Corporate Crime Acts Like a Thief in the Night

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1104-04.htm

Published on Tuesday, November 4, 2003 by the Los Angeles Times
Corporate Crime Acts Like a Thief in the Night
by Lee Drutman

snip:
Using conservative numbers issued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, criminologist Jeffrey Reiman, a professor at American University, estimated that the total cost of white-collar crime in 1997 was $338 billion. The actual cost is probably much greater. For instance, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimates that health-care fraud alone costs up to $100 billion each year. Another estimate suggests that the annual cost of antitrust or trade violations is at least $250 billion. By comparison, the FBI estimated that in 2002, the nation's total loss from robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson was almost $18 billion. That's less than a third of the estimated $60 billion Enron alone cost investors, pensioners and employees.

But corporate crime isn't just about the money. It's also about people's lives. The national murder rate has hovered around 16,000 a year in recent years. (In 2002, the FBI reported 16,204 murders.) But a respected group of occupational health and safety investigators, led by J. Paul Leigh, a UC Davis School of Medicine professor, has estimated that in 1992 alone there were 66,971 deaths resulting from job-related injuries and occupational diseases. These numbers do not include the thousands of annual deaths caused by cancers linked to corporate pollution, deaths from defective products, tainted foods and other corporate-related causes.