Profits are a higher priority than public safety

We cannot allow "big business" to continue to mislead us, influence our country, and harm us for their personal profit!
Fight back with your voice and your VOTE! 

Georgia Congressman, John Lewis,June 22, 2016

"...Sometimes you have to get in the way. You have to make some noise by speaking up and speaking out against injustice & inaction..."

With the current focus on new legislation to help prevent the kind of violence against innocent members of the public that recently occurred in Orlando, it is important to step back and put the issue in a larger historical and social context.

AK-47

To start with, economic interests groups like the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry, and the military-style weapons and munitions industries have many obvious characteristics in common.  In each case, these industries seek greater profits for their mainly wealthy shareholders by selling “products” that clearly do or may, as in the case of the recent Orlando mass shooting, put the general public at risk of terrible harm. Whether we are talking about the risk of lung cancer and other smoking related heath damage, global warming and its catastrophic impacts in the present and future, or the increasing incidents of massacres of innocents in America, profits have been and continue to be a higher industry priority than the public well-being.

At the same time, such industries have continued to try to misinform the public about terrible adverse impacts of their “products” by using many different arguments that, in fact, have been and are consistently deliberately misleading and demonstrably false.

• The cigarette industry touted the association of smoking with lung cancer as actually due to stress, personality type, etc.
• In America, we still hear from almost all leading Republican politicians and candidates that global warming is a hoax or that the consensus of climatology scientists should be ignored because
• not enough research has been done OR
• there must be no uncertainty in climate science before policy makers should accept that the main driver of global warming is human activity (and therefore, we may be able to slow the warming by what we do).
• Likewise for the military-style weapons and munitions industry, their front men have been so successful that the arguments and discussion about protecting the public from harm has moved so incredibly far away from banning all “machine guns” (National Firearms Act of 1934) and their potential for mass killings/injury to who is Constitutionally “entitled” to own such weapons (as well as who is entitled to own munitions that put law enforcement wearing protective vests at risk). 

In the U.S., more than other capitalist countries, very profitable economic interests have typically used every resource, notwithstanding their prior knowledge of the risk of harm to the public, to insure their continued profitability. A key resource is always the effort to mislead the public, policy makers, law enforcement, media, etc., about known harm to the public.

Although not universal, profits before responsibility to the public well-being has become a tacit norm of corporate behavior.

Orlando, FL shooting response

Fight back with your voice and your VOTE!

Don't give up! Vote them out!

#votethemout