Help us out by throwing some cash in the bucket:
Click here to read Hightower's personal message about
REAL CHANGE
(not small change)
Hightower Lowdown
"The difference between fact and fiction is that fiction must be believable."--Mark Twain
In This Issue
Join the upchuck rebellion against corporate crap-food
No-fat? Low-carbs? Baloney! Go for the no-junk diet!
Also in this issue:
July's Lowdown
Big biz wants to own the information superhighway while We the People bump along the backroads
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!"
[read more]
Stay in the Loop
Sign up for email alerts, from breaking news to weekly commentary:
Recent Lowdowns
Search
Subscriber Features
Manage your account by logging in. Don't have an account? Get the Lowdown in the mail every month -- for the unbelievable, ridiculous, low, low price of $15 per year! Save a tree and read it online for just $10 per year!
Dig Deeper
Find more content in these topics: Corporate greed
The General Store
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
Vending machine wars
Coke, Pepsi, and other junk-food purveyors go school board to school board dangling hundreds of thousands of dollars in "educational contributions" in front of each one. Essentially, these are bribes, enticing a board to give the company an exclusive contract to put its vending machines in all of the district's schools. Hundreds of school boards have taken the bribe.
But parents, health-care advocates, and students have been waging fiery counterattacks to rid their schools of those obesity machines. In Los Angeles, for example, a creative bunch of mad-as-hellers sent every school-board member a Mason jar of sugar to represent what the average teenager was ingesting from the soda machines every day. They won a district-wide ban on the sale of sodas.
On another front, Gary Hirshberg was stunned when his teenage son told him he'd had pizza and Skittles for lunch at his school in New Hampshire. Luckily, Hirshberg was in a position to do somethinghe's the top executive of Stonyfield Farm, America's largest organic yogurt maker. Stonyfield is now sponsoring a program to put "healthy vending machines" in schools free of charge.
Food suppliers offer discounts so the snacks are affordable to all students. The healthy vending machines are now in school districts in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington State.