Cause-related marketing, they call it.  Linking purchases of a branded product or service to help for a worthy cause: computers for schools, say, or product (RED).  The idea being that merely by buying brand X instead of brand Y, consumers can help other people.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?  

So here comes Ariel, the struggling British household detergent brand owned by US-based P&G, which enjoyed net earnings of $10 billion in 2007.  

Ariel is supporting the Children’s Safe Drinking Water Programme and Five & Alive in giving water to developing countries. With your help Ariel will provide clean, safe drinking water to families who need it most by donating 10 litres to families in need for every special pack purchased. 

Yet what the promotional campaign doesn’t mention is that P&G, Ariel’s parent company, has a commercial interest in clean water through Pur, another subsidiary which markets a patented water filtration system. Indeed Pur is the company behind the Children’s Safe Drinking Water campaign, the beneficiary of Ariel’s 10-litre promotion.  So by buying Ariel, what consumers are really doing is shifting numbers on a spreadsheet from one part of P&G to another.  P&G is turning a healthy profit on thirst.

It’s hard to know where to begin with the obscenity of the Ariel marketing campaign.  The lack of the single most basic human need - fucking water - is being used to sell soap powder, and to serve the interests of a multinational corporation, while drawing a veil over the power relations responsible for denying people access to water in the first place.  If people are really interested in fighting this problem, they can do it for free by finding out about it at activist sites like this and this.  And maybe donate the money they would have spent on Ariel.

Incidentally, after writing the previous post, I clicked the 42 days tag to see what, if anything, was on wordpress.com about the issue. It took me to the blog of one Tom Harris MP(above), hilariously and originally titled “And another thing”.  The post in question, “Why I’ll vote for 42 days”, does what it says on the tin - “Because we couldn’t get 90 days through” is the answer, in case you cared. 

As the photos above suggest, Harris is your standard issue New Labour middle management cyborg, whose solidly rightwing instincts have propelled him to the giddy heights of some junior ministerial post in Transport.  I also note he claims membership of an all-party Islam group.  Given his voting record, one wonders what he finds to talk about at its gatherings:

How Tom Harris voted on key issues since 2001:

• Voted very strongly against a transparent Parliament. votes, speeches
• Voted a mixture of for and against introducing a smoking ban. votes, speeches
• Voted strongly for introducing ID cards. votes, speeches
• Voted moderately for introducing foundation hospitals. votes, speeches
• Voted strongly for introducing student top-up fees. votes, speeches
• Voted very strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws. votes, speeches
• Voted very strongly for the Iraq war. votes, speeches
• Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war. votes, speeches
• Voted very strongly for replacing Trident. votes, speeches
• Voted very strongly for the hunting ban. votes, speeches
• Voted very strongly for equal gay rights. votes, speeches

Stay tuned for gems from the minister’s blog as they emerge.

I was concerned, but not surprised, to see that a postgraduate student at Nottingham University was recently arrested and held by police for six days under anti-terrorism laws, before being released without charge.  Rizwaan Sabir drew the attention of the authorities after downloading, as part of research for his dissertation on Islamic extremism, a supposed version of an al-Qaeda training manual.  Sabir passed the document, which is freely available online and which he had downloaded from a US government website(pdf), to Hisham Yezza, a member of the university’s administrative staff so that he could get it photocopied without incurring £75 copying charges.  As Lenin’s Tomb reported,

Someone, somehow, saw this material on Yezza’s computer and, thanks to the culture of prying and snitching encouraged by the government and right-wing media, assumed the worst and told the University authorities. The authorities, instead of checking with the staff member in question, or even making a roundabout preliminary investigation, called the police.

Long story short, the pair were arrested and detained for nearly a week while their homes were raided and their families harrassed.  

One reason this frightening tale caught my eye is that, as someone teaching at an English university, I have been witness to continued efforts by the government to bully universities into precisely this kind of activity. The other reason is that the universities secretary, John Denham, was due to attend a debate next week at Southampton University on the very topic of academic freedom.  I say “was”, because today I received an email from the organisers letting me know that the debate had had to be cancelled, owing to the non availability of Mr Denham, who

Immigrants who want to become British and settle permanently in the UK will need to pass more tests to “prove their sanity” to the country under new plans. Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, told MPs the tightening up of immigration controls was essential: “Why would anybody in their right mind want to come to this shithole?”

The new regulations - which will only apply to people from outside the EU, who don’t speak English, have brown skin and eat curry - are part of a package of measures designed to outflank the Conservatives. Other plans include introducing literacy tests for people who lobby their MPs or contact radio phone-ins to complain about immigration. The prime minister added that foreigners who planned to marry British citizens and settle in the UK would have to pass an English test to prove their understanding of key terms such as “gutted”, “whatever” and “Lowri Turner“.

Back in October 2006, I drew attention to my referral to a psychologist, and my hope that it would sort my head out once and for all.  As 2007 drew to a close last night, I am happy to report that the National Health Service has exceeded my wildest expectations.  After nine months of working with the psychologist, I have now been able to identify and address the root causes of the depression which had blighted my life and those of my family; I have reunited with Mrs Bitches; and I am looking forward to the New Year for the first time in decades.  So I only wish that 2008 brings you as much happiness as 2007 did me.

