Category: In the News

Here are the last of my notes from the presentation for The Corporation. I’m going to gather them all into a single entry and post that entry next week.

You might want to see part one and part two of the notes.

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The Hockey Allegory

• The general feeling in professional

  hockey is “What happens on the ice, happens on the ice”. In the rink,

  you can commit all kinds of acts that would get you charged with

  assault in the real world.

• You end up with two selves: on the ice / off the ice
• A

  similar rule applies to corporations. Outside working hours, you’re a

  citizen with moral values and views. During working hours, however,

  it’s okay to do wrong things:

  • Use sweatshop or slave labour
  • Pollute
  • Break laws bercause the fines are inconsequential relative to the profits
• Under such circumstances, you live in a “bifurcated world, morally”
• In one extreme case, the CEO of Shell Oil managed to convince the Nigerian Government to have people hanged
• Distinction

  between corporate behaviour “off the ice” and “on the ice” is blurring:

  CEOs are taking favouring a “Howie Meeker” approach over the “Don

  Cherry” approach: Tom Klein (Pfizer) made an effort to refurbish the

  Brooklyn neighbourhood in which a Pfizer branch was located, the CEO of

  BP supports the Kyoto accord and BP even has solar-powered gas stations

Social Responsibility vs. The Coprporation’s Legal Mandate

• The

  problem with social responsibility is that it comes up against the

  legal mandate of the corporation. How does a corporation justify

  actions it takes to be socially responsible?

• The

  answer: Any “socially responsible” initiative has to be good for the

  company. All corporate acts must be in the corporation’s best interest

• The

  law demands that when companies do good, they must justify it in terms

  of self-interest. This is the “Best Interest Principle”: the head of

  the corporation has to act in the best interests of the company. The

  courts have interpreted “acting the best interests” as “maxmizing

  profit”.

• Example: Although BP’s CEO supports the Kyoto accord,

  he is also pro ANWR drilling. The reason? Supporting Kyoto costs BP

  nothing. They found efficiencies that allow them to follow the accord

  without losing money. At the same time, there is an opportunity cost in

  forgoing drilling in ANWR, and it cannot be conclusively proven that

  the porcupine caribou herd in ANWR will be wiped out or that the way of

  life for native people who depend on this herd will be altered

  irrevocably.

• Example: the Steven James story. James, a

  reporter, does a story on hormones given to dairy cattle, which end up

  appearing in their milk. He filed the story for FOX News. Monsanto came

  down very hard on FOX for allowing such a story to enter the queue, and

  threatened to pull all their advertising. FOX news killed the story and

  fired James.

Why did people who “ought to have known better” consent to be interviewed for the film?

• The

  people who consented to be interviewed are proud of what they do. They

  were, according to Bakan, “intrigued by the project, and were

  intelligent and thoughtful people” who wanted to engage in the

  discussion.

• Most notable case — the one that got the most laughter from the audience was Lucy Hughes.
• Hughes was trying to solve the main problem with marketing children’s goods: children don’t buy things, their parents do.
• Her

  solution: “The Nag Factor”. She realized that there were two levels of

  vulnerability: parents are easily manipulated by their children, and

  children in turn are easily manipulated by television. The trick was to

  turn kids into a live-in marketing department targeting their parents.

• Hughes

  looked at effective nagging habits: 20% to 40% of purchases were the

  result of successful nagging on the part of the child. According to

  Bakan, “entire coporate empires” live and die by the nag. Hughes was

  trying to answer the question “How do you create the ad that creates

  the right kind of nag?”

• “You have to admire the brilliance” of this, Bakan said.
• Lucy

  took this common-sense knowledge and turned it into a science. She got

  behavioural scientists to do research for her, and based on that

  research classified nags. For example, there are simple “I want it! I

  want it!” nags, and there are more complex “reasoning” nags, such as:

  “I want the Barbie Dream House so that Barbie and Ken can have a

  family” — these nags get an “Oh, how clever!” reaction. The best

  results are obtained when kids use both style of nags.

• She also classified 4 types of parents:
  • Deniers: Upper-middle class. Kids have to make good arguments in order to convince their parents to purchase.
  • Kid’s

    Pals: These are typically younger parents. They actually, if

    subconsciously, want the toys for themselves, and will look for any

    excuse to purchase.

  • Indulgers: These people — often single

    parents — feel guilty about not spending enough time with their

    children and purchase to compensate.

