Transcript for:
The Modern Business Corporation Evolution

150 years ago, the business corporation was a relatively insignificant institution. Today, it is all pervasive. Like the church, the monarchy, and the communist party in other times and places, the corporation is today's dominant institution.

This documentary examines the nature, evolution, impacts, and possible futures of the modern business corporation. Initially given a narrow legal mandate, what has allowed today's corporation to achieve such extraordinary power and influence over our lives? To begin our inquiry, scandals threaten to trigger a wide debate about the lack of public control over big corporations. I don't think there is an overhang over the market of distrust. Listen, 95% or some huge percentage of the business community are honest.

and reveal all their assets. Got compensation programs that are balanced. But there are some bad acts.

The media debate about the basic operating principles of the corporate world was quickly reduced to a game of follow the leader. I still happen to think the United States is the greatest place in the world to invest. We have some shakeups that are going on because of a few bad apples. Some people call me a bad athlete.

Well, I may be bruised, but I still taste sweet. Some people call me a bad... These are not just a bunch of bad apples.

This is just a few bad apples. It's not just a few bad apples. We've got to get rid of the bad apples. you can start with taiko bad apples we know all about worldcon bad apples xerox corporation bad apples arthur anderson bad apples enron obviously bad apples kmart corporation the fruit cart is getting a little more full i don't think it's just a few apples unfortunately i think this is the worst crisis of confidence in uh business what's wrong with this picture can't we pick a better metaphor to describe the dominant institution of our time Through the voices of CEOs, whistleblowers, brokers, gurus and spies, insiders and outsiders, we present the corporation as a paradox, an institution that creates great wealth, but causes enormous and often hidden harms. I see the corporation as part of the jigsaw in society as a whole, which if you remove it, the picture's incomplete.

But equally, if it's the only path, it's not going to work. A sports team. Some of us are blocking and tackling, some of us are running the ball, some of us are throwing the ball.

But we all have a common purpose, which is to succeed as an organization. A corporation is like a family unit. People in a corporation work together for a common end.

Like the telephone system, it reaches almost everywhere. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's pretty hard to avoid.

And it transforms the lives of people, I think, on balance for the better. The eagle. Soaring.

Clear-eyed. Competitive, prepared to strike, but not a vulture. Noble, visionary, majestic, that people can believe in and be inspired by, that creates such a lift that it soars. I could see that being a good logo for the principal company.

Okay, guys, enough bullshit. Corporations are artificial creations. You might say they're monsters trying to devour as much profit as possible at anyone's expense. Dr. Frank Frankenstein's creation has overwhelmed and overpowered him, as the corporate form has done with us. The word corporate gets attached in almost, you know, in a pejorative sense to, and gets married with the word agenda.

And one hears a lot about the corporate agenda, as though it is evil, as though it is an agenda which is trying to take over the world. Personally, I don't use the word corporation. I use the word business.

I will use the word company. I'll use the word business community because I think that is a much fairer representation than zeroing in on just this word corporation. What is a corporation?

It's funny that I've taught in a business school for as long as I have without ever having been asked so pointedly to say what I think a corporation is. It is one form of business. ownership.

It's a group of individuals working together to serve a variety of objectives, the principal one of which is earning large, growing, sustained, legal returns for the people who own the business. The modern corporation has grown out of the industrial age. The industrial age began in 1712, when an Englishman named Thomas Newcomen invented a steam-driven pump. to pump water out of the English coal mines so the English coal miners could get it more cold to mine rather than hauling buckets of water out of the mine. It was all about productivity, more coal per man hour.

That was the dawn of the industrial revolution. and then it became more steel per man hour, more textiles per man hour, more automobiles per man hour, and today it's more chips per man hour, more gizmos per man hour. The system is basically the same, producing more sophisticated products today. The dominant role of corporations in our lives is essentially a product of roughly the past century.

Corporations were originally... Originally, associations of people who were chartered by a state to perform some particular function, like a group of people want to build a bridge over the Charles River or something like that. In both law and the culture, the corporation was considered a subordinate entity that was a gift from the people in order to serve the public good.

So you have that history and we shouldn't be misled by it. It's not as if those were the halcyon days when all corporations served the public trust. But there's a lot to learn from that.

The Civil War. And the Industrial Revolution created enormous growth in corporations. And so there was an explosion of railroads who got large federal subsidies of land, banking, heavy manufacturing, and... corporate lawyers a century and a half ago realized they needed more power to operate and wanted to remove some of the constraints that had historically been placed on the corporate form the 14th amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War to give equal rights to black people and therefore it said no state can deprive any person of life liberty or property without due process of law you And that was intended to prevent the states from taking away life, liberty, or property from black people, as they had done for so much of our history. And what happens is the corporations come into court, and corporation lawyers are very clever, and they say, oh, you can't deprive a person of life, liberty, or property.

We are a person. A corporation is a person. And the Supreme Court goes along with that.

And what was particularly grotesque about this... was that the 14th Amendment was passed to protect newly freed slaves. So, for instance, between 1890 and 1910, there were 307 cases brought before the court under the 14th Amendment.

288 of these brought by corporations, 19 by African Americans. Six hundred thousand people were killed to get rights for people. And then, with strokes of the pen over the next thirty years, judges applied those rights to capital and property, while stripping them from people. Everybody makes a mistake once in a while, but I just can't be personally responsible. That's one of the weaknesses of a partnership, isn't it, Sid?

Well, maybe you better incorporate the store. Incorporate? Yes. incorporating would give you the big advantage of what you want right now. Limited liability.

You start with a group of people who want to invest their money in a company. Then these people apply for a charter as a company. corporation this government issues a charter to that corporation now that corporation operates legally as an individual person it is not a group of people it is under the law a legal person Imperial Steel incorporated many of the legal rights of a person it can buy and sell property it can borrow money it can sue in court and be sued it carries on a business.

Imperial Steel, along with thousands of other legal persons, is a part of our daily living. It is a member of our society. Having acquired the legal rights and protections of a person, the question arises, what kind of person is the corporation? Corporations were given the rights of immortal persons, but then special kinds of persons, persons who have no moral conscience.

These are 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 workforce or whatever. The great... problem of having corporate citizens is that they aren't like the rest of us. As Baron Thurlow in England is supposed to have said, they have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate.

I believe the mistake that a lot of people make when they think about corporations is they think corporations are like us. General Electric is a kind old man with lots of stories. Nike.

Young. Energetic. Microsoft. Aggressive. McDonald's.

Young, outgoing, enthusiastic. Monsanto. Immaculately dressed. Disney.

Goofy. The Body Shop. Uh, Deceptive.

Very lovely. Do you know what the body shop is? Nope.

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. Of course they make a profit, and it's a good thing.

That's the incentive that makes capitalism work. To give us more of the things that we need. That's the incentive that other economic systems lack.

People accuse us of only paying attention to the economic leg because they think that's what a business person's mindset is. It's just money. And it's not so, because we as business people know that we need to certainly address the environment, but also we need to be seen as constructive members of society. There are companies that do good for the communities.

They produce. services and goods that are of value to all of us that make our lives better and that's a good thing. The problem comes in the profit motivation here because these people there's no such thing as enough. And I always counter point out there's no organization on this planet that can neglect its economic foundation. Even someone You know, living under a banyan tree is dependent on support from someone.

Economic lag has to be addressed by everyone. It's not just a business issue. But, unlike someone under a banyan tree, all publicly traded corporations have been structured through a series of legal decisions.

to have a peculiar and disturbing characteristic. They are required, by law, to place the financial interests of their owners above competing interests. In fact, the corporation is legally bound to put its bottom line ahead of everything else, even the public good. That's not a law of nature. That's a very specific decision, in fact, a judicial decision.

So they're concerned only for the short-term profit of their stockholders. To whom do these companies owe? Loyalty, what does loyalty mean? Well, it turns out that that was a rather naive concept anyway, 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 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. An externality is the effect of a transaction between two individuals on a third party who has not consented to or played any role in the carrying out of that transaction. And there are real problems in that area, there's no doubt about it.

Running a business is a tough proposition. There are costs to be minimized at every turn. And at some point, the corporation says, you know, let somebody else deal with that.

