Reclaim Democracy!

Branded: Corporations and our Schools

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by Jennifer Rockne
February 2002

“If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come.” –Mike Searles, former president of Kids-R-Us children’s clothing store, on marketing to kids

Competition in the corporate marketing arena is fierce. No news there. But as companies vie for brand recognition, brand loyalties, and market share, schools have emerged as lucrative marketing venues. Ongoing funding challenges faced by public schools have enabled marketers to jump in with “donations”-free or low-cost supplemental materials, equipment, and cash. What does this mean for our kids and schools?

The following excerpt, from a letter to principals of School District 11 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, from John Bushey, the district’s director of “school leadership,” demonstrates one effect of corporate influence in our schools.

In navigating this unique space, companies face the challenge of creating authentic connections with students and educators without overstepping boundaries. This is where skilled marketing strategy becomes essential, combining subtlety with impact. Graphically understands this balance well, crafting visual assets that resonate with diverse audiences while maintaining sensitivity to the environment in which they appear.

For brands entering educational spaces, this agency’s approach offers a model for engaging students without imposing a heavy-handed commercial presence. By designing visuals that are both captivating and contextually appropriate, they help brands build genuine rapport and trust within schools, fostering brand awareness that respects the educational mission.

This strategic, thoughtful approach enables companies to support schools in a way that enhances, rather than disrupts, the educational experience. One year into an $8 million exclusive vending contract with Coca-Cola Corp., Bushey wrote:

Dear Principal: Here we are in year two of the great Coke contract.we must sell 70,000 cases of the product.. Here is how we can do it: Allow students to purchase and consume vended products throughout the day. If sodas are not allowed in classes, consider allowing the juices, teas and waters.

John Sheehan, vice president of the Douglas County, Colorado, school board, was the sole dissenter to a 10-year, $27.7 million deal struck between a three-school district consortium and Coca-Cola. Sheehan explains vividly the challenge of providing quality public education on a tight budget:

Education and marketing are like oil and water. Public education has an agenda that is already crowded enough. When we become marketers and distributors, we confuse our mission. I worry about a time when our educational goals might be influenced or even set by private companies targeting our students with their own narrow messages. . .Yes, schools need money, but turning to commercial sales for income is a cop-out. It sends the message to our voters and legislators that we can let them off the hook-that advertising and sales of consumer products can fill the gap when it comes to supporting education.

Are corporations, with priorities of profit and shareholder return, proper partners for public education?

The Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University, in a study released September 2001, indicated commercializing activity in and around schools has increased nearly 500 percent
since 1990.

Children encounter the corporatization of their schools in their cafeterias, their classrooms, their buses, and on their stadium scoreboards. Companies engage kids by distributing free product samples and coupons through their schools. Even learning itself is laced with commercialism: textbooks feature brand-name products to demonstrate math and science problems, and advertisements saturate classroom magazines and television programs.

Methods Corporations Use to “Go To School”

Electronic marketing such as Channel One,a daily, ad-bearing news program for grades 6-12 broadcast “free” to 40% of all schools contracting it as a mandatory part of the curriculum. The incentive to schools? Installation and unlimited use of the provided satellite dish, VCRs, and classroom TVs. Channel One Communications owns, maintains, and insures the equipment–and repossesses it if the school drops its contract. Two minutes of each daily 12-minute program contain commercials for which corporations pay over $800 million yearly to deliver their propaganda to 8 million captive students.

“The advertiser gets a group of kids who cannot go to the bathroom, who cannot change the station. . .who cannot have their headsets on.” –Channel One executive Joel Babbit on value for advertisers.

Exclusive agreements to sell or use products, primarily with companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola. (Has your child asked for money for Friday’s Taco Bell lunch?) So-called “shoe schools” arise from athletic shoe agreements with corporations like Nike and Reebok-and add unintended stress on schools that compete for students in open-enrollment districts.

