Gotta hand it to Elisabeth Badinter - and I can understand how
Publicis, the 'communications' company whose supervisory board she
chairs, has achieved its wealth, with an annual revenue for 2010 of
€5.418 billion.  No wonder her personal worth places her in the
absolute top layer of the wealthiest people in France.  (All this is
gleaned from the glowing articles about Publicis and about Badinter
herself on Wikipedia, lest anyone think I have used sources unfriendly
to her.)  I wonder whether she bills Nestle for her services when she
generates this kind of coverage. Imagine how much more cost-effective
this is than purchasing advertising space in the same publication -
particularly if readers think it is on the up and up.

The basic themes in her case against breastfeeding remind me of the
arguments launched by a bogus, commercially financed  'feminist' group
some years back, discussed at some length here on Lactnet, in part
because the wife of then-VP Cheney was heading it up. None of the
players in that group had ever had anything to do with the feminist
movement in the US or anywhere else, but they tried to co-opt the name
to appeal to women who might not otherwise respond to their kind of
anti-breastfeeding rhetoric.  I am suppressing the memory of the name
of the group, perhaps someone else recalls it.

I have always considered myself a cynic, permanently disillusioned
about the motives of multinational corporations at a young age, so I
take some comfort in realizing that even I am still shocked at the new
lows to which such corporations will sink for the sake of their own
profits.  Sickening, in the literal sense of the word.

I'm going to be staffing a booth for the BF mothers' organization at
the national meeting of PHNs in Norway next month.  The baby food
industry are always represented (and eagerly visited) at these
meetings.  I think we will need to focus on WHO Code awareness in
addition to 'sleep training' as two underrated threats to sustainable
breastfeeding in this country.

I also notice since becoming a gmail user that I am constantly being
exposed to links about Nestle, presumably because I write about them
regularly.  Repugnant on the one hand, but possibly reassuring that
google only notices the occurrence of the word and not the context in
which I use it.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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