Let's let somebody else supply the mill. to the Middle East to protect the oil at its source. Let's let somebody else build the roads that we can drive these automobiles on. Let somebody else have those problems, and that is where externalities come in. personalities come from, that notion of let somebody else deal with that.

I got all I can handle myself. A corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. Each one is designed in a very efficient way to accomplish particular objectives.

In the achievement of those objectives, there isn't any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it and the shark has within it. those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.

So the pressure's on the corporation to deliver results now and to externalize any cost that this unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize. To determine the kind of personality that drives the corporation to behave like an externalizing machine, we can analyze it like a psychiatrist would a patient. We can even formulate a diagnosis on the basis of typical case histories of harm it has inflicted on others, selected from a universe of corporate activity. Well, this is the office of the National Labor Committee here in the garment area of New York City. It's a little bit disheveled.

These are all from different campaigns to make this stuff concrete. as possible, we purchase all of the products from the factories that we're talking about. This shirt sells for $14.99, and the women who made the shirt got paid three cents. Jackets made in El Salvador.

The jackets are $178, and the workers were paid 74 cents for every jacket they made. Alpine costarios, 31 cents an hour. It's not just sneakers, it's not just apparel, it's everything.

We were in Honduras and some workers, they knew of the kind of work that we did, and they approached us, these young workers, and they said, conditions and our factor are horrible, will you please meet with us? And we said we would, but you can't meet in the developing world. You can't walk up to a factory with your notebook and workers come out and interview them.

I mean, there's goons, there's spies, the military, police. So you do everything in an incandescent manner. We're about to start the meeting, and in walked three guys.

Very tough-looking guys. The company had found out about a meeting and sent these spies. Obviously, we didn't have the meeting. But these young girls were really bright. And as they were leaving, away from the eyesight of the spies, they started to put their hands underneath the table.

And... I put my palm under there, I put my hand under there, and they put into my hand their paystubs. So we'd know who they were, what they were paid, and the labels that they made in the factory, so we'd know who they worked for. And I took my hand out after everyone had left, and then the palm of my hand was the face of Kathy Lee Gifford. But the bottom of it is the interesting part.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this garment will be donated to various children's charities. It's very touching. Get your, right here. Walmart is telling you if you purchase these pants and Cathleen is telling you purchase these pants You're gonna help children. The problem was the people handed us the label were 13 years of age Do many people have family work?

Just me you support how many people do support? How do you do with that sorry Let's look at it from a different point of view let's look at it from the point of view of the The people in Bangladesh who are starving to death, the people in China who are starving to death, and the only thing that they have to offer to anybody that is worth anything is their low-cost labor. And in effect, what they are saying to the world is they have this big flag that says...

Come over and hire us. We will work for 10 cents an hour, because 10 cents an hour will buy us the rice that we need not to starve. And come and rescue us from our circumstance. And so when Nike comes in, they are regarded by everybody in the community as an enormous godsend. We went through the garbage dump in the Dominican Republic.

We always do this kind of stuff. We dig around. One day, we found a big pile of Nike's internal pricing documents. Nike assigns a time frame to each operation.

They don't talk about minutes. They break the time frame. frame into ten thousandths of a second you get to the bottom of all 22 operations to give the workers 6.6 minutes to make the shirt it's 70 cents an hour in the dominican republic that's 6.6 minutes equals eight cents these are nike's documents that means the wages come to three tenths of one percent of the retail price this is the reality it's the science of exploitation What happens in the areas where these corporations go in and are successful?

They soon find that they can't do any more in that country because the wages are too high now. And what's that another way of saying it? Well, the people are no longer desperate.

So, okay, we've used up all the desperate people there. They're all plump and healthy and wealthy. Let's move on to the next desperate lot and employ them and raise their level up.

Well, the whole idea of the Export Processing Zone is that it will be the first step towards this wonderful new development. Through the investment that's attracted to these countries, there will be a trickle-down effect into the communities. But because so many countries are now in the game of creating these free trade enclaves, they have to keep providing more and more incentives for companies to come to their little denationalized pocket, and the tax holidays get longer.

So the workers rarely make enough money to buy three meals a day, let alone feed their local economy. Something happened in 1940 which marked the beginning of a new era. The era of the ability to synthesize and create on an unlimited scale.

new chemicals that had never existed before in the world. And using the magic of research, oil companies compete with each other in taking the petroleum molecule apart and rearranging it into, well, you name it. So suddenly it became possible to produce any new chemicals, synthetic chemicals, the likes of which had never existed before in the world, for any purpose, and at virtually no cost. No cost. Fabrics, toothbrushes, tires, insecticides, cosmetics, weed killers.

A whole galaxy of things to make a better life on Earth. For instance, if you wanted to go to a chemist and say, look, I want to have a chemical, say a pesticide, which will persist throughout the food chain, and I don't want it to have to renew it very, very often, I'd like it to be relatively non-destructible. and then he'd put two benzene molecules on the blackboard and add a chlorine here and a chlorine there and that was DDT. When the 8th Army needed Jap civilians to help them out in our occupation, they called on native doctors to administer DDT under the supervision of our men to stem a potential typhus epidemic.

Dusting like this goes a long way in checking disease and the labs are them. Pardon our dust. 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, produce 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 trivialize 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 one in every two men get cancer in their lifetimes and one in every three women get cancer in their lifetimes. Towards the end of 1989, a great box of documents arrived at my office without any indication where they came from. And I opened them and found in it a complete set of Monsanto files, particularly a set of files dealing with toxicological testing of cows who'd been given RBGH.

BST, trade name PosiLac. is being used in more than a quarter of the dairy herds in the United States, according to Monsanto. The milk has been drunk by a large portion of the American population, since the Food and Drug Administration declared it safe for both cows and humans for years.

And at that time, Monsanto was saying, there's no evidence whatsoever of any adverse effects, we don't use antibiotics, and this clearly showed that they had lied through their teeth. The files described areas of chronic inflammation in the heart, lung, kidney, spleen, also reproductive effects, also a whole series of other problems. The most comprehensive, independent assessment of the drug concludes that BST... results in unnecessary pain, suffering, and distress for the cows. This is not acceptable for a drug designed simply to increase milk production.

It is a silly product. We have a, the industrial world is a... of washing milk. We're overproducing milk.

We actually have governments around the world who pay farmers not to produce milk. So the first product Monsanto comes up with is a product that produces more of what we don't need. Of course you'll want to inject POSILAC to every eligible cow.

Has each cow not treated, it's a lost income opportunity. But the problem was that use of the artificial hormone caused all kinds of problems for the cows. It caused something called mastitis which which is a very painful infection of the udders. When you milk the cow, if the cow has bad mastitis, some of the, and I don't know how to say this in a, you know, I hope people aren't watching at dinnertime, but the pus from the infection of the udders ends up in the milk, and the somatic cell count, they call it the bacteria count inside your milk, goes up.

There's a cost to the cows. The cows get sicker when they're injected with RBGH. They're injected with antibiotics. We know that people are consuming antibiotics through their food, and we know that that's contributing to antibiotic resistant bacteria and diseases.

And we know we're in a crisis when somebody can go into a hospital and get a staph infection and it can't be cured and they die. That's a crisis. Bad for the cow, bad for the farmer, bad potentially for the consumer. The jury is out. We see a lot of conflicting evidence about potential health risks.

And of course, as a consumer, my belief is why should I take any risk? Factory farm cows have not been the only victims of Monsanto products. Large areas of Vietnam were deforested by the US military using Monsanto's Agent Orange.

The toxic herbicide reportedly caused over 50,000 birth defects, as well as hundreds of thousands of cancers in Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, and in former American troops serving in Southeast Asia. Unlike the Vietnamese victims, U.S. Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange were able to sue Monsanto for causing their illnesses. Monsanto settled out of court, paying $80 million in damages. But it never admitted guilt.

Sleeping in a motel in Brewer, Maine one night... I woke up with terrible hay fever and my eyes were burning and I looked out of the river and there were great mounds of white foam going right down the river. And the next morning I got up and I said, my God, what was that happening last night? He said, oh, that's just the river. And I said, what do you mean?

He said, well, look, every night the paper company... send this stuff down the river. I said, what are you talking about?

And he said, don't you understand? That's how we get rid of the effluent from the paper mills. Well, I knew at that time.

I'd been in a business. I'd sold oil to the paper mills. I knew all the owners.

I'd been in politics. I knew the people in the towns. I knew not one constituent of the paper mills wanted to have the river polluted. And yet here the river was being polluted.

And it was more or less as if we created a doom machine. In our search for wealth and for prosperity, we created something that was going to destroy us. At Multinational Monitor, we put together a list of the top corporate criminals of the 1990s.

We went back and looked at all of the criminal fines that corporations had paid in the decade. Exxon pled guilty in connection to federal criminal charges with the Valdez spill and paid $125 million in criminal fines. General Electric was guilty of defrauding the federal government and paid $9.5 million in criminal fines.

Chevron was guilty of environmental violations and paid $6.5 million in fines. Mitsubishi was guilty of antitrust violations and paid $1.8 million in fines. IBM was guilty of illegal exports and paid $8.5 million in fines. It was guilty of environmental violations and paid $1.8 million in fines. manufacturer was guilty of antitrust violations and was guilty of food and drug regulatory violations was guilty of financial fraud was guilty of fraud environmental guilty of an antitrust violation paid 500 million dollars in criminal fines Again and again we have the problem that whether you obey the law or not is a matter of whether it's cost effective.

If the chance of getting caught and the penalty are less than it costs to comply, people think of it as being just a business decision. I'm 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 sign scientific peer-reviewed paper published in the last 25 years that would contradict this scenario. Every living system of Earth is in decline.

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 the same. 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're leaving a terrible legacy of poisoning and diminishment of the environment. For our grandchildren's grandchildren, generations not yet born. Some people have called that intergenerational tyranny, a form of taxation without representation, levied by us, some generations yet to be. It's the wrong thing to do.

One of the questions that comes up periodically is to what extent could a corporation be considered to be psychopathic. And if we look at a corporation as a legal person, then it may not be that difficult to actually draw the transition between psychopathy in the individual to psychopathy in a corporation. We can go through the characteristics that define this particular disorder one by one and see how they might apply to corporations.

They would have all the characteristics and in fact in many respects corporation of that sort is the prototypical psychopath. If the dominant institution of our time has been created in the image of a psychopath, who bears the moral responsibility for its actions? Can a building have moral opinions? Can a building have social responsibility? If a building can't have social responsibility, what does it mean to say that a corporation can?

A corporation is simply an artificial legal structure. But the people who are engaged in it, whether the stockholders, whether the executives in it, whether the employees, they all have moral responsibilities. It's a fair assumption that every human being, real human beings, flesh and blood ones, not corporations, but every flesh and blood human being is a moral person.

We've got the same genes, we're more or less the same, but our nature, the nature of humans, allows all kinds of behavior. I mean, every one of us, under some circumstances, could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint. No job, in my experience with Goodyear, has been as frustrating as the CEO job. Because even though the perception is that you have absolute power to do whatever you want, the reality is you...

don't have that problem. Sometimes if you had really a free hand, if you really did what you wanted to do that suits your personal thoughts and your personal priorities, you'd act differently. But as a CEO you can cannot do that.

Layoffs have become so widespread that people tend to believe that CEOs make these decisions without any consideration to the human implications of their decisions. It is never a decision that any CEO makes lightly. It is a tough decision.

But it is the consequence of modern capitalism. look at a corporation just like when you look at a slave owner. You want to distinguish between the institution and the individual.

So slavery, for example, or... Other forms of tyranny are inherently monstrous, but the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine. Benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves, caring about other people. I mean, as individuals, they may be anything. In their institutional role, they're monsters because the institution's monstrous.

And the same is true here. My wife and I... Some years ago I had a...

at our home, a demonstration. 25 people arrived. They hung a big banner on the top of our house saying, Murderers.

They danced around outside in gas masks and so on. As a public demonstration, it wasn't very effective. There were only two...

This is a very rural area, two people and a dog, and it's not a very big house, which I think rather surprised them. But then we sat down and talked to them for a couple of hours, and, you know, we gave them tea and coffee, and they had lunch on our lawn. All right.

There's another coffee coming. There's no... who wanted... Sorry about the soya, anyway.

No need for you to be deceitful. Why didn't you just ask me whether I was in? I don't know, could we have a murderous panel?

After about 20 minutes they said, well the problem's not you, you know, it's Shell. So I said, no, wait a minute, let's talk about what is Shell. You know, it's made up of people like me. In the end, what we found in that discussion was all the things that they were worried about, I was worried about as well.

Climate, you know, oppressive regimes, human rights. Right. The big difference between us was, I feel that I actually can make a contribution to this. These people were frustrated because they felt they had nothing to do. So an individual CEO, let's say, may really care about the environment.

In fact, since they have such extraordinary resources, they can even devote some of their resources to that without violating their responsibility to be totally inhuman. Which is why. As the Moody Stewart serve tea to protesters, Shell Nigeria can flare unrivaled amounts of gas, making it one of the world's single worst sources of pollution.

And all the professed concerns about the environment do not spare Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists from being hanged for opposing Shell's environmental practices in the Niger Delta. A corporation is not a person, it doesn't think. People in it think. And for them, it is legitimate to create terminator technology so that farmers are not able to save their seeds.

Seeds that will destroy themselves through a suicide gene. Seeds that are designed to only produce crop in one season. You really need to have a brutal mind.

It's a war against evolution to even think in those terms. terms, but quite clearly, profits are so much higher in their minds. The profit motive which drove Fudsy to accomplish so much may bring out the evil as well as the good. My work spans all industry sectors.

I mean, I virtually have worked for, like, I'd say 25% of the Fortune 500. I've posed as an investment banker. I've posed as a venture capitalist. I set up front companies that are executive recruiting firms. Essentially, I'm a spy. I'll locate your employees, and I will tell them that I'm calling from Acme Recruiting Agency, and that...

I've got a job that pays them considerably more than what they're paying. Would they mind meeting me for an interview? And when the executive shows up, what he doesn't realize is I'm actually debriefing him on behalf of a competitor.

And that there is no job and that the office that he's at has been rented. And the picture on my desk of my family is a phony. And it's all just a big elaborate ruse to glean competitive information from. From him. I don't feel any guilt.

You have to expect that guys like me are out there. We're predators. If you're a CEO, I mean, do you think your shareholders really care whether you're Billy Buttercup or not? I think people want money. That's the bottom line.

The fact that most of these companies are run by White men, white rich men, means that they are out of touch with what the majority of the world is. Because the majority of this planet are not a bunch of rich white guys. They're people of other colors, they're the majority. Women are the majority.

And the poor and working poor make up the majority of this planet. So the decisions that they make come from not the reality that exists throughout the world. How much is enough?

How much is enough? If you are a billionaire, would it be okay just to be a half a billionaire? Wouldn't it be okay for your company to make a little less money if it meant... When I bought those two airplane tickets for Phil Knight and myself to fly to Indonesia, I was prepared for him to say, okay, let's go.

Oh, no, not a chance. Not a chance. No?

No, but they're transferable. I can change it to another day. And call me on it. Call my bluff. And he's a smart guy.

I mean, he's not stupid. And so I thought, okay, get ready for this. this, especially because, you know, I bought first class tickets.

So, you know, it'd be a comfortable ride at least, you know. And of course, he tells me then on camera, I've never been to Indonesia. I'm like taken aback by this. I can't believe that the guy is the head of the company has never walked through his own factories. Oh, you've got to go.

I can't go right now. When we were done filming, he calls me up a couple of weeks later and he goes, I may have a chance to go there with you. to the factories. I'm going to the Australian Open to watch some tennis. And, you know, maybe I can get up there, or at least you can go there.

Would you like to go to the Australian Open? Ha, For 21 years, I never gave a thought to what we were taking from the earth or doing to the earth in the making of our products. And then in the summer of 1994, we began to hear questions from our customers. customers we'd never heard before, what's your company doing for the environment? And we didn't have answers.