Incentive programs like General Mills’ Box Tops for Education, Pizza Hut’s Book It!, and Campbell’s Soups’ Labels for Education encourage school fund raisers to influence family purchases of specific brands or to frequent certain businesses. In-school fundraisers using items like magazines or candy turn kids into salespeople. Company sponsors gain an unpaid sales force and can inflate prices since the enterprise appears charitable. Increasingly, schools are engaging in the absurd practice of encouraging purchases from certain websites like schoolpop.com, robbing their community businesses and their own sales tax base-a key part of school funding in many districts! Another ethically questionable appeal urges parents to acquire and use credit cards that provide a kickback to schools, condoning consumerism and debt.

Sponsored Educational Materials
SEMs are best described as public relations materials disguised to look like classroom activities and lesson plans a la the Chips Ahoy counting game in which kids calculate the number of chocolate chips in their cookies. Even more disturbing are nutrition lessons taught by McDonald’s and environmental issues discussed by the Shell and Chevron Corporations, all contained in widely distributed resources.

Sponsorship of programs and activities such as Canon’s National “Envirothon” high school competition and “Coke in Education Day.” Now, some high school regional and state athletic championship games–and even regions themselves–have corporate sponsors. Wells Fargo bank paid $12,000 for naming rights to an athletic conference in central Arizona.

Contests sponsored by companies like Brainstorm USA through schools to obtain demographic information on students and parents for marketing purposes. Companies are promised a potential market of over 14,000 teachers and two million students.

Privatization that shifts school or program management from public accountability to private, for-profit corporations whose accountability is to stockholders, such as Edison Schools, Inc. You have to wonder…if teachers gain stock options after a year’s tenure, where do their loyalties lie?

Can we Rely on Teachers?

While some argue that teachers can serve as gatekeepers against biased messages often found in sponsored materials, most teachers haven’t been taught how, may not see the need, or lack knowledge in the topic addressed. Similarly, claiming teachers can defuse advertising messages in sponsored materials and programs and salvage something worthwhile from them is like using textbooks containing gender or ethnic discrimination and claiming it’s a good way to teach about diversity. “The only genuinely educational use I can see for corporate propaganda in the classroom is to inoculate students against it, so that they will not swallow it uncritically without considering other sides of the question.” David Lunney, teacher, Greenville, NC

Why Target Kids at School?

America’s kids represent a large and growing market. Elementary-aged children spend around $15 billion per year and influence another $160 billion of their parents’ spending. Teenagers have even greater economic clout, spending $57 billion personally and another $36 billion of their families’ money annually.

Are Corporation Solving Financial Troubles?

Taxpayers fund classroom time that is being wasted on ads. A 1998 study by educator Alex Molnar and economist Max Sawicky indicated that taxpayers in the U.S. pay $1.8 billion per year for the class time–twelve minutes spent by students on the required nine out of ten school days–lost to Channel One. Channel One’s commercials alone cost taxpayers $300 million per year, and taxpayer cost for just the advertising time exceeds the equipment’s total value.

Citizens can act to keep schools free of commercialism schools in several ways:

1. Support adoption and enforcement of guidelines ensuring public debate on commercialized money offers and keep commercially-sponsored programs out of classrooms (contact us for specific local and state model policies).

2. Teach children to evaluate commercial content and bias in materials they receive in school, Tv shows, commercials and other sources. Discuss your purchasing and finance decisions with kids where appropriate
ReclaimDemocracy.org is developing and testing a critical thinking curriculum for use in K-12 classrooms-contact us for details.

3. Raise the commercialism issue with school fundraising committees-or better yet, get involved-and directly impact how schools augment funding.

4. Proactively address the larger problem of school funding and disparities between communities, which leads well-intentioned administrators to rely on corporate sponsorship and advertising revenues.

5. Push to eliminate corporate tax breaks for contributions carrying commercial messages to schools, insisting corporations pay their fair share of school funding.

Jennifer Rockne is the assistant director of ReclaimDemocracy.org

Resources

Alex Molnar, Giving Kids the Business (1996). Explores a range of commercialism issues.

Schools Our Children Deserve, Education Inc. & What to Look For in a Classroom All by Alfie Kohn. The first title covers dangers posed by high-stakes testing schemes. The latter two are collections of short essays. Education Inc. compiles many writers and is focused directly on corporate influence. Classroom collects Kohn’s essays on numerous educational issues.

