{"id":20003,"date":"2012-07-09T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=20003"},"modified":"2012-07-08T13:38:44","modified_gmt":"2012-07-08T12:38:44","slug":"greenwashing-the-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/07\/greenwashing-the-olympics\/","title":{"rendered":"Greenwashing the Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rio Tinto, the global mining company, has been named as early front-runner for the Greenwash Gold award<\/a> for the worst Olympic sponsor, with BP, the oil and gas multinational, in second place and Dow Chemical third.
\n<\/em>
\nThe three corporations are banking on getting a good return on their purchase of the right to stick their names all over Olympic promotional material and activities. But Olympic branding has sparked bad publicity, too. Activists have accused the companies of \u201cgreenwashing\u201d<\/a> \u2013\u00a0 a tactic by which companies \u201cpreserve and expand their markets by posing as friends of the environment and enemies of poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week, as London celebrated one month to the Games opening, demonstrators in India and London staged protests against \u201cthe toxic reputation\u201d of Dow Chemical for failing to take responsibility for clearing up the site of the 1984 industrial plant disaster in the Indian city of Bhopal<\/a> to ensure that the toxic waste buried there does not continue to poison people.<\/p>\n

\u201cDow Chemical have been refusing to accept that their wholly-owned subsidiary, the Union Carbide Corporation, is wanted on the criminal charges of culpable homicide for the Bhopal Gas Disaster,\u201d said Colin Toogood of the Bhopal Medical Appeal.<\/a> \u201cWe cannot understand why the Olympic organizers continue to defend Dow Chemical when these are the facts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Campaigners are particularly angry that Lord Coe, the four-times Olympic medalist who runs the London Olympics organizing committee, has failed to honor a promise made in response to a previous demonstration that he would be happy to meet demonstrators to discuss the issues they had raised.<\/p>\n

Human rights organization Amnesty International joined in the criticism, complaining that Coe\u2019s reaction to a mass of emails from the organization \u201cwas apparently to block all emails sent via our website, and disengage from any conversation about Dow\u2019s involvement in the Olympics. This does not reassure us that the Olympic Committee is committed to ethical, responsible investment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coe\u2019s reluctance to engage with the demonstrators is not surprising, given that the Olympic organizers have conferred the title of \u2018Sustainability Partner\u2019 on BP. The activists say that the company is \u201ca world-class climate criminal\u201d, in the words of Emily Coats from the UK Tar Sands Network, who points out that “BP has just launched another shiny advertising campaign to continue to obscure from the public its devastating operations in the Gulf of Mexico, Alberta tar sands and pristine Arctic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other actions have already targeted the company in London. Members of the \u201cReclaim Shakespeare Company\u201d<\/a> leaped on stage and performed an anti-BP \u201cguerilla Shakespeare\u201d skit in front of a theater audience that included many BP employees.<\/p>\n

Rio Tinto must also be bracing for protests. Richard Solly of London Mining Network, one of the backers of the Greenwash Gold campaign, says: \u201cRio Tinto has provided nearly all the metals for the Olympic Medals from mines in Utah where local residents have accused the company of creating so much pollution that it is contributing to premature deaths and respiratory diseases. You can\u2019t pretend to have \u2018the greenest games ever\u2019 when you\u2019re working with such a dirty and disreputable company like Rio Tinto.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meredith Alexander, the ex-Olympics \u2018ethics tsar\u2019 who resigned over controversies surrounding Olympic sponsorship<\/a> condemned Coe for ignoring concerns about unethical Olympic sponsors.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe does not want to hear about BP’s investment in the most polluting form of oil, the environmental problems that come with Rio Tinto’s medals or the fact that Dow Chemical is the company now responsible for the Bhopal tragedy,\u201d said Alexander.<\/p>\n

Anti-corporate protests in London take place on fertile ground because of a series of corporate scandals, the latest of which are the $455 million fine imposed on Barclays bank for letting its traders manipulate the interbank lending rates<\/a> such as Libor and Euribor to suit the bank\u2019s trading positions (even business-friendly Chancellor, George Osborne has said criminal investigations could follow) and revelations about offshore tax avoidance schemes.<\/p>\n

So a report that Olympic sponsors will avoid paying up to $942 million in tax as venues will be treated like offshore havens during the Games<\/a> will add insult to injury.<\/p>\n

A report by Ethical Consumer claimed that under new tax rules ushered in as part of \u201cTeam Great Britain\u2019s\u201d winning Olympic bid, corporate partners like Coca-Cola, McDonald\u2019s and Visa were given a temporary exemption from corporation tax as \u201cnon-resident\u201d companies from March 30 to November 8<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The new rules also reportedly mean foreign employees working for the companies do not have to pay income tax in the UK.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real winners in the London Olympics are those companies who stand to make millions out of the greatest sporting event in the world,\u201d says Tim Hunt of Ethical Consumer.<\/p>\n

On 28 July, the second day of the Olympics, the Counter Olympics Network<\/a> is holding a demonstration in an east London park, on the doorstep of the main Olympic site, \u201cto protest the government\u2019s turning of the games into a showcase for corporate, financial and military power at a time people are crushed by sweeping austerity measures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 corpwatch.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rio Tinto, the global mining company, has been named as early front-runner for the Greenwash Gold award for the worst Olympic sponsor, with BP, the oil and gas multinational, in second place and Dow Chemical third. The three corporations are banking on getting a good return on their purchase of the right to stick their names all over Olympic promotional material and activities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}