»	WELCOME

»	AN INTRODUCTION

»	PROFILES

»	LM WATCH

»	CONTACT

»	LOBBYWATCH LINKS

Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy (23/8/2007)

1.Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy - Claire Robinson
2.The Fake Parade - Jonathan Matthews

NOTE: Item 2 gives a flavour of the material in the biotech chapter of Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy.
---

1.Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy
Edited by William Dinan and David Miller
Pluto Press, 2007 (Available http://www.spinwatch.org) Review by Claire Robinson

The premise of Miller and Dinan's book, laid out in the Introduction, is that PR was created to "take the risk" out of democracy. They point out that PR is overwhelmingly carried out for vested interests, mostly corporations, and that it is not open and transparent about its means or its clients. In its drive to persuade the people that the corporate interest is identical with the public interest, it relies on misinformation, lies, and dirty tricks. One common tactic is the "third-party" technique, in which seemingly independent people or organizations are used to spread a corporate message. The third parties do not disclose their funding or affiliations, and much of the public (and, I'd add, much of the media) has a "blind spot" that prevents them from looking behind the mouthpiece to the source.

Miller and Dinan hope that their book will shine a light into some of the dark corners of covert corporate influence. To that end, it brings together 16 chapters by different writers and activists describing some of the ways in which corporations have deceptively used PR and spin to subvert democracy and work against the public interest. Some of these are summarized below:

***Eveline Lubbers describes how arms company British Aerospace paid spies to infiltrate the NGO Campaign Against the Arms Trade when CAAT was opposing the company's plan to sell jets to Indonesia. CAAT had argued that the Indonesian government would use the jets to crush resistance in East Timor. The infiltrator tried to manipulate CAAT in the direction of more violent protests, a tactic which fortunately did not succeed because of the Quaker pacifist origins of the group. The private company that did the spying boasted back in 1996 that they had a database of 148,900 "known names" of CND members, trade unionists, activists and environmentalists.

***David Miller tells the story of how industry interests, with their friends in government, twisted and tried to discredit research casting doubt on the food safety of farmed Scottish salmon. The research found that the salmon contained dangerously high levels of toxic PCBs, but the message that reached the public after the corporate spin doctors had done their job was that the salmon was perfectly safe to eat.

*** In his chapter, "Biotech's Fake Persuaders", GM Watch's Jonathan Matthews show how corporate interests are using the poor and disenfranchised as fronts to push the pro-GMO message.

***Andy Rowell recounts how oil company Exxon paid lobby groups, think-tanks and front organizations (which did not disclose their corporate affiliations and funding) to cast doubt on manmade climate change, thus disrupting the formation of coherent government policy to combat it. Several of these organizations, including the Institute of Economic Affairs and the International Policy Network, will be familiar to GM Watch subscribers as also having promoted GMOs.

***Olivier Hoedeman tells how Brussels is packed with over 15,000 corporate lobbyists who influence and even write EU policy on matters that affect us all, but who do not have to disclose details of their funding or activities.

***William Clark gives his account of how from the mid-1980s, the US led a concerted campaign to promote a pro-US, pro-corporate orientation among policy makers in Britain. The campaign involved the setting up of supposedly independent think-tanks that co-opted the principles and rhetoric of the political Left for US and corporate interests. These think-tanks pushed neoconservative free market policies into the traditionally socialist Labour Party. They did an effective job in filleting out Labour's old Left sympathies, to such an extent that before the 1997 election, British voters were treated to the sight of "New Labour" leading lights reassuring the CEOs of major corporations that a Labour government would not rock the boat for big business. The right-wing co-option of Labour created a situation in which British voters have a false choice between one lot of neocons or the other lot of neocons (my conclusion, not Clark's).

