After battling city officials
all the way to the Utah Supreme Court over whether enough petition
signatures had been collected to force a referendum, the residents
of Sandy, Utah, will decide the fate of “big box” retail
development at the ballot box.
In a state where
controlling growth often is equated with communism, the court came
down firmly on the side of citizens seeking to stop Sandy’s
City Council from rezoning industrial land to allow a new Wal-Mart
and Home Depot. The court, ruling 5-0, said, “The exercise of the
people’s referendum right is of such importance that it properly
overrides individual (corporation’s) economic interests.”
Even though they won the initial battle, Sandy’s
residents may find the court’s words hollow.
Why?
The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1978 that corporations have an
unlimited “right” to spend corporate funds influencing ballot
questions. As citizens in dozens of communities have learned, that
power enables giant corporations to turn ballot measures —
theoretically the purest form of democracy — into yet another
sphere of corporate dominance.
In May, Wal-Mart spent
almost $400,000 in a Flagstaff, Ariz., to run its own ballot
initiative and reverse a size cap that the city council had passed
on big-box stores. The company outspent the size cap’s
defenders 3-to-1 — a whopping $44 for each vote it received
— en route to winning 51 percent of the vote.
Wal-Mart’s ad campaigns painted the size cap as a union and
governmental attack on citizens’ rights, and ran an ad that
equated opponents with Nazi book-burners. That ad created an angry
backlash, but only after most of the votes had been cast in mail-in
balloting.
Becky Daggett of Friends of Flagstaff’s
Future, which supported efforts to uphold the size cap, said the
corporate funding “absolutely changed the election results from
what they’d have been if only local citizens were
participating in the campaign.”
This is hardly what this
country’s founders had in mind. Corporations originally were
forbidden from influencing government or elections in the states,
and for good reason. When American colonists declared independence
from England in 1776, they also freed themselves from control by
English corporations that extracted colonists’ wealth and
dominated trade.
They retained a healthy fear of
corporate power, and wisely limited corporations exclusively to
business activities, setting up barriers to prevent them from
corrupting politics. In most states, corporations could not make
political or charitable contributions, nor could they spend money
to influence law-making.
In the 1800s, corporations
gradually dismantled many of those barriers. By 1886, a Supreme
Court majority ignored the fact that corporations are unmentioned
in our Constitution, ruling that corporations are legally “persons”
entitled to constitutional rights. Soon, corporations had perverted
the Bill of Rights itself to gain many of its protections — well
before women and minorities had full rights as persons.
Yet, as recently as the 1970s, corporations faced meaningful limits
on their political power — limits that a corporate lawyer named
Lewis Powell thought too burdensome. In 1971, Powell argued in a
memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that big business should
expand its power, noting “the judiciary may be the most important
instrument for social, economic and political change.”
One month later, President Nixon appointed Powell to the U.S.
Supreme Court, where he went on to write the majority opinion in
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the 1978 decision
creating a First Amendment “right” for corporations to influence
ballot measures and other political questions. That ruling is what
allows corporate executives to run their own ballot initiatives if
a local government makes a decision they dislike. This enables
corporations to impose their will on communities around the
country.
So when the citizens of Sandy go to the voting
booth this fall, they’ll battle against a company that needed
to spend less than 60 seconds’ worth of corporate revenue to
defeat a skilled and well-organized citizen effort in Flagstaff.
Whether or not we’re concerned by the proliferation of
big-box stores, we all should be alarmed by this perversion of
democracy.
The reasons that drove our country’s founders
to keep business creations subordinate to democracy are even more
compelling today. Until we limit corporations to business
activities and revoke their ill-gotten political power, democracy
will be in trouble. Citizens still can win some local battles, but
the larger struggle — one to determine whether citizens or
corporations control the future of our communities and country
— must take place nationwide.
Jeff
Milchen is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org).
He is the director of ReclaimDemocracy.org in Bozeman,
Montana.
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