The real answer was not very much. And it really disturbed many of our people. Not me so much as them.

And a group in our Our research department decided to convene a task force and bring people from our businesses around the world to come together to assess our company's worldwide environmental position to begin to frame answers for those customers. They asked me if I would come and speak to that group and give them a kickoff speech to launch this new task force with an environmental vision. And I didn't have an environmental vision. I did not want to make that speech.

And at sort of the propitious moment, this book landed on my desk. It was Paul Hawkins'book, The Ecology of Commerce. And I began to read The Ecology of Commerce, really desperate for inspiration.

And very quickly, into that book, I found the phrase, The Death of Birth. It was E.O. Wilson's expression for species extinction, the death of birth, and it was a point of a spear into my chest.

And I read on, and the spear went deeper, and it became an epiphanal experience, a total change of mindset for myself, and a change of paradigm. Can any product be made sustainably? Well, not any and every product.

Can you make landmines sustainably? Well, I don't think so. There's a more fundamental question than that about landmines. Some products ought not be made at all.

Unless we can make carpets sustainably, perhaps we don't have a place in a sustainable world. But neither does anybody else making products unsustainably. One day early in this journey, it dawned on me that the way I've been running Interface is the way of the plunderer. Plundering something that's not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth.

And I said to myself, my goodness, the day must come when this is illegal, when plundering is not allowed. I mean, it must come. So I said to myself, my goodness, someday people like me will end up in jail. I gotta be honest with you, when the September 11th situation happened...

I didn't know that... And I must say, I want to say this because it's... I want to take it lightly. It's not a light situation. It's a devastating act.

It was really a bad thing. It was one of the worst things I've seen in my lifetime. You know.

But, I will tell you, and every trader will tell you, who was not in that building... And who was buying gold and who owned gold and silver? That when it happened, the first thing you thought about was, well, how much is gold up? The first thing that came to mind was, my God, gold must be exploding.

Fortunately for us, all our clients were in gold. So when it went up, they all doubled their money. Everybody doubled their money.

It was a blessing in disguise. Devastating. Crushing, heart shattering, but on a financial sense. For my clients that were in the market, they all made money.

Now, I wasn't looking for this type of help, but it happened. When the US bombed Iraq back in 1991, the price of oil went from $13 to $40 a barrel for Christ's sake. Now we couldn't wait for the bomb to start raining down on Saddam Hussein. We were all excited.

We wanted Saddam to really create problems. Do whatever you have to do. Set fire to some more oil wells because the price is going to go higher. Every broker was chanting that. There was not a broker that I know of that wasn't excited about that.

This was a disaster. This was something... that was you know catastrophe happening bombing wars in devastation there is opportunity the pursuit of profit is an old story but there was a time when many things were regarded either as too sacred or too essential for the public good to be considered business opportunities they were protected by tradition and public regulation This man needs the fire department. Firefighters started as private companies.

Yes, and lots of other people need the fire department too. And if you didn't have the medallion of a given firefighter brigade on your house, house and it was on fire, those firefighters would just, you know, ride on by because you didn't have a deal. Well, we gradually evolved a public trust for the provision of safety on that very specific level. This is important.

We should not go back from that and start saying, well, you know, why don't we put that back in the market and see what that does? Maybe it'll make it more efficient. The 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-cyclical property. So that means that they can maintain employment in periods of recession, which increases demand, which helps you get out of recession.

A private company can't do that, you know, in a recession, throw out the workforce. That's the way you make money. 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.

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, water and air. Even in the case of air, there's been some progress.

And here the idea is to say, look, we can't avoid the dumping of carbon dioxide, we can't avoid the dumping of sulfur oxides, at least we can't at the moment afford to stop doing that. So we're dumping a certain amount of stuff into the environment. So we're going to say, with the... current tonnage of sulfur oxides, for example, we will say that is the limit and we'll create permits for that amount, we'll give them to the people who've been doing the polluting, and now we will permit them to be traded. And so now, there's a price attached to polluting the environment.

Now wouldn't it be marvelous if we had one of those prices for everything? It sounds like you're advocating private ownership of every square inch of the planet. Absolutely. Every cubic foot of air, water.

It sounds like... It's outlandish to say we want to have the whole universe, the whole of the Earth, owned. That doesn't mean I want to have Joe Bloggs owning this square foot, but it means that the interests that are involved in that stream are owned. ...by some group or by some people who have an interest in maintaining it.

And that, you know, that is not such a loony idea. It's, in fact, the solution to a lot of these problems. Five, four, three, two... Off into space.

Man, that takes real teamwork. And here's a team of junior spacemen with an out-of-this-world breakfast. Comparing the marketing of yesteryear to the marketing of today is like comparing a BB gun to a smart bomb.

It's not the same as when I was a kid, or even when the people who are young adults today were kids. It's much more sophisticated and it's much more pervasive. It's not that products themselves are bad or good.

It's the notion of manipulating children into... to buying the products. In 1998, Western International Media, Century City, and Lieberman Research Worldwide conducted a study on nagging.

We asked parents to keep a diary for three weeks and to record every time, you could imagine, every time their child nagged them for a product. We asked them to record when, where, and why. This study was not to help parents cope with nagging. It was to help corporations help children nag for their products more effectively.

anywhere from 20% to 40% of purchases would not have occurred unless the child had nagged their parents. That is, we found, for example, a quarter of all visits to theme parks wouldn't have occurred unless the child nagged their parents. Four out of ten visits to places like Chuck E. Cheese would not have occurred.

And any parent would understand that. You know, when I think of Chuck E. Cheese, oh my goodness, it's noise. And there's so many kids. Why would I want to spend two hours there?

But if the child... Well, nags enough, you're going to go. We saw the same thing with movies, with home video, with fast food. We do have to break through this barrier where they do tell us, or they say they don't like it when their kids nag.

Well, that's just a general attitude that they possess. It doesn't mean that they necessarily act upon it 100% of the time. You can manipulate consumers into wanting and therefore buying your products.

It's a game. Children are not little adults. Their minds aren't developed.

And what's happening is that marketers are playing to their developmental vulnerabilities. The advertising that children are exposed to today is honed by psychologists. It's enhanced by media technology that nobody ever thought was possible.

The more insight you have about the consumer, the more creative you'll be in your communication strategies. So if that takes a psychologist, yeah, we want one of those on staff. I'm not saying that it's wrong to make things for children. You know, and I also think it's important to distinguish between psychologists who work on products for children, who help, you know, toy corporations make toys that are developmentally appropriate.

I think that's great. That's different from selling the toys directly to the children. Initiative is huge.

I think in the U.S. we place about $12 billion of media time. So we'll put it on TV, we'll put it in print, we'll put it in outdoor, we'll buy radio time. So we're the biggest buyers of advertising time and space in the U.S. and in the world. One family cannot combat an industry that spends $12 billion a year trying to get their children.

They can't do it. They are tomorrow's adult consumers, so start talking with them now, build that relationship when they're younger, and you've got them as an adult. Somebody asked me Lucy is that ethical you're essentially manipulating these children well Yeah, is it ethical? I don't know but our our role at initiative is to move products And if we know you move products with a certain creative of execution, placed in a certain type of media vehicle, then we've done our job.

Like the waters of a mighty ocean, people also represent a tremendous force, the understanding of which is of greatest importance to the American way of life. This force is known as consumer power. The goal for 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.

impose on people what's called a philosophy of futility. You have to focus them on the insignificant things of life, like fashionable consumption. How many created wants can I satisfy? We have huge industries, public relations industries, monstrous industry, advertising and so on, which are designed from infancy to try to mold people into this desired pattern. I saw a homeless person in New York City, and he had, like, a TV set up, and people were going up and trying to get pictures with him, and they wanted to, like, be there.

And if he had, like, a company sponsor him, then that might be kind of interesting, and, like, Polaroid could sponsor it and give out free pictures or something like that. I don't know. It would just be a possibility for someone who doesn't have that many possibilities. Thank you. We saw Tiger Woods on TV with a hat with a Nike logo on it and we figured he probably gets like millions of dollars just to wear the hat on a press conference.

