Many communities are frantically trying to resist the encroachment of giant retail merchandising corporations and the economic and environmental injuries that those corporations inflict on locally owned businesses, community character, and workers. Past efforts to control the amount of harm inflicted by these corporations have resulted in increased environmental and land-use regulation, but there has been a marked failure to secure local authority over whether those corporations will be allowed to operate by the communities that they impact.

In recent years, organizations, communities, and community leaders working on a range of other “single” issues have begun to question why their industrious enforcement of zoning laws, environmental regulations, environmental impact studies and other legal land-use tools have failed to protect the natural environment, create an improved quality of life, or increase community control over corporations. As some community leaders have learned, available legal regulatory remedies are drawn from a “stacked deck” of sorts. Created to enable communities to make it more expensive for corporations to site or operate in a particular location, those regulations maintain the illusion that the community has fundamental decision-making authority over how, or whether, the corporation will operate within the community.

Over the years, activists and communities have struggled to correct the symptoms of corporate control through their use of the regulatory system - a system that, in effect, serves as nothing more than an “energy sink” for activists. Indeed, regulations aimed at lessening corporate harms may actually serve to work against that goal. So often the temporary, regulatory “wins” of activists merely codify specific levels of permissible harm that corporations may legally inflict on people and communities.

Unless these communities, groups, and municipal governments shift their focus from regulating corporate behavior (seeking to lessen corporate harms) to asserting local, democratic control over corporations, attempts to build sustainable communities and protect the natural environment will fail.

The Legal Defense Fund has extended the on-going work it is doing in farming communities - where municipalities have been assisted in developing local laws to stop the encroachment of corporate “factory farms” - by applying this same community organizing strategy in municipalities currently opposing the siting of cartel retailing operations, like the Wal Mart Corporation’s “Super Stores.”

Community groups in Pennsylvania have approached the Legal Defense Fund for assistance in opposing the proposed sitings of cartel retailing operations in their regions. Such neighborhood groups often form to keep a particular development or facility from siting in their community and they inevitably turn to land-use attorneys who inculcate them with the belief that their only options are to use existing legal vehicles to resist the development corporation. These groups have a history of battling Wal-Mart Corporation and other consumer warehousing operations through the enforcement of land use provisions and zoning laws. Because of that history, activists within those groups are already grappling for new strategies, because they understand that the current war of attrition will eventually result in the siting of the unwelcome Wal Mart store.

As with the Legal Defense Fund’s work with communities faced with the siting of corporate factory farms or land applied sludge, a two-step process is necessary to begin the building of a ‘rights-based’ campaign against the siting of cartel retailing operations. The first step involves “reframing” the issue away from land-use particularities, and towards questioning the raw authority of the corporation (and the minority of people managing the corporation) to override the sustainable future enunciated by community majorities. The second step involves the codification of that new understanding through the drafting and adoption of local laws that stop the imminent harm (the siting itself), while directly challenging the ability of the corporation (and its small number of corporate managers) to interfere with the authority of the community to govern itself.

Thus, the first step in this project involves partnering with community groups. The Project Director and one of the attorneys working for the Legal Defense Fund assist the core leaders within those groups to reframe the siting issue into one focused on contesting the authority of the Wal-Mart Corporation to define the contour of local economies within those communities. These gatherings with core groups from involved communities are one day events in which the Legal Defense Fund presents community leaders and local officials with the history of the rise of corporate “rights”, the failure of the regulatory system to confront those “rights”, and how other Pennsylvania communities are using that material to assert local control over corporations. Perhaps most importantly, these gatherings illustrate how corporations (and the few that run them) routinely use constitutional “rights”, and other law, to override the wishes of community majorities.

Recasting the raw data of communities under siege by chain store corporations as an issue in which “the many” in our communities are being governed by “the few” who make corporate decisions, community leaders will come to understand that this is not anti-corporate work, but the work of healing the body politic, of empowering democracy, and of building communities that are economically and environmentally sustainable. Pamphlets have been developed that summarize the key concepts of this “rights-based” approach, and literature has been designed that explains the history of corporate rights and previous people’s movements as relevant to the challenges faced by these communities today.

Designing an “anti-corporate development” Ordinance based on an understanding of the reframed issue is the next step, with the core group working to bring along the Township Supervisors (local elected officials), by educating them and applying pressure for the adoption of a binding Ordinance. Work in Pennsylvania to target corporate activities has already laid the groundwork for the development of these Ordinances, which would ostensibly prohibit certain corporations from engaging in land development within the Townships involved.

Given that the adoption of such a law will inevitably draw a response by the corporation - inevitably seeking to wield the constitutional “rights” of persons against the “taking” of property by the municipality - the Legal Defense Fund will work with those groups to fashion and adopt a local law that also takes aim at the corporate claim to constitutional “rights”. This type of Ordinance, already adopted by several local governments in Pennsylvania, will serve as the framework for the drafting and adoption of such a law in the targeted communities.

An alternate process for the adoption of local laws that assert the governing authority of the local community over corporations involves the adoption of a Home Rule Charter. Especially when local governing officials are either too timid or resistant to adopting Ordinances to govern corporate activities, the Home Rule option allows citizens to propose changing the form of local government through a popular referendum initiated through community petitions. By electing neighbors to draft a Home Rule Charter, which is a local constitution, the community empowers itself to write the rules for writing the rules. Part of this process can be a legal assertion by the community of the subordination of corporations to local governing authority.

This step in the evolution of groups motivated by a reframed issue - codifying their community visions through local Ordinances or Home Rule Charter - prepares the ground for the third stage - deepening and strengthening the community organizing around the inevitable legislative and judicial challenge (see: Corporate Backlash). With success at the township level, countywide organizing could also begin, with public events and workshops hosted in communities not yet threatened by the incursion of chain store cartel retailers.

See also: A Movement Diverted: The Anti-Chain Store Movement of the 1920s and 1930s by Ben Price

"For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it."
--Big Bill Haywood