The Corporation

Our daily lives have come to be so dominated by corporations that we can easily fail to notice it. Most goods, services, information and entertainment now flow from huge multinationals. But what if this dominant player in our existence is certifiably insane?

The Corporation explores this disturbing possibility with mix of wit, opinion and hard facts. It takes us through the visible "personality traits" of these business entities and shows us that, for all intents and purposes, corporations are psychopathic. The film points out that this is not an aberrant state for corporations, but rather an inherent part of their nature. It even portrays high-ranking business executives as people so caught-up in the madness of the corporate world they must act not from their own conscience, but rather from a bottom-line mentality of what is most profitable.

Despite its length and the fact that it features some forty different talking heads (ranging from the former CEO of Goodyear to Noam Chomsky), The Corporation keeps you engaged both visually and intellectually. It is by turns informative, amusing and thought provoking. It does not attempt to present remedies (which would be beyond the scope of a single documentary) but rather challenges its audience to view their world from a different perspective and seek out their own solutions. In this way, it reminds me of Michael Moore's excellent documentary Bowling for Columbine.

I saw this film at the True/False Film Festival and was fortunate enough to hear a Q&A with co-director Mark Achbar after. Many questions seemed to be "Well, what can we do about it." The website for the film has many links available to explore further and learn about actions that individuals can take. Mr. Achbar said half-joking that he may have to bring a handout to future screenings with a list of websites.

Whether you are a longtime activist, or someone who has never thought much about issues of corporate dominance, this film is definitely worth a look.

This extraordinary documentary is based on the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004) by law professor Joel Bakan (see my review at Amazon). Bakan's thesis is that the corporation is a psychopathic entity.

In his book he notes that the modern corporation is "singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context." (p. 56) He adds that the corporation's sole reason for being is to enhance the profits and power of the corporation. He shows by citing court cases that it is the duty of management to make money and that any compromise with that duty is dereliction of duty.

Directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott bring these points and a slew of others to cinematic life through interviews, archival footage, and a fine narrative written by Achbar and Harold Crooks. The interviews cover a wide spectrum of opinion, from Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky on the left, to Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman on the right. Friedman is heard to agree with Bakan that the corporation's duty is to its stockholders and that anything that deviates from that duty is irresponsible.

What emerges is a view of the corporation as an entity working both for and against human welfare. Designed to turn labor and raw materials efficiently into goods and services and to thereby raise our standard of living, it has been a very effective tool for humans to use. On the other hand, because it is blind to anything but its own welfare, the corporation uses humans and the resources of the planet in ways that can be and often are detrimental to people and the environment. Corporations, to put it bluntly, foul the environment with their wastes and will not clean up unless forced to.

An interesting technique that Achbar and Abbott use is to go down the list of behaviors cited in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that identify the psychopathic personality and show how the corporation has all of those behaviors including a criminal disregard for the welfare and feelings of others and a complete absence of guilt. Indeed corporations feel no compunction when they break the law. Their only concern is whether breaking the law is cost-effective. The result is a nearly constant bending and breaking of the law. They pay the fine and then break the law again. The corporation, after all, has no conscience and feels no remorse.

Bakan notes that "corporations are designed to externalize their costs." The corporation is "deliberately programmed, indeed legally compelled, to externalize costs without regard for the harm it may cause to people, communities, and the natural environment. Every cost it can unload onto someone else is a benefit to itself, a direct route to profit." (pp. 72-73) We are shown how rivers are polluted, environments destroyed and people placed into something close to servitude by the corporation's insatiable lust to profit.

The answer to this, as presented in the film, is to make corporations pay for their pollution. What many people are proposing is the creation of bills or certificates that would allow the barer "the right to pollute." The cost of these bills would reflect the societal and environmental costs of the pollution. This sounds scary, but what it would do is make those who pollute pay for their pollution instead of having the costs be externalized as they are now. Consequently, to protect their bottom line, corporations would pollute less.

