Jay responds to Nova Spivack: “your choice of employer is a vote for that employer or against all others”. I find that both hard to believe and more than a little simplistic. That may be true when you first decide to apply for a job at a company, but how many people hate their jobs and would rather not be working with the company they're working for? At least with a democracy, if you don't like your managers, you can vote the bums out.
On effecting change through purchasing power: “If people (a) refuse to work for this evil companies, and (b) refuse to buy from them, and will relinquish this embargo on whatever conditions are relevant, then the companies will change or go bankrupt.” Or ask for a government bailout. The book version of the film goes into a little more detail about the psychopath diagnosis, as well as its argument that shareholder democracy is an oxymoron: shareholders may comprise an ever larger portion of the economy, but the power individual shareholders have varies, and that variance of power is an anti-democratic notion. The book also argues that only through governments (and not through non-governmental organizations) can the psychopathic nature of corporations be restrained. (Deregulation, Bakan argues, is really regulating in favour of corporations rather than regulating in favour it its citizens.) The objection here could be that tools like the Internet enable people to share information easily, and therefore make decisions based on that information rather than be told what to do by corporations or government. But what if corporations own the wires? Is it not in their self-interest that information that tends to make them look bad be suppressed? Information may want to be free, but people still want to charge for it.
Corporations are creations of the government, and, Bakan argues, only since the 1970s have corporations decided that instead of fighting government they would join it (and are becoming it), and it's here that Jay misses an excellent opportunity to argue for a more nuanced libertarian point: corporations and governments, due to their sheer size and structure, are both unfit models for organizing a society. Governments are notorious for waste and harm done to society, but so are corporations. While Dave Pollard and Joel Bakan argue for more government intervention in society, a point Jay can (and does) legitimately disagree with, they both also argue for less corporate intervention in society. Pollard has argued for small, tightly-knit, non-hierachical private organizations where everybody has their own skills to contribute (rather than everybody be jacks-of-all-trades, everybody is an expert in one or two things) while Bakan is silent on the subject, at least in his book and his film. Bakan argues, rather convincingly, that private corporations (either held by an individual, or a small group of people like a family) can respond to customer desire for quality, environmental friendliness, and other "good" values because the values of the people who own the company directly inform the values of the company. But when ownership is dispersed over a larger number of shareholders, making money is not merely the top priority, and not only the only priority, but the legally-mandated purpose of the company. As Bakan says, the CEO of BP would be acting illegally if his shareholders asked him to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and he refused.
Jay said (and I believe him) that if he doesn't approve of a company's practices, he will stop buying that company's products. He does it again in the piece linked above. The implication, though, is that because he will, other people will, and that's a fundamental error. He has said that in the absence of government, corporations would be responsible to customers, which is partially true. They—in their publicly traded form—are even more responsible to their owners, who don't really care what their customers think as long as they keep buying the product (it's the not caring about what effect that might have that makes them psychopathic), and besides, without government, corporations as we know them know wouldn't even exist. That's not an argument for getting rid of government, however. It's an argument for getting rid of large organizations.
