Hey folks! Unfortunately, I 'm back here to discuss some very sad and very serious current affairs. Since the beginning of 2023, an avalanche of massive damage crime scandals that are profitable for a handful of powerful people who enjoy systematic impunity has been happening.
If you don't know me, nice to meet you. My name is Samuel Silva Borges, I'm a criminologist and don't expect me to be calm while discussing these things. Neutrality does not exist and allowing ourselves to be affected by these things is important not only for scientists but for anyone who wants to preserve their humanity in this dystopian world in which we live.
The dynamics are as follows: I will quote and unravel a little of these scandals and I will also bring up some central arguments from critical criminology and a subfield of criminology dedicated to the "Criminality of the Powerful" so that we can analyze what explains this systematic impunity. Like, subscribe, play the intro, and let's go! [Music theme] Subtitles by André Gavasso.
Since January, the Yanomami genocide scandal has finally gained national and international media attention. This genocide had already been announced for years by indigenous leaders and allies of the indigenous struggle, but it only became a hot topic in the first days of Lula's third term. The images of completely malnourished indigenous people are irrefutable proof of the damage that anti-indigenous racism promotes.
Children poisoned with mercury used to gather wealth for a few and they still call it progress and development. I could focus on the responsibility of the Bolsonaro administration or the current freaking senator Damares Alves who are extremely important allies of mining but I want to highlight here who profits from these mined metals. In other words, whoever profits from the genocide and this ecocidal extractivism in the Amazon but who often remains hidden, even in this scandal context.
I'm talking about mining that is largely justified by the search for gold extraction. But where does this gold go? Who buys this gold?
Regarding this, I recommend the reports made jointly by "Repórter Brasil" and "Amazônia Real" which are called "Yanomami Blood Gold" which are very good in showing how the legal bourgeois economy is closely connected with this illegal criminal economy. For illegal mining to exist, a sophisticated money laundering structure is necessary, the laundering of these metals in a multimillion-dollar market that involves very powerful people. And these reports manage to show how this production chain ends up bringing these metals, gold mainly, to luxury jewelry stores that are located in the main malls in Brazil as well as in large technology companies such as Apple, Microsoft and so on.
This can also be present in our own electronic gadgets such as computers and cell phones, showing how the conscious consumption agenda within capitalism is a paradox because contemporary production chains will always involve a level of environmental destruction and illegal, degrading and criminal human exploitation. The central issue is that this type of crime, even if it involves extreme things like genocide and ecocide, is embedded in the normality of the system. A second example that also emerged in January is the Americanas scandal, which was defined by the president of Abradin, the Brazilian Association of Investors, as a monstrous and intentional fraud.
Among the main shareholders of Americanas is the biggest billionaires in Brazil, including the godfather of Tabata Amaral, Jorge Paulo Lemann. What you may not have seen recently is that an accounting fraud has also been reported in another company that also has majority shares owned by Lemann, which is Ambev, that is also accused of an accounting fraud, hiding debts and taxes on its balance sheet among other illicit acts and corporate maneuvers. I should also mention that Lemann is also involved with the Eletrobrás privatization.
So once again we have an example of the association between big capital and criminal practices, and you already know who loses out in this story, right? 2023 also had in these first months a very large increase in the average number of workers rescued in conditions similar to slavery. It could seem like we were living in the administration that encouraged this type of criminal practice.
. . Most of these cases take place on farms where workers are rescued in completely subhuman conditions.
But this also happens in an urban context. There is the case of the mega event, mega popular, Lollapalooza, which is denounced every year for using labor in a situation analogous to slavery. And it is not only in the private sector, but also in public enterprises that use outsourced labor, there are also recent scandals, such as a case involving the city hall of Joinville, Santa Catarina, which had workers on a construction site eating in a kennel and being transported in trunks and other completely degrading things.
The fact is that these cases are very common, especially in the areas of agriculture and mining, where it is easier to hide unhealthy, dangerous working conditions with insufficient wages. The recent case of wineries in Rio Grande do Sul also shows a situation of human trafficking because they deceived victims with job offers that will not materialize in practice. When they realize they are already in the context of a nightmare of debt bondage, forced labor, exhausting working days and degrading conditions in general, including torture.
