BPAmoco’s iMPACT on Education
Kenneth J. Saltman and Robin Truth Goodman
SLICK!
This is a computer simulation of an oil spill at sea. Students must plan and implement methods of dealing with an oil spill at sea. Designed for use for individuals and groups, having two levels: beginner and expert. This resource incorporates graphics, sound effects and a range of printed materials … £20.00 … Add to Shopping Cart.
—BP Educational Services1
From the two sets of three colorful Amoco-branded wall posters, to the Amoco-branded curriculum box, to the BPAmoco ads in the videos themselves, BPAmoco’s iMPACT middle school science curriculum provides this massive multinational oil company with what advertisers refer to as multiple “impressions” or viewings of the brand logo.2 The curriculum is clearly designed to promote and advertise BPAmoco to a “captive audience” in public schools. Brightly mottled posters show Sesame Street-style cartoon characters riding roller coasters to learn physics, a lone cartoon diver encountering a gigantic sea monster to learn biology, and an ominous black mountain exploding with molten magma. These cartoons, with more rainbow-colors than an oil slick, include scientific labels with arrows reminding kids that all of this fun is educational. BPAmoco stamps its corporate logo on fun and excitement, curiosity and exploration, education, nature, science, and work. By rendering its red, white, and blue logo visible in school classrooms, BPAmoco appears as a “responsible corporate citizen” supporting beleaguered public schools with its corporate philanthropy. Not only does the corporate sector defund the public sector by evading its tax responsibility to such public goods as public schools, but the growing trend toward privatization, for-profit charter schools, magnet schools, and commercialization redefine the public schools as opportunities for private profit.3 In reality, BPAmoco’s use of the innocent-looking aesthetics of children’s culture and its appeal to fun and child-like curiosity conceal the fact that this oil company is far from innocent of not only undermining the public sector in this country but of outright human rights violations, widespread environmental devastation, and the uprooting of indigenous communities globally.4
Like other corporate curricula, BPAmoco’s sprightly lessons do more than provide entry for corporate advertisements into public space.5 This curriculum serves a dual function. First, it functions to divert public attention from what BPAmoco is actually doing around the world. Second, it serves an ideological function, constructing a corporate-friendly worldview that defines youth identity and citizenship through consumption and nationality as the corporate interest rather than the public interest. BPAmoco’s curriculum produces ideologies of consumerism that bolster its global corporate agenda, and it does so under the guise of disinterested scientific knowledge, benevolent technology, and innocent entertainment.
Separating the pedagogical from the political, BPAmoco’s curriculum conceals how this corporation undermines democratic institutions such as public schooling and participates in the hindering of democracy and perpetration of human rights abuses and environmental destruction abroad. As Wharton economist Edward Herman and ColombiaWatch’s Cecilia Zarate-Laun expose, the largest investor in Colombia, British Petroleum (BP, now BPAmoco), has not only created its own mercenary forces, but also imported British counterinsurgency professionals to train Colombians. BP gave its own intelligence reports to the Colombian military that used them to track and kill local “subversives.” “Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented numerous examples of collaboration between Colombian army units and brutal paramilitaries who are guilty of over 75 percent of the human rights violations that have been committed in Colombia’s civil conflict.”6 The other oil companies in Colombia have also “cultivated the army and police and hired paramilitaries and foreign mercenaries to protect their oil pipelines.”7 BPAmoco’s behavior overseas must be understood in the context of the relationship between the U.S. government’s foreign policy and its support of the corporate sector. Though said to be specifically supporting Colombia’s war on drugs and not its militarized counterinsurgency efforts pre-September 11, U.S. aid to Colombia (its third highest amount of foreign military aid after Israel and Egypt) was initially earmarked for specific regions of the country such as the Amazon and Orinoco basins and the Putumayo region more largely, regions that happen to be the areas of influence of the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Supplying arms to an important segment of the drug trade suggests that, as with anticommunism in the past, the drug war rationale disguises the pursuit of the real objectives of the policy. We can glean what those objectives might be from reading what the army and paramilitaries actually do with the weapons supplied to them; namely, removing, killing, and silencing the large segments of the rural population that stand in the way of the exploitation of Colombia’s resources (by transnational corporations such as BPAmoco).8
Initially, under the pretext of the drug war, and then additionally post-September 11 under the pretext of the war on terror, the U.S. government is funding Colombia’s internal war against ideologically dissenting factions such as FARC (currently 18,000 strong) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) (currently counting 3,000).9 In June 2000, the U.S. Congress approved a $1.3 billion aid package to Colombia, including military training, helicopters, and intelligence. Even before September 11, the Bush administration escalated this package by $676 million to help Colombia and its neighbors in their war on drugs. This aid package has included a waiver of private contractor limits suggesting the deep interdependence of the business of oil and the business of war.10
Carla Anne Robbins of the Wall Street Journal reports that even though the United States has, for the past ten years, exercised caution in extending developmental aid to Colombia because of widespread allegations of human rights abuses, the Colombian government has managed to reassure Washington that its military equipment will only be used for antinarcotics maneuvers and not for counterinsurgency. Yet, as Justin Delacour of Z-Net has demonstrated, the Clinton administration was “remarkably resistant to conditions placed on the aid that require them to demonstrate that the Colombian government is vigorously rooting out complicity between the army and paramilitaries.”11 In fact, as Marc Cooper of The Nation remarks:
Bill Clinton’s State Department, with only hours left before the Bush transition, employed a loophole in the US aid package [Plan Colombia] and “voluntarily” decided to “skip” having to certify that the Colombian government has complied with US human rights demands attached to Plan Colombia legislation—specifically, suppression of the paramilitary death squads.12
The Wall Street Journal admits that unless the close ties between FARC and the drug trade are loosened, the United States’ stated intentions of bringing peace, political reform, and crop substitution to the region will surely fail. José Cuesta of the Citizens’ Network for Peace in Colombia alleges, “The coca crops are nothing but a concrete response to the ravages caused by unrestrained free-market policies.”13 Washington has only committed 1 percent of the Plan Colombia aid package to crop substitution, and this means that campesinos will not be able to produce even at subsistence level without sustaining coca fields. “In general, a kilo of cocaine is sold at 1.5 to 1.7 million pesos (about $6,800–7,700) and net profit per hectare is 200,000 pesos (about $90). Comparatively speaking, a carga, which is about 100 kilos of corn, is sold for 30,000 pesos, and after paying the costs the peasant is left with only 10,000 pesos (about $4.50) per carga.”14 Even as the Wall Street Journal professes that the problem in FARC-controlled regions stems from drug trafficking; however, it also attributes the need for militarization to FARC’s economic reforms, in particular their attempts to tax the corporate sector:
As conservatives were complaining that Bogotá was selling out to the Marxists [because of the Colombian government’s agreement to negotiate a settlement with guerrillas], New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso accepted an invitation to fly to the demilitarized zone to tutor the FARC on the joys of capitalism … [Carlos Antonio] Lozada [one of the FARC’s negotiators] … explains that instead of indiscriminate kidnapping, the FARC’s new Law 002 will levy a tax on anyone with more than $1 million in assets.15
The expansion of NAFTA into South America is being accompanied by the expansion of U.S. military presence, not only in Colombia, through the provision of military attack helicopters and counterinsurgency equipment for maneuvers nominally against trafficking, but also in Ecuador and El Salvador where bases are being built. This movement of capital through military expansion illustrates concretely New York Times foreign correspondent Thomas Freidman’s thesis that “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”16 This militarization opens the region to U.S. investment as it destroys the fields and livelihoods of poor peasants, using methods as brutal as those attributed to FARC. Alongside and contingent to militarization, education can work to open wider reaches for the neoliberal market. Wall Street’s journey to the region demonstrates that investors understand how education in the “joys of capitalism” opens the way to corporate infiltration.17 Clearly, the so-called war on drugs is in the business of an ideological production partly installed through the very processes of militarization.
