Battling Big Business
Countering greenwash, infiltration and other forms of corporate deception
Contents
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Part One - Corporate Bullying
A. Keeping Up Appearances
2. BP: beyond petroleum?
BP provides an extreme
example of greenwash. While rebranding itself as an energy company by replacing
its old logo with a "vibrant sunburst of green, white and yellow"
and installing solar panels on its service stations, the oil company did not
hesitate to cooperate with paramilitary forces in Colombia.
Enlighted environmentalism and caring for human rights are not on the same
agenda.
3. Dialogue: Divide and Rule
In the past few years, companies have set up
forums between environmentalists and the biotech, oil, mining and nuclear
industries. Stakeholder consultation can be seen as the start of a systematic
attempt by transnational corporations to redefine themselves as operating
for the common good, not profit, while dividing the opposition. What are the
effects of these dialogues between businesses and their moderate critics?
4. The Sponsorship Scam
Corporations manufacture lesson-building kits for schoolchildren to get a
head start on implanting their brands into young minds. They also engage in
"sponsorship" of environmentalism. This can lead to conflicts of interest
such as the WWF accepting people from Shell on its board.
5. The Greens Get Eaten
Environmentalism, like almost everything else, is in danger of being swallowed
by the corporate leviathan. If this happens, it will disappear without trace.
No one threatens its survival as much as the greens who have taken the company
shilling.
B. Behind the Façade
6. Krafting a Smokescreen
Philip Morris strives to polish its image with investors, while launching a
global lobbying effort to undermine a World Health Organization treaty on tobacco
control. INFACT, the corporate watchdog, explains how Philip Morris hired PR
consultant Burson-Marsteller to counter the effects of their boycott campaign.
7. Joint Forces
After successful campaigns and rallies against the MAI and WTO, disgruntled
companies formed coalitions to quash these unwelcome threats to their economic
interests. This chapter analyses the panic that broke out after successful
Internet campaigns and real live rallies (Seatlle!) at the turn of the century.
8. Using Libel Laws to Silence Critics
Long before the McLibel court case, McDonald's proved willing to use British
libel laws to censor the media. Major media players chose to give in after
just one threatening letter from the hamburger giant. Even after the McLibel
trial exposed this, the makers of a documentary about the trial encountered
reluctance by major broadcasting corporations to air the film on national
TV.
C. Undercover Operations
10. Garbology: Activist Trash as Corporate
Treasure
A self-proclaimed activist collected wastepaper at about thirty third-world
and activist movement offices in the Netherlands. Careful research in 1994
revealed how a private security firm had recycled original documents and failed
copies into files on campaigners and their organizations. Content filtered
from the wastepaper surfaced at strategic moments in right-wing newspapers
or on multinationals' desks.
Part Two - Battling Big Business
14. Investigating & exposing
The author of Secrets & Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-environmental PR Campaign
describes the investigative reporter's quest for whistleblowers. This book
exposed a campaign promoting rainforest logging run by the British-based public
relations company Shandwick at the behest of the New Zealand government -
the aim was to "neutralize" environmentalists opposed to logging. About the
research that made the book.
15. Digging Up Astroturf
Bogus environmental organizations present themselves as concerned citizens
while carrying out a corporate agenda. This use of front groups-called "astroturf,"
as opposed to grassroots, movements-has moved into Europe. In Germany the
conventional and nuclear power industries were caught orchestrating a series
of local campaigns against windmills. The chapter looks at the difficulties
of exposing such schemes.
16. Obstructing the Mainstream: Lessons from
Seattle
A practical report from the inside on how the Battle of Seattle and Washington
protests were organized, including the growth and development of inspiring
initiatives like ATTAC and the Ruckus Society. Countering the critique on
the devaluation of the effectiveness of protests against world gatherings
(repetition is boring), this chapter should serve as a reference guide for
future happenings.
17. Communications Guerillas
This practical guide to deconstructing media strategies, written by media
manipulators in the tradition of the Communication Guerilla Handbook, is based
on a concept of politics which tries to understand the ways communication
functions between corporations/polticians and the public and offers lots of
possibilities to influence or divert it. Read about the advantages of not
restricting oneself to traditional declarations and other usual forms of militancy.
18. Virtual Sabotage
On line demonstration aims not to cause maximum damage, but to be a symbolic
act of compression: the long-awaited and long-desired synchronization of the
online and the offline. The Lufthansa Deportation Class Netstrike analysed
as a case of virtual sabotage.
19. Net.activism
Core net activists are confronted with key issues like: How can the Net be
used best for campaigning? Should the focus be on spreading counterinformation
or founding alternative networks? Should it be aimed at spreading content
or connecting to confrontations at street level? Should we keep exploring
the back alleys of the Net? And how much should we worry about the consolidation
of free zones in the face of the potential rise of the dotcoms?
Afterword: the Pandora Project
The making of this book has unearthed a lot of material and sources on corporate
counterstrategies. In order to expand the reach of the book, we intend to
make available much of the research done for it. This idea started as an initiative
to shine a spotlight on the public relations industry: Opening Pandora's Box.
The main goal of the Pandora Project is to compile an online database of corporate
counterstrategies.
Pandora, being too curious
for her own good,
opens a forbidden box, and all the Evils of mankind fly out...
Similarly, the Pandora Project intends to crack open the PR industry
and spread its noxious secrets to people everywhere.
Index