Archive for the 'greenwashing' Category
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Dawn of Death: The Apex of Shamelessness
Partly for intellectual/political reasons and partly because I grew up on the habit, I still watch some television. Last night, I nearly choked on my frozen yogurt when I saw this especially stunning mind-rape come on:
Now, I’m no greenhorn when it comes to the mega-chutzpah that goes into the planning and production of corporate marketing campaigns, which, with the possible exception of organized monotheism, are far and away the most carefully considered and lavishly funded form of dishonesty in human history.
But this just takes the fucking cake, here, folks.
What is the point of de-oiling animals after they have been exposed to petroleum leaks? The Procter and Gamble (Dawn is a P & G brand) ad above would have you believe that it is a simple rescue mission that yields lovely, happy-bunny outcomes. Wash the oil off the feathers or fur, and the critter goes home just fine and dandy. Maybe even cleaner and better!
Let’s leave aside the obvious question of going home to what — the same ecosystem in which they just got oiled, the one to which they were born and are adapted?
At the level of the animal itself, petroleum-soaked feathers or fur, serious as it is, is only the secondary problem. The primary problem is oral ingestion or dermal absorption of oil. Swallowing or soaking in petroleum is a catastrophe to the organism:
The impact on bird eggs and bird and animal babies is worse.
P & G HQ
So, what is the above advertisement for Dawn dish soap? It is a knowing lie, designed to get people to pay a premium for Procter and Gamble’s heavily advertised brand of liquid soap. As all marketing planners know, “a sure-fire way to get consumers to pay more for our products even in these difficult times is to make some ‘green’ claims.”
In reality, then, the above ad is nothing more and nothing less than this: the use of the gargantuan, heart-rending, only-just-begun biological destruction from the Deepwater Horizon blowout as a photo-op for raking in more profits for P & G shareholders, all while sowing Satanic disinformation about the very reality troubling the very victims of the scam.
And, of course, it gets worse. Serious studies of bird survival after petroleum exposure show that “rescuing” birds ranges from being somewhat helpful to being utterly futile and inhumane.
And guess which organization is working to sell the rosiest possible view? That’s right: The International Bird Rescue Research Center, the very group to which P & G sends money as part of this marketing scheme.
The very group whose executive director writes letters of praise to P & G.
The very group that says this on its FAQ page:
Q: What do you use to wash birds?
A: We use “Dawn” dish washing liquid. IBRRC has conducted research on most of the commonly available cleaning agents and “Dawn” meets all the criteria we have established for appropriate cleaning agents. Those criteria are the ability to remove most oils, effectiveness at low concentrations, non-irritating to the skin and eyes, rapid removal from feathers (rinsing), and is easily accessible. Procter and Gamble now donates all “Dawn” detergent to IBRRC and other rehabilitation organizations.
The very group that answers another key FAQ thus:
Q: What is your survival rate?
A: The survival rate will differ with each oil spill because of all the factors that effect it. Some of those factors are the toxicity of the oil, how rapidly the birds are collected and stabilized, what condition the bird was in before it was oiled, and the species involved. We have had release rates as high as 100% and as low as 25% in the early years. We now average about 50% to 80%. Again, it depends on many variables and cannot be predicted.
Did you catch that liar’s shift? What is your survival rate? We won’t say, but here are some statistics about our RELEASE rate.
In other words, the IBRRC is a Procter and Gamble front, a mere pimp for P & G’s “cherished strategy of introducing increasingly sophisticated — and increasingly costly — household staples.”
By the way, a regular 24.0z bottle of Dawn liquid dishwashing detergent presently sells for $5.49, or 22.9 cents per ounce on drugstore.com. I guarantee you that the dollar stores my grandmother frequents sell an indistinguishable product for one dollar.
I can only quote, once again, from the late Robert L. Heilbroner:
At a business forum, I was once brash enough to say that I thought the main cultural impact of television advertising was to teach children that grown-ups told lies for money. How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions?
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Farce Day
What if the Montgomery Improvement Association had responded to the segregation of the city’s buses by calling for an annual Transportation Day, instead of a steady campaign of direct action and movement organizing? What if SNCC had held a rally once a year, rather than launching expanding waves of lunch-counter sit-ins? What if, instead of marching, fighting, and continually and radically educating itself and the wider society, the Civil Rights Movement had launched Black Seal, a new “foundation” to certify select corporate products as minimally racist? The United States would still have Jim Crow apartheid laws.
Nonetheless, today we are supposed to “celebrate” Earth Day, and forget the fact that it is social movements, and only social movements, that have ever mattered in the effort to use politics to make large breakthroughs toward a better world.
Denis Hayes, the Earth Day founder who recommends car tires via “foundations” dedicated to the proposition that “the power of the marketplace” has any chance of being anything but a net ecological disaster, today tells The New York Times he thinks it is “tragic” rather than logical that corporations have turned Earth Day into what that august paper terms “a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services.” What did you expect, Denis, when you suggested that an annual “day” was somehow a serious attack on our overclass’s institutional dedication to planetary ecocide? Gestures are not social movements, no matter how hard one tries to gesture.
