http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15721-pennsylvania-court-deals-blow-to-secrecy-obsessed-fracking-industry
Pennsylvania Court Deals Blow to Secrecy-Obsessed Fracking Industry
Sunday, 14 April 2013 09:58
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet | Report
A Pennsylvania judge in the heart of the Keystone State’s fracking belt
has issued a forceful and precedent-setting decision holding that there
is no corporate right to privacy under that state’s constitution, giving
citizens and journalists a powerful tool to understand the health and
environmental impacts of natural gas drilling in their communities.
“Whether a right of privacy for businesses exists within the prenumbral
rights of Pennsylvania’s constitution is a matter of first impression,”
wrote Washington County Court of Common Pleas Judge Debbie O’Dell Seneca
late last month. “It does not.”
Judge O’Dell Seneca’s ruling comes in an ongoing case where several
newspapers sued to unseal a confidential settlement where major fracking
corporations paid $750,000 to a family that claimed the gas drilling had
contaminated their water and harmed their health. The Court ordered that
settlement unsealed, enabling the papers, environmentalists and
community rights advocates to examine the health issues and causes.
“The ruling represents the first crack in the judicial armor that has
been so meticulously welded together by major corporations,” said Thomas
Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense
Fund, which has helped 150 communities in eight states adopt Community
Bill of Rights to limit corporate powers. “It affirms what many
communities already know, that change only occurs when people begin to
openly question and challenge legal doctrines that have been treated as
sacred by most lawyers and judges.”
The Court’s ruling is significant because the fracking companies have
relied on secrecy agreements with landowners to hide the environmental
and health impacts of gas drilling. Corporate lawyers even filed briefs
in this case claiming that environmental and public health groups such
as Earthjustice, Philadelphia Physicians for Social Responsibility and
others were barred from submitting ‘friend of the court’ briefs, which
they recanted in a hearing, the ruling noted, “because no such rule of
exclusion exists.”
But where the ruling is likely to make the biggest waves is in the
so-called corporate personhood debate. The Judge spent more than a third
of her 32-page decision saying why corporations and business entities
were not the same as people under Pennsylvania’s constitution, and why,
for the purposes of doing business in the state, that federal court
rulings that blur the rights of people and businesses do not apply.
“This court ruling is a significant development for the growing movement
to restore democracy to the people,” said John Bonifaz, the co-founder
and executive director of Free Speech For People, a national campaign
launched on the day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens
United v. FEC. “The ruling is the newest example of dissent within the
judiciary to the fabricated doctrine of corporate constitutional rights.
It will be held up for years to come as a powerful defense of the
promise of American self-government: of, by, and for the people.”
Judge O’Dell Seneca cited the text of the 1776 Pennsylvania
constitution, the history of its various provisions, related recent case
law from other states and policy considerations, and rejected the
various claims by corporate lawyers that “made no attempt to parse those
texts and construe them in light of the full document.” The Court wrote,
“Nothing in that jurisprudence indicates that that right [of privacy] is
available to business entities.”
“There are no men or woman defendants in the instant case; they are
various business entities,” it wrote, saying business entities are
created by the state and subject to laws, unlike people with natural
rights. “In the absence of state law, business entities are nothing.” If
businesses had natural rights like people, “the chattel would become the
co-equal to its owners, the servant on par with its masters, the agent
the peer of its principles, and the legal fabrication superior to the
law that created and sustains it.”
The judge said the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment “use of the word
‘person’ that makes its protections applicable to business entities”
does not apply to Pennsylvania’s constitution. “The exact opposite is
derived from plan language of Article X of the Constitution of the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
“Not only did our framers know how to employ the names of business
entities when and where they wanted them… they used those words to
subjugate business entities to the constitution,” the Court held. “The
framers permitted the Commonwealth to revoke, amend, and repeal ‘[a]ll
charters of private corporations’ and any ‘powers, duties or
liabilities’ of corpoeations… If the framers had intended this section
[Article 1, Section 8] to shield corporations, limited-liability
corporations, or partnerships, the Court presumes that they could and
would have used those words. The plain meaning of ‘people’ is the
living, breathing humans in this Commonwealth.”
The Court held that businesses do have legal rights protecting them from
unreasonable searches and siezure of property, but that’s not the same
as a right to personal privacy. “Our Commonwealth’s case law has not
established a constitutional right of privacy to shield them from out laws.”
And looking at case law and rulings from other states, it held, “This
Court found no case establishing a constitutional right of privacy for
businesses, and it uncovered only one case that allowed a corporation to
assert a state-based right to be free from unreasonable searches and
siezures in a criminal matter.”
Summing up, the Court said “it is axiomatic that corporations,
companies, and partnerships have ‘no spiritual nature,’ ‘feelings,’
‘intellect,’ ‘beliefs,’ ‘thoughts,’ ‘emotions,’ or ‘sensations,’ because
they do not exist in the manner that humankind exists… They cannot be
‘let alone’ by government, because businesses are like grapes, ripe upon
the vine of the law, that the people of this Commonwealth raise, tendm
prune and their pleasure and need.”
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s Linzey said that this
ruling will affect other anti-fracking litigation in state court, but
more importantly is a landmark in the ongoing community rights movement
to elevate public values over private profits.
“It is that disobedience, of entire communities sitting at lunch
counters demanding to be served, that is our only hope of salvation in a
world increasingly commandeered by a small handful of corporate
decisionmakers intent on remaking the world as their own,” he said. “A
revolution that subordinates the powers and rights of corporations to
the rights of people and nature now waits in the wings.”
“Judge O'Dell Seneca is on the right side of history,” said Bonifaz.
“She has clearly articulated what millions of people across this country
understand: that people, not corporations, shall govern in America.
Judge O'Dell Seneca’s ruling provides further legal support for the
national movement for a constitutional amendment to reclaim our
democracy and to make clear that corporations are not people with
constitutional rights.”
_______________________________________________
Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list
Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org
http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel