Here is an important book that dwells on the continuities of Hitler’s Germany, the industries that maintained Hitlerist Germany by churning out tanks and ammunition for the front and today. This is not conspiracy talk, it it just about the fortunes of family businesses who were the actual war profiteers, but after WWII during the so-called German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) period became heroic figures of the new Germany’s industrial might, particularly those involved in heavy industries of the Ruhrgebiet – Thyssen, Krupp, Klöckner, Vögler, etc. and the car industry.
Maybe you are familiar with the seminal modernist novels of Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbowthat deal with the mind-boggling implications of Germany’s harnessing the power of chemistry and rockets under the lead of IG Farben and aerospace engineer Werner von Braun. After WWII von Braun was taken off the Nazi V rocket program to be put in charge of US intermediate-range missile program. Due to the secretive nature of the ultra-rich in Germany, we know very little about today’s German corporate industrial giants and their tarnished past. There is a long debate btw historians of Nazi Germany as to what industry branch was more progressive. What if the Junker-Heavy Industry alliance (btw the militaristic Junkers – rye and the Ruhr barons – iron) did not become so prominent or if electricity took the lead? Did the great bankers and captains of industry bankroll the rise of the NS or only join later when the wind of change was in the air?
Anyway, IG Farben – a former giant of the Chemical industry and Big Pharma (as well as concentration camp poisons and numerous other chemical products ) was a different corporate object than older Imperial power company structures such ad Dutch East India Company let’s say. Here is a close look and long overdue historical reckoning of how Germany’s economic might and beloved motor car industries (Volkswagen or BWM) is deeply enmeshed with its wartime nazi support and war effort even involving slave labor. The heirs and heiresses (some of Germany’s richest women and nr 50 on the world’s top richest) are still silent about these things. An ARD documentary eas entitled specifically The Silence of the Quandts – investigating the role of the Quandt family business during the Second World War – KZ (concentration camp) prisoners worked for the batteries in a specially built concentration sub-camp – without any protection workers had to labor and manipulate highly toxic compounds used by the industry.
“I hope people will become more aware on a consumer level that the money they spend on these products might end up as dividends for these families and might go towards the maintaining of foundations, corporate headquarters, and media properties in the name of Nazi war criminals.
“I think people should be more aware of these histories and of history in general, particularly when it comes to consumption and the continuing whitewashing of history by these consumer brands and families that control them.” David de Jong
What’s with Europe’s ultra-wealthy high-spending fossil fossil-burning elite, beyond the Arab sheikhs and crazy nouveau-rich Asians?
This DW (Deutsche Welle) documentary in English is one of several documentaries and reports being commissioned by very mainstream German media channels (ZDF, DW, ARD etc). Since a few years, the discussion about growing inequality in Germany (or what is termed “inequality studies” in Picketty’s famous update). We enter a world of unwanted and expensive gifts given by the German ultra-rich to their communities or small towns were they live a life of anonymity and how refusing such gifts is becoming harder and harder.
This is also the murky world of “taxation designing”, of Steuern Gestalten basically a German term or euphemism for the high payed fiscal professionals and legal eagles who sometimes work for the government (finance ministry) AND also give advice to the super-rich oligarchs on how to legally avoid taxation in their own respective countries (if they didn’t already leave for the fiscal paradise of Switzerland). As always the best analysis of how the rich keep getting richer in Germany (and elsewhere) – in one of Adam Tooze’s last substack posts (highly recommended!).
While we are all aware and fulminate about the outrageous antics of Russian, Ukrainian (or say Romanian) or US billionaire for that matter – plutocrats, the German super-rich are a shifty lot. They actually stay out of the limelight and are much more elusive – even paying (or suing) to be taken off the lists of the global super-rich. Several of the richest family fortunes (do not get any illusions it is all a family business) owning chains such as Kaufland, Lidl or container shipping liners such as Hapag-Llyod in Germany do not appear listed in the annual who’s who of largest profits and incomes. When education or state services seem less and less reliable – charity capitalism is stepping in, but there are many tie-ins. Not to mention the silence and implications of such foundations with their nazi past (check out Nazi Billionaires 2022 book).
What we still have to learn today is that we cannot trust or employ the super-rich to save the planet (it is more the other way around, saving the planet from them and their private jets), what is less clear is that the Social Market Economy (Ordoliberalism) has been consistently enriching them during the last years, while the vast majority of Germans scrapes by a living from day to day, and the number of homeless people in Germany has doubled the last year.