Another problem with the corporation as emphasized in the film is that the corporate structure is essentially despotic. It is not a democracy or anything close. The owners hire officers to exercise control over everyone who works for the corporation. This is in direct contrast to democratic governments whose officers are elected and who are subject to the checks and balances of a constitutional government with shared powers. It is true that if you are a shareholder of a corporation you may be able to indirectly vote for the CEO. However, such a "democracy" is a democracy of capital in which the electoral power is inequitably distributed. Some people have hundreds of millions of votes. How many does the average shareholder have? Bakan, Achbar and Abbott play fair, and give both sides of the case--although that is not to say that the weight of evidence or sentiment is equally distributed. After all, who's in favor of pollution or the destruction of the environment? The pathological corporation doesn't care about such things, but its officers should. Some do, but feel constrained by their fiduciary duty to their stockholders. Consequently it is our responsibility as the electorate to get our government to make the corporation socially and morally responsible. The way to do that is make the fines for breaking the law large enough to change corporate behavior. Furthermore--and this is essential--make management responsible--criminally if necessary--for the actions of the corporation.

This is absolutely one of the most interesting, most compelling, and, yes, entertaining documentaries that I have ever seen. But beware of some graphic footage.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

Joel Bakan, who served as a clerk for Chief Justice Brian Dickson and advocated for human rights against governments, now takes aim at corporations in this documentary. On the way he gets a little help from friends like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore. The stuff exposed in the final product can be shocking and hits home even if the presentation is fairly one-sided. From stuff little-known like businessmen trying to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt and aiding Nazi death camps, to a reminder of Kathy Lee Gifford's sweatshops. It questions the ethics of applying patents on life and rain water. This is a story that needs to be heard, even if it needs to be balanced.

I first saw most of the movie as part of a sociology course. We considered the concept of a corporation as a person, and how if it were a person it can fit the definition of a psychopath. While it may sound extreme to apply that label to men running businesses, sadly there is some truth to it. Even if this movie doesn't convince me corporations should be banned, it demonstrates why they should not have absolute power and personhood. The stuff about Bolivia having a revolt shows people being pushed can push back, and raises questions of how we may see more of that which is alarming from a security perspective. All of this is helped by use of metaphors and pop culture and the calm, female voice of the narrator. Everyone shaping a national economy should see this movie.

most people who have an interest in progressive causes will be somewhat familiar with the outline of the film - corporate personhood has essentially led to corporations having an insane amount of control over what we see, eat, drink, breathe and consume in general. corporations have become part of our consciousness at an unshakable and unwashable level. they are ubiquitous, single-minded (profit), subversive parasites that erode our society from within. with this in mind you'd think the film was a marxist commercial out to bring capitalism to its knees. you'd be wrong. the film is remarkably even-handed in its approach.

governmental as well as market fixes are proposed by different interviewees. i'm very much into the work of noam chomsky and michael moore (both are interviewed), i've read fast food nation, i'm a big fan of adbusters, i own naomi klein's "no logo" and korten's "when corporations rule the world" so a lot of this stuff wasn't all that new to me, but some of it was and the film is a perfect amalgamation of all this information. archive footage is used extremely well, like a hip-hop artist melding together samples in ways that create an entirely different tapestry of sound. interviews, archival footage, and good old investigative journalism are used to present a solid case about the role corporations have in our global society; as well as how we've gotten to this point and where we may be going. despite the heavy nature and brutal pacing of much of the film, there are a few moments of ironic comedy.

i do think the film would have done well with a few momentary pauses early in the film to allow things to soak in. in feature films a director might cut to an exterior for a beat or two to allow a bit of a cushion from one scene to the next, something similar may have aided the pacing of this film. it's actually remarkable that i wished it had taken a little more time considering its 2 hour and 25 minute runtime. i think it's testament to the film's strength. i also want to note that the long runtime and heavy nature of the film never came off as dry or overly-academic. in other words, it's not a boring film to watch - quite the contrary, it's a rather engaging and almost fun film to watch. i say "fun" reluctantly because learning about the ways in which a corporation is bilking America and the world out of our natural resources and hard-earned money isn't fun, but if you're interested in learning then it is an exciting film. a quick side note - the narrator had a perfect voice for the material and she reminded me a lot of the narrator in the "second renaissance" portions of the animatrix. generally i don't give films i've only seen once anything better than a B+, but this film blew me away from start to finish on so many different levels...A.

