The Aeroflot Papers
Just another day for Carey Gollum
This is a satirical piece based on real events. Only the names have been changed to protect the opportunists.
Last week Carey Gollum woke up to find over 10,000 documents left anonymously on her front doorstep. The boxes contained confidential discovery documents related to the ongoing Aeroflot tort law cases on nurdle exposures from passengers and flight crew using their aircraft. Most documents date back to the 1960s.
“This was an astonishing find” Gollum noted while sipping on her morning Chardonnay, “as I was not even aware that emails existed back in the 60s.” Carey has been publishing the documents via her NGO website and via the Guardian, where she is paid handsomely by the Soros Open Society Foundation to rehash her old material.
“I don’t know who left these documents on my doorstep, I really don’t! It could have been at least four tort law firms” Carey Gollum claimed, “… but in any case, I see it as my fiduciary duty to release these confidential papers on behalf of the clients I consult for.” Calling it the Aeroflot Papers, Carey hopes it will shock more people into taking action and suing the airline.
Gollum listed four reasons why she feels we should be outraged. Aeroflot is a huge industrial company so that is reason enough not to trust them. They are Russian, although managed from Switzerland, so strike two. And they have made billions through the use of chemical poisons and polluting fossil fuels. The fact that they withheld evidence and don’t care what happens to their consumers is reason enough to push these cases forward.
A Serious Story
“This has the makings of a serious story” the toxic sleuth opined. “I can see years of book deals, speaking engagements and maybe a few more interviews with Russia Today or Del Bigtree. Maybe Reuters will then send me that overdue apology when I finally receive my Pulitzer!”
The documents contain internal correspondence on nurdles released to plaintiffs’ lawyers under discovery conditions related to hundreds of thousands of cases in the US courts. Plaintiffs are claiming certain rare cancers were caused by nurdle exposures after having flown on the airline in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
It is quite remarkable how quickly and effortlessly Carey could suss out the important information from more than ten thousand research documents. She really has a real nose for it.
Fair Game
Brent Wiener, lead lawyer at Wiener, Bam and Xenu, does not know who leaked the documents but feels they will play a decisive role in the litigation outcome. “Look, there are hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs seeking justice from Aeroflot” Wiener proudly noted “As we’ve simply overwhelmed them, the corporation will have no choice but to settle rather than take each case to court. And with the billions of dollars we hope to pocket for ourselves, we have been able to afford the best scientists, journalists and NGOs money can buy. For years these little activists have been busily creating enough nurdle fear and outrage to motivate any potential juror.”
Wiener declined to mention which dark, donor-advised foundation he has been using to channel funds to these activist groups but only added, with a glint in his eye, how they are worth every penny. “Fair game is fair game!”
The Threat of Nurdles
“I don’t even know what nurdles are,” Gollum admitted, “but some scientists who frequently feed me information have told me they’re pretty bad stuff; they tell me nurdles break down over thousands of years and can be found in our blood and urine.”
The Firebreak was instructed to speak with one apparently very famous (retired) scientist, Christopher Pontifier, who serves as the main litigation consultant for several tort law firms suing Aeroflot. He was a mysterious last-minute addition to the IARC working group that concluded nurdles could be classified as possibly carcinogenic. “Look, these corporates lied and now people are getting cancer” Pontifier bellowed, “and nobody paid me one God damn cent to say that!”
IARC stands for the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which claims to be affiliated with the World Health Organization, so we can trust that when they conduct a hazard assessment that suggests a correlation between nurdles and rare cancers, then it must be the truth.
Nurdles are the building blocks of most plastics so they are everywhere in the environment, in the water, in the air and in the food we eat. It was recently claimed that nanoparticles from nurdles have even been detected in rainfall. Everyone has been affected by nurdles and we really just don’t know how serious the problem is.
Governments though have been reluctant to pass laws restricting nurdles and protecting the public due to intensive industry lobbying. A flock of NGOs have launched a rather slick NurdleGate campaign, with a Netflix documentary in the works, to shine a light on how these industry lobbyists have bought off every single regulatory scientist.
SWOT Team
Aeroflot assembled a group of highly-paid lobbyists to try to deny what they knew and when they knew it. “The fact that they were writing and sharing messages” Gollum chortled, “is reason enough to assume that they knew all along how dangerous these nurdles were”.
Of the ten thousand documents from the 1960s, Carey Gollum has highlighted three messages that she based her exposé on. The first one showed a SWOT member confessing that Aeroflot simply could not declare that they knew all plastics were 100% safe. The document was marked “Confidential” so that implies they were hiding something.
Another document revealed how Aeroflot procurement officers were trying to purchase nurdles at a lower price, fully aware how there might be quality issues. Gollum’s third document showed SWOT members asking if there were alternatives to nurdles, implying that they already knew, back some 60 years ago, that there were terrible risks involved.
Pontifier concurred, providing, once again, a very long, tedious reply: “Not being able to prove that something is not a carcinogen, in mice being exposed at high doses, is reason enough for the product to be banned. That companies like Aeroflot actually designed possible toxic chemicals into their aircraft, where they would possibly be exposed to people, is representative of the uncaring nature of these capitalists and they will have to pay heavily for their greed.” It is rumored that Pontifier has made millions in consulting fees from tort law firms, but we did not investigate that as it was not deemed relevant to the story.
Representatives from Aeroflot had no comment on the evidence provided by Carey Gollum. But we didn’t actually try to contact them since the names we had were working back in the 1960s and none of them spoke English. OK, truth be told, we only bothered to publish what Carey sent to us in her very detailed press kit. In any case, most of our readers are too stupid to notice how one-sided we are and are happier hearing how these people are all just so awful.