A good many socially minded Americans have invested some energy working in opposition to one corporation or another. Perhaps it is to curb a potential abuse or bring about some remedy for past harms: to clean up a toxic waste site, to stop a harmful mining operation, or to prevent road building or logging in an old growth forest. If the campaign succeeds there’s good cause for happy, hopeful celebration. Yet, after the immediate elation passes, so many other issues seem to say nothing has really changed. The essential powers granted to corporations that allow them to ravage public lands, to pollute the air, land and water, to privatize and plunder publicly held resources, remain solidly entrenched beyond the control of the people. We spin our wheels, dissipating our common pool of energy battling a host of staggering abuses one by one.With each new generation, we seem to move further away from the memory that human society created corporations to serve human needs. They were granted specific rights and privileges, for a limited time, corresponding to the purposes for which they were created. In other words, the people defined the existence of corporations, not the other way around. Members of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) have authored a collection of essays, manifestos and letters entitled Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy, to revive the lost awareness of the fundamental constitutional authority of “natural persons” over corporate economic enterprises. [more]
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