If you’re interested in how powerful forces of marketing & manipulation make the positive change we badly need MUCH harder, read @grantennis.bsky.social’ great book “Dark PR.” – Brent Toderian, Bluesky
“Think global, act local!” “Be the change you want to see in the world!” “Every little bit counts!” We can all get on board with such sentiments, right? That, of course, is exactly what corporate spin-masters across the world are banking on. By weaponizing such seemingly innocuous yet powerful narratives, change becomes a matter of personal choice, something each of us must slave away at day by day: switching off lightbulbs to save the environment or exercising to shed the weight we’ve gained from consuming junk food. All the while, the corporate welfare tap continues to flow, with over $6 trillion worth of annual subsidies dished out to industries that directly contribute to the deaths of over 5.5 million people each year through diabetes, road deaths, global warming, and other crises. But such framing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corporate disinformation playbook. This playbook is the dark matter of activist work: the unseeable element shaping harmful spin across all issues. It has never been reverse engineered – until now.
In Dark PR, Grant Ennis – drawing on his decades of experience working in the environmental, philanthropy, and public health sectors – reveals exactly how multinationals go about hoodwinking and manipulating us. In doing so, he lifts the lid on the nine devious frames contained within the cross-industry corporate disinformation playbook: through denialism, normalization, victim-blaming, multifactorialism, and a variety of other tried-and-tested tactics, corporations divert citizens’ attention away from the real causes of global problems, leading them into counter-productive blind-alley “solutions” like ethical consumerism and divestment. Sadly, though, buying Fair Trade chocolate has not and never will save the world. Only by collectively organizing to lobby our governments can we break this destructive cycle of lies and deadly incentives and reclaim control of our lives.
Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment referenced in the UK House of Lords.
“I’m really interested in a piece of work that’s written by a guy named Grant Ennis, and I would advise you to have a look at his book on subsidy. So actually the Government provide an awful lot of subsidy to unhealthy food producers. Actually we could reduce the subsidy that is provided for that food and use the money in a different way to do different things. He is the expert in that”
– Alice Wiseman, Director of Public Health for Gateshead, England
Link: https://lnkd.in/e6AnKssm Minute 11:34:24
USD $ 6.99 USD $ 21.00Price range: USD $ 6.99 through USD $ 21.00
Grant Ennis has spent his career working across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. His work has spanned spearheading government-led public health efforts in India to supporting civil society projects in Syria. Since 2015, Grant has coordinated government-relations…
“Think global, act local!” “Be the change you want to see in the world!” “Every little bit counts!” We can all get on board with such sentiments, right? That, of course, is exactly what corporate spin-masters across the world are banking on. By weaponizing such seemingly innocuous yet powerful narratives, change becomes a matter of personal choice, something each of us must slave away at day by day: switching off lightbulbs to save the environment or exercising to shed the weight we’ve gained from consuming junk food. All the while, the corporate welfare tap continues to flow, with over $6 trillion worth of annual subsidies dished out to industries that directly contribute to the deaths of over 5.5 million people each year through diabetes, road deaths, global warming, and other crises. But such framing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corporate disinformation playbook. This playbook is the dark matter of activist work: the unseeable element shaping harmful spin across all issues. It has never been reverse engineered – until now.
In Dark PR, Grant Ennis – drawing on his decades of experience working in the environmental, philanthropy, and public health sectors – reveals exactly how multinationals go about hoodwinking and manipulating us. In doing so, he lifts the lid on the nine devious frames contained within the cross-industry corporate disinformation playbook: through denialism, normalization, victim-blaming, multifactorialism, and a variety of other tried-and-tested tactics, corporations divert citizens’ attention away from the real causes of global problems, leading them into counter-productive blind-alley “solutions” like ethical consumerism and divestment. Sadly, though, buying Fair Trade chocolate has not and never will save the world. Only by collectively organizing to lobby our governments can we break this destructive cycle of lies and deadly incentives and reclaim control of our lives.
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John S. Saul, born and first educated in Toronto, Canada, moved to Tanzania almost sixty years ago and, since then, has also taught in Mozambique and South Africa as well as back in Canada at York University. In Tanzania, he discovered the centrality of the war for freedom from white rule and global capitalist dictate then taking shape further south – in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. Both his scholarly interest and his activist bent drew him to support and to seek to better understand the struggles in these nations-in-the-making, a political choice that now culminates in a final trilogy of books under the general title, The Rethinking Southern African Liberation Trilogy. The first volume of this trilogy, On Building a Social Movement: The North American Campaign for Southern African Liberation Revisited, was published by Africa World Press / Fernwood Books (2017). The present book is the second in that trilogy, with a third volume entitled Class, Race and the Thirty Years War for Southern African Liberation – A History set to conclude his work to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
Here, Saul’s extended first chapter lays out the broad premises of the thinking that has guided his endeavours, ideas that takes the core reality of economic production and exploitation centrally but that are alive to the tangible impact on outcomes of a wide range of other social realities, including class, race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, the environment, politics and the state. A second section covers the essential unity of theory and political practice that underpins Saul’s findings. And a third and final section paints illuminating pictures of some core aspects of the diverse regional contexts — sites of both recolonization and continuing struggle, and all contexts whose trajectories will be further explored in his forthcoming third volume.
In Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, Sylvia Tamale presents a powerful and urgent call for Africa’s intellectual, cultural, and political liberation through an Afro-feminist lens. The book critically examines how colonialism has deeply entrenched systems of oppression—based on race, gender, sexuality, class, and knowledge production—and argues that true decolonization requires more than political independence; it demands a radical rethinking of African identities, histories, and futures.
Tamale challenges Eurocentric and patriarchal frameworks that continue to dominate African societies, institutions, and academia. She explores themes such as:
The coloniality of gender and sexuality, using case studies like Caster Semenya to expose how Western norms pathologize African bodies.
The importance of intersectionality in understanding overlapping systems of oppression.
The role of Afro-ecofeminism in reconnecting African ecological wisdom with social justice.
The need to decolonize African academia, law, and family structures to recenter Indigenous knowledge and epistemologies.
The potential of Ubuntu as a framework for justice, community, and relationality.
The book is both a scholarly critique and a visionary roadmap, emphasizing that decolonization must be a feminist, inclusive, and holistic project—one that reclaims Africa’s dignity, autonomy, and intellectual sovereignty.
Written with clarity and passion, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism is essential reading for students, activists, scholars, and anyone committed to understanding and advancing Africa’s liberation in the 21st century.
Written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, this publication celebrates the birth of Black studies as a liberated academic zone. Professor Mũgo reflects upon the significance of Africana studies, specifically within the context of America’s predominantly White universities, revisiting the hers/his/torical context that birthed Black studies as a field of knowledge. She reflects on the ownership of knowledge, its production, dissemination and custodianship while proposing utu/ubuntu as imperatives in defining transformative education. The hypothesis and heart of the argument is that knowledge and scholarship can either be colonizing, alienating and enslaving; or, alternatively, they can be conscientizing, humanizing and liberating, creating new human beings with the agency to transform life and the world, for the better. he dismisses the false myth of dominating, colonizing and imperialist cultures that claim to have a monopoly of knowledge and whose purpose is to justify the dehumanization of the conquered, the attempted erasure of their knowledges, heritages and ultimately, entire cultures.
The collection of essays in Partisan Universalism celebrates the work of Ato Sekyi-Otu, a scholar, teacher and friend, marking his extraordinary contribution to the philosophy, politics and praxis of liberation. As Ato Sekyi-Otu has argued in his recent book, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (Routlege 2019), universalism is an ‘inescapable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in postcolonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration’. Universalism must and can only be partisan.
“Responding to the invitation ‘to re-member severed but shareable things’, these lovers of truth, freedom, and dignity celebrate the searing intellect, generosity, wit, and compassion of the person and the scholar Ato Sekyi-Otu. … this is a precious contribution. Not to be missed!” —Jane Anna Gordon, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement and co-editor (with Drucilla Cornell) of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. /
“Critically engaging Ato Sekyi-Otu’s notion of partisan universalism, this timely volume of essays speaks directly to the onto-metaphysical issues that will give Africana thought the new foundations that will enable it to move beyond the linguistic turn, brush aside the ashes of Afro-pessimism. … A must read for all concerned with the future of Africana theory and praxis.” —Paget Henry, author of Caliban’s Reason/
“Ato Sekyi-Otu’s thought is one of the most important and exciting in Africa today. The texts compiled in this volume celebrate and engage with the work of Sekyi-Otu … They bear eloquent witness to Sekyi-Otu’s stature as a thinker and to his consistent commitment to the universalization of humanity in both theory and practice.” — Michael Neocosmos, Emeritus Professor in the Humanities, Rhodes University, South Africa.
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It is important to see both Marx’s brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.
It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.
Under-Education in Africa: From Colonialism to Neoliberalism is a collection of essays on diverse aspects of educational systems that were written over a period of four and a half decades, written from the point of view of an activist educator.
With the focus on Tanzania, they cover education in the German colonial era, the days of Ujamaa socialism and the present neo-liberal times. Themes include the social function of education, the impact of external dependency on education, practical versus academic education, democracy and violence in schools, the role of computers in education, the effect of privatization on higher education, misrepresentation of educational history, good and bad teaching styles, book reading, the teaching of statistics to doctors and student activism in education.
