POCLAD Article
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Reflections on Richard Grossman
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By Members of POCLAD
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The following reflections are from Richard's POCLAD colleagues. Though he left POCLAD a number of years ago to pursue other interests, his influence on the formation and nurturing of our collective was profound during his tenure. As the reflections suggest, his influence extended to our own thoughts and feelings for the world around us and for our democratic possibilities.
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Gladly, we know his influence for thinking and doing for real change with passion and compassion extended far beyond our POCLAD circle. May these reflections spark your own memories of Richard's influence on you and your work if your paths ever crossed. If not, may they stir your commitment to knowing more about him, his ideas and his sense of how to move in the direction of authentic self-governance.
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I will always remember Richard as my life-changing activist mentor.
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Richard was a true visionary shaking the foundations of the U.S. corporate capitalist mythology that economic "progress" is good no matter whose sweat and blood it exploits or how much of the Earth is destroyed for such greedy short-sighted hubris.
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Richard exposed the fundamental revisionist his-story that has enabled people in this country to be comfortable and patriotic in their ignorance and the system to go on ticking its time bomb toward inevitable global catastrophic collapse, which we now see in ongoing global financial meltdowns, Nationalist martial law-life-theft of our civil rights through racist immigrant bashing and "War on Terror" propaganda, and the all-encompassing climate chaos from unsustainable fossil fuel production and consumption.
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Richard excelled at perceiving the wealthy elite political agenda behind the "invisible hand of the market" and called compellingly for getting to the roots of the problem like a true radical - by ending corporate personhood and corporate rule through a mass people's movement, amending of the U.S. Constitution and real democratic self governance.
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Fortunately, Richard lived long enough to see the vast ripple effect of our collective POCLAD our-storical research and thinking and the beginnings of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement across the world. He lives on through our continued focused, strategic, and passionate revolutionary activism.
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- Karen Coulter
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I first met Richard in a group called Communities Concerned about Corporations. (The director was an activist/environmentalist and film producer named Chris Bedford who ironically just died in June of this year).
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The group ran from March 1991 to Dec. 1995 when Chris left and Richard and I went on to begin organizing POCLAD. Peter Montague (author, activist, publisher of Rachel's Weekly was an active collaborator. It was a large and loose-knit group -- a five year attempt to form a coalition of communities, workers, injured workers and investors affected by the oil and chemical industries to engage in two party bargaining with the individual corporations in the industry. (I was a member--along with other CIPA workers including David Dembo--of a PACE union local: the Paper, Atomic, Chemical and Electrical workers.)
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Richard came to Communities Concerned from a long background of activism, most recently some 20 years in the anti-nuclear movement where he learned hard lessons about head banging against specific corporations. We made common cause as I was learning those same lessons from my then ten-year struggle against the corporate criminals responsible for the Bhopal tragedy.
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One of our projects together was a Nov. 1994 letter that Richard, Peter Montague and I wrote to the leaders of the 15 largest environmental organizations --also signed by some 400 environmental activists-- asking these leaders to meet with us to talk about the threat of corporations to the entire environmental movement. Mike Ferner wrote about this letter in his blog and you can see it (well worth reading as part of Richard's legacy) on this link: mikeferner.org/activists-should-focus-on-corporations
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Richard and I also worked together on the follow-up of the world's worst industrial disaster, in Bhopal, India, held in November 1994 in Charleston, West Virginia (where Union Carbide had a plant). The "merger" of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical brought home to us that this, like other corporate crimes, was far bigger than the guilty corporation(s). Communities Concerned About Corporations and CIPA (Council on International and Public Affairs) co-sponsored this project. From there Richard and I decided to start doing Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy retreats under the banner of POCLAD. We held some of our first retreats in Pennsylvania with Tom Lindsey, and in Chicago and California among other places.
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Richard became my close friend and close colleague. We visited with each other's families. I once lent him a hand in completing one of his research projects by undertaking the electrical work required to finish the remodeling of his new residence in an old New England farmhouse. We canoed together with his daughter. Our relationship was also nurtured by a mishap in the St. Croix River on the international boundary between Maine and New Brunswick. My canoe buckled in the rapids, trapping me until Richard returned with help.
