No Logo Part 9

It has taken us a while, but if another Kader happened tomorrow, the first question journalists would ask would be, "What toys were being produced?" "Where were they being s.h.i.+pped?" and "Which companies hired the contractors?" Labor activists in Thailand would be in instant communication with solidarity groups in Hong Kong, Was.h.i.+ngton, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney, London and Toronto. E-mails would be fired off from Was.h.i.+ngton-based Campaign for Labor Rights, from the Clean Clothes Campaign out of Amsterdam, and forwarded through a network of Web sites, listserves and fax trees. The National Labor Committee, UNITE!, the Labour Behind the Label Coalition and the World Development Movement would be organizing protests outside Toys 'R' Us, shouting, "Our children don't need bloodstained toys!" University students would dress up as the cartoon characters of their childhood and hand out pamphlets comparing Bugs Bunny's payout for s.p.a.ce Jam s.p.a.ce Jam to the cost of putting in a fire exit at Kader. Meetings would be scheduled with national a.s.sociations of toy manufacturers; new and tougher codes of conduct would be highlighted for consideration. The public mind is not only able but eager to make the global connections that William Greider searched for but did not find after the Kader fire. to the cost of putting in a fire exit at Kader. Meetings would be scheduled with national a.s.sociations of toy manufacturers; new and tougher codes of conduct would be highlighted for consideration. The public mind is not only able but eager to make the global connections that William Greider searched for but did not find after the Kader fire.

Though anticorporate activism is seeing a renewal unparalleled since the thirties, there have, of course, been some significant anticorporate campaigns scattered between the thirties and their present-day revival. The granddaddy of modern brand-based actions is the boycott against Nestle, which peaked in the late seventies. The campaign targeted the Swiss company for its aggressive marketing of costly baby formula as a "safer" alternative to breast-feeding in the developing world. The Nestle case has a strong parallel with the McLibel Trial (to be discussed in detail in Chapter 16), largely because the issue didn't really capture the world's attention until the food company made the mistake of suing a Swiss activist group for libel in 1976.12 As with McLibel, the ensuing court case put Nestle under intense scrutiny and led to an international boycott campaign, launched in 1977. As with McLibel, the ensuing court case put Nestle under intense scrutiny and led to an international boycott campaign, launched in 1977.

The eighties saw the largest industrial accident in human history: a ma.s.sive toxic leak in 1984 at a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, killed two thousand people immediately and has taken five thousand more lives in the years since. Today, graffiti on the wall of the dilapidated and abandoned factory reads "Bhopal = Hiros.h.i.+ma."13 Despite this tragedy, widely recognized to be the result of weak safety precautions including a switched-off alarm system, the eighties were a dry spell for most political movements that questioned the beneficial power of capital. Although there was a broad recognition during the Central American wars that U.S. multinationals were propping up various dictators.h.i.+ps, solidarity work in North America focused primarily on the actions of governments, as opposed to multinational corporations. As one report on the subject notes, "attacking [corporations] tended to be seen as a hangover from the 'silly seventies.'" Despite this tragedy, widely recognized to be the result of weak safety precautions including a switched-off alarm system, the eighties were a dry spell for most political movements that questioned the beneficial power of capital. Although there was a broad recognition during the Central American wars that U.S. multinationals were propping up various dictators.h.i.+ps, solidarity work in North America focused primarily on the actions of governments, as opposed to multinational corporations. As one report on the subject notes, "attacking [corporations] tended to be seen as a hangover from the 'silly seventies.'"14 There was, however, one major exception to this rule: the anti-apartheid movement. Frustrated by the international community's refusal to impose meaningful trade sanctions on South Africa, anti-apartheid activists developed a series of alternative roadblocks designed, if not to prevent multinationals from profiting from the racist regime, at least to inconvenience them if they persisted in doing so. Students and faculty members at several universities set up tent cities demanding that schools divest themselves of their endowments from any company doing business with the African nation. Church groups disrupted corporate shareholder meetings with demands for immediate withdrawal, while more moderate investors pushed corporate boards to adopt the Sullivan principles-a set of rules for companies in South Africa that purported to minimize their complicity with the apartheid regime. Meanwhile, trade unions pulled their pensions and bank accounts from inst.i.tutions issuing loans to the South African government, and dozens of munic.i.p.al governments pa.s.sed selective purchasing agreements canceling large contracts with companies invested in South Africa. The most creative blockades were erected by the international trade-union movement. Several times a year, the unions would call a day of action, during which dock workers refused to unload cargo that had come from South Africa, and airline ticket agents refused to book flights to and from Johannesburg. In the words of campaign organizer Ken Luckhardt, workers became "activists at the point of production."15 Though there are definite similarities, there is one key difference between the apartheid actions and the kind of anticorporate campaigning gaining momentum today. The South Africa boycott was an antiracist campaign that happened to use trade (whether the importing of wine or the exporting of General Motors dollars) as a tool to bring down the South African political system. Many of the current anticorporate campaigns are also rooted in a political attack-but what they are attacking is as much a global economic system as a national political one. During the years of apartheid, companies such as the Royal Bank of Canada, Barclays Bank in England and General Motors were generally regarded as morally neutral forces that happened to be entangled with an aberrantly racist government. Today, more and more campaigners are treating multinationals, and the policies that give them free rein, as the root cause of political injustices around the globe. Sometimes the companies commit these violations in collusion with governments, sometimes they commit them despite a government's best efforts.

This systemic critique has been embraced, in recent years, by several established human-rights groups like Amnesty International, PEN and Human Rights Watch, as well as environmental rights organizations like the Sierra Club. For many of these organizations, this represents a significant s.h.i.+ft in policy. Until the mid-eighties foreign corporate investment in the Third World was seen in the mainstream development community as a key to alleviating poverty and misery. By 1996, however, that concept was being openly questioned, and it was recognized that many governments in the developing world were protecting lucrative investments-mines, dams, oil fields, power plants and export processing zones-by deliberately turning a blind eye to egregious rights violations by foreign corporations against their people. And in the enthusiasm for increased trade, the Western nations where most of these offending corporations were based also chose to look the other way, unwilling to risk their own global compet.i.tiveness for some other country's problems. The bottom line was that in parts of Asia, Central and South America and Africa, the promise that investment would bring greater freedom and democracy was starting to look like a cruel hoax. And worse: in case after case, foreign corporations were found to be soliciting, even directly contracting, the local police and military to perform such unsavory tasks as evicting peasants and tribespeople from their land; cracking down on striking factory workers; and arresting and killing peaceful protestors-all in the name of safeguarding the smooth flow of trade. Corporations, in other words, were stunting human development, rather than contributing to it.

Arvind Ganesan, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, is blunt about what his organization refers to as "a s.h.i.+ft in the terms of the debate over corporate responsibility for human rights."16 Rather than improved human rights flowing from increased trade, "governments ignore human rights in favor of perceived trade advantages." Rather than improved human rights flowing from increased trade, "governments ignore human rights in favor of perceived trade advantages."17 Ganesan points out that the severing of the connection between investment and human-rights improvements is today clearest in Nigeria, where the long-awaited transition to democracy has been coupled with a renewed wave of military brutality against Niger Delta communities protesting against the oil companies. Ganesan points out that the severing of the connection between investment and human-rights improvements is today clearest in Nigeria, where the long-awaited transition to democracy has been coupled with a renewed wave of military brutality against Niger Delta communities protesting against the oil companies.

Amnesty International, in a departure from its focus on prisoners persecuted for either their religious or political beliefs, is also beginning to treat multinational corporations as major players in the denial of human rights worldwide. More and more, recent Amnesty reports have found that people such as the late Ken Saro-Wiwa have been persecuted for what a government sees as a destabilizing anticorporate stance. In a 1997 report, the group doc.u.ments the fact that Indian villagers and tribal peoples were violently arrested, and some killed, for peacefully resisting the development of private power plants and luxury hotels on their lands. A democratic country, in other words, was becoming less democratic as a result of corporate intervention. "Development," Amnesty warned, is "being pursued at the expense of human rights...."

This pattern highlights the degree to which the central and state authorities in India are prepared to deploy state force and utilize provisions of the law in the interests of development projects, curtailing the right of freedom of a.s.sociation, expression and a.s.sembly. India's moves to liberalize its economy and develop new industries and infrastructure have in many areas marginalized and displaced communities and contributed to further violations of their human rights.18 India's situation, the report states, is not "the only or the worst" one, but is part of a trend toward the disregarding of human rights in favor of "development" in the global economy.

Where the Power Is At the heart of this convergence of anticorporate activism and research is the recognition that corporations are much more than purveyors of the products we all want; they are also the most powerful political forces of our time. By now, we've all heard the statistics: how corporations like Sh.e.l.l and Wal-Mart bask in budgets bigger than the gross domestic product of most nations; how, of the top hundred economies, fifty-one are multinationals and only forty-nine are countries. We have read (or heard about) how a handful of powerful CEOs are writing the new rules for the global economy, engineering what Canadian writer John Ralston Saul has called "a coup d'etat coup d'etat in slow motion." In his book about corporate power, in slow motion." In his book about corporate power, Silent Coup Silent Coup, Tony Clark takes this theory one step further when he argues that citizens must go after corporations not because we don't like their products, but because corporations have become the ruling political bodies of our era, setting the agenda of globalization. We must confront them, in other words, because that is where the power is.

So although the media often describe campaigns like the one against Nike as "consumer boycotts," that tells only part of the story. It is more accurate to describe them as political campaigns that use consumer goods as readily accessible targets, as public-relations levers and as popular-education tools. In contrast to the consumer boycotts of the seventies, there is a more diffuse relations.h.i.+p between lifestyle choices (what to eat, what to smoke, what to wear) and the larger questions of how the global corporation-its size, political clout and lack of transparency-is reorganizing the world economy. Behind the protests outside Nike Town, behind the pie in Bill Gates's face and the bottle shattering the McDonald's window in Prague, there is something too visceral for most conventional measures to track-a kind of bad mood rising. And the corporate hijacking of political power is as responsible for this mood as the brands' cultural looting of public and mental s.p.a.ce. I also like to think it has to do with the arrogance of branding itself: the seeds of discontent are part of its very DNA.

"Look, Mike, there's a real market for the truth about Nike.... Our debut product will be a proprietary database of Nike labor abuses! I see a Web presence and a CD-ROM of stats, worker affidavits, human rights reports and hidden camera video clips.""Kind of niche product, isn't it, babe?""No. This will be huge!"19 So goes an exchange in Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoon strip-and it's a joke with a strong sting to it. The continuing attacks on brands like Nike, Sh.e.l.l and McDonald's not only reflect genuine indignation at sweatshops, oil spills and corporate censors.h.i.+p, they also reflect how large the antagonistic audience has become. The desire (and ability) to back up free-floating anti-corporate malaise with legitimate facts, figures and real-life anecdotes is so widespread that it even transcends old rivalries within the social and ecological movements. The United Food and Commercial Workers' union, which started targeting Wal-Mart because of its low wages and union-busting tactics, now collects and disseminates information on Wal-Mart stores being built on sacred Native burial grounds. Since when did a grocery-store workers' union weigh in on indigenous land claims? Since puncturing Wal-Mart became a cause in and of itself. Why did the London eco-anarchists behind the McLibel Trial-who don't believe in working for the Man in any form-take up the plight of teenage McDonald's workers? Because, for them, it's another angle from which to attack the golden beast.

The political backdrop to this phenomenon is well known. Many citizens' movements have tried to reverse conservative economic trends over the last decade by electing liberal, labor or democratic-socialist governments, only to find that economic policy remains unchanged or caters even more directly to the whims of global corporations. Centuries of democratic reforms that had won greater transparency in government suddenly appeared ineffective in the new climate of multinational power. What good was an open and accountable Parliament or Congress if opaque corporations were setting so much of the global political agenda in the back rooms?

Disillusionment with the political process has been even more p.r.o.nounced on the international stage, where attempts to regulate multinationals through the United Nations and trade regulatory bodies have been blocked at every turn. A significant setback came in 1986 when the U.S. government effectively killed the little-known United Nations Commission on Transnational Corporations. Started in the mid-seventies, the commission set out to draft a universal code of conduct for multinational corporations. Its goals were preventing corporate abuses such as companies dumping, in the Third World, drugs that are illegal in the West; examining the environmental and labor impacts of export factories and resource extraction; and pus.h.i.+ng the private sector toward greater transparency and accountability.

The merit of these goals seems self-evident today but the commission, in many ways, was a casualty of its time. American industry was opposed to its creation from the start and in the heat of Cold War mania managed to secure their government's withdrawal on the grounds that the commission was a Communist plot and that the Soviets were using it for espionage. Why, they demanded, were Soviet-bloc national enterprises not subject to the same probing as American companies? During this era, criticisms of the abuses of multinational corporations were so bound up in anti-Communist paranoia that when the Bhopal tragedy happened in 1984, the immediate response of a U.S. emba.s.sy official in Mew Delhi was not to express horror but to say, "This is a feast for the Communists. They'll go with it for weeks."20 More recently, attempts to force the World Trade Organization to include enforcement of basic labor laws as a condition of global trade have been dismissed by member nations who insist such enforcement is the job of the UN's International Labor Organization. The ILO "is the competent body to determine and deal with these standards, and we affirm our support for its work in promoting them," states the WTO's Singapore Ministerial Declaration of December 13, 1996. However, when the ILO embarked on an initiative to draft a meaningful corporate code of conduct, it too was blocked.

