May 12, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DOW REJECTS PROPOSAL TO CLEAN BHOPAL USING FIRST-QUARTER PROFITS
The same man who appeared on BBC World TV last December as a Dow
representative to announce that Dow would finally clean up Bhopal [1]
showed up today at Dow's Annual General Meeting (AGM) to suggest the
same thing to Dow's board of directors and shareholders.
"We made an incredible $1.35 billion this quarter," said "Jude
Finisterra," aka Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men [2]. "But for most of
us, that'll just mean a new set of golf clubs. Let's do something
useful instead - like finally cleaning up the Bhopal plant site, or
funding the new clinic there [3]." Dow Chairman Bill Stavropolous
responded to "Finisterra's" suggestion with a curt dismissal [4].
The Yes Men joined other shareholder groups in Midland, including
Amnesty International, which condemns Dow's lack of response to the
Bhopal crisis as a human rights issue [5].
BANKERS EMBRACE "GOLDEN SKELETON" MASCOT
Two weeks ago at a London banking conference to which they had
accidentally been invited, two "Dow representatives" described a new
Dow computer program that puts a precise financial value on human
life.
The 70 bankers in attendance enthusiastically applauded the lecture,
which described various industrial crimes, including IBM's sale of
technology to the Nazis for use in identifying Jews, as "golden
skeletons in the closet"--i.e. lucrative and therefore acceptable.
Several of the bankers then posed for photos with "Dow Acceptable
Risk" mascot "Gilda, the Golden Skeleton," and signed up for licenses
for the "Acceptable Risk Calculator," which helps businesses determine
the exact point where human casualties will start to cut into profit,
and suggests the best regions on earth to locate ventures with
potentially very high death tolls.
See http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/dow/acceptablerisk.shtml for video
and photos of the event, and http://dowethics.com/risk/ to try out the
"Acceptable Risk Calculator" for yourself.
STATE DEPARTMENT FINDS FAKE DOW WEBSITE USEFUL
Dow may not appreciate the DowEthics.com website--but the US State
Department finds it quite useful, and refers requests for information
about Bhopal to various of its pages: see
http://www.dowethics.com/statedeptfoi/ for an example.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
[1] See http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/dow/bhopal2004.shtml
[2] Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno had been given one Dow
"proxy" each by actual shareholders, giving them the right to attend
the annual meeting and address the Dow board.
[3] Two weeks ago, the Sambhavna Trust Clinic of Bhopal opened a new
wing to serve the victims whose numbers continue to grow due to
groundwater contamination from the uncleaned plant site. See
http://www.bhopal.org/ for information on how you can contribute.
[4] See http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/dow/2005agm.shtml for complete
statements and responses, including Yes Man Mike Bonanno's feverish,
red-eared tirade in a neck brace.
[5] See http://www.amnestyusa.org/business/dow_letters.html. See also
http://www.proxyinformation.com/dow/summary.htm and
http://www.TRWNews.net/
Funny bra add copped from StayFree:
"Built-in sculpted graduated cups are designed to create a natural cosmetically enhanced look. "
So post modern, I can't handel it!
"today, out of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are corporations; 47 of them are U.S. corporations – they're not countries, they're corporations."
A great article on how the USA does it's economic dirty work: A former trade negotiating guy interviewed by Amy Goodman.
"In any case, we go to that third-world country and we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community; usually the World Bank leads that process. So, let's say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90 percent, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks – big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt.
Now what also happens is that this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay. For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador's foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit men, is equal to roughly 50 percent of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries.
So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs. And in the case of many of these countries, Ecuador is a good example here, that means destroying their rain forests and destroying their indigenous cultures. That's what we're doing today around the world, and we've been doing it since the end of World War II. It has been building up over time until today where it's really reached mammoth proportions where we control most of the resources of the world."
Enviros have compromised too much, says Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry's mad as hell, and he's not taking it any more. If we all love our land like we say we do, why do we accept -- nay, participate in -- its destruction? Why do we pass the keys over to corrupt politicians and big business? Why do we lobby for wilderness areas but abandon the poor and disadvantaged to economic depravation? We compromise too much. It's time to get radical, Berry says -- in Soapbox, today on the Grist Magazine website.
today in Grist: Wendell Berry says it's time to quit compromising
This is terrifying. It's an article on how chemical pollutants are altering hormones so that embryos become females. This is actually a huge problem. My friend at school here is studying how estrogens in waste make insects and fish all female as well. The body only typically absorbs 10% of medications, and the rest gets flushed into the sewer system and out into the environment. People really need to start thinking about what they put in their toilets. These estrogens are also produced when you microwave plastic, and then they seep into your food. So only microwave glass, ok? The full article is in "more."