Also in the case of these wineries, we notice how impunity works because these large corporations quickly manage to sign agreements, such as with the Public Ministry of Labor, and publicly position themselves in a strategic way claiming that they are paying some type of compensation even if they are ridiculous amounts. I think that no bourgeois would accept a compensation of mere 10,000 reais for even one day of slavery. But that's all they are forced to pay in these agreements.
Also in a recent wave there have been scandals in the production of rice and sugar cane fields, and the production of sugar, so this is not exclusive to the Rio Grande do Sul hills, the producer of wine and grape juice, it is a structural issue that we will only be able to really fight against if we review our agrarian structure. To conclude the examples, I will mention here some foreign cases that you have most likely not even heard of because they have been very little noticed. In February, a chemical disaster occurred in the state of Ohio, in which trains that were transporting extremely toxic and carcinogenic substances such as vinyl chloride, which is used to produce PVC plastic and so on, derailed.
And this material, at the beginning of February, underwent a "controlled explosion" in the city of East Palestine and it is a case that has been compared with the Chernobyl disaster primarily because it was quite muffled. It took many days to see the repercussions of the pollution that was generated in this explosion. Also because it was stated everytime that anyone could not be affected by this while there were cases of massive deaths of animals many miles away from where this explosion occurred, so the damage to human health could be something that could take a while but would probably happen.
So even if there is no news of human deaths, we have a strong suspicion of water contamination and subsequent disasters. Among the likely causes of this disaster is the poor maintenance of the tracks which has been denounced by local unions for many years as a "ticking bomb". So once again it is a case involving corporate and State negligence.
And speaking of Chernobyl, in March there was a case of radioactive leak that happened at a nuclear plant in Minnesota. This leak happened at the end of last year and was hidden from the public until now, and it was no small leak. It involved 400,000 gallons of water contaminated by tritium which is equivalent to one and a half million radioactive liters.
This plant is right next to the Mississippi River, but the company guarantees that there was no type of contamination to the environment and that they only informed the public in March, of a leak that happened in November because they wanted to guarantee that they would be able to manage and find out what the cause was and deal with all the dangers and everything. It's not like they have any incentive to destroy evidence and shield themselves above anything else, right? It is important to remember that the fact that this event took place in the United States, which is the richest country in the world, does not mean that these cases cease to be examples of environmental racism, a very important concept that Sabrina has already worked with here in the Thesis Eleven glossary.
This happens because, even in the center of the empire, corporations often choose as the destination for their factories places where ethnic minority and low-income communities live and who will not be able to resist the pollution damage and everything else that will be externalized. In practice, there is environmental contamination that ends up generating numerous health problems for this population, such as respiratory diseases, cancer and other debilitating health conditions. What all of these corporate crimes have in common is that corporations will do anything to shield themselves from accountability and reparations.
So as you can see, corporate crimes encompass very broad practices, right, ranging from financial fraud to work analogous to slavery, and environmental racism that are linked to the capitalist mode of production. In other words, the externalization of socio-environmental damage to racialized communities that have lived with this type of damage for centuries, since the beginning of extractive colonialism, which has been renewed in the relationship between center and periphery dependence. So, talking about corporate crimes is an issue inseparable from analyzes based on class, race and gender.
Another issue is that we are living in one of the historical periods most prone to the spread of corporate crimes. Notice that the lack of transparency and the lack of control in the processes of large corporations are not mere failures or coincidences, because they are shielded in a neoliberal discourse of a market that regulates itself without the need for State interventions to protect workers and consumers. So let's check the framework that comes from criminology: the core of the criticism from researchers dedicated to the Crimes of the Powerful, such as David Whyte, and researchers from the Power, Control and Social Damage group, such as Luis Borges and Rafaela Melchiors, (and remember that all these works and other references are always here in the video references) they point to three very important concepts: the Corporate Veil; Externalities and the use of Neutralization Techniques.
