The fight against corporate power and corporate personhood is more widely engaged than ever before. The sheer number of small skirmishes being foughtall over America is like the beginnings of the civilrights and suffrage movements.

In Pennsylvania, with help from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), several communities have passed laws or ordinances denying corporations ‘rights’ within their borders, provoking bitter opposition from massive corporations and paid-for local politicians. The laws are being used to keep out factory farms, prevent their communitiesfrom becoming toxic dumping grounds, and to reassert local control over the economy.

Corporate attempts to use ballot initiatives as an end-run around lawmakers and directly enact their agenda have provoked counter-offensives. A mining company in Montana proposed an initiative to overturn a state ban, passed by voters in 1998, on the use of cyanide in gold mining after it leaked into rivers and groundwater. In California, dozens of major corporations have sponsored an initiative to dramatically weaken the nation’s toughest consumer protection law. ReclaimDemocracy.org aims to use these battles to ultimately revoke corporations’ ability to run or influence ballot initiatives.

It’s a big challenge: Wal-Mart paid political operatives in Contra Costa County, California, $10 an hour – 20 percent more than their typical employee – to get an initiative on the ballot to overturn local bans on Supercenters, which they won.

But citizens are winning many such battles. In Humboldt County, California, Pacific Lumber Company attacked district attorney Paul Gallegos - who had sued the company for allegedly lying about plans to denude slopes of redwoods - with an initiative to remove him from office. The intimidation failed. And corporations like DuPont and Dow organized a group called CropLife to fight Mendocino County’s Measure H, the first countywide ban on GE animals and crops. CropLife was defeated by 56 percent to 43 percent, even though they outspent the citizens seven to one.

Activists are working to remind citizens that human rights were intended for humans. “Part of our long-term strategy is to amend the US Constitution to revoke corporate personhood, overturn Supreme Court decisions like Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank v. Bellotti [which established corporate ‘rights’ to political activity and free speech], and establish a constitutional right to vote,” says Jeff Milchen, director of ReclaimDemocracy.org. Communities and legislators are promoting non-binding resolutions to educate people about corporate power, by proclaiming that corporations shouldn’t have human rights.

Such rights are claimed from an 1886 Supreme Court ‘ruling’ that the Bill of Rights covers corporations. The Court ruled no such thing (it was merely inserted into a non-binding headnote by its clerk), but that hasn’t stopped corporations from claiming that EPA inspections violate their “right” to privacy, laws against lies in advertising or giving money to politicians limit their “right” to free speech, or that communities that try to keep out predatory corporations are engaging in unlawful “discrimination” under constitutional amendments written to free slaves after the Civil War.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said “economic royalists” had “carved new dynasties” out in America. “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.”

Corporations called Roosevelt everything from a traitor to a communist. He retorted: “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” In the past the battle for democracy was fought against warlord kings, theocrats, and feudal lords. Today’s feudal lords are called corporations. If democracy is to survive, these efforts from California to Pennsylvania must succeed.

Thom Hartmann is the author of over a dozen books, including Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance.