The Struggle for Democracy:
Activists Take the Offense
by Virginia Rasmussen
By What Authority (Vol. 4, No. 3 - Summer 2002)
from the PROGRAM ON CORPORATIONS, LAW & DEMOCRACY
* We're Mad As Hell and We're Not Taking It Any More!
* Launching The Offensive
* Endnotes
Remarks at the Empowering Democracy Conference, New York City,
April 13, 2002 by Virginia Rasmussen, Women's International League
for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Program on Corporations, Law and
Democracy (POCLAD)
Empowering democracy. This phrase reaches the heart of every
social justice activist's work. What does it mean to give power to
democracy? It relates to making real the people's legal authority
to govern. Whatever the focus of our particular struggle, success
hinges fundamentally on our having the power to bring the change
we envision. Every issue is anchored in the struggle for that
legal authority.
In his book, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and
Concord, Ray Raphael tells us about a democratic moment in
Massachusetts history. In 1774, six months before the "shot heard
'round the world," crowds of men numbering in the thousands
deposed every Crown-appointed official in rural Massachusetts.
This was in response to Parliament's Massachusetts Government Act,
which virtually withdrew the considerable self-governance granted
to the colonists by the 1691 Massachusetts Charter. In Worcester,
4,622 militiamen lined Main Street and instructed the
British-appointed officials to walk the gauntlet, hats in hand, as
they recited their resignations 30 times so all could hear. In
every county outside Boston, the British lost control and never
regained it. Raphael claims that, "Through it all, the
revolutionaries engaged in a participatory democracy which far
outreached the intentions of the so-called `Founding
Fathers.'"[1]
What is it about this glimpse of times past that's important for
us today? Those colonists possessed some critical characteristics
that we, despite all our material and technological pizzazz, now
have in small measure. They assumed themselves capable of
self-governing; they displayed the attitudes and behaviors of
people who took for themselves the authority to be in charge. This
story reveals the essence of democratic culture and helps us grasp
what the work of activists struggling to empower democracy must be
about: building a culture of communities with the assumptions,
attitudes, and authority of sovereign citizens.
This is a challenging task. In The Populist Moment, Lawrence
Goodwyn describes us as "not only culturally confused, our
confusion makes it difficult for us even to imagine our
confusion."[2] But more and more people are cutting through the
fog; our confusion is lifting.
The right to assume that our basic nature just might be decent,
cooperative, and compatible with self-governing has been stolen by
the few who rule over us. And we're figuring it out. Our right to
learn and live by the attitudes and behaviors of self-governance
has been denied to us by the few who are in charge. And we're
figuring it out.
Our authority to be a nation of self-governing people was given
away to the corporation, a "legal fiction" created to serve us. We
intended the corporation to concern itself with business and
commerce, but it now dominates our politics and government. It was
redesigned and legally empowered over the last 150 years to scoop
up wealth and power. It has amassed so much legal authority in the
USA that a propertied few, shielded by corporate "rights," now
govern the many. And having seized most power and wealth in this
country, those few now write international agreements they would
have us believe are about "trade," but which, in fact, foist
corporate governing rights on every nation of the world.
What's an activist to do?
We're Mad As Hell and We're Not Taking It Any More!
What was done in the name of the Enron Corporation has made people
furious -- not only because it engaged in criminal activity like
financial fraud and insider trading, but because most of what the
Enron Corporation did was perfectly legal. Even worse, the laws
condoning those actions were essentially written by Enron
operatives and their cohorts: laws that allow them to pick
candidates and bankroll them into office; make energy policy and
define energy debate; hide debt in ghost entities called
partnerships; buy and sell fictional "derivatives"; put profits in
tax-free, off-shore banks, eliminating Enron Corporation's tax
burden in four of the last five years . . . all quite legal. It's
legal for corporations to fund think tanks that tell us how to
think and what to believe; to endow university chairs, write
textbooks, control research.
In a nation of self-governing people, these are our debates to
define and decisions to make, and more and more activists are
figuring it out.
We're fed up with behaving like subordinates content to influence
the decisions of corporate boards and the corporate class. Having
influence is valuable, but influencing is not deciding. We're
weary of waging long, hard battles simply for the "right to know."
