Topic: Corporate Scum

At What Cost? Global Witness. July 24, 2018.

Irresponsible business and the murder of land and environmental defenders in 2017.

Global Witness today reveals that at least 207 land and environmental defenders were killed last year – indigenous leaders, community activists and environmentalists murdered trying to protect their homes and communities from mining, agribusiness and other destructive industries. 

Severe limits on the data available mean the global total is probably much higher. Murder is the most egregious example of a range of tactics used to silence defenders, including death threats, arrests, intimidation, cyber-attacks, sexual assault and lawsuits.

These six species are about to be sacrificed for the oil and gas industry. Jake Bullinger, The Guardian. July 26, 2018.

  

Mountaintop Mining is Destroying More Land for Less Coal, Study Finds. James Bruggers, InsideClimateNews. July 26, 2018.

What the Monsanto Papers tell us about corporate science. Climate and Capitalism. June 7, 2018.

Internal documents released in a lawsuit by cancer victims show how the chemical giant actively subverts science to promote its products and profits.

Who is paying for Monsanto's crimes? We are. Carey Gillam, Guardian. March 30, 2019.

Match Made in Hell: Bayer-Monsanto Partnership Signals Death Knell for Humanity. Robert Bridge, Strategic Culture Foundation. June 30, 2018.

On what plane of reality is it possible that two of the world’s most morally bankrupt corporations, Bayer and Monsanto, can be permitted to join forces in what promises to be the next stage in the takeover of the world’s agricultural and medicinal supplies?

Warning, plot spoiler: There is no Mr. Hyde side in this horror story of epic proportions; it’s all Dr. Jekyll. Like a script from a David Lynch creeper, Bayer AG of poison gas fame has finalized its $66 billion (£50bn) purchase of Monsanto, the agrochemical corporation that should be pleading the Fifth in the dock on Guantanamo Bay instead of enjoying what amounts to corporate asylum and immunity from crimes against humanity. Such are the special privileges that come from being an above-the-law transnational corporation.

BMW, Daimler and VW charged with collusion over emissions. Arthur Neslen, Guardian. Apr. 5, 2019.


The Worst Drug Crisis in American History. Jessica Bruder, NYT. July 31, 2018.

In 2000, a doctor in the tiny town of St. Charles, Va., began writing alarmed letters to Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. The drug had come to market four years earlier and Art Van Zee had watched it ravage the state’s poorest county, where he’d practiced medicine for nearly a quarter-century. Older patients were showing up at his office with abscesses from injecting crushed-up pills. Nearly a quarter of the juniors at a local high school had reported trying the drug. Late one night, Van Zee was summoned to the hospital where a teenage girl he knew — he could still remember immunizing her as an infant — had arrived in the throes of an overdose. 

Van Zee begged Purdue to investigate what was happening in Lee County and elsewhere. People were starting to die. “My fear is that these are sentinel areas, just as San Francisco and New York were in the early years of H.I.V.,” he wrote. 

Since then, the worst drug crisis in America’s history — sparked by OxyContin and later broadening into heroin and fentanyl — has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, with no signs of abating. Just this spring, public health officials announced a record: The opioid epidemic had killed 45,000 people in the 12-month span that ended in September, making it almost as lethal as the AIDS crisis at its peak. 

Van Zee’s prophecy and other early warnings haunt the pages of Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, a harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency. The third book by Beth Macy — the author, previously, of Factory Man and Truevine — is a masterwork of narrative journalism, interlacing stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference. 

Macy began investigating the drug epidemic in 2012, as it seeped into the suburbs around her adopted hometown, Roanoke, Va., where she worked for 20 years as a reporter at The Roanoke Times. From there, she set out to map the local onto the national. “If I could retrace the epidemic as it shape-shifted across the spine of the Appalachians, roughly paralleling I-81 as it fanned out from the coalfields and crept north up the Shenandoah Valley, I could understand how prescription pill and heroin abuse was allowed to fester, moving quietly and stealthily across this country, cloaked in stigma and shame,” she writes. 

The word “allowed” is a quiet curse. The further Macy wades into the wreckage of addiction, the more damning her indictment becomes. The opioid epidemic didn’t have to happen. It was a human-made disaster, predictable and tremendously lucrative. At every stage, powerful figures permitted its progress, waving off warnings from people like Van Zee, participating in what would become, in essence, a for-profit slaughter.