Marie Claire magazine recently ranked them at number four in their 10 Best Charities but does Polaris Project
deserve our donations or are they closely
connected with individuals and organizations that put profit before people?
While they undoubtedly do some very worthwhile work against people-smuggling, Polaris Project has chosen to accept funds and support from sources that can only bring their claim to be a humanitarian organisation into serious question.
Mega-retailer, The Home Depot, which Polaris Project calls a ˜supporter and partner,' is estimated to be worth $30 billion. They have seemingly gained a great deal of this wealth by exploitation of their workers, including the use of 11-hour shifts, and have faced accusations of sexual harassment as well as allegations of racist treatment of minorities. Home Depot has also sparked considerable community outrage at their aggressive, Starbucks-style pushing out of small competitors as well as for their continued sale of rainforest and old growth timber products.
One of Polaris Project's other major financial backers is the Japanese branch of the giant software corporation, Oracle. They have been touted as "the next Microsoft, having achieved their size by swallowing up as many rivals as possible and sacking thousands of workers when they felt it to be economically expedient. Another of Polaris Project's corporate donors is the Iconix Brand Group, the licensing company behind clothing labels such as Joe Boxer, Mossimo, Mudd and London Fog. They reported a net income of approximately $44.5 million for just nine months of last year. In doing so, they broke U.S. anti-trust laws in October 2007 and had to pay $550,000 to settle related charges.
While they are happily taking money from big business, Polaris Project has also been keen to publicise awards that they have received from a number of companies, who have passed-on money with the award. One of these is the kids' volunteering website: www.DoSomething.org, who recently gave them an "Honor for Innovation and Effectiveness.
Polaris' decision to align themselves so closely with Do Something is more than surprising because young visitors to their website cannot avoid seeing flashing logos for a number of "Sponsors that rock. These include Doritos, who food scientists have pointed the finger at for lying about their damaging food additives and Pepsi Cola, who used rapper Ludacris to promote their product even after the howls of outrage over his song "Move Bitch, where he threatens both violence to a girlfriend as well as road rage against anyone getting in his way.
Another prominently pictured advertising link on the Do Something site is for Karma Tycoon, who promise that they "rock the gaming world by offering you a thrilling ride through the world of social entrepreneurship as you earn Karma in virtual communities across the US. JP Morgan Chase which calls itself "a leading global financial services firm with assets of $1.5 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries is also a paid-up supporter of Do Something, as is Polaris' controversial partner, The Home Depot.
But Polaris Project has other connections that it also boasts about. On their website they proudly proclaim that they earned a "Strength and Spirit Award from a magazine called Redbook. This publication, as part of the huge Hearst media empire (that includes award-giver Marie Claire) is one that continually focuses on women's body image. While this is not unusual for many other women's magazines, the editor Stacey recently commented in one of her nauseating ˜Something About Stacey' blogs that: "every person really must find the ways to get "unplugged so you can fill your brain with emptiness. I felt calmer, thinner, happier and more me when I got on the subway to come to work after this weekend alone. Redbook has come under heavy condemnation for digitally altering a cover photo of already-slim singer Faith Hill to make her appear to be significantly thinner and younger than she actually was. They have also used Limbo 41414 to junk advertise on mobile phone networks.
Polaris Project is keen to make it known that they have received praise from high places. Together with Redbook, another Hearst Corporation, Lifetime Television (jointly owned with the Walt Disney company) recently used Selma Hayek to hand Polaris their "Strength and Spirit Award. The Lifetime channel has been criticized for excessively anti-male programming, and (ironically) for relying on the portrayal of woman as victims in its highly successful quest for female daytime TV viewers. Polaris likes to portray the resilience and strength of those who it assists out of ˜modern-day slavery.' Glad-handing with representatives of the media who make a living out of using images of women as passive objects is worse than being phony. It is nothing worse than deception and fraud.
Along with Lifetime, The Bodyshop is another financial supporter who has bestowed an award on Polaris Project, this time as a "Champions of Change. But The Bodyshop itself is no champion of change. It has a disgraceful record of putting profits before human rights concerns, having consistently acted against its workers having any collective representation, such as through a union. They pay their staff a bare minimum wage.
In its most recent case of self-promotion, Polaris Project congratulated
itself on being selected by The Catalogue
for Philanthrophy as "exemplifying excellence in its
field. One of the people also acknowledged and thanked at the same time for
their "support and commitment of this catalog is Stephen Ward, a former vice president of government
relations for Shell Oil Company for eleven years. As The Ethical
Consumer Guide to Everyday Shopping notes,
they have supplied guns to the brutal and oppressive Nigerian government and were involved in the murder of Ken
Saro-Wiwa and eight other anti-oil protesters in that country. As a genuine humanitarian organization,
if you were working in the Polaris Project you could only feel ashamed to keep
company like this.
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