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The Corporation


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hi.

i've already blabbered about this a few times...thinking

it was already out in the US..when it wasn't...well now it is

and all my dogs and dogettes should check it pronto. one of

the best documentaries you'll ever see.

www.thecorporation.tv

 

here is a little blurb on it, followed by an informative

and interesting interview with marjorie kelly, who recently

authored a book on corporate reform. scooped from here.

 

 

The Corporation

Anthony Lappé, _July 6, 2004

 

 

A box office record-setting documentary is sweeping the country, and it’s not Fahrenheit 9/11. The Corporation, the long-awaited documentary from Jennifer Abbott, Joel Bakan and Mark Achbar recently became the highest grossing documentary in Canadian history - a title previously held by Achbar’s seminal Noam Chomsky doc Manufacturing Consent. The Corporation, which is based on Bakan’s book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, was released in the U.S. last week. The filmmakers hope to piggyback on the buzz from Moore’s white-hot Bush-bashing screed. In fact, the film, which took an audience award at Sundance, is in many ways more important than F-9/11. Moore looks at the symptom; The Corporation takes on the disease.

 

The conceit of the doc is clever. It psychoanalyzes the corporation as if it were a person, using the standard definitions used by modern psychiatry to define a “psychopath.” The film argues that corporations exhibit all the tell-tale signs – callous unconcern for the feelings of others; incapacity to maintain long-term relationships; reckless disregard for the safety of others; deceitfulness. You get the idea. It’s a gimmick, but it works.

 

The two-and-half hour film traces the evolution of the American corporation from the days of the founding fathers when it was conceived as a limited entity with constricted powers, to what it has become today, a transnational, nearly unaccountable behemoth that in many cases wields more authority than any elected official, all the while enjoying the constitutional protections of citizens. The film features an impressive cast of CEOs, whistle-blowers, brokers, gurus, corporate spies and activists who make the filmmakers' case, some unwittingly. The most chilling moment comes when a New York commodities trader describes the first reaction of his co-workers to the 9/11 strikes, only blocks away: Great, we’re going to make a killing on gold. Literally.

 

The film would have worked much better as a five-part television series. Many of the stories cry out for more depth, and it’s hard for anyone, let alone your average moviegoer, to sit through two-and-half hours of talking-heads. Noam Chomsky doesn’t exactly explode off the screen. Many of the stories will be familiar to many GNNers, IBM’s complicity in the Holocaust; the corporate takeover of the food supply; the war over water privatization.

 

The film’s Lila Lipscombe is Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer. Like the grieving mom in F-9/11, he is the character you leave the theater thinking about. Anderson had a spiritual epiphany after reading The Ecology of Commerce, the groundbreaking book by GNN’s friend Paul Hawken. After examining his own company’s impact on the planet, Anderson realized that he didn’t want to be part of the destruction. He re-organized his $1.4 billion company on sustainable principles. Eloquent and nearly religious in his conviction, Anderson has become something of a sustainable business guru, lecturing other companies on how they can change. While he claims his company is on the road to sustainability, it’s not clear how many other corporate polluters he has enlisted in the cause.

 

And that is precisely the problem. There needs to be a revolution in the way the American capitalist economy works, and that will not come from well-meaning CEOs like Anderson, or green philanthropists like Cherry Garcia-mastermind Ben Cohen.

 

The problems are too deep. Only structural change can bring democratic accountability to what has become the planet’s most lawless and dangerous institution.

 

GNN spoke with a trailblazing corporate reformer not featured in the film who has some answers on how that could happen. Author of The Divine Right of Capital, Marjorie Kelly is the founder of Business Ethics magazine and a leader in the corporate reform movement. Kelly argues that blind devotion to short-term profits for stockholders over the well-being of everyone else is equivalent to corporate feudalism. She says nothing short of a peaceful democratic revolution in American business can save global capitalism from itself:

 

GNN: How did you start down this path?

 

Kelly: When I started Business Ethics I thought that socially responsible business people changing their own companies was how we could transform capitalism. But I no longer believe that. I believe that the problems are at the systems level.

 

What’s wrong comes down to one thing: that is the corporate mandate to maximize returns to shareholders, and that includes making CEOs rich. The system is designed to make a few people rich - the very wealthy, the one percent who own half the stock and the CEOs who own the companies.

