Original subtitles

[uplifting orchestral instrumental]

[relaxed exhaling]

[Wendy] 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.

[relaxed exhaling]

[foreboding orchestral instrumental]

[narrator] 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 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 his character to be

pathologically self-interested.

Now, with the world in crisis,

climate change, spiraling 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.

[narrator] Enron and WorldCom have collapsed

in corporate scandals of unprecedented magnitude.

Corporations were being called out

for malfeasance that was destroying lives

and the environment.

[eerie percussion music]

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.

[John Coyne] I think calling corporations psychopaths...

absolutely had an impact,

and I can say that for myself.

When... when I had to consume

that particular thought,

that was...

that was interesting,

to use a very soft word.

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 landfill,

zero deforestation, 100% recycling.

A real and significant shift.

[narrator] 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.

[upbeat, delicate percussion music]

[John] 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.

[narrator] Wait, what did he say?

- [high-pitched rewinding] - That cult of shareholder value

has seen its day as the narrow construct

for how companies operate in society.

[narrator] 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 that corporations now tell about themselves.

[airplane rumbling]

[Klaus] What is the purpose of the company?

Is it just to make money?

[narrator] 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 moneymaking

and social responsibility.

[anticipatory percussion music]

[narrator] To advance his ideas,

Schwab built the world's most important annual gathering

of corporate titans and world leaders.

?

[Sandra] 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 elites'

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.

[upbeat synthesizer music]

[narrator] 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.

[Sandra] These financial elites have great power,

and in some instances this power actually exceeds

those of democratically elected people or institutions.

[narrator] 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?

[narrator] This is Sanjay Jain,

one of Dimon's top executives at JPMorgan Chase.

He's advising a prospective client.

No, but I knew that 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.

[narrator] And here's the client, Bibop Gresta.

Hi, Bibop Gresta. Very nice to meet you.

[narrator] He's looking for investors in his company

that's developing a transportation capsule

that travels at the speed of sound.

[Bibop] Sorry.

I'm sorry. Excuse me.

Hi, it's Bibop Gresta,

Chairman of Hyperloop.

[indistinct chatter]

Oh, good, yeah, I saw some of your colleagues.

Thank you. Good luck today.

[indistinct chatter]

[Sanjay] In 2009,

when the financial crisis happened,

JPMorgan, and Jamie Dimon in particular,

picked Detroit as the one city

in the entire country we were going to save.

So, you need to say to Jamie,

"I just want you to know that we are building

a Hyperloop to Detroit.

We care about Detroit as much as you do."

- That's it. - Okay.

- Okay, got it? - Got it. Got it.

[Jamie] Here he is. How are you?

[Bibop] Jamie, thank you for inviting me.

You going to like, a black tie tonight?

- Well, yeah. They said... - You just dress like this.

- [Bibop laughing] No, I was... - I was telling Tony Blair...

- [Bibop] How are you tonight? - You guys have

- something in common. - Yes.

[Jamie] You were in a rock band.

- [Bibop laughing] - He was in a rock band

before he was Prime Minister.

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 efforts allegedly 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.

You know, we are trying to contribute,

follow your example.

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.

[Klaus] 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.

[looming, anticipatory synthesizer music]

[Valerie] 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.

[Valerie] 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.

[narrator] 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.

[Elizabeth] There are CEOs and corporate boards

attempting to do good in the world.

They clearly are.

But the notion that there is anything inherently

socially responsible about a corporation

is a counter-intuitive 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.

[narrator] What then do we make

of the corporations' 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.

[John Browne] 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.

[narrator] 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.

You, 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.

[man 1 on radio] I need an ambulance

and EMTs right now!

[man 2 on radio] There's people trapped

in the trailer, they need help.

[John Browne] In 2005,

when I was CEO of BP,

we had a terrible tragedy.

Fifteen people died

in a refinery explosion in Texas City.

[news anchor] 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 fourteen safety violations.

[John Browne] All of us at BP are very deeply saddened

by the loss of life and injuries

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.

[news anchor] Technicians at Prudhoe Bay

warned it was understaffed,

lacking in routine maintenance, leak prone,

and vulnerable to explosion.

