How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill? By Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvilaward for excellence in "the forging of public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had beencalled out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John "JW" Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off. Their winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers had come to see sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might exacerbate, if not cause, heart disease and diabetes. With an initial annual budget of nearly $800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of Dixie Crystals, Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the association recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to allay the public's fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold, and bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a "highly supportive" FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made it "unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in coming years." The story of sugar, as Tatem told it, was one of a harmless product under attack by "opportunists dedicated to exploiting the consuming public." Over the subsequent decades, it would be transformed from what the New York Times in 1977 had deemed "a villain in disguise" into a nutrient so seemingly innocuous that even the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association approved it as part of a healthy diet. Research on the suspected links between sugar and chronic disease largely ground to a halt by the late 1980s, and scientists came to view such pursuits as a career dead end. So effective were the Sugar Association's efforts that, to this day, no consensus exists about sugar's potential dangers. The industry's PR campaign corresponded roughly with a significant rise in Americans' consumption of "caloric sweeteners," including table sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This increase was accompanied, in turn, by a surge in the chronic diseases increasingly linked to sugar. Since 1970, obesity rates in the United States have more than doubled, while the incidence of diabetes has more than tripled. more . . .
Free Trade Deal Would Mean Big Win For Corporate Power BY DAVID DAYEN, The Fiscal Times I’d be surprised if a single voter cast their ballot on Tuesday so multinational corporations could exempt themselves from national laws. I don’t remember one TV ad framing the election as a chance to raise prescription drug prices in poor countries, or to stop the government from buying American-made goods. Maybe I missed the cable news chatter about muting the legislative branch’s power to define regulatory boundaries. However, those could be the biggest results of this week’s GOP takeover of the Senate. Every election post-mortem looking for areas of potential cooperation between the Republican Congress and President Obama starts with “free trade.” Because the Washington elite’s hearts go a-flutter whenever they hear the term “free trade,” they see the deals as just the kind of bipartisan solution they think the country has yearned for. But the deals being readied by the Obama Administration actually don’t have much to do with trade at all; they’re about corporate power. more . . .
America and Russia's Richest Lead the World In Sucking Up Wealth from the Rest of Us American wealth has been sucked away from the middle to a greater extent than in any major country except Russia.
Leo W. Gerard Question Before the Court: Can Corporations Betray Retirees? At a chemical plant called Point Pleasant in a town named Apple Grove in a state John Denver labeled almost heaven, a man known as Freel Tackett helped negotiate three collective bargaining agreements that provided raises and decent benefits for workers and retirees. Heaven ended in 2007 for Tackett and other retired Point Pleasant workers. That’s when the corporation that now owns the plant betrayed them by refusing to continue paying the full cost of retiree health benefits. These days, it’s almost hell for retirees. For seven years they’ve lived under a dark shadow, as if Point Pleasant’s most infamous denizen, the monster Mothman, immortalized in the book and movie The Mothman Prophesies, had returned. The United Steelworkers (USW) union told the U.S. Supreme Court last week that these workers had labored a lifetime to earn retiree health benefits. The court should forbid the company from rescinding earned benefits, the USW argued. The corporation, M&G Polymers, asked the court to validate its reneging on its pledge to workers because, it contended, the collective bargaining agreement is insufficiently specific. M&G insisted that vagueness gives it carte blanche to shift costs to workers. M&G Polymers is Point Pleasant's new Mothman “I think a lot of corporations these days are doing the same thing,” Tackett said. “I am just hoping the Supreme Court will prohibit it,” added Tackett, who is one of three named plaintiffs representing the class of 492 Point Pleasant plant retirees and spouses. Workers at the West Virginia plant are members of the USW. Tackett talked about the appeal as he prepared