The real question of the film for me is why the owners of corporations want to make so much profit, and why they are prepared to allow the corporation to behave in an unscrupulous way to achieve it. Therefore to remove the blame for what corporations have done from humans seems artificial. It is the human owners of the corporation – the shareholders – who demand that profit, and as the directors and CEO are answerable to the shareholders, they will act in a way that maximises profit, even if that involves compromising on ethics. The desire for profit motivates the corporation. The filmmakers seem keen to blame and scandalise corporations, but do not look at what makes a corporation behave like a psychopath. The corporation must essentially be the product of the will of the people who work for it. However, this cannot be strictly true as the decisions that are made by a corporation are of course made by its human employees. The film seems to suggest that a corporation has a mind of its own, and that its CEO does not have that much control over all the things that a corporation does. Of course, corporations are not really human at all, but they are run by humans who control a corporation’s actions at every level. How long these thoughts will last once they have walked out of the cinema and are confronted with massive amounts of advertising is debatable! The audience can’t fail to reconsider the role of big businesses in our society after they’ve seen this film, whether they are in North America or elsewhere in the world. The film clearly suggests, as Joel Bakan’s book does, that the corporate domination of society cannot continue indefinitely as it will only lead to scandal and ruin if corporate power goes unchecked. Many other corporate abuses of power are also explored during this documentary that is almost two and a half hours long. The Corporation then looks at the aggressive way that businesses target young children to persuade them to buy their products, and the role of corporate advertising in society more generally. It blames the petro-chemical era for the huge increase in cancer rates, examines the impact of Agent Orange, and discusses the use of hormone injections in cows to increase the production of milk. It takes a lengthy look at the environmental damage that corporations have inflicted and continue to inflict. The Corporation explores the exploitation of workers in China who work to produce shoes, shirts and all sorts of clothing for only a few dimes an hour. It asks whether these examples are just bad apples, or whether this is common market practice the filmmakers seem to clearly believe there are more than a few bad apples. The film then goes on to give many examples of how corporations both past and present have acted with blatant disregard for humanity and our planet because of their unbridled self-interest. The film argues that it is in a corporation’s nature to be evil. They single-mindedly pursue their own aim of profit without consideration for other people and without reference to any moral standards. He concludes that they have a personality disorder that means they can be categorised as psychopathic. Indeed, the film uses a consultant who helps the FBI profile its suspects to analyse the personality of the corporation. Corporations therefore have quasi-human freedoms and privileges, but cannot be punished by traditional methods such as imprisonment, and therefore can act recklessly without regard for those around them, driven by the desire to make profit. Ingenious commercial lawyers used this to transfer many different businesses into an ‘incorporated unit’, making them legal persons with a full range of legal rights. The corporation was originally created in the fourteenth Amendment after the American Civil War to protect the rights of freed slaves. The corporation is a clever US nineteenth century legal invention that has risen from obscurity to become the world’s dominant legal entity. The film is compiled of interviews with a range of individuals including CEOs, university professors, environmental activists, the Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and Michael Moore, who all comment on the problems the corporation has caused for American society and the wider world. The Corporation is based on the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan, an internationally recognised legal scholar and professor of law at the University of British Columbia. This has prompted Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar to direct The Corporation, a documentary made in Canada that examines the rise of the corporation in the US. Documentary films have become very popular in the last couple of years, with Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Farenheit 9/11 and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me among others achieving international success.
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