UnderwoodTheCorporation

The Corporation

This is probably one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. And it’s a documentary, which makes it even scarier. The Corporation was directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, and was released in 2003. It’s also Canadian, which is probably why it was able to be released…

The movie starts by outlining the history of corporations. They grew out of the Industrial Age, and they used to have very strict limits in their state charters, including how long they were allowed to operate before they had to shut down. But then after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was passed, which says that a state cannot deny life, liberty, or property without due process of the law. This Amendment was intended to help protect the newly freed slaves, but instead, corporations used this law to their advantage. Corporations are considered legal persons under the law, which is one of the major problems with corporations. They are not actual people, they are a business. They do not behave as an individual person would behave, because they are not an individual person. As one of the historians in the film put it, “corporations have no soul to save and no body to incarcerate.”

This brings up another problem with corporations, which is their ability to spread blame around. Most corporations are so big, that it’s hard to point the finger at any one person. How do you decide whose fault a problem is? Should the CEO of a corporation be jailed if something bad happens? They say that the company is too big, the CEO can’t keep track of everything that is going on, so you can’t blame them. You can sue a corporation, but they have tons of money and really good lawyers, so it won’t do much good.

This brings up another problem, which is that corporations are pretty much only concerned about money. In fact, they are legally bound to put financial interests ahead of all other possible concerns. Sometimes, this even leads to breaking the law, as long as it’s profitable, which a lot of the time, it is. Even if they get sued because of it, or have to pay a fine, it’s often less expensive for corporations to do so than to obey the law in the first place. This is clearly not good.

Another major problem is that corporations are designed to externalize as much as possible to lower their costs. This may make sense from a financial viewpoint, but this externalizing also includes externalizing blame, externalizing waste and pollution, even externalizing a financial burden on tax payers.

Now, these are all the factors that lead to the way corporations act. The results of this are things like pollution, synthetic chemicals, sweatshops, layoffs, union busting, factory farming, deforestation, and toxic waste. Why would anyone do this? The film does a really good job explaining that there is a big difference between the individual and the institution. The individual people that make up corporations aren’t evil. They are relatively normal people, like you and me. Yet they are a part of all these terrible things, they make it possible for these things to happen. Well, workers in automobile factories are allowing global warming to happen, does that make them bad people? The truth is that a lot of the people involved don’t really think about the larger effects of what they’re doing. They think about direct effects, like sales and acquisitions. One of my favorite people in the movie was Ray Anderson, who started out as just a normal corporate head, and was asked to give an encouraging speech about his company’s environmental goals. He didn’t have any, but he still had to make the speech. As he started trying to figure out something to say, he realized the consequences of his business’s actions, and now they are a “green” company and plan to be carbon neutral by 2020. This I find inspiring. I hope that all corporate people are like this, just ignorant of the problem, because that’s relatively easy to fix, we just need to educate them. However, this is probably not the case. For example, there’s the guy in the film who talked about how the first thought that went through his mind when he heard about the plane crashes on 9/11 was that the price of gold must be soaring. But he insists he’s not a bad guy. Maybe he’s a good guy in his family life, but his business life has clearly corrupted him.

One of the scariest things though, is just how much control corporations have over our lives. They have a lot of money, and with that comes a lot of power. They have a huge influence on our government, which is really not in anyone else’s interest. They squirm their way into our daily lives, through advertising, product placement, and even through their ‘community projects.’ At this point, it’s even hard to imagine a world without these big corporations. Where would we get all of our stuff? The simple answer to that is small, locally owned stores and producers, but in a world already so infected by corporations, it can often be hard to find everything you need in a local fashion.

One thing that I find very ironic is that corporations condone dictatorial governments. And yet corporations would not exist without a democracy. They repress and take advantage of people, but would not be anywhere near as powerful as they are without the protection of a law that was written to protect people from this sort of thing. They even tried to overthrow FDR, when he was trying to get the economy back on track, which, well, seems like it should be rather important to them. Of course, this fits in with the film’s psychological analysis of corporations, which came to the conclusion that they have all the classic characteristics of a psychopath. But then again, this all leads back to the fact that corporations are not people. They are business entities, and as such, they are concerned about their business, not about anything else.

The film makes it clear that the most important thing we can do is “vote with our dollars.” We support corporations by buying their goods. If we don’t buy them, we are not supporting them. This action also goes hand in hand with buying local, which helps support your local economy. You can also buy organic, or fair trade, which, although there are problems associated with certification programs that are attempting to take on such a huge task, are at least trying. This may also help keep you away from nasty chemicals and pesticides, which are “under debate” as to their effects, but it can’t hurt to avoid them (check out []). Another thing we can do is protest the government to abolish corporate personhood ([]). If corporations are not considered people under the law, they will (hopefully) not receive as much legal protection. You can also try to help protect your kids from being influenced by corporations at a young age (if you have kids). Corporations try to get to kids early, because that’s when they are the most easily influenced, and if they get them as kids, they can have them for life. This is very, very bad. There are campaigns against this (like []), or you can try limiting the amount of time your kids watch tv, or maybe only let them watch videos, which don’t have commercials. It would require a major social overhaul to get rid of corporations, and really, not all corporations are bad, there are some that are an integral part of their communities and that really do care about people and take a moral stance on their practices (although these tend to be smaller ones…) But we know that a lot of the really big ones are doing some really terrible things, so instead of buying from them, why not buy from someone local, someone that you know, and can see face to face? Someone that can actually take the blame if something goes wrong, instead of spreading it around and externalizing it.