Heroes of the planet?
BY SEAN HEALY
The scene could be the boardroom of any major corporation: long teak table, leather seats, grey suits, million-dollar views - and an air of suppressed panic. "Gentlemen, we have a problem. Our market research indicates our target audience associates us with exploitation and environmental destruction. We have to design a campaign to rescue our brand name and win back their trust."
Public relations has long been standard business operating procedure (although in the 1920s it was more honestly called "corporate propaganda" by its purveyors). But now, infuriated by the pinpricks of thousands of opponents, companies' PR has taken on a more shrill edge. Its motives questioned, its pet projects stymied, the corporation is fighting back: to convince you it's a "corporate good citizen".
Running the world's economy isn't enough, apparently. The truly "modern" transnational has to crown itself the champion of all social progress, the vanquisher of poverty, the slayer of the dragon of social disharmony and the protector of cute little puppy dogs.
Welcome to the world of "issue management": in which mainstream media outlets run news items straight off company press releases, in which "independent" monitoring boards, research institutes, even "grassroots campaign groups" are set up and funded to trot out the line, in which grand announcements of shiny new charitable initiatives and voluntary codes of conduct are made to distract from unseemly facts.
Image transfer
The central concept of contemporary PR is "image transfer". The brand name stinks and the company knows it, so it seeks to rub itself against anything with a scent more pleasing to the public, in the hope some of it will rub off.
The biggest such instance happened barely two weeks ago. On July 26, in the United Nations' chambers in New York, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and leaders of some of the world's largest multinationals signed the Global Compact, a vaguely worded nine-point declaration which "commits" signatories to respect human rights, labour standards and the environment.
Its 50 corporate signatories include clothing giant Nike, Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto, GE food manufacturer Novartis and oil multinational Shell, all of which have long, hideous records of breaching the very same standards they're now promising to uphold.
UN assistant secretary-general John Ruggie was effusive. "It's about making the world a better place", he beamed, even while admitting, "This is not a code of conduct and the UN has neither the mandate nor the capacity to verify compliance".
Anti-corporate campaigners were scathing, however. The compact "allows companies like Nike ... to wrap themselves in the UN flag without any binding commitment to change", said Joshua Karliner of the San Francisco-based Transnational Resource and Action Centre. "This will enhance the Nike brand name and could be a powerful marketing tool."
A coalition of 19 prominent representatives of non-government organisations, including Karliner, Greenpeace's Thilo Bode, the Transnational Institute's Susan George and the Third World Network's Martin Khor, signed a letter to Annan criticising the compact, dubbing it "bluewash", after the colour of the UN's flag.
Since proposing the Global Compact at the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 1999 annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Annan has been explicit about its aims: it's a rescue boat for capital.
He told a (no doubt grateful) audience at the American Chamber of Commerce: "As you know, globalisation is under intense pressure. And business is in the line of fire, seen by many as not doing enough in the areas of environment, labour standards and human rights. This may not seem fair, but it is a perception that will not go away unless business is seen to be committed to global corporate citizenship. The Global Compact offers a reasonable way out of this impasse."
UN involvement was sufficient to convince even some non-government organisations to transfer their images too: the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the World Wide Fund for Nature and Amnesty International all signed up.
While he was speaking of labour standards, Nike's "vice-president of corporate responsibility" Dusty Kidd could well have been talking of his company's image problems: "One thing we've learned the hard way is the sooner you start talking about these issues the sooner you get solutions". Nike was, quite rightly, ecstatic about the compact.
Appropriating causes
Image transfer applies not only to bodies, like the UN. It also applies to causes - and there's been a heady rush by corporations to appropriate and market their new-found social concern. The publicity surrounding each new announcement works wonders for the brand name; the devil, as always, is in the detail.
The world's largest telecommunications and computer companies, meeting as a special task force of the WEF, weighed in with one such scheme on July 21, at the G8 summit in Okinawa: a plan to bridge the "global digital divide" between the online First World and the offline Third World.
The divide is plain enough: most of the planet has never made or received a phone call, let alone surfed the net. The new technologies are as yet only entrenching the gap between the world's rich and poor.
Behind the fanfare, the "solutions" put forward by the WEF task force, which included AT&T, Cisco and Microsoft, would benefit few except the companies themselves. They boil down to renaming the "global digital divide" the "global digital opportunity" and enforcing Third World compliance with "pro-competitive" policies, including budget restraint, privatisation and implementation of World Trade Organisation agreements opening up Third World telecommunications industries to the multinationals.
India is pursuing these very same policies on telecommunications and has become the darling of the big companies. Internet usage and telephone connections are shooting up.
But, as New Delhi-based educationalist Kirti Jayaraman told the Inter Press Service on July 21, these policies are only replicating the "digital divide" inside India. The children of wealthy families go to English-language schools packed with computers, while those of the urban poor are expected to learn in schools which frequently don't even have roofs.
The US pharmaceutical company Merck is another eager to seize the high moral ground. It beat back suggestions that drug companies care more about their "intellectual property rights" than about the health of the poor. "We believe that high ethical standards will give us the edge in the long term", the company's CEO, Raymond Gilmartin, told the WEF's Davos 2000 conference.
The company seized the opportunity presented by the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, on July 14-19, to announce a joint initiative with the US government to fund US$1 billion of heavily discounted drugs to fight the AIDS pandemic in Africa.
South Africa's Business Day described the deal as "breathtaking in its disingenuousness". The deal discounts the cost of its combination anti-retroviral drug therapy from US$10,000 a year to $1000 a year (as though US$1000 is any more affordable for most South Africans than US$10,000); the US$1 billion is a commercial interest-bearing loan which simply adds to Africa's already massive debt burden; the involvement of the US's export credit agency ensures Merck gets paid no matter what (that's US$1 billion worth of drugs it probably could not have moved otherwise); and the deal helps justify the White House and drug companies' hard-line opposition to Third World countries manufacturing their own cheap, generic anti-AIDS drugs.
To make the company's cynicism even more palpable, its public affairs director admitted that Merck had paid an AIDS activist group to protest at the conference stall of its chief rival, Boehringer Ingelheim.
In other cases, companies haven't even bothered to design a wholesome-sounding initiative, they've just laid it on thick: like Ford's "Heroes of the planet" blitz or Shell's "Profits and principles" campaign.
Davos connection
It's no accident that the WEF appears, and reappears, at the centre of all this. In appropriate PR style, WEF founder Klaus Schwab has described the body as the "social conscience of the global economy" and champions the notion of "corporate good citizenship".
The WEF's meetings, its annual Davos summit in particular, attract thousands of business leaders, senior politicians, academics and editorialists. With a guaranteed favourable audience and tightly controlled media coverage, they've become the launch-pad for many such PR campaigns. They're a chance for CEOs to showcase their latest initiatives, swap tips with their colleagues and workshop united responses to touchy subjects.
The forum's Asia-Pacific summit, scheduled for Melbourne, September 11-13, will follow the trend. A big topic for discussion will be bridging the "global digital divide", and the big companies are no doubt already preparing their contribution to spinning the deregulation of the telecommunications industry as a good thing for the region's poor.
There's more to it than that, though. The forum is now a major venue for ensuring consensus within the world's ruling elite. And that consensus is simple: we need better "issue management" of the biggest issue of them all, corporate domination of almost every facet of social and economic life.
So while the global wave of protests against the institutions of capitalist rule is getting stronger, the elite have a wave of their own coming: a propaganda wave to convince all of us of the virtues of capitalism. Above all, they have to rescue the brand name.
[Visit Green Left Weekly's new S11 web site at <http://www.greenleft.org.au/globalaction/s11>.]