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Others were of course involved in working with Richard in those early days, most notably Mary Zepernick.
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We had many discussions together that were rich and exciting. But Richard's patience was not unlimited and he called more than one spade a vehicle for misguided effort. He had his own very strong views. I was, in fact, even when I disagreed with him, greatly influenced by Richard's seminal thinking about building a truly democratic society.
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I was deeply saddened when he concluded some years back that POCLAD was no longer the vehicle with which he wanted to do his work in the world. I missed him. Richard was always seeking a better way. Even as he saw the Occupy movement grow shortly before his death, he was offering them his advice for moving forward. He died as he lived, telling us how to change the world in his own way.
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Ward Morehouse
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My first meeting with Richard Grossman was on a radio show in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he then lived. In subsequent conversations, I was intrigued by Richard's analysis of corporate power, while he was considerably less so by my views on patriarchy. Over the next several years Richard assembled a group of colleagues and protegees from around the country to wrestle with the history and law underpinning the corporate form's accumulated authority to govern. Thus was born the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy. Richard's towering intellect, along with his personal thoughtfulness and sharp wit, informed POCLAD's gatherings and work - and those of other organizations who were inspired by him. My favorite memory of Richard's humanity is the break during a POCLAD retreat when I needed to take my sick cat to the vet. Richard came along because; "No one should go to the hospital alone."
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Richard is the most complex person I've known: a mixture of compassion and fierce judgment; visionary ideas and impatience with the slow pace of change in progressives' patterns of thinking and thus acting - POCLAD's sometimes included. I am profoundly grateful to have known, worked with, and been inspired by Richard Grossman and will continue on with his voice in my ear.
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Mary Zepernick
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For those who knew Richard less well Richard was a direct and profound inspiration for thousands of activists and people of conscience. Through his writings and the organizations he founded co-founded, including in the mid-1980's the Highlander Center's STP Program ("Stop the Pollution, Save the Planet"), in 1994 the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD), and in 2007 the "Democracy Schools", Richard has helped lead tens of thousands more people to a clearer historical, cultural and legal analysis of the structural causes of -- and potential remedies to -- persistent social and economic disparity in power and wealth between We The People and the political and economic institutions the People are meant to govern.
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Richard was one of the true mentors of my life: a close friend for many years, and advisor, and a sparing partner over ideas and methods. In the movement, Richard was an intentional provocateur, an agitator, a relentless critic of everyone's politic and political strategies, and a serious grump. He was also an incredibly soft, sensitive, caring and passionate man. His humor was as quick and sharp as his critique. He deeply loved life and nature. I don't think I've known so well any other more intellectually stimulating and challenging a person.
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Richard has repeatedly been one of the major influences on my own life's work. I met Richard in 1985 through Josh Karliner when Richard was an early advisor to EPOCA (the Environmental Project on Central America), where Josh and I worked from 1985 to 1990. Richard was then a primary champion of the next major activist project I took on with two other of my former EPOCA colleagues, Jane McAlevey and Florence Gardner. The project was the "Environment and Democracy Campaign", a joint project of the Highlander Research and Education Center and the National Toxics Campaign. Richard was very involved with both Highlander and NTC, and he helped Jane, Florence and I negotiate this new collaboration, and was one of our key advisors through the EDC's four years of work. Just when a bunch of us were founding Sowing Circle and OAEC in 1994, Richard invited me to one of the first workshops addressing 'corporations and democracy', and then invited me to join the think tank-like collective he was forming, which became POCLAD. He and the extraordinary people in the POCLAD collective have had profound influence on my thinking, and I believe the historical knowledge and political theory of many others of us at Sowing Circle and OAEC. Recall that for OAEC's first 10 years, we organized and hosted several dozen "Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy" workshops at OAEC and around N. California. So much of the work we do at OAEC has been in part seeded by Richard's work.
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Thank you Richard!
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Richard absolutely loved OAEC, and the people and "non-human persons" (he would say) here on the land. We had many wonderful times -- often late into the night -- sampling the local leafy and liquid herbal remedies, telling stories and making great fun. I know that for Richard, during his visits to OAEC, he felt deeply at home.
