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.
I think there is an overhang over the market, of distrust.
listen, 95 percent or some percent
huge percentage
of the business community are honest
and uh, reveal all their assets
got compensation programs that are balanced.
But there are some bad apples...
the media debate about the basic operating principles
of the corporate world was quickly reduced
to a game of follow the leader.
I still happen to think the United States
is the greatest place in the world to invest.
We have some shake ups that are going on
because of a few bad apples.
Some people call me a bad apple
but I may be bruised but I still taste sweet.
Some people call me a bad apple
but I may be the sweetest apple on the tree.
These are not just a bunch of bad apples.
This is just a few bad apples.
This is not just a few bad apples.
You've gotta get rid of the bad apples
You can start with Tyco
Bad apples
We know all about WorldCom.
Bad apples
Xerox Corporation.
Bad apples
Arthur Anderson.
Bad apples
Enron obviously
bad apples.
K-mart Corporation
Bad apples
the fruit cart is getting a little more full.
I don’t think it's just a few apples unfortunately.
I think this is the worst crisis of confidence
in business.
What's wrong with this picture?
Can we not pick a better metaphor
to describe the dominant institution of our time?
Through the voices of CEOs whistle blowers
brokers gurus and spies
insiders and outsiders
we present the corporation as a paradox
an institution which creates great wealth
but causes enormous and often hidden harms.
I see the corporation as part of a jigsaw
in society as a whole
which if you remove it
the picture’s incomplete.
But equally if it's the only part
it's not going to work.
A sports team.
Some of us are blocking and tackling.
Some of us are running the ball
some of us are throwing the ball.
But we all have a common purpose
which is to succeed as an organization.
A corporations like a family unit.
People in a corporation work together for a common end
Like the telephone system
it reaches almost everywhere.
It's extraordinarily powerful it's pretty hard to avoid.
And it transforms the lives of people
I think on balance
for the better.
The eagle
soaring clear eyed competitive
prepared to strike but not a vulture.
Noble visionary majestic that people can believe in
and be inspired by
that creates such a lift that it soars.
I can see that being a good logo
for the principled company.
Okay guys enough bullshit.
Corporations are artificial creations.
You might say they’re monsters
trying to devour as much profit as possible
at anyone's expense.
I think of a whale.
A gentle big fish
which could swallow you in an instant.
Dr. Frankenstein's creation
has overwhelmed and overpowered him.
As the corporate form has done with us.
The word corporate gets attached in almost
you know in a pejorative sense to
and gets married with the word agenda.
And one hears a lot about the corporate agenda
as though it is evil
as though it is an agenda
which is trying to take over the world.
Personally I don't use the word "corporation "
I use the word business.
I will use the word use the word company.
I will use the words business community
cause I think that is a much fairer representation
than zeroing in on just this word corporation.
It's funny that I've taught in a business school
for as long as I have
without ever having been asked so pointedly
to say what I think a corporation is.
...it is one form of business ownership.
It's a group of individuals working together to serve
a variety of objectives.
The principal one of which is earning large
growing sustained legal returns
for the people who own the business.
The modern corporation has grown out of the industrial age.
The industrial age began in 1712
with an Englishman named Thomas Newcomen
invented a steam driven pump to pump water
out of the English coalmine so the English coalminers
could get more coal to mine
rather than hauling buckets of water
out of the mine
It was all about productivity more coal per man hour.
That was the dawn of the industrial age.
And then it became more steel per man hour
more textiles per man hour
more automobiles per man hour
and today it's more chips per man hour
more gizmos per man hour.
The system is basically the same system
producing more sophisticated products today.
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 abridge
over the Charles River or something like that.
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 capitalization
what they made or did or maintained
a turnpike 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.
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.
The Civil War and the Industrial Revolution
created enormous growth in corporations.
And so there was an explosion of railroads
who got large federal subsidies of land.
Banking heavily manufacturing
And corporate lawyers a century and a half ago
realized that they needed more power to operate
And wanted to remove some of the constraints
that had historically been placed on the corporate form.
The 14th amendment was passed
at the end of the Civil War
to give equal rights to black people.
And therefore it said
No state can deprive any person of life
liberty or property without due process of law.
And that was intended to prevent the states
from taking away life liberty or property
from black people as they had done
for so much of our history.
And what happens is the corporations come into court
and corporation lawyers are very clever.
And they say
Oh you cant deprive a person of life
liberty or property.
We are a person.
A corporation is a person.
And so supreme court goes along with that.
And what was particularly grotesque about this was
that the 14th amendment was passed
to protect newly freed slaves.
So for instance between 1890 and 1910
there were 307 cases brought before the court
under the 14th amendment.
288 of these brought by corporations
19 by African Americans.
600000 people were killed to get rights for people
and then with strokes of the pen over the next 30years
judges applied those rights to capital and property
while stripping them from people.
Everybody makes a mistake once in a while
but I just cant be personally responsible.
That's one of the weaknesses of a partnership
isn't it Sid?
Well maybe you’d better incorporate the store.
Incorporate?!
Yes
Incorporating would give you the big advantage of
what you want right now limited liability.
You start with a group of people
who wanna invest their money in accompany.
Then these people apply for a charter as a corporation.
This government issues a charter to that corporation.
Now that corporation operates legally as an individual person
it is not a group of people
it is under the law a legal person.
Imperial Steel Incorporated has many of the legal rights
of a person.
It can buy and sell property...
It can borrow money.
It can sue in court and be sued.
It can carry on a business.
Imperial Steel
along with thousands of other legal persons
is a part of our daily living.
It is a member of our society.
Having acquired the legal rights and protections of a person
the question arises
What kind of person is the corporation?
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.
The great problems 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.
I believe the mistake that a lot of people make
when they think about corporations
is they think you know corporations are like us.
General Electric is a kind old man with lots of stories.
Nike young energetic.
Microsoft aggressive
McDonald's young outgoing enthusiastic
Monsanto immaculately dressed
Disney goofy.
The Body Shop um deceptive
very lovely.
Do you know what the body shop is?
Nope.
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.
Of course they make a profit
and it's a good thing.
That's the incentive that makes capitalism work.
To give us more of the things that we need.
That’s the incentive that other economic systems lack.
People accuse us of only paying attention
to the economic leg
because they think
that’s what a business persons mind set is
it's just money.
And it's not so
because we as business people
know that wanted to certainly address the environment
but also we need to be seen as
constructive members of society.
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 these people
there’s no such thing as enough.
And I always counter point out
there’s no organization 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.
But unlike someone under a banyan tree
all publicly traded corporations
has 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.
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.
To whom do these companies owe loyalty?
What does loyalty mean?
Well it turns out that
that was a rather naive 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
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.
An externality is the effect of a transaction
between two individuals.
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.
Running a business is a tough proposition.
There are costs to be minimized at 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 those problems
And that is where externalities come from
that notion of let somebody else deal with that.
I got all I can handle myself.
A corporation is an externalizing 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.
The pressure is on the corporation
to deliver results now
and to externalize any cost
that this unwary or uncaring public
will allow it to eternalize.
To determine the kind of personality
that drives the corporation
to behave like an externalizing machine
we can analyze it
like a psychiatrist would a patient.
We can even formulate a diagnosis
on the basis of typical case histories of harm
that is inflicted on others
selected from a universe of corporate activity.
Well this is the office
of the national labour committee
here in the garment area of New York City.
It's a little bit dishevelled.
These are all from different campaigns.
To make this stuff concrete as possible
we purchased all of the products from the factories
that we're talking about.
This shirt sells for $14.99.
And the women who made this shirt got paid $0.03.
Liz Claiborne jackets made in El Salvador
The jackets are $178
and the workers were paid $0.74
for every jacket they made.
Alpine car stereos $0.31 an hour.
It's not just sneakers.
It's not just apparel.
It's everything.
We were in Honduras
and some workers they knew what kind of work we did
and they approached us and said
conditions in our factory are horrible.
Will you please meet with us.
And we said we would.
But you cant meet in the developing world
you cant walk up in a factory with your notebook
and workers come up and interview them.
I mean there's goons there’s spies
the military police
so you do everything in a clandestine manner.
We are about to start the meeting
and in walk three guys
very tough looking guys.
The company had found out about our meeting
and sent these spies.
Obviously we didn’t have the meeting.
But these young girls were really bright
And as they were leaving
away from the eyesight of the spies
they started to put their hands underneath the table.
And I put my hand under there
and they put into my hand their pay stubs.
So we'd know who they were
what they were paid
and the labels that they made in the factory
so wed know who they worked for.
So I took my hand after everyone had left.
And in the palm of my hand
was the face was of Kathy Lee Gifford
And on the bottom of it was
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this garment
would be donated to various children’s charities.
Very touching gets you right here.
Wal-Mart is telling you if you purchase these pants
and Kathy Lee is telling you
if you purchase these pants
you will be helping children.
The problem was
the people that handed us this label
were 13 years of age.
Do many people in your family work here?
Just me.
How many people do you support?
Eight people?
And how do you do it with that salary is it enough?
No.
Let's look at it from a different point of view
Let's look at it from a point of view
of the people in Bangladesh who are starving to death.
The people in China who are starving to death
and the only thing that they have to offer to anybody
that is worth anything
is their low cost labour.
And in effect what they’re saying to the world
is they have this big flag that says
Come over and hire us.
We will work for $0.10 an hour.
Because $0.10 an hour will buy us the rice
that's wanted not to starve.
And come and rescue us from our circumstance.
And so when Nike comes in
they are regarded by everybody in the community
as an enormous godsend.
Hey wait!
You are not permitted to be here!
The door was wide open.
No no no no no.
That’s my clothes.
Those are my clothes.
This is not your clothes.
Why your camera!?
Don’t touch the woman.
Why!?
This is a private company.
Without permission how can you come here?
Yes well the door was wide open
The doors for employees
not for you.
We went through the garbage dump
in the Dominican Republic.
We always do this kind of stuff
we dig around.
One day we found a big pile
of Nikes internal pricing documents.
Nike assigns a time frame to each operation.
They don’t talk about minutes.
They break the timeframe into ten thousandths of a second.
You get to the bottom of all 22 operations;
they give the workers 6.6 minutes to make the shirt.
It's $0.70 an hour in the Dominican Republic.
That’s 6.6 minutes equals $0.08.
These are Nikes documents.
That means the wages come to three tenths of one percent
of the retail price.
This is the reality.
It's the science of exploitation.
What happens in the areas where these corporations
go in and are successful?
They soon find that they cant do any more in that country
because the wages are too high now.
And what’s that another way of saying
well the people are no longer desperate.
So okay we’ve used up all the desperate people there
they’re all plump and healthy and wealthy.
Let’s move on to the next desperate lot and employ them
and raise their level up.
Well the whole idea of the export processing zone
is that it will be the first step towards
this wonderful new development
through the investment that’s attracted to these countries
there will be a trickle down effect
into the communities.
But because so many countries are now in the game
of creating these free trade enclaves
they have to keep providing more and more incentives
for companies to come to their little denationalized pocket.
And the tax holidays get longer.
So the workers rarely make enough money
to buy three meals a days
let alone feed their local economy.
Something happened in 1940
which marked the beginning of a new era.
The era of the ability to synthesize and create.
On an unlimited scale
new chemicals that had never existed before
in the world.
And using the magic of research
oil companies compete with each other
in taking the petroleum molecule apart
and rearranging it into well you name it...
So suddenly it became possible
to produce any new chemical
synthetic chemicals
the likes of which had never existed before in the world
for any purpose and at virtually no cost.
Fabrics toot brushes tires insecticides
cosmetics weed killers.
A whole galaxy of things to make a better life on earth.
For instance if you wanted to go to a chemist and say
look I want to have a chemical say a pesticide
which will persist throughout the food chain
and I don’t want to have to renew it very very often
Id like it to be relatively non-destructible
and then he’d put two benzene molecules
on the blackboard and add a chlorine here
and a chlorine there
that was DDT!
When the eighth army needed Jap civilians to help them out
in our occupation
they called on native doctors to administer DDT
under the supervision of our men
to stand a potential typhus epidemic.
Dusting like this goes a long way in checking disease
and the laughs on them.
"Pardon our dust"
As the petrochemical era grew and grew
warning signs emerged that some of these chemicals
could pose hazards.
The data initially were trivial anecdotal
but gradually a body of data started accumulating
to the extent that we now know that the synthetic chemicals
which have permeated our workplace
our consumer products
our air our water
produced cancer and also birth defects
and some other toxic effects.
Furthermore industry has known about this
at least most industries have known about this
and have attempted to trivialize these risks.
If I take a gun and shoot you that’s criminal.
If I expose you to some chemicals
which knowingly are going to kill you
what difference is there?
The difference is that it takes longer to kill you.
We are now in the midst of a major cancer epidemic
and I have no doubt
and I have documented the basis for this
that industry is largely responsible
for this overwhelming epidemic of cancer
in which one in every two men get cancer in their lifetimes
and one in every three women get cancer.
Towards the end of 1989
a great box of documents arrived at my office
without any indication where they came from.
And I opened them
and found in it a complete set of Monsanto files
dealing with toxicological testing of cows
who’d been given RBGH.
BST trade name Posilac is being used in more than
a quarter of the dairy herds in the United States
according to Monsanto.
The milk is being drunk by a large portion
of the American population
since the food and drug administration declared it safe
for both cows and humans...
And at that the Monsanto was saying
There’s no evidence whatsoever
of any adverse affects
We don’t use antibiotics.
And this clearly showed that they had lied
through their teeth.
The files described areas of chronic inflammation
in the heart lungs kidneys spleen
also reproductive effects
also a whole series of other problems.
...the most comprehensive independent assessment of the drug
"concludes that BST results in unnecessary pain
suffering and distress for the cows.
This is not acceptable for a drug designed simply
to increase milk production...
It is a silly product.
We have the industrial world is awash in milk.
We're over producing milk.
We actually have governments around the world
who pay farmers not to produce milk.
So the first product Monsanto comes up with
is a product that produces more of what we don’t need.
Of course you’ll want to inject Posilac in every eligible cow
as each cow is not treated is a lost income opportunity.
But the problem was
that use of the artificial hormone
caused all sorts of problems for the cows.
It caused something called mastitis
which is a very painful infection of the udders.
When you milk the cow
if the cow has bad mastitis
some of the
and I don’t know how to say this in a you know
I hope people aren’t watching at dinnertime
but the pus from the infection of the udders
ends up in the milk.
And the somatic cell count they call it
the bacteria count
inside your milk goes up.
There’s a cost to the cows.
The cows get sicker when they’re injected with RBGH.
They’re injected with antibiotics.
We know that people are consuming antibiotics
through their food
and we know that that’s contributing
to antibiotic resistant bacteria and diseases.
And we know we're at a crisis when somebody can go
into a hospital and get a staff infection
and it cant be cured and they die.
That’s a crisis.
Bad for the cow
Bad for the farmer
Bad potentially for the consumer
The jury is out
we see a lot of conflicting evidence
about potential health risk.
And of course as a consumer
my belief is why should I take any risk?
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 50,000 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
U.S. Vietnam war 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
Sleeping in a motel in Brewer Maine one night
I woke up with terrible hay fever
and my eyes were burning.
And I looked out at the river
and there were great mounds of white foam
going right down the river.
And the next morning I got up and I said
My God what was that happening last night
He said "Oh that’s just the river".
And I said "what do you mean?"
He said "Well look every night the paper company sends
the stuff down the river."
And I said "What are you talking about?"
And he said "Don’t you understand?"
"That show we get rid of the effluent from the paper mills."
Well I knew at that time I had been in the business.
I had sold oil to the paper mills.
I knew all the owners.
I had been in politics.
I knew the people in the towns.
I knew not one constituent of the paper mills
wanted to have the river polluted.
And yet here the river was being polluted.
And it was more or less as if we created a doom machine.
In our search for wealth and for prosperity
we created something that’s going to destroy us.
The traders who are involved in the market
are not guys who are
whose moral fibre
when it comes to environmental conditions
are going to be rattled at all
They’re seeing dollars and they’re making money.
Brokers don’t stay away from copper
because it violates their religious beliefs
or your environmental policies.
No.
There are times when you think about it
but it's fleeting.
It really is a fleeting moment.
It's like yeah oh yeah yeah
well a town is being polluted down there in Peru
but hey this guy needs to buy some copper.
I’m getting paid a commission too.
Our information that we receive does not include anything
about the environmental conditions
because until the environmental conditions
become a commodity themselves or are being traded
then obviously we will not have anything to do with that.
It doesn’t come into our psyche at all.
It's so far away and it's you hardly hear
anything about it.
I mean keep in mind there are things going on right in our
backyards for god sake.
We trade live hogs.
I mean there are so many pigs in the state of Carolina
and they’re polluting the rivers
but how often do you find out about that?
At Multinational Monitor we’ve put together a list
of the top corporate criminals of the 1990s.
We went back and looked at all the criminal fines that
corporations had paid in the decade.
Exxon pled guilty in connection to federal criminal charges
with the Valdez spill and paid $125 million in criminal fines.
General Electric
was guilty of defrauding the federal government
and paid $9.5 million in criminal fines.
Chevron was guilty of environmental violations
and paid $6.5 million in fines.
Mitsubishi was guilty of anti-trust violations
and paid $1.8 million in fines.
IBM was guilty of illegal exports and paid.
