Revoke corp charter
thom
It’s time to bring back the corporate death penalty - Alternet.org
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now consider what happens when a corporation behaves like that.
Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) has already been nailed for “speeding”—ignoring laws that require them to operate in a way that’s safe—and people have already died, on multiple occasions.
- PG&E was found guilty for the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion that injured more than 50 people and killed eight. They were fined $1.6 billion and are on probation now.
- Two years ago, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California noted in a public statement that the company had continued to break that same law. “The jury found PG&E guilty of six felony counts—five willful violations of the Pipeline Safety Act and one count of corruptly obstructing the federal investigation…” As an additional penalty, they were ordered to perform 10,000 hours of community service, pay a $3 million fine, and another five years was added to their “probation.”
- In 2017 alone, PG&E’s failure to properly maintain and operate their equipment and rights-of-way caused 17 fires in California; while investigators referred 11 of those cases to prosecutors for code violations, so far there have been no new indictments.
- In December of 2018, PG&E was again busted by the California Public Utilities Commission for not only refusing to mark and warn people of the locations of their gas pipelines in a timely fashion, but, as CNN noted, they “[P]ressured workers to falsify data…”
And the crimes of PG&E pale in comparison to those of the tobacco industry, the asbestos industry, and companies like ExxonMobil that promoted lies about global warming while continuing to profitably and massively pollute.
The Corporate Death Penalty Is Not New
While the human death penalty has largely disappeared in the world and is fading in the U.S. (a good thing), the corporate death penalty needs a revival.
The corporate death penalty, widespread in the 19th century, is a political and economic Darwinian process that weeds bad actors out of the business ecosystem to make room for good players.
The process of revoking corporate charters goes back to the very first years of the United States. After all, the only reasons states allow (“charter”) corporations (normal business corporations can only be chartered by a state, not the federal government) is to serve the public interest.
As the Wyoming Constitution of 1889 laid out:
“All powers and franchises of corporations are derived from the people and are granted by their agent, the government, for the public good and general welfare, and the right and duty of the state to control and regulate them for these purposes is hereby declared. The power, rights and privileges of any and all corporations may be forfeited by willful neglect or abuse thereof. The police power of the state is supreme over all corporations as well as individuals.”
When a corporation does business ethically and legally, it serves its local community, its employees, its customers, and its shareholders. For over a century, American corporations were held to this very reasonable standard.
Beginning in 1784, Pennsylvania demanded that corporations include a revocation clause in corporate charters that automatically dissolved them after a few decades so they couldn’t grow so large or so rich as to become a public menace. It also authorized the state to dissolve any corporation that harmed the state or its citizens, including customers and employees.
It was pretty explicit:
“Nor shall any charter for the purposes aforesaid be granted for a longer time than twenty years; and every such charter shall contain a clause reserving to the legislature the power to alter, revoke, or annul the same, whenever in their opinion it may be injurious to the citizens of the commonwealth…” (Article I, Section 25)
As the United States grew, the federal government passed laws requiring corporate-death-penalty revocation clauses in the state corporate charters of insurance companies, in 1809, and banks in 1814. By the late 1880s, every state required them for all business corporations.
From the founding of America to today, governments routinely revoked corporate charters, forcing liquidation and sale of assets, although it’s been over a century since such efforts have focused on corporations large enough to have amassed financial and, thus, political power.
In the 19th century, banks were shut down for behaving in a “financially unsound” way in Ohio, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania. And when corporations that ran turnpikes in New York and Massachusetts didn’t keep their roads in repair, those states gave the corporations the death sentence.
In 1825, Pennsylvania passed laws making it even easier for that state to “revoke, alter, or annul” corporate charters “whenever in their opinion [the operation of the corporation] may be injurious to citizens of the community,” and by the 1870s, 19 states had gone through the long and tedious process of amending their state constitutions expressly to give legislators the power to terminate the existence of corporations that originated in those states.
Presidents have even run for public office and won on platforms including the revocation of corporate charters. One of the largest issues of the election of 1832 was Andrew Jackson’s demand that the corporate charter of the Second Bank of the United States not be renewed.
Following that lead, states all over the nation began examining their banks and other corporations, and in just the year 1832, the state of Pennsylvania pulled the corporate charters of 10 corporations, sentencing them to corporate death “for operating contrary to the public interest.”
Oil corporations, match manufacturers, whiskey trusts, and sugar corporations all received the corporate death penalty in the late 1800s in Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska, and New York, among others.
President Grover Cleveland invoked the mood of the times in his 1888 State of the Union address, when he said:
“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
The Oligarchs Rise Up
When, in the 1880s, the State of Ohio began threatening Standard Oil Trust of Ohio with the corporate death penalty, John D. Rockefeller and his oligarchic buddies publicly called for states to change their corporate governance laws to get around all of the restrictions that Ohio and most other states had placed on them.
