Monsanto Cares
When American industry manufactures a product that is so dangerous to human health that consumers rebel against it or government bans it, the manufacturers withdraw the stuff from the market and move on to make something else … right?
I’m afraid not, Pollyanna. Instead, American manufacturers have an atrocious history of simply moving their banned nasties to Third World countries, dumping the products on unsuspecting poor people. Take DDT … please! When the makers of this cancer-causing pesticide were stopped some 40 years ago from selling and spreading this deadly poison in the U.S., they jumped to Mexico and other Latin American nations.
Now, here we go again. Monsanto and other U.S. manufacturers of genetically altered crops literally have come a cropper in trying to sell their Frankenfoods in Europe, where they’ve been banned, and in our country, where a growing consumer rebellion has spooked retailers and processors from buying these genetically contaminated foods.
So, Monsanto and the rest are trying to peddle their tampered foodstuffs to the world’s poor. Particularly disgusting is their shameful claim that they’re doing this out of humanitarian concern. The lab techs, they say, can splice foreign genes into rice that will juice up its vitamin A content, thus improving the health of millions of Third World children. Kit Bond, the senator from Monsanto, even put 30 million of our tax dollars into a foreign aid spending bill to buy Monsanto’s Frankenrice for distribution to the poor, piously saying that the funds will “liberate millions from the tyranny of hunger.”
Welcome to the ‘New Economy’
All aboard for the New Economy! Cross that bridge to the 21st century! Get your ticket punched for a knowledge job in the information age!
Everywhere we turn, we’re told that getting ahead these days means getting a college degree and getting on the high tech escalator to upward mobility. School administrators from coast to coast have reconfigured their curriculums to cater to this techie, college crowd. But there are a couple of cold realities that call this educational retooling into question. First, 75% of American workers — even in the widely ballyhooed “New Economy” — will not have a college sheepskin on their walls. What are they going to do? Second, the vast majority of job creation in the foreseeable future will not be in the high tech, highly educated job world, but in decidedly “old economy” positions like mechanics, cooks, and hairdressers, none of which require even a bachelor’s degree.
Yet, America’s high schools increasingly are abandoning this majority of students whose only ticket to the middle class is to get top-notch vocational education for such good, honest, and essential trades as carpentry, air-conditioning, cosmetology, masonry, welding, electrical installation, and plumbing. As a New York Times article recently noted, “no matter how high tech the world gets, someone is still going to have to know how the toilet’s plumbing works.”
Since these skilled trades literally provide the structural and service framework of our society, someone will be hired to fill them, but without proper education, quality becomes inferior and pay will slip from middle-class to borderline poverty.
Spurs Stick It to San Antonio
Let’s go to the Sports Desk [sports theme] for Hightower’s “Wide, Wide, Wide, WILD World of Sports!”
Today’s feature: Getting spurred in San Antonio, where two giant corporations are sticking it to average citizens. The San Antonio Spurs happen to be a good professional basketball team, but they’re owned by wealthy private investors whose real game is to profit from corporate welfare. A couple of years ago, the Spurs Inc. entered into a cabal with their local political puppets to build a shiny new $175 million basketball arena. These private enterprisers, however, turned socialist when it came to paying for their basketball palace. They got County Judge Cyndi Krier, whose husband heads the Chamber of Commerce, to lead the charge to jack up the motel/hotel tax to pay $157 million of the arena’s cost.
A regular taxpayer can’t afford to go to a game here — you’re looking at more than 200 bucks for a family to attend. But for $100,000 and up, corporations can get a dandy luxury skybox, with wet bar, dining table, lounge, and two large-screen televisions — which they’ll need, since they can’t actually see the basketball floor from their exclusive enclave.
Meanwhile, in a PR move, the telephone giant SBC Corporation paid $41 million to the Spurs owners to buy the naming rights for this tax-paid arena, emblazoning “SBC Center” all across the building.
But SBC’s PR move is backfiring among many San Antonians who have long complained about the company’s rising phone bills and deteriorating service. SBC is headquartered in this city, but it has not a single customer service office there! If you call about a phone glitch, you wait days, and even weeks to get the glitch fixed.
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This article appears in December 8 • 2000.