It has been a revealing week. The corporate executives that we are told to celebrate as innovators and job creators are showing themselves to be a particularly soulless, criminal bunch. Con-men in nicer suits. Bullies in expensive cufflinks. That is who really runs the country.
That their crimes against society, humanity and the planet have not resulted in criminal charges does not reduce their impact. That just serves as a further indictment of the legal system under capitalism, which protects the property rights of the rich above all else.
It’s not just socialists like the PSL who are connecting the dots. A NASDAQ.com writer admitted it has been a “bad week for capitalism,” and then even cited Marx to remind readers that with such behavior “capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.”
In case you missed this week’s news:
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Exxon’s deadly deception. An investigative report from InsideClimate News showed that starting in the 1970s, Exxon privately conducted the original research proving the existence of global warming, but then funded extreme disinformation campaigns denying climate change. Like the cigarette companies who denied a connection to lung cancer, the oil giant employed a small army of sellout scientists and advertisers to peddle the lie that carbon emissions had no connection to dangerous global warming. While the cigarette corporations’ fraud and deception was responsible for a major public health crisis, Big Oil — facilitated by the politicians they bought in Washington — fed mass confusion on what has rapidly become a defining issue for the survival of the planet and its inhabitants.
The Justice Department has not announced any legal action against Exxon.
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Turing Pharmaceuticals’ price-gouging of HIV/AIDS patients. Led by 32-year-old former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, Turing Pharma bought the rights to a vital life-saving drug Daraprim and then jacked up the price 5000% from $13.50/pill to $750/pill. On Twitter he called people “morons” when they asked about the price hike and then took to the airwaves to say the drug was “still underpriced.”
The laws and logic of capitalism fully allows such price-gouging, which is rampant throughout the pharmaceutical industry. Ultimately the mass outrage of people across the country (not the government) made Shkreli, the grinning embodiment of capitalist evil, rescind his decision. But when the press blows over, he’ll still be rich and his company will still be buying patents to medicine and making decisions that affect millions of people who rely on them. Socialist presidential candidate Gloria La Riva went further than any other in calling for universal free health care, and profits to be eliminated from the pharmaceutical production altogether.
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General Motors pays off its bodycount. GM just settled with the Justice Department for a mere $900 million — and no criminal charges — for the cover-up of a faulty ignition switch design that resulted in 124 deaths. The auto corporation new of the deadly design flaws for 10 years but did not begin its recall of previously sold vehicles until 2014. Nearly 30 million ended up being recalled. GM undoubtedly estimated the large cost of recalling the cars when they first learned of the flaw would be larger than the cost of settling with future victims’ families.
GM never even disclosed the ignition problems on its own; they came out in 2013 during the course of depositions in a lawsuit from a small-time litigator suing for wrongful death on behalf of a victim’s family. GM’s legal team was so aggressive in intimidating and gagging plaintiffs that they could not even speak to one another; law firms needed such extensive resources to contend with GM that many victims’ families couldn’t find anyone to take their cases.
Although the willful decision to not recall a deadly design certainly constitutes manslaughter — 124 times over — all the executives have escaped without personal culpability. They’re still in charge, or they’ve retired peacefully, or they’ve moved onto another corporate position. The families of the victims have no such opportunities.
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Volkswagen defrauds customers and the Environmental Protection Agency. VW, after long denials, admitted it had rigged the software that tested 11 million of its diesel cars to pass emissions test. While customers thought they were buying eco-friendly vehicles, they were rigged so they could emit 35 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide (smog) without it being registered in tests. The EPA did not uncover the fraud. It was accidentally discovered by a team of engineers who had been hired by the International Council on Clean Transportation to study and replicate VW’s successes.
Under capitalist property laws, corporations are allowed to have exclusive rights to their software and can organize their operations without any transparency, even if they affect all of society. The small regulatory agencies rely on the “good word” of the sprawling corporations they are meant to oversee. BP, for instance, repeatedly lied to regulators about their operations before their disastrous oil spill in the Gulf. After the spill, they were left in charge of the response and clean-up.
It is no wonder why more and more people are turning away from the celebration of capitalism and becoming interested in socialism. Socialism is a system in which the vast majority rule, the corporate criminals are removed from power, and the vast economic operations of society are organized not for private profit, but according to a sustainable plan to guarantee people’s needs are met.
Capitalism, by contrast, gives the people running the economy a material interest to lie, to cheat, to cover up environmental destruction, and to suppress information about deadly products on the market. How much longer can such a system be tolerated?
