Spin Cycle

Examples of corporate social responsibility that confuse selflessness with self-promotion.

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It’s no accident that corporate social responsibility campaigns are often handled by the marketing department. A few notable examples of CSR that confuse selflessness with self-promotion:

Laying Astroturf
Spin: Project Evergreen promotes the environmental benefits of green spaces.
Reality: Funded by Dow, TruGreen, and other chemical companies, the alliance campaigns behind the scenes against regulating lawn pesticides and water use.

An Uncomfortable Fit
Spin: American Apparel hypes its humane working conditions. “You don’t have to fuck the Third World up the ass…or the Canadian and American workers to do business,” boasts CEO Dov Charney.
Reality: The National Labor Relations Board has slapped the hip T-shirt maker for union-busting. Charney is facing two sexual-harassment suits.

Spin the Bottle
Spin: Beer magnate Pete Coors appeared in TV ads, explaining, “When we at Coors say, ’21 means 21,’ believe me, it’s no joke. We’ll wait for your business.”
Reality: Coors—recently arrested for DUI—has lobbied to lower the drinking age. Underage drinkers make up at least 17.5 percent of the booze industry’s sales.

Not-So-Green Acres
Spin: Acres for America preserves an acre of wilderness for every acre of land with a Wal-Mart on it.
Reality: Much of the preserved land is in rural areas far from the valuable suburban real estate the big-box chain builds on.

I Can’t Quit You
Spin: In TV ads for its QuitAssist program, Philip Morris offers to “help smokers who have decided to quit be successful.”
Reality: Since 1998, nicotine levels in cigarettes most popular with kids and minorities, including PM’s Marlboros, have risen 10 percent.

Empty Glass
Spin: Sutter Home Winery pledges $1 to breast cancer research for every bottle of its white zinfandel sold.
Reality: Alcohol has been linked to breast cancer. Consumers must send in a seal to secure each $1 donation. Winery caps total giving at $100,000.

Send in the Clown
Spin: Last year Ronald McDonald started touring schools as a health ambassador.
Reality: Need we say more?

Waiting to Exhale
Spin: A recent TV ad warned, “Some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant…. Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life.”
Reality: The spot was made by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a global warming-denying think tank that has taken $1.9 million from ExxonMobil since 2000.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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