Oldie but Goodie: How Corporate Personhood Threatens Democracy

from POCLAD:



How Corporate Personhood Threatens Democracy
By Kimberly French

Originally Published: UU World XVII:3 (May/June 2003) www.uuworld.org


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Wearing a garland of flowers, Ward Morehouse rose to address the thousands gathered in a sunny park in Bhopal, India, on the tenth anniversary of the worst industrial accident in history. In December 1984 a huge chemical leak at the Union Carbide pesticide factory there had killed more than 15,000 people and injured hundreds of thousands. To this day, the company has never been prosecuted for its negligence and the suffering it caused.

The tall, white-skinned Morehouse, the only non-Indian invited to speak at the 1994 commemoration, pledged in Hindi and in English never to let the world forget "the Hiroshima of the chemical industry." Many of his fellow marchers carried stone slabs inscribed with the names of loved ones. Along the demonstration route, art by children orphaned in the disaster showed people screaming, bodies lying on the street, Uncle Sam holding out a bag of money. On reaching the shut-down factory, the crowd turned to Morehouse, an American, to ignite a ten-foot papier-mâché effigy of the U.S. company's chairman, Warren Anderson, in a symbolic sanctification of those profaned grounds.

For many Bhopalis, Morehouse is a folk hero—the person who has carried the torch of their struggle out of India and into an international network of activism. For activists around the world, he is a high-energy éminence grise for the social justice cause and a deep thinker about the roots of the world's ills. And for the past decade Morehouse, a third-generation Unitarian Universalist who lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts, has been breaking ground for a new citizens' movement pushing for a tectonic shift in the political-economic landscape—a movement to wrest away the staggering power that global corporations have over individuals' lives and replace it with true democracy.

After four decades battling the abuse of power in the world, Morehouse realized that the methods of social justice activists—the tactics he had used his entire career—were not working and never would. In his view, those who seek to change the world must now focus on one radical goal: to legally redefine the role of corporations in our society and drastically limit the wealth and power they are allowed to amass. In the past decade he has become one of the pioneering theorists and principal activists in this new movement.

But that is not the way Morehouse would tell his story. Never one to seek the spotlight, the seventy-four-year-old activist scarcely talks about his own accomplishments. Instead, he prefers to praise the colleagues and organizations with whom he works. Or, with erudition and practicality, he turns the conversation to the democratic principles to which he has committed his life. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.poclad.org/articles/french01.html

all presidents of the later years that is.

Msongs

:kick:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0101-07.htm

an interview.
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/01/int05004.html