And therefore we figured we can do that for someone else and hopefully get money in terms so we can go to school. And that's how we came. up with being corporately sponsored. We made our sponsor announcement on today's show on June 18th.

We're thrilled to be sponsored by First USA. We're thrilled to be working with First USA as our corporate sponsor, and they're covering our college tuition to found First USA as our sponsor, and we're proud to be working with them. Our sponsor is First USA, so we're really thrilled to announce First USA as our sponsor. We're thrilled to be working with First USA. And so we give First USA a good name in the media and include them in our news stories, and then through there they get as much advertising as we can give them.

They'll be conforming not to the wishes of demanding parents, but to the wishes of an image-conscious corporation. They're not just out there for the money. I mean, they want to work with us and be our friends. us help them help us and vice versa.

We became walking billboards to pay for our college tuition. Cool site of the day picked us as cool site and Yahoo picked us and we were in USA Today. When we did our photo shoot for People magazine this is where we stood up on top. We stood up here and we smiled. We smiled and took a picture.

Our parents had war stories and stuff to tell us. We have our corporate sponsor story. Exactly. I mean, I have a lot of faith in the corporate world because it's always going to be there, so you may as well have faith in it because if you don't, then that's just not good. Corporations don't advertise products particularly.

They're advertising a way of life, a way of thinking, you know, a story of, you know, who we are as people and how we got here and what's the source of our so-called liberty and our 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 somehow is remarkably efficient, and that it is responsible for progress and a good life.

They're selling themselves, they're selling their domination, they're selling their rule, and they're creating an image for themselves as just regular folks down the block. Hi, how are you all doing today? Good to see you. How are you doing today? today.

Hi, how you doing today? We're from Pfizer. We're your neighbors. You're in the new houses? Are you in the new houses?

Oh, these are some neighbors. Can we say hello? Can we say hello just for a minute? So what do you think of the neighbors?

neighborhood now. It's all right. It's good.

Yeah, I think it's been getting better over the last 20 years that I've been coming here. Yeah. So I think together, you know, working with you and Pfizer and our other partnership will make this a better place. Okay. Nice to see you, Ms. Frazier.

Bye. There used to be a lot of crime at this subway. One night as I was going home, I got caught and was almost mugged. And so we decided to make a change to make this community better.

We're looking at turnstiles that prevent fare beating. It used to be that you could just hop right over. So Pfizer, in collaboration with the Transit Authority, actually purchased these machines.

This is a talkback box that allows us to speak to the Pfizer guard, which is approximately 500 yards from here. Now, I haven't seen the Pfizer guard today, but I'm going to see if I can call him. If he's not, I'll have to go wake him up. Hello, hello, Tom Klein speaking.

So I'm sure before we're through, he'll call back. But particularly on the off hours, this allows a passenger to call directly to the Pfizer desk for assistance. And then the Pfizer guard calls the transit police, and the transit police respond to any crime situation. As a result of all this crime is down in this station, it's much safer for our community partners.

Thank you. Press the other button just to be sure. Tom speaking, hello. We'll stop over and see him personally.

It's tough, you know. They're putting some taxpayer and 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 those sort of nice things, they're also playing a role in lowering taxes for corporations and lowering taxes for wealthy people, you know, and reconfiguring public policy.

What we don't see is all that reconfiguring going on. We don't see them vacuum out the money, vacuum out the insides of public processes. But we do see the nice facade. I could give you a day in the life of a person who might be the target of undercover marketing, and I will tell you that some of these things are happening right now around you. So you walk out of your building in the morning, some city, you walk out into the street, and you hear some people having kind of a loud conversation about a musical act and they're kind of passing the headphones back and forth.

They go, wow, this is great. Hey, do you know that I heard this CD is really hard to find? fine but I heard they sell it at store X.

I'm going to go pick it up. That's so good. You hear that and you register it and you might kind of pick up on that and maybe later on you'll think hey I wonder what the hot act is.

Bang that might be in your head. Now you get into your office and there's a certain brand of water in the refrigerator. What is that? Take it out, you drink it, you slug it down, it's there. Not really thinking about it.

Wow that's pretty good water. Who knows? Maybe someone plays the water there.

You kind of go out for your lunch break, sitting in the park and people are kind of out there talking in the park and bang, all of a sudden you see another message. By the time you go to bed, you've probably received eight or nine different undercover messages. People are always thinking, well, oh, I know product placement. That's when they put stuff in movies. Well, yes, kind of.

I mean, that's definitely traditional product placement, but real life product placement is just that, placing stuff in movies, but the movie is actually your life. We'll take a group of the tape. attainable, but still aspirational people.

They're not supermodels. They're kind of people just like you. They're doing something for us, whether they're having a certain kind of drink or they're using a certain laundry detergent, whatever it may be. They are kind of the roach motel, if you will. People are going to come over to them and they're going to give them this little piece of brand bait.

Could be a sound bite of knowledge or a ritual. Consumers will get that piece of roach bait and then they would take it. They go, oh, pretty cool.

And then they go out and they spread it to their friends. If you want to be critical, if you want to go through your life like that, sure, be critical of every single person that walks up to you. But if they're showing you something that fits and something that works and something that makes your life better in some way, well then, who cares? We, again, just say thanks. Today the job of building this nation geographically is completed.

There are no new frontiers within our borders. So to what new horizons can we look now? Where are tomorrow's opportunities?

What's ahead for you? For your children, the frontiers of the future are not on any map. They are in the test tubes and laboratories of the great industries.

The Giacobardi case is one of the great judicial moments in world history, and the public was totally unaware it was actually happening as the process was being engaged. General Electric and Professor Giacobardi went to the patent office with a little micro... that eats up oil spills. They said they had modified this microbe in the laboratory and therefore it was an invention.

The patent office, the U.S. government, took a look at this, quote, invention, and they said, no way. The patent statutes don't cover living things. This is not an invention.

Turn down. Then General Electric and Dr. Giacobardi appealed to the U.S. Customs Court of Appeal.

And to everyone's surprise, by a three to two decision, they overrode the patent office. And they said, this microbe looks more like a detergent or a reagent than a horse or a honeybee. I laughed because they didn't understand basic biology.

It looked like a chemical to them. Had it had an antenna or eyes or wings or legs? it would never have crossed their table and been patented.

Then the Patent Office appealed. And what the public should realize now is the Patent Office was very clear that you can't patent life. My organization provided the main amicus curiae brief. If you allow the patent on this microbe, we argued, it means that without any congressional guidance or public discussion, corporations will own the blueprints of life. When they made the decision, we lost by five to four, and Chief Justice Warren Burger said, sure, some of these are big issues, but we think this is a small decision.

Seven years later, the U.S. Patent Office issued a one-sentence decree. You can patent anything in the world that's alive except a full-birth human being. We've all been hearing about the announcement that we have mapped the human genome, but what the public doesn't know is now there's a great race by genomic companies and biotech companies and life science companies to find the treasure in the map. The treasure are the individual genes.

genes that make up the blueprint of the human race. Every time they capture a gene and isolate it, these biotech companies claim it as intellectual property. The breast cancer gene, the cystic fibrosis gene, it goes on and on and on.

If this goes unchallenged in the world community, within less than 10 years, a handful of global companies will own directly or through license the actual genes. that make up the evolution of our species. And they're now beginning to patent the genomes of every other creature on this planet. In the age of biology, the politics is going to sort out between those who believe life first has intrinsic value, and therefore we should choose technologies and commercial venues that honor the intrinsic value. And then we're going to have people who believe, look, life is simply utility.

It's commercial fare. And they will line up with the idea to let the marketplace be the ultimate arbiter of all of the age of biology. In a world economy where information is filtered by global media corporations, keenly attuned to their powerful advertisers, who will defend the public's right to know?

And what price must be paid to preserve our ability to make informed choices? What Fox Television told us was that we were just the people to be the investigators. Do any stories you want, ask tough questions and get answers. So we thought, this is great, this is a dream job, fantastic.

The very first thing they had us do was not to research stories, but to shoot this promo, which was The Investigators. Results, protecting you. And they had a film crew and a smoke machine and we were silhouetted. One of the first stories that Jane came up with was the revelation that most of the milk in the state of Florida and throughout much of the country was adulterated with the effects of bovine growth hormone. With Monsanto, I didn't realize how effectively a corporation could work to get something on the marketplace.