Where the boys aren't
Living with constant pollutants emanating from a dense concentration of chemical plants, a native band struggles to understand why women are giving birth to a disproportionate number of girls
By MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
Saturday, July 31, 2004 - Page A3
SARNIA -- Over the past five years, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation on the outskirts of Sarnia has had nearly two girls born for every boy, an unusual run of female births.
Last year, it was nine boys to 19 girls. The year before it was 10 boys to 21 girls. And the year before that, only six boys to 15 girls. In the band's registry, baby girls began dominating around 1993, but the trend to female births has become most pronounced in recent years.
After a decade of a girl-baby boom, boys often complain of not having friends nearby to play with, and it's never a problem to fill a girls sports team.
But the long string of female births is starting to cause deep unease. Many women have also reported multiple miscarriages, and in local elementary schools, a large number of children have been identified as having developmental delays.
"We're in almost a period of denial right now. This can't be. There are too many things wrong, it can't be true," Darren Henry, a band member, says.
His wife, Kim Henry, who works as a native counsellor at one of the schools, fears that living so close to many chemical plants is affecting the reserve's children. "Are our kids going through all of this because of all the chemicals here and the leaks that are happening?" she asked.
At the reserve, there usually isn't much doubt about what sex a child will be these days. Lisa Joseph has had four girls and one boy, all under 10.
"I have the one and only boy in my part of the family," she says.
Two of her sisters have had six girls between them and a third sister is now pregnant. "She is probably going to have a girl," Ms. Joseph says.
In Canada, and in most industrialized countries where sex ratios have been studied, the percentage of boys born has been in a slight, long-term decline for reasons that are not entirely clear. This trend began in Canada around the start of the 1970s.
Some researchers suspect that environmental pollutants, many of which act like female hormones, could be a factor. Several chemicals, including dioxin, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and hexachlorobenzene, a chemical used in rubber manufacturing, have been associated with excess female births.
Samples taken from around a creek that winds through the reserve have been found to be contaminated with both PCBs and hexachlorobenzene, among other chemicals.
"There is certainly growing evidence that environmental chemicals, even at fairly low levels, can alter sex ratios," says Shanna Swan, a professor in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who has conducted research linking poor sperm quality to pesticide exposure.
Fertility drugs, such as clomiphene citrate, also lead to more girls being born.
The normal state of affairs in the human sex ratio has been for a slight surfeit of males, with about 106 born for every 100 females. At the time of conception, the ratio is even more dramatic, with about 120 males for every 100 females.
That more boys generally are conceived and born is thought to be the way humans evolved to compensate for the higher fragility of male fetuses and the higher mortality rates among males once they are born.
"It's a feedback mechanism that protects against excess male attrition," says John Jarrell, a gynecologist at the University of Calgary, who helped compile the study showing the decline in the ratio of male births in Canada.
At Aamjiwnaang, the expected situation -- slightly more male births than female -- prevailed among the band's approximately 1,500 members from 1984 to 1993.
It is not clear why the ratio suddenly tipped the other way.
Ada Lockridge, one of the band's councillors, suspects chemical exposure and says one major incident occurred around the time of the change. She shows visitors an article from the local paper about an evacuation that took place at the reserve in December of 1993, after a fire and chemical release at the nearby Suncor plant.
Sarnia's chemical valley has been built literally to the edge of the reserve, with a who's who of major companies often just across the road or around the corner. Besides Suncor Energy Inc., the neighbours include Imperial Oil Ltd., Shell Canada Ltd., Dupont Canada Inc., and Dow Chemical Canada Inc. Residents say they have watched workers protected by space suits go about their jobs, while they stand watching from the reserve.
The native community was granted its land at the southern edge of Sarnia in 1827. Much of the 14-square-kilometre reserve remains forested and is dotted with suburban-style homes, an incongruous sight in the middle of a sprawling industrial complex that has 20 per cent of Canada's refineries and produces about 40 per cent of its petrochemicals.
The reserve is also located just downriver from where the so-called Sarnia blob of dangerous chemicals was found on the bottom of the St. Clair River in the 1980s.
Residents complain there is almost always some sort of stink in the air. Sometimes it's like rotten turnips. Other times it's like rotting eggs. Each corner of the reserve has a slightly different stench.
