Anyway, I watched the Story of Stuff and had to restrain myself from throwing the computer out the window. I ended up showing it to my ecology students and letting them get all worked up about the evil capitalist system. Then, I went through the video with them point by point showing how she distorts the facts in an attempt to push a radical agenda the vast majority of Americans would find repulsive.

For example, she says “more than 50% of our federal tax dollars now go to the military.” But, to get that number, she only counted income taxes; that eliminated Social Security and Medicare, which combined cost more than twice military spending. It also excluded excise taxes, such as those placed on every gallon of gas.

I especially loved when she said only “a woman with no other options” would work in a factory with toxic chemicals; but her website says she “was fortunate enough” to travel the world for more than a decade investigating taxic waste coming from factories. Seriously, she went to two Ivy League schools; she has choices, but she chose to expose herself to toxic waste. And from what I can tell, her daughter turned out perfectly fine–no third arm or anything. That must be because, as her site also admits in a small print citation, the total amount of dioxin–that “super-toxin” she said was “the most toxic man made substance known to science–we’re exposed to over our entire lifetimes may give us a risk of cancer between 0.1% and 0.01%.

That means your odds of dying in a car accident this year–this year!–are about the same as your odds of ever getting cancer from dioxin. And getting cancer doesn’t even mean you’ll die from it.

Gotta love the power of cartoons to make everything convincing.

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