"Managed-mendacity arising from a culture of corporate greed gave birth to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Organizational malfeasance arises from deep within the culture of mega corporations, and consists of the collective issues of complexity and strategy; and, individual forms of managerial mischief. The impact of unethical corporate behavior has had wide-spread national and global ramifications for the economy and prestige of the United States. This paper looks at survey results that shows that stiffer penalties for wrongdoing embedded into the legislation are beginning to have an impact on corporate social responsibility..."

A dissertation on how the Business Roundtable met in 1989 to plan a state-by-state campaign to push standardized testing and reduce community participation in education.

Today Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., ranking Democrat and Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finding that states routinely incorporate new non-publicly traded companies without learning the identity of the owners, and that the absence of this company ownership information impedes law enforcement...

"The essays in this volume provide a remarkable portrait of the hothouse brew of corruption, cronyism, unilateralism, neoliberal rhetoric, protectionism, and good old American nationalism that has marked the Bush administration’s approach to post-war and post-disaster reconstruction..."

"PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN THE INTEGRITY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is alarmingly low. While numerous factors contribute to this phenomenon, one of the most potent is the widespread belief that government has been taken over by powerful special interests. Such a belief is not unfounded. Special interests—which these days mainly mean large corporations and their trade associations— spend huge sums on campaign contributions and lobbying..."

"Potentially powerful new forces are surging today in the territory of economic reform. At work are relatively little-known yet vigorous new power centers seeking to democratize control over corporations, and hold them more accountable for the social impacts of their behaviors. Among the emerging power centers are state and local pension funds, trustees of labor’s capital, state treasurers, and state and local governments. They are advancing promising new movements for a democratically controlled economy, using tools such as living wage laws, corporate subsidy reform, purchasing preference laws, shareholder activism, and corporate charter reform..."

"Today, new passions against corporate chain stores are rising. But instead of beginning where the first anti-chain movement began, asserting the rights of self-governing people, today’s organizers start their fight where that earlier movement failed."

"Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth have commissioned this paper to examine the obstacles and options for international approaches to community redress for the harmful effects of multinationals’ activities on people and the environment. Encouraged by the recent adoption by UN experts of human rights norms for business, Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth are also looking beyond the social and environmental obligations that bind business to consider what can be done to guarantee communities redress when harm is done. Compared with small and medium-size enterprises, multinationals have the greatest capacity to cause harm to people and the environment on a global scale and to use political, financial and legal leverage to avoid being brought to account..."

"The Alien Tort Claims Act is one of the only tools Americans have to make human rights abusers pay for their actions. Now the U.S. Justice Department is trying to undermine this important law. Don’t let it happen! The Alien Tort Claims Act allows foreign victims of serious human rights abuse abroad to sue the perpetrators in U.S. courts. No other country has a law quite like it. The accused perpetrator must be in the U.S. to be served court papers, but otherwise neither the victim nor the perpetrator need to reside in the United States..."

"Passed in 1789, the ATCA grants jurisdiction to U.S. federal courts to hear complaints by foreign nationals for torts in violation of the “law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” Beginning in 1981, in the landmark Filartiga decision, U.S. courts have recognized that a limited number of international crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture, “disappearances,” extrajudicial executions, forced labor and prolonged arbitrary detention, violate the "law of nations” and that claims for such abuses therefore can be brought under the ATCA..."

" In 1992, the American corporation Unocal entered into a joint venture with Burma’s military dictatorship (then called the SLORC, or State Law and Order Restoration Council) and a French corporation to construct and operate an oil pipeline running across the interior of the country to Thailand. According to Unocal, the project “brought significant benefits in health care, education and economic opportunity to more than 45,000 people” living in the path of the pipeline..."

"From September 10-14, 2003, the 5th Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) will take place in Cancun, Mexico. There, the 146 member countries of the WTO will intensify negotiations to complete the Doha Development Agenda, which was launched at the 4th Ministerial meeting of the WTO in Doha, Qatar, in November 2001. Much rides on the success or failure of this meeting. The stakes are huge. Powerful governments and their business communities are seeking a major liberalization of services, agriculture and intellectual property rights as well as bold new initiatives on investment, competition and government procurement..."

"SEEN’s ongoing study of World Bank Group financing for fossil fuels finds that the big winners of this globalization game are some of the largest transnational corporations in the world. Of the world’s ten largest corporations , five are among the WBG’s top 15 private welfare recipients. Shell, the world’s eighth biggest corporation, benefited from over $1.93 billion in World Bank projects since 1992, and ranks third among all firms. BP-Amoco and Exxon Mobil , the world’s second and fourth largest corporations, benefited from around $900 million in WBG financing a piece..."

"So, the voluntary approach to social and environmental is working, is it? In that case, where are all the social reports? Since the Prime Minister called for the top FTSE350 to report on their environmental impacts by December 2001, few have actually responded to the challenge. By late last year, less than one third of the FTSE 350 produced a substantive environmental report, and only a scant 24 reported that they would endeavour to do so in the near future.i The results of social reporting are even more worrisome..."

"Corporate personhood is a legal fiction. The choice of the word “person” arises from the way the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was worded and from earlier legal usage of the word person. A corporation is an artificial entity, created by the granting of a charter by a government that grants such charters. Corporation in this essay will be confined to businesses run for profit that have been granted corporate charters by the states of the United States..."

Poll results on American's views on corporations.

"There is a rich quarter-century history of attempts, many of them international in scope, to make corporations more accountable to communities, workers, and environmental concerns. Yet, unlike the environmental movement or the civil rights movement, there is no self-conscious "corporate accountability movement." Instead, there are hundreds of scattered corporate campaigns, many of which have been highly sophisticated, successful, and have crossed borders and movements. These efforts have made major inroads into the tobacco industry, the arms industry, and the apparel and footwear industries, and have changed the way many corporations approach the environment and treat their workers..."