Corporate Criminals
VW Case Shows Need for More and
Bigger Government
Again
and again we hear about corporations doing bad things so they can make more
money:
polluting, selling contaminated food or otherwise harming people’s health,
selling products that injure people or just don’t do what they advertise,
tricking and scamming people out of their money, selling banned goods or
providing financial services for terrorists or drug cartels, and so many other
things that are not good for people or society.
Wouldn’t
it be great if there were some entity that was more powerful than these
corporations, whose purpose is to protect us, reign these corporations in, make
and enforce rules, prosecute offenders and put a stop to this stuff?
This Week: VW
This
week we are hearing about Volkswagen (VW). For years the company claimed they
were selling “clean diesel” engines, but they were tricking their customers,
the public and governments around the world. Their cars are really a public
health threat, putting out up to 40
times the legal limit of pollutants that cause asthma and other
disease.
VW
built a “defeat mechanism” into as many as 11 million cars. This mechanism let
the cars pass government tests, even though they were polluting like crazy when
driven in the real world. The mechanism made the engine run clean during
government tests, then when it detected that the tests were finished it set the
engine to start polluting again.
For
years these cars have been harming people and until now VW was getting away
with (and making big profits from) this. They were finally caught, and we will
see whether executives are prosecuted, or if this will be one more case of weak
(or corrupted) government issuing a fine that lets a company make its
shareholders pay the cost instead of holding the executives that did it
accountable.
The Fix For The VW
Cars
This
is huge. Up to 11 million cars have these “defeat” mechanisms in them. These
cars have to be fixed because their emissions can cause people to develop
asthma and other respiratory diseases. But fixing this is a big problem.
According
to Wired, in “VW
Owners Aren’t Going to Like the Fixes for Their Diesels,” there are two
choices for fixing these cars – and either choice means the car owners end up
losing a lot of what they thought they had paid for.
The
first is to update the software so the cars always run in the “test mode” that
defeated the emissions tests. But the changes the software made to the engines
to get them to operate within the legal emissions limits while being tested
will cause the car to either have poor acceleration or poor gas mileage.
The
second is to actually fix the problem that causes the engines to pollute. According
to Wired, VW would have to add a “urea” tank and the means to inject this into
the catalytic converter:
The
standard way of making a diesel run cleanly is to use selective catalytic
reduction, a chemical process that breaks NOx [mono-nitrogen oxides] down into
nitrogen and water. Part of that process includes adding urea to the mix. The
super effective system can eliminate 70 to 90 percent of NOx emissions, and is
used by other diesel manufacturers like Mercedes and BMW. The downside is that
it adds complication to the system, and cost — $5,000 to $8,000 per car. And
you need to periodically add the urea-based solution to your car to keep it
working.
…
So it seems the logical way to get those cars to perform like their diesel
cousins is to add a urea. VW’s unlikely to embrace that option, because adding
hardware to half a million cars would be far more expensive than a computer
update. It wouldn’t be any fun for the TDI owner, either. Not only do you have
to spend an afternoon with your local dealer, you have to make room for the
tank. That could mean sacrificing cargo space or giving up the spare tire.
The
cost to VW will be huge, and the customers lose either way. Never mind all the
people suffering asthma and lung disease resulting from the pollution these
cars were emitting.
VW Not An Isolated
Case
The
New York Times reports, in “Volkswagen
Test Rigging Follows a Long Auto Industry Pattern,” that,
For
decades, car companies found ways to rig mileage and emissions testing data. In
Europe, some automakers have taped up test cars’ doors and grilles to bolster
their aerodynamics. Others have used “superlubricants” to reduce friction in
the car’s engine to a degree that would be impossible in real-world driving
conditions.
Automakers
have even been known to make test vehicles lighter by removing the back seats.
… [In 1973 the EPA] fined Volkswagen $120,000 after finding that the company had installed devices intended specifically to shut down a vehicle’s pollution control systems. In 1974, Chrysler had to recall more than 800,000 cars because similar devices were found in the radiators of its cars.
… [In 1973 the EPA] fined Volkswagen $120,000 after finding that the company had installed devices intended specifically to shut down a vehicle’s pollution control systems. In 1974, Chrysler had to recall more than 800,000 cars because similar devices were found in the radiators of its cars.
[.
. .] Beyond emissions, the industry has long been contemptuous of regulation.
Henry Ford II called airbags “a lot of baloney,” and executives have bristled
at rules requiring higher mileage per gallon.
VW
might not even be the only company that is scamming government testing labs
with “defeat mechanisms’ right now. From the report,
“We
call it the tip of the iceberg,” said Jos Dings, the director of Transport and
Environment. “We don’t think this will be limited to Volkswagen. If you look at
the testing numbers for the other manufacturers, they are just as bad.”
The
Times report lists several examples of the auto industry engaging in
profit-making by endangering their customers. There was the “unexploded Pinto”
problem of gas tanks blowing up. There were 271 deaths from the Ford-Firestone tire
scandal. There were the
Takata airbags that either don’t work or injure people. There was Chrysler
selling as new cars that had been driven for 60,000 miles with the odometers
disconnected. Click
through, there’s plenty… But no one has been put in jail.
So
what VW was caught doing is “not an isolated incident” and, in fact, VW had already been caught doing the
same thing in the 1970s.
Not Just Auto Industry
VW
is hardly the only company in the auto industry engaged in these practices, and
the auto industry is hardly the only industry
engaging in this kind of activity.
●
Of course, tobacco
still kills over 480,000 Americans each year and no one even talks about doing anything
about it. Everyone understands this is because of the great wealth and power of
the tobacco companies as well as their influence over a certain political
party. More than 480,000
terrible, painful deaths each year!
