THE LAWRENCE SUMMERS MEMORIAL AWARD*

The December 2000 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to administrators at Perrysburg Junior High School in Ohio. They earned the reward for sending two children, D.J. and Carlotta Maurer, to the Wood Juvenile Detention Center because they refused to watch Channel One and other television programming.

Channel One, owned by Primedia, donates televisions and other equipment to schools in exchange for a binding commitment by the schools to have their students watch a 12-minute Channel One show — replete with advertisements — every day.

Gary Ruskin, director of Commercial Alert and to whom credit is due for sending this item to Multinational Monitor, and Jim Metrock, president of Obligation, Inc. in an October 14 letter followed up the report on the detention of the children with a letter to Ohio Governor Robert Taft.

Noting that "when the government sends children to a juvenile detention center because they don't want to watch advertising, that is both Orwellian and more than a little sick," Ruskin and Metrock urged Taft to "take a stand for parents and remove Channel One from Ohio's schools."

"This would be a clarion call for those parents who wish their children to grow up free from the depradations and enticements of the media corporations and their advertisers.

*In a 1991 internal memorandum, then-World Bank economist and current Secretary of Treasury Lawrence Summers argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" Summers wrote. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic.