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What did the Enlightenment promise us?
It promised us freedom
on the basis of being able to think for ourselves,
and thus govern ourselves.
That was really the premise.
That if we were released from constraints of myth
and tradition,
released to be able to think,
and reason,
and discover what was true for ourselves,
that that was the source of our freedom...
but something happened at the end of the 20th Century,
which was this new way of thinking about society
and human beings
as a market.
What does it mean to rule yourself
if we are all meant to think of ourselves
as commodities,
and everything is marketized?
What's really tragic
about the economization of every aspect of life
is that we're really seeing the Enlightenment dream
come to a kind of end,
where the mandates of a financialized society
all but extinguish the real freedom
to make yourself according to your own lights.
In the early 2000s,
we made a film,
"The Corporation."
We argued that large publicly-traded corporations
are programmed relentlessly to pursue profit and growth,
and have become the dominant institutions of our time.
We showed that the corporation is deemed, by law,
to be a person.
That it has the same rights as human beings,
sometimes even more.
So we posed the question,
if the corporation is legally a person,
what kind of person is it?
We analyzed it
the way a psychiatrist would analyze a patient.
We found its character
to be pathologically self-interested.
Now with the world in crisis,
climate change,
spiralling inequality,
a global pandemic,
we re-examine the corporation,
how it's changed,
how it's changing our world,
and how it's changing our very sense of who we are.
To begin this story,
we take you back to the 2000s.
At that time, the corporation was in crisis.
This meeting will come to order.
This is a case of America's largest corporate bankruptcy.
Enron and WorldCom
had collapsed in corporate scandals
of unprecedented magnitude.
Corporations were being called out for malfeasance
that was destroying lives and the environment.
Around the same time,
globalization was sparking worldwide protests
against the growing power and impunity of the corporation,
and our first film had just charged
that corporations are institutional psychopaths.
I think calling corporations psychopaths
absolutely had an impact,
and I can say that for myself.
When I had to consume that particular thought,
that was, um...
that was interesting,
to use a very soft word.
Uh, it was outrageous.
Has it influenced it? Yes.
Are we on the road to recovery?
I hope... I hope we are.
About 2005,
we started to see
many of the world's biggest branded companies
suddenly making very sweeping promises.
Promises such as 100% carbon neutrality,
zero waste to landfills,
zero deforestation,
100% recycling,
a real and significant shift.
Since that shift,
corporations have mounted a major charm offensive,
rebranding themselves
and rebranding the entire capitalist system
as having changed,
having evolved into something new and improved.
I think there is genuinely
a different dialogue that's taking place
about corporations
and the role that they play in society.
That cult of shareholder value has seen its day
as the narrow construct
for how companies operate in society.
Wait, what did he say?
That cult of shareholder value has seen its day,
as the narrow construct
for how companies operate in society.
This idea
that making money for shareholders
is no longer the Corporation's only goal,
it's the essence of the new story,
the story Corporations now tell about themselves.
What is the purpose of a company?
Is it just to make money?
This is Klaus Schwab,
the man who first came up with the idea
of a new kind of corporation.
Companies recognize
that they have a special responsibility,
how we combine,
or how we blend money-making and social responsibility.
To advance his ideas,
Schwab built the world's most important annual gathering
of corporate titans and world leaders.
Every year,
Davos, in Switzerland,
hosts one of
the most important gatherings of the global super elite.
It's kind of the first stop
in the elite's yearly migration route.
People who are successful and make a lot of money
are a dime a dozen,
but these are the people who are the most successful.
But Davos isn't only a meeting place
for the super elite.
It's also where corporate chiefs and government leaders
come together each year
to promote the story of the new corporation...
that corporations are conscientious now,
no longer greedy and selfish,
but poised to help make the world a better place.
Sandra Navidi is a Davos insider,
and author of a book
about the world's most powerful players.
These financial elites have great power,
and in some instances,
this power actually exceeds those
of democratically-elected people or institutions.
This is Jamie Dimon.
He heads the biggest bank in the United States,
and is a leading voice for corporate America.
So, the Jamie Dimon reception,
there will be some introduction to the clients, right?
This is Sanjay Jain,
one of Dimon's top executives at JP Morgan Chase.
He's advising a prospective client...
No, but I knew that, uh, we needed to be here,
because Davos is the place
where all these people come together for a week.
It's insane what happens here.
...and here's the client,
Bibop Gresta.
Hi. Bibop Gresta, very nice to meet you.
He's looking for investors in his company,
that's developing a transportation capsule
that travels at the speed of sound.
Sorry.
Sorry, excuse me.
Hi. It's Bibop Gresta, Chairman of Hyperloop.
Nice to meet you...
Oh, good, yeah, I saw some of your colleagues.
Thank you. Good luck to you.
Hey, you're here!
How are you?
Jamie, thank you for inviting me.
Are you going, like, to a black tie tonight?
Well, yeah, they said--
Or are you just dressed like this?
No, I was in the--
I was telling Tony Blair...
How are you? Nice to meet you.
...you, you guys have something in common.
-Yes. -You were in a rock band.
Right.
He had his own rock band before he was Prime Minister.
That's true, that's true...
I don't know what I was expecting
from a person like Jamie Dimon.
I discovered a person
that installed a very great culture
inside their company.
They're starting programs trying to improve society,
creating a special program for Detroit,
reconstruct it completely,
I wasn't expecting that.
I knew what you've done for Detroit
and all the effort that you did to save it,
and it's not public yet,
but we are... we signed a deal with Ohio
to actually build a Hyperloop to Detroit.
We are trying to contribute,
following your example.
I think it's a very important project.
It's a big, big year for us.
It's exciting.
I'll see you in a couple weeks.
Okay, okay, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Davos is a place of interaction, of dialogue.
We look at the ecosystem of what's happening,
but always with a sense of responsibility
for us,
and "us," it means not just one country,
not just one person.
I think at the end,
we are all a globally interdependent humankind.
So here in Davos,
we debated the motion,
is the business of business still just business,
and interestingly,
more than 80% said no,
in today's transformative age,
business has a wider accountability
and opportunity.
We're in a new age of doing business.
You need to give back.
You need to be part of the solution.
Society is demanding that companies,
both public and private,
serve a social purpose.
There is a new possibility.
We can imagine something different.
It takes courageous leadership,
and it takes people who get it here,
and who get it here,
and who understand that life is short and precious,
and if we're in positions of power and influence,
that we should use that to help shift the paradigm,
and the possibility of what it means
to be a business on the planet,
and what it means to be a human being.
It all sounds so good,
this talk of a new kind of corporation,
in Davos and everywhere else.
For many businesses,
the commitment to the triple bottom line
of people, profit, and planet
is real.
The problem is the capitalist system as a whole
is not committed to that.
There are CEOs and corporate boards
attempting to do good in the world.
There clearly are...
but the notion
that there's anything inherently socially responsible
about a corporation
is a counterintuitive proposition.
By law, the corporation exists for one reason--
to return benefits to shareholders.
There is no such thing
as corporate social responsibility.
Corporations don't have the leeway
to sacrifice shareholder returns
for doing whatever they want,
or whatever they believe is socially responsible.
What then do we make
of the corporation's new image?
Of the claim corporations have changed?
Since our last film,
the American Psychiatric Association
has added a new item to its diagnostic checklist.
You always have to come back, as a leader, to purpose.
Why are we here?
Why are we doing business?
And we want to do business for the long term.
Values are part of a purpose of a company.
John Browne is a leading voice
in today's
new corporation movement.
When he was CEO
of the world's second largest oil company,
he professed deep environmental beliefs
while achieving record profits and meteoric growth.