Good documentaries have both a viewpoint and an agenda. They reflect the vision, politics, values and angst of the director(s). "The Corporation" meets those standard criteria and in an overlong movie it's Prosecution Exhibit A for an indictment of a) modern corporations, b) consumerism, c) disdain for the Earth and its bounty, d) globalization, e)sleek marketing and f) dishonest, money-grubbing media, the current Whores of Babylon. There's probably more but I was saturated long before the film ended.

In terms of style, directors Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar have made a visually engrossing film with excellent interweaving of archival film with sound bites by noted academics as well as business executives. We get Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman and many lesser lights. Michael Moore appears enough to seem more a director than an interviewee but some of his remarks, particularly at the end, are more insightful than much of what he opines on in his own films.

Using story boards to announce different themes, "The Corporation" tells - very quickly and, indeed superficially - the history of the legal entity, what we in the law call the "Juridical Person," the modern huge, business creature. Its early history is quickly sketched, the complexities of the Anglo-American societies that spawned this economic model barely hinted at much less explained.

For better or for worse, documentaries best make their argument through striking anecdotes and this movie is no exception. We see corporations engaged in behavior that wreaks havoc on health, deprives poverty-stricken citizens of poor countries of even minimal control of their lives and, of course directs our spending and leisure habits.

But some scenes show corporate strategies as just plain silly as with a couple ambulating down an urban street, one telling the other how great a CD he's listening to happens to be. The idea is that passersby will become curious enough to buy the disc. I doubt this happens much but the use of shills goes back hundreds of years (ample evidence of their employment can be gleaned from Elizabethan literature) and it pales as a menace when juxtaposed to the true evils depicted in the documentary.

Some very complex issues which few viewers are likely to know anything about are presented as proof that corporations are inherently driven solely by profit motives with no regard for other values. Particularly disturbing is the incarnation of the writings of an independent scholar named Black who claims that IBM was in sympathetic and knowing collusion with Nazi Germany to sell them embryonic computers (not mentioned by name but they were the Hollerith punch card machines) which then made expediting millions to their concentration camp murder feasible. This account has been discredited by most historians but the more serious and unmentioned reality is that the U.S. government knowingly permitted some American corporations to prepare to profit from a postwar world by maintaining ties with subsidiaries in Germany (the Bank for International Settlements is never mentioned: now THAT's a subject for a film).

"The Corporation" returns often to the theme that this business entity is a "person" with constitutional rights ( declared a number of times as a sad fact of American law). In fact that's true but what is never explained is that investing corporations with an identity that is juridically recognized means that the entities - AND their assets - are amenable to every form of lawsuit from civil rights violations to environmental law accountability to - you name it. And corporations can be criminally charged and convicted. Yes, obviously they can't be jailed but the entity can be sentenced to remedial action, something that would be impossible if liability was limited to individuals who lack assets sufficient to cure major violations and, in any event, who surely could do nothing from jail or forced retirement.

Where could Ralph Nader's crusade for safer cars have gone if General Motors and other corporations were not amenable to suit as legal persons? How much benefit derived for anti-smoking advocates from being able to arraign Big Tobacco in court (even if losses exceeded wins)? Why are women and minorities working for Big Business (or just trying to get in the door) less likely to be targeted for discrimination these days? You'd never know from this film.

So we have a very mixed bag here - a well constructed polemic that is too one-sided if educating the audience rather than satisfying the converted was the goal. It was fun to sit in a packed theater in an epicenter of affluence - New York's Pleasantville in Westchester County - and note the righteous reaction of an audience of which I'd bet 95% own stock in major corporations.

8/10