Turning Children Against Business

Imagine this: environmental activists transporting second-graders from suburban Connecticut public schools to Manhattan to protest a major U.S. bank at its headquarters.Impossible, you say? Not so. The Rainforest Action Network used Fairfield County, Conn., elementary school students to do just that to banking giant JP Morgan Chase last month. Apparently, the 7-year-olds objected to the bank’s lending practices in developing nations.This was no isolated incident. RAN’s actions, aptly characterized by Terence Corcoran of Canada’s National Post as “ideological child abuse,” are just one example of a startling new trend driven by left-leaning social and environmental activists who are now reaching into schools and homes not only to generate kiddie-pressure on targeted businesses, but also to get a hold of children’s developing value systems – the younger, the better – and to characterize businesses as the Darth Vaders of the grown-up world.The children were lured to JP Morgan under the pretext of a poster contest, which was the culmination of an international RAN-sponsored curriculum that teaches kids to take a dim view of wood, oil, and beef consumption.JP Morgan was targeted for the kiddie protest because it balked at RAN’s initial pressure.Not taking “no” for an answer – especially in the wake of Citigroup’s and Bank of America’s previous capitulations to similar RAN demands – the activist group used the Fairfield second-graders to pressure the bank to “stop lending money to projects that destroy endangered forests and cause global warming.”Although there’s no word yet on whether the bank ultimately will allow to RAN to dictate how it does business, JP Morgan’s director of environmental affairs reportedly thanked the kids for coming, told them they were “true rainforest heroes,” and said that JP Morgan Chase “takes the environment very seriously and is committed to developing a policy that would address these issues.”Intimidated by RAN’s use of 7-year-olds as a human shield, JP Morgan missed the opportunity to teach the kids about the need for, and benefits of, lending to developing nations – such as helping to lift Third World children out of the sort of abject poverty not often seen in tony suburban Connecticut.And RAN isn’t the only group out to indoctrinate kids against legitimate, necessary, and beneficial businesses.The animal rights activists at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, teach kids to think that Yum! Brands fast-food chain KFC really stands for “Killing Friendly Chickens.”PETA tells kids: “Chickens should be friends not food” and “Chickens are friendly, curious birds who value their lives just as much as you value yours.”PETA urges kids to write Yum! Brands’ CEO and warn him that “until [KFC] starts treating birds better, [we] won’t keep quiet about KFC’s secret recipe – cruelty to animals.”The Center for Science in the Public Interest – notorious for its attacks on fast food, movie popcorn, and Chinese food – instructs kids through a Web site cartoon character that the food industry doesn’t tell the truth: “Gus Bogus is the industry’s spokesman. Can you trust Gus?”Let’s not forget the organic-foods industry, whose business depends on scaring people about conventional food products. Organic Valley, for example, urges kids to write Congress to “protect the organic seed supply from industrial and pharmaceutical crops” and to “demand that Congress protect Americans from mad cow disease by [putting] public safety before beef interests.”The significance of these kiddie campaigns goes beyond simply pressuring businesses and politicians to cave into today’s activist demands – it represents an educational outreach effort to affect children’s behaviors and choices for the rest of their lives.If anti-business activists are permitted free rein to mold our children’s values from an early age, what kind of future citizens, investors, customers, employees, and policy-makers will they make?Corporate managements, sensitive about their brands and next quarter’s numbers, tend to look for the easy way out of confrontation with activists by appeasing or ignoring them in hopes they simply go away.These strategies may defuse situations in the short term, but aren’t likely to work in the long term, especially now that the activists have their eyes set on shaping the hearts and minds of future generations.Mr. Milloy publishes CSRwatch.com and is an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Turning Children Against Business

Turning Children Against Business

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