Last week, reports the New York Times, Toyota hit a milestone in its comeback, saying it was on pace to earn its biggest-ever annual profit in its current fiscal year. It is a rapid turnaround for a company that nearly lost its reputation for quality when millions of its cars were recalled for problems with unintended acceleration. Under its chief executive, Akio Toyoda, the company has hastened cost cuts, streamlined its global organization chart and increased its emphasis on newer models, flashy designs and fuel economy. The company has also continued to resolve lawsuits stemming from the recalls. While American automakers have made drastic comebacks since the recession, no car company has had a bigger revival than Toyota.
Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health
This week, Oxford University Press releases a new book by Corporations and Health Watch founder Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health at City University of New York School of Public Health and Hunter College. Here’s an excerpt from the Preface:
Never before in human history has the gap between the scientific and economic potential for better health for all and the reality of avoidable premature death been greater. In the past, babies died in infancy, women in childbirth, workers from injuries or occupational diseases, and people of all ages from epidemics of infectious disease exacerbated by inadequate nutrition, contaminated water, and poor sanitation. For the most part, the world lacked the resources and the understanding to eliminate these problems. As societies developed; as science, technology, and medicine advanced; and as people organized to improve their standards of living, more and more of the world’s population attained the living conditions that support better health and longer lives.
Today, the world still confronts the global health challenges of the last century. Epidemics of malaria, HIV infection, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases still threaten well-being and economic development in many poor countries. More than a billion people live in urban slums where the average lifespan can be 35 years, half of that in better-off places where residents have certain access to adequate nutrition, clean water, and sanitation.
Now new threats have emerged. Deaths from chronic conditions like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and stroke have surged, today accounting for more than 60 percent of the world’s deaths. Injuries have become the leading cause of death for young people around the world. Everywhere, from the wealthiest nations like the United States to the poorest countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the proportion of deaths from these causes of death are growing. These premature deaths and preventable illnesses and injuries impose new suffering on individuals, families, and communities. They burden economies and taxpayers and jeopardize the improvements in health brought about by the public health advances of the previous two centuries.
Alarmingly, these new epidemics are not the result of the poverty and squalid living conditions that caused illness and death in the past, even though chronic disease and injuries afflict the poor much more than the rich. Nor are they the result of ignorance and inadequate science. For the most part, we understand the causes of these illnesses and injuries enough to prevent them. What we lack is the political will to implement the needed preventive measures. Even worse, in some cases the growing health burden is the result of new science and technology, which have been used to promote profit rather than prevent illness. These new epidemics of chronic diseases and injuries are instead the consequence of what most people thought were the remedies for poverty-related ill health: economic growth, better standards of living, and more comfortable lifestyles.
While many factors contributed to this global health transformation, Lethal but Legal focuses on what I consider to be most important and most easily modifiable cause: the triumph of a political and economic system that promotes consumption at the expense of human health. In this book, I describe how this system has enabled industries like alcohol, automobiles, firearms, food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, and tobacco—pillars of the global consumer economy—to develop products and practices that have become the dominant cause of premature death and preventable illness and injuries. This system was born in the United States and has now spread around the world.
In a global economy that focuses relentlessly on profit, enhancing the bottom line of a few hundred corporations and the income of their investors has become more important than realizing the potential for good health that the world’s growing wealth and the advances in science, technology, and medicine have enabled. This tension between private accumulation and public well-being is not new. But in the twenty-first century, it has come to shape our economy and politics in ways that profoundly threaten democracy, human well-being, and the environment that supports life. Paradoxically, the increasing concentration of power in the small number of the world’s multinational corporations also presents new opportunities to create another healthier and more just future.
Lethal but Legal is available online from:
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Super Bowl Dreaming
A few nights ago I dreamt I watched a transformed Super Bowl. It wasn’t the Broncos or the Seahawks who starred in my dream but the ads. Instead of promoting soda, beer, SUVs and candy, the ads urged viewers to reject appeals to enrich big corporations by consuming products associated with premature death and preventable illnesses and injuries.
