America was outraged in 2007 when pets started dropping dead from melamine-tainted pet food exported from China. Last year, China was even more outraged when melamine-tainted milk killed six children and sickened 300,000, some experiencing acute kidney failure.
Acute kidney failure means a lifetime of dialysis without an organ transplant. Either way, that's a lifetime of serious and expensive medical issues to drop on a baby and their family, for the rest of what will probably be their much shorter lives.
Two managers identified as particularly responsible for continuing to distribute milk they knew was contaminated have now been executed and several others have been jailed, including the former chair of the offending corporation, who has been given a life sentence.
This shouldn't be surprising if you were following the pet food story, as a former head of their state food and drug safety agency was executed after being convicted of bribery in connection with that and other food safety crises.
While I don't approve of the death penalty, and disagree with a lot of China's business practices and lax worker protections, I envy the fact that they've got a country where being a wealthy corporate big wheel or a high-ranking government official doesn't always insulate people from punishment in keeping with what others would be subject to for similar crimes. We can't even get a decent investigation going when our banks crash the world economy, and barely moreso when food companies put out tainted products that kill people.
There is hopefully some middle ground between corporations being free to act with impunity and executing their leaders. Yet when a person dies of someone else's deliberate action or willful neglect, there should be a manslaughter investigation at the very least, if not a full-blown murder investigation.
And there are US states that still enforce the death penalty in certain murder cases, so it isn't like we're really in a position to be high and mighty over this. I say so particularly remembering the enormous collective yawn over George W. Bush's joking treatment of approving executions in Texas. Probably most of the outrage this story would provoke in the US would be based on shock that white collar criminals from 'good families' would ever face the same kind of sentencing hazards as poor, usually brown, street thugs. It's shocking for financially successful people to get prosecuted in the US even when, as in the cases of Enron and WorldCom, their guilt is blatantly obvious.
Though if a company's officers knew their product or workplace was killing people, or was likely to, 'it was profitable' or 'it was too expensive to fix' can't continue to be socially permissible defenses for injuries and deaths or carcinogenic contamination. The people who knew should be tried for resulting deaths as though they were personally responsible for those deaths. Because they were. It shouldn't be less of a crime to sentence someone to death from the distance of your orderly office than it is to personally break their skull open with a bat - they're just as dead and their loved ones will miss them just as much.
Our system of limited corporate liability has been used too many times by US corporations as a license to sicken, defraud and kill people. It's repellent that not only do they often get off with only petty fines, but that they are too often allowed to continue doing business in the good graces of everyone. Going to work can't be an excuse to abandon all humanity for profit.
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