guerilla marketing | VVV Public Relations: BPR + Guerrilla Marketing

Tag Archives: guerilla marketing

At Northrop Grumman, It’s All About the Green

February 9, 2012 – 2:19 pm

Of the “Big 5″ U.S. defense contractors who each year bank billions of taxpayer dollars we know about – and probably billions more we don’t – none appreciate the importance of high-profile, high-volume campaign contributions and legislative lobbying more so than Northrop Grumman. In fact, they even devote one third of their website’s home page slide show to enlisting YOU to lobby for THEM:

http://www.northropgrumman.com

If they change the slideshow or you can’t access flash, here are screenshots of the slides I’m referring to:

http://ldrlongdistancerider.com/NorthropGrumman/Slide6.jpg
http://ldrlongdistancerider.com/NorthropGrumman/Slide7.jpg
http://ldrlongdistancerider.com/NorthropGrumman/Slide8.jpg
http://ldrlongdistancerider.com/NorthropGrumman/Slide9.jpg

Yes, Northrop Grumman would certainly love to have all of us 99 percenters dialing for dollars on their behalf. But even without us, they still have a sizable army of well-heeled lobbyists working the Hill. In 2010, for example, they deployed a force of 65 that included two revolving-door Senators (John Breaux and Trent Lott) as well as two revolving-door Congressmen (Jack Edwards and Robert Livingston):

http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D000000170&year=2010

All that good-ole boy networking must have been effective, because that year Northrop Grumman was “awarded” over $15.5 billion in new federal contracts despite a record of government overcharges, mischarges, cost overruns, nonconforming parts, hazardous waste permit violations and outright fraud that only Lockheed Martin or the Boeing Company could envy:

http://www.contractormisconduct.org/index.cfm/1,73,221,html?ContractorID=42&ranking=3

Northrop Grumman is another textbook example of how the Kleptocracy makes a mockery of the dysfunctional two-party system their paid pundits work hard to keep the Sheeple believing is the essence of democracy. They don’t care who gets elected, or which party is in power, so long as fat government contracts keep coming their way. Almost all of their campaign contributions go to the incumbents, and they generally ride the horse that wins. In the 2000 through 2006 election cycles, the majority of their contributions went to the red team (ie. Republicans). In 2008 and 2010, they shifted to the blue side (ie. Democrats). And so far, it looks like they’ll shift back again in 2012:

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000170&type=P&sort=A&cycle=2000

But don’t get lost in all the color references. Northrop Grumman is not about red, or blue, or the red-white-and-blue plastered all over their marketing propaganda. At Northrop Grumman, it’s all about the green…

General Dynamics and its Dynamic Generals

February 8, 2012 – 5:39 pm

Part 1 of 4: National Security Inc.

“The evolution of General Dynamics was based on one simple strategy: Follow the money. The company embraced the emerging intelligence-driven style of warfare. It developed small-target identification systems and equipment that could intercept an insurgent’s cellphone and laptop communications. It found ways to sort the billions of data points collected by intelligence agencies into piles of information that a single person could analyze. It also began gobbling up smaller companies that could help it dominate the new intelligence landscape, just as its competitors were doing. Between 2001 and 2010, the company acquired 11 firms specializing in satellites, signals and geospatial intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, technology integration and imagery. On Sept. 11, 2001, General Dynamics was working with nine intelligence organizations. Now it has contracts with all 16. Its employees fill the halls of the NSA and DHS. The corporation was paid hundreds of millions of dollars to set up and manage DHS’s new offices in 2003, including its National Operations Center, Office of Intelligence and Analysis and Office of Security. Its employees do everything from deciding which threats to investigate to answering phones.”

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/national-security-inc/1/

Part 2 of 4: General Dynamics Elects General James L. Jones to Board of Directors

“General Dynamics (NYSE: GD) board of directors has elected retired U.S. Marine Corps general James L. Jones to be a director of the corporation, effective Aug. 3, 2011. Jones, 67, is currently president of global consulting firm Jones Group International and served as National Security Advisor to the President of the United States from January 2009 to November 2010. Previously, he was Supreme Allied Commander of the U.S. European Command and served as the 32nd Commandant of the Marine Corps, which he served for more than 40 years until his 2007 retirement. Jones is also on the boards of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Atlantic Council of the United States, among other institutions.”

http://www.govconwire.com/2011/08/general-dynamics-elects-gen-james-l-jones-to-board-of-directors/

Part 3 of 4: From the Pentagon to the private sector

“Retired General William S. Wallace, who ran the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command before retiring in 2008, said he was not representing one of the prospective bidders at the time of the meeting. Like the other participants, however, one of the ethics questions he was asked to answer, according to a blank copy, was whether he intended to consult in the future for a client that may have a direct interest in bidding on the new tank… Wallace declined to say how he answered that question. Wallace confirmed that he is now a consultant for General Dynamics Land Systems Division, which is seeking to win the ground combat vehicle contract.”

Part 4 of 4: Dynamic Generals

“Nothing lubricates the wheels of defense commerce better than to have General Dynamics’ boardroom filled with retired generals and admirals?