The opening ad showed two polar bears, one emaciated, one obese, wandering through a nightmare landscape where glaciers melted in the background and dark cactuses in the shape of classic Coke bottles blocked the bear’s path. “In my world,” said the scrawny bear, “we can’t find any food and we’re dying from hunger and the stress of food insecurity.” “In my world,” the plump one replied, “we’re all coming down with diabetes from drinking too much Coke. My left back paw may need to be amputated and my grandkids are so fat they can hardly move. How did we get here?”
The second ad was a TV version of a print ad run a few years ago by a group called Evangelical Environmental Network . Targeted at Christian Super Bowl viewers, the ad asked “Would Jesus drive an SUV?” The screen flashed statistics on the higher pollution levels of Ford Explorers, F-150s, Dodge Rams and other SUVs and light trucks, the rollover danger they posed to their drivers and passengers and the danger these massive vehicles posed to pedestrians, other drivers, and our carbon emissions. “Be a steward for the future. Protect your children and protect the environment. Don’t buy SUVs, “the heavenly announcer urged.
“Do you think Big Alcohol will clean up your vomit or bail you out of jail after the fourth drink?” asked the third ad, showing images of a young woman throwing up in a toilet and a guy in handcuffs with a black eye after being arrested in a drunken brawl. This ad was sponsored by Drink Truth, a new group that discourages binge drinking and promotion of alcohol to young people. Drink Truth was using the lessons from the truth campaign, designed by the Legacy Foundation with tobacco settlement dollars. Truth appealed to rebellious teens to reject the tobacco industry’s efforts to profit at the expense of their health. Scientific studies show that it contributed to more than 300,000 teens not starting to use tobacco.
This being the Super Bowl, there were another 47 minutes of ads—worth about $300 million in ad revenue to Fox — but mercifully my dream moved on to the half time show. The opener was Super Bowl favorite Beyoncé who began by apologizing to viewers and young people in general for accepting $50 million from Pepsi to promote their high sugar, salt and fat products that put her fans at risk of early death from diet-related diseases. To atone for her avarice, she pledged to contribute $5 million and kick off a new campaign, Water Me Now, that will support schools, colleges and hospitals to replace their beverage vending machines with free water fountains. Beyoncé then sang her new release Water Me Now Baby which extolled the virtues of free water for life, health and love. In the Super Bowl show, Beyoncé swam, poured and went down a water slide in a super sized version of the Water Me Now water fountain that she planned to distribute.
To reach another demographic, the next star, also a Super Bowl alumna, was Madonna. She apologized for her role in a Smirnoff ad campaign that encouraged young women to drink vodka, a campaign that public health experts believe contributed to rising rates of alcohol-related health problems among young women, a trend that threatens to bring equal opportunity for alcohol injuries and diseases to females, who had previously been at much lower risk than young men. Madonna promised to contribute her dollars and talent to Drink Truth’s ad campaign.
Third up was Justin Beiber, ready to make amends for his recent drunk driving arrest. With Beyoncé, the former Material Girl, Jay Z, LeBron James (the basketball star who has $42 million of endorsement contracts from Coca Cola, McDonald’s , Dunkin Donuts and others), Beiber announced the celebs were creating Fans United for Restoring Democracy to urge young people across the country to mobilize for the 2014 Congressional elections to elect a Congress that will overturn the Citizens United decision, support meaningful campaign finance reform, and limit special interest lobbying. “Until young people decide that politics matter,” said Beiber, “corporations are going to continue to undermine health, threaten democracy, and endanger our environment. We who have benefited so much from the young people who support us feel we need to give back to ensure that our fans and their children have a safer, healthier and more democratic future.”
I woke up Sunday morning asking, Is another world possible? Can Hollywood and Madison Avenue apply their genius to making a better, healthier world better instead of enriching those who profit from illness? By Monday morning, after watching Bob Dylan pitching polluting autos and cuddly puppies shilling Budweiser beer, I realized that as long as big corporations dominate our economy and politics, my Super Bowl dreaming is only a fantasy.