A Consumers Union Report has produced a comprehensive report: Captive Kids: A Report on Commercial Pressures on Kids at School.
See: consumersunion.org/other/captivekids/index.htm

Cashing in On Kids, a report from the Center for Analysis of Commercialism in Education (CACE) is available online: asu.edu/educ/epsl/Archives/cashinginonkids.htm.

Montanans Organize to Stop Coal Trains, Exports

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Plans by coal corporations could create five-fold increase in train traffic, extensive traffic delays and large increases in noise and air pollution

Note: City Commission Vote! Gallatin Valley residents: come speak or express your opposition to exporting coal through Bozeman and show your support for this proposed city resolution at the Bozeman City Commission meeting on Monday August 13 (time TBD) at City Hall, 121 North Rouse Avenue (old library building). Thanks to all who came out to the July 9 Commission meeting to exporess your views and push this forward.

Please see bottom of this page for information on submitting letters to the editor of Montana daily newspapers and (for Bozeman residents) to City Council members.

Imagine dozens more trains than existing traffic levels passing through your town…every day and night. Trains with 70 or more cars carrying uncovered carloads of crushed coal. Time and money wasted in traffic back-ups of 8 or more minutes every half-hour. More noise pollution. Coal dust pollution. Higher taxes to pay for massive “externalities” created by transnational mining corporations like Arch, Peabody and Cloud Peak. All this so they can extract coal from Montana and Wyoming, transport it to Pacific ports and ship it across the ocean, while creating almost no new Montana jobs.

Citizens of Bozeman, Billings, Livingston and other many other communities in Montana, Oregon and Washington would suffer directly while the planet will endure environmental impacts from burning huge amounts of oil to ship cheap coal to China and other Asian nations, where it can be burned with inadequate pollution controls. Virtually no new jobs or revenues would be created in any Montana communities.

This disturbing picture already is coming into focus. We now see an average of five more trains daily passing through communities on the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe rail line through Montana and into Washington (many through Oregon as well). We believe the harms caused to our communities and the environment as a whole are unacceptable and must be halted through a grassroots uprising.

Perhaps we can learn from the lead of Coal-Free Bellingham, which is pushing to implement the Bellingham Community Bill of Rights. Instead of asking the EPA or Army Corps of Engineers to limit the number of coal trains, reduce the 500 pounds of dust that falls of each rail car, or seek help for traffic problems, their resolution says, “Whereas, the residents of the City of Bellingham possess the inherent and inalienable right to govern their own community…” and goes on to prohibit exportation of coal through their port. The group, working through our allies at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, also has compiled an informative FAQ (pdf). The people of Bellingham are choosing to act as sovereign citizens, not as subjects. Will we?

Elsewhere, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a resolution on May 29 opposing the development of coal-export terminals in Washington, while Missoula took the modest step of passing a resolution asking the Army Corps of Engineers to study the health impacts of the proposed expansion of coal trains and export.

Contact info@ReclaimDemocracy.org or call 406-582-1224 to get involved and get contacts in your community. In Bozeman, an inaugural organizing meeting yielded four action groups: public education, state-level policy, developing city ordinances and networking to build alliances with sister communities and organizations. Contact us for the point person in any group of interest to you.

Background Links on the Coal Train/Export Controversy

News

Key Resources and Organizations

Bozeman, MT Organizing Updates and Resources
(contact us to engage or join local announcement list). See report on inaugural community organizing meeting of May 29.

Speak Up in Print! Express you thoughts in a letter to the editor to one of the Montana newspapers (below) in impacted communities. Reclaim Democracy! created this thorough free primer on writing effective letters to help you (and we’re happy to offer editing assistance).

Bozeman City Commission

  • Sean Becker, Mayor, sbecker@bozeman.net
  • Jeff Krauss, Deputy Mayor, jkrauss@bozeman.net
  • Carson Taylor, Commissioner, ctaylor@bozeman.net
  • Chris Mehl, Commissioner, cmehl@bozeman.net
  • Cynthia Andrus, Commissioner, candrus@bozeman.net

The Great American Sell-Out

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By Reclaim Democracy staff
September 2001

The management of one of our national treasures — the Smithsonian Museum — threatens to plumb new depths in pimping the public domain to corporate interests. A preliminary deal awaiting consideration by the Smithsonian board of regents would sell General Motors Inc. naming rights for the institute’s new hall of transportation for $10 million.

Want fries with that? The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum is replacing its current food vendor, Guest Services Inc., with McDonald’s Corporation– a partnership providing the museum with a potential $34 million and McDonald’s with its projected busiest site.

The two deals are just the latest on the Smithsonian menu. It’s easy money, but ethically troublesome when considering that two-thirds of the financial support for the Smithsonian comes from taxpayers.

Professional sports were the proving ground for such corporate moves. Today, corporate financing and naming stadiums are routine. A recent addition to corporate logos on uniforms, the Jumbotron and banners pulled by small planes above the game, is the corporate-sponsored play-by-play, subjecting fans to the Jiffy-Lube Double Play and the Geico Direct Call to the Bullpen.

And let’s not forget the public schools turned into corporate marketing venues. School rooftops are the trendy locus for cell phone towers. Schools blame budget concerns as cause for signing away public property and children’s health with lucrative deals that submit children to Channel One in the classroom, Pepsi in the hallway, and McDonald’s at the lunch table. Teachers receive free, corporate-sponsored lesson supplements (let’s learn about the environment from Exxon-Mobil!). And ads adorn buses, book covers and folders, as well as the school cafeteria.

Home isn’t immune–they’re after my son. I’ve labored to clothe him without making him a billboard, but with difficulty. Our culture now readily accepts that children will be emblazoned from head to pinky toe with corporate logos and embed them into their personal image as they grow.

Philanthropy, once viewed as altruistic, in countless cases has degenerated to a nauseating and socially offensive quid pro quo. We generally suspect there’s a catch.

But across the country, there is a move to reclaim public space:

  • A bill pending in the Oregon legislature would prohibit naming public buildings after corporations.
  • Some school districts aren’t renewing exclusive corporate contracts and others are refusing them outright.
  • Corporate bidders for naming rights to four subway stations in Boston have been scared away by public outcry.
  • In protest of further commercialization, some people are refusing to pay new recreation fees for access to public land.
  • The Denver Post has chosen to call the Broncos’ new, publicly subsidized home “Mile-High Stadium” rather than its official, corporate moniker.

So what about the Smithsonian? Ethical concerns about previous major donor agreements have curators and researchers waging a Dump Small sticker campaign, demanding ouster of Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small, a former Citibank executive. Responding to decisions such as K-Mart’s being allowed to sponsor the Smithsonian’s traveling African American sacred music exhibit, The Smithsonian Congress of Scholars has weighed in against Secretary Small in a memo to the regents.

“Of all the acquisitions made by the Smithsonian in over 150 years,” it states, “the most significant by far is the trust of the American people…Secretary Small’s decisions circumvent established decision-making procedures and seem certain to commit our museum to unethical relationships with private donors. These actions threaten to change fundamentally the nature of the museum, while ignoring the broad consultation and open public discussion called for by such changes.”

According to the scholars whose work supports the Smithsonian, “responsible” practice in the past has meant that major changes undergo professional review and scrutiny. They write: “Newly adopted projects, such as the creation of a hall of fame of individual Americans, renaming the museum, and the reconfiguring of exhibition space in the museum, have not been subject to the deliberative procedures applied to all proposals, independent of the source of the ideas or the source of the financial support for the project.”

Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution are corporations mentioned, yet our Supreme Court bestowed upon them rights of persons in an 1886 decision, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Perhaps the people behind corporations think that status justifies “corporate citizenship.” It’s time to declare our rights to the public realm and reclaim them.

America could use another good rebellion.

 

Capsule Book Review: When Corporations Rule the World

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First published summer 2001
By Tim Nickles

The first (1995) edition of When Corporations Rule the World awakened many Americans to the destructive systemic impacts of the global economic system and the depths of the structural problems. Coming from a self-described conservative with an extensive background in international development and economics, WCRW offered a thorough and extensively documented analysis capable of swaying even hard-core laissez-faire advocates.

