Just in time for holiday cookouts, the Washington Post has a story about uproar over watering down the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s organic label.

It chronicles questions about the purity of the USDA Organic stamp that can be found on everything from t-shirts, cosmetics and pet food to the hamburgers and corn on the cob enjoyed at the typical All-American Independence Day bash. The Post story inquires: Has the country's preeminent organic label become tainted by the influences of factory farmers and food processing giants? Do products bearing the stamp no longer meet national standards? 

Pressing as those questions may be they are hardly the only controversies surrounding “healthy” and “green” claims used to sell products that have swept into our supermarkets and discount stores in the last couple of years.

TerraChoice, an environmental marketing firm, has published a review of 2,219 consumer product claims. It found that 98 percent of the items had false or misleading advertisements on their labels. 

The Consumers Union is also hard at work debunking falsely “green” advertising. Its Eco-Labels Center is a clearinghouse of more and less “meaningful” labels and standards. Decisions are based on a few things: Are the claims verified? Is the information consistent and available to the public? Are the labels free of influence by the companies hawking the merchandize?

"You can have good labels and standards that are not independent. But they tend to have more bias and cater more to the lowest common denominator. And, third-party verification means nothing when the label is made by a trade association,” Consumers Union senior scientist Urvashi Rangan, told me this spring for an article in ArchitectureWeek about the National Association of Home Builders new greenwashing green building labels.

While it may not seem exactly shocking to learn industry groups sometimes fudge the facts to sell more goods, a surprising number of greenwashing scandals involve the very government agencies charged with protecting the public.

The Federal Trade Commission “crackdown” on greenwashing has been less than robust. Since the FTC launched its green advertising overhaul last year, pitifully few companies have been called on the carpet. Even the Environmental Leader, a “green business” website, reacted with a Jun. 20 editorial that screamed: FTC on Greenwashing: Is That All There Is? And, EL is a publication that never saw a green business initiative it didn’t like.

Today’s Post story centers on the unilateral decision of one USDA bureaucrat to lift a ban on synthetic additives in “organic” baby food. The same official issued 2004 directives allowing farmers to sometimes use pesticides on organic crops and feed non-organic fish meal to organic livestock. Both of the 2004 decisions caused maelstroms and were later overturned, as the Post rehashes today.

Created in 2002, the USDA Organic label was intended to put an end to such controversies by establishing firm rules for what could be sold as “organic.” But, there are big bucks in the balance – the market has grown to about $24 billion a year. The label has become a battlefield pitting the farmers and purist consumers, who pioneered the organics market, against corporate giants like Kraft Foods, Campbell Soup and Dean Foods that are drawn to the double-digit growth rates and premium prices.

Even the Environmental Protection Agency has been implicated in greenwashing. Until the new administration pulled the plug, the EPA ran a special program that rewarded hundreds of companies with fewer inspections and laxer hazardous waste disposal requirements. Participants were portrayed as having impressive pollution-busting policies. But they included some of the biggest polluters in the country; companies that had paid millions of dollars in EPA fines.

First, this just came in from one of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Yahoo groups: Beware of the telephone shysters posing as sales reps for the FBI. No, silly! Not the real Federal Bureau of Investigation. This one's an alleged alarm company peddling “free” security systems. The pitch starts off saying "you live in a high crime statistics area" and offers a free home alarm system in exchange for letting the company put an FBI sign on your lawn. It’s the latest twist in alarm system scams.

AFTER THE JUMP: More on D.C. confidence schemes and Obama's plans to take down abusive consumer lenders.

For weeks, reports of shady looking traveling salesmen have been burning up neighborhood listservs.  More than a few residents reported unnerving visits from alleged alarm company reps going door to door. These guys demand to be let inside homes to see if the systems needed upgrading. Needless to say not too many street-smart District residents have fallen for this one (um, or perhaps we've only heard from the folks who told the grifters to clear off.)

Well, anyway, those ruses are in no way unique. It turns out the country is awash confidence schemes. The Federal Trade Commission says thousands of people have been swindled out of millions of dollars since the economic downturn began. 

Today, the agency announced a crackdown on scammers who have hoodwinked consumers with get-rich-quick plans, imaginary government grants, and fraudulent debt-reduction opportunities, among other things.

The enforcement crackdown involves dozens of cases brought by the FTC, the Department of Justice and law enforcers here in the District and at least 13 states. At today’s press conference, officials even trotted out “a Washington, D.C. job seeker who was conned by a company that made false promises of maintenance and janitorial work.”

I missed the webcast, so I have no more details on our very own District victim. But it sounds like he or she may have been duped by Wagner Ramos Borges, one of several alleged criminal masterminds picked up in the nationwide sweep, officially dubbed: “Operation Short Change.”

Ramos Borges allegedly advertised janitorial jobs in area newspapers and online sites. But once applicants responded, he would trick them into paying $98 apiece for bogus “certified registration number” cards. Those cards were supposed to land them jobs with one of the front companies he operated. But the jobs didn’t exist, officials say.

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As for the perfectly legal scams run by banks, the Obama Administration is taking them on too. The Department of the Treasury forwarded a proposal to Congress yesterday that would establish a new agency to oversee home mortgages and other consumer lending. Click here for the press release discussing the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The administration says the new outfit would shield consumers from lending abuses like those that led to the financial sector’s current travails.

According to today’s Washington Post, the banking industry is in revolt over the plan, saying it would allow the government to meddle too much into its business; but lawmakers may have a hard time voting against it without looking like corporate sellouts.

The maker of the caffeinated schnapps Wide Eye has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that its advertisements were “deceptive, unsubstantiated, and in violation of federal law.”

Coming in flavors like Pomegranate Spice, Cherry Bomb and Mango Chill, Wide Eye is one of many alcoholic energy drinks that started turning up in liquor stories in the last year or so. But the FTC says its maker, Constellation Brands Inc., has no credible evidence to back up claims that the liqueur as a great way to get a buzz on without losing your edge.

“The truth is that alcohol and caffeine could be a dangerous mix, and a claim like that can have very serious consequences,” says Eileen Harrington, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

FTC officials have been on a roll recently. On Tuesday, they nabbed Kmart Corp. and two other companies for greenwashing. All three were charged with making “false and unsubstantiated claims” that paper plates, paper towels and moist wipes that they sold were biodegradable.