Auto Industry Should Embrace Mileage and Emissions Standards
In a commentary in Poststar.com, Dan Becker and James Gerstenzanga from the safe Climate Campaign note that one year after automakers began building cars to meet tough new mileage and emissions requirements, it is clear the new standards are working. They report that an in-depth assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency found manufacturers are on track to deliver a fleet by 2025 that will cut in half the global-warming pollution of cars and save Americans billions of dollars at the pump.
Can Big Auto Build the Car of the Future?
In WIRED, Jason Fagone describes a car competition that led to new car model that achieved 207 mpg, using EPA standard test procedures. But, he argues, even “with new government targets looming … the automakers are still resisting radical change…They’re not rethinking the automobile from scratch, from the ground up, like the successful prize teams did. And with a few exceptions,…the automakers are also failing to make significant investments in bringing down the cost of advanced composite materials that are light, strong, and durable. One Nissan executive recently “quipped” to Green Car Reports that the company doesn’t want to make cars out of carbon fiber because it’s too durable: “We don’t need such a material,” the executive said. “That means we cannot sell a new car in 30 years.”
Air Pollution, Cancer and the Concerns of U.S. Auto Executives
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently announced that it has classified air pollution as a human carcinogen. Automobile exhaust is a major source of such emissions. “We now know that outdoor air pollution is not only a major risk to health in general, but also a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths,” said Dr Kurt Straif of the IARC in the organization’s announcement. A recent survey of more than 75 U.S. auto industry and auto supplier executives by Booz and Company /Bloomberg identified top concerns of these industry leaders. The survey found that executives were confident about continued growth of auto sales through 2015. Leading concerns were the need for continued innovation in vehicle entertainment, telematics, and the “connected car”; the value of aggressive use of incentives to encourage more sales; and fears of a decline in sales growth after 2016.
Read about Lethal But Legal: Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health, a new book by Nicholas Freudenberg
Lethal But Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health
By Nicholas Freudenberg published by Oxford University Press in February 2014 with new paperback edition with an afterword by the author released in March 2016.
“In his new book, “Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health” Freudenberg’s case is that the food industry is but one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls “the corporate consumption complex,” an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles. It sounds creepy; it is creepy. .. Freudenberg details how six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to defend the sales of health-threatening products. This playbook, largely developed by the tobacco industry, disregards human health and poses greater threats to our existence than any communicable disease you can name.” – Mark Bittman, contributing op-ed writer, New York Times
“A superb, magnificently written, courageous, and compelling exposé of how corporations enrich themselves at the expense of public health—and how we can organize to counter corporate power and achieve a healthier and more sustainable food environment. This should be required reading for anyone who cares about promoting health, protecting democratic institutions, and achieving a more equitable and just society.” –Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University; author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.
In this century, it is estimated that one billion people will die prematurely because of tobacco use, according to “Lethal but Legal,” a smart new book about corporate irresponsibility by Nicholas Freudenberg, a professor of public health at City University of New York. Put that one billion in perspective. That’s more than five times as many people as died in all wars of the 20th century. Freudenberg notes that smoking grew in part because of deliberate manipulation of the manipulation of the public by tobacco companies. For example, tobacco executives realized that they could expand their profits if more women smoked, so they engineered a feminist-sounding campaign to get females hooked: “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”– Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times
“A reservoir of constructive indignation that can arouse all Americans who adhere to basic human values.” ―Ralph Nader
Nader Recommends New Book Lethal but Legal to Provoke Conversation in 2014
“Freudenberg is optimistic that, despite the enormity of the challenges facing us as we confront the power of the multinational companies, a tipping point will be reached when the many thousands of pro-health organisations around the world come together and create the political power—and therefore the political will—necessary for success. Lethal But Legal buoyed my optimism.” Robert Beaglehole, The Lancet
“A real eye-opener. Freudenberg lays out the labyrinth of connections between corporate misbehavior and the health of the world, then gives a roadmap to fix it. I love this book.” –Cheryl G. Healton, Director, NYU Global Institute of Public Health; former President and CEO, American Legacy Foundation
“After documenting how multinational corporations manipulate us into hyperconsumption, this book goes on to identify the strategies we can, together, use to liberate ourselves.” –Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham
Watch Marion Nestle, Professor in Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at NYU and Laura Berry, Executive Director of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility discuss Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health on CSPAN Books.
