Systemic Corporate Cons

I've been thinking this week about the spectrum of corporate deceit, propaganda, and misinformation. Among my pondering includes the poor reasoning for war and coups...profits for arms manufacturers and fossil fuel. Name one of our dirty little wars that benefited people. The denial of our climate disaster and business as usual promotion of fossil fuels. The wholesale devastation of ecosystems like tropical forests and the polar regions. The lousy state of our health and health care system promoted by big ag, big pharma, and some doctors. I understand much of the manipulation is a function of corporate media spewing misinformation, but it is much wider in scope. Research in all domains is largely funded by corporations. I spent time in the publish or perish world of hustling research monies and climbing the academic ladder....something I'm glad I escaped. Universities like politicians are purchased by the oligarchs. There is some push back, but we have a systemic problem across the spectrum.
Remember this example? The seven CEOs steadfastly refused to budge under stringent questioning that they knew cigarettes were addictive. Each stated under oath that they did not believe nicotine was addictive. (1.5 min)

Over the past few decades, the fossil fuel industry has subjected the American public to a well-funded, well-orchestrated disinformation campaign about the reality and severity of human-caused climate change. The purpose of this web of denial has been to confuse the public and decision-makers in order to delay climate action and thereby protect fossil fuel business interests and defend libertarian, free-market conservative ideologies. The fossil fuel industry’s denial and delay tactics come straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook. As a result, the American public have been denied the right to be accurately informed about climate change, just as they were denied the right to be informed about the risks of smoking by the tobacco industry. While fossil fuel companies attacked the science and called on politicians to “reset the alarm,” climate-catalyzed damages worsened, including increased storm intensities, droughts, forest damage and wildfires, all at substantial loss of life and cost to the American people.

https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/america-misled/

The fossil fuel industry has known about the reality of human-caused climate change for decades. For a very long time before climate change became part of the global discourse.

But it deliberately funded and orchestrated denial and disinformation campaigns against climate action. So that business continued as usual and bottom lines were protected.
A new report by researchers from Harvard, George Mason and Bristol universities called America Misled: How the fossil fuel industry deliberately misled Americans about climate change.
An internal memo of Exxon Mobil Corp in 1977, among others, forecast:
I. CO2 RELEASE MOST LIKELY SOURCE OF INADVERTENT CLIMATE MODIFICATION.
II. PREVAILING OPINION ATTRIBUTES CO2 INCREASE TO FOSSIL FUEL COMBUSTION.
III. DOUBLING CO2 COULD INCREASE AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE 1°C TO 3°C BY 2050 A.D. (10°C PREDICTED AT POLES).

These are consistent with modern climate research. As climate change consensus became robust, the industry attacked the consensus and exaggerated uncertainties, which:
I. Reduced public understanding of climate change
II. Lowered support for climate action
III. Stopped accurate information on the subject
IV. Polarised the public along political lines
V. Led to a lack of public dialogue and private conversation
Scientific evidence was challenged by tactics including cherry-picking, fake experts, and conspiracy theories. The fossil fuel industry’s denial-and-delay tactics come straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook says the report.

Boston, MA - Today, Massachusetts became the second state to sue ExxonMobil for misleading investors about climate change and the first to sue ExxonMobil for deceiving consumers. The lawsuit, filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, claims that the company knowingly deceived investors and consumers about the risks of climate change to its business and the public.

https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2019/10/25/exxonmobil-faces-anothe...
I'll bet as many fossil fuel execs are sentenced as there were bankers after the 2008 collapse.

Climate is merely one example of the colossal corporate con. What got me thinking along these lines was edg's essay on cancer. In the comments I state the research is strong that cancer feeds on sugar. Rev. Jane replied the only study she had seen said a low fat high grain diet was beneficial, and U. Ripped then asked how two such opposite results are possible. My answer is corporate profit.