Two essays provide a comparative view of the situation in Tanzania and the USA. Linking the state of the educational system with society as a whole, they explore the possibility of progressive transformation on both fronts. They are based on the author’s experience as a long-term educator, his original research, relevant books, newspaper reports and discussions with colleagues and students.
The author is a retired professor of medical statistics who has taught at colleges and universities in Tanzania and at universities in the USA and Norway.
À rebours des thèses soutenant que la migration contribue au développement ou que l’in- vestissement dans le développement réduit la croissance de la migration « irrégulière », ce livre marque une rupture tonifiante avec les idées communes abondamment véhiculées dans la littérature sur les liens entre migration, mobilités et développement en Afrique. Il accorde un intérêt manifeste pour la plus grande part des mobilités africaines, lesquelles se situent à l’intérieur du continent, et à la formation des diasporas en dehors des fron- tières nationales et continentales. Cette considération conjointe des mobilités « Sud-Sud » et « Sud-Nord » permet de remettre en cause l’hypothèse selon laquelle il existe des diffé- rences fondamentales entre elles.
Cet ouvrage examine les fluctuations ordinaires des mouvements de populations – à travers l’Afrique, comme dans le reste du monde –, qui étendent les familles, génèrent de nouvelles relations, reconfigurent les connexions économiques et politiques, et sont intégrées dans l’expérience quotidienne des millions de personnes qui y prennent part.
The in-depth knowledge of the mostly African authors adds to the quality of a research field, which was for long far too Eurocentric. – Ilke ADAM, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)
Il était temps de mettre en lumière ce que migration et mobilité représentent en Afrique. L’ouvrage offre une perspective originale et décoloniale sur le sujet. – Eric HAHONOU, Roskilde Universitet (Denmark)
Christian Bouquet, « Quelques éclairages nouveaux sur les migrations africaines », EspacesTemps.net [En ligne], Books, 2020 | Mis en ligne le 20 November 2020, consulté le 20.11.2020. URL : https://www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/quelques-eclairages-nouveaux-sur-les-migrations-africaines/ ; DOI : 10.26151/esapcestemps.net-jc2a-6b03
Avec la participation de John O. IGUE, Saydou KOUDOUGOU, Pierre-Joseph LAURENT, Bassirou MALAM SOULEY, Hamidou MANOU NABARA, Marème NIANG NDIAYE, Amadou SARR DIOP, Sadio SOUKOUNA , Eric Stève TAMO MBOUYOU et Astadjam YAOUBA.
The pamphlet begins with two letters written by Paul the Apostle in which Christianity first acquires a universal address. The new religion came to exclude people who were not Christians from the count of the human. This became explicit around a thousand years later when Pope Urban II authorised the First Crusade.
In 1492 planetary history was split in to two. Muhammad XII of Granada conceded defeat to Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain, who went on to expel the Jews from the territory under their control. Europe became a Christian project. In the same year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean and Europe also became an imperial project with a planetary reach.
The origins of the racial ideology can be seen in this period, in which ideas about religion came to be entangled with fantastical ideas about the imagined purity of blood. But it was in the English colony of Virginia in the seventeenth century that the legitimation for the exclusion from the count of the human began to move from claims made in the name of religion to claims made in the name of science. This is the point at which modern racism, rooted in the appearance of the body, began to cast its malignant shadow across the planet.
The author argues that the struggle to put an end to the epoch of world history that opened in 1492 will require new ideas, and new practices. It follows the Caribbean tradition that runs from Aimé Césaire to Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in affirming the need for a counter-humanism, a radical humanism, a humanism that, in Césaire’s famous phrases, is “made to the measure of the world”. There is a need for a shift in the ground of reason towards the lived experience and struggles of people rendered, in Wynter’s phrase, as ‘pariahs outside of the new order’.
Daraja Press
Dark PR is cited by The Australian
“We can’t solve a pandemic caused by an unhealthy food environment by treating it with drugs,” said Mr Ennis, the author of Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms our Health and the Environment. He said there were extensive links between pharmaceutical companies and diabetes and obesity groups in Australia, via direct funding and sponsorship, the sponsorship of research, and payments to attend education seminars and conferences.
“By funding these health organisations it risks making them front groups,” Mr Ennis said. “I’m unaware of any policy in Australia for obesity or diabetes that has any substance. I’ve never seen a country where nutrition and health groups appear so captured.”
Daraja Press
A list of media coverage
Dayble, Will. Resilience Is Propaganda! CreativeMornings HQ: CreativeMornings HQ, 2021-06-22. https://youtu.be/H_IiVGSTxr4.
