blogging it real

Westpac sent me an email the other day. The subject was: Help save 600 trees with Westpac.

It began: "It's World Environment Day, so together let's do our bit. Choose to stop your paper statements and you'll be helping to save around 600 trees every year. That's the number of trees it takes to make the 156 tonnes of paper we currently use sending our statements . It's a small change we can make that'll make a big difference to the where we all live."

A couple of things are wrong with this:

1. World Environment Day is phony lip-service with corporate sponsors so it peeves me, but that's another post.
2. I have already switched my statements off, for fucks sake. So much for all the feel-good "a person, not a number" marketing bullshit. Don't bother to check first before you send me an email asking me to do something I've already done or anything huh?
3. I am doing my bit! How dare "you" lump me in with "your" need to be seen to be good? I don't need "your" tarnished good karma.
4. re the "you" thing above. Oi! Westpac! Just 'cause you got employees don't make you human! What's with the "where we all live" piece? Jesus Christ! You do not live anywhere because you are not alive! You are a corporation. Corporations aren't human. Corporations are soulless faceless profit machines that consume labour and capital. Make no mistake, corporations might want to appear to be natural entities, as deserving of rights and consideration as real beings, but that should not be further from the truth.

Which brings me to the point. Westpac, any bank, is worried about the environment? Um, gee... ah, well, hmmm, I dunno... ooh! Got it! How about you lay off funding and thereby making possible the constant expansion of industrial pollution-producers all over the world? While you're at it, how' bout cutting off the line of credit that sustains mining, deforestation and land-conversion projects that are destroying eco-systems globally? Why don’t you ‘get’ that you are one of the biggest threats to the environment?

They truly are disingenuous wankers.

Labels: banks, corporations, disingenuity, environment