Help us out by throwing some cash in the bucket:
Click here to read Hightower's personal message about
REAL CHANGE
(not small change)
Help us out by throwing some cash in the bucket:
Click here to read Hightower's personal message about
REAL CHANGE
(not small change)
Also in this issue:
In the 1970s, Lily Tomlin developed an iconic comic character she named Ernestine--a telephone clerk who took perverse pleasure from hectoring customers. Her character was a perfect portrayal of the arrogance of AT&T, the monopolistic telephone giant of that day. In one skit on on the TV show, Laugh-In, Tomlin had Ernestine delivering a TV pitch for the corporation:
"A gracious hello," she cheerfully began, speaking directly into the camera. "Here at the Phone Company, we handle 84 billion calls a year. So, we realize that every so often, you can't get an operator, or for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care!"
Sign up for email alerts, from breaking news to weekly commentary:
Find more content in these topics: Corporate greed
Visit Hightower's General Store, to buy high-power Hightower books and other goodies like that.
Home | Contact | RSS | Privacy policy | Copyright Public Intelligence, Inc., all rights reserved 1999-2010
CORPS HIJACK "ORGANIC"
Organic food, once scoffed at by the corporate food giants, is now the fastest-growing segment of the food industry, topping $15 billion in sales last year, so the giants have gone from scoffing to co-opting.
Philip Morris, Kellogg, General Mills, PepsiCo, Dean Foods, and Coca- Cola have all taken over popular organic brands in the last few years, though they're careful not to put their own conglomerate names on the goods.
Now they're perverting the very meaning of the word "organic." After a herculean effort, the small farmers, marketers, and consumers who are the essence of the burgeoning organic movement won a federal consumer-protection label in 2002. Last October, however, corporate lobbyists got eight Republican senators to sneak through an amendment (in the middle of the night) that allows the food giants to add nonorganic ingredients, synthetic additives, antibiotics, and other impurities to processed food, yet still label it organic. Bam! It was doneno hearing, no discussion, no vote.
Then, last December, George W appointed Katrina Heinze to be the consumer representative on the national organic standards board, which is supposed to protect the purity of the federal government's organic label. Guess what our consumer representative does for a living? She's the manager of global regulatory affairs for General Mills.
The Organic Consumers Association (218-226-4164) is working to restore the integrity to the label.