The 5 Most Horrifying
Things Corporations Are Taking Over
http://www.cracked.com/article_19274_the-5-most-horrifying-things-corporations-are-taking-over.html
By:Kathy
Benjamin July 08, 2011 It's
true that a part of us dies every time we see Dr. Dre doing Dr. Pepper
commercials, but in reality we've pretty much accepted that "selling
out" is a part of life. Everybody needs to get paid, right?
But sometimes corporate
sellouts involve more than cringe-worthy ads and intrusive product placement.
This is when selling out starts to get just a bit horrifying.
#5. The Military
It's kind of hard to
trash talk mercenaries when The A-Team made it clear that next to being an
astronaut fireman, there's just about nothing as cool as being a soldier of
fortune.
Still, it's one thing to hire a four-man army of mercenaries to get your
watermelon crop to market, but it's quite another to hire over 100,000 private
contractors to run everything from security detail to weapons training to air
surveillance of your enemies.
The Sellout: When the U.S. military is stretched too
thin, private firms like Blackwater and DynCorp have graciously offered to fill
in the gaps. They're kind of like substitute teachers, except instead of kicking
up their heels, reading trashy romance novels and snacking on CornNuts, these
substitutes are kicking up their heels and doing some Abu Ghraibing, accidental
murdering and sex slave trafficking.
Since 2000, Blackwater
alone has received at least $600 million in contracts from the CIA and over a
billion dollars from the federal government. In all, 90 percent of their total
revenue comes from United States government contracts. So what do they do with
all that money? The exact same thing the military does -- security, training,
humanitarian aid and jogging in time to singsong rhymes.
The problem, though, is oversight.
Normally, the military is accountable to the government; the minute a marine
screws up, a whole can of procedural hell is opened up. Not so with private security companies,
which was why when Blackwater contractors killed 17 unarmed civilians in
September 2007, no one was quite sure what to do about it. And why when a
former employee was accused of murder, Blackwater founder Erik Prince said all
they could do was fire him. And probably why the same accused murderer was free
and available for other private contractors to get him armed and back in the
Middle East within months of the incident. Via Qwiki.com
Not only are the repercussions of dirty
dealings murky for private contractors, but also for a while there the guys
were pretty much immune from Iraqi law. The fact that private security
companies have to start playing by some vague rules that aren't exactly spelled
out is the good news. The bad news is that once official troops finally start
getting out of Iraq, the number of private contractors is expected to triple.
#4. Prisons The idea behind privatizing
things that used to be run by the government is that private companies tend to
do jobs more efficiently. Walmart gets you through the checkout line way faster
than the DMV gets you a new license.
So, when privately run prisons started popping up, it seemed to make
sense; if a corporation can guard, house and feed prisoners more efficiently
than the government, why not let them? "Wait, it doesn't cost anything to set those
chains on fire, right?"
The Sellout: As a society, you kind of want there to
be fewer prisoners. Prison is about the most expensive possible way to deal
with a person who is doing something you don't like. But if you're a company
getting paid by the prisoner, well, you want the opposite.
So, remember Arizona's
controversial anti-illegal immigrant law, which required immigrants over the
age of 14 to carry their papers at all times? And how getting caught without
proper documentation would get them up to 20 days in jail on the first offense?
Actually, illegal immigrants are probably relieved about the 20-day thing,
since the first version of the law allowed for up to six months in jail. Now, we're not interested in
debating immigration policy or border safety. But chew on the first draft of
that law for a second. Six months in jail, when it costs somewhere in the
neighborhood of $62 a day to house an inmate, and when Arizona claims to have
somewhere in the neighborhood of 460,000 illegal immigrants. Someone was going
to have to house a whole bunch of unNorth American Americans. "Can we just stick them in
some ... slums and harass them when they try to leave? Has anyone thought of
that yet?" It's a good thing
a for-profit prison company had a plan! They didn't just have a plan, they were
the driving force behind the law itself. According to this investigation, the
Corrections Corporation of America, a publicly traded billion-dollar company
that imprisons people for profit, helped draft SB 1070 because "immigrant
detention is their next big market." They added, "We're also considering ... up some
babies." Before the bill was
ever introduced to legislators, before you or anyone in Arizona heard of it, a
group of businessmen and interest groups wrote it, named it and voted on in at
the Grand Hyatt hotel in Washington, D.C. -- not even in Arizona. And don't think that just because the
CCA had a heavy hand in writing the bill that they nobly recused themselves
from campaign donations or lobbying legislators, because of course they didn't.
Even better, a solid year before the bill passed, representatives from the
company started pitching a prison to house illegal women and children, since
women and children are clearly Arizona's number one perpetrators of
mayhem. What's so wrong with
prisons that make a little money? Nothing, except for two small things. One is
that private prisons are pretty [bad]... at their jobs. One private prison has
been accused of using beatings as a behavior management tool. At another
facility, an immigrant was left for 13 hours in solitary confinement after
suffering some sort of mysterious brain injury. He died not long after, and
family and friends are still in the dark about what happened to him in the
first place. Unfortunately,
we'll never know. Other private
prisons are accused of cutting corners to the point where the corners are no
longer corners -- they're just dilapidated knobs. They cut guard pay, food
quality, drug rehab programs, medical care and basic necessities like toilet
paper because, hey, why not?
#3. The News + Let's say you're an investigative
reporter. ..., let's say you work for Fox News. Now, let's say that you
are investigating an agriculture company, and you discover the company has a
stupid amount of synthetic bovine growth hormone in its milk. Which is
interesting because milk containing that particular hormone is banned all over
the developed world (except in the United States). So you make your report, do
your consequent 83 edits required by your news station, then, presumably
because your boss is the devil, you get asked to make it so the hormone sounds
as harmless as apple pie. Naturally you threaten to report your station to the
FCC. Then, for the sake of a good story, let's say you're fired and
subsequently blackballed from the media.