New Jersey heard the call, and thus became the first state to engage in what was then called “charter-mongering”—changing its corporate charter rules to satisfy the desires of the nation’s largest businesses. In 1875, its legislature abolished maximum capitalization (size) limits.
In 1888, the New Jersey legislature took another huge and dramatic step to help out Rockefeller by authorizing—for the first time in the history of the United States—New Jersey-chartered companies to hold stock in other companies. The Standard Oil Trust was legally still in business (Ohio outlawed trusts in 1892, but by then Rockefeller had moved his corporate governance to New Jersey), renamed “Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.” (It’s now ExxonMobil, the company that has funded lies about climate change for decades.)
As New Jersey and then Delaware threw out old restrictions on corporate behavior, allowing corporations to have interlocking boards, to live forever, to define themselves for “any legal purpose,” to own stock in other corporations, and so on, corporations began to move both their corporate charters and, in some cases, their headquarters to the charter-mongering states.
By 1900, trusts for everything from ribbons to bread to cement to alcohol had moved to Delaware or New Jersey, leaving 26 corporate trusts controlling, from those states, more than 80 percent of production in their markets.
There was pushback in New York, though. In 1894 the Central Labor Union of New York City campaigned for the New York State Supreme Court to revoke the charter of Standard Oil Trust of New York for “a pattern of abuses,” and the court agreed and dissolved the company.
In 1912, New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson was alarmed by the behavior of corporations in his state, and “pressed through changes [that took effect in 1913] intended to make New Jersey’s corporations less favorable to concentrated financial power.”
But as New Jersey began to pull back from charter-mongering, Delaware stepped into the fray, passing in 1915 laws similar to but even easier on corporations than New Jersey’s.
Delaware, over the next few decades, continued to strip away their corporate accountability rules so that, as the state’s website said in 2002, “More than 308,000 companies are incorporated in Delaware including 60 percent of the Fortune 500 and 50 percent of the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange.” (The site today merely has “corporate-friendly” gibberish.)
Progressives Fight Back
In reaction to public disgust with the predatory and monopolistic behavior of these corporate giants, the “Progressive Era” of Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency (1901-1909) saw numerous laws passed designed to restrain bad corporate behavior. The most well-known was the 1907 Tillman Act, which made it a felony for a corporation to give money to federal politicians’ campaigns.
The Tillman Act was based, in part, on numerous state laws, like this one that Wisconsin passed in 1905 (and was taken off the books in 1954):
“Political contributions by corporations. No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office. [Wis. Laws, Section 4479a (Sec. I, ch. 492, 1905)]” (emphasis added)
The penalty for an individual (even a lawyer or lobbyist representing a corporation) breaking this law on behalf of a corporation was not just a large fine but a two-year prison term, and if the corporation itself was found to be violating the law, it faced the corporate death penalty: “dissolution of the corporation and sale of its assets.”
But 1921 saw the end of all that, when Republican Warren G. Harding successfully ran for president on a platform of tax cuts, deregulation and privatization. His twin slogans were, “More business in government [privatize], less government in business [deregulate],” and “Return to normalcy” (take taxes back down to where they were before World War I).
When elected, he lowered the top tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, producing a huge “sugar high” for the economy. It kicked off the Roaring ’20s and led straight to the Great Crash of 1929, which was made much worse by Harding’s successful deregulation of the banks and brokerage houses.
Between the 1920s and the 1980s all U.S. states amended their constitutions or changed their laws to make it easier for large corporations to do business without having to answer to the citizens of the state, without size limits, and with infinite lifespans.
Today, every state still has laws that allow it to impose the corporate death penalty; it’s just been decades since they’ve been used against a large corporation. (Small companies are routinely shut down by Secretaries of State, sometimes for malfeasance but mostly just because they’ve become inactive or failed to pay their taxes.)
Corporations have successfully argued before the Supreme Court that they should have First Amendment rights of free speech, Fourth Amendment rights of privacy, Fifth Amendment protections against takings, and Fourteenth Amendment rights as “persons” to “equal protection [with you and me] under the law,” among other “rights of personhood.”
It’s long past the time that these “persons,” when they become egregious and recidivist criminals (and particularly when they repeatedly kill people), be treated the same as human criminals: remove them from society permanently.
New, smaller, more innovative companies can fill the spaces now occupied by bloated corporate criminals. The result will be (as it was after AT&T was broken up in the 1970s for violating anti-monopoly laws) an explosion of innovation, competition, and opportunity.
If enough corporate criminals are targeted, the American business renaissance could spread across industries including media, pharmaceuticals, airlines, tech, banking, insurance, food, chemicals, oil and beyond.
It would be a real stimulus, meaningful and long-lasting, as opposed to Trump’s tax-cut heroin.