At first, these failures to regulate capital left many reform and opposition movements in a state of near-paralysis: citizens, it seemed, had lost their say. Slowly, however, a handful of nongovernmental organizations and groups of progressive intellectuals have been developing a political strategy that recognizes that multinational brands, because of their high profile, can be far more galvanizing targets than the politicians whom they bankroll. And once the corporations are feeling the heat, they have learned, it becomes much easier to get the attention of elected politicians. In explaining why he has chosen to focus his activism on the Nike corporation, Was.h.i.+ngton-based labor activist Jeff Ballinger says bluntly, "Because we have more influence on a brand name than we do with our own governments."21 Besides, adds John Vidal, "Activists always target the people who have the power...so if the power moves from government to industry to transnational corporations, so the swivel will move onto these people." Besides, adds John Vidal, "Activists always target the people who have the power...so if the power moves from government to industry to transnational corporations, so the swivel will move onto these people."22 Already, a common imperative is emerging from the disparate movements taking on multinational corporations: the people's right to know. If multinationals have become larger and more powerful than governments, the argument goes, then why shouldn't they be subject to the same accountability controls and transparency that we demand of our public inst.i.tutions? So anti-sweatshop activists have been demanding that Wal-Mart hand over lists of all the factories around the world that supply the chain with finished products. University students, as we will see in Chapter 17, are demanding the same information about factories that produce clothing with their school insignia. Environmentalists, meanwhile, have used the courts to X-ray the inner working of McDonald's. And all over the world, consumers are demanding that companies like Monsanto provide clear labeling of genetically modified food and open their research to outside scrutiny.

Placing demands like these on private companies, whose only legal duty is to their shareholders, has generated a surprising number of successes. The reason is that many multinationals have a rather sizable weak spot. As we will see in the next chapter, activists around the world are making liberal use of the very factor that has been the subject of this book so far: the brand. Brand image, the source of so much corporate wealth, is also, it turns out, the corporate Achilles' heel.

Billboard Liberation Front jams an Apple campaign on the streets of San Francisco. The Gap falls victim to a "skulling" epidemic on Toronto outdoor ads.

Chapter Fifteen.

The Brand Boomerang The Tactics of Brand-Based Campaigns It can take 100 years to build up a good brand and 30 days to knock it down.

-David D'Alessandro, president of John Hanc.o.c.k Mutual Life Insurance, January 6, 1999 Branding, as we have seen, is a balloon economy: it inflates with astonis.h.i.+ng rapidity but it is full of hot air. It shouldn't be surprising that this formula has bred armies of pin-wielding critics, eager to pop the corporate balloon and watch the shreds fall to the ground. The more ambitious a company has been in branding the cultural landscape, and the more careless it has been in abandoning workers, the more likely it is to have generated a silent battalion of critics waiting to pounce. Moreover, the branding formula leaves corporations wide open to the most obvious tactic in the activist a.r.s.enal: bringing a brand's production secrets cras.h.i.+ng into its marketing image. It's a tactic that has worked before.

Though marketing and production have not always been separated by so many bodies of water and layers of subcontractors, the two have never been exactly cozy. Ever since the first ad campaigns created folksy mascots to lend a homemade feel to ma.s.s-produced goods, it has been the very business of the advertising industry to distance products from the factories that make them. Helen Woodward, an influential copywriter in the 1920s, famously warned her co-workers that "if you are advertising any product, never see the factory in which it was made.... Don't watch the people at work...because, you see, when you know the truth about anything, the real inner truth-it is very hard to write the surface fluff which sells it."1 Back then, d.i.c.kensian images like those from the Triangle s.h.i.+rtwaist Fire were still fresh in the minds of Western consumers. They didn't need to be reminded of the dark side of industrialization when they were buying soap, stockings, cars or any other product that promised happiness in the self and envy in everybody else. Besides, many of the consumers being targeted by advertising were themselves factory workers, and the last thing a fluff writer wanted to do was trigger a memory of the dreary monotony of the a.s.sembly line.

But as First World countries have s.h.i.+fted into "information economies," we have developed a certain nostalgia for the gritty authenticity of Woodward's era of industrialization. And so the factory, long marketing's greatest taboo, has recently found a place in advertising. The shop floor is featured in Saturn car ads, for example, where we meet empowered auto workers who can "stop the line" just because something looks a little dodgy. Interior shots of a factory also briefly appear in an early nineties Subaru ad-there to make the trademark Wieden & Kennedy point that cars really aren't about impressing your neighbors but driving "the best machine."

However, the factories featured in both the Saturn and Subaru campaigns aren't the sweat shop floor that Woodward warned her fellow ad writers to never lay eyes upon; these are New Age nostalgia factories-about as realistic as Intel's dancing techno-technicians. The role of these factories, like that of Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats mascot, is to a.s.sociate Subaru and Saturn with a simpler time, a time when goods were made in the countries where they were consumed, when people still knew their neighbors and n.o.body had heard of an export processing zone. In the early nineties, at a time when car factories were closing in droves and the market was being flooded with cheap imports, the ads-though purporting to take us behind the glitz of advertising-were there not to illuminate the manufacturing process, but to obscure it.

In other words, Helen Woodward's rule holds truer now than ever: at no point has the double life of our branded goods been more conflicted. Despite the rhetoric of One Worldism, the planet remains sharply divided between producers and consumers, and the enormous profits raked in by the superbrands are premised upon these worlds remaining as separate from each other as possible. It is a tidy formula: because the contract factory owners in the free-trade zones don't sell a single Reebok sneaker or Mickey Mouse sweats.h.i.+rt directly to the public, they have a limitless threshold for bad public relations. Building up a positive relations.h.i.+p with the shopping public, meanwhile, is left entirely in the hands of the brand-name multinationals. The only catch is that for the system to function smoothly, workers must know little of the marketed lives of the products they produce and consumers must remain sheltered from the production lives of the brands they buy.

