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- Project: Video: The Corporation & Bureucracy |
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- Project: Video: The Corporation & Stratification |
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Plot Line: THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Footage from pop culture, advertising, TV news, and corporate propaganda, illuminates the corporation's grip on our lives. Taking its legal status as a "person" to its logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" Provoking, witty, sweepingly informative, The Corporation includes forty interviews with corporate insiders and critics - including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change. |
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Is corp corruption the result of a "few bad apples" or endemic in the system? |
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- Project: The Corporation: A Few Bad Apples |
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Cathy Lee Gifford tried to reform some of the sweat shops in the 3rd world |
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Corps make chemicals whose effects on humans & the env are untested |
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The corp is a legal person. Does the corp exhibit good mental health? |
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Capitalism & profits: There is opportunity in disaster & corps are always there to take advantage of that opportunity. |
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The Enclosure of the Commons reduced public property to private property. Now the water & the air is also being privatized. Regulation, free trade, etc. is another enclosure when natural resources are declared private property. Services such as fire fighters were once private but then it was determined that it meets society's needs only if it is a public service. |
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The song Happy Birthday is owned by Time Warner. Marketing is very effective & pervasive today. Corps manipulate our needs. Study on nagging demonstrated that children do have an impact on parental buying behavior | ||||
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Jeremy Rifkin: Dr. Jack Avarte & GM took a microbe to be patented. The microbe eats oil slicks. Patent office holds that you cannot patent life, but they allowed this microbe to be patented. Today, you can patent any form of life except a fully grown human being | ||||
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Case study of the reporting on Bovine Growth Hormones (BGH) | ||||
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Bolivia fought Bechtel over control of their water | ||||
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Corps throughout history have been instrumental in controlling nations | ||||
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Corporate social responsibility is a new corp ethic that some have embraced, sometimes. | ||||
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In India, a group of determined women fight the corp over genetically engineered seeds. | ||||
THE CORPORATION - DETAILED SYNOPSIS
In THE CORPORATION, case studies, anecdotes and true confessions reveal behind the scenes tensions and influences in several corporate and anti corporate dramas. Each illuminates an aspect of the corporation's complex character. Among the 40 interview subjects are CEOs and top level executives from a range of industries: oil, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, manufacturing, public relations, branding, advertising and undercover marketing; in addition, a Nobel prize winning economist, the first management guru, a corporate spy, and a range of academics, critics, historians and thinkers are interviewed. A LEGAL "PERSON"
THE PATHOLOGY OF COMMERCE: CASE HISTORIES
MINDSET
The people who work for corporations may be good people, upstanding citizens in their communities - but none of that matters when they enter the corporation's world. As Sam Gibara, Former CEO and Chairman of Goodyear Tire, explains, "If you really had a free hand, if you really did what you wanted to do that suited your personal thoughts and your personal priorities, you'd act differently." Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer, had an environmental epiphany and re-organized his $1.4 billion company on sustainable principles. His company may be a beacon of corporate hope, but is it an exception to the rule? MONSTROUS OBLIGATIONS
The Corporation exists to create wealth, and even world disasters can be profit centers. Carlton Brown, a commodities trader, recounts with unabashed honesty the mindset of gold traders while the twin towers crushed their occupants. The first thing that came to their minds, he tells us, was: "How much is gold up?" PLANET INC.
Around things too precious, vulnerable, sacred or important to the public interest, governments have, in the past, drawn protective boundaries against corporate exploitation. Today, governments are inviting corporations into domains from which they were previously barred. PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT
Today people can become brands (Martha Stewart). And brands can build cities (Celebration, Florida). And university students can pay for their educations by shilling on national television for a credit card company (Chris and Luke). And a corporation even owns the rights to the popular song "Happy Birthday" (a division of AOL Time Warner). Do you ever get the feeling it's all a bit much? Corporations have invested billions to shape public and political opinion. When they own everything, who will stand for the public good? THE PRICE OF WHISTLE BLOWING
Fox demanded that they rewrite the story, and ultimately fired Akre and Wilson. Akre and Wilson subsequently sued Fox under Florida's whistle blower statute. They proved to a jury that the version of the story Fox would have had them put on the air was false, distorted or slanted. Akre was awarded $425,000. Then Fox appealed, the verdict was overturned on a technicality, and Akre lost her award. [For an update on the case see Disc 2 where we learn that at one point, Jane and Steve became liable for Fox's $1.8 million court costs, later to be reduced to $200,000.] DEMOCRACY LTD.
And corporations do not hesitate to take advantage of democracy's absence either. One of the most shocking stories of the twentieth century is Edwin Black's recounting IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany - one that began in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continued well into World War II. FISSURES
As global individuals take back local power, a growing re-invigoration of the concept of citizenship is taking root. It has the power to not only strip the corporation of its seeming omnipotence, but to create a feeling and an ideology of democracy that is much more than its mere institutional version. |
The End