It’s time for our states to start enforcing the corporate death penalty.
greg c cleaveland clinic shut hosp ~ kucinich
The Case for a Federal Corporate Charter Revocation Penalty Kyle Noonan*
The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street
Mary Kreiner Ramirez
Steven A. Ramirez
Copyright Date: 2017
Published by: NYU Press
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1bj4rcs
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bj4rcs
1998? LAT
A coalition of environmental and human-rights groups petitioned California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren on Thursday to revoke the corporate charter of Union Oil Co. of California and seize the oil giant’s assets because of alleged violations of state and international laws going back nearly three decades.
The unusual legal strategy is part of a protest campaign that has waged for years against Unocal, the El Segundo-based parent of Union Oil, and other multinational companies that do business in politically troublesome parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Indonesia and Myanmar....
cd NRA letitia james ny AG trump fdn defunct
sandy hook was inflection pt, // exxon
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Democracy Dies in Darkness
National
D.C. attorney general issues subpoenas to NRA, its charitable foundation
By Katie Zezima ,
Carol D. Leonnig and
Keith L. Alexander July 12 2019
The District’s attorney general issued subpoenas Friday to the National Rifle Association and its charitable foundation,putting additional pressure on the embattled gun rights organization from nonprofit regulators.
The office of Attorney General Karl A. Racine is seeking financial documents from the NRA and its foundation. The NRA Foundation is chartered in the District, and the NRA is registered as a nonprofit and does business there.
“The Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia has issued subpoenas to the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) and the NRA Foundation, Inc., as part of an investigation into whether these entities violated the District’s Nonprofit Act,” Racine said in a statement.
He continued: “We are seeking documents from these two nonprofits detailing, among other things, their financial records, payments to vendors, and payments to officers and directors.”
William A. Brewer III, the NRA’s outside counsel, said in a statement that the organization will cooperate with “any appropriate inquiry” into its finances.
“The NRA has full confidence in its accounting practices and commitment to good governance,” Brewer said, noting the organization’s financial statements are audited and that it is “committed to utilizing best practices” in accounting and governance.
Racine’s office has jurisdiction over nonprofits. It can seek court action to dissolve or place into receivership a nonprofit that misuses funds or does not act in accordance with its stated mission.
Racine’s subpoenas come as the organization is under mounting internal and external pressure. They are the second state legal action taken against the NRA in recent months.
In April, New York Attorney General Letitia James also issued subpoenas to the NRA and its foundation seeking financial records about its tax-exempt status. The NRA was chartered in New York in 1871.
Racine’s inquiry into payments to officers and directors comes after The Washington Post reported last month that 18 of the NRA’s 76 board members collected money from the NRA during the past three years, according to tax filings, state charitable reports and NRA correspondence. They include a former National Football League player who received $400,000 for public outreach and firearms training, and a writer who was paid more than $28,000 for articles in NRA publications.
NRA board members are tasked with overseeing the organization’s finances.
[NRA money flowed to board members amid allegedly lavish spending by top officials and vendors]
The NRA is also enmeshed in a lawsuit with New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), who issued a directive last year urging insurance and financial services companies to review their relationships with the organization. It came after a state investigation found the NRA’s “Carry Guard” insurance [murder insurance] product to be illegal under New York law.
Scrutiny of the organization has also increased on Capitol Hill. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been investigating the organization, looking for answers about financial and other ties between the organization and Russia. Two Democratic House members have written to NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, stating they were concerned about a “complex web of relationships” between the organization and Russia.
The NRA also has been grappling with growing internal strife in recent months. In the past several weeks, it has seen its top lobbyist resign and its television arm shut down, and has severed all business with its longtime public relations firm, which helped brand the NRA as a hard-edged organization that would defend gun rights at all costs.
The NRA’s top lobbyist, Christopher W. Cox, resigned last month after being accused of being part of an extortion scheme to oust LaPierre. Cox had led the organization’s political and lobbying arm since 2002 and was considered one of its most effective and high-profile leaders. The political arm spent more than $30 million to help elect President Trump.
In April, LaPierre accused former NRA president Oliver North of extortion, claiming North threatened to reveal damaging financial information if LaPierre did not step down and withdraw the NRA from a lawsuit against its longtime and now estranged public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen.
[Newtown massacre divided NRA leaders, foreshadowing split to come]
The organization has been rocked by revelations of exorbitant spending by top executives, including that LaPierre racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges at a Beverly Hills clothing boutique and on foreign travel, according to invoices.
North, who stepped down from his post after the allegations, also claimed the NRA spent $24 million in legal bills last year. The allegations come as the organization’s 2018 financial report show that the nonprofit, its four affiliated charities and its political committee ended the year $10.8 million in the red.
The report shows that the NRA increased spending on overhead including legal fees, travel, entertainment and office supplies, while cutting money to its core missions, including gun training and political spending.
