McDonald’s Greenwashing Campaign in Michigan
Yesterday, news media outlets all covered Michigan Governor Snyder’s visit to Conklin, Michigan as part of a press conference promoting McDonald’s contribution to the state’s economy.
The news coverage for the most part just presented the claims of Snyder and McDonald’s, with little investigation into the claim that the fast food giant’s decision to buy more Michigan produce for McDonald’s as a benefit to the local economy. While, much of the commentary focused on the local aspect of this effort, it tended to ignore the contradictions.
Snyder used the opportunity to promote the idea that Michigan sells products all around the world and he sees what McDonalds as doing is giving the state a profile for more exports. If Michigan does export more of the produce grown here, then it undermines other states and communities own ability to create locally based economies, despite this being one of the main themes of the press conference.
Even Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow bought into the McDonald’s campaign. Stabenow posted a message on her website that read in part, “It is great that McDonald’s is buying Michigan-grown fruits, eggs, and milk-supporting Michigan farmers who are producing quality products. With its ‘From Michigan For Michigan’ campaign, McDonald’s is continuing its commitment to Michigan and our agricultural industry. When we grow things and make things in Michigan, we create jobs in Michigan.”
The general consensus from so many sectors is interesting in that it demonstrates both a lack of historical knowledge about what the fast food giant has done and how effect greenwashing is in this era of green capitalism.
If people are not familiar with the history of McDonald’s they might want to read Eric Schlosser’s books Fast Food Nation and Chew on This. Another great resource is the film McLibel, which deals with the longest legal case in British history, where the McDonald’s corporation goes after 2 activists for handing out leaflets to people about what is wrong with the fast food company. The major arguments are: 1) McDonald’s engages in deceptive advertising that targets children, 2) treats their workers poorly, 3) contributes to environmental destruction on a mass scale, 4) promotes cruelty to animals and 5) promotes poor nutrition.
McDonald’s Farm to Front Counter campaign is a classic example of greenwashing in that it is both tapping into a growing interest in people to eat “local” food and a public relations response to the scrutiny put on the fast food/junk food industries for their role in the epidemic of childhood obesity.
Local Responses
As we mentioned earlier in the article, most of the reporting on the McDonald’s Michigan campaign did not provide news consumers with many critical voices. The MLive story from yesterday did include a critical response to the McDonald’s greenwash campaign, with a comment from the Boston-based group Corporate Accountability International, which just produced a report entitled, Slowing Down Fast Food.
We talked with two local food justice organizations about their take on the announcement of the new McDonald’s campaign.
Lisa Oliver King with the Grand Rapids group Our Kitchen Table responded by saying, “We see it as green-washing and a destructive affront on the local food system. Regardless of the fact that these foods will be supplied by local agriculture, they will still be fried and have tons of salt added. The cooking approach has not changed. So, good food is going to waste. We can’t be deceived simply because they are buying from local farmers.”
We also spoke with Cynthia Price, with the group the Greater Grand Rapids Food Systems Council, which produced a Local Food Guide for West Michigan. Price said, “We’ll never move to a sustainable food, or economic, system as long as we rely on corporations like McDonalds to rehash locally grown ingredients and spit them out again as national, or even international, commodities. Only by relearning local food self-reliance will we be able to develop a just and balanced human-scale food system, and, for that matter, establish a stable base for a truly viable economy that values people and place and not just profits.”
Next Thursday, the Grand Rapids chapter of the IWW and the Bloom Collective will be hosting a screening of part one from the two-part biopic film on Ernest “Che” Guevara. 
Part one of the Steven Soderbergh deals with the Cuban revolution and the role that Che played in making that come about. The film is based in part on Guevara’s diaries and other writings, as well as other archival sources that deal with the Cuban Revolution, its aftermath and the US government’s response to the revolution.
Soderbergh’s film does an excellent job of depicting what the Cuban revolutionaries did in order to overthrow the Bautista regime and the antagonistic relationship that developed between the US and Cuba after July of 1959. The film also does a good job of humanizing Guevara without romanticizing the legacy of one of the most famous Latin American revolutionaries of the 20th Century.
Che: Part I
Thursday, May 17
7:00PM
IATSE Labor Hall
931 Bridge St. NW, Grand Rapids
This film is free and open to the public. A discussion will follow the screening.
Drones in US Flight Paths
This article by David Swanson is re-posted from CounterPunch.
On March 9th the Federal Aviation Administration requested comments from the public on drone test sites. On May 8th, lengthy comments were submitted by Not 1 More Acre! and Purgatoire, Apishapa & Comanche Grassland Trust. The FAA asked all the wrong questions, but still got a lot of the right answers. When the drone accidents start, and you’re told “Nobody could have known,” refer them here: PDF.
