I ate spaghetti tonight, and I kept spilling it on one of my running shirts. We have been shopping down at Whole Foods for a while now. Yeah, I guess that healthy food thing has something to do with why I bought a DVD last week. I had a few reasons why. But spaghetti. Oh yeah. Is there corporate integrity from a large chain of organic food stores? Am I just a pawn in the advertising machine because they made me believe that kind of food is healthier? The DVD didn’t really answer those two questions!
The Corporation
Documentary. 2 hours 24 minutes long.
What I agreed with or made me really think:
- Corporations have essentially become an idol.
- Consumerism is out of control, and we are manipulated and shaped to not care who or where it comes from, as long as we get product “A” because it will fulfill me.
- The earth is being plundered from all kinds of industries (they had the former CEO of the largest carpet manufacturer), and the food we eat is extremely unhealthy. See Cancer rates.
- The chapter laying out a case history of corporations based on a personality profile, was biased, but the idea behind it to make their point was brilliant.
- The main causal factor in all of this is the untiring motivation from individuals in certain corporations – greed.
Although the film clearly didn’t do this, I was filtering these issues from a spiritual context.
Aspects that I wasn’t big on:
- They really didn’t spend any time talking about the benefits that many corporations make to society. I heard a podcast recently from Tony Campolo talking about the benefits of a local corporation near him called Cardon Industries. Fascinating points he made. Certainly the film had an agenda to maintain, and any words affirming institutions as anything but evil, except the awful CEO’s, seemed like lip service. It appeared to take on a tone that the institution itself is basically evil.
- There were only a couple interviews with people that seemed to be advocates for corporations.
- Some sections with specific stories really dragged on.
- I would have liked to see what their solutions were. Protest and boycott seemed to be the only possibilities they covered. And given the ubiquity of corporations, that they tried to argue for, this doesn’t seem reasonable unless you do in fact live in one of a few cities who have banned chain-restaurants and other retailers from moving in.
What is the solution(s)?
Okay, I’m attaching my notes for the film, but they are chaotic and probably incoherent.
- All pervasive, it’s like the church used to be, and it is today’s dominant institution. First analyzing it’s historical evolution. Initially it was given a narrow legal mandate.
What is a corporation?
A form of business ownership. A group of individuals and the primary objective is getting, growing, and sustained legal earnings.
It has grown since 1712. That year a pump was invented for water out of a mine – productivity. More everything, per man hour.
The system is basically the same today with just more sophisticated products.
- Originally corporations were charted by a state to do a function, i.e. a bridge but there were very few in early US history and they had clear stipulations.
It was subordinate entity serving the public good.
Then the Civil War.
Industrial revolution created growth. Railroads. Banking. Manufacturing. Corporate lawyers wanted more power removing these historical constraints.
14th amendment came along to give equal rights to African Americans. No state can deprive a person of life, liberty, or due property of whatever it is. Corporations came into the courts and said, you can’t deprive a “person,” corporations are a person, and the Supreme Court agreed. What is strange is that 14th amendment was for slaves, and between 1890 and 1910 there were 307 cases, 288 were brought by corporations, the rest by African Americans. 600,000 people killed for this? Judges applied these rights to capital and property.
Corporation = legal person. A member of our society?The question becomes what kind of person is it?
These special persons who didn’t have a moral conscience, because this kind of person designed by law is concerned to stockholders, not stakeholders (community environment etc)
A corporation isn’t like the rest of us. Is it?All of them have a structure that is disturbing. They put the financial interests of their owners ahead of anyone else, and this is required by law. The bottom line is legally ahead of everything else including the public good. A judicial decision. Short term profit of stockholders is it.What does loyalty mean for them? To who? If you can make others pay for it, that’s even better. They are called “externalities.” A transaction between two parties, and a third unconsenting party. Costs to be minimized. They say let somebody else deal with that.It’s not malevolence, it’s a characteristic, and how it was designed to deliver results and externalize whatever costs it can.- Chapter 5: Case histories from a psychological perspective.
To determine the personality of the corporation. A diagnosis from the past.
1. Callous unconcern for others?2. Maintaining enduring relationships?
Section on Sweatshops we export. Nike will pay a community ten cents an hour, until the workers pay increases, it’s more than they want to pay and then they go somewhere else.3. Harm to others?
1940. Era of synthetic chemicals that never exited before for any purpose at virtually no cost. Warning signs? Some posed hazards. Agent Orange. Industry tried to disregard risks. Cancer rates have skyrocketed over recent decades.4. Deceitfulness for the sake of personal gain?
1989. Cows. RBGH BST and Posilac in cows. Monsanto was saying there is no evidence it was bad…but they lied. Anti-biotics pumped in cow that we eat, and you wonder why someone gets a staff resistant infection. RBGH is banned in Canada and Europe but still used in America.5. Unable to feel guilt? Monsanto – Agent Orange. 50,000 birth defects and thousands of people w/ cancer. Veterans sued for $80 million…but the company never admitted guilt. Whether you obey the law doesn’t matter, because it’s about cost analysis. Cost of punishment vs. cost of profit.
Each of these fit the definition for a psychopath. This is the dominant institution?
Who is responsible?
- Biosphere. Not a single peer reviewed journal over last 25 years would refute that every living system of earth is in decline. Same with support systems. This is not just our life but 30 million other species.
Intergenerational tyranny – taxation without representation. Putting these costs on next generations without being there.
- Distinguish between institution and individual. Slavery as an institution was evil…but individually slave owners may have been the nicest people. Same is true here.
- Seems like everything is getting privatized. Air. All of it. Everything will be owned. AOL holds the copyright for the song “Happy Birthday. Singing it in a film – 10,000 bucks each time.
- Advertising 30 years ago and today; not even the same. Night and day. Products are not bad or good, but manipulating children into buying them? Western International Media did a study on nagging in 1998, to have journals for three weeks from parents every time they nagged from children. Not to help parents with nagging, but it was helping corporations know how to get kids nag most effectively. 20-40% of purchase would not have occurred unless a kid nagged. Theme parks. Chucky cheese. Toys. Movies. Fast food. Corporations are manipulating kids in a specific way based on their developmental stage in life, and psychologists are employed to help manipulate their minds at that stage.$12 billion a year is spent on this. A family combating those resources and manipulation?Institutions shape people and have power over them?Corporations must turn a consumer into a buyer of products they actually don’t want or need. Individuals who have a self-worth start to base decisions on how many desires and wants they can satisfy. Huge industries with advertising is trying to mold us into this pattern and mindset.Therefore they don’t just advertise a product, but actually a way of life, and it’s propaganda to get us to think a certain way. And now the corporation is indispensable and responsible for our good life, and we believe we can’t live without it.So its not a product its “branding.” To take their image and invasively give you the feeling about them they want you to have. Branding is about building these privatized cocoons and it really is imperialism. What if we find out all of our relationships between us and others is a commercial? Can civilization survive based on that kind of interaction?- Jack Avarde (sp?) and General Electric went to patent office and showed them the modified living thing that ate up oil spills. An “invention” rejected by patent office. This microbe is owned by GE? Eventually the Supreme Court ruled for the corporation.
Seven years later the patent office said – You can patent anything in the world that’s alive except a human.
- Transnational corporations have long histories of supporting tyrannical governments.
Some crazy stories about American corporations, and their role with Germany and Italy before, and during, WWII. Ford, Mobile and many others were all working with those regimes. Coca-Cola couldn’t so Fanta Orange was created so Coke could still get profits from Germany. IBM was used for the tracking systems of punch card machines to transport and kill millions. They say they had no control of that subsidiary but there is a paper trail that says otherwise. IBM and third Reich documents in 1941, 42. Crazy.
Recent US treasury department report – In one week alone, 57 US corporations were caught and fined for trading with terrorists and despotic regimes.
Cheers.