When it finally came out a few years ago that Roundup causes cancer , none of the multimillionaire heirs to the Monsanto fortune lost their mansions and none of Monsanto ’ s executives went to jail .
Neither did the owners of chemical companies that left behind deadly Superfund sites like the one that caused birth defects and stillbirths at Love Canal ; others do so to this day across the nation .
When it came out that the Sackler family decided to lie that their new Oxycontin drug was less addictive than normal opioids they walked away with billions ; none have seen the inside of a jail cell for even an hour .
Owners and operators of mining operations across the country lied to communities for generations that they ’ d clean up their poisonous waste : instead , they routinely bankrupt their companies and walk away with millions , leaving behind moonscape-like devastation .
Even banksters like “ Foreclosure King ” Steve Mnuchin , who reveled in “ earning ” around $ 200 million by throwing over 36,000 of California families out of their homes while his Wall Street buddies stole trillions of dollars , continues to troll us with his twitter pontifications like he ’ s some kind of elder statesman worthy of our respect .
As Honoré de Balzac noted in 1834 ( in slightly less compressed language ), “ Behind every great fortune lies a great crime ”:
• Americans are quick to forget about the families of the thousands of small businessmen John D . Rockefeller destroyed before Congress outlawed and Teddy Roosevelt broke up his predatory monopoly .
• Seven tobacco CEOs lied to Congress and took home millions in bonuses ; their families are still morbidly rich and their children and grandchildren are the toast of high society .
• Defense contractors take over half of our Pentagon budget and steal billions from us every year ; their mansions , complete with servants ’ quarters and riding stables , still ring Washington , DC . and we have literally never been able to successfully audit them .
Historically , the only corporate criminals we hold to account are those who rip off rich people : Ken Lay , for example , defrauding his Enron investors , and Bernie Madoff scammed millions from Wall Street oligarchs .
On the other hand , if you can make billions exploiting , poisoning , misinforming , or ripping off working-class Americans you ’ re generally guaranteed a soft landing . We have to change the rules . We ’ re now confronted with a crisis that goes far beyond this routine orgy of corrupted capitalism : climate change isn ’ t just killing a few Americans ; it ’ s threatening civilization itself and perhaps even the future of the human race .
Fossil fuel companies have known for two generations that their products would at the least disrupt society and at worst produce a great extinction on the order of what killed off the dinosaurs .
Not only did they cover it up : they actively funded climate change “ disinformation ” campaigns with front groups and bought-off scientists openly lying in the press and before Congress .
And now , like with asbestos , tobacco , and dozens of other known-as-deadly products , the bill is coming due .
In the face of this fossil-fueled climate change we need immediate and expensive action : America needs to harden its infrastructure , and fast .
If high-tension power lines had been buried underground in California and Colorado , for example , the worst of the wildfires would have been avoided , as they were caused by wind-downed wires .
Cities from Miami to New York are regularly crippled by sea-level-rise flooding and therefore must spend hundreds of billions on levees , pumps and reconfiguring water , power , mass transit , and sewage systems .
So many American homes have been destroyed by global-warming-worsened fires and freezes ( see : “ Texas ”) that building materials have exploded in price and fireproof “ intumescent ” house paint is the hot new product .
The bad guys should be paying for this . We ’ ve certainly established a legal framework for it .
Before my dad died , he joined an asbestos lawsuit that , after lawyer fees , got his estate around $ 40,000 which eased life for my mom . Similarly , states have received compensation from tobacco companies for their costs treating lung cancers and the federal government steps in to remediate old mines and superfund sites .
While the majority of people injured by the kind of raw capitalism we practice in this country never see a penny , there is precedent for holding lying industries responsible for the harms they intentionally and knowingly cause .
At the very least , this could take the form of a carbon tax , with the revenue going to reimburse victims and harden our infrastructure .
But given how egregious these companies have behaved — and how many are still , to this day , funding climate denial and lobbying against green energy — Congress should extract restitution and recompense from the companies and punish the psychopathic executives who oversaw their campaigns of deadly lies .
This goes way beyond garden variety crime , even dwarfing the damage caused by asbestos or tobacco . These are quite literally crimes against the American people and crimes against our larger humanity .
It ’ s time to hold the perpetrators to account and make them pay .
50 x The Trial Lawyer