William Gran, in his July 5 My Turn column, provides us with one more incontrovertible example of why our rapidly deteriorating climate is due to human activity.
Gran notes that the “New York Attorney General is investigating whether Exxon Mobil deliberately deceived shareholders and the public about the risks of climate change.” The Stanford Research Institute produced a report for the American Petroleum Institute in 1968, Gran wrote, which noted that “CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were outstripping natural CO2 processes that keep the atmosphere in equilibrium.”
Climate change is killing people in various parts of the world where extreme weather patterns caused by global warming are resulting in unsurvivable heat, melting ice caps, flooding and drought conditions. Fifty years ago, Exxon adopted a strategic plan to financially support “scientific” studies that refuted global warming warning in the interest of its bottom line. “If they had shared what they knew when they knew it,” Gran writes, “where would we be now?”
Forty years ago, when Ralph Nader was at the height of his fame, a major critique of corporations was that they knowingly put their bottom line above the health and safety of the American people. Exposés of car safety, cigarettes, air pollution, lead paint, and prescription drugs revealed how corporate executives knew that their products or behavior caused harm and death but went ahead anyway to bolster profits.
Over time, though, this critique of corporate malfeasance fell away, and recent years have been dominated by an economic and political analysis of corporate power, focusing on financial irresponsibility, excessive CEO pay, worker exploitation, and corrupting campaign donations.
Exxon, in my opinion, is guilty of murder.
My anger has led me to research how many other corporations are guilty of killing their workers, customers and the public-at-large. The list is too long to list within the confines of this column. But here are some examples.
First was the GM inquiry about faulty ignition switches that led to the deaths of 13 people. The company CEO blamed the incident on a “culture of cost” that prioritized financial savings over consumer safety. Instead of recalling the cars to replace the faulty switches — a relatively quick and inexpensive fix — GM chose to save the money and people died.
In May 2011, Philip Morris CEO Louis Camilleri claimed, “It’s not that hard to quit smoking.” The year before, the company had collected $27 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, smoking is responsible for one in five deaths in the United States. Philip Morris has often dodged lawsuits and continues to market its deadly product to teenagers who, they hope, will become lifelong customers — provided these are substantially shortened lives.
In the 1980s and 1990s, studies began to demonstrate that cigarette smoke killed not just smokers but their non-smoking spouses and workers employed in smoke-filled environments. Big Tobacco spent millions of dollars employing more and smarter scientists to argue that these studies were flawed.
The result was the creation of an industry of scientific consultants who specialize in “product defense” and the recognition by corporate spin experts that manufacturing doubt works. Do it well and you can stop government regulators, or at least slow them down for years.
In 1969, an executive at Brown & Williamson, a cigarette maker now owned by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., unwisely committed to paper the perfect slogan for his industry’s disinformation campaign: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”
The practices perfected by Big Tobacco have proliferated into a growing trend that disingenuously demands proof over precaution in the realm of public health and most notably in human caused global warming.
Monsanto, the multinational agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation, is best likened to a serial killer that you could arrest for murder but never be sure of exactly how many people he killed. The deaths we know about involve the Indian farmers who commit suicide every 30 minutes because the GMO seeds they are basically forced to plant fail to produce necessary yields.
Disturbingly, some of the farmers committed the act by consuming the same Roundup herbicide Monsanto gave them for their crops. The total death count is estimated at 290,000.
Additionally, Monsanto may very well be causing irreversible kidney damage and cancer on large-scale populations with the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as Roundup. The city of San Diego is even suing Monsanto for polluting its bay with cancer-causing PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).
These cases, and so many more, are a reminder of why effective government regulation of industry is so important. We are not “over regulated,” as the presumptuous Republican presidential candidate asserts.
Corporate rule over this country is more disturbing than ever, but it’s important to never gloss over the crimes of the past. Corporations can and do get away with murder — and have been doing so for a long time. Their dubious “personhood” status — which bestows upon them seemingly limitless powers of “citizenship” — has in many cases immunized them from the same laws and regulations real humans face.
Too many corporations are getting away with murder.
John Bos is a Shelburne resident. He can be emailed at: john01370@gmail.com.