Being hemmed in by big chemical complexes means any exposure to harmful compounds is likely to be far greater than in Sarnia itself, where most residents live kilometres away from the plants.
There are about 20 chemical plants or refineries in the area whose emissions are large enough that they must be reported to Environment Canada's national registry of pollution releases.
Earlier this year, Ontario sent its environmental SWAT team to Sarnia because of the high number of chemical spills. The St. Clair River near Sarnia is also one of the sites where federal environmental scientists have found male wildlife species with blurred sexual characteristics.
Finding explanations to the puzzling birth trend will require a major study comparing the reserve to other similar native communities that don't have such high chemical exposure, according to Dr. Jarrell.
On the ground in the reserve, Mr. Henry, who helped coach teams, says girl squads were easier to assemble. "I know it was a lot, lot easier to raise a team of girls to play sports than it was for boys. It just seemed like there was a whole lot of girls here."
Edna Cottrelle, who lives about 10 houses down from the Suncor plant, says her son Nodin, 11, finds the shortage of boys acute. "There are no boys his age along the river," she says. "He's always complaining."
This is an AMAZING article on the Columbian situation. Everyone should read it.
from nbc:
the US has 5% of the world's population and has 25% of the prisoners
oddly enough this is very similar to oil consumption
we use 25% of the world's oil
"By 2002, one of every four black men in the U.S. was idle all year long. This idleness rate was twice as high as that of white and Hispanic males."
"The study did not consider homeless men or those in jail or prison. It is believed that up to 10 percent of the black male population under age 40 is incarcerated."
"This does not even begin to address the very serious problems of underemployment, such as part-time or temporary jobs, and extremely low-wage work."
"Finally, it's just wrong to allow so many Americans to remain in a state of social and economic degradation without attempting to alter the conditions responsible for their suffering.
Education is one of the keys here. As Professor Sum found, 44 percent of black men with no high school diploma were idle year-round versus 26 percent of those with a diploma, and 13 percent of those with a bachelor's (or higher) degree."
This is a really interesting statement by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and is an obvious reason behind the US economic expansion.
The following is a press release for the latest stunt pulled off by the fabulous Yes Men! I *highly* recommend following the link at the bottom and reading the page it goes to, as it describes who the Heritage Foundation is in greater detail and I really believe that this is the goal and vision of this administration: to shut down the state, just not in the nice happy anarchist way, more in the evil corporate empire way:
May 5, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PROTESTERS AMBUSH CONSERVATIVE THINK TANK
Speaker applauded for lambasting Bush
At the Heritage Foundation's annual Resource Bank meeting in Chicago last
Friday, protesters masquerading as a right-wing think tank took the stage
and announced that in light of Bush's shortcomings, they were nominating
former Reagan Attorney-General Ed Meese for president.
The audience applauded for nearly ten seconds. Meese, eating at a table
just feet away from the podium where Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men made
the announcement, grimaced and shook his head in surprise.
Heritage is the most influential think tank in Washington, spending over
$25 million annually to influence policy. Just as the wildest anarchists
aim to "smash the state," Heritage hopes that "the liberal welfare state
can be brought to collapse," in the words of its current president.
The Yes Men registered for the Heritage event as "The Society for
Socioeconomic Stability" and spent two days mingling among the 650
participants before approaching the microphone during a lull in the
closing luncheon.
Echoing sentiments expressed by others throughout the event, Bichlbaum
condemned Bush as an inadequate free-markets candidate. But while others
had condemned Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program as "socialistic,"
Bichlbaum focussed on the administration's war in Iraq, calling it "crony
corporate welfare" and "market distortion on a fairly gigantic scale."
"The Iraq war was history's biggest illegal trade subsidy," said Yes Man
Mike Bonanno, who was also in attendance. "One thing we'll be trying to
do in the months ahead is lodge an official complaint about this with the
WTO in Geneva."
"In a free market, companies like Halliburton and Exxon should be funding
their own market expansion projects instead of depending on the Federal
government for it," said Louise Smith, another Yes Man attendee.
Please see http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/bush/heritage.shtml
forpictures and video.
An interesting look at the corporate angle of activism.
It's pretty much self-explanatory.
a great article regarding ms jackson's wardrobe malfunction.
Frank Rich: My Hero, Janet Jackson
February 15, 2004
It may be a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. Two weeks after the bustier bust, almost no one has come to the defense of Janet Jackson. I do so with a full heart. By baring a single breast in a slam-dunk publicity stunt of two seconds' duration, this singer also exposed just how many boobs we have in this country. We owe her thanks for a genuine public service.
