Corporate Media War on Human Health

- CORPORATE WAR ON HUMAN HEALTH - - Three Associated Press items, as seen in, at least, Philadelphia Inquirer 4/6/01:
(If errors and ommisions and etc can be spotted by non-medical lay person, how obvious are they to medical professionals?...and what is their reaction?)

1) \"Ailing Flight Attendant Loses Tobacco Suit\" (AP) :
First of all, once again, typical cigarettes, according to US Patents,
are NOT necessarilly made from any tobacco at all but, instead, an
assortment of types of industrial waste cellulose...including Municipal
Paper Waste! Calling this \"tobacco\", without qualification, despite the
measured shot of nicotine and all the additives etc used to make the
trash seem like tobacco, is preposterous and quite helpful to the
cigarette industry and additives suppliers. Article, of course, said
nothing about the presence of high levels of KNOWN carcinogen (the highest, worst level), dioxin,
from all the chlorine adulterants....not to mention the many hundreds of
untested, often dangerous non-tobacco additives etc.
The article pointed out one of many troubling characteristics of
the supposedly anti-cigarette industry campaign. That is...in gratitude
for the cigarette cartel being such nice guys about everything, the
States\' Attorneys General gave them protection against Class Action
Suits...so that anyone with grounds to challenge must do it on their
own...something very few people can afford to do, are well enought to do or are willing to do. Because smokers have been turned into pariahs by the corporate media, few rose to defend them. The oldest trick in the book. So the industry
(including additives suppliers, tobacco pesticide mfgrs., paper suppliers, ETC)
waltzed away with a huge victory as everyone was persuaded that
punishment was duly meted out. FAR from it. Philip Morris stock
SOARED up over 90% in 2000. They may pass their \"settlement\" costs to
customers AND they are STILL permitted to have dioxin, secretly, in their
products! Ouch.

2) \"Researchers Link Weight Gain and Cancer\" (AP) : Back to that
Life-Blood of the most heatlh-damaging, environmentally-destructive
industries...chlorine, and its by-product, dioxin. Dioxin is fat-
soluable. It bio-accumulates in fatty tissues. One of the ways, if not
the only way, to get rid of some of it is to loose fat. No one can survive
losing all fat. The Corporate sector, swimming in chlorine and
desperate at all times to evade liabilities and bad PR for dioxin and the
HOST of harms it is known to cause or exacerbate, advises us to
\"exercise\" and \"lose weight\". Who can argue with value of that? This
advice also comes from the Animal Products industry which is responsible
for so much heart disease. Advice is not to avoid meats and fatty foods
nor is it to avoid chlorine chemicals and dioxin but to, instead, \"take
personal responsibility\" and \"diet and exercise\". Health insurers,
which own billions of dollars in chlorine and chlorine-related
investments (including cigarette manufacturers, incidentally) a) do NOT
want to lose the chlorine profits and b) do NOT want to dilute profits by
having to care for victims of their investment properties. (That is a nut-shell explanation for the wholesome corporate-promoted \"anti-tobacco\" crusade, by the way.)They would also like us to buy lots of diet drugs which happen to be from the
chlorine-soaked Pharmaceutical Industry. We are told to \"diet and
exercise\"... not because the corporate establishment cares about our
well-being. If the servants of the corporate machine did care, chlorine
would be out of the picture by day-break next Monday....replaced by all
sorts of benign, though less-profitable, alternatives. To remove it,
however, would be to admit to its harmfulness and...big time liabilities
AND big time discrediting of the \"Regulatory\" system that allowed it to
poison so many for so long.
And which still allows it. So...we keep the
chlorine and the dioxin and the chemical firms and the rest. Better
for bizness this way. A nightmare for living things.
I don\'t know if losing some body weight of dioxin will significantly lessen risk but the health advantages of trimming down might provide fewer opportunities for disease in dioxin-contaminated people (everyone) who have dioxin-compromised immune systems.

3) \"Proposal Reversed on Meat Testing\" (AP): Well....in the previous day\'s
news (also AP) we learned that the GW Bush administration would dump
salmonella testing for school meat programs and replace it with
irradiation...nation-wide. That news failed to mention the nutritional
and health drawbacks of irradiation or the insane shipping of radioactive
waste material all over the country to food processors. It did, however, obliquely refer to the lack of requirements to inform consumers or school children\'s
parents.
Today\'s news (4/6/01) said that the administration almost instantly
backed off from this plan due to widespread consumer complaints about, as
the story reported, just the elimination of salmonella testing. Not A
word mentioned about complaints about the irradiation or about the nature
or scope of those complaints! Topic disappeared. Better, apparently, to not even entertain an un-winable argument on the subject. That the AP didn\'t mention it at all is not likely because no one complained but, rather, because complaints must have been thunderous. (Same syndrome evident when huge protests against
globalization erupt all over the world. No news of it at all.) Industry and Bush Administration do not want to expand already huge oppositon to irradiation to every parent of every public school child in the land. Let\'s hope that this quick back-off did NOT work and that all the parents now know the story from somewhere besides the corporate media.