Four years ago, after the U.S. justice department began investigating Chiquita Brands, the ubiquitous banana company confessed that it had been funding terrorist groups.
Chiquita's also been accused of violating workers' rights and exposing them to toxic pesticides. When 25,000 workers employed by the fruit company in Jamaica went on strike demanding fair treatment, armed thugs shot 40 of the strikers, killing them.
And of course the company called Chiquita was formerly known as the United Fruit Company, the ruthless, exploitative, corrupt produce empire made famous for its bribery and helping to engineer coups in South America. The term "Banana Republic," describing a country ruled by an undemocratic and crooked elite, was invented to describe the colonial dictatorships propped up by the firm now known as Chiquita Brands.
And today, Chiquita Brands is attacking Canadians for our ethics? This is a company that is, truly, bananas.
Chiquita's CEO, Fernando Aguirre, has apparently made the decision to boycott Canadian oil sands.
Instead, Mr. Aguirre will ensure that his trucking fleet replaces ethical oil from Canada with more conflict oil from OPEC countries. The CEO of a company with one of the most infamous corporate stories in American history would rather send his support to the tyrannical royals of Saudi Arabia and the abusive Chavez regime in Venezuela. He would prefer to support regimes that deny women basic human rights, execute women for "sorcery" as happened in Saudi Arabia recently, and sentence people to lashes and prison for being gay. It looks like Chiquita still has a spectacularly inverted sense of corporate ethics.
And that won't change as long as Aguirre continues to take his marching orders from ForestEthics. That's the environmental extremist group that's been demanding for a while now that Chiquita (as well as competitor Dole) boycott Canadian fuel. That's what ForestEthics -- whose very name reveals how narrowly it understands ethics and seems to be entirely lacking any interest in the well-being and moral treatment of humans -- does best: publicly bully Fortune 500 companies into swearing off Canadian energy.
But if Chiquita is looking to burnish its image, it's picked the wrong group to use as its moral compass. ForestEthics itself has been caught lying, first with an anti-Alberta ad campaign, urging tourists to boycott the province, based on wildly exaggerated statistics (it multiplied the oil sands land use footprint by a mere factor of 200) and made-up conspiracy theories about companies secretly dumping oil into rivers at night.
If ForestEthics has a problem with corporations that like dirty tricks, it'll have more luck finding them in the banana business than in the oil sands.
ForestEthics was also caught red-handed last year when it suggested that clothing companies the Gap, Timberland and Levi's had all agreed to submit to the eco-group's demands to boycott Canadian oil. Turns out that ForestEthics just made that up; the shocked companies were forced to later clarify that they had agreed to no such thing.
When it came to banana companies, Forest Ethics employed the same misleading tactics: its full page newspaper ads meant to embarrass Chiquita and Dole, claimed oil sands extraction "threatens" an area of Boreal forest the size of Maine. In reality, oil sands mining disturbs an area smaller than the footprint of metro Calgary.
The ads also claimed that 90 per cent of the water used in oil sands processing ends up in lakes of "toxic waste." In reality, 80 per cent of mining process water is recycled and many in situ oil sands processes use no fresh water at all. The entire oil sands industry draws all of about one per cent of the flow of the adjacent Athabasca River.
Perhaps it isn't surprising then that an environmental group with such a flexible sense of ethics should find a partner in a banana firm made notorious for its own history of vast ethical deficits. The two of them have now teamed up to make Chiquita Brands a friend to the petro-tyrants of the world.
The Chiquita banana lady somehow doesn't seem the right symbol for that company anymore. A more suitable one would be a woman in a burka, unable to vote, drive, or even leave her house without her male guardian's permission. That's what Chiquita Brands stands for today.
Follow Kathryn Marshall on Twitter: www.twitter.com/KVMarshall
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http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Following+money+oilsands+debate/5911174/story.html
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/foreign+money+fuelling+oilsands+fight/5881141/story.html
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Debate+future+boreal+forest+baseless+conspiracies/5891162/story.html
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Slamming+oilsands+protesters+using+bogus/5891158/story.html
So the truth????
We must be vigilant with how we go about getting this oil out, of this sand in northern Alberta.
We need groups and organizations like the Pembina Institute, to keep these big corporations enviromentally in line. If we let ethicaloil.org have any say in this we are ....................................
Is there a sign on the pump?
Or is this just a joke designed to fool the green idiots?
And how will the consumer be able to recognize "ethical oil" at the pump?
The whole notion of “ethical oil” is worse than a bad joke; it is unethical and reprehensible.
Chiquita is the one saying they can differentiate the supply.
How will ethical oil help?
The more ethical oil in the common supply the less unethical oil.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Then the concept of conflict free diamonds and fair trade coffee are also bullshit, right?
The concept of conflict-free diamonds is bullshit for the same reason.
The concept of fair-trade coffee is not bullshit because the expression means that the coffee has been purchased directly from the growers for a higher price than standard coffee.
Hint, Venezeula produces heavy oil...
So which is more ethical, the larger or the smaller carbon footprint?
I hear Dole bananas are just as tasty !
To which planet are you referring?
Tar comes from trees.
If you can't get the basic facts correct...
2. You are correct in asserting that tar does come from the pitch of wood. "Tar-like products can also be produced from other forms of organic matter such as peat. Mineral products resembling tar can be produced from fossil hydrocarbons including petroleum. Coal tar is produced from coal as a byproduct of coke production. Bitumen is a term used for natural deposits of oil 'tar' [such as the Canadian Athabasca tar/oil sands]" (Source: Wikipedia)
3. The answer to your question is that strictly speaking the blogger, Kathryn Marshal, and the commentators in this blog-string are talking about bituminous sands, which are colloquially known as oil sands or tar sands. Similarly the Canadian Athabasca oil sands are also known as the Athabasca tar sands.
Ernie Hemingway used to call shills like Ez and Kathy, "Ballroom Bananas", and avoid them.
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/foreign+money+fuelling+oilsands+fight/5881141/story.html
This excellent opinion editorial puts Marshall away: well worth reading after this ridiculous banana nonsense.
To even discredit the Pembina Institute, as the way Marshal has just proves there is no ethics with ethicaloil.org. An Alberta based institute working with the major players involved with the oil sands corporations and levels of government, on how to work together to develop and advocate responsible oil sands development. The key word here is "responsible".
Marshal and her ilk from ethicaloil.org are not responsible to anyone it seems but, big oil.
The bitumen extracted from Canadian tar/oil sands is one of the dirtiest, most unrefined of all crude oils with the resulting liquid fuels having among the highest carbon footprints of any oil on earth.
Many of the same petroleum corporations extracting bitumen from the Athabasca tar/oil sands are also operating in the Middle East. How then can the same petroleum producer be ethical in Canada but not in the Middle East? It can’t be: a petroleum corporation is either ethical or unethical.
The only source of energy (including wind, tidal, photovoltaic, coal, nuclear, and geothermal) with a worse economic return on investment (EROI) than oil from tar sands is bioenergy. What is unethical is the conscious decision by Canadian and United States legislators to subsidize and permit carbon-intensive and economically inefficient forms of energy -- like oil from the Athabasca tar sands -- to the detriment of Canadian human and environmental health. That is what is ourageously unethical.
Doesn't seem to bother environmentalists either !!
1. From which oil corporation do you prefer to buy gas/petrol?
2. From where does that oil corporation gets its petroleum?
3. How do you know whether or not that oil corporation is ethical or not?
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Slamming+oilsands+protesters+using+bogus/5891158/story.html