by Al Gore
90 “forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society”
Karl Marx, “The Fall of Paris,” May 1871, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch06.htm.
91 white flag that had been flown by Parisians
Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71 (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 433.
92 obsessively following the daily reports
Sacks, “Corporate Citizenship.”
93 than any other story that year besides government corruption
John Harland Hicks and Robert Tucker, Revolution & Reaction: The Paris Commune, 1871 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), p. 60; Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900 (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), p. 153.
94 bankruptcy of financier and railroad entrepreneur Jay Cooke
“The Panic of 1873,” The American Experience, Ulysses S. Grant, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/grant-panic/.
95 “opportunity or the incentive to spread abroad”
“The Communists,” New York Times, January 20, 1874.
96 decided to make it his mission to strengthen corporations
Sacks, “Corporate Citizenship.”
97 Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly became president, and the following year
“Domestic Politics,” The American Experience, TR, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tr-domestic/.
98 inside his new Department of Commerce and Labor
Ibid.
99 break up J. P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Corporation
Ibid.
100 112 corporations worth a combined $571 billion (in 2012 dollars)
Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, p. 67.
101 “twice the total assessed value of all property in thirteen states”
Ibid.
102 This was followed by forty more antitrust suits
“Domestic Politics,” PBS.
103 protected more than 230 million acres of land
Ibid.
104 winning the Nobel Peace Prize
Historians now believe that, while Roosevelt was no doubt essential to the brokering of an effective deal, he was not truly a neutral arbiter and tilted heavily toward Japan in private. See James Bradley, “Diplomacy That Will Live in Infamy,” New York Times, December 6, 2009.
105 “wise custom” by serving only two terms
Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 364.
106 William Howard Taft, abandoned many of TR’s reforms
“American President: William Howard Taft,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, http://millercenter.org/president/taft/essays/biography/1.
107 “corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit”
Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” August 31, 1910, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/tr-nationalism/.
108 given privileges to which they are not entitled
Lessig, Republic, Lost, p. 4.
109 “twist the methods of free government”
Ibid., p. 5. Theodore Roosevelt, “From the Archives: President Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism Speech,” August 31, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/06/archives-president-teddy-roosevelts-new-nationalism-speech.
110 “prohibit the use of corporate funds”
Roosevelt, “From the Archives: President Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism Speech.”
111 “does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation”
Ibid.
112 secretly bribed Harding administration officials
United States Senate, “1921–1940: Senate Investigates the ‘Teapot Dome’ Scandal,” http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_Investigates_the_Teapot_Dome_Scandal.htm.
113 “menace to the welfare of the nation”
Jeffrey Rosen, “POTUS v. SCOTUS,” New York, March 17, 2010.
114 Historians differ on whether Roosevelt’s threat was the cause
“Presidential Politics,” American Experience, FDR, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/fdr-presidential/.
115 began approving the constitutionality
Ibid.
116 return court rulings to the philosophy that existed prior to the New Deal
Jeffrey Rosen, “Second Opinions,” New Republic, May 4, 2012.
117 Powell, a Richmond lawyer
Jim Hoggan, “40th Anniversary of the Lewis Powell Memo Launching Corporate Propaganda Infrastructure,” DeSmogBlog, August 23, 2011, http://www.desmogblog.com/40th-anniversary-lewis-powell-memo-launching-corporate-propaganda-infrastructure; John Jeffries, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.: A Biography (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), p. 4.
118 state legislatures, and the judiciary in order to tilt
Lewis F. Powell, “The Powell Memo,” August 23, 1971, http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/.
119 “corporate speech,” which he found to be protected by the First Amendment
Jeffrey Clements, “The Real History of ‘Corporate Personhood’: Meet the Man to Blame for Corporations Having More Rights Than You,” AlterNet, December 6, 2011.
120 that the law violated the free speech of “corporate persons”
Ibid.
121 have revenues larger than many of the world’s nation-states
Vincent Trivett, “25 US Mega Corporations: Where They Rank If They Were Countries,” Business Insider, June 27, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/25-corporations-bigger-tan-countries-2011-6?op=1.
122 “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based”
Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), p. 71.
123 “dependence upon the positions of particular governments”
Bakan, The Corporation, p. 25.
124 “Nobody tells those guys what to do”
Coll, Private Empire, p. 257.
125 political action committees exploded
Federal Election Commission, “The Growth of Political Action Committees, 1974–1998,” http://www.voteview.com/Growth_of_PACs_by_Type.htm.