Basically, for the first time,
an oil company executive stepped forward to say
"Global warming is a problem."
It set BP apart.
I think people are much more convinced now,
at least around the world,
that there is a real case to take precautionary action
to avoid carbon concentrations
going to beyond a critical level
in the atmosphere...
My sense is that John Browne's concerns are genuine,
his interest in the environment is genuine,
his concern for workers
and for people's safety,
theoretically, is genuine,
but those desires are just inherently conflicting
with the need to make money,
because turning a profit for those corporations
is always going to come first.
I need
an ambulance and E.M.T.s right now!
There's people trapped in the trailer!
They need help!
In 2005, when I was CEO of BP,
we had a terrible tragedy.
15 people died in a refinery explosion
in Texas City.
This is the second time
people have died at this plant
in less than a year.
In that time,
it has been fined
for more than 14 safety violations.
All of us at BP are very deeply saddened
by the loss of life
and injury suffered by so many people.
After Texas City,
we were at pains--
at pains to say safety must never be compromised
for financial performance.
We were very concerned to make sure that safety,
operational safety,
process safety,
took primacy.
It's ridiculous for John Browne to suggest
that he had adequately addressed process safety
in the wake of the Texas City Refinery.
It was less than a year later
his company had a spill in Alaska,
on oil pipelines,
which, it turns out, were not maintained.
Technicians at Prudoe Bay
warned it was understaffed,
lacking in routine maintenance,
leak-prone, and vulnerable to explosions...
There was a specific decision
to save money by not running corrosion tests
in those pipelines.
It's the same kind of thing
that led to the Texas City explosion.
Yet BP claimed
it had learned its lesson from Texas City.
In 2007, I left BP,
and I thought, "This is great.
This company has got it."
What was so depressing to me
was that yet again people died...
and while I wasn't there,
and I didn't know what had happened,
I could see some terrible echoes of history.
While John Browne had left BP,
some things hadn't changed.
The poor decisions that led to the Deepwater Horizon
echo and track what John Browne instituted in the company
a decade or two before.
John Browne pushed the largest cost cut
that I've heard of
at any corporation
in any kind of industry,
not just the oil industry.
You can't do that
without cutting corners on maintenance of equipment,
without pushing timetables.
That's the culture that he built.
When given that choice between doing good,
and doing well for your company,
the fact that publicly-held companies
have an obligation to deliver to their shareholders,
making those profits
will always be the highest priority.
Those trend lines are just headed in opposite directions,
and I think they always will be.
We are a-- just to make it clear--
a for-profit institution...
...and we are making an investment in Detroit.
Remember Jamie Dimon?
From JP Morgan Chase?
He's the CEO who wants to save Detroit.
Detroit was devastated by the 2008 financial crisis.
A third of its homes were abandoned.
Over the next five years,
it spiraled towards rock bottom.
When the 2008 financial crisis
hammered North America,
long-suffering Detroit was hit especially hard.
Detroit is officially the largest city in history
to file for bankruptcy.
After bankruptcy,
Jamie Dimon and his bank stepped in
with vast amounts of capital.
Why Detroit?
So obviously it's good for the bank,
but it's part humanity.
You're trying to help your city and your people come back,
and recover from what have been, basically, a terrible 20 years.
Jamie Dimon wants to rescue Detroit,
but what's misleading
is he wants America to believe
that he,
and, by implication, JP Morgan Chase Bank,
are somehow the good guys,
that they are leading us
in a direction we ought to be going in,
without--
without any memory
that he and the bank caused, in part,
a huge recession
that wrecked the lives of millions,
tens of millions of people.
At one point,
the market fell as if down a well.
The NASDAQ, everything and more
has been completely wiped out...
Three of the five biggest independent firms
on Wall Street
have now disappeared...
Major sectors
of America's financial system
are at risk of shutting down.
The 2008 financial crisis
was the result of corporate misconduct
and reckless speculation.
That malfeasance nearly destroyed the global economy.
It cost the American economy about 20 trillion dollars
in terms of lost housing value,
lost productivity from the recession.
Millions of people lost their jobs.
Millions of others were thrown out of their homes.
People were really hurt.
The nation's biggest bank,
JP Morgan Chase,
has agreed to a $13-billion settlement
with the U.S. Government
for misleading investors and mortgage agencies
about the safety of mortgage-backed securities
it sold ahead of the financial crisis.
That would be the largest fine
ever paid by a single bank
to settle civil charges,
yet doesn't even resolve a possible criminal case.
But JP Morgan Chase's caring image
helped mask its self-interested nature.
I think we have to acknowledge
that as a kind of private sector propaganda,
it has been remarkably successful.
This is Anand Giridharadas,
an expert on how corporate elites
cloak profit-making in virtue.
When you have someone like Jamie Dimon,
who is running an institution
that paid fines for its role
in helping to cause a financial crisis
that wiped out communities--
we're talking about obliterated certain communities--
when you have someone like that
who then turns around and says,
"We gotta save Detroit,"
what's so amazing is this kind of two-step
that this plutocratic group has been able to pull off.
You first create conditions
in which people in a city like Detroit
are shattered by your speculation decisions,
and then you have the gall
to market yourself to those folks
as their-- as their Christ.
We were here in the darkest moments
for everybody, at all times.
We didn't run, we didn't hide...
...and we figure, you know,
if we can help in Detroit,
you can help anywhere.
We participate in this game
that allows the very people abetting harm to our society,
or actively harming our society,
to reinvent themselves as saviours.
But that's part of a larger game
corporations now play.
Making feel-good promises with bright smiles,
appearing to be different than what they really are.
If the new corporation had a playbook,
what might it look like?
What would its key plays be?
I am here with Bill Gates.
I'd love you to tell our readers
what the heck creative capitalism is.
Can we take some of the caring and innovation power,
the resources of corporations,
and get them to focus more of that
on the needs of the poorest?
Bill Gates
put his idea of Creative Capitalism to work,
pouring billions into investments in Africa,
including a multi-million-dollar stake
in a start-up company
called Bridge International Academies.
Good morning, class.
Good morning, teacher.
How are you?
We are fine, thank you, teacher,
and how are you?
I'm fine, thank you.
Bridge is a flagship
of creative capitalism.
We serve children living in poverty.
Even people who are living in poverty,
they are earning cash,
and they're earning cash for a reason.
They're earning it to be able to spend it
on things they need in their lives.
Five years ago,
my co-founder, Shannon, and I
decided that an aggressive start-up company
that could figure out
how to profitably deliver education at a high quality
could radically disrupt the status quo in education,
ultimately creating
what could be a billion-dollar new global education company.
Private schools for the poor
is a $51-billion-a-year market
no one's even thought about.
In the global south,
what we've seen is the emergence of chains of schools,
for-profit schools,
to compete against the public education system.
One of the biggest players
is Bridge International Academies.
Venture capitalists invest in Bridge schools,
Pearson, the World Bank, Zuckerberg, Gates,
and the list goes on.
We hear of creative capitalism,
but that's promoting a world
where the market would dictate terms
with respect to the provision of education.
We take lessons
that other large global service providers use,
like McDonalds or Starbucks.
We build for scale,
we systematize, we standardize.
We call this vertically-integrated platform
our "Academy in a Box."
What is so interesting
about this social-business thing
is, on the surface, it seems incredibly noble.
They're saying
money-making should not be the sole goal of a business,
it should also have a social purpose,
but what it is also saying
is that the kinds of change
that we ought to pursue
are the kinds of change
that kicks something back to the winners.
But those interested financial reasons
are good for the world.
If we succeed in serving 10 million children,
which I know we will,
it's still only about 1% of children
who need improved services
in their government and community schools.