I spend a lot of time discussing corporate social responsibility with my students, and it is a complex topic on which opinions are divided. Do corporations have an obligation to the wider society? Or simply to their shareholders? How should such responsibility be discharged? Are we right to be suspicious when corporations bang on about how “committed” they are to the community or the environment?

Joel Bakan’s excellent book, The Corporation, presents a credible argument for the corporation as a psychopath: its overriding, statutory responsibility to shareholders renders it incapable of sustaining longterm relationships, experiencing guilt, considering the harm its actions may cause others, and so on.  But another characterisation, that of the corporation as paedophile, is equally apt.  Like the paedophile, the corporation in late capitalism thinks of itself as the friend of those it seeks to exploit; it uses its unequal power relationship with communities and groups to manipulate them for its own ulterior motives - a paedophile might use a puppy and a van, but the corporation might use promises of community investment, codes of conduct on child labour, and so on.  And, like the paedophile, the corporation sees nothing wrong in its conduct: doing well by doing good, as the CSR evangelists never tire of saying.   If I’m a kid and some multi-billion dollar global corporation wants to be my friend, I know what to do.

I have recently got around to reading Simon Winder’s The Man Who Saved Britain, an amusing and credible attempt to put Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels into their post-War cultural, social and historical context. Winder’s account plants Bond squarely amid the seemingly familiar setting of British post-War decline, but with a historian’s eye for the continuities and breaks from one era to the next. Funny, insightful, and worth a read, the book slips in a casual account of a certain post-War mindset which comes closer than anything I have ever read to solving the eternal mystery of why on earth people read the Daily Mail.

Like many people, I am baffled by the world as seen through its pages. I am offended by its bigotry, its contempt for good journalism, its ignorance, but I am more inclined simply to scratch my head in amazement at a world I simply don’t recognise. And yet, and yet…the paper still commands a readership several times that of its middle-market imitator the Daily Express, albeit down nearly two percent over the past year, and its influence on British culture and politics remains extraordinarily strong.

Danuta Reah’s The Language of Newspapers reminds us how newspapers - all newspapers - construct their readership by implication and the creation of sets of shared assumptions, in the same way that automobiles and toothpaste are designed, branded and marketed by use of subtle emotional cues, so that we know that that brandis for people like us.We know who the Mail reader is, or at least we think we do. The paper appeals to aspirational, Pooterish, indignant, “common sense” types. But its credo, and its implied readership, is riddled with contradictions. Vitriolic hatred sits alongside the most mawkish sentimentality; “down to earth” “common sense” alongside the most airy-fairy, new age, live-to 150 nonsense; deference and aspiration mixes with furious defiance of alleged “élites”. Who are these people, and how did the Mail hit such a rich seam? Over to Winder (who is in his mid-40s, like me):

My early memories are filled with the stifling nostalgia for the Second World War that filled my parents’ newspapers. I was brought up in a Conservative household by parents who were in no sense violently ideological and who were more than willing to be critical of ‘their’ government. My mother’s views at that time, the late sixties and early seventies, were reflected by papers such as the Daily and Sunday Express and were suffused with an overwhelming sense that ‘things were going wrong’. I have often thought about those strange papers which really fed quite remorselessly on a sense of bitterness and anger over a poorly defined ‘they’ who had let everyone down. ’They’ could be the Soviets, of course, but also oily Europeans, vulgar Americans, vicious Africans…shirkers and cheats of all kinds - in fact virtually everybody.

This is a vast, clear strand in British life that goes oddly unnoticed. In the years I lived in the US I never once encountered anything approaching this strange tic, and it does not seem a serious force in countries such as Italy or Germany. Le Pen, of course, taps into something related in France and for similar reasons - and I bet there’s lots of it in Russia, which now shares much of Britain’s old psychosis.The 1950s saw this tendency in British life really find its feet. A whole category of people became decisively embittered.

They hated the Socialist government of 1945, hated the loss of India, hated the feeling that Britain was no longer Great and were worked up about the USA, about which many had, to say the least, complicated feelings. This bitterness has been a huge theme in British life ever since…These people clung to Churchill, who should have retired in 1945, they adored the royal family, they emigrated in substantial numbers, and they hated every twist and turn of the permissive society as it unfolded in the fifties and sixties. They were not fools in any sense but they were doomed by political, military and economic events to experience the next decades as a roller coaster in a condemned fairground they had not even asked to visit.

Alisher Usmanov, the Uzbek billionaire shareholder of one of England’s top football clubs, is using his wealth to shut down websites that report allegations against him originally published by the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray.  Usmanov has employed the libel lawyers, Schillings, not to seek writs against Murray (who published the allegations nearly two years ago in his book Murder in Samarkand), but to pressurise ISPs simply to shut offending sites down.  As Lenin’s Tomb reports,

Craig Murray’s website, Tim Ireland’s website, Bloggerheads, and that of Councillor Bob Piper, have been pulled by their service provider, Fasthosts Internet Ltd of Gloucester.

