Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It (34 page)

42
. Testimony of R. James Woolsey, U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Hearings on Geopolitical Implications of Rising Oil Dependence and Global Warming, April 18, 2007,
http://www.globalwarming.house.gov/tools/assets/files/0117.pdf
(accessed April 20, 2011); Center for Public Integrity, “Foreign Oil Dependence Has Grown,” n.d.,
http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/broken_government/articles/entry/1002/
(accessed April 2, 2011).

43
. See the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, “Facts & Figures: Almost Half of America’s Electricity Generation,”
http://www.cleancoalusa.org/about-us-almost-half-america’s-electricity-generation
(accessed April 1, 2011).

44
. Paul R. Epstein and others, “Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
1291 (February 17, 2011): 73-98,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x/full
(accessed March 27, 2011).

45
. Ibid.

46
. Environmental Protection Agency, “Mercury Maps: Linking Air Deposition and Fish Contamination on a National Scale,” January 2005,
http://water.epa.gov/type/watersheds/datait/maps/fs.cfm
(accessed April 21, 2011):

As of December 2003, 45 states had issued fish advisories for mercury covering more than 13,000, 000 lake acres and over 750,000 river miles. Atmospheric deposition of mercury is a primary route of transport of mercury to water. Mercury air emissions from coal-fired power plants, waste incinerators, mercury cell chlorine manufacturing facilities, and other sources can be transported long distances before ultimately depositing on watersheds and water bodies.

47
. Matthew L. Wald, “Stimulus Money Puts Clean Coal Projects on a Faster Track,”
New York Times,
March 16, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/energy-environment/17coal.html
(accessed August 30, 2011). Also see Taxpayers for Common Sense, “Clean Coal Gets Boost in House and Senate Stimulus Bills,” January 30, 2009,
http://www.taxpayer.net/search_by_tag.php?action=view&proj_id=1842&tag=coal%20subsidies&type=Project
(accessed August 18, 2011).

48
. Epstein and others, “Full Cost Accounting.”

49
. Pew Center on Global Climate Change, “Climate Change 101: Understanding and Responding to Global Climate Change,” January 2011,
http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/climate101-fullbook_0.pdf
(accessed April 4, 2011).

50
. Center for Public Integrity, “No Robust, Sustained Alternative Energy Policy,” n.d.,
http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/broken_government/articles/entry/
no_robust_sustained_alternative_energy_policy/
(accessed April 2, 2011).

51
. Center for Responsive Politics, “Lobbying: Top Industries, 1998-2011.”

52
. Jim Snyder, “Oil Group Starts Political Giving as Congress Weighs Repeal of Tax Breaks,”
Bloomberg,
February 24, 2011,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-24/oil-group-starts-political-giving-as-congress-eyes-subsidies.html
(accessed April 20, 2011).

53
. “If you tried to fill 25 feet of the Hudson River, we would put you in jail.” Quoted in Paul de Barros, “Robert Kennedy Jr. Says West Virginia Coal Industry out of Control in Documentary,”
Seattle Times,
July 21, 2011,
http://www.dfw.com/2011/07/21/484290/robert-kennedy-jr-says-west-virginia.html
(accessed July 27, 2011).

54
. Epstein and others, “Full Cost Accounting”:

More than 500 mountains have been obliterated, the adjacent valleys filled, in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, completely altering some 1.4 million acres, burying 2,000 miles of streams. In Kentucky alone, there are 293 MTR [mountain top removal] sites, over 1,400 miles of streams damaged or destroyed, and 2, 500 miles of streams polluted. Valley fill and other surface mining practices associated with MTR bury headwater streams and contaminate surface and groundwater with carcinogens and heavy metals and are associated with reports of cancer clusters, a finding that requires further study.

55
. I Love Mountains,
http://www.ilovemountains.org;
Appalachian Voices,
http://www.appvoices.org;
Kentucky Riverkeeper,
http://www.appalachianstudies.eku.edu/kyriverkeeper/;
Waterkeeper Alliance,
http://www.waterkeeper.org.

56
. Robert Kennedy Jr., “RFK Jr. on
Citizens United”
(video), June 11, 2011,
http://www.freespeechforpeople.org;
also available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k-DxVzq
(accessed June 22, 2011).

57
. “Harlan County, Kentucky: What Happened to Elmer’s Fish Pond?” September 8, 2009,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuPyevfufCE
(accessed June 22, 2011).

58
. Quoted in Mark Baller and Leor Joseph Pantilat, “Defenders of Appalachia: The Campaign to Eliminate Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining and the Role of Public Justice,” 37
Envtl. L.
629, 640 (2007),
http://legacy.lclark.edu/org/envtl/objects/37-3_Pantilat.pdf
(accessed July 27, 2011).

59
.
Bragg
v.
Robertson et al.,
Civil Action No. 2:98-0636 (U.S. D. Ct. S.D. W.Va.), Memorandum Opinion and Order Granting Preliminary Injunction, March 3, 1999.

60
.
Bragg
v.
West Virginia Coal Association,
248 F.3d 275, 285 (4th Cir. 2001).

61
. Francis X. Clines, “Judge Takes on Bush on Mountaintop Mining,”
New York Times,
May 19, 2002,
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/national/19STRI.html
(accessed April 21, 2011);
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth
v.
Rivenburgh
(KFTC I), 204 F. Supp. 2d 927, 946 (S.D. W.Va. 2002).

When the longstanding practice was challenged, the agencies undertook to change the rule so streams could be filled as immense waste dumps if the disposal had the “effect” of filling the waters of the United States…. Regulators were pushing ahead rapidly to change the rules, without regard for the purposes, policy, history, or language of Act itself. [vacated, 317 F.3d 425 (4th Cir. 2003)]

62
. Kennedy, “RFK Jr. on
Citizens United.”

