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-UE
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I thought the same. It pretty much depends which bully is closer.
In order to commemorate Memorial Day
I've decided to do a quick little write-up on Ford and Coca-Cola, the most American of companies.
Ford was founded by, of course, Henry Ford. Henry Ford was a genius who innovated the manufacturing industry with his radical approches to construction of his automobiles. He was also a huge racist.
Yeah, it's really no surprise that Ford was anti-Semitic. He's one of the most famous racists of the 20th century, in fact. But what most people don't know is that this didn't stop just at his opinions. He financed a newspaper, The Independent, for eight years, and had this paper print The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which had been known to be a forgery for quite some time. He also printed stories about how the Jews had started the First World War, and how they had planted bombs in U.S. merchant ships to make it seem like the Germans had torpedoed them.
Continuing this theme of supporting Germany no matter what, he had the German arm of Ford, Ford-Werke, employ hundreds of British and French POWs during WWII in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Adolph Hitler was a huge fan of Ford, and had a very large portrait of him in his office. He also owned a well-read copy of The International Jew, a series of treatises published in The Independent that accused Jews of engineering the Great Depression because Jews love money!!! The International Jew, in fact, was one of the main tenets of the philosophy that Hitler used to justify the Final Solution. Distributed in Germany almost as much as Protocols and Mein Kampf were, it was one of the most influential anti-Semitic documents of the century. Ford is also the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf, denied Jews the use of his cars, and received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany's highest honor, in 1938.
Also, Ford has over 54 toxic Superfund sites in the United States, and its policy of dumping wherever it wanted to has led to thousands of deaths.
But surprise surprise, Ford wasn't the only American company collaborating with Nazis! Coca-Cola got in on that sweet death camp action by employing slaves in its German factories. Unlike Ford, it continues to employ human suffering by using extremely unhealthy levels of pesticides in its Indian factories and using up valuable groundwater. There are literally towns in places like India where there isn't any clean water, but there are Coca-Cola vending machines. And if you think "Well, at least Coke is giving you something to drink," consider that it takes 9 liters of water to create one liter of Coke.
Coca-Cola has also had a large presence in the apartheid regimes in South Africa. Know that there have been upwards of a dozen murders in its plants around the world and hundreds of human rights violations, and Coke has yet to answer for any of them. And, of course, its use of actual cocaine in the product for decades helped fuel the violent Colombian drug market.
Happy Memorial Day!
e: Okay, maybe I was a little unfair to Ford up there. The man was racist, to be sure, but he was also kind of crazy. He sent Pinkerton men to violently break up unions but at the same time instituted a 40-hour work week and increased wages at his factories. These were both mostly to make his workers happier, because he felt that happier workers made better products and made them faster. His hate from unions stemmed from the fact that he felt they were controlled by DAS JUDEN! When this proved unpopular with his shareholders, he went to court arguing that he had a greater duty to his community and country than to his shareholders. This being early 1900s America, he lost. He also went even more insane in his later years, to the point where he was basically a figurehead after 1940. The man was terrible, but interesting.
You forgot, IIRC, IBM. They supplied Germans with computing machines to count all the Jews they gassed.
I wasn't originally planning on doing an exposé on the media industry because of how ridiculously broad it is and also because it tends to lead to conspiracy theorizing, but this image is far too great for me to pass up and sums up the problem far better than I ever could. (Also, I'm pretty busy, which is why there hasn't been a new installment in a while.)
Do you have anything on who controls the Global Media?
In b4 Jews.
Murdoch is probably in there somewhere.
No doubt, but one likes to hope that the Global Media is more diverse than the US media.
...what am I supposed to do about any of this?
Not every discussion about a problem is a personal exhortation for you to do something about it, Don.
Oh look, people doing bad things!
So what else is new?
Eelektross - it actually is a fairly recent trend for it to be that homogenized if that chart is anything to go by. Recent in the long term as in since the 80s there have been a ton of mergers and acquisitions.
But also hell man, being apathetic about bad shit going on out there doesn't do anybody any good. Sure you can't really do much, but it's helpful to have the information about it.
The chart is also slightly simplified. For example, rather than owning NFL.com in totality, CBS has a sponsorship deal going on with the NFL that works similarly to how Time Warner and CBS play the schedule.
Murdoch is probably in there somewhere.
He owns the top newspaper on three continents! (I was really not expecting the Sun to be the biggest newspaper in Europe. C'mon Brits, you can do better than that. Just listen to Liverpool.)
