Courtesy The New Yorker

According to The New Yorker, “These were urbane, expensively educated, presumably well-informed people. Could they conceivably be unaware of the accumulated evidence about the tainted origins of their fortune? Did they simply put it out of mind?

“Greed can get people to rationalize pretty bad behavior,” one person told me. “It’s a parallel to what the tobacco industry did. They got caught in America, they saw their market share decline, so they export it to places with even fewer regulations than we have. You know what’s going to happen. You’re going to see lots and lots of death.”

“We asked them, ‘What do you want?’ And they said, ‘We want to be able to go to cocktail parties and not have people come up and ask us why we’re killing people.’ That’s an exact quote.”