Consider this interview...(which I featured last week also)
Chris Hedges talks to Marion Nestle, New York University professor of nutrition, on how food companies distort the science and research into what we eat. In her book ‘Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew The Science Of What We Eat,’ Nestle explains that the food industry follows the formula pioneered by the tobacco industry – cast doubt on the science, fund research to provide desired results, offer gifts and consulting arrangements to buy silence or loyalty, use front groups, promote self-regulation and personal responsibility, and use the courts to challenge critics and dismantle regulations. (28 min)

My diet mentor Jason Fung explains how the same techniques are used in medicine also.

The first conflicts of interest he highlights pertain to the corruption of doctors. Practicing physicians who accept gifts from Big Pharma are 225-335% more likely to prescribe drugs from the gift-giving company than those who do not, Fung explains.

The corruption of doctors in prestigious universities is even worse, he claims. “There's a clear correlation: The more prestigious a doctor, the more money they're getting from the pharmaceutical.” Anecdotally, he says, this means you may be better off seeking medical advice from a family physician than from a Harvard professor; the former probably just accepted a $10 pen from Big Pharma while the latter is on the take for $500,000. “It just is a terrible system,” he says. “Yet, these people are the people that are in the newspaper. They're the ones that are teaching medical students, are the ones who are teaching the — the dietitians, the pharmacist — everybody.”

The most insidious corruption affects the published research on particular drugs. Fung highlights the influence industry can have when it finds a medical journal editor willing to take its money. Another problem arises in the form of industry-funded medical research. This conflict of interest leads to the selective publication of positive trials, which can skew the science on particular drugs and lead to unnecessary or even dangerous overprescription. Fung notes how statin prescriptions illustrate the scope of this particular problem.

“We accept this of drug companies … but the problem is that people die,” Fung says. He later adds: “You can make arguments that sugar is a health food, that opioids are good for you … but it harms patients, and we always have to remember that at the end of the day, this is not why we became doctors. The reason we became doctors was to help people, but we're not until we kind of set those same rules as everybody else.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6IO2DZjOkY (50 min presentation)
Transcript here.

I want to post this list as a resource. I spent a couple of weeks slowly working my way through this series of lectures by Jason reviewing the scientific research, and presenting to other doctors. If you're on a health journey you might be interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w34VyzcYowI (part 1 - 58 min) A new hope with diet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3NuOaWNntQ (part 2 - 1 hr) the science of diabesity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu6jl2eTfHs (part 3 - 1.4 hr) Diet trials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyXc3OuWty0 (part 4 - 1.4 hr) the fasting solution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiBs5_Z8op4 (part 5 - 1 hr) diet and disease
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3kfEnZWHOw (part 6 - 1.25 hr) about fat

I want to pause here to say I'm not telling anyone what they should or should not eat... just as I'm not going to suggest how you should vote or worship. I'm just trying to share what I've learned in my exploration. Diet is tricky. Take the Inuits and their diet of meat and blubber. They have little to no heart disease nor cancer, that is until they began consuming European food like breads.
https://www.cardiobrief.org/2016/07/29/changes-in-eskimo-diet-linked-to-...
On the other hand consider another population with similar health outcomes on Okinawa...

Vegetarian and seafood rich: The islander's traditional diet includes a relatively small amount of fish and somewhat more in the form of soy, low-calorie vegetables like bitter melon, and other legumes. Almost no meat, eggs, or dairy products are consumed. Fish provides omega-3 essential fatty acids like alpha-linolenic acid (ALA),eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Besides being an excellent source of protein, soy (in the form of tofu), contains health benefiting compounds like soluble dietary fiber, tannin antioxidants, and plant sterols. Altogether, these phytonutrients offer protection against heart diseases, stroke, colon, and prostate cancers.

https://www.nutrition-and-you.com/okinawa-diet.html

Here we have a contradiction as U. ripped suggested. Why are the opposite diets giving similar results? My hypothesis is the carbs that Okinawan's consume are primarily digested in the lower GI tract where bacteria convert them into ketones which are the same as the product of fat metabolism in our bodies. They are essentially probiotics.
Dr Mark Hyman explain how potato starch is a probiotic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXOr1H7HnW4 (3 min)
The other important factor in both populations is limited calorie intake. They limit their consumption.

