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Corporate persons are special
(by Dave Lange - February 22, 2012)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Corporate persons are special
On a 5-2 vote earlier this month, Orange Village Council decided that the municipal government needs to keep an eye on residents' homes to make sure their kitchens aren't too cluttered, their toilets flush and dog poop gets picked up.
Last September, Solon City Council voted 5-2 to conduct regular government inspections inside residential rental units throughout the city, although commodes and feces presumably are not a concern within owner-occupied dwellings.
Such local government regulation is perfectly fine with the state of Ohio due to a concept known as home rule.
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which addresses "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," apparently is inapplicable to such intrusions.
As the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission in January 2010 and Republican presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney recently confirmed on the campaign trail, "corporations are people." In fact, way back in 2004, the state legislature decided with passage of Ohio House Bill 278 that corporations are very special people.
They are so special that, while the government has a right to know whether sinks are clogged in Orange and showers are slimy in Solon, nobody has a right to know exactly what corporate drillers for gas and oil are doing in their communities.
As Chardon Law Director James Gillette reminded his City Council during a recent discussion of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which drills miles underground for fossil fuels, H.B. 278 took away local governments' ability to establish any regulation of the industry whatsoever.
Not only that, but, as Gates Mills Councilwoman Sandra Turner noted, the fracking process is exempt from the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act and a slew of other regulations that protect the health and safety of ordinary people who probably are not corporations.
Furthermore, the industry is exempt from disclosing how much and what kinds of chemicals are used in the fracking process, many of them toxic to human beings but quite delectable to corporate persons. One hydraulically fractured well can require the pressurized infusion of millions of gallons of a liquid concoction that includes thousands of gallons of chemicals.
Even though hydraulic fracturing reaches gas and oil thousands of feet below ground and most water aquifers are just a couple hundred feet deep, many people fear the impact of these chemical injections on their water wells. When residential wells have become contaminated at precisely the same time that fracking occurred nearby, the drilling industry and the governmental entities that consider corporations special people flatly deny any connection.
But there is a movement afoot by conservation groups to impose a moratorium on fracking in Ohio until more safeguards can be put into effect. And Ohio Attorney General Michael DeWine is seeking to increase environmental penalties and chemical-reporting requirements on the industry.
Meanwhile, the government does know what ingredients are in the detergent that's used to wash dishes in Orange and the paint that's applied to apartment walls in Solon.
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