feature documentary "The Corporation"

Fair dos but it would be a shame to see this get diluted or simply boshed out because they're automatically going to get lapped up. It's like LOTR was excellent and now every month there's yet another mindless epic trying to ride it's mithril tail feathers. The idea of this genre being turned into a big money maker, farfetched as it seems, isn't completely out of the question.

Still haven't seen "The Corporation," though I'd like to. This point that Sebastien made:

A priority for this trend of documentary should be to make it clear and easy how to join movements, doing the hard work and taking the risks that comes with it if there are some. It can be a good thing as long as they don't make people feel self-satisfied just by having watched em

is right-on and was one of the major problems I had with "F9/11."

'teh corporation' (good piece here: http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html) is well cool and does end with an uplifiting moment using the bolivian water protests as an example of how YOU can make a difference, but not in a naff way. in fact it's lack of lefty we-have-all-theanswers earnestness was one of the film's many plus-points.

this is based on my impression (from the trailer/reviews) that the people who made this docu. were the people behind the noam chomsky docu., and that the talking heads in the film were largely drawn from the z magazine-oriented crowd.

much better done than fahrenheit 911 imo

Is J-Ro gettin' some or what? Two masterpieces in a month!

The scene filmed at the CEO of Shell's house in England where a bunch of Earth Firsters show up with a banner reading "MURDERER" to hang on his house, and ends up with the missus serving them tea on the front lawn was worth the admission price, too.

I still don't understand why people consider libertarian "right wing." How does believing the military needs to be reduced in size, we need to stop occupying foreign territories, and marijuana should be legalized constitute at all as right wing?

It showed more of both sides and, whereas leaving a Michael Moore film I usually just feel pissed off and hopeless, I left this with some sort of idea that I can do something.

Yes it's a good scene esp for Chomsky's analysis of such cases. I paraphrase him, he said when you look at corporations you got to distinguish between the institution and the individual, for an example take slavery or any other form of tyrany : they are inherently monstruous but the people participating in em may be the nicest people you can inamagine, benevolant, friendly, nice to their children, nice to their slaves, caring for other ppl: but in their institutional role they are monstrous. The former chairman dutch shell said the bigh diference betwen him and the protesters is that he feels he can make a contribution to their shared concerns whereas they are powerless, they just feel helpless.

Then the documentary went back to Chomsky who said: the CEO may care about the environment, and the corporations have extrarodianry ressources and may invest some of em to control their damages but only to a certain limit, that they allow, since it's not their main priority. They also mention shell is still one of the worst polluter and all their talk about how they are concerned about the environment didnt spared the life of activist Ken Saro Wiwa who was hanged for criticized his government's oil policy with Royal Dutch/Shell.

Do you think I'm one of these people? Would I have been clearer if instead of
"Any resident right-wing/ open market libertarian would like to talk about the "positive" externalities?"
I would have written
"Any resident right-wing and/or open market libertarian would like to talk about the "positive" externalities?"

"The Simultaneous Policy is a peaceful political strategy to democratically drive all the world's nations to apply global solutions to global problems, including combatting global warming and environmental destruction, regulating economic globalization for the good of all, and delivering social justice, peace and security, and sustainable prosperity."

it's the economy! more precisely, american-style libertarians believe that there should be little to no state involvement in economic matters -- they want something as close to pure laissez-faire capitalism as possible. that's why they get considered "right-wing."

???

I've never understood this line of argument. I mean, if you're the kind of person who would prefer that more people be better educated about the history of corporations, the ways they use and acquire power, and the ramifications thereof, then wouldn't you rather people saw the movie then didn't see it, regardless of which advocacy groups they join later or which members of congress they write letters to? Seeing the film itself is a form of activism, since you have to be interested enough to take the time and spend the money (and the money helps support and encourage the filmmakers). Yeah, not everyone who sees it is going to rush out and join anti-corporate protests. But it might make them think a little differently, and it might give them something to say the next time drunk Uncle Henry starts in about the goddamn gubmint getting in the way of the free market and whatnot.

Getting snide about some mythical bourgeois liberals who go to socially-conscious documentaries just so they can feel "self-satisfied" is just another version of Sean Hannity and co.'s "liberal elite" line. You can drink that bug juice if you want, but at least recognize the flavor.

I.e. more government to less

Funny then that communists were called anarchists!

no, because anarchism as practiced and espoused is a left-wing movement, not a right one. The furthest end of conservatism is probably Nazism, though they weren't laissez-faire but nationalist in economic policy.

I will be so happy if our political science reference points ever evolve beyond increasingly unhelpful simplifications of 19th-century philosophical concepts. It's like 21st century geneticists trying to talk about biology in the language of Lamarck.

so is Ricky Williams the football equivalent of a laissez-faire economy?

practiced by whom????

(nb this doesn't really matter, sorry to nitpick. i hate these kind of "debates" b/c the left/right concept has a limited usefulness, and i think when you get into this sort of territory it's very limited, that is close to useless. it tends to obfuscate or sidetrack rather than clarify.)

Why are you assuming I don't want people to see that movie?
Ultimately why would you want more people be better educated about the history of corporations? Are you implying I don't think many type of economic visions can cohabit on this planet? Of course many paths are possible, and I think some are closer to social justice than others.

Yeah indeed. We seem to agree but you are aiming at social changes for the very long run, from within a system where there is competition/garbage rises? Feel free not to answer, I'm too busy plotting ways to neuter big governments!

About 100 years ago the corporations were associations of people chartered by the state to do particular funcitions like building a bridge and stuff like that. There was very few chartered corporations. They were like, a gift from the people to serve public good.

The civil war and the industrial revolution created an enormous growth in the number of corps: many railroads were created and the corps had large loans and subsidies in land, a lot of banking and manufacturing was going on etc. Then the corporate lawyers relized they needed more power to operate so they wanted remove some of the constraints that had historicaly been place on the corporate form (how long they can operate, the amout captialization they need, what they made, what they did, forbiden to do anything else, can't own other corps, shareolders are liable, etc)

The end of civil war brought equal rights to black ppl: from now on no state can deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. That prevented the state to take property of black people like they did in past.

So... the corporations went in court, and said "You can't deprive a person of life, liberty or property, well it happens that the corporation is a person!" And the supreme court went along with that.

In the docu someone remarked how that was grotesque, the 14th amendment was passed to protect newly freed slaves and,
for instance, between 1890 and 1910 among the 307 cases were brought before the court under the 14th amendment, 288 were made by corporations and 19 by african americans.

Six hundred thousand people were killed in the Civil War to get rights for people and within the next 30 years, with strokes of the pen, judges applied those right to capital and property wile stripping them from people.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743247442/qid=1090959344/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/102-5437547-2955346?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

I'm actually a bit alarmed to hear that the movie has been chopped down, because even at the near-three-hour runtime, it was almost all essential, if a tad depressing. I just hope that if they release it on DVD that they offer the full version of it and not a compromised cut for the MTV generation.

The only way I can understand someone coming away from the movie with that feeling is if they went into it biased. I think the movie made the more complex point that these huge corporations aren't "bad", as much as amoral juggernauts that need to be reigned in by the people via the government. I thought the film-makers were even-handed and good about distancing themselves from the "Shell CEOs are murderers!" crowd. I also appreciated fact that the film had a somewhat optimistic attitude about it. I was still a bit depressed for a few hours after watching it, though.

Was that the point? In what sense are corporations amoral? You mean that morality doesn't apply to them, or that morality doesn't enter into their calculations? I don't think either is exactly true. You can't generalize about corporations in that way anyway, since corporations are made up of the people in them, and the actions of corporations are in a very real sense the actions of people. I think people do think about morality in making decisions at work. And I don't think anyone would argue that the government has a role to play with regulation (as consumers also have a role to play in how they choose to spend their money), but I just think that's a simple point that could have been made in about a 5 minute news segment. This 2-1/2 hr documentary grossly belabored the point without adding much insight, to my mind.

pundit: "A corporation is like a shark..."
(cut to footage of a shark)

pundit: "There are a few bad apples..."
(cut to footage of an apple picking machine)

facile imagery doesn't make the movie awful, deej. also, this:

"You can't generalize about corporations in that way anyway, since corporations are made up of the people in them, and the actions of corporations are in a very real sense the actions of people. I think people do think about morality in making decisions at work. "

One of the points the movie belabored is that *this doesn't matter*. That corporations are legally beholden to their stockholders' bottomlines means almost automatically that they will act amorally, whether or not the people running them are moral or not.

Anyway, i thought it was good, if over-long by half.

anyone into actor-network theory? we are all cyborgs, etc.

in other words i agree w/ gbx

I've been watching parts of this on youtube. I agree with some of its premises but I find underlying it a frustrating strain of terribly unself aware liberal fantasy that the source of evil is always identifiable and always other, that life could be nearly perfect if only it weren't for those evil forces, that it's always a choice between harm or good rather than between harms, that there's a kind of natural harmony and balance that life is supposed to have that's somehow being "upset" by "unnatural" forces, that human life isn't inherently doomed and that living creatures don't by design expend resources and expire.

(sorry, "by design" wasn't exactly the right phrase in that last part)

I particularly disliked the "checklist" device -- you could just as easily do it with any human being

- WASTES ENERGY AND WATER RESOURCES
- DISOBEYS THE LAW
- NEEDLESSLY CAUSES EMOTIONAL DISTRESS TO OTHERS
- SHOWS BLATANT DISREGARD FOR THE EFFECT OF HIS ACTIONS ON FUTURE GENERATIONS

etc

i've not seen the movie, just bakan's book, and o.nate's criticisms stand true.