10 Dark Secrets Brands Don’t Want You to Know 10. DuPont In 1951 DuPont, an industrial chemical company, purchased a little known compound called Perfluorooctanoic [per-floro-okta-no-wick] Acid, or PFOA for short. At this point, DuPont was producing around 900 tons of Teflon, the non-stick coating, every year. Their new acquisition of PFOA helped improve the manufacturing process, which meant more Teflon and more money. The only problem is that PFOA is a horribly toxic chemical that causes cancer in animals and does not break down in the environment.
DuPont agreed to phase it out by 2015, when asked by the Environmental Protection Agency. This came on the back of the EPA fining DuPont $16.5 million for concealing information about health effects. One citation came in 1981 when DuPont found that pregnant members of staff were having babies with birth defects, such as facial deformities. DuPont also realized in 1991 that it had contaminated the water supply of 12,000 people. In 2015 DuPont lost a case to woman who claimed they had caused her kidney cancer. PFOA is now detectable in 98% of the US population and has been found everywhere, from household dust to popcorn. There are currently 3,400 cases awaiting court. 9. IBM IBM’s role in the Holocaust and its 12 year collaboration with Hitler’s Third Reich remained unknown until a 2001 book published by historian Edwin Black. While we know that everything from Fanta to Volkswagen was invented in Nazi Germany, IBM - an American company - sank to even darker depths. The IBM Hollerith machine, which tabulated punch cards, turned out to be central to the systematic killing of Jews in Europe. The machines tracked census information to identify the locations of populations across Europe, then - when captured - they were used to track movements on trains to and from ghettos and concentration camps. The number tattooed onto Auschwitz prisoners was their IBM punch card identification. The CEO of IBM at the time met with Hitler and the vast process could not have been maintained without support from the American offices. Two class-action lawsuits were brought against IBM by Holocaust survivors in the early noughties, but both were dropped due to legal technicalities. 8. Kids Wish Network Labeled America’s Worst Charity by the ‘Center for Investigative Reporting’, the Kids Wish Network seems to be less about helping and more about hoarding. Out of the $141 million dollars they had raised, just $3.5 million went to making children’s dreams come true - less than 2 and a half percent. So where did this money go? Well $116 million was spent on ‘fundraising solicitors’, which are run as for-profit corporations. Money also went to the founder and president - a salary of $130,000 a year and $4.8 million to companies he controlled. They also avoiding telling the IRS about financial transactions made to associates of the charity. The Kids Wish Network was founded in Florida in 1997 and originally called the “Fulfill a Wish Foundation”, which sounds an awful lot like the “Make a Wish Foundation”. They thought so too and didn’t want to be associated with this venture so sued Fulfill a Wish to make them change their name. 7. Bayer Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant, has been behind a number of world changing drugs: aspirin, heroin, antibiotics and birth control. But, as we’ll see, it hasn’t just been curing diseases; it’s also knowingly caused them. In the 1980s they had developed drugs to help blood clotting in haemophiliacs. The medicine involved an injection with concentrate made from donated pools of blood plasma. The catch was that the blood had been taken prior to HIV testing. Over 8,000 haemophiliacs developed AIDS in the USA as a result. In response, Bayer developed a safer medicine in 1984, but continued to knowingly sell the old medicine overseas - making millions - in order to get rid of their large stock.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorBen Wilson is author of Edu Blog, where primarily we will discuss famous books and their authors. Ben studied at Stanford University. He is a teacher of History in High School. Ben also writes book review for ThePaperGuide Platform. ArchivesCategories |