I started watching it, but then stopped when she started going through the "corporations are evil" bit.

She deliberately chose to paint government as good and corporations as bad even though they are both only composed of people, who are just looking out for their self-interest, trying to get money from other people, who are also just looking out for their self interest.

It's a intellectual shortcut to paint corporations OR government as evil, and not accurate or meaningful at all.

Actually in my experience she painted government as evil as well. She clearly points out how governments give corporations the power to do what they do.

In addition, I see no reason why painting government or corporations as evil is a bad thing because when it comes down to it, what they are doing to third world countries is evil.

We execute murderers for killing people. Yet corporations are killing people overseas by poisoning and maiming them in dangerous factories.

I see no reason why calling a corporation evil is not accurate or not meaningful.

I think the point the OP was making was that both corporations and governments are made up of people. I agree with this; a corporation and a government is not a physical entity, and can therefore not be evil. However, people can act evil in the name of that entity. Personally, I think that as soon as we try to brand a group of people, we lose the argument.

I personally think more as Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath". The people in the organization are not evil, it is the organization itself which forces them to play certain roles to serve the group and the machine they have built.

Steinbeck portrayed the bank as a great machine in which each person working for it played a small role that they didn't necessarily like to play. Agents were forced to evict people from their land because they were not able to pay their mortgage, yet that was not something that they really wanted to do. It was something they had to do because of the corporation they were a part of.

No individual person in the corporation is evil (generally). However the corporation is bigger than each individual member.

So calling a corporation evil does not mean branding each individual person. Rather it means that you recognize that the corporation as a greater force causes evil things.

In that respect I don't see it as unrealistic to say then that the corporation can be evil.

If we restrict the freedom of other countries to trade freely with us or each other we would be killing a lot more people.

That is a good point. However, trade doesn't have to mean abuse of third world countries.

You're right and my argument is that most of the time it does not - certainly not to the extent of what this video would have you believe anyway. I'll even provide as much evidence for my argument as the video does for her argument by saying "I've researched it and it's true" ;^).

Okay, fair enough.

The numbers of people killed by governments dwarfs the number killed by corporations.

Can you back that up with some links to data?

Thank you for sharing your experience/opinion.

Or maybe I should say the ideas of Adam Smith and others on the pursuit of the self interest leading to happiness and wealth are an appealing and interesting notion, but difficult to work "out of the box"?

Confirmed. It's personal. Anyway.

Linkage: http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Have not watched the video, but this is a great article. I find downsizing living to be such a relief; it's almost like having a burden lifted. One thing that drives me kinda nuts to have too much "stuff" to worry about. Quantity of possessions grows to accumulate in the space a person lives; smaller space = less room for frivolous items. Makes a lot of sense.

It only grows if you have the wrong mindset. I love open spaces with less stuff!

Rather than downloading the multi-megabyte video, which requires much more consumption of stuff, I found the PDF version here and read that instead

http://www.storyofstuff.com/pdfs/annie_leonard_footnoted_scr...

I would have preferred an HTML version because PDF is a newer, more complex, format that forces us to use newer, heavier applications to read. PDF is incompatible with old and lightweight computers so it forces us to buy powerful new computers and throw away our old ones. Given an HTML version I could have consumed even less stuff.