“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 $ 21.00
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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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.
Written by Karim F Hirji, a retired professor of Medical Statistics, Religion, Politics and Society focuses on the four major global religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam—together with minor religions like the Ahmadiyya, Confucianism, Sikhism, Seventh Day Adventism and Traditional African Religion as well as on Secularism, New Age beliefs and the ancient Paleolithic and Neolithic era belief systems to explore the origin, spiritual import and social function of religion in human society. Utilizing the canons, beliefs, practices, history, eminent personages, institutions of the diverse faiths, it tackles matters like: How did the social function of religion evolve over time? How does religion relate to the power structure of society? Does religion promote or hinder social harmony, justice and equality? Under what circumstances? Is religion necessary for morality? What are the roots of interfaith conflict? How do modern religions and neoliberalism interact with each other? Does religion have a future? Can religion and secularism be harnessed for resolving the globally vexing yet pivotal concerns of human society? If so, how?
These and related issues are tackled with the help of a variety of past and contemporary individual level and broader type of richly illustrated examples. The role of women in religion a topic of focus throughout the text. The varied functions of religion under slavery, feudalism, capitalism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism. socialism, and neoliberalism are also attended to.
The foundational premise of this book is that while spiritual beliefs differ, all humans are equal in dignity and have equal rights. No religion is more exalted than others; there are no chosen people. We all belong to the global human family. Our religious and cultural diversity is a cause for celebration, not conflict.
Respectful in style and targeted towards the general and knowledgeable readers, Religion, Politics and Society is the first of a two-book project. The second book, Religion, Science and the Pandemic, addresses the relationship between religion, science and mathematics. The key objective of these books is to help uplift the quality and tenor of the current discourse on religion and explore how faith can promote human dignity, equality, social justice and harmony. A genuine consensus and peaceful coexistence cannot emerge from diluting the truth.
Dictators as Gatekeepers for Europe is a detailed journalistic account of how the EU is attempting to limit mobility within the African continent as a matter of the EU’s domestic policy agenda, hence the title hinting at the many agreements (with Turkey, Libya, Sudan) aimed at blocking migrants from approaching the European continent. The new “Berlin Wall” not only encircles Europe, but also generates a proliferation of militarised borders in Africa. …To summarise, the authors argue, Europe desires protected borders and open markets. The novelty is the amount of material that this book contains about African desires and strategies, both as a continent and as single states. This, in particular, makes the work a collection of extremely valuable directions of research. In fact, Africa, if one were to simplify the continent’s intentions, is depicted as aspiring to the exact opposite of Europe, namely open borders (with the African Union aspiring to free movement within the continent) and protected markets (protected from Western corporate predatory strategies). Moreover, contrary to the narrative of aid according to which the West “helps develop” Africa, the figures quoted by the authors suggest the opposite: while Sub-Saharan Africa receives $134 billion a year in development funding, $192 billions flow out of Africa, with $46 billion in profit for major corporations and another $35 billion vanishing in tax havens (218). https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2022/02/double-book by Oana Pârvan.
Moçambique celebrou, em Junho de 2020, 45 anos de sua independência. Os ganhos e avanços que o país alcançou nesta quase meia década de independência são inegáveis, mas os desafios que subsistem são muitos. Este livro reflecte sobre Moçambique contemporâneo nos seus vários aspectos, destacando a formação e o papel do Estado, a democracia, a participação dos cidadãos, a política económica e social e o desenvolvimento. Como se pode ver, o livro não é temático e oferece diversas perspectivas de autores e autoras que se dedicam à investigação, ao jornalismo e ao activismo. O livro pretende exactamente oferecer uma leitura do país a partir dos olhos daqueles que não ocupam uma posição de poder mas que vivem, experienciam e lêem a realidade do país a partir de uma perspectiva crítica da sociedade.
O objectivo deste livro é dar uma melhor compreensão do que tem sido o processo de independência em Moçambique e porque é que o país pós-colonial ainda é ‘colonial’ na sua estrutura política e económica. Assim, são dados muitos exemplos para dar ao leitor a possibilidade de confrontar as perspectivas teóricas aqui utilizadas com os casos concretos.
Todos os estudos deste livro mostram que quarenta e cinco anos de independência não foram vividos da mesma forma pelas elites que governam o país e pelas populações que vivem sob o seu domínio. Por um lado, as elites no poder e os seus parentes beneficiaram, e ainda beneficiam, dos recursos do país, enquanto que uma grande parte da população continua à espera das promessas da independência. De um ponto de vista político e económico, os estudos que compõem o livro destacam como o “desenvolvimento” em Moçambique tem estado em contradição com as necessidades do país. Significa que o actual modelo de desenvolvimento responde muito mais ao capital internacional do que à transformação social de Moçambique.
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.
As the oldest (and arguably best-known) university in Uganda and the wider eastern and central Africa region, Makerere University looms large in the history of higher education on the continent. Alma mater to presidents, public intellectuals and pundits of all disciplines, Makerere has attracted considerable scholarly and popular attention, both in respect of its prominence and achievements, and well as with regard to its failures and foibles. The proposed book focuses on a particularly understudied aspect of the place of higher education in the African context, i.e. the relationship between a public university of unique historical importance and the contestations over democratization that have taken place both within campus and outside of it. It is built around the late-1980s struggle by the Makerere University Academic Staff Association (MUASA) for improved living conditions against the backdrop of the early programs of structural adjustment and economic reform that the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) government adopted soon after taking power in 1986. Although seemingly introverted in focus, in many respects the MUASA action represented the earliest forms of political struggle against a regime of governance that promised a great deal, but disappointingly delivered considerably less.
The focus on MUASA provides a critical entry-point to a wider debate about the place of organized democratic action by academics in a post-conflict context where the traditional institutions of political and civil society, i.e. political parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have either been severely compromised or discredited, or where they are too weak and inorganic to provide any form of significant counter-juxtaposition to the government in power. By organizing the first strike by academic staff in the sixty-seven (67) year history of the university, for a time MUASA became the focal-point for democratic organizing against a regime that was yet to fully expose its nefarious and anti-democratic colours. The book examines the broader issues concerning the relationship between organized academic action and democratization; the place of the Media in reviewing these struggles; the position of students as a critical component of academe; “big P” and “small p” politics affecting female academics, and finally, the paradoxical role of the School of Law in both aiding and inhibiting the struggle against dictatorship in a country which has enjoyed
Africa Matters: Cultural politics, political economies, & grammars of protest provides a sampling of insightful articles from the first five issues of Nokoko, journal of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. It brings together pieces that the journal’s editorial board felt were particularly perspicacious in their analysis and resonant in their crafting. Uniting them in this book permits a new dialogue to emerge around the key themes of cultural politics, political economies and grammars of protest. Their intersection here sheds light on important issues for Africans in the twenty-first century.
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.
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