McLibel - Burger Culture on Trial, by John Vidal (Macmillan £15.99), MCDONALD'S food is not nutritious, and can kill you.
Although the multi-national corporation deny this, there is an overwhelming weight of scientific evidence that foods such as those produced by McDonald's which are high in fat, sodium and sugar can cause cancers of the breast and bowel as well as heart disease.
And if you draw the conclusionthat the company has little respect for human life, then it will hardly shock you to learn that they also condone the inhumane factory farming and slaughter of animals.
To add to their sins, in order to facilitate the mass breeding of livestock for their products, they are complicit in the mass destruction of tropical rainforests in order to provide grazing land.
If that isn't enough, the packaging produced for their produce necessitates the cutting down of even more areas of forestation.
So, you may ask, if they have so little respect for both animals and humans, how then do they treat the vast majority of their employ. ees, the brainwashed drones who work for them in their millions of outlets throughout the world, the vast numbers of "crews" who, according to the company are dedicated-to keeping their ships afloat and providing the customers with Big Macs, Fries, Double Cheeseburgers, Chicken McNuggets (Yumm!.. we could go on)?
No unions The answer is, in two words -LIKE SHIT. McDonald's crew members receive piss-poor wages -in the UK - £3.10 per hour in 1994. What's more, throughout the world, McDonald's employees are prohibited from joining unions. If they try to, there is firstly persuasion not to, secondly coercion and finally the sack.
Before I go on, I wouldn't like you to think that these are my allegations. After all, this publication could also be sued. Although I may have added some additional hyperbole, they are essentially the same allegations as were contained in a factsheet first disseminated by the London Greenpeace group (no relation to the international environmental organisation) in 1986. In 1990, McDonald's began legal proceedings against five activists. who they believed were key to its distribution.
And in writing his book about the McLibel trial, the Environmental Editor of the Guardian, John Vidal, is at pains to point out that he does not necessarily share the view of the defendants.
You can hardly blame him. McDonald's method of silencing its critics is often that of the SLAPP - a phrase first used by two American academics and meaning Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation.
Of the five people who were originally in the frame, three eventually gave McDonald's what ther wanted - an apology. The other two, Helen Steel and Dave Morris stuck it out and so began the trial that was to become at 313 days the longest of any kind in English hisThis does not take into account the numerous preliminary hearings and various appeals which took place before the actual trial commenced.
And it's not over yet. On December 13 last year, after he had heard the closing speeches, Mr. Justice Bell Said: 'I wilt say now that I propose to reserve my judgement...I don't mean to be difficult when I say I don't know when I will deliver it because I don't know.' Not surprising really, given that he has to review some 58,000 pages of documentary evidence and transcript testimony.
During the preliminary stages, the plaintiff's barrister persuaded the judge that on the basis that much of the scientific evidence would be too complex for a jury to understand, the trial should take place without one. The judge would be arbiter of both fact and the law.
In late 1990 the McLibel Support Campaign was establsihed. From small beginnings it mushroomed into an organisation with significant support from people in many different countries. In February 1996, it established its own McSpotlight website on the Internet.
Vidal: "The act of taking two people to court was having the exact opposite of the desired effect...it was exacerbating the situation...By April 1994, the McLibel Support Campaign was claiming that more than half a million "What's Wrong With McDonald's" leaflets had been handed out since the writs were served.' To counter this McDonald's started distributing a "Why McDonald's is going to court" leaflet from its restaurant outlets. This effectively branded Steel and Morris as liars', and in a deft move they counter-claimed for libel against McDonald's.
Now there were to be two trials taking place at the same time. Effectively McDonald's was on trial, and Mr. Justice Bell would have a doubly hard task, eventuTwo people against the multi-millions of the McDonald's machine: Helen Steeland and Dave Morris ally having to rule not on sixteen "but thirty-two charges.
As might be expected, by far the greater part of Vidal's book is given over to trying to encapsulate the long tortuous process of the trial. McDonald's executives were paraded before the court in order to defend every aspect of corporate policy. Both sides called large numbers of expert witnesses and their evidence was often contradictory if not confusing.
For McDonald's the crucial part of the allegations was whether or not their food was nutritious and the allegations of a link between it and the development of cancers, heart disease and strokes.
The defendants had scored an early victory when they trapped a McDonald's witness on nutrition into admitting that just such a link existed. The corporation were then allowed to move the goal posts by amending their claim in such a way that Morris and Stee! had to prove that the consumption of McDonald's food actually caused the ailments which had been cited.
Out of court
Although this was much harder, McDonald's were still worried. Late in August, 1994 they made an offer to settle the case out of court. There was to be no payment of compensation or costs to either of the parties but a substantial sum of money would be paid companies to infiltrate the London Greenpeace group and spy on its members. As neither company were aware that the other had also been retained, sometimes the investigators were unknowingly gathering information on each other.
In order to establish their credibility with the genuine members of the group, many of the agents assisted with the production and distribution of anti-McDonald's material. Part of Steel and Morris's defence was that the company had thus actually colluded in the dissemination of the literature they claimed had defamed it!
The testamonies of McDonald's executives were often ludicrous. More so than in this book, this was plainly apparent in a dramatic reconstruction of parts of the trial, recently shown on Channel 4. Robert Beavers, a senior vice president of the corporation broke down in tears while describing how a teenager who previously had never achieved anything, won a crew member of the year award.
When another executive was asked if he knew what a typical tree in the rainforest might look like, his reply was that they were tall and slender, somewhat like himself.
It would be wrong to see the trial merely as an amusing circus. Vidal locates the actions of McDonald's within a strategy pursued by many other multinationals, some of it much more sinister than the pursuit of two anarchists through the vast labyrinth of the English legal system.
He cites as example the complicity of the Shell corporation in the Nigerian regime's persecution of the Orgoni people and its execution on trumped-up charges of fierce critics such as the writer and political activist, Ken SaroWiwa.
He points out how, because of their crossing of national boundaries, the multi-nationals are now beyond regulation by national governments and even emergent supra-states such as the EC.
While we have not been looking, global capitalism has been reinventing itself. It works now not only through nation states but through the World Bank, the IMF and the GATT, now transmuted into the World Trade Organisation.
Grass roots
What, however, can be done about these shadowy and unaccountable organisations? Vidal seems to see the answer in what he terms 'civil society' - a loose grouping together of oppositionists who range from the likes of Saro-Wiwa to those in the West who set up grassroots systems of barter and credit unions.
Into this he also inserts Steel and Morris.
It is true that many of these groups and initiatives challenge the increasing hegemony of global capitalism, Vidal fails to answer the vexed problem of how these disparate groupings can be brought together.
He claims the politics of both the left and right have failed but fails to define terms which are after all somewhat vague. Its true that some on the left have been dismissive of the fight to save the planet and of those activists working for this new begining.
But a real socialism for the future must contain an analysis of capitalism's latest global phas, e and must be able to involve all those who fight it and its accompanying destruction of the environ-