These companies are trying to impress you, "the consumer:"
"…the interesting part: 'A portion of the proceeds of the sale of this garment will be donated to various Children's Charities.' Wal-mart is telling you if you purchase these pants and Kathy Lee is telling you if you purchase these pants you are going to help children. The problem was, the people who handed us the label were thirteen years of age."
-Charles Kernaghan
Watch The Corporation at your leisure.
These rhetorical conventions – these tricks – ethos, pathos and logos, have been influencing consumer opinion for greater than two thousand years. The Greeks consumed, whether it was olives, odysseys, religion, sports, democracy or education. They too influenced mass opinion through entertainment which explicitly validated the beliefs of the culture. Companies have always realized that they are able to influence consumption through consumer opinion through suggestive presentations. Drink wine. Sacrifice a bull. Buy a house. Vote. Read this, watch that and come here. To that extent, even a minimal analysis of modern advertisements reveals that they are persuasive tools; ideally, they incite action, even if that action is something as superficial as consumption. Research on consumer habit is plentiful. Companies have always realized that they are able to influence consumption through consumer opinion. The 'green' movement is just a recent example of media shaping consumer habit.
An issue with describing a new concept with old words is connotative baggage. Green, for instance, refers to nature, inexperience, and money, among other things. Movies such as "Soylent Green" (most explicitly) make reference to the notion that progressive removal of man from nature will one day produce a fetishism amongst consumers for green foods.
Consumption is one thing all humans have in common with each other and with every other living organism. Current scientific theory supposes that protists, the first multi-cellular organisms, developed as a result of prokaryotes (unicellular beings) consuming each other. In fact, Mitochondria, the prokaryotic power cores of eukaryotic cells (multi-cellular beings) power humans and all other animals on the most basic level. As descendants of cannibalistic bacterium, we possess, down to our very core, primal, insatiable needs; needs that when untended result in violent, desperate behavior. Corporations follow the same patterns. They are powered by lesser organisms (workers) and consume each other, often for the purposes of diversity; they exhaust resources to preserve their will.
Despite their legal standing, the very truth of the matter is that corporations are not people. As described in "The Corporation", companies are fictitious beings that have been afforded the legal rights of a human being. Because companies are legally bound to do nothing but increase their shareholder's profit margins – that is, because companies are able to enter into a contractual relationship with individual investors – they have been structured in the following manner to extract maximal profits from consumers.
Steps for corporate success:
1. Create an artificial scarcity or insufficiency by obtaining a monopoly or near monopoly on a commodity
2. Raise public interest to want a return to plenty, a return to balance
3. Charge the public for access to that artificially scarce commodity once you are sure they are willing to pay more
Literature is only subversive if you don't understand it. Literature becomes much less impressive if you are able to create it for yourself.
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