America, and perhaps all of civilization, has been in thrall to money for as long as it has existed. Using money to make a moral decision is obviously a specious construct, though thinking so makes me an elite. And that, Donald, is one of the reasons you aren’t an elite, despite your having nicer boats.

Am I making up my  own definition of elitism? Wikipedia defines it as a power thing, exclusively composed of decision makers to-the-manor-born. I use it to refer to people who make time for, and are interested in, reading, contemplation, and discussion. People excited by ideas. My favorite people.

Shuddering from the images of the US using its considerable weight to body block efforts by the World Health Organization to promote breast feeding and reduce sugar consumption, I decided to double down instead of detox by reminding myself that greedy assholes have been around for a while.

I found a couple of examples in Big Chicken by Maryn McKenna, which is reminding me that the idyllic 50s and 60s were really pretty toxic. Thomas Jukes, father of antibiotic use to fatten livestock, who died in 1999 at the age of 93, fulminated to the end over ridiculous attempts to limit profit-making by farmers for such flummery as antibiotic-resistant pathogens and humane treatment of food animals. Then there’s Rep. Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, who spent the last 17 of his 54 years in Congress renewing a rider he inserted in an appropriations bill, a rider requiring his personal blessing before funding antibiotic bans. He was able to block such bans until he retired in 1995.

He was also a Democrat, for those of you who think they have a monopoly on the white hats.

Both of these guys were motivated, of course, by funding, and were funded by organizations whose big money-making products undermine public health, as both the men and the companies well knew.

My most precious trading card in the Greedy Jerk collection is one I acquired years ago:  General Motors inventor Thomas Midgley, Jr. This gem came up with his first big idea, adding tetraethyl lead (TEL) to gasoline to reduce engine knocking, in 1921. Two years later he took a leave of absence due to lead poisoning. He returned as vice president of a spinoff manufacturing the additive. The first two plants were plagued by ten deaths as well as several cases of lead poisoning, demoralizing the staff. A third plant with a revised process experienced cases of lead poisoning, hallucinations, and insanity, followed by five deaths. Nonetheless, Midgley appeared at a press conference in 1924 pouring TEL over his hands and inhaling it to demonstrate its inoffensiveness, after which he took another leave due to lead poisoning.

Midgley lost that position in 1925, but was not fired. He moved to GM’s Frigidaire division, where he invented Freon. Both TEL and Freon were widely used worldwide for decades, and Midgley won awards from various industry groups and science societies as well as two honorary degrees. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences the year he died.

Midgley died from polio, indirectly. After contracting it in 1940, he invented a rope-and-pulley system to lift him from his bed. In 1944, it strangled him to death.

J. R. McNeill posited that Midgley had “more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.”

Does it make me feel better that bad actors have always valued money over lives? Maybe. Whatever values and wilderness we have now survived them, at least. Conversely, the density of egregious actors seems to be growing exponentially.