MUST READ SUNDAY: Corporate Conspiracies
CONSPIRACY THEORIES have long fascinated me. Ever since I laid eyes on a document known as “The Gemstone File” nearly 40 years ago. If I quote just the first few sentences from the cover-page, you’ll understand why I found it so hard to put down:
Tell me what it is, dear editors, before I get into it.
My dear, it’s heavy.
What is its history?
It’s an anonymous manifestation mailed from Tucson, Arizona, to a fanatical friend of The Fanatic, who insisted it should be published for the good of the North Indies – that radiated land improperly referred to by trivialists as America.
What does it mean?
It’s mean. It names names, and pushes punches right back where they came from.
On whose behalf?
God and the Revolution … If this planet’s a corporation, it’s a corpse.
In the age of the Internet this sort of pitch is commonplace: the staple fare of wild-eyed conspiracists the world around. Back in the late 1970s, however, when practically every form of written communication was carried on the surface of pulped trees, a document like “The Gemstone File” rapidly acquired semi-mystical status. It was passed from hand-to-hand; photocopied to the point of illegibility; puzzled over and debated through long nights of drug-fuelled paranoia.
The very best kind of undergraduate fun!
Whoever wrote “The Gemstone File” was right about one thing though: if this planet is a corporation, then it is a corpse. But even in the fevered brain of The Fanatic and his fanatical friends, it is unlikely that fantasy ever outstripped the true extent of corporate mendacity.
It is only in the last few years, for example, that the world has learned about the American sugar industry’s successful battle to suppress the science linking excessive sugar consumption with heart disease. In a tactic borrowed from the tobacco industry, scientists working for the sugar barons heaped doubt upon the emerging evidence and diverted scientific attention towards saturated fats as the primary cause of heart disease.
For nearly four decades the deadly impact of sugar on the health of people all over the world was downplayed. Not only was sugar’s major contribution to heart disease minimised, but its crucial role in fuelling the West’s burgeoning levels of obesity was also deliberately obscured. The inevitable outcome of a sugar-laden diet – a global epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes – looks set to burden the health services of the world for many years to come.
Calculating the harm done by the American sugar industry is difficult. But the number of people who, since the 1960s, have had their lives cut short by heart attacks, strokes, and the deadly consequences of undiagnosed and untreated Type 2 Diabetes, must run into the tens-of-millions.
It is difficult to comprehend the psychological make-up of people who, in the name of selling tobacco and sugar, were willing to suppress and/or denigrate the scientific evidence pointing to these substances catastrophic effects on public health. That they entered into genuine conspiracies to thwart all attempts to mitigate the harm caused by their products is indisputable – as is the conclusion that they have the blood of millions on their hands. And yet, somehow, they still manage to carve their Thanksgiving Turkey and ruffle the curls of their grandchildren. Death on an obscene scale is simply written-off by these corporate killers as the cost of doing business.
And it’s still going on. The tried and true tactic of denying and/or debunking “inconvenient” scientific evidence was adopted with alacrity by the oil industry as it became increasingly clear that anthropogenic global warming was fossil-fuelled. Once again the hired scientific guns of the big corporations were dispatched to undermine every effort to reduce carbon emissions. That a majority of Americans are now convinced that man-made climate-change is a “hoax” bears testimony to the efficacy of the tobacco and sugar barons’ ‘big lies’. That a planet rendered incapable of sustaining human civilisation might be the ultimate outcome of their public relations triumph did not slow them down.
The author/s of “The Gemstone File” devoted considerable creative energy to inventing a world ruled by individuals utterly consumed by greed, lust and ambition. Paradoxically, their villains are too charismatic, too grandiloquent, to be believably evil. True evil is nearly always the work of ordinary, or, to use Hannah Arendt’s superbly chosen adjective, “banal”, human-beings whose lack of empathy and atrophied imaginations make them the ideal carriers of the corporate disease.
How else could so many of them work so diligently for corporations that have piled up so many corpses?
‘True evil is nearly always the work of ordinary, or, to use Hannah Arendt’s superbly chosen adjective, “banal”, human-beings whose lack of empathy and atrophied imaginations make them the ideal carriers of the corporate disease.’
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_careerists_20120723
The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions………
And they do not ask questions…… What puzzles me is that more than a few do know the truth , but it gets stonewalled so effectively by these “banal” human beings. Their power of suppression is phenomenal.
Good point Garibaldi. I’ve been thinking recently about how these powers of suppression might work. I’ve been leaning about the psychological phenomena known as “learned helplessness” (see: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2009/11/11/learned-helplessness/ ). Today, I started wondering, does this manifests on the political level as well as the personal?
In this country, over the past few decades, a multitude of activists, groups, organisations, and social movements, have put everything we have into debunking neo-liberal myths, and resisting the state-corporate system’s “reforms”. We have had wins, but they feel like they come at a huge energetic cost to us (mostly volunteers), while our opponents draw generous salaries (eg Thompson and Clark and Crosby-Textor), and sometimes it feels like we just end up refighting the same battles again and again (eg MAI/ TPPA, biotech companies pushing gene patenting and GMOs).
