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| The Corporation (Interviews) *********************** 1) Branding *********************** Selling us our values - Naomi Klein Coming to us and asking us: "What do you care about?" and then coming back to us and selling it to us at a premium. [NOTE: but the alternative is for pockets of gangs with shared values forcing everyone to pay for things they may not agree with] *********************** 2) Capitalism *********************** Needs a Moral Manifesto - Ira Jackson Capitalism is undeniably amoral, but it has emerged as our new global theology. Curiously, capitalism which is a system that's derived and driven by competition, has no competition of its own today. That's a very dangerous place for any successful -ism, or corporation, or university to find itself. I think it's in capitalism's self-interest, it's in the self-interest of the corporation to use this unprecedented prosperity and not to binge at the Ritz. I'm a reformer not a revolutionary although what I think capitalism needs is a new manifesto. ... The premise of communism, I think, and the communist theory is still relevant and worth thinking about today. ... I think what we need today is the moral equivalent of a manifesto for capitalism. And, absent morality, I don't know how we sustain a global cohesion if the unchecked, unbridled, savage aspects of capitalism -- to quote [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn -- become evermore triumphant. If we were to ever now recalibrate capitalism and take it to its next stage, operating alongside of a more responsible and accountable set of governmental interventions and, in partnership -- public, private, NGO -- I think capitalism can yet save itself from itself. This is a very conservative argument at the end of the day because what I'm proposing is that capitalism engage in practices that expand the pie, and -- by creating hundreds of millions of potential new users and participants in the new capitalism, eager and able to purchase goods and services from successful corporations -- it's ultimately in the long-term self-interest of those corporations to actually promote social justice and social progress. *********************** 3) Corporate Crime 4) Corporations and Government *********************** Corporations' Rules - Maude Barlow Bechtel ... was basically kicked out of Bolivia by the people because they came in and privatized their water system and doubled the price of water. When they realized that they were going to have to leave, they set up their water company in Holland because Holland has a bilateral agreement with Bolivia. Now ... one of the biggest corporations in the world is suing one of the poorest countries in the world. *********************** The corporation as government - Sam Gibara Corporations need to become more trustworthy because there has been a transfer of authority from the government to the corporation, and the corporation needs to assume that responsibility, needs to assume that authority, and needs to behave as a corporate citizen of the world, needs to respect the communities in which it operates, and needs to assume the self-discipline that -- in the past -- governments required from it. *********************** Shell in Nigeria - Sir Mark Moody-Stuart A corporation has some responsibility for the distribution of the wealth generated from its activities. *********************** Accounting for greed - Robert Monks After that 1996 Senate vote, the pay of CEOs went up like a rocket because from that day on a company did not have to charge against its earnings the options that it granted to executives, many of which went to the CEO. Now there is the clearest case that historians will look back on and they will say that the American government was a branch of business. *********************** 5) Democracy *********************** Property over people - Mary Zepernick If one acknowledges that the Constitution was essentially set up by propertied white men to protect their property, and that the great majority of people in the United States had to struggle -- and continue to -- for full inclusion, full personhood, then you can understand the primacy, the primary importance of property, and its protection, over people. *********************** Slave master to corporate manager - Richard Grossman Corporations are governing entities. They make the rules, and that is contrary to the theory of governance in the United States. It's contrary to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and to all the work that people in every generation have done in trying to wrest power from the few and distribute it among the many. When the General Motors corporation speaks it drowns out the rights of people. People go to work for any corporation: as soon as you cross over onto corporate property, you have no Constitutional rights in the United States, you have no freedom of speech, you have no due process, you have no equal protection. ... and it's not much different from the slave masters. The Law of the Land is not neutral. ... The law of the land enables men of property, enables these institutions of capital, these institutions of property, to deny the rights of the many -- and that's not called democracy in my book. *********************** I don't believe in democracy - Milton Friedman You will find it hard to find anybody who will say that if 55% of the people believe the other 45% of the people should be shot, that's an appropriate exercise of democracy. What I believe is not in democracy, but in individual freedom, in a society in which individuals cooperate with one another and in which there's an absence of coercion and violence. *********************** 6) Ethics and Values 7) Externalities 8) History *********************** The end of freedom - Noam Chomsky ... progressives like Woodrow Wilson, who was a big proponent of corporatization, nevertheless point out, correctly, that this is the end of freedom. It's the end of private enterprise. It's the end of freedom. It's a new America in which people will not be working for themselves, but will be servants of corporate entities. *********************** Adam Smith: Poster boy for greed - Ira Jackson Adam Smith ... has been expropriated as the poster boy for greed, because [Adam] Smith -- who believed very much in the efficacy and the efficiency of the "invisible hand" -- also wrote as a moral philosopher about the obligation and need for business to also extend a helping hand. *********************** Adam Smith - Mark Kingwell The fact is, all markets are regulated in some way. The real question is not: Is the market regulated or not? It's: To whose interest is it regulated? Is it regulated to the interests of the citizens who make up a country, or is it regulated to the interests of people who are in the business of making profit? Adam Smith was an 18th Century Scottish moralist. He believed in justice, and he believed in subsidization of education, of the postal service, of garbage removal. In fact, if you read him, I think, properly, he's a welfarist liberal. What he reminds us of is that all markets are unfree. The question is really: How are they unfree, and who benefits from the way that they're unfree? Who benefits from the constraints that will always be there? *********************** Backlash to the future - Howard Zinn Now the labor movement in Seattle is taking center stage, joined to the environmental movement, and the feminist movement, and if that kind of anti-corporate movement can be joined also to a Hispanic and Black movement ... it is possible to conceive of a social movement in the year 2050 which will dwarf the social movements in the 1960s and the 1930s. *********************** 9) Labour 10) Marketing 11) Marketing to kids *********************** The battle for kids' minds - Dr. Susan Linn I will defend the First Amendment up, down, and backwards, but a corporation is not a person, and marketing is not free speech. *********************** 12) Perception Management 13) Regulation *********************** The Government Industrial Complex - Milton Friedman Big corporations in part lead to big government and big government leads to big corporations. Eisenhower spoke of the military industrial complex. That's a phase of it, but you have in general a government industrial complex. The notion that government erects regulations to prevent big government[sic] from hurting the consumer is a nice, ideal notion. And I have no doubt that most regulations begin that way. But once regulations are instituted, then the enterprises that are regulated have a much stronger interest in controlling those regulations than the consumer who is diffuse and has many things to worry about. *********************** Regulation is the problem - Michael Walker ... that these ideas were, at principle, part of the problem. That the regulations and the controls and the knobs that we were putting in the economy to try to fine tune it were in fact creating the perverse outcome of less economic activity, less dynamism, less growth, less opportunity for the young people who were graduating from our schools in Newfoundland and in British Columbia and in Ontario and so on. *********************** | ||||
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