Your Coffee, Citizen

Yet another reason to ditch the Public Broadcasting System

In the midst of a really big news week for all Americans, including the release and reaction to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report, came one of the weirder bits of news involving PBS.

On Dec. 6, it was announced that the Public Broadcasting Service and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters had formed a partnership to launch a new organic coffee blend known as PBS Blend. The press release says the new blend will be offered in “whole bean, 10-oz. packages and single-serve K-Cups for use in Keurig Single-Cup brewers,” also owned by Green Mountain.

(snip)

“Sweetly balanced and smooth,” it states, “with full flavor and a rich finish, PBS Blend is grown in the lush, tropical rain forests surrounding the El Triunfo Biosphere in Mexico. PBS Blend carries the Fair Trade Certified™ label, which guarantees farmers a fair price for their coffee harvest and enables them to reinvest in their communities. In addition, PBS Blend is environmentally-friendly. A certified organic coffee, its beans were grown using agricultural practices that preserve biodiversity and vital habitats for migratory birds and other wildlife.

“‘We are pleased to be working with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which shares PBS’s commitment to social responsibility and community education,’ said Andrea Downing, Vice President, Home Entertainment and Partnerships. ‘This partnership allows PBS a new way to engage and inform consumers around a quality product, provides them with another way to support public television through their every day lifestyle choices and purchases, and ensures that our member stations can continue to deliver a valuable public service in their communities.’

“Robert Stiller, President of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, said, ‘This collaboration with PBS reinforces our belief that when like-minded organizations join together, they can be an agent for positive change. We admire PBS and its member stations’ focus on public service and education, as well as its long-standing reputation as a trusted community resource. This delicious coffee provides us with new avenues for supporting our global community and advancing public education about Fair Trade.’”

Leaving out all the eco-socialist rhetoric about “bio-spheres” out of it, check out the end of that last sentence.

“public education about Fair Trade”

Not “Free Trade”, but “Fair Trade”.

Someone needs to ask the Fed if this is now official policy; To be advancing a socialist dogma where the person(s) on one side of the bargain deserve to be paying more for a product or getting less for their product for the sole reason that they are better off than the folks on the other side?

And just what is a government agency doing locking themselves into a commercial venture with a private company using our money anyway? As the PBS Ombudsman mentions later in the above mentioned press release, PBS DOES sell items such as DVD and VHS copies of it’s shows, but we’ve already paid for those shows and the money made back gets kept by the PBS. This deal, on the other hand, sounds as though we’ve lended a private corporation venture capital to import over-priced coffee on our dime. Nowhere does it state what the profit split is. Nowhere does it state who has to pay the balance if no one buys their “socially conscious” coffee.

But I’ll bet you that the left won’t be bitching about getting the GAO into this debacle.

Found at NRO via The DANE