[Abrahm] 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.

[narrator] Yet BP claimed it had learned its lesson

from Texas City.

[John Browne] In 2007 I left BP

and I thought, "This is great.

This company has got it."

[explosion roaring]

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.

[explosion roaring]

[narrator] While John Browne had left BP,

some things hadn't changed.

[Abrahm] The poor decisions that led

to the Deepwater Horizon echo and track

what John Browne instituted in the company

a decade or two before it.

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.

And that's the culture that he built.

[soft, pulsating orchestral instrumental]

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.

?

[Jamie] We are a, just to make it clear,

a for-profit institution.

- [audience laughing] - And we are making

an investment in Detroit.

[narrator] Remember Jamie Dimon

from JPMorgan 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.

[news anchor] 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.

[narrator] 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... but it's part humanity,

trying to help your city and your people

come back and recover from what had been

basically a terrible 20 years.

[Robert] Jamie Dimon wants to rescue Detroit,

but what's misleading is he wants America

to believe that he and, by implication,

JPMorgan 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.

[reporter 1] At one point,

the market fell as if down a well.

[reporter 2] The NASDAQ, everything and more

has been completely wiped out.

[reporter 3] Three of the five biggest

independent firms on Wall Street

have now disappeared.

[George W. Bush] Major sectors of America's

financial system are at risk of shutting down.

[narrator] 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 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.

[woman sobbing]

[newscaster] The nation's biggest bank,

JPMorgan Chase, has agreed to a $13 billion

settlement with the US 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.

[narrator] But JPMorgan Chase's caring image

helped mask its self-interested nature.

[Anand] I think we have to acknowledge

that as a kind of private sector propaganda,

it has been remarkably successful.

[narrator] 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

the 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 that it saved 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 time.

We didn't run, we didn't hide.

And we figure, you know, if we can help in Detroit,

you can help anywhere.

[Anand] We participate

in this game...

that allows the very people ...

abetting harm to our society,

or actively harming our society,

to reinvent themselves as saviors.

[audience applauding]

[narrator] But that's part of a larger game

corporations now play:

making feelgood promises with bright smiles...

appearing to be different than what they really are.

[birds chirping]

If the new corporation had a playbook...

what might it look like?

What would its key plays be?

[eerie orchestral instrumental]

[reporter] I am here with Bill Gates.

I'd love you to tell our readers what...

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?

[narrator] 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.

- [teacher] How are you? - We are fine,

thank you, Teacher, and how are you?

[teacher] I'm fine, thank you.

[Shannon] 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.

[Angelo] 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 McDonald's or Starbucks.

We build for scale. We systematize. We standardize.

We call this vertically integrated platform.

Our academy in a box.

[Anand] What is so interesting

about this social business thing

is, on the surface, it seems incredibly noble.

They're saying moneymaking

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 kick something back to the winners.

But those interested financial reasons

are good for the world.

If we succeed in serving ten 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 trans-cede it, and in so doing,

be a good partner for our shareholders

and those who've entrusted us with their capital ...

to try to make a big impact.

[Diane] 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.

[Shannon] We believe everyone is a teacher ...

and everyone could be.

There are certain core skills you need to have.

You've got to be able to read.

Might seem like a low bar,

but you have to start somewhere.

[narrator] It's true.

Bridge Teachers know how to read.

But they're required to do little more

in their classrooms because they follow

scripted lesson plans,

read word for word from a tablet.

[Shannon] 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 ...

follow a scripted curriculum that tells you,

"Walk three steps to the blackboard,

walk around the classroom."

And that's...

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, if hopefully the government will fix it."

But fix it with what?

[narrator] "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.

[Ronald Reagan] In this present crisis,

government is not the solution to our problem.

Government is the problem.

[Margaret Thatcher] We believe that government should be

severely limited

in the way in which they say

that they're entitled to impose

their judgment on what the people want.

If you look at the real problems of poverty

and denial of freedom to people in this country,

almost every single one of them

is a result of government action.

[Wendy] In the 1980s, corporations were frustrated

by the limits on profits

that they felt were imposed upon them

by the combination of labor 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.

[narrator] 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.

[Marshall] 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.

[foreboding chimes]

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 US 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.

JPMorgan Chase, they just announced earnings,

and they were incredible.

Where... 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 JPMorgan's blowout quarter.

Best profit for any bank ever in history.

[Tim Ryan] 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 say,

"What do we do now? Let's do a tax cut."

Thirty-six 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?

[narrator] And while corporations lobby for

and profit from tax cuts at home...

they further avoid taxes by stashing profits abroad.

[Sandra] The corporate elite is best positioned

to use the system that we have to their advantage.

And one manifestation of that is tax havens.

[narrator] Every year, corporations squirrel away

billions of dollars in tax havens.

And when that's combined with tax cuts...

guess what happens?

Sixty 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 have flown in here

to hear Sir David Attenborough speak

about, you know, how we're wrecking the planet.

And 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 got to be talking about taxes.

That's it. Taxes, taxes, taxes.

All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion.

[woman] Thank you.

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.

[Anand] 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 have 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 ...

you know, 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."

[Angelo] 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?

[Susan] By 2020, 44% of all water infrastructure

in the United States will be classified as poor,

very poor, or beyond live.

[Angelo] You deny resources for quality public services.

[Susan] In the 1970s, there were

a lot of pools of free federal money.

That has really, no pun, dried up.

[Angelo] And Io and behold, the answer is privatization.

[Susan] What we believe is that private industry

is part of the answer, which is very

consistent with what the President's plan is.

[narrator] 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.

[Grand Chief Stewart] 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.

But 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?

[Diane Ravitch] 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.

[narrator] In the rise of big tech corporations,

it's now accelerating this process.

For example, in schools.

Not only in Africa, but elsewhere too.

[Diane Ravitch] Corporations have decided

that they should remake education

by using technology.

And they want to have teacher-less classrooms.

But the teacher is the single most important

and expensive part of education.

In the tech industry's dream,

if the teacher is removed from the equation,

then you can cut costs dramatically.

[Paul] 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.

[Anand] Silicon Valley is the new Rome of our time.

The Valley has become

this extraordinary power center

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,

etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

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 health care,

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.

[narrator] 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 the technology

and the tech companies in a way which is similar

to the way we treat our 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.

[Anand] 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 handling 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.

[upbeat synthesizer music]

[Sun-Ha] Technology provides us

such a seductive fantasy.

Our smartphones, 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

leaves 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 challenged 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 are 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.

[eerie buzzing]

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.

?

[Chris] 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.

[woman] 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.

[eerie synthesizer music]

[Michael] 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 a much of a believer in political citizenship.

I actually believe much more

in the power of the marketplace.

[narrator] This is Richard Edelman,

one of the world's most influential business gurus.

[Richard] 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, 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.

[Narrator] 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.

[Katie] Mr. Dimon, you're an expert on financial statements,

and you run a $2.6 trillion bank.

I went to Monster.com and I found a job

in my hometown of Irvine at JPMorgan Chase

that pays $16.50 an hour.

[narrator] 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...

[narrator] 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's working full time at your bank?

I ...

I don't know that all your numbers are accurate.

That number is a start... is generally a starter job.

[Katie] 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.

[narrator] 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 favor 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.

[Marshall] 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... - [Jamie] I'd love to call up

and have a conversation about her financial affairs

and see if we can be helpful.

[Katie] See if you can find a way for her

to live on less than the minimum

- that I've described? - [Jamie] Just be helpful.

[Anand] The 1% and.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 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 tha... 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. - [Alexandria] 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. - 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.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is coal.

Don't be afraid. Don't be scared.

[man] 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.

[narrator] This is Scott Morrison.

He later became Prime Minister.

He heads a group of high-level politicians with deep ties

to 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.

The issue in regulation or deregulation

is not the number.

I mean, that's really absurd.

What you want to know, you know,

do you want to have another financial crisis?

Well, if you do,

let's get rid of the financial regulations.

[Robert] 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 an 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 it's not a hypothetical.

