The Great Corporate Bodycount

Almost one person in three is now killed by big business.

That’s the finding of an horrific new report by the Center to End Corporate Harm, at the University of California, San Francisco and published in a world-leading medical journal.

The study found that 31% of all human deaths are attributable to just five major corporate products: fossil fuels, tobacco, highly-processed foods, industrial chemicals and alcohol.

Almost 22 million people die each year from the products of these five industries – which is at least double the annual death rate in World War II.

“Transnational corporations that manufacture and market health-harming products are a primary vector for the global increase in mortality related to noncommunicable diseases,” the researchers said.

“They make products and expose people to these products or influence their consumption, which results in health harms.”

Sales of the deadly products have grown substantially worldwide, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, intensified by globalisation, the study found.

The paper underwent unusually comprehensive legal and scientific vetting before the New England Journal of Medicine agreed to publish it, lead author Dr Nicholas Chartres of the University of Sydney said.

The report acknowledged that corporations are legally bound to deliver a return to their shareholder – but noted this was often at a huge cost in human life and health.

Furthermore, the corporations invested large sums of money in trying to compel governments into letting them continue their homicidal practices – the resistance by the tobacco lobby to anti-smoking campaigns and the resistance of oil companies to clean air laws being prominent examples. This gave corporations de facto control over public policy, laws and regulation in many countries.

Research has shown that these industries have known for decades of the harm and deaths their products cause – but have fought tooth-and-nail any efforts by government or the public to reduce the death toll and other social and physical harms.

The Centre also announced it has created an industry library containing more than 24 million documents from the six health-harming industries. This enables people to understand the mechanisms and tactics used by the industries to evade public scrutiny, mislead public discussion and poison the policymaking process.

The documentation also clearly links the industries to cancers, adverse birth outcomes, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, brain and nerve disorders among other health problems.

It shows that corporations typically use three strategies to bamboozle government and the public:

· Knowledge capture: in which corporations try to suppress unfavourable science results and carry out their own research to deflect blame from their products.

· Regulatory capture: the use of “front groups” and “revolving door” access to government to corrupt the political process and conscript politicians.

· Public disinformation: deploying insidious and pervasive marketing and “unbranded” campaigns targeting vulnerable populations, including children.

The report makes it clear that most governments have been taken prisoner by transnational corporations to the point of suppressing laws that can save lives, blocking new ones and generally confounding public discourse with fake information.

It offers a range of possible counter-measures including:

· Mobilising the influence of the medical and healthcare industries to fight the tidalwave of disease and premature death unleashed by corporates

· Exposing research funded by corporates it to public scrutiny

· Imposing academic standards of honesty and transparency on all research carried out by or for corporations

· Outlawing financial ties and conflicts of interest between industry and science

· New rules to safeguard public policymaking from corporate pressures.

“Corporations and their allies, both individually and collaboratively, have undermined science and policymaking to prioritize profits over health,” the report concludes.

Comment:

Despite its brave attempt to document the mass slaying and injury of people worldwide in the name of shareholder value, the UCSF study fails to draw the obvious conclusion: that premeditated mass murder on a global scale is now a crime without equal in human history.

It also fails to recognise another evident trend – that corporations are rapidly becoming far more powerful than governments, even the largest ones. Of the world’s largest 100 economic entities, 69 are corporations and 31 are nations. Unless curbed, they will continue to harm and kill far and wide in ever increasing numbers, knowing full well what they are doing.

Since premeditated mass murder is a crime, it needs to be declared as such under International Law, and offenders duly prosecuted at the International Criminal Court. These offenders must include the directors, chairs, major shareholders, CEOs, CFOs and senior executives of each corporation. In almost every case it can be shown that they had detailed foreknowledge of the lethal effects of their products – and often chose to keep producing the bad ones rather than switch to safer or greener ones, for reasons of simple greed.

These individuals will all doubtless plead the Nuremburg Defence: “I was only following orders from the shareholders.” It follows that, if guilty, they should receive the Nuremberg penalties in due course.

This also raises the question of the culpability of the customers and consumers in the killing – for they too are beneficiaries, who generate primary demand for deadly products.

This being the case, it is surprising that the UCSF did not devote more attention to consumer education, consumer boycotts and shareholder rebellions as tools for disciplining conscienceless corporations.

Consumer education is essential to reducing the death toll, by making citizens more aware of the most dangerous products, so that they avoid buying them and so protect their own and their family’s lives.

And shareholder education should be compulsory for every share transaction, so shareholders cannot go on pretending to themselves it is just about money, and they do not know the consequences. We require driver training to prevent road deaths – why not with corporate deaths too?

Consumer boycotts are also proving highly effective at bringing attention to recidivist corporates who think they can get away with murder. There is nothing they fear more than the judgement of the marketplace. Trying to contain them legislatively in 196 different countries is a mug’s game. They must be pursued at global level, for global crimes.

While the world trembles at the brink of WWIII, it is time to realise another, more deadly war has long been under way.