126 corporations with registered corporate lobbyists
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 118.
127 from $100 million in 1975 to $3.5 billion per year in 2010
Robert G. Kaiser, “Citizen K Street: Introduction,” Washington Post, March 2007, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/citizen-k-street/chapters/introduction/; Bennett Roth and Alex Knott, “Lobby Dollars Dip for First Time in Years,” Roll Call, February 1, 2011.
128 top the list of lobbying expenditures
Roth and Knott, “Lobby Dollars Dip for First Time in Years.”
129 more than all lobbyist expenditures combined when the Powell Plan
Kaiser, “Citizen K Street: Introduction.”
130 only 3 percent of retiring members of Congress
Lessig, Republic, Lost, p. 123.
131 more than 50 percent of retiring senators and more than 40 percent
Ibid.
132 “ideological warfare”
Powell, “The Powell Memo.”
133 change the character of American government
Timothy Noah, “Think Cranks,” New Republic, March 30, 2012.
134 principal as quickly as possible in order to have maximum impact
Ibid.
135 Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Ibid.
136 Adolph Coors Foundation
David Brock, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 43.
137 “if, in turn, business is willing to provide the funds”
Powell, “The Powell Memo.”
138 seminars organized by wealthy corporate interests
Eric Lichtblau, “Advocacy Group Says Justices May Have Conflict in Campaign Finance Case,” New York Times, January 19, 2011.
139 basic functions that had been performed by democratically
Emily Thornton, “Roads to Riches,” BusinessWeek, May 6, 2007; Jonathan Hoenig, “Opportunities in Infrastructure: Should We Privatize Bridges and Roads?,” Fox News, August 5, 2007, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,253438,00.html.
140 highest inequality of incomes and the highest poverty rate
James Gustave Speth, “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I,” Orion, March/April 2012.
141 lowest “material well-being”
Ibid.
142 highest child poverty rate
Ibid.
143 highest infant mortality rate
Ibid.
144 biggest prison population and the highest homicide rate
Ibid.
145 largest percentage of its citizens unable to afford health care
Ibid.
146 “should be monitored in the same way that textbooks”
Powell, “The Powell Memo.”
147 “opportunity for supporters of the American system”
Ibid.
148 “vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good”
James Madison, Federalist No. 10, “The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection,” November 23, 1787, http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_10.html.
149 “unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts”
Ibid.
150 “the various and unequal distribution of property”
Ibid.
151 property, and income in the United States is now larger
Timothy Noah, “Introducing the Great Divergence,” Slate, September 3, 2010.
152 who are relatively more tolerant and others who are relatively less tolerant
Jonathan Haidt, “Born This Way? Nature, Nurture, Narratives, and the Making of Our Political Personalities,” Reason, May 2012.
153 value liberty and fairness but think about them differently
Ibid.
154 differences are reinforced by social feedback loops
Ibid.; Sasha Issenberg, “Born This Way: The New Weird Science of Hardwired Political Identity,” New York, April 16, 2012.
155 what language would most trigger feelings of outrage
Frank Luntz, Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear (New York: Hyperion, 2006), p. 165.
156 strategy known as “starve the beast”
Bruce Bartlett, “ ‘Starve the Beast’: Origins and Development of a Budgetary Metaphor,” Independent Review, Summer 2007.
157 U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio will be 70 percent in 2013
Congressional Budget Office, “The 2012 Long-Term Budget Outlook,” http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/06-05-Long-Term_Budget_Outlook.pdf.
158 exceeds GDP if money the government owes to itself is added to the debt
Agence France-Presse, “US Borrowing Tops 100% of GDP: Treasury,” August 3, 2011; Matt Phillips, “The U.S. Debt Load: Big and Cheap,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2012.
159 no perceptible effect on the demand for U.S. bonds
Tim Mullaney, “A Year After Downgrade, S&P’s View on Washington Unchanged,” USA Today, August 7, 2012.
160 add approximately $1 trillion to interest payments over the next decade
Jeanne Sahadi, “Washington’s $5 Trillion Interest Bill,” CNN Money, March 12, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/05/news/economy/national-debt-interest/index.htm.
161 “the diffusion of power away from government”
Joseph S. Nye, “Cyber War and Peace,” Project Syndicate, April 10, 2012, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/cyber-war-and-peace.
