Activist Robert Kennedy Jr. Denies He Wants to “Jail Climate Change Deniers” – Actually Wants to “Execute” Climate Villain Corporations and Think Tanks

In his article, “Jailing
Climate Deniers” over at EcoWatch, prominent
environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr. magnanimously allows that
individual Americans – even misguided souls who question the
scientific consensus on man-made global warming – have a First
Amendment right to speak their piece. Corporations and think tanks,
however, are another matter. Kennedy argues that such organizations
do not enjoy free speech protections and therefore can and should
be targeted for death by activist state attorneys-general. As
Kennedy explains: 

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.”…

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, nationless 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.

Besides the usual suspects of ExxonMobil and Koch Industries,
Kennedy offers a preliminary list of groups that he thinks deserve
execution: 

Among the groups that have received millions from Exxon and Koch
Industries are the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, Cooler
Heads Coalition, Global Climate Coalition, American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Heartland
Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), George C.
Marshall Institute, State Policy Network, Competitive Enterprise
Institute (CEI) and American Enterprise
Institute (AEI).

Of course, this kind of thing could get out of hand. Who knows
but that some brave state attorneys-general might decide to
“execute” prominent organizations that misrepresent the science on
the safety of, say, biotech
crops, or
vaccines?

For more background, see my article, “Confessions
of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore.”