 

Disparities in wealth are not an accidental by-product of the system, they are the direct result of the system design. It is a system designed by the few, for the few.

 

GNN: Tell me about the metaphor of a corporate aristocracy that you use in your book.

 

Kelly: This goes back to the time of kings and nobles when a very few people held all the wealth and power, and that was how the world was supposed to be. We moved into a new world of democracy, but we have only democratized government. We have yet to democratize economics.

 

The hallmark of democracy is equality. The hallmark of artistocracy is privilege. Privilege comes from the root word, privus, which means private law. It benefits a few people and not everyone else. In a corporation, only those who own stock vote. This is the private law. Since the wealthiest one percent own half of all stock, they have control over corporations. The more wealthy you are, the more wealth you have. That is privilege under a financial aristocracy.

 

Look at the French aristocracy before the Revolution. They had income completely detached from productivity. This is what an artistocracy always aims to do: We want to get plenty of money coming in and we don’t want to work for it. Back in the Dark Ages, the lord of the manor actually earned his keep in France. He had dues and fees coming in, and in return for that he would keep order within his realm. He would hold court and settle disputes; he would feed people in time of famine. Over time the French aristocracy dropped all its functions, but it kept its dues and fees coming in. That’s very much what we have today with stockholders. Ninety-nine percent of all stock trading is purely speculative. You may think that when you invest in a company that it is actually reaching that company, but it’s not. The stock market works like a used car market. When you buy a 1999 Ford Explorer, that money doesn’t go to Ford, it goes to the previous owner of the car. It’s the same with stock. When you invest in Ford, that money goes to the previous owner of the stock. That is true 99% of the time.

 

The money is just trading hands from speculator to speculator. Yet corporations are still designed to maximize returns to shareholders. So you have income that is completely detached from productivity.

 

GNN: I take it we’re the serfs.

 

Kelly: The serfs of the system are the workers – which is all of us – anyone who works for a living. Companies are designed to pay working people as little as possible so they can pay shareholders as much as possible. That is what I call wealth discrimination. It says if you own wealth we are going to make you as rich as we can, and if you own nothing we will pay you as little as we can. Wealth discrimination is a third form of discrimination in this country that we haven’t acknowledged.

 

When you go back to the founding of his country, the vote was restricted in three ways: In order to vote you had to be male, white and you had to have wealth, you had to own property. We have since done away with all three restrictions when it comes to the vote, but we’ve only recognized two of the other forms of discrimination – we call them racism and sexism. We haven’t yet recognized wealthism – the idea that special privileges in law are reserved for those who process wealth.

 

GNN: How did we end up with this system?

 

Kelly: When you go back to the founding of this country, corporations were chartered only to serve the public good. You could only get a corporation charter if you had public purpose, like building a road or a canal, but in the era of the robber barons after the Civil War, they changed the corporation. It used to be that corporations had a limited life. They lasted 20 or 30 years, you made as much money as you could, then they went out of business. The robber barons said, no, corporations have eternal life, exist not to serve the public good but to make their shareholders money, and they have limited liability. If we step on people on the way, we have no responsibility for that. That whole model which we still have today came from the robber barons. It’s no accident they were called barons – that’s a term from the aristocracy. They wanted to make themselves rich and they created a form that would do that effectively. We still have that form, but we’ve outgrown it. We now have income detached from productivity.

 

It’s time for a new revolution.

 

We democratized government in 1776, it’s time we democratized economics. Employees ought to be able to impeach their CEO. Employees ought to be able to have a stake in their company. If a company is going to have massive lay-offs that are going to affect a community, the community ought to have a say in that - democratic input into corporate decisions.

 

GNN: Describe what is missing from the public’s understanding of the corporation.

 

Kelly: There is a common picture of the corporation, that’s a piece of property that is owned by shareholders. They invested in it, they paid for it, they own it, they can do what they want with it. That may have been true at the turn of the last century. At the end of the 19th century, two-thirds of the companies listed on the New York stock exchange were railroads. They were tangible; they were paid for by real shareholders.

 

But today, you look at the S&P 500 and their real value is in intangibles. It’s not on the balance sheet - you can’t find it. It’s mostly knowledge. Most of the value of companies is in employees’ heads. What does that mean to say their stockholders own that? Do stockholders own peoples’ minds? The corporation has no longer become a piece of property, it has become a human community. And because it has become a human community, the people who are that community deserve a say.

 

GNN: What would be the mechanism to change that understanding of the nature of the corporation?

 

Kelly: I’m part of something called the Economic Democracy Project. And we are convening right now to figure out if we were going to rewrite the laws that affect corporate governance, what would those look like? I can give you a hint, I don’t have a blueprint. I would say you could have employee ownership, with employees on the board. You could have a separate [governmental] house where you have employee representatives. That’s what they have in Germany; they have workers’ councils where you can’t do a massive layoff without the approval of the employee house. Workers' councils work on the level of the firm as well. If you are going to change the hours of a shift, management needs to consult with the workers' council. There are models out there of how to do this.

 

There are other ideas out there as well. For example, perhaps we need new property rights. Peter Barnes (Who Owns the Sky?) has suggested that we need property rights in the sky. It belongs to the people and if you pollute it you ought to pay for it. The Alaska Permanent Fund maintains that oil resources belong to the people of Alaska, and when we sell them, the people ought to be compensated. The fund today pays a family of four $4,000 a year.

 

We have common resources and we are not being adequately compensated when corporations take advantage of them.

 

GNN: What do you think would be the response of the corporate community if some of the changes started to be implemented?

 

Kelly: What the right is going to tell us is you can’t make these kinds of changes because it will make stock prices fall. Well, guess what, stock prices have already fallen because of corruption. The system does not work even on its own terms. A company like Enron, they are laser-focused on earnings-per-share, which is the basis of the stock price. They did everything possible to drive up earnings-per-share, including cooking the books; cheating California electricity consumers so their bills went up 3 or 4 times. They rewrote the laws of electricity deregulation. They dismantled the regulatory system of our nation – all to create this wealth that then evaporated because it stood on shifting sand. With economic democracy you may not have a stock market that goes up 50% a year – and maybe we shouldn’t because we’ve seen the bottom falls out of that – what you’d probably have are slower, more steady, more reliable gains. I think we’d all like to see that.

 

GNN: Earlier you talked about how, at the end of the feudal era, income had become detached from productivity. Are we at a similar point now?

 

Kelly: The aristocracy was doomed when it reached a point of extreme decadence - when you had this mass opulence completely detached from any contribution to society. Capitalism in its current, aristocratic form is now in a decadent phase. You had these massive stock market gains that were basically sucking the wealth out of corporations, out of society, evading taxes, extracting wealth and giving nothing back. The burst of the stock market bubble, and the corruption of all of these companies is a sign of development that is in a late stage of decadence and is ready to be transformed.

 

GNN: But is it going to take a hundred Enrons before radical change can come?

 

Kelly: We need a revolution, but it’s not going to happen in the streets. We are not going to shed any blood. It’s going to happen in the courts, in the media, in the debate of ideas about what it is we need to do. We need to form a coherent agenda and begin to form citizen groups to work for this. Already in Minnesota, there is a grassroots organization that has formed to change the corporate purposes in state law. Right now, corporate purposes say directors must maximize returns to shareholders. The citizens group wants to change it to read, you can’t do so at the expense of the employees, the community or the environment. These kinds of efforts to change the law can happen all over the country. I believe our moment has come, we can do this.

 

The thing about democracy is that it is an unstoppable historical force. There is nothing yet that has stopped democracy.

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um, yeah.

 

 

thanks brownie.

i have seen ads for it in the nation.

i'm hoping the shit gets released around here, not sure yet. i think so far it's only out in 4 cities?

 

i may have to wait for dvd.

 

eeeeeeee!!! yes. i looked.

out here on july 23rd.

 

i'll be checkin it.

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I heard some interview with one of the people from the corporation on the radio the other day. Girl went from talking about how evil and profit driven transnationals are straight into how much their movie is grossing.

 

I don't know, I got the impression that this movie would had never have been made if this whole "mockumentary" thing wasn't so popular at the moment.

 

And, if thats the case... the idea of a movie like this being made as a product of basic free market supply and demand is just completely fuck faced ... not to mention hypocritcal

 

I could be wrong though...

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