One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  Point Arena’s resolution was the first to renounce corporate personhood anywhere in the US, and it doesn’t look like being the last; other cities across the country are currently considering similar moves. Though Bill calls the resolution ‘basically toothless’, it was, as ever, an education tool for a local community who had no idea that corporations were ‘persons’ or why it mattered that they were.

  Jan, who has been rummaging around in a file, hands me a piece of paper.

  ‘Here’s a list we did of what would actually change if we didn’t have corporate personhood,’ she says. ‘We’ turns out to be the venerable campaigning group the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (unfortunate acronym: WILPF), founded in the early twentieth century to campaign for women’s rights, whose US branch has adopted the abolition of corporate personhood as one of its national campaigns. WILPF is mobilising to get fifty cities in the US to adopt resolutions like Point Arena’s by 2005, and to make corporate personhood an issue in the 2004 presidential election; though Osama bin Laden may have scuppered any chances of getting it on to the national agenda for a while.

  Revoking corporate personhood, claims Jan’s list, would allow local, state and federal government to do things which corporations currently claim are a violation of their constitutional rights. Prohibit political activity by business, for example; revoke corporate charters by popular referendum; allow government agencies to inspect corporate premises with no notice; ban advertising for dangerous products like guns or cigarettes (currently protected as ‘free speech’); prevent damaging mergers or limit the size and scope of corporations. The potential, she says, is enormous.

  And Jan is an optimist. She has spent the last few years researching corporate personhood in depth (I’ve seen enough to know that it’s one of those issues that turns people into obsessives once it gets hold of them). She’s read court cases, dissected the constitution, written essays, compiled histories; and she thinks the battle to remove corporate personhood, though it will be a long one, is winnable. It exists at all, she points out, because of a string of Supreme Court judges’ interpretations of the constitution. But it was another Supreme Court interpretation of the same constitution that decided women couldn’t vote; another again that decided racial segregation was constitutional. Both were overturned as a result of mass popular campaigns, says Jan; this could be too.

  ‘It would make a difference,’ she says. ‘It just would. OK, we have international laws, too; WTO agreements, NAFTA, and all of these enshrine corporate power as well. But if it can start to be rolled back in the USA, which in many ways is the home of the modern corporation, then that starts something incredibly important. Sure, all we’ve done here in one sense is pass this little local resolution. But everything starts somewhere. I like to see Point Arena as a weak point in the shell of corporate America; a crack that we can start to lever open. Anarchism begins at home!’ She grins, widely. ‘Help yourself to another cookie.’

  If Point Arena – and Humboldt County, and Boulder – really are weak points in the armour of corporate America, they are not the only ones. In fact, the chinks seem to be growing more numerous. In the few weeks I spent in the US, I found a few others myself. In Santa Cruz, another Californian coastal town, this time south of San Francisco, I met Lois Robins, a determined woman in her seventies who has gathered together another group of optimists to try to change state law. I sat in on a meeting in her living room, in which a handful of locals were discussing a plan to introduce a new law to crack down on corporate crime. They had cheekily stolen their language from the plague of right-wing politicians who, in recent years, have popularised the idea of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ laws for criminals – get caught committing the same crime three times and you go away for life, or something similarly over the top. Lois and her gang want a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ law for corporate crime.

  Under their proposed law, if a corporation based in California commits a ‘major violation of the law’ three times in a ten-year period, then its charter will be revoked, and it will be closed down. It strikes me that if such a law had been in existence in Texas, Enron would have probably been shut down a long time ago. Corporate crime, explained Lois, costs the public far more than individual crime, and is far less likely ever to be punished. ‘If you get stopped by a cop,’ said one of her co-conspirators, Len, to me, ‘he can radio in your name and licence plate and get details of everything you’ve done down to the last traffic violation. But if some corporation is spilling toxins into the bay and you want to find out if they’ve ever done it before, you have to go rooting through file drawers for months. There’s no database of corporate crimes, and very little monitoring. They have the legal advantages of people without the legal responsibilities.’

  Lois, Len and Co. will need to gather 175,000 signatures in support of their idea just to get it on to the Californian ballot; for this, says Lois, they will need a lot of money and time, and that’s before they’ve even thought about promoting it. Even if it never happens, though, the concept has inspired others. In Sacramento, California’s state capital, Nancy Price and Ben Sher told me that they liked the idea, even if they weren’t sure of its practicality. Nancy and Ben run the local chapter of the Alliance for Democracy, a national organisation founded in 1996 which describes itself as a ‘new populist movement’ aiming to build popular support for ending ‘the domination of our economy, our government, our culture, our media and the environment by large corporations’.7 There are over thirty chapters around the country, including one in Point Arena run by Jan and Bill. The Alliance for Democracy, like everyone else I met, though focused on American politics and corporations in US life, also sees itself as part of a global movement, and a global trend. Alliance for Democracy representatives were at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002, reporting back on corporations elsewhere and staging debates about reining in corporate power at global level; debates that people like Jeff Milchen and Paul Cienfuegos hope that their fundamental re-think of the relationship between people and corporations can help to influence.