The new 2001 edition contains a new introduction, epilogue and three new chapters updating the growing gap between the rich and poor, the global citizen movement against corporatization and provide a context within which to discuss the role of spirit and culture in distinguishing between a society oriented towards capital versus one oriented towards people.

Korten argues against what he calls “Corporate Libertarianism” which demands that all political, economic, and civic barriers to the free reign of corporate interests be demolished and for “Democratic Pluralism” which requires a “pragmatic, institutional balance between the forces of government, market, and civic society.” He maintains that America’s economic success through the 1950s and 60s was the result of a more pluralistic balance between these three forces and that restoring this balance is essential for continued peace and prosperity.
While Korten emphasizes the importance of markets and private ownership, like Adam Smith he is a harsh critic of the centralization of wealth and political power. Korten’s background includes an MBA and Ph.D. from Stanford Business School, teaching at Harvard Business School and working with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Asia.

I recommend WCRW to everyone as a guide to understanding the full extent of today’s global economy–an essential foundation for effective action for change.

Why Is Killing for Capital Not a Capital Crime?

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By Jeff Milchen & Jonathan Power
June 11, 2001

As of early 2001, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recorded 203 deaths, more than 700 injuries, and thousands of complaints involving rollover-prone Ford Explorers crashing following sudden tread separation on factory-installed Firestone tires. That deadly combination also was implicated in at least 48 deaths in Venezuela and the Middle East.

Despite evidence that officers at both corporations knew they were killing people by keeping defective products on the market, there has not been a single indictment of either corporation, nor of any culpable corporate officers to date. Why?

In August 2000, the tire manufacturer Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. announced a voluntary recall of 6.5 million tires, most of which were original equipment on the Explorer. By that time, Firestone already had been replacing the defective tires in 16 other countries for up to a year, all the while concealing the danger from U.S. citizens.

Ford and Firestone officials received complaints as early as 1997 and knew of at least 35 deaths and 130 injuries before the federal government launched a probe early last year. How do we know? They were defending lawsuits from scores of survivors and the families of dead victims.

Clearly, executives at Ford and Firestone willfully kept products on the market that they knew to be unsafe, and that they knew would kill many more innocent people.

Comparing the lack of criminal investigation in this case to the resources often devoted to resolve a single “street crime” killing graphically illustrates a dual standard for accountability and justice in American society. While nearly every candidate for public office talks tough on street crime, they ignore the fact that societal costs from corporate crime exceed that of street crime in both dollars and lives lost. Individuals acting in the capacity of corporate managers, such as those from Ford and Firestone, literally can kill with impunity.

Corporate executives regularly deploy cost-benefit analyses that weigh the potential cost of civil lawsuits or fines for criminal convictions (such fines are tax-deductible as a cost of doing business) against the cost of recalls or other safety measures. Their job simply is to decide which option is more lucrative, as demonstrated by a 1973 memo that Ford executives wrote about the Ford Pinto gas tank problem.

Then-president Lee Iacocca and other Ford executives used a human life value estimate of $200,000, –a number created by the NHTSA at the auto industry’s urging–and priced the company cost from severe burn injuries at $67,000 per incident. Next they calculated the cost of saving an estimated 180 people from being burned to death (actually, over 500 were killed) and preventing scores of serious injuries by recalling the Pintos and fixing the fuel tank. Their conclusion? Killing 180 people, maiming hundreds more and shattering families’ lives was more profitable than spending $11 per auto (Ford’s estimate) to make them far safer.

So how can we prevent corporate crimes from killing more innocent people? First, we must remove the liability shield for crimes committed on company time. Corporate officials, like Ford CEO Jacques Nasser, Masatoshi Ono (who since resigned as Firestone Inc.’s CEO) and their respective boards must be held accountable for fatalities, injuries, and illnesses caused by their actions.

But we’re deceiving ourselves if we believe serious corporate crime could be blamed on a few bad actors. A system that permits cost/benefit analyses to take precedence over human health and life must be changed radically.

To reclaim democratic authority over corporations and protect ourselves from recidivist corporations, we can learn much from our country’s founders. They regularly exercised a corporate “death penalty” by revoking the charters of corporations whose products or actions harmed society and refused to let individuals use the corporate form to hide from personal accountability.

