Real corporate conspiracies against consumers are extensively documented

Evidence

In The Shock Doctrine I told a counterhistory of the rise of neoliberalism through many such well-documented plots, and I have no doubt that there are other conspiracies that have managed to stay secret. We also know of many contemporary examples of powerful people conspiring against the public. The poisoned water system in Flint, Michigan, was covered up by state officials year after year. British Petroleum and Halliburton cut corners in the operation of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, and the result was the largest accidental oil spill in history in the Gulf of Mexico, with the companies scrambling to cover up the full extent of the damage. Volkswagen ran a conspiracy for years to cover up how much polluting carbon its diesel vehicles were emitting (the cars were programmed to fool the testers). Most consequentially, Exxon and several other oil majors ran a conspiracy to spread doubt and confusion about the reality of climate change for decades, taking a page from the tobacco giants. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 773

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Klein’s earlier The Shock Doctrine and to the reader’s interest in assessing whether the book’s anti-conspiracy-theory stance acknowledges real conspiracies as a baseline.
• SEED: A counterpoint piece: the ‘conspiracy theory’ label gets weaponized precisely when the conspiracy is corporate rather than satanic — the banal-plot list as a rhetorical lever.