The real criminals are the white-collars who launder, embezzle, and steal money from the public. Most people don t even know about most white-collar crimes. The FBI doesn t include these crimes in their authoritative annual report, Crime in the United States. Yet corporate lobbyists effectively blocked the creation of a Consumer Protection Agency under President Carter, and have continually pushed for safety deregulation and defunding of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which inspects 15,000 products a year. Also, most corporations have chemical wastes they dump, which cause cancer and other illnesses that lead to taxpayer money being spent to provide medication.
Pollution is another way that big corporations kill.
According to a sophisticated study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, some 64,000 people may die prematurely every year from particulate air pollution. The above list of how Americans are really murdered is far from complete, but it gives us a start in comparing the official murder rate to the real one. Now let's calculate the real rate. To be certain, not even the most aggressive programs can completely eliminate job accidents, pollution and infant mortality. Therefore, we can list only a percentage of the total fatalities, on the grounds that these abnormally high rates can be reduced with properly funded programs.