The Profitability of An Early Death
 

by Robert Lederman

Perhaps you've seen their heart-warming public service ads on TV about renovating a drug rehabilitation center and how much they care about kids despite being a cigarette manufacturer. here's something they left out of those 60 second announcements.

The tobacco giant Phillip Morris just suffered an embarrassing public relations gaffe by inadvertently revealing a fact economists, actuaries and eugenicists know but rarely speak publicly about.

Governments save huge amounts of money when citizens die prematurely.

Phillip Morris, one of the world's wealthiest corporations, recently commissioned a study intended to highlight this fact as a selling point to the Czech government, which is considering legislation to regulate cigarette smoking. Phillip Morris controls almost 90% of the rapidly-growing Czech tobacco market.

The study described premature deaths from cancer and emphysema as, "indirect positive effects" of smoking, leading to "savings in public health care costs and state pensions due to early mortality of smokers."

Responsible for millions of deaths in the U.S. due to smoking and the decades spent hiding the truth about its dangers from the public, Phillip Morris is by no means unique in its coldly-calculating bottom line approach to business. Automobile, pesticide, chemical, food, biotech, pharmaceutical and health care corporations all factor in similar statistical selling points as they lobby the Congress to prevent legislation from being passed that would protect human life.

Ever wonder why U.S. technology can get us to the moon but can't manufacture cars that don't blow up when hit or that kill an average of 50,000 Americans each year? Why do 500,000 Americans die each year from nothing more than taking prescription drugs? Did it strike you as peculiar when our "compassionate" President GW Bush wanted to prevent new restrictions on how much arsenic - a deadly poison - would be allowed in our drinking water?

Are you curious as to why in this modern age of refrigeration there's a steady increase in deaths from food poisoning or why our food supply is more disease-ridden than at any time in the past fifty years? Is the government's rush to release thousands of untested genetically-altered plants, animals and organisms into the environment scientific over-confidence, or might it be an indication of a more sinister purpose than helping feed the multitudes?  

As you watch the news each night, do you ever wonder why so many people are getting cancer, are infertile, have disabling learning disabilities or psychological problems and thus need a lifetimes worth of expensive prescription drugs in order to function - drugs which will directly shorten their lives?

Is it possible our government wants people to die prematurely?

Just think of it in these simple terms. If millions of today's senior citizens were to die a mere one year sooner, the U.S. government would save hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs, social security and other social services. If they died five years sooner the savings might amount to trillions of dollars. Viewed in that context, causing even a minor increase in premature death in the American population would be the single most cost-effective economical measure the government could ever take.

New York City often represents the cutting edge of U.S. governmental efforts concerning human health. Whether it's throwing children off welfare, issuing the police hollow-point bullets, closing public hospitals or spraying the entire population with toxic pesticides, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani can be counted on to be at the forefront of any government efforts to downsize the population.

Take his enthusiasm during the past three years for spraying poisons invented by the Nazis on eight million New Yorkers.

Was it an oversight or an error that the Mayor consistently lied to the public about the well-known negative health effects of being repeatedly exposed to the organophosphate and pryrethyroid nerve gasses Malathion and Anvil? Was it an accident that products whose labels specifically state they are not to be sprayed on people under any circumstances were directly applied to children in parks, to shoppers and to millions of workers going to and from their jobs? [2]

My eight years of research on Mayor Giuliani shows him to be ideologically linked in numerous ways to the science of eugenics or population control - as is his pal GW Bush. Both men claim to get their ideological inspiration directly from the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank founded by Reagan's CIA chief William Casey after he brought thousands of former Nazi experts in eugenics to the U.S.

If understanding Giuliani's Nazi-connection requires one to research the maze-like corporate, think tank and CIA connections behind his administration, GW Bush's are a simple matter of documented American history. Until their assets were seized by the U.S. Congress in 1942, President Bush's family operated banks and shipping companies that were fronts for the Third Reich. Their Nazi-connection is the source of the Bush family fortune and continues to this day. [3]

Bush and Giuliani's policies euphemistically code-named, "compassionate conservatism" and "quality of life", share a common but never publicly stated objective - the efficient shortening of our lives.