I would have asked “Should weaponized drones be permitted to exist on earth?” and “How can surveillance drones possibly comply with the Fourth Amendment?” The FAA asked:
“The Congressional language asks the FAA to consult with and leverage the resources of the Department of Defense and NASA in this effort. Since many public operators already have access to test ranges and control the management and use of those ranges, should the management of these new test ranges be held by local governments or should private entity [sic] schedule and manage the airspace?”
Not 1 More Acre! replied:
“Neither. Although the pilot UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] program is a Congressional mandate, and the timelines are accelerated, the complexities and potential dangers of integration of UAS into civilian airspace must not be delegated to local governments or private organizations in the name of expediency, entrepreneurship, or profit. . . . The wording of Question A suggests that the FAA is contemplating abdicating its inherent authority to manage the NAS [National Airspace System] by ceding broad discretion over UAS flight operations. . . .
“. . . The primary driver of the move to integration has clearly been contractors funded by the DOD, working in concert with the secretive Joint Special Forces Operation Command, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA, among others. . . . Private defense [sic] contractors increasingly woo local law enforcement agencies and other community groups with grants to help fund the purchase of new UAS. The FAA should not allow any other federal agency to usurp its authority over the NAS or circumvent the pre-decisional public disclosure requirements of NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] including agencies like the CIA, NASA, and JSOC which are not transparent or accountable to the public.”
Of course, there’s a catch. Even the accountable agency has, naturally, ceased to be accountable:
“However, the FAA has never conducted any NEPA review related to UAS. The agency has never prepared an Environmental Impact Statement or Environmental Assessment to disclose the potential impacts of UAS to the public and agency officials, despite issuing hundreds of Certificates of Waiver and Authorization to some 60 public agencies.”
Have you heard about the 51st State for Armed Robotic Drones?
The 63 drone sites in the U.S.?
The 30,000 drones planned for U.S. skies?
The habit drones have of crashing even on their own?
While initially cheaper than manned planes, unmanned drones of the sort used now tend to require many more personnel: 168 people to keep a Predator drone in the air for 24 hours, plus 19 analysts to process the videos created by a drone. Drones and their related technologies are increasing in price rapidly. And to make matters worse, they tend to crash. They even “go rogue,” lose contact with their “pilots” and fly off on their own. The U.S. Navy has a drone that self-destructs if you accidentally touch the space bar on the computer keyboard. Drones also tend to supply so-called enemies with information, including the endless hours of video they record, and to infect U.S. military computers with viruses. But these are the sorts of SNAFUs that come with any project lacking oversight, accountability, or cost controls. The companies with the biggest drone contracts did not invest in developing the best technologies but in paying off the most Congress members.
What could go wrong?
Public Citizen is organizing a campaign to both educate and resist a new trade policy that would benefit the global 1%.
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
It is the dream of the 1%. With 600 U.S. corporations as officials advisors, this stealthy international agreement has been negotiated behind closed doors over the past two years – with talks heading to Dallas in May.
What would TPP mean for the 99%?
Millions more American jobs off-shored. Backdoor deregulation for financial firms to wreck the economy again. Floods of unsafe food and products. Higher medicine prices. A ban on Buy America policies needed to create green jobs and rebuild our economy. Foreign corporations empowered to attack our environmental and health policies in foreign tribunals.
Closed-door talks are on-going between the U.S. and Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam; with countries like Japan and China potentially joining later. The 600 corporate advisors have access to the draft text of this deal that could change all of our lives. The public, Members of Congress, journalists, and civil society are excluded.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership would give:
Corporations Grab Taxpayer $$ Attacking U.S. Laws in Foreign Tribunals
Read how foreign corporations would be empowered to attack U.S. health, land use, environmental, and other laws before tribunals of three corporate lawyers operating under World Bank or UN rules to demand taxpayer compensation for policies they think undermine their expected future profits. (Already $350 million has been paid to corporations under NAFTA’s version of this crazy system.)
Bye Bye American Jobs & Buy America
Special investor protections take away the risk of offshoring jobs to low-wage countries and in fact incentivize offshoring by providing special benefits for companies that leave. Plus, TPP would impose limits on how our elected officials can use tax dollars – banning Buy America or Buy Local preferences when government buy goods and services.
TPP would require us to import food that does not meet U.S. safety standards. It would limit food labeling.
Son of SOPA: Curtailing Internet Freedom
Thought SOPA was bad? Read how TPP would require internet service providers to “police” user-activity and treat individual violators as large-scale for-profit violators. Plus, TPP would stifle innovation.