* Jay L. Johnson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer – Retired Admiral, U.S. Navy. Chief of Naval Operations from 1996 to 2000.
* George A. Joulwan, Director and Chairman, Compensation Committee – Retired General, U.S. Army. Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, from 1993 to 1997. Commander-in-Chief, Southern Command from 1990 to 1993.
* Paul G. Kaminski, Director and Chairman, Finance and Benefit Plans Committee – Under Secretary of U.S. Department of Defense for Acquisition and Technology from 1994 to 1997.
* John M. Keane, Director – Retired General, U.S. Army. Vice Chief of Staff of the Army from 1999 to 2003.
* Lester L. Lyles, Director – Retired General, U.S. Air Force. Commander of the Air Force Materiel Command from 2000 to 2003. Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force from 1999 to 2000.
* Robert Walmsley, Director – Retired Vice Admiral, Royal Navy. Chief of Defence Procurement for the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence from 1996 to 2003.

[The] key nodes in the corrupt government-corporate nexus are clearly at the highest levels where tax dollars get siphoned into private bank accounts by retired generals and former government officials who smugly regard the practice as the way Washington works. Indeed it is – and it is the way capitalism corrupts democracy.”

http://warincontext.org/2010/07/20/dynamic-generals/

ExxonMobil: High Earnings, Low Taxes, No Ethics

February 6, 2012 – 10:35 am

Exxon Mobil Corporation is the the world’s largest publicly traded international oil and gas company. It is a direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly and – along with BP, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, and Total S.A. – one of the five global oil and gas ‘supermajors’.

“Over the past two years [2009-2010], ExxonMobil reported $9.91 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But it enjoyed so many tax subsidies that its federal income tax bill was only $39 million – a tax rate of only 0.4 percent.”

http://www.ctj.org/pdf/energy20110429.pdf

“Even when Exxon Mobil had a record profit of $40 billion in 2008 due to record oil prices it had only a 31 percent effective tax rate. That’s 13 percent lower than the maximum 35 percent despite being Exxon Mobil’s fifth year as the top corporate earner in Fortune 500′s annual listing. The company paid NO TAXES AT ALL to the U.S. federal government in 2009 on its domestic profits of nearly $2.6 billion. It appears that they avoided the tax man that year by legally funneling their profits through wholly owned subsidiaries in countries like the Cayman Islands, and reinvesting their earnings overseas… More striking still is the discrepancy between Exxon Mobil’s rates and those of most American breadwinners. The company’s effective rate of 17.6 percent is nearly 16 percent below the average individual federal tax rate, which according to the Congressional Budget Office was 20.4 percent as of 2007.”

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/05/tax_man.html

It is not by accident that one of the world’s largest and most profitable corporations gets to keep so much of its earnings. In 2010 alone, Exxon Mobil spent $12.45 million keeping an army of 50 mostly ‘revolving-door’ lobbyists marching up and down the halls of Congress maximizing its federal income tax loopholes while minimizing all those pesky environmental protection and anti-trust regulations:

http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D000000129&year=2010

This of course leaves them with plenty of cash for PR propaganda campaigns aimed at whitewashing their corporate image to not only wipe away unpleasant memories of the Exxon Valdez oil spill but also distract attention from inconvenient truths like their #2 ranking among the Toxic 100 Air Polluters in the U.S.:

http://www.peri.umass.edu/toxic_index/

That disclosure of course tags Exxon Mobil as a key contributor to the larger “Inconvenient Truth” of Global Warming, and the response of their spinmeisters has been to flood our corporate-controlled media with authoritative-sounding denials that such a thing even exists. And while Wikipedia entries are often incomplete, inaccurate or subjectively skewed, in this case the supporting references that follow indicate they got it right:

“A recent analysis by Carbon Brief from 2011 concluded that 9 out of 10 climate scientists who claim that climate change is not happening have ties to ExxonMobil. The results showed that out of the 938 papers cited by climate sceptics, 186 of them were written by only ten men, and foremost among them was Dr Craig D. Idso, who personally authored 67 of them. Idso is the president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, an ExxonMobil funded think tank. The second most prolific was Dr Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who receives roughly 40% of his funding from the oil industry.”

http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate-change-papers-exxon-mobil/

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/04/900-papers-supporting-climate-scepticism-exxon-links/

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/dirty-money-climate-30032010/

http://ldrlongdistancerider.com/images/ExxonMobil_GlobalWarming.jpg

VVV Public Relations: BPR + Guerrilla Marketing

Tag Archives: guerilla marketing

At Northrop Grumman, It’s All About the Green

General Dynamics and its Dynamic Generals

ExxonMobil: High Earnings, Low Taxes, No Ethics

Black PR Alternatives
White Hat Guerilla Marketing
White Hat Guerrilla Activism
@VVVPR :: 877-919-5351

Contact

Pages

Revelations

Resources

Meta

Follow “VVV Public Relations: BPR + Guerrilla Marketing”

VVV Public Relations: BPR + Guerrilla Marketing

Tag Archives: guerilla marketing

At Northrop Grumman, It’s All About the Green

Share this:

General Dynamics and its Dynamic Generals

Share this:

ExxonMobil: High Earnings, Low Taxes, No Ethics

Share this:

Black PR AlternativesWhite Hat Guerilla MarketingWhite Hat Guerrilla Activism@VVVPR :: 877-919-5351

Contact

Pages

Revelations

Resources

Meta

Follow “VVV Public Relations: BPR + Guerrilla Marketing”

Black PR Alternatives
White Hat Guerilla Marketing
White Hat Guerrilla Activism
@VVVPR :: 877-919-5351