- There are only two things the large aspartame corporations
really understand, both the manufacturers and the corporate end-users:
1) threats of product liability and the cost of hiring lobbyists and/or
corporate lawyers to shut people up when they raise questions of product
liability for the hundreds of millions of people suffering from neurodegenerative
damage done by aspartame.
-
- In the 30 day session in 2006 and the 60 day session
of 2007 in the New Mexico legislature, my educated guess is that the lobbyists
must have cost at least $2 million, and, if you add in the costs of representation
by lawyers during the Environmental Improvement Board hearings and the
Pharmacy Board consideration of holding hearings, maybe another few hundred
thousand dollars, just for Ajinomoto to pay to shut New Mexico's questions
up entirely. The truth will probably never be known because not even one
among the sharpest and most inquiring journalists on these issues has take
the time to telephone Ajinomoto's Chairman of the Board, or even the CEO
of Coca Cola to inquire about these mounting costs, or an even more obvious
question: WHY DOESN'T COCA COLA JUST SWITCH TO STEVIA, OR SOME OTHER HARMLESS
SWEETENER?
-
- They could make a killing after the resultant media blitz:
we could even write the advertisement for them (can't you just hear it
now?): "America, we have listened to your concerns about whether Coca
Cola is healthy! That is why we're switching to Stevia, to protect your
health." They just aren't that smart.to make such a bold move.
-
- Ajinomoto is in a different predicament. Their products
are recognized by most intelligent Japanese people as harmful and deleterious,
so they do what any American company would do when confronted with the
medical harm caused by their products: SHIP IT TO A 3RD WORLD NATION, like
Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines: nations with plenty of street
vendors, where they can ply their products like the gangsters they really
are, based on the first hand reports from those nations as to how Ajinomoto
operates.
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- Some health official objects? No problem, just bribe
them or smother them with smoke-and-mirrors and sophistries about how this
product has been so thoroughly tested and then accepted by so many nations.
-
- A state like New Mexico raises some official inquiries?
No problem; just hire the largest and best politically connected law firm
in the state to do the dirty work and scuttle the hearings. The scuttled
hearings were why we took the bills to the Legislature in the first place.
We have lost two years in a row, and the lobbyists throw in some character
assassination to impugn the legislators and those who backed the bills
behind the scenes, and presto, maybe the bills won't come up next years.
-
- Not all lobbyists are bad, but these kinds of corporate-serving
representatives and mouthpieces are very much like assassins: they are
very well paid, they plan every thing precisely and well in advance, and
their real work may only take a few minutes. I believe New Mexico law prohibits
paying them any bonus for scuttling legislation, but judging by how these
bozos work, nothing would surprise me as to how they might get around the
relevant laws, if not outright flaunt them.
-
- After all, they could get up and tell legislative committees
outrageous lies like Dr. H.J. Roberts' really never wrote a book about
Aspartame Disease: he "just had his patients fill out forms,"
or "the Ramazzini Foundation purposefully picked Dewley Sprague rats
for Aspartame research because, as a breed of rats, they were predisposed
to develop brain tumors, so a statistical increase of brain tumors was
to be expected." This is just a small sample of the drivel that was
put forth by the Calorie Control Council lobbyist, and not one legislator
even questioned the veracity of such perfidious hooliganisms.
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- In a photocopied handout which the legislators immediately
all threw away, they stated that the bills would make possession of a diet
soda a felony; had they read the bill or the relevant statutes in this
context, it would have been clear that selling aspartame products would
have become a misdemeanor. Their intent, however, was to manipulated and
distort the truth, so that no legislator could side with those saying that
aspartame should be prohibited as misbranded, adulterated, and a poisonous
and deleterious substance, which is, in fact, against the law in most states,
and thus the groundwork for activists in other states to put forth similar
legislation in their states.
-
- These New Mexico legislators are in too big a hurry to
even pay any serious attention to the obvious medical imperatives which
were in front of them, as if they were also afraid that one of their major
campaign contributors like Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola might object to their
voting to implement such an obvious medical imperative.
