Corporations & sponsorship

In August, PN learned for the first time of PUMA Peace, one of the sponsors of the World Peace Festival 2011, which took place 20-27 August in Berlin (no one invited us!). Yes, that’s Puma as in the sportswear company. “Peace starts with me” is a new annual PUMA Peace commission, launched with seven short online films from international artists and filmmakers. Jochen Zeitz, CEO of the sportswear group, said: “At PUMA we feel that we are uniquely positioned to contribute to making the world a…

In July of this year, following exhibitions in Llangollen and Carmarthen, there was an exhibition of Emily Johns’ prints “Conscious Oil” at the environment centre in Swansea. These pictures have a dramatic impact on most people who see them, and have prompted debate throughout the sustainability movement in South-West Wales.

On 22 July the exhibition was accompanied by talks by Aghogho Okpako on the oil spills in the Niger Delta and the "Wild Law" barrister Polly Higgins on the need…

In Ireland, the Rossport Solidarity Camp has had a busy summer, with regular blockades of Shell’s efforts to complete the next section of their Corrib Gas Project. During a week of action in July, Shell managed to complete just 40 truck movements – as opposed to the expected 159 every day. The project is already a decade late and three times over budget.

On 16 October 1985 (international World Food Day), London Greenpeace -- an independent, anarchist/anti-militarist group originally set up in 1971 by people around Peace News -- launched an annual international day of action against "McDonald's and all they stand for."

The group's leaflets brought together criticisms of McDonald's business practices made by different movements in relation to the environment, workers' rights, cash crops and world trade, nutrition, advertising to…

Greg Muttitt’s first solo book follows on from joint projects with socio-environmental arts project Platform, taking on the oil industry, British foreign policy past and present, market dynamics, and the grassroots impact of big powers at play. With this book we see Muttitt shifting into top gear, drawing on the interdisciplinary analysis and corporate super-sleuthing he’s honed over the past 15 years with Platform and Corporate Watch (which he helped co-found) to navigate the neo-con, neo-…

According to a recently leaked CBI memo, minister for the cabinet office Francis Maude told the Confederation of British Industry that there would not be wholesale privatisation because: “The government was not prepared to run the political risk of fully transferring services to the private sector with the result that they could be accused of being naïve or allowing excess profitmaking by private sector firms.”
“Political risk” is a euphemism for “public protest”.

In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, president Eisenhower warned that the US “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex.”

In this book investigative journalist Solomon Hughes updates Eisenhower’s advice for the 21st century, noting that we now face an increasingly powerful “security-industrial complex”.

Since 9/11, Hughes argues, private companies have played a growing role in the “war on terror”. Through extensive…

The privatisation of so much of the US military machine has been more than just a subplot of the Iraq war, and Jeremy Scahill's comprehensive study of the rise of mercenary company Blackwater is a useful guide to the reconfigured military-industrial complex the anti-war movement now faces.

Blackwater was founded by Christian conservative Erik Prince in 1997 to meet the “anticipated demand for outsourcing” in the US military.

From a relatively low-key initial training role, it…

Last year myself and filmmaker Mayyasa Al-Malazi spent several weeks interviewing and filming people involved in the Shell to Sea campaign, including the Rossport Solidarity Camp, in the region of Erris, county Mayo, south-west Ireland. We got to know and love the area and had the privilege of being welcomed by a warm and open-hearted local community, who until recently led quite settled and tranquil lives. (“We used to be so boring...” they laugh,”Now the telephone hardly stops ringing…

It is a pity that books such as Blood Money have to be written. However, as long as such national hubris exists to prompt the current level of almost unimaginable mismanagement that is prevalent in Iraq today, then it as well that such misdeeds are put under the harshest, most thorough possible, public scrutiny. Any reader of this book should also be grateful that it is written by as competent and thorough an investigative journalist as Christian Miller, a Los Angeles Times staffer…

The big shopping splurge of the year is upon us. Are we buying war and injustice for gifts and ourselves? It is time to consider the implications of our shopping habits. Around the world people are speaking though their wallets: boycotts and ethical buying are powerful tools.

First of all, we can support international boycotts of corporations embedded in war and oppression. The global boycott of corporations that support the war in Iraq was launched in 2004 at the World Social Forum…

Recently I had the pleasure of seeing Syed Aamir Raza once again. Aamir used to work for Nestle, the world's largest food company and the target of an international boycott because of its aggressive marketing of baby milk.

Aamir had been a Medical Delegate for Nestle in Pakistan, responsible for a circuit of 200 doctors to whom he presented company products. He was good at his job, congratulated for hitting sales targets and earning his bonuses. Then one day while he was visiting…

It's spring - and a young activist's thoughts naturally turn towards... company AGMs. Yes, it's that time of year again, when most of the major corporations hold their shareholders' meetings, and when the most probing questions at these events always seem to come from the smallest shareholders.

This year's Rio Tinto AGM, at the high-security Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster on 12 April, saw a group of nominal shareholders challenging the company about…

Well darlings, the object of our desire this month is not a person, it's a concept. Oooh. An advertising concept. Aaaaah. It is - wait for it - “Beyond Petroleum”.

We've all seen it on billboards, we've seen it in magazines. It's the ever so post postmodern advertising solution that BP is using to convince us all that, oh no, they don't do oil any more. Oil is ever so last century darling. What use would the company formerly known as “Anglo Iranian” have for fossil fuels? It's all…

On 10 November, nine nooses were hung outside the London Shell headquarters, paralleling the hangings of activist-author Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his Ogoni colleagues on 10 November 1995. The nine were arrested in Nigeria and held without charges, tortured, and eventually sentenced to death for their peaceful efforts to bring Shell's exploitation of the Ogoni people to light.

At his trial, Saro-Wiwa wrote for his closing testimony, “I and my colleagues are not the only ones on…