As we watch RAN's [Rainforest Action Network] struggle with Boise Cascade and watch corporations in general develop new weapons against their critics, it is useful to take a step back. The Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (which leaves them with the unfortunate acronym POCLAD) does just that. The group's thought-provoking work on the questions of corporate power in a democracy go beyond redressing a specific wrong to ask what we can do about it in a larger sense.

As FDR said, "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."

I find POCLAD most useful for the questions it asks: "What is property? Who decides what is public and private? What is liberty? Who is it for? Should a business corporation be regarded as a citizen? Why does the General Motors Corp. have more rights than the United Auto Workers Union? . . . Thousands of groups know how to stop an incinerator, organize a union, block a timber harvest sale, decrease a toxic emission, orchestrate a referendum or initiative, enact new permitting and disclosure regulations. [But] people spend years getting regulatory agencies to lessen a single corporate harm."