Katie Zezima
Katie Zezima is a national correspondent covering drugs, guns, gambling and vice in America. She covered the 2016 election and the Obama White House for The Washington Post. Follow
Carol D. Leonnig
Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her work on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret Service. Follow
Keith L. Alexander
Keith L. Alexander covers crime and courts, specifically D.C. Superior Court cases, for The Washington Post. Alexander was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that investigated fatal police shootings across the nation in 2015. He joined The Post in 2001. He previously worked as a reporter for USA Today, BusinessWeek and The Dayton Daily News
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Politics
Newtown massacre divided NRA leaders, foreshadowing split to come
A demonstrator interrupts a speech by NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre in Washington on Dec. 21, 2012, a week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
By Carol D. Leonnig ,
Beth Reinhard and
Tom HamburgerJuly 4
Twenty young children had just been gunned down by a semiautomatic rifle in their classrooms in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, and inside the hardened bunker of the National Rifle Association, rattled officials were wrestling with rare feelings of self-doubt.
In the past, the gun rights organization had responded to mass shootings with unapologetic, high-profile attacks on any attempt to restrict firearms. But several senior NRA officials — laid low by images of sobbing parents planning their children’s funerals rather than tucking presents under Christmas trees — thought the organization should take a less confrontational approach this time, according to multiple people familiar with the internal debate.
Archival video: NRA calls for protecting schools with armed guards
National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre called for schools to be protected with armed guards on Dec. 21, 2012. (Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
Over the objections of some top officials, however, NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre struck a defiant posture. In fiery public appearances crafted by Ackerman McQueen, the organization’s longtime advertising firm , LaPierre announced that the group would create a model program to train armed security guards who could protect schools from shooters, saying that was the only measure that would keep children safe.
Then LaPierre and his wife left for the Bahamas, a trip they billed through Ackerman McQueen — and was ultimately paid for by the nonprofit organization. Their post-Christmas flights to and from Eleuthera, known for its pink beaches, cost the NRA nearly $70,000, according to internal documents and people familiar with the trip.
NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said the couple was on official business, doing outreach to donors and supporters, whom he declined to identify.
After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, “Wayne’s main concern was being respectful of the victims and their families,” he said. LaPierre, as leader of the NRA, sought “to figure out a way to harden our schools” while also defending the Second Amendment, Arulanandam said.
New details about how the NRA handled the tumultuous moment show how Sandy Hook —one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history — divided the leadership of the powerful gun rights organization. The episode also showcased the symbiotic relationship between LaPierre and Ackerman McQueen, an alliance that defined the NRA for more than three decades, several former officials said.
During that period, the bills for LaPierre’s wardrobe and his private jet travel flowed through the Oklahoma-based ad firm, recently revealed internal documents show, a practice that critics say shrouded the nature of the costs from some NRA leaders and members. At the same time, Ackerman McQueen collected tens of millions of dollars in consulting fees and kept a tight grip on the NRA’s aggressive messaging, according to documents and people familiar with the dynamics.
In recent months, a bitter legal dispute over control of the NRA has fractured their longtime alliance, spilling the revelations about the organization’s finances into public view. Ackerman and the NRA are now estranged, locking in warring lawsuits. The tumult led to the resignation last week of longtime NRA lobbyist Christopher W. Cox, whom the NRA has accused of participating in a scheme to oust LaPierre. Cox has denied the allegations.
[‘All those people are completely estranged and at odds.’ Beth Reinhard on rifts within the NRA. Listen on Post Reports.]
The factors that would later fuel this remarkably public civil war were already at play in on Dec. 14, 2012, when the NRA confronted perhaps its worst political crisis in history. On one side was Cox, who was pushing for the group to take a lower-key approach amid a wave of national outrage. On the other was LaPierre, who decided to go on the offensive.
Four months after the massacre, a raft of gun control measures failed in Congress. But outrage about lawmakers’ inaction after the loss of so many young lives in Newtown also spurred a resurgence among groups fighting to restrict firearms.
'Kids are getting shot'
A man and child leave the funeral for 6-year-old Jack Pinto on Dec. 17, 2012, in Newtown, Conn. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
The mass shooting at Sandy Hook, in which 20 first-graders and six adults were killed, scalded the country.
President Barack Obama wiped away tears as he spoke that day about the children who had died. When he visited Newtown two days after the shooting to talk privately with families who had lost their loved ones, he later said, he saw something he’d never witnessed before: the stalwart Secret Service agents on his detail quietly weeping.
The tragedy immediately led to a clamoring for new limits on firearms. Obama vowed that gun control would be a “central issue” of his second term.
Some NRA leaders girded for what they considered inevitable: congressional action to revive the federal ban on assault weapons that had expired in 2004. Several senior officials and longtime leaders thought the killing of children required the group to alter its normally defiant response to mass shootings and keep a low profile — at least in the immediate aftermath, said people familiar with internal discussions.
