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Protecting the Rights of People & Nature From the Local Up
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Special Edition Honoring the Life
of Jane Anne Morris
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Hi,
The movement to dismantle corporate rule has lost one of its giants –
Jane Anne Morris
– who died on May 28th in Madison, Wisconsin of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.
She was one of the principal members of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (
POCLAD.org
), a think tank of about a dozen wise individuals who came together in the early 1990's to try to
better understand why all of our activism against corporations causing harm to people and nature
was so unbelievably ineffective.
Over a number of years, she was one of the primary researchers, writers and workshop leaders in POCLAD, sharing - with whomever would listen - what they were discovering about the
deeply embedded structures of law
that grant a wide variety of so-called constitutional "rights" to corporations (almost entirely via the US Supreme Court), and how the state legislatures then use these court rulings to further embed corporate "rights" into state laws in such a way as to
make it literally illegal for local governments to pass laws that protect the health, safety and welfare of people and nature
locally.
In the mid-1990's, I attended at least a half a dozen of POCLAD's training weekends - "Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy" - and Jane Anne was by far my favorite teacher. She had an extraordinary sense of humor that allowed the rage she carried about our troubled world to be focused in a way that drove her points home and made them much easier to understand and remember. And from these many weekends, I gradually developed my own
weekend training
which I lead to this very day.
In later years,
Jane Anne Morris was instrumental in creating the curriculum
that Thomas Linzey's public interest law firm - Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (
CELDF.org
) - uses for their
Democracy School
weekend sessions, and she was one of their first trainers as well.
Years later, I tried to coax Jane Anne to come back into a leadership role in this work, in a failed attempt to create a new organization. A few years after that, I finally succeeded in
co-founding Community Rights US
in the Fall of 2017, and Jane Anne continued to be one of the people I reached out to periodically when I needed a dose of common sense, still delivered with that wry sense of humor.
Over the past few months, I met numerous times with Jane Anne, after she was already fully incapacitated by her disease, convincing her that her
vertical files and audio tapes would be of tremendous value
to our movement's continuing work. Community Rights US is now the proud depository for many boxes of these resources, which we will be doing our best to
make available to writers and researchers
over this coming year. Oh my will Jane Anne be missed!
And here's a 26-minute C-Span
video
of a talk she gave at a conference in Texas.
And finally, to truly understand the breadth and depth of this remarkable woman's creative work, check out her website,
DemocracyThemePark.org
which includes a lovely short biography of her life
HERE
.
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Onward.
Paul Cienfuegos
Founding Director,
PS. Remember that CRUS is soliciting
donations
and
volunteers
in order to support our important work, and my new
Patreon page
is up and running! In exchange for your support at different levels, you can receive my new book, video conference Q&A sessions, and other goodies.
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Additional Tributes to Jane Anne Morris
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Over this past month, Community Rights US has reached out to numerous friends and colleagues of Jane Anne's, requesting short statements for us to share with the wider public. Here is a sampling of what we've received thus far. To view everyone's tributes, click
HERE
. And
if you would like to add your tribute, please
email
us.
It's not too late!
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Jane Anne Morris described herself as a corporate anthropologist. This was not meant to suggest she worked on behalf of corporations. Quite the contrary;
she used her
anthropological skills to study how corporate power was exercised to thwart democratic and popular movements
to protest militarism, environmental pollution and human rights abuses.
I have followed Jane's career as an anthropological activist from her community organizing against lignite mining in Texas, her international solidarity work with the
Colombia Support Network
in Madison, Wisconsin and her work to educate the public about the environmental hazards of metallic sulfide mining in Wisconsin.
Jane Anne was a dedicated researcher who
exposed the hidden mechanisms of corporate power
and how ordinary citizens could exercise greater control over their resources, communities and environment. Her 1999 book,
Not in My Backyard: The Handbook
was a step-by-step manual for
citizen empowerment
against abusive corporate power...
...Jane Anne's life and commitment to empowering people to
resist abusive corporate power and reassert control
over their lives and communities is an inspiring model of the scholar-activist.
Read Al's full tribute
HERE
.
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I only met Jane Anne briefly a couple times but am familiar with her great essays, filled with right-on, succinct "acid humor". She was a
brilliant thinker and analyst
of our messed-up capitalist political, economic and regulatory system. She is one of the few (only?) people I've read who nailed the core reasons for our environmental regulatory failures right on the head.
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I first met Jane Anne Morris soon after moving back to Madison in 2004 following my early retirement from the Chicago Public Library. We quickly gravitated together out of
shared environmental concerns
, a passing interest in the Green Party (and much shared disenchantment with what it was devolving into), a shared disgust with the entire capitalist political and economic system in the United States, and dismay over the degeneration of most of what passed for the American "left."
...I will always treasure having had the privilege of knowing this great radical thinker and activist:
THE ROSA LUXEMBURG OF THE RADICAL WING OF THE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT.
David Williams
, retired reference librarian at Chicago Public library, activist for fifty+ years; coordinator of the Peregrine Forum, and a member of the Madison IWW since 2004
Read David's full tribute
HERE
.
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More than 15 years ago, when Jan Edwards and I were doing corporate personhood talks around the country using a 17-foot long
timeline
,
we
were invited to Madison, Wisconsin and Jane Anne was able to come. We were eager to get her feedback because, after all, she and the rest of the POCLAD were our primary mentors.
At the end of the talk, Jan and I sat down with her and I'll never forget the first words she said: "You know too much." She coached us on the
value of staying focused
on what points we wanted people to hear because the whole message could so easily be overwhelming for people to take in.
