Note
that the title begins with an indefinite article for there are many roots of
evil, but the one most invasive and destructive is America’s corpocracy. It is
the mother root with two branches that are slowly snuffing out America and the
world with it. Those two branches are corporate America and government America.
This essay is about the first, corporate America, and specifically, evil corporate
leadership, defined here as profoundly immoral, socially irresponsible, and harmfully
consequential behavior.
There
are many scholarly theories of leadership, but neither a scholar nor theory is
needed, just ordinary common sense to define leadership. It is simply “the
capacity to control the means to get desired ends.” One sentence replaces
thousands of pages in dozens of books I have read on the subject. I may have
just saved you a lot of unnecessary reading.
Great
Corporate Leadership: Where?
If,
instead of being evil, corporate leadership were great we could have great corporations.
But we don’t---let me know if you know of any. A great corporation would be one
that uses positive means to achieve positive ends. Another way to put it is
that a great corporation would be one that is socially responsible, and no
corporation can ever meet all six of my criteria for corporate social responsibility.
Here
are the six: A socially responsible corporation: 1. stays financially viable
over the long haul; 2. Provides socially
beneficial products and/or services without, 3. knowingly causing any physical,
psychological, financial or ecological harm,
4. without externalizing costs (e.g., job outsourcing, waste disposal), 5.
without seeking or depending on “warfare welfare” or other government favors
such as corporate personhood, campaign financing, lobbying, subsidies,
revolving doors, laissez-faire regulations, or criminal immunity, and, 6. conducts
business ethically and legally while treating all stakeholders fairly and with
dignity. If a corporation and its leadership fail to meet any one or more of
those criteria they are socially irresponsible. And the fewer they meet the
more evil they are.
And
all corporations I have ever studied, observed or experienced have flunked one
or more of the six. I once followed up on two scholars’ separate lists of what
they claimed to be 100 some great corporations due to their sustained profits.
Their conventional bottom lines were indeed in the black, but these
corporations’ unconventional bottom lines were indeed in the red, falling below
the acceptable line of good corporate behavior as evidenced by the incidents in
“The Different Police Gazette” to be shown later in this essay. They ought to tell
us that corporate greatness requires far more than just being money deep.
What
exactly keeps corporations from being great? After all, they have the capacity,
or power, to become great if that were their aspiration and thus their standard
of performance. But neither their aspiration nor standard of performance call
for being a socially responsible corporation. Fattening their conventional line
is their Holy Grail. But that is not a sufficient answer to the question. The
conventional bottom line and the primacy given to it are just two of several
intrinsic factors preventing corporate greatness. Other intrinsic factors
include a hierarchical organizational structure, or pyramid, in which
wrongdoing of any kind is orchestrated at and denied by the top while being
carried out at the bottom; rewards for “negative” success (i.e., ill begotten
success); and, above all, evil leadership. The latter thrives in a pyramid.
Here’s how it works in a pyramid:
An
ignoble expectation or order starts somewhere higher up and goes down the pyramid
in one version or another until it gets to the doers who cannot get rid of it
without doing its bidding or getting fired. Here is an illustrative scenario:
Top
Level-Unrealistically high goals are set without issuing an explicit order to
cut legal or ethical corners.
Next
Level- Translates goals into specific targets and gives hints or wink and nods
on unethical or unlawful means of accomplishing them.
Next
Level- Tells subordinates, the doers, to “do whatever is necessary” or may even spell
out the necessary means, such as get the “toxics dumped at night,” or “keep two
sets of books.”
Thus,
the expectation/order may start implicitly, gets less implicit, and eventually
becomes blunt as it cascades downward. However
it is couched, the expectation/order is expected to be met or else. Moral considerations become situational, and
the situation is defined by the boss next up the line.
As
for the intrinsic barrier, evil leadership, we shall return to and expand on it
momentarily..
Then
there are several extrinsic barriers to greatness that ought to be obvious to
anyone reading this essay. They include government handouts even for, or
especially for, corporate failures, government either looking the other way,
giving wrist slaps, or making lawful in so many different ways what should be
unlawful corporate wrongdoing that ranges from the “ordinary” to the truly evil,
and, of course, global gobbling capitalism.