New update is coming soon, I promise.
By the way, what's so bad about that Mrs. Robinson song?
Nothing really. It's just a lovely example how this sort of media stranglehold lets things stagnate and make everybody experience the same thing for years on end.
If I recall, that whole stranglehold is why those companies keep trying to lobby for laws that greatly restrict the internet. Because it allows people to access a plethora of media that the main 6 don't control, along with information, which threatens their stranglehold
Mining/Minerals/Extraction
Blood Diamonds isn't a very good movie. It is, however, a rather good indictment of the diamond industry and how atrocious it treats its workers, from beatings to child slavery. What many people don't know, however, is that diamonds are completely and totally worthless.
There are literally warehouses all across the world full of diamonds. But they can't be sold. Russia sits on top of one of the world's largest diamond deposits. But they don't mine it. This is in order to artificially strangle the global diamond market, jacking up the prices of what really shouldn't be anything other than a particularly shiny piece of carbon. And this has been known for decades and decades.
Enter De Beers. It was founded in 1871 by a man named Cecil Rhodes. After diamonds were first found in South Africa, Rhodes used money from the goddamned Rothschilds to buy up smaller farmers' claims and build the world's first modern mining company. A little side note on Rhodes: he founded the colony of Rhodesia in his name and also helped to fund the Niger Oil Company. Classy guy, that Rhodes.
Anyway, he began the company's corporate policy by creating a massive monopoly; by 1902 De Beers controlled 90% of the global diamond market. They did so by claiming that their diamonds were "special" and, when other companies refused to be bought out by them or yield their diamond fields, they flooded the market with diamonds falsely labeled as their competitor's. Yes, this was illegal back then, too. They also began the major association of diamonds with romance, actually coining the phrase "Diamonds are forever" in 1947. Their quest to keep their own diamond market artificially dry was so single-minded that they prevented the United States from getting industrial diamonds critical to the war effort in WWII. Ernest Oppenheimer (not to be confused with the bomb guy) proposed that they could get around this by violating the Sherman Antitrust Act instead of, y'know, giving up just a fraction of a sliver of their massive diamond stockpiles.
The diamond industry writ large has, of course, contributed massively to the conflict mineral industry, where tensions between local people are exploited and controlled in order to gain more access to precious minerals. For example, De Beers has been trying to force the Bushman peoples of Botswana off of their land for thirty years. They have refused, and De Beers has responded by beginning to kill them in secret. Since this is the only place in the world the tribe lives, it is considered genocide by the group Survival International.
In the 1980s, De Beers was partially bought out by another British mining corporation named Anglo American. They have continued basically the same practices that De Beers employs, such as conflict instigation and environmental degradation. Special mention, however, goes out to the time that they bought out the South African newspaper Rand Daily Mail, which was crucial in exposing the world to the attempts of the South African government to create a pro-Apartheit propaganda campaign. When the Rand Daily Mail reported on the death of Stephen Biko in a hunger strike against the Apartheit government, they quietly tried to suppress the only media outlet in South Africa providing critical, in-depth reporting.
BHP Billiton has tried to kill anti-mining activists in Papau New Guinea; ALROSA contributed extensively to the Icelandic financial crisis; Harry Winston constructed oil pipelines against the wishes of the Canadian government. There seems to be a pattern of these companies caring neither about the environment nor the local population. But there's a special place in hell for a few other of these companies, including De Beers, because what they've done is pretty fucking hellish.
Lev Leviev
Vale
Freeport-McMoRan
Rio Tinto (this one's a long one)
Note that in 1998, Rio Tinto was given an award for their ethical behavior by the Worldaware Foundation. The foundation is funded by a sugar-processing company, Tate & Lyle, and ceased to exist in 2005.
Also note that the corporation is named after the Rio Tinto in Spain, a river used for mining purposes for centuries and which constantly runs with the color of rust and is unable to support life aside from bacteria.
For more information:
^For what it's worth, the people running De Beers don't enter the US because they'd be arrested on sight.
Source?
Actually, I looked at Wikipedia and apparently that's outdated now that the antitrust trial has settled, so
heh
antitrust suits meaning anything
that's funny
Antitrust? I hardly knew 'er!
What should happen is that De Beers should have all their diamonds from them and any puppet companies prevented from coming in, and the second the people responsible step into ANY UN country, they get arrested and put on trial (possibly for war crimes? Not entirely sure how those work)