“Everyone was saying, ‘Are we doing the right thing here?’ ” one former NRA employee said, describing internal discussions about whether the group should consider a modest gun control compromise or alter its aggressive posture. “Kids are getting shot. Is there something else we should be doing?”
Cox, a seasoned political strategist, wanted to head off efforts to restrict firearms and thought that a combative approach at that time was unwise and could invite a public backlash, said multiple people familiar with the debate.
But LaPierre ultimately agreed with Ackerman McQueen that the NRA had to forcefully counter growing public calls to rein in weapons.
Cox, who did not respond to requests for comment, did not attend a news conference that LaPierre held a week after the Sandy Hook shooting.
As soon as LaPierre stepped before hundreds of reporters at the Willard hotel in Washington on Dec. 21, he made it clear that the NRA would remain fiercely opposed to any gun control measures.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said after the Sandy Hook massacre. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
The NRA chief announced that a task force would create a program, later called NRA School Shield, to help train armed security guards to protect schools from shooters — and preemptively defended the group from those he predicted would criticize the idea.
[Put armed police in every school, NRA urges]
“Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the word ‘gun’ automatically become a bad word?” LaPierre said.
He then delivered the line that would become a mantra of NRA hard-liners: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
LaPierre ridiculed gun-free school zones as welcome signs to insane murderers and warned of “monsters .?.?. who walk among us every day.”
“The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them,” he said.
Two days later, LaPierre went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to promote the NRA’s new shield program. “If it’s crazy to call for putting police and armed security [guards] in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” he said.
When Obama later voiced skepticism that putting more guns in schools would keep children safer, Ackerman McQueen produced a video that alluded to his daughters’ Secret Service protection, calling him an “elitist hypocrite.”
“Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” the narrator intoned.
[Ackerman McQueen PR firm has been behind NRA’s provocative ads for decades]
There were signs that some inside the NRA were uncomfortable with the focus on Obama’s daughters. Jim Baker, one of the organization’s top lobbyists, said at the time that he considered the ad “ill-advised,” adding, “I don’t think it was particularly helpful.”
In a statement, Ackerman McQueen officials said that the firm’s job was to help the NRA respond to news and public events, as it did after the Sandy Hook massacre, and that LaPierre was the final decision-maker on the strategy to propose armed defenders in schools.
“Throughout the entire relationship with the NRA, Wayne LaPierre controlled every aspect of NRA public communications,” the firm said.
Po Murray, chairwoman of Newtown Action Alliance, whose four children graduated from Sandy Hook Elementary before the shooting, called the approach taken by the NRA and Ackerman McQueen “corrupt and irresponsible.”
“We felt the NRA’s position after Sandy Hook was completely insensitive and so out of touch when we were going through such a significant amount of trauma,” she said.
Arulanandam said that LaPierre “had great compassion for those impacted by this horrific event” and was seeking to find a way to “protect our most treasured resource — our children.”
“These events, sadly, all too often become politicized by people on all sides of the conversation,” he said, adding: “At the same time, during these events the media demands that we defend our position on the Second Amendment.”
Gun control falters
After his combative public performance, LaPierre left town.
Three days after the mass shooting in Newtown, he charged $39,947 for a private jet to Eleuthera, according to internal travel records detailed in letters this spring from Ackerman McQueen’s chief financial officer to LaPierre, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal and obtained by The Washington Post.
On Dec. 27, the LaPierres flew to the island, NRA officials confirmed. The organization has previously said that LaPierre, as the public face of the organization, must travel by private plane for security reasons.
Arulanandam, the NRA spokesman, said the couple’s week-plus visit to the Caribbean resort area during the winter holidays was a business trip related to donor outreach. The organization declined to provide details, saying it was against NRA policy to discuss individual donors.
“There was a business trip after Christmas 2012 involving donor outreach and the recruitment of influential NRA supporters and members,” Arulanandam said. “Wayne is responsible for a campaign to raise almost $400 million annually, so he travels extensively on behalf of the Association — even over the holidays.”
Susan LaPierre, co-founder of theNRA Women’s Leadership Forum, a coalition of female philanthropists who support the Second Amendment, traveled with her husband to “assist with NRA business and development efforts as she frequently does,” Arulanandam said.
After ringing in the New Year in the Caribbean, Wayne LaPierre charged another private air charter on his Ackerman McQueen credit card: $29,100 on Jan. 3 to fly from Nassau, Bahamas, to Dallas, according to internal documents and people familiar with his trips.
NRA officials said LaPierre flew to Dallas to attend donor and member events there as part of a hunters’ sporting exposition.
NRA chief lobbyist Christopher W. Cox and LaPierre stand near an empty seat reserved for then-NRA President Oliver North at the group’s annual meeting in Indianapolis on April 26. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News)
William A. Brewer III, a lawyer for the NRA, has said that the vast majority of LaPierre’s travel involved “donor outreach, fundraising and stakeholder engagement.” He said that the NRA chief routed some travel expenses through Ackerman McQueen for “confidentiality and security purposes,” but that this method of billing has since been modified.
