By Joel Bleifuss

Take a step back and consider the madness that afflicts our world. The Earth's last great forests are cut down, entire species of animals and plants are shunted toward extinction, and chemical toxins poison our food and water. Around the world, billions of people endure a wretched life amid social decay. Millions of others, who once prospered, find their livelihoods stripped from them. Some citizens organize, lobby and vote to reverse this downward spiral. But the media, the regulatory agencies and the electoral process are beyond the reach of human reason. They are in the thrall of beings whose power mocks that of mortals.

I am not talking about aliens, but corporations. In 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, granted the rights of natural persons to corporate entities, in a willfully perverse interpretation of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees due process and equal protection under the law to all U.S. citizens. Thus empowered, these fleshless beings have affixed themselves symbiotically to human host organisms: the CEOs and chairmen of the board who are paid millions to manage the labor and resources that fuel the corporate mission. Indeed, these executives are required by law to do their best to increase the profits of the spectral creations that employ them. To that end, they hire lawyers, flacks and lobbyists to ensure that public policy advances the expansion of these seemingly immortal corporate beings.

In recent years, corporations have broken the last vestigial links to the human communities from which they arose. And, in order to evolve into leaner, and meaner, entities capable of competing against their global rivals, modern corporations have begun to shed surplus human labor.

In response, some politicians have embarked on belated and feeble efforts to rein the beast in. Some well-meaning liberals have responded to "downsizing" with calls for tax incentives to encourage corporate responsibility. For example, Sens. Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) have proposed the creation of a special corporate class, the "A-corporations," with the "R" standing for responsible, not rapacious.

Richard Grossman, co-director of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, a Boston-based group, believes these reformers are, at best, deluded. In a February letter to Ralph Nader, Grossman urged the nascent presidential candidate not to support these quarter-measures. "It is so premature, so limited, so diversionary," wrote this neo-abolitionist. "Why shut off debate on logical aspirations, and on fundamental causation? What's to be gained today by granting more incentives to corporate leaders who promise to cause less harm, before citizen anger has had a chance to focus?"

Grossman is helping to focus that anger by outlining ways for people to put "corporate fictions" back under human control. This, he claims, is a simple matter of reasserting the hard-fought constitutional right of citizens to govern themselves. As he put it in a recent interview: "Are we the people? Or are we not?"

Since helping found the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy in 1993, Grossman has stumped through 15 states, sponsoring weekend-long "rethinking the corporation" seminars. "We are looking to define the corporation," says Grossman. "Not regulate it around the edges."

His critique is gaining currency in some legal circles. Last month in Eugene, Ore., Grossman delivered one of the keynote speeches at the 1996 Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, hosted by the University of Oregon Law School.

In his address, Grossman invoked the spirit of Henry Demarest Lloyd. In his 1894 book, Wealth Against Commonwealth, Lloyd—a prominent Progressive-era reformer—wrote: "We are calling upon [those who control corporate] power and property, as mankind called upon kings in their day, to be good and kind, wise and sweet, and we are calling in vain. We are asking them not to be what we have made them to be. We put power into their hands and ask them not to use it as power." That is as true today as it was 100 years ago. Said Grossman, "We have to understand that it's what corporations are designed to do that is the source of their harm." He went on to tell his audience:

We're saying it is illegitimate for corporate fictions to divide and conquer us; to define our labor; control our wealth; demarcate the commons; write our laws; elect our officials; poison our food; indoctrinate our children; use job blackmail and control of information, the press and money to run our local, state and federal governments. . . . We're not suggesting that folks work harder to resist each chemical one at a time; each clear cut one at a time; each mass layoff one at a time; each toxic dump one at a time; each corporate purchase of a law or of an election one at a time. We're advocating citizen authority over the subordinate entity that is the modern, giant, corporation. . . . We are not about bestowing new rewards and incentives upon corporate leaders in order for them to cause a little less harm.

The Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy has put forth a number of possible actions to place corporations under the control of civil society. That list includes:

• Recharter corporations to limit their powers and make them subordinate to the sovereign people.

• Establish worker and/or community control over production units of corporations in order to protect the property rights of workers and communities.