Let’s be clear.  This is not about bloggers enjoying an untrammelled right to smear the innocent.  Unlike most of us, Usmanov has the resources to seek legal remedy against Craig Murray.  It is about resisting the idea among the rich and powerful that they can bully ISPs into closing down your site and mine, on the basis of nothing more than a threatening letter.  Chicken Yoghurt is doing a sterling job rallying bloggers about the affair.

If you think this is an important matter of principle - whatever your political or sporting affiliations -  join the growing list of sites spreading the word.  Meanwhile, for background, I reproduce Murray’s original post below:

 Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist

I thought I should make my views on Alisher Usmanov quite plain to you. You are unlikely to see much plain talking on Usmanov elsewhere in the media becuase he has already used his billions and his lawyers in a pre-emptive strike. They have written to all major UK newspapers, including the latter:

“Mr Usmanov was imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime. We wish to make it clear our client did not commit any of the offences with which he was charged. He was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records . . . Mr Usmanov does not have any criminal record.”

Let me make it quite clear that Alisher Usmanov is a criminal. He was in no sense a political prisoner, but a gangster and racketeer who rightly did six years in jail. The lawyers cunningly evoke “Gorbachev”, a name respected in the West, to make us think that justice prevailed. That is completely untrue.

Usmanov’s pardon was nothing to do with Gorbachev. It was achieved through the growing autonomy of another thug, President Karimov, at first President of the Uzbek Soviet Socilist Republic and from 1991 President of Uzbekistan. Karimov ordered the “Pardon” because of his alliance with Usmanov’s mentor, Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov. Far from being on Gorbachev’s side, Karimov was one of the Politburo hardliners who had Gorbachev arrested in the attempted coup that was thwarted by Yeltsin standing on the tanks outside the White House.

Usmanov is just a criminal whose gangster connections with one of the World’s most corrupt regimes got him out of jail. He then plunged into the “privatisation” process at a time when gangster muscle was used to secure physical control of assets, and the alliance between the Russian Mafia and Russian security services was being formed.

Usmanov has two key alliances. He is very close indeed to President Karimov, and especially to his daughter Gulnara. It was Usmanov who engineered the 2005 diplomatic reversal in which the United States was kicked out of its airbase in Uzbekistan and Gazprom took over the country’s natural gas assets. Usmanov, as chairman of Gazprom Investholdings paid a bribe of $88 million to Gulnara Karimova to secure this. This is set out on page 366 of Murder in Samarkand.

Alisher Usmanov had risen to chair of Gazprom Investholdings because of his close personal friendship with Putin, He had accessed Putin through Putin’s long time secretary and now chef de cabinet, Piotr Jastrzebski. Usmanov and Jastrzebski were roommates at college. Gazprominvestholdings is the group that handles Gazproms interests outside Russia, Usmanov’s role is, in effect, to handle Gazprom’s bribery and sleaze on the international arena, and the use of gas supply cuts as a threat to uncooperative satellite states.

Gazprom has also been the tool which Putin has used to attack internal democracy and close down the independent media in Russia. Gazprom has bought out - with the owners having no choice - the only independent national TV station and numerous rgional TV stations, several radio stations and two formerly independent national newspapers. These have been changed into slavish adulation of Putin. Usmanov helped accomplish this through Gazprom. The major financial newspaper, Kommersant, he bought personally. He immediately replaced the editor-in-chief with a pro-Putin hack, and three months later the long-serving campaigning defence correspondent, Ivan Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death from a window.

All this, both on Gazprom and the journalist’s death, is set out in great detail here:
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/06/russian_journal.html

Usmanov is also dogged by the widespread belief in Uzbekistan that he was guilty of a particularly atrocious rape, which was covered up and the victim and others in the know disappeared. The sad thing is that this is not particularly remarkable. Rape by the powerful is an everyday hazard in Uzbekistan, again as outlined in Murder in Samarkand page 120. If anyone has more detail on the specific case involving Usmanov please add a comment.

I reported back in 2002 or 2003 in an Ambassadorial top secret telegram to the Foreign Office that Usmanov was the most likely favoured successor of President Karimov as totalitarian leader of Uzbekistan. I also outlined the Gazprom deal (before it happened) and the present by Usmanov to Putin (though in Jastrzebski’s name) of half of Mapobank, a Russian commercial bank owned by Usmanov. I will never forget the priceless reply from our Embassy in Moscow. They said that they had never even heard of Alisher Usmanov, and that Jastrzebski was a jolly nice friend of the Ambassador who would never do anything crooked.

Sadly, I expect the football authorities will be as purblind. Football now is about nothing but money, and even Arsenal supporters - as tight-knit and homespun a football community as any - can be heard saying they don’t care where the money comes from as long as they can compete with Chelsea.

I fear that is very wrong. Letting as diseased a figure as Alisher Usmanov into your club can only do harm in the long term.

So let me get this right.  Owing to circumstances entirely outside my control, I am unable to obtain credit of any kind.  I live from pay cheque to pay cheque, and must use cash for all payments.  Now my tax payments are to be used to guarantee the savings of Northern Rock customers following a multi-billion pound run on the bank.  And what, precisely, is in this for me?