Here's one more dietary contradiction - The Maasai. To a large extent, the Maasai live on the milk from their cattle, which means their diet is as full of fats. Unlike Westerners, the Maasai do not have many problems related to lifestyle diseases. Health researchers around the world have therefore been greatly interested in these East Africans since cardio-vascular and other lifestyle diseases only started to become a great problem in the west in the 1960s and 1970s as they began farming and moving toward a more western diet.
https://sciencenordic.com/denmark-diseases-exercise/the-maasai-keep-heal...

No wonder people are puzzled by diet. Three (at least pre-industrial) healthy populations with little to no heart disease or cancer eating entirely different diets, plus we have the profit motive driving ill advice. I think sugary fruit loops have a heart healthy label. They pay the heart association for that. I like to listen and learn from doctors.

Dr Ken Berry's book, Lies my doctor told me, echo many of Jason's dietary recommendations and medical system criticisms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZPq1hABNcw (51 min)
Transcript here.

Dr Aseem Malhotra from the UK was one of the first doctors to explode the myths about fats. Here he is talking about deceit in medical research filmed at the Public Health Collaboration Conference 2019 at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV9yQbNCE3E (38 min)

Correlation is not causation. Clinical trails on diet are not common. There's no drug to sell and promote at the end of the study. So other that the handful of studies Fung and the other discuss all we have is the anecdotal evidence of Doctors and the history of their patients.
Many Doctors are on youtube trying to spread the word of healthy eating and diet...
Dr William Davis, Dr. Joe Mercola, Dr. Mark Hyman, Steven Gundry

Why don't more doctors suggest healthier diets?
William Davis makes the point in his conversation with Ivor Cummings

I was an interventional cardiologist, I was the guy doing stents and angioplasty and atherectomies, and all that stuff. I’ll tell you Ivor, it pays great. I can get paid several thousand dollars per patient, I could do several procedures a day. It wasn’t uncommon to do 6,7,8,9,10 procedures a day, so it paid very well. Why should I be bothered identifying people before they have a catastrophe, a heart catastrophe and prevent it? Why would they do that? They don’t do it. So there’s a willing ignorance, there’s a willful ignorance. I really mean that. There’s an absolutely willful ignorance in identifying people who are at risk a year, two years, five years for a heart catastrophe, because it pays so much better. You put in stents, bypass, do heart catheterization, etc.

Later he continues...

Don’t pay any attention to cholesterol. It’s ridiculous. It’s outdated. It came from 1950s, 1960s understanding of heart disease causation. Unfortunately, that’s all the conventional doctors pay attention to. They think that cholesterol is a wonderful marker and reducing cholesterol is the answer to all heart disease, which of course is absurd. As you have helped point out, cholesterol is a lousy marker. It distracts everybody from the real causes. And that’s what shocks me. No one’s paying attention to the real causes. So if all you do is reduce cholesterol with a cholesterol reducing drug, like Lipitor, take aspirin and follow a low fat diet, you have no impact, for instance, on the progression, the rise, expected rise in a heart scan score.

If you have an interest in cholesterol, Dr David Diamond has a one hour presentation on the demonization and deception in cholesterol research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX1vBA9bLNk

Even chiropractors are on to improved diets like Eric Berg and David Jockers, and Dr Kieth and his nutritionist wife Becky.
I really have learned a good deal from Biochemical engineer, Ivor Cummings who interviews many doctors and nutritionists.

Human health needs to be uncoupled from the profit motive!

Another great con is the media war machine...