  • Conflicted (Bakan puts

    himself in this category): These parents resent the fact that their

    children are the targets of such intense marketing, but buy the toys

    anyway.
• Another interviewee: Milton Friedman. His assistant said: “If he’s bored with your question, he’ll walk out of the room”.
• Many CEOs said “no”, but not out of any explicit objection to the concept of the film, but because they said were too busy
• The

  corporate spy who was interviewed in the film has not ended his career

  by appearing in it. He is, in Bakan’s own words, “a master of disguise”.

Anti-globalization

• “Anti-globalization”

  is an imprecise term. A more correct term is “anti-a-particular-kind of

  globalization”. It’s against the neo-liberal kind of globalization that

  we’re experiencing.

• First signs of this movement: the

  APEC meeting in Vancouver in 1997. By this time, they’d already started

  making the film. The APEC demonstration was the first major mass

  demonstration of this sort, and arose from concern about the complicity

  of nation-states and corporations.

• “Deregulation” is a misleading term: it’s really just a shifting of control from government to corporation.

Government: Antidote to Corporate Malfeasance?

• You can’t have property rights and contracts without the state
• In the “Anti-globalization” movement, there is a sense that you can’t confront government anymore.
• Bakan

  says that still have to work with governments and even with political

  parties and “build more democracy around the shell of democracy we

  already have”.

• Corporations can still be influenced by

  governments; after all, there are no porperty rights nor contract law

  without government.

• The idea that we can somehow rely on

  socially responsible consumers, CEOs and shareholders to

  “self-regulate” is a myth — we still need some other mechanism, and

  that is government.

On Non-Fiction Book and Documentary Filmmaking

• Documentaries are likely to become a more popular type of film, considering the attention it’s been receiving lately. Cites:
  • The interest in SuperSize Me
  • Errol Morris’ recent Oscar
  • Mark Achbar being invited to a Vanity Fair party
• Documentaries can have influence: in the wake of SuperSize Me, McDonald’s announced that it will remove the SuperSize items from its menu. Its rationale: they want to “simplify their menu”.
• There

  seems to be an appetite for non-fiction books and documentary films.

  Bakan suggests that this appetite is driven by people’s opinion that

  that the world is veering onto a dangerous path and their need to

  understand the “why” and “how” behind things. They try to reckon what’s

  going on with the world. They come with their own point of view, but

  you know what that point of view is. Their format must be entertaining,

  moving, inspiring and humourous.

• Even if what the non-fiction

  book or documentary film’s content is dpressing, they are successful if

  their audiences walk out feeling hopeful, inspired, becuase they have

  new knowledge.

• Many good non-fiction books and documentary

  films take what their audiences intuitively sense, and build around

  them with evidence.

The Success of the Book

• There’s a lot of angst out there, and that has contributed to the book’s success. It’s angst over:
  • Encroachment of commercial values in the schools that their kids go to
  • The environment
  • Less job security
  • The lowering of safety standards
• A lot of this comes from governments’ giving more leeway to corporations.
• One

  very important part of Bakan’s message: this state of affairs isn’t

  part of natural law. Corporations are not forces of nature; they are

  creatings of our own making: we have somehow allowed our governments to

  hand over power to them, and we can take it back.

• Trying to provide “a sense of understanding and a sense of hope”.

What You Can Do

• In book, Bakan proposes what can be done in the near future
• “The fact that we can’t do everything doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do something.”
• Start acting:
  • Join a political party
  • Join your school board
  • Do something
• We’re losing that sense of being citizens — if we lose that, we’ve lost the possibility of democracy
• See The Corporation web site for more discussion/ideas/ongoing dialogue

Q&A Session

People

I know fall into vicious cycle of avoidance and denial — things are

bad, and instead of changing the situation, they’re retreating and

avoiding it. How do you motiviate such people?

This is a

hard question to answer at such a general level. You have to talk to

your friends.  “If we care about issues, we should to talk about

them to people who something to us” — it’s part of being a family

member / community member.

You talk about the corporation

as a monolithic entity. They have different forms depending on where in

the world they are. Why didn’t you analyse the corporation in its many

forms?

The focus is different in the book and in the

film. In the film, we were looking at the US transnational for-profit,

publicly traded company, the institution having the greatest impact. We

tend to think of corporations in terms of difference — company X,

company Y, company Z, industry 1, industry 2, industry 3 — but I

wanted to convey the sense that corporations share the same

institutional structure. Once you abstract away the industry they’re in

or what they produce, the actual underlying institution doesn’t vary

much from corporation to corporation. Underneath it all, they are

entities whose reason for existence is to generate wealth for their

owners.

