The Corporation (2003)

Mikela Jay: Self - Narrator

Quotes 

• Narrator : It should not surprise us that corporate allegiance to profit will trump their allegiance to any flag. A recent U.S. Treasury Department report revealed in one week alone, 57 U.S. corporations were fined for trading with official enemies of the United States, including terrorists, tyrants and despotic regimes.

• 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.

• [first lines] 

  Narrator : 150 years ago, the business corporation was a relatively insignificant institution. Today, it is all-pervasive. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today's dominant institution. This documentary examines the nature, evolution, impacts, and possible futures of the modern business corporation. Initially given a narrow legal mandate, what has allowed today's corporation to achieve such extraordinary power and influence over our lives? We begin our inquiry as scandals threaten to trigger a wide debate about the lack of public control over big corporations.

• Narrator : Factory farm cows have not been the only victims of Monsanto products. Large areas of Vietnam were deforested by the US military using Monsanto's Agent Orange. The toxic herbicide reportedly caused over 50,00 birth defects and hundreds of thousands of cancers in Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, and in former American troops serving in South-East Asia. Unlike the Vietnamese victims, US Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange were able to sue Monsanto for causing their illnesses. Monsanto settled out of court, paying $80 million in damages. But it never admitted guilt.

• Dr Robert Hare : One of the questions that comes up periodically is to what extent could a corporation be considered to be psychopathic. And if we look at a corporation as a legal person, that it may not be that difficult to actually draw the transition between psychopathy in the individual to psychopathy in the corporation. We could go through the characteristics that define this disorder, one by one, to how they might apply to corporations. They would have all the characteristics, and, in fact, in many respects, the corporation of that sort is the proto-typical of a psychopath.

  Narrator : If the dominant institution of our time has been created in the image of a psychopath, who bears the moral responsibility for it's actions?

  Milton Friedman : Can a building have moral opinions? Can a building have social responsibility? If a building can't have social responsibility, what does it mean to say that a corporation can? A corporation is simply an artificial legal structure. But the people who are engaged in it, whether the stockholders, whether the executives in it, whether the employees, they all have moral responsibilities.

• 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.

• Narrator : The pursuit of property is an old story but there was a time when many things were regarded either as too sacred or too essential for the public good to be considered business opportunities. They were protected by tradition and public regulation.

• Narrator : Some of the best creative minds are employed to assure our faith in the corporate world view. They seduce us with beguiling illusions. Designed to divert our minds and manufacture our consent.

  Richard Grossman : Corporations don't advertise products particularly; they're advertising a way of life. A way of thinking. A story of who we are as people and how we got here and what's the source of our so-called liberty, and so-called freedom. You know, so you have decades and decades and decades of propaganda and education teaching us to think in a certain way. When applied to the large corporation, it's that the corporation was inevitable, that it's indispensable, that it's somehow remarkably efficient, and that it's responsible for progress and the good life. They're selling themselves, they're selling their domination, they're selling they're rule, and they're creating an image for themselves, as just regular folks down the block. It's tough, you know, they're putting some taxpayer shareholder money into helping and who can say? But that money should be going to the taxpayers to decide what to do. And while they're doing these sorts of nice things, they're also playing a role in lowering taxes for corporations and lowering taxes for wealthy people, and reconfiguring public policy. And what we don't see is all that reconfiguring going on; we don't see all that vacuuming up of money, vacuuming out the insides of public processes, but we do see the nice facade.

• Narrator : In a world economy where information is filtered by global media corporations, keenly attuned to their powerful advertisers, who will defend the public's right to know? And what price must be paid to preserve our ability to make informed choices?

• Narrator : What Fox neglected to report is this: Jane sued Fox under Florida's whistleblower statute, which proects those who try to prevent others from breaking the law. But her Appeal Court judges found that falsifying news isn't actually against the law. So they denied Jane her whistleblower status, overturned the case, and withdrew her $425,000 award. Canada and Europe have upheld the ban on RBGH. Yet it remains hidden in much of the milk supply of the United States.

• Narrator : The prospect that two thirds of the world's population will have no access to fresh drinking water by 2025, has provoked the initial confrontations in a world-wide battle for control over the planet's most basic resource. When Bolivia sought to refinance the public water services of its third largest city, the World Bank required that it be privatised, which is how the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco gained control over all Cochabamba's water, even that which fell from the sky.

  Oscar Olivera : All these laws and contracts also prohibited people from gathering rainwater. So rainwater was also privatised. Unpaid bills gave the company rights to repossess debtors' homes and to auction them off. People had to make choices: from eating less and paying for water and basic services, to not sending their children to school, or not going to the hospital and treating illnesses at home; or, in the case of retired people who have very low incomes, they had to go out and work on the streets. Then, with the slogan: "The Water is Ours, Damn it!" People took to the streets to protest.

