Our daily bread
do you know where your food comes from
Food Inc.
Fast food nation
Earthlings
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is a
2005 documentary film by director Robert Greenwald. The film presents
an unfavorable picture of Wal-Mart's business practices through
interviews with former employees, small business owners, and footage of
Wal-Mart executives. The film intersperses statistics between the
interviews to provide large-scale examinations beyond personal opinions.
Official Website: Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price: http://www.walmartmovie.com/
While the film begins with footage of Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott praising the corporation at a large employee convention, the film spends a majority of its running time on personal interviews. A variety of criticisms of the corporation emerge from these interviews, demonstrating Wal-Mart's anti-union practices, detrimental impacts on small businesses, insufficient environmental protection policies, and poor record on workers' rights in the United States and internationally. The film ends with interviews of community leaders that have prevented Wal-Mart stores from being built in their communities and an exhortation for others to do the same.
Official Website: Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price: http://www.walmartmovie.com/
While the film begins with footage of Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott praising the corporation at a large employee convention, the film spends a majority of its running time on personal interviews. A variety of criticisms of the corporation emerge from these interviews, demonstrating Wal-Mart's anti-union practices, detrimental impacts on small businesses, insufficient environmental protection policies, and poor record on workers' rights in the United States and internationally. The film ends with interviews of community leaders that have prevented Wal-Mart stores from being built in their communities and an exhortation for others to do the same.
Truth About Supermarkets
Factory cities
Factory City: EUPA
They live there. They eat there. Their
children attend school there. But most of all, they work there. They are
the 17,000 employees of EUPA, a "Factory City" in the southeast corner
of China.
EUPA's massive workforce pumps out 15 million irons per year, millions of sandwich grills, microwaves, coffee makers and blenders. Now they are about to take the manufacturing world by storm with their introduction of solar powered products.
From the 2500 microwaves that come off the line each day to the four tons of rice served daily in the five cafeterias, we showcase the process and the personalities that keep this massive machine well-oiled.
The show will focus not only on how the goods are made, but how the Factory City operates.
It's a novel concept for the rest of the world. But it's become a way of life in China, where a new industrial revolution is unfolding on a scale the world has never seen.
Try Google Maps & take a look yourself, 24.495000, 117.939000
EUPA's massive workforce pumps out 15 million irons per year, millions of sandwich grills, microwaves, coffee makers and blenders. Now they are about to take the manufacturing world by storm with their introduction of solar powered products.
From the 2500 microwaves that come off the line each day to the four tons of rice served daily in the five cafeterias, we showcase the process and the personalities that keep this massive machine well-oiled.
The show will focus not only on how the goods are made, but how the Factory City operates.
It's a novel concept for the rest of the world. But it's become a way of life in China, where a new industrial revolution is unfolding on a scale the world has never seen.
Try Google Maps & take a look yourself, 24.495000, 117.939000
Directed by Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar
The Corporation is like an amoeba. It is
an entity that sucks and eats whatever is on its path; pollutes and
excretes whatever it cannot digest. It begins as an organism;
interactive organisations that structure and animates its form that must
continually grow so as to reproduce parts of itself and dominate the
environment of its birth. The Corporation is alive but it is not merely
confined to an organism; it mutates into a subject.
The Corporation is based on Joel Bakan’s
book titled The Corporation: The pathological pursuit of profit and
power. The documentary questions the confounding logic that claims a
corporation, legally defined in the 14th Amendment, as a subject. A
subject is distinct from the legal definition of a ‘natural person but
nonetheless hold similar rights. These legal privileges gives the
company limited liability, which means that stockholders hold no
accountability for the corporation’s financial loses; the subject is
allowed to sue and in return be sued; it is allowed to own property,
sign binding contracts, have constitutional rights and even more
disturbing, participate in social life.
What does it mean to be a subject, or in
the terms of U.S. law, a corporate personhood? This question is
pervasive in the documentary, which Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott
(dirs.) relentlessly use as a trope to attack the smugness of corporate
security. The voice-of-god enunciated by Mikela J. Mikael introduces the
documentary with a cyborgian indifference. The invisible narrator that
exposes the power structures of corporations presents a posthuman
condition. The modernist, whole, and rational person is no longer
visible but fragmented and prosthetically linked to an efficient system.
The difference in this posthuman model is that the prosthetic is not
composed of mechanical parts but rather constituted by natural persons.
Machinic organisations of the corporate
subject are thus comparable to The Matrix trilogy (Wachowski Brothers:
1999, 2001, 2003) whereby the consumers of everyday life are illusionary
creations of an apathetic and ruthless alien composite. The meaning of
everyday life is an economical, semiotic formation that is provided by
thousands of brands and corporate images. The consumer ingestion of
logos and digitally remastered advertisements provide the necessary
requirements for corporate survival. We are but sacrificial lambs in a
capitalistic pen waiting to be honoured to a God called the corporation,
which dictates only one law: make profit.