We'll say that, hypothetically, you're these two people. Or, pretend you work for the news
program 48 Hours and you do an expose on a certain big shoe company's (Nike's)
labor practices. When you try to update your report with a timely follow-up,
you're denied. When you try to respond to a nasty Wall Street Journal piece
about your report, you're denied. Two years later, the same station that aired
your report cuts a deal with Nike and lets their sports reporters sport
Nike-labeled parkas while reporting on the Olympics.
The Sellout: In both cases, major corporations,
specifically Monsanto and Nike, influenced the editorial content of news
programs. In the Fox News case, the story of Monsanto's hormone-enhanced milk
was hyped to the nines by the station, until Monsanto found out about it and
wrote to the president of Fox News. The reporters on the story, who refused to
downplay the presence of the hormone, were fired, but their story was aired in
the end -- wait, actually, the Monsanto version of their story was aired. In 2003, the Florida
Court of Appeals agreed that, yes, news media does have the right to lie about
everything. After all, why should politicians have all the fun? As for Nike, in 1998 Nike sponsored CBS
coverage of the Olympics in Japan, and part of the deal was that reporters
would wear Nike swooshed parkas while reporting. The same parkas that were presumably
made in the sweatshops Roberta Baskin of 48 Hours had exposed two years
earlier. Naturally, Baskin was
...[upset]. Especially since the upper brass hadn't let her follow up her Nike
story with relevant updates or rebut attacks on her investigation. To be fair,
CBS claimed the sponsorship in no way affected their coverage, and they did
digitally remove Nike labels from subsequent broadcasts. To be fairer, Roberta
was demoted, then granted a request to leave her contract. She quit CBS and
went to ABC where, on her first day, no joke, she got a letter from Disney
addressing her as a "fellow cast member."
#2. Doctors and
Hospitals
If you're anything like
over 25 percent of Americans in any given year, you get depressed every now and
then, maybe even depressed enough to be counted among the 10 percent of
Americans who are on antidepressants. The fact that such a large number of
people from the civilization that invented beer hats are blue enough to
medicate themselves is sad enough, but the bad news isn't over yet. For one thing, those cool pills your
doctor prescribes for your permanent case of the Mondays might not be the best
medication for your symptoms. They might just be the ones he was paid to shill,
in a roundabout way.
The Sellout:
While doctors cannot actually take money in exchange for prescribing a
certain company's drugs, they can be invited to conferences and put up in
expensive five-star hotels. And as people who rarely get to lodge anywhere but the
backseat of a Chevette in a Kmart parking lot, we can assure you that five-star
hotels can make a man do a lot of things. We'd shiv a three-legged dog for a
stay at a Motel 6, so it's not hard to see how luxury digs might persuade a guy
to shell out some happy pills. As for the conferences themselves, doctors are
bombarded with information about new drugs and medical equipment, and this
exposure makes it worth it for medical companies to pay millions to attend. Or,
better yet, to hire the doctors themselves to do the speaking as consultants.
In 2004, the U.S. government sued a company
called TAP for providing kickbacks to doctors for prescribing their medications
over others. The defense contended that it was "standard practice and not
illegal to offer freebies." And they won. There seems to be a fine line
though, because in May of 2011, another company lost their court case for doing
almost exactly the same thing. These wins are rare though, and are in fact so
difficult to obtain that recently the government changed tactics and is now
going after the doctors themselves. When most of us think of the college experience,
we think of illegal hazing and roofie avoidance, not the mundane stuff that
goes on behind the scenes. Which is why we probably forget that universities
aren't just host to ragin' keggers -- they're also often behind medical
breakthroughs and new technologies. For every couple of frat boys testing the
limits of vodka/energy drink consumption, there's a Dr. Brainiac on the cutting
edge of some world-changing something.
If you're one of those saps in the lab, you've got to get the funding
for your rabbit-man hybrid experiment from somewhere. Your options are limited:
you can apply for a government grant, or you can apply for a private grant.
Money doesn't grow on trees, and researchers need money to research. Dr. Janice McScience discovers
the circle, made possible with funding from people like you. But what if you're, say, a villain
company? And universities all over the country are looking for the fastest way
to plot your downfall? You know, like how lots of researchers are trying to
come up with "green" energy technologies that will drive the oil
companies out of business? Do you think they'll be as likely to trigger your
demise if you're giving them over $800 million for research?
The Sellout:
Big oil companies
like BP, Chevron and Conoco have donated at least that much money to colleges
across the country. Not just any colleges -- colleges that were studying
alternative energy sources and ways to curb greenhouse emissions. Birds and Oil: A Study of Their
Symbiotic Relationship. For
example, since 2002 ExxonMobil has donated over $225 million to Stanford to
fund research to "study technology to curb greenhouse gas emissions."
Of course this gift came with a planet-sized catch, the caveat being that the
panel that considers research proposals by the faculty be made up of oil
industry people, and that each panel member be named "Tex" or
"Rusty."
"The cowboy hat tells me your research on why electric cars murder
babies needs to be funded."
In 2007, BP funded a $500 million research center for green technology
at UC Berkeley. At least one professor went on record as saying he would find
his own damn funding rather than be subject to the demands of BP. Today he's
making amazing breakthroughs in the squirrel-powered rickshaw industry. Squirrel not included. For more corporate jerk-offery, check
out 6 Insane Conspiracies Hiding Behind Good Causes and 5 Hollywood Secrets
That Explain Why So Many Movies Suck.