The corporate veil deals with the creation of a corporate legal personality so that the company is set apart as "other person" but it is very obvious that the corporation is not a person, it is legal fiction. But this is fundamental because the existence of this corporate legal personality allows shareholders, executives and owners of these companies to be able to transfer responsibility for crimes from the corporation to the legal entity, thus exempting themselves from responsibility and protecting these individuals from the possibility of losing their financial assets in legal liability. If this idea seems like a paradox to you, it is because it is in fact absurd.
The very idea of corporate governance involves "organized irresponsibility" designed to protect these individuals. So the entire bureaucratic structure of these corporations decentralizes functions and decisions to many individuals and ends up shielding them and their assets from being targets of reparation and accountability policies. In other words, everything is set up so that the damage caused by corporations is understood merely as collateral damage and must be borne by communities or governments.
Anyone but those who profit millions from harmful activities. And so we can make the association with the examples I already gave you. Think about the case of illegal mining and the Yanomami genocide.
The responsibility lies with everyone except the companies that are buying this gold to profit from it. And even in the most absurd cases, corporations use neutralization techniques to manipulate the public and again minimize the responsibility they have for the damage caused. Let's look at these techniques.
Number 1: denial of responsibility. In this technique they deny their own responsibility by claiming that circumstances are beyond their control or that another person is the responsible one, thus ignoring the company's own failures. In the examples of wineries and work analogous to slavery, it is very simple to say that it is simply the outsourced company's fault, so it is never your fault: you outsourced it and if that outsourced company carries out this type of exploitation, the primary fault lies with that company, you didn't know.
Number 2: denial of damage. This technique involves minimizing the severity of the damage caused. That is, arguing that it is not as bad as it seems or even claiming that there is not enough evidence to prove that damage was caused.
This is very common in cases involving Industrial pollution and fits very well those cases of chemical and radioactive disasters in the United States that I mentioned earlier. Number 3: victim denial. This is the old victim-blaming tactic.
In other words, stating that the victim deserved what happened to them or that they brought the damage to themselves in some way. So, for example, in the case of illnesses related to exposure to toxic substances at work, the company will again claim that it was the worker who did not use the appropriate personal protective equipment, so it is always the individual's fault and not the company's. And number 4: Condemnation of the condemners.
This technique involves discrediting or persecuting people or organizations that attempt to hold the corporations responsible for the damage caused. In other words, if scientists produce studies demonstrating that company's operations are causing harm to the environment, they will devise a smear campaign to discredit these scientists and their studies. Other examples are suing activists or public servants who are promoting a type of exposure.
So you resort to legal harassment to try to stifle or at least disrupt the development of the complaints against the company. And the last one, criminal organizations can go for witness elimination so they will try to execute any individual who presents danger to their impunity. This is common in rural conflicts in which indigenous and peasant leaders are systematically killed in Brazil, something that is also very common in other dependent capitalist countries.
Bottom line: the practice of crimes by corporations is systematic. On the one hand, there is legally permitted damage as the mere normality of business, whether in mining or in the financial market, industries, and so on. On the other side, there are practices that are punishable by law but are not punished.
This happens because powerful criminals have enough influence to manipulate laws and regulations to their own advantage, often at the expense of innocent individuals and vulnerable communities. Corporations have disproportionate power in relation to their victims and they will use this to try to keep their crimes invisible or at least unpunished, whether through legal agreements or through political lobbying, corporations end up having permission to break the law, whether exploiting people, polluting the environment, or evading taxes. Most of these crimes also generate damage that is not reversible and can even kill on a large scale, as in cases of genocide and ecocide.
Financial fraud may be nothing more than an accounting maneuver for the super rich but it can harm people on a gigantic scale, millions. Therefore, it is essential that corporations are held accountable for their crimes and that a shift towards preventing and repairing damage is put in place. All civil society organized in social movements, organized in parties, must constantly pressure governments to ensure that corporations are duly held accountable, expropriating the lands of those who use slave labor and the shares of fraudulent shareholders in favor of affected workers, and the property of those who dare invade Indigenous Land to kill with mercury or be negligent in any productive activity that poses risks to society.
In the end, you already know the conclusion: ecosocialism or barbarism.
