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The Corporation (2004) by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott

The central agreement of the film is that corporations are institutions that are extremely profitable but are one that cause countless negative consequences. The corporation’s role is only to make profit; they do not care about how the corporation goes about getting that profit as long as they are able to make a profit.
 * · __Political__ – Poor countries give incentives for corporations to come into their countries with the hopes that with them doing business within their countries it will raise the standards of livings for their people by economic means. However, in most cases when the standard of living rises even a bit, the corporations will just move to other poorer counties and repeat the same things.
 * · Don’t assume after everything is said and done, a corporation will raise the standard of living a lot. It could be simple economics that are working in these cases. Bhat before these companies came, workers were paid 10 cents an hour and after it rose to 15 cents the companies decide that the pay increase was too much for them, resulting in them moving elsewhere.
 * · One must also note that the politicians and other people of power, in any of these countries say that they do not want pollution to be produced within their countries but at the same time do not care if it actually occurs. We must also note that even if countries or states wanted to go the right thing, there may be a political backlash.
 * · For example, I believe it was in California that a city wanted to ban the use of a certain chemical. However the international law, the Free Trade Agreement, was used by corporations to say that the city is not allowing them to make profit. As a result, that city had to pay around 900 millions to that corporation for potential profit loss.
 * · In the 1950’s the corporations wanted to quite literally overthrow Roosevelt. Now however, the do not need to do such a radical thing because the quite literally own quite of few people who are in positions of political power. One also should not be able to forget the recent Supreme Court case that gave corporations even more political power.
 * · __Legal__ – The corporations used the 14th amendment for their own gains in that they are now seen as individuals, thus giving them the same rights that a “real” and physical person has. By law, they are ONLY required to make profit for whoever that may be. The law basically says that corporations should place profit over the public good.
 * · They do not have any reason whatsoever to care about the people, environment and so forth. In addition, corporations cannot be held liable for their own actions. Corporations also love deregulation, free trade and privatization of the market. In addition, corporations use the cost benefit analysis to decide whether it is cheaper to follow the law or just pay the fines the collect by breaking the law.
 * · __Economic__ – Externalities, are things that occur indirectly from transactions, are caused by the notion to let others deal with the problems that are caused by corporation actions. Make money now, a short term objective and do not think in the long term. Corporations pay well below minimum wage, international wages in comparison to US wages, to make products while at the same time they sell those products at hundreds, if not thousands of times the price they pay their workers.
 * · __Technological__ – Since the 1940’s, corporations can basically engineer anything they want without any concerns for the consequences. Currently there are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals made and around 1,500 additional ones get added each year. For example, Monsento made a chemical that makes cows produce more milk. However that very chemical caused countless problems to both the cows and humans. Yes, we cannot make anything perfect but at the same time you, should know how whatever you produce will affect whatever that product is being used for.
 * · __Media and Informational__ – Quite frankly, the media for the most part does not give us any information about all the issues that are caused by corporations. Why, the reason is simple, corporations own the various forms of news that we rely on to get our information. The movie showed that a corporation was doing some very bad things however that very corporation owned Fox Broadcasting Company. As a result, the Fox former reporters were unable to talk about all the bad things that their parent company did.
 * · __Ecological__ – Every living system, whatever it may be, on our planet is for the most part in decline. Quite frankly, corporations can be blamed for almost everything that has or will possibly happen to our planet.
 * · __Behavior__ – Some people look at the various problems that occur throughout the world as something that is profitable. After 9/11, some people were happy when they looked at the prices of gold had doubled. The Golf War, 1991, caused the price of barrels of oils to go from $13 a barrel to around $40 a barrel.
 * · There are some people equate the more problems there are in the world, wherever that may be, to the higher probability to make more money. There will soon be a price on pollution, called Carbon Credits, that is yet another way, hopefully a good idea, that companies should make money. Seriously, why doesn’t an extremely rich corporation just buy the whole planet so that they can profit from everything. Companies already have and want to buy all human genes in order to make a profit.
 * · The movie went around asking a few people how they would describe corporations. The people mostly used words that would describe a physical person not some abstract term known as a corporation. People are literally taught to behave in thinking that a corporation is a real person when in fact they are not such.
 * · __Economic__ – Externalities, are things that occur indirectly from transactions, are caused by the notion to let others deal with the problems that are caused by corporation actions. Make money now, a short term objective and do not think in the long term. Corporations pay well below minimum wage, international wages in comparison to US wages, to make products while at the same time they sell those products at hundreds, if not thousands of times the price they pay their workers.
 * · __Technological__ – Since the 1940’s, corporations can basically engineer anything they want without any concerns for the consequences. Currently there are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals made and around 1,500 additional ones get added each year. For example, Monsento made a chemical that makes cows produce more milk. However that very chemical caused countless problems to both the cows and humans. Yes, we cannot make anything perfect but at the same time you, should know how whatever you produce will affect whatever that product is being used for.
 * · __Media and Informational__ – Quite frankly, the media for the most part does not give us any information about all the issues that are caused by corporations. Why, the reason is simple, corporations own the various forms of news that we rely on to get our information. The movie showed that a corporation was doing some very bad things however that very corporation owned Fox Broadcasting Company. As a result, the Fox former reporters were unable to talk about all the bad things that their parent company did.
 * · __Ecological__ – Every living system, whatever it may be, on our planet is for the most part in decline. Quite frankly, corporations can be blamed for almost everything that has or will possibly happen to our planet.
 * · __Behavior__ – Some people look at the various problems that occur throughout the world as something that is profitable. After 9/11, some people were happy when they looked at the prices of gold had doubled. The Golf War, 1991, caused the price of barrels of oils to go from $13 a barrel to around $40 a barrel.
 * · There are some people equate the more problems there are in the world, wherever that may be, to the higher probability to make more money. There will soon be a price on pollution, called Carbon Credits, that is yet another way, hopefully a good idea, that companies should make money. Seriously, why doesn’t an extremely rich corporation just buy the whole planet so that they can profit from everything. Companies already have and want to buy all human genes in order to make a profit.
 * · The movie went around asking a few people how they would describe corporations. The people mostly used words that would describe a physical person not some abstract term known as a corporation. People are literally taught to behave in thinking that a corporation is a real person when in fact they are not such.
 * · __Behavior__ – Some people look at the various problems that occur throughout the world as something that is profitable. After 9/11, some people were happy when they looked at the prices of gold had doubled. The Golf War, 1991, caused the price of barrels of oils to go from $13 a barrel to around $40 a barrel.
 * · There are some people equate the more problems there are in the world, wherever that may be, to the higher probability to make more money. There will soon be a price on pollution, called Carbon Credits, that is yet another way, hopefully a good idea, that companies should make money. Seriously, why doesn’t an extremely rich corporation just buy the whole planet so that they can profit from everything. Companies already have and want to buy all human genes in order to make a profit.
 * · The movie went around asking a few people how they would describe corporations. The people mostly used words that would describe a physical person not some abstract term known as a corporation. People are literally taught to behave in thinking that a corporation is a real person when in fact they are not such.
 * · There are some people equate the more problems there are in the world, wherever that may be, to the higher probability to make more money. There will soon be a price on pollution, called Carbon Credits, that is yet another way, hopefully a good idea, that companies should make money. Seriously, why doesn’t an extremely rich corporation just buy the whole planet so that they can profit from everything. Companies already have and want to buy all human genes in order to make a profit.
 * · The movie went around asking a few people how they would describe corporations. The people mostly used words that would describe a physical person not some abstract term known as a corporation. People are literally taught to behave in thinking that a corporation is a real person when in fact they are not such.
 * · The movie went around asking a few people how they would describe corporations. The people mostly used words that would describe a physical person not some abstract term known as a corporation. People are literally taught to behave in thinking that a corporation is a real person when in fact they are not such.

