Corporation (the company contracted to install the new antenna -on a pole owned by PGE
Corporation), and finally by a certified health physicist who is an expert in non-ionized radiation. He too was paid by T Mobile Corporation to make the presentation, so you can imagine how little his claims were trusted by the very agitated audience of 90 neighborhood residents. The energy in the room became even more unsettled when an oncologist specializing in brain cancers challenged the corporate-funded physicist's claims that there was absolutely nothing to fear by having a cell phone antenna placed on a pole just twenty feet from the nearest home bedroom -- and just about 100 feet from the oncologist's home down the street.
What struck me as most surprising is how tone deaf the City's hired facilitator was. What did the City think would be the inevitable outcome when yet another corporation appears to be forcing yet another corporate project down the throats of its unwilling victims? The two-hour agenda provided a scant fifteen minutes for "Additional Q & A". But this crowd of angry home owners wasn't going to take this lying down, so they interrupted every few minutes with one insistent question after another, not willing to wait until the very end of the meeting to express their opposition. And only questions were permitted by the facilitator -- no statements were allowed at all -- which just further cemented an assumption among all of the attendees that this meeting was held merely as a legally-required formality, after which time the City would rubber-stamp the permit.
As listeners to my weekly commentary have learned by now, I focus a lot of my educational work on spreading the word about how corporations have been granted one new constitutional "right" after another by the Supreme Court, starting in 1819 -- that's 196 years ago!
The corporate constitutional "rights" angle to this cell tower story is perhaps more startling than most. For you see, the federal government passed a sweeping new law in 1996 that made it illegal for a city or county government to vote "No" on a cell tower application based on the elected officials' concerns about the human or environmental health impact of the proposed tower. Let me say that again, because it's such a dramatic example of corporate "rights" trumping the rights of We the People.
Back in 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act. It was the very first piece of national legislation ever written entirely by a corporate industry. The telecommunications industry didn't have to lobby to get it passed, they simply wrote it from beginning to end, and our elected legislators overwhelmingly passed it -- very few of them even read it because the bill was as thick as the Manhattan phone book!
Buried in the Act was Section 704, that banned local governments from even considering the human or environmental health impact of a proposed cell tower in their decision-making process, because, and this is the best part".because it would violate the corporation's civil rights. Yes, that's right. The telecommunications industry argued that they were people just like historically oppressed African Americans, and therefore the 1964 Civil Rights Act protected the corporation's civil rights against discrimination by race, religion, or gender. Now I don't know about you, but I'm pretty darn sure that a for-profit business corporation does not have a definable race, religion, or gender. But hey, that's what the industry-written law stated, so it must be true, right?
But it gets even better than that! Even if the local government votes to not approve a cell tower
application, and bases its decision on other issues that they are allowed to consider, such as aesthetics, the corporation can still sue the City if their leaders "believe" that the City's decision was partially based on concerns about human health. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. The corporate leaders must simply "believe" it to be true, and they then have the legal right to sue, to overturn a city or county government's decision. So what tends to happen is that local governments approve tower after tower, even when 99% of the neighborhood is adamantly opposed. And they call this democracy!
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