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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In recent years southern Africa has aroused the interest of domestic and foreign investors targeting several sectors. Agrarian and extractive capital has been penetrating the countryside, causing land conflicts, displacement of local peasant communities and in worse cases, deaths. Rural people in general have not, been passive—alone or in alliance with non-governmental organizations and activists, they have organized raised their voices. Resistance movements to capital are taking place throughout the region, even when faced with repression. The book provides critical assessments of the dynamics of agrarian and extractive capital in southern Africa: with contributions from DRC, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mozambique, Mauritius and Madagascar.
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.
Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth is about how new generations are discovering their mission of humanizing the world by claiming Fanon as a thinker for our times. Why Fanon, why now? For the wretched of the earth, conditions have not improved since Fanon’s time and in some cases they have worsened. Reason and revolt are inescapable, quite simply because, as Fanon wrote, it has become ‘impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word’. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Fanon’s death (in 1961), the contributors to this book address the resonances of Fanon’s thinking on movements of resistance and mass revolutionary uprisings occurring in response to repression or state violence in Algeria, Brazil, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Pakistan, Palestine, Portugal, South Africa, Syria, Trinidad, USA and beyond. The driving force of each chapter of this unique collection of writings is Fanonian praxis, engaging with Fanon the thinker and Fanon the revolutionary.
Why do so many Africans believe they cannot break the “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” cycle? Six decades after colonial flags were lowered and African countries gained formal independence, the continent struggles to free itself from the deep legacies of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. Many intellectuals, politicians, feminists and other activists, eager to contribute to Africa’s liberation, have frustratingly felt like they took the wrong path. Analyzed through the eyes of Afro-Feminism, this book revisits some of the fundamental preconditions needed for radical transformation. It challenges the traditional human rights paradigm and its concomitant idea of “gender equality,” flagging instead, the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a serious alternative for reinvigorating African notions of social justice. If you are a student of Africa or in a space where you wish to recalibrate your compass and reboot your consciousness in the struggle for Africa’s liberation, this book is for you.
Why do so many Africans believe they cannot break the “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” cycle? Six decades after colonial flags were lowered and African countries gained formal independence, the continent struggles to free itself from the deep legacies of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. Many intellectuals, politicians, feminists and other activists, eager to contribute to Africa’s liberation, have frustratingly felt like they took the wrong path. Analyzed through the eyes of Afro-Feminism, this book revisits some of the fundamental preconditions needed for radical transformation. It challenges the traditional human rights paradigm and its concomitant idea of “gender equality,” flagging instead, the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a serious alternative for reinvigorating African notions of social justice. If you are a student of Africa or in a space where you wish to recalibrate your compass and reboot your consciousness in the struggle for Africa’s liberation, this book is for you.
The volume includes two sections exploring nonviolence in the long Black freedom struggle within the US. From Ella Baker to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, from Vincent Harding and Grace Lee Boggs to Colin Kaepernick, the two sections on the Black liberation movement highlight the theory of nonviolence in direct and indirect ways and foreground the relevance of these historic texts for the present moment of political uprisings on both the left and the right. Black strategies for survival and power are analyzed in terms of the ongoing US economic and epidemiological crises as well as the global climate crisis and ecological collapse. A section on revolutionary nonviolence in Africa presents a previously unpublished piece on the role of armed struggle by Franz Fanon, as well as essays by Amilcar Cabral, Barbara Deming, Graca Machel, Kenneth Kaunda, and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge This section clearly contextualizes the continent’s anti-colonial struggles with the practical thinking about military and unarmed tactics which those movements faced over the course of a half-century.
The section on nonviolence and feminist struggle highlight the work of Grace Paley, Audre Lorde, and Arundhati Roy, along with a little-read piece by Johnnie Tilmon, a leader of the 1960s welfare rights movement. The section on resistance against empire tilts toward Latin American scholars/activists with essays by Maria Lugones, Anibla Quijano and Berta Caceres. This section includes pieces that draw from current debates about the role of state power in building towards radical change and the push to build holistic perspectives on what liberation means for all peoples. The final section on social change in the 21st Century reflects on specific aspects of organizing that are facing campaigns and movements of today and tomorrow. Our goal is to provide challenges and insights for building effectively against all forms of oppression! Though primarily compiling key texts not often seen or contextualized together, the book also provides new strategic commentaries from key leaders including Ela Gandhi, Ruby Sales, ecofeminist Ynestra King, Africa World Press’ Kassahun Checole, and Palestinian Quaker Joyce Ajlouney, Hakim Williams, and Mireille Fanon Mèndes-France.
This book collects four decades of writings on dialectics, a number of them published here for the first time, by Kevin B. Anderson, a well-known scholar-activist in the Marxist-Humanist tradition. The essays cover the dialectics of revolution in a variety of settings, from Hegel and the French Revolution to dialectics today and its poststructuralist and pragmatist critics. In these essays, particular attention is given to Lenin’s encounter with Hegel and its impact on the critique of imperialism, the rejection of crude materialism, and more generally, on world revolutionary developments. Major but neglected works on Hegel and dialectics written under the impact of the struggle against fascism like Lukács’s The Young Hegel and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution are given full critical treatment. Dunayevskaya’s intersectional revolutionary dialectics is also treated extensively, especially its focus on a dialectics of revolution that avoids class reductionism, placing gender, race, and colonialism at the center alongside class. In addition, key critics of Hegel and dialectics like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty, are themselves analysed and critiqued from a twenty-first century dialectical perspective. The book also takes up the dialectic in global, intersectional settings via a reconsideration of the themes of Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, where nationalism, race, and colonialism were theorized alongside capital and class as key elements in Marxist dialectical thought. As a whole, the book offers a discussion of major themes in the dialectics of revolution that still speak to us today at a time of radical transformation in all spheres of society and of everyday life.
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.
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