The formula has worked for quite a while. For the first two decades of their existence, export processing zones were indeed globalization's dirty little secret-secured "labor warehouses" where the unsightly business of production was contained behind high walls and barbed wire. But the "brands, not products" mania that has gripped the business world since the early nineties is coming back to haunt the free-floating, incorporeal corporation. And no wonder. Severing brands so decisively from their sites of production and shuttling factories away into the industrial h.e.l.lholes of the EPZs has created a potentially explosive situation. It's as if the global production chain is based on the belief that workers in the South and consumers in the North will never figure out a way to communicate with each other-that despite the info-tech hype, only corporations are capable of genuine global mobility. It is this supreme arrogance that has made brands like Nike and Disney so vulnerable to the two princ.i.p.al tactics employed by anticorporate campaigners: exposing the riches of the branded world to the tucked-away sites of production and bringing back the squalor of production to the doorstep of the blinkered consumer.

Designer Activism: The Logo Is the Star I'm sitting in a crowded cla.s.sroom in Berkeley, California, and somebody is turning up my collar to see the label. For a moment, I feel as if I am back in grade school with Romi the logo vigilante checking for impostors. Instead, it's 1997 and the person examining my collar is Lora Jo Foo, president of Sweatshop Watch. She is running a seminar called "Ending Sweatshops at Home and Abroad" as part of a conference on globalization.

Every time Foo runs a seminar on sweatshops, she pulls out a pair of scissors and asks everyone to cut the labels off their clothing. She then unfurls a map of the world made of white cloth. Our liberated brand names are sewn onto the map, which, over the course of many such gatherings in several countries, has become a crazy patchwork quilt of Liz Claiborne, Banana Republic, Victoria's Secret, Gap, Jones New York, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren logos. Most of the dense little rectangular patches are concentrated in Asia and Latin America. Foo then traces a company's global travel routes: she begins with when its products were still being produced in North America (only a few labels remain on that part of the map); then moves to j.a.pan and South Korea; then to Indonesia and the Philippines; then to China and Vietnam. According to Foo, clothing logos make a great teaching aid; they take faraway, complex issues and plant them as close to home as the clothes on our backs.

It must be said that no one is more surprised by the power and appeal of brand-based activism than those who have spearheaded the campaigns. Many of the people leading the anti-sweatshop movement are longtime advocates on behalf of the Third World's poor and marginalized. In the eighties, they plugged away in near-total obscurity on behalf of Nicaragua's Sandinista rebels and El Salvador's FMLN opposition party. After the wars ended and the pace of globalization accelerated, they learned that the new war zone for Central America's poor was the sweatshop factory locked inside the military-guarded free-trade zone. But what they weren't prepared for was how sympathetic the public would be to this problem. "I think that what gives this issue such widespread appeal-makes it so much more real to people than the Central American wars were-is that people make a direct connection with their own lives; it's no longer something that's 'out there,'" says Trim Bissell of the Was.h.i.+ngton-based Campaign for Labor Rights. "If they eat at one of those chain outlets, they may well be putting into their bodies food that in one way or another depends on the oppression of someone else. If they buy toys for their children, those toys may have been made by children who have no childhood. It is so direct and so emotional and so human that people contact us us and say 'How can I help?' In this work, we're not having to say 'There's a problem.' We're mostly saying, 'Here's a productive way you can direct your outrage.'" and say 'How can I help?' In this work, we're not having to say 'There's a problem.' We're mostly saying, 'Here's a productive way you can direct your outrage.'"2 American author Lorraine Dusky described the dynamics of this personal connection in USA Today USA Today. Watching TV reports of the May 1998 riots in Indonesia, she found herself wondering whether her logos had anything to do with a young Indonesian girl shown wailing over the dead body of a fire victim. "Were my Nikes somehow to blame?" she writes. "That bereft young girl might still have a father if Nike had insisted that workers be better paid. Because if Nike had, other sweatshop employers might have followed suit." It may seem like a leap-blaming one's sneakers for a death in an Indonesian pro-democracy protest-but it did provide the connection necessary, as Dusky writes, to see that "globalization means more than the easy exchange of currency and goods; it means that we are all our sisters' and brothers' keepers."3

But while the effectiveness of brand-based campaigns may be in their immediate relevance to our own branded lives, there is another factor contributing to their appeal, particularly among young people. Anticorporate activism enjoys the priceless benefits of borrowed hipness and celebrity-borrowed, ironically enough, from the brands themselves. Logos that have been burned into our brains by the finest image campaigns money can buy, and lifted a little closer to the sun by their sponsors.h.i.+p of much-loved cultural events, are perpetually bathed in a glow-the "loglo," to borrow a term from science fiction writer Neal Stevenson.4 As Alexis de Tocqueville predicted, it is fantastical creations like this that have the power to make us "regret the world of reality"-and no reality has come to seem more comparatively regrettable than that of people suffering under poverty and oppression in faraway places. So in the late seventies, as the loglo grew brighter, social-justice activism faded; its woefully unmarketable ways no longer held much appeal for energetic young people or for media obsessed with slick aesthetics. As Alexis de Tocqueville predicted, it is fantastical creations like this that have the power to make us "regret the world of reality"-and no reality has come to seem more comparatively regrettable than that of people suffering under poverty and oppression in faraway places. So in the late seventies, as the loglo grew brighter, social-justice activism faded; its woefully unmarketable ways no longer held much appeal for energetic young people or for media obsessed with slick aesthetics.

But today, with so many anticorporate activists adopting the aesthetics and humor of culture jamming and the irreverent att.i.tude of street reclaiming, that is beginning to change. From their new "leech-like" vantage point, the brands' detractors are benefiting from the loglo in an unantic.i.p.ated way. The loglo is so bright that activists are able to enjoy its light, even as they are in the act of attacking a brand. This vicarious branding may seem to some like an erosion of their political purity but it also clearly helps to lure foot soldiers to the cause. Like a good ad bust, anticorporate campaigns draw energy from the power and ma.s.s appeal of marketing, at the same time as they hurl that energy right back at the brands that have so successfully colonized our everyday lives.

