The Corporation Documentary Quotes

It was a well-known problem in corporate America—performance targets were too often tied to short-term results.

James O. Incandenza - A Filmography The following listing is as complete as we can make it. Because the twelve years of Incadenza'a directorial activity also coincided with large shifts in film venue - from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace TelEntertainment laser dissemination and reviewable storage disk laser cartridges - and because Incadenza's output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, nondramatic ('anti-confluential') noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial works, this filmmaker's career presents substantive archival challenges. These challenges are also compounded by the fact that, first, for conceptual reasons, Incadenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time, secondly, that his output increased steadily until during the last years of his life Incadenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, that his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his high-conceptual projects' agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy.

LIVE FROM THE PASTA FARMS, THIS HAS BEEN AL DENTE: The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired a documentary on its new show Panorama about Spaghetti growers in Switzerland-- on April 1, 1957. The joke broadcast showed Swiss spaghetti farmers picking fresh spaghetti from 'spaghetti trees' and preparing the spaghetti for market. It also mentioned that the pasta farmers had a bumper crop partly because of the 'virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.' Soon after the broadcast, the BBC received phone calls from viewers eager to know if spaghetti really grew on trees and how they might grow a spaghetti tree of their own. To the last question, the BBC reportedly replied that they should 'place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.

The popular 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates how AI’s personalization will cause you to be unconsciously manipulated by AI and motivated by profit from advertising. The Social Dilemma star Tristan Harris says: “You didn’t know that your click caused a supercomputer to be pointed at your brain. Your click activated billions of dollars of computing power that has learned much from its experience of tricking two billion human animals to click again.” And this addiction results in a vicious cycle for you, but a virtuous cycle for the big Internet companies that use this mechanism as a money-printing machine. The Social Dilemma further argues that this may narrow your viewpoints, polarize society, distort truth, and negatively affect your happiness, mood, and mental health. To put it in technical terms, the core of the issue is the simplicity of the objective function, and the danger from single-mindedly optimizing a single objective function, which can lead to harmful externalities. Today’s AI usually optimizes this singular goal—most commonly to make money (more clicks, ads, revenues). And AI has a maniacal focus on that one corporate goal, without regard for users’ well-being.

But there is also (though much of this is kept from us, to keep us intimidated and without hope) the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against the endless wars (I think of the Russian women in the nineties, demanding their country end its military intervention in Chechnya, as did Americans during the Vietnam war); the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination—we see, for instance, the new international movement against female genital mutilation, and the militancy of welfare mothers against punitive laws. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color. In the United States, we see the educational system, a burgeoning new literature, alternative radio stations, a wealth of documentary films outside the mainstream, even Hollywood itself and sometimes television—compelled to recognize the growing multiracial character of the nation. Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future.

If that was a real question, there wasn’t time for me to answer because a very smartly dressed woman flared over and began talking to him, standing close with her fists on the hips of her slim-cut skirt, blocking him from view. This was Lillian Hellman, I would soon learn. She and Ernest and the others in the room made up the newly formed Contemporary Historians, a corporation bent on funding a documentary film that would help Spain acquire ambulances and other kinds of support. The filmmaker was Dutch, apparently, and already over in Spain with his Norwegian cameraman. Other members of the Historians were John Dos Passos, Archie MacLeish, and Evan Shipman, all writers big enough to cast shadows. The room seemed full of them as I sat in my blue chair, wondering how I might break in.

To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and punishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, neces-sary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today? The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations--and this is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well--is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.

Considering the long-shot nature of its petition against Fahrenheit 9/11, it is worthwhile to consider whether Citizens United was mainly interested in hectoring the marketing strategy for that film, or whether it had ulterior motives in mind. One possibility is that Citizens United had recognized an opportunity to test whether the FEC would grant a “media exception” from the electioneering rules to companies producing documentary films. The BCRA allowed such exemptions for material that appeared “in a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of a broadcast, cable, or satellite television or radio station.” Though it was banned from traditional “electioneering” due to its corporate structure, Citizens United might have believed in 2004 that the FEC would distinguish between documentary films and campaign advertising, allowing corporate producers of the former to air ads with candidate images. Such a decision would have allowed it to create and market similar movies advocating conservative ideas.

He noted more than once that had Citizens United released the same material in a different format—on the Internet or in a book, for instance—there would be no constitutional issue, as Congress had only banned corporate electioneering for broadcast media. Justice Scalia appeared to agree, and offered some thoughts that seemed to aid Olson’s position: It may well be that the kind of speech that is reflected in a serious 90-minute documentary is entitled to greater constitutional protection. And it may well be that the kind of speech that is not only offered but invited by the listener is entitled to heightened First Amendment scrutiny, which is what this is since you have pay for view. Scalia’s was an important distinction, if one accepted the premise that Congress had sought to ban electioneering communications with the understanding that the voting public could find corporate-funded advertising persuasive, and also that people would have little choice with regard to the advertisements that they saw during a given telecast. Because people were in effect paying to watch Hillary: The Movie at their leisure (via television on-demand), Scalia was suggesting that perhaps it was difficult to argue that they were being forcibly influenced.