to go to a funeral for a friend from his days in the plant. That man will never know the ultimate outcome of the case that the retirees won at both the trial and appeals levels. The man’s widow is struggling financially and told Tackett she thinks she will be forced to sell her home to cover the cost of her husband’s unpaid medical bills. Tackett urged her to try to hold out for the high court’s decision. Tackett told her that if the justices rule for the retirees, then M&G Polymers will likely have to reimburse her the nearly $20,000 that her husband and other retirees paid to maintain their company health insurance until the trial court ordered M&G Polymers to resume paying the full premiums. “We have several people who passed away,” as they awaited the outcome, Tackett said. “We just don’t know how many of them died as a result of not going to the doctor when needed or not getting medication they needed" because they couldn't afford the insurance, he said. Court records show that as of Dec. 14, 2011, only 96 of the retirees were still paying the costs imposed by M&G Polymers to cover themselves and their spouses. Some retirees quit the company plan because they found less expensive insurance elsewhere. Others, the court records show, went without coverage. The fees M&G charged retirees rose dramatically each year. For those old enough to receive Medicare, the initial cost was $144.44 a month. But for younger retirees, it was $856.22 a month. By 2011, those charges rose to $452.01 a month for the Medicare eligible and $957.92 a month for the others. “It is a huge amount of money when you are on a fixed income,” Tackett said, “I had to spend a big part of my pension on health insurance.” Tackett started working at the plant when Goodyear owned it. He negotiated contracts and served for four years as president of the local union in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before Goodyear sold the plant to Shell in 1992. Shell sold it to M&G in 2000. Throughout that time, Tackett said, he believed that language in the collective bargaining agreement guaranteed the company would pay the total cost of health benefits for workers who were eligible for full pensions when they retired. The lawsuitquotes the collective bargaining agreements as saying that workers earning a full pension “will receive a full Company contribution toward the cost of [health care] benefits.” And the collective bargaining agreement says that if a retiree dies before his or her spouse, then the spouse remains entitled to health benefits until death or remarriage. The agreement never says the retiree loses the benefit after so many years or must pay a portion of the costs. It also doesn’t say benefits earned by retirees over their work lives end with the expiration of any given collective bargaining agreement. Even conservative Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to agree with the retirees on that point, saying during the arguments, “It is a reasonable assumption, call it a presumption if you like, that any promise to pay those benefits continues after the termination of the union contract.” The fact that the collective bargaining agreement never specifically says the benefits must be paid in full by the company for the retiree’s lifetime is not unusual. A law firm with no financial interest in the outcome of the case reviewed collective bargaining agreements providing health insurance for retirees and reported to the Supreme Court that only 26 percent contained at least one clause suggesting that the benefit must be paid for life, while 14 percent contained ambiguous language and 16 percent were silent on the issue. Previous owners of the plant never questioned the obligation and paid the benefits in full until the retiree and spouse died. In addition, M&G’s demands of Shell show that it knew the obligation was not limited. When Goodyear sold the plant to Shell, it retained responsibility for the workers who retired during its ownership. Shell did not want to do that. So M&G hired actuaries to calculate the cost of the benefits that would be owed to the workers who retired in the eight years Shell owned the plant. That would include costs for Tackett who retired in 1996. Shell allowed M&G to subtract that amount from the price of the Point Pleasant plant. As a result, Shell paid M&G the costs for those retirees. Now M&G is trying to get paid a second time by demanding those Point Pleasant retirees pay part of their premiums. Tackett, who lives in Bidwell, Ohio, started work at the plant in 1966. That, coincidentally, is the year that Mothman began terrifying local residents. As Mothman did, M&G has stricken hundreds of families in this rural West Virginia region with fear. They’re scared they won’t be able to afford health insurance they believed they’d earned. A decision by the Supreme Court affirming the lower courts’ rulings would relieve retirees like 78-year-old Tackett and restore justice in Point Pleasant.
Libs think a corporation shouldn't be able to change benefits later, but that the gov't can turn around and change the tax or benefit laws at their whim anytime it wants to and if anyone doesn't like it, that's just tough.
Creston Davis On Remembering 'Democracy' There's an old joke about memory loss. A couple in their nineties are both having problems remembering things. During a checkup, the doctor tells them that they're physically okay, but they might want to start writing things down to help them remember. Later that night, while watching TV, the old man gets up from his chair. 'Want anything while I'm in the kitchen?' he asks. 'Will you get me a bowl of ice cream?' 'Sure.' 'Don't you think you should write it down so you can remember it?' she asks. 'No, I can remember it.' 'Well, I'd like some strawberries on top, too. Maybe you should write it down, so as not to forget it?' He says, 'I can remember that. You want a bowl of ice-cream with strawberries.' 'I'd also like whipped cream. I'm certain you'll forget that, write it down?' she asks. Irritated, he says, 'I don't need to write it down; I can remember it! Ice cream with strawberries and whipped cream - I got it, for goodness sake!' Then he toddles into the kitchen. After about 20 minutes, the old man returns from the kitchen and hands his wife a plate of bacon and eggs. She stares at the plate for a moment. 'Where's my toast?' It's natural to forget things every now and again. According to the "psychology expert" Kendra Cherry, there are four basic reasons we forget: -1 Retrieval Failure -2 Interference -3 Failure to Store -4 Motivated Forgetting But forgetting doesn't just take place on an individual basis, it can also happen, if you will, to the "collective mind." Like a person, societies too remember and forget. The question is: What does society remember (or pass on) and what does it forget, and why? The late philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, wrote a book entitled, Memory, History, Forgetting that explored why some events are remembered while others aren't. The "Holocaust" rightly triggers the ghastly horrors of millions of Jews, homosexuals, mentally challenged and Gypsies exterminated by employing the capitalist technologies that Henry Ford developed called the "assembly line." But what doesn't get triggered is the memory of the Armenian genocide. Why? Think too about the neofascist McCarthy era or France's role in Northern Africa or even the slave economy on which the United States of America was founded. The point is that just like we don't want to remember embarrassing events of our personal past (and heaven forbid if our children found out), so too society is necessarily selective about what we pass on from generation to generation and what we forget. The process by which we pass on memories (or not) from one generation to the next is called education. From this it is clear that whoever controls the educational apparatus of society also controls the shaping of the collective memory that helps define what that society is and how it unfolds through future generations via values, truths, and so on. Memories don't just spring up from nowhere; they are shaped and controlled by power. Those in power desire to keep their power. This is why the loss of the public sphere in America since the Reagan era in the 80s has, at the same time, introduced an anti-public logic that gave birth to privatizing schools, prisons, and institutions in the public sectors. This trend, moreover, is anti-democratic because only a handful of individuals control what is remembered and what is left to the dustbins. And this is dangerous because if the wealthy class controls what is remembered/lost in our history by privatizing education we will have lost the spirit of our collective struggle of governing "of the people, by the people, for the people." Instead we'll be brainwashed into thinking that America was build not by working class people but only the wealthy few. It's as if we are enslaved to the rich and hopeless without them. But why should we have to think that? Further, this anti-democratic trend has permitted the rich-class to ascend to historically unparalleled levels of inequality. Oh, wait our present inequality of wealth distribution in America is matched historically to levels only comparable to the late 1920s, the eve of the Great Depression. Even our public universities have sold-out to this neo-liberal logic. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, public funding cuts to state universities and colleges has continued to decline since 1987 (i.e., the Reagan era). And where did the public dollars come from before the politicians decided to gut education funding? It came from tax dollars largely backed by the wealthy class. This is the same class that has outsourced our jobs and moved offshore to avoid paying taxes to the very society that gave them the opportunities to succeed in the first place. It might be easy to buy into the Republican (corporate) rhetoric of "no taxes" but if we look at the facts more carefully, we'll see that "no taxes" (for education, public infrastructure etc.) means that the middle and working classes ultimately take on the "hidden" and unfair burden of educating their children just to compete and survive. Why? Because less public funding means that colleges must spike tuition costs, which are up close to 1000% since Reagan took office. This unfairly shifts the cost of education to the individual and once again the loss of the public good is felt at all levels, meanwhile the rich keep getting richer and they pay little taxes to help share the burden and to embody what it means to be a good neighbor. It is time we did our part in keeping the 1% accountable to the very society that gave them the opportunity to succeed in the first place. If we fail to do this soon we won't even remember that we were once a democracy at all.
