Capitalism Corrupted: Lead Paint and Asbestos
Disclaimer: I am not advocating for the abolition of capitalism, and believe that capitalism can offer many freedoms that many other forms of government do not. However, Capitalism is something that isn’t perfect, and in fact, causes a lot of harm. Let’s at least start to accept that the flaws so that we can fix them.
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Little comes close to showcasing the atrocities that a Capitalist government can imbue than the story behind lead paint and asbestos. For those of you who do not know, I will go through both of these substances in brief to provide a backstory.
Asbestos
Asbestos has been used in the past, but was not a part of the US industrial sector until about 1858. It was used in everything from floor tiles to drywall, to glass, roofing tiles, and most importantly, insulation. This is because it was naturally insulating, naturally fire resistant, and very cheap to mine and make into mortar for bricks, etc.
It was highly popular up to and through 1918, when the US government started to notice that asbestos workers were dying in larger numbers. By 1942, over 200 studies showed a link between Asbestos and disease. However, by 1960’s, this happened:
The medical literature continued to identify asbestos as a major carcinogen and environmental hazard, with over 200 publications describing the hazards of asbestos by the end of the 1960s. Notwithstanding this knowledge, and the death that resulted from breathing in the dust from these products, the manufacturers and installers of these materials continued to sell and install asbestos products without warning workers, reducing the dust or substituting equally effective materials in place of the asbestos. Tragically, many companies had secured additional knowledge regarding the connection between asbestos and cancer as early as the 1930s. However, these companies altered research reports to hide these findings from the public.
Companies and industry not only ignored these findings, but actively decided to conceal them. by 1990, Asbestos was banned by the EPA, but it was then overturned a year later, due to lobbyists who run on the corporation's best interests. Asbestos to this day is still used in certain products, and people still get sick from the lung cancer that it causes.
Lead Paint
Lead is a very serious material, that was used in paint as a way to make the paint look whiter. It was also used in things such as pipes, which carry water to the house. This water can easily become contaminated with lead, and in fact, many homes still have lead pipes to this day, and most often seen in lower income communities.
The sad part about this is that lead has been generally recognized as a poison since the BCE. Even Hippocrates described it in 400 BCE. Even with this, and centuries of reports of deaths of children ingesting lead paint from cribs and window sills, corporations still continued to use lead in paint.
In fact, France, Belgium and Austria all banned lead paint in 1909 due to these awful affects. Guess when the US did the same? 1978. Almost 70 years after so many other countries have already banned it. In fact, for most of those years, the oil and paint industries fought against the regulations, claiming that they should be able to continue to sell their product, despite tons of people dying as a result.
Transfats
Transfats were created in a lab as an alternative to saturated fats. It was believed that these would be healthy, but nobody really tested them for their safety before pushing them out into the market.
In the 1980’s, saturated fat was linked to heart disease, so as a result, many companies switched to transfats. However, transfats were not seen as potentially dangerous until 10 years later. It was shown that transfats were tenfold more dangerous to heart health than saturated fat could ever be. However, despite that knowledge, it would take 25 years until transfats were officially banned in the US.
in 2003, Mcdonalds claimed to be going transfat free, but would silently ignore that in 2004 and revert back to transfats. They were officially sued and lost the case. It took until 2015 until the FDA finally found transfats to be not GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe).
Conclusion
Now I am not going to try to say that this would not have happened in the absence of Capitalism. But it is obvious that capital was the main motivating factor for the continuance of deaths caused by these products despite decades, if not centuries, or research showing its danger to society.
These are by far not the only three cases either. The same can be said about processed meat and its connection with cancer, or how the sugar industry tried to forge data to hide the dangers of sugar in relation to heart disease. The government takes far too long to regulate, and companies lobby hard to try to continue selling a product that is linked to disease and death.
This should never be the case. We should all have a right to live in a society without fear of severe health hazards not being regulated because it makes a company too much money.