Abby Martin was on Matt and Katie's show explaining the interrelationship of corporate media and war. She comes on about the 20 min mark...Excellent conversation worth the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1cKItw_gM

When William Arkin, a veteran national security reporter with NBC and MSNBC, wrote his resignation email last week, he shared it with his colleagues. It was then leaked to other news outlets. Among Arkin's criticisms of his former employer that by incessantly covering the presidency of Donald Trump, the network is being held hostage by Trump; that in its reflexively anti-Trump coverage, it has become even more promilitary; that NBC and MSNBC are now captives of the security state.
...
But American news consumers are tuning in to MSNBC, and its anti-Trump agenda, in record numbers. Armed with those kinds of ratings, what corporate-owned news channel would risk alienating its shareholders by changing tack?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WCi8-lEwoM (20 min)

Deception and Lies have pervaded all the wars of the last century, making it very difficult to believe anything the Government or its propaganda arm, the corporate media, tell us about those nations that they have designated as "existential threats" to the West. The US Military Industrial complex therefore has a serious credibility crisis on its hands, since the old methods of "crisis initiation" will no longer work. Nice documentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rFebpiy0FY (26 min)

How economic hit men in the IMF promote war
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EysdS30TUkI (2 min)
More from John Perkins (his TED talk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btF6nKHo2i0 (18 min)

Private contractors now make up a large portion of the war machine...
Here's a 10 min excerpt from the documentary "Iraq for sale - the war profiteers"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhpfNqeZzUE

The F-35 is another monstrous boondoggle. By putting construction facilities in almost every state the politicians will not call out this incredible waste of money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTF_a1DuIyE (8 min)

Jimmy explains the US involvement in Syrian - just one example of our illegal behavior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV1JNONpXSU (5.5 min)

All this is no surprise to the c99 community but it is perhaps the biggest on-going con - using corporate media to promote wars and coups and to not report on the disastrous results of the violence the US and our minions perpetrate.

Let's look at one more of the big corporate cons...Banking and Economics

From a former Wall Street insider and author of All the Presidents' Bankers, a searing exposé of the collusion between public and private banks as they seek to control global markets and dictate economic policy. Central banks and institutions like the IMF and the World Bank are overstepping the boundaries of their mandates by using the flow of money to control global markets and dictate economic policy both at the domestic and global level. These public institutions have become so dependent on funding from private banking and the revolving door between the two worlds is so smooth that public and private banks are effectively working toward the same goals.
Nomi Prins: "Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World" (58 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JmWYRkMZRo

Why banks are broken...European Parliament, Strasbourg, 21 May 2013
Speaker: Godfrey Bloom MEP, UKIP (Yorkshire & Lincolnshire),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYzX3YZoMrs (2 min)

The Federal Reserve is itself a con created by the oligarchs for their benefit.

the entire 3 hour documentary is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maC7phpUVno

And finally the con of our demockrazy

The parties rig elections in many ways. Today, both parties have engaged in a “voting rights” debate related to “voter access” and “voter fraud.” But rarely do we ask fundamental questions about the process itself, like why do our representatives seem to serve their party more than the voters in the first place?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gndkcb12X1c (6 min)

I've featured this clip about rigged voting several times, but if you've missed it you might want to watch to remind yourself of the unreliability of your vote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdG6oyjV2Qk (15 min)

Yes friends we are in the midst of a Corporate Coup

For more about the film -
http://globalcomment.com/divide-and-conquer-the-corporate-coup-detat/
...and a 45 min interview with the film maker Fred Peabody
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6GfgsKWjkE

Chris Hedges and Ralph Nader sit down to talk about how this coup happened
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yePIn0zwGCc (25 min)

So across the spectrum of our society we see a complete corporate capture and disregard of of people....especially working people. Corporate power is integrated vertically as well across domains. It is re-enforced by corporate media, and sadly is accepted as normal. As individuals we can minimize the effects on us personally, but the pervasive capture can't be escaped. Most of the c99 community understand this and we commonly discuss one area or another. I wanted to point out in this discussion the integration of it all...food, health, research, war, media, economics, politics...essentially a corporate ecology of deceit, manipulation, and abuse. As a result we have the most inequality perhaps of all time. I hope you each have a refuge from this insanity, and a physical community of folks that support you. It is past time to change this system of inequity and the abuse of our planet and people for profit. People all over the world are marching. My primary question is "Can we change this system before the collapse of the ecosystem?"