A
Topsy-Turvy Metaphor
Roots
thrive at the bottom, so my metaphor is topsy-turvy. The evil roots of
corporate leadership thrive at the top, as I have illustrated. Evil corporate
leadership is synonymous with evil corporations for the latter are under the
stewardship of the former.
I
have never been an insider at the top echelons of corporate pyramids, but I
have studied them enough to understand the people there and their internal
workings. What follows next are a few pertinent generalizations that obviously
do not apply in every instance.
What
I call “warped” boards of directors tends to have limited influence on who gets
to be the CEO. Directors are generally handpicked and usually back the
CEO.
The
average tenure of nearly one-half million CEOs in America is about 10 years,
and then a new CEO is ensconced. Nearly 70% of all CEOs are bred internally,
which means they have back stabbed and clawed their way to the top. There’s no
need to pity discarded CEOs. Their severance pay is more than the average
American could amass in several lifetimes.
So
CEOs come and go, but only the faces and names change. Their “PMU” or
psychological make-up stays basically unchanged, one that only their
grandmothers could love. CEOs tend to be imperious, if not before getting to the
top spot, then while in it by being seduced by the power of the position
itself. CEOs personal flaws don’t stop there. From my extensive review of the
literature I have concluded that CEOs tend to be greedy, irresponsible
shepherds of “their” companies (actually owned by investors), lack of virtue,
materialistic values, moral frailty, narcissism (including unbridled hubris), narrowly
educated and narrow-minded. These flaws usually go together. A CEO with one
tends to have all of the rest, too. The flaws are not unique to the corner office
but are more pronounced and more destructive there.
Conceivably
great corporations could exist if they followed my models proposed elsewhere
for corporate reform and for a socially responsible capitalism, but those
proposals will never materialize so there is no point in referencing them here.
Then,
too, Americans could continue weaning themselves away from corporations by
turning to alternative forms of business such as cooperatives. That trend is
occurring slowly but will never replace the corporation as a mode of doing big
business.
The
Different Police Gazette
Given
the ubiquity of evil doing at the top of the corporate pyramid and the
corresponding evil doing of government, is it any wonder why I was able for
many years long ago to compile a different police gazette, one that records the
corpocracy’s crimes and other forms of evil doing? I was motivated to do so
because “our” government records everything about us but corporate crime,
probably because doing so would clearly implicate government as an accomplice
and often an instigator (as in forever buying weapons from the weapons’
makers). While my compilations have tapered off considerably over the last decade
or two, the gazette would be book size had I continued to this day.
I
am going to close this essay with a decidedly non-scientific sampling of
incidents of corporate evil doings from my gazette as shown in Exhibit A. I
simply chose some incidents and stopped choosing more when I got tired of
choosing, an escape I could never get by with writing for so-called scientific
journals. You will notice some redundancy among the incidents because the more
egregious industry-wide incidents are repeated when found in the
industry-specific entries.
While
many of the incidents were the doings of people below the CEO, we can be sure
the CEO didn’t disapprove. All of the incidents are taken directly from my
files and are unedited, yet they clearly speak for themselves in their raw
form, like unwashed and naked filth. By the time you finishing reading them you
may feel more outraged and worried than before. Blame it not on me but on the
corporate Devil.
The
incidents are numbered across categories to facilitate any referencing. As you
pour over the incidents think about how they deviate from the criteria of
social responsibility and from the following universal moral values found by
Michael Josephson, the lawyer turned ethicist (that’s a bizarre twist), to
traverse time and place: accountability, commitment to excellence, concern for
others, fairness, honesty, integrity, law abiding, loyalty, promise keeping,
and respect for others. As you go along consider flagging the top 10 or so incidents
that you judge to be the most evil in their intentions, in their means, and in their
consequences, and perhaps also the 10 least evil ones in your judgment. I
refuse to pick the 10 least evil ones. Evil is evil and I wouldn’t wish any of
them on anyone.
The
first group of incidents depicts the two scholars’ picks of “great
corporations” that I cited earlier.
Exhibit A. Sampling “The Different Police Gazette”
Incidents from the Purportedly “Great” Corporations
1.Involved
in antitrust lawsuits and settlements.
2.Accused
of breach of contract and fraud in dealing with retailers.
3.Violated
securities laws.
4.Falsification
of financial accounting.
5.Infringement
of copyrights and patents.