This military intervention into the political situation in Colombia is a result of the fact that the U.S. imports more oil from the region than it does from the Middle East (260,000 barrels from Colombia per day). Indeed, the claim that the administration was funding drug containment policies was hardly convincing when publicly funded treatment centers were radically cut from city, state, and federal budgets nationwide. In 1994, the White House commissioned the Rand Institution to research the most effective methods for controlling and reducing drugs. The Rand report found that treatment was 7 percent cheaper and more successful than domestic enforcement, 11 percent more than interdiction, and 23 percent more than source-country eradication policies, the policy embraced by this aid package.18 Clearly, then, defunding public support for treatment ultimately benefits the profit-mongering of the private sector, which helps explain the policy. It also explains why, unlike public advocates like Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, private corporations like BPAmoco support the militarization of Colombia’s war on drugs:
[I]t’s questionable whether or not it even qualifies as a drug policy at all. Several corporations whose interests have nothing to do with drug policy have been pushing the Colombia package from day one. Multinationals and U.S.– based weapons producers who are pushing the package include Occidental Petroleum Corp., Enron Corp., BPAmoco, Colgate-Palmolive Co., United Technologies Corp. and Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. Occidental Petroleum’s strong backing of the package derives from the fact that its extensive oil operations in Colombia have been frequently sabotaged by guerrilla groups who object to the terms of the agreement between the Colombian government and multinational oil corporations that operate in the country. Occidental Petroleum’s Vice-President Lawrence Meriage was even called to testify before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Drug Policy, leading observers to wonder how oil executives suddenly qualified as drug policy experts.19
Ultimately, then, U.S. taxpayers are paying millions of dollars to protect the oil pipelines of BPAmoco, Occidental Petroleum (a strong backer of Al Gore’s political career and presidential campaign), Shell, and Texaco—companies that have spilled 1.7 million barrels of oil onto the soils and rivers in the past twelve years. The Bush administration and inner circle is stocked with former oil executives and members of chambers of commerce in countries being opened for oil exploitation (Bush, Jr., Bush, Sr., Cheney, Rice, Armitage, Baker, etc.). At the same time, U.S. chemical companies Monsanto and Dow are being enriched by U.S.-assisted spraying of their toxic herbicides (Roundup and Spike) on coca and opium plants in Colombia:
Monsanto’s Roundup, which is the principal chemical being sprayed in Colombia to reduce the coca and poppy crops, contains phosphorus, which upon contact with water captures oxygen and destroys fish in lakes, lagoons, and marshes. Crop spraying affects food crops such as cassava, plantains, corn, and tropical fruits. Likewise, peasants exposed to the spray have reported cases of diarrhea, fever, muscle pain, and headaches attributed to their exposure to the chemical spray.20
Not only is this endangering the world’s second-richest ecosystem (after that of Brazil), but the same drugs evading eradication by the chemical sprays (coca production is in fact on the rise) are being sold to the United States, with the profits being used to fund right-wing death squads and paramilitaries who work in the interests of the multinationals and the government and to fund the left-wing guerrillas fighting against the government and the multinationals.21
In short then, the same interests that are supporting drug trafficking are also supporting multinational corporate expansion in the region. This is not just a case of two blood-seeking powers—the government and the insurgency—fighting it out at the expense of the little guy, but rather an imperialist manipulation for economic and ideological control where corporations are winning the conflict on both sides. The entire process of corporate expansion is militarized in combination with the drug trade. However, by omitting any mention of the complex web of murder, pollution, and politics undergirding its quest for profit, BPAmoco lies to school kids by painting a picture of science and education as innocent and free of their motivating forces—in this case, corporate greed.
The BPAmoco curriculum is not simply about hiding the insidious operations of the company abroad under sunny pictures of smiling children playing happy games in pristine parks. The BPAmoco curriculum also constructs and naturalizes a worldview where public concerns are erased underneath the adventures of corporatism and the thrills of the consumer. Part of educating citizens in the “joys of capitalism” consists of, for instance, making the exploitation of other nations’ natural environments, raw materials, and labor forces seem like affective friendships or even love affairs celebrated in joyous pictures of wondering gazes at the triumphs of technological mastery. These kinds of images stage a drama of corporate excellence that overrides any possible apprehension about how exactly such curricula are remaking public schooling itself as training ground for consumer armies:
At the primary and secondary levels, the spoils of the public school system have long been coveted by “education entrepreneurs,” touting the “discipline” of the marketplace over the “inefficiency” of the public realm, and normalizing the rhetoric of corporate management—the public as customer, education as competitive product, learning as efficiency tool. Remember Lamar Alexander’s declaration, shortly before becoming Secretary of Education, that Burger King and Federal Express should set up schools to show how the private sector would run things? … While your local high school hasn’t yet been bought out by McDonald’s, many educators already use teaching aids and packets of materials, “donated” by companies, that are crammed with industry propaganda designed to instill product awareness among young consumers: lessons about the history of the potato chip, sponsored by the Snack Food Association, or literacy programs that reward students who reach monthly reading goals with Pizza Hut slices.22
While BPAmoco seduces school kids with the lure of fun knowledge, it is also actively engaging in practices that directly undermine the public. Domestically, as BPAmoco was distributing its “Rivers of Fire” curriculum in Chicago, it was creating real rivers of fire in Michigan and Missouri. In River Rouge, Michigan, the city was fighting to force BPAmoco to stop leaking explosive petroleum products into its sewer system.23 City leaders worried that BPAmoco was re-creating the conditions for an explosion in 1982 that “set off fires and smaller explosions inside nearby sewer lines and blew out windows of buildings and cars.”24 While the Rivers of Fire video was being distributed in Chicago, in Sugar Creek, Missouri, families were forced to flee their homes as BPAmoco’s cleanup of its decades-old ground, water, and air pollution forced contaminated air into the homes of local residents. The Chappell family, advised by the EPA to find alternative lodging, had begun an investigation into unusually high incidents of cancer in their neighborhood.25 At the same time, BPAmoco pleaded guilty to felony charges in a case of illegal dumping of toxic chemicals.
Alaska’s North Slope is an environmentally sensitive area and BP’s Endicott Island drilling site sits on the Beaufort Sea, home to birds and marine life. Hundreds of 55-gallon barrels containing paint thinners, paints, oil and solvents were dumped, according to federal prosecutors.26
The conviction followed a 16-month-long legal battle in which BPAmoco denied knowledge of the dumping, despite the previous conviction of the same contractor on identical dumping charges. This pollution too had been going on for years.