So I hope we not only get there,
but far transcede it,
and in so doing,
be a good partner for our shareholders,
and those who have entrusted us with their capital,
to try to make a big impact.
This is colonialism,
pure and simple.
Fundamentally, Bridge is saying
"Give us your education system,
we will take care of it."
Public education is one of the basic commitments
of a democratic society.
Education is not non-political,
it's not apolitical.
You teach a set of values when you're teaching.
You cannot rely on Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates,
the World Bank, to take over
and provide the education
that you should be providing yourself.
Bridge is in business.
When you want to utilize poor citizens of this world
as a source of income.
They're making money
out of utilizing unqualified teachers.
We believe everyone is a teacher,
and everyone could be.
There are certain core skills you need to have.
You've gotta be able to read.
It might seem like a low bar,
but you have to start somewhere.
It's true,
Bridge teachers know how to read
but they're required to do
little more in thier classrooms
because they follow scripted les
read word-for-word from a tablet.
It's telling you all of these different ways
to behave.
Move away from the board,
circulate in the classroom,
give them one-on-one coaching.
You cannot have teachers who behave as robots,
who follow a scripted curriculum
that tells you walk three steps to the blackboard,
walk around the classroom,
and that's just...
A teacher ought to be a natural teacher.
From an investment point of view,
that because of a tragic failure of our existing systems,
there's an incredible need for services
to solve these problems.
People have just kind of said,
"Well, hopefully, the government will fix it,"
but fix it with what?
Government can't fix problems.
It's a defining idea of the new corporation,
a key play in its playbook,
and it goes back nearly half a century.
In this present crisis,
government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.
We believe
that government should be severely limited
in the way in which they say
that they're entitled to impose their judgement
on what the people want.
If you look at the real problems of poverty
and denial of freedom to the people in this country,
almost every single one of them
is a result of government action.
In the 1980s,
corporations were frustrated
by the limits on profits
that they felt were imposed upon them
by the combination of labour unions,
increasing regulation,
taxation,
and that combination of things led to a kind of rebellion--
one that wouldn't overthrow democracy
in some overt way
but choke it, leash it,
tone it down,
and, above all, replace it with markets.
Corporations formed alliances
with governments they had helped elect,
governments that were in fact anti-government,
and that happily lifted limits on corporate freedom.
Profits soared, but a price was paid,
and not by corporations.
What you get is this profound anti-government program
to create deficits
through the combination of tax cuts
and military spending,
so as to make it impossible
to use government in a positive and constructive way,
to deal with our social problems.
Mr. President,
on behalf of the business leaders here in the room,
let me particularly congratulate you
for the historic tax reform passed last month,
greatly reducing the tax burden of U.S. companies,
providing a tremendous boost
to the global economy.
I cannot wait to sign these giant tax cuts.
It'll be the largest tax cuts by far
in the history of our country.
JP Morgan Chase,
they just announced earnings,
and they were incredible.
Where are you?
They were very substantial.
Will you say,
"Thank you, Mr. President," at least? Huh?
"Thank you, Mr. President," may be in order.
Apparently, he believes he played a strong role
in JP Morgan's blow-out quarter.
Best profit for any bank, ever in history.
Corporate profits
are the highest they've been in decades.
Fast forward a few months,
global pandemic,
the rich keep getting richer,
and our friends on the other side said,
"What do we do now?
Let's do a tax cut!"
36 million people unemployed,
40% of families
who have a worker that makes $40,000 a year or less
lose their job last month,
four million people didn't pay their rent,
and the Republican Party says,
"We don't have any money to help you!"
Are you kidding me?
Where do you guys live?
And while corporations lobby for
and profit from tax cuts at home,
they further avoid taxes
by stashing their profits abroad.
The corporate elite is best positioned
to use the system that we have to their advantage
and one manifestation of that is tax havens.
Every year,
corporations squirrel away billions of dollars
in tax havens,
and when that's combined with tax cuts,
guess what happens?
60 of some of America's biggest companies
reportedly paid no federal income tax for 2018
despite earning billions of dollars in profits.
This is my first time at Davos,
and, uh, and I find it quite a bewildering experience,
to be honest.
I mean, 1,500 private jets flown in here
to hear Sir David Attenborough speak
about, you know, how we're wrecking the planet,
and, uh, I mean, I hear people talking
the language of participation, and justice,
and equality, and transparency,
but then, I mean, almost no one raises the real issue
of tax avoidance, right,
and of the rich just not paying their fair share.
We gotta be talking about taxes.
That's it, taxes, taxes, taxes.
All the rest is bullshit,
in my--in my opinion.
Government used to have a lot of power
to extract wealth in the form of taxes,
and then be able to use that wealth
for the betterment of the society as a whole,
but what's happened now
is that we have given more power to corporations
to control their wealth
and to take it out of the tax system.
So what happens as a result of that?
First of all,
companies and rich people get a lot richer,
not paying those taxes you might've been paying.
Second thing that happens
is the government has less money.
The government's capacity is sort of contracted,
and then social problems start to grow,
in part because the government has less money.
Now with that background,
rich people step onto the scene
and say, "Oh, my gosh, this is a shame.
This situation we see here is a shame.
We got all these social problems,
and government, my gosh,
the government should be solving this stuff,
but it isn't.
That is embarrassing.
Well, I'm happy to solve these problems,
but of course when we do solve it,
we're going to do it my way.
We're going to privatize the solution."
The privatizer's blueprint,
often also called "Starve the Beast."
You create a crisis of confidence...
How much money do we need to be investing right now
in the United States in water infrastructure?
By 2020,
44% of all water infrastructure in the United States
will be classified as poor, very poor, or beyond life.
You deny resources
for quality public services...
In the 1970s,
there were a lot of pools of free federal money.
That has really, no pun, dried up.
...and lo and behold,
the answer is privatization.
What we believe
is that private industry is part of the answer,
which is very consistent
with what the President's plan is.
American Water Works
is one of the world's largest water corporations.
It takes over public water systems,
and runs them for profit,
and around the world,
there are many other companies doing the same thing.
It's an absolutely
terrifying notion,
privatization of water.
Moving in exactly the wrong direction.
Access to potable, clean drinking water
is a fundamental human right.
It's just insidious
that the corporate mind could even conceive
or imagine the notion of privatizing it.
Corporations have figured out
that there are really big business opportunities
in these public sectors,
in part, because they've been walled off
from corporate influence in the past.
The private sector is voracious
in seeking to privatize almost everything.
First, privatize government services
as much as possible...
and also the seizure and the commodification
of the public commons--
your parks, your public schools,
your streets.
How can we get more money out of the public commons?
The for-profit motivation
is always a very bad reason for providing public services.
There's a conflict of interest
between whether you're going to pay off the shareholders,
or whether you're going to invest in the public system.
Many responsibilities and obligations must be public
in order to maintain equal access
to the basic necessities of life.
A healthy democratic society has a thriving private sector,
and also a thriving public sector,
and as we permit the private sector
to encroach upon
and to, literally, absorb the responsibilities
and obligations of a democratic society,
we lose our democracy.
And the rise of big-tech corporations
is now accelerating this process.
For example, in schools.
Not only in Africa, but elsewhere, too.
Corporations have decided
that they should remake education
by using technology.
They want to have teacher-less classrooms...
but the teacher is the single most important
and expensive part of education,
and the tech industry's dream,
if the teacher is removed from the equation,
then you can cut costs dramatically.
These companies monopolize everything.
First of all, monopolize their sector,
and the next thing is to look, "Where's left?"
These giant corporations are frantically searching
for new sources of profit
because it's drying up.
