What follows are excerpts from a letter Grossman wrote to David Brower last year, explaining why he was sitting out the 1995 conference.
"Environmental lawyers have been processed by law schools and our corporate culture and by the dominant national environmental / conservation / labor groups. Witn few exceptions, people come out of law school without having questioned pro-corporate doctrines on property - future profits are corporate property, the fruits of employees' labor are corporate property, the right to manage is corporate property. They accept today's giant corporations as inevitable. They don't seem to wonder how it came to pass that corporations became legal persons with free speech and other constitutional rights - while workers on company turf have no Bill of Rights protections.
"They do not encourage the rest of us to ask why a sovereign people should permit corporate legal fictions to elect our representatives, write our laws, and lie to the public on vital issues. Environmental and labor lawyers are trained to accept the prevailing assumptions about the law and all the current legal doctrines - and then they train us.
Stacked Deck
"Corporate lawyers, government lawyers, environmental lawyers - all have been funnelling people's time, energy and resources into stacked deck regulatory and administrative law arenas. Once there, even if we "win," we don't win much; and there are few mechanisms we can use to shift rights and powers from corporation to people, communites and nature.
"Most popular struggles - labor, civil rights, environmental - have been taken out of the public's hands. Trade unionists allow their rights as organizers to be defined not by the power they wield but by the National Labor Relations Act. Years of protest by civil rights activists led to federal laws like the Voting Rights Act which are much less than what people had organized and - indeed - died for.
"Decades ago, the American people demanded clean air, clean water, and wild lands preserved as national parks, forests and wilderness areas. Our movement lawyers and corporate lawyers wrote the laws. What did we get? Laws legalizing poisoning air and water, and the legalization of clear cutting. Corporate privilege and immunity was left unchallenged, and power remains in the hands of appointed regulators and administrators insulated from our reach.
Ford & Rockefeller
"Environmental law groups - NRDC, EDF, the Environmental Law Institute, the Conservation Law Foundation, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, were formed 20-30 years ago by young men just out of law school. When these men were students, there was no real 'Critical Legal Studies' movement. As students they were not exposed to even the modest questioning of curriculum and law professor biases which goes on in some law schools today.
"Some of these environmental groups received immediate support and financial backing from powerful philanthropies like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and from law firms which represented large corporations. Today these groups define the legal agenda of environmentalism. They drive much of the environmental movement toward permitting and disclosure laws administered by federal regulatory and administrative agencies.
Sources of Power Over Us
"What we really have to do is take away the sources of corporations' powers over us: withdraw the corporations' sole right to manage, its legal personhood and other special privileges; prohibit corporations from interfering in our elections and in our lawmaking; prohibit any corporation from owning another corporation; ban corporate meddling in policy debates and discussions; ban front corporations; withdraw liability protections from directors, manager and shareholders; revoke the charters of corporations that exceed their authority.
"We should employ the usable assets these corporations have taken from people and the Earth over the past hundred years and start the many investment, work and organizational transitions our communities demand.
"Movement lawyers should take their cues from the activists on the ground. Local organizers should say: 'Such-and-such investment and producton are destructive, uneconomical and wrong, but are protected by law and therefore by government. We will educate and organize to stop these harmdoers.'
"We need lawyers to figure out how we can use the law and the courts to help us, or at least not to block us. Please don't lecture us about what we can't do. Don't come up with legal strategies which enable corporations to hide behind the privileges and immunities which corporations have taken from the people. And please, don't tie our hand."
Richard Grossman and Ward Morehouse gave a presentation on corporations at the Willits Environmental Center on January 25th of this year (see photo on the previous page). The presentation was well attended and a local group concerned about corporate control was born that night. This group continues to meet. You are invited to attend the next meeting where there will be a potluck lunch on Saturday, March 23, at noon at the Willits Environmental Center. Come, bring some food to share, and explore ways we may be able to stop the ruinous corporate domination of our democracy, economy and environment. For more information, call the MEC at 468-1660.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited