Corporate Policies Cause Millions of Deaths. Fining Them Won't Stop It

Source: Climate and Capitalism

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

6-13-23

 

In the capitalist economic model, a minority of people own the means of producing the necessities, of human life. These productive forces are only set in motion if profit can be the outcome; we all accept this in one way or another.

In the poorest countries of the world (and here in the US), people starve, cannot get fresh water, housing or basic health care, not because human society doesn’t have the means to provide it. They suffer because they can’t pay for it and it’s not profitable to invest private capital in such projects.

 

Here in the US we are in the belly of the beast when it comes to rights given to this section of human society; to the private sector, the so-called free market and capitalism. We are never free from being sold a product. We live in a perpetual 24/7 marketplace. Everything has a price and can be sold and traded. *

An interesting point here is that the same forces, or group of people, that own the means of producing commodities that we need to live our lives from cars to washing machines and food, own the means of producing ideas and information. So what we read or watch in the mass media is carefully crafted and designed with a purpose. And that purpose is to strengthen and maintain capitalism and the almost divine stature of the market. The propaganda assaults the public sector, schools, education, services, transport etc. as inefficient and the cause of our ills and the private sector as the solution.

 

How many workers are aware of the recent legal battles between the producers of “forever chemicals” and the state? The basketball finals dwarf this news but that’s not an accident.

 

I happened to catch a glimpse of this issue in my latest BusinessWeek that arrived today. BW reports that there are 4000 lawsuits against 3M, just one of the producers of these chemicals known as Per-and Polyfluoralkyl substances or PFAS. A judge is trying to work out the details of a “tentative” settlement in a $10 billion deal 3M has agreed to as a result of the lawsuits.

 

On May31, Washington States Attorney General, Bob Ferguson, filed an environmental lawsuit against numerous manufacturers of these chemicals. “These corporations knew for decades about the serious risks these forever chemicals pose to human health and our environment,” Ferguson said. “Their corporate greed caused significant damage, and they need to be held accountable.”, says Ferguson. The tobacco industry redux.

 

Forever chemicals are linked to cancer, infertility and “development issues in children”. Earlier this month three other chemical companies, Chemours, DuPont and Corteva, agreed to pay more than $1 billion as part the, “….first in a wave of claims that they and other companies contaminated drinking water across the country with so-called forever chemicals that have been linked to cancer and other illnesses.” 

The penetration of these chemicals in to our food and water supply is extensive. “The synthetic chemicals are so ubiquitous that nearly all Americans, including newborns, carry PFAS in their bloodstream. As many as 200 million Americans are exposed to PFAS in their tap water, according to a peer-reviewed 2020 study. ”Three ‘Forever Chemicals’ Makers Settle Public Water Lawsuits NYT 6-02-23

 

The Washington State AG admits that these companies not only lied, they made millions in profits doing it. And it’s not a faceless corporation we are talking about here. Human beings, lawyers, scientists, doctors all collaborated in the lie and the investors, (many of the same people) have walked away with not millions, but billions over decades.

 

Alongside this, JP Morgan, the largest bank in the US that just picked up the failed Republic Bank in a sweet deal has just agreed to pay an almost $1 billion fine for defrauding the precious metal markets. This affects us all as precious metals are incorporated in many of the products we need in everyday life.

 

Auto companies have paid out billions in fines for various infractions, cheating and theft. Volkswagen has paid out more than $30 billion worldwide for, installing, “..emissions-cheating devices in their vehicles in 2015”. British Petroleum was fined $5.5 billion for the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There are so many examples of these fines against corporations for their behavior which is harmful to human beings and the environment, and harmful is putting it mildly. The number of deaths, cancers, deformities that people have suffered due to these conscious decisions by strategists of capital are impossible to measure but they must be in the millions. I have often thought about breast cancer which appears to be as common as the common cold today as being an environmental cause and yet they search for the evasive gene or magic cure.

 

These corporations will pay the fines, that is what the insurance business is about. It is rare, if ever, that individuals responsible for the decisions actually suffer. Corporations have money set aside for the times when their corrupt practices and thievery is too much even for their body politic to tolerate. These individuals bought homes, yachts, land, other businesses and such from the profits from this death industry and if justice were served, these assets along with the wealth they have accumulated would be seized.

 

But that will never happen and what is clear is that fining these private enterprises while it might make them a little more cautious next time it will not stop them; the fines are nothing to them.

 

The railroad spills, the fertilizer plant in West Texas that could have blown up a school full of children, the Flint Michigan water crisis, are all free market disasters. The only way to begin the process of eliminating these catastrophe’s and the victims of forever chemicals must number in the millions or hundreds of millions, is to take the dominant forces of production in society in to public ownership, management and control and to institute a national plan of production based on social needs not profits for a select minority of society.

 

This will not be realized of course without the transformation of society along these lines internationally. But we see in Europe where workers are fighting back to protect public ownership even within capitalist states, pensions in France for example and reintroducing public ownership of the railways and water utilities in the UK.

 

Public ownership, not fines will open up a new era.

 

*The reason for this obsession is not greed in the abstract but because in the capitalist system, wealth is accumulated through the labor process. Workers produce more value (surplus value) through the labor process than we are paid for; we work longer than the time during which we produce the value of our own wages. The result is a commodity for sale that contains human labor time in it that is paid for and labor time that the capitalist gets for free. But that surplus value cannot be “realized” without the sale. This rapacious quest for profits is the source of the obsession.