They say, "We need to take the education system,
take the health-care system,
take the transport system,
and own it,
or we die."
Silicon Valley is the new Rome of our time.
The valley has become this extraordinary power centre
that has a huge say
over what kind of media and information we have
in a democracy,
over, you know, frankly,
how many of our biggest problems are solved,
over how election campaigns are run,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Technology's neutral,
and, in many ways, it's great,
but there's a difference
between a technology,
and allowing a few powerful players
to manipulate it for their own ends.
So we've gone from this wide-open world
that opened up all of these possibilities
for people to create things,
to share information, to share ideas,
and it has collapsed into these walled gardens
that are controlled by a few very powerful players.
We're seeing Amazon, for example,
gobbling up every kind of business in sight.
They're interested in getting into pharmaceuticals,
and they're making a big move into food.
They capture about half of everything
that Americans spend online,
and they're growing into all these different directions.
They control 35% of the world's cloud-computing capacity.
They're building out shipping and logistics infrastructure
that is scaled to take on the postal service and UPS,
and, increasingly,
they are the intermediary for all of our smart devices,
Alexa, their voice system, is 70% of the market,
and on it goes.
They're making investments in finance, in healthcare,
in hit movies and television shows.
Amazon is increasingly setting the rules
for what happens in its marketplace,
and pretending like that's a real market,
but, of course it's not.
You know, that's a direct threat to democracy,
a very fundamental threat to democracy.
Though elected by no one,
corporations are now starting to be treated like governments.
We're joined now live
by the world's first ever tech ambassador.
Can I start simply by asking you
what exactly does a tech ambassador do?
Well, we're basically
trying to treat technology and the tech companies
in a way which is similar
to the way we treat a bilateral relationship
with countries all over the world.
The value of their stocks
is more or less the same as the GDP of France,
and we think that that is being translated
into influence over political affairs.
We think it is necessary
to treat them in a way which is similar
to the way we treat other countries.
A lot of folks in the valley
believe that the companies they are building
are kind of replacements of government.
I think if we don't push back
against the kind of agenda that these companies have,
we're going to live in a world
in which they are governing us privately
through the profit motive.
But governing us.
The deal that the corporations want from us
is to hand everything to them,
all the value to them,
and we get a little bit of utility.
We get usefulness.
It becomes easier to study,
or easier to get to work,
or easier to take a health test.
That is a dangerous deal,
because nobody can guarantee
what is going to be done with the information.
We're handing our data
with no checks, no balances, no control over it.
I think that's going to be one of the new challenges
of life in the 21st Century.
I'm going to call them
the super social media corporations,
the entities that really run our lives right now.
The scope of their reach cannot be underestimated.
They know everything about us.
Every single aspect of what we do,
who we do it with, where we do it, what we buy,
is a goldmine for aggregators.
It lets them mold their policies and their products,
predicting how you are going to live
the rest of your life.
They're trying to influence the decisions that you make
from now to when you die,
so that it will best serve, ultimately,
the corporate bottom line.
Technology provides us
such a seductive fantasy.
Our smart phones, our data driven systems,
our social-media platforms,
they are all designed to conceal
the true cost of these technologies
to our society as a whole.
Privacy is usually the value that we use
to think through these issues,
but for me, it's not about privacy,
it's about control.
The drive to make data profitable
leads these companies to say who we are,
and define who we are to other people.
Let me use a real-life example of a hiring algorithm.
You'll do an interview.
They'll analyze your video footage,
and they'll say,
"You challenge the status quo.
You are a change agent.
Don't hire this person,
because they are more likely to cause trouble at work."
As far as the algorithm is concerned,
you are not a human being,
you're just a collection of data points,
and this is one of the dangers that we face today,
because we are now saying
we need to stop using human reason,
and we need to rely more
on these kinds of algorithmic decision-making systems.
We are increasingly surrendering our capacity
to rely on human experience
and to trust in each other.
So, the question
that these technologies are really raising for us
is what does it mean to be human?
And this kind of technology of strangers
is one of the ways
in which we are moving away from the genuine heritage
of the Enlightenment.
We're taught that it is all about me.
Narcissism, the cult of the self,
the idea that consumption
can somehow help us overcome our alienation,
make us important...
I thought, you know,
what better way to cure the darkness,
than to go shopping.
You know, help stimulate the economy.
These were all...
I hesitate the word "values,"
but these were all consciously instilled in the public.
It upends traditional values of thrift,
self-effacement,
communitarianism,
and replaces them with the values
that we now define as American values,
but which should properly be called corporate values.
In recent years,
we've drifted, almost without realizing it,
from having a market economy
to becoming a market society.
The difference is this.
A market economy is a tool,
a valuable and effective tool
for organizing productive activity.
But a market society is a place
where almost everything is up for sale.
We are so steeped in this commodification
that it's hard to distinguish between being a consumer
and being a citizen.
I'm not much of a believer in political citizenship.
I actually believe much more in the power of the marketplace.
This is Richard Edelman,
one the world's most influential business gurus.
I think companies
actually have filled a void
left by government.
Business is at the top rank.
Government and media really are
at the back end of the trust rank.
These are big changes
in reliability of business as potential "good actor."
It's a brilliant strategy.
They're going to present themselves as good actors,
and use that as part of their image
and as part of their branding.
When we see a big corporation doing something,
it creates a sense of hope
that maybe we can solve the climate crisis,
or inequality,
or other kinds of problems.
We maybe even think of their huge power
as being a plus,
because we know that the scale of these challenges
are so big,
and we feel so powerless and frustrated
about the ability of our government systems
to actually solve them,
that we start to sort of put our faith in corporations,
but of course, in the process of doing that,
we're going further down the path
that led us here.
I grew up in the 1950s,
and at that time,
there was a sense that our society
would continually progress towards greater equality
and greater opportunity,
that there would continue to be social mobility
for those at the bottom.
The average pay for a CEO in the 1950s
was 20 times that of the average worker.
Today the average pay of a CEO
is 270 times
that of the average worker.
In some cases, that gap is much greater.
For example,
Jamie Dimon makes more than 1,000 times the salary
of one of his lowest-paid employees.
Mr. Dimon,
you're an expert on financial statements,
and you run a $2.6-trillion-dollar bank.
I went to Monster.com
and I found a job in my hometown of Irvine
at JP Morgan Chase.
It pays $16.50 an hour...
This is U.S. congresswoman Katie Porter
providing an example of a hypothetical employee,
a single mother working as a teller
at one of Jamie Dimon's banks.
... she rents a one-bedroom apartment.
She and her daughter sleep together
in the same room.
In Irvine, California,
that average one-bedroom apartment
is going to be $1,600.
She spends $100 on utilities...
Congresswoman Porter
itemized typical monthly expenses,
and showed they greatly exceed the employee's salary.
My question for you, Mr. Dimon,
is how should she manage this budget shortfall
while she is working full-time at your bank?
I, uh, don't know that all your numbers are accurate.
That number is a starter-- is generally a starter job.
She is a starting employee.
She has a six-year-old child.
This is her first job.
You can get those jobs out of high school,
and she may have my job one day.
But the widening gap
between CEOs and their employees,
is just one symptom of rising inequality
more generally.
Right now in the United States,
the richest country on the planet,
half of American families
couldn't pay a $400 bill
that landed on their doorstep
without going into debt
or selling something.
That's because corporate executives
and corporate lobbyists
are constantly able to change the rules of the game
in the favour of the people who are already wealthy
and powerful,
making it harder to form a union,
making it easier for mega-corporations
to shut out competition from smaller businesses,
slashing the taxes
on wealthy people and corporations,
and shifting more of the responsibility
on working-class people.
