That’s confirmed today, as the Archdruid writes this howler:

Marxism reached its high-water point in the 1950s and then receded, as the golden promises of Das Kapital gave way to gray bureaucratic inefficiency and, in time, total systemic failure.

ROFL.  What “golden promises” would those be?  Anybody who had actually read Capital would be well aware of the fact that it contains exactly zero promises of any kind.  Seriously.  Take a look.

In reality, of course, Karl Marx was hugely affected by the work of Justus von Liebig, the coiner of “Liebig’s Law,” which points out that ecosystems are only as strong as their weakest links.

The Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids, however, can’t be bothered to crack an actual book he doesn’t like for entirely a priori and conventional reasons, despite his claim to value rebellious thought and varied opinions and analyses.

The degree to which even the wildest forms of green thinking remain utterly  captive to conventional American dogma is truly astounding, and not a little scary.

Consider Terracycle, the scam being run by college drop-out Tom Szaky.

Terracyle claims to be an “upcycler,” purportedly taking used products and packages and making them into supposedly “green” new products.

Of course, though you’d never know it from the fawning coverage it receives in the capitalist press, the operation doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny, even from the outside.

Consider the product by which Terracycle got itself off the ground — garden fertilizer sold in re-used soda bottles. The obvious two questions about this stuff? First, what happens to the empty bottles after the fertilizer is gone? Second, given that Terracycle is a “partner” with both Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay/Pepsi, isn’t Terracycle actually yet another device for pre-empting bottle bills, to say nothing of its role in preventing people from questioning the explosion of plastic drink packaging in the first place?

Meanwhile, consider the degree of green-ness of this:

What is that? It’s a pair of supposedly portable speakers for computers and mp3 players.  When used, they look like this:

Again, rather obvious questions arise:

First of all, precisely what does the product’s main eco-promise — “made with up to 80% recycled materials” — actually mean?  This piece of marketing double-talk combines both the “made with” and the “up to” escape clauses that are so familiar from mainstream corporate marketing efforts.  “Made with” is not the same as “made entirely from,” though it takes active thinking to catch the distinction.  Meanwhile, if you, dear reader, would be so kind as to post a reply to this very blog post, I will gladly send you up to a million dollars as a thank you gift.

Second, take another look at the packaging of these so-called speakers (which Terracycle telling markets not as electronics equipment but as toys for kids).  How “up to” green is this particular offering, if one counts the plastic box and cardboard casing in which it comes?  Why does Terracycle omit the packaging from its internet depictions of the product?

Finally, notice how Terracycle “upcycles” the junk food wrappers it solicits from it targeted victims.  Why does Terracycle use the wrappers as decorative coverings for its products, rather than pulverizing and blending them into their structures?  Doing the latter would certainly be greener, as it would require no primping and gluing of the wrappers.  Could the real reason, perchance, be that Terracycle’s corporate junk-food partners see the former move as a clever new way of deepening brand loyalty while also implying their products are green?

And notice, too, that Terracycle’s main targets are school children.  “Szaky says more than 60% of all American schools are collecting garbage with TerraCycle.”  Again, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the connection between that, the supposed “upcycling” of wrappers onto the faces of Terracycle products, Terracycle’s list of corporate partners, and its true purpose and business model.

The actual rank of environmental concern in that model can be judged by reading the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Szaky.  From that, does he sound to you like a worried ecologist or just another cash-seeking con man?

People care less about the environment or green marketing claims than they did a few years ago, yet they’re also less likely to doubt marketers’ green claims or motives, according to the new Green Gauge Report from GfK.

The 2011 version of the study, based on surveys of more than 2,000 respondents between June 9 and July 5, found only 33% said the environment is “very serious and should be a priority for everyone” this year, down from 39% last year and 46% in 2007. At the same time, 41% of people agreed with the statement “first comes economic security, then we can worry about environmental problems,” up 13 points from 2007, according to GfK.

Despite people being less responsive to environmental ad claims, they seem to believe them more often. The Green Gauge report found 39% of people say business claims about the environment aren’t accurate, substantially lower than the 48% who believed that three years ago. And 37% of respondents this year said business and industry are fulfilling their responsibility to the environment, up 8 points from 2007.

This, of course, is music to the corporate ear:

“There’s a thawing in attitudes toward greenwashing,” said [study author Timothy Kenyon]. “There’s also a realization from consumers, given the economy, that [companies] can only do so much.”

And there’s even more excellent news:

People also increasingly get their environmental information from marketers, Mr. Kenyon said.

Things to notice here include the explicit discussion of the landscape for greenwashing.  That’s powerful evidence that, behind closed doors and despite public denials, greenwashing is indeed the ultimate, intentionally planned aim of corporate “green” marketing efforts.

Also, don’t let the obscurity of the name “GfK” fool you.  This is the biggest of big-time work:

“Headquartered in New York, GfK Custom Research North America is part of the GfK Group, the world’s fourth largest market research company. “

You can rest assured the “consumer package goods” giants are lapping up this exciting research.

Hence, it was probably inevitable that some jerk would invent the idea of Recyclebank, the Philadelphia-based Trojan Horse for corporate ecocide.

