Fact: The rich commit far more crime than the poor.
Summary
The upper class commits far more crime than the lower class. Street criminals stole $15.3 billion in 1993, but white collar-criminals embezzled $200 billion. Street criminals murdered 23,271 people that year, but the decisions of profit-driven corporations murdered at least 318,368 (through pollution, consumer and worker safety violations, etc.) Corporations deserve blame for these deaths because they lobby for and enact policies which drive up these death rates. Virtually all other rich countries have higher safeguards and lower death rates.
Arguments
Say the word "criminal," and the image that comes to the mind of most people is a street criminal… usually poor, usually black, usually armed with a gun.
In terms of sheer damage, however, the crimes of the poor do not even begin to compare with the rich. In 1993, the property loss to theft and robbery amounted to $15.3 billion. (1) But white-collar embezzlement costs about $200 billion a year! (2) So conditioned are we to ignore the crimes of the middle and upper classes that the FBI does not even list this statistic in its authoritative annual report, Crime in the United States. The very way we think of crime is racist and classist to its core.
The same is true of murder. Officially, the FBI counted 23,271 murders in 1993. (3) But a truer figure would run at least 318,368, even by the incomplete and conservative count listed below. Society has simply conditioned us not to think of the deaths caused by corporations as murder. For example, when a criminal breaks into someone's home and shoots a family of six, we have no trouble identifying that as mass murder. But what about the mine disaster that kills 26 miners -- after the owners had committed 1,250 safety violations in the last 13 years? (4) If the mine owner callously and knowingly risks human lives in his pursuit of profits, shouldn't he then be guilty of murder?
Murder is defined as "unlawful killing with malice aforethought." Clearly, a mine owner who has been lawfully warned that his mines are unsafe has the requisite foreknowledge of likely death. And the mine owner who would then choose to ignore those warnings in his quest for profits clearly displays the requisite malice towards his fellow human beings. An analogy best describes this similarity. Suppose someone puts out a $100,000 contract on your life, causing a gangster to show up at your door one day and kill you. He may not have known you, or held a personal grudge against you. He did it for the money -- that is, with cold-blooded malice aforethought. The same is true of a businessman who desires to earn an extra $100,000 in profits when scientists have already warned him that this action will drive up the percentage of worker or consumer deaths.
Three objections are commonly raised to the above argument. Some object that a street crime is different because it is terrifying, direct and real in a way that work is not. But this only begs the question: which would you rather be killed by, a street criminal or an unsafe job?
Others object that job deaths are accidental, even negligent, but not criminal. But our society has a long tradition of finding people guilty for criminal negligence (such as drunk drivers who kill, or restaurants that fail to put out the "wet floor" sign). Even so, it cannot be negligence if scientists, experts or regulators have repeatedly warned the perpetrator.
Others object that if workers do not want to work at dangerous jobs, they should simply find another. Unfortunately, the job market is ruled by the mathematics of displacement. If you quit a dangerous job to take a safe one, you have removed a safe job opening from the job market and replaced it with a dangerous one. Since people must either work or starve, they must take whatever jobs are available. And with an unemployment rate of 5-6 percent, job seekers actually find themselves competing for these jobs. To put it another way, suppose that 30 percent of the jobs in the economy were dangerous. The solution is not to rotate the workforce in and out of those jobs. Nor is the solution to let workers compete for the safer jobs, leaving the bottom 30 percent of workers stranded in dangerous ones. The only real solution is to lower the percentage of dangerous jobs to zero. And that is something only managers and owners can do.
Corporations not only expose workers to danger, but consumers as well. Scientists have long warned corporations that air and water pollution kills a certain percentage of the population (mostly through higher cancer rates). So do cigarettes, cars without safety features like air-bags, defective silicon breast implants, unsafe nuclear waste disposal, chemical food additives and pesticides, inadequate health care, inadequate disaster and emergency services, poverty, poor education and training… the list goes on and on.
So how do corporations get away with it? In 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all Political Action Committees (the lobbyist organizations that bribe our Congress) and contributed 79 percent of all "soft money" to national political parties. (5) These corporate lobbyists have persuaded Congress to scuttle pro-consumer, pro-labor and pro-environmental safeguards, even though this results in a higher percentage of disease and death. Indeed, the statistics below reveal that the U.S. has some of the highest death rates and pollution rates in the industrialized world.
