This article from Bloomberg creates one more poster child for why corporate America ought to be held far more accountable than simple monetary punishments. Jacqueline Fox, the woman described in the piece, is the epitome of a hard working, caring American mother who did right by her kids. Her only mistake? Having a brand, and product, she trusted for far too long. A product the brand new was quite probably lethal.
The thing that really angers me about this sort of revelation is the contrast you can draw here from the way coverage revolves around these kinds of acts of violence, even though they take longer to be realized, and our coverage of the odd shooting, or bombing, that gets played up to terrifying proportions. Sure, people dying from grotesque acts of outright violence tug at the heart, as well as our propensity to be scared, a great deal more easily from that kind of terrorism. And the fact that it is usually instigated by the radical, and extremist, hatemongers of the world, also aids in making that kind of destruction more headline worthy.
The coldly calculating corporate denial of humanity, in deciding that the few thousand lives that will be lost, especially if they are a minority, will ultimately cost them less than doing the right thing up front, ought to be seen as its own kind of terrorism; only here the terror is in the powerlessness you are meant to assume in relation to those who make the big financial decisions in our lives. You may think you can punish them by taking a monetary damage settlement away but you are not; at least not in any real sense because they just see that as another cost factor; a factor for which they will pass back to the consumer in one way or another. And the punch line here, a real killer of one in fact, is that this is exactly why they are empowered to continue doing it. This, my friends, is the Capitalist mentality at the core of its dark, profit is everything, logic.
More than 1,000 women are suing the company for covering up a cancer risk.
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