London’s Grenfell Tower Inferno

Forum

I am referring to the London’s Grenfell Tower –  the devastating fire that occurred on June 14, 2017, in a residential high-rise building in North Kensington, London. The fire started in a fourth-floor apartment and rapidly spread due to the building’s external cladding, which was found to be highly flammable. The tragedy claimed 72 lives and left many others injured. A public inquiry into the devastating blaze blamed the disaster on failings by the government, construction industry and, most of all, the firms involved in fitting the exterior with flammable cladding. Not surprisingly, all 72 deaths in were avoidable.

It really does seem there’s no human(e) or moral accountability when big profit is involved; nor can there be a sufficiently guilty conscience if the malpractice is continued, business as usual. ‘We are a capitalist nation, after all,’ the self-justification may go.

Then, such big businesses can get, or are getting, unaccountably even bigger, defying the very spirit of government rules established to ensure healthy competition by limiting concentrated ownership.

Still, there must be a point at which corporate greed thus practice will end up hurting big business’s own monetary interests. Or is the unlimited-profit objective/nature somehow irresistible? It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.

One can see corporate officers shrugging their shoulders and defensively saying their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. And the shareholders also shrug their shoulders while defensively stating they just collect the dividends and that the big bosses are the ones to make the moral and ethical decisions.

A very large and growing populace are increasingly too overworked, tired, worried and even angry about food and housing unaffordability thus insecurity for themselves or their family — largely due to insufficient income — to criticize or boycott Big Business/Industry for the societal damage it needlessly causes/allows, particularly when not immediately observable.

Indeed, so very many people, perhaps an all-time-high percentage, have to choose between which necessities of life they can afford.

Nevertheless, the more that such corporations make, all the more they want — nay, need — to make next quarterly. It’s never enough, yet the corporate news-media, which make up virtually all of Western mainstream news media, will implicitly or explicitly celebrate their successful greed [a.k.a. ‘stock market gains’].

Frank Sterle Jr.
White Rock, B.C.

Canada, V4B 4B5

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 27 September 2024