The Crisis of Elite Indifference to Corporate Mass Murder

And a Modest Proposal to License No More than 10 CEO Murders Each Year to Improve Corporate Accountability

We face a moral crisis of indifference to the mass murders committed by corporate leaders. Not only do our political and media elites not condemn these murderers, they often celebrate them, fete them on television and in the halls of power, and even appoint them to high office.

In the news this week is the pain and often deaths at the hands of insurance companies denying care to those needing it. However, our murderers' row includes not just health insurance executives denying the sick care they need, but oil executives spewing poisons into our air, companies releasing deadly products to consumers, employers killing their own workers in unsafe working conditions, and historic all-time champions in the mass murder division like tobacco industry executives.

The true scale of corporate killing dwarfs the imaginination. Air pollution alone claims 7 million lives globally each year.. That's equivalent to wiping out the entire population of Hong Kong or Arizona - every single year. The numbers keep mounting: 1.9 million dead globally from work-related causes in a single year. The tobacco industry alone kills over a million Europeans annually.

In the United States along, the body count from pollution is over 200,000 premature deaths each year. The majority of these deaths trace back to corporate decisions: coal plants belching toxins, factories spewing particulates, diesel trucks flooding our cities with poison. And every 96 minutes in America, another worker dies on the job - 5,190 lives snuffed out in 2022 alone. But these workplace fatalities are just the tip of the iceberg.

The culprits aren't shadowy figures - they're celebrated CEOs and executives featured in glossy magazines and CNBC interviews- or being appointed as Cabinet secretaries in the new Trump administration. Even more of them will sit, honored, on presidential advisory boards and fund political campaigns while their companies murder hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Below is a chart I pulled together a couple of years ago for my white collar crime class, For 2020, Covid deaths overshadow the pollution deaths but the difference is those pollution deaths mount year after year, as do deaths due to workplace injuries and unsafe consumer products. And while not the sole source of the problem, the role of big pharmaceutical companies in driving the opioid epidemic and mounting drug overdose deaths is considerable, given the role of companies like Perdue pharmaceutical in recklessly and illegally pushing out opioids for years. And yet no one in the Sandler family, the major owners of Perdue, have gone to jail.

Why We Tolerate Mass Murder by Corporations

Given the way deaths from pollution and other corporate murders dwarf those from street crime, it does raise the question of why street murders - a pretty minor cause of deaths overall - hold the headlines so much more than the corporate environmental violations that drive so many more deaths? Why does the murder of the United Health CEO dominate the national news for a week, while the names of the hundreds of thousands of victims of corporate violence get barely a mention most of the time?

For all these corporate-related murders, some people will say that the executives don't mean to murder any particular person, so it’s different from conventional homicide. However, when those executives know statistically that their actions will lead to a predictable number of deaths, how does it differ from a mass shooter firing into a crowd? In neither case does the murderer intend to kill any particular person, but the body count is firmly predictable.

When confronted with these statistics, corporate spokespeople deploy euphemisms like "externalities" and "acceptable risks." They hide behind armies of lawyers and PR firms. The moral crisis is that as bodies pile up in morgues due to these corporate murders, the media respectfully recycles as news these corporate press releases - what we should rather call "manifestos" justifying these murderous corporate acts.

Now, there are reasons we as a society tolerate this level of corporate mass murder. People want to have jobs and consumers want the benefits of the goods and services produced by the firms emitting these toxic emissions, producing an inevitablely fatal number of defective products, and designing dangerous work environments. It is seen as a necessary evil of having a modern economy.

And we try to regulate the degree of murder done by corporate executives, passing regulations to reduce the number of corporate murder victims each year while maintaining our modern lifestyle. What’s striking is how precisely we do allocate the number of murders we tolerate as a society, though. Earlier this year, the Biden administration passed new regulations to reduce toxic emmissions by corporations. As the EPA press release stated:

On Thursday, Feb. 8, EPA finalized a stronger air quality standard that will better protect America’s families, workers, and communities from the dangerous and costly health effects of fine particle pollution, also known as soot. The stronger annual health-based air quality standard for fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) will help avoid up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays…

This is the blandly bureaucratic way the government decides how many people corporate America is licensed to murder each year. The business community had argued for being allowed a larger number of yearly victims and environmental advocates had argued for a smaller yearly body count, but we collectively accept mass murder to achieve our utilitarian social goals - the only question being the exact number that need to die to achieve them.

But no one should be surprised that there is a simmering anger and resentment among those in cancer wards dying from toxic poisons, from those crippled due to preventable workplace injuries, and from those denied life-saving medical care - with that resentment extending to the family and friends of those who have died because of this utilitarian licensing of corporate mass murder.

The public reaction to Luigi Mangione’s murder of United Health’s CEO clearly tapped that simmering rage. The media, business and government elites outraged at that public reaction - rather than at the corporate murderers perpetuating those mass deaths - just compound that anger with their refusal to recognize this broader context of corporate murder that Mangione’s act is embedded within.

Many think that a little fear among CEOs might restrain the worst excesses of corporate greed that drive overreaching corporate murder beyond the bounds needed for the utilitarian goals of maintaining our modern economy.

A Modest Proposal

On the other hand, the fear in the corporate class is that Mangione might spark a free-for-all of murders of corporate CEOs, a chaotic upsurge of violence against the corporate class that would mean unregulated chaos.

So the modest proposal is to regulate it.

License no more than ten CEO murders per year. Any one agrieved by the excessive greed or illegal behavior of a corporate CEO would have to register those grievances with the government to obtain a license to murder them- and if the quota has been exhausted for this year, they will have to wait until the following year.

The benefits of such regulated violence against corporate excess would be clear. First, the worst examples of greedy corporate leadership would be eliminated each year, much as many firms clear our their underperforming employees each year, improving the overall quality of corporate leadership overall. But the benefits would likely extend to improving the behavior of the corporate class overall. Jockeying to avoid ending up on the top ten worst corporate offender list, CEOs as a whole would seek to improve their behavior, better justify their decisions not just to shareholders but to the public as a whole, and reduce the public body count of victims perpetuated by their firms.

Now, licensing ten corporate CEO murders each year might end up being excessive. So we should no doubt establish a government agency to review the number each year and potentially adjust it, just as the EPA regularly evaluates the body count of environmental victims of corporate murder to decide whether a bit fewer will yield the social results we desire as a society. Possibly eight CEO murders or even seven would yield the desired reining in of corporate greed that we desire, so the agency tasked with setting the yearly quota could license fewer CEO murders for the following year.

Possibly allowing the anger of often disturbed young men pick which CEOs will be eliminated may not be the best selection process, so I’d be open to alternatives. Possibly we nominate a larger list of the worst offending CEOs, put them in a room together and let them decide who will be eliminated, Survivor-like, or have the public call in their votes and in the manner of American Idol have the popular choices of the most odious examples of corporate leadership executed publicly on live TV- possibly heightening the impact and maybe reducing the number of CEOs that need killing each year to achieve the desired social results.

Possibly all that will be needed is one CEO publicly executed each year, along the line of Shirley Jackson’s Lottery, to rein in the corporate excess that angers so many millions of Americans. Maybe Luigi Mangione’s act this year will focus America’s corporate leadership on reexamining why this anger exists and addressing it more directly.

But I have my doubts so my proposal remains. Jonathan Swift once said of his own plans for social reform, he was open to “any offer, proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual” as am I.

But a bit of corporate bloodletting to reduce the corporate mass murder we live with now seems the most straightforward reform possible.