Muntisov, Michael. “The Best Thing You Can Do to Tackle Global Warming.” Court of the Grandchildren, July 27, 2021. https://courtofthegrandchildren.com/the-best-thing-you-can-do-to-tackle-global-warming/
Ennis. Grant. We Already Have a Carbon Price. Negative $5 Trillion per Year. Demand Change at COP26! Citizens’ Climate Lobby Australia, Oct 12, 2021. https://youtu.be/xxk8xApGtB4.
Muntisov, Michael. “Australia’s Climate Is Changing.” Court of the Grandchildren, May 29, 2022. https://courtofthegrandchildren.com/australias-climate-is-changing/.
Muntisov, Michael. “Every Time History Repeats, the Price Goes Up.” Court of the Grandchildren, June 23, 2022. https://courtofthegrandchildren.com/every-time-history-repeats-the-price-goes-up/.
Muecke, James, and Grant Ennis. “Sugar Shovellers Are Making Us Sick, Fat and Poor (and Check out What They Pay in Tax!).” Michael West, November 15, 2022. https://michaelwest.com.au/sugar-shovellers-are-making-us-sick-fat-and-poor-and-check-out-what-they-pay-in-tax/
Muecke, James. “Turning the Tide.” Low Carb Down Under. Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre: Low Carb Down Under, Nov 27, 2022. https://youtu.be/OHaaHD5heFQ.
McIlroy, Tom, James Muecke, Grant Ennis, and Sophie Scamps. “Junk Food Tax Breaks: Former Australian of the Year James Muecke Says Parliament Needs to Act on Growing Obesity Rates in Australia – Why This Doctor Isn’t Pushing for a Tax on Sugary Drinks.” Australian Financial Review, November 17, 2022, sec. federal. https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/why-this-doctor-isn-t-pushing-for-a-tax-on-sugary-drinks-20221112-p5bxon
Light, Tan. “Tan’s Resolution: Read More Non-Fiction.” All Lit Up. 2023 ALU Bookish Resolutions, 2023. https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2023/2023-ALU-Bookish-Resolutions.
Client Publications Authors Liz Monument Publication date 2023/3/1 Journal LizMonument.com Publisher https://www.lizmonument.com/client-publications
Robinson, Natasha, Joanna Panagopoulos, and Georgina Noack. “Shining Spotlight on Shadow Weight-Loss Drug Campaign.” The Australian, February 14, 2023, Exclusive edition. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/shining-spotlight-on-shadow-wirghtloss-drug-campaign/news-story/c1f8b1151638e72515d66961722822ec.
Ennis, Grant. “How PR and the Fog of Corporate Disinformation Has Governments Paying to Burn the Planet.” Michael West, March 10, 2023. https://michaelwest.com.au/how-pr-and-the-fog-of-corporate-disinformation-has-governments-paying-to-burn-the-planet/.
Wilson, Kea, and Grant Ennis. “Stop the Spin: How to Spot Nine Types of Auto-Industry Disinformation.” Streetsblog USA, March 13, 2023. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/03/13/stop-the-spin-how-to-spot-nine-types-of-auto-industry-disinformation/.
Ennis, Grant. “Goodreads Giveaway of 10-books in Canada.” Self, March 2023. (Not a publication. Just noting down that this was done and it worked well). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62832561-dark-pr
S01 E38: Name this Podcast… and dummies Authors Michael Brooks, Anthony Cimino Publication date 2023/3/16 Journal Center for Auto Safety Podcast Publisher https://www.autosafety.org/podcast/name-this-podcast-and-dummies/
How to Reframe the Narrative About Car Dependency Authors Kea Wilson, Grant Ennis Publication date 2023/3/28 Journal StreetsBlogUSA Publisher https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/03/28/how-to-reframe-the-narrative-about-car-dependency/
What It Takes To Reframe the Narrative About Car Dependency (Grant Ennis) Authors Grant Ennis, Kea Wilson Publication date 2023/3/28 Journal The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast Publisher https://player.fm/series/the-brake-a-streetsblog-podcast/what-it-takes-to-reframe-the-narrative-about-car-dependency-grant-ennis
The Haul ST: Enabling people to live a “car-light” life: This week, New Mercedes-Benz CLA is debuting soon, Kia launched a new all-electric EV9 SUV, Uber’s Comfort Electric … Authors Adam Feldman Publication date 2023/3/31 Journal Movements Publisher https://www.readmovements.com/p/the-haul-st-enabling-people-to-live
How PR and the fog of corporate disinformation has governments paying to burn the planet Authors Grant Ennis Publication date 2023/4/1 Journal The Tawny Frogmouth: The Northern Beaches Monthly Mag V