Everything is for sale?

Every great thought demands big words.

Feeling the pressure of the value of my last reflection, i have decided to come up with something ridiculously simple - who of us have not heard popular catch-phrase: Money talks, bullshit walks, that is how life goes. Funny, simple, rough... but also tricky.

Working on my blog on corporate communications issues or campaign, I have decided to follow the idea of blogging publishing my deepest thoughts or concerns or questioning the overwhelming power of those wealthier or better-connected. Fascinated with the power of communication and at the same time threaten with possible manipulation that might occur or had already taken place without if noticing it, I want to ask if money rounds the world. We had previous example that money can run politics or media, that it is enough to pay to shut the conscience.

Here comes the question of ethics - professional help in creating positive image, building the positive reputation, whitewashing sinners to present them later as converted supporters of environmentalism or protectors of human rights. Everything is for sale...

Greenwash Awards...

And the Oscar for the most successful greenwashing goes to ....

Can actually anyone believe that you can posses an award for the significant contribution to whitewash your sins and brainwash population? No commence. There cannot be any comment as I hope no one is proud of the being in posses of Greenwash Oscar.
The phenomenon that i am considering at the moment relates to the tricky CorpWatch' practice that follows the flow of the media, corporation' activities and their green appearance in a public eye. They try to nab companies in a process of mystifying their real values or intentions.

The CorpWatch comments on the idea of the Greenwash Awards as follows:

CorpWatch gives out bimonthly Greenwash awards to corporations that put more money, time and energy into slick PR campaigns aimed at promoting their eco-friendly images, than they do to actually protecting the environment.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=102

The most recent Greenwash Award went to Shell as a company had been accused of greenwashing their image financially supporting the of one of Britain’s most prestigious wildlife photography exhibitions however facing the environmentalist' protest, the company has abandoned its sponsorship.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=102

Explosion of the whitewash...

Hey you, haven’t you heard?! Whitewash, greenwash, bluewash, brainwash are GOOD for you! That is 21^st century- era of political correctness, good intentions and big illusions! You have done something wrong and keep doing it? Do not worry, I am sure you did not mean to hurt anyone, you did not have any bad intention and definitely it was not your fault!

Interesting, fascinating, brilliant... the world is scrupulous cleanliness-mad and that is not only temporary spring impulse to tide up but long term programme to rewash a tainted reputation of big corporations.

The world has been warned of the evil practice of big names. Let’s have a look once again at the definition of greenwash, this time provided by CorpWatch:

green*wash: (gr~en-wosh) -washers, -washing, -washed 1.) The phenomenon of socially and environmentally destructive corporations attempting to preserve and expand their markets by posing as friends of the environment and leaders in the struggle to eradicate poverty. 2) Environmental whitewash. 3) Any attempt to brainwash consumers or policy makers into believing polluting mega-corporations are the key to environmentally sound sustainable development 4) Hogwash. (http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=242 )

To other forms of whitewash belong:

Bluewash

"Bluewash" refers to corporations that wrap themselves in the blue flag of the United Nations in order to associate themselves with UN themes of human rights, labor rights and environmental protection. Even companies with practices antithetical to UN values, such as Nike, Nestle, and Shell, have attempted to bluewash their image. Bluewash is typically associated with attempts by "corporate humanitarians" to weaken UN agreements, in favor of voluntary, toothless codes of conduct regarding social and environmental issues.

Sweatwash

With child labor and sweatshop abuses at the fore of social issues, it is natural that companies notorious for use of sweatshop labor try to divert attention from their factories' practices. Examples include Nike's school curriculum about downcycling of sneakers, and Reebok's Human Rights Awards.

Deep Greenwash

Behind the green PR is a deeper corporate political strategy: to get the world's governments to allow corporations to police themselves through voluntary codes of conduct, win-win partnerships and best practices learning models, rather than binding legislation and regulation. We call the corporate strategy of weakening national and international environmental agreements while promoting voluntary measures Deep Greenwash. Deep Greenwash may occur behind the scenes or in coordination with public forms of greenwash such as environmental image advertising.

All above definitions come from the article Greenwash Fact Sheet dated on 22^nd March 2001 and available online from: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=242

Green Catwalk

2008 – London, New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, Milan.

New world-wide trends with new outrange – everyone wears green: Shell, BP, Mitsubishi, General Motors, Westinghouse, Solvay, Rhane-Paulence, Nike etc. It is absolutely a must have item that suits everyone perfectly. It does not really matter if you are chemical, pharmaceutical or oil company, if you manufacture chlorine, polyvinyl chloride or pesticide, if work for nuclear industry or electronic or if you pollute air, water or soil; ‘good PR and green marketing make up’ will provide you the right look that other will love.

New era has come...

In a battle over a consumer, marketing, public relations and advertising join the big corporations’ forces. To be considered as successful is not enough to hit the giant profit, you have to demonstrate the efforts that you have made in other sectors. Today Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) dictates the rules – a corporation needs to consider the interest of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on their employees, shareholders, customers, as well as on communities and environment where they operate [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility], [Becker, 2002 – Global Spin].

The corporations are encouraged to take and voluntary action in order to improve the quality of life of people somehow connected or affected by the organisation and support the protection of the natural sources by reducing pollution etc (ibid).

There are different types of approach to the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility, however one of the most interesting, at least in my eyes, is the idea of ‘the triple bottom line’ know as well as ‘TBL’, ‘3BL’ or ‘People, Planet, Profit’ created by John Eldkinton. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line ]. The financial success is no longer equivalent with the success acknowledgment by the business environment and critics. To achieve the prestige title of a successful company, an organisation needs to cooperate with the three sectors on the highest level demonstrating the economic growth, social- and environmental performance (ibid).

Corporate Social Responsibility, critics’ tribute and customers’ satisfaction almost push companies to play their ‘green game’.

Sharon Beder in her resounding publication ‘Global Spin. The Corporate Assault On Environmentalism’ dates the beginning of corporate activism for 1970s. She investigates the very first days of the birth of environmental movements and corporations’ response for new way of perceiving goods, consumption, nature and a human’s place in the world.

For years and decades companies managed to educate there audience with economic-growth propaganda encouraging people to explore the nature according to their needs without any second thoughts of the possible damage. Beder states firmly:

Part of the aim of all this ‘education was to get people used to the idea that ‘it is an appropriate part of business’s role in democracy to judge what beliefs we must have in order to be ‘economically educated’.

(Bender, S. (2002) Introduction in Global Spin. The Corporate Assault On Environmentalism, Green Books, UK)

Those generations were not meant to question corporation’s activities; as long as they were provided with job and had constant source of income, they were devoid of deeper reflection. Fortunately or unfortunately, corporations could not stop the raise of green movement at the en beginning of 1990s. At that time survey showed increasing environmental awareness where a consumer had become conscious of dangers. One of the greatest customer’s concerns was a company’s ecological responsibility which determinated one’s buy choice. That was the right time for response of TNCs as the significant number of green customers could have not longer been ignored. Frank Mackiewicz , senior executive at transnational PR firm Hill & Knowlton, observes:

The big corporations, our client are scared shitless of the environmental movement. They sense that’s a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side- if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to yield up to to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they’re the establishment.

(Bender, S. (2002) Introduction in Global Spin. The Corporate Assault On Environmentalism, Green Books, UK)

Beder mentions also the problem of lobbying and fronting groups financed by the wealthier companies. Merrill Rose, Executive Vice-President of the public relations firm Porter/Novelli advises companies:

Put your words in someone else’s mouth... There will be time when the position you advocate, no matter how well framed and supported, will not be accepted by the public simply because you are who you are. Any institution with a vested commercial interest in the outcome of an issue has a natural credibility barrier to overcome with the public, and often with the media.

(Bender, S. (2002) Fronting for Industry in Global Spin. The Corporate Assault On Environmentalism, Green Books, UK)

Big corporations, we might say, operate in different fields of the environmental mobilization. At the same time they support their lobby groups to lobby against ‘harmful’ environmental requirements at the decision-making level of the politics, politicians and policy making, as well as they form they secret support for pro-green groups sponsoring front groups and think-thanks to ‘just in case’ have a green supporter on their site.