Never posted anything from the Romanian net-sphere which is a pity. Here is an comprehensive video about social democracy nowadays going into its history, its avatars and current conundrums. It tries to make light in one of the most contentious subjects of recent Romanian history from a leftist perspective, which is quite rare. Most things regarding PSD are clearly centrist and usually completely missing out the historical or global systemic dimension of the subject matter. PSD does not demonized or bashed in the usual way – the tensions and contradictions are made evident in a specific dialectical way. Maybe I have a problem with the technical specifics, the speed of the voice and the way it is drowned inside the barrage of sound, but otherwise we need more of these and more meme friendly political analysis in the manner of dezarticast.
“A Documentary about how Hustle Culture, Workaholism, Toxic Productivity, Self Improvement, and Self-Help gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk function as a form of Social Control which the Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls Psychopolitics. Psychopolitics is a form of smart power that governs our Neoliberal Society of Control and Hustle Culture and Positive Psychology (Toxic Positivity) are just some of its many manifestations. It is leading to burnout, depression, and anxiety.” (1Dime channel)
Honestly sometimes I find the concepts used by Byung-Chul Han a bit simplistic, and also a bit redundant, considering that others have been using nearly the same terms. For me it is a bit unclear why psychopolitics is better than neuropolitics, or why smart power is somehow better than soft power. Some of these terms feel a bit too fancy or just slightly upgraded versions of something else. When calling something ‘smart’, just because everything tend to be called ‘smart’ nowadays, there is always the pitfall of reinforcing or even unwittingly hyping up the very things one tries to warn against.
That being said, this documentary is voicing out a general dissatisfaction and sense of doom regarding work – bullshit jobs and the whole protestant ethic, as well as the entire self help industry that is trying hard to re-educate and optimize everything in times of climate crisis, dwindling opportunities and general burnout. There also more and more the feeling that the so-called CEO mindset is being sold and advertised to everyone. This is not anymore the get rich quick scams online but an inescapable reality of theological proportions, of insanely rich CEOs (what the Chinese are already calling their own rich as crazy rich) acting like everybody else is disposable.
Gibney’s style is quite gonzo, yet also influenced by the Bunuel The Exterminating Angel approach that refuses a reductionist, simple analytical perspective and offers a more experiential one. I am tempted to say that pain -and tremendous suffering cannot be just measured – especially when it’s about the left behind & especially since it exists as such a vast scale. Pain has been coupled with blackouts with all those images of unknown worn-out people that rescuers just try to revive or try to inject in order activate their bodies again and again. It is impossibly sad but also important to face this reality. Probably this will be the definitive documentary on Big Pharma and specifically the so-called pain epidemic in the US. It is really a close look at how things got out of hand and how the slow creep of ever more powerful and addictive pills got legally distributed, prescribed and paid by health insurance companies producing some of the most successful IPOs at the stock market and undoubtedly the profitable businesses on this planet. One cannot ever ever imagine the level of craziness and impetus of pushing (better said dealing as in drug dealing) that 21st century Pharma has revved up. There is infinite growth and there is infinite painkiller growth.
First importantly to understand that initially what seemed a good solution – a transition from traditional very brutal mental health therapy in the 1950s – shock treatment and lobotomy regulars in asylums at the time to a more humane, chemical (also say alchemical in tune with the Alchemical Cookbook movie) had much to offer. What started as finding a viable & more effective pain relief for terminal cancer patients that suffered from chronic (or constant) pain – that lead to some groundbreaking discoveries such as long release/extended release medicine ended up being readily available pipeline for anyone ache or no ache, with terrible consequences for the everbody. The 4h long investigation details the way regulatory institutions and a few health professionals strove without much success to warn everybody, shut down producers and try and bring health justice to the people that have been overwhelmingly blamed (the fault lies with you the patient, the addict, the lab rat). Many died because of this readily available and very profitable pill production. Since the developement of anestethics, there has been huge resistance, generally unjustified since doctors really believed patients should suffer or that bodies get purged by suffering – yet the current sitution is at the opposite pole. Pain has been transformed into No 1 enemy, entire clinics, methodologies, pain scale assesssments and pain lecture circuits (including lobbies & pain clinics) have been mushrooming. The result was exponential, the more available the more potent these pills became. Also big ignorance, or willful ignorance to what was happening not only in the private industry labs but also on the streets, the way ppl started circumventing, trafficking and how addicts in turn organizing their own DIY rings and local networks. The reality is much worse than the largely dystopian and conservative vision of Brave New World – in that pharmocracy is still largely highly patented full of patent trolls with no R&D investment.Oxy and the rest did encourage a maintenance of status quo, yet with no equilibrium steady state in view but a continuous disequilibrium, of heaped vulnerabilities latched on and gamed by systems that rarely recompose or manage to protect a majority smashed by decades of neoliberal depredation and legislative loopholes.
