Sunday, December 09, 2007
A Must-watch
This film just struck me. It's been 2 days and I've still got my thoughts leading towards the issues addressed in this particular film. It's a superb film, a documentary, a real-life account of how the vast amount of corporations that form part of our society since the dawn of the industrial revolution; are so destructive, disastrous and manipulating our very essence of life. The film has formed a tag cloud across my mind. Words like business, corporations, economy, 'legal' persons, limited liability, outsourcing, environment, fraud, stock market; all these words seem too familiar, yet they are all issues that affect our lives.
Some excerpts from the film worth noting:
Michael Moore: I believe the mistake that a lot of people make when they think about corporations, is they think you know, corporations are like us. 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.
Robert Monks: To whom do these companies owe loyalty? What does loyalty mean? Well, it turns out that that was a rather naïve concept anyways 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 that 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'.
Michael Walker: Let's look at from the point of view of the people of 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 labour. And, in effect, what they're saying to the world is they have this big flag that says, 'Come over and hire us. We will work for $0.10 an hour. Because $0.10 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.
Charles Kernaghan: Nike assigns a timeframe to each operation. They don't talk about minutes. They break the timeframe into ten thousandths of a second. You get to the bottom of all 22 operations; they give the workers 6.6 minutes to make the shirt. It's $0.70 an hour in the Dominican Republic. 6.6 minutes equals $0.08. 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.
Michael Moore: The fact that most of these companies 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 are people of other colours, they are the majority. Women are the majority, the poor, and working poor make up the majority of this planet. So the decisions they make come from not the reality that exists throughout the world.
Oscar Olivera: Small battles are being won around the world, but, I think people are losing. I do see the present and the future of our children as very dark. But I trust the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion.
More commentaries can be found at IMDb. Okay, I'm going to watch this film again during my Christmas holiday.
I am so craving coffee now!~ *sipping my hot Nescafe Vanilla Latte*
This film just struck me. It's been 2 days and I've still got my thoughts leading towards the issues addressed in this particular film. It's a superb film, a documentary, a real-life account of how the vast amount of corporations that form part of our society since the dawn of the industrial revolution; are so destructive, disastrous and manipulating our very essence of life. The film has formed a tag cloud across my mind. Words like business, corporations, economy, 'legal' persons, limited liability, outsourcing, environment, fraud, stock market; all these words seem too familiar, yet they are all issues that affect our lives.
Some excerpts from the film worth noting:
Michael Moore: I believe the mistake that a lot of people make when they think about corporations, is they think you know, corporations are like us. 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.
Robert Monks: To whom do these companies owe loyalty? What does loyalty mean? Well, it turns out that that was a rather naïve concept anyways 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 that 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'.
Michael Walker: Let's look at from the point of view of the people of 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 labour. And, in effect, what they're saying to the world is they have this big flag that says, 'Come over and hire us. We will work for $0.10 an hour. Because $0.10 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.
Charles Kernaghan: Nike assigns a timeframe to each operation. They don't talk about minutes. They break the timeframe into ten thousandths of a second. You get to the bottom of all 22 operations; they give the workers 6.6 minutes to make the shirt. It's $0.70 an hour in the Dominican Republic. 6.6 minutes equals $0.08. 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.
Michael Moore: The fact that most of these companies 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 are people of other colours, they are the majority. Women are the majority, the poor, and working poor make up the majority of this planet. So the decisions they make come from not the reality that exists throughout the world.
Oscar Olivera: Small battles are being won around the world, but, I think people are losing. I do see the present and the future of our children as very dark. But I trust the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion.
More commentaries can be found at IMDb. Okay, I'm going to watch this film again during my Christmas holiday.
I am so craving coffee now!~ *sipping my hot Nescafe Vanilla Latte*
