By Robert L. Brenna Jr.
The Daily Record Newswire
Approximately 150 percent of our country is for sale.
And 175 percent of all maladies with cute names and ailments you never heard of before were created by Madison Avenue with only one objective in mind: Create a new market, scare the hell out of everybody who might have even some of the egregious “symptoms,” then convince them that they have a new syndrome with an easily remembered name.
It’s no coincidence that the most recent TV commercials aired by Big Pharma just happen to have a brand-new product that will make you all better.
Just how many new syndromes are created this month will be directly proportional to how many new products multinational pharmaceutical companies want to sell, not only to your doctor, but to you directly.
I’ve personally been involved in product liability lawsuits that revealed a “smoking gun” memo within the memos used to prepare for FDA hearings. They included comments that, in sum and substance, advised the company employees and attorneys to try to steer the FDA inquiry away from the topic if the FDA realized there was a risk of stroke.
Making millions a week by getting a drug switched from prescription to over-the-counter seems to be a great incentive to ignore morality completely. You see, all you have to do is take doctors out of the equation, tell the public that the FDA has approved the product, and the money rolls in faster than you could print it yourself.
That doesn’t mean doctors are not being approached daily, with enormous attempts to get them to sign on with the industry programs. Even doctors can be manipulated. Some can be purchased.
Remember when doctors wearing white coats actually sold cigarettes in TV commercials? “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” he says while smiling and wearing a white coat to make sure that you are secure in the knowledge that smoking is what doctors want you to do.
Not surprisingly, not all of the money is going into pure advertising. Some of it goes to various marketing executives who are paid to come up with scary sounding names for those syndromes and to develop commercials that will make you want to buy the newest medicine that can cure that newest scary sounding ailment. There is an old axiom that if you say something enough times people will start to believe it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud that we are a capitalistic society. Wouldn’t see it any other way! But what happens when the money from big business can be used to buy the public trust? What happens if lies, no matter whether they incorporate false statistics, are repeated so many times over the airwaves that people start to believe them?
So what’s my beef? It’s that ever-present, underlying fear that we are about to see the same thing happen in our national and local elections.
What happens when a multinational corporation decides it can begin saving billions of dollars by paying — anonymously — for enough advertising so that they ultimately control the decisions made by our government? What happens is that we lose our freedom. We lose our liberty. We lose our right to self- govern.
A corporation has a fiduciary duty to its stockholders. The bottom line is all that counts. What happens when an attempt to maximize the bottom line becomes an incentive for huge amounts of money to be used to surreptitiously move our jobs overseas? That now can be done, mind you, with no trace of identification, sourcing, motivation or even something that we lost sight of long ago — the truth.
What happens when the ads we are subjected to on television are repeated so often that some of us start to believe them? There is an old axiom ...
Do you really think corporations are not funding ads to make sure the people they want in control of our country will win the elections? Of course they can, and they are. They’re doing it right now, without even showing their faces.
If the sole motivation is stockholder profit, do you really think a multinational corporation engaged in any business won’t fund as many ads as it needs to make sure that our Legislature votes the way it wants? You know they will try to influence who becomes president, thereby changing the Supreme Court in the direction they want it to go. That becomes a perfect tri-fecta.
Approximately 200 percent of my stomach turns just thinking of what percentage of our government will be purchased in the near future.
I hope to God it’s not too late to take back control of our government before it is sold overseas in a fire sale that will envelop and scorch us all.
Robert L. Brenna Jr. is a partner in the Rochester, New York, law firm of Brenna, Brenna & Boyce PLLC, which his father founded.