The levels of coordination they had to have. They had to get university professors into the fold. They had to get experts into the fold. They had to get reporters into the fold.

They had to get the public into the fold. And of course the FDA, let's not leave them out. They had to get the federal regulators convinced that this was a fine and safe product to get it onto the marketplace. And they did that. They did that very, very well.

POSILAC is the single most tested new product in history and is now available to you specifically so you can increase your profit potential. The federal government basically rubber-stamped it before they put it on the marketplace. The longest test they did for human toxicity was 90 days on 30 rats, and then either Monsanto misreported the results to the FDA or the FDA didn't bother to look in depth at Monsanto's own studies.

The scientists within Health Canada looked very carefully at bovine growth hormone and came to very different conclusions than the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. did. Monsanto's engineered growth hormone did not comply with safety requirements. It could be absorbed by the body and therefore did have implications for human health.

Mysteriously, that conclusion was deleted from the final published version of their report. I personally was very concerned that there's a very serious problem. of secrecy, conspiracy, and things of that nature. We have been pressured and coerced to pass drugs of questionable safety, including the RBSD. We wrote the story.

We had it ready a week beforehand. They bought ads. Farmers in the milk industry say it's safe, but studies suggest a link to cancer. Don't miss this special report from the investigation. That Friday night before the Monday this series was to begin, the fax machine spit out a letter from this very high-priced...

lawyer in New York that Monsanto had hired. It contained a lot of things that were just off the wall false, just demonstrably false. But if you didn't know the story and you didn't know how we had gone about producing it, would have scared you as a broadcaster, as a manager. And they decided that they would pull the story and they would just check it one more time. But the bottom line was that there was no factual errors in that story.

Both sides had been heard from. Both sides had had an opportunity to speak. One week later, Monsanto sent the second letter. And this was even more strongly worded. And it said there will be dire consequences for Fox News if the story airs in Florida.

And this time they freaked. They were afraid of being sued, and they were also afraid of losing advertising dollars at all of the stations owned by Rupert Murdoch. And he owned more television stations than any other group in America. That's 22 television stations.

That's a lot of advertising dollars for Roundup, Aspartame, NutraSweet and other products. So we got into a battle and the first deal was the new general manager. And his name's Dave and Dave is a salesman and you know he'd pump your hand, how you doing, how you doing? Called us upstairs to his office and he said, what would you say if I killed this piece?

What if it never ran? And we said, well, you know, we wouldn't be very happy about that. And he said, well, I could kill it, you know.

And we said, yes, of course, you're the manager. You could kill it. It would never air. And he's hemming and he's hawing and he's backing.

And we couldn't figure out, what is this all about? And finally, he blurted out, look, would you tell anybody? You know, I said, I'm not going to lie for you. About a week later, he calls us back to the office and says, OK, we'd like you to make these changes.

In fact, you will make these changes. We said, well, look, let us show you the research that we have that shows that this information you want us to broadcast isn't true. To which he replies, I don't care about that. I said, pardon me? And he said, that's what I have lawyers for.

Just write it the way the lawyers want it written. I said, you know, this is news. This is important. This is stuff people need to know. And I'll never forget, he didn't pause a beat, and he said, we just paid $3 billion for these television stations.

We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is. I said, I'm not doing that.

And he said, well. He said, if you refuse to present this story the way we think it should be presented, you'll be fired for insubordination. I said, I will go to the Federal Communications Commission, and I will report that I was fired from my job by you, the licensee of these public airwaves, because I refused to lie to people on the air. And it's, thank you very much, you'll hear from us right away. Well, 24 hours came and went, and we didn't hear a thing.

And about a week later, he calls us back, and now we've changed strategies. How about if we pay you some money and you just go? And I said, how much money? Because, you know, when somebody offers to bribe you like that, I always want to know if it might be worth it. He was going to offer us the rest of our year's salary if we agreed not to talk about what Monsanto had done.

To not talk about the Fox corporate response in suppressing the story and to not talk about the story. Not talk about BGH again, anywhere. Not take the story to another news organization.

Zip up. I said, you mean if I want to go to my daughter's PTA meetings and explain what's in the school milk at the school lunch program? I can't, no.

You can never speak about this anywhere. And Steve says, okay, write it up. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Write it up.

And I didn't say anything. And Dave, he wrote it up. And he fed X to us a couple days later. And he said, are you going to sign? And we said, nah, Dave, we're not going to sign that.

And he said, we'll send it back, okay? I said, nah, Dave, we're not going to send that back. It was, okay, we can't buy you out. We can't shut you up. Let's get the story on the air.

in a way that we can all agree it will go on the air and we started rewriting and editing with their lawyers. Well during this eight-month review process I say jokingly, they did things like for example they wanted to take out the word cancer. You don't have to identify what the potential problem is but just say human health implications. Any criticism of Monsanto or its product they either removed it or minimized it and it was very very clear. I would say almost every edit they made to the piece, that was the aim.

And we'd change this and this and this, and then that wasn't good enough. Okay, now change this and this and this. Now change this and this.

Version after version after version, 83 times. 83 times is unheard of. It doesn't happen.

You shouldn't have to rewrite something 83 times. Obviously, they didn't want to put the thing on the air, and they were trying to drive us crazy and get us to quit. or wait until the first window in our contract so that they could fire us.

They, in effect, announced that they were going to fire us for no cause. Well, this was a little much. And Steve wrote a letter to the lawyer in Atlanta, whose name is Carolyn Forrest, the Fox corporate lawyer. And I said, you know, this isn't about being fired for no cause. You're firing us because we refused.

to put on the air something that we knew and demonstrated to be false and misleading. That's what this is about. And because we put up a fight, because we stood up to this big corporation, and we stood up to your editors, and we stood up to your lawyers, and we said to you, look, there ought to be a principle higher than just making money. And she wrote a letter back and said, you are right.

That's exactly what it was. You stood up to us on this story, and that's why we're letting you go. Big mistake. Big mistake.

That says retaliation. You can't retaliate against employees if they're standing up for something that they believe is illegal, that they don't want to participate in. So that gave us the whistleblower status that we needed in the state of Florida to file a whistleblower claim against our employer. Two or three years later, we got to trial. Five weeks of testimony led to a jury verdict of $425,000.

in which the jury determined that the story they pressured us to broadcast, the story we resisted telling, was in fact false, distorted, or slanted. Fox News appealed the verdict. Five major news media corporations filed briefs with the court in support of Fox's appeal. You may recall that Jane Acree, a former reporter here, sued Fox 13 in a whistleblower lawsuit. Claiming she was fired for refusing to distort her report.

The appeals court today threw that case out, saying Ms. Acri had no whistleblower claim against the station based on news distortion. Fox 13 Vice President and General Manager Bob Linger says the station has been completely vindicated by the ruling. What Fox neglected to report is this. Jane sued Fox under Florida's whistleblower statute, which protects those who try to prevent others from breaking the law. But her appeal court judges found that falsifying news isn't actually against the law.

So they denied Jane her whistleblower status, overturned the case, and withdrew her $425,000 award. Canada and Europe have upheld the ban on RBGH, yet it remains hidden in much of the milk supply of the United States. The prospect that two-thirds of the world's population will have no access to fresh drinking water by 2025 has provoked the initial confrontations in a worldwide battle for control over the planet's most basic resource.

When Bolivia sought to refinance... ...the public water service of its third largest city. The World Bank required that it be privatized, which is how the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco gained control over all of Cochabamba's water, even that which fell from the sky. This law and this contract forbade people to accumulate rainwater.

Therefore, the rainwater... The water bill gave the company a legal value......so that it could take ownership of its property......and kill itself. People had to make a decision.

Eat less, pay for the water, pay for basic services, stop sending children to school, not go to hospitals and take care of themselves at home. or, in any case, retired people, for example, who have very low incomes, should look for work on the streets. With the slogan of Water is our shit, people go out into the streets, out into the streets and protest.

