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  • From: Mark <mpludwig@facstaff.wisc.edu>
  • To: midwestpermaculture@yahoogroups.com, permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org, kludwig@mhub.students.wisc.edu
  • Subject: [permaculture] Fwd: [mad_ftaa] Fwd: PR industry produces fake citizen support
  • Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 07:45:49 -0500

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




  • [permaculture] Fwd: [mad_ftaa] Fwd: PR industry produces fake citizen support, Mark, 05/30/2002

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