Common Ground: A Film Becomes a Movement

July 2004 | Dock of the Bay

A Film Becomes a Movement

The June 4th American premiere of The Corporation, the award-winning documentary by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan (see CG’s June cover story on our website) received a 10-minute standing ovation from a sold-out crowd at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre. The film charts the bizarre legal history that granted corporations the same First Amendment rights as individuals. Despite the film’s overt anti-globalization stance, even reviewers at the Wall Street Journal and The Economist have given it kudos. Its success is yet another indication of a growing movement opposing the profit-first depredations conducted under the cover of “Corporate Personhood.”

Business Week recently announced that “over 81% of Americans feel corporations have too much power over too many aspects of our lives.” On May 3, Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission voted 11 to 1 to approve a resolution against Corporate Personhood (Berkeley’s City Council is still considering whether to adopt the measure). On May 19, the Arcata City Council approved a resolution declaring Corporate Personhood illegitimate and undemocratic.

“We hope that our success in passing a resolution will encourage other communities to ... limit excesses in corporate power,” said Councilmember Dave Meserve.

Women’s League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) activist Jan Edwards told the Berkeley City Council: “Scratch the surface of almost any issue like the environment, health, education, or campaign finance, and you discover [the impact of] corporate personhood.” Mark Achbar, director of The Corporation, also addressed council members: “If a corporation is a person, what kind of person is it? It fits the clinical diagnosis of a psychopath, singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context.”

Fifty US cities are preparing to adopt resolutions against Corporate Personhood. Are such measures anti-business? Ted Nace, author of Gangs of America: the Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy and founder of Berkeley’s Peach Pit Press, says no. “Placing limits on the political power of mega-corporations,” he says “aids independent businesses and smaller chains.”

For a complete list of theaters and local show times for The Corporation visit: www.thecorporation.tv/usa.

The filmmakers recently launched a new interactive website called i-Corp (www.thecorporation.com/usa). Check out the first webisode at www.docback.org

For more about the anti-Corporate Personhood campaigns, visit: www.wilpf.org; www.reclaimdemocracy.org; www.Personsinc.org

— Gar Smith

Take a Message to Kerry

UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics, may well be the best-known linguist after Noam Chomsky. Lakoff spoke recently at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church on a subject that is fast making him a darling among progressives: how to reclaim political discourse in the public arena from the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

His thesis is simple: over the last three decades, a highly organized and well-funded conservative movement has called the shots by re-casting fundamental American values (freedom, patriotism, compassion) from a radically right-wing perspective. Through seductive rhetoric and misleading language, conservatives are dominating political debate, even though a majority of Americans reject much of their worldview. Conservative rhetoric uses the persona of the stern parent: wealth and hard work are virtuous; poverty results from laziness and character flaws (hence conservative disdain for social programs and welfare). As part of their trope, conservatives cast themselves as hardliners and progressives as permissive and self-indulgent (latté liberals soft on defense and crime).

It is essential, Lakoff argues, that progressives regain the high moral and semantic ground by crafting a message that reaches the majority of Americans across party lines. (Lakoff is currently advising Senator John Kerry in his November election bid.

“We have a president,” he told his Berkeley audience, “who has betrayed our trust and weakened this country, our alliances, economy, and environmental protection. We need to reframe the issues from our moral point of view.”

Bush’s policies, Lakoff argues, are framed in doublespeak: They mean the opposite of what they say. The administration and its spokespersons “have camouflaged their cruelty with a false model and false descriptions...so much so, it is Orwellian. When they use phrases like the ‘Healthy Forest Act,’ and ‘The Clear Skies Act,’ a linguist notices something: Politicians only use these techniques when they are weak...when the public is not buying where they are at.”

One antidote for progressives is to turn conservative rhetoric on its head and call the Bush initiatives by their rightful names: “The Dirty Skies Act,” “The Logged Forest Act,” and “Billionaires Tax Cut.”

Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute (with which he is affiliated) have positive prescriptions as well.