It means people get poisoned,

they get diseases, they get sick.

Corners will be cut, people will be injured,

and people will be killed.

We see it over and over again.

[determined electronic music]

[exhaling breath]

[music continues]

?

[music fades]

[Abrahm] 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.

[rewind cranking]

[explosion rumbling]

[narrator] Remember this?

This, too, was a consequence of deregulation.

[foreboding orchestral instrumental]

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.

[foreboding electronic music]

[narrator] Lives are being destroyed

as corporations profit from their playbook moves...

as they play to win.

[Vandana] These corporate forces have no limits.

And these forces ...

have put the very human species itself at risk.

?

[Vandana] 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.

[man] 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.

[man 2] Major cities all around the world

are vulnerable to a disease arriving in the city

and then causing a major epidemic.

And again, we're seeing that more and more.

[woman] 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.

[newscaster] All of Italy is now effectively a red zone.

[newscaster 2] Warnings from Sao Paolo are dire.

[newscaster 3] In the United States,

disaster has been declared in all 50 states.

[narrator] When the coronavirus hit

in the spring of 2020,

it laid bare the unjust and dangerous fault lines

of corporate capitalism.

[newscaster 4] African Americans

have been hit hardest by the virus.

Despite accounting for 14% of Michigan's population,

they represent 41% of its COVID victims.

I'm praying that it's not ...

I haven't been in contact with nobody that has it.

[woman] We got a hospital COVID, 52-year-old male,

10 minutes out [indistinct].

[man] I'll be honest with you, I can barely keep track.

This is the culmination of decades of tilting policy,

tilting public resources,

in favor of the biggest corporations.

Fewer hospitals, fewer hospital beds,

less capacity to be able to respond

in an emergency like this.

[melancholy orchestral instrumental]

[sirens wailing]

Other systems are also breaking down right now.

Essential workers, people who are on the front lines

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 labor 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.

[narrator] As ordinary people suffered the despair

and harsh effects of economic breakdown,

giant corporations were thrown a lifeline.

[McConnell] Madam President, I have an update.

At last, we have a deal.

[Alexandria] 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.

[Robert] Once again, the very wealthy,

big corporations did extraordinarily well

over the last year and a half.

They have 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 have 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, a corporate socialism,

but also the harshest form of capitalism

for most working people and the poor.

The crisis has highlighted

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.

[Heather] 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.

[Abrahm] 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.

[narrator] With the impacts of climate change

now in plain view,

fossil fuel companies have stopped actively denying

that it's happening.

They have 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, 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.

[Abrahm] 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 look 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

to 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.

[narrator] The fossil fuel industry

is ramping up new mega-projects.

Some companies are pursuing profits

from even the dirtiest fuels...

like Adani.

[man] 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.

[Murrawah] It's the largest new proposed coal project

in the world

to be 40 kilometers by 13 kilometers ...

entirely encompassed within Wangan and Jagalingou country.

[Sam] It is on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef,

an already very stressed and vulnerable ecosystem.

And what we're going to 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,

the traditional owners of that country.

[Murrawah] Wangan and Jagalingou,

we're a problem for Adani.

So, they're going to 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 devised 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."

[chanting in Spanish]

They use our security,

they use our own Aboriginal police against us,

they use every means they can.

[Grand Chief Stewart] To Indigenous people,

it is clearly a life and death struggle.

That's what you're witnessing happening around the world.

There's this destructive corporate agenda

that is completely out of control.

[rapid gunfire]

[menacing electronic music]

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.

[Vandana] 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!

[people cheering]

[Anand] It's only a matter of time

before... people

want to shatter the system.

[man on radio] You must disperse now.

Riot police will be used in this area.

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.

[crowd chanting] Build that wall! Build that wall!

Build that wall! Build that wall!

[Marshall] It's akin to the fascist movements

of the 1920s and '30s

where the alienated can feel a sense of empowerment

by identifying with the great leader,

often in these big rallies.

I mean, it really is like snapshots out of the 1930s,

this kind of politics of hatred,

and reaction, and division.

[Nick] 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.

Go fucking make my tortilla, motherfucker!

And build that fucking wall for me!

Trump!

[Wendy] 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.

[woman translating into French]

Let them call you xenophobes.

[woman translating into French]

Let them call you nativist.

[woman translating into French]

Wear it as a badge of honor

because every day we get stronger and they get weaker.

Parts of the population are actually leaning

towards strongmen: Donald Trump.

The large part of the Turkish population

is supporting Erdogan,

or we're seeing it in Hungary with Orbán.

We are proud to stand together with United States

on fighting against illegal migration,

on terrorism,

and to protect and help

the Christian communities all around the world.

[Michael] All of these right wing regimes

represent a continuation of privatization

of the destruction of welfare,

the undermining of labor units, et cetera.

Unchained by the kinds of restrictions

that workers' rights posed,

or that environmental protections posed,

more than 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.

[ethereal chiming]

[Micah] 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 it's a 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.

[narrator] In 2011, mass movements for change

swept across the globe in the aftermath

of the 2008 financial crisis.

There was the cycle of struggles,

sometimes called the Movement of Squares.

It starts in Tunisia ...

and passes to Egypt.

Passing then across the Mediterranean to Spain.

[people chanting in Spanish]

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?"

Be 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.

[crowd] Resurrect democracy!

[Micah] These movements were a kind of refusal

of corporate culture, consumerism,

and that was their essence.

[crowd] Of New York City.

[narrator] The Occupy movement

quickly spread from Zuccotti Park

to cities across the United States.

And then the world.

[upbeat synthesizer music]

[Kshama] The Occupy movement captured 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.

[Robert] 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%.

[man] We're just trying to figure out a way

that we can change this system,

an economic system that is fundamentally...

fundamentally misaligned in the corporate interests,

and against the peoples' interests.

And that's all we're doing.

[weapons firing]

[man] Hey, back up, back up, back up.

[man 2] What happened? What happened?

[man 3] He was shot.

[indistinct yelling and talking]

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

teargas 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 going to 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.

[upbeat chiming percussion music]

[newscaster] 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... to the Seattle City Council

since the early 20th century.

Her signature issue was

$15 an hour minimum wage.

[Kshama] 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.

[narrator] 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.

[Kshama] We organized ordinary people:

Workers, rank and file union members,

and activists who wanted to fight for $15.

If you're actually going to be true to the movement,

if you're 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.

After over a billion dollars

of taxes that Amazon owes to the IRS,

they now get a break

of $789 million.

[man] Her campaign wins so many supporters

that Seattle becomes the first major city in America

to adopt $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.

[Kshama] 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 PhD in economics

to know that your life sucks under capitalism,

and we've got to build a movement to fight for it.

[crowd] Four more years! Four more years!

Four more years!

[narrator] 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.

[breath exhaling]

[Juan] 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 the 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.

[door thumping and cracking]

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.

Fundamental rights are non-negotiable!

It was a very tough fight

to stop home evictions and force the banks to negotiate

with these families so they could keep their homes

or, at a minimum, not to have a debt for life.

Why are you doing this? We're not criminals!

This is our home!

We will stop this eviction! We will stop this eviction!

[Juan] Through mass protests and civil disobedience,

she gains a name for herself

as a defender of the homeowners.

The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH)

has stopped the eviction of a family

that was to take place this morning.

Nobody's coming in here!

The President of the bank can make decisions,

and until he arrives,

we're not leaving.

We encountered an existing government

that had colluded with the financial interests,

the banks, and big corporations -

many of us asked ourselves,

maybe it is necessary to step forward

and regain control of the government.

and recover what is ours.

Many of us wondered if the moment

had arrived to launch a political candidacy,

to make politics a more democratic process

than what it had been before.

Thank you!

[rhythmic clapping music]

I came to be the first woman mayor of Barcelona.

With our arrival to city hall

all the elites in power saw us as intruders

we had the telephone numbers of no-one,

absolutely no-one that was representative

of the city's economic power.

[Juan] 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.

Barcelona is now the leader

fighting against home evictions,

more than any other government institution in all of Spain.

We are the city that invests the most in social programs

in the entire country.

