Welcome Back, Boycotter p.6

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Milk is Murder
Nestle baby formula; Nestle S.A.

Nestle and other manufacturers have a history of aggressively marketing baby formula to poor Third World mothers who lack access to sanitation and clean water, often resulting in infant malnutrition and disease. In 1977 the corporate watchdog group INFACT organized a highly visible boycott of Nestle which helped lead the World Health Organization to adopt its International Code for Marketing Breast-Milk Substitutes in 1981; WHO estimates that effective breast feeding could avert 1.5 million infant deaths per year. INFACT called off the boycott in 1984 after Nestle agreed to change its marketing behavior — but when Nestle was caught backsliding in many countries, INFACT’s sister organization, Action for Corporate Accountability, renewed the boycott in 1988 in order to continue pressuring Nestle to abide fully by its marketing agreement.

GATT Bastards
Gerber baby food, Gerber Products Co.

Apparently no one has yet called for a boycott of Gerber, but maybe someone should: Multinational Monitor named Gerber one of the Ten Worst Corporations of 1996 because of its sledgehammer tactics marketing baby formula in Guatemala. Although the adorable, chubby, healthy, blue-eyed Gerber Baby is an attractive marketing image — so powerful that some Guatemalan parents have named their babies “Gerber” — the trademark also violates Guatemala’s 1983 Law on the Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes. That law, like the WHO code it’s based upon, explicitly prohibits images of babies on packaging, and requires packaging to state that breast milk is the best food for babies.

Gerber not only refused to comply, it wrote to the Guatemalan president threatening trade sanctions under GATT and other trade agreements. Then the U.S. government — your tax dollars at work — threatened the tiny country with a total ban on imports if it didn’t weaken its own law and allow Gerber’s baby trademark on formula. After years of resisting Gerber’s pressure, the country succumbed to the bullies; it stopped enforcing its baby milk law in 1995, and last year an obliging Guatemalan Supreme Court ruled that imports — like Gerber — were exempt.

After Every Meal
Five out of five dentists may recommend it, but which fluoride toothpaste is ethically hygienic — Colgate or Crest?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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