Occupy Earth Day: An Expose of the Corporate Propaganda Systems that Undermine Systemic Change Activism

This Earth Day, like so many oth­ers, we’ll be invit­ed to pick up lit­ter, plant trees, be remind­ed to recy­cle, and count­less oth­er per­son­al habits we can adopt to save the earth. Cor­po­ra­tions pitch­ing “green” prod­ucts will bust out their “Lorax-approved” logos and encour­age our “green” consumption.

This will be the first Earth Day since the Occu­py Wall Street move­ment took form. How can we Occu­py Earth Day – or as our Indige­nous col­leagues have urged us all to rename Occu­py… how can we Decol­o­nize Earth Day? To get to the root of this (in oth­er words, take a “rad­i­cal” approach), we need to look deep­er into how Earth Day, and our broad­er cul­ture, got colonized.

Part of this sto­ry starts with Keep Amer­i­ca Beau­ti­ful (KAB). Formed short­ly after the first Earth Day in 1970, KAB seems on the sur­face to be an innocu­ous lit­ter-cleanup group. How­ev­er, accord­ing to the Green­peace Guide to Anti-Envi­ron­men­tal Orga­ni­za­tions, KAB is actu­al­ly a sophis­ti­cat­ed green­wash­ing oper­a­tion that is fund­ed and gov­erned by the waste and pack­ag­ing indus­tries as well as the cor­po­ra­tions most respon­si­ble for sell­ing the dis­pos­ables that become lit­ter – com­pa­nies like McDon­ald’s, Altria (for­mer­ly Philip Mor­ris), Nes­tle, Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola. KAB sup­ports trash incin­er­a­tion (the dirt­i­est way to deal with waste) and oppos­es bot­tle deposit bills, which would increase recycling.

The authors of Tox­ic Sludge is Good for You! – Lies, Damned Lies and the Pub­lic Rela­tions Indus­try also warn that Keep Amer­i­ca Beau­ti­ful is a slick PR effort to get con­sumers to think that they are respon­si­ble for the trash that KAB’s fun­ders cre­at­ed. You get to pick up their trash, put it in dis­pos­able plas­tic bags, then have it sent to a land­fill or incin­er­a­tor that is prob­a­bly owned by one of KAB’s founders. In fact, the trash decom­pos­es more quick­ly on the side of a road than in a land­fill. If brought to an incin­er­a­tor, the trash is turned into high­ly tox­ic air pol­lu­tion and tox­ic ash. While none of us want to see lit­ter, there are bet­ter approach­es to help­ing the envi­ron­ment than pick­ing up after the cor­po­ra­tions who make dis­pos­ables – such as chal­leng­ing the use of dis­pos­ables in the first place.

Denis Hayes, a nation­al stu­dent coor­di­na­tor for the first Earth Day in 1970, spoke pas­sion­ate­ly at the Wash­ing­ton, D.C. ral­ly, shout­ing, “polit­i­cal and busi­ness lead­ers once hoped that they could turn the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment into a mas­sive anti-lit­ter cam­paign.” He stat­ed that “we’re tired of being told we are to blame for cor­po­rate depre­da­tions… insti­tu­tions have no con­science. If we want them to do what is right, we must make them do what is right.” These words still ring true today, yet cor­po­ra­tions have been a lit­tle too suc­cess­ful at shift­ing the mes­sage and get­ting peo­ple to focus on pick­ing up after cor­po­rate messes.

Older than Earth Day, Deeper than Litter

I once saw a pick­up truck with two bumper stick­ers on it. One was some sort of pro-log­ging stick­er, like “have you hugged a log­ger today?” The oth­er said sim­ply “Smokey Needs You.” I was blown away – not only by how these two stick­ers could be on the same truck – but by the fact that the “Smokey Needs You” stick­er did­n’t even have to tell me the mes­sage. The mes­sage was already in my head! The stick­er was just there to trig­ger it. The adver­tis­ing was so per­va­sive and effec­tive that they no longer even need to say the mes­sage. Most any­one grow­ing up in the U.S. knows who Smokey is and what he wants from us. Who is Smokey and what does he want? Of course, he’s Smokey the Bear… and he wants us to pre­vent for­est fires. Very good, boys and girls.