Ackerman McQueen said the firm footed the initial bill for LaPierre’s travel at the NRA’s instructions.
“Ackerman McQueen did not have any knowledge of the plans or details of the expenditures in question, all of which the NRA client claimed had a sound business or security rationale,” the firm said in a statement.
For several months, the deaths of the Connecticut schoolchildren continued to spur public cries for action. Polls showed that 90 percent of Americans supported new legislation to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.
In a letter dated Jan. 3, 2013, that was sent to congressional lawmakers, Cox said the NRA wanted to be a “constructive voice” in the debate about how to prevent the next school massacre. He stressed his opposition to a ban on assault weapons, but said the organization supported efforts to keep all weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill.
The tragedy spurred a rare bipartisan effort on gun control in the Senate. Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), a pro-gun Democrat, and Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) joined forces to expand background checks to cover a major source of gun sales: unlicensed dealers at gun shows and online vendors.
Parents of the Sandy Hook victims visited Washington to pressure lawmakers to act, carrying pictures of their children: a freckle-faced boy smiling with a missing front tooth, a 6-year-old boy in his favorite Superman shirt.
But by the time of the final vote on April 17, their chance of victory was slim. Some Republicans said the bill was unfair to gun owners because it would require them to pay for a background check to exercise their right to buy a gun. The NRA had vowed to “score” senators based on their vote on the legislation, stressing that they would face consequences for supporting it. The organization asked its members to flood senators with letters, emails and phone calls.
John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group backed by former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said that Sandy Hook was a turning point for the NRA and that “its leaders chose the course of extremism and refused to even consider common-sense laws supported by most Americans.”
As a cluster of Sandy Hook parents gathered in the gallery to watch the key vote, a Republican-led filibuster blocked the measure, with four Democrats joining to oppose it. The Senate also blocked other measures Obama sought to ban certain military-style rifles and limit the size of ammunition magazines.
The visibly angry president declared that it was a temporary loss.
“All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” he said, vowing to try again. “Sooner or later, we’re going to get this right.”
Julie Tate, Alice Crites and Katie Zezima contributed to this report.
Carol D. Leonnig
Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her work on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret Service. Follow
Beth Reinhard
Beth Reinhard is a reporter on the investigative team at The Washington Post. She was a member of the Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize, George Polk Award and Toner Prize in 2018. She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, National Journal, the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post. Follow
Tom Hamburger
Tom Hamburger is an investigative reporter on the national desk of The Washington Post. He has covered the White House, Congress and regulatory agencies, with a focus on money and politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/us/nra-board-subpoena-letitia-james.html
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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/jailing-climate-deniers_b_5912596.html
10/14
Hysterics at the right-wing think tanks and their acolytes at The Washington Times, talk radio and the blogosphere, are foaming in apoplexy because I supposedly suggested that “all climate deniers should be jailed.” Last week, that canard leapt from the wingnut echo chamber into New York magazine, which reported, under Jonathan Chait’s byline, that “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. shares the opinion that climate denial should be criminalized.” Chait was quoting the National Review‘s Kevin Williamson who made that outlandish claim at one of Heritage Foundation’s annual “Conference for Kooks.” Of course, I never said that. I support the First Amendment which makes room for any citizen to, even knowingly, spew far more vile lies without legal consequence.
I do, however, believe that corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty. This can be accomplished through an existing legal proceeding known as “charter revocation.” State Attorneys General can invoke this remedy whenever corporations put their profit-making before the “public welfare.”
In 1998, New York State’s Republican Attorney General Dennis Vacco successfully invoked the “corporate death penalty” to revoke the charters of two non-profit tax-exempt tobacco industry front groups, The Tobacco Institute and The Council for Tobacco Research (CTR). The two groups Vacco annulled were creatures of a decade long campaign funded principally by tobacco giant, Brown & Williamson to avoid costly health regulations that would diminish the profit margins of an industry that was killing one out of five of its customers. “Doubt is our Product,” explained B&W’s notorious 1969 memo outlining the reptilian communications strategy that hatched its front groups.
Vacco complained that these companies were “[feeding] the public a pack of lies in an underhanded effort to promote smoking so as to addict America’s kids.” Attorney General Vacco seized their assets and distributed them to public institutions.
Laws in every state maintain that companies that fail to comply with prescribed standards of corporate behavior may be either dissolved or, in the case of foreign corporations, lose their rights to operate within that state’s borders. These rules can be quite expansive and, in contrast to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings on campaign finance law, companies, under state laws, enjoy far less protection than human beings. New York, for example, prescribes corporate death whenever a company fails to “serve the common good” and “to cause no harm.”