6.Disbarred
from further government contracts (must have really irritated Uncle Sam).
7.Employment
discrimination lawsuits.
8.False
advertising consent decrees.
9.Filing
lawsuits against public complaints.
10,Forcing
applicants to sign dispute resolution agreements.
11.Hiring
illegal aliens.
12.Implanting
“spy” chips in products.
13.Privacy
violation lawsuit settlements.
14.Serious
malpractice lawsuits.
15.Serious
product failures and liability settlements.
16.Racial
profiling and redlining.
17.Selling
returned merchandise as new.
18.Sexual
harassment suits.
19.Stonewalling
investigations.
20.Union
busting.
Incidents from Industry in General
21.Tell-tale
documents were shredded to impede governmental investigation.
22.Knowing
company was about to collapse, top management officials cashed over one billion
dollars in stock options while preventing employees from selling company stock
in their retirement plans.
23.During
settlement talks on severance pay for workers, labor lawyers weren’t told about
the lavish bonuses received by top management.
24.Board
of directors twice voted to suspend its own code of ethics to allow for
unethical activities.
25.Fabricated
earnings to hide debt and inflate profits to give top management a windfall.
26.Pocketed
millions in tax money from a subsidiary.
27.Puts
positive spin on layoff notices.
28.Buys
cheap labor overseas.
29.Hijacks
the constitution (e.g. in proclaiming free speech).
30.Shapes
the political agendas of both parties.
31.Lobbies
for favors (e.g., subsidies) and against regulations.
32.Privatizes
public services.
33.Gets
favors through campaign financing.
34.Holds
high government posts via the ‘‘revolving door.”
35.Ghost
writes regulations favorable to corporate self-interests.
36.Stonewalls
government investigations.
37.Creates
monopolies.
38.Promotes
excessive consumerism.
39.Bullies
vendors (e.g. suppliers and dealers).
40.Scams
state and local governments for subsidies.
41.Abandons
communities in bad times.
42.Plunders
and poisons natural resources.
43.Treats
workers as vassals.
44.Sells
databases of personal information to parties known for defrauding the public.
45.After
years of underfunding their pension plans, now go to bankruptcy court to
dispose of employee pensions.
46.Freezes
pension plans.
47.Fails
to provide meal breaks to nearly 116,000 hourly workers as required by a state
law.
48.Designs
complex rebate rules to keep redemption rates low.
49.Initiates
layoffs to take advantage of huge tax breaks meant to generate cash for hiring.
50.Retrieves
foreign-held profits at a huge discount off the normal tax rate.
51.Gives
kickbacks to buyers in foreign countries
52.Violates
a USA embargo to deal with the embargoed country.
53.Foreign
branch of a U.S. corporation aided the suppression and torture of troublesome
workers during that country’s dictatorship.
54.Outsources
to contractors in other countries knowing about their inhumane treatment of
workers.
55.Brags
to news media about its progressive stance in preferring to mediate instead of
going to court, when in reality the company mediates only if there's a good
chance of losing in court.
56.Company
buys a landmark plant located in one state, closes it down, lays off loyal
workers with long service, opens facility in a less-taxing, adjacent state, and
uses same product name to market to both states.
57.Fires
whistleblowers after slowly and deliberately covering tracks to disguise the
decision.
58.Underpays
female workers.
59.Using
illegal immigrants as slave labor.
60.Sold
off a division and then declared that its employees had “resigned,” allowing it
to confiscate their pensions.
61.CEOs
engaging in insider trading.
62.Reduces
allowable sick days.
63.Substantially
increases employee contributions to and deductibles under their health
insurance coverage.
64.Executives
reaped millions with little financial risk by creating shell or phantom
partnerships;
65.Establishes
phony ethics and social responsibility programs.
Incidents from Some More Certain Life Threatening
and Ending Industries
Agriculture/Chemical/Food
Industries
66.Sued
a farmer claiming he was using the company’s patented seeds.
67.Outspending
food safety and organic advocacy groups nearly seven to one to defeat a ballot
initiative mandating labeling of food containing GMOs.
68.Industry
is playing with “genetic fire.”
69.Controlling
our everyday food-buying choices with misleading messaging, artificially low
prices, and heavy control over legislation and regulation.
