Showing posts with label corporate irresponsibility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corporate irresponsibility. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

"Death By Medicine" (documentary)

Ashley Wells and CC Liu (Wisdom Quarterly)
() Death by Medicine explores America's medical paradigm, the current health crisis, and a healthier, more holistic system. Based on Gary Null's groundbreaking based on hard science the medical industry claims as its backing while ignoring finding or not actually testing its interventions and drugs.*

Western Medicine Doesn't Kill, Does It?
Wisdom Quarterly (ANALYSIS)
Iatrogenic injuries (those caused by the practice of medicine) is becoming the leading cause of death in the US. This means that doctors, hospitals, insurance agents, PPOs, and the general corporate culture actually kills more Americans than any other cause of death.

Few, for example, die of cancer nowadays. But the death rates for those undergoing invasive cancer "treatments" are sky high.

Of course, it is not interested in "curing" anyone, just creating a symptom-control income stream. And it has been very successful at doing that. Corporate greed trumps medicinal need.

Since no one knows the word "iatrogenic," no one likes to think Western (allopathic) medicine does more to harm us than help us. Sure, bones can be set well, but every pharmaceutical is a poison by definition (the biblical practice of "sorcery," pharmakos, which got Sodom and Gomorrah in big trouble with the judgy and angry space Gods). That is why they have to be tested for safety, which is more important than effectiveness.

And of all those that are found to be safe enough and rubber stamped by the industry-controlled FDA, a wolf guarding the hen house situation, there are still catastrophes: Massive lawsuits cause the pulling of wonder drugs from the market when they are found to have side effects that were hidden, under reported, or unforeseen.

Neither abuse nor accidents are not the worst of it. Most pharmaceutical kill when used as directed.



But those lawsuits aren't massive enough to cut into profits. They are externalities (costs unloaded onto society) accounted for by lawyers and well paid researchers. The statistics from inconvenient lawsuits amount to more deaths than result from US wars (troops only, never counting the civilians the troops are there killing).

This, too, has been taken care of by lobbying for legislation to make sure cases do not go to trial but to arbitration. And even if they do go before a jury and win, the judge simply removes the punitive judgments in accordance with law. It's the "magic of the marketplace" when corporations buy and sell politicians, judges, and elections.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power," is a famous quote attributed to Italian fascist Mussolini (publiceye.org). The pharmaceutical-industrial complex wins again.
  • *The information in "Death By Medicine" is detailed in Gary Null Ph.D.'s book with statistical evidence of hundreds of thousands of injuries and deaths due to conventional medicine. How does the money-making system work? The pharmaceutical industry, associations, drug reps, medical schools, medical journals, and the absence of real medical science are all implicated in the scheme to grow rich in spite of millions of injuries and deaths. The lack of oversight by so-called regulatory agencies, private insurance firms, and lobbying influence on our legislators and representatives ensure the system stays in place no matter how much harm is done when treatments are more deadly than diseases. The Western medical system is broken beyond repair. We need a new medical paradigm.
  • The Moral Majority becomes the Tea Party
  • Mussolini, a misunderstood monster?

Medical Holocaust? Keep it quiet.

The Harm of Corporate "Medicine" (video)

Wisdom Quarterly
()

Gary Null Ph.D. [an often arrogant-sounding yet altruistic scientist] has created numerous award-winning documentaries that focus on the most important social issues of our time. This video highlights these crucially important films. His latest blockbuster is DEATH BY MEDICINE.

An issue so bad and obvious that even PBS has covered it

"Hot Coffee" - How Corporations Rule (video)

HotCoffeeTheMovie.com, Wisdom Quarterly
(HBO, Susan Saladoff) Stories we're told by corporate media hide shocking truths.

Is Justice Being Served?
["Tort reform? What's tort reform? "Forced arbitration and 'frivolous' lawsuits," now that's G.W. Bush and Dick "Halliburton" Cheney will not stand for!] Seinfeld mocked it. Letterman ranked it in his Top 10 list. And more than 15 years later, its infamy continues.

Everyone knows the McDonald’s coffee case. It has been routinely cited as an example of how citizens have taken advantage of America’s corporations and legal system, but is that a fair rendition of the facts?

