Date: 2024-10-31 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00023335 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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CORPORATE CRIME:
What About Crime in the Suites? Written by Russell Mokhiber in 2021 or early in 2022, For the past thirty-six years I’ve been editing The Corporate Crime Reporter newsletter from our office in the National Press Building. But during COVID, I’ve been working mostly from home here in West Virginia, a 70/30 Trump state. People around here have a keen understanding of street crime, from family members and the media. But pretty much they don’t have an understanding of law and order for corporations, even though they are often victims of corporate crime and violence. So let’s go back to Election Day—November 3, 2020. Our family votes at a local state park two miles away. I went and voted there, and then went fishing at the lake right next to the polling booth. And next to me also was a man fishing whom I’d never met, who had just voted for Trump, He spent about a half hour telling me about his troubles during COVID, how his dad died from working at a brake lining facility in nearby Maryland, how his nephew was hooked on opioids, how his cousin died from a cancer he believes he got from being sprayed with chemicals in Vietnam, and how he was trying to get his aunt out of a local nursing home due to, in his view, elder abuse in the nursing home. I told him about my work on corporate crime, and that pretty much everything he just described were corporate crimes that I’ve written about over the years, beginning with my 1988 book Corporate Crime and Violence. We both sat quietly and resumed fishing. I guess we both understood that no matter who we just voted for, no one was going to take the corporate crime epidemic seriously. No matter the administration, corporate crime continues undeterred. For example, some nursing home deaths are criminally prosecuted as reckless homicides, but very few. There never was a criminal prosecution of the chemical companies for dropping the toxic herbicide Agent Orange on Vietnam and exposing more than 4 million Vietnamese and tens of thousands of American soldiers, causing cancers, diabetes, and birth defects. Nor has an asbestos company ever been criminally prosecuted for the tens of thousands of workers exposed and sickened with the deadly asbestosis. The opioid epidemic could have been slowed if the Justice Department had listened to its own prosecutors in 2006 and brought criminal charges against Purdue Pharma and top company executives—those federal prosecutors, working in the heart of Appalachia in West Virginia, saw the devastation that the opioid addiction was having on their own community sixteen years ago, and wrote out a 100-page memo to their supervisors at the Justice Department calling for strong criminal response to the damage. Had they been listened to, tens of thousands of American lives could have been saved. But high-powered corporate criminal defense attorneys went over their heads and limited the range and scope of the prosecution. And if you want a nice summary of this, the New York Times put up a mini-documentary entitled “A Secret Memo that Could Have Slowed the Epidemic.” My friends and neighbors here in West Virginia are for the most part decent, hardworking, religious people who strongly favor law and order, family, and country. A “law and order” message, “Fund the police. Crack down on crime,” resonates with them…whether the message is directed at street criminals or corporate criminals. But the criminal justice discussion in this country has been focused almost exclusively on street crime. Here’s two examples taken from podcasts by the New York Times. Jane Kosten has one called The Argument, and she puts on these public intellectuals to discuss issues of the day. Last month she put on one titled, “Is Crime that Bad? Or Are the Vibes Just Off?” and she opened with “Republicans say Democrats are soft on crime. Democrats say Republicans are over-policing with no accountability. And what do voters think? What’s clear is that crime—or the perception of crime—is driving our political conversations.” Yet the conversation is focused almost exclusively on street crime. There was a throwaway line by one of the panelists about “white collar crime,” which usually refers to individuals committing crimes like insider trading, often against the market or against the corporate state. But “corporate crime” should include illegality by powerful institutions themselves, committing crimes against human beings. Another example is from Ezra Klein at the New York Times, who put up a podcast recently called “Violent Crime is Spiking. Do Liberals Have an Answer?” Again, no discussion of corporate crime, even though corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined. So, for example, the FBI tells us that 24,000 Americans are murdered every year. Compare that to 54,000 Americans who die every year from on-the-job occupational diseases like black lung and asbestosis, and the other tens of thousands who fall victim every year to pollution, contaminated foods, hazardous consumer products, and hospital malpractice. The FBI puts out its yearly ‘Crime in the United States” report—no talk about corporate crime. We’ve been calling for years for a “Corporate Crime in the United States” report, to no avail. The problem is that the mainstream media and political elite focus on street crime and violence. There’s an exception from this year’s election cycle in Missouri that may show a path forward—a Democratic Senate candidate named Lucas Kunce. He’s a Democrat and 13-year veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who’s running for the U.S. Senate. In May he wrote an opinion piece in the Joplin Globe entitled “They Are Guilty of Corporate Manslaughter. Prosecute Them.” He addressed the corporate crimes committed by the baby formula companies. In a nutshell, a whistleblower from Abbot’s Michigan plant sent the FDA a 34-page document outlining contamination and sanitary issues at the plant. The FDA sat on it for three months. By then it was too late—two babies who drank the contaminated formula had already died, and more were hospitalized. Kunce called for breaking up the baby formula cartel, but added that “we need to prosecute Abbot, and everyone in Abbot who helped hide the unsanitary plant conditions from the FDA. They killed two babies. This is corporate manslaughter.” [He lost his August 2 primary.]
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