I posted this under another subject but I think this would be a better place for more people to see this.If you like or hate Michael Moore films and if you want to see a different perspective about unregulated corporation capitalism watch the documentatry called The Corporation. Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore are in the movie but so are Milton Friedman and CEOs of big corporations. It is obviously another 'point of view' documentary against big corporations which IMHO is much more elegant than Michael Moore's latest Fahrenheit 9/11 but still somewhat entertaining. It gives a pretty good idea about how unregulated corporation capitalism can go wrong.I'll also try to summarize the film maker's basic point below. The corporation by legal definition is a 'person' who can only care about the benefit of its stock holders and nothing else. Executives of a corporation are legally bound to make decisions thinking only about the EV of their corporation (like a poker player:) and should not care (legally) if he/she is doing a moral thing or he/she is harming others or the environment).So the executives of a corporation cannot say things like "Oh we are exploiting the hell out of poor starving sweat shop child workers in Honduras let's increase their wages" or "we are f...ing the environment up with our factory in Nigeria. Although there are no regulations about environment in Nigeria I am going to invest $500M for an environmentally friendly cleaning system this will be better for the earth and public good". The movie is full of examples of such wrong doings of the corporations.I don't know if you've seen the movie "Fight Club". In one scene main character explains his job to someone else like this."I'm a recall coordinator. My job was to apply the formula. It's simple arithmetic. It's a story problem. A new car built by my company leaves Boston traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: Do we initiate a recall? You take the number of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement ©. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." (This is incidentally the basic EV calculation we do for every bet we make at the poker table:)The corporations are legally bound to be like this. It is not about if the people who are managing the corporations are "good or bad" or "moral or immoral". The selfishness and "do anything for profit" idea is right there in the definition of this mechanism.What the makers of the movie suggest is that the corporations are these powerful (legal) persons who have no moral values and incapable (by definition in law) of thinking about others and the earth. So they say that, the popular idea of deregulating the corporations more will be +EV for the corporations and owners of the corporations and it will be a huge -EV value for the common man and our children.You can get it from Netflix or Amazon. Also check out www.thecorporation.comlink to the trailer: http://movies.yahoo....&id=1808565671
documentary movie suggestion= the corporation
Started by cemvardar, May 18 2005 10:19 PM
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