Let's talk ... about corporate greed.

The Talking Heads:

Today is the day that one big business has chosen to make itself look good and to brand its corporate image with the glow of a Very Important social / health issue.

Yes, today is Bell _Let's Talk™_ Day.

My co-blogger fern hill wrote about it two years ago.

I agree with her.

Yesterday there was a number of people waiting with me at a Bank Street bus stop, including a mother and her young adult daughter who kept whispering loudly to her mother about the spirits she saw who were telling her *things*.  The older woman was painfully aware that people were looking at them, some in kindness, others not so much as she tried to guide her daughter away from the group.

They travelled briefly on the same bus with me then disembarked to transfer on to a different route. I wondered and worried about them.  My daughter's childhood friend developed schizophrenia in her late adolescence.  Many of her (her partner's, too) peers and contemporaries are beset with a wide range of mental health issues that are aggravated by precarious employment conditions and dwindling mental health resources.

Yet:

Indeed.  For every tweet, Bell will donate 5¢ per.  The corporation claims that funds they've dedicated to mental health programs are distributed according to funding requests awarded.

You want more numbers crunching? This blogger does an excellent job of breaking down the figures.

[...]in reality one of the things that is actually happening is that for $4.26 per hour Bell are paying you to act as a PR representative for their brand – part of that branding is the image of a “responsible corporate citizen.”

Bell could just pay the same corporate income tax in 2013 that corporations paid in 1960 (or really any point since then) and contribute vastly more to the treatment of mental health in Canada than the money they are contributing as part of a corporate PR campaign. Bell Canada’s 2011 net profits were $2,160,000,000 and its total revenue was 19,500,000,000 – so whatever they end up donating for mental health treatment/awareness could be replaced with stable, annual funding by increasing corporate income tax by less than a sliver of a fraction of a percentage point.

So Bell demands more and more corporate welfare and tax relief from the federal government.  This leads to shortfalls in revenues which governments at the federal, provincial and municipal level must absorb by cutting mental health programs.

At which point Bell swoops in like a white knight in shining armour and can point to where it takes credit for patching up the healthcare infrastructures disintegration that its own corporate greed and gluttony for profits has caused.

Toxic capitalism. 

It also seems a good time to note, as communications flunkeys who toil for the Harper government furiously tweet up a storm on behalf of its CPC Ministers and MPs, that the CRA is directed to investigate charities that do not comply with his government policies, and that millions of dollars in advertising are dedicated to promoting his *Party of One* on the ordinary Canadian taxpayer's dime.

Toxic Harper killing everything that is Canadian.

Possibly the only truly honest statement Harper has ever uttered was his 2006 threat to reconfigure Canada: “You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it”.

More here.  And here.

An article in the Winnipeg Free Press deconstructs the Harper government communications strategy that stamps PMSHithead's brand on every media event.

Internal documents show the prime minister's department micro-managed a media event staged by Parks Canada, trying to erase the venerable agency from a public announcement while promoting the Harper government.

The incident is a case study in communications control from the centre, a signal feature of the governing Conservatives since they first came to power in 2006.

The event was an Oct. 17, 2011, news conference in Halifax to announce an agreement to transform Sable Island, a fabled sand crescent 290 kilometres off Nova Scotia, into a national park reserve.

The deal had been meticulously negotiated by Parks Canada with the Nova Scotia government over the course of a year, and proud officials wanted a splashy announcement as a way to celebrate Parks Canada's 100th birthday in 2011.[...]

Alas for Parks Canada, the carefully wrought plan started to unravel days before the event when a vetting team at the Privy Council Office began to pick apart the agenda, the news release and two background documents, demanding changes. The office is the central organ of the federal government, under the control of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.[...]

When the Privy Council Office finally responded, officials demanded a raft of changes, many of them designed to quash Parks Canada's identity at the event.

A so-called "backgrounder" for handout to news media, for example, erased the agency's name altogether.

"I note the only change was that Parks Canada was 'disappeared,'" an agency official noted. "I have never seen our name completely eliminated in this manner before."

The stage backdrops for the news conference in Halifax were to have included a Parks Canada banner celebrating the agency's centennial in 2011. PCO told officials to get rid of it.

"No Parks Canada banner — the brown and yellow is ugly. Please stop using this," an unidentified official demanded in a note.

Remember, the Harper government has slashed and burned essential, front line services as well as exemplary best practices and performance achievements in world-respected programs, such as the Experimental Lakes Areas, "the one-of-a-kind outdoor laboratory that has informed the world about the effects of contaminants such as mercury, acid rain and phosphorus".  

But it has hired hundreds of communications hacks to crank out propaganda in line with the PMO aka Harper's Politburo's tactical campaign of disinformation through speaking points regurgitated by Attack™ MPs. 

And then, there's the millions of $$$ spent advertising Harper's brand of conservatism.

Update: More calculated BS from the Corruption Party government: 

Canada’s longstanding shortage of skilled workers has apparently made Prime Minister Stephen Harper mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Sources tell [DJ! emphasis] CBC News that, for the past year, the prime minister has been banging heads in his government to come up with new ways to help Canadians get the right skills for the right jobs — namely, thousands of vacancies that companies are begging to fill.

This is a classic message-framing tactic, straight from the Karl Rove / Tom Flanagan play-book on media manipulation.  Next step: Diane Findley will be wringing her hands over the *fact* that non-union, cheap imported indentured workers have to be imported from China and other authoritarian regimes to fill those jobs in the tarsands and other raw-resource extraction industries.

Branding Sarah Palin.

Whatever your political orientations/choices may be, there's some interesting information to be found in the article about Sarah Palin in the October issue of Vanity Fair, now online.

She manages to be at once a closed book and a constant noisemaker. Her press spokesperson, Pam Pryor, barely speaks to the press, and Palin shrewdly cultivates a real and rhetorical antagonism toward what she calls “the lamestream media.” The Palin machine is supported by organizations that do much of their business under the cover of pseudonyms and shell companies.

In accordance with the terms of a reported $1 million annual contract with Fox News, Palin regularly delivers canned commentary on that network. But in the year since she abruptly resigned the governorship of Alaska, in order to market herself full-time—earning an estimated $13 million in the process—she has submitted to authentic, unpaid interviews with only a handful of journalists, none of whom have posed notably challenging questions. She keeps tight control of her pronouncements, speaking only in settings of her own choosing, with audiences of her own selection, and with reporters kept at bay. (Despite many requests, neither Palin nor her current staff would comment for this article.)

She injects herself into the news almost every day, but on a strictly one-way basis, through a steady stream of messages on Twitter and Facebook. The press plays along. Palin is the only politician whose tweets are regularly reported as news by TV networks. She is the only one who has been able to significantly change the course of debate on a major national issue (health-care reform) with a single Facebook posting (in which she accused the Obama administration, falsely, of wanting to set up a “death panel”).

The reaction from Palin's marketing division/PR should be instructive.