The Corporation Comments

Noam Chomsky: It's a fair assumption that every human being, real human beings, flesh and blood ones, not corporations, but every flesh and blood human being is a moral person. You know, we've got the same genes, we're more or less the same, but our nature, the nature of humans, allows all kinds of behaviour. I mean, every one of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint.

Sam Gibara: No job, in my experience with Goodyear, has been as frustrating as the CEO job. Because even though the perception is that you have absolute power to do whatever you want, the reality is you don't have that power, and sometimes, if you had really a free hand, if you really did what you wanted to do that suits you personal thoughts and you're personal priorities, you'd act differently. But as a CEO you cannot do that. Layoffs have become so widespread that people tend to believe that CEOs make these decisions without any consideration to the human implications of their decisions. It is never a decision that any CEO makes lightly. It is a tough decision. But it is the consequence of modern capitalism.

Noam Chomsky: When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the insitution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous, but the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you could imagine. Benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves, caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything. In their institutional role they're monsters because the institution is monstrous. The same is true here. So an individual CEO, let's say, may really care about the environment and, in fact, since they have such extraordinary resources, they can even devote some of their resources to that without violating their responsibility to be totally inhuman.

Narrator: Which is thy, as the Moody-Stuarts serve tea to protestors, Shell Nigeria can flare unrivalled amounts of gas, making it one of the world's single worst sources of pollution. And all the professed concerns about the environment do not spare Ken Saro Wiwa and 8 other activists from being hanged for opposing Shell's environmental practices in the Niger Delta.