Toban Black

A post that I put together for the Sociological Images web site

Basically, I compare Olympics marketing imagery and rhetoric with the living conditions and activism of indigenous peoples here in Canada. (The post is about a Canada-wide context, more so than it’s about Vancouver and the VAN Organizing Committee per se.)

I invite you to skip the blurb about me, at the start of the post.

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Lisa helped to edit the writing, and Gwen fixed formatting problems that I had left in there.

I also appreciate other help from Laura, Annick, and Steve.

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The post stems from a relatively brief e-mail that I had sent in to Sociological Images back on May 24th, 2009. After writing some thoughts on Flickr posts here and here, I had sent the e-mail to the web site editors to connect the same sorts of native issues to Olympics marketing that already was circulated around here in Canada.

Then, after May, I published a piece about some native activism in Ontario, and I became very involved in pro-native campaigning against the tar sands — for the sake of wider climate justice.  (I have posted about climate justice issues here.)  (So far, I mainly have been a climate justice activist in a local Mobilization for Climate Justice group; but I also have started to form collaborative connections with people in other areas of the U.S. and Canada.)  And, over the past two weeks, I was very involved in anti-Olympic protest organizing, which I mainly joined because of how the day of action was connected with tar sands issues.

In a “Feminism and Race” Women’s Studies grad course that I was in last term, I also worked through some indigenous and climate justice issues.  That course helped a lot with the writing that I did for the Sociological Images post.

(By “Mr. Lunch Breath“)

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Similar greenwash techniques also are used in other marketing and PR spin.

Here’s one example -

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Automobile branding

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Little drivers

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A car advertisement on the back of a local bus

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Andy Rowell on the Oil Change blog -
“Electric Vehicles May Increase CO2”
(I think it’s too much of a stretch to say that electric vehicles are “all the rage”; but some people definitely are looking toward them as ’solutions.’)

Brad Aaron on the Streetsblog New York City site -
“Do Your Part: Buy an Audi, Drive Fast” (in October)
(Evidently the author is using the word “transit” to refer to mass transit — such as buses.)

Fred Pearce in The Guardian -
“BMW’s ActiveHybrid X6 Accelerates Nonsense About High-performance, Low-emission Cars” (in September)

Brad Aaron on the Streetsblog New York City site -
“Ad Nauseam: Toyota’s (Passive-Aggressive) Ransom Note to America” (in October)

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Here are some related posts on this blog -
http://tobanblack.net/blog/?tag=automobiles

Andy Rowell on the Oil Change blog  -
“Big Oil Front Group Fights for Tar Sands” (in October)

Leo Hickman in The Guardian -
“CO2 is Green: The TV Advert Making Viewers Choke” (in September)

Anya Kamenetz on a Fast Company site -
“Head in the Tar Sands? The New York Times Runs Anti-Peak Oil Op-Ed” (in August)

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Coal industry PR

Amanda Terkel on Think Progress -
“‘Let’s Learn About Coal’: Industry Front Group Distributes Coloring Book On The ‘Advantages’ Of Coal”

Amanda Terkel on Think Progress -
“University Of Kentucky Approves New $7 Million Industry-Funded Dorm Named After ‘Coal’” (in late October)

“Sparki” on The Understory blog  -
“The Real FACES of Environmental Extremism” (in October)

Rob Smart on his blog -
“Food Marketing: Impacts on Consumer Choice”

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Jim Hightower on recently introduced “Smart Choice” labelling -

“The industry says that this seal of approval is all about helping today’s busy shoppers save time. No need to read those tedious lists of ingredients on the backs of food boxes, bottles, jars and cans, for the simple green checkmark is your one-glance reassurance that you’re making the smart nutritional choice.”

“You know, smart choices like Froot Loops, Fudgesicle bars and Frosted Flakes. Yes, all of these sugar-saturated concoctions and many more have received the industry’s good-for-you checkmark.”

“What we have here is yet another corporate PR scam. This supposedly independent nutritional certification program was created and is paid for by such purveyors of unhealthy sugars, fats, salt and chemical additives as Coca-Cola, ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kraft and PepsiCo. Each of them pay fees of up to $100,000 a year to get to use the Smart Choices label, and the fees are based on the total sales of products that bear the label.