You can argue that Ms. Jackson is the only honest figure in this Super Bowl of hypocrisy. She was out to accomplish a naked agenda - the resuscitation of her fading career on the eve of her new album's release - and so she did. She's not faking much remorse, either. Last Sunday she refused to appear on the Grammys rather than accede to CBS's demand that she perform a disingenuous, misty-eyed ritual "apology" to the nation for her crime of a week earlier. By contrast, Justin Timberlake, the wimp who gave the English language the lasting gift of "wardrobe malfunction," did as he was told, a would-be pop rebel in a jacket and a tie, looking like a schoolboy reporting to the principal's office. Ms. Jackson, one suspects, is laughing all the way to the bank.
There are plenty of Americans to laugh at, starting with the public itself. If we are to believe the general outcry, the nation's families were utterly blindsided by the Janet-Justin pas de deux while watching an entertainment akin to "Little Women." As Laura Bush put it, "Parents wouldn't know to turn their television off before that happened." They wouldn't? In the two-plus hours "before that happened," parents saw not only the commercials featuring a crotch-biting dog, a flatulent horse and a potty-mouthed child but also the number in which the crotch-grabbing Nelly successfully commanded a gaggle of cheerleaders to rip off their skirts. What signal were these poor, helpless adults waiting for before pulling their children away from the set? Apparently nothing short of a simulated rape would do.
Once the deed was done, the audience couldn't stop watching it. TV viewers with TiVo set an instant-replay record as they slowed down the offending imagery with a clinical alacrity heretofore reserved for the Zapruder film. Lycos, the Internet search engine, reported that the number of searches for Janet Jackson tied the record set by 9/11-related searches on and just after 9/11.
"That a single breast received as much attention as the first attack on United States soil in 60 years is beyond belief," wrote Aaron Schatz, the columnist on the Lycos Top 50 site. (Though not, perhaps, to the fundamentalist zealots who attacked us.)
For those who still couldn't get enough, the cable news channels giddily played the video over and over to remind us of just how deplorable it was. Even though by this point the networks were blurring the breast with electronic pasties, there was still an erotic kick to be milked: the act of a man tearing off a woman's clothes was as thrilling to the audience as whatever flesh was revealed therein, perhaps more so. But to say that aloud is to travel down a road that our moral watchdogs do not want to take. It's the unwritten rule of our culture that the public is always right. The "folks," as Bill O'Reilly is fond of condescending to them, are always the innocent victims of the big, bad cultural villains. They're never complicit in the crime. The idea that the folks might have the free will to tune out tasteless TV programming or do without TV altogether - or that they might eat up the sleaze, with or without young 'uns in the room - is almost never stated on television, for obvious reasons of fiscal self-interest. You don't insult your customers.
Since the public is blameless for its role in creating a market for displays like the Super Bowl's, who should be the scapegoat instead? If you peruse Mr. O'Reilly's admonitions in his first three programs dealing with the topic, or the tirades of The Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing direct-mail mills like the Parents Television Council and Concerned Women for America, you'll find a revealing pattern: MTV, CBS and their parent corporation, Viacom, are the exclusive targets of the invective. The National Football League is barely mentioned, if at all. To blame the country's highest-rated sports operation, after all, might risk insulting the football-watching folks to whom these moral watchdogs pander for fun and profit.
But the N.F.L. is in the sex business as assiduously as CBS and MTV, and for the same reason: it wants those prurient eyeballs. It's now been more than a quarter-century since Super Bowl X, when the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders first caught the attention of the nation. "The audience deserves a little sex with its violence," Chuck Milton, a CBS sports producer, said back then.
The N.F.L. has since worked tirelessly to fill that need. This year was not the first MTV halftime show that the league has ordered to try to expand its aging audience beyond the Levitra demographic. The first such collaboration, Super Bowl XXXV three years ago, featured Britney Spears all but falling out of a halter top and numbers in which both Mr. Timberlake (then appearing with 'NSync) and Nelly grabbed their crotches. There was, to my eye, twice as much crotch-grabbing then as there was this year, but that show generated no outrage whatsoever.
It did, however, attract two million more viewers than the game itself. The N.F.L. wanted more of the same for 2004, which is why the league's commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, released a statement saying, "We're pleased to work again with MTV" when announcing the encore. Or pleased up to a point. When MTV proposed that part of the show be devoted to a performance of the song "An American Prayer" by Bono to increase awareness of the horrific AIDS epidemic in Africa, the N.F.L. said no - even though Bono had done the league the favor of giving the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show a dignified musical tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.
