No CEOs on Death Row: My Beef with the Death Penalty

Since absolutely nobody asked, here's my main gripe with capital punishment.  (Well, aside from all those botched and rushed executions in the face of possibly exculpatory evidence).  My #1 issue with the death penalty in America is its unequal application.  Most people on death row are indeed guilty of their crimes, and horrific crimes they are.  They deserve to be where they are.  But they shouldn't be there alone.  Black people and other minorities/poor people are disproportionately represented to the point that they're nearly the only people represented at all.  When's the last time you saw an American CEO or multi-millionaire on death row?  Oh, right.  Never.  Not once, even when they committed murder or mass murder knowingly in the name of greed.  A few notable examples include:

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The Bayer AIDS scandal:  In the 1980s, Bayer's Cutter Biological division knowingly sold HIV-tainted hemophilia blood products to Asia and Latin America. The company continued to export the high-risk, non-heat-treated product for roughly a year after developing and releasing a safer, heat-treated alternative in the US and Europe.  Thousands of hemophiliacs (i.e. male children) in countries across Asia, Latin America & the rest of the world contracted HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C as a direct result of these products.  AIDS was a death sentence at this time.  TL;DR - Bayer infected thousands of children with a progressive, fatal disease with no cure rather than lose a few dollars.  Mass murder on a global scale.

The BP Oil Spill:  The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which released 134 million gallons of crude oil, was one of the largest environmental disasters in world history.  According to Wikipedia, Marsh vegetation was reduced along 350 to 720 miles of shoreline, while between 4 and 8.3 billion harvestable oysters were lost.  Between 51,000 and 84,000 birds, 56,000 to 166,000 juvenile sea turtles, and an estimated 2 to 5 trillion newly hatched fish were killed, alongside up to a 51% decline in the Barataria Bay dolphin population.  Rare deep-sea corals and red crab communities were affected across roughly 400 to 700 square miles near the wellhead, and recreational losses from reduced boating, fishing, and beachgoing were estimated at $527 million to $859 million.  Again, more death and disease as well as economic and environmental devastation inflicted on unwilling participants in the name of profits.

The Monsanto Agent Orange scandal:  Monsanto, along with companies like Dow Chemical, was one of nine government contractors that manufactured the toxic herbicide Agent Orange for the U.S. military during the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1969. The chemical was heavily contaminated with dioxin (TCDD), causing devastating long-term health and environmental consequences for both native Vietnamese people & returning U.S. troops.  Historical records have shown that internal Monsanto officials knew about the extreme toxicity of the dioxin contaminant in Agent Orange as early as 1962.  In 1984, Monsanto and other manufacturers agreed to a $180 million out-of-court settlement for U.S. veterans exposed to the chemical. However, subsequent lawsuits filed by Vietnamese victims against the manufacturers were consistently dismissed by U.S. courts, which ruled the government held immunity for wartime actions.  Translation:  Sorry, G00ks.  We actually meant to inflict generations of birth defects, cancer and metabolic disease on you so you get nothing.  Ya dirty commies.

The 2018 PG&E Campfire:  Erupting on November 8, 2018, in Butte County, this was the largest wildfire in California history.  It was sparked by faulty Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) transmission lines & worsened by high winds, which drove the blaze into the communities of Paradise and Concow, resulting in 85 fatalities and destroying over 18,000 structures.  The catastrophic wildfire blazed for 17 days, ultimately burning 153,336 acres and causing an estimated $16.5 billion in damages.  So all that hubbub about whether this was a result of climate change or California not cleaning up their leaves was a distraction--it was actually caused by corporate greed & negligence.  

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These are just a handful of examples; there are many others.  Each of these crimes was a top-down decision made by an actual human or group of humans with full knowledge of what they were doing, and there's documentation to prove it.  Yet not a single CEO or other person in a leadership position spent a single day in jail for these crimes, nor were the companies shut down after the fact.  At worst, corporations and their leaders are usually subject to petty civil suits, even when the crime is an obvious criminal offense. They "settle out of court for an undisclosed amount" with the stipulation that the victims can never speak on the issue in public again and that's that.  A chilling effect on our so-called freedom of speech when it's perhaps most important to speak out.




Corporate Death Penalty

A question was raised recently about whether industries that kill more people than they employ annually, such as the tobacco and coal industries, should have a "corporate death penalty".  It went mostly unnoticed.  What would this even look like?  Why should there be a separate death penalty for corporate leaders and the rest of us?  The two-tiered justice system has been a massive failure already--just take money out of the current legal system and treat everybody the same.  That's all we want.  

Get rid of for-profit bail bondsmen, make quality legal representation available to all, do away with pre-trial detention for everyone except violent offenders and those proven to be a flight risk & quit cutting "deals" with rapists, child abusers, murderers & other violent fucks.  No negotiating with terrorists, goddammit.  Plea deals encourage false confessions while allowing horrible monsters to serve unjustly short sentences.  Enact truth-in-sentencing laws in all 50 states and stop locking up petty non-violent offenders like drug users/dealers, small time thieves  and sex workers who actually need treatment, not incarceration.  Focus on actually reforming people while they're locked up instead of making them perform slave labor for the state and corporations.  And do away with the prison informant testimony BS which is about as reliable as a Scientology e-meter.

Yeah right, like that'll fucking happen.  Prison is a for-profit racket just like everything else in this hellhole nation.  Another source of slave labor, nothing more.  🇺🇲💰🫱🏽‍🫲🏻

The U.S. is willing to not only tolerate but protect any industry that makes some fat cat in suit rich as long as he's willing to play along with the lobbying, ass-licking Capitol Hill Olympics.  Who cares if the only thing they sell is death?  That's capitalism, babay!  Employ literal children in your slaughterhouses illegally by the hundreds, some of whom lose limbs or die on the job after being hired with fake/stolen IDs?  Punishment:  Pay a fee equal to a few dollars to the average American and keep right on going.  Do not lose your business license, do not go to jail, do not get put on trial or sit in prison even one motherfucking day.  But get caught with a crack rock and $50 in your pocket and it's off to prison for drug distribution, even if you've never sold drugs a day in your life.  This is the state of corruption in the "greatest nation on Earth" and our media is making sure we hear as little about it as possible so we don't 🔥 it all to the ground.  (We're saving that for the 🤖📈 centers.  I kid.  They'll be protected by killer robot dogs so good luck).

So yeah, in conclusion that's my #1 issue with the death penalty: who it's NOT killing.  The things we view as violent vs. normal in this society are incredibly twisted.  Shoot one guy in a suit dead in the street?  That's violence!  Sit in an office killing thousands of people with "delay, deny, defend" tactics via a service they've already paid for (that people in other developed nations don't even have to pay for) as they die of horrific time-sensitive diseases?  Not violence! 

When people like Trump say they "love the uneducated," this is exactly what they mean.  They love complacent, ignorant people who blindly swallow the narratives fed to them by the idiot tube because they're easier to control.  📺

 American "justice" 

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