63
. John Cheves, “Coal Execs Hope to Spend Big Under New Rules to Defeat Conway and Chandler,” Bluegrass Politics, July 28, 2010,
http://bluegrasspolitics.bloginky.com/2010/07/27/coal-execs-hope-to-spend-big-under-new-rules-to-defeat-conway-and-chandler/
(accessed April 21, 2011).

1
. Stephen Haber, “Introduction: The Political Economy of Crony Capitalism,” in
Crony Capitalism and Economic Growth in Latin America: Theory and Evidence,
ed. Stephen Haber (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2002),
pp. xii
-
xv
.

2
. American Sustainable Business Council, “Business for Democracy: Who’s Already on Board,”
http://asbcouncil.org/Business_For_Democracy.html
(accessed July 28, 2011). Business for Democracy was launched by the American Sustainable Business Council, which is working in partnership with Free Speech for People on the People’s Rights Amendment campaign.

3
. James Roberts, “Cronyism: Undermining Economic Freedom and Prosperity Around the World,” Heritage Foundation, August 9, 2010,
http://origin.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/08/Cronyism-Undermining-Economic-Freedom-and-Prosperity-Around-the-World
(accessed July 28, 2011).

4
. Robert Monks, quoted in Joel Bakan,
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
(New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 70.

5
. Roosevelt,
Roosevelt,
p. 425.

6
. There have been many convincing descriptions of this phenomenon in recent years. See, for example, Hacker and Pierson,
Winner-Take-All Politics;
Robert Kuttner,
The Squandering of America
(New York: Knopf, 2007); Paul Krugman,
Conscience of a Liberal
(New York, Norton, 2007); and Joseph E. Stiglitz,
Freefall
(New York: Norton, 2010).

7
. U.S. Census Bureau, “State & County QuickFacts,” June 3, 2011,
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
(accessed June 15, 2011).

8
. Hacker and Pierson,
Winner-Take-All Politics,
p. 3.

9
. Inequality.org, “By the Numbers,” n.d.,
http://www.demos.org/inequality/numbers.cfm
(accessed June 19, 2011).

10
. “From 1973 to today, the top 5 percent of income earners have seen their wages rise by over 31 percent while the workers in the tenth percentile of income-earners (earning the lowest wage) have seen their wages increase by only 1 percent.” Kurt Greenfield,
The Failure of Corporate Law
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 155.

11
. Jared Bernstein and Karen Kornbluh,
Running Faster to Stay in Place: The Growth of Family Work Hours and Income
(Washington, D.C.: New America Foundation, June 2005,
http://www.newamerica.net/files/nafmigration/archive/Doc_File_2437_1.pdf
(accessed July 29, 2011): “Between 1970 and 2000, the percentage of mothers in the workforce rose from 38% to 67%.”

12
. Economic Policy Institute, “Wealth Flows to the Wealthiest as the Percentage of Americans Who Own Stock Falls,” August 2006,
http://www.epi.org/page/-/old/newsroom/releases/2006/08/SWApr-wealth-200608-final.pdf
(accessed April 21, 2011).

13
. Greenfield,
Failure of Corporate Law,
p. 156.

14
. Gregory Leo Nagel, “The Effect of Labor Market Demand on U.S. CEO Pay Since 1980,”
Financial Review,
August 19, 2009,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1095690
(accessed August 17, 2011).

15
. Richard McCormack, “The Plight of American Manufacturing,”
American Prospect,
December 21, 2009,
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_plight_of_american_manufacturing
(accessed April 3, 2011).

16
. Ibid.

17
. Bernstein and Kornbluh,
Running Faster.

18
. Ron Rittenmeyer, chair of Electronic Data Systems, quoted in Brian Jackson, “EDS Says Offshoring Great for Profitability, Promises to Continue,”
ITBusiness.ca
(Canada), April 23, 2008,
http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=48091
(accessed July 29, 2011).

19
. Bernstein and Kornbluh,
Running Faster.

20
. Robert Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University, has explored the relationship between income disparities and financial distress; links to his work are available at
http://www.robert-h-frank.com/
(accessed April 12, 2011).

21
. Massachusetts today remains one of only eight states with a flat income tax rate. Urban Institute and Brookings Center,
Tax Policy Center Report,
March 2007,
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=1001064
(accessed April 2, 2011).

22
. John Chesto, “Procter & Gamble Unveils Plans to Cut 215 Jobs from Its Gillette Factory in South Boston over Five Years,”
Patriot Ledger,
August 7, 2008,
http://www.patriotledger.com/business/x1280301726/Procter-Gamble-unveils-plans-to-cut-215-jobs-from-its-Gillette-factory-in-South-Boston-over-five-years
(accessed June 15, 2011).

23
. “Fat Merger Payouts for CEOs,”
Business Week,
December 12, 2005,
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_50/b3963106.htm
(accessed June 15, 2001).

24
. United for a Fair Economy, “Shareholders Press BankBoston on CEO Pay, Golden Parachutes, Layoffs After Fleet Merger,” April 20, 1999,
http://www.faireconomy.org/press_room/1999/shareholders_press_bankboston_on_
ceo_pay_after_fleet_merger
(accessed June 15, 2011); “13,000 Job Cuts Loom in Merger; FleetBoston, BofA Shareholders OK Giant Bank Deal,”
San Francisco Chronicle,
March 18, 2004,
http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-03-18/business/17417500_1_banking-resources-america-spokeswoman-eloise-hale-job-cuts
(accessed June 15, 2011); Report of Trillium Asset Management available at
http://trilliuminvest.com/resolutions/lending-4/
(accessed June 15, 2011).