A third of your friends are locked down in an old-growth grove or at a corporate headquarters with law enforcement officers rubbing pepper spray in their eyes. Another third are preparing testimony so they can be persuasive at a generic regulatory agency while begging for enforcement of a tiny portion of our laws. The last third are trying to raise money to pay lawyers to get your friends out of jail (after they've been released from the hospital) or take the regulatory agency to court (after it refuses to enforce the law).

The pepper spray, groveling and money-grubbing might not be so bad if we could honestly say that the Earth is better off today than it was four years ago. I can't honestly say that. This diatribe is an effort to insinuate some elements into the debate.

Many of our groups are organized to save wolves, butterflies, trees, prairie flowers, rivers, deserts or estuaries. But corporate executives don't organize to destroy wolves, butterflies, flowers or estuaries. Nor do they organize to pollute the air, spoil the rivers or promote five-legged frogs. This asymmetry should give us pause as we try to understand why corporations are on a roll while we're stuck in a feedback loop.

Corporate strategy leverages their power; their efforts reinforce and magnify each other. Our strategy splits our resources and dissipates our power. Corporate strategy aims to increase the power that corporations have over people. When a single corporation gets a victory, it helps all other corporations, too. They all have more power, and people have less.

Some think that this fracturing results from not being organized enough or not being organized right. This opens the door for endless bickering about whether we should organize by bioregion or by article of clothing, by species or by chemical, by issue or by occupation. Either way, we're still fractured. Meanwhile, what are corporate people doing?

Every few years corporate lobbyists make a quiet pilgrimage to state legislatures to make changes in the corporate code, the law that creates and defines corporations. There are no banners, no mock barrels of toxic waste, no lock-downs, no buckets of guts. Legislators offer no resistance, and non-corporate human citizens don't even raise an eyebrow. It is a free lunch for corporate management.

Citizen activists "working within the system" are elsewhere, engaged in regulatory agency marathons where they will spend years or decades preparing testimony, hiring experts, paying lawyers and urging people to attend hearings and write letters to unresponsive bigshots.

While corporations use tax-deductible funds to fill the airwaves and newspapers with self-serving propaganda, citizen activists dress up as animals to get a moment on TV or a two-line caption in a newspaper.

There is an unspoken agreement, evidently, that citizen activists will limit ourselves to two venues - the regulatory playpen (which was designed to neutralize our input) and direct action (which mainstream media corporations will ignore, exaggerate and distort).

It's as though a spell has been cast over corporate law, protecting it from the eyes of citizen activists who never think of reading it or rewriting it. Corporate representatives do not feel constrained in this way. Nothing is too destructive, too audacious, too outrageous for them to attempt. After all, they have most of us believing in the idea that corporations have "rights."

Why would activists want to bother with corporate law?

At regulatory agencies corporate persons (that is, corporations) have constitutional rights to due process and equal protection that human persons do not. Corporate law proclaims that corporations are legal constitutional "persons" with rights to due process and equal protection before the law for their "private property," privacy and free speech, among others.

Corporate law requires corporations to maximize profits to stockholders and externalize costs onto society and future generations. Corporate law allows corporations to evade liability by hiding in a maze of subsidiaries, freeing stockholders of liability. It defines corporations as entities that can divvy up their assets and then decide to go out of business to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This corporate law is not hidden away in sacred texts under a rock somewhere. It is in the same law books that contain the regulatory law we have practically memorized. In fact, the provisions of corporate law insure that regulatory law will regulate citizen input instead of corporate behavior. As long as we persist in leaving corporate law to the corporate lawyers, the consequences will continue to be devastating.

Campaign reform efforts will be constipated and trivial as long as we accept corporations as participants in the democratic process with First Amendment rights. Public opinion will continue to be swayed by corporate fairy tales as long as we accept that corporations can buy off potential opposition with strategic charitable, civic and "educational" contributions. Human persons will have to continue to have to fight for "standing" to participate in the democratic process as long as we accept the law that defines corporations as constitutional "persons."

