Remembering his work and life – Richard Grossman said: “.. corporations don’t have rights. Rights are for people. Corporations only have privileges, and only those that we the people bestow on them.” In a nutshell that was the essence of his research and teaching.
Grossman said that we need to remember that the American revolution was fought less against the King but against the crown corporations, the Hudsons Bay and East India Corporations. In his work with POCLAD, the Project on Corporations, Law and Democracy and CELDF, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund he drove home the point that corporations are chartered by sovereign people. He said that based on that sovereignty people have the right to take that charter away and revoke corporate person-hood.
His lasting legacy are the Democracy Schools that continue to be taught across the country, and a pamphlet: Taking Care of Business, that describes the process of de-chartering corporations. <http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoB.html>
Two important projects that Richard Grossman initiated in the last months of his life do not receive enough notice. He presented, at the August 2011 Green Fest in New York City, the draft of a law to not just regulate or limit the practice of Fracking but to formally criminalize the procedure in an amendment to the penal code. And he formalized as draft, just 4 weeks before he died in 2011, an Act To Criminalize Chartered, Incorporated Business Entities as a class. <http://www.tucradio.org/GrossmanActToCriminalize.html>
If he were alive today to witness the ever magnified acts of corporations in drug overdose deaths, food, soil and water poisoning, mining, preventing action on climate change and control of all phases of the democratic process he would have finalized that draft. As the folk singer Utah Phillip said: “The earth is not dying, she is being killed. And those who are killing her have addresses and names.”
Richard Grossman was recorded by Maria Gilardin in Washington DC on May 11 at the 1996 Teach-In organized by the International Forum on Globalization.
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