The Corporation »
Posted By dissent 6 months, 4 weeks ago in NewsI believe this is one of the best and most important documentary films to be made in many years.
This is an extraordinary film about the creation of the American corporation, its legal organizational model, its global economic dominance and its psychopathic tendencies, and its incredible ambition to influence every aspect of culture in its unrelenting pursuit of profit.
After viewing this film, it becomes all too evident that these large corporations have too much power, whose mandate is not the common good of the people, and who will go to any lengths, legally and otherwise, in the pursuit of profit and the bottom line. Reviewer: C. Middleton (Australia)
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dissent
we live in a culture of war.
let's make it a culture of peace.
"my country is the world. and my religion is to ...
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Beau78906 months, 4 weeks ago
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Corporations exist for only one reason: to make money. (They're inherently amoral because of it.)
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Once they take in enough money, it's to be expected that they'll use some of it to open other avenues toward that goal--legal or illegal, socially responsible or not--it's a good investment for them.
I'll have to check out the whole video.-
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deathray6 months, 3 weeks ago
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corporations exist to manimize the financial return to one group, their shareholders (although these days it seems that the trend seems to be tilted towards the management) it's this dissociation between ownership and worker that has created the idea that labor is merely another commodity input to corporate profiz maximizaton.
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talk about a dehumanizing institution. -
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Georgia506 months, 3 weeks ago
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But you, being enlightened, go to work not for a paycheck, but because you love to hear the sizzle of burgers on the grill, and the transformation of frozen french fries into crispy, tasty snacks.
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No other reason, right? So you can just stay home and NEVER accept EVILLE MONEY for your efforts, right? Just gonna grab a spear and head for the woods to keep from being a filthy lying hypocrite, right?
You clowns don't even qualify for the insults that come to mind.
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hyperbola6 months, 4 weeks ago
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In practice corporations in America have become licenses for corruption.
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Top Senate Democrat: Bankers 'Own' the US Congress
Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis "own" the U.S. Congress -- according to one of that institution's most powerful members -- demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.
The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials. Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:
Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist ....
...So: Paese went from Chairman Frank's office to be the top lobbyist at Goldman, and shortly before that, Goldman dispatched Paese's predecessor, close Tom Daschle associate Mark Patterson, to be Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, himself a protege of former Goldman CEO Robert Rubin and a virtually wholly owned subsidiary of the banking industry. That's all part of what Desmond Lachman -- American Enterprise Institute fellow, former chief emerging market strategist at Salomon Smith Barney and top IMF official (no socialist he) -- recently described as "Goldman Sachs's seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs."
Meanwhile, the above-linked Huffington Post article which reported on Durbin's comments also notes Sen. Evan Bayh's previously-reported central role on behalf of the bankers in blocking legislation, hated by the banking industry, to allow bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of mortgages so that families can stay in their homes. Bayh is up for re-election in 2010, and here -- according to the indispensable Open Secrets site -- is Bayh's top donor:-
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hyperbola6 months, 4 weeks ago
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.... Goldman shares, which have surged more than 70% during the past month, continued rising late Monday, gaining about 4.7% for the day. Nobody even tries to hide this any longer. The only way they could make it more blatant is if they hung a huge Goldman Sachs logo on the Capitol dome and then branded it onto the foreheads of leading members of Congress and executive branch officials...
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...One might think it would be a big news story for the second most-powerful member of the U.S. Senate to baldly state that the Congress is "owned" by the bankers who spawned the financial crisis and continue to dictate the government's actions. But it won't be. The leading members of the media work for the very corporations that benefit most from this process. Establishment journalists are integral and well-rewarded members of the same system and thus cannot and will not see it as inherently corrupt (instead, as Newsweek's Evan Thomas said, their role, as "members of the ruling class," is to "prop up the existing order," "protect traditional institutions" and "safeguard the status quo").
That Congress is fully owned and controlled by a tiny sliver of narrow, oligarchical, deeply corrupted interests is simultaneously so obvious yet so demonized (only Unserious Shrill Fringe radicals, such as the IMF's former chief economist, use that sort of language) that even Durbin's explicit admission will be largely ignored. Even that extreme of a confession (Durbin elaborated on it with Ed Schultz last night) hardly causes a ripple.
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/05/04/top-sena...
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hyperbola6 months, 4 weeks ago
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And, frankly if we don't rope them in, greedy corporations may make our lives miserable in many ways.
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Life-threatening disease is the price we pay for cheap meat
A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue that this global pandemic – and all the deaths we are about to see – is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So is the way we produce our food really making us sick as a pig?...
