Toxic Capitalism: Corporate Crime and the Chemical Industry

If the chemical industry has provided enormous material benefits, equally the costs have been enormous, even catastrophic. Moreover, both costs and benefits are distributed in an unequal manner. Of particular concern in this text is the development of an adequate understanding of how both the positive and negative effects of the industry are produced and also what determines how the benefits and costs are distributed. Currently, the destructive nature of the industry - the death, injury, ill-health, and environmental devastation which it causes - remains particularly poorly recognized and challenged. This is a problem of "law and order". Yet, today, this problem still continues to be defined largely in terms of the crimes of "street" offenders; by contrast, corporate abuses of power, the victimization of employees, local public and consumers, and the crimes of the powerful more generally, remain relatively free of state, public and academic scrutiny. The recent attention to corporate crimes has focused on various forms of financial crimes, rather than upon the feaures of toxic capitalism that are the subject of this text. The criminogenic features of toxic capitalism - which are no mere side effects - form the subject matter of this text.