Modernity's Corporate Plagues

North Americans suffer the ravages of three plagues induced largely by corporate advertising and marketing policies: COPD, obesity, and diabetes. The latter two are closely related in origin, and often accompany one another.

COPD -- chronic obstructive pulmonary disease -- is either emphysema, or chronic bronchitis, or both. It nearly always is the result of long-term cigarette smoking. Obesity and diabetes, both of which have increased dramatically in recent years, are mainly caused by bad diet, especially diets containing a lot of processed foods, and loaded with refined-flour carbohydrates which contain high-fructose corn syrup.

The prevalence of these diseases is a direct consequence of corporate advertising and marketing policies. It's not that the corporations who market these products are deliberately plotting to kill us, but more a matter of their not caring whether we live or die. A corporation never has a conscience, except for those rare ones that decide they need to acquire one, and the only thing they value is the bottom line.

I'm not obese nor diabetic, but I do suffer from emphysema. Looking back at the circumstances of my early youth, I have to conclude that I was the victim of a culturally imposed drug addiction, that the culture of advertising and the cult of machismo which prevailed at the time required it, and that the culture of smoking within my own family demanded it of me as well.

The power of big tobacco has been broken over the past couple decades, however, and news reports indicate that half the people who were once smokers have now quit. I consider myself fortunate to be numbered among them, and while full recovery isn't possible, a reasonably high quality of life is.

But huge agribusiness corporations such as Archer-Daniels-Midland carry on their lethal advertising and marketing practices which render greater and greater numbers of Americans and Canadians (and, increasingly, Europeans) fat, diabetic, and dangerously ill.

This is a political issue, and one more instance of an area in which we need to short-circuit the tyranny of capital, imposed upon us by the mass brainwashing of advertising, expose the culprits for who and what they are, and take control of our own lives back from them.