Financial Deregulation: Banksters’ Delight
TPP would rollback reregulation of Wall Street. It would prohibit bans on risky financial services and undermine “too big to fail” regulations.
More Expansive Medicines, Threats to Public Health
Disgustingly, U.S. negotiators at TPP are pushing the agenda of Big PhaRMA – longer monopoly control on drugs for the big firms and higher prices for us. These proposals would mean millions in developing countries are cut off from life-saving medicines and higher prices for those of us in rich countries.
For right now Public Citizen is calling on people to sign a petition, but clearly if this trade agreement moves forward it will need to be resisted with more than electronic opposition.
Lastly, Public Citizen has put together a catchy little video to illustrate what is so dangerous about TPP.
An estimated 80 people traveled to Lansing today to take part in a demonstration against the public auctioning of land for the purpose of fracking for natural gas.
The public auction of land was facilitated by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR), at Constitutional Hall, a building just west of the State Capital. Most of those who came for the protest stayed outside with signs, information tables and a petition campaign that would ban fracking from taking place anywhere within the State of Michigan.
Other people who made the trip to Lansing went into the building to either act as observers of the public auction to disrupt the proceedings. This writer went inside for the first 90 minutes to document what was happening.
People who were there to bid on public land had to register with the DNR before entering the room being used for the public auction. Before the auction even state representatives from the DNR were asking people to leave the room if they had not registered, even if they were news media.
There were ongoing tensions between the DNR & building security and people who felt that since the auction was of public land and being facilitated by a government entity (DNR), they should have every right to be present to observe the proceedings. People who had entered the room without registering were individually confronted and asked to leave.
However, even after those who were asked to leave had registered, many of them were not allowed to enter because of room capacity, which is the reason that the DNR gave. There was back and forth discussion about public transparency and how unacceptable it was for the public to not be able to observe the proceedings.
After 30 minutes of verbal confrontation, city and state police arrived to intimidate people and remove a few that were not compliant.
At 9:00AM the public land auction began by individual parcels from counties across the state in alphabetical order. After an hour of auctioning this writer left the room go back outside to see what protesters were doing.
Once outside I was told that at about 9:00AM several people entered the lobby and began chanting in the hopes that the noise would disrupt the public land auction. At 10:00AM the protesters outside moved away from the main entrance and found a spot on the north side of the building where the auction was taking place.
Once the crowd moved to a different location, they began making noise by chanting and banging on drums in order to disrupt what was going on inside. Here is some video footage of that action.
The protest lasted about 45 minutes just outside of the room where the DNR land auction was taking place, when eventually the police showed up in large numbers and demanded that the protesters move back up to the sidewalk area. Once people moved back up to the street, it became apparent that the police were there to arrest people if the disruption continued, with nearly 20 officers, 8 cars and police dogs on the scene.
By 10:30AM we began getting reports from people inside that several people began to disrupt the public land auction. We found out that some people made statements and others bid on land and then never paid the cost. We also heard that some people were actually buying public land as a way to prevent those parcels from being subjected to the drilling necessary for natural gas fracking.
We had the opportunity to interview two people who participated in some form of disruption inside.
A Watered-Down Education
This article about is re-posted from Food & Water Watch. For more information on marketing to children in schools or corporate created curriculum check out the film Captive Audience: How Advertising Invades the Classroom.
Joe Camel. Ronald McDonald. Tony the Tiger. Spuds McKenzie. Kid-friendly advertising tricks by corporations seeking to lure young consumers clutter the annals of marketing history.
While some of these efforts are more insidious than others, they share a common trait. In each case, advertisers were trying to hook new consumers early to cultivate a sense of brand loyalty to be exploited for years to come. With the advent of programs ostensibly designed to teach kids about water issues, bottled water companies are getting in on the action. Their tactics flow through an institution that few kids can escape — the classroom.
The best example of this is Project WET. This non-profit organization claims to educate children and parents about the importance of preserving global water resources. According to its website, “sustainable water management is crucial to secure social and economic stability, as well as a healthy environment.”
That’s certainly true. But Nestlé Waters North America, the organization’s main sponsor, is the last entity that should be empowered to educate the public about responsible water use. When you consider the bottled water behemoth ‘s track record of hogging global water supplies and profiting from them, Project WET’s supposed mission is a slap in the face to any community that has had its water muscled away by Nestlé.
By its own admission, Nestlé expends 2.37 gallons of water for every gallon of bottled water it produces. The company used approximately 4 billion gallons of water in 2007. That same year, it reduced the amount of water it used by 1.3 percent, but that was more than cancelled out as it increased the volume of bottled water it produced by 10 percent. Meanwhile, Nestlé buys community water for as little as $ .000081 per gallon, and sells it back to consumers for at least 127,000 times as much.