Lethal but Legal examines how corporations have shaped ― and plagued― public health over the last century, first in industrialized countries and now in developing regions. It is both a current history of corporations’ antagonism towards health and an analysis of the emerging movements that are challenging these industries’ dangerous practices. The reforms outlined here aim to strike a healthier balance between large companies’ right to make a profit and governments’ responsibility to protect their populations. While other books have addressed parts of this story, Lethal but Legal is the first to connect the dots between unhealthy products, business-dominated politics, and the growing burdens of disease and health care costs. By identifying the common causes of all these problems, then situating them in the context of other health challenges that societies have overcome in the past, this book provides readers with the insights they need to take practical and effective action to restore consumers’ right to health. Nicholas Freudenberg, DrPH, is Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the City University of New York School of Public Health and founder and director of Corporations and Health Watch, an international network of activists and researchers that monitors the business practices of the alcohol, automobile, firearms, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and tobacco industries.
Lethal but Legal is available from:
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Read book excerpts and op-eds by Nick Freudenberg
Top lessons from 50 years of fighting the tobacco industry, The Guardian, January 21, 2014
CVS stores will no longer sell cigarettes. It’s the health over profit revolution, The Guardian, February 5, 2014.
McDomination: How corporations conquered America and ruined our health, Salon, February 23, 2014
How Washington dooms millions of Americans to premature death, The Daily Beast, February 25, 2014
How corporate America exports disease to the rest of the world, Salon, March 2, 2014.
Insatiable: Sizing Up the Corporate-Consumption Complex, The American Interest, March 3, 2014
Why Taming Corporation Promotion of Dangerous Consumer Products is Vital to Improving Public Health Scholars Strategy Network, March 2014
Profit Above Safety, Slate, April 1, 2014
GM’s $35 Million Fine Is A Downpayment On Fixing America’s Regulation, Talking Point Memo, May 20, 2014
A Blind Spot on Rearview Cameras
On average, backover car accidents kill some 230 people a year, mostly children and mostly in accidents in which a parent or another relative is driving, writes the New York Times in an Editorial. Another 18,000 people are injured annually in backover accidents. Yet the Obama administration has balked at carrying out a law that requires rearview technology in new cars…. One reason the industry doesn’t want mandatory rearview cameras is that it makes more money selling them as options. The added cost to a car is small — $160 to $200, according to a government estimate from 2010 — and that is surely too high now, given the technology’s declining cost.
China’s Plan to Curb Air Pollution Sets Limits on Coal Use and Vehicles
The New York Times reports that the Chinese government announced an ambitious plan to curb air pollution across the nation, including setting some limits on burning coal and taking high-polluting vehicles off the roads to ensure a drop in the concentration of particulate matter in cities. The government is responding to criticism over the abysmal condition of the country’s air, soil and water.
Car Industry Chiefs Urged to Give Latin America Safer Vehicles
The Global New Car Assessment Programme (Global NCAP) is a newly established non-profit organization which aims to encourage the worldwide availability of independent consumer information about the safety of motor vehicles. Its chairman Max Mosley has urged CEOs at Renault-Nissan, General Motors and Suzuki to apply the UN’s minimum crash safety standards to their global passenger car production. New crash test results have indicated that popular cars sold by the manufacturers in Latin America pose an unacceptably high risk of death or injury in the event of a crash.
Corporations and Health Watch 