The price this beleaguered country paid for World Bank loans was the privatization of the state oil industry and its airline, railroad, electric and phone companies. But the government failed to convince Bolivians that water is a commodity like any other. So, there we saw that the government defended the interests of the transnational Bechtel because people wanted water, not gas. People wanted justice and not bullets. These are the images that reflect the situation that Cochabamba experienced during the day of this Friday.

It was practically besieged. Bolivia was determined to defend the corporation's right to charge families living on $2 a day as much as one quarter of their income for water. The greater the popular resistance to the water privatization scheme, the more violent became the standoff. And that's why hundreds of wounded young people died at the age of 16 or 17, they lost their arms, their legs, they became paralytic, they were injured from the head for life, and Victor Hugo Daza died. Transnational corporations have a long and dark history of condoning tyrannical governments.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, his goal was to dismantle and destroy the Jewish community. This was an enterprise so fast that it required the resources of a computer. But in 1933, there was no computer.

What there was, was the IBM punch card system, which controlled and stored information based upon the holes that were punched in various rows and columns. Naturally there was no off-the-shelf software as there is today. Each application was custom designed and the engineer had to personally configure it.

Millions of people of all religions and nationalities and characteristics went through the concentration camp system. That's an extraordinary traffic management program that required an IBM system in every railroad direction and an IBM system... in every concentration camp.

Now this is a typical prisoner card. There are little boxes where all the information is to be punched in. We compare this information to the code sheet for concentration camps. And here you see Auschwitz is one, Buchenwald two, Dachau is three.

Now... What kinds of prisoners were they? They could be a Jehovah's Witness for two, a homosexual for three, communist for six, or a Jew would be eight.

Now what was their status? One was released, two was transferred, four was executed, five was suicide, and six. Code six, Sonderbehandlung, special treatment, meant the gas chamber or sometimes a bullet.

They would punch that number in, the material was tabulated, the machines were set. And of course, the punch cards, by the millions, had to be printed, and they were printed exclusively by IBM, and the profits were recovered just after the war. I really do believe that that particular accusation has been fairly discredited as a serious accusation.

That is, the fact that they have used equipment, you know. That is a fact, but how they got it, how much cooperation they got, and any kind of collusion trying to connect dots that are not connected, I think that's the part that is discredited. Generally, you sell computers and they're used in a variety of ways, and you always hope they're used in the more positive ways possible.

If you ever found out they are used in ways that are not positive, then you would... hope that you stop supporting that, but do you always know? Can you always tell? Can you always find out? IBM would of course say that it had no control over its German subsidiary, but here in October 9th of 1941 a letter is being written directly to Thomas J. Watson with all sorts of detail about the activities of the German subsidiary.

None of these machines were sold, they were all leased by IBM, and they had to be serviced on site once a month, even if that was at a concentration camp such as Dachau Buchenwald. This is a typical contract with IBM and the Third Reich, which was instituted in 1942. It's not with the Dutch subsidiary, it's not with the German subsidiary, it is with the IBM Corporation in New York. It should not surprise us that corporate allegiance to profits will trump their allegiance to any flag.

A recent U.S. Treasury Department report revealed that in one week alone, 57 U.S. corporations were fined for trading with official enemies of the United States, including terrorists, tyrants, and despotic regimes. You can roughly locate any community somewhere along a scale running all the way from democracy to despotism.

This man makes it his job to study these things. Well, for one thing, avoid the comfortable idea that the mere form of government can of itself safeguard a nation against despotism. For big business, despotism was often a useful tool for securing foreign markets and pursuing profits.

One of the US Marine Corps'most highly decorated generals, Smedley Darlington Butler, by his own account, helped pacify Mexico for American oil companies, Haiti and Cuba for National City Bank. Nicaragua for the Brown Brothers brokerage, the Dominican Republic for sugar interests, Honduras for U.S. fruit companies, and China for Standard Oil. General Butler services were also in demand in the United States itself in the 1930s, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to relieve the misery of the Depression through public enterprise and tougher regulations on corporate exploitation and misdeeds.

More power to you, President Roosevelt. The entire country's behind you, thrilled with hope and patriotism. But the country was not entirely behind the populist president. Large parts of the corporate elite despised what Roosevelt's New Deal stood for.

And so, in 1934, a group of conspirators sought to involve General Butler in a treasonous plan. The plan as outlined to me was to form an organization of veterans. He used it as a bluff, or as a club at least, to intimidate the government. But the corporate cabal had picked the wrong man.

Butler was fed up with being what he called a gangster for capitalism. I appeared before the Congressional Committee, the highest representation of the American people, under subpoena to tell what I knew of activities, which I believe might lead to an... ...attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship.

The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men, which would be able to take over the functions of government. A congressional committee ultimately found evidence of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt. According to Butler, the conspiracy included representatives of some of America's top corporations, including J.P.

Morgan, DuPont, and Goodyear Tire. As today's chairman of Goodyear Tire knows, for corporations to dominate government, a coup is no longer necessary. Corporations have gone global. And by going global, the governments have lost some control over corporations.

Regardless of whether the corporation can be trusted or cannot be trusted, governments today do not have over the corporations the power that they had and the leverage that they had. 50 or 60 years ago, and that's a major change. So governments have become powerless compared to where they were before. As 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere gather to draft a far-reaching trade agreement, one that would lay the groundwork to privatize every resource and service imaginable, thousands of people from hundreds of grassroots organizations join to oppose it.

Canada's top business lobbyists and its chief trade representative discount. the dissent in the streets. For them, the America's 800 million citizens speak with one voice.

Nice to see you. Well done on your strong advocacy of truth, justice, wisdom, and all those things. I was looking yesterday at the statements at the inauguration, the opening ceremony. What an extraordinary progress.

over the last 15 years when you heard such a common language. A common language. Yes, and from the most developed, the least, it was extraordinary that now that we see the benefits.

...of trade. More and more people want to buy it. Because we do realize that it helps everyone.

From the poorer to the better off. A lot of these countries are not saying we want to get off, they want to get on. Exactly! No one wants out, everyone wants in. Anyway, well done.

Thank you. Felicidades. So far so good? I'm inside and this is all outside, so that's the way it is. So what do you think when you look at all this?

Well, I mean, I think it's too bad that this has erupted. Does there need to be some measure of accountability? Yes. And I think the business community recognizes that.

But that accountability is in the marketplace. It's with their shareholders. It's with the public perception and the public image that they are projecting. That's, if companies don't do what they should be doing, they're going to be punished in the marketplace, and that's not what any company wants. There's a new market.

These guys and gals aren't out there because government's putting a gun to their head, or because they've suddenly read a book about transcendental meditation and global morality. My inner voice says honor my inner child. Mine says love everyone. My inner voice says I like a Wendy's bacon mushroom milk. They're there because they understand the market requires them to be there, that there's competitive advantage to be there.

I ask myself oftentimes, why? Why so many companies subscribe to corporate social responsibility? I'm not sure it's because they necessarily want to be responsible in an ultimate way, but because they want to be identified and seen to be responsible.

But who am I to... judge. Who am I to judge?

It's better they belong than not belong. It's better that they make some public profession than the opposite. Social responsibility isn't a deep shift because it's a voluntary tactic a tactic a reaction to a certain market at this point and as the corporation reads the market differently it can go back one day you see Bambi next day you see Godzilla how do you define socially responsible what business is it of the corporation to decide what so socially respond That isn't their expertise. That isn't what their stockholders asked them to do. So I think they're going out of their range, and it certainly is not democratic.

I don't really care what the chairman of General Motors thinks is an appropriate level of emissions to come out the tailpipe of General Motors'automobiles. He may have a lot of scientists, he may be a very good person, but I didn't elect him to anything. He doesn't have any experience.

have any power to speak for me. These are decisions that must be made by government and not by corporations. If you take this to its logical conclusion, one would have an image that we are, in fact, at this, at this, the end of the world is. is nigh and we are all completely brainwashed and there's no space left.

And I don't believe we're there yet. And I think it's really important that we don't overstate the case and that we admit that there are cracks and fissures in all of these corporate structures and sometimes when a corporation is concentrating on one particular project they look the other way and all kinds of interesting things happen in the corner. It is the case in every period of history where injustice, based on falsehoods, based on taking away the right and freedoms of people to live and survive with dignity, that eventually, when you call a bluff, the tables turn.

