How Corporate Polluters Always Change the Subject

Over the past 150 years, the Western chemical industry has invented - for better and for worse - roughly 10 million synthetic chemical compounds that had never appeared before in nature, at least not in significant quantities on earth.

Some of these completely novel chemical compounds have added immensely to human civilization; others have proved to be deadly to human health and enormously destructive to natural ecosystems, mostly because over billions of years of evolution, living things - including microorganisms involved in decomposing waste materials into simpler substances - have never had a chance to evolve ways of handling them.

Hence the deadly effects of DDT, a known human carcinogen, on species of bird life around the world. Hence the deadly effects of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs when they float into the ionosphere far above the planet and begin to unravel it. Hence the dangerous health effects of many of the organophosphate class of pesticides, many of which were first developed during World War II by German scientists who were hoping to use them as nerve gases.

For nearly the past 40 years ago, ever since Rachel Carson's publication of 'Silent Spring' in the 1960s, environmentalists and public health advocates have been battling to stop the production of the most dangerous of these chemicals.

And so what are we seeing in this news group and indeed around the world? A concerted crusade by the chemical manafacturers and their public relations experts and some of their clients to CHANGE THE SUBJECT - to get the public around the world to forget just how destructive a relative handful of the chemical industry's 10 million brain children can be.

Now we've got people lambasting Greenpeace for supposedly oppressing and injuring the Third World through its opposition to the continuing use of DDT around the world.

Does anybody seriously believe that 90 percent of the corporate flacks who are behind the anti-Greenpeace protests really care at all about the people of the Third World - about their health, their welfare, or any other facet of their existence except their potential to serve as a vast new market for DDT production?

Does anybody seriously believe that the corporate interests now promoting genetically engineered crops for the Third World are seriously doing this out of an altruistic desire to battle world hunger - and not out of a desire to earn huge salaries for the genetic engineers and big profits for their employers?

In the not-so-distant past, certain American chemical companies manufactured napalm, or jellied gasoline, a product that the U.S. military demonstrated in the Third World by dropping it on Vietnamese villagers and burning them alive.

Another product that the U.S. chemical industry manufactured that found considerable application in Vietnam in the 1960s was Agent Orange, an herbicide contaminated with trace amounts of dioxin that the U.S. military sprayed on Vietnamese rain forests, to deny their use to Viet Cong guerrilla fighters, and that the military also sprayed on a fair number of rice fields, where the stuff destroyed crops. Other American-made herbicide products used in the military's 'Operation Ranch Hand' in Vietnam contained arsenic, and yet they were sprayed into Vietnamese wells.

And now the same industry that produced the napalm, the Agent Orange and the arsenic-laden herbicides is proclaiming that it's investing in genetically engineered crops - in the manipulation of DNA, the basic building block of life itself - in order to serve the Third World poor.

DOES ANYBODY BELIEVE THIS, REALLY?

And if you, would you like a bridge I've got to sell you?

Have you read Bernard Goldberg's 'Bias?' It's an interesting look at this question from an insider's viewpoint.

I can give you plenty documented examples of the sort of Leftist suppression of campus speech I referred to.

Of course he/they is/are. Just like 'Psalm/Lion' is spraying it with drivel right off the word processors of various left-wing flacks whose sole motivation is to use the environment as a tool to increase state power. So what? If I were to respond to every point raised by a serious environmentalist as if he/she were 'Lion,' I'd wind up making myself look like an idiot. Gentle hint to those who respond to all critics of environmentalism as if they were 'Man.'

Not that it's important, but why do you think Sunny/Missile/Man represents any interest group other than himself? As a general rule, fanatics don't need to be funded.

JohnAndrew, that's the sort of statement that's going to get you liquidated when Lion's Revolution comes. :^}

That's exactly where I think you're doing yourself a disservice. Sure, 'Man' undoubtedly posted the piece to gloat over it and create a little havoc. But he didn't make it up. This is a serious issue to such non-'corporate interests' as the Congress of Racial Equality. Nobody can force you to treat it as a serious issue, but if you inevitably respond with nothing more than ideological broadsides against your perceived class enemies, you create the impression that you can't respond to the issues on their merits.

That's more like it. Now, why do you suppose CORE doesn't see it that way?

Well, as they say, there you go again. The fact that multinational corporations develop markets in the expectation of making profits is generally understood. It doesn't seem to have any relationship to CORE's dispute with Greenpeace.

Ditto.

Maybe you should read my post again.

:^},

RSR - I haven't read Bernard Goldberg's book; I suppose I ought to to see what he's saying. But I can say from my own somewhat limited experience working in the media that yes, they are biased - but not biased in what I'd call a 'leftist' direction.

A liberal direction at times, a conservative direction at others, and at times a centrist direction - but almost never is the news shaped by the far left. Not in this country, anyway. Whereas you can hear the likes of Rush Limbaugh and - is it Dan Savage? the new anti-environmentalist populist screamer? - you can hear them all the time.

A journalism prof I had in college used to that that on a good, professional, 'objective' newspaper or TV news department, the reporters when examining a controversial subject where the opinions run from '1' to '10' will seek out and report on the '3s' and the '7s.'

The mainstream media won't pay too much attention to the 5's, who are right in the middle on the spectrum of opinion and therefore are pretty boring. But they'll virtually never quote any of the 1's, 2's, 9's and 10's - partly for fear of offending advertisers, but partly to avoid seeming 'biased' and 'kooky.'

When I've worked as a journalist, I admit, I've had a tendency to over-quote government officials, partly because they do seem to be 'neutral' in some sense of the word, partly because they're politically powerful and therefore important, and partly because they have fairly reliable PR people who will usually answer the phone.

Most reporters are going to be biased towards favoring anyone they have to go to frequently for tips about the news, because in the news business these people are like your natural resources: when you lose access to them, you're cooked.

All this gives a powerful centrist bias to the news, I think, but not an especially leftist one.

As far as news reporters, I think a lot of us do tend towards a liberal or occasionally a leftis bias, occasionally a far-right bias ... whereas the rich people who tend to own the media tend to be establishment conservatives. And you need to think about the influence of the advertisers.

At one point in my life, I was both the main environmental reporter and the garden page editor for a small Republican-owned daily newspaper in Indiana, and so long as I was pretty objective in my reporting my editors didn't mind my covering environmental topics - as much as I good, given very limited time to spend on the subject.

One of my tasks as the garden page editor, though, was to prepare the newspaper's annual spring garden supplement - and when I got down to tackling this, I realized it was a huge wrap-around vehicle for ads: ads for garden fertilizers and pesticides, ads for nifty sit-down tractors for cutting your grass, ads for landscaping companies - you name it. Most of the news photographs I had in a file set aside for the garden supplement had been contributed by local nurseries and landmower companies and garden supply houses.

I fought and worked to get some information on organic gardening and alternative gardening concepts included in the supplement - but it was a fight, and all of the pressure in the job was toward making the supplement and the weekly garden page into advertising vehicles, nothing more. And based on that experience and others, I think you're sadly mistaken to see much serious left-wing bias in the news you're getting. I will take a look at Bernard Goldberg's book, though.