People feel lonely because they feel powerless in the face of crime. Crime is defined and reported
on in America as if it's person to person crime: somebody holds you up at gunpoint,
somebody clobbers you, some individual shoots another individual. But they don't report on the
major crimes from which we all suffer: low wages and wage theft, shoddy goods, unhealthy foods,
inadequate protection on the job and shoddy products. To give you an example,
deadly infant products [were] sold after recalls, still sold at TJ Maxx, Marshalls and Home Goods.
You can get this from the U.S Consumer Product Safety Commission,
but who reads that every day? That's not the crime reported on in our newspapers.
The U.S Consumer Product Safety Commission announced today the discount stores TJ Maxx,
Marshalls and Home Goods sold 19 different recalled products to consumers between 2014
and 2019. The products included the Rock N' Play and Kids II inclined
sleepers for infants which are responsible for numerous infant deaths. Murder should be a crime,
for which they will not ever be tried, no less serve jail time. Another very strong example
is what happened to the Sackler family that marketed Oxycontin, that advertised it as a
12-hour pain med when it expires in eight hours. And they knew it from their experiments and left
people desperate for more pain relief. And [this] led to the 600,000 deaths that have
happened since they released Oxycontin- overdose deaths for people who got hooked on their product
which they knew was addictive and then overdosed and often were desperate for more pain relief.
They've had some embarrassments. People demonstrated so they're not allowed to be on
the prestigious board of the Guggenheim Museum. The Sackler Wing at the Louvre in France is no
longer called the Sackler Wing. The Museum of Natural History got one of the Sacklers off their
board of directors, but they'll never see jail time. That's six hundred thousand people dead-
more than were killed in any of the last wars that America has fought.
Those are crimes, and it's very lonely to be in a country that leaves you vulnerable
to crime against which you feel powerless. Because you believe the ads.
You get the products and you can die and so can your kids.
And they will never be held accountable. I think one of the reasons that the U.S features all these
crime shows where crime doesn't pay [is] because at the top of course it pays. It's lonely to
feel that you're in a dangerous place where the biggest criminals go utterly unpunished
and where you could be held accountable. There was a big scandal in New York where the cops
really cracked down on shoplifting, and the things that were shoplifted overwhelmingly
were diapers which have gone up so much in in cost and baby oil and baby wipes.
That kind of crime is exposed but not the crime from which people majorly suffer.