Our activist and anti-consumer court majority

  In yet another display of its arrogance and anti-consumer sentiment, the four member Republican majority of the Michigan Supreme Court today denied standing to Michigan citizens to protect the water table in Mecosta County.  The Nestle Corporation bottles water in Mecosta and local citizens sued in 2001 to control the amount of water Nestle could remove.  The judge who heard the case found that Nestle was damaging the local watershed and limited Nestle's water-taking activities pursuant to the Michgian Environmental Protection Act.   

          The four member majority of our Supreme Court, in another decision favoring large corporate interests over the interests of ordinary citizens, reportedly struck down the provisions of the MEPA that allow citizens to file suit.  It arrogated this legislative decision to itself and refused to honor the will of the Legislature--despite clear constitutional authority for the Legislature's action.  It seems that this Supreme Court won't be satisfied until all of the laws of our state have been returned to the status of the so-called "Gilded Age" at the turn of the 1900s, when citizens, employees, victims and even the government had no protections from avaricious corporations.  We have only heard news reports and haven't had the opportunity to read the court's opinion, but it certainly promises to be depressing reading.