That’s right, in 2020 we’re calling out corporations instead of people. For anyone who doesn’t follow me, I have a tag ‘corporate crime highlight reel’ for all the best capitalism has to offer regarding profit-motivated crimes against humanity. There are some articles about Nestle in the tag, but I have yet to make a full post on it.
WHY NESTLE IS PROBLEMATIC
1. Has not yet stated an opinion on Steven’s University and 2. is perhaps the personification of everything wrong with capitalism and corporate greed. Let’s go!
1. Nestle’s infant formula scandal (SOURCE, SOURCE)
How does an industry go about creating consumers? There are clear rules:
• create a need where none existed • convince consumers that your products are indispensable for the ‘good life’ • link products with the most desirable and unattainable concepts; and then give a sample… free.
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Knowing that fear and anxiety can actually stop lactation, companies consciously design marketing strategies that aggravate in-built worries and interfere with the pyschophysiology of the human body in order to sell more of their products. In Africa, Nestle’s Lactogen was advertised for use ‘when breast milk fails’. And in the 1950’s a radio jingle for Borden KLIM in the Belgian Congo went like this:
The child is going to die Because the mother’s breast has given out Mama o Mama the child cries If you want your child to get well Give it KLIM milk
This is perhaps one of Nestle’s most infamous scandals, in which the company used manipulative marketing and exploited the conditions of third world mothers to sell addictive infant formula that leads to, according to the World Health Organization, “underfeeding, malnutrition, and vulnerability to infection”. It was also sometimes lethal. Large outrage surrounding Nestle’s role in the issue started in the 1970s, but as mentioned above, Nestle had been doing this decades earlier.
Here, one mother recounts a Nestlé “milk nurse's” sales pitch:
“The nurse began by saying … breastfeeding was best. She then went on detail the supplementary foods that the breastfed baby would need … The nurse was implying that it was possible to start with a proprietary baby milk from birth, which would avoid these unnecessary problems.”
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In the Times, United States Agency for International Development official, Dr. Stephen Joseph, blamed reliance on baby formula for a million infant deaths every year through malnutrition and diarrheal diseases. It also hindered infant growth in general, said War on Want. Citing “complex links emerging between breast feeding and emotional and physical development,” the group said breastfed children walked “significantly better than bottle-fed” kids, and were more emotionally advanced.
Boycotts against Nestle spread from the U.S. to the world, with many mothers refusing to buy Nestle products as a result of the deaths caused by the company.
2. Nestle makes billions bottling water it pays nearly nothing for (SOURCE)
I’ve long been critical of bottled water in general, mainly because it is a terrible result of capitalism’s tendency to commodify and profit from natural resources at the expense of people’s health and lives, and Nestle is no stranger to the problem as a massive manufacturer of bottled water.
Nestle has come to dominate a controversial industry, spring by spring, often going into economically depressed municipalities with the promise of jobs and new infrastructure in exchange for tax breaks and access to a resource that’s scarce for millions. Where Nestlé encounters grass-roots resistance against its industrial-strength guzzling, it deploys lawyers; where it’s welcome, it can push the limits of that hospitality, sometimes with the acquiescence of state and local governments that are too cash-strapped or inept to say no.
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There’s also the issue of scarcity. The United Nations expects that 1.8 billion people will live in places with dire water shortages by 2025, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under stressed water conditions.
