CITIZEN V. CORPORATE RIGHTS

From Reverend Gregory Wilson 

From where do we derive our rights as people?

Is it from the government, the constitution, or the bill of rights?

If it is from any of these, they can be taken away, modified, have their meaning changed, or enforced for a particular group. What if our rights were derived from the seventh principle of the Unitarian Universalist faith which: affirms and promotes respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

What if, simply being a part of the interdependent web of existence was the source of our rights? Then no king, queen, president, or legislative body could take or alter the meaning of our rights.

Bruce Alexander in his work the, Globalization of Addiction, says that central to the process of recovering from the globalization of addiction is, “Getting beyond the first steps of social action … requires a global transformation in world view.”

In Thomas Berry’s thinking: …“The universe is, ‘the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe’. The second element is the significance of story, and in particular the universe as story. ‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything."

The myth we have been living with, internalized into our very body is proving to be destructive to our planet and our bodies. The rights granted by governing agencies play a role in this destruction. For a recent example, the State of Massachusetts was contesting the continuation of a nuclear plant whose time was up. The Federal government on behalf of the company, Louisiana Entergy (considered by law to have the rights of a citizen) denied the state's wishes. The state's attorney general argued that the decision should have assessed safety issues, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined to hold a new hearing and the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston upheld the decision.

The federal government, the courts, and a corporation, trumped a state's right and its safety concerns. This is a theme in the narrative we must transform and move away from: clearly, human rights in Massachusetts are being subjugated to the rights of the legal citizen called Louisiana Entergy.

Having rights originating from ‘being an expression of this wonderful web of existence’ would mean the power of local communities would trump powers residing thousands of miles away. This would change the story in which we live.