Meanwhile, at today’s Earth Day rally in New York City, those keeping track will get another chance to see that corporate capitalists are routinely pulling of feats of propaganda that would make Big Brother poop their pants in fits of jealousy. PepsiCo, the conglomerate whose core business is peddling various forms of unhealthy sugar water cased in plastic, is going to unveil its Dream Machine recycling kiosks. For each bottle shoved into one of these stations, PepsiCo promises to make “a per-bottle donation to the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans, a business training program for disabled veterans.” The amount of that donation to such an amazing cause? Unspecified, of course. But, rest assured, it will be “an amount.” 1/1000th of one cent? That’s an amount, isn’t it? And what vet, fresh back from killing poor people for no reason, doesn’t want to go get harangued about “entrepreneurship” by PepsiCo? That’s just as good as the old G.I. Bill of the 1940s, right?
But all this isn’t the half of it. PepsiCo, the massive plastic and sugar-water pusher, is, all the while and right into the future, a long-standing major opponent of bottle bills, widely and uncontroversially known as far and away the most effective and efficient incentive to beverage container recycling. On behalf of its shareholders and corporate retailer customers, PepsiCo finds bottle bills to be “unwieldy for store customers and suppliers, and inconvenient for consumers.” In other words, bad for profits. Ergo, Pepsi and it corporate capitalist allies work the nation and world to make sure that bottle bills don’t spread from the handful of places where they already exist.
Welcome to Earth Day!
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Greenwash: Hot Advice from a Pro
As somebody once observed, the heart of man is a wonderful thing, especially when it is carried in his wallet.
Same goes for the heart of a woman, of course.
To, wit, the latest issue of Advertising Age conveys the fabulous wisdom and morality of attorney Randi W. Singer, “litigation partner in the New York office of Weil, Gotshal & Manges,” whose “practice focuses on copyright and Lanham Act false advertising and trademark litigation, as well as media, music licensing, First Amendment and other intellectual property issues” on behalf of “the world’s most sophisticated clients.”
In a column titled “Going Green the Smart (and Legal) Way,” Ms. Singer writes:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock in a remote part of the ever-dwindling rain forest, you know that a sure-fire way to get consumers to pay more for your products even in these difficult times is to make some “green” claims. And if you can time your ads to coincide with events such as Earth Day or convince the federal government to expedite the review for your green technology patent all the better. Bonus points for naming an actual shopping day “Green Monday” or changing the color of your logo to green.
Of course, Ms. Singer knows “going green” doesn’t mean going green, even in narrow terms:
But before jumping on the green bandwagon, it’s important to do your homework. Last summer, the Federal Trade Commission issued complaints against Kmart, Tender Corp. and Dyna-E International for making false and unsubstantiated claims of “biodegradability.” On the heels of those complaints, the FTC went after a number of companies that claimed their products were green because they were made of bamboo when, in fact, they were made of rayon — a man-made fiber that is technically created from the cellulose found in plants and trees, but only after it is chemically dissolved through a process that releases various pollutants. (After settling with the manufacturers, the FTC followed up with warning letters to 78 retailers, including Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Target). S.C. Johnson & Son faces a class action suit alleging that placing a proprietary “Greenlist” seal on its Windex window cleaning products misled consumers into believing that the products were independently certified by a third party (the Greenlist was actually an S.C. Johnson-conceived program). And following review by the National Advertising Division, the advertising industry’s self-regulatory forum, Clorox Co. decided to voluntarily discontinue claims that its Green Works Natural Cleaning Wipes were biodegradable, and MasterNet was advised to stop making claims that its plastic netting packaging products “saved countless trees from destruction.”
So, “What’s a would-be green marketer to do?”
Keep making those “green” (in quotation marks) claims, but be careful, and know your corporate lawyer’s number!
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
More from Behind the Green Curtain
The corporate capitalist marketing of allegedly “green” products depends on fixing buyers’ attention on the end commodity only. How many bio-diesel users, for instance, understand that bio-diesel not only diverts food to gas tanks, but is a net energy loser that requires more hidden petro-inputs than plain old gasoline-burning? Not many.
And there’s a reason our moguls conceal their processes: Every time a green scheme rings the cash register, a strip mine run by gangsters gets its wings.
That is a photo of a “rare earth” mine in China. The New York Times‘ Keith Bradsher (who wrote an excellent book about the insanity of the car corporations’ SUV push of recent decades) reports today:
GUYUN VILLAGE, China — Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.
Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.
Miners scrape off the topsoil and shovel golden-flecked clay into dirt pits, using acids to extract the rare earths. The acids ultimately wash into streams and rivers, destroying rice paddies and fish farms and tainting water supplies.
A close-knit group of mainland Chinese gangs with a capacity for murder dominates much of the mining and has ties to local officials, said Stephen G. Vickers, the former head of criminal intelligence for the Hong Kong police who is now the chief executive of International Risk, a global security company.
The biggest user of heavy rare earths in the years ahead could be large wind turbines, which need much lighter magnets for the five-ton generators at the top of ever-taller towers. Vestas, a Danish company that has become the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturer, said that prototypes for its next generation used dysprosium, and that the company was studying the sustainability of the supply. Goldwind, the biggest Chinese turbine maker, has switched from conventional magnets to rare-earth magnets.
And, of course, the world’s most powerful and sophisticated overclass pleads ignorance to it all:
Western users of heavy rare earths say that they have no way of figuring out what proportion of the minerals they buy from China comes from responsibly operated mines.
“I don’t know if part of that feed, internal in China, came from an illegal mine and went in a legal separator,” said David Kennedy, the president of Great Western Technologies in Troy, Mich., which imports Chinese rare earths and turns them into powders that are sold worldwide.
