from POCLAD:
How Corporate Personhood Threatens DemocracyBy Kimberly French
Originally Published: UU World XVII:3 (May/June 2003) www.uuworld.org
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Wearing a garland of flowers, Ward Morehouse rose to address the thousands gathered in a sunny park in Bhopal, India, on the tenth anniversary of the worst industrial accident in history. In December 1984 a huge chemical leak at the Union Carbide pesticide factory there had killed more than 15,000 people and injured hundreds of thousands. To this day, the company has never been prosecuted for its negligence and the suffering it caused.
The tall, white-skinned Morehouse, the only non-Indian invited to speak at the 1994 commemoration, pledged in Hindi and in English never to let the world forget "the Hiroshima of the chemical industry." Many of his fellow marchers carried stone slabs inscribed with the names of loved ones. Along the demonstration route, art by children orphaned in the disaster showed people screaming, bodies lying on the street, Uncle Sam holding out a bag of money. On reaching the shut-down factory, the crowd turned to Morehouse, an American, to ignite a ten-foot papier-mâché effigy of the U.S. company's chairman, Warren Anderson, in a symbolic sanctification of those profaned grounds.
For many Bhopalis, Morehouse is a folk hero—the person who has carried the torch of their struggle out of India and into an international network of activism. For activists around the world, he is a high-energy éminence grise for the social justice cause and a deep thinker about the roots of the world's ills. And for the past decade Morehouse, a third-generation Unitarian Universalist who lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts, has been breaking ground for a new citizens' movement pushing for a tectonic shift in the political-economic landscape—a movement to wrest away the staggering power that global corporations have over individuals' lives and replace it with true democracy.
After four decades battling the abuse of power in the world, Morehouse realized that the methods of social justice activists—the tactics he had used his entire career—were not working and never would. In his view, those who seek to change the world must now focus on one radical goal: to legally redefine the role of corporations in our society and drastically limit the wealth and power they are allowed to amass. In the past decade he has become one of the pioneering theorists and principal activists in this new movement.
But that is not the way Morehouse would tell his story. Never one to seek the spotlight, the seventy-four-year-old activist scarcely talks about his own accomplishments. Instead, he prefers to praise the colleagues and organizations with whom he works. Or, with erudition and practicality, he turns the conversation to the democratic principles to which he has committed his life.
"He is the most unpretentious important person that I know," observes Richard Grossman, Morehouse's long-time colleague in activism. "He either keeps his ego in check, or he doesn't have one. He's not out for power or glory. He truly cares about people, and that is his great strength."
Friends tell of someone who can always be relied on to pick them up at an out-of-the-way but cheaper airport, or take days off to use his electrician skills to help them wire a new office, or fetch juice and fend off reporters and hecklers for a colleague engaged in a hunger strike, or work day-in, day-out seeking justice and compensation for victims of corporate crime half a world away.
In a career spanning more than fifty years, Morehouse has worked with activists around the world addressing a broad spectrum of issues: safe energy, land use, consumer advocacy, labor, women's rights, environment, human rights, peace. His warmth and generosity of spirit have spanned extreme differences of opinion in the heated climate in which passionate activists live and breathe.
"He is always the peacemaker," observes David Dembo, who has worked for twenty years under Morehouse as program coordinator at the Council for International and Public Affairs (CIPA). "He listens to everyone's point of view, synthesizes, and shows people they're not as far apart as they think."
Chuck Collins, cofounder of United for a Fair Economy, who has also worked with Morehouse in UUs for a Just Economic Community, concurs: "He doesn't see any value in trying to seem like 'I have the answer.' He checks out where people are at, and he's not going to beat them up about it."
Eschewing pretension in any form, Morehouse nearly always sports a uniform of khakis and a plaid workman's shirt over a white T-shirt, breast pockets stuffed with agenda and address books. For public appearances, he may throw on a rumpled jacket and tie. When things get more informal, friends note, his socks are sure to have holes. Yet sooner or later, he reveals the breadth of his intellect and skills: as a person who has both set up small worker-owned businesses and organized an alternative global summit to the Group of Seven world economic plan; a master carpenter who has built every house he's called home as an adult and can write national energy and technology policy; a beloved husband, father, grandfather, and friend who might as easily talk about global corporations as where to find the best berries or a secret hideout of fifty seals near his Maine cabin.
"A lot of times activists get themselves into a position where they can be so easily discounted," says colleague Virginia Rasmussen of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). "Ward has a way where he can't—his style, his approach, his language, his demeanor. He projects a level of wisdom about his issues, and he speaks the language of respectability." ..........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.poclad.org/articles/french01.html 
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