BPAmoco produces this science curriculum in conjunction with Scholastic, Waste Management Inc., and Public Television, and freely distributes it to the Chicago public schools. The overwhelming corporate interest in investing in this project is far from innocent, philanthropic, or charitable, as the curriculum participates in an overall corporate strategy of producing global corporate citizens and re-creating profit motives as moral values, or rather, tutoring the kids in the “joys of capitalism.” As Alex Molnar has shown, Scholastic itself is one of the most aggressive and shameless cases of corralling youth into the consumer market:
[Mark] Evans [a senior vice president of Scholastic, in his 1988 essay in Advertising Age] managed to paint a picture of noble purpose and business need combined in perfect harmony to advance the welfare of American students. Perhaps not wishing to seem too self-serving, he failed to mention that at the time he wrote his essay, Scholastic was in the process of establishing its educational marketing division and was looking for corporate clients. Early in his essay, Evans identified a few business-supported educational projects that, in his mind, illustrated how corporations, pursuing profits, and schools, trying to better educate their students, could work in tandem to advance the cause of social progress. Then he dispensed with the “good cop” fiction and came to the point: “More and more companies see education marketing as the most compelling, memorable and cost-effective way to build share of mind and market into the 21st century.” Evans then set aside any pretense of high educational and social purpose when he chose a model for all to emulate. “Gillette is currently sponsoring a multi-media in-school program designed to introduce teenagers to their safety razors—building brand and product loyalties through classroom-centered, peer-powered lifestyle patterning.”27
In conjunction with these company goals, the BPAmoco curriculum certainly shows how profits and market values are replacing social purpose in the education of citizens. The BPAmoco curriculum demonstrates how corporations are using schools to teach market values and make these values into common sense, even fashioning them as the basis of morality. Oil companies in particular, as David Cromwell points out, are using classroom curricula to spread propaganda that “modern civilization is dependent on the hydrocarbon business,”28 as the popularization of this belief is essential to the survival of the industry. Specifically, as we detail in what follows, BPAmoco’s curriculum envisions nature and knowledge, as well as work, education, and science, through the imaginary of corporate culture.
Each of the videos begins and ends with advertisements for BPAmoco. “Major funding for the New Explorers is provided by BPAmoco celebrating the adventure of scientific discovery for the year 2000 and beyond.” This voice-over accompanies images of pristine nature: the moon, a bald eagle flying over a serene lake. The BPAmoco logo, in patriotic red, white, and blue, joins with the bald eagle in suggesting that the trademark could replace the U.S. flag. In the context of public school classrooms (complete with a U.S. flag hanging near the VCR), such mergings of these common tropes fashions the idea of national citizenship as corporate branding.
These framing advertisements present serene scenes of idealized yet decontextualized nature, labeled with the oil company logo and suggesting an alignment of ecological health and the BPAmoco corporation. The ad for BPAmoco is followed by a connected ad for Waste Management, “Helping the world dispose of its problems.” Together these images and assuring voice-over present nature in a state of benevolent corporate management. The pristine horizon punctuated by a range of snow-capped mountains, pure colors, still lake waters, and soaring birds serves to Americanize the natural landscape further by placing the corporate logo in the spacious skies and mountain ranges of the beauty America sings. The pure air and stillness give a sense that time has stopped and that human hands have left nature’s sublimity untouched and dazzling. The history of Waste Management reveals, of course, quite another story, and certainly the contention that Waste Management disposes of the world’s problems is less credible than would be a contrary claim— that it has created new ones. Founder and billionaire Wayne Huizenga, a hero of capitalist consolidation, mergers, and acquisitions, has come up time and again under allegations of unethical practices, illegal price-setting, stock bailings, and underworld corruption. Additionally, his profit motivations have proven far from environmentally astute, as he reneged on the waste-hauling industry’s practices of breeding pigs to eat edible garbage when his own pigs developed special diseases not evident on the competitors’ farms.29 Though Huizenga has since sold the company, Waste Management has a stake in deregulating capital and finance as well as finding ways to avoid restrictive environmental legislation. The pedagogical intent here is to show nature, indeed, as self-regulating, able to revitalize and reproduce itself without human intervention or investments of any kind. The logo then serves to link the bountiful abundance and cleanliness of nature without controls to the advancement of clean, corporate, healthful capital.
The videos envision nature as not merely best served by corporate management, but as an expression of corporate culture. Rivers of Fire opens with a drive through the jungle likened to that of a typical suburban commuter on his way to his desk job. “Except for the tropical foliage, [geologist Frank Truesdale’s] routine looks like a typical suburban commute, but when he takes the first exit off the paved highway, we get a hint that he’s not exactly on his way to a desk job in an office building.” Frank’s four-wheel drive jostles down a dirt-paved road flanked on either side by lush vegetation. Corporations themselves thus come to seem part of nature.
Within the imaginary of the videos, nature appears alternately as dangerous and in need of control or as tamed suburban landscape. “If something goes wrong here,” warns narrator and producer Bill Kurtis in Dive Into Darkness, “there’s no easy escape to the surface. Since cave diving took hold in the 1960s, more than 300 people have died in caves in Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean alone.” “Temporary loss of air supply, temporary disorientation, temporary loss of lights—those aren’t reasons to die in a cave,” admits one of the experts. “The reason people die in those situations is panic, perceived stress. That’s what kills people.” “But despite these risks,” the video concludes, “not one of them [the divers] would turn back. This is not just a job for these divers. It’s a mission. Like the original explorers in space, they had to send a person there to really know what’s going on.” Rivers of Fire presents scientists as adventurers, explorers, but also conquistadors driven to control an angry and unpredictable final frontier—namely, the earth itself about to spew forth burning deadly fluids. Bill Kurtis kneels before a stream of magma running into the ocean as he explains the danger. “In January of 1983,” a voice-over begins, “the skies were just as blue on the big island of Hawaii, the beaches just as inviting as any other day. But thirty miles beneath the crater of Kilowaya, molten lava was rising.” This narration is accompanied by ominous bass music, invoking horror movie conventions as in Jaws when the monster is about to pounce. Continual video crosscuts intersperse the explosion of this deadly lava with shots of human technology—seismic equipment, which Kurtis explains, is necessary to watch and hence control the unpredictable earth. Lava flows “threaten home sites and other subdivisions that may be in its way.” By framing nature as violent and in need of control by science and technology, Rivers of Fire naturalizes the role that the corporation, and here more specifically Amoco, plays in protecting citizens and property from the threat of nature. The technological instruments provide “a way to prevent lava from consuming those who live around the volcanoes.”