Pumping all that water comes at a steep price to consumers and the planet. U.S. bottled water consumption used energy equivalent to 32 to 54 million barrels of oil in 2007, enough to fuel approximately 1.5 million cars over the course of a year. Moreover, 77 percent of all empty plastic water bottles consumed in the United States end up in landfills.
And yet, Nestlé has the audacity to anoint itself a leader in water education.
With over 1.1 billion people in the world lacking access to clean water and sanitation, it’s more important than ever that children learn the connection between the choices they make as consumers and their greater impact on the world. But Nestlé’s brand of water education only greenwashes the company’s own hand in profiting from an increasingly scarce resource to which all humans have a right, while cultivating a new generation of consumers.
Luckily, the Nestlé-funded Project WET isn’t the only water education program in town. We at Food & Water Watch have developed an innovative initiative to teach students that the simple choice of choosing a water fountain over a bottle of water can make a real difference in preserving our shared water resources. The Take Back the Tap Curriculum uses English, science, math, and social studies to help students draw the connection between the stuff that comes out of their taps at home and that which their peers across the globe sometimes have to walk miles to procure.
As Americans, it’s easy to take drinking water for granted, but this basic resource is central to a complex web of political and environmental issues. We should teach our kids the importance of protecting it. We can’t abdicate that responsibility to corporations with a vested interest in building demand for bottled water.
Legislation would remove protections against domestic violence & sex crimes for immigrant women
This Action Alert is from the National Council of La Raza.
Congress has a long-standing history of reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a law that protects victims of abuse. Congress is debating the reauthorization of VAWA once again; it has already been passed by the Senate. The bill that has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representatives Eric Cantor (R–VA) and Sandy Adams (R–FL) would roll back years of protections and bipartisan commitment to protect vulnerable immigrant victims of domestic violence, stalking, sex crimes, and human trafficking.
The Cantor-Adams bill (H.R. 4970) would effectively prevent immigrant victims from applying for protection from their abusers. It radically changes the current application process for immigrant women and puts steep new hurdles to eligibility in the path of immigrant survivors seeking protection under VAWA.
Since its inception, VAWA has protected immigrant victims of domestic violence by permitting them to obtain legal status on their own when their U.S. citizen and lawful permanent resident spouses, as part of the abuse, refused to petition for them. H.R. 4970 would roll back these protections by removing critical confidentiality provisions and requiring notification of the abuser as part of the VAWA self-petition process.
In what world would victims come forward if they knew their abusers would be notified?
As if this weren’t bad enough, H.R. 4970 also leaves out provisions to increase the safety of LGBT victims that were included in the VAWA reauthorization bill that recently passed in the Senate with bipartisan support.
Media Get Bored With Occupy—and Inequality
This article is re-posted from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Occupy Wall Street is rightly credited with helping to shift the economic debate in America from a fixation on deficits to issues of income inequality, corporate greed and the centralization of wealth among the richest 1 percent. The movement has chalked up other victories as well, from altering New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tax plan (New York Times, 12/5/11) to re-energizing activists and unions, but bringing some discussion of class into the mainstream dialogue has been one of its crowning achievements.
As Occupy slowed down for the winter, though, would corporate media continue to talk about our increasingly stratified society without a vibrant protest movement forcing their hand? The answer, unsurprisingly, is no.
As mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy movement” waned in early 2012, so too have mentions of “income inequality” and, to an even greater extent, “corporate greed.” The trend is true for four leading papers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, L.A. Times), news programs on the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), cable (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News) and NPR, according to searches of the Nexis news media database. Google Trends data also indicates that from January to March, the phrases “income inequality” and “corporate greed” declined in volume of both news stories and searches.
From June 2011 through March 2012, mentions of the phrase “income inequality” in the four papers first increased dramatically, then decreased slightly more slowly. The number of mentions per month ranged from 8 to 15 between June and September. Then in October, when OWS coverage peaked, “income inequality” mentions increased nearly fourfold to 44, and reached 52 mentions in November. January had a total of 64 mentions, though 13 of those stories focused on President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.
By March, there were only 16 mentions of “income inequality,” half from the New York Times—which also far outpaced the other papers in coverage of OWS that month, at 45 mentions to the L.A. Times’ 12, the Post’s 10 and USA Today’s three, due in part to the scores arrested in New York City on the movement’s six-month anniversary on March 17.