The result is economic inequality.
It's a real moral outrage,
and it can't be dealt with separate from race and gender.
We can't really deal with these inequalities separately
because they're all so interwoven.
The Black and brown people
who are impacted by police brutality,
women who are impacted by sexual harassment
in the workplace,
the enormous numbers of workers
who are struggling with poverty and homelessness,
and all the degeneration that we see under capitalism
for no fault of theirs.
We're talking about a global economy
that, for all the wealth that was generated last year,
a trillion dollars of that new wealth
went to just 500 individuals.
I know you have a lot of--
I'd love to call her up
and have a conversation about her financial affairs
and see if we can be helpful.
See if you can find a way
for her to live on less than the minimum
that I've described?
Just be helpful.
The 1% and 0.01%
is a group of folks
who talk an extraordinary game,
and also act an extraordinary game,
of trying to help out in an age of inequality,
and who are willing to do absolutely anything to help
except stepping off the backs
of the working people of this country
who have been screwed
and, and, and passed over by four decades worth of change.
There's a great quote
that was attributed to Justice Brandeis
that said you can have democracy,
or you can have large accumulations of wealth,
but you can't have both.
That wealth gives them a tremendous amount of power,
both in promoting our political leaders,
in promoting a legislative agenda,
in every aspect of our society.
If I want to run a campaign
that is entirely funded
by corporate political action committees,
is there anything that legally prevents me
from doing that?
No.
So now I'm elected, now I'm in,
I've got the power to draft, lobby, and shape the laws
that govern the United States of America.
Are there any limits on the laws that I can write
or influence?
There's no limit.
So there's none,
so I can be totally funded by big pharma,
come in, write big pharma laws,
and there's no limits to that whatsoever?
That's right.
Is there anything preventing me
from holding stocks, say, in an oil or gas company,
and then writing laws to deregulate that industry
and potentially cause the stock value to soar,
and accrue a lot of money in that time?
-You could do that, yes. -Oh, okay, great.
I think we've seen the disappearance
of independent governments,
with the rise of corporate rule.
We have seen more and more takeover of government,
takeover of electoral processes.
The problem is a corporate system
and a political system,
where governments see their main role
as facilitating private corporations
to basically do whatever the hell.
Nothing more starkly illustrates this
than our Federal Treasurer picking up a lump of coal
and carrying it around Parliament House.
Mr. Speaker.
This is coal.
Don't be afraid, don't be scared.
The Treasurer knows the rule on props!
It's coal.
Mr. Speaker, those opposite
have an ideological, pathological fear of coal.
Affordable energy
is what Australian businesses need
to remain competitive.
This is Scott Morrison.
He later became Prime Minister.
He heads a group of high-level politicians
with deep ties to the major coal companies.
Take note of this one-- Adani.
We'll return to it later.
What's happening in Australia
is just one part of a larger global story.
It's become accepted that corporations are in charge.
Governments are incredibly subservient
to corporate rule.
In the United States,
we've seen, under the Trump administration,
the wholesale corporate takeover of government
on a scale with no historic precedent.
It's beyond the wildest dreams of the corporate sector,
especially in the area of deregulation.
I pledged to eliminate
two unnecessary regulations
for every one new regulation.
We have succeeded beyond our highest expectations.
Instead of two for one...
we have cut 22 burdensome regulations
for every one new rule.
I'm willing to bet that those are made-up numbers.
But the issue in regulation or deregulation
is not the number.
I mean, that's really absurd.
What you want to know is, you know,
do you want to have another financial crisis?
Well, if you do,
let's get rid of the financial regulations.
Corporations have said, repeatedly,
"We are responsible now,
we understand the public interest,
so we don't have to be regulated,
we can self-regulate."
Well, they've got obvious self-interest in saying that.
The reason they can't self-regulate
is that that's not what they're about.
They're about trying to make profit.
Routinely,
when government regulation fails,
companies in the pursuit of profit
endanger people,
and that's not a hypothetical.
It means people get poisoned,
they get diseases, they get sick.
Corners will be cut,
and people will be injured, and people will be killed.
We see it over and over again.
Every industry has fought regulation.
They all resist oversight by the government
because regulation increases their cost of operating,
but I've never seen an industry that's fought it
more than the oil and gas industry...
Remember this?
This, too, was a consequence of deregulation.
As a result
of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe,
nearly 200 million gallons of crude oil
spilled into the Gulf of Mexico,
making it one of the worst
environmental and deregulation disasters
in history.
But deregulation wasn't the only problem.
BP was also recklessly breaking the law.
And they're not alone in being corporate lawbreakers.
Corporations will certainly do things
that are wrong, that are unethical,
if they're legal and permissible.
And all the empirical evidence
says that they will also violate the law routinely,
either intentionally
or because they'll just go over the lines,
if there's profits to be made.
This opioid crisis is a killer,
and it's a killer that does not discriminate.
Lives are being destroyed
as corporations profit from their playbook moves...
...as they play to win.
These corporate forces have no limits
and these forces have...
put the very human species itself at risk.
The giant ecocidal corporations--
they're literally playing casino with life on Earth.
Their logic of profits,
their process of profits
is the death of nature.
Whenever you mess with nature,
you don't know for sure what the exact impact will be.
We chop down forests,
we bring livestock into new regions,
and we spread these new diseases.
We're at the source of this problem.
The major cities all around the world
are vulnerable to a disease arriving in the city
and then causing a major epidemic.
Again, we're seeing that more and more.
The rate at which new disease epidemics
are originating,
many of them moving from forests and wild species
to humans,
is partly because of
corporate invasions into ecosystems
and violence to animals.
The attack on other species
is bouncing back as an attack on us.
All of Italy is now effectively a red zone.
Warnings from Sao Paulo are dire.
In the United States,
disaster's been declared in all 50 states.
When the coronavirus hit
in the spring of 2020,
it laid bare
the unjust and dangerous faultlines
of corporate capitalism.
African-Americans
have been hit hardest by the virus.
Despite for accounting for 14% of Michigan's population,
they represent 41% of its COVID victims,
I'm praying that's it's not...
I haven't been in contact with nobody that has it.
We got a possible COVID,
52-year-old male.
10 minutes out.
I'll be honest with you, I can barely keep track.
This is the culmination
of decades of tilting policy,
tilting public resources
in favour of the biggest corporations.
Fewer hospitals, fewer hospital beds,
less capacity to be able to be able to respond
in an emergency like this.
Other systems are also breaking down right now.
Essential workers,
people who are on the frontlines
of getting our groceries to us,
are really putting their lives on the line
without any kind of real backing
from the companies that employ them.
This is partly the product
of the absence of labour protections,
unions, and so on.
What we're seeing is a continuation
of the ways that corporations have undermined
ordinary people's ability
to have any say over their lives.
This is actually not a crisis full of novelties,
it's a crisis full of revelation.
For example, the same exact dynamic
of the 2008 financial crisis bailout,
where the most powerful gained power
as a net result of those bailouts,
that is literally happening again-- maybe worse.
As ordinary people suffered
the despair and harsh effects of economic breakdown,
giant corporations were thrown a lifeline.
Madame President, I have an update.
At last, we have a deal.
What did the Senate Majority fight for?
One of the largest corporate bailouts,
with as few strings as possible,
in American history.
Shameful!
The greed of that fight is wrong,
for crumbs for our families,
and the option that we have
is to either let them suffer with nothing
or to allow this greed and billions of dollars,
which will be leveraged into trillions of dollars,
to contribute
to the largest income inequality gap
in our future.
Once again,
the very wealthy big corporations
did extraordinarily well.
