At 10:58 PM 11/27/96 +0000, "Jay M. Fleisher Ph.D. wrote:
 
>It seems that the type of study you describe below is known as an
>ecological epidemiologic study design.  Before you imply causation,
>it is and has been a well known fact that minorities suffer excess
>morbidity and mortality from a variety of diseases.
 
I agree with Jay Fleisher here.  Causation would be
 impossible to prove.
 
A much better question would be to ask why corporations
 (artificial people) are encouraged to perform uncontrolled
  experiments on real people -- especially minorities?
 
Here is an essay I wrote on the subject:
 
==============================================================
 
                  THE CORPORATE MACHINES               11/6/95
                      by Jay Hanson
 
 
  Nowadays, everyone knows that corporations control our
political system and subjugate our citizens.  But before the
Civil War of 1861, citizens controlled the corporations.  Up
to that time, corporations were chartered for a specific
limited purpose (for example, building a toll road or canal)
and for a specific, limited period of time (usually 20 or 30
years).
 
  Each corporation was chartered to achieve a specific social
goal that a legislature decided was in the public interest. At
the end of the corporation's life time, its assets were
distributed among the shareholders and the corporation ceased
to exist.  The number of owners was limited by the charter;
the amount of capital they could aggregate was also limited.
The owners were personally responsible for any liabilities or
debts the company incurred, including wages owed to workers.
Often profits were specifically limited in the charter.
Corporations were not established merely to "make a profit."
 
  Early Americans feared corporations as a threat to democracy
and freedom.  They feared that the owners (shareholders) would
amass great wealth, control jobs and production, buy the
newspapers, dominate the courts and control elections
(one-dollar-one-vote).
 
  After the Civil War, during the 1870s and 1880s, owners and
managers of corporations pressed relentlessly to expand their
powers, and the courts gave them what they wanted.  Perhaps
the most important change occurred when the U.S. Supreme
Court granted corporations the full constitutional
protections of individual citizens.  Congress had written the
14th Amendment to protect the rights of freed slaves, but in
an 1886 decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific
Railroad) this was expanded when the courts declared that no
state shall deprive a corporation  ". . . of life, liberty or
property without due process of law."
 
  "There was no history, logic or reason given to support that
view,"  U. S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was to
write 60 years later.  But it was done anyway.  By applying
the 14th Amendment to corporations, the court struck down
hundreds of local, state and federal laws that were enacted to
protect people from corporate harm.
 
  By the early 20th century, courts had limited the liability
of shareholders;  corporations had been given perpetual life
times;  the number of owners was no longer restricted;  the
capital they could control was infinite.  Some corporations
were even given the power of eminent domain (the right to take
another's private property with minimal compensation to be
determined by the courts).  Of course, a corporation cannot be
jailed.  It cannot even be fined in any real sense;  when a
fine is imposed, it is the shareholders who must pay it.
 
  In effect, the U. S. Supreme Court bestowed natural rights
on un-natural creatures, amoral beasts that were created to
serve selfish men.  Now corporations had life and liberty (but
no morals), and the fears of the early Americans were soon
realized.
 
  Large corporations are autonomous technical structures
(machines) that follow the logic inherent in their design.
Corporate machines ingest living, natural systems (including
people) in one end, and excrete un-natural, dead garbage and
waste (including wasted people) out the other.  These
machines have no innate morals to keep them from seducing our
politicians, subverting our democratic processes or lying in
order to maximize profit.  Moreover, they are only nominally
controlled by laws, because the people who make our laws are
in turn controlled by these same machines.  Today in America,
we live under the de facto plutocracy of the corporate
machines (one-dollar-one-vote).
 
  Corporate machines, in an orgy of corporate profit, have
completely destroyed American Democracy and now destroy the
very basis of our lives -- both physically and morally.  These
machines leave our children to face an ugly future of fighting
each other over the un-profitable leftovers!
 
  The only arguments that we can muster against this relentless
destruction are religious and ethical:  the obligation of
stewardship for all of God's creation and the extension of
brotherhood to future generations.
 
  But corporate machines have no religion or morals
   -- and we have no chance.
 
- - - - - - - -
 
Would we be able to salvage our political system without
violence? Here is one candid opinion from an executive with
the influential public-relations firm of Hill & Knowlton:
 
"The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of
 the environmental movement," Mankiewicz confided.  "They
 sense that there's a majority out there and that the emotions
 are all on the other side -- if they can be heard.  I think
 the corporations are wrong about that.  I think the companies
 will have to give in only at insignificant levels.  Because
 the companies are too strong, they're the establishment.
 The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in
 the square in Romania before they prevail."
 
From:
 
 WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE: The Betrayal of American Democracy,
  by William Greider; Simon and Schuster, 1992  0-671-68891-X
 
*************************************************************
 
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Jay Hanson