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THE CORPORATION -- A MOVIE EVERY PERSON SHOULD SEE |
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by Charles Carreon First question: How did corporations become the major beneficiaries of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted to prevent recently-freed slaves from being deprived of life, liberty, and property? Second question: Since corporations are designed by law as the profit-seeking extensions of their shareholders, who are insulated from personal liability for the wrongful conduct of the corporation; since corporations repeatedly break laws intended to protect human health and the public benefit, employing deception as routine practice; since corporations exhibit no remorse for their misdeeds and perpetrate wrong as a routine practice; would it not therefore be appropriate to diagnose corporate behavior as psychopathic? The Corporation, a movie I just saw tonight, answers the first question and poses the second. It then proceeds to analyze the nature of corporate crimes against human beings, highlighting dramatic confrontations between oppressed people and corporate goons, giving equal time to the avuncular, bushy-browed Chief Executive of Shell Oil, and to a pedantic economic analyst who waxes eloquent on the joys of pollution credits and how well the world will be cared for when every square inch of it is privately owned. The movie devotes a good share of time to the fight by the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, to free themselves from an oppressive private water company that was imposed on them by the International Monetary Fund. This devil's bargain put Bechtel in the position of selling water to Bolivians, even criminalizing the act of gathering rainfall, and jacking the price of water up to a quarter of the income of these simple people, for whom life is hard enough without thirst and a lack of washing water to make it still more cruel. It also reprised footage of Michael Moore inviting Phil Knight to come visit his sweatshops in Indonesia, and covered the Kathy Lee/Wal Mart sweatshop flap, which apparently did not in any degree alter Wal Mart's purchasing policies, but did popularize the issue, leading to a big anti-sweatshop deal with The Gap. The film also contrasts images of opulent soirees in the conference rooms of the Seattle WTO summit, while anarchists swirled around the building, attacking the barricades. It is hard to tell, in these scenes, who is more out of touch -- the trade boosters who shoehorn the world's economy into their projection of perfection, or the zealots who attack a corporate monolith that they do not comprehend. While corporations will poison, beat, starve, and extort in the developing world, they use media manipulation to deaden public awareness and distort the truth in the "developed world." How far the media monopolists will go to kill the truth is made clear by the sad story of a couple of Fox reporters in Florida, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, who tried to break the scandal that Monsanto is poisoning cows and people with bovine growth hormone ("Prolactin"). While they were highly touted as "investigative journalists," their story was the wrong story. Fox wouldn't run it, and they were jacked around, threatened with firing, jacked around more, fired, and even after they sued, they were deprived of their wrongful termination jury verdict by an appeals court that said there was nothing illegal about manufacturing a false news story to distort the truth in favor of the Monsanto-controlled-milk industry; therefore, there had been nothing illegal about firing them for refusing to engineer a false story. Why I never wanted to be a lawyer. I knew courts pull that kinda crap. Yeccccchhh. Makes ya wanna shower. The film tries to balance criticism of the corps with an encouraging message that changes sometimes happen when people fight back against corporate abuse. We are each encouraged to plant an acorn of faith that we, the living, breathing creatures, can recover our freedom from the Hannibal Lecter-like corporate monsters that prey on humanity, using divide and conquer techniques to keep on devouring the earth and its children. The most encouraging character is a kindly carpet magnate, who said he had an epiphany when he read "The Ecology of Commerce, A Declaration of Sustainability," by Paul Hawken. He realized that he was a plunderer, because he was taking wastefully from the planet's resources to create his product, and producing garbage. Since his epiphany, his company has become 30% more sustainable, or something like that, and he aims to reach what he calls "the peak of Mt. Sustainability" for his business by 2020. One of my favorite stories is about a Roman tribune who was leading a troop of soldiers in the Middle East when he saw an old man planting fig trees he'd grown from cuttings. He called the old man to him and asked why he was performing this labor when he'd never be around to eat the figs. The old man replied that while that might be true, even if he weren't around, his children would be, and they would benefit. Years later, the tribune, grown older and more powerful, camped with his regiment in a grove of figs. Once again, he saw the old man laboring, and told his soldiers that he wanted a bag of figs from the old man, and to have him bring them to him personally. When the old man entered his presence, he directed the man to put the figs in a bowl, and ordered his treasurer to fill the empty bag with gold. So there were two wise men, and both of them made more fortunate thereby -- the tribune enriched in wisdom, and the old man in all manner of bounty.
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