Bill Cosby’s gross corporate lesson: What NBC’s reaction reveals about rape & money Charges of serial predation didn't seem to bother the comedian's network -- until a whole new set of concerns arose KATIE MCDONOUGH According to a report from Variety, NBC is currently facing “mounting pressure” to drop a sitcom in the works with alleged serial rapist Bill Cosby. The allegations that Cosby drugged and raped more than a dozen women are not new, but the network’s apparent unease about working with a reported sexual predator is very much a recent development. Why is that, exactly? For the same reason that the NFL continues to egregiously and unapologetically fumble its handling of domestic violence among its players, from Ray Rice to Adrian Peterson. Because the press got intolerably bad. NBC hasn’t confirmed whether it will cancel the project with Cosby, but you can imagine what the backlash might look like if the deal holds. The show was being pitched as a “domestic comedy,” with Cosby as the beloved patriarch overseeing a multi-generational family of children, in-laws and grandchildren. For some viewers, the yuppie bohemian allure of “Parenthood” may be marred by the fact that, in real life, Zeek Braverman is aright-wing banana brain, but asking audiences to swallow humorous life advice from a man who is reported to have drugged and raped 14 women (and counting) is probably a stretch. The public, it seems, is turning against Cosby. Risk alienating viewers, and advertisers get nervous. Watch enough television and you can probably predict the commercials that would run with a show like what’s in the works for Cosby. Kids eating cereal, moms using cleaning supplies, dads smiling in sport utility vehicles. But I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find a company that wants to attach its brand to an alleged serial rapist at the precise moment the public is catching wise to the allegations against him. And if talking about NBC’s calculus around working with an alleged serial rapist in terms of advertising dollars grosses you out, that’s probably because it’s really gross. But it’s also really, you know, real. The allegations against Cosby have reached an unprecedented level of visibility in recent weeks. A viral bit from comedian Hannibal Buress reignited the entire conversation. Another woman has come forward saying that she was drugged and assaulted by the comedian. The Washington Post ran an editorial from Barbara Bowman, who has unflinchingly shared her for a decade. This weekend, NPR host Scott Simon did what so many others in the media have refused to do by asking Cosby to comment on the startling number of allegations against him. It’s clear that public awareness has shifted as a result of all of this media attention, but I’m going to guess here that NBC hasn’t learned much that it didn’t already know going into the project. What changed is how mad the public seemed about it. The same could be said for how the NFL, and particularly its clown/villain hybrid of a commissioner Roger Goodell, has opted to handle the issue of domestic violence within its ranks. After a dizzying process of penalizing and not penalizing Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, a man who stuffed leaves in his 4-year-old son’s mouth while he beat him with a switch, Goodell suspended Peterson without pay for the remainder of the season. Goodell’s stated reason? To prioritize the safety of Peterson’s son and send a message that the player’s lack of remorse around his physical abuse is unacceptable, out of line with the league’s values. But anyone who has been paying attention to Goodell, even one second of attention, knows this penalty is more about Goodell’s self-image and the league’s reputation with advertisers than any gesture at safety or accountability for victims of abuse. Now here’s the part that feels tricky, at least for me. I want NBC to drop Cosby’s sitcom. I want NBC to have never even considered the sitcom in the first place, since these allegations have been a damning part of the public record for a decade now. I want to exist in a culture that sends a message about not working with serial predators. Likewise, I want the NFL to take action to sanction Peterson for brutalizing his child, just as I want the league to take action against any player who assaults another person. But I am also so weary of empty gestures that don’t address the root problems and allow massive corporations to escape the kind of accountability that might stop them from, say, working with a serial predator in the future or, say, pressuring victims of domestic violence to stay quiet and arbitrarily wielding its power to protect its bottom line. I am tired of obscenely wealthy corporations thinking the public is stupid, beyond easy to placate. In addition to seeing Cosby dropped, I want to see the network take responsibility for ignoring these allegations until this week. I want some explanation from producers Mike O’Malley and Mike Sikowitz about why, exactly, they didn’t think they warranted consideration until it became a brand crisis. Or why network entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt said allegations that Cosby drugged and raped more than a dozen women (“the other things”) would just “sort themselves out.” I don’t want a sanctimonious letter from Roger Goodell chastising Adrian Peterson. I want a transparent agreement to be negotiated between the NFL Players Association and league executives that will lay out how it will handle these issues moving forward, so that victims will have a sense of safety and protocol if they need to report abuse, regardless if there are criminal charges. I want the NFL to give millions and millions of dollars of its absurd wealth — on a reoccurring basis — to prevention and assistance programs that, unlike Roger Goodell, know how to do this work. I want, perhaps more than anything, for people to matter more than money. For humanity to prevail, even when advertisers aren’t circling.
A Cautionary Note to the 1%: Workers at a tea plantation in eastern India have killed the owner during negotiations over a pay dispute. The owner of the Sonali tea estate in West Bengal was dragged out of talks on the payment of arrears. He died after being beaten up and stabbed by a crowd. Police say the owner had come to pacify angry workers who had reportedly not been paid for two or three months. Correspondents say many workers in India's tea plantations are malnourished and poorly paid. Several incidents of attacks on tea executives by workers have been reported in recent years. In 2012 a tea plantation owner and his wife were burned to death in the neighbouring state of Assam.
This is not news... employees kill business owners nearly every week in India. It is a common occurrence.