What about the relationship of the filmmaker to

the corporation? In some way you have to play into the corporation to

get published or your film shown.

True. The US book

publisher is Simon and Schuster, and they in turn are owned by Viacom.

The film was shot on Panasonic cameras, and distributed bycorporations

in the US, Canada, UK, Italy. They were shown in theatres owned by

corporations. This is proof that the corporation is the dominant entity

in our society: you can’t make anything without them. To try and make

something outside the sphere of their influence is “like saying you’ll

operate outside the monarchy in 13th-century England”.

It

seemed silly and ironic, but they thanked their corporate sponsors at

the awards ceremonies at Sundance. American filmmakers said of them:

“Well, those guys can joke about corporate sponsorships; they have a

whole public infrastructure supporting them.”

The problem: Public

broadcasters are under attack and privatization is a holy grail. We

should be concerned about the demise of public cultural institutions.

Certain people such as Michael Moore are stars, and have the appeal to

do what he wants, but most of us don’t have that luxury.

When you look at the success of corps in China, India — outsourcing — is this the beginning of reform?

Appeared

on a talk radio in the US. Heard from a truck driver: “I only buy

American, and I make wife buy American too. I’m a conservative

anarchist, but I don’t like the way things are goin’.”

We’re

losing jobs to the developing world: self-interested concern. This will

probably shape up to a major issue in the election and could be an

election winner for the Democrats.

Of course, there are

those such as Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute, who say that by

outsourcing jobs, we’re doing people in developing countries a big

favour. They’ll do slightly better than without us. Alturism isn’t the

goal, though, cheaper rpices are. The high-mindedness is over an

“incidental benefit” to these people. It’s the old “in a slave system,

the slaves are materially better off” argument. It’s “a morally

specious argument, and it’s always suprising to me when people make it

with a straight face.”

We need to twin policies to both protect

local jobs and support aid programs and redistribution of wealth [The

“R” word! I just felt a great disturbance in the Libertarian Force —

Joey]. We have to be willing to pay more so that people in the

developing world can have decent lives.

What do mean that corporations are required by law to act in these ways?

It’s

meant to safeguard investors, to guarantee that their money will be

used for the prupose they intended rather than to pay for some

manager’s vacation. It’s the Best Interest Principle.

How did you go about balancing appeal to emotion and appeal to reason?

There

is a difference between appealing to emotion and being manipulative.

Not all appeals to emotion are manipulative, and not all are for

profit. There is a difference between art for advertising and art for

creativity. In writing the book and film at same time, they influenced

each other: the film had more intellectual rigor, and the book had more

narrative and emotion.

How do you pose a political challenge to corporations, if they’re so powerful and pervasive?

If

you look at history, you’ll see that it’s often at the time that the

dominant forces seem most omnipotent that they are actually the most

vulnerable, whether it was the Church, the monarchy, or the Communist

Party. In the end, it was people’s willingness to stand up to these

forces that caused the chnage to happen.

Bakan: “I don’t know

what choice we have” other than to believe that we, as citizens, can

change for the better. Ultimately, we are the ones who empower the

corporation. We in essence created corproate law and property rights.

The institutions that we’re up against are institutions that we’ve

made. “Perhaps I’m an optimist, and perhaps I being naive, but

corporations aren’t forces of nature. We can change them.”

Other notes

• Other

  Bakan comment: Advertising encourages us to think in terms of our own

  self-interest solely, and tries to paint corporations as “good

  neighbours”.

• My

  personal rant: Will you people at this sort of Q&A session stop

  prefacing your questions with mini-manifestos? Just ask the damned

  question!

The Film and The Book

• Bakan called himself the content maker, giving credit to Achbar and Abbott for their filmmaking skills.
• Tried

  to make the book less driven by dry analysis and driven more by

  stories. He wanted to draw the the points he wanted to make from the

  stories, which really serve as metaphor.

• Some of the stories in

  the book are same as in the film, some are different. The media are

  different and require different approaches.

• Ray Anderson is

  major in the film, but not the book. Anderson had an epiphany in 1993;

  became a “sustainable business” kind of guy. “People just fall in love

  with him” on the screen. Bakan was able to say cover his story in 2 or

  3 pages in the book. In the film he’s in and out because he’s

  “incredibly compelling”, and works well in the “emotional medium” of

  film.

• To use him in the book as often as in the film would “seem strange”.
• Wanted to make the book not just informative, but interesting and fun to read.
• Joked: wished he could’ve got a “push button book” in which you can hear Ray Anderson speak.