You can see this jujitsu strategy in action in what has become a staple of many anticorporate campaigns: inviting a worker from a Third World country to come visit a First World superstore-with plenty of cameras rolling. Few newscasts can resist the made-for-TV moment when an Indonesian Nike worker gasps as she learns that the sneakers she churned out for $2 a day sell for $120 at San Francisco Nike Town. Since 1994, there have been at least five separate tours of Indonesian Nike workers through North America and Europe-Cicih Sukaesih, who lost her job for trying to organize a union in a Nike factory, has been back three times, her trips sponsored by coalitions of labor, church and school groups. In August 1995, two Gap seamstresses-seventeen-year-old Claudia Leticia Molina from Honduras and eighteen-year-old Judith Yanira Viera from El Salvador-went on similar North American speaking tours, addressing crowds outside dozens of Gap outlets. Perhaps most memorably, shoppers were able to put a face to the issue of child labor when fifteen-year-old Wendy Diaz appeared before the U.S. Congress. She had been working in a Honduran factory sewing Kathie Lee Gifford pants since she was thirteen. Diaz testified to the presence of "about 100 minors like me-thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old-some even twelve.... Sometimes they kept us all night long, working.... The supervisors scream at us and yell at us to work faster. Sometimes they throw the garment in your face, or grab and shove you.... Sometimes the managers touch the girls. Pretending it's a joke they touch our legs. Many of us would like to go to night school but we can't because they constantly force us to work overtime."5

No group has taken advantage of the branding economy's various leaks and cracks with more laser-like accuracy than the National Labor Committee, under its director, Charles Kernaghan. In the five years between 1994 and 1999, the NLC's three-person office in New York has used Greenpeace-style media antics to draw more public attention to the plight of sweatshop workers than the multimillion-dollar international trade union movement has achieved in almost a century. As the garment-industry bible Women's Wear Daily Women's Wear Daily put it, "Charles Kernaghan and his anti-sweatshop battle have been shaking up the issue of labor abuses in the apparel industry like nothing since the Triangle s.h.i.+rtwaist Fire." put it, "Charles Kernaghan and his anti-sweatshop battle have been shaking up the issue of labor abuses in the apparel industry like nothing since the Triangle s.h.i.+rtwaist Fire."6 The NLC didn't achieve this rather remarkable feat by lobbying government or even by organizing workers. It did it by setting out to sully some of the most polished logos on the brandscape. Kernaghan's formula is simple enough. First, select America's most cartoonish icons, from literal ones like Mickey Mouse to virtual ones like Kathie Lee Gifford. Next, create head-on collisions between image and reality. "They live or die by their image," Kernaghan says of his corporate adversaries. "That gives you a certain power over them...these companies are sitting ducks."7 Like the best culture jammers, Kernaghan has a natural feel for the pitch. He knew that he could "sell" overseas sweatshops to the U.S. media-notorious for its double-jeopardy bias against labor and problems in places where people don't speak English. But what he needed to do was steer clear of obscure labor laws and arcane trade agreements, and keep the focus squarely on the logos behind the violations. It's a formula that has brought the sweatshop story under serious scrutiny on 60 Minutes 60 Minutes and and 20/20 20/20 and in and in The New York Times The New York Times-and ultimately even to Hard Copy Hard Copy, which sent a crew to accompany Kernaghan on a tour of Nicaraguan sweatshops in fall 1997.

The tabloid news show and the gutsy labor group didn't make as strange bedfellows as one might think. We are a celebrity-obsessed culture, and such a culture is never in finer form than when one of its most loved icons is mired in scandal. What Kernaghan had seized upon is that the fanatical obsession with logos extends not only to building them up, but also to tearing them down. Though on a vastly different scale, Nike's sweatshops are to labor reporting what O.J. Simpson's trial was to the legal beat: designer dirt. And the NLC, for better or for worse (definitely for worse, say its critics), is indeed the Hard Copy Hard Copy of the labor movement, forever searching out that intersection between the dazzling celebrity stratosphere and real life on the mean streets. of the labor movement, forever searching out that intersection between the dazzling celebrity stratosphere and real life on the mean streets.

So Kernaghan lays out the facts and figures of the global economy in Disney pajamas, Nike running shoes, Wal-Mart aisles and the personal riches of the individuals involved-and crunches the numbers into homemade statistical contraptions that he then wields like a mallet. For example: all 50,000 workers at the Yue Yen Nike Factory in China would have to work for nineteen years to earn what Nike spends on advertising in one year.8 Wal Mart's annual sales are worth 120 times more than Haiti's entire annual budget; Disney CEO Michael Eisner earns $9,783 an hour while a Haitian worker earns 28 cents an hour; it would take a Haitian worker 16.8 years to earn Eisner's hourly income; the $181 million in stock options Eisner exercised in 1996 is enough to take care of his 19,000 Haitian workers and their families for fourteen years. Wal Mart's annual sales are worth 120 times more than Haiti's entire annual budget; Disney CEO Michael Eisner earns $9,783 an hour while a Haitian worker earns 28 cents an hour; it would take a Haitian worker 16.8 years to earn Eisner's hourly income; the $181 million in stock options Eisner exercised in 1996 is enough to take care of his 19,000 Haitian workers and their families for fourteen years.9 A typical Kernaghanism is to compare and contrast the plush living conditions of the dogs on the set of 101 Dalmatians 101 Dalmatians with the shacks in which the Haitian workers live who sewed Disney pajamas decorated with the movie's characters. The animals, he says, stayed in "doggie condos" fitted with cushy beds and heat lamps, were cared for by on-call vets and served beef and chicken. The Haitian workers live in malaria- and dysentery-infested hovels, sleep on cots and can rarely afford to buy meat or go to the doctor. with the shacks in which the Haitian workers live who sewed Disney pajamas decorated with the movie's characters. The animals, he says, stayed in "doggie condos" fitted with cushy beds and heat lamps, were cared for by on-call vets and served beef and chicken. The Haitian workers live in malaria- and dysentery-infested hovels, sleep on cots and can rarely afford to buy meat or go to the doctor.10 It is in this collision between the life of brand and the reality of production that Kernaghan works his own marketing magic. It is in this collision between the life of brand and the reality of production that Kernaghan works his own marketing magic.

The NLC's events-far from the usual gray labor rallies-take full advantage of the powers of the loglo. An October 1997 rally in New York City was a case in point: it began in Times Square across from Disney's flags.h.i.+p superstore, proceeded along Seventh Avenue, past Macy's Tommy Hilfiger window display, past Barnes & n.o.ble, and Stern's department store. As the kickoff of "The Holiday Season of Conscience," the rally had as visual backdrop for the chants and speeches Manhattan's most enormous logos: a giant red swoosh on the skyline, the Maxell guy in his armchair getting "blown away" by digital sound and 3-D displays for The Lion King The Lion King on Broadway. When Jay Mazur, president of UNITE, p.r.o.nounced that "sweatshops are back and we know why," he did so with a towering, neon-lit Little Mermaid forming a halo over his head. At another NLC-sponsored protest, this one in March 1999, partic.i.p.ants parked a giant rubber rat outside the Disney store. And because Kernaghan's tactics don't demand pop-cultural asceticism in exchange for partic.i.p.ation, they have proven hugely appealing to students, many of whom show up for these rallies as walking culture jams. Echoing the cartoonish aesthetics of rave culture, high-school kids and college students dress in fuzzy animal costumes: a six-foot pink pig holding up a sign that reads "Pigs Against Greed," the Cookie Monster sporting a "No Justice, No Cookie" placard. on Broadway. When Jay Mazur, president of UNITE, p.r.o.nounced that "sweatshops are back and we know why," he did so with a towering, neon-lit Little Mermaid forming a halo over his head. At another NLC-sponsored protest, this one in March 1999, partic.i.p.ants parked a giant rubber rat outside the Disney store. And because Kernaghan's tactics don't demand pop-cultural asceticism in exchange for partic.i.p.ation, they have proven hugely appealing to students, many of whom show up for these rallies as walking culture jams. Echoing the cartoonish aesthetics of rave culture, high-school kids and college students dress in fuzzy animal costumes: a six-foot pink pig holding up a sign that reads "Pigs Against Greed," the Cookie Monster sporting a "No Justice, No Cookie" placard.

