The best adverts to save the planet

Title: Oil
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather,
Greenpeace (China)
Tag line: Everyone's entitled to an opinion. Voice yours at forum.greenpeace.org

Title: Paint
Agency: Contrapunto
Made For: WWF (Spain)

The best adverts to save the planet

Title: Tarzan
Agency: Uncle Grey
Made for: WWF (Denmark)
Tag line: 15m sq of rainforest disappears every minute

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Guardian/UK

Since 2001, Swiss-based not-for-profit organisation ACT Responsible (Advertising Community Together), has been collecting global advertising that 'promotes responsible communication on sustainability, equitable development and social responsibility' in a bid to highlight how the creativity of advertising professionals can be used to address the world's problems.

Among its 2,500 ads from more than 40 countries and 140 award-winning agencies is a striking collection of adverts that focus on environmental and social issues: from deforestation to recycling and conserving water to climate change.

New Secrecy Rule Lets Goldman Sachs Control Stock Prices Unmolested by Public Scrutiny

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The new rule means the public will no longer be able to tell if large investment banks are manipulating the stock market for their own gain.

Daniel Tencer
July 6, 2009 - Raw Story

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The New York Stock Exchange quietly announced last week that it would end its practice of requiring companies to report all their program trading -- a move that helps shield large investment banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, from public scrutiny.

The new rule means the public will no longer be able to tell if large investment banks are manipulating the stock market for their own gain, says Matt Taibbi, the journalist whose Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs' role in asset bubbles over the past century has rocked the financial world.

According to previous NYSE rules, any company that carried out program trading -- essentially, large computer-automated trades worth more than $1 million -- had to report the trades to the NYSE, which then made the information publicly available.

But, under new regulations (PDF) published last week, that requirement has been removed.

"The NYSE announced that it will no longer be releasing its weekly program trading data," Taibbi wrote in a blog posting. "This is quiet obviously a move designed to make it even more impossible to track what's going on in the NYSE and shield, in particular, Goldman Sachs."

Taibbi argues that the move is designed to protect investment banks from bloggers who are exposing the companies' stock market manipulations. Goldman Sachs is singled out because the investment bank's share of principal NYSE trading has gone from 27 percent at the end of 2008 to fully 50 percent of trades in recent months.

Blogs such as Zero Hedge have been using NYSE data to argue that Goldman Sachs now has an almost unfettered ability to control stock prices.

Responding last week to news of the NYSE's rule change, Zero Hedge argued:

The NYSE has taken action to make sure that nobody will henceforth be able to keep track of the complete dominance that Goldman Sachs exerts over the New York Stock Exchange. This basically ends our weekly Program Trading updates disclosed every Thursday indicating that Goldman has singlehandedly captured all of NYSE's program trading.

Taibbi's article on Goldman Sachs' long history of involvement in asset bubbles and crashes can be found here:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine

Zen Moment for the Oil Industry

From 1998 to 2005, ExxonMobil directed almost $16 million to a network of 43 lobbying groups in an effort to confuse Americans about global warming. After being criticized by the Royal Society in 2006, the oil giant promised to stop funding groups that denied the science behind climate change. In May 2008, ExxonMobil again pledged to cut funding to groups that "divert attention" from the need to develop and invest in clean energy. Yet, in 2008, while cutting contributions to the most extreme groups, the company still funded other groups. Indeed, London's Daily Telegraph reported last week that "[c]ompany records for 2008 show that ExxonMobil gave $75,000 to the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas and $50,000 to the Heritage Foundation in Washington. It also gave $245,000 to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington."

Similarly, ExxonMobil has devoted millions to ad campaigns touting clean energy without actually investing significantly in renewable energy. In 2007, for example, ExxonMobil spent $100 million on advertising and "green-washing" campaigns in an attempt to exaggerate its commitment to renewable energy. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil spends just $10 million per year on renewable energy research -- a tenth of the amount it spent talking about investing in clean energy. This latest evidence of ExxonMobil's continued opposition to clean energy comes less than a month after the American Petroleum Institute released a report revealing just how little the top Big Oil companies invest in renewable energy -- and how far they'll go to claim otherwise.

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html