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Failing infrastructure has already led to a near-total reliance on bottled water in parts of the world. Nestlé started selling Pure Life in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1998 to “provide a safe, quality water solution,” the company says. But locals wonder if the Swiss multinational is exacerbating the problem. “Twenty years ago, you could go anywhere in Lahore and get a glass of clean tap water for free,” says Ahmad Rafay Alam, an environmental lawyer in the country. “Now, everyone drinks bottled water.” He adds that this change has taken the pressure off the government to fix its utilities, degrading the quality of Lahore’s supply: “What Nestlé did is use a good marketing scheme to make tap water uncool and dangerous. It’s ubiquitous, like Kleenex. People will say, ‘Give me a bottle of Nestlé.’ ”
Nestle’s former CEO, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, caused outrage in his argument for the commodification of water; “One perspective held by various NGOs—which I would call extreme—is that water should be declared a human right. … The other view is that water is a grocery product. And just as every other product, it should have a market value.” This statement, seemingly coming from a super-villain, is unfortunately just the logical conclusion of capitalism, and Nestle made the mistake of saying it out loud. Dodging regulations and lobbying governments, Nestle’s commodification of this natural resource necessary for survival has been a growing and seemingly unstoppable success.
In the U.S., Nestlé tends to set up shop in areas with weak water regulations or lobbies to enfeeble laws.
Yes, the company supposedly saving the world with clean water is responsible for a lot of pollution.
As with any “respectable” large company, Nestle has been involved in several incidents regarding pollution. A 1997 report found that in the UK, over a 12 month period, water pollution limits were breached 2,152 times in 830 locations by companies that included Cabdury and Nestle. But again, the situation in China was much worse.
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Nestle Sources Shanghai Ltd’s bottled water manufacturing plant also made the list for starting operation before its wastewater treatment facilities had passed an environmental impact assessment.
“These are only some of the water pollution violations committed by multinational companies in China, since our website has yet to cover information about air and solid waste pollution,” said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs. “The parent companies in their home countries are models for environmental protection. But they have slackened their efforts in China.”
This is yet another example of Nestle evading regulations and exploiting resources for profit. In fact, this particular example ties into pollution outsourcing, which is a result of economic imperialism under capitalism.
4. Use of child slave labor and human trafficking (SOURCE)
Like many other similar corporations, Nestle knowingly makes use of child slave labor in its supply chains in Africa. For decades, ex-slaves have been speaking out against the company’s practices.
“The allegations paint a picture of overseas slave labor that defendants perpetuated from headquarters in the United States,” the San Francisco-based appeals court said. The case, filed by six former slaves who were kidnapped from their native Mali, has been moving up and down the federal court system since 2005. The companies are accused of aiding and abetting slave labor by giving Ivory Coast farmers financial assistance in the expectation that cocoa prices would stay low. The suit alleges the companies were fully aware that child slavery was being used.
The ex-slaves say children were forced to work as much as 14 hours a day, given only scraps to eat, and were severely beaten or tortured if they tried to escape.
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Combined, Ivory Coast and Ghana produce almost 60% of the world’s cocoa, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of International Affairs. “Latest estimates found 2 million children engaged in hazardous work on cocoa farms in these two countries,” the bureau says on its website.
FUN BONUS: Nestle’s PR contacted me on twitter regarding the company’s use of child labor and dismissal of lawsuits.
Rozinsa Mamattohti couldn’t sleep or eat for days after she read the detailed records the Chinese government had been keeping on her entire family.
She and her relatives, most of whom live in China’s western Xinjiang region, aren’t dissidents or extremists or well-known. But in a spreadsheet kept by local officials, her entire family’s lives are recorded at length along with their jobs, their religious activity, their trustworthiness and their level of cooperation with the authorities. And this spreadsheet could determine if Mamattohti’s sister remains behind razor wire in a government detention center.
Her family’s records, and hundreds of government reports like them, have been leaked to journalists by a patchwork of exiled Uyghur activists.
The document reveals for the first time the system used by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to justify the indefinite detention on trivial grounds of not only Mamattohti’s family but hundreds – and possibly millions – of other citizens in heavily fortified internment centers across Xinjiang.
It is the third major leak of sensitive Chinese government documents in as many months, and together the information paints an increasingly alarming picture of what appears to be a strategic campaign by Beijing to strip Muslim-majority Uyghurs of their cultural and religious identity and suppress behavior considered to be unpatriotic.