Corporate law - defining law, as opposed to regulatory law - bestows upon corporations powers and rights that exceed those of human persons and sometimes of governments as well. It seems pretty obvious, then, that we need to rewrite the defining laws. Sooner or later we come up against the claim that all this stuff about "rights" and so on is just too legalistic. None of us wants to be involved in narrow and excessively legalistic strategies.

However, a glance through any EF! Journal will confirm that we're constantly dealing with the law, whether we're filing testimony or engaged in direct action. As long as we're in the legal arena, we might as well be dealing with defining law and not the regulatory frufru that distracts us.

Here is one cluster of ideas for rewriting the defining law of corporations. It's not a three-point plan, and it's not the beginning of a 20-point plan - just some ideas to think about.

1. Prohibit corporations from owning stock in other corporations. Owning stock in other corporations enables a corporation to control huge markets and shift responsibility, liability, resources, assets and taxes back and forth among parent corporations, subsidiaries and other members of their unholy families. By defining corporations in such as a way to prohibit such ownership, much of the antitrust regulatory law becomes unnecessary and superfluous.

2. Prohibit corporations from being able to choose when to go out of business (in legalese, no voluntary dissolution). This would prevent corporations from dissolving themselves when it came time to pay taxes, repay government loans, pay creditors, pay pensions, pay for health care and pay for toxic cleanups.

3. Make stockholders liable for a corporation's debts. People who want to be stockholders would reallocate their resources to corporations that they knew something about, that weren't engaged in risky, toxic projects. (This would encourage local, sustainable businesses and healthy local economies. Imagine that.)

These three measures might seem "unrealistic" to some, but it beats the heck out of a voluntary code of conduct or a wasted decade at a regulatory agency. All three of these provisions were once common features of state corporate codes. No wonder corporate apologists prefer that we hang around in the regulatory agencies with our heads spinning with parts-per-million and habitat conservation plans.

These three measures were quite effective, which is why corporate lawyers worked so hard to get rid of them. But they address only a tiny portion of what needs to be done.

Here's another cluster of ideas for ways to shape a democratic process.

1. No corporate participation in the democratic process. Democracy is for and about human beings. Corporations should be prohibited from paying for any political advertisements, making any campaign contributions or seeking to influence the democratic process in any way.

2. Corporations have no Constitutional rights. A corporation is an artificial creation set up to serve a public need, not an independent entity with intrinsic "rights."

3. Corporations should be prohibited from making any civic, charitable or educational donations. Such donations are used to warp the entire social and economic fabric of society and make people afraid to speak out against corporations.

These probably seem even more "unrealistic" than the first batch. Imagine how nice it must be for corporate executives that we find these ideas "impractical." And by the way, these were all once law, too.

Focusing on corporate law offers an opportunity to work on common problems without neglecting specific issues. That is because there's not a separate version of corporate law for each corporation, for each factory, for each grove of old-growth, for each type of athletic shoe, for each toxic chemical.

Corporate law is very similar for almost all for-profit corporations in the US. (It is true that each state has its own corporate code, but variations are tiny. More than half of the Fortune 500 corporations are chartered in one state, Delaware.)

If we were to change even one line of defining law in the corporate code, it would affect thousands of corporations. Our efforts would be magnified, instead of being split among countless individual campaigns. When we rewrite a line of the corporate code, we don't just define one corporation, we define them all.

A final objection to be raised is that we'll never get anywhere as long as the "news media" is against us. Agreed. But the "news media" are corporations, key players in a system of propaganda that encompasses not only television, radio and newspapers but also the entire educational system. The "air waves" belong to the public. Why have we allowed a puppet federal agency to "lease" the public airwaves to huge corporations? Ya wanna lock down? Lock down to a TV or radio station and make the public airwaves public again. Not for a day but for a lifetime.

Ya like boycotts? What if a regulatory agency gave a hearing and nobody came? The outcome would be the same, but we wouldn't have wasted all the time and resources, nor would we have helped grant an aura of legitimacy to a sham proceeding.

What could we do instead?

We could come back from our self-imposed exile in the regulatory agencies and turn our attention to the defining law of corporations. And there, we could start acting as though we believed that people are people, and corporations are not.

Jane A. Morris, a corporate anthropologist, works with the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). Comments and correspondence are welcome. POB246, South Yarmouth, Ma. 02664