FILM
The Corporation
Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott
from www.globeandmail.com
Corporations are wonderful things, if you own shares and they're up. But, as Enron's chief financial officer marched off to 10 years in prison this week, many agree that all is not well in the corporate world. Is it a question of "bad apples," or is the tree rotten?
These are big questions, and The Corporation is a documentary with big answers. It's not friendly to corporations, but it's careful to give CEOs lots of space to tell their story. It starts with a fast-cut montage of dozens of business people chirping variants of the phrase "bad apples." Then it answers with another fast-cut montage, this time the logos of familiar companies convicted of serious crimes (trading with pariah regimes, cheating shareholders, dumping poison into sewers): General Electric, Chevron, IBM, Kodiak, Pfizer, Sears and a blur of other mainstream names.
How did we arrive in a place where venerable companies persistently flout the law?
Corporations were originally government charters to people who wanted to undertake a project -- building a bridge or a ship -- and make money from it. The charter had a time limit, and the corporation couldn't buy other corporations, or sue anybody. After the U.S. Civil War, these now-gigantic entities tried to find a way to make themselves permanent and extend their power. Using the 14th Amendment, passed after the war to protect the equal rights of freed slaves, lawyers in 1880 won a bizarre victory whose snowballing effects are still with us today: Corporations won the status of a "person," with legal rights equal to those of a living human being.
It's by now generally agreed that a corporation is an amoral person (as a sardonic Lord Edward Thurlow observed, it is just like a person "except it has no soul to be damned.") It must be carefully regulated. But, say the filmmakers, growing power has transformed the "amoral" corporate person into a psychopath. They interview Robert Hare, an FBI expert at profiling deviant behaviour who shows how typical corporate decisions satisfy the "checklist" profile of a psychopathic personality. A series of cases, complete with gory footage of agonized cows dragging their udders on the ground (thank you Monsanto for bovine growth hormones) and children locked in factories for 12-hour work days (thank you Kathy Lee Gifford and Wal-Mart), demonstrates how the modern corporation answers every criterion of pathology.
Many of these dreadful cases are familiar. But The Corporation does follow-up which shows that even penitent CEOs cannot prevent these companies from repeating their sins. Then it asks how they feel about it. Sam Gibara (retired CEO of Goodyear Tires) answers simply that he had to do things which violated his personal ethics, or he would have been fired. Commodities trader Carlton Brown describes the glee his colleagues felt on Sept. 11, 2001: "Every trader will tell you that their first thought was, gold must be exploding!"
Some attempt to justify this system on ethical grounds. Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute explains that we would be better off if everything on Earth -- water, plant genes, the air itself -- is privately owned: Things will be better taken care of.
Now that it is legal to patent genes and own airplane routes, Walker's vision is being realized. But emerging evidence does not support his optimism. Every living system on Earth is now in decline, according to scientific studies. The documentary offers a few hopeful examples of business leaders who have faced the ugly facts. The most striking is Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets. "We are plunderers," he says in a speech to his peers. "The first industrial revolution is the mistake. We must move on to another and better industrial revolution."
The Corporation
Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott
from www.globeandmail.com
Corporations are wonderful things, if you own shares and they're up. But, as Enron's chief financial officer marched off to 10 years in prison this week, many agree that all is not well in the corporate world. Is it a question of "bad apples," or is the tree rotten?
These are big questions, and The Corporation is a documentary with big answers. It's not friendly to corporations, but it's careful to give CEOs lots of space to tell their story. It starts with a fast-cut montage of dozens of business people chirping variants of the phrase "bad apples." Then it answers with another fast-cut montage, this time the logos of familiar companies convicted of serious crimes (trading with pariah regimes, cheating shareholders, dumping poison into sewers): General Electric, Chevron, IBM, Kodiak, Pfizer, Sears and a blur of other mainstream names.
How did we arrive in a place where venerable companies persistently flout the law?
Corporations were originally government charters to people who wanted to undertake a project -- building a bridge or a ship -- and make money from it. The charter had a time limit, and the corporation couldn't buy other corporations, or sue anybody. After the U.S. Civil War, these now-gigantic entities tried to find a way to make themselves permanent and extend their power. Using the 14th Amendment, passed after the war to protect the equal rights of freed slaves, lawyers in 1880 won a bizarre victory whose snowballing effects are still with us today: Corporations won the status of a "person," with legal rights equal to those of a living human being.
It's by now generally agreed that a corporation is an amoral person (as a sardonic Lord Edward Thurlow observed, it is just like a person "except it has no soul to be damned.") It must be carefully regulated. But, say the filmmakers, growing power has transformed the "amoral" corporate person into a psychopath. They interview Robert Hare, an FBI expert at profiling deviant behaviour who shows how typical corporate decisions satisfy the "checklist" profile of a psychopathic personality. A series of cases, complete with gory footage of agonized cows dragging their udders on the ground (thank you Monsanto for bovine growth hormones) and children locked in factories for 12-hour work days (thank you Kathy Lee Gifford and Wal-Mart), demonstrates how the modern corporation answers every criterion of pathology.
Many of these dreadful cases are familiar. But The Corporation does follow-up which shows that even penitent CEOs cannot prevent these companies from repeating their sins. Then it asks how they feel about it. Sam Gibara (retired CEO of Goodyear Tires) answers simply that he had to do things which violated his personal ethics, or he would have been fired. Commodities trader Carlton Brown describes the glee his colleagues felt on Sept. 11, 2001: "Every trader will tell you that their first thought was, gold must be exploding!"
Some attempt to justify this system on ethical grounds. Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute explains that we would be better off if everything on Earth -- water, plant genes, the air itself -- is privately owned: Things will be better taken care of.
Now that it is legal to patent genes and own airplane routes, Walker's vision is being realized. But emerging evidence does not support his optimism. Every living system on Earth is now in decline, according to scientific studies. The documentary offers a few hopeful examples of business leaders who have faced the ugly facts. The most striking is Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets. "We are plunderers," he says in a speech to his peers. "The first industrial revolution is the mistake. We must move on to another and better industrial revolution."
posted by D @ 1:16 PM
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