Links

Organizations, campaigns, and information clearinghouses advancing democratic self-governance for all people, and striving to dismantle corporate authority to govern and to define our future:

Humboldt Coalition for Community Rights
This is the group that ran Measure T in Humboldt County, CA. Measure T passed by 55% of the vote on June 6, 2006. It prohibits political contributions from non-local corporations and asserts that corporations should not be treated with the same rights as human beings. Democracy Unlimited brought the group together that ultimately formed the Humboldt Coalition for Community Rights.

Liberty Tree: Foundation for the Democratic Revolution
Liberty Tree is a non-profit organization rooted in the belief that the American Revolution is a living tradition whose greatest promise is democracy. Their central purpose is to build on the accomplishments of earlier American movements by launching a new stage in the struggle for democracy.

The New Rules Project: Designing Rules As If Community Matters
"Why New Rules? Because the old ones don't work any longer. They undermine local economies, subvert democracy, weaken our sense of community, and ignore the costs of our decisions on the next generation."

ReclaimDemocracy.org
ReclaimDemocracy.org is dedicated to restoring democratic authority over corporations, reviving grassroots democracy, and revoking the power of money and corporations to control government and civic society. They strive to work proactively to effect systemic change, rather than reacting to the agenda of corporate and moneyed interests.

Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) - Challenge Corporate Power and Assert the People’s Rights Issue Committee
The Challenge Corporate Power, Assert the People's Rights Issue Committee is dedicated to understanding how corporations use their illegitimate constitutional “rights” and powers to define our law, politics, jurisprudence, work, technologies, food, communities... you name it! The Committee does this through learning and helping others to learn how we got into this mess through the discovery and study of hidden histories with an eye toward rethinking WILPF activism by placing it in the context of people’s right to self and mutual governance and uncovering the meaning of real (radical) democracy along with developing its skills and practice. This website has extensive resources on "corporate personhood."

California Center for Community Democracy
The fiscal sponsor for Democracy Unlimited. We helped form this organization to serve as a fiscal agent for grassroots groups who are forming across the state to challenge corporate power and assert democracy in their own communities. The California Center is also the sponsor for North Coast Action, a group dedicated to effecting the outcome of the Georgia Pacific Mill site property in Fort Bragg, California to benefit the healthy sustainable future of the North Coast community.

Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD)
Nine writers, educators, activists, former elected officials, directors of environmental, labor and human rights organizations, union organizers, and researchers scattered around the U.S. who - since 1994 - have been researching corporate, labor and legal histories, rethinking our social movements' past organizing strategies and talking with people about democracy movements.

Redwood Coast Chapter of the Alliance for Democracy
The folks who wrote the very first 'Resolution to End Corporate Personhood' in the City of Point Arena, CA. Also includes the Declaration to End Corporate Personhood, and their terrific introductory pamphlet on the history of the Santa Clara court decision about corporate personhood: "Santa Clara Blues".

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF)
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund was launched in 1995 to provide free and affordable legal services to grassroots, community-based environmental groups, and rural municipal governments. It hosts four program areas, one of which is 'The Corporations and Democracy Program'. Through this Program, the CELDF drafts Ordinances for local governments and assists organizations to assert direct, local, and democratic control over corporations.

Center for Democracy and the Constitution
A Massachusetts group formed to challenge the corporate right to influence decisions affecting their communities.

180/Movement for Democracy and Education (180/MDE)
The 180/Movement for Democracy and Education is dedicated to helping build a campus-based movement for political empowerment and participatory democracy. Through education and organizing they strive to encourage a radical political presence in our schools to transform them and our communities into truly democratic spaces.

Dakota Rural Action
"We strive to build grassroots leadership through community organizing by giving people a strong voice in decisions affecting their quality of life." They've been active for many years in organizing the Dakota's farmers to challenge the right of giant farming corporations to move in to the Dakotas and destroy their rural communities.

Friends of the Constitution
Friends of the Constitution is a 19-member coalition of farm, church, and environmental groups concerned about corporate farming. The groups have joined together to defend and enforce Initiative 300, the Nebraska ’s constitutional amendment banning non-family farm corporations.

Ohio Committee on Corporations, Law and Democracy
An ad-hoc group of activists and individuals from across Ohio concerned with the growing power of corporations to govern, and harms this poses to democracy in our state, nation and world. The Committee educates Ohioans about the past history and current dimensions of these problems. They strive to encourage democratic participation and reassert control over the corporate form. Greg Coleridge, one of the founders of this group, has started a new blog: OhioDemocracy.org.

Public Information Network
The Public Information Network provides research services and training to citizens who are working for corporate and governmental accountability, and who are committed to socially just and ecologically sustainable societies. They promote alliances among groups working on ecological, democratic, human rights, and labor concerns, as well as coordination between activists in developed and developing nations.

National Lawyers Guild Committee on Corporations, the Constitution & Human Rights
The Committee is committed to exploring legal issues and political strategies related to: 'Corporate Constitutional Rights', 'Corporate Political Participation', 'Corporate Constitutional Obligations' and 'Transnational Corporations and Local Law'.

Unocal Corporate Charter Revocation Action Center
A group of nearly 30 organizations (including Democracy Unlimited) and individuals which a number of years ago petitioned the Attorney General of California to initiate charter revocation proceedings against Unocal Corporation because of what we believe to be its egregious record on the environment, labor, human rights, usurpation of political power, and deception. The link above goes to the website of Michael Feinstein, one of the petition signers and former City Councilmember from Santa Monica, CA. His site gives the text of the petition as well as a number of media articles about the action. For more information you can read the book that details the whole story.

San Francisco Personhood Working Group
A San Francisco, CA-based group working to pass a resolution through the SF Board of Supervisors to abolish corporate personhood. This is an unmoderated list serve on yahoo that is quite lively. It also has meetings and events listed.

Aurora Institute: Shedding light on the corporation
The Aurora Institute is a Canadian citizen-based organization which pursues its aims by conducting innovative research and public education which sheds light on the very structure of the corporation as a cause of the political, social, economic and environmental symptoms we face in modern society.

The People-Centered Development Forum
The Forum is an international alliance of individuals and organizations dedicated to the creation of just, inclusive, and sustainable human societies through voluntary citizen action. It has sought consistently to expose the fallacies and illusions underling much of the conventional wisdom underlying policies relating to economic growth, development, and governance. Its more recent focus has been on the dysfunctions of corporate globalization and life-centered alternatives to money-centered corporate rule.

Polaris Institute
The Institute strives to enable citizen movements to re-skill and re-tool themselves to fight for democratic social change in an age of corporate driven globalization. Their work with social movements is carried out on both a national and an international basis.

Big Medicine
"Big Medicine is a recon, arms and resource center for those battling malignant corporate power, at least those wise enough to explore Big Corporate Bodies as evolving living systems, eco-social pathogens, and/or our morbid rivals for control of the world." There's no other site quite like it on the web!

Ending Corporate Governance: We The People - Revoking Our Plutocracy
A personal website of two intrepid researchers - Rebecca Lord and Dave Ratcliffe - on corporate governance issues. Full of articles (and even emails) found on no other websites.