The Chinese government has claimed it is running a mass deradicalization program targeting potential extremists, but these official records, verified by a team of experts, show people can be sent to a detention facility for simply “wearing a veil” or growing “a long beard.”
For Mamattohti’s sister, 34-year-old Patem, the crime for which she was detained, according to the document, was a “violation of family planning policy,” or put simply, having too many children. Under the countrywide policy, which rarely if ever is cause for imprisonment, rural families in Xinjiang are limited to three children. Patem had four.
It was the first time since 2016 that Mamattohti had received any concrete news of what had happened to her family.
“I never imagined that my younger sister would be in prison,” Mamattohti told CNN, through tears, in her house in Istanbul. She said she first saw the leaked records when they were informally circulated on social media among Uyghurs overseas. “As I was reading their names I couldn’t hold myself together, I was devastated.”
The leak exposes what appears to be a detailed and far-reaching system of state surveillance in the region, run by the local government in Xinjiang, designed to target Chinese citizens for peacefully practicing their culture or religion.
-Have VP Pence, who wanted to ‘pray away’ HIV epidemic, oversee the response
-Let ex-pharma lobbyist Alex Azar refuse to guarantee affordable vaccines to all
Disgusting,” Sanders tweeted Wednesday.
Sanders embedded a clip of Azar, under questioning from Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), saying “we would want to make sure that we worked to make” a vaccine affordable to anyone in need of it, “but we can’t control that price, because we need the private sector to invest.”
Pence faced widespread criticism as governor of Indiana following an HIV outbreak in Scott County led to more than 200 cases in 2015 after Pence and GOP state lawmakers defunded Planned Parenthood, which was one of the primary vectors of HIV testing in the county.
The then-governor, asked if he would support a needle exchange program to slow the HIV spread, said, “I’m going to go home and pray on it.” He would later sign legislation for a temporary exchange program two months after the outbreak was initially detected.
Pence said Wednesday at a press conference with Trump and public health officials that his role in a possible coronavirus outbreak would be to bring Trump “the best options for action” and to “see to the safety and well-being and health of the American people.”
The coronavirus has infected more than 80,000 people globally and with more than 2,500 deaths.
The World Health Organization announced Wednesday that for the first time since the outbreak began in December, more new cases were being reported outside of China than in it.
The $9 billion ticketing industry has frustrated American consumers with hidden fees for years. A Government Accountability Office study found in 2018 that fees can equal as much as 37% of a ticket’s face value.
In a memo announcing a congressional hearing, lawmakers also noted complaints about industry practices like restrictions on transfers, websites which appear to be for a venue but are not, and limited ticket availability because, for example, tickets are sold at pre-sales before the general public may buy.
Amy Howe, chief operating officer of Ticketmaster, told a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday that her company, a division of Live Nation Entertainment Inc, would support a move to disclose all fees upfront but only if it is mandated that all companies do so.
Pressed on the issue by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Howe argued that Ticketmaster could not do it without all companies being required to make the disclosure because it would make her company’s tickets look relatively more expensive.
At the hearing, Pallone noted the sheer size of the online ticket market. “Every day, millions of Americans shop on the internet for tickets for live events like sporting events and concerts,” he said. “In some ways, the internet has made this experience more convenient, but it has also led to consumers being ripped off as they try to navigate a ticketing industry that for too long has operated in the dark.”
Pallone, along with Representative Bill Pascrell and Senator Richard Blumenthal, re-introduced a bill last spring to address some of the biggest complaints about the primary and secondary ticketing market, including a measure to require the disclosure of all fees at the time a ticket is selected for purchase.
StubHub, which is owned by eBay Inc, tried all-in pricing but abandoned the practice in 2015 after less than two years because rivals’ tickets appeared to be cheaper and so its market share diminished.
StubHub General Counsel Stephanie Burns said it still gives customers an option to see the final price as they shop.
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