[narrator] 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 center."

Colau was re-elected mayor in June 2019.

[upbeat percussion music]

Seeing the documentary, The Corporation,

it opened my eyes.

[narrator] This is Chris Barrett.

He appeared in our first film,

featured as one of the first

corporate-sponsored college students.

[Chris] I 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 can go to school.

You guys were poking fun at us,

but we were 18-year-old kids.

Seeing The Corporation,

my... 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.

[crowd cheering]

[Chris] And I got connected to Grassroots for Sanders.

They offered me a position

of Assistant Fundraising Manager

where I could be able to do

the fundraising asks on Reddit.

[upbeat, melodious synthesizer music]

We were able to raise over $10 million

directly to Bernie Sanders' campaign.

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 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 going to stay on this path and I'm going to 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, you know,

that the Sanders' 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 of years ago

are now right in the middle of attention.

[narrator] 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.

[Noam] Some form of green New Deal is essential

for the survival of humanity.

Now it's part of the general agenda.

Why?

Activist engagement, young people,

they receive 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 going to 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?"

[upbeat synthesizer music]

[narrator] 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.

[Sam] 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.

[Murrawah] 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 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.

[John] We figured that the only way

we could really stop the project

is stopping them getting financed.

[Sam] Yes, they need the permits and the approvals,

but Adani also needs money.

[narrator] Both stop Adani,

and the Wangan and Jagalingou people

pushed to halt funding of the Adani coal mine.

[Murrawah] 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 had already given them $680 million.

[narrator] 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.

[narrator] Adani and his 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.

[Murrawah] 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.

[John] 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."

[pensive electronic music]

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 and Poland.

There's campaigns against pipelines in Canada:

Kinder Morgan, Keystone XL,

the fight at Standing Rock.

[Kukpi7 Judy] 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.

[Grand Chief Stewart] 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.

[crowd] We will rise. We will rise.

You cannot un-ring 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.

You 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 we are 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.

[Michael] One thing that's remarkable is just that ...

people keep struggling.

That in the worst situations,

people always fight.

Even when you thought...

nothing was possible,

you look at the political situation

and think how bad it is,

then something beautiful and inspiring comes out.

[upbeat rhythmic orchestral instrumental]

[narrator] In the spring of 2020,

the world shut down.

But people's hearts opened wide.

?

[sirens wailing]

[bells jangling]

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,

but 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.

[Stacy] 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.

[Robert] 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 the corporate takeover

of our political culture

and our political system.

[Kshama] 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.

[narrator] Then, as this film was being finished,

George Floyd is brutally killed by police.

A flashpoint that ignites an uprising.

[newscaster 1] Thousands took to the streets,

demanding justice for George Floyd.

[newscaster 2] The death of a Black man pleading

that he can't breathe, as a white officer

was kneeling on his neck.

Justice! Now!

Black lives matter!

[Keeanga-Yamatta] Imagine how angry, 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!

[crowd] Take your knee off our necks!

[William] The [indistinct] just trying to breathe

because of the weight of poverty on our neck,

and the denial of health care on our necks.

Because what's happening is, metaphorically,

the whole culture's saying, "We can't breathe."

[narrator] Despite sometimes brutal police repression,

the protests grew

and began to target broader injustices

and distorted priorities.

[woman] 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.

[narrator] 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 labor in the U.S.

[crowd cheering]

[newscaster] There are calls to rethink

who we choose to honor from our past.

Monuments to men who were once honored,

now viewed by a new generation as symbols

of racism and colonialism.

[William] People are protesting because they know

it don't have to be like this.

People only protest what they believe can be changed.

If folk didn't protest,

that meant we really would be in trouble.

[woman] I don't believe these are just protests

against police brutality.

We're seeing the convergence of a class rebellion

with racism at the center of it.

I believe without a doubt

that change will come from this protest.

It is not just Black people.

[William] 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 [indistinct] traditions.

But it must not be weak.

It has to be strong.

It has to last for an election

and beyond an election.

[breath exhaling]

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 in 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."

[breath exhaling]

[upbeat electronic music]

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