When Bad People Do Bad Things

There must be consequences

(I wanted to start with a quick note to say thank you. I’ve just passed 3,000 subscribers, something I could never have imagined when I started writing this less than a year ago. And to the 40 or so who throw me some cash for my writing, thank you so much. You’ve helped save my skin over the last few months more than you know. For those who want to contribute without paying for a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee. Once again, thanks to everyone. Hope you enjoy this latest piece).

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If living in a society means anything, it means that when bad people do bad things and everyone knows they’ve done bad things, there must be consequences.

This was the thought I was left with after watching the documentary about Boeing, currently on Netflix.

The bottom line is that Boeing sent planes up in the air that they knew would crash. They knew it. They ran the numbers. They calculated a crash every 2 years.

Then two crashes happened in five months because of a new system installed on retrofitted planes, a system Boeing kept secret to avoid the regulatory approval and extra pilot training it necessitated. All because these approvals and training would have slowed the roll-out of the planes and hurt profits.

When a plane inevitably crashed, killing nearly 200 people, they styled it out. They didn’t ground the planes, they blamed the foreign pilots. Because Boeing execs had become used to operating in a political and corporate environment of impunity. Then another plane crashed in almost identical circumstances, killing more than 150 people. They knew why, but again they blamed the pilots and again refused to ground the planes. Eventually air aviation authorities in countries around the world stepped in and banned the model in question from flying.

But about that environment of impunity – it turns out they were right. No criminal charges were ever brought against the executives, they paid off the US government with a $2.5 billion fine, and the CEO at the time who led the cover-up retired with a cash pot of $65 million. Boeing is still very much in business. There are thousands of Boeing planes in the air as you read this. (Nowadays large sections of the plane are blowing off mid-flight).

Boeing killed hundreds of people, we know they killed hundreds of people, and nothing happened.

If living in a society means anything it means that when bad people do bad things and everyone knows they’ve done bad things, there must be consequences.

This should be the line in the sand. The point at which we all – as a society, from very top to bottom – agree.

But it isn’t. Lines in the sand exist. But they exist for us. Not the ruling class.

All of the big existential issues that are forcing our civilisation into a nosedive are because of an out-of-control culture of political and corporate impunity enabled by elite rule.

Let’s look at the charge sheet.

The climate crisis.

Fossil fuel companies lied for 40 years about the consequences of their products. They knew that continued burning of fossil fuels would rapidly heat the Earth and eventually make some places uninhabitable. They knew seas would rise. That crops would fail. That mega fires were our future. And they covered it up. A cover up that by now is well-documented.

Bad people did bad things. It has all been documented. But nothing happened.

Oil companies are still some of the biggest companies in the world with the richest executives in the world. The old execs that led the cover-ups are now multi-millionaire lobbyists, consultants, retired or dead without consequence. Some were recently US secretary of state.

The pandemic.

A virus emerged with the potential to cause a pandemic. It didn’t have to cause a pandemic. After all, the first one of its type, Sars1, was controlled. But this one wasn’t.

The ruling class, through a captured media, lied that it wasn’t airborne, said the virus was only dangerous to the old and vulnerable, told us kids couldn’t catch it, then they could catch it but couldn’t spread it, then that it was no danger to kids. The US president said vaccinated people couldn’t spread the virus, and that it had become mild.

Early in the pandemic, before vaccines, global media from the BBC to CNN platformed scientists who demanded the end of any restrictions and a policy of mass infection. The so-called Great Barrington Declaration.

Pandemic propagandists who coordinated this statement are heads of medicine at Stanford and Harvard.

Think about this: esteemed professors at supposedly the most prestigious schools of learning in the world spearheaded a campaign not to control, but to let a virus rip during the worst pandemic in a century.

It sounds like a conspiracy. But it couldn’t be more true.

And they got what they wanted. They set the stage for the great return to normal and the millions of infections we suffer every day.

Now 27 million people are dead. Including many thousands of kids, for whom it wasn’t and isn’t harmless. Thousands are still dying every day, and many more are to varying degrees disabled, and continue to be disabled, by post-covid conditions.

Bad people did bad things. It has all been documented. But nothing happened.

The war on terror.

The US-UK coalition invaded Iraq and sparked a conflict which left up to a million people dead. They began the process by standing on stage at the UN and lying to the world. Politicians gave orders which led to horrific human rights abuses and the murder of a unfathomable number of people. Weddings were bombed. And bombed again. Funerals were bombed. Families were slaughtered day after day.

At the behest of the US government a concentration camp that carried out torture was opened up and remains open to this day.

WE KNOW ALL OF THIS. We have pictures, videos, testimony after testimony.

Bad people did bad things. It has all been documented. But nothing happened.

The only people that have faced any consequences are those who risked their lives confronting US empire to expose these truths. People like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.

Global surveillance.

It has been more than a decade since Edward Snowden leaked details of the global US surveillance programme. I revisited this recently to remind myself just how astonishing the revelations were. So astonishing that as one cyber security expert put it: “even the most paranoid observers were shocked by the sheer scale of what the NSA was doing.”

The US spy agency the NSA, and the UK’s spy agency GCHQ, collected millions of still images from every Yahoo Messenger webchat stream, and used them to build a massive database for facial recognition. They tapped the lines used to connect Google and Yahoo data centres, capturing vast torrents of data on US and European users. The NSA and FBI collaborated with Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple to install a backdoor than enabled these agencies direct access to people’s emails, direct messages and browser histories.

Bad people did bad things. It has all been documented. But nothing happened.

All of which is why South Africa bringing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague is so important.

The 84-page indicting document is incredibly powerful. The nine full pages of genocidal statements made by Israeli officials over the last 3 months are shocking in their murderous clarity.

Reading the case for the prosecution could almost restore your hope in international justice.

For the first time I can remember, bad people are being called out on a world stage for the horrific things they have done.

Alone in the world, the South African government is defying the cynicism and despair that says nothing can change in the face of power, a despair that comes from watching violent states commit mass murder with impunity again and again.

South Africa is saying actually there are mechanisms in international law to stop these horrors. The South African prosecutors are challenging the embedded norm that Israel has an automatic right to do war crimes unchallenged, and in doing so is challenging the assumptions that underpin so much casual understanding of Israel’s position in the region and the world.

The prosecutors are exposing the idea of powerlessness in the face of ultra violent states.

They are showing us that there are mechanisms that can restrain such states, even when they are supported by the political and military force of the world’s singular imperial power.

South Africa is restoring our ability to imagine justice in the world.

South Africa is showing us that if living in a society means anything, it means that when bad people do bad things and everyone knows they’ve done bad things, there must be consequences.