Network broadcasts followed the same pattern, albeit with significantly lower numbers. From June to September, there was only one mention of income inequality (ABC, 8/10/11). Mentions across ABC, CBS and NBC jumped to seven in October and held fairly steady through January, but returned to zero by February.
Similarly, “income inequality” was barely mentioned on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News in the early months of the study. October saw a dramatic increase on MSNBC and CNN, with 10 and 14 mentions, respectively, while Fox News stayed low at only five mentions. The numbers peaked at 54 total in January—again, partially due to the SOTU—but by March, “income inequality” was mentioned only six times across all three cable news channels, four times on CNN and once each on MSNBC and Fox.
NPR followed the same pattern, with a peak of 18 mentions in October and only one mention each in February and March.
The spike and subsequent drop-off for “corporate greed” was even more pronounced. After only five total mentions in the four leading papers from June through September, the numbers skyrocketed to 62 mentions in October—again, at the peak of Occupy coverage. The following month, however, “corporate greed” only showed up 19 times. By January, it had completely disappeared from the pages of USA Today and the L.A. Times and made only a meager showing at the New York Times (four mentions) and Washington Post (one).
The broadcast network coverage again mirrored the print coverage. From June to September, “corporate greed” appeared only once. In October, mentions shot up to 35, but as in the newspapers, the drop-off was severe: 11 mentions in November and only one across February and March (ABC, 3/14/12).
NPR and cable data tell the same story. Prior to OWS, “corporate greed” virtually never came up. Then, in October, NPR used the phrase 23 times and CNN used it a remarkable 78 times. The return to business as usual was quick, though, with three mentions on NPR in November, one in December, and none after that. By March, “corporate greed” was mentioned only one time on CNN, and not at all on MSNBC or Fox (where the October peaks were only 11 and five mentions, respectively). While it is certainly true that prior to Occupy, there was virtually no discussion of class issues in the mainstream media (Extra!, 8/09), it’s clear that as Occupy faded from coverage, the media turned away from the persistent issues the movement is trying to highlight.
That’s not to say that there have been no important, lasting rhetorical shifts. Occupy’s most prominent slogan—“We are the 99 Percent”—and the other side of the equation, “the 1 Percent,” have created new ways of talking about centralized wealth in America. Even as media focus turned away from Occupy, the phrase “the 1 Percent” continues to appear in news stories worldwide. Whether it’s used to describe recent lottery winners (Washington Post, 3/31/12), consumers of expensive new gadgets (PC Mag, 3/26/12) or beneficiaries of Paul Ryan’s recently released budget (Chicago Tribune, 3/26/12), the phrase seems to have staying power: From January to March, 109 articles in the four papers mentioned “the 1 Percent” and “wealth.”
The danger, of course, is that “the 1 Percent” simply becomes a buzzword and ceases to have any connection to the way American capitalism produces and reproduces economic and social inequality.
What these data show is that “changing the conversation” isn’t a one-time thing. Corporate media and their owners have every incentive to ignore not only protest movements, but also the underlying causes of those protest movements. Hurricane Katrina showed that even the most powerful and dramatic events exposing the inequalities and poverty in this country have had only very short-term impact on media coverage of those issues (Extra!, 7–8/06). Occupy Wall Street reminded the country of the deep economic divisions running through our society, but it appears the only way to keep the issue in the media discussion is to keep OWS—or some other form of large-scale protest—in the news.
Join Occupy Grand Rapids and friends for a discussion on anarchy, Occupy, and the Oakland Commune. Hosted by Aragorn!, editor of the new book Occupy Everything: Anarchists in the Occupy Movement, this discussion will look at the flexibility, energy, and experience that anarchists brought to The Occupy Movement as it moved beyond lower Manhattan onto the docks and streets of Oakland, the town square of Philadelphia, and abandoned buildings around the country.
“The anarchists’ way of operating was changing our very idea of what politics could be in the first place. This was exhilarating. Some occupiers told me they wanted to take it home with them, to organize assemblies in their own communities. It’s no accident, therefore, that when occupations spread around the country, the horizontal assemblies spread too.” – From Nathan Schneider in The Nation
Occupy Everything: Anarchy, Occupy, & the Oakland Commune
Thursday, May 10
7pm – 9pm
The DAAC
115 South Division, Grand Rapids
Chomsky on Latin American Social Movements
This video is re-posted from ZNet.
Prolific author and political commentator Noam Chomsky talks about the historical significance of current social movements in Latin America. Chomsky draws attention to the particular importance of growing Latin American autonomy from the US.
In this excerpt from a larger conversation, Chomsky talks about the model of Bolivian democracy, the new Latin American economic alliance, the growing recognition of indigenous rights and what this could mean for the rest of the hemisphere.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 