Greenwash Guerrillas Pie Thomas Freedman

Prov­i­dence, RI — Earth Day, 2008.
Footage avail­able at http://www.greenwashguerrillas.org

Thomas Fried­man, the author and NY Times colum­nist, was invit­ed to Brown Uni­ver­si­ty to give a keynote speech on Earth Day, before a packed audi­to­ri­um. His talk, titled “Green is the new Red, White and Blue” was about how cor­po­rate envi­ron­men­tal­ism (based on putting a price on the atmos­phere, and invest­ing in agro­fu­els and tech­no-fix­es) can restore Amer­i­ca to its “nat­ur­al place in the glob­al order.” This out­ra­geous neolib­er­al cap­i­tal­ist pro­pa­gan­da was inter­rupt­ed with a sur­prise vis­it from the Green­wash Guer­ril­las. After splat­ter­ing him with two green cream pies, leaflets were thrown to the crowd, stat­ing:

Thomas Fried­man deserves a pie in the face…

* because of his sick­en­ing­ly cheery applaud for free mar­ket cap­i­tal­is­m’s con­quest of the plan­et

* for telling the world that the free mar­ket and tech­no fix­es can save us from cli­mate change. From car­bon trad­ing to ethanol, these dis­trac­tions are dan­ger­ous in and of them­selves, while encour­ag­ing inac­tion with respect to the true prob­lems at hand.

* for help­ing turn envi­ron­men­tal­ism into a fake plas­tic con­sumer prod­uct for the priv­i­leged

* For his long-stand­ing sup­port for the US Occu­pa­tion of Iraq and the Israeli occu­pa­tion of Pales­tine. Such com­mit­ted sup­port to the US War Machine and its proxy states over­seas can­not be masked behind any twist­ed mask of “green” — the US Mil­i­tary is the largest sin­gle emit­ter of green­house gas­es in the world.

* for his pure arro­gance.

On behalf of the earth and all true envi­ron­men­tal­ists — we, the Green­wash
Guer­ril­las, declare Thomas Fried­man’s “Green” as fake and tox­ic to human and plan­e­tary health as the cool-whip cov­er­ing his face.

Mean­while, while the plan­e­tary clock is tick­ing. If there are to be tru­ly real solu­tions (and not cap­i­tal­ist false solu­tions) to the many prob­lems we face, it will come out of trans­for­ma­tive social move­ments and not cor­po­rate board­rooms. For these rea­sons, we chal­lenge Thomas Fried­man and all oth­er green cap­i­tal­ists to a duel, in which we will con­tin­ue to expose their shams while point­ing towards the social move­ments in the Major­i­ty World that are already liv­ing solu­tions and trans­form­ing soci­ety towards a live­able, healthy, and non-cor­po­rate future based on jus­tice not greed.