The Pineapple Problem

"http://tinyurl.com/2vjyzq2"

Costa Rica is a beautiful country with a perfect climate for growing some of the world's most popular plants (both ornamental and nutritious). But does this translate into real economic benefit for the people of Costa Rica? For at least 100 years, foreign agri-business has been attempting to despoil Costa Rica's riches and often succeeding. It began with United Fruit and banana plantations and continued with pineapple and other crops and with first USA and then international conglomerates such as Chiquita Banana, Dole, and others. I was told that "they" came in with huge tractors separated by a kilometer and with a razor sharp blade or wire between them and simply bulldozed huge swaths of rain forest to make pineapple plantations. "They" paid off politicians and government workers to get whatever permits they wanted and then hired the locals whom they paid very little, required long back-breaking work from them, and treated them as sub-human. Then Costa Rica got tougher with them and the labor laws became tougher and more fairly enforced so that "they"had to start paying a minimum wage and pay into the government health and pensions funds. I now that as long ago as 2008, Dole Pineapple was getting around many of these restrictions by hiring workers by the day, trucking them in in the backs of cattle trucks, and then letting them go. So they were only temporary, casual, and part-time workers according to the legal records. They would then send the cattle trucks out again and collect the workers lined up waiting for a job. The work, of course, is seasonal. That makes it easy for Dole and other such companies to get around various labor laws.

I have been told by workers in the banana plantations and in the rice fields that pesticides are sprayed from crop dusters while the workers are in the fields working. The incidence of sterility, birth defects, and cancers among these workers and their families is very high.

The ecological damage done by the clearing of huge areas of forest to plant a single crop is enormous. The on-going damage is still not completely known.

The economic questions is this: Do the losses to the environment and the public health get cancelled out by economic benefits to the people of Costa Rica?

This blog from PoveryMatters Blog, attemps to answer the question. Anyone interested in the Costa Rica left behind by tourists, should be aware of how outside interests and mega agribusiness in particular are affecting the country.

Gratuitous Violence

http://tinyurl.com/cmzrpox

The above link gives information posted on Anonymous about the campus police officer in California who deliberately spetrayed seated non-violent protesters with pepper spray at point blank range right into their eyes.  Contacts to voice your opinions of his actions are also given.

A policeman is responsible for public safety and that includes the safety of people exercising their right to freely assemble and to express their concerns about government without threat as long as they are causing no harm.

Please let relevant people know that you want the policeman in question removed from duty.  He is obviously not psychologically fit for his responsibilities.

snopes.com: YouTube/Facebook Virus

snopes.com: YouTube/Facebook Virus:

This is apparently for real folks! A very dangerous Trojan horse that is using Facebook and other social media. Names of your friends/contacts are hijacked and used to entice you into opening the email and clicking on a link or downloading a virus that destroys your main hard drive in the computer. No fix for it as of yet.

'via Blog this'

Copyright Mary B. ThormanAll rights reserved

Relative Values

Foreigners often experience 'Culture Shock" when they move to Costa Rica. The values are different here. Below is something I recently wrote to a friend who had sent me information about how the phone companies in the USA earned money from text messaging:

t's strange. Here the text messaging is free, but the calls are more expensive. So everyone wants a cell phone to get that free texting and they all use it instead of calling. But once they have the cell phone, they can't resist the instant voice contact, so they start using that frequently as well. Of course, here, smart phones (especially iPhone) are a status symbol. Heidi went to the local grammar school with Nogui one day for some event. In front of her were Nogui's seven-year-old daughter, Hellen, and a friend of hers. The little girls saw Heidi taking pictures with her iPhone. One said, "Is that an iPhone?" When Heidi said it was, the other little girl said, "An iPhone 4?" "Well, no, " said Heidi. It's an iPhone 3.5." The little girls rolled their eyes at this apparent lack of taste in a Gringa and said, "so . . . it's ONLY an OLD one." Imagine this with seven-year-old disgust! Neither of their families, of course, could afford even an old iPhone, but they had expected better from a Gringa. Too funny! Little kids so in tune with what's IN. When the iPhone 4s were finally introduced in Costa Rica (San Jose area only) several months ago, the line for the limited number available (1000, I believe) filled Parque La Sabana which is BIG and then around the several kilometers of sidewalk surrounding the park. People had camped out overnight to be closer to the first ones to get a phone. These same folks will do without new clothes or more food in order to have the new gimmick. ICE said it had seriously underestimated the demand and quickly made arrangements to import thousands more. Which were all grabbed up. A new house is out of most people's reach. A new car or a new horse (horse's being more expensive than most houses) is also out of reach. So people need something to show status. Bling, the latest hi-tech gadgets, and knock-off "stylish" clothing are the best ways to do that. Very few people have a good understanding of what the real value of jewels (eg. diamonds) is, so they'd rather have a very large zirconium engagement ring to flash at everyone than a smaller real diamond. It's all a matter of perception of value which is very much a cultural thing and not based on hard data.