In The Multi-National Interest

Since Jello Biafra took to the semi-stand-up arena of the spoken word and began perfecting fabulously entertaining megaphone rants against All-American hypocrisy, big business foibles and planetary injustices, the former Dead Kennedys firebrand has spewed forth all manner of seductive propositions.

His enlightened proposals for downtown businessmen to wear clown costumes and for the voting age to be lowered to five may, sadly, prove too sensibly radical for most political tastes. Less controversial is Jello’s call for Noam Chomsky to be made Minister of Education. Might the good professor be a better candidate than recent apparatchik appointee Mary Hanafin? Hmm, it’s a distinct possibility.
Filmmaker Mark Achbar is inclined to agree. Having previously directed Chomsky in the documentary Manufacturing Consent; Noam Chomsky And The Media, Mr. Achbar’s latest film, The Corporation once again calls upon the MIT stalwart to voice his learned opinions on the malign influence of vast corporate entities.
“Professor Chomsky is extremely giving of his time,” explained Mark, visiting Dublin recently for the Stranger Than Fiction Documentary Festival. “He literally spends thirty hours a week on correspondence, and he’ll diligently respond to everything. I don’t know how he does it. I often wonder if there are several Chomskys. One for writing letters, one for lecturing, one for campaigning and one to go home to the family. It’s like he’s been cloned.”
Despite calling on the views of such an entrenched idealogue as Chomsky, Mark Achbar’s clever dialectically-swinging film is no mere piece of agitprop. In addition to recalling atrocities perpetrated by the Monsanto Petrochemical corp. and lining up familiar rabble-rousing faces, including fellow Canadians Michael Moore and Naomi Klein, The Corporation visits with boastful corporate spies, broadminded CEOs, not-so-broadminded CEOs, economists, historians and one terrifying individual who advises toy companies on how best to manipulate kids and harness ‘pester power’. These disparate voices repeatedly underline the inherently illogical nature of laissez-faire capitalism. The right-wing Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, for example, is seen to be in complete agreement with left-wing historian Howard Zinn. Both men state that the bottom line dictates all and by extension multi-national profits must come before national interest.
In a similarly contradictory vein, the most damning anti-corporate testimony frequently comes from the mouths of those who would defend the system. One commodities broker admits that as news of the September 11th attacks filtered through, every trader’s first thought was “Wow, gold must be exploding… In devastation there is opportunity.” Later, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, who famously presided over the company as Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists were hanged, admits to being impotent as an agent of change.
“That was an extraordinary thing about making the film”, Mark tells me, “the candour of people like Mark Moody-Stuart. In a way, that enables you to distinguish between the institution and the individual. You see him, for example, talking to protesters on his lawn about human rights and the environment. But if we accept that he, the company CEO, was powerless to change anything, that’s a damning indictment.”
Despite such illustrations of systemic inhumanity and discounting its delightfully neat line in gallows humour, The Corporation is not all doom and gloom. Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Carpets, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, provides an inspiring case in point. Following a personal environmental epiphany, he reorganised his $1.4 billion company with the aim of being completely sustainable by 2020. Fighting the power on a much smaller scale, the film recounts the successful grassroots efforts of a small Bolivian town, whose population resisted Bechtel’s attempts to privatise their water supply. Hope, it would seem, does indeed lie with the Proles so understandably, the director is keen to spread the word.
“I’d like to reach as many people as possible,” explains Mark, “and as broad a demographic as possible. It would be great if people who are sympathetic to the issues in the film could drag along those who aren’t so sympathetic. If you haven’t got a hard-nosed capitalist friend to bring, then maybe it’s time you made one. Maybe it’s about time we all got together to create some democratic dialogue about this.”
To further this end, The Corporation has spawned Act. i-Corp, a website intended to mobilise activists, promote issue-based campaigns linked to the film and ultimately build an online community to fight the power, as the parlance of our times would have it.
“It would be great if people could sign up”, says Mark, “and don’t worry, we’re very careful not to bombard people with mails they’ll never read. If you find it obnoxious, you can always sign off later. But try it. We like to work with groups that have similar interests. So let’s all get together.”

The Corporation opens in the IFI on October 29th