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This past couple months I have been thinking a lot of Richard. I hear the direct and indirect influence of Richard Grossman every day in the "Occupy Movement". I'm sure he had quite a critique of everything "occupy", but I know he must have relished in the increasingly widespread conscious dissent he has helped instigate.
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Long Live the Love, Passion and Ideas of Richard Grossman!
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Dave Henson
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Richard was unquestionably the most extraordinary person in my own life and learnings, in how I witnessed the world, understood its history and saw its possibility. The rigor, depth and consistency of his thought, that relentless integrity and steadfast faith in what could be if we held fast, fed the soul as it challenged the mind.
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He brought to the work of bettering our human condition a stunning grasp of the ways the few have always defined those conditions for the many. And he set forth strategies, goals and vision for an activism of democratic language and courage, an activism that sought to rewrite law and culture in service to people and all of us "Earthlings."
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In whatever community of colleagues Richard worked he remained deeply committed to the truths he came to know, yet open to their reexamination, refinement, renewal and reapplication. And all of this was unfailingly joined with his generous, ready measure of respect, warmth, humor, love and appreciation true to situation and feeling.
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There is no doubt that his brilliant, determined labors are shaping, flavoring and giving direction to these times.
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Virginia Rasmussen
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Richard was a mentor, a friend, and a gentle and loving human being. In every conversation and communication with me, he insisted that we challenge long-held assumptions about American history, and that we follow the pursuit of truth wherever it took us.
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Richard not only helped to lay the intellectual groundwork for much of the cutting-edge democracy work occurring in the United States today, he also gave countless hours to people who were grappling with the implications of his writings.
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I was a beneficiary of his wisdom and friendship, and will remain
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forever grateful.
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I love you, Herr Grossman.
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David Cobb
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It is indeed astonishing how stars will align.
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Just yesterday, I sat down to try and put my thoughts of joy, thanks and congratulations for the "occupy" movement respectfully within a historical context that might help explain its ancestry, what it shares, what mighty accomplishments appear possible at this shining moment in time.
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Conditions for writing were perfect. Downed phone lines put off the usual email temptations. But I was stumped for a beginning.
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"In the old days ... What we used to do ... When I was young ... " will rightfully cast any essay into the dark abyss where nothing will be read. So I left the screen blank for later in the day when insights might bubble closer to the surface.
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When I returned, the Internet was back up! Being a fan of Oscar Wilde's motto, "I can resist anything but temptation," I first opened the email, where one subject line caught my attention: "Sad News."
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"Richard Grossman died of cancer last night," it began.
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You may likely be unaware of that name and therefore think the typical rejoinder, "and a bright light was extinguished" would be just so much cliche. But if you will suffer a few paragraphs with me, I believe you'll not only agree about Richard but see how the occupy movement is a fitting continuation of his vision.
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For perhaps the last five years, I've not been able to have a conversation with someone at a demonstration against the war or for health care without hearing someone say something very close to, "Well, you know what's at the bottom of the whole mess -- it's that corporate personhood business!"
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That was Richard Grossman's life's work.
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By the early '90's, Richard had established a considerable body of work as a writer, researcher, intellectual and activist in various branches of the environmental and economic justice movements: nuclear power, toxic pollution of poverty-stricken districts in the rural south, the employment potential of safe energy industries, exploding the myth that environmental protection caused job loss, explaining why environmentalists should make common cause with union members.
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His first article that caught my eye was a one-page essay in some obscure publication, reproduced on a mimeograph machine, in 1976. "Being Right Is Not Enough," was an analysis of the drubbing the electric utility industry and unions gave to a California citizen initiative to restrict nuclear power plants.
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Richard showed how the industry and unions had successfully frightened voters with a host of economic nightmares sure to happen if fuzzyheaded environmentalists got their way. To me, the key of it was that if environmentalists were concerned about pollution in the air and water, how much more should we be concerned about pollution inside the workplaces killing workers every day?
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He made the obvious political point that an alliance among unions and environmentalists would increase each other's political clout. Then 32 years old, he went on to say much more, explaining how the work of environmentalists wasn't just to preserve the environment and that the work of unionists wasn't just to improve wages and conditions, but how both were somehow working for something more fundamental, something simply described as "a better world."
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