How It Works

At the Democracy School, we learned about how the regulatory system (the state and federal regulatory agencies and local councils and permit boards) actually does not regulate dangerous corporate activities like deforestation, air, water and soil pollution, traffic hazards and the like.

The chart above shows how, when a new, large, corporate project is proposed in a community, a majority of affected community members often come together to resist the project. They base their concerns on broad, usually nonpartisan and non-controversial ideas about their community’s values and character, such as environmental protection, historical preservation, clean, safe food supplies, open space, direct democracy (as contrasted with representative democracy), and they are expected to voice those concerns at public hearings.

However, the regulatory system was designed and implemented by the corporate interests through drafting and pushing the federal and state legislation that created the regulatory agencies. For example, the laws that govern the Environmental Protection Agency are not set up answer the question: “Does this community want a toxic business poisoning its air, water and soil, and giving its residents cancer?”

Instead, the EPA and every other agency set up ostensibly to regulate commerce, food supplies, the environment, communications and other human necessities, are designed only answer questions like: “How much poison can a given business spew out into a community’s air, water and soil? How many people can be exposed to how many different carcinogens?”

At the public hearings, the real life experiences, concerns and values of residents become completely irrelevant, and the expert knowledge residents have about life in their communities doesn’t weigh into agency decisions. Citizens are funnelled into technical hearings where the only “experts” are attorneys, consultant engineers, scientists, and other technical professionals, and the only permissible testimony is projected parts per million of dangerous chemicals, or projected flood levels, or projected trip generation patterns for traffic. And the agencies and local boards, under current laws, can’t say “No pollutants at all;” “No additional flood risks;” “No new traffic pressures.”

But laws can be changed.

That’s why the community self-determination movement has sprung up, and why more than 100 towns in Pennsylvania have passed ordinances, like the one proposed by NP Citizens for Community Rights, prohibiting corporate activities that endanger their residents’ health and environment, and why several towns have taken the next logical step to pass ordinances that strip corporations of Constitutional rights. Unlike the suggestions in this recent article on the movement, the goal is not to overturn the Constitution, but to better realize its ideals of self-governance by and for free and equal human beings.