Over the last year and a half,
they've spent over a trillion dollars
buying back their shares of stock
to artificially boost their share prices,
so that the top executives and major investors
would benefit.
They could've used that trillion dollars
as a cushion against the big rainy day,
the storm that we now have.
They didn't.
Instead, they got bailed out!
It's socialism for the rich, corporate socialism,
but also the harshest form of capitalism
for most working people and the poor.
The crisis is highlighting
that we're absolutely unprepared
to deal with disasters
like what we're facing right now,
and we also have this other, even bigger looming crisis,
which is the climate catastrophe.
That's not going anywhere.
It's no exaggeration to say
that the greed economy is killing us.
It's killing off species.
It's depleting our natural resources.
It's poisoning our people.
A handful of corporations
are allowed to put next quarter's profits
ahead of the next generation.
When our children and grandchildren
look back in the history books
and ask the question,
"Why didn't we stop the crisis of climate change?"
The only answer we'll have for them
is that it was profitable for a handful of corporations
to keep polluting our planet.
The changes that we fear are coming faster
than anybody thought.
The impacts from them
are going to be far worse than we thought.
It's also going to change
the entire global dynamic around equality.
The world is going to divide in ways
that we have a difficult time imagining now.
We're headed for a world
that sees a protected, privileged few
surrounded by an immensely impoverished
majority of the global population.
With the impacts of climate change
now in plain view,
fossil-fuel companies
have stopped actively denying that's it's happening.
They've discovered
that a better strategy for them now
in the age of active climate breakdown,
is to charm us all
into believing that they're part of the solution,
saying, "Okay, we're going to invest in renewables,
but meanwhile,
we have to keep using fossil fuels for a long time,
so, you know, we can use lighter fuels, like natural gas,
but we have to be realistic."
It is impossible--
impossible--
to displace carbon fully for a very long time.
Gas is a very good carbon fuel.
You have to see this
as one more arrow
in the large quiver of delay tactics
and ways to preserve
what's really the core of their business,
not the core of the best interest of society.
We need to transition
to the cleanest form of carbon-free energy
as quickly as possible.
If we were to do this by tomorrow,
it wouldn't be fast enough.
I mean, we'd just be stupid,
if we looked to the coal and gas and oil industry
for a clean-energy future.
That's not what they do.
They have a business model.
They're going to pursue that business model
until the end of time,
and they may do that
if we're not able to control them.
The fossil-fuel industry
actually doesn't plan to stop increasing production
and increasing extraction
anytime soon.
In fact, they're doubling down on it.
Their goal is to extract as much as possible
before it becomes just completely unviable
for them to do so.
The fossil-fuel industry
is ramping up new mega-projects.
Some companies are pursuing profits
from even the dirtiest fuels.
Like Adani.
Around 2011,
there were plans for nine new coal export ports
up and down the Great Barrier Reef Coast.
Adani's proposed Carmichael Mine
would be a 60-million-ton-a-year thermal coal mine
in the middle of the Galilee Basin.
It's the largest new proposed
coal project in the world.
40 kilometres by 13 kilometres,
entirely encompassed
within Wangan and Jagalingou country.
It is on the doorstep
of the Great Barrier Reef,
an already very stressed and vulnerable ecosystem,
and what we're gonna see
is 500 more coal ships
every year,
trudging through a stressed reef
that, what scientists are telling us,
is already half-dead.
The Adani Carmichael Mine would drive global warming,
it would destroy habitat for endangered species,
it would destroy groundwater,
and it would disenfranchise Wangan and Jagalingou,
traditional owners of that country.
Wangan and Jagalingou,
we're a problem for Adani,
so they're gonna do whatever they can
to try and get rid of that problem.
We know that the mechanisms of the state
line-up to work for mining companies and corporations,
essentially to roll over aboriginal people,
to get past us.
The government and the state
and the corporations
devise ways, saying,
"Oh, we want to put this mine in,
we just want to do it,
we just want to put this pipeline in,"
and "oh, these people are in our way,
we need to remove them."
You know, they use their security,
they use our own aboriginal police against us,
they use every means they can.
To indigenous people,
it is clearly a life-and-death struggle.
That's what you're witnessing happening around the world--
this destructive corporate agenda
that is completely out of control.
When a society begins to understand
that that good job that they had or their parents had
is never coming back,
that they are going to be working 70 hours a week,
and still be consumed by crippling debt peonage...
that all of their dreams
that Oprah and everyone else has told them
can come to fruition
are never going to arrive...
and they scream for vengeance and moral renewal,
and they look
for the internal enemies that have thwarted
the possibility
of their own aggrandizement.
So then you turn on the vulnerable.
You turn on Muslims,
undocumented workers, homosexuals,
feminists, intellectuals, liberals...
...all of those forces
that you are told have thwarted
the possibilities that were your "right" to have.
What you see is a frustration
that grew out of economic disempowerment,
turning into a new wave of hate.
There's no question
that a lot of people around the world
have a feeling that we've lived in this age
that is incredibly abundant in innovation
but short on progress,
if progress means most people's lives getting better.
I'm right-wing and I'm proud of it!
It's only a matter of time
before people want to shatter the system.
There's no guarantee
when people rise up to shatter a system,
whether you get Medicare for all
or a wall on the Southern border.
Build the wall! Build the wall!
It's akin to the fascist movements
of the 1920 and '30s,
where the alienated can feel a sense of empowerment
by identifying with "the great leader,"
often in these big rallies.
But it really is like snapshots out of the 1930s,
this kind of politics
of hatred and reaction and division.
Donald Trump wasn't the problem.
Donald Trump was
the symptom of the problem.
The problem
is a breakdown in the social cohesion
that makes democracy and civil society possible.
And that breakdown in social cohesion
in turn was created
by 40 years of rising economic inequality,
by the evisceration of the middle class.
Collectively, the nation lashed out
by electing the candidate who was lashing out, too.
Fuck you!
Go fucking make my tortilla, motherfucker!
And build that fuckin' wall, for me!
Trump!
This angry right-wing eruption
completely agreed
with the free market fundamentalism
of this new order,
and represented themselves
as a people
whose whiteness, whose traditional values,
whose Christianity, whose nativism
should be at the heart of the country's concerns.
Let them call you "racist."
Let them call you "xenophobes..."
Let them call you "nativist."
Wear it as a badge of honour,
because every day,
we get stronger and they get weaker.
Parts of the population
are actually leaning toward "strongmen"--
Donald Trump.
a large part of the Turkish population
is supporting Erdogan,
or we're seeing it in Hungary with Orban.
We are proud to stand together with United States
on fighting against illegal migration,
on terrorism,
and to protect and, um,
help the Christian communities all around the world.
All of these right-wing regimes
represent a continuation of privatization,
of the destruction of welfare,
undermining labour unions, et cetera.
Unchained by the kinds of restrictions
that workers' rights posed,
or that environmental protections posed,
or that even structures for providing for the poor posed.
So now, corporations have freer reign.
Money has replaced the vote.
America is dominated by a system of legalized bribery.
Our three branches of government
are wholly captive to corporate power.
So you have corporate forces
that purport to pay fealty to electoral politics,
the constitution,
the iconography and language of American patriotism,
and yet, internally,
have rendered the citizen impotent.
I don't think that you can honestly grasp
the forces we're up against,
including the unraveling of the ecosystem,
and not be filled with despair.
The greatest existential crisis of our time
is to at once understand the reality before us,
and then find the capacity to resist.
So much of our lives
is about the stories we tell ourselves.
And corporations have done a very effective job
at defining the limits of possibility
and defining what we can expect out of life.