70.Causing
more climate change from production and waste than any other source..
71.Clearing
two acres of rain forest each minute to raise cattle or crops to feed them.
72.Polluting
35,000 miles of American rivers with animal waste.
73.Using
100 times more water and 5 times more land to raise animal protein than plant
protein.
74.Causing
billions of dollars to be spent yearly for healthcare, subsidies, environmental
damage, and more from producing and consuming foods laced with pesticides, antibiotics
and GMOs.
75.Factory
fishing ships over fishing the world's oceans probably leading in a few decades
to the extinction of all commercially fished species.
76.Using
unsafe antibiotics and growth hormones on animals.
77.Produced
as much potentially harmful waste as a city of half a million.
78.Manufacturing
unhealthy pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers for feed production.
79.Using
forced labor living in shanties.
80.Refusing
to compensate veterans and families for exposure to Agent Orange.
81.Producing
and selling artificial sweeteners linked to cancer.
82.Making
oil-based plastics that are never biodegradable and that release cancer-causing
benzene into the environment for a thousand years.
83.Purchasing,
trading and profiting from palm oil grown on stolen lands.
84.Sold
millions of pounds of ground meat tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella.
85.Backing
bills in various statehouses that would criminalize undercover investigations
of livestock farms’ atrocious operations.
86.Hijacking
a cultural exchange program to get a source of cheap labor.
87.Mass
producing toxic chemicals.
88.Aggressively
running small farms out of business or forcing them into factory farming.
89.Fooling
the public with slogans like “life sciences.”
90.Coercing,
infiltrating and bribing government officials around the globe to get their
genetically modified products approved.
91.Smuggling
its product into countries.
92.Using
the “revolving door” to assume policy making positions and then squelching
subordinates’ warnings about industry products.
93.Cooking
the books of their research studies and/or hiding the damaging results.
Pharmaceutical
Industry
94.Selling
pills that kill about 100,000 Americans annually.
95.Using
improper techniques to test drugs.
96.Intimidates
and threatens their in-house scientists.
97.Used
falsified trial results to swindle the U.S. government out of hundreds of
millions of dollars for an inadequate
vaccine.
98.Used
animal antibodies to artificially inflate test results.
99.Hires
ghost writers to write up studies avoiding unfavorable findings and signs on
academics as “authors.”
100.Withheld
data on side effects from final report to FDA.
101.In
submitting a new generic product for testing, hid regular brand under the pill
coating fearful that the generic brand wouldn’t pass the test.
102.Heavily
outsources drug development to foreign suppliers, some with dubious records of
quality control in order to reduce costs and increase profits.
103.Fabricated
drug safety data and lied to the FDA.
104.“Sells”
a disease (e.g., “it’s under-recognized”) to justify a new drug.
105.Gets
quick FDA approval by saying its products are duplicates of other products
previously approved.
106.Routinely
bribing doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs.
107.Helping
doctors overbill the state for medicines bought by the doctors.
108.Providing
drugs to doctors at a discount so they can be sold to patients at a big profit.
109.Rewarded
doctors handsomely for doing nothing more in their drug “research” than write
down brief notes of their observations of patient outcomes.
110.Skirting
the rules against advertising drugs for unapproved uses by sponsoring seminars
where doctors are paid to make presentations promoting their drugs, including
the “off label” uses.
111.Marketed
a drug that is more expensive than alternative drugs and deadly among adults
and children.
112.Sponsors
health and illness awareness days in public schools and then blitzes them with
promotions.
113.Secretly
puts media stars on their payrolls to slyly slip in lines about some real or fake
ailment and a drug cure on TV.
114.Spends
sizeable percent of research on “me-too” drugs designed to make a profit, but
are therapeutically useless.
115.Sales
reps tells purchasers how to bill the government at full prices for free or
discounted non-prescription products.
116.Charges
what the market will bear rather than keep price increases in line with
inflation.
117.Markets
“off-label drugs,” versions of drugs different from those tested by federal
regulators. Uses consumers’ private medical information for commercial
purposes.
118.Raises
drug prices before new legislation passed seeking to curb drug prices.
119.Sued
to stop a program that lets states create preferred drug lists for Medicare
patients and then demanded steep discounts from drug companies that want to get
on the list.