This returns us to the definition of murder: "illegal killing with malice aforethought." If Congress rules that these fatal practices are not illegal, then corporations may claim that they are not guilty of murder. But let's revisit the hypothetical $100,000 contract put out on your life. Suppose that the gangster accepting the contract first visits his local member of Congress, and bribes him to make contract murder legal before going ahead with terminating you. Should society let this gangster off the hook for murder because of this technical loophole?
The following is a closer look at the statistics of how Americans are really murdered. This is obviously an incomplete list, but the tally below easily dwarfs the FBI's official murder count of 23,271.
THE REAL MURDER STATISTICS
In 1992, nearly 70,000 Americans were killed from job-related accidents or work-related illness and desease. Another 13.2 million suffered non-fatal injuries or illness, at a cost of $170 billion to the economy. (6) Although some accidents are obviously inevitable "acts of God," a large portion are surely preventable. When industry pushes the pace of production to the limit, cuts safety corners, lobbies Congress for budget cuts in OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and urges extensive safety deregulation, then a certain percentage of these deaths are attributable to profit-driven managers and owners. Throughout this analysis, we will be conservative, counting only 10 to 25 percent of the total deaths as industry-responsible. In this case, that amounts to 17,500 work-related deaths.
Pollution is another way that industry kills. Since 70 percent of all Americans consider themselves pro-environmentalist, environmental legislation tends to pass by wide margins in Congress. But corporations know how to resist these laws. For example, the original Clean Air Act (1970) called for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate hundreds of known air pollutants. But by 1990, after twenty years of corporate stalling, dodging and fighting in the courts, the EPA had managed to issue regulatory standards for only seven pollutants. (7) Furthermore, corporations are quite successful in lobbying exemptions into environmental laws. In 1990, the Clean Air Act was revised by Congress; environmentalists wanted a clause to reduce industrial cancer risks to one-in-a-million. "The Senate bill still has the requirement," said environmental lobbyist Richard Ayres at the time. "But there are forty pages of extensions and exceptions and qualifications and loopholes that largely render the health standard a nullity." (8) And when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Newt Gingrich invited corporate lobbyists themselves to write the texts of environmental legislation.
But pollution kills. The National Cancer Institute has conducted a massive, county-by-county study of cancer in the U.S., in an effort to locate the nation's "cancer hotspots". Dr. Glenn Paulson summed up the results this way: "If you know where the chemical industry is, you know where the cancer hotspots are." (9)
Another study has linked high local cancer rates to hazardous waste sites. A team of researchers identified 593 such hazardous waste sites from the Environmental Protection Agency's National Priority List for cleanup under the Superfund. They found that hazardous waste site counties had significantly higher death rates for six types of cancers for white men, and another six types of cancers for white women (including breast cancer), than non-hazardous waste site counties. (10)
The same correlation exists between breast cancer rates and the nuclear industry. In 1990, the National Cancer Institute conducted a study of cancer mortality rates near nuclear facilities. Using data from that study, Drs. Ernest Sternglass, Jay Gould and Joseph Mangano found that 18 percent of the U.S. female population lives in or adjacent to counties that have nuclear reactors. This 18 percent of the population accounts for 55 percent of all breast cancer deaths. Nationally, breast cancer declined 4 percent over the period of the NCI's study, but for these women, the breast cancer rate rose 9 percent. Prior to start up of nuclear operations in the 107 "nuclear counties" of the NCI's analysis, cancer mortality in these mainly rural counties was 1% below the rate experienced by the U.S. as a whole. After start-up, cancer mortality in these counties increased to 2% above the national rate.
According to a sophisticated study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, some 64,000 people may die prematurely every year from particulate air pollution. It reports that tens of thousands of these deaths could be averted if the Environmental Protection Agency set stringent health standards for fine-particulate pollution. (11)
Many Americans are unaware that the U.S. is the most polluting society in the First World. In some areas, like the emission of greenhouse gases, it even outdoes the environmentally ravaged former communist countries. Click here to see the full statistics.
Unsafe consumer products are another way that industry kills. Each year there are about 21,700 consumer product deaths and 28.6 million injuries, at a total cost of $200 billion. Yet corporate lobbyists effectively blocked the creation of a Consumer Protection Agency under President Carter, and have continually pushed for safety deregulation and defunding of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which inspects 15,000 products a year. (12)
Perhaps the biggest consumer killer is cigarettes. The American Cancer Society reports that "smoking is related to about 419,000 U.S. deaths each year." (13) Some might argue that this is a personal choice, more appropriately labeled "slow suicide" than "murder." However, the tobacco industry spikes its cigarettes with added nicotine to make them more addictive. And it aggressively advertises to teenagers, using cartoon characters like "Joe Camel," or enviable adult images like the "Marlboro Man." Teenagers are targeted to replace the older customers the industry kills off. According to a 1994 Gallup poll, 75 percent of all smokers admit they are addicted, and 81 percent say they would not start smoking again if they had to do it over. This no longer sounds like a personal choice.