Knowing is critical, but knowing is not deciding. We're tired of
exercising our right to dissent as the be-all and end-all. Dissent
is vital, but dissenting is not deciding. Influencing, knowing,
dissenting, participating -- all are important to a democratic
life, but not one of them carries with it the authority to decide,
the power to be in charge.
Launching The Offensive
More and more people are taking this power, shifting goals and
strategies in order to defy corporate authority over our lives,
work, communities, values, law and politics, culture and future.
These initiatives are directed toward public officials, attorneys
general, elected boards, and legislatures. We're not taking the
subordinate role of asking the Enron Corporation to behave a
little better. We're not content with putting a corporate-designed
and -controlled regulatory agency on Enron's trail. Regulatory law
protects corporations from pesky people. It enables and protects
the corporate agenda as it was intended to do. We're catching on
that the language and strategy, actions and arenas that frame our
work determine its outcome. If we seek democratic outcomes, we
must frame activism in the people's sovereign authority to rule.
Coalitions of citizens and activist organizations around the
country are conducting community-based study groups, learning how
corporations acquired legal powers way beyond those possessed by
human beings. We are getting clear that corporate lawyers relied
on judges to turn into law whatever business practices gave
corporate actors power over people and natural resources. They
interpreted state-granted corporate charters to be contracts over
which states were no longer sovereign; they made gifts of private
property to corporate claimants that transformed We the People
into trespassers. They saw to it that a corporation's future
profits and the decision-making in its name are constitutionally
protected from us -- beyond the people's authority.
We are learning that the commerce clause, prohibiting states from
interfering with interstate commerce, was the first incarnation of
a free-trade agreement. Corporate insiders and their judge
advocates used it to declare that laws protecting workers,
communities, children, and the environment are unconstitutional
impediments to free-flowing commerce. We are finding an early
model for powerful international trade tribunals in the unelected,
unaccountable Supreme Court.
Where is the people's authority in this picture? Why do corporate
entities have rights at all? Rights are for people. Corporations
should have privileges only, to do what we ask of them. This was
once obvious to people, until corporations were declared "persons"
under the law by the Supreme Court in 1886. The court extended
14th Amendment protections of due process of law to the corporate
form, protections intended for recently freed slaves. From the day
of that decision, corporate lawyers have not stopped seeking and
winning protection after protection for corporations while African
Americans have struggled to realize the promise of the 14th
Amendment in their lives.
Endowed with legal personhood status, the corporate form then
acquired the protections of the Bill of Rights. First Amendment
free speech rights for "corporate persons" leave real people in
the electoral dust; Fourth Amendment protections from search and
seizure for "corporate persons" trump workplace safety and health
law. Now corporate lawyers say that the Fifth Amendment protects
corporations from any government "taking" without "just
compensation." They are making the case that any environmental
regulation encroaches on corporate property "rights." Some federal
judges are agreeing, awarding compensation based on alleged lost
future profits. The final curtain on environmental regulation may
well be coming down. Indeed, corporate rights of private property
give them power over the people, and their personhood rights bring
them protection from the people.
Unless we challenge corporatized law and culture, activists will
be waging defensive battles against harm after endless harm
forevermore.
Where do we take action to oppose corporate rule? To our
communities for conversation and learning, to the culture for
reflection and rethinking, to town boards, public officials, and
state legislators. This is where we have legal standing. In these
arenas we have the opportunity to empower democracy, to write true
democratic law. Such law can only arise from the will of the
people and the vision of a democratic culture. It will never arise
in the arenas of oppression: corporate boardrooms, courts of law,
or regulatory bodies.
The people in ten townships of south central Pennsylvania passed
ordinances to protect family farms that are locally owned and
managed. They wanted to prevent corporate hog farms from invading
their communities. They could see that battles about parts per
million of hog pollution in their creeks, or square feet of
stinking hog waste in lagoons, was waging a fruitless battle on
the corporation's terms. Like the 18th-century Massachusetts
democrats before them, they sought to define their own lives and
work, economies and communities.