  Nearly 3,000 miles away, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I met Mary Zepernick and Virginia Rasmussen, both of whom work for the organisation that has inspired all the campaigners I met in the USA. POCLAD – the Programme on Corporations, Law and Democracy – is the thinktank that provided much of the intellectual engine-room work that people like Paul Cienfuegos and Jeff Milchen are building upon. Virginia describes part of its work as ‘training the trainers’. Mary sees it as a project to finish the work that the American revolution began: bringing about real democracy. ‘That was the promise,’ she says, ‘but it’s never been realised. POCLAD is about, simply, contesting corporations’ authority to govern: it’s not even anti-corporate.’ All over the US, this ‘democratic conversation’ is going on at ever louder levels.

  I’ve been intrigued, even excited, by a lot of what I’ve seen across the USA. It really does seem possible to at least begin challenging corporate power at a local level, and to engage people in debate about democracy, authority and private power. It’s something that could happen, in different ways, anywhere on Earth. But there are still hard questions to be asked and there are, it seems to me, flaws in this model of campaigning. Most of the laws and resolutions passed so far, for example, are primarily symbolic. Even if they weren’t, how would a corporation react? It would quite probably react to, say, Lois Robins’s Californian ‘three strikes’ initiative by moving its base out of California so as not to get caught. However strong a local law is, it’s not going to be enough in itself. Then there is the international network of trade rules, mostly drawn up under corporate influence, and mostly favouring multinationals. Even without the ‘corporate personhood’ that so many American campaigners are keen to abolish, the WTO, NAFTA and a host of other agreements, official and informal, would still bind America, and the globe, into a corporate free-trade model. Global trade relies on giant corporations. To hem them in would be
to alter that trade model dramatically: a good idea, most of the campaigners seem to agree; but a tough one to implement, and one with wide implications.

  But it also seems to me that all of this, while true, is to miss the point slightly. For the value of everything that Jeff, Paul, Lois, Bill, Doug, Jan, Mary, Virginia and many others all across the USA are doing is not so much in the specific tiny law changes, resolutions, business alliances and all the rest, but in the public discussions that go with them, and the support they build up as they go. As I was told so many times, this is a long-term campaign to delegitimise corporate authority – to build a head of steam that will bring about change. It may or may not work – even if it does, it may become something quite different from what today’s campaigners imagine. One thing does seem certain though: building a popular base will be its keystone. Without popular support, nothing of any significance will change. With it, anything seems possible.

  And who knows: it may happen. It wouldn’t be the first time, for the USA has a hidden but strong populist tradition. The last time it bubbled to the surface and took on corporate power on a national scale was probably in the late nineteenth century, when a ‘Farmers’ Alliance’ movement sprang up across the country, dedicated to destroying industrial and agricultural monopolies, breaking the power of rich financiers in the countryside and bringing democracy back to local level, in a country increasingly dominated by newly empowered corporate ‘persons’. At its height, the Farmers’ Alliance had 1.5 million members, with a parallel organisation, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance, boasting another 2 million African-American farmers committed to an aim that seems almost contemporary: ‘To secure our people from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations.’

  In the 1890s, the Farmers’ Alliance linked up with disenchanted Democrats and others to form the most influential third party in American history – the Populist Party, dedicated to political reform, reining in corporations and protecting farming. In the 1890 elections, the Populists saw dozens of senators and representatives elected; in 1892, their presidential candidate drew over a million votes.8

  The party itself eventually fell apart, but many of its ideas lived – and live – on. Many people I met claimed inspiration from the Populists. If anything like it were to happen again the shock waves, emanating from the world’s economic powerhouse, would surely be global.

  Today, with an American populace apparently persuaded by terrorist attacks and a longing for national unity to draw together behind the most venal corporate administration in decades, such a popular movement against corporate involvement in democracy might seem further away than ever. But it may not be as far as it looks. The initiatives I saw in California and Colorado, for example, are not the only stirrings of local resistance to corporate control across the republic. The harder you look, in fact, the more you see.

  In 1993, the small town of Greenfield, Massachusetts went to the polls to vote against a planned Wal-Mart superstore being built in their town. The man who masterminded the campaign, former journalist Al Norman, has since founded a national movement, Sprawl-Busters, dedicated to empowering communities across the country to prevent mega-retail chains from cannibalising their communities. Over thirty towns have rejected Wal-Marts and other ‘big box’ chains as a result. Carmel and Solvang, two towns in California, have banned all chain restaurants. Palm Beach, Florida, and Santa Cruz, California, have enacted laws limiting chain operations. Plymouth, Massachusetts, prohibits ‘box stores’ from part of the town. And nine entire states have adopted laws prohibiting corporations from engaging in agriculture. There will undoubtedly be more.