The poor, children, minorities, the elderly and the environment must all be sacrificed in order to increase the profitability of corporations - the same corporations which put these elected officials in office or which in Bush's case, he, his family and his administration members are major stock-holders in.

The increase in disease creates fantastic economic opportunities for drug manufacturers and health providers while at the same time lessening the long-term total in social benefits that the government must pay out. Disease is rapidly becoming the driving force behind the entire U.S. economy. It may prove even better than war as a profit-driving engine.

What more cost-effective way to cut government spending than to massively apply chemicals to the population which reduce fertility, worsen chronic illnesses such as asthma (which is at epidemic proportions among minorities in N.Y.C.) and lead to terminal diseases such as cancer?

The reason many people balk at accepting this view of Giuliani or Bush as eugenicists is that they don't see people immediately dying in large numbers as a result of their policies. What isn't understood is that we are dealing with death rates as analyzed by an actuary. Like geology, the effects can only be observed over a long period of time.

Learning from the mistakes of the past century, immediate death - as in rounding up millions of people and shipping them to gas chambers - is an unworkable solution from this viewpoint. Reducing life expectancy by as little as a single year or reducing fertility so that one less child is born to each family or so that an additional 15-30% of people become infertile is all that's needed in order to save vast amounts of government money while creating a huge economic boon for pharmaceutical, chemical and medical companies.

These savings on social programs can then be passed along in the form of tax write-offs and corporate welfare - exactly as Giuliani and Bush have done to the delight of their wealthiest patrons.

Another factor which makes it hard to comprehend what's really going on is that today's eugenics agenda is not necessarily about targeting Jews, Blacks or some other minority. In this madness, no one is to be spared. Giuliani's enthusiastic use of Malathion may have even given himself prostate cancer, which is a known effect of repeated Malathion exposure.

Before you say this proves he could not have known it was harmful, ask yourself if Phillip Morris executives didn't allow their family members, children and friends to smoke, knowing as they did that tobacco was a definite cause of cancer?

Ask yourself if Ford executives allowed their friends to drive cars they knew were defective and might shred their tires at high speeds or overturn?

Ask yourself if the drug manufacturers that have every study at their disposal and know the long-term effects of taking their products don't allow their own friends, family and relatives to take these dangerous medications or if chemical company executives aren't aware that they and their children are being slowly killed by air pollution and chemical contamination of the environment?

Perhaps this is what is meant by the saying, money is the root of all evil.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to whoever at Phillip Morris commissioned the benefits of an early death study. Perhaps as a result more Americans will realize that our corporations and the government they own and operate may not be the public servants and public benefactors their glossy commercials and service announcements would lead us to believe they are.

Public enemy #1 might actually be a far more apt description for them.

---

[1] CBS Evening News 7/17/2001
Philip Morris: Dead Smokers Cheaper
Tobacco Co. Outlines Savings To Czech Gov't From Smokers' Deaths
Company Is Lobbying Against Stricter Anti-Smoking Regulations
July 17, 2001 AP
(CBS) "Sick smokers may burden a country's health care system, but dead smokers save governments money. That's the conclusion of a study on the financial cost of smoking that was commissioned by tobacco giant Philip Morris. The company is lobbying the Czech government against stricter health regulations on cigarettes with a study of "indirect positive effects" of smoking, detailing "savings in public health care costs and state pensions due to early mortality of smokers...The study by research company Arthur D. Little International concluded that the financial benefits to the Czech government from duties and taxes paid by consumers, importers and tobacco businesses outweighed the costs of health care, lost working days and fires caused by cigarettes. "

[2] For the latest article on Giuliani's West Nile Virus fiasco see:
http://www.villagevoice.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0129/baard.shtml
Village Voice 7/18-24/2001
Mutant Malathion: How New York's mosquito spray campaign spawned a deadly neurotoxin

[3] For numerous documented articles about the Bush/Giuliani-Nazi connection, the CIA's Manhattan Institute, eugenics and West Nile Virus information see:
http://baltech.org/lederman/

Street artist information
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html

Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
[email protected]
(718) 743-3722

Feel free to forward widely.