Economically driven patterns

A recent article posted at Truthout.org describes an ongoing battle between a Texas rancher name Eleanor Fairchild and TransCanada which has not upheld their agreement to restore her land after building a pipeline through it.

The story brings up issues of corporate power, eminent domain, citizen's / landowner / individual rights, enforcement, unequal power and environmental stewardship.

(1) Eleanor Fairchild's story along with the ongoing protests by Native American tribes at Standing Rock, ND over the Dakota Access pipeline also brings to mind the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers and the U.S. government. Foreign settlers forced Native Americans from their homes, deliberately exposed them deadly pathogens from which they had little defense, stole their land and territory, negotiated treaties conferring certain rights and those treaties often weren't worth the paper they were written on. Whether signed or not, the U.S. government often imposed its will regardless.

And Eleanor Fairchild's story is extraordinarily similar. Her land was trespassed on and damaged before any rights were transferred; then accused of eco-terrorism for defending her land; and after damaging her land to put through their pipeline, failed to honor their agreement to restore her land.

In both cases, larger powers either used the power of the state (military intervention in Native American relationships, treaties between 'states'; judicial system, eminent domain) or the deliberate abrogation of state power of oversight (broken treaties; lack of enforcement/accountability for TransCanada) to force their will on the less powerful.

The U.S. Constitution is the supposed foundation of laws in this country and establishes the concept of equality under the law. In practice, the powerful have always had the law at their backs. Land hungry early settlers used the military to grab land from Native Americans; now power takes the form of paper entities like corporations to grab land and land rights from their owners. (International trade agreements repeat the same pattern - confers greater rights to corporations at the expense of nations and their citizens.) It makes me question if the true intent of the Constitution was the lofty descriptions taught to schoolchildren. The second amendment compromise to appease the slave holding south suggests those who drafted the Constitution had multiple motives, not all of them pure.

(2) A major by-product of corporate profit making activity in this country is environmental degradation - fracking and agriculture pollutes water; oil spills/ fires/ explosions destroy structures, infrastructures, damages air/water quality... And this is reminiscent of the damaged environment of China and the former USSR. In these cases, powerful authorities could and did override the will and wishes of local residents to determine what industries, what individuals and what interests could do as they wish in any given location. In the U.S., government is not making the decisions but its enforcing corporate decisions.

Has the U.S. ever been a state where voters make decisions? These patterns suggest otherwise.