Fighting city hall: Corporation 1, citizens 0

UU World: The Magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, May/Jun 2003 by Wolman, David, Wax, Heather

Ernie Bauer doesn't hide the fact that he likes having a cell phone. It's a convenience, plain and simple. Bauer, a retired schoolteacher, lives in the Cape Cod hamlet of Wellfleet, a town that has tried hard to maintain a salty, secluded personality, far from the hustle of Boston and New York, and far from cell phones and cell phone towers.

"It's a tough one, because I have mine right here," he says, pulling his phone from his belt clip and pointing to the little bars on its screen that indicate good reception. "And cell phones definitely offer meaningful advantages to a person. But if the majority of people didn't want the towers, I could live without a cell phone."

A century ago, from a station in South Wellfleet, Guglielmo Marconi tapped out a wireless greeting in Morse code from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII of England. Marconi's radio engineering feat would help earn him a Nobel Prize and would earn Wellfleet a tiny spot in science history. Inside the town's Historical Society building, where Bauer volunteers at the front desk, visitors can find Marconi memorabilia and photographs of his wireless wonder alongside corroded harpoons from the whaling era.

Today, wireless communication in Wellfleet has new meaning. In 1998, a group of Bauers fellow residents began a battle to keep cell phone companies from putting up their antennas in the town, and therein lies our story.

The residents did everything necessary to crank up the machinery of local government and make democracy work for them. Wellfleet's Planning Board responded by voting to deny a permit to the cell phone company Omnipoint (later Voicestream, and still later T-Mobile). The corporation sued, its lawyers charging that the town had violated the Telecommunications Act of 1996. But the company didn't just want its permit; it also sued for damages and attorneys' fees under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination by race, religion, and gender, and is one of the signal legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. The prospect of having to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if they lost was too much for town officials, and they backed down. The corporation had overpowered the democratic process. The antenna was installed inside the steeple of the First Congregational Church, set on a hill in the middle of town.

"It's a tough pill to swallow," says Bauer. "I resent that, when things get shoved down your throat like that."

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Since the failed campaign, the people of Wellfleet have learned a couple of things. They've learned that democracy in practice isn't necessarily like the democracy we're taught in civics class, especially when a huge corporation comes to town. And some of them have learned-perhaps more than they ever wanted to-about the obscure term "corporate personhood."

It's rarely discussed these days, even in law school classes, but in 1886 the Supreme Court granted personhood to corporations. These abstract and artificial creatures of the law thus gained many of the rights of living, breathing, vulnerable human beings. Giant corporations have used these rights as levers to gain ever greater size and strength, then used their strength to co-opt governments as their allies or to simply walk over them; the footprints left by Omnipoint in its triumphant march through Wellfleet's exercise of democracy are still fresh in the minds of the town's citizens. Corporate "persons" have marched through communities all over the United States, not just to plant cellular antennas but to have their way with all kinds of democratically enacted restrictions. And, as corporate globalization becomes ever more sweeping, the phenomenon is happening everywhere due to World Trade Organization rulings.

It used to be said that you can't fight city hall, but these days it's at least as true that city hall can't fight big corporations. Wellfleet provides a picture-postcard setting for one such drama, or at least for the third of its three acts.

The first act is set in the ornate chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the opening scene nineteenth-century corporate lawyers parade through in their relentless campaign to gain power for their clients by securing rights for them as persons. The act's final scene is in 1978 as the lawyers, still parading, use the First Amendment to gain a ruling that enlarges corporations' right of political speech to include spending great sums of money for lobbying and campaign contributions.

In act two, the setting shifts to Capitol Hill in the early 1990s, and instead of lawyers this time the parade is peopled by lobbyists from telecommunications corporations. Generous application of their expanded right of political speech results in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is famous in Washington for being written almost entirely by these lobbyists.

And in the third act, Omnipoint shows up in Wellfleet. Before that, it wasn't clear to Ernie Bauer and his fellow residents that the Bill of Rights could belong not only to the real people whom the Constitution was enacted to protect but also to corporate "persons," and that democracy could be trumped by corporate might. But they learned.