I’ve definitely found myself, at times, feeling like there’s no point. That whatever we do is only delaying the inevitable. That maybe the neo-liberals are right and “There is No Alternative”. Is this political learned helplessness? If so, what can we do about it?
The other psychological phenomena I’ve been thinking might have a political manifestation is “gaslighting”. This is where an abusive partner consistently misrepresents what’s going on, corroding the abused partner’s ability to trust their own sense of reality.
Key and his Ministers make a habit of continuing to deny politically inconvenient truths, even when the evidence is right in front of the public. Its one thing for the government to deny the truth when the facts are still unclear, and the evidence has not yet been gathered and published, but surely they would back down if they had been conclusively proven wrong? The growing gulf between what the government is saying, and what increasingly appears to be true, creates frustration and confusion. Could this be a confidence trick, a kind of “political gaslighting”, a conscious strategy to make members of the public doubt our grasp on the facts, or even our own sanity, so as to weaken our resistance?
Yes Chris,
Corporations have no human brain they are a shell that is hooked up to a computer that finds the most profit without considering the human cost or the environment.
This is clearly seen two days ago when the huge German Bayer chemical company (that rates as the most toxic Corporation globally) has taken over Monsanto who is one of the most polluting chemical company already with Roundup, so this will become a double whammy if the commerce commission passes the takeover.
Our food will become even more toxic then.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/10921-the-toxic-100-top-corporate-air-polluters-identified
The Toxic 100 Air Polluters rankings include large privately held firms, such as Koch Industries, as well as the world’s largest publicly traded corporations.
The top five air polluters among large corporations are:
•The German-owned Bayer Group,
•Textron Inc.,
•General Electric Co.,
•Precision Castparts, and
•Koch Industries.
We need to get back to the basics before we are all dead!!!!!!!
and when you have ‘healthy’ food/meal products with 25-30 grams of sugar in them..(!)
the ‘solution’ proffered by annette king is to put some small tax on fizzy drinks…(!)
(yeah – that’ll work/solve the problem..)
whereas the only real solution to stop the food-industry using their products as a delivery-vehicle for eye-wateringly large amounts of obesity/diabetes-causing sugar – is to regulate the maximum amount of sugar allowed in any drink/food-product..
..anything else – and especially this small tax on fizzy-drinks – is just an exercise of pissing into the wind..
http://www.whoar.co.nz/2016/op-ed-fooddrink-just-delivery-vehicle-sugar-time-sugar-watch-methinks/
I recently got given some supermarket products a friend had pulled out of their skip bin. Keep in mind as you read this that the first ingredient listed on food packaging is the largest component of the product, and so on.
Exotic Food Sweet Sour Sauce
* first ingredient: sugar
* second ingredient: pineapple juice (mostly fruit sugar and water)
* third ingredient: water
Exotic Food Supreme Sweet Soy Sauce
* first ingredient: sugar
* second ingredient: glucose syrup (pure sugar, see below *)
* third ingredient: water
Essentially the same kinds of ingredients as in soft drink. I have idea what they charge people for these bottles of sugar water with a bit of flavouring in, but it’s misleading to market it as “food”, even “convenience food”.
I’ve also recently started checking the ingredients of jam in the supermarket. The first ingredient on all of them – even the flashy expensive ones – is sugar. The highest proportion of fruit I could find in any of them is 55%, which means it’s 45% sugar (the remaining ingredients are gelling agents and preservatives which I presume take up very little volume). Most of them are over 50% sugar. Would anyone make jam at home with this much sugar?!?
Remember when Raro sachets could be sold as “juice”? Selling this fruit-flavoured sugar-slime as “jam” is just as misleading and should be banned.
* sugars are “simple carbohydrates”. Glucose is the purest form of sugar, consisting of molecules made of one carbohydrate each. Cane sugar is sucrose, a molecule made of two carbohydrates in a chain. “Complex carbohydrates” or “starch”), like those in potatoes and grains like wheat and rice, are long chains of carbohydrates. The longer the carbohydrate chain, the longer it takes the body to digest it, and turn it into energy (or body fat).
It’s very well known that sugars NOT fats cause heart disease and diabetes, and has been for many years:
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2548255
http://dailynews.mcmaster.ca/article/trans-fats-but-not-saturated-fats-linked-to-greater-risk-of-death/
http://www.nutritionjrnl.com/article/S0899-9007%2814%2900332-3/fulltext
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26791181
There is no such thing as an “essential carbohydrate”. ALL fast carbohydrates are bad for you (these include sugar, rice, pasta, bread, cereals etc) and excessive consumption of them, as recommended by the “Food Pyramid” will kill eventually you. Just don’t bring them into your house. It may well save your life.
If one man beats another man to death, he’s a murderer.
If a thousand men beat another man to death, it’s company policy.
I gave up on my corporate and middle NZ friends a few years ago….
They have a herd mentality.