Anything Prose

Not a Rant -- Film Argues that Corporations are Sick

The Corporation is a new release, it's from Joel Bakan and Mark Achbar. Remember Achbar's 1992 award-winning 'Manufacturing Consent'? A great job that inspired many a cinematographer since . . .

Corporations Need Treatment, Documentary Argues
by Stephen Leahy

TORONTO - Corporations are not only the most powerful institutions in the world, they are also psychopathic, a new Canadian documentary on globalization elegantly argues.

While the corporation has the rights and responsibilities of ”a legal person”, its owners and shareholders are not liable for its actions. Moreover, the film explains, a corporation's directors are legally required to do what is best for the company, regardless of the harm created.

What kind of person would a corporation be? A clinical psychopath, answers the documentary, which is now playing in four Canadian theatres.

”Everything we do in the world is touched by corporations in some way,” says 'The Corporation' writer Joel Bakan.

Six years ago he was researching a book on the subject and teamed up with documentary makers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, and then set out to drum up enough money to make the film and to do more than 40 interviews.

”Corporations are the most dominant institutions on the planet today. We thought it was worth taking a close look at what that means,” Bakan told IPS.

In law, today's corporations are treated like a person: they can buy and sell property, have the right to free expression and most other rights that individuals have.

This legal creativity came as a result of U.S. businesses using the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- designed to protect blacks in the U.S. South after the Civil War -- to proclaim that corporations should be treated as ”persons”.

The filmmakers show four examples of corporations at work -- including garment sweatshops in Honduras and Indonesia -- to demonstrate that this ”legal person” is inherently amoral, callous and deceitful.

The corporation, the film points out, ignores any social and legal standards to get its way, and does not suffer from guilt while mimicking the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.

A person with those character traits would be categorized as a psychopath, based on diagnostic criteria from the World Health Organization (WHO), points out the film.

Unlike 'Bowling for Columbine' -- to which it has been compared -- 'The Corporation' does not follow a shambling (sic) yet crusading interviewer (Michael Moore) into corporate head offices to ask tough questions.

Instead the filmmakers use simple but beautifully lit head and shoulder shots of its subjects against a black background. The interviewer is never seen or heard; the corporate chiefs, professors and activists speak directly to the viewer.

The technique is so compelling that not listening or turning away would seem impolite.

The interviews are interspersed with archival footage from many sources, including scenes from sweatshops and news conferences. It also includes some ironic and darkly humorous excerpts from corporate ad campaigns and training films from the 1940s and '50s.

But the film is not a rant. It gives ample time to corporate chief executive officers (CEOs) and representatives of right-wing organizations, like Canada's Fraser Institute.

Fraser's Michael Walker tells viewers that hungry people in the developing world are better off when a sweatshop pays them 10 cents an hour to make brand name goods that sell for hundreds of dollars.

And it is just good business sense that a corporation moves to seek out more hungry people when its workers demand higher wages and better working conditions, Walker argues.

Many others are less ruthless. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, is honestly concerned about protecting the environment. Under his guidance, Shell adopted many green initiatives and a commitment to developing renewable energy.

At the same time, Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists were hung in Nigeria for protesting Shell Oil's pollution of the Niger Delta.

Social critic and linguist Noam Chomsky -- the subject of Achbar's 1992 award-winning 'Manufacturing Consent' -- carefully points out that people who work for corporations, and even those who run them, are often very nice people.

The same could have been said about many slave owners, he observes. The institution -- not the people -- is the problem, Chomsky argues.

Eminent economist Milton Friedman sums up the role of the corporation succinctly: it creates jobs and wealth but is inherently incapable of dealing with the social consequences of its actions.

'The Corporation' documents a bewildering array of these consequences -- including the deaths of citizens who protest corporate ownership of their water in Cochabamba, Bolivia -- that demonstrate the extent and power of today's corporations.

It looks at the often-cozy relationships between corporations and fascist regimes, such as that of IBM and Nazi leader Adolph Hitler.

It demonstrates the power of advertising to create desires for luxury items, as well as how corporations can suppress information.

The documentary shows agribusiness corporation Monsanto successfully preventing the news media from airing a story about the potential health hazards of a genetically engineered drug given to many U.S. diary cows.

'The Corporation' also tells a number of success stories, including activists' successful fight to overturn corporate patents on the neem tree and basmati rice.

Bolivia's Oscar Olivera describes how citizens of Cochabamba city re-took control of their water. The lesson, he explains, is the people's capacity for ”reflection, rage and rebellion” as an effective counter to corporate globalization

That is one of the film's messages, says Bakan. ”We want people to understand that they can change things.”