What is important is that is also makes clear that this is just one sequence of the story – of opiates and traditional opiate derivatives from poppy that was grown since antiquity. Once industrialized and processed opium became a weapon to open up new markets and balance out imperial trade deficits, most famously and disastrously (for China) during the Opium Wars it became an essential part of modern medicine. Those wars that European imperial powers forced on others in order to make them accept the very lucrative opium traffic in exchange for silver bullion had huge consequences. Generally when the Opioid crisis is mentioned, there is a sort of amnesia regarding the laissez faire economics and open door policies that basically got millions of Chinese addicted to opium traded by the British from the Indian Raj. China tried to fight and destroy these shippments of drugs, but the result was war and gunboat politics as well as territorial concessions by the Chinese, a shameful situation that lasted till 1990s in the case of HK.
One memorable aspect is the whole sales aspect of Pharma (Perdue or otherwise), in my experience one of the most surreal and most brash examples of marketing anywhere, in any industry, including tobacco or arms deals. There is this sequence of training videos for internal use – tactics destined for sales reps ob hip hop rap lyrics, aimed at those that are supposed to convince doctors trough any means (including honey traps or regular bribes etc) that they should continue over-prescribing or increase the dosage. It almost reminded me of Bulgakov based movie Morphineby Aleksei Balabanov with the slowly depedent provincial doctor in Siberia increasing his dosage in order to keep others supplied and face the horrible situation. This in turn has been feeding other more potent drugs in a feedback loop that also ramped up heroin use addiction. The whole is just the alchemy of hell that somehow manages to inundate all sectors, all ages and all problems, especially the Mid West section, former mining towns, rust belt, Appalachia etc
Nothing is a conspiracy because, as always legislation seems to be written in collusion with the makers, where Pharma representatives meet in restaurants with FDA to draft laws around the distribution and safety of these medication. Emails and papers made public speak volumes, yet they always arrive too late. There is also the important art collecting and philantropic aspect of the Sackler family (sponsors of Tate, Smithsonia, Museum of Natural History etc Guggenheim), that denied all responsibility. What I like about Gibney that he does not focus or zoom in just on the founders, of the particular details of the Sackler clan, but takes a broad look into lots of other corners and examples that are not so easy to tie down. Interestingly (for me) is the emphasis on “passion”- in the sense that it truly seems to be a some sort of addiction going on with the founders or CEOs as well. It is easy to demonize Pfizer and just latch onto colorful vaxxer imagination, but it is harder to represent or imagine the vast legal production and pill mill explosion that does not need a virus or an epidemic, or CDC approval, only just incentives by vast amounts of in-flowing money and expansion from cancer patients into new territories and unfettered free access to new bodies.
Everything what they make is with “passion”, and the quote from Sackler Sr about Art and Medicine I find magical in its imbecile purity and mantra like appearance. It has lots of insiders talking, sales reps that where scapegoated and somehow spilled over all that information about whole logic (dare I call it corporate philosophy), of how things actually worked in practice not just on paper. How did this long term persuasion exercise continue and how distributed it got till the end or how hard it is to actually separate state institutions from private interests. Gibney does not exculpate the Sacklers, yet he zooms in order to widen the net and this I appreciate. Revolving doors, people joining the enemy camp happen all the time, at the same time, there is also some sort of permanent watchdogs of the industry, there is also enduring scrutiny by people who are not anti-science or anti-medicine or anti- pills per se, but regular almost barfoot (like the Chinese countryside dr) health soldiers, local family doctors or ex DEA employees on a crusade against Big Pharma. Like always corporation prefer to settle out of court, pay fines (that are merely symbolic in most cases) and never admit wrongdoing.
TimeSpace Warps 