February 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Challenging Corporate Power and Asserting the People's Rights

Virginia Rasmussen and Mary Zepernick administer POCLAD and co-chair the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's campaign leadership team; for information, call 508/398-1145 or Email people@poclad.org. WILPF's study group curriculum and the organizing packet to Abolish Corporate Personhood are available from WILPF, 1213 Race St., Philadelphia PA 19107 for $15 and $10 respectively, or you can download it from www.wilpf.org. POCLAD's website is www.poclad.org. Its recently published collection of articles, speeches and commentary, "Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy: A Book of History and Strategy," is available from for $20.95 from The APEX Press, POB 337, Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520; 800/316-2739.

"The movements which deal with single issues or single solutions are bound to fail because they cannot control effects while leaving causes in place," wrote Wendell Berry over a year ago in an essay titled "In Distrust of Movements."

Reframing Activism at the Roots

We are longtime activists for environmental health, racial and gender justice, economic equity, and disarmament. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), an 87-year-old, multi-issue organization, has been our primary organization, with its principled history, international sisterhood, and strong community on Cape Cod where we live.

Independence Mall, Washington, DC, July 1998, Middle Passage Pilgrimage. Photo: Skip Schiel

In the past decade, despite plenty to work on and stalwart colleagues to work with, we increasingly asked ourselves why so many good efforts on issue after issue had basically come to naught. We were ripe for a new framework that made sense of our questions, even (or especially) if it didn't provide a "quick fix." So it was our good fortune to encounter the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy in 1995. POCLAD was just forming, with a mission to "instigate democratic conversations and actions that contest the authority of corporations to govern."

Corporations govern? Reading and grappling with the hidden history of people and corporations, we learned how the corporate form has accumulated over
decades and centuries the power to define our values and culture; make basic decisions about production, investment, and work; raid our treasury and despoil our health and environment; create the regulatory system and draft the laws that perpetuate the rule of the many by the few. All this with the complicity of the Constitution and the "rule of law," greatly enhanced by the 1886 Supreme Court gift to the corporate form of legal personhood under the 14th Amendment. Corporate "persons" used this illegitimate status to gain Bill of Rights freedoms and protections, entering our electoral and governing processes well before indigenous peoples, women, African Americans, and other persons of color, well before most people without property.

We shared this perspective in an overflow WILPF Congress workshop six years ago. A committee formed and a fruitful collaboration was born between WILPF and POCLAD--the one a community-based membership organization, the other a collection of 12 people uncovering the history of property's rule and learning to reframe single issues in the context of fundamental authority rather than symptoms and behavior.

Going Grassroots with the Framework

In 1999 WILPF launched a national campaign to Challenge Corporate Power, Assert the People's Rights, taking
POCLAD's research and analysis into community-based democratic conversations and actions. The first phase of the campaign was a rigorous, ten-session study group curriculum, designed by a leadership team that has expanded to nine WILPF members and staff.

An early task was to persuade busy activists that, as Paulo Freire demonstrated in his popular education model, study and action are inseparable. As word has spread about this opportunity for deep and sustained political discussion, dozens of study groups have been conducted and many continue to be formed--by WILPF members and branches and in coalition with other organizations, like Greens, the Alliance for Democracy, Unitarian-Universalists, local groups, and people on POCLAD's mailing list.

Study group participants read about and discuss the subordinate relationship of the corporate form in early US history, and the evolving and ultimately successful efforts of corporate operatives to shed constraints on their power and authority. The curriculum includes sessions on corporate globalization; property, profit & power; workers' struggles; corporate personhood; and democracy as "solution."

Participants learn how struggles that came before us, like the powerful Populist Movement with its visionary program, were ultimately thwarted by co-optation or by entangling regulatory processes. They discover that the first regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was virtually created by railroad barons, who were assured by President Cleveland's attorney general that it would be "a sort of barrier between you and the people."

When nonviolent measures have been deemed an inadequate barrier, the full weight of state power--from the sheriff and police to the military and Pinkertons--has come down on those perceived to threaten property's rule. In the 1786 Shays Rebellion, Massachusetts militia fought veterans and farmers seeking debt relief; in 1886 police fired on striking workers in Chicago's Haymarket Square; in 1932 General Douglas MacArthur led troops against veterans in the Bonus Army march on Washington, DC. Indeed, activists in Washington, DC, Seattle,
Prague, and Quebec have experienced such power when they shined a spotlight on the mechanisms and machinations of the minority writing rules that govern the majority.

Making It Real with Local Campaigns

Once there were enough study groups to provide a base for further action, WILPF's leadership team created an organizing packet for designing local campaigns to Abolish Corporate Personhood. We launched this phase of our work at a late September gathering of 125 people in Santa Cruz, California. The rich engagement of community activists made it clear that building a democracy movement which demands the authority of self-governance is the road to genuine security, justice, and peace.

The packet provides historical background on corporate personhood; suggestions for implementing the campaign; a Matt Wuerker cartoon; two songs and a "melodrama"; examples of what we gain by abolishing corporations' rights as "legal persons"; and sample resolutions for organizations and municipalities. The pamphlet "Santa Clara Blues" by William Meyers tells the story of the Supreme Court's decision to give corporations 14th Amendment protections--the open door to "rights" that are a fundamental barrier to democratic control of our institutions and arrangements. Also included will be the process of Point Arena, California, residents who achieved a city council resolution against corporate rights of persons.

The WILPF campaign leadership team and the POCLAD core of 12 see the evolution and nurturing of our own democratic processes as central to this work. Sharing ideas and resources, our collaboration is contributing to an ever-widening circle of organizations and organizers, researchers and writers, teachers, artists, and lawyers engaging in the struggle to make corporations subordinate to a people in charge.

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