Just as Big Tobacco funded the now moribund C.T.R. and the Tobacco Institute to systematically deceive the public about the perils of cigarettes, the carbon cronies, with far larger profits at stake, have funded an army of front groups to persuade the public that global warming is a hoax.
For over a decade, petroleum industry behemoths led by Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, have waged a successful multi-million dollar propaganda blitz to mislead the public about global warming using the same techniques honed by Big Tobacco in its campaign to hoodwink the public about smoking.
In their efforts to impede state, national and international efforts to protect humans from the destructive climate chaos, both companies have engaged in massive spending sprees purchasing phony “junk” science devised to undermine the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming. Between 1997 and 2013, ExxonMobil, pumped over 29.9 million dollars into an elaborate network of over 75 front groups to manufacture skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe. At the same time, Koch Industries has piped at least $67,042,064 to over fifty groups that play central roles in the Koch-funded offensive against climate science.
Two decades after Brown & Williamson’s notorious “Doubt is our Product” memo, the oil industry launched its own anti-science juggernaut replicating Big Tobacco’s and utilizing many of the same corrupt scientists and PR firms. Two secret memos dictated the blueprint for Big Carbon’s anti-science offensive. The American Petroleum Institute — lobbyist for ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips — was the spear tip of a multi-million dollar campaign to confound American citizens about climate science by manipulating the media. On April 3, 1998, API laid out its “Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan,” the detailed blueprint of “tactics and strategies” for deceiving the American people and press by sewing doubts about climate science. The API team would create front groups and “educate” editorial boards and corporate CEOs to challenge “prevailing scientific wisdom.” Under “recruiting and training,” API outlines its plan for tapping neophyte — “read malleable” — scientists and tame journalists ( “e.g. John Stossel,” the memo suggests) to bamboozle the public. “Victory will be achieved,” API promises, “when average citizens and the media recognize uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’”
Four years later in 2002, conservative pollster Frank Luntz in an influential memo to President George Bush and oil patch lawmakers, applauded the industry for the success of the API campaign. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community.” Nevertheless, he warned Big Carbon’s indentured servants on Capitol Hill “the science [is closing against us] but is not yet closed.” He advised, “therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
Over the next dozen years, a string of front groups conducted the deceptive anti-science campaign outlined in the API’s 1998 plan and Luntz’s 2002 memo and funded primarily by ExxonMobil and Koch.
Among the groups that have received millions from Exxon and Koch Industries are The Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Global Climate Coalition, The American Enterprise Institute (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), George C. Marshall Institute, the State Policy Network, The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Like the Tobacco Institute and CTR, these front groups are snake pits for sociopaths. Run by venomous carbon industry toadies, they stable a craven menagerie of propaganda wizards, slick biostitutes, tobacco scientists, snake oil hucksters, voodoo economists and other so-called “experts” employed to publish beguiling studies, appear on TV and radio, and write deceptive articles critiquing the “flawed science” predicting climate change. They broadcast zany theories to bolster policies that encourage increased energy consumption, torpedo renewable energy, attack pollution rules, maintain Big Carbon’s obscene government subsidies, and, in general provide the philosophical underpinnings for a system of cushy socialism for the “dirty energy” tycoons and bitter, savage capitalism for the rest of mankind.
For example, CEI, which describes itself as being “a leader in the fight against the global warming scare,” spent years denying that warming was real, and then, as the tsunami of evidence made that position untenable, pivoted to the more defensible posture that human beings are not causing it. CEI has more recently beat its final retreat to the terminal default position that global warming is great because it will “create a milder, greener, more prosperous world.” The floods, fires, drought, rising oceans, disappearing ice caps, melting glaciers, drowned cities and refugees have not exactly been “mild.” But things have been prosperous and “green” — if one means greenbacks — for the Koch Brothers and ExxonMobil, who are enjoying the biggest profits in world history. “You’re Welcome, Planet Earth!”
AEI, one of the richest and most influential think tanks in the United States — and the high priest of climate denial — offered a $10,000 bounty in 2006 to any scientist or economist who could produce an article undermining the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) Report. The IPCC report was the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science representing the scientific consensus among thousands of climate scientists comprising the leading and most prestigious and scientific stars from over 130 participating nations.
Any State Attorney General with the will, resolve and viscera to stand to up to the dangerous and duplicitous corporate propagandists, has authority to annul the charters of each of these mercenary merchants of deceit. An Attorney General with particularly potent glands could revoke the charters not just oil industry surrogates like AEI and CEI, he or she could also withdraw state operating authority from the soulless, nation-less oil companies that have sponsored “Big Lie” campaigns and force them to sell their in-state assets to more responsible competitors.
