tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva:

obliviouspsychic:

tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva:

speaking of amazon, it wasn’t the only company to threaten employees if they didn’t leave before the storm. this needs to be a discussion as much as climate change. people were fucking locked in factories and warehouses. we should never look at the triangle shirtwaist factory fire as a mistake of the past…corporations don’t change when they don’t have to.

i edit video lectures for a university as my job, and i’m currently editing a PR course. the lecturer is a PR agent and naturally VERY good at twisting words to bend the truth. she was talking about PR history and at one point said “In the early 1900s, business were being forced to submit to more government regulation and they encountered hostile criticism from the press.” immediately before describing the triangle shirtwaist factory fire as the point when “corporations realized that deception, manipulation, and self-serving half-truths were inappropriate to media challenges.” as IF lmao. then she used the ludlow massacre as an example of a ~good~ PR agent convincing mr. rockefeller to talk to the press and change his ways, ending the section by saying rockefeller went down in history as “one of the greatest philanthropists of all time.”

immediately after that she started talking about the next stage of PR, epitomized by edward bernays who she first lifts up by saying how cool it was that he convinced americans to eat bacon for breakfast and that’s super widespread now, before adding at the end that he was also the guy who engineered mass marketing cigarettes to women in the 20s. but this guy is totally a good person! because “he was haunted by this campaign later in life, when he became aware of the dangers of tobacco use.”

and the entire time i’m editing all of this the only thing i can think about is that amazon warehouse and how this woman definitely knows about stuff like that because it’s her job to mitigate what she calls “reputation crises;” whenever she brings up horrible labor abuses or massacres she always does it with the intent of lifting up the PR agents whose job it was to lie to the public and try to regain the corporation’s reputation, at the same time as she’s saying the unethical days of PR are behind us lmao

reminds me of this article

https://news.yahoo.com/bloody-birth-corporate-pr-080000599.html

The Bloody Birth of Corporate PR

Madison Avenue got its start because of a gruesome massacre in the Rocky Mountains.

news.yahoo.com