Founded by eccentric billionaires, conservative foundations and politically motivated multinational corporations, right wing policy entrepreneurs founded think-tanks, university centres, and political journals, and developed the social and political networks necessary to tie this nascent empire together. The end product was a tidal wave of money, ideas and self promotions.

(Bender, S. (2002) Fronting for Industry in Global Spin. The Corporate Assault On Environmentalism, Green Books, UK)

New concerns created the desire for a new approach in public relations: C.J.Silas, CEO for Phillips Petroleum Company, wrote in Public affairs Journal in 1990s-

‘There’s no reason we can’t make the environmental issue our issue’.

(Bender, S. (2002) Fronting for Industry in Global Spin. The Corporate Assault On Environmentalism, Green Books, UK)

In order to professionally manage the companies’ public reputation and satisfy environmental expectations the green marketing and PR have been established. Among a number of practitioners in this kind of sectors environmentalism was labelled as ‘the life and death PR battle of the 1990s’ and ‘the issue of the decade’ (Bender, S. (2002) Introduction in Global Spin. The Corporate Assault On Environmentalism, Green Books, UK)

Digging deeper.....

What the green colour refers to? What is the correct meaning of ‘green’? Nature or money?

To answer this question, I googled ‘green colour meaning’ and I have been linked to Color Wheel Pro - See Color Theory in Action available online from http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html. According to their website:

GREEN COLOUR

Green is the color of nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. Dark green is also commonly associated with money.

Green has great healing power. It is the most restful color for the human eye; it can improve vision. Green suggests stability and endurance. Sometimes green denotes lack of experience; for example, a 'greenhorn' is a novice. In heraldry, green indicates growth and hope. Green, as opposed to red, means safety; it is the color of free passage in road traffic.

Use green to indicate safety when advertising drugs and medical products. Green is directly related to nature, so you can use it to promote 'green' products. Dull, darker green is commonly associated with money, the financial world, banking, and Wall Street.

Dark green is associated with ambition, greed, and jealousy.
Yellow-green can indicate sickness, cowardice, discord, and jealousy.
Aqua is associated with emotional healing and protection.
Olive green is the traditional color of peace.

Isn’t it overwhelming? Green – the colour of nature with is associated with hope, peace, joy, disinterest, harmony; and green that refers to money, profit, benefit, self-interest, chaos.

So does the term ‘greenwashing’ refer to environment and ecology or is it rather the other way of maximizing the profit?

Source Watch website questioning the 21^st century phenomenon of combined techniques of marketing, PR and advertising, better known as ‘greenwashing’, tries to capture the term in a frame of a definition –

Greenwashing is the unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government, a politician or even a non-government organization to create a pro-environmental image, sell a product or a policy, or to try and rehabilitate their standing with the public and decision makers after being embroiled in controversy.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Greenwashing

The Greenpeace alone seems to be especially touched by corporations’ good-will movement. They stay sceptical with regards for rapid set ecological agenda by dozens of transnational corporation which made their fortune polluting the biosphere. In first sentence to The Greenpeace Book of Greenwash , it is stated – ‘A leader in ozone destruction takes credit for being a leader in ozone protection’. Then comes as follow:

A giant oil company professes to take a ‘precautionary approach” to global warming. A major agrochemical manufacturer trades in a pesticide so hazardous it has been banned in many countries, while implying the company is helping to feed the hunger. A petrochemical firm uses the waste from one polluting process as raw material for another, and boasts that this is an important recycling initative. A company cuts timber from natural rainforests, replaces it with plantations of a single exotic species, and calls the project “sustainable forest development’.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/5/59/GP_Book_of_Greenwash.pdf

Finally Greenpeace clarifies the term:

This is a GREENWASH, where transnational corporations (TNCs) are preserving and expanding their markets by posing as friends of the environment and leaders in struggle to eradicate poverty.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/5/59/GP_Book_of_Greenwash.pdf

So is ‘the green’ the new black? Everyone wants to wear it ? Is it a kind of new fashion – to be in you have to be green? Can anyone exist nowadays without declaring deep loyalty with environmental values? Why do big brands have to wear a green mask if they do not identify themselves with the ideas of the Earth and natural resources protection? Where does this obsession of being green come from? And in the long run is it important at all?