Koch Industries and ExxonMobil have particularly distinguished themselves as candidates for corporate death. No other companies have worked harder or spent more money to impede the government from taking action on global warming to safeguard public welfare. Both companies have employed artifice on a massive scale and spent tens of millions of dollars to purchase fraudulent junk science. The greedy, immoral, anti-social pathology behind ExxonMobil and Koch’s mendacious crusade is even starker given the open acknowledgment since 2007 by the other major oil companies including Shell, Chevron and BP, that burning oil is causing climate change.
Though they like to invoke patriotic themes and drape themselves in the flag, the oil barons have persistently demonstrated their enthusiasm for putting corporate profits ahead of the public welfare.
“I’m not a US company,” Exxon’s legendary former CEO, Lee Raymond told his board, “and I don’t make decisions on what is good for the US.” These companies are not friends to America. They are enemies of mankind.
The notion that a State Attorney General might actually execute one of these villains is not a pipe dream. State Attorneys General have historically shown a willingness to stand up to American democracy’s biggest corporate bullies including, Wall Street, Big Tobacco, coal-burning utilities and the oil titans even in eras, like the present, when corporate money has subverted our democracy and extracted the spinal cords from most politicians. It was 46 courageous State Attorneys Generals who brought down the cigarette companies. It was nine northeastern State Attorneys General who sued the coal-burning utilities for damages to their citizens from airborne pollutants. And it was State Attorneys General in New York, Ohio and Texas who, during the Gilded Age, dismantled the Standard Oil octopus, and restored economic democracy to America. That deadly Frankenstein monster, now reassembled and resurrected as ExxonMobil, poses an even greater threat today to our historical values and quality of life.
Let’s all hope for and vote for a home state Attorney General candidate who promises to stand up against carbon’s duplicitous proxies and fight for truth, justice and democracy and to provide our children with safe, healthy, dignified and wholesome communities and the prosperity that should not be exclusive to the Koch Brothers and ExxonMobil.
"Corporate Crackdown," Kalle Lasn and Tom Liacas
nypolisci.org/files/PDF%20FILES/Chapter%20VI_13_Corporate%20Crackdown.pdf
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Chartering a New Course: Revoking Corporations' Right to Exist
westgatehouse.com/art120.html
Perhaps the boldest use of the charter revocation enforcement tool against multinational corporate interests in recent years came in 1998, when New York's then-attorney general Dennis Vaccoannounced his intention to snuff out two tobacco industry front groups--the Council for TobaccoResearch and the Tobacco ...
Seattle News and Events | Killing corporations - Seattle Weekly
www.seattleweekly.com/1999-07-14/news/killing-corporations/
Oct 9, 2006 - In May 1998, New York Attorney General Dennis Vacco began corporate charter revocation proceedings against the nonprofit Council for Tobacco Research and the Tobacco Institute Inc., calling them "shills" for tobacco corporations. In October, he won the revocation of the council'scharter, forcing it to ...
Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of ...
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1576753190
**Ted Nace** - 2005 - Business & Economics
In the late 1990s Florida revoked the charters of a number of corporations involved in stock fraud schemes that cost investors $81 million. In 1998, New York's attorney general, Dennis Vacco, announced action to revoke the charter of the Council for Tobacco Research. According to Vacco, CTR violated its official mission of ...
What States' Attorneys General Can Do About Climate Deniers | HuffPost
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f.../jailing-climate-deniers_b_5912596.html
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:{[PDF]:(style="font-weight:bold;cursor:auto;margin:0px 3px 0px 0px;float:left"):}:The Case for a Federal Corporate Charter Revocation Penalty
www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/80-2-Noonan.pdf
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by K Noonan - Cited by 7 - Related articles
ment for crimes committed.95 Similarly, in 1998, New York Attorney. General Dennis Vacco very nearlyrevoked the charters of tobacco industry front groups that peddled junk science promoting tobaccouse.96. Further, the revoked charters in both Florida and New York were for fairly minor corporate players in the larger ...
Revoke ExxonMobil's Corporate Charter for Climate Destruction and ...
www.truth-out.org/.../34379-revoke-exxonmobil-s-corporate-charter-for-climate-dest...
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The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1597262803
Andrew Kimbrell - 2002 - Business & Economics
In 1998. such a charter revocation was initiated in New York State, under Republican Attorney GeneralDennis Vacco. The state sought to revoke the charters of two nonprofit public relations and lobbying groups for the tobacco industry — the Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research. Before the court could ...
More on RFK's proposal to invoke the corporate death penalty ...
www.professorbainbridge.com/.../more-on-rfks-proposal-to-invoke-the-corporate-dea...
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Cigarette Makers' Strategy of '94 Is Echoed Today - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/us/cigarette-makers-strategy-of-94-is-echoed-today.html
May 2, 1998 - Attorney General Dennis Vacco of New York said on Thursday that he was moving torevoke the groups' tax-free status as not-for-profit research and information organizations because they violated their charters. Mr. Vacco accused the groups of posing as nonprofit groups while, at taxpayer expense, they ...