“Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay a total of $2.2 billion and plead guilty to a misdemeanor in a deal that would settle U.S. Department of Justice investigations into the marketing of antipsychotic Risperdal and other drugs.” – The Wall Street Journal.
The Talmud records that the very first thing a person is asked upon death is the question, “Were you honest in business?”
Gordon Gekko taught us that “greed is good.” The central purpose of a corporation is to make a profit; not, by contrast, to make the world a better place. To prey on an unsuspecting population is reprehensible and abhorrent. The same actions, if made by a person, would not just be criminal, but the individual would be considered a dangerous sociopath. Yet, for some reason, we Americans accept this behavior from corporations.
Can you imagine what would happen if someone in your neighborhood admitted to pushing drugs on the elderly and making mountainous profits from it? The dealer would be incarcerated. They would take away his voting rights; and heaven forefend, his gun ownership rights. The sociopath would be serving a life sentence. The government considers corporations as individuals regarding freedom of speech (see the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Case), but the law gives corporations a privileged eye when it comes to crimes that help the company’s bottom-line at the expense of public safety.
Apparently, J&J encouraged the use of the anti-psychotic for off-label use. They worked with old-age homes and large pharmacies to push the drug as a treatment for dementia – an application the drug was never approved for. People are hemming and hawing about the clumsy launch of healthcare.gov; they point to it as proof of the issues of “big government” involved in healthcare, all the while ignoring a very real issue in health care: The greed of corporate America.
In his final interview before his death in 1972, Rabbi A.J. Heschel said, “There was an old idea in America, that virtue pays. And the idea was helpful to many people, until some of us discovered that crime pays even more. And it does. So why not commit a crime?” Many American corporation have made the switch from virtue to crime and considered the price of getting caught as simply the price of doing business. Apparently, the investing class accepts this reasoning, as evidenced by Johnson & Johnson’s stock dropping a mere 0.4% after their admission of guilt and $2.2 billion fine.
$2.2 billion dollars is a lot of money, but from Johnson & Johnson’s perspective, it’s just the cost of doing business. Their official response to the guilty plea and the fine was to simply put this behind them. “[This] resolves complex and lengthy legal matters, allowing us to continue focusing our full attention on delivering innovative health-care solutions for patients and their families,” said Michael Ullmann, the company’s general counsel (WSJ).
My concern is not with J&J or with JP Morgan Chase (see a previous blog), or any other corporation. No, my concern is with us, that we have come to accept theft and public endangerment from central corporations with little moral outrage. Greed and indifference are a dangerous combination. Heschel taught that “there is a drive for cruel deeds in all men, as there is a drive for goodness in all men. But you need more than a drive for goodness to overcome the drive for evil. You need some greater help. And that greater help, I believe, is a little fear and trembling and love of God.”
One might not need God to be good. Perhaps surprising to some, numerous Jewish text support this notion. However, corporations such as Johnson & Johnson show us exactly what lacking a strong moral compass can lead to.
Talmud
Pronounced: TALL-mud, Origin: Hebrew, the set of teachings and commentaries on the Torah that form the basis for Jewish law. Comprised of the Mishnah and the Gemara, it contains the opinions of thousands of rabbis from different periods in Jewish history.