In response to this assertion of people's authority, lawyers for
the farm bureau and agribusiness corporations filed a lawsuit
declaring that Belfast Township has no constitutional authority to
pass such an ordinance. They state that the Constitution's equal
protection and due process clauses, its no takings clause, its
commerce clause, its contracts clause, its privacy protections,
its 14th Amendment protections are all stacked against the people
and for the corporations. This action strengthened the people's
and township supervisors' resolve, convinced as they are that the
Constitution should be in service to people and not to property
organized in the corporate form. At a recent meeting of
Pennsylvania municipalities, 350 township governments voted to
oppose the stripping away of local governmental control over
corporate farming and sewage sludge management. This is forceful
evidence of a growing determination to drive self-governance into
the Constitution, which is what our activist labors must be about.
This is not anti-corporate work. This is the work of healing our
body politic, of coming to the defense of our common good. It's
the work of empowering democracy.
We are among generations of people who've struggled for the right
to be self-governing. There were always those who understood, who
pulled themselves together, took the offense, organized
resistance, demanded democratic alternatives, established some of
their own. And while their efforts were often ridiculed, crushed,
or coopted, they offered lessons to inform this generation's work.
Knowing their stories is essential if we are to create our own.
Like our activist forebears, we are pulling ourselves together and
pushing into the Constitution and the rule of law that was
asserted by those in Massachusetts who tossed out British rule in
1774, and by our Declaration of Independence and the American
Revolution: the right of the people to govern.
It's a radical task, a large and long one. Whom do we summon to
this assignment?
Poet and author Annie Dillard has this to say:
There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a
clean hand nor a pure heart on the face of the earth,
nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting
ourselves with the notion that we have come at an
awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead --
as if innocence had ever been -- and our children unfit,
not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a
false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled
comfort of pleasures and grown exhausted, unable to seek
the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but
us. There never has been.[3]
Endnotes
1. Raphael, Ray, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington
and Concord, The New Press, New York, 2002.
2. Goodwyn, Lawrence, The Populist Moment: A Short History of
the Agrarian Revolt in America, Oxford University Press, NY,
1978, p. ix.
[See (PDF) excerpts from the Introduction to this book
presented in "Session VI - People's and Workers' Resistance
Movements" one of ten study group packets from the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom Campaign:
Challenging Corporate Power, Asserting the People's Rights
and the Abolishing Corporate Personhood. "The objectives of
the study groups are: (1) to frame learning and discussion in
ways that focus on the root causes of corporate and state
oppression, and (2) to direct efforts for change in law and
culture toward those public officials and public bodies that
must take the authority to place economic institutions and
all corporate entities under the control of a self-governing
people." --ratitor]
3. Dillard, Annie, Holy the Firm, Harper and Row, New York,
1977, p. 56.
Copyright © 2002 by Virginia Rasmussen
Copyright © 2002 by POCLAD
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
------------------------------------------------------------------
By What Authority, the name of our publication, is English for quo
warranto. Quo warranto is the sovereign's command to halt
continuing exercise of illegitimate privileges and authority.
Evolved over the last millennium by people organizing to perfect a
fair and just common law tradition, the spirit of By What
Authority animates people's movements today.
We the people and our federal and state officials have long been
giving giant business corporations illegitimate authority. As a
result, a minority directing giant corporations privileged by
illegitimate authority and backed by police, courts and the
military, define the public good, deny people our human and
constitutional rights, dictate to our communities, and govern the
Earth. By What Authority is an unabashed assertion of the right of
the sovereign people to govern themselves. A publication of the
Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy.
POCLAD is a project of the nonprofit Council on International and
Public Affairs.
POCLAD Karen Coulter, OR
P.O. Box 246, So. Yarmouth Greg Coleridge, OH
Massachusetts 02664-0246 Mike Ferner, OH
Phone: (508) 398-1145 Richard Grossman, NH
FAX: (508) 398-1552 Dave Henson, CA
E-mail: people@poclad.org Peter Kellman, ME
Website: www.poclad.org Ward Morehouse, NY
Jane Anne Morris, WI
Jim Price, AL
Virginia Rasmussen, MA
Mary Zepernick, MA
***
Bill Bachle, London, UK
Back to Articles
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/demStruggle.html (hypertext)
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/demStruggle.txt (text only)
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/demStruggle.pdf (print-ready)