”Everyone keeps thanking us for making the film,” says Mark Achbar, from the Sundance festival of independent films in Utah state.

”People are fed up with being talked down to and enjoy being intellectually engaged,” he adds, trying to explain the documentary's popularity and several international festival awards.

Despite its current limited distribution in Canada, 'The Corporation' has been sold as a three-part, one-hour TV series to international markets, and Achbar is hoping it will be translated into Spanish.

Of course, there will not be a multi-million marketing campaign. The number of people who will see it will depend on those who have, spreading the word.

That is just one way to take back the power that corporations have usurped.

© Copyright 2004 IPS - Inter Press Service

African / Caribbean Videos at U. of Colorado

Do you like lists and short descriptive paragraphs about culture, history and biography? Try this catalog of films on African American and Caribbean culture. It might fit. Click HERE It is a PDF file.

Sample entries:

Adam Clayton Powell
53 min Sr.High/College
A candid chronicle of the influence
and personality of this powerful politician
and Civil Rights leader. Archival footage,
photographs and onscreen interviews tell
the story of Powell’s achievements–from
smashing racial barriers in 1930’s Harlem
to spearheading Congressional social
legislation in the 1960’s. While a
flamboyant lifestyle led to political ruin,
Powell’s story provides a perspective on
America as it entered the Civil Rights era.

Produced by Richard Kilberg. (1989
DCINEMA)
V00595,VH VHS Video
. . . + + + . . .
Black Is...Black Ain’t
86 min Sr.High/College
Producer Marlon Riggs’ last film
explores African American identity by
weaving together the testimony of those
whose complexion, class, gender, speech
or sexuality has made them feel "too
black" or "not black enough." Riggs
locates the essence of "blackness" in
African Americans’ courage from slavery
down to the present to improvise a
positive meaning in their lives in the face
of discrimination and suffering. Riggs
expresses his reaction to dealing with
AIDS from which he died before final
completion of the film.

Produced by
Marlon Riggs and Signifyin’ Works.
(1995CNEWS)
AV0433,VH VHS Video
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Bernice Johnson Reagon: The
Singing Warrior
40 min College
An interview with Bernice Johnson
Reagon, SNCC freedom singer and
founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, at
the Iliff School of Theology, Denver,
Colorado on October 27, 1997. Contents
include: On childhood religion – On
activism – On singing – Songforms and
democracy – On being an elder –
Understanding the movement.

(2000
ILIFF)
V09962,VH VHS Video

The listings are from the video library of the University of Colorado at Boulder

Acrobat Reader is worth your time for the free download to access gems like these.

The video library list of mediagraphies links is topical. The interesting PDF files can be found HERE

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South Africa: Top US/Local Actors to Film Rwanda Movie in SA

Hotel Rwanda

rjp - I hope this is a success. But when I heard that Courtemanche's novel -- see left side-bar -- was being turned into a film, I was hopeful it would be a big hit, the first out of the gate here in Canada at least.

Is this film a candidate for next fall? Certainly not a Christmas 2004 film! There is a bit of a 'rip-off here if Courtemanche is not credited. The action in HIS novel (By the Pool in Kigali) centres a Rwandan hotel. Rusesabagina's brave actions are mentioned in the epilogue.

HOLLYWOOD stars Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix and Don Cheadle are to film a movie in South Africa.

"I was looking for a story about Liberia or Sierra Leone, but then I found this true story about Paul Rusesabagina, who strove to keep his own family safe during the Rwanda genocide.He ended up caring for over 2 000 people, some of them members of the Tutsi elite who were prime targets of the Hutu assault. Not one person under his care died in the conflict." Those are the powerful dramatic elements that enabled George to find financing for the film in South Africa, Italy and Britain, but he has another clear motive in view.

"I want to shame audiences by showing them what really happened and how little they understood it.

The local actors include Sarafina! star Leleti Khumalo, Mothusi Magano of Gums and Noses and the crowd-pleasing Desmond Dube. Filming will take place in Johannesburg and Alexandra.

Utopia: Fatal Flaws for Collective Life

. . . My take on establishing any collectivist community is that it would be easiest to establish one in a wilderness environment.

Any frontier community is held together by the frequent and continual individual sacrifices expected from every individual. Survival demands it. This establishes discipline and concensus (I'm starting to dislike it already.)

So you need a little entertainment, a bit of celebration (maybe worship) at regular intervals. These could be rites that mark the collective success as the group pulls through trials and tribulations. (Having a common threat, such as open attacks by the surrounding indigens, also helps keep the collectivity functioning as ONE.)