Despite such fascinating material, Miller and Dinan's book is a bit of a curate's egg, good in parts but... In some places, for instance, it seems that both the books' sociologist editors and the publisher's in-house editors could have worked harder to bring clarity to over-complex passages. Also, while some of the articles are impeccably referenced (stand up, Miller, Matthews and Rowell), there are some serious omissions which the editors should have picked up on. A case in point is Clark's assertion that Shell is "a major Demos funder". This is sufficiently controversial to deserve a reference.

I also found that one or two of the chapters raised more questions than they seemed to answer. In Lubbers' chapter, for instance, we're told that even after the man who infiltrated CAAT had been exposed as a paid spy, he was still able to go on working for the Disarm DSEi campaign. There's an obvious question here, but seemingly, it wasn't asked. This chapter also left me wanting more information and advice from the spied-upon NGOs themselves. Presumably, they learned bitter lessons from the experience, but we are not told what they are. This would be useful to know since, as Lubbers notes, an all-too-common response to the possibility of infiltration is paralysis.

These are, however, relatively minor cavils given the scope and depth of the investigations carried out by the writers of this book. Without their painstaking research, much of what is detailed here would have remained, as it was always intended to be, hidden from public view.

Miller and Dinan conclude their book by calling for an end to privileged access to government by corporate interests. To this end, they want legislation enforcing transparency for lobby groups of all persuasions. Corporations would have to declare which think-tanks, institutes, and front groups they fund. "Third-party" lobbying would be made illegal. Exposing the truth about corporate spin and deception, point out Miller and Dinan, will roll back corporate power and lead to democratic renewal.
...

Claire Robinson is an editor at GM Watch

---

2.The Fake Parade
BY JONATHAN MATTHEWS
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=254

"Carrying his placard the man in front of me was clearly one of the poorest of the poor. His shoes were not only threadbare, they were tattered, merely rags barely being held together."

So begins a graphic description of a demonstration that took place at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg. The protesters were "mainly poor, virtually all black, and mostly women... street traders and farmers" with an unpalatable message. As an article in a South African periodical put it, "Surely this must have been the environmentalists' worst nightmare. Real poor people marching in the streets and demanding development while opposing the eco-agenda of the Green Left."

And seldom can the views of the poor, in this case a few hundred demonstrators, have been paid so much attention. Articles highlighting the Johannesburg march popped up the world over, in Africa, North America, India, Australia and Israel. In Britain even The Times ran a commentary, under the heading, "I do not need white NGOs to speak for me".

With the summit's passing, the Johannesburg march, far from fading from view, has taken on a still deeper significance. In the November issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, Val Giddings, a Vice President of the Biotech Industry Organization (BIO), argues that the event marked "something new, something very big" that will make us "look back on Johannesburg as something of a watershed event--a turning point." What made the march so pivotal, he said, was that for the very first time, "real, live, developing-world farmers" were "speaking for themselves" and challenging the "empty arguments of the self-appointed individuals who have professed to speak on their behalf."

To help give them a voice, Giddings singles out the statement of one of the marchers, Chengal Reddy, leader of the Indian Farmers Federation. "Traditional organic farming...," Reddy says, "led to mass starvation in India for centuries... Indian farmers need access to new technologies and especially to biotechnologies."

Giddings also notes that the farmers expressed their contempt for the "empty arguments" of many of the Earth Summiteers by honoring them with a "Bullshit Award" made from two varnished piles of cow dung. The award was given, in particular, to the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, for her role in "advancing policies that perpetuate poverty and hunger"

A powerful rebuke, no doubt. But if anyone deserves the cow dung, it is the President of BIO, for almost every element of the spectacle he describes has been carefully contrived and orchestrated. Take, for instance, Chengal Reddy, the "farmer" that Giddings quotes. Reddy is not a poor farmer, nor even the representative of poor farmers. Indeed, there is precious little to suggest he is even well-disposed towards the poor. The "Indian Farmers Federation" that he leads is a lobby of big commercial farmers in Andhra Pradesh. On occasion Reddy has admitted to knowing very little about farming, having never farmed in his life. He is, in reality, a politician and businessman whose family are a prominent right-wing political force in Andhra Pradesh--his father having coined the saying, "There is only one thing Dalits (members of the untouchable caste) are good for, and that is being kicked".

