Rockefeller-influenced NGOs, or RINGOs, are arguably the Wall Street junta of the new green economy. As adept managers of advertising and public relations, RINGOs like 350 make regular use of techniques like branding to herd their followers. As such, social engineering by RINGOs, like the No KXL campaign, uses Mad Men methods to manipulate a mass audience.

As Cory Morningstar notes in Yes Logo: The McKibben-Klein Doctrine, 350 — Naomi Klein’s radical RINGO chariot — uses corporate branding developed for Obama (sunrise over stars and stripes) to create an attitude that generates a powerful subconscious feeling. This consumer psychology in our era of “accelerating social engineering,” says Morningstar, ‘embodies an emotional chimera of “hope” and “change” that we can choose to believe in.’ Attitude branding, she says, is “a very sophisticated and calculated method of indoctrination, perhaps one of the highest (and most subtle) forms of psychological manipulation/brainwashing.”

Ironically, notes Morningstar, the Obama brand utilized by 350 is a ‘compelling example of the indoctrinating attitude branding that Naomi Klein describes as “fetish strategy” in her 2000 book No Logo.’ In this way, owning the “change” ideology appropriated from Obama, Klein, notes Morningstar, ‘reinforced the illusion that this same iconic “change” is still sitting right in front of us, ours for the taking, if  only we believe.’