The Corporate Shill -- The Buying and Selling of Jared Diamond

[Octafish]

We live in truly perilous times. If we continue to let the little turd from Crawford and his cronies have their way, the planet is kaput.



While We the People need the press to do their Constitutional duty and get off the propaganda bandwagon, they continue to sound off like the turds responsible will come up with a plan -- like carbon credits and whatever PR can buy them. Case in point:

The Corporate Shill

The Buying and Selling of Jared Diamond

By STEPHANIE McMILLIAN
CounterPunch
Dec. 8, 2009

On December 6th the New York Times published an outrageous op-ed piece by corporate cheerleader Jared Diamond, who states, “I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.” The examples he provides? Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron.

His title asks, “Will Big Business Save the Earth?” That’s not a difficult question to answer: No. No, big business will not save the Earth. Instead of being honest, though, Diamond, answers the question in the affirmative and subjects us to a poorly-argued, mind-warping, illogical and denial-drenched apology for some of the most destructive corporations that curse our planet with their existence.

His overall argument doesn’t hold up to even the most casual scrutiny. He spends the whole column arguing that we shouldn’t hate big corporations because market forces are causing them to make changes to help the planet. “Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run.” He attempts to show that Wal-Mart, Coca Cola and Chevron are transforming their production practices to reflect their concern for the natural world (and that this also improves their bottom line, so it’s a big win-win).

His actual agenda is revealed in the last paragraph, which is partly a plea for the government to give corporations incentives like tax breaks and money for research to facilitate these changes. But if they’re already modifying production practices to help the environment because that is good for profits, then why do they require incentives? I don’t get it.

Mainstream liberal environmentalist groups lack credibility among real environmentalists for many reasons, one of which is the presence of corporate executives on their boards, and another of which is the huge amounts of money that they accept from corporations. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, landed a $3 million contract with Chevron in the early 1990s to implement an “Integrated Conservation and Development Project” in Papua New Guinea, where Chevron’s oil drilling was vehemently resisted by the affected indigenous people. (See “Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond Greenwasher”).

CONTINUED with LINKS...

http://www.counterpunch.org/mcmillian12082009.html

There are so many ways to lie. It's the opposite of "WMDs in Iraq!"

Seriously: I don't mean to sound alarmist or anything, but do you really think Dick Cheney is going to share his undisclosed location with you?

[Deja Q]

1. Makiong proper products that don't need to be replaced every 18 months due to poor design

would go a lot longer toward proper resource usage than our "disposable society filled with disposable people" mantra...

Just saying...

[Octafish]

2. Agree. We need sustainability in design.

Architect William McDonough put a green roof on top of the Ford Rouge plant and made the water flowing out of the place cleaner than when it came in.

If we weren't so busy paying Blackwater and the rest of the warmongery, maybe we'd have some money for granting this office's applicants: Sustainable Design Program

[Hannah Bell]

25. but it's more profitable to make shit products that break down & get thrown away quickly, you see.

i have an alarm clock, iron & flashlight from the 50s. all working fine.

there's a light bulb somewhere that's burned nearly since the time of edison, too.

it's not like corps don't have the technology to make such products, but they're not good for profits.

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. Sometimes the errand boys are easy to pick out

Jared Diamond wears his lack of ethics like a crown.

[Octafish]

5. I didn't know anything about the guy.

Glad to say.

The New York Times, yeah. Well...

Download PDFs, while we still can, of some accurate history:

Lies of Our Times

[amborin]

4. he gives his dept a bad name

his last book was so shabby

and 'guns, germs, and steel' wasn't that great either

[Octafish]

7. Corporate McPravda looks the other way when it comes to connecting pollution and breast cancer...

Overlooking Evidence - Media ignore environmental connections to breast cancer

[amborin]

9. well, more research needs to be done, clearly

my mother died from breast cancer; eating meat, particularly beef, has to rank up there in possible causes, though that might upset the beef industry; and all those face creams have a lot of crap in them.

lymphoma certainly seems to have possible environmental links

[Octafish]

12. I am truly sorry, amborin. Please accept my deepest sympathies.

My wife's mom died of lung cancer. We're in Michigan, in a part of the state hit hard by a cluster of cancer cases. Many of our friend's and their families have suffered from breast cancer and other forms of the illness. One friend who lost both her mom and her best friend started a not-for-profit organization to raise awareness of the link between environmental pollution and public health:

Local Motion brought in great speakers and top scientists to talk about the latest research and what people need to know about chemicals in the home, neighborhood and stores. A lot of their work is available online.

