A Brief History of Corporate Personhood
Corporations originated in Great Britain at the beginning of the 17th century. The British East India Company was the most fully developed and was instrumental in the spread of the empire and inventing the key legal principles that a corporation is a separate entity from its owners; this separation limits the owner’s liability and creates an organization with an indefinite lifespan. Because of abuse and corruption 18th century French, English, and American thinkers were critical of corporations because of their monopoly practices and unaccountability. The Boston Tea Party was an attempt to thwart the British East India Company’s plan to monopolize American commodity markets. Read more…

Derrick Jensen – An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Bellingham’s Coal Train Ban and Community Bill of Rights – an Idea Whose Time Has Come
by Derrick Jensen
Over the past several years, of all of the articles that I’ve written for magazines, two have caused the greatest consternation and dismay to mainstream environmental and progressive groups. The first, published in Orion Magazine in 2006, was entitled “Beyond Hope”, and the other, also published in Orion, in 2009, was entitled “Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change.” Read more…

What has happened to the world since the advent of capitalism –and the passage of the major environmental laws in the 1970s. Download PDF.

Sins of the Fathers: How Corporations Use the Constitution
and Environmental Law to Plunder Communities and Nature
Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq.
Executive Director
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Inc.
Thursday, March 4th, 2004
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White Paper

The Community Organizing Strategy
of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
and Living Democracy

Liberating Popular Self-Determination
to Create Sustainable Communities

This white paper, authored by the Executive Committee of Living Democracy and relying extensively on materials provided by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF 1), summarizes our community organizing strategy, which involves working with municipalities to adopt new civil, political, environmental, and cultural rights frameworks that undo more than a century of legal doctrines and political constraints that prevent communities from building viable governments, sustainable economies, and healthier environments.