Here’s how it works: Customers who sign-up with RecycleBank receive a special container embedded with a computer chip. Every time the recycling truck comes for a pickup, it records the weight of the bin and transmits it wirelessly to an online account. Homeowners accrue up to $35 worth of credits a month based on the amount of recycling they do.

The credits, in turn, can be turned into coupons that can be redeemed at more than 300 retailers, including Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Rite Aid. [Source: Forbes]

How green is what Recyclebank does?

First of all, its system pays people more “points” for more mass in the recycling bin, meaning higher overall product-usage rates are encouraged, not discouraged, by Recyclebank.

Of course, how else would its corporate partners — Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Dow Chemical, Target, Home Depot, etc. — have it?

Moreover, despite its condescending and cynical prattle about being “a group of passionate people who’ve made it our mission to inspire others to take action – small to big – that will have a positive impact on our planet,” Recyclebank is also a double shill: It pre-empts both pay-as-you-throw trash programs and bottle bills, the latter undoubtedly one of the reasons why Coca-Cola is a Recyclebank “partner.”

All the while, what do the entrepreneurs running Recyclebank really, truly think about the “consumers” they profess to care so deeply about? The usual:

In fact, advertising is a big piece of [CEO] Gonen’s strategy. As RecycleBank rolls out nationally in the next couple of years – look for a debut in some Manhattan apartment buildings this winter – he’ll have collected the names, addresses and buying habits of hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions of people.

At that point, Recycle Bank will have a database of loyal customers who manage accounts online and can be targeted by advertisers. If nothing else, it should become a place where companies can sell to “green” consumers, says Gonen.

“The core of this company is the ability to target and market to a captive audience that feels good about what they are doing,” he said.

click to enlarge

One of advertising’s many anti-democratic aspects lies in its power as an arbitrary agenda-setter.

So, here we see Proctor & Gamble touting their efforts to use less energy in the manufacture of Charmin Ultra toilet paper.

But, ask yourself, what is the number one environmental crime inherent in manufacturing a product like Charmin Ultra?

It is not the use of electricity to run industrial facilities.  It is the use of old growth timber to make “soft” toilet paper.  Of course, why do they need to make this stuff “soft” in the first place?  So that they can justify the exaggerated marketing claims and jacked-up prices.

The “Sustainably Manufactured” tagline is, of course, pure belligerent prevarication.  Not only is the ad a conscious cover-up of the old growth facts (which P&G certainly knows would, if widely known, be lethal to the brand), but who is to say that its (alleged) slightly reduced energy use makes Charmin Ultra environmentally benign?  Anybody want to wager on what a genuine investigation would reveal there?

Anyhow, such is American culture:  Greenwashing ass-wipes on behalf of socio-cidal money-hoarding rentiers.

This tortured, whorish double-talk is of a piece with the rest of RecycleBank’s attempted assault on the public mind.

“There’s no denying that the invention and eventual widespread use of plastic was a major advance for society,” says RecycleBank, complete with a supporting weblink to “The Benefits of Plastic” on –wait for it — plasticsindustry.com!

After listing some beneficial uses of plastic, RecycleBank delivers the core proposition:

While a huge benefit of plastic is its durability, this very property is also sometimes a downside — some plastic takes centuries to break down, taking up more room in landfills for a longer time.

This, of course, is absolute malarkey.  The chief problem with plastics is not their durability, but their grossly excessive use as packaging by corporate capitalists.  Nobody denies that plastic has a place in the world.  What people are rightly concerned with is why there is so god-damned much of the stuff being heedlessly made and sold.

But that concern is exactly what greewash marketing like RecycleBank exists to massage into tame, misconceived channels.  What we need and ought to be demanding is access to the macro-economic decisions that determine when and where plastic gets used.  What we get instead from RecycleBank and its paymasters is two things:

1. the fiction that recycling could ever compensate for the consequences of those macro-level choices, over which the public remains utterly powerless; and

2. the transfer of all responsibility onto “consumers,” among whom Recycle Bank positively encourages “green guilt.”

Oh, and the sponsor of the RecycleBank plastics “awareness” mindfuck?

Naked Juice, the “healthy” plastic-bottling subsidiary of PepsiCo.

Two items:

Wind Farms Over-Rated

Micro-Wind Hopeless

None of this stops energy capitalists from spreading and exploiting the shit out of the naive assumptions that rule the roost on this crucial topic.

The fact of the matter is that the laws of physics are real, and they dictate that it always costs some energy to get energy.  As explained by Kevin Phillips, wind power’s regime had its heyday in the 17th century.  It is not capable of powering the 21st, unless we get very radically small.

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:

Because birds preen themselves meticulously to maintain their insulating air layer, external oiling almost always leads to some oil ingestion. Once oil is ingested, it can cause direct damage to the gastrointestinal tract, evidenced by ulcers, diarrhea, and a decreased ability to absorb nutrients. If the volatile components of the oil are inhaled, it can lead to pneumonia, neurological damage, or absorption of chemicals that can lead to cancer. Metabolism of the oil components by the kidney and liver can lead to extensive damage to those organs as well. Lastly, oil (and the stress of being oiled) can cause birds to have significant anemia and the lack of blood cells that combat infection.

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?

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!