• Initiate referendum campaigns, or take action through legislative bodies—and in the courts—to strip from corporations constitutional rights intended for natural persons.

Grossman says that popular action should begin at the state level, since states have the power to charter corporate operations and regulate corporate actions. Anti-corporate campaigns are already off the ground in Wisconsin, Oregon and Maine.

In Madison, Wis., Jane Anne Morris is helping organize Democracy Unlimited of Wisconsin, a group that is being legally established as a cooperative rather than a not-for-profit corporation. Morris, who holds a Ph.D. in corporate anthropology, says the group is preparing a "people's indictment" against Exxon, which plans to strip-mine a large chunk of central Wisconsin; Monsanto, whose bovine growth hormone threatens the state's dairy industry; and Pepisco, which is heavily invested in Burma's military dictatorship.

Once the indictments are handed down, Democracy Unlimited will seek to revoke the "certificates of authority" that permit these felonious corporations to do business in Wisconsin. The group is exploring ways that Wisconsin can strip corporations of their legal status as persons. For example, Democracy Unlimited might push for an amendment to the state constitution that would read something like this: "In the State of Wisconsin corporations shall not be considered to be constitutional persons." To help realize its agenda, Morris says Democracy Unlimited will "hit the county fairs" this summer, talking to Wisconsinites about how to confront corporate rule.

In eastern Oregon, Karen Coulter co-directs the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project. Currently, she and other environmentalists have set their sights on three timber companies: Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascade and Plum Creek. Such campaigns gain momentum, she says, when people realize that corporations "are not blank entities, but have names and faces behind them who should be held accountable." For example, last April corporate abolitionists converged on George Weyerhaeuser's home in Tacoma, Wash. Coulter recalls that for several hours they partied to tunes like Casey Neill's "Dancing on the Ruins of Multinational Corporations" and then ceremonially revoked Weyerhaeuser's state charter.

Coulter is currently helping organize a May 20 National Day of Action to End Corporate Dominance. Each group participating in the event will target a corporation of its own choosing.

On the other side of the continent, in Maine, the state chapter of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy is working closely with the 2^nd Maine Militia. The militia is the result of Maine novelist Carolyn Chute's first foray into politics. Last Christmas Eve, Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt Maine and Merry Men, published an op-ed article in the Maine Sunday Telegram inviting folks to join her crusade. She wrote, in part:

Many other militias and many individuals blame gays, blacks, Jews, Spanish-speaking folks, welfare mums, illegal drugs, seat belts, schools without prayers, women with shoes, abortions, environmentalists, unseen communist forces and so-called liberals. Meanwhile, the so called liberals blame men with guns, men who whistle and wink at women, women who like whistles and winks, women who like waiting on men, unseatbelted people and what they call "uneducated white trash." The whole of America is squabbling over all these details while huge corporations smilingly take more than 50 percent off the top of the federal budget for subsidies, including outright handouts for researching new business opportunities in other countries where they can exploit foreign workers like they exploit us, all in the name of "free enterprise" and "individual rights." . . . The 2^nd Maine Militia is planning big. . . . This is the true family values militia. We welcome everybody. We hate nobody. . . . We will not listen to any campaign promises except radical reform. . . . We are just a bunch of regular hard-working angry Maine people who are not going to sit around any more like a pen of castrated sheep.

Since that call, the 2^nd Maine Militia has branched into four regional units and begun to act. On March 8, for example, about 125 people went to Augusta and lobbied their legislators to take human rights away from corporations.

Peter Killian, a former labor organizer at International Paper, has been working closely with Chute and Grossman. "We are trying to start a debate on the role of public corporations," he says, "and then take that debate into the summer and into the election and into the next year."

The 2^nd Maine Militia's tent is big enough to hold both Buchanan supporters and Earth Firsters! The trick, says Killian, is to keep to the basic "unifying issue" of corporate power. "It overwhelms everything. It is about the entire culture. It is about the direction of Western civilization. It's about creating a democracy, and we are not going to have a democracy as long as we have corporate rule," he says. "For the first time, I feel that we are really going for the jugular."