OK, we all know how criminals claim that rich corporations are people with more rights to pollute than real people have rights to defend themselves.
Now frackers are playing a freakish version of that deadly game. Does an ecosystem -- a watershed -- have more rights to pollute the people of Warren, Pa. than they have rights to protect their own water wells?
Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE), an oil and gas company based in Warren, Pa., filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming the township used an “impermissible exercise of police power” by prohibiting the underground injection of industrial waste from oil and gas fracking within the township....
Grant Township joins over 100 municipalities in Pennsylvania who’ve passed rights-based ordinances. These communities make up the Pennsylvania Community Rights Network (PACRN), whose ultimate goal includes changing the state’s constitution to recognize community rights.
“Until Pennsylvania communities are liberated to protect their health and safety, they will remain the subjects of their corporate-driven legislature,” reads PACRN’s website.
Similar to other municipalities before it, Grant Township’s new Bill of Rights asserts:
“…private corporations engaged in the depositing of waste from oil and gas extraction are wrongly recognized by the federal and state government as having more ‘rights’ than the people who live in our community, and thus, recognition of corporate ‘rights’ is a denial of the rights of the people of Grant Township…”
Does nature really have the same rights as a person? Corporations are considered ‘persons’ under current U.S. law, but not ecosystems. Both ecosystems and corporations ‘contain’ real living people, but it will be up to the courts to decide whether both have equal rights as living entities.
-- From “Pennsylvania Ecosystem Fights Corporation For Rights In Landmark Fracking Lawsuit,” by Melissa Troutman, at this December 10, 2014 Public Herald site:
1 comment:
Fracking is safe but the crazy lefty's want to demonize it to keep America down.
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