...Now compare this to what happens when a virus evolves in a modern factory farm. In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces.
Instead of having just 20 pigs to experiment and evolve in, the virus now has a pool of thousands, constantly infecting and reinfecting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. The ammonium from the waste they live above burns the pigs' respiratory tracts, making it easier yet for viruses to enter them. Better still, the pigs' immune systems are in free-fall. They are stressed, depressed, and permanently in panic, making them far easier to infect. There is no fresh air or sunlight to bolster their natural powers of resistance. They live in air thick with viral loads, and they are exposed every time they breathe in.
As Dr Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: "Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these super-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of these factory farms as possible. That's why the development of swine flu isn't a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association – the oldest and largest in world – called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realise the real cost of factory farming."
...It's no coincidence that we have seen a sudden surge of new viruses in the past decade at precisely the moment when factory farming has intensified so dramatically. For example, between 1994 and 2001, the number of American pigs that live and die in vast industrial farms in the US spiked from 10 per cent to 72 per cent. Swine flu had been stable since 1918 – and then suddenly, in this period, went super-charged.-
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hyperbola6 months, 4 weeks ago
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How much harm will we do to ourselves in the name of cheap meat? We know that bird flu developed in the world's vast poultry farms. And we know that pumping animal feed full of antibiotics in factory farms has given us a new strain of MRSA. It's a simple, horrible process. The only way to keep animals alive in such conditions is to pump their feed full of antibiotics. But this has triggered an arms race with bacteria, which start evolving to beat the antibiotics – and emerge as in the end as pumped-up, super-charged bacteria invulnerable to our medical weapons.
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...Of course, agribusinesses is desperate to deny all this is happening: their bottom line depends on keeping this model on its shaky trotters. But once you factor in the cost of all these diseases and pandemics, cheap meat suddenly looks like an illusion.
We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity's conscience – but now we fear they are a scar on our health. If we carry on like this, bird flu and swine flu will be just the beginning of a century of viral outbreaks. As we witness a global pandemic washing across the world, we need to shut down these virus factories – before they shut down even more human lives.
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/05/04/life-thr...
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dissent6 months, 4 weeks ago
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from the documentary:
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“The largest institution on earth, the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most pervasive, the most influential is the instrument of business and industry-- the corporation – which also is the current present day instrument of destruction. It must change.”
Ray Anderson, CEO Interface, world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer. -
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dissent6 months, 3 weeks ago
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two words... easy to say when you haven't watched it
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apply yourself to just some of what this 3 hour documentary has to say and any reasonable objection, that is, any objection that you have yet to come up with, will be easily and definitively rebutted -
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reallypsst6 months, 3 weeks ago
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Anyone with half a brain knows how corporations operate and that money and power are their ultimate goal,we see it in our everyday lives,just look at our government they operate like one mega corporation,stay in power,protect the system,make money!
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tchef6 months, 3 weeks ago
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This is why we need sensible regulation of corporations. The government needs to work for the people. That means allowing enough profit to keep corporations healthy so they can provide jobs, but not allow them to make it at the cost of everybody else.
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dissent6 months, 3 weeks ago
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from the video:
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"We stopped the third world being viewed as the pirates and we showed the corporations were the pirates."
Vandana Shiva is a physicist, environmental activist, eco-feminist and author of several books. Shiva, currently based in Delhi, is author of over 300 papers in leading scientific and technical journals.
Shiva has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food. Intellectual property rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, bioethics, genetic engineering are among the fields where Shiva has contributed intellectually and through activist campaigns. She has assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria with campaigns against genetic engineering. (source: wikipedia) -
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Icantwait6 months, 3 weeks ago
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My Fellow Americans: It is obvious that Hyperbola is on the Presidents payroll along with Dissent and others. They stay up nights scribbling this propaganda, all unfounded, most made up, simply to discredit all the good and progress that our country has done and made since our founding. Equating meat and flu, bankers and corruption, etc. What a farce. They don't even live in this country. Is this how they repay a country that literally educated them, protected them against oppression, and who allows them to speak their minds, even though it's all falsehoods. May the made up Swine flu somehow get them. Wishful thinking. The Real American
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Georgia506 months, 3 weeks ago
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Actually, the liberal filth who promote this view are unwittingly doing the bidding of established multinationals.
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ANY laws or rules created today to curb the alleged excesses of the E-ville corporation is designed NOT to reign in corporations, but to substantially increase barriers to competitors' entry to markets.
That is the INTENT.
That is the EFFECT.
But it will never be the RHETORIC.
Don't be lied to. Competition is good, and that is what resides in the crosshairs of these so-called class warriors.
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