For the NLC, logos are both targets and props. Which is why, when Kernaghan speaks to a crowd-at college campuses, labor rallies or international conferences-he is never without his signature shopping bag br.i.m.m.i.n.g with Disney clothes, Kathie Lee Gifford pants and other logo gear. During his presentations, he holds up the pay slips and price tags to ill.u.s.trate the vast discrepancies between what workers are paid to make the items and what we pay to buy them. He also takes his shopping bag with him when he visits the export processing zones in Haiti and El Salvador, pulling out items from his bag of tricks to show workers the actual price tags of the goods they sew. In a letter to Michael Eisner, he describes a typical reaction: Prior to leaving for Haiti, I went to a Wal-Mart store on Long Island and purchased several Disney garments which had been made in Haiti. I showed these to the crowd of workers, who immediately recognized the clothing they had made...I held up a size four Pocahontas T-s.h.i.+rt. I showed them the Wal-Mart price tag indicating $10.97. But it was only when I translated the $10.97 into the local currency-172.26 gourdes-that, all at once, in unison, the workers screamed with shock, disbelief, anger, and a mixture of pain and sadness, as their eyes remained fixed on the Pocahontas s.h.i.+rt.... In a single day, they worked on hundreds of Disney s.h.i.+rts. Yet the sales price of just one s.h.i.+rt in the U.S. amounted to nearly five days of their wages!11 The moment when the Haitian Disney workers cried out in disbelief was captured by one of Kernaghan's colleagues on video and included in the NLC-produced doc.u.mentary Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti. Since then, the doc.u.mentary has been shown in hundreds of schools and community centers in North America and Europe, and many young activists say that scene played a critical role in persuading them to join the global struggle against sweatshops.

Another Kind of Logo Traffic Information about the disparity between wages and retail prices can also prove radicalizing to the workers in the factories who, as I learned in Cavite, know little about the value of the goods they produce. At the All Asia factory in the Cavite Export Processing Zone, for instance, the boss used to leave the price tags for the Sa.s.soon skirts in plain view-$52, they said. "Those price tags were put beside the b.u.t.tons, and we were able to see the prices when we pa.s.sed through the packing section," one seamstress told me. "So we computed the amount in pesos and the workers were saying, 'So the company is having this kind of sales? Then why are we getting this small pay?'" After management got wind of these covert discussions there were no more price tags left lying around at All Asia.

In fact, I discovered that even finding out which brand names are being produced behind the locked gates of the Cavite zone requires a fair bit of detective work, work that has been embraced by the Workers' a.s.sistance Center outside the zone. One of the center's walls is covered by a bulletin board that looks remarkably like Lora Jo Foo's logo quilt. Clothing labels are pinned all over the board: Liz Claiborne, Eddie Bauer, Izod, Guess, Gap, Ellen Tracy, Sa.s.soon, Old Navy. Beside each label on the board is the name of the factory it came from: V.T. Fas.h.i.+on, All Asia, Du Young. The organizers at WAC believe that this information connecting brands to work is crucial in their attempt to empower zone workers to stand up for their legal rights, particularly since the factory bosses are forever crying poor. When workers learn, for instance, that the Old Navy jeans they are sewing for pennies apiece are sold by a famous company called the Gap and will sell for $50 in America, they are more likely to demand overtime pay, or even long-promised health coverage. Many workers are eager for this information too, which is why they have taken the great risk of smuggling these clothing tags out of their factories; they slip them into their pockets at work, hope that the guards don't find the sc.r.a.ps when they get searched at the gate, and then bring them over to the center. The next task for WAC is to find out something about the company that owns these names-not always easy since many of the brands aren't even available for sale in the Philippines, and those that are can only be found in the high-priced malls of Manila's tourist district.

In the last few years, however, gathering this information has become a little easier, in part as a result of a marked increase in activist traffic around the world. With the aid of travel subsidies from well-funded nongovernmental organizations and unions, representatives from the tiny Workers' a.s.sistance Center in Rosario have gone to conferences all over Asia as well as in Germany and Belgium. And only two months after I first met her in Cavite, I saw WAC organizer Cecille Tuico again in Vancouver at the November 1997 People's Summit on APEC. The conference was attended by several thousand activists from forty countries and was timed to coincide with a meeting of the leaders of the eighteen Asia-Pacific economies-from Bill Clinton to Jiang Zemin-who were gathering in Vancouver that week.

On the last day of the summit, Cecille and I skipped out of the seminars and spent an afternoon on busy Robson Street, popping in and out of chain stores that sell many of the brand names produced in the Cavite zone. We scoured the racks of fleece Baby Gap sleepers and booties, Banana Republic jackets, Liz Claiborne blouses and Izod Lacoste s.h.i.+rts, and when we came across a "Made in the Philippines" tag, we scribbled down the style numbers and prices. When she returned to Cavite, Cecille converted the prices into pesos (taking into account her country's plummeting currency rate) and carefully pinned them next to the labels on the bulletin board in the WAC office. She and her colleagues point to these figures when workers drop by the center distressed about an illegal firing, back wages owed or an endless string of overnight s.h.i.+fts. Together, they calculate how many weeks a zone seamstress would have to work to be able to afford one Baby Gap sleeper for her child, and workers whisper this shocking figure to each other when they return to their cramped dormitory rooms, or break for lunch at their sweltering factories. The news spreads through the zone like wildfire.

I remembered our "sweatshopping" trip (as The Nation The Nation writer Eyal Press calls these odd excursions) when I received an E-mail from Cecille some months later telling me that WAC has finally succeeded in unionizing two garment factories inside the zone. The logos on the labels? Gap, Arizona Jeans, Izod, J.C. Penney and Liz Claiborne. writer Eyal Press calls these odd excursions) when I received an E-mail from Cecille some months later telling me that WAC has finally succeeded in unionizing two garment factories inside the zone. The logos on the labels? Gap, Arizona Jeans, Izod, J.C. Penney and Liz Claiborne.

Act Globally Ever since the politics of representation first captured the imagination of feminists in the early seventies, there have been women urging their movement sisters to look beyond how the fas.h.i.+on and beauty industries oppress Westerners as consumers, and to consider the plight of the women around the world who sweated to keep them in style. During the twenties and thirties, Emma Goldman and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union rallied the women's movement behind sweatshop workers, but in recent decades, these connections have seemed somewhat out of step with the times. Though there has always been a component of second-wave feminism that sought to forge political connections with women in developing countries, the struggle for internationalism never quite took hold of the movement in the way that pay equity, media representation or abortion rights did. Somehow, the seventies rallying cry that "the personal is political" seemed more related to the issue of how fas.h.i.+on made women feel about themselves than to the global mechanisms of how the garment industry made other women work.

In 1983, the American academic Cynthia Enloe was one of the voices in the wilderness. She insisted that the "Made in Hong Kong" and "Made in Indonesia" labels that were appearing with greater frequency inside her clothing provided a non-abstract starting point for women who wanted to understand the complexities of global economics. "We can become more able to talk about, and to make sense of such alleged 'abstractions' as 'international capital' and the 'international s.e.xual division of labour.' Both of these concepts, so long the presumed intellectual preserve of male theoreticians (most of whom never ask who weaves and who sews) are in reality only as 'abstract' as the jeans in our closets and the underwear in our dresser drawers," she wrote.12 At the time, thanks to a combination of too little awareness, cultural barriers and First World parochialism, few were ready to listen. But many are listening today. Once again, this s.h.i.+ft may be an unexpected by-product of branding ubiquity. Now that the corporations have spun their own global rainbow of logos and labels, the infrastructure for genuine international solidarity is there for everyone to see and use. The logo network may have been designed to maximize consumption and minimize production costs, but regular people can now turn themselves into "spiders" (as the members of the Free Burma Coalition call themselves) and travel across its web as easily as the corporations that spun it. Which is where Lora Jo Foo's logo map comes in-and Cecille Tuico's bulletin board and Charles Kernaghan's shopping bag and Lorraine Dusky's sneaker epiphany. It's like the Internet in general: it may have been built by the Pentagon, but it quickly became the playground of activists and hackers.

So while cultural h.o.m.ogenization-the idea of everyone eating at Burger King, wearing Nike shoes and watching Backstreet Boys videos-may inspire global claustrophobia, it has also provided a basis for meaningful global communication. Thanks to the branded web, McDonald's workers around the world are able to swap stories on the Internet about working under the arches; club kids in London, Berlin and Tel Aviv can commiserate about the corporate co-optation of the rave scene; and North American journalists can talk with poor rural factory workers in Indonesia about how much Michael Jordan gets paid to do Nike commercials. This logo web has the unprecedented power to connect students who face ad bombardment in their university washrooms with sweatshop workers who make the goods in the ads and frustrated McWorkers who sell them. They may not all speak the same language, but they now have enough common ground to begin a discussion. Playing on the Benetton slogan, one Reclaim the Streets organizer described these new global networks as the "United Colors of Resistance."

A world united by Benetton slogans, Nike sweatshops and McDonald's jobs might not be anyone's Utopian global village, but its fiber-optic cables and shared cultural references are nonetheless laying the foundations for the first truly international people's movement. That may mean fighting Wal-Mart when it comes to town, but it also means using the Net to network with the other fifty-odd communities in North America that have fought the same battle; it means bringing resolutions about global labor offenses to the local city council meeting, and joining the international fight against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. It also means making sure that the cries from a toy factory fire in Bangkok can be heard loud and clear outside the Toys 'R' Us at the mall.

Following the Logo Trail As global brand-based connections gain popularity, that trail from the mall to the sweatshop becomes better traveled. I certainly wasn't the first foreign journalist to pick through the laundry of the Cavite Export Processing Zone. In the few months before I arrived, there had been, among others, a German television crew and a couple of Italian doc.u.mentary filmmakers who hoped to dig up some scandal on their homegrown brand, Benetton. In Indonesia, so many journalists have wanted to visit Nike's infamous factories that by the time I arrived in Jakarta in August 1997 the staff at the labor-rights group Yakoma were starting to feel like professional tour guides. Every week another journalist-or "human-rights tourist," as Gary Trudeau calls them in his cartoons-descended upon the area. The situation was the same at a factory I tried to visit outside Medan, where child laborers were st.i.tching Barbie's itsy-bitsy party outfits. I met with local activists at the Indonesian Inst.i.tute for Children's Advocacy and they pulled out a photo alb.u.m filled with pictures of the NBC crew that had been there. "It won awards," program director Muhammad Joni proudly informs me of the Dateline Dateline doc.u.mentary. "They dressed up as importers. Hidden cameras-very professional." doc.u.mentary. "They dressed up as importers. Hidden cameras-very professional."13 Joni glances down at my little tape recorder and at the batik sundress I bought the week before on the beach, unimpressed. Joni glances down at my little tape recorder and at the batik sundress I bought the week before on the beach, unimpressed.

After four years of research, what I find most shocking is that so many supposed "dirty little secrets" are crammed into the global broom closet with such a casual att.i.tude. In the EPZs, labor violations are a dime a dozen-they come tumbling out as soon as you open the door even a crack. As The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal's Bob Ortega writes, "in truth, the entire apparel industry was one continuing and underreported scandal."14

With such corporate carelessness at play, no public-relations budget has proved rich enough to clearly dissociate the brand from the factory. And the wider the disparity between the image and the reality, the harder the company seems to get hit. Family-oriented brands like Disney, Wal-Mart and Kathie Lee Gifford have been forced to confront the conditions under which real families produced their wares. And when the McLibel crew released many of their most gruesome tidbits about McDonald's-tortured chickens, and hamburgers infested with E. coli bacteria, they displayed these facts over an image of the manic plastic face of Ronald McDonald. The logo adopted by the McLibel defendants was a cigar-chomping fat cat hiding behind a clown mask because, as the McLibelers put it, "Children love a secret, and Ronald's is especially disgusting."15 When the brand being targeted is anch.o.r.ed by a well-known personality, as is increasingly the case in the era of the superbrand, these collisions between image and reality are potentially even more explosive. For instance, when Kathie Lee Gifford was exposed for using sweatshops, she didn't have the option of reacting like a corporate CEO-whom we expect to be motivated exclusively by shareholder returns. The bubbly talk-show host is the human Aspartame of daytime TV. She could hardly start talking like a callous capitalist cowboy when fifteen-year-old Wendy Diaz publicly pleaded, "If I could talk to Kathie Lee I would ask her to help us, to end all the maltreatment, so that they would stop yelling at us and hitting us, and so they would let us go to night school and let us organize to protect our rights."16 After all, five minutes before, Gifford might have been confessing to the free world that a child's illness had moved her to such copious tears that she was forced to reduce the swelling under her eyes with Preparation H. She is, as Andrew Ross writes, "a perfect foil for revelations about child labor." Confronted with Diaz's words, Gifford had two options: throw away her entire multimillion-dollar TV-Mom persona, or become the fairy G.o.dmother of the maquiladoras. The choice was simple enough. "It took Gifford only two weeks to ascend to the saintly rank of labor crusader," Ross recounts. After all, five minutes before, Gifford might have been confessing to the free world that a child's illness had moved her to such copious tears that she was forced to reduce the swelling under her eyes with Preparation H. She is, as Andrew Ross writes, "a perfect foil for revelations about child labor." Confronted with Diaz's words, Gifford had two options: throw away her entire multimillion-dollar TV-Mom persona, or become the fairy G.o.dmother of the maquiladoras. The choice was simple enough. "It took Gifford only two weeks to ascend to the saintly rank of labor crusader," Ross recounts.17

In an odd twist of marketing fate, corporate sponsors.h.i.+p itself has become an important lever for activists. And why shouldn't it? When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) became mired in bribery and doping scandals in late 1998, the media immediately focused on how the controversy would affect the games' corporate sponsors-companies that claimed to be aghast at the IOC's innocence lost. "It goes to the heart of why we're involved in the Olympics. Anything that affects the positive image of the Olympics affects us," said a spokesperson for Coca-Cola.18 But surely that theory cuts both ways: if sponsors can be tarnished by corruption in the events they sponsor, those events can also be tarnished by the dubious activities of their sponsors. This is a connection that is being made with increasing frequency as the sponsors.h.i.+p industry balloons. In August 1998, Celine Dion's concert tour was picketed by human-rights activists in Boston, Philadelphia and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Although she was unaware of it, her tour sponsor-Ericsson cellular-was among Burma's most intransigent foreign investors, refusing to cease its dealings with the junta despite the campaign for an international boycott. But when the brand bas.h.i.+ng moved beyond Ericsson proper and began to spill onto Dion's diva image, it took only a week of protests to induce Ericsson to announce its immediate withdrawal from Burma. Meanwhile, sponsors that fail to s.h.i.+eld performers from anticorporate campaigns being waged against them have also found themselves under attack from all sides. For instance, at Suzuki's Rock 'n' Roll Marathon in San Diego, California, in May 1999, the bands mutinied against their corporate sponsor. Hootie and the Blowfish-hardly known for their radical political views-decided to join forces with the campaigners who were targeting the event because of Suzuki's business dealings with the Burmese junta. Band members insisted that a Suzuki banner be taken down before they got on stage and then performed wearing "Suzuki out of Burma" T-s.h.i.+rts and stickers.19

In addition to aggressive sponsors.h.i.+p, another marketing trend that has begun to backfire is the commercial co-optation of ident.i.ty politics, discussed in Chapter 5. Rather than softening its image, Nike's feminist-themed ads and antiracist slogans have only served to enrage women's groups and civil-rights leaders, who insist that a company that got rich off the backs of young women in the Third World has no business using the ideals of feminism and racial equality to sell more shoes. "I think people feel uneasy about the repackaging of social justice images as commercials from the start," U.S. media critic Makani Themba explains, "but they're not sure why. Then you hear these charges and you're ready to pounce on Nike as hypocritical."20 Which might explain why the first company to feel the heat of the sweatshop police was one that had seemed to be a paragon of ethical corporatism, Levi Strauss. In 1992 Levi's became the first company to adopt a corporate code of conduct after some of its contractors overseas were found to be treating their workers as indentured slaves. This was not the image the company had presented back home, with its commitment to nonhierarchical collective decision making and, later, its high-profile sponsors.h.i.+p of such girl-power events as the Lilith Fair festival. Similarly, the Body Shop-though it may well be the most progressive multinational on the planet-still has a tendency to display its good deeds in its store windows before getting its corporate house in order. Anita Rodd.i.c.k's company has been the subject of numerous d.a.m.ning investigations in the press, which have challenged the company's use of chemicals, its stand on unions and even its claim that its products have not been tested on animals.

We have heard the same refrain over and over again from Nike, Reebok, the Body Shop, Starbucks, Levi's and the Gap: "Why are you picking on us? We're the good ones!" The answer is simple. They are singled out because the politics they have a.s.sociated themselves with, which have made them rich-feminism, ecology, inner-city empowerment-were not just random pieces of effective ad copy that their brand managers found lying around. They are complex, essential social ideas, for which many people have spent lifetimes fighting. That's what lends righteousness to the rage of activists campaigning against what they see as cynical distortions of those ideas. Al Dunlap, the notorious job-slasher-for-hire who built his reputation on ruthless layoffs, may be able to respond to calls for corporate accountability with a rev of his chainsaw, but companies such as Levi's and the Body Shop can't shrug them off, because they publicly presented social accountability as the foundation of their corporate philosophy from the first. Over and over again, it is when the advertising teams creatively overreach themselves that-like Icarus-they fall.

Injustice-in Synergy By some accident of fate, on February 25, 1997, the multiple layers of anti-corporate rage converged over the Mighty Ducks hockey arena in Anaheim, California. It was Disney's annual meeting and about 10,000 shareholders crowded into the arena to rake Michael Eisner over the coals. They were upset that he had paid more than $100 million in a severance package to Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, who'd lasted only fourteen scandal-racked months at Disney as second in command. Eisner was further attacked for his own $400 million multiyear pay package, as well as for stacking the board with friends and paid Disney consultants. As if shareholders weren't angry enough, the obscene amounts of money lavished on Ovitz and Eisner were thrown into harsh relief by an unrelated shareholders' resolution chiding Disney for paying starvation wages to workers in its overseas factories, and calling for independent monitoring of these practices. Outside the arena, dozens of National Labor Committee supporters were shouting and waving placards about the plight of Disney's Haitian workforce. Of course the monitoring resolution was trounced, but the way the issues of sweatshop labor and executive compens