All the talk nowadays is about the threat that terrorism supposedly has on National Security. But reality is that Americans are more likely to be taken down by cancer or heart disease instead. Perhaps, companies like Dupont and 3M actualy pose much greater threats to our personal security than does al quaeda? Cheney would disagree, I am sure, but the evidence is not on his side.

Dupont, especially, is a company that has been engaged most recently in a tobacco industry style campaign of disinformation and cover-up about the dangers of PFOA, an artificial substance that has accumulated in 95% of us Americans. It’s produced by Dupont (and was also by 3M previously) for use in making fabrics and non-stick cookware, amongst other items. We’re talking Teflon and GorTex now. This is big moneymaker for Dupont, and they have been just a s stubborn about the reality that it causes cancer as Exxon-Mobil has been about denying that global warming is a world threat.

The headlines this week get yet worse about capitalist driven, factory production’s effects on life here on earth. It appears, too, that microscopic pieces of plastic are in ocean water in greater and greater concentrations and in the life forms that live in salt water, too. These are called mermaids’ tears. See the BBC article, Plastics Poisoning World’s Seas. Humans are filling up with PFOA, and sea life is collecting just plain old plastics in their bodies. Oh, along with mercury and numberous otehr toxins. I guess polar bears get it all, since they are finding PFOA in them, plus they also eat the fish filled with mermaids’ tears besides. Lesson. Don’t eat polar bear!

Both articles I linked to illustrate that capitalism does not self-regulate its production. To the contrary, capitalist enterprises deliberately produce harmful products that destroy the environment and destroy your health. The corporate management attitude is simply that if the product does not knock you over seconds after it you consumed it, then who cares about the longer term consequences? That can be hidden away from public view forever, or at least for centuries, oops but maybe only decades. But it can be hidden for the longest time, and by then, the consequences to public health have become enormous.

There simply is no effective observation of the dangers that these ‘free enterprises’ routinely put us in. It is if the meth lab next door was subject to no observation, no requirements to cease production, and the operators of it were also to be held in the highest public esteem even as they were cooking up a poisonous vapor for all the neighborhood. In fact, the neighborhood I lived in last before moving here, had both meth labs in the neighborhood, and a film production facility that did its dirty production at night, as vapors were then vented to float through our streets. Could I have called the police to check them out for safety and health? I think not. Our ‘botanical gardens’ there were run by the Benzene producing company that dominated the regional business community. Our big marine aquarium had a display where the enormous tank was filled with miniture oll derricks to explain to us the suppopsed benefits that the offshore oil rigs gave to sea life! The people effected by these criminal enterprises are nobodies, while the rich owners strut around as if they were the communities’ patron saints of benevolence.

The mermaids cry, the fish do die, and meanwhile, us humans keep dying of cancer. What a stupid way of ‘life’. All because we are taught to adore the rich, and to never, ever question them.