Red or Dead: News Roundup
Photo from Oprah.com
Product Red saves African lives: “This season, you can actually feel good if your bank account is running in the red.”
[U2's Bono] is bringing his good-faith efforts to the mass population, teaming up with the world’s largest clothing retailer, The Gap, to sell his “Product Red” clothing line. The Gap, itself a target of quite a few anti-sweatshop activist groups, is redeeming its image with Bono’s new line of t-shirts and jeans, some of which are made in factories in Africa in order to stimulate economic growth, and as much as fifty percent of the net sales of all Product Red items will go to purchase AIDS anti-retroviral drugs.
Product Red doesn’t stop at The Gap’s doors either. Apple has launched a Product Red iPod nano and Motorola a Product Red Razr phone, and Emporio Armani and Converse are also selling items under the label. Donations are made by each of these companies to provide AIDS medication.
I threw up this link partly for the crybabies who bawl about how the poor megacorporations JUST WANT TO BE LOVED. (Not that I care about them, because, trust me, I don’t.) But also mainly because my old grad-school roommate is a HUGE Bono fan of terrifying proportions and she would wallop me with a giant cannoli till I lost all consciousness if I didn’t give the man props. So this is for you, Maria. Because you’ve watched The Godfather trilogy far too many times for comfort and I’m afraid for my family.
And in case anyone thought I was getting soft in my old age …
Product Red kills African lives: “[S]pare me the fantasy that shopping till you drop somehow affects radical change.”
In the place of anything resembling citizenship we have consumer choices, “innovation” and above all brand marketing, which is even now in Product Red being cast as some sort of corporate largesse. (”Isn’t it so great that the Gap and Apple would submerge their own brand identity,” glowed many a business page article). Shopping is sharing, and the unprecedented accumulation of wealth squares entirely with “ending poverty”—just ask Gates or Warren Buffet. In their world, fighting AIDS somehow never seems to query how Europe and the US underdeveloped Africa and how the continent’s abundant resources are still exploited by the world’s wealthy.
And as this smart blogger points out, the AmEx board is stacked with former and current CEOs and directors of major Pharma companies who waged a genocidal campaign against the generic production of AIDS drugs. At 1 percent of AmEx Red profits, absolution comes cheap these days, don’t it?
Related article: Think Before You Pink
Microwave popcorn could kill you: “Want your lungs popped in a jiffy? Cook yourself a bowl of microwave popcorn.”
The chemical in question is called diacetyl. It’s naturally present in butter, and food manufacturers use a synthetic version of this compound whenever they want to endow a product with a buttery taste. Other products that contain this chemical include margarine, butter substitutes, cooking oil, lard, and countless frozen food products.
Diacetyl was widely accepted as safe and effective until dozens of workers at a microwave popcorn manufacturing plant in Jasper, Missouri, inexplicably developed a rare disease called bronchiolitis obliterans, which, as its Latin name suggests, is a condition that completely destroys the lungs.
British moms sell contraband junk food, kill kids: “Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t make him eat.”
“No matter how healthy it is, if kids don’t like it they’re not going to eat it,” said Julie Critchlow, a parent at Rawmarsh, a high school set between a sprawling housing project and the south Yorkshire hills. She mentioned the school’s new low-fat pizza and tagliatelle and meatballs as being particularly unappetizing to her children and said the cooks were so overworked that the baked potatoes were being served half-cooked.
The fact that Rawmarsh now bans children who do not go home for lunch from leaving school has made things worse, she said, leading to an overcrowded cafeteria and the elimination of the old fast-food-down-the-road option.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to tell the kids what to eat,” Mrs. Critchlow said of the school authorities. “They’re treating them like criminals.”
Mrs. Critchlow has become a notorious figure in Britain. In September she and another mother—alarmed, they said, because their children were going hungry—began selling contraband hamburgers, fries and sandwiches to as many as 50 students a day, passing the food through the school gates.
Related article: Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children
Accidental drug exposure causes premature puberty in kids, “feminization” in boys, but doesn’t kill … yet: “[S]ome physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty as a result of the increasing prevalence of certain drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants, called ‘endocrine disruptors,’ that can cause breast growth, pubic hair development and other symptoms of puberty.”
Dr. Dedekian’s first patient was evaluated for possible genetic endocrine problems and a rare brain tumor before the cause of her puberty was discovered. It turned out that her testosterone level was almost 100 times normal, in the range of an adult man. The same problem affected her brother.
The doctors realized that the girl’s father was using a concentrated testosterone skin cream bought from an Internet compounding pharmacy for cosmetic and sexual performance purposes. From normal skin contact with their father, the children absorbed the testosterone, which caused pubic hair growth and genital enlargement. The boy, in particular, also developed some aggressive behavior problems.
Related news: “Could chemicals have destroyed my sons’ chances of becoming fathers?”
Brianne said,
October 19, 2006 at 5:11 am
My brain just melted. How do you find all this information?
I actually wanted to peel the eyeballs out of my head and give ‘em a good rinse off, but the water here is barely potable.
Melissa said,
October 19, 2006 at 10:40 am
Information overload - but it’s all good!
My almost five-year-old son is the pickiest of the picky. This boy has not voluntarily eaten a fruit or vegetable since he was an infant, and he would rather go hungry than eat the healthy choices I serve. My husband is of the let-him-eat-cake philosophy so long as he’s actually eating somehing. Me, I’ll give in to his endless requests for cereal and PBJ sandwiches only after scrutinizing every ingredient. I don’t understand how my son grows, but I am convinced his nutritional status is affecting other aspects of his life (which we are now addressing).
BTW -he does love popcorn, but only if it’s been popped on the stove the good ole fashioned way. Good boy!
The Worsted Witch » said,
March 7, 2007 at 5:33 pm
[...] Brilliant! It’s what I’ve been saying all along—give more, buy less. Check out BuyLessCrap.com. Something else I’ve come across: Product Red has spent as much as a reported $100 million on advertising and promotion, but has raised only $18 million to fight AIDS in Africa. This makes me more sad than mad, I suppose. Devil’s advocate POV: You can’t put a price on spreading awareness. Cynical POV: I wonder how much those companies made from all this? [via One Change and Green LA Girl respectively] [...]