  Narrator : The price this beleaguered country paid for World Bank loans was the privatision of the state oil industry, and its airline, railroad, electric and phone companies. But the government failed to convince Bolivians that water is a commodity like any other.

  Oscar Olivera : Then we witnessed how the government defended the transnational interests of Bechtel. People wanted water not teargas! People wanted justice not bullets!

  Narrator : Bolivia was determined to defend the corporation's right to charge families living on $2 a day as much as one-quarter of their income for water. The greater the popular resistance to the water privatisation scheme, the more violent became the standoff.

  Oscar Olivera : There were hundreds of young people, 16 or 17-year olds, who lost their arms or legs or who were left handicapped for life by brain injuries and Victor Hugo Daza was killed.

• 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.

• Narrator : For big business, despotism was often a useful tool for securing foreign markets and pursuing profits. One of the U.S. Marine Corps' most highly decorated generals, Smedley Darlington Butler, by his own account, helped pacify Mexico for American oil companies, Haiti and Cuba for National City Bank, Nicaragua for the Brown Brothers brokerage, the Dominican Republic for sugar interests, Honduras for U.S. fruit companies, and China for Standard Oil. General Butler's services were also in demand in the United States itself in the 1930s as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to relieve the misery of the depression through public enterprise and tougher regulation on corporate exploitation and misdeeds. But the country was not entirely behind the populist president. Large parts of the corporate elite despised what Roosevelt's New Deal stood for. And so, in 1934, a group of conspirators sought to involve General Butler in a treasonous plan. But the corporate cabal had picked the wrong man. Butler was fed up being, what he called, "A Gangster for Capitalism". A Congressional Committee ultimately found evidence of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt. According to Butler, the conspiracy included representatives of some of America's top corporations, including J.P. Morgan, Dupont and Goodyear Tire. As today's chairman of Goodyear Tire knows, for corporations to dominate government, a coup is no longer necessary.

  Sam Gibara : Corporations have gone global and by going global, the governments have lost some control over corporations regardless of whether corporations can be trusted or cannot be trusted, governments today do not have over the corporations, the power that they had, and the leverage they had 50 or 60 years ago. And that's a major change. So, governments have become powerless compared to what they were before.

  Ira Jackson : Capitalism today commands the towering heights, and has displaced politics and politicians as the new high priests, and reigning oligarchs of our system. So capitalism and its principle protagonists and players, corporate CEOs, have been accorded unusual power and access. This is not to deny the signifiance of government and politicians but these are the new high priests.

  Marc Barry : I was invited to Washington D.C. to attend this meeting that was being put together by the National Security Agency called, "The Critical Thinking Consortium". I remember standing there in this room and looking over on one side of the room and we had the CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, Customs, Secret Service. And then on the side of the room we had Coca-Cola, Mobile Oil, GTE and Kodak. And I remember thinking, "I am like in the epicenter of the intelligence industry right now". I mean, the line is not just blurring, it's just not there anymore. And, to me, it spoke volumes as to how industry and government were consulting with each other and working with each other.

• Narrator : As 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere gathered to draft a far reaching trade agreement, one that would lay the groundwork to privatise every resource and service imaginable, thousands of people from hundreds of grassroots organisations joined to oppose it. Canada's top business lobbyists and its chief trade representative discount the dissent in the streets. For them, the America's 800 million citizens speak with one voice.

  Thomas D'Aquino : Nice to see you. Well done on your strong advocacy of truth, justice, wisdom and all those things, eh.

  Pierre Pettigrew : I was looking yesterday at the statements at the inauguration and opening ceremony. What an extraordinary progress over the last 15 years. When you heard such a common language. Yes, and from the most developed to the least. It was extraordinary that now that we see the benefits of trade, more and more people want to buy in. Because we do realise that it helps everyone. From the poorer to the better off.

  Robert Keyes : A lot of these countries are not saying they want to get off, they want to get on.

  Pierre Pettigrew : Exactly, no one wants out, everyone wants in.

• Narrator : Through the voices of CEOs, whistle blowers, brokers, gurus and spies, insiders and outsiders, we present the corporation as a paradox, an institution that creates great wealth, but causes enormous, and often hidden harms.

• Narrator : To determine the kind of personality that drives the corporation to behave like an externalising machine, we can analyse it like a psychiatrist would a patient. We can even formulate a diagnosis, on the basis of typical case histories of harm it has inflicted on others selected from a universe of corporate activity.

• 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.