The movement to dismantle corporate rule has lost one of its giants – Jane Anne Morris – who died on May 28th in Madison, Wisconsin of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
She was one of the principal members of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD.org), a think tank of about a dozen wise individuals who came together in the early 1990’s to try to better understand why all of our activism against corporations causing harm to people and nature was so unbelievably ineffective.
Over a number of years, she was one of the primary researchers, writers and workshop leaders in POCLAD, sharing – with whomever would listen – what they were discovering about the deeply embedded structures of law that grant a wide variety of so-called constitutional “rights” to corporations (almost entirely via the US Supreme Court), and how the state legislatures then use these court rulings to further embed corporate “rights” into state laws in such a way as to make it literally illegal for local governments to pass laws that protect the health, safety and welfare of people and nature locally.
In the mid-1990’s, I attended at least a half a dozen of POCLAD’s training weekends – “Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy” – and Jane Anne was by far my favorite teacher. She had an extraordinary sense of humor that allowed the rage she carried about our troubled world to be focused in a way that drove her points home and made them much easier to understand and remember. And from these many weekends, I gradually developed my own weekend training which I lead to this very day.
In later years, Jane Anne Morris was instrumental in creating the curriculum that Thomas Linzey’s public interest law firm – Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF.org) – uses for their Democracy School weekend sessions, and she was one of their first trainers as well.
Years later, I tried to coax Jane Anne to come back into a leadership role in this work, in a failed attempt to create a new organization. A few years after that, I finally succeeded in co-founding Community Rights US in the Fall of 2017, and Jane Anne continued to be one of the people I reached out to periodically when I needed a dose of common sense, still delivered with that wry sense of humor.
Over the past few months, I met numerous times with Jane Anne, after she was already fully incapacitated by her disease, convincing her that her vertical files and audio tapes would be of tremendous value to our movement’s continuing work. Community Rights US is now the proud depository for many boxes of these resources, which we will be doing our best to make available to writers and researchers over this coming year. Oh my will Jane Anne will be missed!
In closing, here’s a tribute I wrote to her a few months ago which we published in our monthly newsletter: Tribute to Jane Anne Morris: Corporate Anthropologist & Co-Founder of the Community Rights Movement.
And here’s a 26-minute C-Span video of a talk she gave at a conference in Texas.
And finally, to truly understand the breadth and depth of this remarkable woman’s creative work, check out her website, DemocracyThemePark.org!
Additional Tributes to Jane Anne Morris:
Over this past month, Community Rights US has reached out to numerous friends and colleagues of Jane Anne’s, requesting short statements for us to share with the wider public. Here is a sampling of what we’ve received thus far. If you would like to add your tribute, please email us. It’s not too late!
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I only met Jane Anne briefly a couple times but am familiar with her great essays, filled with right-on, succinct “acid humor”. She was a brilliant thinker and analyst of our messed-up capitalist political, economic and regulatory system. She is one of the few (only?) people I’ve read who nailed the core reasons for our environmental regulatory failures right on the head.
— Maria Powell, President of the Midwest Environmental Justice Organization
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Jane Anne Morris described herself as a corporate anthropologist. This was not meant to suggest she worked on behalf of corporations. Quite the contrary; she used her anthropological skills to study how corporate power was exercised to thwart democratic and popular movements to protest militarism, environmental pollution and human rights abuses.
I have followed Jane’s career as an anthropological activist from her community organizing against lignite mining in Texas, her international solidarity work with the Colombia Support Network in Madison, Wisconsin and her work to educate the public about the environmental hazards of metallic sulfide mining in Wisconsin.
Jane Anne was a dedicated researcher who exposed the hidden mechanisms of corporate power and how ordinary citizens could exercise greater control over their resources, communities and environment. Her 1999 book, Not in My Backyard: The Handbook was a step-by-step manual for citizen empowerment against abusive corporate power.