So if we believe
that we are in a dog-eat-dog world,
and this patriarchal-machismo view of reality,
then that constrains how we act and how we behave.
Social movements are created out of a contagious mood
and a new tactic.
Part of what that new tactic does
is it wakes people up,
and part of what that mood does is gets them to dream again.
In 2011,
mass movements for change swept across the globe
in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
There was a cycle of struggles--
sometimes called "the movement of squares."
It starts in Tunisia...
...and passes to Egypt,
passing then
across the Mediterranean
to Spain...
...to Greece...
...before it finally arrives at Zuccotti Park,
in the United States.
And what were these movements about?
They were really about the demand
for a new kind of democracy.
During "Occupy Wall Street,"
we suddenly thought, "What?
We can have a democracy in this country
that's not run by corporate finance capitalism?"
Like, "that's amazing," you know?
And the moment was so ripe that, within 24 hours,
activists in New York City took up the idea
and ran with it.
These movements were a kind of refusal
of corporate culture or consumerism,
and that was their essence.
The Occupy Movement
quickly spread from Zuccotti Park
to cities across the United States,
and then the world.
The Occupy Movement captured the...
the feeling that ordinary working people had
that, when the recession happened in 2008,
the very banks
that had caused the financial collapse
were the ones being rewarded,
and the rest of us had got sold out.
What was so important about Occupy
was to crystallize the public anger.
Occupy did that,
and put an explanatory narrative around
"the 99% versus the 1%."
We're just trying to figure out a way
that we can change the system--
an economic system that is fundamentally--
fundamentally misaligned in the corporate interests
and against the people's interests.
And that's all we're doing here.
Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure,
but it taught us something very important.
We need to pair protests with gaining sovereignty,
which means either pairing protests
with winning elections,
or pairing protests with winning wars.
And you can choose, as an activist.
I would advocate elections.
There's only so many times
you can have tear gas fired into your face
and get hit over the head by a police baton
or be dragged off to jail.
And after a while, you say, you know,
"we're gonna do something at the level of politics now."
But all those movements face the challenge--
"what do you stand for?"
Are you actually going to challenge
the power of corporations?
This is what the 2020s will be about.
We turn now to Seattle, Washington,
where a former Occupy Wall Street activist
is being sworn in today to the city council.
We have shown that it's possible to succeed
as an independent, grassroots openly-socialist campaign,
not taking any money from big business.
This moment belongs to that way of organizing.
Kshama becomes the first socialist
elected to the Seattle City Council
since the early-20th century.
Her signature issue
was $15-an-hour minimum wage.
There were
courageous workers of McDonald's and other fast-food outlets
who went out on a one-day strike.
"15 and a union" was their slogan.
On the 15th of May, 2014,
thousands of fast-food workers
flooded the streets of 150 U.S. cities,
striking to demand a $15 minimum wage,
better working conditions,
and the right to form a union.
We organized ordinary people--
workers, rank-and-file union members,
and activists
who wanted to fight for 15.
If you are actually going to be true to the movement,
if you are going to be accountable
to all these people you claim to represent,
once you're elected,
it does require you to take a bold and strong stance
against the corporate politicians.
If they are not on your side,
then you have to fight against them.
You're duty-bound!
Of the over a billion dollars in taxes
that Amazon owes to the IRS,
they now get a break of $789 million.
Her campaign wins so many supporters
that Seattle becomes the first major city in America
to adopt a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
And that starts the ball rolling
as more and more cities across the nation
have followed the example of Seattle.
If you empower workers
by giving them a better standard of living,
it's not going to stop there.
It raises their sights, the confidence
of working people
towards a different kind of society.
You don't need a Ph.D. in Economics to know
that your life sucks under capitalism,
and we've got to build a movement to fight for it.
Four more years!
In 2019,
Kshama Sawant was elected to a third term
on Seattle City Council,
despite Amazon spending $1.5 million
to try to unseat her.
Kshama was pioneering
the new urban Renaissance.
Starting around 2013 and '14, especially,
a whole new movement developed
of grassroots organizations from various movements
that then united
to elect for the first time
representatives of their perspectives into office.
You had a whole wave of people,
all of whom were not expected to have a chance.
All of them are running
on more or less the same platform--
that income inequality is the moral issue of our time,
and they were not just part of a U.S. movement,
but you had Sadiq Khan,
the first Muslim elected to the mayoralty of London,
you had Anne Hidalgo,
a leading environmentalist and socialist of Europe,
winning the mayoralty of Paris,
Carmen Yulin Cruz, the Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico,
and you had Ada Colau in Barcelona.
In the wake of the mortgage meltdown worldwide,
there were thousands of Spanish homeowners
being evicted from their houses by international banks,
and Ada Colau begins to lead a resistance movement
of the homeowners.
Through mass protests
and civil disobedience,
she gains a name for herself as a defender of the homeowners.
What's different about this movement
is that the progressives have seen the necessity
to actually capture office,
then also, once they get into office,
they've understood the necessity for continuing
to be connected to the grassroots movements
that got them there.
In 2019,
more than 200 leading thinkers and activists
endorsed Colau's bid for re-election.
"Barcelona has become a beacon of hope," they wrote,
proving that we don't have to be afraid
of standing up to corporate power,
that there is another way of doing politics
that puts people at the centre."
Colau was re-elected Mayor in June, 2019.
Seeing the documentary The Corporation,
it opened my eyes.
This is Chris Barrett.
He appeared in our first film,
featured as one of the first
corporate-sponsored college students.
We saw Tiger Woods on TV with a hat
with a Nike logo on it,
and we figured,
you know, he probably gets, like, millions of dollars
just to wear the hat on a press conference,
and therefore, we figured we can do that for someone else
and hopefully get money,
in turn so we could go to school.
You guys were poking fun at us,
but we were 18-year-old kids.
Seeing The Corporation,
my mind just, like, kind of exploded.
It was just, like,
I had never been exposed to this mindset before.
I was having lunch with my grandfather
and I asked him "Who should the Democratic nominee be?"
And he told me at the time
that "Bernie Sanders looks pretty good."
I went home,
and I researched Bernie's platform,
and I realized that, internally,
like, I align with a lot that Bernie says.
This great nation and its government
belong to all of the people,
and not to a handful of billionaires.
When I got connected to "Grassroots for Sanders,"
they offered me the position
of Assistant Fundraising Manager,
where I could be able to do the fundraising asks on Reddit.
We were able to raise over $10 million
directly to Bernie Sanders' campaign.
At some of the field offices,
people would come through the door
and they would say, "How do I get involved?
I have never voted in my life."
One of Bernie's messages,
after he lost his Presidential run,
was that local people could take back the power
and we could run for office.
I met a local political organizer
in my town of Collingswood.
He was putting together
a slate of progressive candidates.
I thought that was a brilliant idea.
It was exactly what Bernie wanted us to do,
and we-- I signed the form,
and we were running for office.
I don't think,
when I was out there getting a corporate sponsor,
that I realized that, in 16 years,
I would be an elected official in New Jersey.
I'm gonna stay on this path,
and I'm gonna continue down this political route
until we have the progressive party of the future.
Historically,
progressive movements
were more interested about building power in the streets--
which is an important thing--
and they kind of neglected running for office.
I think, now,
progressives are starting to see the nature of power,
where it lies,
and the reason to contest for it.
Now we have thousands of people saying,
"Hey! I want to run for office."
It's common to say now
that the Senator's campaign failed.
I think that's a mistake.
I think it was an extraordinary success.
Completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion.
Issues that were unthinkable a couple years ago
are now right in the middle of attention.