As soon as you start to see the smoke from any neighbouring chimney, it then becomes a matter of getting along on friendly terms with the neighbour, who you-of-the-faith regard as a threat -- the heathen encroaching on your little haven. But you need one another economically and socially.

Personally, my nature is to be the first to go out to discover whatever new appears on the horizon, to explore all those little heathen corners as they encroach on my little world. So I would probably be the first one thrown out of a collectivist community by the more dogmatic members.

The Hutterians on the plains in western Canada send out regular patrols from their communal settlements to the cinema houses in the villages where they drag their kids out by the ear. I guess my ears would have been mighty sore if I was one of those Hutterite kids!

KISS & the 'Open Question' in Bowling for Columbine

Until I see all of his oeuvre, whatever I think about Michael Moore comes mostly from my appreciation of two of his films, the comedy Canadian Bacon and the Oscar-winning "best documentary feature" Bowling for Columbine, and his latest best-seller, Dude Where's My Country.

Note: You can read a critical review Moore's approach (from a moderately social-democratic perspective) in Dissent Magazine, Spring 2003, where Kevin Mattson goes into much of what Moore had done up to one year ago: "The Perils of Michael Moore, Political Criticism in an Age of Entertainment."

Being a Canadian and American citizen, I was an easy target for Canadian Bacon, one of the few films of the past decade that inspired me to buy the video and watch it a couple of times every year.

The work of Michael Moore is more extensive than you probably realize. And I have quite a challenge ahead to see and read even a goodly portion of whatever the prolific writer-producer has hatched (my personal project for entertainment in 2004 is to do just that).

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Here is a list of Moore's work (not including a stint he served editing Mother Jones Magazine):

Books:
Dude Where's My Country
Stupid White Men
Downsize This
Adventures in a TV Nation

Movies:
Bowling for Columbine
Roger and Me
Fahrenheit 911
The Big One
Canadian Bacon

Television:
TV Nation
The Awful Truth
Music Videos

On my subjective side, I like it when he portrays the contrast between Canada and the US. But I am not naive enough to believe that Canadians are as passive as portrayed in the Moore films I have seen. Nor do I believe that the way poverty is lived in Canada versus, say, what you can find in Flint, Michigan or Buffalo, N.Y. is as great a divide as he portrays. But it is sure nice to see somebody interested in the Northern Neighbor for a change, and if it helps broadcast a plea for peace, disarmament and the tempering of US imperialism then I will give that sort of cinema my support.

Unfortunately, I think Moore has not bothered to challenge himself enough on one score. He's not made an effort to understand Canadians and he certainly has little to say about the great cultural-geographic contrasts between Native Canadians, Westerners, prairie provinces, Ontario, French Canada and the Maritimes. But then Moore probably does not believe in the discredited culture wars approach to the US so he probably would rather sidestep the nature of such substantial conflicts within Canada.

I don't know all the arguments reviewers use to put down Columbine or Bacon. If you think there is too much of the late John Candy in the latter and too much of the very-much-alive Michael Moore in the former, then critically you and I part ways. I adore them both and they both, coincidentally, resemble a dear, departed friend of mine from Iowa, Dan Kelly, who was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known. So you could say my appreciation on that score is also subjective.

The matter of KIS comes up in the films. This means "Keep It Simple". Keep the plot simple. Keep the message simple. Keep the humor simple. Keep the morality simple. Keep the answers simple. Usually it is abbreviated as KISS, but the second 's' is special, especially with Moore's very engagé productions.

The second 's' in KISS, the way I read it, stands for Stupid. The way I learned it in photography school is that the formula should read like KIS,S because it is always the teacher who is telling the student that if he or she doesn't keep is simple, then it is the artist (or communicator) who is being stupid.

There is nothing really stupid in the films of Moore other than the people who are the butt of his polemic against a screwed up society. Or the jokers like Bud Boomer (Candy) in Bacon.

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The use of situations and background for his interviews in Columbine (even the cutting as the film runs subtitle script under news clips) makes this non-fiction documentary cinematic. It keeps the narrative moving. On the other hand, the comedy Canadian Bacon is more theatrical. Fine. But Bacon sure is funny and Bowling for Columbine couldn't be sadder. In Columbine, even the cartoons are wry, leaving you wondering if Moore isn't saying, 'If you believe this cartoon crap, you're a bigger moron than Bush.'

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The question -- Why do you think there are so many gun shootings in the US, when there are so many fewer in Canada, Australia, Britain and even Germany? --

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What about the 'Open Question?' Is there really anything that is not open and shut in Columbine? Yes, yes, there is an open question. Michael Moore does not even take Charleston Heston for an idiot nor does he slap an answer in his face -- though, on Moore's personal website, he does imply again that chalking up the 11,127 deaths per year in the States to "ethnic diversity", as Heston put it, IS STUPID.

What Moore wants from people is human decency and the National Rifle Association that Heston leads had the indecency to show up in both Denver (near Columbine) 10 days after two youths had shot up the entire school. Heston and the NRA even showed up in Flint, Michigan with their right to bear arms message shortly after a local 6-year-old boy shot and killed a 6-year-old girl in school using a handgun he picked up at his uncles place.

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You can't say Moore is answering his own question by showing the indecency of the NRA and its movieland leader. What I contend is that there are two levels to posing the question in the first place, one with the cinematic technique and content and the other with what the people interviewed actually say and how their answers reposition the question-answer narrative, which constantly shifts during the film.

Perhaps the cinematic parts answer the interview parts, the film seems to be edited that way. But the heavy emphasis on the way people interact on screen is so powerful -- in the context of the interviews -- that, if the individuals seem to have only a parts of the answer, then their ambiguous responses really do leave the question open on a very important level.

We are, notwithstanding the antiwar movement, the civil rights struggles, and the placard-carrying parents whose children died in gun attacks -- despite all this clarity -- we are all left wondering exactly why so many people are murdered with guns every year in the United States of America.

Moore, in both films, showcases an American people who are bathing in violence as a direct result of all the wars of aggression that the US has engaged in for so long. Columbine High School really is located right next door to the Lockheed plant in Littleton, Colorado, the munitions plant that makes such a variety of nuclear missiles. All of this in the film is established more cinematically than in dialogue. If you ask the locals, and he does mostly that, they will say that Columbine and the Littleton suburbs are the most average American settings you could imagine. That must mean that everyone in the States is living metaphorically next-door to one sort of Lockheed plant or another.

But Moore is equally convincing when he showcases the 6 o'clock pm newsclips with it's mantra 'If it bleeds, it leads.' Or the violent programs and reality police-beat shows. Just when the answer seems to emerge cinematically, we're told they (we in my case) have the same thing in Canada, i.e., the guns, the racial diversity, violent TV and films.

Us Canadians have everything that the Americans have, except the rate of gun-related deaths and a media obsession with such violent crime.

I believe that by posing the question -- Why do you think there are so many gun shootings in the US when there are so many fewer in Canada, Australia, Britain and even Germany? -- the producer is sincerely throwing it out. He really is fishing for an answer. Obviously, the interviewees, each of whom answers differently from the previous one, didn't see the film before joining the cast so to speak. Moore is not trying to make them look stupid.

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The second level of the film is the answer carried cinematically, i.e., that the US policy of unilateral aggression around the world is fuelling much of the domestic violence. That TV programming is part and parcel of that same culture.

You may find it odd, but that other film under discussion here, the comedy about invading Canada, says just about the same thing in a black-humor, more ham-fisted and theatrical manner.

Another thing that is obvious is that Michael Moore wants the peanut gallery to start to think about the answers. Just refer that back to the technique he is using in Columbine of not dotting all the i's nor crossing all the t's in the narration. The film may be one of the best propaganda (in a good sense) films of the last 10 years, but it is not didactic. (There is now, by the way, a teaching guide to accompany the film. This does not make the film didactic itself.)

Moore's critique of the occupation of Iraq by the US and Britain (expressed at the Oscar-night awards ceremonies) is consistent with the pacifism of his other features, films and especially his latest book, Dude Where's My Country. He probably never will break from the KIS formula in his manner of communicating simple messages. By posing arguments simply, maybe, eventually, it will even sink in. If the message does get through, Moore should probably start to look for a broader audience.

With no slight to Michael Moore's outstanding contributions, it would be grand to see this producer at least attempt to rise to the status of being more of an international artist. Then we could watch Mr. Moore take on the challenge and the nuance needed to tackle international topics and themes, or at least subjects that touch other parts of the globe, hopefully without posing these people as merely other victims of US aggression.

After all, it is not ONLY the Americans who toppled Allende on the left, not to mention Hitler on the right more than five and a half decades ago. The generals in Chile were waiting in the wings to off Allende. In WW II, Stalinist Russia had more than a hand in stopping the fascists. Greater Russians checked Hitler under the bodies of close to two million Soviet citizens. Years later, while in the post-Stalinist USSR even the managerial class was losing its grip, the populations in the post-colonial states of Africa suffered for 20 years, even after independence, before starting to lose grip on the hopes and pretensions they nurtured about progressive and popular economic development. We never even had the time to absorb the final lessons of colonialism before we started witnessing the national liberation struggles crumble, though nominally they succeeded to state power all over. The world is complex.

