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CORPORATE MAFIA Corporations have no conscience: they only have a bottom line. Corporate policy is based on profit: if it pays, it gets the go-ahead. Society is increasingly controlled by international conglomerates and with more and more gigantic mergers taking place this means more and more power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. This in turn has a negative effect on news media: huge corporations own all major media and the news is increasingly managed to suit the corporate owners. One of the biggest mergers took place recently when AOL joined Time-Warner, but other corporate mergers include Disney Corporation owning the American Broadcast Corporation (ABC) and General Electric owning the National Broadcast Corporation (NBC). The news is doctored to an extent few people recognize. When military corporations and governments work together, the news is particularly manipulated and biased. You only have to look at US foreign policy. Cuba and Iraq are vilified and subjected to economic strangulation with sanctions, while China gets preferential trade status. The public has a very short memory, but the now demonized Saddam Hussein during the Reagan administration was supported by the US. Washington hoped Iraq's war against Iran would get rid of Ayatollah Khomeini. When Iraqi fighter planes bombed the US warship the Stark and 38 American sailors died, Reagan said it was an honest mistake! Today such an act would result in major military retaliation. US support for Hussein ended when he failed to win the war
against Iran and Khomeini retained his iron grip on that country.
Similarly as long as former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega
helped the US in its ignominious support of the so-called contras
in Nicaragua, he was supported by the US despite his drug dealings.
There is even a photo of former CIA director (1976-77) and later
US president (1989-1993) George Bush Sr. sitting on the same
sofa with Noriega having a cordial chat. In 1989 the same Bush
sent in US military forces to capture Noriega just before Christmas.
Noriega is currently serving a long prison sentence in the US
having outlived his usefulness to the US. 1. In Belgium crankcase oil spiked with dioxin was mixed with cattle feed in the late nineties to reduce costs. The risk of the dioxin subsequently getting into meat and milk products (including chocolates) resulted in an international import ban. For the sake of saving money on cattle feed and thus increase profits, public health was severely compromised. 2. A common practice in many parts of the industrialized world is to grind diseased cadavers into a so-called protein supplement and feed this carnivorous mix to plant-based animals such as cattle. This can lead first to Mad Cow Disease (see: OUR FATAL FOOD in this issue) and subsequently to Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease in human beings which destroys the brain and is 100 per cent fatal. To this day mixing animal parts with other cattle feed continues and poses a critical risk to the health of consumers. 3. Some manufacturers use rayon in feminine hygiene tampons which some studies suggest extends the period of bleeding (thus boosting tampon sales) and are suspected to cause cervical cancer, particularly when combined with another carcinogen: asbestos fibers. Rayon is a synthetic fiber made from wood pulp. The risk to a woman's health is magnified by the fact that these fibers are commonly subjected to a bleaching process which creates dioxin, a potent and cumulative carcinogen. In a lifetime a woman uses about 11,400 tampons. Unbleached cotton tampons are made, but are not widely available. For more tampon information visit the Period Conspiracy web site: http://cooties.punkrock.net/tpc/tpc.html 4. A major study published in the prestigious British medical
journal The Lancet shows that the massive mammography programs
promoted in Canada and the US produce six cases of breast cancer
for every one breast cancer death that is avoided. Yet the lucrative
x-ray business continues to promote mammograms, despite the fact
that study after study has shown that mammography screening of
pre-menopausal women has not reduced the breast cancer mortality
rate. For post-menopausal women the results are only marginally
better while radiation-induced cancer remains a serious risk. Top executives in industry see their accountability limited to the shareholders and when they must choose between corporate profits and consumer interests, they invariably choose the former over the latter. Corporations show an incredible resilience when exposed as unconsciable entities. The best example is the tobacco industry which still promotes their lethal wares despite massive lawsuits. How do corporations stay in business despite image damage and major lawsuits? They rely on: The Ten Commandments of corporate fudging: 1. DENY a problem even exists. 2. MINIMIZE the risks and emphasize the benefits. Try to confuse the public with terms such as "acceptable levels" and "genetic susceptibility." 3. DISTRACT public attention by focussing on other issues. 4. STALL for time by demanding more studies (an old ploy of the tobacco industry). 5. JUSTIFY a problem by explaining that everything in life
involves risks including going to bed. 8. RETALIATE with your own research to "prove" outside research is wrong in claiming a product is harmful to public health or the environment. 9. UNDERMINE proposed new laws by persuading politicians to weaken them. 10. THREATEN to relocate a plant elsewhere and lay off all
employees if regulations are not softened. Whatever you can't
produce and sell at home, produce and sell abroad. If someone dares to expose carcinogenic contamination from within the workplace, the consequences can be deadly. For example, Karen Silkwood had documents which purportedly showed the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation in Crescent, Oklahoma had falsified reports about radioactive levels at the plant where she worked as a technician. She also claimed that 40 pounds of plutonium were missing. On November 13, 1974 she was to hand the documents over to a New York Times reporter. On her way to the meeting the car she was driving ran off the road and she died. The official version was that she fell asleep behind the wheel, but others believe she was deliberately run off the road by someone in another vehicle. The documents were missing and have never been found. Her apartment was so radioactive, it took three months to decontaminate it. Her plutonium-contaminated clothes had to be disposed of in a nuclear waste dump! Her estate launched a civil suit against Kerr-McGee. Twelve years after her death an out-of-court settlement was reached for $1.3 million. The Kerr-McGee plant was closed in 1975. In conclusion it is worth noting that 24 independent US scientists--including Dr. Samuel Epstein--have stated that the American Cancer Society (ACS) is "doing virtually nothing to help reduce public exposure to cancer-causing chemicals" (Dr. Ralph Moss: The Cancer Industry, pp. 352). For example, when the FDA suggested a printed notice should accompany Premarin and other hormone-containing drugs to warn women these drugs may increase their risk of cancer, the ACS opposed the proposal on the grounds that this would "interfere with the practice of medicine" and "discourage patients" from taking such drugs (ibid.: 352). The US is the world's biggest exporter of carcinogens. It exports tobacco to countries all over the world and sells chemicals, pesticides and food additives (many of which are now banned in the US) to mostly Third World nations. Some companies play both sides of the fence. For example, Zeneca produces tamoxifen to treat breast cancer, but the corporation also produces pesticides which the company describes euphemistically as "crop protection products." There is indeed a conspiracy to withhold or distort information. The three key players are: the government, industry and the major news media. It is very much like trying to figure where the pea is in the classic shell game. See the pea as the facts and the con artists as government, industry and the news media. Add to the mix the multi-billion advertising industry, and it is little wonder that the public is at best confused and at worst pacified. To end on a positive and empowering note: all relevant information, while not easy to find, is nevertheless available. It just takes time to do your own research, but (if you will pardon the cliche) the life you save may be your own. |