Tuesday, August 13, 2002

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Global Corporate Metastasis Diversification


Having become very thirsty this afternoon while not at home, in one of my frequent tests of new products just to try and stay abreast with what's going on in the global market as manifested right here in Japan, I bought one of those new cutely branded "pure fruit juice" (global marketing terminology should be taken with a grain of chemotherapy) drinks the metastasizing international conglomerates are peddling in all the internationally metastasizing convenience stores (to say nothing of third world worker and ecological travesties), when my wife said "Don't drink that, it's full of poison!" So I read the list of ingredients and saw there unspecified "flavors" (naively, I'd thought it was grapefruit, like it said on the label!), unspecified "sourers" (souring additives to compensate for the taste effect of other added chemicals) as well as a chemical preservative (that reportedly had no statistically significant effect on a couple dozen rats in experiments financed in one way or another by grants from the producers of the preservative), and I thought of the trillions of drinks and snacks out there containing zillions of minimally tested toxins of all varieties going down billions of throats every day, and those toxins in my own body generated a vision of the future wherein all the pieces of global big-business diversification fit perfectly together: if global corporate conglomeration continues unabated, would it be far-fetched to foresee that any possible malignancies or other illnesses absolutely unrelated to the consumption of A2Z Corp. drinks and snacks (made from produce grown on A2Z Corp. subsidiary agrobusiness farms) could be treated at one of the many A2C Corp. subsidiary hospitals using one or more of the revolutionary A2Z Corp. subsidiary neodrugs, followed by months of expensive A2Z Corp. subsidiary aftercare; and if treatment failed, an A2Z Corp. subsidiary undertaker would be there with an A2Z Corp. subsidiary cemetery real estate plot and A2Z Corp. subsidiary insurance policies for remaining family members, a general win-win situation for the global juridical body at the ongoing expense of the merely local human body, A2Z Corp. being of course richly represented and lobbied for in all world houses of government, in contrast to the invisibly individual taxpayer and nameless statistic. Does this sound completely cynical, or can there really be corporations as unscrupulous as Enron and all the others on that long and growing list whose mere surface we see every day in the news? Also, you want the rest of this grapefruit juice?

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