Furthermore, second-hand smoke also kills about 3,000 nonsmokers a year. (14) The cancer risk of smoking cigarettes has been known for decades, but it wasn't until 1992 that the Environmental Protection Agency classified Environmental Tobacco Smoke (or ETS) as a Class-A carcinogen. The Centers for Disease Control report that 88 percent of all Americans have cotinine -- a by-product of ETS -- in their blood. Their survey shows that 43 percent of U.S. children (aged 2 months through 11 years) live in a home with at least one smoker, and that 37 percent of adult non-tobacco users live in a home with a smoker or are exposed to ETS at work. (15)
One example especially clarifies how Americans are really murdered each year: unnecessary surgery. Health care experts have long known that many doctors have a financial incentive to recommend surgery; in 1975, this resulted in 3.2 million unnecessary operations. Obviously, surgery is a radical procedure, and a certain percentage of these patients die as a matter of course. Dr. Sidney Wolf estimates that about 16,000 people died unnecessarily that year, at a cost of $5 billion. (16) (Even the most conservative estimates for that year were 12,000 deaths.) Since 1975, things have only gotten worse. One notorious example is the C-section. In 1970, Caesarean births comprised 5.5 percent of all births; by 1988, they had soared to 24.7 percent. The optimal rate is 12 percent, according to a scale devised by Dr. Edward Quillan, dean of the School of Medicine at the University of California. (17)
Unnecessary prescriptions are also an excellent way for health care providers to turn a profit. Dr. George Silver, a professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, estimates that 22 percent of the nation's 6 billion doses of antibiotic medicines are unnecessary, resulting in 2,000 to 10,000 deaths a year. Silver's estimates are extremely conservative; other authorities put the deaths somewhere between 30,000 and 160,000. (18)
Poverty also kills. The American Journal of Epidemiology reports that "a vast body of evidence has shown consistently that those in the lower classes have higher mortality, morbidity, and disability rates." (19) This is because the poor suffer more polluted, stressful and unsafe work and living environments; they have less preventative health care, less post-health care, less education about safety and health issues, less nutritious meals, less creature comforts like heating or air-conditioning, less recreational opportunities, less tools to ease their standard of living, less isolation from sick and infected people, and less contact with people who could direct them to solutions. Although affluent blacks enjoy the same good health as affluent whites, there are more blacks in poverty than whites (33.1 percent compared to 12.2 percent). (20) And for this reason, the average black life span is about seven years shorter than the average white life span (a statistic that doesn't change even when factoring in the murder rate). (21)
Some might object that America's poor are significantly richer than the poor of other countries. However, researchers have discovered that it is not only absolute poverty that kills, but relative poverty as well! Drs. Bruce Kennedy, Ichiro Kawachi and Deborah Prothrow-Stith conducted a study at the Harvard School of Public Health that found that the gap between the rich and the poor matters. "We found that mortality was strongly related to inequality in the distribution of income, but not to the median income or per capita income of a state," says Kennedy. (22) States with the most income inequality had higher death rates of heart disease, cancer, homicide, tuberculosis, pneumonia and high blood pressure. The Harvard team concluded that if U.S. inequality were reduced from 30% to 25% on the Robin Hood index (about where it is in England), deaths from coronary heart disease would be reduced by 25%. (23) In 1993, the U.S. suffered 489,970 deaths from coronary heart disease; a quarter of that would represent 122,493 lives saved. (24)
A separate study by the California Department of Health Services made the same findings. They found high levels of income inequality and high death rates in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and New York. Conversely, they found comparatively low levels of income inequality and low death rates in New Hampshire, Utah, Wisconsin, Iowa and Hawaii. By both measures, New Jersey and Connecticut were in the middle. Interestingly, the principal researcher in the California group, Dr. George A. Kaplan, says: "The evidence in these two studies suggests that the increased death rates in those states are not due simply to their having more poor people. Income inequality seems to be increasing mortality rates among nonpoor people as well, and we are investigating that possibility." (25)
That said, we can now show that the U.S. has the highest level of income inequality in the industrialized world:
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