corporations
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Science — especially climate research — needs a ‘sunshine’ law
Ten years ago, I worked in the United States Senate and helped draft and pass the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. The law requires companies to report monies and gifts they give physicians, which are known to influence what doctors prescribe or promote. Thanks to the Sunshine Act, you can look up doctors on a public […]
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Report: Corporations are big fat hypocrites about climate change
Corporations are officially people now, and like people, sometimes corporations will loudly say that they believe one thing while their actions reveal another preference entirely. Like a lady who says she wants to settle down but dates only dudes who are apt to move to Hawaii at a moment’s notice, American companies having been saying […]
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What corporate logos does a 5-year-old know?
This video, in which a 5-year-old rattles off corporate logos while sounding exactly like Marcel the Shell, is simultaneously adorable and sobering.
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Time to be angry, not cynical, about corporate money in politics
We're unfazed by things that should shake us to the core, like how Big Oil pays Congress to do its bidding. We need to get naïvely angry again.
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Energy companies get $24 billion of corporate welfare from taxpayers
Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green. Tax breaks and subsidies for energy companies have gotten so extreme that dozens of top companies have made billions in profits while having negative taxes — actually receiving taxpayer welfare instead of paying anything to the federal treasury. An analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and […]
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From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Earth
Photo: Eric WagnerThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems — its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere — goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and […]
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Is the environmental crisis caused by the 7 billion or the 1%?
The United Nations says that the world’s population will reach 7 billion people this month. The approach of that milestone has produced a wave of articles and opinion pieces blaming the world’s environmental crises on overpopulation. In New York’s Times Square, a huge and expensive video declares that “human overpopulation is driving species extinct.” In […]
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Can smart consumption replace green government?
A couple of years ago we were promised the “greenest government ever” — not a difficult thing in the U.K., but it sounded fun all the same. Sadly, the green stuff that was a major part of Prime Minister David Cameron’s “detoxification” of the Conservative party image a couple of years ago left no trace […]
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Greens join Occupy Wall Street, protest against everything being super screwed up
In all of the navel-gazing that climate activists conduct in order to figure out why the world is on the highway to carbon hell, one thing that's easy to forget is what we're up against: Gigantic, tremendously wealthy entrenched interests whose only goal is to maintain the status quo right up until the Once-ler burns the last of our fossil fuels. In other words, corporations.
Corporations fund the climate denial machine, lobby for subsidies to keep themselves viable long after the social and environmental costs of their ways have become egregious, and at the slightest provocation, sic their anointed party on any alternative energy that should threaten their unsustainable model.
That's why it should be no surprise that a movement aimed, at least vaguely, at reducing the power of corporations should be appealing to anyone who cares about the future of life on earth.