Obvi­ous­ly, it took a lot of mon­ey to put Smokey’s mes­sage in every­one’s heads. So, who funds Smokey the Bear? Who spon­sors all of these ads? Here’s a hint. The same orga­ni­za­tion that funds Smokey the Bear also funds mes­sages that say “don’t drink and dri­ve,” “buck­le your seat­belt,” “pick up lit­ter,” “wear a con­dom,” “tutor kids after school,” “feed the hun­gry” and many sim­i­lar mes­sages. They’re the same ones who did such pop­u­lar cam­paigns as “a mind is a ter­ri­ble thing to waste,” “take a bite out of crime,” “friends don’t let friends dri­ve drunk,” and “just say no” to drugs. You’ve seen and heard these ads in news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, on TV, radio, bill­boards, bus­es and bus stops.

These are all cam­paigns brought to you by the Ad Coun­cil. Most of us absorb the mes­sage with­out even notic­ing the spon­sor. It’s almost subliminal.

Around $2 bil­lion a year in Ad Coun­cil pub­lic ser­vice announce­ments reach peo­ple in the Unit­ed States with 123.4 bil­lion media impres­sions in 2010 alone. That amounts to 400 ads per per­son for the year – more than one a day on average.

Who is the Ad Coun­cil and what are they try­ing to tell us? There is a com­mon thread between all of their ads, and you can find it in Smokey the Bear’s exact mes­sage: “Only YOU can pre­vent for­est fires.” The most impor­tant word in that mes­sage is the one they them­selves cap­i­tal­ize: you. The com­mon theme between all of these seem­ing­ly dif­fer­ent mes­sages is that indi­vid­u­als are the cause of social prob­lems and that indi­vid­ual change is the solu­tion. In case this isn’t obvi­ous enough, it’s one of their five stat­ed cri­te­ria for top­ics they’ll take on: “the issue must offer a solu­tion through an indi­vid­ual action.”

The Ad Coun­cil and its fun­ders are a Who’s Who of major cor­po­ra­tions in the Unit­ed States, includ­ing at least half of the nation’s 100 largest cor­po­ra­tions. The idea for an Ad Coun­cil was con­ceived in 1941 to counter crit­i­cism of cor­po­rate adver­tis­ing by show­ing that ads could also be in the pub­lic inter­est. Adver­tis­ers feared that leg­is­la­tion might tax cor­po­rate ads or reg­u­late their con­tent. Sev­er­al weeks lat­er, in 1942, with U.S. entry into World War II, it was found­ed as the War Adver­tis­ing Coun­cil, to build U.S. sup­port for involve­ment in the war, with “Rosie the Riv­et­er,” “Buy War Bonds” and “Loose Lips Sink Ships” cam­paigns. The Ad Coun­cil has per­sist­ed in sup­port­ing cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment / mil­i­tary objec­tives, even with anti-com­mu­nist ads in the 1950s, a post‑9/11 “Cam­paign for Free­dom” and mil­i­tary recruit­ment ads in more recent years. Aside from these mil­i­tary ad cam­paigns, most of the Ad Coun­cil’s his­to­ry has been to use cor­po­rate fund­ing to pro­mote cam­paigns that dis­tract from the cor­po­rate caus­es of social problems.

Only You…

The Ad Coun­cil strat­e­gy is a blame-shift­ing pub­lic rela­tions tac­tic. These are the dom­i­nant insti­tu­tions of our time say­ing that they are not the cause of social prob­lems – you are… that they don’t need to change to solve the prob­lems – you do. The Ad Coun­cil and Keep Amer­i­can Beau­ti­ful exist to pre­vent such things as the McTox­i­cs Cam­paign, where high school­ers teamed up with com­mu­ni­ty anti-land­fill activists in the late 1980s to mail back the Sty­ro­foam clamshells to McDon­ald’s cor­po­rate head­quar­ters in Oak Brook, Illi­nois to get McDon­ald’s to stop using Sty­ro­foam. This is a group activ­i­ty get­ting an insti­tu­tion to change the pack­ag­ing they use so that it does­n’t end up as lit­ter and in land­fills and incinerators.