[amborin]

18. thank you!

i think she ate too much meat, and the water in so cal is notoriously bad

[leftstreet]

24. That article is startling

What a complicated dance the M$M engages in to avoid reporting this

[Posteritatis]

8. GGS put a bunch of neat ideas/questions in my head

It's way too geographically-deterministic, though, and I keep hearing howls of rage about his research practices and arguments from the anthropology community regarding his subsequent books. One of my best friends is doing a PhD in archaeology at the moment and turns all sorts of interesting colors when his name comes up.

I certainly don't regret reading GGS, especially when I did (about a year into my history BA). It got me thinking a lot more about the impacts of geography, technology, epidemiology, etc., upon various histories. At the same time, I'm pretty careful to take some of the questions raised more seriously than the somewhat excessively-sweeping answers he suggests now and then.

[amborin]

13. agree, g,g, and s was a good read!

lots of fascinating theories

it's just that the way he presents evidence for his hypotheses is a bit lame in many places

the book after that, whose name escapes me, was particularly shoddily thrown together

[Posteritatis]

21. Collapse? Yeah, I never finished reading that one. (nt)

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

6. This is kind of like a wannabe McCarthyism, isn't it?

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the corporatist party?

[Octafish]

10. That's not what I meant, but that's not a bad idea and I like NASA.

My concern is that the nation's news media aren't doing their job of informing the citizenry of the problems the planet and nation face. Case in point is NYT showing their hand. Here's a bit of what they've missed:

NASA's Assault On The Ozone Layer

By Christian Parenti
Lies of Our Times
September, 1993

On April 8, 1993, Florida's night sky was
pierced by the fiery arc of the space shuttle Discovery,
burning its way to the stratosphere on a mission to
"study the ozone layer". What did Discovery find up
there? As usual, not much ozone. And what did the
media report? Just about every mundane detail
imaginable, but not a word about the most startling fact
of all, that the shuttle vehicle itself, sent to measure the
depletion of ozone, is an important destroyer of ozone.

The National Toxics Campaign, which
obtains much of its information from the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) itself,
reports that three shuttle launches release as much
ozone-destroying chlorine into the atmosphere as the
single largest industrial producer of chloroflorocarbons
(CFCs) generates in a year. The annual output of
DuPont's West Virginia facility is 800,000 pounds of
CFCs, which contain 450,000 pounds of chlorine.
Each shuttle launch deposits 150,000 pounds of
chlorine into the stratosphere, according to NASA.
NASA now averages about nine shuttle flights a year,
making it the single largest destroyer of ozone in the
U.S.

Because the shuttle burns solid, not liquid,
rocket fuel, it leaves hydrogen chloride in its wake.
This is quickly broken down into hydrogen and
chlorine. In the lower atmosphere, hydrogen chloride
becomes an ingredient in acid rain and the chlorine
does its damage in ways that spare the ozone layer. But
when chlorine is released as a byproduct of solid
rocket fuel combustion, the chemical is dumped high
in the sky, where it goes straight to work on the earth's
protective ozone shield.

Media Don't Make the Connection

A recent sampling of articles in the _New
York Times_ and the _Boston Globe_ in the U.S. and
_The Independent_, _The Guardian_, and the
_Financial Times_ in England revealed that none of
these papers mentioned the fact that the shuttle's solid
rocket fuel is hamrful to the ozone layer. While stories
of shuttle liftoffs and landings often appeared on the
front page, none linked the flights to the reports of
unprecedentedly low levels of stratospheric ozone,
which were relegated to the inside pages--3 inches in
_The Guardian_ on page 5 (April 23, 1993), 6 inches
in the _Boston Globe_ on page 22 (April 18), and a
comparatively generous article in the _New York
Times_ on page B7 positioned just above a feature on
the discovery of dinosaur fossils (April 15.)

Blaming Individuals is a Coverup

The media's lack of interest in NASA's adversarial
relationship with the environment is indicative of the
mainstream media's standard approach to the ozone crisis
itself. Most of the media in the U.S. and England continue to
treat the issue of ozone depletion in an overly measured
way that fails to portray the urgency and magnitude of
the problem. Ozone depletion thus becomes just one more
bothersome aspect of modern living, like litter, noise pollution,
or graffiti.

Framing the global ozone crisis in terms of individuals
helps to bury the problem. Americans are regularly chided by
corporate media for environmentally unsound practices such as
owning airconditioners that use CFCs as a coolant. Or else the
public is informed that replacing CFCs presents "difficult
tradeoff(s)" and that it will be "more than an inconvenience" (John
Holusha, "Ozone Issue: Economics of a Ban," _New York Times_,
January 11, 1990, p. D1). But when it comes to corporate or
government responsibility--such as the intransigence of the DuPont
company (which holds the patent on CFCs and is dragging its
feet on abandoning these ubiquitous chemicals) or NASA's
hypocrisy--the presses fall silent.