If it seems open to doubt that Reddy was in Johannesburg to help the poor speak for themselves, the identity of the march's organizers is also not a source of confidence. Although the Times' headline said "I do not need white NGOs to speak for me", the media contact on the organizers' press release was "Kendra Okonski", the daughter of a US lumber industrialist who has worked for various right wing anti-regulatory NGOs--all funded and directed, needless to say, by "whites". These include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based "think tank" whose multi-million dollar budget comes from major US corporations, among them BIO member Dow Chemicals. Okonski also runs the website Counterprotest.net, where her specialty is helping right wing lobbyists take to the streets in mimicry of popular protesters.

Given this, it hardly needs saying that Giddings' "Bullshit Award" was far from, as he suggests, the imaginative riposte of impoverished farmers to India's most celebrated environmentalist. It was, in fact, the creation of another right-wing pressure group--the Liberty Institute--based in New Delhi and well known for its fervent support of deregulation, GM crops and Big Tobacco.

The Liberty Institute is part of the same network that organized the rally: the deceptively-named "Sustainable Development Network." In London, the SDN shares offices, along with many of its key personnel--including Okonski--with the International Policy Network, a group whose Washington address just happens to be that of the CEI. The SDN is run by Julian Morris, its ubiquitous director, who also claims the title of Environment and Technology Programme Director for the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank that has advocated, amongst other interesting ideas, that African countries be sold off to multinational corporations in the interests of "good government".

The involvement of the likes of Morris, Okonski and Reddy doesn't mean, of course, that no "real poor people," were involved in the Johannesburg march. There were indeed poor people there. James MacKinnon, who reported on the summit for the North American magazine Adbusters, witnessed the march first hand and told of seeing many impoverished street traders, who seemed genuinely aggrieved with the authorities for denying them their usual trading places in the streets around the summit. The flier distributed by the march organizers to recruit these people played on this grievance, and presented the march as a chance to demand, "Freedom to trade". The flier made no mention of "biotechnology" or "development", nor any other issue on the "eco-agenda of the Green Left".

For all that, there were some real farmers present as well. Mackinnon says he spotted some wearing anti-environmentalist t-shirts, with slogans like "Stop Global Whining." This aroused his curiousity, since small-scale African farmers are not normally to be found among those jeering the "bogus science" of climate change. Yet here they were, with slogans on placards and T-shirts: "Save the Planet from Sustainable Development", "Say No To Eco-Imperialism", "Greens: Stop Hurting the Poor" and "Biotechnology for Africa". On approaching the protesters, however, Mackinnon discovered that all of the props had been made available to the marchers by the organizers. When he tried to converse with some of the farmers about their pro-GM T-shirts, "They smiled shyly; none of them could speak or read English."

Another irresistible question is how impoverished farmers--according to Giddings, there were farmers on the march from five different countries--afforded the journey to Johannesburg from lands as far away as the Philippines and India. Here, too, there is reason for suspicion. In late 1999 the New York Times reported that a street protest against genetic engineering outside an FDA public hearing in Washington DC was disrupted by a group of African-Americans carrying placards such as "Biotech saves children's lives" and "Biotech equals jobs." The Times learned that Monsanto's PR company, Burston-Marsteller, had paid a Baptist Church from a poor neighborhood to bus in these "demonstrators" as part of a wider campaign "to get groups of church members, union workers and the elderly to speak in favor of genetically engineered foods."

The industry's fingerprints are all over Johannesburg as well. Chengal Reddy, the "farmer" that the President of BIO singled out as an example of farmers from the poorer world "speaking for themselves", has for at least a decade featured prominently in Monsanto's promotional work in India. Other groups represented on the march, including AfricaBio, have also been closely aligned with Monsanto's lobbying for its products. Reddy is known to have been brought to Johannesburg by AfricaBio.

