Tuesday, January 10, 2006

And the Award for Europe'’s worst lobby goes to...


/ deceivers / prized /
...Campaign for Creativity aka C4C, which according to the Corporate Europe Observatory,

...pretends to represent artists, musicians, designers, engineers and software developers. The texts on the C4C website give the impression that the authors are part of the creative sectors (www.campaignforcreativity.org). In reality, however, C4C is orchestrated by Campbell Gentry, a London-based public affairs firm (www.campbellgentry.com). C4C is de facto run by Simon Gentry, a public affairs consultant who in the past also lobbied for biotech patents on behalf of SmithKline Beecham. The English language website vaguely mentions that the campaign is "supported by" corporations including software multinationals Microsoft and SAP, and industry association CompTIA. Simon Gentry, however, refuses to disclose how C4C is actually financed. Gentry claims that C4C has some hundred individual supporters, but these do not contribute financially. The companies, Gentry told LobbyControl, contribute to specific actions of the campaign, not on a fixed scheme.


The C4C campaign was the winner of the EU Lobby Award, with a huge margin of victory over its competitors.

Also via spectrezine, another corporate top-list, Global Exchange's Most Wanted" Corporate Human Rights Violators of 2005, presents the 14 corporations that, during the past year most excelled in violating human rights around the world. These corporations (Caterpillar, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Dyncorp CSC, Ford, KBR (Kellogg, Brown, and Root - a Subsidiary of Halliburton), Lockheed-Martin, Halliburton, Monsanto, Nestle USA, Philip Morris, Pfizer, Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux and Wal-Mart), are engaged, according to Global Exchange, in criminal practices. As Global Exchange concludes:

This list of "MOST WANTED" corporate criminals gives you information about the abusive behavior of this year's top fourteen worst corporations, tells you who is responsible, and how to connect with and support people who are doing something about it. The more you know, the less these corporations can continue their abuses out of public eyesight: so share this information with your friends, get on the phone with the CEOs themselves, and exercise your rights as a citizen and consumer today.

2 comments:

lazopolis said...

The bloody shocking Global exchange's Most Wanted corporations list deserves an extensive exposition both here and in the greek Istologion (where a consumers'emgbargo campaign might be organised against the companies that have a market share in Greece).

kkk said...

Talk about "NewSpeak", the Campaign to Bugger Up Creativity being called the Campaign"4"Creativity.

Oh, well just another of those parasites in the SCO mold. "NeoLiberals" of the type "everything is Free for me, but You have to Pay for everything".

They'll never go away until they're laughed off the face of the planet, you know.

No doubt "creativity" includes "creative" accounting.