http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0723-07.htm

Published on Tuesday, July 23, 2002 by Arianna Huffington
Capitalism Without Conscience
by Arianna Huffington

"It is just the tip of the iceberg."

Such is the well-worn cliché that has become the mantra of
the moment, as soothsayers from think tanks, the media,
politics, academia and even the business world, assess the
current wave of corporate scandals.

I think what we're seeing is actually just the tip of the
tip of the iceberg. Because beyond the financial frauds that
have endangered jobs, retirement funds and the stock market,
the "profit uber alles" mindset is endangering the health and
safety of the American people.

"In the long run," said President Bush in his finger-wagging
speech to Wall Street earlier this month, "there's no capitalism
without conscience" -- an assertion that makes you wonder
if his severance package from Harken Energy included a pair
of rose colored glasses. Of course there's capitalism without
conscience, President dear. And plenty of it.

Market forces have no intrinsically moral direction, which
is why, before he wrote "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith
wrote "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." Ethics should
precede economics. But it doesn’t have to. And it’s not inevitable
that it will. We know this because we’ve seen the results of
capitalism without conscience: the pollution of the air we
breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat;
the endangerment of workers; and the sales of dangerous
products -- from cars to toys to drugs. All in pursuit
of greater and greater profits.

For example, did you realize that 20,000 people -- many of
them children -- are killed every year by defective products?
Or that such products cause close to 30 million injuries a year?

We are up in arms -- and rightly so -- about corporate greed
that leads to massive shareholder rip-offs, but shouldn't we be
even more irate about corporate greed that leads to loss of life?

The giant drug companies have been among the worst culprits,
harming their customers with a wanton disregard for human life
only matched by the tobacco companies and firearms manufacturers.

You don’t still think there’s capitalism without a conscience,
Mr. President? Take Schering-Plough. In May, the company agreed
to pay a record $500 million fine for repeatedly violating FDA
regulations regarding quality assurance, manufacturing, equipment,
laboratories, packaging and labeling. Other than that, they
apparently ran a very tight, conscience-laden ship. After all,
they haven't been accused of any accounting scandals. Not yet,
anyway.

Even more damning, the drug giant is also currently under
criminal investigation, reportedly for the literally breath-taking
allegation that it caused the deaths of 17 people -- including
a ten-year old boy -- who died while using asthma inhalers the
company manufactured and distributed, even though it knew the
inhalers might not actually contain any asthma-fighting medication.

According to FDA reports, the ten-year-old victim had an asthma
attack, "reached for his inhaler and obtained no relief," then
died shortly thereafter. I'd like to see Schering-Plough try and
work that suffocating little tableau into one of their gauzy,
omnipresent TV ads.

There has got to be a very special place in hell for corporations
willing to sacrifice the health of their customers on the altar
of increased profits. If so, a toasty spot should be reserved for
the folks at Wyeth who have been desperately trying to develop a
drug that causes mass amnesia ever since a new study revealed
that women using its wildly profitable hormone replacement drug,
Prempro, showed heightened risk of breast cancer, heart attacks,
strokes, and blood clots.

The corporate crime is not that Prempro -- which, along with its
sister pill Premarin, pumps more than $2 billion a year into
Wyeth’s coffers -- has proven more harmful than beneficial.
It’s that the company has aggressively marketed them despite
growing concerns about the drugs’ safety.

Indeed, the company secretly funded the writing and promotion
of "Feminine Forever," the 1966 book that helped turn hormone
replacement into a national craze and Wyeth’s estrogen pill,
Premarin, into a cash cow. Touting estrogen as a "wonder drug",
the book’s author, Dr. Robert Wilson, wrote that women taking
estrogen "will be much more pleasant to live with and will not
become dull and unattractive." What's a little breast cancer
if it means you can avoid becoming dull and unattractive?

And witness the "conscience" -- more like "depravity"
-- with which the company promoted Duract, a painkiller
it manufactured and marketed in 1997 -- even though research
proved the drug could cause serious liver damage. Duract
was an instant hit, with over 2.5 million prescriptions
written in the 10 months before the drug started racking
up liver-related deaths and was yanked off pharmacy shelves.

If signing off on a false balance sheet will soon be enough
to supposedly land a CEO in the slammer for 20 years, what
should the sentence be for allowing liver-damage and deaths
in the name of milking ten months’ worth of profits out of
a defective, deadly product? Or how much time should an executive
do who signs off on working conditions that lead to 56,000 deaths
a year from on-the -job accidents or work-related illnesses
such as black lung and asbestos poisoning?

Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary and former Alcoa CEO
Paul O’Neill couldn’t have been clearer about the need to
establish very different corporate priorities: "If you go
and look at Alcoa today you will find it’s the safest company
in the world. Because I said to the people 'I don’t care about
how much it costs. If there’s a safety hazard or risk that
we know about it should not be budgeted. It should be taken
care of tomorrow morning.'"

What if O’Neill’s leadership mandate became the norm in
American business? That, Mr. President, would truly be
something approaching capitalism with conscience, where
the profit motive doesn’t come at the expense of the public
interest.

Few now dispute that it’s time for American business to
clean up its act. The debate that rages is over the extent
of the reforms that are needed. Will we settle for a few
simple gestures on accounting and SEC enforcement or will
we seize the moment to bring corporations to account for
their anti-social behavior?

We have the chance to clean things up before an even grosser
and deadlier corporate crime wave starts grabbing the
headlines -- and public confidence in our business leaders
sinks even lower than the free-falling Dow.

Copyright © 1998-2002 Christabella, Inc

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