Business Info

One of the key demands made by Republican politicians is to clamp down on trial lawyers – these inconvenient people who go round suing capitalists who cause loss and injury to others. Capitalism is all about making the maximum possible profit. If this means cutting a few corners and taking a few risks, that’s an acceptable part of the game and should be without liability if things go seriously wrong. Lawyers have this twisted sense of reality. They believe manufacturers and service providers should be held responsible if they injure other people. The courts try to occupy the middle ground and order corporations too seriously at fault to ignore to pay out a few millions as compensation. No large corporation has ever been hit with an award of damages so high that it was forced into bankruptcy. This leaves judgments from the courts and negotiated settlements with government as no more than a slap on the wrist. After payment, business goes on as before. It’s as if nothing happened.

Which brings us to the emerging evidence of a link between Bisphenol A (BPA) and sexual problems for men. Now you might not have heard of BPA but it’s everywhere. The key uses are to harden clear plastic and as part of the recipe to make epoxy resin. Pick up any food or drinks container and the odds are it contains BPA. It’s also used to line virtually every can of food and drink sold in the US. There’s just one problem. The chemical leaches into the food or drink. That means everything you eat from canned vegetables, meat or fish, and everything you drink from juice to beer, contains this chemical. In adults, this may not be quite so bad but in babies and young children, it’s really bad. So bad, in fact, that its use in any infant product has been banned in several countries. In the US, the FDA has been weighing up the evidence to decide whether there should be limits on its use. So far, the manufacturers have resisted any suggestion their product damages people. Wal-Mart, Toys “R” Us and a few other stores have not waited and already impose a voluntary ban. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherever you go on the internet, whichever newspapers and magazines you open, there’s a familiar marketing message. Apparently, it’s easy to lose those unwanted pounds. Yeah, right. The marketers target our insecurities. They show us “before” and “after” pictures and suggest we too can become an “after” person if we buy their product. “Just spend your dollars with us,” they wheedle, “and we’ll heal your pain.” There are a mass of interesting assumptions in all these ads. It seems almost everyone is a target. We all want to shed pounds. That means we must all be unhappy with our current body shape. We must feel uncomfortable, perhaps even the victim of discrimination. Perhaps the health message is getting through and we begin to feel real fear of blocked-up arteries, high blood pressure and heart disease. Whatever the reason, the advertizers scent blood in the water and they are circling round our purses and wallets ready to sink their teeth into our dollars and disappear without delivering on all their promises. Read the rest of this entry »