  And it’s not all local: increasingly, the discontent is national. In 1999, for example, something remarkable happened. An 89-year-old woman, Doris Haddock – or ‘Granny D’ as she was soon to become known – began a walk across the United States to protest against corporate involvement in politics. Despite her age, her emphysema and her arthritis, the five-foot grandmother trekked 3,200 miles from California to Washington DC to campaign for legislation to get corporate money out of politics. She gave speeches in towns and cities along the way, drawing thousands of people. Congresspeople walked part of the way with her and everywhere, people expressed support for her aims. An ABC News opinion poll, conducted in September 2000, was typical of many others: it found that 63 per cent of Americans believed that ‘large corporations have too much power for the good of the country’.9 When she arrived in Washington, thousands came out to greet her. She told them, as she had told others, that her aim was to ‘defeat utterly those forces of greed and corruption that have come between us and our self-governance’.10

  Corporations, says Granny D, are ‘hogs at the public trough’. Tens of thousands appeared to agree. In March 2001, as Congress debated a controversial bill designed to put an end to at least some of the corporate money that US politics is awash with, Granny D walked continually around the outside of the Capitol building for seven days. Much to the Bush administration’s chagrin, the bill was passed.

  What is fascinating, and peculiarly American, about all of this is that it is based on an appeal to patriotism– to the original ideas of the revolution. Freedom, self-government, liberty and democracy: government by, for and of The People. An appeal like this can, and does, unite right and left, young and old, in a struggle for a new kind of American democracy, based on the best of the democratic spirit of 1776. As it does so, it uses the tools of that democracy – local laws, ballot initiatives and the like – to try to fundamentally alter, or perhaps repair, the relationship between citizens and corporations. To reposition The People as the authority and the corporations as supplicants, rather than, as is so often the case now, the other way around. Could a new populist movement arise in America? If it does, it will surely grow from these seeds, planted in the heartland of corporate rule, and nurtured by its supposed beneficiaries.

  9

  the gathering storm

  ‘First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.’

  MAHATMA GANDHI

  ‘From what we now see, nothing of reform in the political world ought to be held improbable. It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.’

  THOMAS PAINE, 1791

  Wednesday, 12 June 1381 was a sunny day. On Blackheath, an old stretch of common land five miles south-east of medieval London, birds were singing. It was the eve of the feast day of Corpus Christi, and on the grasslands a vast crowd of English peasants was gathered. Some of them were listening to a sermon by a priest named John Ball. Ball was preaching more than the gospels – he was speaking of revolution, advising the assembled masses to ‘get rid of all the Lords, Archbishops, Abbots and Priors’,1 to abolish feudalism and serfdom, to take the lands of Crown and Church and hand them out to the people.

  Around him, peasants from Kent, Essex and beyond were sharpening daggers and stringing bows. There were over 100,000 of them, angry, exhausted and out of patience. These were the peasants, the serfs, the villeins; virtual slaves on the bottom rung of the feudal ladder. Now they had risen up against their masters.

  It was an unprecedented and utterly unexpected revolt. But it was not without reason. For decades the peasants had been held down by laws restricting their wages, extreme punishments for minor crimes, the corruption and greed of Church and gentry and a studied lack of interest in their woes from King and government. The last straw had been a ‘poll tax’ levied on them by a cash-strapped parliament. In May 1381, peasants in Essex began attacking tax collectors. From there, things spiralled rapidly through Kent, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and other counties. Within days, armies of peasants were marching through town and country stringing up lawyers and tax collectors and burning the great houses of clergy and gentry. Together, they began to move towards London.

  By the time the rebels reached the outskirts of the capital they had a lea
der – ‘one Watt Teghler of Maidstone’ – they had weapons and vast numbers, and they had swept all before them. Their initial grievances had developed into a radical analysis of the state they were in – one fed by the revolutionary preachings of John Ball and the self-belief of Watt Tyler. Now they wanted more than tax relief and justice – they wanted an end to serfdom, a breaking-up of the Church, a sweeping shift in social relations and economic organisation.

  Now, on Blackheath, the commons had come for the King. The peasant army was demanding an audience with the newly crowned monarch, Richard II, only fourteen years of age. They had demands to make – and they trusted him to meet them. The rebels, for all their talk of radical change, for all their dislike of grasping gentry and corrupt ministers, trusted their King. The system was rotten, they knew – but the King had the power to restore it. He was appointed by God to be their rightful master. They knew that if they could put their case to him, he would listen, he would see reason – and he would turn the system the right way up again.

  But the King didn’t come. Outraged, the peasants stormed London, breaking through the gates and raining fire on the streets of the walled city. For three days they burned the houses of the rich, invaded churches and legal temples, killed clergy, lawyers, gentry and royal advisers, released prisoners. They dragged the Archbishop of Canterbury from his prayers and beheaded him. Then they surrounded the boy-King and his trembling ministers in the Tower of London and refused to leave until he listened.

  But the mob outside Richard’s palace had come not to bury him but to save him – to save him from corrupt advisers and the mistakes of his ministers, from a system that wasn’t working. They wanted, in the end, not quite revolution but reform. They wanted a better, fairer England, and they trusted their King to deliver it. That was, after all, what feudalism was supposed to be about: the nobility meeting their obligations to the lower orders. That was the deal. They believed that the King would stick to it. It was to be their undoing.