In this case, the video does more than camouflage the real role that BPAmoco’s science and technology play in threatening citizens and nature. It also denies the history of why the volcano observatory was established in the early twentieth century and by whom. The curriculum fails to mention that the observatory was initially funded by one of the five businesspeople who overthrew the indigenous Hawaiian government and installed a plutocracy. The observatory was designed not merely to study nature, but to predict volcanic flows so that other foreign investors could be convinced that their investments in development projects and industry would not be destroyed by lava. In other words, the video ignores the observatory’s role in a history of economic and political imperialism, explaining its purpose solely in terms of a disinterested study of nature. When BPAmoco and Scholastic describe their lessons as “An Amoco Expedition with the New Explorers,” they are actively excluding the history of conquest that paved the way for today’s seemingly disinterested measurement of nature. The establishment of the observatory was part of settling the frontier, annexing Hawaii, and continuing the westward expansion, which was part of an American history characterized by violence and exploitation and motivated by profit rather than a benevolent protection of citizens from an unruly nature:
The entire history of this country has been driven by violence. The whole power structure and economic system was based essentially on the extermination of the native populations and the bringing of slaves. The Industrial Revolution was based on cheap cotton, which wasn’t kept cheap by market principles but by conquest. It was kept cheap by the use of land stolen from the indigenous populations and then by the cheap labor of those exploited in slavery. The subsequent conquest of the West was also very brutal. After reaching the end of the frontier, we just went on conquering more and more— the Philippines, Hawaii, Latin America, and so on. In fact, there is a continuous strain of violence in U.S. military history from “Indian fighting” right up through the war in Vietnam. The guys who were involved in “Indian fighting” are the guys who went to the Philippines, where they carried out a massive slaughter; and the same people who had just been tried for war crimes in the Philippines went on to Haiti, where they carried out another slaughter. This goes right up through Vietnam. If you look at the popular literature on Vietnam, it’s full of “We’re chasing Indians.”30
In the BPAmoco videos, nature, rather than technology, corporations, and the capitalist economic system itself, appears to threaten families, consumption, and the innocent pleasures of beach-combing. Additionally, nature functions as an extension of the corporation, becomes plunderable, and substitutes as the workspace. Such an understanding of nature as the work-site serves oil-drilling sponsor BPAmoco well, who also wants students to see that nature is dangerous to civilization and in need of control, manipulation, and constant measurement by scientists. In Dive Into Darkness, one scientist reminds viewers that nature is being destroyed, “things are disappearing so rapidly we need to document them.”
The BPAmoco kit includes three videotapes, six colorful wall posters, teachers’ guides, and public relations instructions for teachers and gas station owners to place promotional photos and stories about the “partnership” in local newspapers. BPAmoco’s curriculum suggests that education must be fun, exciting, exploratory, and meaningful to students. “I think it’s important that students see many things on the way home from school that they saw in the classroom,” explains one of the physics teachers. And the success of such meaningful pedagogical practices is proven in the countless testimonies of students who were never interested in science before now. “Any teacher can go to college and get their degree and come in to teach and do all kinds of chalk talk,” one student observes. “But Mr. Hicks comes in and makes it all fun. He basically loves every one of us …. We’re a family and he teaches it with love.”
The BPAmoco curriculum draws on popularized notions of progressive pedagogy to suggest that education should derive from experience, that students be involved in “constructing” knowledge by participating in activities that are meaningful to them, and that learning must not disconnect knowledge from the world. Another middle-level pedagogue, Nancy Atwell, in her book In the Middle, professes to make learning meaningful by giving kids more power to decide on curriculum and on what happens in the classroom: “Together we’ll enter the world of literature, become captivated, make connections to our lives, the world, and the world of other books, and find satisfaction.”31 Atwell, hailed in both the popular and educational presses as an educational innovator, emphasizes hands-on learning where kids take responsibility in deciding what the curriculum will be and formulate, in discussions with their classmates, the kinds of topics they will write about. Atwell contrasts this new way of teaching middle school with a more traditional teacher-centered methodology where kids’ potentials for imagination and involvement are never tapped or developed. At the same time, however, she does not talk about how this freedom for educational experimentation functions to bolster the sense of privilege of her white private-school, suburban students, nor does she address how these methods are meant to train, precisely, those in control of the future means of production. For instance, given the classroom time to write poetry without being assigned specific topics, Atwell’s student Joe writes about the emotions he experiences when alone in his bedroom, and Atwell comments, “When I read Joe’s poem, I remembered my bedroom in my parents’ house and the most complicated relationship I ever enjoyed with a physical space.”32 Atwell neglects to mention what kinds of students have their own bedroom, what the politics of real estate are that provide for these kinds of empty spaces, or what kinds of populations enjoy the privileges of solitude. For Atwell, “empowering” students means giving them a sense of confidence and personal power. Yet, Atwell has no sense of different levels of power, privilege, agency, and sense of entitlement experienced by different students in different social, economic, and cultural contexts. Atwell’s kids are already in a class position to receive power. Atwell does not help her privileged students see their privileges as a part of a broader system that fails to extend basic social services to students elsewhere. Neither does she offer her students the tools for challenging oppressions, such as the maintenance of a highly unequal structure of educational resource allocation. Atwell, thus, embraces a highly individualized progressive methodology divorced from any social, political referent for more just social transformation. Likewise, BPAmoco’s Rock n’ Roll Physics shows conventional classroom physics lessons as the height of decontextualized, abstract, and boring education that fails by failing to engage students. A physics teacher drones on, spewing formulas as students sleep, doodle, and play with chewing gum. Narrator Kurtis says, “This is no way to teach physics.” Cut to the class riding on a roller coaster and Kurtis yells from the roller coaster, “Now this is the way to learn physics.” As Atwell states, “Learning is more likely to happen when students like what they are doing,”33 but there is no sense given here about what kinds of students get to experience such pleasures and under what circumstances, nor what kinds of political values, institutions, and configurations of power are being assumed and supported through such initiatives. Such pleasure is seldom innocent.
The use of adventure-thrill and high-speed derring-do in the BPAmoco curriculum keys in to a broader public discourse about the economy that promotes instability, fear, and physical trepidation as the goals of the good life. As the BPAmoco curriculum redefines the pursuit of knowledge as a dangerous game, Time and MTV both juxtapose high-risk sport with day trading and risky stock investment. Quitting jobs, starting businesses, and risky investment in the market are being likened to base-jumping, paragliding, mountain climbing, and other adventure sports. MTV shows bungee jumpers freaking out over whether or not to plunge while an e-trade advertisement contextualizes the situation in the lower right corner of the screen. Clearly, Time and MTV construct and romanticize the popular embrace of volatile and uncertain ventures. This could be viewed as simply a ploy to naturalize an increasingly unstable economy as an exciting challenge, which the brave can fearlessly negotiate. Job insecurity, an uncertain financial future, and growing inequalities in wealth and income appear as exciting obstacles to brave in the new economy. The economy metaphorizes as nature itself, standing there as the tantalizing mountain to climb or jump off in the Mountain Dew commercial. In other words, adventure sports are being used by corporate mass media to naturalize economic insecurity.
The notion of hands-on learning is indebted to contemporary progressive educational methodologies of constructivism grounded in Piagetian theory as well as the influence of the Deweyan tradition and the wrongful appropriation of Paulo Freire’s criticism of banking education. “Education thus becomes,” Freire maintains, “an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.”34 These progressive traditions share with the BPAmoco curriculum an insistence on the centrality of the learner, the need for a de-centering of teacher authority in the classroom, and the importance of knowledge that is meaningful as the basis for further learning. The BPAmoco curriculum seems progressive by appearing to take seriously the notion that education should be meaningful to students and that the classroom structure should not treat students as depositories for rarefied teacher knowledge. However, like many wrong-headed liberal appropriations of Freire, the BPAmoco curriculum treats progressive educational ideals instrumentally, that is, strictly as methods to increase the likelihood that students will absorb knowledge of which the justifications for its teaching remain unquestioned.35 In the case of the BPAmoco videos, this means that there are no questions raised as to why students should learn physics, whose interests are served by the teaching of this knowledge, what this knowledge is used for in the world, and at whose expense and to whose benefit. Hence, seemingly progressive methodologies are not theoretically justified and end up being just a more efficient delivery system for accepted knowledge about science.
The BPAmoco videos view nature as a resource. That is, nature appears as needing to be tamed and domesticated, brought within the control of scientific rationality represented in automatic machines drawing lines on graphs, making sense. Nature is out there waiting to be retrieved, transported back to laboratories equipped with state-of-the-art equipment for measurement and storage, named, and labeled for future research. “Imagine a place left on earth,” says master of ceremonies Bill Kurtis introducing Dive Into Darkness, “that is virtually unexplored.” The underwater cave Sagittarius in Sweetings Key of the Bahamas is, he continues, an “unstudied world waiting for … discovery.”
However, the pursuit of knowledge here seems like an alibi. Scientists just happen to stumble upon natural holes filled with energy sources. Jill Yaeger of Antioch University swims across blue holes brimming with blue bubbles. These blue holes, the voice-over explains, give off a strong force, which, when reversed by the tides, create twisting fields of force that sweep swimmers into tow without granting any path of escape or release. Searching for knowledge, the scientific exploration team is able to avoid such deep-sea traps. The energy fields themselves are resources to be used in the production of knowledge. BPAmoco does not think it worth mentioning that they themselves are in the business of exploiting energy fields as resources for production. Acquiring knowledge of nature-as-energy becomes a substitute, even a cover, for exploiting natural sources of energy for company profit. Collecting bits of natural knowledge becomes a safety valve, an antidote to the destruction that natural energy would cause if left unexplored and unexploited, and a compassionate rationale for expanding technocratic controls into foreign territories. BPAmoco’s view of nature communicates that what is important to know about nature is how it can be used for human progress and profit. “Scientists believe that sharks may hold the secrets to important medical benefits for man,” Dive Into Darkness informs students. “They’re animals in need of protection and study.” The video neglects to mention that human industry in the form of commercial fishing is the primary cause of the endangerment of sharks. Instead, “humanitarian” concerns serve to justify Yaeger’s dives into darkness on a mission to bring back the newly discovered form of crustacea remipede to her research laboratory in Ohio. These animals need to be known about, named, labeled, and cataloged in order to construct a total knowledge of life, the videos suggest, and of evolution. In fact, the sea dives themselves are depicted as travels back through evolution, into the dark origins of life at the bottom of the sea, while the precarious return to the water’s surface works as a triumphant enlightenment. However, what made the journey of discovery so successful turns out to be the successful retrieval of the remipede for scientific research—in other words, the collection and acquisition of resources. The videos translate activities of collecting into the ethical entertainment of learning, knowledge acquisition and accumulation. The idea that knowledge of nature needs to be whole and complete means here that mastery of nature leads to a greater variety of products. Also, nature is biding its evolutionary time, waiting to be brought to civilized places where it can be “taught to eat store-bought food,” as Yaeger announces. BPAmoco does not allude to the ways nature might be destroyed when its products are extracted, nor to how nature and the ecosystem are not designed simply to be exploited for human instrumental use, or to how all nature is not passively waiting to be turned into products of consumption and objects of display.
Public Image: The corporate image of Monsanto as a responsible member of the business world genuinely concerned with the welfare of our environment will be adversely affected with increased publicity.
Sources of Contamination: Although there may be some soil and air contamination involved, by far the most critical problem at present is water contamination…. Our manufacturing facilities sewered a sizable quantity of PCB’s in a year’s time …
—Monsanto committee memo, 196936
Amoco is not the only company using nature to teach kids the values and joys of capitalism. Under these types of curricula, nature is remade to express and reflect the social relations of capital, and thereby the unequal relations of capital are made to seem part of nature. A 2000–2001 exhibit titled “Underground Adventure,” at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, for example, is a spectacular trip underneath the earth’s surface to explore the wonders of the soil.37 “You will never feel the same about the soil again,” are the words that welcome you into Monsanto’s “fun for the whole family” learning trek. On the other side of the video greeting room called the “basecamp” is Monsanto’s magical shrinking machine, which makes all the critters around the visitors suddenly into towering monsters, gigantic plastic beetles, and bulging roots that would have made Kafka ogle and Gulliver shake his head. What is truly fantastic about the display, however, is not so much that Monsanto is hiding its own destruction of such fertility in the soil through its genetic manipulations or its annihilation of such critters through its production of insecticides such as Roundup or its own monopolistic stronghold of species’ diversity by its horizontal control of agricultural products that create essential needs among farmers for its other exclusive products. Nor is it very surprising, after all, that Monsanto would not acknowledge, in this exhibit, its emissions of PCBs that contaminated much farming and breeding lands in West Anniston, Alabama, and caused cancer among much of the population there with the full and documented knowledge of the company itself as to the damage that PCBs cause.38 Rather, what makes Monsanto’s natural history lessons truly magical is precisely how the company manages to exhibit such unethical, unbalanced, and destructive capitalist practices as the way of nature, rather than of multinational corporations.
Monsanto’s aims in its exhibit are clear from the moment the visitor enters. The first thing the visitor sees is a series of Plexiglas displays professing the importance of the soil in providing various consumer products. These are not just any consumer products, but rather major corporate trademarks. For example, one case displays an old pair of blue jeans with the glaring Gap label, while the sign reads: “Without soil, there would be no jeans. These jeans are made of cotton denim stitched together with cotton thread. Their blue color comes from indigo dye. Cotton and indigo come from plants that need soil to grow. No soil—no jeans.” Next comes a basket of Coca-Cola cans piled on top of one another. The sign exclaims, “The aluminum in these cans has been recycled over and over again. But new aluminum starts out locked inside of soil in an ore called bauxite. No soil—no aluminum.” The exhibit never admits what Monsanto or the other sponsors have at stake in displaying this particular constellation of goods, for example, Monsanto’s production of NutraSweet artificial sweetener used in Diet Coke. “Without soil there would be no penicillin,” the next sign triumphantly declares. The sign does not go on to explain Monsanto’s investments in the pharmaceutical industry, nor how the consolidation of large pharmaceutical companies and their lobbying of protections for global intellectual property rights is making medicine less accessible throughout the world to those who need it most, but rather indicates how many lives are being saved because penicillin arises fruitfully from the soil.
Monsanto is clearly telling its young patrons that, just like the mall, the soil is rich in its offerings of fun and diverse things to wear and to buy, as if multinational products emerge straight out of the earth without involving people, labor, or social relations. In other words, Monsanto here seems to literalize the classical Marxist claim that naturalization erases the processes of production from the commodity. Nature is made to seem richly abundant of capitalist output, making invisible the inequalities inherent in the mass manufacturing of cotton or dye, or the injustices practiced in both Third and First World sweatshops where much of, for example, The Gap’s merchandise is stitched together (often outsourced) by the poor, the exploited, and the marginalized, or when Coca-Cola’s local parent-company Minute Maid employs child labor for low wages in Brazil. What is also not assessed is how such multinationals are involved in, say, polluting the very soil they are said to enrich by distributing nonbiodegradable and nonrecyclable litter, or dumping their excesses in Third World markets to keep prices high, thereby making such items not truly as widely accessible as their spontaneous soil generation would imply.