This means that the more food items certified by the Smart Choices program, the more money it collects, which gives it an incentive to apply the label liberally. Thus, we get such absurdities as this: ‘light’ mayonnaise, which contains less fat than regular, has been granted the better-for-you check mark; but so has regular mayonnaise!

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Back in 2005, Keri Smith offered some insight into problems that come with with ads on blogs — and ads that surround blogging.
Here are exerpts that I’ve snipped out of three of those posts -

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“As a blogger who has over time established a somewhat regular audience, I have been approached by many companies asking to advertise on my site, and in some cases endorse their products through my writing. have always had a policy to not do anything that goes against my own beliefs …
And so I would not advertise nor endorse any product or company that I do not fully believe in. But even then I struggle with advertising in general.

As a member of a culture that is so laden with advertising I become easily winded, oversaturated, numb to it all. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to find any public space WITHOUT some form of advertising.” “One grocery store I was in recently has televisions throughout the store selling products in every aisle! As one who was weaned on television at a young age, this is too much even for me.” “I have a hard time and resent being told what to look at as I walk through my day.”

“And so I make choices to not partake in a world that is about selling, (to me being exposed to advertising on a regular basis is the equivalent of emotional junk food and I truly care about my body, so there is an emotional cost to me).”

“If I am making the choice to not clutter my mind with the chaos that is advertising, (as I choose not to put junk food into my body), then I must cut down on the sites that are saturated with it.

If I am to speak frankly here, I am saddened when I go to a site of an artist or a blogger I admire and they have ads on their site. I feel a loss of respect. When companies have approached me for the same thing I admit to a moment of ‘it might make my life easier, I could focus on my personal work more, finish that manuscript’, yes I could.

But I ask again, what is the greater cost? When do we put our human needs before those of the corporations?”

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[In this post I basically am following up another one titled "Waves of greenwash"]

Body Shop marketing in a mall

Shop for The Earth!
Buy from the Planetary Guardians!

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Exerpts from an article by Stan Cox in CounterPunch -
“The Political Economics of Greenwashing: Green as a Blackjack Table” (in 2008)

“In their desperation to keep the American economy afloat, government and business will be tossing overboard any proposals for real environmental protection. No time for such romantic foolishness when there are investments to be protected.”

“Not that we won’t be hearing about the environment; indeed, the next [commercial expansion] spurt, if it comes, is likely to be clothed in a green as green as the felt on a blackjack table.”

“For more than 30 years, The Body Shop and its CEO, self-styled anti-capitalist capitalist Anita Roddick, avidly cultivated a corporate image as pioneers of high business ethics. But The Body Shop has been dismissed by critics as no more than a world leader in pale-green consumerism.”

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(Photo by Andy_K)

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John Bennett (in this blog post) -
“How can simply placing our hands on the steering wheel impair our judgement, turn us against our fellow citizens and cause us to engage in risky behavior that we know will yield only small, fleeting rewards (if any).”

I’m going to start to explore those issues here –
without focusing so much on car equipment (such as steering wheels).

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Matt Richtel on the New York Times Gadgetwise blog -
“Driving While Texting Remains Popular — and Dangerous” (May 20th)

Brad Aaron on the New York Streetsblog -
“Ad Nauseam: Antisocial Thuggery From Pioneer”

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Tom Vanderbilt (in this blog post) -

“It’s almost as if there’s something about being inside a vehicle of any kind, removed from the normal pace and experience of walking — the only thing we were actually born to do, after all — that evokes its own special behaviors, its own convulsive social physics, and problems — traffic fatalities, it should be noted, were ranked as the leading cause of fatalities in London in the early 18th century.”

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(Photo by “dno1967“)

In a grocery store in Florida

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Marie Cocco at TruthDig.com -
“Guns and the Link We Won’t Admit“ (June 15th)

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(Photo by Willie Stark)

In Las Vegas — where this billboard also is or was on display to promote The Gun Store

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Gwen on the Sociological Images blog -
“Increase in Gun Sales“ …

(Comments 4 through 6 were posted by me.
Later I was planning to follow those statements up to respond to at least one of the other subsequent comments, but I didn’t get around to doing that.)

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