Eastman Kodak was guilty of environmental violations.
Pfizer the drug manufacturer
was guilty of antitrust violations.
Odwalla was guilty of food and drug regulatory violations.
Sears was guilty of...
Damon Clinical Laboratories was guilty of...
Blue Cross Blue Shield was guilty of
Again and again we have the problem
that whether you obey the law or not
is a matter whether its cost effective.
If the chance of getting caught
and the penalties are less than it costs to comply
people think of it as just a business decision.
Drawing the metaphor of the early attempts to fly.
Theban going off of a very high cliff in his airplane
with the wings flapping
and the guys flapping the wings
and the wind is in his face
and this poor fool thinks he’s flying
but in fact he’s in freefall
and he just doesn’t know it yet
because the ground is so far away
but of course the craft is doomed to crash.
That’s the way our civilization is
the very high cliff
represents the virtually unlimited resources
we seem to have when we began this journey.
The craft isn’t flying
because it's not built according to the laws of aerodynamics
and is subject to the law of gravity.
Civilization is not flying
because it's not built according to the laws of aerodynamics
for civilizations that would fly.
And of course the ground is still a long way away
but some people have seen that ground rushing up
sooner than the rest of us have.
The visionaries have seen it and have told us its coming.
There’s not a single scientific
peer reviewed paper published in the last 25 years
that would contradict this scenario
Every living system of earth
is in decline
every life support system of earth is in decline
and these together constitute the biosphere
the biosphere that supports and nurtures all of life
not just our life but perhaps 30 million other species
that share this planet with us.
The typical company of the 20th century
extractive wasteful abusive linear
in all of its processes
taking from the earth
making wasting sending its products
back to the biosphere waste to a landfill...
I myself was amazed to learn just how much stuff
the earth has to produce through our extraction process
to produce a dollar of revenue for our company.
When I learnt I was flabbergasted.
We are leaving a terrible legacy of poison
and diminishment of the environment
for our grandchildren’s grandchildren
generations not yet born.
Some people have called that intergeneration tyranny
a form of taxation without representation
levied by us on generations yet to be.
It's the wrong thing to do.
One of the questions that comes up periodically
is to what extent could 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 a corporation.
We could go through the characteristics
that define this particular disorder one by one
and see 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.
If the dominant institution of our time has been created
in the image of a psychopath
who bears moral responsibility for its actions?
Can a building have moral opinions?
Can a building have social responsibility?
If a building cant have social responsibility
what does it mean to say a corporation can?
A corporation is simply an artificial legal structure
but the people who are engaged in it
whether the stockholder
whether the executives in it
whether the employees
they all have moral responsibilities.
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.
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
sometimes if you had a really free hand
if you really did what you wanted to do
that suits your personal thoughts
and your personal priorities you’d act differently.
But as a CEO you cannot do that
Layoffs have become so wide-spread
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
When you look at a corporation
just like when you look at a slave owner
you want to distinguish between the institution
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.
Then the same is true here.
My wife and I some years ago had at our home
a demonstration.
25 people arrived
they hung a big banner on the top of our house
saying murderers
they danced around outside with gasmasks and so on.
As a public demonstration it wasn’t very effective
due to the fact that this is a very rural area
two people and a dog
and it's not a very big house
which I think rather surprised them
but then we sat down and talked to them
for a couple of hours
and we gave them tea and coffee
and they had lunch on our lawn.
After about 20 minutes they said
Well the problem is not you. It's Shell.
And I said now wait a minute lets talk about
what is Shell?
It's made up of people like me.
In the end what we found in that discussion
were all the things they we're worried about
I was worried about as well
climate oppressive regimes human rights
the big difference between us was
I feel that I can actually make a contributions to this
these people were frustrated
because they felt that they had no nothing to do.
So an individual CEO lets 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
which is why
as the Moody-Stuarts serve tea to protestors
Shell Nigeria can flare unrivalled amounts of gas
making it of the worlds single worst sources of pollution.
And all the professed concerns about the environment
do not spare Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists
from being hung for opposing Shells environment practices
in the Niger Delta.
The corporation is not a person
it doesn’t think.
People in it think
and for them it is legitimate to create terminator technology.
So that farmers are not able to save their seeds.
Seeds that will destroy themselves
through a suicide gene.
Seeds that are designed to only produce crop in one season.
You really need to have a brutal mind.
It's a war against evolution to even think in those terms.
But quite clearly profits are so much higher in their minds
The profit motive which drove Klutzy
to accomplish so much may bring out the evil
as well as the good...
Hellooo?
My work spans all industry sectors
I mean I virtually have worked for like Id say
25 percent of the fortune 500.
I’ve posed as an investment banker.
I’ve posed as a venture capitalist.
I’ve set up front companies
that are executive recruiting firms.
Essentially I’m a spy.
I'll locate your employees
and I will tell them that I’m calling
from Acme Recruiting Agency
and that I’ve got a job that pays them
considerably more than what they’re paying.
Would they mind meeting me for an interview?
And when the executive shows up
what he doesn’t realize is
I’m actually debriefing him on behalf of a competitor.
That there is no job and that the office
that he’s at has been rented
and the picture on my desk of my family is a phoney
and it's all just a big elaborate ruse
to glean competitive information from him.
I don’t feel any guilt.
It's you know what I mean you have to expect
that guys like me are out there.
We're predators.
It's about competition it's about market share
it's about being aggressive
and it's about shareholder value.
What is your stock at today?
If you’re a CEO
I mean do you think your shareholders really care
whether you’re Billie Buttercup or not?
Do you think that they really
they would prefer you to be a nice guy?
Over having money in their pocket?
I don’t think so.
I think people want money.
That’s the bottom line.
The fact that most of these companies are run
by white men white rich men
means that they are out of touch
with what the majority of the world is.
Because the majority of this planet
are not a bunch of rich white guys.
They are people of other colours
they are the majority.
Women are the majority
the poor and working poor
make up the majority of this planet.
So the decisions they make
come from not the reality that exists in the world.
How much is enough?
If you are a billionaire
would it be okay just to be a half a billionaire?
Wouldn’t it be okay for your company
to make a little less money...
When I bought those two airplane tickets
for Phil Knight and myself to fly to Indonesia
I was prepared for him to say okay lets go.
Oh no not a chance
Not a chance.
No?
They’re transferable.
I can change it to another day.
And call me on it.
Call my bluff.
He’s a smart guy.
I mean he’s not he’s not stupid.
And so I thought okay get ready for this.
Especially because you know I bought first-class tickets.
So you know it would be a comfortable ride at least
you know and of course he tells me then on camera.
I’ve never been to Indonesia.
And I’m like taken aback by this.
I cant believe it.
The guys the head of the company
he’s never walked through his own factories.
Oh you’ve got to go.
I cant go right now and the rest of this year.
When we were done filming he calls me up
a couple of weeks later and he goes
I may have a chance to go there with you to the factories.
I’m going to the Australian Open to watch some tennis.
and uh you know maybe I can get up there
or at least you can go there.
Would you like to go to the Australian open?
For 21years
I never gave a thought to what we were taking
from the earth or doing to the earth
in the making of our products.
And then in the summer of 1994
we began to hear questions from our customers
we had never heard before
What’s your company doing for the environment?
And we didn’t have answers.
The real answer was not very much.
And it really disturbed many of our people
not me so much as them
and a group in our research department
decided to convene a taskforce
and bring people from our businesses around the world
to come together to assess
our company’s world wide environment position
to begin to frame answers for those customers.
They asked me if I would come and speak to that group
and give them a kick off speech
and launch this new task force with an environmental vision
and I didn’t have an environmental vision
and I did not want to make that speech.
And at sort of the propitious moment
this book landed on my desk.
It was Paul Hawkins book The Ecology of Commerce
and I began to read The Ecology of Commerce,
really desperate for inspiration
and very quickly into that book
I found the phrase The death of birth.
It was E. O. Wilson’s expression for species extinction
The death of birth
and it was a point of a spear into my chest
and I read on and the spear went deeper
and it became an epiphanal experience
a total change of mindset for myself
and a change of paradigm.
Can any product be made sustainably?
Well not any and every product.
Can you make landmines sustainably?
Well I don’t think so.
There’s a more fundamental question than that
about landmines.
Some products ought not to be made at all.
Unless we can make carpets sustainably you know
perhaps we don’t have a place in a sustainable world
but neither does anybody else making products unsustainably.
One day early in this journey it dawned on me that
the way Id been running interface
is the way of the plunderer
plundering something that’s not mine
something that belongs to every creature on earth
and I said to myself
my goodness
the day must come when this is illegal
when plundering is not allowed
it must come.
So I said to myself my goodness
some day people like me will end up in jail.
I’ve got to be honest with you.
When the September 11th situation happened
I didn’t know that the and I must say
and I want to say this because its
I don’t want to take it lightly
it's not a light situation.
It's a devastating act.
It was really a bad thing
it's one of the worse things
I’ve seen in my lifetime you know.
But I will tell you and every trader will tell you
who was not in that building
and who was buying gold and who owned gold and silver
that when it happened
the first thing you thought about was
well how much is gold up?
The first thing that came to mind was
my god gold must be exploding.
Fortunately for us all our clients were in gold.
So when it went up they all doubled their money.
They’ve all doubled their money.
It was a blessing in disguise.
Devastating you know crushing heart shattering
but on the financial sense
for my clients that were in the market
they all made money.
Now I wasn’t looking for this type of help
but it happened.
When the US bombed Iraq back in 1991
the price of oil went from $13 to $40 a barrel
for Christ sake!
Now we couldn’t wait for the bombs
to start raining down on Saddam Hussein.
We were all excited.
We wanted Saddam to really create problems
Do whatever you have to do
set fire to some more oil wells
because the price is going to go higher.
Every broker was chanting that
there was not a broker that I know of
that wasn’t excited about that.
This was a disaster.
This was something that was you know
catastrophe happening.
Bombing wars
In devastation there is opportunity.
The pursuit of profit 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.
We can really begin to take a look at the emergence
of the modern age with the enclosure movements
of the great European commons in the fourteenth
fifteenth and sixteenth century.
Medieval life uh was a collectively lived life
It was a brutish nasty affair.
But there was a collective responsibility
People belonged to the land;
the land did not belong to the people.
And in this European world
people farmed the land in a collective way
because they saw it as a commons.
It belonged to God.
And then it was administered by the church
the aristocracy
and then the local manors as stewards of gods creation.
Beginning with Tudor England
we began to see a phenomenon emerge
and that is the enclosure of the great commons
by Parliamentary Acts in England
and then in Europe.
And so first we began to take the great landmasses
of the world
which were commons and shared
and we reduced those to private property.
Then we went after the oceans the great oceanic commons
and we created laws and regulations
that would allow countries
to claim a certain amount of water outside
their coastal limits for exploitation.
In this century we went after the air
and we divided it into air corridors
that could be bought and sold
for commercial traffic for airplanes.
And then of course the rest is history.
With deregulation privatization free trade
what we're seeing is yet another enclosure
and if you like private taking of the commons.
One of the things I find very interesting
in our current debates
is this concept of who creates wealth.
That wealth is only created when it's owned privately.
What would you call clean water fresh air
a safe environment?
Are they not a form of wealth?
And why does it only become wealth when some entity
puts a fence around it and declares it private property?
Well you know that’s not wealth creation.
That’s wealth usurpation.
Over the centuries
we have put more and more things in that public realm
and lately just lately
in the last
lets say in the last three or four decades
started pulling them out again.
So fire-fighters for instance.
Fire-fighters started as private companies
and if you didn’t have the medallion
of a given fire-fighter brigade
on your house and it was on fire
those fire-fighters would just ride on by
because you didn’t have a deal.
Well it gradually evolved a public trust
for the provision of safety on that very specific level.
This is important.
We should not go back from that and start saying
well you know why don’t we put that back in the market
and see what that does?
Maybe it will make it more efficient
Privatization 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 get out of recession.
Private companies cant do that in a recession
throw out the work force cause that’s the way you make money.
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.
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 cant avoid the dumping of carbon dioxide.
We cant avoid the dumping of sulphur oxides
at least we cant at the moment afford to stopping 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 well 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 those prices
for everything?
It sounds like you’re advocating private ownership
of every square inch of the planet.
Absolutely.
Every cubic foot of air water.
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 that is not such a loony idea.
It's in fact the solution to a lot of these problems.
Imagine a world in which one of the things
owned by a corporation was the song happy birthday.
In fact
an AOL/Time Warner subsidiary holds the copyright.
In the past
it has demanded over $10000
to allow you to hear anyone sing this popular song
in a film.
We didn’t pay.
We preferred to use the money to fly our crew to Boston
and Los Angeles to bring you the following story
Comparing the marketing of yesteryear
to the marketing of today
is like comparing a BB Gun to a smart bomb.
It's not the same as when I was a kid
or even when the people
who are young adults today were kids.
It's much more sophisticated and it's much more pervasive.
It's not that products themselves are bad or good.
It's the notion of manipulating children
into buying the products.
In 1998 Western International Media
Century City and Lieberman Research Worldwide
conducted a study on nagging.
We asked parents to keep a diary for three weeks
and to record every time
you could imagine
every time their child nagged them for a product
we asked them to record when where and why.
This study was not to help parents cope with nagging.
It was to help corporations help children nag
for their products more effectively.
Anywhere form 20 percent to 40 percent of purchases
would not have occurred
unless the child had nagged their parents.
That is we found for example
a quarter of all visits to theme parks
wouldn’t have occurred unless a child nagged their parents.
Four out of ten visits to places like Chuck E. Cheese
would not have occurred.
And any parent would understand that
you know when I think of Chuck E. Cheese
oh my goodness its noise.
And there’s so many kids.
Why would I want to spend two hours there?
But if the child nags enough you 're going to go
We saw the same thing with movies with home video
with fast food...
We do have to break through this barrier
where they do tell us or they say
they don’t like it when their kids nag.
Well that’s just a general attitude that they possess.
It doesn’t mean that they necessarily act upon it
a 100 percent of the time.
You can manipulate consumers into wanting
and therefore buying your products.
It's a game.
Children are not little adults;
their minds aren’t developed.
And what’s happening is that the marketers are playing
to their developmental vulnerabilities.
The advertising that children are exposed to today
is honed by psychologists;
it's enhanced by media technology
that nobody ever thought was possible.
The more insight you have about the consumer
the more creative you’ll be in your communication strategies.
So if that takes a psychologist
yeah we want one of those on staff.
I’m not saying it's wrong to make things for children.
I also think its important to distinguish
between psychologists who work on products for children
to help you know toy corporations make toys
that are developmentally appropriate.
I think that’s great
that’s different from selling the toys
directly to the children.
Initiative is huge.
I think in the U.S. we place
about $12 billion of media time.
So well put it on TV well put it in print
well put it up in outdoor well buy radio time;
so we're the biggest buyers of advertising time and space
in the U.S. and in the world.
One family cannot combat an industry that spends
$12 billion a year trying to get their children.
They cant do it.
They are tomorrows adult consumers
To start talking with them now build that relationship
when they’re younger...
And you’ve got them as an adult.
Somebody asked me you know Lucy is that ethical?
You know you’re essentially manipulating these children.
Well yeah is it ethical?
I don’t know.
But our role at initiative is to move products
And if we know you move products
with a certain creative execution
placed in a certain type of media vehicle
then we’ve done our job.
Every institution provides the people
who are members of it
with a social role to occupy
And typically institutions that are vibrant
and have a lot of power will specify that role
in some sense as a list of virtues.
It's true for churches for schools
for any institution that has power over people
and shapes them.
The corporation likewise.
It provides us with a list of virtues
a kind of social role
which is the good consumer.
Like the waters of the mighty ocean
people also represent tremendous force
the understanding of which is the greatest importance
to the American way of life.
This force is known as consumer power.
The goal for the corporations is to maximize 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 created wants
So you have to create wants.
You have to pose 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.
Who’s conception of themselves the sense of value
is just how many created wants can I satisfy?
These people are customers
because they are willing to trade money for widgets.
And all the customers take the widgets home
to all parts of the country.
Look at all the money the widget builder has
taken in from the sale of his widgets.
We have huge industries public relations industry
monstrous industry
advertising and so on which are designed
from infancy to try to mould people
into this desired pattern.
We saw Tiger Woods on TV
with a hat with a Nike logo on it
and we figured you know he probably gets
like millions of dollars
just to wear the hat on a press conference.
And therefore we figured we can do that for someone else.
And hopefully get money in time so we can go to school.
And that show we came up with being corporately sponsored.
We made our sponsor announcement
on the Today Show on June 18
...were thrilled to be sponsored by First U.S.A...
We're thrilled to be working with first U.S.A as our corporate
sponsor and they’re covering our college tuition...
...we found First U.S.A as our sponsor and we're proud
to be working with them...
...our sponsor if First U.S.A
we're really thrilled to announce First U.S.A
as our sponsor...
...we're thrilled to be working with First U.S.A...
and so we give First U.S.A
a good name in the media
and include them in our news stories
and through there
they get as much advertising as we can give them.
They’ll be conforming
not to the wishes of demanding parents
but to the wishes of an image conscious corporation...
They’re not just out there for the money and they’re just...
I mean they want to work with us
and be our friends and let us help them help us
and vice versa.
And we became walking billboards
to pay for our college tuition.
Cool Site of the day picked us as a cool site
and Yahoo picked us and we were in U.S.A Today.
When we did our photo shoot for people magazine
This is where we stood up on top.
We stood up here and we smiled.
We smiled and took the picture.
Our parents had war stories and stuff to tell us.
We have our corporate sponsor story.
Exactly.
I have a lot of faith in the corporate world
because it's always going to be there
so you may as well have faith in it
because if you don’t then it's just not good.
Some of the best creative minds
are employed to assure our faith
in the corporate worldview.
They seduce us with corporate beguiling illusions.
Designed to divert our minds
and manufacture our consent.
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
you know 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 is was inevitable
that it's indispensable
that it is somehow remarkably efficient
and that it is responsible for the sort of
for progress and the good life.
Perception management is a very interesting concept
It's basically a methodology
which helps us when we work with our clients
to go through a very systematic thoughtful process
in order to be able to help our clients identify
what the resources are that they have.
What the barriers to their success are
and how we can use communications
to help them accomplish their objectives.
If Michael or Angelica came to me and said
Dad what do you do and why is it important?
My answer to that question is basically
that I help corporations have a voice.
And I help corporations share the point of view
about how they feel about things.
They’re selling themselves
they’re selling their domination
they’re selling their rule
and they’re creating an image for themselves
as just regular folks down the block.
Hi how y'all doing today?
Good to see you.
How are you doing today?
Hi how you doing today?
We're from Pfizer.
We're your neighbours.
You're in the new houses?
Are you in the new houses?
Ohhhhhh!
These are some neighbours.
Can we say hello?
Can we say hello just for a minute?
So what do you think of the neighbourhood now?
It's all right it's good.
Yeah I think it’s been getting better
over the last 20 years that I’ve been coming here.
Yeah
So I think together you know working with you
and Pfizer and our other partnership
well make this a better place.
Okay.
Okay nice to see you Miss Fraser bye.
There used to be a lot of crime at this subway.
One night as I was going home I got caught
and was almost mugged.
So we decided to make a change
to make this community better.
We're looking at turnstiles
that prevent fare beating.
It used to be you could just hop right over.
So Pfizer in collaboration with the transit authority
actually purchased these machines.
This is a talkback box that allows us to speak
to the Pfizer guard
which is approximately 500 yards from here.
Now I haven’t seen the Pfizer guard today
but I’m going to see if I can call him.
If he’s not I'll have to go wake him up.
Hello.
Tom Kline speaking.
So I'm sure
before we're through hell call back.
But particularly on the off-hours
this allows a passenger to call directly
to the Pfizer desk for assistance.
And then the Pfizer guard calls the transit police
and the transit police respond to any crime situation.
As a result of all this crime is down in that station.
It's much safer for our community partners.
Thank you.
I'll press the other button just to be sure...
Well go over and talk to him personally.
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 those 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 façade.
When I was researching the takeover of public space
when I started off I thought okay this is just advertising.
We’ve always had advertising.
It's just more advertising.
But what I started to understand
and what I understand now
is that branding if not advertising its production.
The very successful corporations
the corporations of the future do not produce products.
They produced brand meaning.
The dissemination of the idea of themselves
is their act of production.
And the dissemination of the idea of themselves
is an enormously invasive project
so how do you make a brand idea?
Well a good place to start is by building
a three dimensional manifestation of your brand.
For a company like Disney
it goes even further
where it's actually building a town Celebration Florida.
Currently there are about 5000 residents
who call Celebration home.
And there are about 1300 single-family homes
a town centre that’s a place where people gather.
It has about four or five restaurants
and about a dozen other shops.
Their inspiration their brand image
is the all American family.
And the sort of bygone American town.
Their brand driver is family magic and everything
that the company does is in and around those two words.
If you take that
a branded environment such as a Disney World
or a Disneyland is a logical extension of that brand.
Film animated film family oriented film;
it's a very logical extension of that.
As a business though
they also know that if they want to get
into other forms of entertainment
that does not fit family magic
they do not brand it Disney.
If they want to get into adult
more serious type fare
when it comes to film they brand it Touchstone.
Disney brand speaks of reassurance
it speaks of tradition it speaks of quality.
And you can see that here
in this community that we’ve built.
And that’s where you see the truly imperialist
aspirations of branding which is about building
these privatized branded cocoons.
Which maybe you start by shopping in
and then you continue by holidaying in
but eventually why not just move in.
What happens if we wake up one day
and we find out that virtually all of our relationships
that are mediated between us and our fellow human beings
are commercial?
We find out that virtually every relationship we have
is a commercially arbitrated relationship
with our fellow human being?
Can civilization survive on that narrow a definition
of how we interact with each other?
Wow what a dream...
I can give you the day in the life of a person
who might be the target of undercover marketing.
And I will tell you this
that some of these things are happening right now
around you.
So you walk out of your building in the morning
in some city
and you walk by the doorman and say
hey good morning!
And you notice there’s a bunch of boxes at his feet
from some on line or mail order retailer.
And there’s a bunch of boxes there with of course
big brand message on it.
You walk out and wonder
a lot of people must be ordering from that company.
Well what you don’t know is that we paid the doorman
to keep those empty boxes there.
You walk out into the street
and you hear some people having kind of a loud conversation
about a musical act
and they are passing headphones back and forth
and going this is great!
Hey do you know that I heard this CD is really hard to find
but I heard they sell it at store X.
You hear that and you register it
and you might kind of pick up on that
and may be later on you’ll think
hey I wonder what the hot act is bang
that might be in your head.
Now you get into your office
and there’s a certain brand of water in the refrigerator.
What is that?
You take it out you drink you slug it down it's there
not really thinking about it.
Wow!
That’s pretty good water.
Who knows?
Maybe someone placed the water there
You kind of go out for your lunch break
you’re sitting in the park and people are kind of out there
talking in the park and bang
all of a sudden you hear another message.
By the time you go to bed you've probably received
eight or nine different undercover messages.
People are always thinking
well oh I know product placement.
That’s when they put stuff in movies!
Well yes kind of.
I mean that’s definitely traditional product placement.
But real life product placement is just that:
Placing stuff in movies but the movie’s actually your life
Well take a group of attainable
but still inspirational people
they are not supermodels
they are kind of people just like you
they’re doing something for us
whether they are having a certain kind of drink
or they are using a certain laundry detergent
whatever it may be.
They are kind of the roach motel if you will
People are going to come over to them
and they are going to give them
this little piece of brand bait.
It could be a sound bite of knowledge or a ritual.
Consumers will get that piece of roach bait
then they would take it.
Oh pretty cool!
Then they go out and spread it to their friends.
If you want to be critical
if you want to go through your life like that
sure be critical of every single person
that walks up to you.
But if they are showing you something that fits
and something that works
and something that makes your life better in some way
well then who cares.
We again just say thanks!
Today the job of building this nation geographically
is completed.
There are no new frontiers within our borders.
So to what new horizons can we look now?
Where are tomorrows opportunities?
What's ahead for you for your children?
The frontiers of the future are not on any map.
They’re in the test tubes and laboratories
of the great industries.
The Chakrabarty case is one of the great judicial moments
in world history.
And the public was totally unaware
it was actually happening as a process was being engaged.
General Electric and Professor Chakrabarty
went to the patent office with a little microbe
that eats up oil spills.
They said they had modified this microbe in the laboratory
and therefore it was an invention.
The patent office and the U.S. Government
took a look at this quote invention;
they said no way.
The patent statures don’t cover living things.
This is not an invention.
Turned down.
Then General Electric and Doctor Chakrabarty
appealed to the U.S. Customs Court of Appeal.
And to everyone’s surprise by a three to two decision
they overrode the patent office.
They said this microbe looks more
like a detergent or a reagent
than a horse or a honeybee.
I laugh because they didn’t understand basic biology;
it looked like a chemical to them.
Had it had an antenna or eyes or wings or legs
it would never have crossed their table and been patented.
Then the patent office appealed.
And what the public should realize now
is the patent office was very clear
that you cant patent life.
My organization provided the main amicus curiae brief
if you allow the patent on this microbe we argued
it means that without any congressional guidance
or public discussion
corporations will own the blueprints of life.
When they made the decision we lost by five to four
and Chief Justice Warren said
sure some of these are big issues
but we think this is a small decision.
Seven years later the U.S. Patent office issued
a one sentence decree
you can patent anything in the world that’s alive
except a full birth human being.
We’ve all been hearing about the announcement
that we have mapped the human genome.
But what the public doesn’t know
is now there’s this great race by genomic companies
and biotech companies and life science companies
to find the treasure in the map.
The treasure are the individual genes
that make up the blueprint of the human race.
Every time they capture agene and isolate it
these biotech companies
they claim it as intellectual property.
The breast cancer gene
the cystic fibrosis gene
it goes on and on and on.
If this goes unchallenged in the world community
within less than 10 years
a handful of global companies will own
directly or through license
the actual genes that make up the evolution of our species.
And they’re now beginning to patent the genomes
of every other creature on this planet.
In the age of biology the politics is going to sort out
between those who believe life first has intrinsic value
and therefore we should choose technologies
and commercial venues
that honour the intrinsic value...
And then we're going to have people who believe
look life is a simple utility.
It's commercial fare
and they will line up with the idea
to let the marketplace be the ultimate arbiter
of all of the age of biology.
In a world economy where information is filtered
by global media corporations
keenly attuned to their powerful advertisers
who will defend the publics right to know?
And what price must be paid to preserve our ability
to make informed choices?
What Fox Television told us was that we were just the people
to be the investigators.
Do any stories you want
ask tough questions and get answers.
So we thought
this is great this is a dream job.
Fantastic.
The very first thing they had us do
was not to research stories
but to shoot this promo which was...
The Investigators.
Uncovering the truth
getting results protecting you.
and they had a film crew a smoke machine
were silhouetted...
One of the first stories that Jane came up with
was the revelation that most of the milk
in the state of Florida
and throughout much of the country was adulterated
with the effects of bovine growth hormone
with Monsanto I didn’t realize how effectively a corporation
could work to get something on the marketplace.
The levels of coordination they had to have.
They had to get university professors into the fold.
They had to get experts into the fold.
They had to get reporters into the fold
They had to get the public into the fold
and of course the FDA lets not leave them out.
They had to get the federal regulators convinced
that this was a fine and safe product
to get it onto the marketplace.
And they did that;
they did that very very well.
Posilac is a single most tested product in history
and is now available to you specifically.
so you can increase your profit potential.
The federal government basically rubber stamped it
before they put it on the marketplace.
The longest test they did for human toxicity
was 90 days on thirty rats.
And then either Monsanto misreported the results
to the FDA
or the FDA didn’t bother to look in depth
at Monsanto’s own studies.
The scientists within Health Canada looked very carefully
at bovine growth hormone
and came to very different conclusions
than the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. did.
Monsanto's engineered growth hormone did not comply
with safety requirements.
it could be absorbed by the body
and therefore did have implications for human health.
Mysteriously that conclusion was deleted
from the final published version of their report...
I personally was very concerned
that there’s a very serious problem of secrecy
conspiracy and things of that nature.
We have been pressured and coerced
to pass drugs of questionable safety
including RBST.
We wrote the story.
We had it ready a week beforehand.
They bought ads
...farmers in the milk industry say it's safe
but studies suggest a link to cancer.
Don’t miss this special report from The Investigators...
That Friday night before the Monday the series was to begin
the fax machine spit out a letter
from this very high priced lawyer in New York
that Monsanto had hired.
It contained a lot of things that were just
off-the-wall false
Just demonstrably false
but if you didn’t know the story
and you didn’t know how we'd gone about producing
it would have scared you as a broadcaster
or as a manager.
And they decided that they would pull the story
and they would just check it one more time.
But the bottom line was that there was no factual errors
in that story.
Both sides had been heard from
both sides had had an opportunity to speak.
One week later
Monsanto sent the second letter
and this was even more strongly worded.
And it said there will be dire consequences for Fox News
if the story airs in Florida.
And this time they freaked.
They were afraid of being sued
and losing advertising dollars.
And all of the stations owned by Rupert Murdoch.
And he owned more television stations than any
other group in America.
That’s 22 television stations.
That’s a lot of advertising dollars.
For Round Up Aspartame Nutra Sweet
and other products.
So we got into a battle.
And uh the first deal was the new general manager
his name's Dave and Dave is a salesman.
And you know he’d pump your hand
how ya doin how ya doin?
Called us upstairs to his office and he said
what would you say if I killed this piece?
what if it never ran?
And we said well you know
we wouldn’t be very happy about that.
And he said well I could kill it you know
and we said yes of course you’re the manager
you could kill it it would never air.
And he hemming and he showing.
He’s back and he’s forth.
And we couldn’t figure out what is this all about
and finally he blurted out
look would you tell anybody?
You know I said I’m not going to lie for you.
And about a week later he calls us back to the office
and says okay wed like you to make these changes.
In fact you will make these changes.
We said well look let us show you the research
that we have that shows that this information
you want us to broadcast isn’t true.
To which he replies.
I don’t care about that.
I said pardon me?
And he said well that’s what I have lawyers for
just write it the way the lawyers want it written.
I said you know this is news
this is important.
This is stuff people wanted to know.
And I’ll never forget he didn’t pause a beat
and he said
we just paid three billion dollars
for these television stations
Well tell you what the news is.
The news is what we say it is.
I said I’m not doing that.
and and he said
Well he said if you refuse to present this story
the way we think it should be presented
you’ll be fired for insubordination.
I said I will go to the Federal Communications Commissions
and I will report that I was fired from my job by you
the licensee of these public airwaves
because I refused to lie to people on the air.
And it's thank you very much you’ll hear from us right away.
Well 24 hours came and went and we didn’t hear a thing.
And about a week later he calls us back
and now we’ve changed strategies.
How about if we pay you some money
and you just go away?
And I said how much money?
because when somebody offers to bribe you like that
I always want to know if it might be worth it.
He was going to offer us the rest of our years salary
if we agreed not to talk about what Monsanto had done
To not talk about the Fox corporate response
in suppressing the story.
And to not talk about the story.
Not talk about B G H again anywhere.
Not take this story to another new organization.
Zip up.
I said you mean if I want to go to my daughter's PTA meetings
and explain what’s in the school milk
at the school lunch program I cant?
No you can never speak about this anywhere.
Steve says okay write it up.
And I’m like what are you talking about write it up?
And I didn’t say anything.
And Dave he wrote it up and he FedExed it to us
a couple of days later.
And he said are you going to sign?
And we said nah Dave we're not going to sign that.
And he said well send it back okay?
We said no Dave were not going to send that back.
It was okay we cant buy you out
we cant shut you up
lets get the story on the air in a way that we can all agree
it will go on the air.
And we started rewriting and editing with their lawyers.
During this eight month re-review process
I say jokingly they did things like for example they wanted
to take out the word cancer.
You don’t have to identify what the potential problem is
just say human health implications.
Any criticism of Monsanto or its product
they either removed it or minimized it.
And it was very very clear I would say
almost every edit they made to the piece
that was the aim.
And we changed this and this and this.
And then that wasn’t good enough
okay now change this and this.
Now change this and this.
Version after version after version.
83 times.
83 times is unheard of it doesn’t happen
you shouldn’t have to rewrite something 83 times
Obviously they didn’t want to put the thing on the air
and they were trying to drive us crazy and get us to quit
or wait until the first window in our contract
so that they could fire us.
They in effect announced that they were going to fire us
for no cause.
Well this was a little much.
And Steve wrote a letter to the lawyer in Atlanta
whose name is Caroline Forest the Fox corporate lawyer.
And I said you know this isn’t about being fired for no cause.
You're firing us because we refused to put on the air
something that we knew and demonstrated to be false
and misleading.
That’s what this is about.
And because we put up a fight
because we stood up to this big corporation
and we stood up to your editors
and we stood up to your lawyers.
And we said to you
look there ought to be a principle higher
than just making money.
And she wrote a letter back and said
you are right that’s exactly what it was.
You stood up to us on this story
and that’s why we're letting you go.
Big mistake
That says retaliation.
You cant retaliate against employees
if they’re standing up for something
that they believe is illegal
that they don’t want to participate in.
So that gave us
the whistleblower status that we needed
in the state of Florida to file a whistleblower claim
against our employer.
Two or three years later we got the trial.
Five weeks of testimony led to a jury verdict of $425,000
in which the jury determined
that the story they pressured us to broadcast
the story we resisted telling was in fact false
distorted or slanted.
Fox News appealed the verdict.
Five major news media corporations filed briefs
with the court in support of Fox's appeal.
You may recall that Jane Akre a former reporter here
sued Fox 13 in a whistleblower lawsuit
claiming that she was fired
for refusing to distort her report;
the Appeals Court today threw that case out
saying Ms. Akre had no whistleblower claim
against the station based on news distortion.
Fox 13 vice-president and general manager Bob Linger
says the station has been completely
vindicated by the ruling...
What Fox neglected to report is this
Jane sued Fox under Florida’s whistleblower statute
which protects those who try to prevent others
from breaking the law.
Buther 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.
But it remains hidden in the milk supply
of the United States
The prospect that two thirds of the worlds 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 planets most basic resource.
When Bolivia sought to refinance
the public water services of its third largest city
the World Bank required privatization
which is how the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco
gained control over all of Cochabamba's water
even that which fell from the sky.
The price this beleaguered country paid
for World Bank loans
was the privatization 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.
Bolivia was determined
to defend the corporations 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 privatization scheme
the more violent became the standoff.
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?
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 are cognition
that fascism rose in Europe
with the help of enormous corporations.
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.
I think one of the greatest untold stories
of the twentieth 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 show 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.
When Hitler came to power in 1933
his goal was to dismantle
and destroy the Jewish community.
This was an enterprise so vast
that it required the resources of a computer.
But in 1933 there was no computer
What there was
was the IBM punch card system
which controlled and stored information
based upon the holes that were punched
in various rows and columns.
Naturally there was no off the shelf software
as there is today.
Each applicant was custom designed and an engineer
had to personally configure it.
Millions of people of all religions nationalities
and characteristics went through
the concentration camp system.
That’s an extraordinary traffic management program
that required an IBM system
in every railroad direction
and an IBM system in every concentration camp.
Now this is a typical prisoner card.
There are little boxes
where all the information is to be punched in.
We compare this information to the code sheet
for concentration camps.
And here you see Auschwitz is one
Buchenwald is two
and Dachau is three.
Now what kinds of prisoners were they?
They could be a Jehovah’s witness for two
a homosexual for three a communist for six
or a Jew for eight.
Now what was their stats?
One was released two was transferred
four was executed
five was suicide
and six. Code six
Sonderbahandlung
special treatment
meant the gas chamber or sometimes a bullet.
They would punch that number in
the material was tabulated
and the machines were set.
And of course the punch cards by the millions
had to be printed.
And they were printed exclusively by IBM
and the profits were recovered just after the war
I really do believe that particular accusation
has been fairly discredited as a serious accusation.
They used equipment
that is a fact but how they got it
how much co operation they got
and any kind of collusion
trying to connect dots that are not connected
I think that’s the part that is discredited.
Generally you sell computers
and they are used in a variety of ways
and you always hope they are
using the more positive ways possible.
If you ever found out they’re used in ways
that are not positive
then you would hope you would stop supporting that
but you know do you always know?
Can you always tell?
Can you always find out?
IBM would of course say
they had no control over its German subsidiaries.
But here on October 9th 1941
a letter is being written directly
to Thomas J. Watson with all sorts of detail
of the activity of the German subsidiary
none of these machines were sold
they were all leased by IBM.
They had to be serviced on site once a month
even if that was at a concentration camp.
This is a typical contract with IBM and the Third Reich.
Which was instituted in 1942.
It's not with the Dutch subsidiary
it's not with the German subsidiary.
It is with IBM corporation in New York.
You know as it happens I know that story.
I discussed it more than once with old Mr. Watson
and I was around at the time.
I’m not saying that Watson didn’t know
that the German government used punch cards.
He probably did know
after all he had very few customers.
Watson didn’t want to do it.
It was not because he thought it was immoral or not
but because Watson
with a very keen sense of public relations
thought it was risky.
It should not surprise us that corporate allegiance
to profits 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.
...you can roughly locate any community somewhere along
a scale running all the way from democracy to despotism.
This man makes it his job to study these things...
Well for one thing
avoid the comfortable idea
that the mere form of government can of itself
safeguard a nation against despotism.
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 Butlers services were also in demand
in the United States in the 1930s
as president Franklin Delano Roosevelt
sought to relieve the misery
of the depression through public enterprise
and to offer regulation on corporate exploitation
and misdeeds.
more power to you President Roosevelt
The entire country’s behind you.
thrilled with hope and patriotism...
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.
.. The plan as outlined to me was to form an organization
of veterans to use as a bluff or as a club at least
to intimidate the government...
but the corporate cabal had picked the wrong man.
Butler was fed up being what he called
a gangster for capitalism.
...I appeared before the Congressional Committee
the highest representation of the American people
under subpoena to tell what I knew of activities
which I believed might lead to an attempt to set up
a fascist dictatorship.
The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed
to lead an organization of 500000 men which would
be able to take over the functions of government...
A Congressional Committee ultimately found evidence
of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt.
According to Butler the conspiracy included
representatives of some of Americas top corporations
including J. P. Morgan Dupont and Goodyear tire.
As today's chairman of Goodyear knows
for corporations to dominate government
a coup is no longer necessary.
Corporations have gone global and by going global
the governments have lost some control over corporations
regardless of whether the corporation can be trusted
or can not 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.
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 significance of government
and politicians
but these are the new high priests.
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 other side of the room we had
Coca Cola, Mobile Oil, GTE and Kodak.
And I remember thinking
I am in the epicentre
of the intelligence industry right now.
I mean the line is not just blurring
it just not there any more.
And tome it
it spoke volumes as to how
industry and government were consulting with each other
and working with each other.
As 34 nations of the western hemisphere gathered
to draft a far reaching trade agreement
one that would lay the groundwork
to privatize every resource and service imaginable
thousands of people
from hundreds of grassroots organizations
joined to oppose it.
Canada’s top business lobbyists
and its chief trade representative
discount the dissent in the streets.
For them the Americas 800 million citizens
speak with one voice.
I’m inside and this is all outside.
That’s the way it is.
What do you think when you look at this?
Well I mean I think that it's too bad
that this has this has erupted.
Does the ranted to be some measure of accountability?
Yes
And I think the business community recognizes that.
But that accountability is in the marketplace
it's with their shareholders.
It's with the public perception and the public image
that they are projecting.
If companies don’t do what they should be doing
they’re going to be punished in the marketplace
and that’s not what any company wants.
There’s a new market.
These guys and gals aren’t out there
because governments putting gun to their head.
Or because they’ve suddenly read a book
about transcendental meditation and global morality.
My inner voice says honour my inner child
Mine says love everyone
My inner voice says
Id like a Wendy’s Bacon mushroom melt
They’re there because they understand.
The market requires them to be there.
That’s their competitive advantage to be there.
I’m listening to your concerns.
I worry about climate.
I worry about pollution.
I do not have all the answers to this
but we are prepared to work with you with society
with NGOs with governments to address it.
So you’re build the trust so that you come back to
a new kind of trust
and then the ultimate goal is then
to become the corporation of choice.
He believes that almost half our energy can one day come
from renewable sources.
He’s been called a dreamer and a crank.
and I’ve been called a hippie.
and more recently a project manager for Shell.
I ask myself often times why
so many companies subscribe to
corporate social responsibility.
I’m not sure it's because they necessarily
want to be responsible in an ultimate way
but because they want to be
identified and seen to be responsible.
But who am I to judge?
Who am I to judge?
It's better that they belong than they not belong.
It's better that they make some public profession
than the opposite.
Social responsibility isn’t a deep shift
because its a voluntary tactic.
A tactic
a reaction to a certain market at this point.
And as the corporation reads the market differently
it can go back.
One day you see Bambi
next day you see Godzilla.
How do you define socially responsible?
What business is it of the corporation to decide
what’s socially responsible.
That isn’t their expertise
that isn’t what their stockholders ask them to do.
So I think they’re going out of their range
and its certainly is not democratic.
I don’t really care
what the chairman of General Motors thinks
is an appropriate level of emissions
to come out the tailpipe of General Motors automobiles.
He may have a lot of scientists
he may be a very good person
but I didn’t elect him to do anything.
He doesn’t have any power to speak for me.
These are decisions that must be made by government
and not by corporations.
You take this to its logical conclusion.
One would have an image that we are in fact at this
the end of the world this nigh.
And we are all completely brainwashed
and there is no space left.
And I don’t believe we're there yet.
And I think it's really important
that we don’t overstate the case
and that we admit that there are cracks
and fissures in all of these corporate structures.
And sometimes when a corporation is concentrating
on one particular project they look the other way
and all kinds of interesting things happen in the corner.
It is the case in every period of history where injustice
based on falsehoods
based on taking away the right and freedoms of people
to live and survive with dignity
that eventually when you call a bluff the tables turn.
Ultimately capital puts its foot down somewhere.
And anywhere it puts its foot down
it can be held accountable.
Originally Wal-Mart and Kathy Lee Gifford had said
why should we believe you that children work in this factory?
What we didn’t tell them was that Wendy Dias
in the centre of the picture was on a plane
to the United States.
This is Wendy Dias.
She comes to the United States.
She’s unstoppable.
Congress heard testimony today from children who
testified they were exploited by sweatshops overseas.
Kathy Lee Gifford apologized to Wendy Dias
It was the most amazing thing Id seen.
This powerful celebrity leans over and says
Wendy please believe me
I didn’t know these conditions existed.
And now that I do I’m going to work with you.
I’m going to work with these other people
and it'll never happen again.
And that night we signed an agreement
with Kathy Lee Gifford.
I thought it would be a relatively easy process
and it isn’t.
As for every question I have there seem to be
five questions that come back tome.