The first object the visitor sees after having been shrunken is a giant U.S. penny inscribed with the words, “In Soil We Trust.” Indeed, the godhead capital lords over nature here. As well, Lincoln’s prominent visage at the entrance invokes the authority of the state and American history to suggest an organic connection to capital growth here in the former prairieland of Chicago. More simply, first seeing a series of commodities that come from soil and then seeing money itself in the soil, the visitor is being told outright, “There is big money in the soil.” To emphasize that the soil is naturally organized by the laws of capital, in the “Root Room,” scientific labels mark uniform units of time along the branch of a tree, becoming farther and farther apart to demonstrate that the branch’s rate of growth is accelerating. This celebration of unlimited accumulation and growth makes the project of capital seem driven by a natural propensity toward expansion, rather than, as William Greider points out, toward depletion and nonsustainability: “The nettlesome assertion,” he writes, “that governing authorities did not wish to grasp [in 1992] was that rising affluence itself, at least as it was presently defined and achieved, faced finite limits. The global system, as it generated new wealth-producing activity, was hurtling toward a wall, an unidentified point in time when economic expansion would collectively collide with the physical capacity of the ecosystem.”39 In real terms, Monsanto’s vision of unrelenting growth and monumentalized consumption can only be sacralized by forgetting the social costs of accelerated production, costs usually not accounted for on balance sheets, like “deforestation, desertification, urbanization and other activities that, so to speak, paved over the natural world”40 as well as other costs attributed to the impoverishment of the places providing the raw materials, or to their domination by outside powers, like weakened institutions for justice, fiscal austerity, starvation wages, and diminished authority for taxing foreign businesses. Making capital bigger does not necessarily make the world better for most people. Moreover, the exhibit does not allude to the fact that Monsanto’s own growth did not happen naturally at all. Rather, it resulted in part from a governmental action responding to pressures from big business interests: the passage of the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act, which was to phase out federal subsidies to farmers and thereby drive small farmers out of business. The legislation, however, did not work to stabilize prices nor to lessen the surpluses pushing prices up, but rather required an increase in government subsidies to farmers (from $16 billion in 1998 to $32 billion in 1999) as Congress enacted “emergency” relief measures. “Among the consequences,” Greider concludes, “the capital-intensive treadmill for farmers sped up, and they became even more eager to embrace whatever innovation promised to boost returns. Just as farm prices were cratering, Monsanto and others began promoting genetically altered seeds for corn and soybeans with cost-cutting promises, and this new technology swept the landscape.”41
Ideas about bigness and growth presented in the entryway set the standard, throughout the exhibit, for connecting consumption to the expansion of the good life promised by corporate growth. The individual museum-goer is supposed to identify with the bugs and critters and so with corporate greed, wanting to consume enough to fatten corporate bellies. Further down the path of exploration, a section is called, “Recycling Leftovers,” where the sign reads: “Partnership or Parasite: Can You Tell Which Is Which?” The life-size panorama shows giant worms and bugs feasting on one another in a “feeding frenzy.” Across the way stands a vending machine. The first item for selection in this vending machine explains, “millipede: decomposer” while the glass screen displays a package of decaying plants. The vending machine places the viewer into the same position of the feeding critters nearby, proving that nature is but another manifestation of the kind of consumption that vending machines offer when they sell junk food and soda. Critters seem to be selecting their nutrients in the same way that shoppers do, even as some of the selected nutrients cause death and decay to others. Like Amoco, Monsanto is presenting nature as consumer relations under corporate management.
This playful cartoonishness makes violence cute, and even as the bugs chew one another to death, nobody seems to get hurt and everybody equally seems to win organic improvements and benefits. Capital competition appears as a fearless game of destruction through consumption, like Time Warner-promoted Pokemón, making destructive competition fun rather than harmful as it was, for example to Karen McFarlane and her family in West Anniston:
[Karen] has PCBs in her body fat. According to tests done by a local doctor, Ryan’s blood has nearly triple the level considered “typical” in the United States; for Tiffany, their 6-year-old, it’s double. Nathan, 8, has severe developmental problems, and everyone in the family suffers from respiratory problems and the skin rashes associated with PCB exposure. Chris, Karen’s 11-year-old son, who’s home from school with an upset stomach and is splayed out on the couch, lifts his Panthers basketball T-shirt to reveal brownish-red blotches up the sides of his chest. “It smells like decaying flesh,” Ryan warns. “Like it’s rotten.”42
Certainly for the McFarlanes, the soil where they grow their food and feed their livestock is not abundantly offering consumer items like clothes from The Gap, or giant smiling pennies, or the healthy promise of penicillin. Instead, the joyful critters happily participating in Anniston’s consuming frenzy are increasing the McFarlanes’ exposure to deadly PCBs as the contamination’s rate of growth intensifies moving up the food chain. Not only are the McFarlanes and their neighbors now caught up in a litigation suit that will most likely take years before they see results, but it is also clear to them that the government would have more strictly scrutinized Monsanto if the contamination were happening in a wealthier and whiter area. As it eats away at the shrunken bugs and worms, Monsanto’s drive for unlimited growth and profitability appears no longer as a cute and childish game nor an arcade governed by nature and its laws of free competition, but instead as excessive degradation and costs to powerless citizens with the stakes unfairly and quite unnaturally set against them.
In Monsanto’s display of nature, natural organisms are not only consumers but they also compose the labor force. Certain critters are presented as looking for jobs, displaying their resumés, classifying their skills like “must work well with others in grazing and/or predatory relationship,” “must be energetic and willing to work overtime,” or “dis-assembly line worker.” In case the point still is not clear, further along there is a tilted tank of soil with water pouring in, demonstrating the way water spreads through the earth. The tank is tagged, “The Trickle-Down Effect.” Referencing Reaganomics, conservative procorporate economic language seems here to describe relations of nature, showing, as an established fact, how everybody benefits, grows, and nourishes when the top layers get moistened. As Donna Haraway notes about corporate-motivated representations of biotechnology and genetic fusion more generally, “The latent content is the graphic literalism that biology—life itself—is a capital-accumulation strategy in the simultaneously marvelous and ordinary domains of the New World Order, Inc. Specifically, natural kind becomes brand or trademark, a sign protecting intellectual property claims in business transactions.”43 As the visitor leaves the exhibit, famous quotes about the earth are painted across the wall facing a kaleidoscopic, holographic projection of the world. The globe is constituted by video images of trees and clouds merge into shots of tilled fields that, in turn, merge into housing developments. Consistent with multiple other displays, the video globe suggests a holistic endless cycle of nature within which the actions of clouds, trees, lightning, corporations, and consumers all play a role as redemptive forces of nature. Directly across from this the wall declares in bold letters, “Plowed ground smells like earthworms and empires.”
Amoco’s domination of nature as a resource, which the videos depict as benevolent and fun, clears the way for its domination and exploitation of peoples and nations, its violent bids to control Third World labor through militarization, and its wiping out of any local and more equitable terms of production. In other words, what the videos show as the healthy curiosity of scientists is, in reality, the violence of colonial conquest for capitalist acquisition, or the reduction of all value to money values and the simultaneous decimation of human values. Affirms David Harvey:
This power asymmetry in social relations [between First and Third World nations] ineluctably connects to the inequities in environmental relations in exactly the same way that the project to dominate nature necessarily entailed a project to dominate people. Excessive environmental degradation and costs, for example, can be visited upon the least powerful individuals or even nation states as environmental hazards in the workplace as well as in the community. Ozone concentrations in large cities in the United States affect the poor and “people of color” disproportionately and exposure to toxins in the workplace is class-conditioned. From this arises a conflation of the environmental and the social justice issues.44
Indeed, BPAmoco’s treatment of nature models its own treatment of the people who live in the areas surrounding the sites of exploration. The black people of Sweetings Key, Bahamas, do not seem to have gainful employment outside of waiting for the explorers to come and put them to work. Like the remipedes, they are sitting around waiting for the white scientists to put them to productive work. As picturesque backdrops, they stand by the boats, seemingly incomprehensive as the scientists explain the uses of the equipment to the video viewers. As they trek to the lake, the scientists seem overburdened with large and heavy tools for the dive, and Bill Kurtis explains that they have brought two of every piece of equipment in case of failings. The natives are therefore requisitioned to carry the heavy air tanks and gear on their backs, following the scientists through a wooded field in an image reminiscent of a typical colonial scene like the one Michael Taussig describes of Colombian Indians carrying Spaniards across the Andes: “The normal load for a porter was around 100 pounds, while some were known to have carried 200. Even with these weights they were said to climb the mountains with the greatest of ease and seldom to rest.”45 The relationship between the natives and the scientists in the BPAmoco video seems cordial but noncommunicative, as they silently do chores to their benefactors’ bidding, expressing no will of their own or any sense of initiative outside of serving the needs and doing the tasks of the scientists. Though the natives in the BPAmoco video are indeed laboring, there is no sense of payment, contracts, organization, conflict, possibilities of worker self-interest, or of worker control over work conditions. Instead, the natives are rendered quasi-mechanical, instrumental, objectified, and vitally curious, mirrors of scientific wonder, proving that the scientists’ curiosity is natural, primitive, and raw, the kernel of being human. The black men stare out over the waters, and the camera lingers over their profiled tense faces, creating suspense and worry about the scientists’ welfare and safety in the dangerous waters. The bravery of the scientists in the pursuit of knowledge is made starkly visible as the natives sit by the water’s edge, not knowing the treasures of discovery that the white establishment, in its superiority, values so highly.
What is the “iMPACT” of such colonialist portrayals being brought into the Chicago public schools that are disproportionately black and Hispanic? What are the videos teaching working-class students about their relationship to the white establishment and to science? The videos all begin with a message from a light-skinned black woman named Paula Banks who is an BPAmoco vice president. Banks, surrounded by countless antique and contemporary Amoco red-white-and-blue filling station signs, explains to young viewers that science should not only be educational but also fun and exciting. Distributed to largely nonwhite students in the Chicago public schools, the video suggests that alignment with the power of the corporation to control nature like the white scientists do, comes through a whitening. Aside from providing BPAmoco with a few solid minutes of advertising the logo, this prelude establishes the oil company as “multicultural” and hence offering a promise of potential employment to young nonwhite viewers. Absent here are the historical facts that domestically jobs above the level of service station “jockey” were not available to blacks during the time of the antique BPAmoco signs and despite the fact that globally the history of oil company exploration and production is the history of white imperialism and enrichment and black subjugation and impoverishment. This is, of course, aside from recent lawsuits against oil giants such as Amoco, Texaco, and others for the maintenance of corporate glass ceiling on promotions and racist harassment on the job, for their environmental exploitation of jungle lands inhabited by the indigenous people of Ecuador and elsewhere.46
More than this, the presence of a light-skinned black woman enters into a racial spectrum manifested in the videos that mirrors that of the skin-tone hierarchy of white supremacy. Race ranges from the dark-skinned primitive natives in the Bahamas to the light-skinned black Paula Banks to the white scientific explorers. The racial representations in the film position blacks as working with nature and a part of nature, while portraying whites as controlling, studying, and manipulative of nature. Dark-skinned black Frank Truesdale, a federal forestry worker and not an BPAmoco employee, the only nonwhite scientist in the videos, who works on the volcano itself is shown to be in a romantic relationship with a feminized moody earth. “Frank knows his volcano too well to relax,” notes the voice-over. “He’s seen all her moods. Serene beauty. Wonder. Anger.” Unlike the white scientists, Truesdale appears to have an intimate relationship with anthropomorphized nature. “It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” the voice-over narrates the history of Truesdale’s career, “Frank and the volcano.” This intimacy establishes him as closer to nature, elided with it. Frank is not the one you see operating the high-tech equipment, the machines, the large needles and measuring rods automatically drawing minute seismatic changes on a graph. “These machines,” the voice-over explicates, “could hear the volcano’s heartbeat.” Rather, Truesdale is the one out in the field, discovering and experiencing nature directly with a primitive metal stick that digs up the lava and a barrel of water that cools it for study. Truesdale’s work shows him engulfed in nature and so part of it, distanced from technology that facelessly watches over him, overseeing his acquisitions and his labors while processing his collections of data reduced to numbers on a chart.
Neoliberalism envisions a world controlled by corporate power, where environmental and human rights as well as democracy are marginalized, if not completely annihilated, in the pursuit of power, profit, and growth. How does such a dystopian idea about the future become widely acceptable, even the only possibility imaginable? Currently, schools are often the ideological mechanisms where the values of international capitalist relations are being diffused. As Henry Giroux notes, “In this scenario, public education is replaced by the call for privately funded educational institutions or for school-business partnerships that can ignore civil rights, exclude students who are class and racially disenfranchised, and blur the lines between religion and state.”47 In other words, students are learning to see their interests coinciding with those of global capital, even and especially in those places where they are fundamentally at odds. Schools need to become, instead, places where students learn to renegotiate their relationships to corporate-sponsored ideologies and to formulate possibilities for oppositional political agency.
As BPAmoco and other corporate curricula continue to turn schooling into a propaganda ground for their own destructive interests, one solution is clearly to stop using them. Another is to provide teachers with resources for researching the agendas of the corporations that finance and distribute such products in public schools and museums so that the ideological functions of the curricula can be turned against themselves, and the corporations’ global agendas will be shown as contextualized and centered within the curricula. In this way, students can be shown how their interests and worldviews actually differ from the way their interests and worldviews are constructed in the curricula. However, in the face of, for example, classroom overcrowding, the growing bureaucratization of teacher tasks and paperwork, and the cutting of public supports, equipment, programs, and infrastructures in schools, teachers are still prone and even sometimes propelled to use the preparation short-cuts that corporate curricula offer free of charge. Public actions like the anti-WTO and anti-World-Bank and IMF protests in Seattle and Washington DC provide important revelations about how corporations are operating against the public interest, are instrumental in perpetuating human rights and environmental abuses, are creating conditions for the exploitation of cheap labor abroad by destroying environmentally sustaining and economic infrastructures in already poor nations, and are weakening the institutions of democracy on a world level as capital gains power over civil governing. This type of counter-hegemonic education of the public serves as a counterpoint to the seamlessly happy world ensconced in the pleasures of pure knowledge promised by BPAmoco and Monsanto and starts on the difficult, uphill path of demanding that corporations be held responsible for their crimes against nature and humanity. Simply teaching students to read critically cannot counter the adoption of global capitalist interests into school curricula. Additionally, the school needs to be revitalized as a public power that holds out against private interests. As in South Africa in the 1970s, schools need, therefore, to be linked to other battlegrounds fighting for democratic values and human liberation as well as to those popular forces now producing counter-scenarios to the lie of disinterested satisfaction in a corporate-controlled public sphere.
1 BP Educational Services, available at www.bpes.com (accessed April 16, 2010).
2 Al Ries and Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding (New York: Harper Business, 1999).
3 For example, AOL Time Warner’s weekly advertisement for all things corporate, Time magazine, informs readers that they should be principally concerned with Wall Street’s profit from privatizing public schools rather than even mentioning the implications for democracy of turning over publicly funded institutions to be exploited by the corporate sector. John Greenwald, “School for Profit,” Time (March 20, 2000), 56–57. For an extensive discussion of the dangers to democracy posed by public school privatization see Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (Lanham, Md. and Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. See also, Henry A. Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and Alex Molnar, Giving Kids the Business (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).