120.Opposed
pending legislation to create lists of preferred, lower-cost drugs for Medicare
patients and hid their intent by secretly funding advocacy groups believed to
oppose the same legislation but for different reasons.
121.Hires
PR firms to establish diseases as "public health threats" and massive
direct-to-consumer advertising.
122.The
industry was aware for at least a decade of animal studies linking breast
implants to cancer and other illnesses, but women were not told of the risks
until years later.
123.Responded
to questions about product safety and lawsuits with a full-court press to keep
internal memos and studies from reaching the public.
124.Began
buying the new ingredients of one of its key drugs from a new supplier and
never followed up on the ingredient’s effects until reports of serious problems
patients were experiencing.
125.Finally
owned up to deadly products in wake of bacteria scandal.
126.Knew
for 20 yrs that its product was unreliable, but didn't believe it would cause a
health problem, did very little testing, and stonewalled in liability case before
finally trying to make amends.
127.Relied
on its deceptive practices to earn billions of dollars selling potentially
dangerous drugs to unsuspecting consumers and medical patients; didn’t deny any
of it, simply paid the paltry fine, apologized to its customers, and continue
doing wrongdoing as usual.
128.Compounds
drugs that are often too week or too strong.
129.Sold
a concentrated product even though executives were warned of the dangerous side
effects.
130.Diluted
cancer drugs to boost profits.
131.Mislabeled
and adulterated several of its drugs used by millions of consumers and then
masterminded a massive cover up of its activities.
132.Made
a drug that caused thousands of deformities and then was again involved years
later in yet another disputed drug case in court.
133.Hid
behind court secrecy proceedings in defending itself against hundreds of
lawsuits brought by patients and thus avoided the disclosure of several
important documents sought by the congressional investigative committee.
134.Sells
to other countries a drug taken off the US market because of concerns about the
drug’s adverse effects.
135.Knew
of many deaths among overseas users of one of its drugs before the FDA approved
the drug for domestic sale.
136.The
industry blocked state legislation designed to lower drug prices for state
residents w/o insurance coverage.
137.Cut
off supplies to Canada licensed pharmacies that continue to sell its
lower-priced medicines to Americans.
138.Falsified
production records to meet federal standards.
139.Kept
a book entitled “Off-the-Record Production” in which unauthorized production
changes and manufacturing short-cuts were secretly recorded.
140.Abandoned
its headquarters in a town after getting big tax breaks and forcing people to
move out of their homes so it could locate on their land.
Big
pharma has over 600 lobbyists in the nation’s capital and outspends all other
industries in lobbying politicians. As a result of its lobbying, the industry
succeeded in:
141.Defeating
mandatory discount pricing.
142.Protecting
drug patents in trade agreements.
143.Preventing
medicare price negotiations with companies.
144.Prohibiting
government listing of preferred drugs.
145.Delaying
availability of generic pediatric drugs.
146.Speeding
up government drug safety reviews.
147.Defeating
bill to make generic drugs more accessible.
148.Making
it harder for government to issue warning letters.
149.Easing
restrictions on direct-to consumer advertising.
150.Easing
licensing and continuous reviews of new sites for making drugs.
151.Getting
government to drop price controls.
152.Being
allowed to pay fee for faster reviews.
153.Making
it easier for brand-name makers to sue generic makers.
War/Gun/Ammunition
Industries
154.Places
through the revolving door key people in influential government positions.
155.Goes
around DoD to Congress to sell an expensive airplane DoD didn’t want anymore.
156.Lobbied
to prevent foreign sale of the world’s most expensive weapon from being halted.
157.Pays
picayune fines for defrauding the government.
158.Makes
and sells weapons riddled with flaws and way above promised cost.
159.Named
the “war profiteer of the month.”
160.Invested
heavily in and profited immensely from adding spy contractor on its resume.
161.Gave
a 10-year employee a layoff notice the very day the employee returned from
bereavement leave following the death of the employee’s young son.
162.Provides
technology to government for spying on anyone it wants to spy on.
163.Tells
government what its annual war/security budget should be, what its war/security
purchases should be, for what purposes, and how much they should cost, and what
minimal legislation and oversight would be acceptable.
164.Strategically
locating their facilities in their Congressional districts and States to ensure
that contracts will be steered to them.
