About POCLAD
Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy

Attention all citizens: Now available individually and collectively for speeches, seminars and residencies are the members of POCLAD.

What is POCLAD? : A Brief Overview
POCLAD is comprised of eleven writers, educators, activists, former elected officials, directors of environmental, labor and human rights organizations, union organizers, and researchers scattered around the country. POCLAD was formed in 1994 with a primary purpose to instigate democratic conversations and actions that contest the authority of corporations to govern and to assert people’s rights over property interests.

POCLAD continues to develop vital research and analysis for the years ahead: reading lists, pamphlets on critical issues, a twice-yearly publication By What Authority, an anthology on corporations and democracy, videos, Power Point presentations, and workshops on strategic engagement. POCLAD helps organizers challenge the mass production and mass marketing of law and culture by artificial entities called corporations. They also assist citizens to understand the role of the US Constitution in preventing authentic self-governance. POCLAD members have spent over a decade researching corporate, constitutional, labor and legal histories, rethinking past organizing strategies and talking with people about democracy movements.

The members work with politically active citizens, historians, lawyers, et al, exploring
a) How fundamental relationships that govern our lives were established (for example, why most corporate harms against life, liberty, property and democratic self-governance are regarded as legal; how corporations can deny their workers freedom of speech and other Bill of Rights protections; how the Constitution protects property over people and the planet);
b) Why decades of valiant citizen resistance, along with regulatory laws galore, have neither stopped corporate assaults nor shifted governing power to people and communities;
c) What is being done across the country to put people in charge of our own governance and the institutions we create.

You can understand the problem by asking these questions:
a-Who is really represented by my elected officials?
b-By what right do corporations dominate our political process?
c-With all of out technical wizardry, why do social and environmental conditions worsen?

Despite generations of conventional citizen activism, the U.S.A. still lacks universal health care, a sustainable resource base, resilient local economies, unpolluted waterways, solar-efficient energy systems, racial justice, workers rights, and other everyday life improvements.

What do POCLAD speakers hope to accomplish in their presentations?
a-Expose the dominant reality that citizens in the USA do not exercise real governing power and the rule of law bars people from getting what they want and need
b-Explore the history behind our current predicament, a corporate empire class empowered to make the rules and a Constitution set up to shield the propertied few from the many.
c-Contest the illegitimate rights of corporations and board members to be in charge of citizens’ lives, time, work, production and culture
d-Engage audience members in discussing if democracy is possible when corporations exercise constitutional rights and wealth and power are concentrated in fewer hands
e-Assert the need to shift to real democracy by changing laws, claiming our rights of self-governance, and strategizing specific ways to assert our right to decide.

Invite one or more of the following POCLAD speakers to address your organization: