Fighting city hall: Corporation 1, citizens 0

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

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The law is like an ecosystem, where every decision reverberates with an impact on future decisions. By 1978, the Supreme Court's nineteenth-century personhood decision had rippled out to the free speech case of First National Bank v. Bellotti, in which Justice Lewis Powell wrote for the majority that "[t]he inherent worth of speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend on the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, or individual." For a number of years before, the Massachusetts State legislature had watched large corporations spend huge sums on advertising campaigns to defeat measures for a progressive income tax. Finally, lawmakers legislated a ban on the corporate expenditures, as long as the referendum did not directly affect corporate assets. A consortium of Boston corporations sued, raising a First Amendment challenge to the Massachusetts statute, and the Court struck down the legislation, saying the corporations had a right to make campaign contributions as protected political speech.

Since Bellotti, corporations have been spending for lobbying and campaign donations on a scale with which no individual or group of individuals can compete. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is one result. The Washington Post estimates that telecommunications corporations donated $48 million to federal candidates and the state and national committees of the major parties while Congress was working on the bill and in the years after it took effect. An article by staff writer Mike Mills in December 1998 noted that "[d]uring one period, from October 25, 1995, to February 2, 1996, as House and Senate lawmakers were huddled in a conference committee to work out the final details . . . the industry sprinkled $2.7 million in contributions over lawmakers and parties-three times more than it gave during comparable periods in each of the previous two election cycles." The newspaper, using the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, also found that lobbying expenditures and campaign giving rose even higher after the Telecommunications Act came into law, with a lot of cash "aimed at educating legislators and regulators on the fine points of carrying out the law."

The Telecommunications Act pays lip service to the importance of local zoning regulation, enough to encourage a town to dispute a site location, but it's false piety. The act says a planning or zoning board has to find a place for the tower somewhere in the town. If a town challenges this in court, the advantage is clearly with the corporation, which conies armed with a staff of lawyers, ready-to-go research, and experience with similar cases. Often, as in Wellfleet, the town is paralyzed by limited finances.

When Wellfleet voted against the antenna, Omnipoint spoke back in court papers, using Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Contending that Wellfleet and its Planning Board had injured it by violating its law-given right to erect an antenna, Omnipoint sued for its permit, compensatory damages, and attorneys' fees.