Hot Coffee reveals what really happened to Stella Liebeck, the 81-year-old Albuquerque woman who spilled scalding coffee on herself and sued McDonald’s, while exploring how and why the case garnered so much media attention, who funded the effort, and to what end.


How corporate America destroyed our rights in court

[Hint: Corporations fabricated AstroTurf organizations to undermine our legal standing against them in court whenever they are liable for anything from irresponsibility, to criminal negligence, to rape. Yes, rape. KBR/Halliburton got a case against them redirected to private arbitration in the case of the group rape of Jamie Leigh Jones.] See the film, and decide who really profited from spilling hot coffee.

Jamie Leigh Jones, featured in "Hot Coffee" was raped by corporate (Halliburton/KBR) forces in Iraq (Mother Jones/Twylah.com).

“Eye-opening indictment of the way big business spins the media.”
—Variety

“Stunning debut … Sends audiences out of the theater thinking in a brand new way.”
—Washington Post

“Entertaining, informative…vividly illuminating.”
—Hollywood Reporter

Why, Why, Why?
Wisdom Quarterly (ANALYSIS)

Why was the coffee so hot (190 degrees or just 22 degrees below boiling) even after 700 complaints to McDonalds? Three reasons: it was corporate policy. But why? To mask with heat the flavor of the cheap coffee beans used by McDonald's and, moreover, to keep people from asking for a second free cup of coffee because by the time the first one cools, most customers have already left the fast food outlet.

Why was Pfc. Jamie Jones gang raped so badly by US soldiers ahd Halliburton/KBR contractors that she needed reconstructive surgery? Rape is a perk for our troops in Iraq -- homosexual sodomy of fellow US soldiers, sexual assault of nearly all female troops and support staff, rape and murder of Iraqi girls (maybe boys and prisoners, too). Don't ask, don't tell. It's torture, it puts people (prisoners as well as soldiers) in their place, keeps the hierarchy/patriarchy and our culture of violence alive. It's CIA policy.


"I'm lovin' it?" "You know you like it hot."

Friday, October 21, 2011

How Corporations Became People (video)



() "The Corporation," full movie. Corporations are people? Corporations are not people. "They have no 'soul' to save, no body to incarcerate." They do have a profit motive.

"The Corporation" is a classic Canadian documentary exploring how we ended up with business entities that are legally bound to place "profits before people." How are we to assess a corporation's "personality"?

The documentary concentrates on North American corporations, particularly those from the United States.

The film was written by Joel Bakan and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. It is critical look at the modern-day "limited liability" corporation, considering its legal status as a class of PERSON. And it evaluates its behavior towards our society and the world at large the way a psychiatrist examines a patient.

The exploration goes through specific examples. It has been shown worldwide -- on TV, DVD, file sharing, and free downloading. Bakan wrote a book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of this documentary.


Showing the development of the contemporary business corporation, the movie follows the definition in court. Corporations went from legal entities that originated as government-chartered institutions engaged in public functions to commercial institutions entitled to most of the legal rights of a human being, US citizen, and now multinational body with no allegiance to the US.

They gained personhood as a result of an 1886 case in the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite referred to corporations as "persons" having the same rights as human beings based on the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. The film's assessment is effected via the diagnostic criteria in psychology's Bible (DSM-IV).

FBI consultant and professor of psychology Robert Hare, Univ. of British Columbia, compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically-diagnosed PSYCHOPATH.

The film is in vignettes examining and criticizing corporate business practices. It establishes parallels between the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave and the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.

(otherwords.org)

The topics covered include:

  • the Business Plot in 1933 where the popular Gen. Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against US Pres. Franklin Roosevelt
  • the tragedy of the commons
  • Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning people to beware of the rising "military-industrial complex"
  • economic externalities
  • suppression of an investigative news story about bovine growth hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate TV station
  • the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany
  • the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust)
  • the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia's municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation
  • general themes of corporate social responsibility
  • the notion of "limited liability"
  • the corporation as a psychopath
  • and the corporation as a person.

() "The Corporation," short form