02/19/2015
The Murder of Melyce page 12,
2014 version of A Bitter Fog by Carol Van Strum~
“From what you read and hear nowadays,” wrote Agatha Christie prophetically in 1969, “it seems that murder under certain aspects is slowing but surely being make acceptable to a large section of the community.” Risk assessment, which defines a certain number of poisoning deaths as “negligible” and thereby acceptable, raises Christie’s fiction to grim reality. Countless deaths from pesticides, workplace poisons, radioactive materials, and ubiquitous environmental pollutants are now considered acceptable p***c costs of corporate profits, with neither public understanding nor consent.
Risk assessment promotes the misleading friction that the cancer death risk to an individual is one in a million, but this is false; the calculation actually estimates one caner death for each million exposed persons. For the exposed individual dying of cancer, there is no risk, just fatal certainty. The person who spiked a few Tylenol bottles with cyanide, indifferent to the indemnity of its victims, was vilified as a murderer after a few people died, but risk assessment allows the same number of unidentified people to die from pesticide exposure so long as the victims are nameless and the poisoner makes a profit.
The manufacturers, users, and regulators of these poisons know as certainly as did the Tylenol poisoner that some people will die when exposed, making them equally guilty of premeditated murder. Companies whose products and wastes have poisoned entire populations for decades are in fact serial killers beyond the grotesque dreams of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dhamer.
As ‘persons’ under the law, corporations can be tried for murder and though the corporation itself cannot be put in jail, it’s officers can, and the corporation can be dissolved, its charter canceled, its assets seized. This will only happen when risk assessment’s “negligible” form of murder is no longer acceptable to society.”
