Corporate Crime Woke Corporatism and the Rise of Law and Order Politics

Black Lives Matter.
Defund the Police.
Cancel culture.
Not corporate crime.
Wealth inequality.
Political corruption.
Corporate culture.

The agenda has been set by the corporations and led to the rise of woke corporatism.

Corporations and corporate criminals embrace 2021 liberal values to escape 1921 liberal values.

Or as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it in a 2018 column titled The Rise of Woke Capital –

“In every era and every political dispensation, businessmen ask themselves: What am I required to do to make money unmolested by the government?”

Four pillars of woke corporatism – Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Democratic Congressional Leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and President Biden – all have taken a knee for Black Lives Matter.

And when they stand up, they go back to work for Wall Street.

Woke corporatism protects a criminal justice system that throws poor whites and blacks into prison for minor drug crimes while allowing corporate criminal drug pushers off the hook.

Think — Purdue Pharma.

In 2006, prosecutors in western Virginia wanted to put an end to the Purdue Pharma sponsored opioid epidemic.

Those prosecutors wrote a more than 100 page prosecution memo.

“The memo was an incendiary catalogue of corporate malfeasance,” reporter Patrick Radden Keefe writes in his book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.

“It wasn’t just that it spelled out a litany of prosecutable misdeeds. It substantiated, in forensic detail, the knowledge and direction of those misdeeds at the highest levels of Purdue.”

But corporate criminal defense lawyers went over the heads of line prosecutors to Main Justice and the criminal prosecution that could have limited the damage was turned back. (To get a nutshell overview of the story, check out Barry Meier’s New York Times 2019 report and mini documentary – A Secret Opioid Memo That Could Have Slowed An Epidemic.)

Woke corporatism protects a death penalty for individuals but prevents a death penalty for culpable corporations.

Think — health insurance corporations.

Are there any corporations more deserving of the corporate death penalty than health insurance companies?

Americans overwhelmingly want to put insurance companies out of their misery and ours.

But woke corporatism prevents this humane execution at every turn.

Those who made their names calling for the death penalty for insurance companies – Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal – refuse to raise the issue this year in deference to the corporate powers that be.

Sanders has yet to introduce his single payer bill in the Senate. And while Jayapal introduced hers, she has refused to hold the hearings she promised earlier this year.

Single payer would replace major health insurance companies with Medicare for All saving hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of American lives a year.

Instead of defunding the corporate crime police, we should be making heroes and heroines out of those on the front lines in the battle against corporate crime.

How many Americans know the name Frances Kelsey?

She was the young Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official who, fifty years ago, prevented a pharmaceutical disaster in the United States by refusing to authorize the anti-nausea drug thalidomide for market in the United States because she was concerned about the drug’s safety.

Resisting pressure from the company, Kelsey refused for over a year to approve the drug. She was vindicated when it was shown that where the drug was being used in Europe and around the world, it caused serious birth defects – babies born with no arms and no legs.

A headline in the Washington Post last week reads – In a Setback for Black Lives Matter, Mayoral Campaigns Shift to Law and Order.

Today we need a headline that reads – “In a Setback to Woke Corporatism, Congressional Campaigns Shift to Law and Order for Corporate Criminals.”

(Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter).