In (dis)honor of the TPP, some quotes from the documentary "The Corporation"

[marmar]

Elaine Bernard: "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."

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Noam Chomsky: "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 to get out of recession. Private companies can't do that in a recession. Throw out the work force because that's the way you make money."

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Maude Barlow: "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."

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Robert Monks: "To whom do these companies owe loyalty? What does loyalty mean? Well, it turns out that that was a rather naïve 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 that it can make other people pay the bills for its impact on society. There's a terrible word that economists use for this called 'externalities'."

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Samuel Epstein M.D.: "Something happened in 1940, which marked the beginning of a new era. The era of the ability to synthesise and create, on an unlimited scale, new chemicals that had never existed before in the world. So, suddenly it became possible to produce any new synthetic chemical, the like of which had never existed before in the world, for any purpose and at virtually no cost. For instance, if you wanted to go to a chemist and say, 'Look, I want to have chemical, say a pesticide that will persist throughout the food chain and I don't want to have to renew it very, very often, I'd like it to be relatively non-destructible', and then he'd put 2 benzene molecules on the blackboard and add a chlorine here, and a chlorine there, that was DDT! 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 trivialise 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 1 in every two men get cancer in their lifetimes, and 1 in every 3 women get cancer in their lifetimes."

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Ray Anderson: "Drawing the metaphor of the early attempts to fly. The man 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 thinks he's flying, but, in fact, he's in free fall, 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 unlimited 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 it's subject to the law of gravity. Our 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 it's 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, and 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 learned, 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."

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Noam Chomsky: "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."

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Michael Moore: "I believe the mistake that a lot of people make when they think about corporations, is they think you know, corporations are like us. They think 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."

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Vandana Shiva: "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."

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Naomi Klein: "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 is not advertising; it's production. The very successful corporations, the corporations of the future do not produce products. They produce 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 real? Well, a good place to start is by building a 3-dimensional manifestation of your brand. For a company like Disney, it goes even further where it's actually building a town: Celebration, Florida. Their inspiration, their brand image is the all-American family. And this sort of bygone American town. And that's where you see the truly imperialist aspirations of branding, which is about building these privatised branded cocoons. Which maybe you start by shopping in and then you continue by holidaying in but eventually, "Why not just move in?"

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Noam Chomsky: "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 impose 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. Whose conception of themselves, the sense of value is just, 'how many created wants can I satisfy?' We have huge industries, public relations industry, monstrous industry, advertising and so on, which are designed from infancy to mold people into this desired pattern."

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Jeremy Rifkin: What happens if we wake up one day, and we find out that virutally 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 beings. Can civilization survive on that narrow a definition of how we interact with each other?

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Richard Grossman: 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 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 was inevitable, that it's indispensable, that it's somehow remarkably efficient, and that it's responsible for progress and the good life. They're selling themselves, they're selling their domination, they're selling they're rule, and they're creating an image for themselves, as just regular folks down the block. 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 these 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 facade.