Ad fontes !!! To the sources!!!

Common sense has been called back – if we want to debate over the corporation, corporate social responsibilities, building a reputation, corporation’s influence on media, organizations, workers’ unions, individuals etc we need to be equipped with the ‘appropriate tools’. So instead of presuming that everyone is familiar with the right terminology, I will support my blog with some theory in form of the Canadian movie The Corporation directed by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbar and Joel Bakan available online on YouTube (movie clips are placed down on right site of my blog under 'Video Bar')

Corporation – an interesting creation of the contemporaneity. Is it necessary in present world?

As it has been said in the attached clip, people are likely to perceive a corporation as a real person with attitude such as friendly, nice, caring etc. However in this lovely but a bit naive description major thing seems to be forgotten – the profit. With regards to business, isn’t it a principle? Big names – Shell, Nike, Gap – pose as the supportive members of society stricken with mission of pleasing the whole world or maybe they rather accompany the society identifying its needs and moods like for example pro-social, anti-smoking, pro-environmental and doing what they can do the best – selling a product and encouraging people to purchase.

Selling products, selling services .... selling yourself?

But if consumerism is not the right and the only-one way of life? If selling and purchasing harm people, animals, biosphere? If in mixture of profit-power game, corporations injure own workers or the fate of future generations? How about the god's footstool – Earth, biosphere, animals?

Authors of The Corporations skillfully focus a viewer’s attention on these issues. They raise a question of low-cost labour. Citizens of the Third World countries are explored to manufacture Nike or Gap clothes, Cathy’s handbags or other super-trendy designer’s accessories. ‘Wealthy’ residents of developed part world pay free-market prices, while the actual builder/creator gets ‘dog’- meat’ because what is the other expression for 0.3 per cent of its retail price?

Critics would argue that it is kind of unwritten law of the free market. The only thing that might attract investors in the poorest countries is ‘low-cost labour’. People forced to work for this ridiculous money, still prefer to work and get paid than not to get paid and starve.

But hang on a minute, where is the equivalent amount of 97,7 per cent of retail price?

Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbar and Joel Bakan consider also the problem of the possible harm of the biosphere. Animals, plants, human beings, water, air, soil are only a few elements of the biosphere that are effected with the corporate activities. A picture of earth exploration shows air-, water- and soil- pollution; in the era of productivity animals are stuffed with drugs to increase results, people are infected with civilization diseases such as cancer or HIV. Scary...

Unlimited power?

The Global Spin. The corporate assault on environmentalism by Sharon Beder inspires...

It almost forces you to start thinking, to question, to investigate...

On very first page we read David Edwards's comment on, as he claims, 'real environmental crisis' - 'the one that consists not of decaying eco system, ozon depletion and global warming, but of the corporate domination of what we are able to hear, see, know and think' (Beder, 2002). Edwards, a co-editor of Media Lens - Correcting for the Distorted Vision of the Corporate Media (www.medailens.org), dares to claim as follows: 'The crisis lies in the fact that modern mass media system is not a medium for the 'free' discussion of ideas and viewpoints, but is deeply embedded in, and depend on, the wider corporate status quo, and on the related capacity of corporate communications and economic power to boosts facts, ideas and political choices that are conducive to profit maximization and stifle those that are not (ibid).

So what does it really mean? Are we only mindless toys that take a part in global play where rules are dictated by those more powerful? Are big corporations responsible for amplitude manipulation? Do they have enough power to influence every-day media? Can they twiddle the information that is forwarded to us by newspapers, TV, radio etc. and which shapes our public, social, political, environmental awareness? And finally do we have enough evidence to talk about ‘global spin’? Or is that rather one more fascinating story created by conspiracy theories’ supporters that tend to read between lines to trace deception, lies, plots in contemporary world? Are we in a process of constant ‘brainwashing’? And who is ‘brainwashing’?