In the case of the defeat of apartheid in South Africa in the mid 1990s, the intervention of the US was indirectly a drag on liberation/emancipation. The US was surely a drag on progress throughout the whole region by supporting the wrong side in Angola and Mozambique. Finally, however, the US took a stance on the side of freedom for blacks and helped topple apartheid. It isn't a linear progression there either.

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To lay the greater part of the credit or blame for all of this on the US and her allies may prove to be nearly achievable, but the KIS formula will leave no one convinced and, until the public becomes better informed, could only appeal to an already captive audience of the converted. In some cases internationally, the "simple" in KIS amounts to little more than the stupid in KISS. I would not recommend to Michael Moore the formula "Keep it Simple AND Stupid" if he tackles international themes. Please do not go that route in your next film, Michael.
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**********The Canadian Thing***********

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Maybe Mr... Moore could check out the 50 per-cent-plus drop-out rate in some high schools in many Canadian working-class/working-poor neighborhoods. Or the remarkably high rates of adolescent suicide in Quebec and especially in Native communities. Why the hell did he end up videotaping one of the most exceptional social housing projects without interviewing at least one of the tens of thousands of deserving Canadian family members already waiting for a decade on a growing list to get into any sort of subsidized housing they can find? These are issues any honest Canadian would have to pose -- after getting over the flattery and understandable collective boosterism -- and Canadians are in a good position to understand and help bring Michael Moore up to speed. We may all agree that the US is suffering from a serious racial and politico-military-socio-economic malaise on several scores, but frequently we still wonder north of the 49th parallel whether Canada outshines the States on more than only a handful of scores.
"We also have conservative Canadians (particularly in the West) starting to organize politically. (They destroyed the Progressive-Conservative Party a short while ago.) This Calgary-centered Right would trade in our Canadian tendency to settle for half a loaf every day for a bit part in the American world-cop-imperialist role. The worst of this nascent political party would probably be proud to wear a kevlar helmet, flak jacket or full body armour as they travel abroad to survey Canadian troops alongside US brothers and sisters.

"American citizens probably already and correctly suspected that the Canadians traveling abroad with a maple leaf sewn on their backpacks put it there more out fear than out of pride. Fear they will be mistaken for Americans. Besides, nobody really knows that it is the Canadian oil industry and mining firms (again, HQ'd in the West) that are so heavily involved in raping Africa's Congo Basin of natural resources or that the Canadians groomed Aristide to take power in Haiti, let the Americans handle the invasion, and then sent in a few cops to train the locals. Thereafter, we just stepped back while our homegrown international business elite began to back the capitalist faction of the anti-Aristide Haitian opposition party. Now, ever-passive Canada sits back and watches the whole bale of twine unravel in a pool of Caribbean blood on the western shores of Hispaniola. Haiti's fate hasn't even put a dent in the lucrative tourist trade from Canada to the island's leeward side, i.e, the Dominican Republic. Vacation packages to that vacationland now serve as incentive bonuses for US-owned big-box stores who reward their high-sales performers with all-expenses-paid week in the sun.
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What would be a more universal theme? It could be the simple premise that was already raised in Canadian Bacon, to wit: that the Cold War was needed by both sides of the conflict. That the tensions (even the Cuban Missile Crisis) were exaggerations. You could even suggest that such incidents were staged by both the Americans and the Soviets throughout the 1950s and 60s.

After all, both sides needed to turn the attention of their domestic populations away from internal failures. Russians and Americans were promised improved standards of living and liberty. Realistically, without an arms race, these advances were within the grasp the West within a decade after WW II and in the USSR everybody (even in the countryside) they would have had indoor plumbing and a telephone before the year 2004. The sad truth is that improvements in real wages and living standards never were achieved for many folks, iron curtain or no, and buying power of US pay envelopes started slipping in the 1960s.

Without much physical effort, Michael Moore, if he dropped the national baggage of purely US themes, could take a more direct route beyond the confines of the 50 states with a short trip but a longer stay in, I would suggest, Quebec or Mexico.

Once there, he can explore what it is like for a nation living next door to an American elephant, a beast capable of snuffing out your culture and linguistic heritage merely by rolling over as it absorbs or takes over the print and broadcast media.

 Such a topic may not be truly universal, but such foreign fare would broaden the scope of this one producer, at least as long as he avoided simply painting the two nations over the US border as paragons of virtue (which they are not) compared to State-side.

Mexicans and the French-Canadian Québécois would love (and his own country needs) to have a Michael Moore as their self-appointed ambassador abroad, but don't hold your breath.

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