The Sanders campaign
took to the larger political stage
the kind of politics
being practiced by local politicians,
like Sawant,
Colau,
and Barrett--
electoral politics interwoven with grassroots activism.
Some form of "Green New Deal"
is essential for the survival of humanity,
now it's part of the general agenda.
Why?
Activists' engagement.
Young people,
they received support
from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other young legislators,
who came into office
as part of the Sanders-inspired popular wave.
I think the next wave of revolutions
really is gonna be this kind of strange thing
where we wake up and we're like,
"Oh, my gosh, there's this social movement.
They're in the streets,
but they're running election campaigns.
They have candidates and they're winning?"
Whatever form it takes,
change always begins with organizing.
2018 is going to be
the year that we take
the toxic, stultified politics of climate change
and turn it on its head,
and it starts with stopping Adani!
Our aim
is to move the world away from fossil fuels
as fast as possible.
The Wangan and Jagalingou people
have a different struggle,
which is to protect their land and to win land rights.
No means no!
Adani has tried to rip our people apart.
It's actually brought our people together as well.
And we've been able to think about,
"What is our alternative future?
What do we want to build?"
And it's not extractive industries
that governments
and other corporations would like it to be.
What we've set out to do
is support a whole range of organizations and individuals
to work together,
to achieve much bigger change
than any one organization could achieve working alone.
We want to lose control of as many people as possible,
headed in the right direction.
We figured that the only way
we could really stop the project
is stopping them getting financed.
Yes, they need the permits and the approvals,
but Adani also needs money.
Both "Stop Adani"
and the Wangan and Jagalingou people
pushed to halt funding of the Adani Coal Mine.
We met with some of the largest banks in the world
and said,
"You need to acknowledge
that any investment in the Adani Carmichael Coal Mine
will be a breach of your obligations to us
as the indigenous people who have said no."
Within a month,
Standard Chartered came out publicly
and said that they would not be giving any money to Adani.
That was after they'd already given them $680 million.
The two campaigns together succeeded
in stopping funding from all banks worldwide.
Then they won again,
blocking the Australian government's attempt
to fill the gap with a $1-billion loan.
It was a huge victory for us
because we were told
it was something that couldn't be done.
Adani and its government allies
continue their push for the mine to go forward.
And yet,
not a single lump of coal has been mined to date.
The resistance continues.
All of my life,
I have been told who I am through stories
about the people that I come from.
Without their resistance and their resilience,
I would not be here.
It's come down to me,
and I refuse to be the broken link in the chain.
The fight over the Adani Coal Mine
has become a symbol
whether corporations can continue to ride roughshod
over the wishes of the community,
and create a future
that is in their financial interests alone,
or whether the community actually can build enough power
to say, "No, that is not the future we want.
We want a safe future with a safe climate for everybody."
There is this global network.
There's a big fight brewing
in Argentina against fracking corporations,
against coal expansion in South Africa
and the Philippines,
in India,
in Poland.
There's campaigns against pipelines in Canada--
Kinder Morgan, Keystone XL--
the fight at Standing Rock.
Our indigenous people
have been on the front lines way before my time.
It's about the land, the water...
our inherent jurisdiction as caretakers of Mother Earth.
But it's not just an indigenous struggle,
it's a struggle of humanity.
We need to come together
to push back the corporate agenda.
All people,
all races are beginning to realize
we're in this together.
We will rise! We will rise!
You cannot unring a bell.
Our civilization is being sacrificed
for the opportunity
of a very small number of people
to continue making enormous amounts of money.
We have not come here
to beg world leaders to care.
You have ignored us in the past
and you will ignore us again.
We have run out of excuses
and we are running out of time.
We have come here
to let you know that change is coming,
whether you like it or not.
The real power belongs to the people.
If they're really wanting
to address the deep problems
of social, racial, and gender injustice in our society,
then we need to think of lessons from history.
One thing that's remarkable
is just that people keep struggling.
That, in the worst situations,
people always fight...
...even when you thought "nothing's possible,"
you look at the political situation
and think how bad it is,
then something beautiful and inspiring comes up.
In the spring of 2020,
the world shut down,
but people's hearts opened wide.
One of the most beautiful things
I've seen during the crisis
is the way workers in a variety of sectors
have refused--
have refused to go along with putting workers in danger.
Amazon workers striking,
FedEx workers walking out,
also health-care workers put in dangerous situations.
This foresees the kinds of struggles
that will emerge from this crisis
that confront the inequalities of this economy.
The pandemic
has revealed that there is broad support
for the idea that we need to contain corporate power,
so that we live in a society
where we reinvigorate democracy,
where we have a sense of the public purpose,
and that we're not simply at the mercy
of a few corporations that increasingly run our lives.
This can
change the way people think about the system.
We owe one another certain things,
certain minimum things.
That's been lost in the last 40 years
of deregulation and privatization
and corporate takeover of our political culture
and our political system.
It is starting to dawn on society as a whole
that we're not going to go back to the old normal,
there's no such world,
because the pandemic has revealed
that the system is incapable
of addressing even the most basic needs
of our society.
Then, as this film was being finished,
George Floyd is brutally killed by police--
a flash point that ignites an uprising.
Thousands took to the streets,
demanding justice for George Floyd.
...The death of a Black man pleading
that he can't breathe
as a white officer was kneeling on his neck.
Justice!
Now!
Imagine how angry and desperate
you would have to be to come out and protest
in the historical pandemic
that has had
a disproportionately horrendous impact
in Black communities.
Take your knee off our necks!
The democracy is just trying to breathe.
Because of the weight of poverty on our neck.
The denial of health care on our neck.
'Cause what's happening
is metaphorically the whole culture is saying,
"We can't breathe!"
Despite sometimes- brutal police repression,
the protests grew
and began to target broader injustices
and distorted priorities.
Look at the gear
and the equipment that they have,
compared to hospital workers,
dressing themselves in garbage bags,
being forced to use the same N95 masks
for weeks at a time.
The protests
quickly became about more than racist policing...
confronting the echoes
of corporate capitalism's racist past.
Capitalism is racial capitalism.
The Industrial Revolution,
which pivoted around the production of capital,
was enabled by slave labour in the U.S.
There are calls to rethink
who we choose to honour from our past.
Monuments to men who were once honoured
now viewed by a new generation
as symbols of racism and colonialism.
People are protesting
because they know it doesn't have to be like this.
People only protest
what they believe can be changed.
If folks didn't protest,
that'd mean we really would be in trouble.
I don't believe
these are just protests against police brutality.
We're seeing the convergence of a class rebellion,
with racism at the centre of it.
I believe, without a doubt,
that change will come from the protests.
It is not just Black people.
We can't be the same coming out of this.
Too many people are suffering.
We must make our political system respond.
We must do it
in our deepest moral and non-violent traditions,
but it must not it be weak.
It has to be strong.
It has to last for the election and beyond an election.
There is a whole new spirit out there
that's saying
500 years of colonialism is enough,
200 years of corporate rule is enough,
200 years of the building of a fossil-fuel age
is enough.
I see people who are waking up to the realization
that, no, you don't go start an app
if you want to change the world.
You actually try to change the world
and de-rig a rigged system.
And, in a moment like this,
if you're not working
at that level on those kinds of things,
you have to really ask yourself,
what was your role in this moment of history?
We've been here before.
We've been at a place
where my ancestors
were bought and sold for profit.
We've been at a place
where people routinely died on the job.
And over time,
movements of ordinary people have broken the chains
and have held corporations and powerful people accountable
and changed the rules,
so that more people can flourish and feel truly free.
I think we are in the midst
of another one of those movements
right now,
where a lot of people, all across the world,
are saying "Enough is enough."