The Corporation (2003)

Noam Chomsky: Self - Institute Professor, MIT

Quotes 

• Noam Chomsky : The dominant role of corporations in our lives is essentially a product of roughly the past century. Corporations were originally associations of people who were chartered by a state to perform some particular function. Like a group of people want to build a bridge over the Charles River, or something like that.

  Mary Zepernick : There were very few chartered corporations in early United States history. And the ones that existed had clear stipulations in their state issued charters, how long they could operate, the amount of capitalisation, what they made or did or maintained, a turnpike or whatever was in their charter and they didn't do anything else. They didn't own or couldn't own another corporation. Their shareholders were liable. And so on.

  Richard Grossman : In both law and the culture, the corporation was considered a subordinate entity that was a gift from the people in order to serve the public good. So you have that history, and we shouldn't be misled by it, it's not as if these were the halcyon days, when all corporations served the public trust, but there's a lot to learn from that.

  Narrator : Having acquired the legal rights and protections of a person, the question arises - what kind of person is the corporation?

  Noam Chomsky : Corporations were given the rights of immortal persons. But then special kinds of persons, persons who had no moral conscience. These are a special kind of persons, which are designed by law, to be concerned only for their stockholders. And not, say, what are sometimes called their stakeholders, like the community or the work force or whatever.

  Robert Monks : The great problem of having corporate citizens is that they aren't like the rest of us. As Baron Thurlow in England is supposed to have said, "They have no soul to save, and they have no body to incarcerate."

  Michael Moore : I believe the mistake that a lot of people make when they think about corporations, is they think you know, corporations are like us. They think they have feelings, they have politics, they have belief systems, they really only have one thing, the bottom line - how to make as much money as they can in any given quarter. That's it.

• Noam Chomsky : It's a fair assumption that every human being, real human beings, flesh and blood ones, not corporations, but every flesh and blood human being is a moral person. You know, we've got the same genes, we're more or less the same, but our nature, the nature of humans, allows all kinds of behaviour. I mean, every one of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint.

  Sam Gibara : No job, in my experience with Goodyear, has been as frustrating as the CEO job. Because even though the perception is that you have absolute power to do whatever you want, the reality is you don't have that power, and sometimes, if you had really a free hand, if you really did what you wanted to do that suits you personal thoughts and you're personal priorities, you'd act differently. But as a CEO you cannot do that. Layoffs have become so widespread that people tend to believe that CEOs make these decisions without any consideration to the human implications of their decisions. It is never a decision that any CEO makes lightly. It is a tough decision. But it is the consequence of modern capitalism.

  Noam Chomsky : When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the insitution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous, but the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you could imagine. Benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves, caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything. In their institutional role they're monsters because the institution is monstrous. The same is true here. So an individual CEO, let's say, may really care about the environment and, in fact, since they have such extraordinary resources, they can even devote some of their resources to that without violating their responsibility to be totally inhuman.

  Narrator : Which is thy, as the Moody-Stuarts serve tea to protestors, Shell Nigeria can flare unrivalled amounts of gas, making it one of the world's single worst sources of pollution. And all the professed concerns about the environment do not spare Ken Saro Wiwa and 8 other activists from being hanged for opposing Shell's environmental practices in the Niger Delta.

• Noam Chomsky : Privatisation does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person. It means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny. Public institutions have many side benefits. For one thing they may purposely run at a loss. They're not out for profit. They may purposely run at a loss because of the side benefits. So, for example if a public steel industry runs at a loss it's providing cheap steel to other industries. Maybe that's a good thing. Public institutions can have a counter cyclic property. So that means that they can maintain employment in periods of recession, which increases demand, which helps you to get out of recession. Private companies can't do that in a recession. Throw out the work force because that's the way you make money.

  Maude Barlow : There are those who intend that one day everything will be owned by somebody and we're not just talking goods here. We're talking human rights, human services, essential services for life. Education, public health, social assistance, pensions, housing. We're also talking about the survival of the planet. The areas that we believe must be maintained in the commons or under common control or we will collectively die. Water and air.

  Michael Walker : Even in the case of air there's been some progress and that is the trading of pollution permits. And here the idea is to say, "Look, we can't avoid the dumping of carbon dioxide. We can't avoid the dumping of sulphur oxides, at least at the moment afford to stop it so we're dumping a certain amount of stuff into the environment. So we're going to say with the current tonnage of sulphur oxides, for example, we will say that is the limit. And we'll create permits for that amount and give them to the people who've been doing the polluting and now we will permit them to be traded". And so now there's a price attached to polluting the environment. Now, wouldn't it be marvellous if we have one of the prices for everything?

  Interviewer : It sounds like you're advocating private ownership of every square inch of the planet. Every cubic foot of air, water.

  Michael Walker : Absolutely. It sounds outlandish to say we want to have the whole universe, the whole of the earth owned. That doesn't mean I want to have Joe Bloggs owning this square foot. But it means the interests that are involved in that stream are owned by some group or by some people who have an interest in maintaining it. And that, you know, is not such a loony idea. It's in fact, the solution to a lot of these problems.

• Noam Chomsky : The goal for the corporations is to maximise profit and market share. And they also have a goal for their target, namely the population. They have to be turned into completely mindless consumers of goods that they do not want. You have to develop what are called "Creative Wants". So you have to create wants. You have to impose on people what's called a Philosophy of Futility. You have to focus them on the insignificant things of life, like fashionable consumption. I'm just basically quoting business literature. And it makes perfect sense. The ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another. Whose conception of themselves, the sense of value is just, "how many created wants can I satisfy?" We have huge industries, public relations industry, monstrous industry, advertising and so on, which are designed from infancy to mold people into this desired pattern.

• Narrator : Transnational corporations have a long and dark history of condoning tyrannical governments. Is it narcissism that compels them to seek their reflection in the regimented structures of fascist regimes?

  Howard Zinn : There was an interesting connection between the rise of fascism in Europe and the consciousness of politically radical people about corporate power. Because there was a recognition that Fascism rose in Europe with the help of enormous corporations.

  Noam Chomsky : Mussolini was greatly admired all across the spectrum, business loved him, investment shot up. Incidentally, when Hitler came in in Germany the same thing happened there, investment shot up in Germany. He had the work force under control. He was getting rid of dangerous left-wing elements. Investment opportunities were improving. There was no problems. These are wonderful countries.

  Michael Moore : I think one of the greatest untold stories of the 20th century is the collusion between corporations, especially in America, and Nazi Germany. First, in terms of how the corporations from America helped to essentially rebuild Germany and support the early Nazi regime. And then, when the war broke out, figured out a way to keep everything going. So General Motors was able to keep Opal going, Ford was able to keep their thing going, and companies like Coca-Cola, they couldn't keep the Coca-Cola going, so what they did was they invented Fanta Orange for the Germans. And that's how Coke was able to keep their profits coming in to Coca-Cola. So when you drink Fanta Orange, that's the Nazi drink that was created so that Coke could continue making money while millions of people died.

• Elaine Bernard : So what we need to do is to look at the very roots of the legal form that created this beast, and we need to think who can hold them accountable.

  Noam Chomsky : They're not graven in stone. They can be dismantled. And, in fact, most states have laws, which require that they be dismantled.

  Jim Lafferty : For too long now giant corporations have been allowed to undermine democracy here in the United States and all over the world. But today the National Lawyer's Guild and 29 other groups and individuals are fighting back. We are calling upon State Attorney General, Dan Lungren, to comply with California law and to revoke to the corporate charter of the Union Oil Company of California for its repeated and grevious offences.

  Robert Benson : This is a statute that is well known. It has been used. It can be used. What this will mean is the dissolution of the Union Oil Company of California, the sale of its assets under careful court orders to others who will carry on in the public interest.

  Jim Lafferty : From its complicity in unspeakable human rights violations overseas against women, gays, labourers and indigenous peoples, to its efforts to subvert U.S. foreign policy and deceive the courts, the public and its own stockholders, Unocal is emblematic of corporate abuse and corporate power run amok.

  Don Xui Xziang : Extending a business deal with the Burma army is immoral. Unocal cannot do business in Burma without supporting that hopeless regime.

  Title Card : The Attorney General of California refused to revoke the corporate charter of Unocal but did acknowledge his office had the power to do so.

• Sir Mark Moody-Stuart : People accuse us of only paying attention to the economic leg, because they think that's what a business person's mindset is, it's just money. And it's not so, because we, as business people, know that we need to certainly address the environment, but also we need to be seen as constructive members of society.

  Michael Moore : There are companies that do good for the communities. They produce services and goods that are of value to all of us, that make our lives better, and that's a good thing. The problem comes in the profit motivation here, because for these people, there's no such thing as enough.

  Sir Mark Moody-Stuart : And I always counterpoint out, there's no organisation on this planet that can neglect its economic foundation. Even someone living under a banyan tree is dependent on support from someone. Economic leg has to be addressed by everyone. It's not just a business issue.

  Narrator : But, unlike someone under a banyan tree, all publicly traded corporations have been structured, through a series of legal decisions, to have a peculiar and disturbing characteristic. They are required, by law, to place the financial interests of their owners above competing interests. In fact, the corporation is legally bound to put its bottom line ahead of everything else, even the public good.

  Noam Chomsky : That's not a law of nature, that's a very specific decision. In fact, a judicial decision. So they're concerned only for the short-term profit of their stockholders who are very highly concentrated.

  Robert Monks : To whom do these companies owe loyalty? What does loyalty mean? Well, it turns out that that was a rather naïve concept anyways as corporations are always owed obligation to themselves to get large and to get profitable. In doing this, it tends to be more profitable to the extent that it can make other people pay the bills for its impact on society. There's a terrible word that economists use for this called 'externalities'.

  Milton Friedman : An externality is the effect of a transaction between two individuals on a third party who has not consented to, or played any role in the carrying out of that transaction. And there are real problems in that area. There's no doubt about it.

  Ray Anderson : Running a business is a tough proposition. There are costs to be minimised a every turn, and at some point the corporation says, you know, let somebody else deal with that. Let's let somebody else supply the military power to the Middle East to protect the oil at its source. Let's let somebody else build the roads that we can drive these automobiles on. Let's let somebody else have these problems. And that is where externalities come from, that notion of let somebody else deal with that. I got all I can handle myself.

  Robert Monks : A corporation is an externalising machine in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. Each one is designed in a very efficient way, to accomplish particular objectives. In the achievement of those objectives there isn't any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.

  Ray Anderson : The pressure is on the corporation to deliver results now and to externalise any cost that this unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalise.