Thomas Linzey: Community Bill of Rights | Democracy Now

Thomas Linzey works with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and is an adviser to Envision Spokane, which is gathering signatures to place a “Community Bill of Rights” on the November 2009 general election ballot.

[O]ur activism is limited in the United States. We’re, in essence, placed into a box, which is limited by something called corporate rights. Corporations today have the same constitutional rights as you or I, but because of their wealth, of course, they can exercise those rights to a greater extent.

So, even though you and I have First Amendment rights and Fourth Amendment rights and Bill of Rights protections under the US system of law, corporations have those rights, too. So, Wal-Mart Corporation, for example, has First Amendment rights and Fourth Amendment rights under the law.

And what the folks in Spokane [Washington] have started to say is, well, as a hundred-some communities on East Coast which have begun passing these ordinances and laws as well, is that to say to themselves, “We can’t build a sustainable, environmentally, economically sustainable system, if our activism is defined for us within that box. And so, we need to break out of that box somehow.”

And one of the most amazing things about this — these particular Community Bill of Rights, which are being amended into the Spokane city home rule charter — is that it actually deals with that, declaring in that bill of rights that corporations don’t have rights that can exceed the rights of people within the city of Spokane.