Plutocracy Kills -- The American Prospect

[erronis]

https://prospect.org/power/2024-12-26-tkacik-best-of-2024/

From the Boeing door plug blowout to the assassination of Brian Thompson to the never-ending oligarch-fueled genocide of Gaza, 2024 was not a year of moral ambiguity or nuance.
by Maureen Tkacik
December 26, 2024

She lists five events below this introduction. It's amazing how quickly some of these have moved off my radar in just a year.

When I started writing about corporate America a little over 20 years ago, the fundamental PR problem capitalism faced was that it had gutted so many retirement funds. Tens of millions of Americans had lost their nest eggs piling into the stocks of companies that had cooked their books, and the populist outrage was so intense and bipartisan that the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform bill, which made it a felony for CEOs and CFOs to sign off on SEC filings they knew to be fraudulent, passed both houses with just three “nay” votes in both houses. Still, fully half of Americans that year said they were “very” or “somewhat satisfied” with the size and influence of large corporations.

Eight years later, after corporate America had made trillions throwing millions of American families out of their homes under fraudulent pretenses, that number plunged to 29 percent, and today as Sarbanes-Oxley has been used primarily to pad the sentences of January 6th participants and prosecutions of white-collar criminals are at an all-time low, just 24 percent report being satisfied with the size and influence of corporations; another quarter of Americans—and 41 percent of younger ones, along with an apparent 47 percent of Princeton students—have told pollsters they are “satisfied” with the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

That’s because corporate America, and the political class that professionally enables it, is increasingly synonymous with needless death. Pretty much every story I have written this year seems to have revolved around this unfortunate fact.

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