The immortality of the corporation is
maintained by the ignorance of its consumers. But gods are frequently
annihilated in our cultures and corporations are no exception. The
documentary interpellates a resistive audience and offers
counter-strategies against capitalistic systems that exploit Third World
workers. The political commitment to grassroot coalitions such as
Cochabambaian’s war on water privatisation in Bolivia is a prime example
of effective opposition.
While The Corporation maintains a
critical assault on privatisation and its economic rationality,
government ownership of businesses is projected as a more agreeable and
less damaging option. Both the documentary and Bakan’s book expresses
the need for governments to enhance and revitalise the obligation to
democracy, although this is less explicit in the film. Bakan states in
an interview: “What I suggest is that government, when it is
democratically-run and democratically accountable and I mean democratic
in a much deeper and broader way than we experience in our current
so-called democracy has a substantial role to play in constraining and
channeling the actions of the entity that it creates, namely the
corporation” (UrbanVancouver.com). Of course, this is the hope and
idealism of democracy, which supports populist and socialist concerns
while undermining capitalist fundamentalism. However, as Lee Kuan Yew,
Minister Mentor of Singapore, once bluntly said, a democracy is always a
false democracy. How does the unraveling of government inequities and
corruption facilitate the Marxist goal of fair, capital distribution and
elevation of poverty? What are the characteristics of a
pseudo-democratic nation state? These questions remain to be analysed,
should be analysed, in another documentary called The Government. I am,
however, unsure if the film could be contained in less than 180 minutes.
An old English proverb reminds us that
corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be damned.
It is an amoeba that adapts and transforms into a most undesirable,
monstrous entity called a corporate subject or personhood. This
documentary amply justifies the current mutation and cannibal practices
of powerful corporate houses. It has also suggested that environmentally
sustainable projects by British Petroleum and Shell are rerouting
resources to fuel a less polluting economy. But when profits are down
and production prices soar, will these corporations still save the
orang-utans and penguins of the Antarctica? Bakan says no. Achbar and
Abbott says no. I say no. But you have to decide for yourself.
I Am Fishhead - Are Corporate Leaders Psychopaths?
http://www.fisheadmovie.com/
I Am Fishead: Are Corporate Leaders Psychopaths?It is a well-known fact that our society is structured like a pyramid. The very few people at the top create conditions for the majority below. Who are these people? Can we blame them for the problems our society faces today? Guided by the saying "A fish rots from the head" we set out to follow that fishy odor. What we found out is that people at the top are more likely to be psychopaths than the rest of us.
Who, or what, is a psychopath? Unlike Hollywood's stereotypical image, they are not always blood-thirsty monsters from slasher movies. Actually, that nice lady who chatted you up on the subway this morning could be one. So could your elementary school teacher, your grinning boss, or even your loving boyfriend.
The medical definition is simple: A psychopath is a person who lacks empathy and conscience, the quality which guides us when we choose between good and evil, moral or not. Most of us are conditioned to do good things. Psychopaths are not. Their impact on society is staggering, yet altogether psychopaths barely make up one percent of the population.
Through interviews with renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo, leading expert on psychopathy Professor Robert Hare, former President of Czech Republic and playwright Vaclav Havel, authors Gary Greenberg and Christopher Lane, professor Nicholas Christakis, among numerous other thinkers, we have delved into the world of psychopaths and heroes and revealed shocking implications for us and our society.
The Tax Free Tour
Where do multinationals pay taxes and how
much? Gaining insight from international tax experts, Backlight
director Marije Meerman (the maker of Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street and Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box), takes a look at tax havens, the people who live there and the routes along which tax is avoided globally.
Those routes go by resounding names like
‘Cayman Special’, ‘Double Irish’, and ‘Dutch Sandwich’. A financial
world operates in the shadows surrounded by a high level of secrecy. A
place where sizable capital streams travel the world at the speed of
light and avoid paying tax.
The Tax Free Tour is an economic
thriller mapping the systemic risk for governments and citizens alike.
Is this the price we have to pay for globalized capitalism?
At the same time, the free online game “Taxodus”
by Femke Herregraven is launched. In the game, the player can select
the profile of a multinational and look for the global route to pay as
little tax as possible.
MEAT THE TRUTH
How to stop global warming? This
extraordinary movie made by the Nicolaas G. Pierson Foundation from
Holland shows us the whole and bitter truth about the influence of the
meat industry on our climate and on the devastation of our environment,
water and air.
We feed the world
The Coca-Cola Case
This feature length documentary present a
searing indictment of the Coca-Cola empire and its alleged kidnapping,
torture and murder of union leaders trying to improve working conditions
in Colombia, Guatemala and Turkey.
The filmmakers follow labour rights
lawyers Daniel Kovalik and Terry Collingsworth and an activist for the
Stop Killer-Coke! campaign, Ray Rogers, as they attempt to hold the
giant U.S. multinational beverage company accountable in this legal and
human rights battle. Listed below are union leaders at Coca-Cola’s
Colombian bottling plants who have been murdered. Hundreds of other Coke
workers have been tortured, kidnapped and/or illegally detained by
violent paramilitaries, often working closely with plant managements.
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