The top 1% stays in pow­er by keep­ing us divid­ed. They divide us with racism, sex­ism, het­ero­sex­ism, immi­gra­tion sta­tus and wedge issues like guns and abor­tion. They’ll divide us along every line except for class, for which they must keep the mid­dle class fight­ing the poor. If the mid­dle class and poor see past the man­u­fac­tured cul­ture wars and unite to fight the wealthy, the 1% is in trou­ble, because we out­num­ber them. Through­out the his­to­ry of this coun­try, racism has played an impor­tant role. In a book

called A Dif­fer­ent Mir­ror – A Mul­ti­cul­tur­al His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States, the author spells out this his­to­ry, show­ing how plan­ta­tion own­ers, when their work­ers start­ed to orga­nize for bet­ter work­ing con­di­tions, would bring in oth­er work­ers in order to racial­ly divide their work­forces, such as hav­ing Native Amer­i­cans work along-side African Amer­i­cans and pay­ing one group less than the oth­er so that they resent each oth­er and fight each oth­er instead of their boss­es. In Hawaii, the sug­ar plan­ta­tion own­ers did the same, pay­ing the Por­tuguese more than the Japan­ese work­ers, and – once that dif­fer­en­tial wage sys­tem was abol­ished in response to Japan­ese labor protests – plan­ta­tion own­ers brought in more Fil­ipino work­ers and pre­ferred a spe­cif­ic ratio of Japan­ese to Fil­ipino work­ers. The expres­sion “the shit rolls down­hill” came from there, where the man­agers’ hous­es would be on top of the hill, with sewage sys­tems flow­ing down past the Japan­ese and Por­tuguese labor­ers hous­ing to the Fil­ipino work­ers’ shan­ty hous­es at the base of the hill, reflect­ing the labor hier­ar­chy. This his­to­ry was very inten­tion­al and many sorts of divi­sion tac­tics con­tin­ue to this day.

The Ad Coun­cil strat­e­gy is the sci­en­tif­ic per­fec­tion of this divide and con­quer strat­e­gy. Instead of divid­ing peo­ple into groups, it divides us into indi­vid­u­als, so that we don’t even see prob­lems and solu­tions in terms of group iden­ti­ties. It’s designed to pre­vent orga­niz­ing into groups to make change, which is why so many envi­ron­men­tal­ists start off see­ing their options as doing lit­ter cleanups, vol­un­tary recy­cling, tree plant­i­ng, adopt­ing acres / cows / whales, etc. – tac­tics that don’t chal­lenge the pow­er struc­ture and which focus on indi­vid­ual changes, not insti­tu­tion­al change.

Orga­niz­ing for insti­tu­tion­al change runs con­trary to the Amer­i­can ide­al of indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, but social change is usu­al­ly made by move­ments, not indi­vid­u­als work­ing alone. Our cul­ture hides this from us when our his­to­ry books por­tray the “Rosa Parks effect” – where we learn about social change in the con­text of indi­vid­u­als who made it pos­si­ble, not the orga­ni­za­tions and entire move­ments of which these indi­vid­u­als were a part.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
– The Lorax

There is a para­dox in the fact that we need to find big­ger (insti­tu­tion­al) ways to reach large num­bers of indi­vid­u­als to get them think­ing that indi­vid­ual changes aren’t enough to solve social prob­lems, and that their par­tic­i­pa­tion in move­ments to make change is vital (and not just vot­ing for “change” every four years).

We need to wake peo­ple up to the pub­lic rela­tions dis­trac­tions around them and decol­o­nize our minds. How­ev­er, we don’t have the reach to counter hun­dreds of bil­lions of media impres­sions a year by try­ing to wake up one per­son at a time. This is the very weak­ness of indi­vid­ual change. So, how can we insti­tu­tion­al­ize sys­temic think­ing, or the dis­man­tling of PR dis­trac­tions? Is fight­ing for media democ­ra­cy enough, when Ad Coun­cil ads now appear on web­sites, with­out a coun­ter­bal­ance to encour­age insti­tu­tion­al change thinking?

Occu­py has been incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful at chang­ing the nar­ra­tive on group iden­ti­ty – putting class inequal­i­ty into the mass con­scious­ness, with the mass media help­ing per­pet­u­ate the sim­ple “99% vs. 1%” fram­ing. Can we come up with a sim­i­lar meme that tack­les the per­va­sive wave of you-are-the-prob­lem-and-solu­tion adver­tis­ing and get peo­ple think­ing in terms of group action to change institutions?

Source: http://www.corporations.org/occupyearthday.html