The Corporation

In many walks of life, resources that were once considered publicly owned, like the ocean, the public airwaves, and even our own DNA, are being quietly appropriated by the private sector. When the Bolivian government brought in a transnational corporation to privatise water, at the demand of the World Bank, it became illegal for people to collect rain. A corporation literally owned what was falling from the sky. Those who could not afford to buy water went thirsty, until a popular uprising wrestled back water ownership into the public domain.

This is perhaps the most shocking case study—and there are many—in the Canadian documentary The Corporation. The film argues that the corporation is today's dominant institution and that we should be troubled by its behaviour. The problem is not just that corporations are plundering our common wealth, but that in their unfettered pursuit of profit, they have also become a liability, and a danger to our health and the health of the planet.

This argument, of course, isn't new, but what the film makers have done successfully is to lay out the most compelling evidence in a fast-paced and stylish movie, with bold graphics and a pounding soundtrack. The story is so well told that even the Economist, a great believer in the benefits of the market, called the movie “a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution.”

Figure 1.

A material world

The two and a half hour film begins with a potted history of the US corporation, which gained the legal status of a “person” in the mid-1800s, allowing it the same rights and protections that people enjoy. The film makers then pose a question that teachers at business school love to put to their students: “If the corporation is a legal person, what kind of personality does it have?”

The question is answered through a series of 40 interviews with people inside and outside the corporate world. There are plenty of familiar faces from the left, such as Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky, but the film is balanced by giving an equal voice to chief executive officers and high level executives from a wide range of industries, including pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Some of the corporate insiders come across as thoughtful and concerned, particularly Roy Anderson, CEO of a carpeting firm, who is working towards making his company environmentally sustainable. But others come across as callous, clueless, or both. A commodities trader says that when the twin towers were struck, the first thing that gold traders asked was, “How much is gold up?” An advertising executive can't see anything wrong with her company's “Nag Factor” technique, in which children are encouraged to nag their parents to buy them the advertised goods, much to the horror of child psychiatrists. The CEOs of clothing companies seem utterly oblivious to the exploitation of their factory workers.

The “personality” of the corporation that emerges is self interested (it serves its shareholders, not the public), deceitful (it suppresses data showing that its products could cause harm), amoral, willing to break the law to get its way, unable to feel guilt, and yet able to mimic caring and altruism. In a witty denouement, the film makers look up this list of personality traits in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders. Psychiatrists reading this will have already made the diagnosis—psychopathic personality disorder.

The Corporation spends too much time outlining the problems and too little time looking at solutions. It gives just a few examples—which are certainly inspiring—of the public fighting back against corporations, such as Indian farmers battling against the patenting of basmati rice (www.eciad.bc.ca/~lolin/basmati/). The film would have been even more powerful if it had highlighted the many other ways in which people are joining together to create public sector alternatives—like the Human Genome Project, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (www.dndi.org), or the common assets movement (www.commonassets.net). We can surely stop the corporation putting a dollar sign on every damned thing on this planet.