4 For a discussion of the political use of childhood innocence, see Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, Md. and Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
5 For an excellent analysis of this phenomenon in relation to the broader privatization of the public sector and of mass media, see Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). David Cromwell notes that the oil industry, not merely a few companies, are engaged in funding and distributing pro-oil corporate curriculum (“Oil Propaganda Wars,” Z Magazine (March 2000): 7–8.
6 Justin Delacour, “Human Rights and Military Aid for Colombia: With ‘Friends’ Like the Senate Democrats, Who Needs Enemies?”, previously available at www.lbbs.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html.
7 Edward Herman and Cecilia Zarate-Laun, “Globalization and Instability: The Case of Colombia,” Z-Net, previously available at www.lbbs.org/ZNETPOProanimation.html.
8 Ibid.
9 Marc Cooper, “Plan Colombia: Wrong Issue, Wrong Enemy, Wrong Country,” The Nation (March 19, 2001): 14.
10 See Ken Silverstein’s Private Warriors (New York: Verso, 2001) for an excellent illustration of the expansion of private militaries and their use by multinational corporations.
11 For an in-depth history of how U.S. drug eradication efforts in the region have helped to build up South and Central American intelligence operations which have routinely instituted torture and corruption, see Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1991, 1998). The authors here cite as an example the Peruvian agency SIN (National Intelligence Service), which was created by the CIA and whose agents were trained by the CIA. SIN was headed by the now-infamous Vladimiro Montesinos who was revealed as the terrorizing spook behind much of the corruption in Alberto Fujimori’s regime. Though Montesinos’s acceptance of bribes became a mark of his immorality in a spectacle circulated in the international press in 2000, prompting Fujimori’s resignation by fax from Japan, the same sort of outrage was never directed towards what Scott and Marshall have documented as Montesino’s undisputed ties to the drug cartels in Colombia and other places (x–xi).
12 Marc Cooper, “Plan Colombia,” 14.
13 As cited in Marc Cooper, “Plan Colombia,” 16.
14 Cecilia Zarate-Laun, “Introduction to the Putumayo: The U.S.-assisted war in Colombia,” Z-Net (February 2001), previously available at www.lbbs.org/ZMag/articles/feb01laun.htm.
15 Carla Anne Robbins, “How Bogota Wooed Washington to Open New War on Cocaine,” Wall Street Journal (June 23, 2000), 1: A12. Not mentioned here is the proportion of now taxable large assets that are associated with the drug trade.
16 Thomas Freidman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999), 309.
17 “Raul Reyes, commander of the FARC, met with Richard Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, who explained to the guerrilla leader how markets worked. As the two figures embraced in this rebel-controlled area demilitarized by the government, Grasso told Reyes that Colombia would benefit from increased global investment and that he hoped that this meeting would mark the beginning of a new relationship between the FARC and the United States.” As quoted in Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Lanham, Md. and Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 70.
18 Delacour, “Human Rights and Military Aid.”
19 Ibid.
20 Zarate-Laun, “Introduction to the Putumayo.”
21 Cecilia Zarate-Laun, “Crossroads of War and Biodiversity: CIA, Cocaine, and Death Squads” by the Eco-Solidarity Working Group, Covert Action Quarterly (Fall–Winter, 1999): 16–17.
22 Andrew Ross, “The Mental Labor Problem,” Social Text 63 (Summer 2000): 1–31.
23 This wasn’t the first time this particular river was made into a polluted site by oil-related industries. There’s a history here. “Virulently anti-union employers, epitomized by Henry Ford, retained their own strikebreaking ‘security forces.’ During the Communist-led Ford Hunger March of unemployed workers in March 1932, Ford’s men shot to death four workers at the gates of the huge River Rouge complex. After more than seventy thousand sympathizers attended the funeral march, Ford and other employers responded by purging and blacklisting thousands of suspected radicals from their plants.” William M. Adler, Molly’s Job: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line (New York: Scribner, 2000), 104–105.
24 Steve Pardo, “River Rouge Fears Explosion: City Sues BP/Amoco in Effort to Clean Up Sewers and Avoid Repeat of 1988 Blast,” Detroit News (November 30, 1999): D3.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Alex Molnar, Giving Kids the Bu$iness: The Commercialization of America’s School (Boulder, Colo: Westview, 1996), 30–31.
28 David Cromwell, “Oil Propaganda Wars,” Z Magazine (March 2000): 8.
29 Martin S. Fridson, How to Be a Billionaire: Proven Strategies from the Titans of Wealth (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 148–150. “Subpoenas and fines for harassment of competitors and price-fixing dogged Waste Management during its spectacular growth period …. [R]egulators and prosecutors relentlessly investigated Waste Management, inspired by previous revelations of organized crime’s control of commercial waste hauling in southern New York and northern New Jersey …. Not only his business strategies, but also his financial practices generated criticism. Observers objected to the prices he paid in certain acquisitions, arguing that they exceeded industry norms …. Huizenga also had to endure the accusation that the companies he created through consolidation fared poorly after he left the scene …. finally, critics lambasted Huizenga’s practice of acquiring businesses for stock.”
30 Noam Chomsky, “Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy,” edited by Pepi Leistyna and Stephen Sherblom, Harvard Educational Review (1996): 111.
31 Margaret Atwell, In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998), 35.
32 Ibid., 52.
33 Ibid., 69.
34 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1970, 1993), 53.
35 Amoco is hardly the first corporation to appropriate progressive methodology in a way that jettisons critical social transformation as an underlying ideal. Disney’s Celebration, in Florida schools, exemplifies this corruption: see Giroux, The Mouse that Roared. As Donald Lazere has argued, “[m]any … Freireans … have failed to perceive that the political right has coopted their ideas to depict its own social camp, even in its most powerful, privileged, and prejudiced sectors, as meriting the same level of pluralistic encouragement of self-esteem and expression of feelings accorded the least privileged groups. Some such students expect teachers to make them feel good about being bigots, like Rush Limbaugh does—and some teachers … gladly comply.” Donald Lazere, “Spellmeyer’s Naive Populism,” CCC 48 (May 1997): 291.
36 Nancy Beiles, “What Monsanto Knew,” The Nation (May 20, 2000): 18–22.
37 Monsanto is the main sponsor of this exhibit. Other sponsors include ConAgra Foundation, National Science Foundation, the Fort James Foundation, Chicago Park District, Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer Foundation, Prince Charitable Trusts, Service/Master Company, Marion S. Searle/Searle Family Trust, and the Chicago Board of Trade Foundation.
38 “‘PCB is a persistent chemical which builds up in the environment. It, therefore, should not be allowed to escape …’—Monsanto, 1972” (Beiles, “What Monsanto Knew,” 19).
39 William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 455.
40 Ibid., 456.
41 William Greider, “The Last Farm Crisis,” The Nation (November 20, 2000): 15.
42 Beiles, “What Monsanto Knew,” 19–20.
43 Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_ Onco-Mouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 65–66.
44 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Malden, Mass. and Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1996), 155.
45 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 298.
46 Eyal Press, “Texaco on Trial,” The Nation (May 31, 1999): 11–16.
47 Henry A. Giroux, “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Politics: Beyond Polemics and Cynicism,” Journal of Advanced Composition 20, 3 (Summer 2000): 505–540.