The mention of a sexually transmitted disease might dampen the libido of the salacious MTV show that the N.F.L. wanted this year and wanted so badly that the league remained silent even when MTV's pregame publicity promised that the performance would contain "some shocking moments." As one participant in the production told me, the N.F.L. saw "every camera angle" at the show's rehearsals and thus was no less aware of its general tone than CBS and MTV were. You don't hire Ms. Jackson, who's been steadily exposing more of her breasts for over a decade on magazine covers, to sing "Rock Your Body" if you have a G-rated game plan. Nonetheless, Joe Browne, the league's flak, pleaded total innocence after the event, releasing a hilarious statement that the N.F.L., like the public, was the unwitting victim of a show that it had both commissioned and helped supervise: "We applaud the F.C.C.'s investigation into the MTV-produced halftime. We and our fans were embarrassed by the entire show."
That investigation, piggybacked by last week's Congressional hearings, is an election-year stunt as full of hot air as the Bud Light horse flatulence ad. "Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration," declared Michael Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, upon announcing that the entire halftime would be examined. A celebration of what, exactly? Didn't Mr. Powell, the nation's chief television regulator, watch the previous MTV halftime show?
He promises to conduct the investigation himself - a meaningless gesture, though it may gain him an audience and perhaps a photo op with Ms. Jackson. Mr. Powell's real agenda here is to conduct a show trial that might counter his well-earned reputation as a wholly owned subsidiary of our media giants. Viacom has been a particularly happy beneficiary of the deregulatory push of his reign, buying up every slice of the media pie that's not nailed down. Should CBS be found guilty of "indecency" by the feds, the total penalty would amount to some $5 million, roughly the price of two 30-second Super Bowl commercials. Congress's new push to increase those fines tenfold is just as laughable. Viacom took in $26.6 billion last year.
Not for nothing did the company's stock actually go up the day after the Super Bowl. The halftime show was great merchandising for both MTV and CBS, the go-to network for "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show." Not to be left without a piece of the action, even NBC got into the act. Citing the Jackson flap, it decreed that two split-second shots of an 80-year-old woman's breast in an emergency room sequence in "E.R." be excised. But the "E.R." star Noah Wyle then went on NBC's "Today" show the morning of the broadcast to joke about the decision, and the network-owned NBC affiliate in New York used the banned breast as a promo for its post-"E.R." news broadcast: "What you won't see on tonight's episode of `E.R.' - at 11!" Thus did NBC successfully transform its decision not to bare geriatric flesh into a sexual tease to hype ratings. This is true marketing genius, American-style.
What's next? Some are predicting that all the tape delays being injected into TV events to pre-empt future wardrobe malfunctions will be the death of spontaneous, live TV. But the moment an awards show takes a ratings hit, this new electronic prophylactic will be quietly abandoned by the networks even faster than the N.F.L.'s vague threat not to collaborate with MTV next year.
Ms. Jackson, the biggest winner in this whole escapade, is already back on the air. Her official rehabilitation began right after the Super Bowl, when BET started broadcasting a 10-part series of "special Black History Month" spots in which she profiles historical luminaries like Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier.
"Her tone is serious and focused, with the air and diction of a seasoned lecturer," says the network's news release, which also notes that "the spots feature Ms. Jackson clad in classic black." Wasn't her Super Bowl dominatrix costume classic black as well? Well, never underestimate the power of synergy. BET is another wholly owned subsidiary of Viacom.
NOT FOOLING ANYBODY: A CHRONICLE OF BAD CONVERSIONS AND STOREFRONTS PAST
While it is often said that somewhere in America a new McDonalds is opening
every 30 minutes, you never hear about them closing. But thanks to my friend
Liz Clayton, we now have a outlet for documenting yet another ill of our
fast food nation: crimes against architecture and design.
Liz compiled this nifty photo archive of businesses housed in what were formerly fast food restaurants and other chains. A Taco Bell transformed into local middle-eastern restaurant,
a KFC morphed into a liquor store, a Chinese Hut that bears an uncanny
resemblance to Pizza Hut: it's all here. Some conversions are clearly more
successful than others. Quality Properties Real Estate, for example, is
barely recognizable as a former Burger King. But Best of Philly Cheesesteaks
didn't even remove the Taco Bell logo from its street sign!
Liz is always looking for more photos for her archives so if you've got any
good (bad) examples in your town, email submissions@notfoolinganybody.com.