●
The “Obamacare” health reform was written the way it was because it was understood
from the start that the insurance and pharmaceutical companies had enough power
to block anything they didn’t like. So we didn’t get Medicare for All or even a
“public option.” These industries had already blocked the administration of
President Bill Clinton from reforming the health care system, leading to more
decades of deaths, untreated illness and bankruptcies.
●
In 2000, The Nation reported, in “The Secret History
of Lead,” that the lead industry knew and kept secret for decades that they
were poisoning people with lead in gasoline, paint and other products, and
instead of doing something about it they protected their profits by covering
this up and attacking government efforts to do something.
The
leaded gas adventurers have profitably polluted the world on a grand scale and,
in the process, have provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and
nuclear power industries, and other twentieth-century corporate bad actors, for
evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the
mantle of scientific uncertainty.
Mother
Jones’ Kevin Drum reported on just one of the societal consequences of this
decades-long crime, in “America’s
Real Criminal Element: Lead.” His investigative report concluded that lead
may be “the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD
epidemic.” That whole put-millions-in-prison thing that has ruined so many
lives? Oops, it might have been the lead industry’s doing. Are any lead
industry executives in jail for that?
●
The fossil-fuel industry is notorious for polluting and for causing climate
change. The industry has
captured an entire political party and has them fight the development of
alternative energy sources, taxes on carbon, fuel-saving public transportation
initiatives, other energy-saving efforts, etc. The industry funds a climate
denial cult that threatens the entire planet.
These
are just a few of so many
examples.
Big Government
Prosecutions Can Make A Difference
Corporations
save money by cutting corners. Dumping carbon into the air. Putting lead in
gasoline. You name it. They price the potential fines into the product as a
cost of doing business. And company shareholders pay those fines. The
executives who commit the actual wrongdoing are rarely if ever held accountable
themselves.
Many
companies can safely assume that the government isn’t even going to catch them
or do anything if they do. Government cowed by intense anti-government
propaganda. We hear that “government can’t do anything as well as business
can,” that “big government threatens us,” and “government takes money out of
the economy.” We hear about “burdensome government regulations” that “kill
jobs” on a 24/7/365 basis. Government and democracy do not have an advertising
budget to counter this relentless propaganda.
Government
is underfunded because the propaganda elects corporate-backed anti-government
politicians who convince people to allow tax cuts (on the corporations and
their owners) paid for by cutting back on government. And especially cutting
back on government regulation and enforcement. The result is government
enforcement is backing down all the time.
Industry
executives revolve through the door into government and then back into plush
corporate offices where they collect rewards for protecting their industries.
Our “captured” government notoriously refuses to bring corporate criminals to
justice. Not one banker, for example, was prosecuted for obvious crimes leading
to the 2008 financial crash.
However
last week we saw one rare instance of a prosecution of individuals for
corporate crime. The people running Peanut Corporation of America, a Georgia
peanut company, were prosecuted after a salmonella outbreak that sickened and
hospitalized hundreds of people and
killed 9 of them. Company executives knew for years their product
was made in unsafe ways that were causing contamination — but instead of
spending what was needed to fix the problem they covered this up. So the owner
was sentenced to 28 years in prison and other executives were sentenced to 20
years.
Thanks
to an actual prosecution resulting in prison terms for company executives it is
likely that the public will suffer fewer food-safety problems, at least for a
while.
Our
government supposedly exists to protect We the People from wealthy and powerful
interests, including other countries. Our revolution against the wealthy
British aristocracy and the King’s corporations testify to this. A government
that is “of the people, by the people and for the people” should be big enough,
strong enough and funded enough to reign in companies and billionaires, and
protect We the People from the kind of corporate misbehavior we saw from
Volkswagen — long, long, long before it involves 11 million cars all spewing
out serious threats to public health.
From Campaign for
America’s Future @ http://ourfuture.org/20150924/vw-case-shows-need-for-more-and-bigger-government
For more information about space migration see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/corporations
- Scroll down
through ‘Older Posts’ at the end of each section
Hope you like this
not for profit site -
It takes hours of work every day by
a genuinely incapacitated invalid to maintain, write, edit, research,
illustrate and publish this website from a tiny cabin in a remote forest
Like what we do? Please give anything
you can -
Contribute any amount and receive at
least one New Illuminati eBook!
(You can use a card
securely if you don’t use Paypal)
Please click below -
Spare Bitcoin
change?
Xtra Images by R. Ayana – https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8189/8134637935_070e76e022_c.jpg
For further enlightening
information enter a word or phrase into the random synchronistic search box @
the top left of http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com
And see
New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com
New Illuminati on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/the.new.illuminati
New Illuminati Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/newilluminati/playlists
New Illuminati’s OWN Youtube Videos
-
New Illuminati on Google+ @ For
New Illuminati posts - https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RamAyana0/posts
New Illuminati on Twitter @ www.twitter.com/new_illuminati
New Illuminations –Art(icles) by
R. Ayana @ http://newilluminations.blogspot.com
The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
DISGRUNTLED SITE ADMINS PLEASE NOTE –
We provide a live link to your original material on your site (and
links via social networking services) - which raises your ranking on search
engines and helps spread your info further!
This site is published under Creative Commons (Attribution) CopyRIGHT
(unless an individual article or other item is declared otherwise by the copyright
holder). Reproduction for non-profit use is permitted
& encouraged - if you give attribution to the work & author and include
all links in the original (along with this or a similar notice).
Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or
mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web –
but remember attribution!
If you like what you see, please send a donation (no amount is too
small or too large) or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…
Live long and prosper! Together we can create the best of all possible
worlds…
From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com