Psycopathology of the Corporation

• Bakan did psych as an undergrad, many psychologists in the family (both parents, an uncle).
• In Psych 101, you learn a “psychopath” (someone with antisocial personality disorder) has these qualities:
  • Pathologically self-interested
  • Incapable of concern for others
  • No feelings of guilt or remorse
  • Relationships are limited to ones in which they use other people
  • No moral obligation to obey laws or social norms
• In Law School, you learn that:
  • Corporations are legally required to serve their own self-interest
  • Decisions had to be made to maximize the wealth of shareholders
  • Corporations are persons in the eyes of the law (something drilled into to you on the first day of Business 101)
• The

  corporation as a person is one that has been programmed to have a

  psychopathic personality. “We created this artificial person and we’ve

  required it to be self-interested.”

Here’s the first of my notes from last night’s session with Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation. More later today.

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Innis TownHall Theatre was packed solid, even with the extra

folding chairs that had been set up. It was decided to open the

balconies which ran the length of the sides of the theatre. Eldon and I

took seats on the atrium steps to the near the front of the theatre,

just to the right of the seats.

They first showed the trailer for the movie, followed by clips. Among the clips were:

• The

  “Bad Apples” Sequence: A rapid-fire series of jump-cuts from news

  programs in which various interviewees kept saying that the scandals of

  2002 (Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Andersen, et. cie.) were either “just a

  few bad apples” or “not just a few bad apples”.

• Michael Moore,

  talking about the cognitive dissonance between the products we make and

  the effects they have, citing his family’s history of working on th

  elines at General Motors.

• Ray Anderson, president of Interface,

  talking about the epiphany he had. His discovery that his business —

  carpet tiles — was not an asset to the planet and not sustainable.

  This discovery, in his own words, was “a spear through his heart”.

• Noam

  Chomsky, complete with the finger-wagging that is his stock in trade,

  talking about the difference between the individuals in corpoations —

  very nice people — and the corporations as entities — not very nice.

• Commodities trader Carlton Brown, who said that he could guarantee that the first thought

  running through the mind of every trader who wasn’t in the World Trade

  Center on 9/11 was “How much is gold up?”

• Lucy Hughes, Director of Research for AdLink (VP of Initiative Media during filming) and co-conceiver of a concept called The Nag Factor,

  talking about how her book and her studies were not about helping

  parents cope with nagging, it’s to help us help kids nag more

  effectively in order to sell more children’s products. “Is it ethical?”

  she asks, with a grin. “I don’t know.”

Origin story

• 1997 – Bakan had just published a book about Canadian Charter of Rights.
• He

  came to the conclusion that the reasons why the Canadian Constitution

  had little or no impact on social justice was that the rights specified

  within dealt with the behaviour of the goverment towards people.

  Corporations have more power over people these days.

• With economic globalization, corporations do more than making products. They dictate political, economic and social conditions.
• We need to look at and think about corporations in the same way we do with governments.
• The Corporation was originally conceived as an academic book
• The problem with academic books: largely inaccessible, read mostly by other academics.
• Met

  Mark Ackbar (co-directed “Manufacturing Consent”), who said “Why don’t

  I make a film about the book?” “The book doesn’t exist.” from this came

  the idea to write the book and make the film simultaneously.

The pitch

• 3.5 years to get funding for the film
• Lots of pitches, many unsuccessful
• Fortunately

  as a lawyer, he is trained in the art of persuading people of certain

  things (“often you have to do this for thing you tyourself don’t

  believe.”)

• Pitching to TV people is similar to making a case in court
• You

  can’t just walk to Sony or Miramax and say you want to make a film that

  says their institution is psycopathic. He talked to public companies.

• Turned down by CBC
• Bakan

  has two theories as to why they were turned down: the film idea was (a)

  too edgy (b) not edgy enough. He thinks that both were true.

• Kept falling between the two poles of too/not controversial enough
• VisionTV first sponsor; TVOntario also funded the film.
• Raised $1.4M to shoot the film
• The

  film couldn’t have been made in the US where public broadcasting is

  heavily funded by corporations. Testament to the value of public

  broadcasting and the public sphere.

• Trying not to focus on the “bad execs”, and not just “bad corporations”, but a larger topic: the corporation as a generic entity

The “Bad Apple” Jump-Cuts in the Film

• Mark

  Ackbar got a sattelite dish and taped news channels in the wake of the

  Enron/Worldcom scandals for source material for this sequence.

• 80% of the pundits said it was “just a few bad apples”, 20% said the opposite.