During the Crandon mine controversy, when Exxon Minerals wanted to dig a large underground zinc-copper mine at the headwaters of Wisconsin’s Wolf River, the industry argued that we need copper and zinc. Jane Anne did extensive research on the metal recycling industry and argued that secondary metals are underutilized “because their consistent and complete recovery and re-use would cut into the profits that currently accrue to corporations that mine primary ore. Mining is for profits, not need, not providing jobs, not national defense.” She concluded that it was “time to relegate planned obsolescence to the scrap heap of history. Zero extraction now!” Her short, well-written pamphlet, “Homo metallicus: Copper Mining Through the Ages” was widely disseminated in the environmental community and provided an effective counterpoint to mining industry propaganda.
Jane Anne’s life and commitment to empowering people to resist abusive corporate power and reassert control over their lives and communities is an inspiring model of the scholar-activist.
— Al Gedicks, Executive Secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council & an emeritus professor of environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
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I first met Jane Anne Morris soon after moving back to Madison in 2004 following my early retirement from the Chicago Public Library. We quickly gravitated together out of shared environmental concerns, a passing interest in the Green Party (and much shared disenchantment with what it was devolving into), a shared disgust with the entire capitalist political and economic system in the United States, and dismay over the degeneration of most of what passed for the American “left.”
From time to time she would mention the Community Rights movement to me but I was too focused on and over-extended in other social causes such as opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I have recently helped Paul Cienfuegos promote its ideas in the Madison area). We did little mutual activist work in those days but enjoyed getting together periodically and venting over beers. She had a gift for deep analysis which nonetheless could be rendered very succinctly and with acid humor. I would go away from these conversations treasuring her pithy soundbites.
A few years later I was finally able to lend her some practical activist support in her prolonged campaign to have a community garden installed on the roof of the soon-to-be-renovated Madison Central Library. It was eventually deemed by Madison’s supposedly “progressive” city government to be too novel and complicated an idea.
After the onset of her fatal A.L.S. I visited her regularly and did what few modest things I could to comfort her and help out although others did far more. I helped her go through her archive, and removed and placed her library, and it was a powerful testament to me of her vigorous activist life and work in Texas, across the U.S. and Latin America. Despite great suffering she was determined to hold on until all or most of her archives could be properly distributed or disposed of and she did this with great perseverance and courage characteristic of the Jane Anne we knew.
I visited her together with Mary Sanderson about two weeks before she died. Her last request to me was to massage her feet. She was in obvious acute distress, expressed to us in broken speech and tears. It was heartbreaking. Even approaching age 70, I have led a relatively sheltered life with respect to the suffering and deaths of family members and friends and it shook my emotional shell.
I will always treasure having had the privilege of knowing this great radical thinker and activist: THE ROSA LUXEMBURG OF THE RADICAL WING OF THE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT.
— David Williams, Retired reference librarian at Chicago Public library 1976-2004); antiwar, environmental and social justice activist for fifty+ years; former long-time Green Party member; coordinator of the Peregrine Forum, and a member of the Madison IWW since 2004
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More than 15 years ago, when Jan Edwards and I were doing corporate personhood talks around the country using a 17-foot long timeline we were invited to Madison, Wisconsin and Jane Anne was able to come. We were eager to get her feedback because, after all, she and the rest of the POCLAD were our primary mentors.
At the end of the talk, Jan and I sat down with her and I’ll never forget the first words she said: “You know too much.” She coached us on the value of staying focused on what points we wanted people to hear because the whole message could so easily be overwhelming for people to take in.
Jane Anne’s advice has come back to me many times in the years since, in writing, public speaking, and individual coaching. Whenever I start to see someone glaze over, in my head I hear, “You know too much.” The work is to communicate with the person or people right here, right now — and stop when they’re saturated. It’s made me much more skillful, effective, and self-aware. I’m grateful for an opportunity to thank her now for her contribution to my life!
— Molly Morgan
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