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.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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