Richard Grossman.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: The Progressive Interview - Co-director of Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy - Interview

I first met Richard Grossman when I was following Ralph Nader on the campaign trail through New England. Grossman lives in New Hampshire, and Nader brought him along on a visit to the state capitol, introducing him to lawmakers as "the preeminent historian of corporations" and a "treasure" right there in their home state.

Grossman co-directs the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, which describes its mission as "instigating democratic conversations and actions that contest the authority of corporations to govern."

The group came together in the early nineties, he says, when a dozen activists who had spent much of their lives working on issues of peace, labor, women's rights, and the environment decided that something more had to be done.

"It's funny, we did not set out to become experts on the corporation," he says. "We set out to try to discover why it is that the activist work of so many good and able people around the country for so many decades had not brought about the kinds of changes that people had been hoping for. Why is it--after so many years of so many groups fighting toxic chemicals and winning, passing laws, and closing dumps, and doing all kinds of good things--that every day more toxic chemicals are produced than the day before? We saw that power was being concentrated even more in corporate boardrooms. The ideal of democracy was moving further out of reach. And by most objective criteria--the wealth gap, public health, the environment, workers' rights--things were getting worse."

In a recent book published by the group, Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy (Apex Press, 2001), Grossman and his colleagues argue that corporate power has grown unchecked. "Following the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, appointed judges gave privilege after privilege to corporations," the book notes. One of the worst cases early on was the 1886 Supreme Court decision Santa Clara Country v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., which ruled that a corporation was a "person" under the Constitution, sheltered by the Fourteenth Amendment. This legal doctrine spawned modern corporations--commercial Frankensteins--with all the rights of real people, and immortality, too. In one stroke, the Court killed future efforts by states and local governments to rein in corporate behavior.

It's time people took back control over corporations, Grossman says. I spoke to him by phone as the Enron debacle was generating front-page news coverage.

Q: Do you think Enron is going to be a mass consciousness-raising exercise? How about Dick Cheney refusing to release the list of corporations that helped shape energy policy because it would have a chilling effect on shaping policy in the future?

Richard Grossman: Who's going to be surprised at Dick Cheney's list of corporate executives who participated in the energy plan? We've seen the plan. We know what it's about, we know whose values are represented there, whose ideas. It's not a big question.

The real issue is that Enron's DNA was to do what it did. Enron basically created a new market that wasn't about goods or services that people need; it was about making money. The executives figured out where they wanted to go, what laws they had to change, how they had to reframe the debate about energy, and then within ten or twelve years they accomplished a huge amount of what they set out to do. And that didn't happen because they were the most brilliant people in the world, but because they had all the tools they needed. Enron took advantage of a process that has been going on for the last 200 years, which made it very easy for them. They could use the law, the regulatory agencies, and the Supreme Court doctrine that money is a form of speech. They...