With a unified passion and active fervor, Ward Morehouse spoke out against corporate dominance yesterday at the Moritz College of Law.
Morehouse particularly addressed the fight of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy. He co-founded POCLAD to address the rising issue of corporate control over the democratic process.
“There is a struggle of individuals to assert their sovereignty as freestanding citizens for democratic society,” Morehouse said. “We need to grasp understanding of history, and we need to try and examine ways to build a truly democratic society.”
As globalization continues, the concentration of ownership and control of power becomes continually centralized. The largest entities are not nations, but corporations, with accumulating increase in world wealth, he said.
The combined assets of the largest 200 corporations owned 16 percent of global goods in the mid-1960s. This percentage rose to 24 percent in the mid-1980s, and in the mid-1990s, it rose to 32 percent, he said.
“With their constitutional rights, corporations are able to donate money to lobbying and political campaigns,” said Loucile Powers, co-chair of the National Lawyer Guild. “This may be where a potential problem arises that threatens the democratic process of the majority.”
Morehouse also addressed the affects on society’s freedom by the purchasing of mass media outlets by large conglomerates.
“Concentration of ownership and control of mass media is down to five entities that reach across the whole spectrum of communication,” Morehouse said. “These entities spread themselves over an enormous range that feeds into society, and we become consumers and they define our cultural values for us.”
The majority of the problems arising out of corporate dominance are because the government rests in the hands of a few, he said. Morehouse believes democracy is being threatened because fewer people control the most wealth and power in the world.
“Activists push corporations to keep in mind that there is a universe outside of their wealth, and they cannot trample on it,” said secretary of the Ohio Family Farm Coalition Ritchie Layman, who attended the event.
Not all of the audience agreed with Morehouse’s portrayal of corporate control.
“The solution is not to scrap the corporate system but (to) encourage more active participation within the shareholders,” said Justin Finn, first year law student and member of the Student Bar Association. “I think, unlike in politics where if you don’t vote you don’t have a voice, people who aren’t shareholders can vote as consumers. It’s not the concentration of power in government or corporation that is a problem but the concentration of control of that power.”
In response to the opposing views on corporate dominance, Morehouse said he is not anti-corporation but pro-democracy. He said democracy is government for the people and a belief in a practice of social equality.
The problem of corporate dominance arises when their power impedes on social equality, and it often does with corporations that accumulate enormous amounts of wealth because wealth ascertains social and political power, he said.
Some audience members weren’t completely convinced.
“If we have a diffusion of the power, we can have our cake and eat it too, because we have shared power and a global economy without the corporate person as an autonomous entity,” Finn said.
For much of the audience, today’s world stands as a society with corporations and democratic beliefs, but the ideology of corporate dominance still remains vague.
“The question is how can we get back to democracy, and as we move to democracy, move power back in the hands of the people,” said Cherish Cronmiller, first year law student and member of the National Lawyer Guild. “A lot of times we think corporations are great, but they abuse powers for dollars.”
The National Lawyer Guild and Environmental Law Society sponsored Morehouse’s speech because of his activism against corporate dominance and his work in India during a 1960s environmental disaster.
“We chose to have him speak because he has quite an amazing career of activism, work of raising awareness and really acts on what he says,” Cronmiller said.
