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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending People & Planet's Summer Gathering. It's an annual week-long training event for student activists with a bunch of inspiring and empowering workshops, great vegan food (that's high praise coming from a meat-eater) and fantastic company. I'm gong to be helping out with P&P's Corporate Power campaign in the coming year, so it was great to see so much enthusiasm for challenging corporations' influence on education.
Anyway, whilst we were there, P&P (along with Platform and WDM) treated the world to an massively exciting announcement. They are actually attempting to sue the Treasury over the RBS bailout!People & Planet are also asking us to help put pressure on Alistair Darling to manage our investment ethically.
I'll keep you posted on this unprecedented legal challenge. Who knows, if it comes off, we could even remove RBS/NatWest from the Big 8.Pete
After an early summer lull in corporation-free activity, I'm pleased to say that the pledge is going strong again. The great news is that there are now 100 people who trying to live without the Big 8.
100 may not sound like a huge number, but for every person signs the pledge, dozens of others have looked at the website and read about the Big 8. So why haven't they all signed the pledge? It's not really surprising. People find it hard enough to boycott one corporation, so 8 at once seems like too great a leap. Nevertheless, the website has an effect on anyone who sees it by encourages them to question where the stuff they buy comes from and what happens to the profit.
So, thank you to everyone who has signed the pledge and an even bigger thank you to everyone who has told their friends about the website. Let's keep the momentum going!
Pete
When I started choosing the Big 8 a friend asked me “Why are you picking on large corporations?”. The question amused me (David accused of “picking on” Goliath), but it does raise an important point. What’s wrong with being big? Size shouldn’t matter. We all know it’s what you do that counts, right? But there are practical reasons why bigger isn’t better. Get too big and it’s hard to see who you’re stepping on. The distances between decision makers and the people who their decisions effect has never been greater. I sympathise with any corporate employee who’s job it is to ensure ethical and environmental standards down the supply chain. As hard as they try, the pressure from the top to keep costs down is overwhelming. That pressure means real improvement is impossible and ensures that exploitation continues. Suppliers will just go to greater lengths to hide it. So why do corporations get so big? It seems that most business people, economists and politicians believe that “growth is good”. Yet economic growth has done little for human happiness. It might be more accurate to say “growth is greed”. Growing means claiming a larger share of the world’s money and resources. Thus it is impossible for everyone to achieve continuous grow on a finite planet. There are winners and losers. Many of the big winners got there by being ruthless. The biggest losers are future generations that simply won’t have the resources that we currently enjoy.
So, Innocent have sold 20% of themselves to Coca-Cola. That's right, Coca-Cola! One fifth of the profit from each innocent smoothie now belongs to one of the least innocent corporations in the world.
Why? Innocent have a bad case of the growth bug. They are a very successful company, but they are not satisfied. They want to take Europe and they have chosen to use Coca-Cola's dirty money and experience in aggressive marketing to do it.Read this excellent piece by Take the Red Pill, see Mark Thomas' response and leave your comments below.Pete
Poor RBS. They have had a rough time of it lately. The humiliation of the bailout, the biggest loss in UK corporate history, embarrassment over city bonuses and Sir Fred's pension, having windows smashed by 'anarchists', their own shareholders voting against their pay policy and the loss of 9000 valued employees. RBS are so pathetic I almost feel sorry for them. And now what! A bunch of students outside their AGM shouting about their fossil fuel investments. Talk about kicking them while they're down. Whilst this may look like environmentalists jumping on the bank-bashing bandwagon, People & Planet have actually been targeting RBS since long before the term 'credit crunch' entered our vocabulary. The truth is that RBS have for many years been the UK's biggest investor in fossil fuels. That is why RBS/NatWest are in the Big 8. Just as RBS were blind to the sub-prime mortgage time bomb, they are too short-sighted to see that they are investing in the climate crisis.
However, far from kicking RBS, People & Planet are actually offering them a helping hand. Redemption is theirs if they publicly shed their unethical investments and start financing the green new deal. By getting some of their current detractors onside their outlook would improve dramatically, and, as we now own RBS, the government should be making it happen. However, years of dirty banking may have left them too blind to see this opportunity. If that's the case, the public flogging will continue and the boycott begins in September!
Pete
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