And here lies the real key to the President of BIO's account of the march, and specifically to the attack on Vandana Shiva. Monsanto and BIO want to project an image of GM crop acceptance with a Southern face. That's why Monsanto's Internet homepage used to be adorned with the faces of smiling Asian children. So when an Indian critic of the biotech industry gets featured, as Shiva was recently, on the cover of Time magazine as an environmental hero, the brand is under attack, and has to be protected.

The counterattack takes place via a contrarian lens, one that projects the attackers' vices onto their target. Thus the problem becomes not Monsanto using questionable tactics to push its products onto a wary South, but malevolent agents of the rich world obstructing Monsanto's acceptance in a welcoming Third World. For this reason the press release for the "Bullshit Award" accuses Shiva, amongst other things, of being "a mouthpiece of western eco-imperialism". The media contact for this symbolic rejection of neocolonialism? The American, Kendra Okonski. The mouthpiece denouncing an Indian environmentalist as an agent of the West is a...Western mouthpiece.

The careful framing of the messages and the actors in the rally in Johannesburg provides but one particularly gaudy spectacle in a continuing fake parade. In particular, the Internet provides a perfect medium for such showcases, where the gap between the virtual and the real is easily erased.

Take the South-facing website Foodsecurity.net, which promotes itself as "the web's most complete source of news and information about global food security concerns and sustainable agricultural practices". Foodsecurity.net claims to be "an independent, non-profit coalition of people throughout the world". Despite its global reach, however, Foodsecurity.net's only named staff member is its "African Director", Dr. Michael Mbwille, a Tanzanian doctor who's forever penning articles defending Monsanto and attacking the likes of Greenpeace.

The news and information at Foodsecurity.net is largely pro-GM articles, often vituperative in content and boasting headlines like "The Villainous Vandana Shiva" or "Altered Crops Called Boon for Poor". When one penetrates beyond the news pages, the content is very limited. A single message graces the messageboard posted by an [email protected];the domain name of The Bivings Group, an internet PR company that numbers Monsanto among its clients. There's also an event posting from an Andura Smetacek, recently identified in an article in The Guardian as an e-mail front used by Monsanto to run a campaign of character assassination against its scientific and environmental critics.

The site is registered to a Graydon Forrer, currently the managing director of Life Sciences Strategies, a company that specializes in "communications programmes" for the bio-science industries. A piece of information that is not usually disclosed in Graydon Forrer's self-presentation is that he was previously Monsanto's director of executive communications. Indeed, he seems to have been working for the company in 1999--the same year the site of this "independent, non-profit coalition of people throughout the world" was first registered. Foodsecurity's "African Director", Dr. Mbwille, is not, incidentally, in Africa at the moment. He is enjoying a sabbatical observing medical practice in St. Louis, Missouri--the home town, as it happens, of the Monsanto Corporation.

Foodsecurity.net forms but one of a whole series of websites with undisclosed links to biotech industry lobbyists or PR companies, as our previous research has demonstrated. But despite the virtual circus oscillating about him, if the BIO Vice President were really interested in hearing poor "live, developing-world farmers... speaking for themselves", he need look no further than Chengal Reddy's home state of Andhra Pradesh. Here small-scale farmers and landless laborers were consulted as part of a meticulously conducted "citizens' jury" on World Bank-backed proposals to industrialize local agriculture and introduce GM crops. Having heard all sides of the argument, including as it happens the views of Chengal Reddy, the jury unanimously rejected these proposals, which are likely to force more than 100,000 people off the land. Similar citizens' juries on GM crops in Brazil and in the Indian state of Karnataka have come to similar conclusions--something that BIO's Vice President is almost certainly aware of.

But rainchecks on the real views of the poor count for little in a world where "something new, something very big" and "a turning point" in the global march towards our corporate future, turns out to be Monsanto's soapbox behind a black man's face.