Noam Chomsky, Richard Grossman: "The Corporation"

Noam Chomsky: "The goal for the corporations is to maximize profit and market share. And they also have a goal for their target, namely the population. They have to be turned into completely mindless consumers of goods that they do not want. You have to develop what are called "Creative Wants". So you have to create wants. You have to impose on people what's called a Philosophy of Futility. You have to focus them on the insignificant things of life, like fashionable consumption. I'm just basically quoting business literature. And it makes perfect sense. The ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another. Whose conception of themselves, the sense of value is just, "how many created wants can I satisfy?" We have huge industries, public relations industry, monstrous industry, advertising and so on, which are designed from infancy to mold people into this desired pattern."

Narrator: "Some of the best creative minds are employed to assure our faith in the corporate world view. They seduce us with beguiling illusions. Designed to divert our minds and manufacture our consent."

Richard Grossman: "Corporations don't advertise products particularly; they're advertising a way of life. A way of thinking. A story of who we are as people and how we got here and what's the source of our so-called liberty, and so-called freedom. You know, so you have decades and decades and decades of propaganda and education teaching us to think in a certain way. When applied to the large corporation, it's that the corporation was inevitable, that it's indispensable, that it's somehow remarkably efficient, and that it's responsible for progress and the good life. They're selling themselves, they're selling their domination, they're selling they're rule, and they're creating an image for themselves, as just regular folks down the block. It's tough, you know, they're putting some taxpayer shareholder money into helping and who can say? But that money should be going to the taxpayers to decide what to do. And while they're doing these sorts of nice things, they're also playing a role in lowering taxes for corporations and lowering taxes for wealthy people, and reconfiguring public policy. And what we don't see is all that reconfiguring going on; we don't see all that vacuuming up of money, vacuuming out the insides of public processes, but we do see the nice facade."

- "The Corporation", 2003. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/quotes

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