The consequences of the ozone crisis are presented in
the same individualistic terms. One EPA study even went so
far as to estimate the costs Americans may incur due to increased
solar radiation's damaging effects on plastic lawn furniture. Many
articles in the U.S. press mention increased incidence of cataracts
and melanoma, but fail to point out the broader implications and
ultimate consequences of ozone destruction (e.g., Clare Collins,
_New York Times_, August 11, 1991, sect. 12, p. 3).

CONTINUED...

http://funpeople.org/1993/1993AIP.html

The sooner we get crackin' on solving the world's problems, the better.

[anonymous171]

14. That wouldn't be such a bad idea. nt

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

15. OK, you have no shame or sense of decency.

But then I already knew that.

[anonymous171]

11. How dare they!? Don't they know that he wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel"?

A fact which automatically makes his article immune to criticism from anyone who has not read all of his books.

[Octafish]

16. Did they ever read Stanislaw Lem? Jorge Luis Borges? John Boyd?

They still need to. And they need to know that the planet is getting to the point where big changes are going to mess up a lot of places in a lot of ways we're just begining to see. Like Hawai'i:

As seas rise, time running out on Hawaii’s beaches

For other places, like Bangladesh, it's worse. There, millions of people farm the land near the sea. Once it goes salty, they can't raise rice. And India's created a border fence to help keep out any future refugees.

India builds a 2,500-mile barrier to rival the Great Wall of China

We gotta get on the stick, or else it's lights-out for everyone without the means to survive a couple of years without food.

[amborin]

17. I just read Diamond's article

and kind of agree

he starts out making the realistic (pragmatic?) point that, since we live in America, inc., it will be corporations that play a major role in combatting global climate change

i mean, given corps rule the world, if we want to combat global climate change, they have to be part of it, right?

they have to be on board; and he's simply giving examples of some that have made some tiny steps toward energy conservation

corporations have to see the economic benefit before they make changes

i mean, until the revolution occurs, this seems to be true

(especially when so many people, including folks on this web site, argue that the economy trumps environmental concerns (i don't agree))

but---i'm tired so maybe i'm not reading it correctly!

[Octafish]

19. Corporations used to have to obey the law.

Today they own the lawmakers and the top brass.

That has got to change.

We've tried shaming them out.

We've tried shouting them out.

We've tried ordering them out.

We've tried voting them out.

And yet... nothing happens.

Looks like we're going to have to kick them out.

[bridgit]

20. Why We Fight, indeed! Is it only for Madison Ave? For Richard Perle's crepe & high-dollar wine list?

Rumsfeld was provided a snap from space at night and asked what the image represented to him


Insofar as the lighted areas; he was able to wax rather poetically as to beacons of learning, progress, industry, civilization, humanity. When asked as to the darkened areas...he changed, just like that, offering cold sardonic antithetical counterpoints: unenlightened, uncivilized to all other rosy scenarios with ulterior tags: worthless, inferior, inhuman too easy to read between

It's PR's job to convince all comers that some of the most violent oppressions, wars of religious fundamentalism; left/right, east/west, north/south - fascism - all lit up cozy & warm and corporate no-bid crony rapes of the natural world *do not* continue to this day

It's PR's job to convince all comers that if in the event such matters are flushed out - that they will continue to be the thus, and likely for some time to come yet. So have a Coke, a Pepsi, a Mountain Dew the choice is yours you are free while wherein those very darkened areas the annexing, thieving, waring for scarce/finite resources that will be made to *light* the cherry-wood boardrooms in the lit areas and the desk lamps under which many of these plans are drawn daily - all of it will continue. And that that is a form of "winning" so have a Ding Dong too

It's PR's job to convince all comers that a light switch is just a light switch and it does not matter in the least, where it was made

The ghost of Sam Walton says, "I need more Super WalMarts in that darkness right there"

Coca-cola says, "The darkness is thirsty"

And Chevron says, "Fuck You!! We were here first!"

[Octafish]

22. Carlyle Group bought Dr. Pepper for those very reasons.

Power to gain Profit. Profit to gain Power.



Rumsfeld and his 'old friend' Saddam

Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984

Thank you for cluing me in on Rumsferatu's take on the planet's light pollution. Please tell more. Exploring the psychopathy of a warmonger always makes me feel, somehow, better, eh, superior.

The warmongering turd can wax eloquent on the civilized parts because he serves its owners. How long did the Iran-Iraq war last? A lot longer than it needed to, thanks to Poppy and War Inc. The black hearted scut and Rumseratu laugh to think that the large majority of the world has to fight over their crumbs. And thanks to the traitors and thieves they serve, the people of the United States have joined that competition for the crumbs.



Perhaps, instead, let's bell the cat. Then let's get the cat to play in the street.

[lostnfound]

23. Beautiful.

and by the way, Jung is a favorite genius for me.