165.Give
politicians junket trips and other goodies.
166.Exports
for sale more weapons than any other country.
167.War
industry’s investor relations people tell investors war is good for returns on
their investing.
168.Gun
industry executives say mass shootings are good for business.
169.The
multi-billion dollar gun industry uses the NRA as their official pimp.
170.Bullies
politicians into passing laws making it easier to sell more rifles and
handguns.
171.Promotes
gun sales by stoking fear and racism.
172.Links
patriotism with gun ownership.
173.Got
the U.S. Supreme Court to misinterpret the 2nd Amendment.
174.Slowly
kills people from after effects of atomic testing and nuclear weapons
development.
175.Makes
and sells products that kill more Americans than auto deaths.
176.Makes
and sells products deliberately intended to kill.
177.Makes
products deliberately intended to spy.
Incidents from Some Other Industries
Energy/Extractive
Industries
178.Controls
supply and manipulates prices of critical resources.
179.Spilling
countless barrels of oil offshore and onshore.
180.Despoiling
mountain sides scraped clean to get coal.
181.Leaving
elevated levels of arsenic and other heavy metals in groundwater near natural
gas fracking sites.
182.Permanently
contaminating aquifers.
183.Authorized
an air raid during an anti guerilla operation at a village in South America where
one of its pipelines is located, killing many civilians, including children.
184.Poorly
designing and operating pipelines that burst and release contaminating spills.
185.Delays
for years cleaning up after major spills.
186.
Using super-hazardous, poisonous chemicals to extract oil.
187.Utility
company cuts a secret quid quo pro deal with the government in exchange for
price consessions.
188.Operated
a nuclear power plant in violation of federal fire regulations and then lied
about it to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
189.Used
inadequate and falsified tests of the reliability of its nuclear power plant.
190.Hires
a consulting company to teach nuclear power plant operators how to deceive the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
191.Knowingly
sold transformers containtaining hazardous levels of PCBs, then acted as if
they did no wrong when signing the consent decree.
192.Underground
coal mine operators systematically cleaning dust samples before sending to
federal safety inspectors.
193.An
oil company executive personally ordered the rigging of gasoline pumps to
shortchange customers.
194.Uses
goon squads to intimidate, threaten, and harm striking miners protesting company
policies and conditions.
195.Exaggerated
the amountt and success of its environmental cleanup after one of its tankers
spilled an unprecedented amount of oil.
196.Plant
managers retaliated against a technician at a nuclear plant who had publically
complained about safety by ordering him to do useless work in a room filled with
toxic and radioactive materials.
197.Oil
companies pressure dealers to keep long hours and push sales.
198.Oil
companies raise prices in a time of pending war.
199.Energy
company spins off an insurance company subsidiary, deliberately neglecting to
tell buyers that there might be millions of dollars in suits for asbestos
claims filed against the subsidiary.
Financial
Industry
200.Created
and marketed fantasy financial products plummeting U.S. into 2nd
greatest depression.
201.Planning
on confiscating customer deposits.
202.Bank
rolling the polluting coal industry.
203.Peddling
falsified debt documents to collection firms.
204.Getting
default payments by filing thousands of collection lawsuits against consumers
expecting them not to contest the claims.
205.Selling
unreliable credit card debts.
206.Succeeded
in getting law separating depositing and investing banking overturned.
207.Big
banks lobbying to end competitive credit unions.
208.Acquired
risky loans to grow faster and increase executive compensation.
209.Preying
on customers, hiding costs and penalties, downplaying the effects of variable
rates, and pressing unaffordable loans for the purchase of fraudulently
overvalued homes.
210.Publishes
favorable but false stock ratings.
211.Helping
corporations devise shelters letting them operate tax free while exaggerating
profits.
212.Confuses
policyholders about their benefits’ forms
213.Unduly
denies insurance coverage.
214.Constantly
raising deductibles while shrinking coverage.
215.Auto
insurers coercing car repair shops to using cheap and sometimes dangerous
parts.
216.Disputing
in court and finally settling personal injury claims.
217.Overcharging
policy holders.
218.Requiring
in some areas, unlimited personal injury protection and no-fault coverage.
219.Hem
hawing in honoring claims and short changing legitimate claims.
220.Using
various tactics to reduce, avoid, or stall home insurance claims in an effort
to boost their own earnings.
