across Pennsylvania are being changed in ways that ordinary people find harmful. Local citizens are banding together to stop the invasion of their hometowns by factory farms, corporate sludge haulers, giant cartel retailing operations, privatized water systems, toxic landfills, sprawl, low wage/no benefit jobs-- and they are discovering to their horror that they have no say about big corporate projects.

It has become all too clear that there is a need for a strategic transformation of our efforts in every community in Pennsylvania. The proof is all around us that relying on regulatory agencies to protect us is a tactic that isn’t working. With each attempt by communities to preserve their rural quality of life by making local decisions about the kind of agriculture, energy production and commerce they prefer to support, the state legislature, under the influence of industry lobbyists, passes preemptive legislation and usurps grassroots democracy. After decades of submission to corporate-friendly environmental and land use laws, things have gotten much worse, not better. When we ask the simple question, “Who decides what communities will look like in the future?” it is crystal clear that the answer is not “the people who live there.” That’s why the Legal Defense Fund is taking Democracy Schools to the counties -- to challenge citizens to change gears and adopt a new strategy for organizing their communities.

The county-level schools are designed to help participants uncover the hidden history of how the Regulatory System permits large agribusiness and development and retail corporations, representing small groups of people hiding behind them, to inflict harm on communities and claim legal protection for their actions.

The County Democracy Schools are one-day versions of the weekend-long Democracy Schools offered by the Legal Defense Fund five times a year at Wilson College in Chambersburg. They have been scheduled in seven counties across Pennsylvania, and more are in the works.

We will help participants examine why they aren’t making the rules for their communities, and open a discussion in each county…as a way to begin the over-due organizing of rural communities that is so desperately needed across the Commonwealth.

What's happened in communities where people have attended these democracy schools? There have been real changes in strategy and outcomes. Just this year communities in Schuylkill County passed local laws that strip corporations of constitutional "rights" intended to protect People, not the "fictional persons" of corporations. And they became the first communities in history to recognize that ecosystems have legal standing and inalienable rights that can be defended in our courts.

In Washington County, a community has overturned coal mining corporations' "right" to engage in long-wall mining, and the people have stripped those corporations of "mineral rights" that empower them through the "rights of property" to usurp the community's authority to make binding decisions about the quality of life for its citizens and future generations.

We can't say every community that hosts a Democracy School will decide to challenge the Corporate State to a showdown over who has rights: People and the environment or corporations. Replacing the rule of polluting corporate directors with real local decision-making power isn't for the faint-hearted. But the time has come for a new People's Movement. Maybe it's time right there, where you live.

If you, your organization or municipality would like to host a One-Day Democracy School in your County, Contact Ben Price at the Legal Defense Fund: 717-243-6725 BenGPrice@aol.com

"Some contend that states are sovereign, when, in fact, they are only political societies. There is a gradation of power in all societies, from the lowest corporation to the highest sovereign. The states never possessed the essential rights of sovereignty. These were always vested in Congress. . . The states, at present, are only great corporations, having the power of making by-laws and these are effectual only if they are not contradictory to the general confederation. The states ought to be placed under the control of the general government - at least as much so as they formerly were under the king and British parliament." -- James Madison at the Constitutional Convention