Rant

OK, I’m just going to have a rant.

First up: GlaxoSmithKline.

Now I can understand how a jar of homemade marmalade sold at a local fete might not have the most accurate nutrition information slapped on the side. I’ll forgive it because there is hardly an easy way for Mrs Jones from down the road to get access to scientific instrumentation to analyse said product.

She doesn’t have the same equipment as, say, the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world. And, it seems, even a business of that size can struggle with checking its own claims. But if 14 year old students are expected to perform the lab work for multinationals, there’s a problem.

What happened here? Did you forget to chuck in the vitamin C into Ribena? Was the vitamin guy off sick? Did your obsessive processing reduce the quantity of the nutrient? How did you not notice? Surely you didn’t just simply lie? You are mostly a drug company, it’s kind of important for you to do adequate testing on your products.

And while I’m at it – can you cut back on the doctor kick-backs a little – there’s one GP I dub ‘the GlaxoSmithKline lady’ – no matter what ails you, they have a product that can cure it. Like when I went in for a certificate for a cold I was almost entirely over (just a bit of mucus left) – and got a prescription for freaking Ventolin.

Climate Change Denials.

I don’t have any particular problem with ExxonMobil’s impressive efforts to question the validity of climate change. They’re protecting their interests; a lot of companies do the same in various ways.

I start to have a problem when they enter the realms of both deception and risk. All businesses and people should be free to protect their interests by funding studies, lobbying, etc, just as long as it does not depart from reality or pose a danger. And if they do indeed resort to both (which is obviously the case for ExxonMobil) their argument is void, and there should be penalties.

The fossil fuel sector is hardly at fault, it is merely a machine of business, there will be no success in pleading to its morals if they conflict with its existence. Business is never going to work that way, but feel free to boycott. Legislators bear the entire blame for any corporate machine that protects its survival at the risk of living beings.