Andy Schmookler points out that corporations would do what it takes to hide the reality that something they do are killing human beings.
Andy Schmookler on who’d kill for money.
Andy Schmookler does not mince his words. His article “Who’d Kill for Money” is probative.
Whenever a big corporation, or an entire industry, discovers that the products that have been enriching them are also killing people, it will choose to hide the truth, though people will die, so their profits will continue undiminished.
Three major, well-known instances:
- It has been established in courts around the world that the asbestos industry knew that asbestos was slowly killing their workers. But they kept their knowledge secret, and didn’t protect their workers (which would have eaten into profits), instead letting workers unknowingly risk dying a terrible death, which a very great many did.
- The tobacco industry – as the nation now well knows — conducted a propaganda campaign for decades to obscure the lethal effects of smoking. They calculated that by sowing false doubts about established facts, they could persuade many of their customers, who otherwise would have given up the habit, to continue buying their products. An industry choosing to kill for money.
- Now comes what is by far the most consequential instance of this pattern: the fossil fuel industry came to know more than forty years ago that the consumption of their products was endangering the stability of the earth’s climate. But, far from warning the surrounding world of that potentially catastrophic problem, they embarked on a decades-long campaign of lies to prevent America from taking actions urgently needed to protect the human future. They placed their short-term profits ahead of the lives of our children and grandchildren.
I asked a friend of mine, who has studied such things for decades, if there were examples of such corporate entities that had not chosen to sacrifice the lives of others to avoid any hit to their profits, when faced with such choices. He said knew of no cases where some corporate entity had chosen to do the right thing.