Ultimately, capital puts its foot down somewhere. And anywhere it puts its foot down, it can be held accountable. Originally, Walmart and Kathie Lee Gifford had said, why should we believe you that children work in this factory?

What we didn't tell them was that Wendy Dias, in the center of the picture, was on a plane to the United States. This is Wendy Dias. She comes to the United States. She's unstoppable. Congress heard testimony today from children who testified they were exploited by sweatshops overseas.

Kathy Lee Gifford apologized to Wendy Diaz. It was the most amazing thing I'd seen. This powerful celebrity leans over and says, Wendy, please believe me.

I didn't know these conditions existed. And now that I do, I'm going to work with you, I'm going to work with these other people, and it'll never happen again. And that night, we signed an agreement with Kathie Lee Gifford. I thought it would be a relatively easy process, and it isn't. Every question I have, there seem to be five questions that come back at me.

As far as Walmart goes and Kathie Lee, pretty much everything returned to sweatshop conditions. But because this was fought out on television for weeks, this incident with Kathie Lee Gifford actually took the sweatshop issue to every single part of the country. And so, frankly, after that, there's hardly a single person in this country who doesn't know about child labor or sweatshops or starvation wages. The curse for me has been...

The fact that in making these, you know, documentary films, I've seen that they actually can impact change. So I'm just compelled to, you know, keep making them. Yep, that's me, doing what I do. All year long, I give big companies a hard time. But at Christmas time, I like to set aside my differences and reach out to big business.

Like cigarette companies. I went to Littleton, Colorado, where the Columbine shooting took place. And I didn't know this, but when I arrived, I learned what the primary job is of the parents of the kids who go to Columbine High School. The number one job in Littleton. Littleton, Colorado.

They work for Lockheed Martin, building weapons of mass destruction. But they don't see the connect between what they do for a living and what their kids do at school or did at school. And so I'm kind of, you know, up on my, you know, high horse, you know, thinking about this. And I thought, you know, I said to my wife, you know, we both are, you know, sons and daughters of auto workers in Flint, Michigan.

There isn't a single one of us back in Flint. any of us, including us, whoever stopped to think, this thing we do for a living, the building of automobiles, is probably the single biggest reason why the polar ice caps are going to melt. and end civilization as we know it. There's no connect between I'm just an assembler on an assembly line building a car, which is good for people and society. It moves them around.

But never stop to think about the larger picture and the larger responsibility of what we're doing. Ultimately, we have to, as individuals, accept responsibility for our collective action and the larger harm that it causes in our world. world. Over the past decade, we have been gaining ground. And when I say we, I mean ordinary people committed to the welfare of all of humanity, all people irrespective of gender and class and race and religion, all species on the planet.

We managed to take the biggest government and one of the largest chemical companies to court on the case of Neem and win a case against them. W.R. Grace and the U.S. government's patent on Neem was revoked by a case we brought along with the Greens of Europe in Parliament and the International Organic Agriculture Movement. We won because we worked together. We have overturned nearly 99% of the Basmati patent of RiceTech.

Again, because we worked as a worldwide coalition. Old women in Texas, scientists in India, activists sitting in Vancouver, a little Basmati action group. We stopped the third world being viewed as the pirate, and we showed the corporations were the pirate. Look how little it took for Gandhi to work against the SALT laws of the British, where the British decided the way they would make their armies and police forces bigger is just tax the SALT. And all that Gandhi did was walk to the beach, pick up...

the salt and say nature gives it for free, we need it, we've always made it, we will violate your laws, we will continue to make salt. We've had a similar commitment for the last decade in India that any law that makes it illegal to save seed is a law not worth following. We will violate it because saving seed is a duty to the earth and to future generations.

We thought it would really be symbolic. It is more than symbolic. It is becoming a survival option. Farmers who grow their own seeds, save their own seeds, don't buy pesticides have threefold more incomes.

and farmers who are locked into the chemical treadmill, depending on Monsanto and Cargill. We have managed to create alternatives that work for people. There are many tools for bringing back community, but the important is not the tools. I mean there's litigation, there's legislation, there's direct action, there's education, boycotts, social investment, there's many many ways to to address issues of corporate power. But in the final analysis what's really important is the vision.

You have to have a better story. Do I know you well enough to call you fellow plunderers? There is not an industrial company on earth, not an institution of any kind, not mine, not yours, not anyone's, that is sustainable. I stand convicted by me, myself alone, not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the earth, but not by our civilization's definition. By our civilization's definition, I'm a captain of industry, and I, as many, a kind of modern-day hero, but really.

Really, the first industrial revolution is flawed, it is not working, it is unsustainable, it is the mistake. And we must move on to another. and better industrial revolution and get it right this time. When I think of what could be, I visualize an organization of people committed to a purpose. And the purpose is doing no harm.

I see a company that has severed the umbilical cord to earth for its raw materials, taking raw materials that have already been extracted and using them. over and over again, driving that process with renewable energy. It is our plan, it remains our plan, to climb Mount Sustainability, that mountain that's higher than Everest, infinitely higher than Everest, far more difficult to scale, that point at the top symbolizing zero footprint. So we've got to undo a lot of things in order to be smart enough to do this really dangerous and risky and difficult work, you know, the best way that we possibly can.

And that means people coming together and learning a whole lot of stuff. that we just don't know that has been driven out of the culture driven out of the society driven out of our minds that to me is the most exciting thing that is happening it's happening all over the world now in certain momento de la lucha no me el momento mas culminante The army was quartered, the police also did not leave their barracks, the congressmen disappeared, the governor hid, the governor denounced, there was no legal authority, the only legitimate authority was the people, who were in a cabildo, who were in the square and who made decisions in large assemblies, and in the end they decided on the law. And I think that the people, the young and the old, for a long time, we were able to savor, we were able to get rid of that democracy.

And so we have achieved it, comrades! We have inherited a company, like any other public company, with technical problems, financial problems, legal problems and administrative problems. We are facing them. Because if we show that it is the simple and hardworking people who can solve their problems, We can be at the door of asking that everything that was privatized, everything that was sold, everything that is in the hands of corporations, return to the hands of the population. I learned a very important lesson there, that one cannot distrust the capacity of the people.

A slogan that I had always repeated in the marches, that the people united will never be defeated. And seeing that for me was very great. Sometimes it surprises me how effective you can actually be. After we beat the gap, I walk past these gap stores and I look at them and I think, my God, there's like 2,000 in your stores across the country. Look at all that concrete, look at the glass, look at all the staff people, look at all the clothing, look at that power.

You can still reach these companies. You can still have an effect. I think we have won. We are winning small battles in the world.

But I think people are losing the war. I see the present and the future for our children very dark. But I trust in the ability to reflect, in the ability to be indignant, and in the ability to rebel people.

We can change the government. That's the only way we're going to redesign, rethink, reconstitute. ...to what capital and property can do.

15 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 you know i've often thought it's very ironic that i'm able to do all this and yet what am i on i'm on networks i'm distributed by studios that are owned by large corporate entities. Now, why would they put me out there when I am opposed to everything that they stand for? And I spend my time on their dime opposing what they believe in. Okay. Well, it's because they don't believe in anything.

They put me on there because they know that there's millions of people that want to see my film or watch the TV show. And so they're going to make money. And I've been able to get my stuff out there because I'm driving my truck through this incredible flaw.

capitalism, the greed flaw, the thing that says the rich man will sell you the rope to hang himself with if he thinks he can make a buck off it. Well, I'm the rope. I hope.

I'm part of the rope. And they also believe that when people watch my stuff or maybe watch this film or whatever, they think that, you know, well, you know what, they'll watch this and they won't do anything. You know, because we've done such a good job of numbing their minds and dumbing them down, you know, they'll never affect anything.

People aren't going to leave the couch and go and do something political. They're convinced of that. I'm convinced of the opposite. I'm convinced that a few people are going to leave this movie theater or get up off the couch and go and do something, anything, to get this world back in our hands.