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1. What is POCLAD?
Response: We are a group of 11 people, from a variety of social change movements, who found each other in the mid-1990's asking the same question: "Why, despite decades of good work, do corporate assaults against life and democracy keep increasing?" We wanted to know why so many people had gotten so good at fighting one problem at a time, over and over, but the real power to decide our lives never shifted. We wanted to know why and how corporations gained such immense authority, to the point where they can define our culture, govern our nation and plunder the Earth. This required that we research corporate, labor and legal histories, rethink past organizing strategies, analyze historic popular movements and work with activist organizations to develop effective strategies that assert human rights over property interests. We aren't a membership organization or a coalition of groups. We work with membership organizations, coalitions and individuals to share our research and analysis of "how we got into this mess." We learn from each other as we try to find ways out of it. We try to fulfill the democratic ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. We work in the tradition of people's struggles to replace illegitimate and tyrannical institutions with democratic ones that disperse, rather than concentrate, wealth and power.
2. The kind of "democracy" you recommend is very demanding. How in the world are we going to do that? Don't you have too much trust in the people?
Response: Indeed, the fundamental challenge here is about us, it's not about corporations. We are the ones who have to change, who have to reexamine the meaning of democracy, who have to accept that we have the RIGHT to be self-governing and then DEMAND that we activate the right. We have to explore our own nature and capacities to BE democratic. Then there is the need to learn how to DO democracy, to learn the skills and have opportunities, all of us, in every educational and organizational setting we are a part of, to PRACTICE those skills.3. I don't get it.. Corporations as they now exist deliver almost everything we need and want. How could we manage without them?
Response: We're a pretty amazing species, don't you think? Surely we can design (and have in the past and even in the present) alternative forms in which to produce our basic needs and some of our wants. Admittedly, it's the decision-making processes to get us there that will be the larger challenge.4. But what about the good corporations? The nonprofits that are trying to make things better? Won't we be taking away their rights to shape policy and debate as well?
Response: We'll have to define what the privileges of business/for-profit corporations will be and how those will differ, if they will, from nonprofit corporations. But nothing is simple. Profit-making corporations sponsor plenty of non-profit, shill organizations to do "research" and get out their message. We'll have to decide what privileges/rights/voice associations of citizens will have and should have. Perhaps the rights and responsibilities for democracy rest with individual citizens. Surely people can form groups to educate themselves and one another, but those groups themselves may have no political rights to participate in governing.5. I don't see how We the People can make decisions about our lives and governance any more. Everything is so big. The scale of our institutions, economic and political, is beyond the people's capacity to know what's going on and, therefore, to respond wisely.
Response: This is a very good point to raise. The scale of our governing/decision-making institutions is critical to having anything like democracy. We need to examine carefully where the responsibility for particular decisions about particular policies should rest. The criteria are multiple, to be sure, but a key one is keeping them as "close to home" as possible, as small in scale as possible, so that people can understand them, be able to know what is working and why or why not, and how to reach in and make a well considered change.6. How can we move POCLAD's analysis and vision into our culture when all media is so corporatized and will never let this news/these trends over the airwaves or in the press?
Response: This work is initially one for the grassroots, for people in their communities and then their states. We'll not go far unless we change the culture to a democracy-demanding culture (which is a bottom up process), resulting in changes in law and in ownership patterns, presently and totally antidemocratic. Putting the ownership of OUR airwaves in OUR hands will require VERY large numbers of us settling for nothing less. Until that happens, you're right, we won't hear much about this movement over the corporatized airwaves.