permaculture

[Mark <mpludwig@facstaff.wisc.edu>]

> Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 23:40:18 -0500
> From: Mitch Rosefelt <PixelDroid@thepixelfarm.com>
> Subject: [mad_ftaa] Fwd: PR industry produces fake citizen support
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> It doesn't matter what the issue is .... GM foods, as in the British report
> below, or fee-demo, charter forests, you name it. The PR industry will
> fabricate "citizen input" to give the impression of public support. Under
> no circumstances believe governmental data showing support for any of the
> schemes favoring privatization of public domain. And that includes all of
> the "local control" arguments.
>
>
> Published on Wednesday, May 29, 2002 in the Guardian of London Corporate
> Phantoms The Web of Deceit Over GM Food by George Monbiot
>
> Tony Blair's speech to the Royal Society last Thursday was a wonderful
> jumble of misconceptions and logical elisions. He managed to confuse
> science with its technological products. GM crops are no more "science"
> than cars, computers or washing machines, and those opposing them are no
> more "anti-science" than people who don't like the Millennium Dome are
> "anti-architecture".
>
> He suggested that in the poor world people welcome genetic engineering. It
> was unfortunate that the example he chose was the biotech industry in
> Bangalore in south-west India. Bangalore happens to be the center of the
> world's most effective protests against GM crops, the capital of a state in
> which anti-GM campaigners outnumber those in the UK by 1,000 to one. Like
> most biotech enthusiasts, he ignored the key concern of the activists: the
> corporate takeover of the food chain, and its devastating consequences for
> food security.
>
> But it would be wrong to blame Blair alone for these misconstructions. The
> prime minister was simply repeating a suite of arguments formulated
> elsewhere. Over the past month, activists have slowly been discovering
> where that "elsewhere" may be.
>
> Two weeks ago, this column showed how the Bivings Group, a PR company
> contracted to Monsanto, had invented fake citizens to post messages on
> internet listservers. These phantoms had launched a campaign to force
> Nature magazine to retract a paper it had published, alleging that native
> corn in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen. But this, it now
> seems, is just one of hundreds of critical interventions with which PR
> companies hired by big business have secretly guided the biotech debate
> over the past few years.
>
> While I was writing the last piece, Bivings sent me an e-mail fiercely
> denying that it had anything to do with the fake correspondents "Mary
> Murphy" and "Andura Smetacek", who started the smear campaign against the
> Nature paper. Last week I checked the e-mail's technical properties. They
> contained the identity tag "bw6.bivwood.com". The message came from the
> same computer terminal that "Mary Murphy" has used. New research
> coordinated by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews appears to have unmasked
> the fake persuaders: "Mary Murphy" is being posted by a Bivings web
> designer, writing from both the office and his home computer in
> Hyattsville, Maryland; while "Andura Smetacek" appears to be the company's
> chief internet marketer.
>
> Not long ago, the website slashdot.com organized a competition for hackers:
> if they could successfully break into a particular server, they got to keep
> it. Several experienced hackers tested their skills. One of them was one
> using a computer identified as bw6.bivwood.com.
>
> Though someone in the Bivings office appears to possess hacking skills,
> there is no evidence that Bivings has ever made use of them. But other
> biotech lobbyists do appear to have launched hacker attacks. Just before
> the paper in Nature was publicly challenged, the server hosting the
> accounts used by its authors was disabled by a particularly effective
> attack which crippled their capacity to fight back. The culprit has yet to
> be identified.
>
> Bivings is the secret author of several of the websites and bogus citizens'
> movements which have been coordinating campaigns against environmentalists.
> One is a fake scientific institute called the "Center for Food and
> Agricultural Research". Bivings has also set up the "Alliance for
> Environmental Technology", a chlorine industry lobby group. Most
> importantly, Bivings appears to be connected with AgBioWorld, the genuine
> website run by CS Prakash, a plant geneticist at Tuskegee University, Alabama.
>
> AgBioWorld is perhaps the most influential biotech site on the web. Every
> day it carries new postings about how GM crops will feed the world, new
> denunciations of the science which casts doubt on them and new attacks on
> environmentalists. It was here that the fake persuaders invented by Bivings
> launched their assault on the Nature paper. AgBioWorld then drew up a
> petition to have the paper retracted.
>
> Prakash claims to have no links with Bivings but, as the previous article
> showed, an error message on his site suggests that it is or was using the
> main server of the Bivings Group. Jonathan Matthews, who found the message,
> commissioned a full technical audit of AgBioWorld. His web expert has now
> found 11 distinctive technical fingerprints shared by AgBioWorld and
> Bivings' Alliance for Environmental Technology site. The sites appear, he
> concludes, to have been created by the same programmer.
>
> Though he lives and works in the United States, CS Prakash claims to
> represent the people of the third world. He set up AgBioWorld with Greg
> Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the far-right libertarian
> lobby group funded by such companies as Philip Morris, Pfizer and Dow
> Chemical. Conko has collaborated with Matthew Metz, one of the authors of
> the scientific letters to Nature seeking to demolish the maize paper, to
> produce a highly partisan guide to biotechnology on the AgBioWorld site.
> The Competitive Enterprise Institute boasts that it "played a key role in
> the creation" of a petition of scientists supporting biotech (ostensibly to
> feed the third world) launched by Prakash. Unaware that it had been devised
> by a corporate lobby group, 3,000 scientists, three Nobel laureates among
> them, signed up.
>
> Bivings is just one of several public relations agencies secretly building
> a parallel world on the web. Another US company, Berman & Co, runs a fake
> public interest site called ActivistCash.com, which seeks to persuade the
> foundations giving money to campaigners to desist. Berman also runs the
> "Center for Consumer Freedom", which looks like a citizens' group but
> lobbies against smoking bans, alcohol restrictions and health warnings on
> behalf of tobacco, drinks and fast food companies. The marketing firm
> Nichols Dezenhall set up a site called StopEcoViolence, another "citizens'
> initiative", demonizing activists. In March, Nichols Dezenhall linked up
> with Prakash's collaborator, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to
> sponsor a conference for journalists and corporate executives on
> "eco-extremism".
>
> What is fascinating about these websites, fake groups and phantom citizens
> is that they have either smelted or honed all the key weapons currently
> used by the world's biotech enthusiasts: the conflation of activists with
> terrorists, the attempts to undermine hostile research, the ever more
> nuanced claims that those who resist GM crops are anti-science and opposed
> to the interests of the poor. The hatred directed at activists over the
> past few years is, in other words, nothing of the kind. In truth, we have
> been confronted by the crafted response of an industry without emotional
> attachment.
>
> Tony Blair was correct when he observed on Thursday that "there is only a
> small band of people... who genuinely want to stifle informed debate". But
> he was wrong to identify this small group as those opposed to GM crops.
> Though he didn't know it, the people seeking to stifle the debate are the
> ones who wrote his speech; not in the days before he delivered it, but in
> the years in which the arguments he used were incubated.
>
> www.monbiot.com
>
>
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Mark P. Ludwig
Poultry Research Lab
University of Wisconsin -Madison
608-262-1730 WK
608-846-7125 HM