While terrorist acts that justifiably have commanded so much public attention are difficult to predict and prevent, the criminal actions in corporate boardrooms that kill many more Americans are neither. A smart cost-benefit analysis would direct us to focus substantial attention to these preventable threats to our lives.

Let’s protect ourselves and preserve incentives for law-abiding businesses to prosper by reinstating appropriate punishments for criminal corporations and those who run them.

Jeff Milchen founded ReclaimDemocracy.org. Jonathan Power is a Boulder, CO – based volunteer.

© 2001 ReclaimDemocracy.org

To learn more about the Ford Pinto case see Mark Dowie’s article, Pinto Madness.

The Biggest Obstacle to Equal Representation for Women in Congress Isn’t Sexism, It’s Money

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by Jennifer Rockne 
March 2001

Sexism and extremism steamrolled tradition when women who were in line for House committee chairs this session were slighted because their male counterparts were deemed “more qualified” (read: more conservative).  The majority party normally chooses committee chairs based on seniority, but another norm was maintained instead–the 107th House now boasts committees all chaired by white men.

Nearly as dismal, this Congress also includes a record number of women, but they still occupy a mere 13 percent of seats in both the House and Senate.

With the overall progress women have made to dispel social stigma and sex discrimination, why is their representation in Congress so minimal?

The greatest factor in getting and keeping Congressional seats is money.  As long as we accept the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision that equates spending money to influence elections with free speech, the majority of Americans will continue to be underrepresented.

The Buckley decision stated political campaign spending could not be regulated, and contributions could be limited only in certain narrow ways.  It legitimized the practice of corporations and political action committees funding politicians, political parties, and campaigns of their choosing, and reaping legislative favors.

The problem is not that women are unable to fund their campaigns.  Women candidates presently raise campaign money on a par with men and have since the 1980s, in part

The road to incumbency is rugged—and expensive. Escalated campaign costs have made fundraising a daunting task, preventing most potential candidates from even considering running for office and ensuring “serious” candidates are those with access to money.due to contributions from at least 46 PACs and donor networks that primarily contribute to women candidates or whose donors are female.  The problem is that incumbents typically raise more than twice the amount of money, as do challengers, allowing them greater media access and other exposure to the public.

Incumbents raise funds more readily than challengers simply by the advantages of holding office. According to Washington insider and former Cabinet member Joseph Califano, House members typically start fundraising for re-election immediately after they are elected, and most senators easily spend one-third of their six-year terms fundraising.

 Historically, women have fared equally well in running for open Congressional seats against non-incumbent men, but fared much worse challenging male incumbents, a trend illustrated by the results of the 2000 election:  only two of 33 women major party candidates challenging male House incumbents were deemed winners.

Preliminary spending reports indicate just three challengers defeated incumbents for Senate seats in 2000 without outspending them, and lower-spending challengers won just four House seats.

Despite their slight representation in the Congress, women have played a vital role with respect to issues such as sex discrimination that entered the law books because those who had firsthand experience championed them.

Title IX, that denies federal funds to schools that discriminate based on sex, might not exist today if a woman in Congress hadn’t saved it from near-defeat. Women led the way for federal laws on equal pay and funding of daycare for poor women. Historically, women in Congress raise issues of health, poverty, family, and social concerns that often are dwarfed by military or foreign policy issues.

While the corrupting influence of money in government is not exactly a revelation to Americans, most current reform proposals merely seek to lessen the damage to democracy and fail to challenge the faulty premise at the root.

Those interested in changing the rules must recognize that the Supreme Court tends to react to popular movements and the social climate–as it did in response to civil unrest during the Civil Rights Era—rather than lead the way. Government officials, whether appointed or elected, rarely create the necessary changes to enable a government worthy of the name democracy—an organized public will.

Whether our goal is achieving equal representation for all Americans, or simply a less corrupt government, reversing Buckley v. Valeo and dispelling the money-equals-speech dogma must be part of the foundation of change.  Doing so may not ensure fairer representation, but it would help return politics to its root, polites or citizen, and open the board to a greater diversity of players—one that looks more like the constituency it purportedly represents.   

Jennifer Rockne is the Assistant Director of ReclaimDemocracy.org