The movie had several most compelling scenes. The first one was what happened in the country of Ecuador. There was a company that wanted to privatize the water that the countries residence used. By privatizing the water, the company would be able to charge whatever they want for the water. In addition that company had also privatized rain water. As a result, the people would have to pay for the water that can down as rain. Sadly, the only way the citizens could change this water incident was that they do a march with a huge crowd of citizens. Thankfully their action resulted in the removal of the privatization of both the local water and rain water.

The other scene that was very compelling was what the movie stated about what corporations had done during World War II. I did not know that several well known American corporations had directly or indirectly supported the Nazi’s during the war. Some of them include IBM, Coca-Cola, and Ford. For example, a system made by IBM was used to count all the prisoners that were imprisoned by the Nazi Party.

I understand that you cannot put all the blame on IBM but they should have known that they are selling a product in a country that our own country is at war with. However, what I think added salt to the wound was that IBM collected all the revenue from the counting machine after the war had ended.

In addition, both Ford and Coca-Cola both made and sold new products or at least the same product but under other brand names within Germany. What’s worse is that while Coke was selling their product in Germany, under the Fanta brand, they were award a defense contract from the US government to provide their product to the US soldiers. The only other companies that received this defense contract were the Hershey Corp and Chef Boyardee. Previously I stated above that some people and corporations look at problems, such as war, as something that could be profitable. Sadly, Coke has shown that this is indeed true, when they were literally making double the profits by selling their products, be it under different names, to both sides.

There are several possible solutions to some of the issues that are brought up by the movie. One of the solutions is to change the legal system that as either directly or indirectly caused and allowed corporations to become the way they are now. Initially, the goal of corporations was for the “public good” that was written as a provision in the corporation’s charter. Sadly it has been almost two centuries since this provision was removed, however if this provision gets added again, then it would be possible that corporations can be held responsible for not following what was written on their charter.

In addition, if corporations do things that harm the “public good” then that corporation should be legally responsible in that they will be forced to fix issues caused by them. In extreme cases, the corporation may no longer be legally known as a corporation and thus remove any rights they had as such.