BUSH BRIBERS TARGET THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM
TexasDude,
The sinister effort of the Bush team to turn all information into propaganda (or vice versa) is taking a devious new twist, as the reality of the rape of the environment is now to be whitewashed in our schools, courtesy of the rape & pillage crowd re-writing the textbooks into corporate commercials........
counterpunch.com
July 3, 2002
Bastion of Ecological Literacy Under Siege Logging and Mining Industries Target Public Schools
by John Borowski
A Ford Motor Company donation of $1.5 million dollars to "Provider Pals" epitomizes the quest by extractive industries and their spawn to conquer society's last, un-commercialized bastion: our public school system. Provider Pals is the latest attempt to run the gauntlet and blow wide open the proverbial doors of fairness, objectivity, and sound science found in schools and replace it with nothing short of corporate America's wish list. And that list has a long history of distortions, half-truths, and bold-faced lies.
Provider Pals, organized by Bruce Vincent, a mouthpiece for logging, mining and grazing on public lands, is brilliantly orchestrated with a charismatic, yet simple objective. Put a face on miners, loggers and ranchers: a very happy face indeed. Bringing his minstrel show to urban areas, Vincent and his happy band of "providers" apparently show the "city kiddies" how wood, meat and other resources are brought to the market. Central to this theme, is the pretext that no good American would criticize American icons like the cowboy and logger. Industry has often used workers as pawns; millions of dollars were spent on the timber corporation's PR ploy to pit loggers versus Spotted Owls. Loggers were not the bad guys, it was the likes of Boise Cascade and Weyerhaeuser who butchered millions of acres of watersheds, fragmented forests on a scale never seen before and used "cut and run" techniques caring little about workers and their communities.
The irony of programs like Provider Pals is while they tug at our 'heart-strings', and have a valid message in terms of good, hard working rural folk, the omissions in the classroom are akin to a corporate commercial.
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