-
- However, if activists in every state asked their legislators
to submit an adapted copy of Senate Bill 498 in the next session of their
legislatures, then the same corporations would have to hire lobbyists in
49 other states, and perhaps even several other nations. The cost would
be much higher in New York or California, with perhaps more sophisticated
legislators and more accurate and energetic Health Department Officials.
This might cost Ajinomoto and Coca Cola hundreds of millions of dollars,
and even then, they would ultimately fail, with so many Americans asking
these key questions; newspaper articles and editorial page letters perhaps
even could begin to wake up the silent accepting acquiescent naïve
American consumers out of their Diet Coke and Equal stupor.
-
- These activists would not have to work as hard as I had
to, just to advance this legislation as far as I did in New Mexico. They
would just have to print out the bill and send it to their legislators
with perhaps a petition from their friends and neighbors: legislators do
comprehend and take action based on petitions from their constituents,
and now that Rumsfeld is out of the picture (or is he?), even a few Republicans
could get behind getting rid of Aspartame, maybe.the ideal legislator would
be a Democrat Populist Physician who is in some leadership position, like
President Pro Tem, Majority Leader, Speaker of the House, or at least a
committee chairman.
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- In New Mexico this year, the crème de la crème
signed the bills as legislative sponsors: Majority Leader in the House,
Finance Chair, 5 or 6 committee chairs in each House, including Judiciary,
Rules, Vice Chair of Senate Finance, Consumer Affairs, etc. The Lobbyists'
tactic was not to go after the intellectual or moral leadership or the
Committee Chairs; like jackals and hyenas chasing a herd, they went after
the lesser members because they could still vote against the bill; they
sought, instead, to count votes in the Committee. No person or legislator
was beneath their dignity to inculcate with their dastardly lies about
how "harmless" aspartame should be, according to them, or how
many agencies and governments internationally acquiesced to accepting it.
They piled up lists of organizations in support, some based on comments
made 22 years ago, and for the average underinformed hurried legislator,
anxious not to offend the Coca Cola Bottler or all of those grocery stores
in their home town, it was easy and quick to vote down a ban on aspartame.
-
- Obviously, in 20/20 hindsight, almost any court of law
would have to take much more time and be more exacting, especially if the
right case, like a victim with a brain tumor or a family of someone who
had died of aspartame- induced multiple sclerosis, were brought to trial.
-
- God knows there are thousands of them in every state,
and the National Association of Attorneys General might be where I concentrate
my next serious efforts in the USA, in addition to the many nations in
which I have made serious progress, thanks to correspondence and DVD's
and Compact Disc lectures sent to the Heads of State of those nations.
Heads of State can actually take actions which protect their nation's health.
That is what they are supposed to do, and in the balance of 2007, let's
see how many do exactly that.
-
- I frequently think back to the pristine examples of Galileo
and Gandhi. Galileo, jailed, accused, even threatened with death because
he had the temerity to announce the results of his years of research that
proved the earth is round and goes around the sun, and is not flat and
the sun goes around the earth. Eventually proven correct, but at what a
cost, what a ridiculous struggle against the forces of arrogant stupidity
and belligerent ignorance.
-
- Most often, I think of Gandhi, who wore the British down
over decades with his superior moral path of non-violence, which also was
intellectually superior to the British brute tactics of controlling India
as a conquered nation. He often put it this way:
-
- "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you,
then they beat you, and then you win."
-
- We are facing massive forces of bestial stupidity, ignorance,
and complete corporate indifference to protecting the health of American
and international consumers of aspartame. If we wear down the corporations
by costing them many many more millions in lobbyists and corporate lawyers
and in eventual judgments against the manufacturers and corporate end-users,
we will succeed by patience and perseverance, much like Galileo and Gandhi
ultimately triumphed, respectively against the Catholic Church and the
British Empire.
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- Yet, at what a terrible cost to challenge the corporate-led
stupidity and destructive arrogance of the modern corporation. The most
efficient way to defeat them is by causing them to go broke buying lobbyists
and lawyers to defend them, to win against them in the court of public
opinion, and to ultimately beat them in many many courts of law, both in
the United States and in other nations, something like the suits against
Big Tobacco in the 1990's.
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- Stephen Fox
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- stephen@santafefineart.com
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