To learn more, visit: www.rockridgeinstitute.org

— David Kupfer

Bushburgers: No Profit Left Behind

Last April, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to take food out of the mouths of children and parents cheered. At issue was irradiated beef, a controversial food item being promoted by the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National School Lunch Program.

The Board’s rejection of the USDA’s rad-infested food was unanimous. Commissioner Mark Sanchez hoped the vote would send a message that the big-biz-and-beef-friendly White House “can’t use our children as guinea pigs for this questionable technology.” Clearly, eco-sensitive San Franciscans (who would rather eschew than chew genetically engineered “Franken-foods”) were not about to subject their offspring to an untested menu of Roentgen-foods.

The USDA may not be listening. In 2003, it invited public comments on feeding Zap-burgers to tots and 93 percent of the responses ranged from negative to ballistic. That didn’t deter the USDA from proceeding to dangle the offer of “free meat” to 27 million school kids.

What makes the USDA’s beef-patty-pandering even harder to swallow is that laws requiring producers to label irradiated foods don’t apply to such free-fryer zones as restaurants, hospitals, and school cafeterias. It was another case of the government putting profits before people.

Sure, zapping food with radiation kills bacteria, but it also vaporizes essential nutrients and vitamins and produces a fallout of suspected carcinogenic by-products.

Public Citizen’s safe-lunch campaigner Tracy Lerman praised San Francisco for drawing a line in the sandwich. Lerman hailed the vote as “evidence of an increasing demand for wholesome, healthy and nutritious food in schools.”

By placing its 116 schools off-limits to Bush-burgers, San Francisco has joined five other California school districts that have just said “No.” Opponents note that, to date, “no school district has purchased irradiated meat through the USDA for the 2004-2005 school year.”

To learn more, visit www.safelunch.org

— GS

Paradise or Parking Lot?

Berkeley plans to commemorate environmental Archdruid David Ross Brower with a major downtown building — a high-rise monument to sustainability and activism. The $47 million David Brower Center (DBC) would rise between the existing Gaia Building and the western edge of the UC Berkeley campus.

The two-building complex would feature commercial rentals and housing units in one high-rise while the signature building would house many of the Bay Area’s leading green groups, including Brower’s Earth Island Institute (EII), Rainforest Action Network, and International Rivers Project (all EII spin-offs).

EII claims the DBC will be one of the greenest buildings ever built. Heat, cooling, and power would flow from solar collectors and photoelectric panels; “living machines” would purify water; and the DBC would be designed “to reduce auto use.”

But a problem arose when it came to financing. Tax-strapped Berkeley wasn’t about to forego the $350,000 in parking fees from a municipal lot the DBC would replace. So the city offered to donate the $5 million parcel on condition that developers incorporate existing parking slots into the new building — and allow the city to harvest the fees.

The trade-off must have looked like a masterstroke of creative compromise. Unfortunately, über-eco-icon Brower had raised several generations of environmentalists for whom the word “compromise” was as unwelcome to the ear as “clear-cut.”

When the shift hit Brower’s fans, there was Hell to pave. Brower, Ford Escalade, and ChevronTexaco are words that were never meant to share the same sentence, let alone the same building. A classic stand-off: Archdruid versus Arch-fluid.

“A sustainable future has no place for a parking garage, even if the building is the most progressively green ever devised,” said oil industry critic Jan Lundberg. Lundberg’s Alliance for a Paving Moratorium (where Brower served as an advisor) noted that Brower spent his last years fighting to boot cars from Yosemite Valley and boost rail and mass transit as a means to reduce the world’s growing hoard of schmutz-pooting gas-guzzlers.

Berkeley biker-cum-blogger Jim Doherty warned the council that building the DBC atop a parking structures would make the edifice an earthquake risk. Doherty and other Browerites have suggested replacing the second building with a working organic farm to generate revenue for the City.

If DBC must be transport-friendly, Lundberg says, limit it to non-polluting vehicles (preferably owned by disabled residents) and bikes. SUVs should be banned. What will become of the garage in the inevitable Post-petroleum Age? So far, proposals include turning the basement into a wine vault; a mushroom farm; or, in honor of Brower’s favorite brew, a combined potato patch and vodka distillery.

— GS

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