"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 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 a bridge 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 can't 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 30 years judges applied those rights to capital and property while stripping them from people." "Everybody makes a mistake once in a while but I just can't 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 a company." "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 wanted." "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 wanted 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 in the profit motivation here because these people there's no such thing as enough." "And I always counterpoint 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 for 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 can't meet in the developing world you can't 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 wed 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 anymore 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 bust results in un necessary 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 a wash 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 can't 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 50000 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 think she'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 united 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 can't 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 everyone 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 and so metes if you had 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" "Layoff shave 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 a tour 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 Starts 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?" "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 can't believe it." "The guys the head of the company he's never walked through his own factories." "Oh you've got to go." "I can't 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 21 years" "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 can't avoid the dumping of carbon dioxide." "We can't avoid the dumping of sulphur oxides at least we can't 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 we'll 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 b. b. 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 kid snag." "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 can't 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 we'll 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." "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 fa�de." "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 by gone 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 can't 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 a gene 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 wed 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 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 BGH 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 can't?" "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 FedEx 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 can't 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" "Big mistake" "That says retaliation." "You can't 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 stats that wanted 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 $425000 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 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 stats overturned the case and withdrew her $425000 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." "Translational 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 to me... 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" "I'd 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 night." "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 I'd 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 to me." "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 we're 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 we'd deal with it or we'd figure it out or we'd 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 won't 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 a better 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 a company 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 to me 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 thinks 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 won't 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." "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 can't 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 a gene 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 wed 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 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 BGH 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 can't?" "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 FedEx 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 can't 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" "Big mistake" "That says retaliation." "You can't 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 stats that wanted 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 $425000 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 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 stats overturned the case and withdrew her $425000 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." "Translational 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 to me... 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" "I'd 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 night." "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 I'd 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 to me." "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 we're 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 we'd deal with it or we'd figure it out or we'd 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 won't 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 a better 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 a company 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 to me 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 thinks 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 won't 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."