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It would be sad, if it weren’t so downright predictable.
For years, residents of several Virginia counties have begged their elected boards of supervisors to stop urban sewage sludge – a toxic mix of human and industrial wastes – from being dumped on them. In response, county boards have routinely declared that there’s nothing that they can do.
County supervisors have then channeled citizen opposition into the General Assembly, where it is diluted and subverted as bills are introduced, shuttled to the appropriate committee, and promptly killed by the sludge and waste corporations. To make matters worse, legislators don’t even think in terms of whether sludge will be land applied, but merely how to make sludge dumping less harmful by drafting regulations, subject to corporate approval, concerning buffer zones, odor, and application rates.
Honest legislators in other states openly admit that no legislation preventing sludge from being dumped – or recognizing the authority of communities to prohibit sludge from being dumped – could ever pass the legislature. With five massive waste corporations controlling over 70 percent of sewage sludge hauling in the United States, and those corporations leveraging their power in the legislatures, that should come as no surprise.
It’s not just sewage sludge, of course, but every other issue one can conceive of – from toxic waste incinerators to landfills to corporate hog farms. Citizens, committed to stopping what the state deems to be a “legal” land use, are shunted into a regulatory structure that denies them the right to say “no,” assumes that the dumping will proceed, and seeks only to render it slightly less harmful.
At the same time, the citizens’ elected local governments abandon their responsibility and their oaths of office by refusing to take the steps necessary to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their constituents by challenging the authority of the state to gut local democracy.
When governments fail to serve their unquestioned, primary role – to protect and secure people’s rights – all state constitutions recognize the right of community majorities to dismantle them. At its base, this is an understanding that when governments act to deny our rights – or don’t act to protect them – they are acting illegitimately.
After all, the abolitionists didn’t ask for a Slave Protection Agency. They drove changes into the Constitution that fundamentally redefined African-Americans from being property to being rights-holding persons. The American Revolutionaries didn’t petition the Crown Attorney General for a ruling that the Declaration of Independence was “legal.” If they had, they would have received the same response that the Virginia Attorney General will deliver after being asked about the legality of the sludge ordinances currently under consideration by the Campbell and Bedford county boards of supervisors.
Throughout the history of this nation, groups of people have arisen and refused to accept the status quo, simply because there was no other option. Having your back against the wall often means that you come out kicking, particularly when accepting what is deemed legal means that your children will be sacrificed to line someone else’s pockets.
The Virginia Constitution’s declaration that “all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people” raises an interesting question: If all legitimate governing authority derives from community majorities, by what right does the General Assembly preempt communities from governing themselves?
The final predictable part of this process occurs when the corporation – usually run by a handful of men – threatens to sue the local government when it passes an ordinance that challenges the corporation’s authority to assault the community. In essence, this means wielding state and federal courts – the power of higher levels of government – to smack down community majorities. And since the law in these cases is so clear – indeed, so clear because it’s been co-written by the very corporations that the law enables – judges are able to cleanly sweep away “we the people.” Bewildered, exhausted, confused, and outspent, community groups dwindle away and expire.
This is what a corporate state looks like – a system of government run by a corporate minority to run roughshod over the rights, hopes, and values of community majorities.
Changing that structure means standing on the shoulders of those courageous citizens who came before us – the populist farmers of the 1880s, who took on the railroad and banking corporations; civil rights crusaders, who knew that legal segregation had to be challenged on all fronts; and the suffragists, who asserted that women had the right to full participation in the democratic process.
All of them ran smack into the courts and legislatures, who worked to preserve the status quo. It was the courts, after all, who recognized corporations as having constitutional rights 40 years before they recognized women as having those rights, and more than 70 years before they recognized African-Americans as having those rights.
It’s simply a matter of who wields government against whom.
It’s time for the citizens of Campbell, Bedford, and other Virginia counties to understand that what they face isn’t a sludge problem.
It’s a democracy problem.
Thomas Linzey, Esq.
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania 17201
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Call us at 434-376-1871 for more information on how to stop sludge in your community. |
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