He is come with Cindy. Somehow, he has convinced her he is a straight so he can punch on your head and make overpasses at me.” Roshan shivers and sticks out his tongue in feigned disgust. Wynn picks up his donut and looks it over before stealing another bite. “It’s punch down, babe. He’s saying he’s going to punch down on me. Implying that his corporeal existence is above mine. Which would be funny if it didn’t feel true.” Wynn sinks his teeth into the donut, sighing heavily, and Roshan tries to smile encouragingly from his thrift store a seaboard away.

we need simply look at how capitalism changed after the idea of shareholder supremacy took over—which only happened in the final decades of the twentieth century. Prior to the introduction of the shareholder primacy theory, the way business operated in the United States looked quite different. “By the middle of the 20th century,” said Cornell corporate law professor Lynn Stout in the documentary series Explained, “the American public corporation was proving itself one of the most effective and powerful and beneficial organizations in the world.” Companies of that era allowed for average Americans, not just the wealthiest, to share in the investment opportunities and enjoy good returns. Most important, “executives and directors viewed themselves as stewards or trustees of great public institutions that were supposed to serve not just the shareholders, but also bondholders, suppliers, employees and the community.” It was only after Friedman’s 1970 article that executives and directors started to see themselves as responsible to their “owners,” the shareholders, and not stewards of something bigger. The more that idea took hold in the 1980s and ’90s, the more incentive structures inside public companies and banks themselves became excessively focused on shorter-and-shorter-term gains to the benefit of fewer and fewer people. It’s during this time that the annual round of mass layoffs to meet arbitrary projections became an accepted and common strategy for the first time. Prior to the 1980s, such a practice simply didn’t exist. It was common for people to work a practical lifetime for one company. The company took care of them and they took care of the company. Trust, pride and loyalty flowed in both directions. And at the end of their careers these long-time employees would get their proverbial gold watch. I don’t think getting a gold watch is even a thing anymore. These days, we either leave or are asked to leave long before we would ever earn one.

In the 1980s, Australia had a few home-grown immunisation sceptics, although the great majority of parents immunised their children. In 1996, a film-maker made a supposedly scientific documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She interviewed people who were both pro- and anti-immunisation in equal numbers, ‘for balance’. She was pregnant with her first child, and concluded the documentary by saying that she had not yet decided whether or not to get her baby immunised. I was one of the doctors interviewed. When the documentary was shown in Australia it generated considerable debate and controversy. Two weeks later I was in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and gave a presentation to the hospital about immunisation. A number of the audience told me they recognised me from the documentary, which had been shown that week on PNG television. They were puzzled as to why anyone would make such a film. Their wards were filled with children with severe tuberculosis, newborns dying from tetanus, and babies with severe rotavirus gastroenteritis, all preventable by immunisation. On their streets were people crippled forever by poliomyelitis. But Papua New Guinea did not have the money or the public health infrastructure to deliver vaccines effectively to its population. Papua New Guineans knew vaccines could prevent the devastating diseases they saw every day, and could not understand why anyone in Australia would dream of not immunising their child. Immunisation scepticism is very much a first-world problem.

Larry Elford worked inside Canadian investment dealers for two decades. He saw how high status persons and corporate entities were not subject to the same application of rules or laws as others. Higher status entities were able to “police themselves” or retain their own regulators to “police” their business activities. He learned how status plus this ability to “self regulate”, allowed the growth of corrupt practices, without having to worry that a policeman would come to the office door. Self-regulation also granted the privilege of being able to quietly purchase “exemption” from laws, to further enable corrupt practices without public knowledge or consequences. Not willing to be an accomplice to harming the public, he spoke out as instructed by codes of conduct and ethics. Those calls for ethics were not welcomed and he felt forced to leave the industry. He released a documentary film in 2009, titled “Breach of Trust, the Unique Violence of White Collar Crime”, after becoming aware of the suicide of an investment industry whistleblower. This person was bullied to his death by industry lawyers and those who used the courts as a mechanism to “hush” persons who spoke about abusive practices. He gradually learned more about unwritten “codes of silence”, which usually received priority over written codes of ethics. The truth teller is most often drummed out of the business, rather than being thanked for the honesty and protection of the firm’s reputation. The “Unique Violence” he learned about white collar crime is that there is little