Jane Anne's advice has come back to me many times in the years since, in writing, public speaking, and individual coaching. Whenever I start to see someone glaze over, in my head I hear, "You know too much."
The work is to communicate with the person or people right here, right now
— and stop when they're saturated. It's made me much more skillful, effective, and self-aware. I'm grateful for an opportunity to thank her now for her contribution to my life!
Molly Morgan
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What a tremendous loss.
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Recently I was asked to collaborate in the creation of a Jane Anne Morris Wikipedia page. I enthusiastically thought it was a great idea, and was surprised one didn't exist already. I saw it as a great opportunity for myself and others to go
deeper into learning about the Community Rights strategy and movement.
Jane Anne had front line experience fighting corporate power in this illegitimate system of law we live under. And one of her greatest gifts was being able to stand back and admit the mistakes she made in her role as a conventional activist, improve on them, and through her work help others improve on their own mistakes.
What citizen wanting a better world for their children and grandchildren, I thought, couldn't benefit from this exceptional woman's work?
1. Why We Research Corporate Law (1998)
"When people say that corporations are running the country (and the world), they mean the corporations have used their power to take over the role of governing that in a democracy belongs to the people.
"
But much current activism involves efforts to adjust corporate behavior without having to reduce corporate power.
Adding a chemical to a list, taking a bird off a list, writing more letters to the Forest Service, putting a labor representative on a task force, or asking a corporation to employ more minorities in its quest to plunder the planet and enslave its inhabitants while enriching the fortunes of a few--will not alter the dominant governance role of corporations."
"Corporations are not natural entities, like karner blue butterflies or white pines. Corporations are artificial creations that are set up by state corporations codes. These state laws, plus a bunch of court cases, form the basis for the notion that corporations have powers and 'rights.'
"This law is Defining Law. This law is the script that corporate lawyers write for corporations. This law is the law that we don't even read."
"No referendum was ever held on whether corporations should have the natural rights of human persons. No legislature ever passed a bill giving corporations such rights.
"If they [the people] want corporations to be treated as humans are treated, if they want to grant corporations this large degree of emancipation from state regulation, they should say so. The Constitution provides a method by which they may do so. We should not do it for them through the guise of interpretation."
This was a difficult task, and I knew it would be.
Every other paragraph that Jane Anne Morris has written in these essays is quotable. The writing and content is just that good.
My hope is readers will sit down in a quiet room with one of her essays, preferably one that is printed on actual paper in a book, and slowly take in what she is saying. And I'd be willing to bet it would be difficult to stop with just one, at least it was for me.
Curt Hubatch, CRUS Media Team Leader
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Reflections on Community Rights
from Rural America
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Tiny Town Heroes Pay Our Support Forward
by Curt Hubatch
Reflections on Community Rights from Rural America is a monthly column by CR activist and organizer Curt Hubatch.
Curt runs the CRUS newsfeed homepage and is an unschooling father of two young children and one young adult. Currently he works as a substitute rural letter carrier for the USPS. He lives in a cordwood house that he built with his family and friends in Northwestern Wisconsin.
I have this Community Rights collaborator in Texas. It's a pretty serious collaboration. For instance, two years ago, while holding a We the People 2.0 (The first documentary ever on Community Rights movement) showing at the St. Marys Catholic church in Minong, Wisconsin, she showed up on a whim. I've helped organize a few of these events, and promotion to assure good attendance from local community members for an event like this can be a challenge. My collaborator came from Texas! She's fond of saying, "Everything moves in the face of commitment." She's serious about that.
Recently she contacted me with an idea. She said let's send postcards of support to the people of Grant Township, Pennsylvania, and ask others to do the same. A few days later we were promoting the "Send One Ask One" postcard campaign to friends and family on and off the internet. The idea is to send a postcard of your own and ask another to do the same, the person you asked will then do the same, until we send 100 postcards or more!
You might ask with all the injustices and ugliness in the world, why have we chosen to support Grant Township? I want to pull an Edward Abbey here, and simply ask, "why not?" But I'll be a bit more specific with our intentions. Our intention is to support a democratic majority in Grant Township that are clearly and coherently exercising their inalienable Right to Local Community Self-Government to protect themselves and their water.
The people of Grant are faced with a corporate harm that may poison their water table for generations. To say it another way, it'll turn their township into a toxic waste dump. Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) wants to inject waste water from the fracking process into an abandoned well for a decade or more. We think the mindset and strategy the people of Grant are putting into action are what thousands of municipalities across the nation must do if we are to survive in this form of democracy and for America to remain the land of the free.
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Essential CR News from the Web
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Want the latest News & Analysis from and about the Community Rights Movement?
CLICK HERE
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"Hidden in Plain Sight" Exhibit
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We have produced a captioned photography exhibit titled, “
Hidden in Plain Sight
”, exploring the myriad of ways that business corporations exercise their constitutional “rights” everywhere under our very noses.
Pictured here, you too can celebrate “National Small Business Week”
at Staples – the multinational corporation with 1200 stores
in the US alone. It also owns Corporate Express Inc, one of the world’s largest office supply wholesalers. In 2017, Staples Corp was bought by Sycamore Partners for $6.9 billion.
Small business indeed!
YOU could host this exhibit in your own community’s library or community center or coffeehouse or gallery or college campus.
It has already appeared in numerous communities in Iowa, Wisconsin, California and Oregon. Find out more
HERE.
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Want to help further the work of Community Rights US?
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Please also forward this to family, friends, and colleagues who may be interested. Thanks!
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