Juggling Dynamite

This week Facebook was fined £500,000 by UK regulators for its part in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and failing to protect its users’ information.  This was the maximum fine possible under the Data Protection Act of 1998.  Meanwhile, in the first quarter of 2018, Facebook took in £500,000 in revenue every five and a half minutes.

Clearly, regulatory fines are wholly inadequate in deterring illegal activities once companies achieve massive scale in wealth and influence. This is why we must use long-standing anti-trust laws to break up too big to regulate corps and prosecute individual actors and directing minds with penalties that include clawing back executive compensation and significant jail terms.  See Facebook fined for data breaches in Cambridge Analytica.

Big corporations with big political influence have become the enemy of democracy and the Rule of Law essential for a free and civil society.  This is reality. What we do in response to these facts, will decide what happens next. Elizabeth Denham, the UK information commissioner this week acknowledged the larger challenges at hand in this way:

“Facebook has failed to provide the kind of protections they are required to under the Data Protection Act. Fines and prosecutions punish the bad actors, but my real goal is to effect change and restore trust and confidence in our democratic system.”

The below interview with a former employee and whistle blower at Cambridge Analytica illuminates the business and political entanglements involved in present conditions.

Christopher Wylie, who worked for data firm Cambridge Analytica, reveals how personal information was taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. At the time the company was owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Donald Trump’s key adviser, Steve Bannon. Its CEO is Alexander Nix.  Here is a direct video link.

This week brought news that the American delegation at the spring United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly in Geneva, at the behest of big food lobby in attendance, attempted to block a resolution calling on governments to  “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” as well as another passage calling on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that can have deleterious effects on young children. See Opposition to breast-feeding resolution by US shocks UN officials:

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

The showdown over the issue was recounted by more than a dozen participants from several countries, many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from the United States.

Similar positions have been reported in recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations where American representatives have been pushing for language limiting the ability of Canada, Mexico and the United States to put warning labels on junk food and sugary beverages.

Meanwhile decades of research including a 2016 study published in The Lancet have confirmed that breast-milk prevents hundreds of thousands of child deaths a year across the globe and yields some $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk.

A Canadian study published in the Journal of Pediatrics finds (not surprisingly) that babies who were breastfed had different microbiomes, in their guts –- and lower obesity levels as they grew -– than babies who were primarily fed formula.  See Infant formula could change gut bacteria, contribute to childhood obesity–new study:

Obesity begins early, research has shown, and breastmilk is known to lower a baby’s risk of obesity as an adult.

“Breastmilk is a very specialized food –- not just for babies, but also for their gut bacteria. Breastmilk contains oligosaccharides, which are complex sugars that feed specific gut bacteria,” Dr. Meghan Azad, lead researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics & Child Health and Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba, told ABC News.

The study looks at a theory on why this happens: That “good” bacteria in babies’ digestive systems affects how they burn and store fat, as well as how they use energy.

As the world rejoices in the brave rescue of 12 children from a cave in Thailand today, one struggles to reconcile that with the systemic and daily abuse of children worldwide as the big food industry strip-mines health and our taxpayer funded sick-care system for short-term profits.

Big corporations are running global policies in a just-for-their-own profit-mandate at the expense of our sustainability as a species.  This cannot be allowed to continue.  This is not about vanity or fat-shaming.  The illness that bad food breeds is undermining our health, productivity and life quality now and for the future.  We must insist on fundamental changes to our food system and shift the cost of paying for all the harm being inflicted back onto the corporations who are causing it, rather than we, the people. We cannot afford to do otherwise.

Here is a direct video link to an ABC report on the obesity epidemic among our youth.

Designates who are appointed to represent others in positions of trust must be held to a fiduciary standard.  The courts of equity have long acknowledged that financial conflicts and non-disclosure of personal benefit are anathema to fulfilling fiduciary duty.

Although Donald Trump handed over control of his businesses to his sons, the president still collects on their profits. Here’s how Trump’s White House is a money-making machine. Here is a direct video link.

Trump’s White House has been a money-making machine from CNBC.