162 not even close to the fiscal conditions that would have reduced the risk
David Marsh, “The Euro’s Lost Promise,” New York Times, March 17, 2010; Sven Boll, “New Documents Shine Light on Euro Birth Defects,” Der Spiegel, May 8, 2012.
163 for the two decades since reunification—at an estimated cost of $2.17 trillion
Katrin Bennhold, “What History Can Explain About the Greek Crisis,” New York Times, May 21, 2012.
164 plant varieties that were especially suitable for cultivation
Jared Diamond, “What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?,” New York Review of Books, June 7, 2012.
165 Fertile Crescent (and in nearby Crete)
Ibid.
166 several other areas of the world, including Mexico, the Andes, and Hawaii
Ibid.
167 shared form of national languages stimulated
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, new ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 39–48.
168 difficulty communicating with speakers of other forms
Ibid.
169 further strengthened national identities
Ibid.
170 while often neglecting to include narratives
Ibid.
171 China and Korea have regularly become sources of tension in Northeast Asia “Japan Textbook Angers Chinese, Korean Press,” BBC News, April 6, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4416593.stm.
172 Google Translate
Franz Och, Google Official Blog, “Breaking Down the Language Barrier—Six Years In,” April 26, 2012, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/breaking-down-language-barriersix-years.html.
173 more documents, articles, and books in one day
Ibid.
174 Seventy-five percent of the web pages translated
Personal correspondence with Franz Och, Google.
175 Chinese language users of the Internet
Matt Silverman, “China: The World’s Largest Online Population,” Mashable, April 10, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/04/10/china-largest-online-population/; David Teegham, “Chinese to Be Most Popular Language on the Internet,” Discovery News, January 2, 2011, http://news.discovery.com/tech/chinese-to-be-most-popular-language-on-internet.html.
176 once vested in its national government
U.S. Department of State, “Background Note: Belgium,” March 22, 2012, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2874.htm.
177 an “assembly of men”
Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery,” The Leviathan, 1651; ibid., “Of the Rights of Sovereign by Institution.”
178 1,500 years ago between the Western and Eastern Roman empires
“Bosnia and Hercegovina,” Lonely Planet, 2008, http://www.lonelyplanet.com/shop_pickandmix/previews/mediterranean-europe-8-bosnia-hercegovina-preview.pdf.
179 went to the disputed territory of Kosovo
Barney Petrovic, “Serbia Recalls an Epic Defeat,” Guardian, June 29, 1989.
180 launched genocidal violence against both Bosnians and Croats
Ibid.
181 20 percent of all land in the world, putting 150 million people
“The United States Becomes a World Power,” Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook_print.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3158; Saul David, “Slavery and the ‘Scramble f
or Africa,’ ” BBC, February 17, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/scramble_for_africa_article_01.shtml.
182 nineteen of the forty-three known terrorist groups
Lieutenant Colonel David A. Haupt, U.S. Air Force, “Narco-Terrorism: An Increasing Threat to U.S. National Security,” Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2009.
183 larger than the national economies of 163 of the world’s 184 nations
Ibid.
184 Hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily, $3 trillion was wasted
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: Norton, 2008).
185 amount of television watched and the decline of support for fundamentalism
Mansoor Moaddel and Stuart A. Karabenick, “Religious Fundamentalism among Young Muslims in Egypt and Saudi Arabia,” Social Forces 86, no. 4 (June 2008).
186 popularity of its movies and television programs
Thomas Seibert, “Turkey Has a Star Role in More Than Just TV Drama,” National, February 8, 2012.
187 decline in the number of people killed in wars
Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Dutton/Penguin, 2011), pp. 5–6.
188 decline in the number of wars in every category
Ibid.
189 “by arbitration under International Law”
Bulletin of the Pan-American Union 38, nos. 244–49 (1914), p. 79.
190 in spite of U.S. superiority in conventional and nuclear weaponry
Richard Clarke, “China’s Cyberassault on America,” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2011.
191 more than on any other program besides Social Security
John Mueller, “Think Again: Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Policy no. 177 (January/February 2010); Peter Passell, “The Flimsy Accounting in Nuclear Weapons Decisions,” New York Times, July 9, 1998.
192 President Barack Obama reversed U.S. policy four years ago
“A Treaty on Conventional Arms,” editorial, New York Times, July 9, 2012.
193 some of which end up being trafficked in black markets
C. J. Chivers, “Small Arms, Big Problems,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 1 (January/February 2011): 110–21; Richard F. Grimmett, Congressional Research Service, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2003–2010,” September 22, 2011, http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/174196.pdf.