221.Home
insurers routinely refusing to pay market prices for homes and replacement
contents.
222.Changing
isurrance policy coverages with no clear explanation.
223.Asking
claims adjusters to lie to customers and to overestimate their losses and
vastly overprice premiums.
224.Soaking
credit card holders with excessive rates.
225.Mortgage
brokers rewarded for putting borrowers into the costliest loans possible.
226.Falsifying
home mortgage program to increase defaults and then “sending foreclosure
notices, scheduling auction dates, and even selling consumers’ homes prematurely.
227.Finances
wars.
228.Launders
drug money.
Media/Entertainment
Industries
229.A
few big corporations control the news media.
230.Hollywood
submits its war glorifying movie scripts to the military for review and gets
access to dazzling military equipment to use for props in profitable movies.
231.Telephone
company removes pay phones
from low-income districts
to prevent people from using them
as "offices" to
receive incoming calls.
232.Prominent
newspaper belatedly and half-heartedly acknowledges its mistake in rushing to
judgment based on questionable sources to publish very derogatory info about a
person.
233.Newspaper
publishes ads designed to look like news.
234.Network
shows commercials disguised as talk shows, panel discussions, self-improvement
seminars, etc.
235.Pays
sources for information.
236.Editor
prods reporters to be news hounds who stretch limits to get a source, a document,
a witness.
237.To
scoop the competitors, a mass media organization goes forward with a story
before they had all the facts.
238.Plays
to the lowest common denominator of audience/readership with sensationalism,
sex, and violence.
239.National
TV network shows reenactment of a newsworthy event without telling viewers it
wasn't live.
240.
Knowingly misled the public on reasons for the Iraq war.
Transportation
Industry
241,Builds
cars “unsafe at any speed.” Does anything more need to be added?
Well,
yes.
242
A financially ailing airline routinely ignored vital repairs and maintenance to
minimize downtime of planes and then falsified records to make it appear as if
the work had been done.
243.Airline,
knowing a flight departure will be delayed, boards passengers anyway to prevent
them from seeking alternative flights.
244.Car
maker stages a large truck being dropped from a crane onto a new model without
telling viewers the car had been reinforced to withstand the impact.
245.A
worker was crushed to death because an automaker was lax in ensuring safety
measures in one of its plants.
246.Automaker
set back the odometer settings and sold the cars as new to dealers.
247.Automaker
knew millions of its transmissions were faulty.
248.Automaker
knowingly allowed plant workers to be overexposed to deadly levels of lead and
arsenic.
249.US
tire manufacturer recalls its tires on foreign cars abroad after safety
problems arise but delays a much more costly recall of domestic tires until
after mounting fatalities cause publicity and outcries.
250.Automakers
sometimes instruct their dealers to fix certain common defects free of charge
or at reduced cost but only if auto owners demand that the repair be made under
warranty.
251.Automaker
goes to court to try and bar the use of cheaper copycat repair parts not made
by the automaker.
252.It
wasn’t until after pressure from federal and state authorities along with
consumer advocate groups that an automaker recalled thousands of ambulances to
correct mechanical defects that had resulted in some fires and injuries.
253.Ever
since the early 20th century when auto and bus makers tore up the
trolley tracks, the transportation industry has been hitting the public,
especially the poor below their belt.
254.Imposing
demanding and unrealistic schedules on truck drivers.
255.Skimping
on truck fleet maintenance overhauls.
The
End---Except for an Addendum
Incidents
from many more industries could have been added to the 255, but it would have
been more of the same generally, and there is more than enough evil to have
read in one setting!
You
will have noticed the incidents involving corporations where they mistreat
their own people. I am reminded of Alice in the Dilbert comic strip bellowing
“I am not a resource!” in reaction to the company’s “Human Resource
Department.” Alice, be glad you don’t work for a real corporation!
And
since corporations treat their own people so badly, it should come as no
surprise how much they mistreat America and the world at large. The evil in the
gazette is not evil in the abstract. It is evil that reaches out and afflicts
you, me and particularly the powerless in so many different short-term and
long-term ways through getting us killed, poisoned, injured, starved, homeless,
unemployed, bankrupted, deceived, short changed, and ad infinitum. And it is
not going to stop until---.
