The Pyramid Power

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film critical of the modern-day corporation, considering it as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychologist might evaluate an ordinary person. This is explored through specific examples.

The cineastes

The documentary was written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The Corporation has been displayed worldwide, on television, and via DVD. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (ISBN 0-74324-744-2), during the filming of the documentary.

Synopsis

The documentary shows the development of the contemporary business corporation, from a legal entity that originated as a government-chartered institution meant to effect specific public functions, to the rise of the modern commercial institution entitled to most of the legal rights of a person. One theme is its assessment as a “personality”, as a result of an 1886 case in the United States Supreme Court in which a statement by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite[1] led to corporations as “persons” having the same rights as human beings, based on the 14th Amendment to the US constitution. The film’s assessment is effected via the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV; Robert Hare, a University of British Columbia psychology professor and a consultant to the FBI, compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically-diagnosed psychopath. The documentary concentrates mostly upon North American corporations, especially those of the United States.

The film is in vignettes examining and criticising corporate business practices, to establish parallels, between corporate legal misbehaviour (malfeasance) and the DSM-IV’s symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.

Topics addressed

Topics addressed include the Business Plot, where in 1933, the popular General Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex; economic externalities; suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station; the invention of Fanta due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany; the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust); the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia’s municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation; and in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.

Interviews

The film also features interviews with prominent corporate critics such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Vandana Shiva, Charles Kernaghan, and Howard Zinn as well as opinions from company CEOs such as Ray Anderson (from the Interface carpet & fabric company), the capitalist viewpoints of Peter Drucker and Milton Friedman, and think tanks advocating free markets such as the Fraser Institute. Interviews also feature Dr. Samuel Epstein with his involvement in a lawsuit against Monsanto for promoting the use of Posilac, (Monsanto’s trade name for recombinant Bovine Somatotropin) to induce more milk production in dairy cattle.

    “The corporation is an externalizing machine (moving its operating costs to external organizations and people), in the same way that a shark is a killing machine.” – Robert Monks, a corporate governance advisor in the film and former GOP (Republican) candidate for Senate from Maine

The following individuals were interviewed for The Corporation, each appearing on the screen at different times during the documentary:

• Jane Akre, investigative reporter, fired by TV station WTVT
• Ray Anderson, CEO, Interface Inc., world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer
• Joe Badaracco, Prof. of Business Ethics, Harvard Business School
• Maude Barlow, chairperson, Council of Canadians
• Mark Barry Competitive intelligence professional
• Elaine Bernard, director, Harvard Business School Labor Program
• Edwin Black, author, IBM and the Holocaust
• Carlton Brown, commodities broker
• Noam Chomsky, professor, M.I.T.
• Chris Barrett & Luke Mccabe, “Corporately-sponsored” students
• Peter Drucker, management guru
• Dr. Samuel Epstein, Emeritus Professor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, U. of Illinois
• Andrea Finger, spokesperson, Disney-built town of Celebration
• Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist
• Sam Gibara, chairman and former CEO, Goodyear Tire
• Richard Grossman, co-founder, Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy
• Dr. Robert Hare, Ph.D., psychologist and FBI psychopath consultant
• Lucy Hughes, vice president, Initiative Media
• Ira Jackson, director, Center for Business & Government, Kennedy School, Harvard
• Charles Kernaghan, director, National Labor Committee
• Robert Keyes, president and CEO, Canadian Council for International Business
• Mark Kingwell, philosopher, cultural critic, author
• Naomi Klein, author, No Logo
• Tom Kline, vice president, Pfizer Inc., world’s largest pharmaceutical corporation
• Chris Komisarjevsky, CEO, Burson Marsteller Worldwide
• Dr. Susan Linn, Prof. of Psychiatry, Baker Children’s Center, Harvard
• Robert Monks, corporate governance adviser and shareholder activist
• Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman, Royal Dutch Shell
• Michael Moore, author, filmmaker
• Oscar Olivera, leader, Coalition in Defense of Water and Life
• Jonathon Ressler, CEO, Big Fat Inc., undercover marketing specialist
• Jeremy Rifkin, president, Foundation on Economic Trends
• Dr. Vandana Shiva, physicist, ecologist, feminist and seed activist
• Clay Timon, CEO, Landor and Associates, global branding specialists
• Michael Walker, executive director, Fraser Institute
• Robert Weissman, editor, Multinational Monitor
• Steve Wilson, investigative reporter, fired by TV station WTVT
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president, Technology and Strategy, IBM Servers
• Mary Zepernick, coordinator, Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy
• Howard Zinn, historian and author, A People’s History of the United States

Reception

Film critics gave the film generally favorable reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 90% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 104 reviews.[2] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 73 out of 100, based on 28 reviews.[3]

Variety praised the film’s “surprisingly cogent, entertaining, even rabble-rousing indictment of perhaps the most influential institutional model for our era” and its avoidance of “a sense of excessively partisan rhetoric” by deploying a wide range of interviewees and “a bold organizational scheme that lets focus jump around in interconnective, humorous, hit-and-run fashion.”[4]

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert described the film as “an impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation,” but felt that “at 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome. The wise documentarian should treat film stock as a non-renewable commodity.”[5]

The Economist review suggests that the idea for an organization as a psychopathic entity originated with Max Weber, in regards to government bureaucracy. Also, the reviewer remarks that the film weighs heavily in favor of public ownership as a solution to the evils depicted, while failing to acknowledge the magnitude of evils committed by governments in the name of public ownership, such as those of the Communist Party in the former USSR.[6]

The Maoist Internationalist Movement, in their review criticizes the film for the opposite: for depicting the communist party in an unfavourable light, while adopting an anarchist approach favoring direct democracy and worker’s councils without emphasizing the need for a centralized bureaucracy. The film, in their view “offers no realistic alternative to imperialism.” and “it shares some of the strengths and downfalls” of Mark Achbar’s film Manufacturing Consent, which celebrates the life of anarcho-syndicalist, linguist, and activist Noam Chomsky. In their view, “corporate power for profit [is] not the same as megabureaucracy without profit.”[7]

The film was nominated for numerous awards, and won the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, 2004, along with a Special Jury Award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival in 2003 and 2004.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “The Corporation”

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