POCLAD
Program on corporations, law and democracy
"Contesting the authority of corporations to govern"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 5, 2002

CONTACT:
Elizabeth Goldman (603) 749-2466 <www.poclad.org> POCLAD@aol.com
Mary Zepernick (508) 398-1145 <www.poclad.org> people@poclad.org
Mike Ferner (419) 729-3205 <www.poclad.org> mferner@utoledo.edu

STATE OFFICIALS SHOULD SEIZE ENRON'S ASSETS

Enron Corporation Story Is About Democracy, Not Business, Asserts Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy

State officials have enabled Enron Corporation--and all giant corporations--to usurp the people's right and ability to govern ourselves, charges the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD).

Government officials seized Al Qaeda's assets. POCLAD calls upon attorneys general in every state where Enron Corporation did or does business to seize all Enron's assets.

State governments charter corporations in We the People's names. State legislators, governors, attorneys general and secretaries of state are the men and women who have unleashed more than 3,000 Enron corporate entities upon the land. They've been treating businesses as "legal persons," "corporate citizens," and "corporate constituents." With congress people and judges, they have given corporate managers authority to buy up other corporations and write laws.

Much attention has been focused on insider trading, shredding, and corrupt accountants. But the real work of Enron Corporation's trustees and executives was to use public resources to sell fictions called "derivatives." The real purpose of Enron Corporation remains socially acceptable: redesigning the nation's energy and other policies--ultimately, governing the nation--in order to siphon wealth from community after community.

As is true with all corporations, making policy and laws is "legal." And the corporate executives who drive this work are lionized and rewarded by US culture.

In the Enron Corporation bankruptcy now unfolding, state elected officials must wield the public's authority and clout against giant corporate creditors and their silk-stocking lawyers. If the public's representatives don't act, Enron corporate directors, corporate creditors and their lawyers will use the last two hundred years of corporate constitutional manipulations to waltz off with the Enron plunder.

To stop other Fortune 500 corporations from using this history to govern the country, people need to rewrite corporation laws in all 50 states.

Corporate resistance to democracy is not new. In every generation people have struggled to build democratic institutions, as seen in the following quotations.

from the 1879 California Constitution: ". . . the exercise of the police power of the State shall never be so abridged or construed as to permit corporations to conduct their business in such a manner as to infringe on the rights of individuals or the general well-being of the State." [Article 12, Section 8] . . . "Every private corporation, and every individual or association of individuals owning, operating, managing, or controlling any. . . pipeline, plant or equipment. . . for the production, generation, transmission, delivery or furnishing of heat, light, water or power. . . to or for the public, is hereby declared to be a public utility." [Article 12, Section 23]

from the New Hampshire Constitution: "Free and fair competition in the trades and industries is an inherent and essential right of the people and should be protected against all monopolies and conspiracies which tend to hinder or destroy it. The size and function of all corporations should be so limited and regulated as to prohibit fictitious capitalization." [Article 83, added in 1904; still current]

from the 1873 Minnesota Grangers: "We, the farmers, mechanics and laborers of Minnesota, deem the triumph of the people in this contest with monopolies essential to the perpetuation of our free institutions and the promotion of our private and national prosperity."

POCLAD is a group of organizers, researchers, activists, thinkers, teachers, and former elected officials who have been studying corporations' assault on democracy for more than a decade. POCLAD has run more than 200 "Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy" workshops around the country, lectured at colleges and law schools, addressed hundreds of civic groups, keynoted scores of conferences and published numerous articles and our regular journal By What Authority. Last fall we issued two groundbreaking works, Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy: A Book of History and Strategy, and Building Unions: Past, Present & Future.
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Bill Bachle, London UK
Greg Coleridge, Ohio
Karen Coulter, Oregon
Mike Ferner, Ohio
Richard Grossman, New Hampshire
Dave Henson, California
Peter Kellman, Maine
Jane Anne Morris, Wisconsin
Ward Morehouse, New York
Jim Price, Alabama
Virginia Rasmussen, Massachusetts
Mary Zepernick, Massachusetts