As far as Wal-Mart goes and Kathy Lee
pretty much everything returned to sweatshop conditions
but because this was fought out on television for weeks
this incident with Kathy Lee Gifford actually
took the sweatshop issue
took every single part of the country.
And so frankly after that
there’s hardly a single person in this country
who doesn’t know about child labour
or sweatshops or starvation wages.
So what wanted to do is to look at the very roots
of the legal form that created this beast
and wanted to think who can hold them accountable.
They’re not graven in stone.
They can be dismantled.
And in fact most states have laws
which require that they be dismantled.
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 Inn 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 the corporate charter
of the Union Oil Company of California
for its repeated and grievous offences.
This is the 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.
This is nothing more than a smear campaign.
This company has been part of California’s economy
for over 100 years... thousands of jobs.
Doesn’t mean it's never made any mistakes
paid for those mistakes
but this demonizing of a company
I think I am in a time warp or something
that I fell asleep and woke up 50 years ago
and we heard that kind of rhetoric.
Well we have a very very broad set of people angry
very angry at this corporation
well people from the left of the spectrum
who don’t produce anything except hot air.
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
...is immoral.
Unocal cannot do business in Burma
without supporting that hopeless regime...
The curse for me has been the fact that in making these
you know documentary films
I’ve seen that they actually can impact change
so I’m just compelled to just keep making them.
Yep that’s me doing what I do
All year long I give big companies a hard time
but at Christmas time I like to set aside my differences
and reach out to big business like cigarette companies.
Deck the Halls with boughs of holly...
fa la la la la la la la
I went to Littleton Colorado
where the Columbine shooting took place
and I didn’t know this
but when I arrived I learned what the primary job is
of the parents of the kids who go to Columbine High School.
The number one job in Littleton Colorado
They work for Lockheed Martin
building weapons of mass destruction.
But they don’t see the connect
between what they do for a living
and what their kids do at school
or did at school
And so I’m kind of you know up on my high horse
thinking about this and I thought you know
I said to my wife
we both are sons and daughters of auto workers
in Flint Michigan.
There isn’t a single one of us back in Flint
any of us including us
who ever stopped to think
this thing we do for a living
the building of automobiles
is probably the single biggest reason
why the polar ice caps are going to melt
and end civilization as we know it.
There’s no connect between
I’m just an assembler on an assembly line building a car
which is good for people and society
and it moves them around.
But never stop to think about the larger picture
and the larger responsibility of what were doing.
Ultimately we have to as individuals
accept responsibility for our collective action
and the larger harm that it causes you know in our world.
Today the first of two historic town hall meetings
will get underway in Arcata California
61 percent of Arcatans voted in favour
of publicly discussing
whether democracy is even possible with large corporations
...so much wealth and power under law.
They also voted to form a committee
to ensure democratic control over corporations in Arcata.
Corporations are not accountable
to the democratic process.
That is what this is about.
I don’t want to make decisions
about everything that goes on in their corporation.
But I do have a strong belief
that they don't need to be held accountable to us.
If we don’t like certain products
if we don’t like Pepsi-Cola Bank of America
well if you don’t like what they do
don’t use them.
That’s the way I see the peoples power is.
You have a lot more money than me
You have more votes than I do
If we use the model of boycott and voting with your dollars
that’s an undemocratic situation.
What are we afraid of?
I mean are all the businesses going to leave Arcata?
I don’t think so.
And if they did
wed deal with it or wed figure it out
or wed do something different.
We're creative people.
I just don’t see why we are afraid.
If you think it's tough making a decision
where to buy your stuff today
how tough do you think it is when there’s only
one provider and it's the state.
And by the way
you don’t get to have this little democracy forum
in those communities either.
People that say that they fear their govern meant
I really hope that they understand
that they’re allowed to participate in their government
they’re not allowed to participate in anything
the corporations do.
So don’t fear the government.
Help it be the government that you wont fear.
If this many people around the country would do this
instead of watching Super bowl Sunday
our nation would be controlled by the people
not by the corporations.
...no more chain restaurants in Arcata after
a long awaited decision...
Over the past decade
we have been gaining ground.
And when I say we
I mean ordinary people committed
to the welfare of all humanity.
All people irrespective of gender and class
and race and religion.
All species on the planet.
We managed to take the biggest government
and one of the largest chemical companies to court
on the case of Neemand win a case against them.
W. R. Grace and the U.S. governments patent on Neem
was revoked by a case we brought
along with the greens of European parliament
and the international organic agriculture movement.
We won because we worked together.
We have overturned nearly 99 percent
of the basmati patent of Ricetek.
Again because we worked as a world wide coalition
old women in Texas scientists in India
activists sitting in Vancouver
a little basmati action group.
We stopped the third world being viewed as the pirate
and we showed the corporations were the pirate.
Look how little it took for Gandhi
to work against the salt laws of the British
where the British decided
the way they would make their armies
and police forces bigger
is just tax the salt.
And all that Gandhi did was walk to the beach
pick up the salt and say
nature gives it for free.
Wanted it. We’ve always made it.
We will violate your laws.
We will continue to make salt.
We’ve had a similar commitment for
the last decade in India.
That any law that makes it illegal to save seed
is a law not worth following.
We will violate it because saving seed is a duty
to the earth and to future generations.
We thought it would really be symbolic
It is more than symbolic.
It is becoming a survival option.
Farmers who grow their own seeds
save their own seeds
don’t buy pesticides
have threefold more incomes
than farmers who are locked into the chemical treadmill
depending on Monsanto and Cargill
We have managed to create alternatives
that work for people.
There are many tools for bringing back community.
But the importance is not the tools
I mean there’s litigation there’s legislation
there’s direct action there’s education boycotts
social investment...
There’s many many ways to address issues
of corporate power.
But in the final analysis
what’s really important is the vision.
You have to have abetter story
Do I know you well enough to call you fellow plunderers?
There is not an industrial company on earth
not an institution of any kind
not mine not yours not anyone’s
that is sustainable.
I stand convicted by me myself alone
not by anyone else
as a plunderer of the earth
but not by our civilizations definition.
By our civilization’s definition
I'm a captain of industry.
In the eyes of many a kind of modern-day hero.
But really really
the first industrial revolution is flawed
it is not working.
It is unsustainable.
It is the mistake
and we must move on to another
and better industrial revolution
and get it right this time.
When I think of what could be
I visualize an organization of people
committed to a purpose
and the purpose is doing no harm.
I see accompany
that has severed the umbilical cord to earth
for its raw materials
taking raw materials that have already been extracted
and using them over and over again
driving that process with renewable energy.
It is our plan
it remains our plan to climb Mount Sustainability
that mountain that is higher than Everest
infinitely higher than Everest
far more difficult to scale.
That point at the top symbolizing zero footprint...
So we’ve got to undo a lot of things
in order to be smart enough
to do this really dangerous and risky and difficult work
you know the best way that we possibly can.
And that means people coming together and learning
a whole lot of stuff that we just don’t know
that has been driven out of the culture
driven out of the society driven out of our minds.
That tome is the most exciting thing.
That is happening
it's happening all over the world now.
Sometimes it surprises me how effective you can actually be.
After we beat the Gap
I walked past these Gap stores
and I looked at them and I think
my God there’s like 2000 of these stores across the country.
Look at all that concrete look at the glass
look at all the staff people look at all the clothing.
Look at that power
You can still reach these companies.
You can still have an effect.
We can change the government.
That’s the only way were going tore design re think
re-constitute what capital and property can do
Fifteen corporations would like to control the conditions
of our life
and millions of people are saying not only do
we not need you
we can do it better.
We are going to create systems that nourish the earth
and nourish human beings.
And these are not marginal experiments
they are the mainstay of large numbers of
communities across the world.
That is where the future lies.
You know I've always thought it's very ironic
that I’m able to do all this and yet what am I on?
I’m on networks.
I’m distributed by studios
that are owned by large corporate entities.
Now why would they put me out there when I am opposed
to everything that they stand for?
And I spend my time on their dime opposing
what they believe in.
Okay?
Well it's because they don’t believe in anything.
They put me on there because they know that there’s millions
of people that want to see my film or watch the TV show
and so they’re going to make money.
And I’ve been able to get my stuff out there
because I’m driving my truck through
this incredible flaw in capitalism
the greed flaw.
The thing that says the rich man will sell you the rope
to hand himself with
if he think she can make a buck off it
well I’m the rope.
I hope.
I’m part of the rope.
And they also believe that when people watch my stuff
or maybe watch this film or whatever
they think that you know
well you know well you know what
they’ll watch this and they wont do anything
because we’ve done such a good job of numbing
their minds and dumbing them down
you know they’ll never affect...
People aren’t going to leave the church
and go and do something political.
They’re convinced of that.
I’m convinced of the opposite.
I’m convinced that a few people
are going to leave this movie theatre
or get up off the couch
and go and do something
anything and get this world back in our hands.