Every year, corporate greed kills hundreds of thousands of Americans. And it could get much worse.
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Greed kills. Throughout history, it is probably responsible for more deaths and suffering than anything else apart maybe from religion. In fact, a case can be made that greed and “My God is better than your God” are distant cousins, and that many “religious” wars were really more about the acquisition of land and treasure than anything else.
Greed is as old as civilization. For as long as anybody can remember, whenever somebody had something, somebody else wanted to take it away. It’s either been that, or the “haves” oppressed, enslaved, exploited, and murdered the “have-nots” — to keep what they had and get more.
While there are still the occasional territorial wars, light colonialism, and slavery, today’s greed manifests itself in different ways.
Nowadays, the real killers don’t sit on thrones, they sit in boardrooms, and the threats to humanity as a whole are greater.
Therefore, in the end, it may not be an asteroid that wipes out humanity but rather a few people who cannot get enough.
In fact, they may already be alive today.
Obviously, the classic example of this dynamic is global warming and the resulting change in our climate. Oil companies have been aware of this problem for more than 50 years, and the only thing they have done about it is to lie to the public, obfuscate the science, and pay off lawmakers. Even now, when natural disasters are becoming more frequent, more severe, and more expensive, and warning signs are flashing across the globe that things will get much worse very quickly, they keep exploring and drilling and pumping (abetted by grasping politicians) as though their lives depend on it.
But it is not their lives that are on the line, it’s ours and that of our children.
That doesn’t matter, though, because something much more precious is at stake for oil company CEOs and OPEC princes: wealth and their bottom line.
Everybody already knows where this is headed. In the not-so-distant future, humans will fight each other for dwindling resources.
If we make it that far…
Because climate change is not the only game in town when it comes to the potential to wipe out the species.
First, there were nuclear weapons. However, after trying them out, world leaders for once exercised restraint because they realized that the use of these nukes would lead to mutually assured destruction.
Of course, if that decision were no longer in human hands, who knows what would happen?
Well, we may just find out when artificial intelligence takes over.
This isn’t just the plot of a movie. While experts disagree on how long exactly it will take for AI to surpass human intelligence, the consensus is that the so-called singularity will occur in the next couple of decades.
What happens then is anybody’s guess. One theory is that AI will view humans as the greatest threat to its existence and act accordingly.
Should this give us pause when it comes to the development of this technology? Absolutely.
Will it give us pause? Absolutely not.
Because, well, greed. Right now, AI is a great way to make a buck, and, once again at the expense of the environment and precious resources.
So is mining cryptocurrency, but at least bitcoins “just” waste energy and water and won’t turn on us.
And that’s not all. At any point, some scientist out for money and fame (or a new weapon) could come up with a much more potent virus that will lead to the extermination of humanity.
While all of the above are potential extinction-level events (and climate change causes countless deaths and mayhem already, though that’s just a small taste of what’s to come), greed also kills hundreds of thousands of Americans annually — and it’s all perfectly legal.
Take cigarettes.
When used as intended, they kill half a million Americans each year. As we now know, the tobacco industry was aware of the harmful effect of its products and then spent untold millions of dollars on obfuscating the science and misleading the public about the dangers of smoking.
And, just this week, OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, agreed to pay up to $7.4 billion to settle lawsuits related to the role their potent painkiller played in the opioid crisis that has resulted in the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans since the mid-1990s.
That settlement is a perfect example of the kind of “accountability” that company executives and owners can expect to face when they are caught doing something evil for profit.
Instead of being sent to prison — as a dealer who is responsible for just one overdose death would be — the punishment usually consists of fines that leave those being punished still incredibly wealthy.
As for the corporations themselves, even billion-dollar fines are just the cost of doing business.
Then there are the health insurance companies that make huge profits from letting their customers die, and whose business practices received an unwelcome spotlight following the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year.
That backlash, by the way, was the clearest sign yet that maybe Americans are getting a little bit fed up with being the targets of unrestrained greed.
Finally, the compulsion to always accumulate more money and more power isn’t just killing people in bulk, it is also killing them one at a time — every day, in great numbers and a myriad of ways.
Take the device you are reading this on.
Maybe it’s a phone or a tablet or a computer. Whatever it is, you can be reasonably certain that, somewhere along the supply chain, somebody got exploited or even killed to make that device.
That someone might have died mining rare earth elements in Africa, or they might have died bicycling to a manufacturing plant in China (how else is a 10-year-old supposed to get to work?).
In addition, you can also make the case that greed kills indirectly, for example when companies do not pay their employees a living wage or do not provide them with health insurance because that would hurt profits.
Or that corporations not paying their fair share of taxes harms all Americans.
In 2024, corporate profits in the US totaled about $14 trillion dollars after taxes. The corporate income tax rate is now 21 percent (down from 35 percent following Donald Trump’s giveaway for the rich in 2017), and it raised less than $500 billion in 2022.
Do the math! It does not add up… at least not for regular Americans. It adds up just fine for companies who use various accounting gimmicks to exploit loopholes in laws their lobbyists helped write.
This raises another issue: the complicity of elected officials in all of this (which we will get into in a future column).
Put it all together, and it seems very clear that greed is one of the greatest threats to the country. So, what are Americans doing about it?
Based on the results of the last election, not much.
However, there seems to be an opportunity for the kind of economic populism that someone like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been championing, especially once it becomes apparent that Donald Trump will just redistribute wealth into the pockets of billionaires and corporations.
Democrats, who are struggling to find a message after their stinging defeat in November, should give it a try. Instead of focusing on vote-losing social issues, why not convince the American people that Democrats will make their lives much easier while making those of corporations and billionaires, who have been taking advantage of regular people, quite a bit harder.
