If Wall Street is the engine, corporate America is the machine it powers, and the defining feature of that machine over the last several decades has been the near-total disappearance of responsibility for what it produces. Let me start with something that happened to me personally. I went through two Category 5 hurricanes with a large piece of property, and I took real damage. After the second storm, my insurer sent me a check for ninety-six thousand dollars with no letter, no explanation, nothing attached. I called and asked a simple question: if I cash this check, am I giving up my right to ask for more? They wouldn’t answer me. So I looked into it myself, and sure enough, that is precisely the strategy — send an unexplained check, hope the policyholder cashes it without asking, and treat that as a settlement. The novelist Upton Sinclair wrote, more than a century ago, that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. I later figured out that ninety-six thousand dollars was roughly five percent of my actual losses. I hired an attorney, I sued, and I won enough to rebuild properly, strong enough to withstand the next storm, which it did.

My next-door neighbor wasn’t as fortunate. He was a senior citizen living on Social Security, and his insurer offered him barely enough to patch his roof, let alone rebuild. He couldn’t fight it. One day I watched a moving truck pull up, and he told me he was giving up and moving north to live with his daughter, because he simply couldn’t afford to stay. Not one person on our block got what they were owed. Years later, Senator Josh Hawley held a hearing where a State Farm executive was confronted, under oath, by his own current and former employees and insurance adjusters, who testified that claims teams were pressured to pay out only a fraction of what storm damage actually cost. This is exactly what happened after Hurricane Katrina, when State Farm was accused of systematically undervaluing wind damage claims so it could shift the cost onto the federally backed flood program instead, and eventually settled hundreds of lawsuits and paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements rather than have the practice tested fully in open court. Did anything change afterward? Was anyone referred for prosecution? No. It never is.

You don’t pay a premium at one hundred percent and get told, no matter the damage, we’re only paying ten. Nobody would ever agree to that insurance policy if you told them the truth about it up front.

This is not confined to insurance. Look at Boeing. In 2018 and 2019, two brand-new 737 MAX aircraft crashed within five months of each other, killing three hundred and forty-six people, because the company had installed a new flight-control system, kept its existence hidden from pilots to avoid the cost and delay of additional training, and continued selling the plane even after internal engineers raised alarms. The Department of Justice negotiated a deferred prosecution agreement, and years later, even after further safety lapses, no Boeing executive has ever faced criminal charges for those deaths.

Look at Purdue Pharma, whose owners, the Sackler family, built a fortune of more than ten billion dollars aggressively marketing OxyContin as safe and non-addictive, decades of documented internal knowledge to the contrary notwithstanding, while a public health catastrophe of opioid addiction and death spread across this country. The company eventually pleaded guilty to criminal charges. The family that made the decisions and took the profits never did; they reached a civil settlement that, after years of appeals, still shields them from most further liability. Look further back, to Ford, which in the 1970s calculated that it was cheaper to pay wrongful-death settlements than to fix a known defect in the Pinto’s fuel tank that caused it to explode in rear-end collisions, and chose the settlements.

Look at General Motors, which knew for more than a decade about a faulty ignition switch that could shut off a car’s engine, power steering, and airbags mid-drive, tied to at least a hundred and twenty-four deaths, before it finally issued a recall — and paid a criminal penalty as a corporation, while no individual executive ever served a day for the decision to stay quiet. Look at Wells Fargo, whose employees, under relentless sales-quota pressure from management, opened millions of bank and credit card accounts in real customers’ names without their knowledge or consent, for years, before regulators forced a public reckoning — and even then, the executive who had presided over the scandal left with a severance package worth tens of millions of dollars. The pattern doesn’t change. Only the industry does.

Consider synthetic hormone replacement therapy, prescribed to roughly ten million American women a year for more than forty-five years, carrying documented risks of heart attack, stroke, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, colorectal cancer, dementia, and autoimmune disease at rates researchers have put as high as thirteen percent. Multiply that risk across four and a half decades of continuous use and ask yourself how many women’s lives were shortened or diminished by a therapy that, at minimum, deserved a far more skeptical prescribing culture than it ever received — and then ask how many physicians ever went on television to say so publicly, knowing what that kind of honesty would cost them with the institutions that license and refer them. I can tell you the number is vanishingly small, because the same economic incentive that keeps a hospital system from admitting fault keeps an individual doctor from breaking with the professional consensus that protects his own livelihood. It is also worth asking why medicine built almost entirely on prevention and lifestyle — the kind long practiced in Ayurvedic, homeopathic, naturopathic, and traditional Chinese systems, and documented across tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies sitting in the National Library of Medicine’s own PubMed database right now — remains functionally excluded from mainstream American practice, dismissed as unproven by the same institutions that have never bothered to read the evidence they claim doesn’t exist. My own research years ago found we could restructure American health care around prevention and save an estimated two point seven trillion dollars a year while improving outcomes, and that research went essentially nowhere, because a system built to treat disease profitably has very little financial incentive to prevent it cheaply.

And it isn’t only about physical products. During the pandemic, I watched every single major newspaper, every broadcast network, every big tech platform, and nearly every public health authority in this country line up in absolute lockstep behind one man’s guidance, no matter how often that guidance contradicted itself, because the advertising dollars, the access, and the approval of the same handful of powerful institutions all flowed through the same narrow channel. What happened to the free press as a check on power, when the press and the power came to depend on each other for revenue? What happened to freedom of choice, when you were free to choose only the choice you’d already been told to make? A press that will not challenge the corporations and agencies it depends on for access is not a free press. It is a bulletin board.

Go to Part Three