"Regulating" the Rate of Destruction

Over a century ago, corporate robber barons and their politicians started creating the nation’s regulatory laws and agencies. Corporate managers, their lawyers and their politicians have been perfecting this system ever since. It’s fine-tuned to the point that most of us think it was us trying to regulate them.

By replacing real governing power with the toothless Regulatory System, corporate schemers have us trudging off to permit application hearings, hat in hand, to beg our elected Zoning Board members and Environmental Agency employees not to let corporations use their pre-engineered regulatory law as a community wrecking ball.

By relying on the Regulatory System to solve problems that effect community health, local economies, environments, and the sustainability of a decent quality of life, we let powerful minorities hiding behind corporations and the legal protections they wield call the shots. They are always one step ahead of us, since they wrote the rules.

Our communities expend time, money, energy, and resources in an endless game in which the right of corporations and those who command them to harm our communities and deny our rights isn’t even on the table.

Decades of experience have convinced growing numbers of people that the Regulatory System operates as an “energy sink” -- forcing communities to expend limited resources on roads to nowhere.

Others hold onto the hope that if they make the right presentation, hire the best lawyers, become experts in hydrology, toxicology, traffic patterns...the people working at the regulatory agencies will notice and protect our communities.

What some of us have learned is this: we have been letting corporations regulate us. We’ve been letting corporate mangers LEGALIZE corporate assaults with their deadly technologies, disruptive constructions, and denials of rights. We know this because their Regulatory System has been issuing the permits.

The story of the corporate theft of people’s rights reaches back to the 1600s, when the very first global corporations included the East India Company, the Royal African Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, The Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay Companies. Like today’s multinationals, they exploited cheap or slave labor, appropriated ineffectually defended public resources, and swindled markets.

In 1787, when the U.S. Constitution was drafted behind closed doors, the same institutionalized culture of promoting privileges for the privileged left all women, blacks, Native Americans, and un-propertied white men with no claim to constitutional rights. In 1886 it granted those rights to corporations, which then proceeded to challenge the rights of  people.

In 1893, when the very first regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), was established, then Attorney General Richard Olney assured the president of the Burlington Railroad that there was nothing to worry about:

"The [ICC]...is, or can be made, of great help to the railroads. It satisfied the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, at the same time that the supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be to take the business and railroad side of things. It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests."

Regulatory agencies established after the ICC are no different. They protect corporations from being governed by the people with laws that would clearly subordinate the powerful minorities commanding them to community majorities. The Regulatory System has, in fact, erected a nearly impenitrable barrier between the soveriegn people and their legal creations, the mighty corporations of today. (e.g. see: PA local officials condemn attempt to usurp authority to govern corporate ag.) And there is much more. The true history of corporations is largely untaught and therefore cannot instruct us as we attempt to protect our communities from the harm they inflict, unless we take the initiative to ferret out the truth, and learn it. Citizens who are interested in uncovering this history are encouraged to attend the Daniel Pennock Democracy School.

Our authority to simply decide what kinds of communities we want to live in has been robbed from us through an ingenious bait-and-switch. Regulatory agencies create the illusion that we have legal remedies in the face of corporate assaults on our communities and families.To safeguard the future for our children and the planet it is time we confront these usurpations. What needs to become clear is that it is no use just fighting a particular corporation, a site battle, a permit. In every campaign, we are fighting hundreds of years of accumulated law and custom that have stolen democracy, rights, and self-determination from us. And it matters what you will do next.

The Legal Defense Fund Replaces Regulatory Site-Fights

With Rights-Based Community Organizing

"Americans seem to have lost the capacity to think seriously about the structure of their own society. Words like 'inevitability,' 'efficiency,' and 'modernization' are passively accepted as the operative explanations for the increasingly hierarchical nature of contemporary life...Inexorably, the consolidation of economic power in corporate America has shaped an entirely new political landscape, one in which the agenda of possible democratic actions has shrunk significantly.  Modern politics takes place wholly within the narrowed boundaries of the corporate state. In most circles, it is now considered bad manners to venture outside these boundaries. While most Americans do not venture, they also do not celebrate the limits. 

"Today, the values and the sheer power of corporate America pinch in the horizons of millions of obsequious corporate employees, tower over every American legislature, state and national, determine the modes and style of mass communications and mass education, fashion American foreign policy around the globe, and shape the rules of the American political process itself. Self-evidently, corporate values define modern American culture." -- Lawrence Goodwyn in The Populist Moment, pp.315-322

"It is business control over politics (and by 'business' I mean the major economic interests) rather than political regulation of the economy that is the significant phenomenon of the Progressive Era. Such domination was direct and indirect, but significant insofar as it provided a means for achieving a greater end -- political capitalism. Political capitalism is the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security -- to attain rationalization -- in the economy. Stability is the elimination of internecine competition and erratic fluctuations in the economy. Predictability is the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable expectations. By security I mean protection from the political attacks latent in any formally democratic political structure.

"I do not give to rationalization its frequent definition as the improvement of efficiency, output, or internal organization of a company; I mean by the term, rather, the organization of the economy and the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run. My contention...is not that all of these objectives were attained by World War I, but that important and significant legislative steps in these directions were taken, and that these steps include most of the distinctive legislative measures of what has commonly been called the Progressive Era." -- Gabriel Kolko in The Triumph of Conservatism

“Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate systematical job of reducing us to slaves." --Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence