Updating my earlier post on Robert F Kennedy Jr.'s absurd proposal to impose the corporate death penalty on companies that disagree with his extreme climate views, Keith Paul Bishop examines the relevant California principles and concludes:
I agree with the professor, none of these authorizes the killing of a corporation merely because it has put its profit motive above the “general welfare”.
Meanwhile, Andrew Stuttaford argues that:
Kennedy also argues 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.”
As a precedent, Kennedy cites this:
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)… Attorney General Vacco seized their assets and distributed them to public institutions.
Hmmm, whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of that particular decision, it’s worth noting that it was directed against groups with charitable status, a status that rests on a presumption of some sort of public good. What Kennedy is contemplating is action against ‘regular’ corporations (such as ExxonMobil and Koch Industries) that support a political and scientific agenda with which he disagrees, corporations that, incidentally, he believes to be “enemies of mankind”. That hysterical and demagogic description tells you everything that you need to know. Kennedy’s is the language of a tyrant-in-the-making, prowling around America’s constitutional protections and looking for a way in.
We should, I suppose, thank Kennedy for highlighting the fact that State attorneys-general have this power, and we should take steps to ensure—by law—that it cannot be abused by those who cannot stomach the awkwardness of free speech.
Stuttaford concludes by bashing Kennedy's hyperbolic attacks on vaccine scientists.
