are what you enable
A review of The Corporation
are two messages—one explicit, the other implicit—in The Corporation,
a documentary film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan.
The explicit point is that if corporations are people,
then they are psychopaths. In the first of the film’s three parts, Achbar
& Company cleverly link the World Health Organization’s symptoms
of psychopathology to corporate behavior.
The film’s tacit suggestion, however, is that the people
who work for them and/or buy into corporate philosophy—as producers
and/or consumers—are also psychopathic, or at least possess many of
the same symptoms (you are, in part, what you enable).
This subtlety, in my opinion, makes it a more intellectually
stimulating film than Fahrenheit-911. Whereas F-911 limits itself by
attending to the emotions of potential American swing voters and the
left-wing faithful, The Corporation’s imagined audience is open-ended,
appealing to honest, hard working folks worldwide, many of them corporate
employees or beneficiaries themselves. Since corporations are global
entities, the film focuses on their planetary and species-wide effects,
rather than one nation’s election. And it does this all in a way that
allows us to feel our complicity in failing to resist the rise of totalitarianism
in our societies. We are like the pre-Stalinist soviets and Weimar Germans
In many ways, The Corporation reveals how decent
people permit such inhumane systems. Which brings us to another irony—it
is a more profoundly political film than F-911. Its implicit message
makes it so. In its first part, the film employs the most commonly used
chart by mental health professionals for diagnosing psychopathy, checking
off the symptoms as the mélange of images and talking heads gradually
render the logical verdict.
The corporation, the right wing economist Milton Friedman
tells us, can’t be any more socially responsible than a building, so
asking it to be something it can’t be is absurd (but buildings aren’t
legal persons!). One can’t expect it to behave in a lawful way or put
the common interests of the public and planet ahead of the private interests
of its financial profiteers. Its primary reason for being is to make
them money, it is legally bound to do so, and it’s the primary law they
adhere to. Because they don’t give a shit about how others feel about
them, and have no faculty for long-term relationships or thinking, and
recklessly jeopardize the health of all living things, are deceitful
without feeling any guilt, corporations are psychopathic outlaws.
There’s the master of urban disguise, Marc Barry, who
twenty-somethings might relate to Puck from MTV’s original “The Real
World.” With at times spiked blond hair, a goatee and various costumes,
this young millionaire proudly makes his way by stealing information
from corporate executives on behalf of their competitors, and doesn’t
feel any guilt about it. It’s just the way the world is, he says, while
stylin’ and profilin’ for the camera.
Carlton Brown is a Wall Street commodities broker who
resembles Charles Barkley. He’s a sharp dresser, very stylish, and it
was the price of gold going up that was on his mind while he watched
the twin towers come tumbling down. He felt nothing for anybody. Make
them a commodity and I’ll pay attention, he said, more or less.
Then there’s America’s leading dissident intellectual,
Noam Chomsky, telling the camera, “When you look at a corporation, just
like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between
the institution and the individual [but in good conscience, you can’t].”
Renowned progressive historian Howard Zinn reminds us,
as if we already knew, of course, that European fascism rose with the
help of corporations. Does claiming that one didn’t know what was going
on or that one was just following orders hold up in the end?
Perhaps most disturbing is the delusional blather of Michael
Walker, president of the Fraser Institute, a Canadian corporate libertarian
think-tank. Walker waxes poetic, gesticulating with his hands to the
point where, for particular emphasis, he would unconsciously use masturbatory
gestures. Coupled by his gleaming eyes and somewhat flushed, glowing
baldness, one could not escape the profound narcissism informing his
vision of the world. Walker is jovial, nay downright jocular, when he
agrees with the statement that every identifiable particle on earth
should be privately owned and colonized by a corporation to benefit
both its plump and happy workers and, of course, its stockholders…gesticulate.
Naturally, Walker seems oblivious to the film’s numerous
case studies showing not only the already well-publicized harm to the
environment, but also to the physical and mental health of workers and
consumers damaged by corporate inhumanity.
But why and how can a corporation be considered a “person”
and subjected to such an analysis, you ask? The filmmakers anticipated
their audience’s resistance, thankfully, providing a perhaps too brief
sketch of how corporations became legal persons in the United States.
Basically, corporate lawyers used the 14th Amendment to
the Constitution, which recognized the rights of former slaves to be
protected equally under the laws of the land in order to gain greater
power for their business clients. Equal protection meant that corporations—as
citizens of the United States—had certain inalienable rights, among
them free speech and protection from search and seizure of their private
“persons” (i.e.: property) by government agencies without due process
of law. So it didn’t take long for them to take everything over in the
U.S. since they live longer, accumulate far more wealth and exercise
far greater mobility than other types of people, whose flesh and blood
physical constraints prevent them from competing with corporations for
life, liberty and happiness.
OK, one might say, “But that’s just business. It’s economics.
What’s it got to do with politics and my civil liberties? How does that
The Corporation addresses these issues and assumptions
by presenting the views of a wide range of people. You might see yourself
somewhere in this film. Philosophers, corporate executives, Bolivian
activists, college students, academics, farmers, housewives and others
are interviewed, revealing through their own stories, words and actions
the insanity that’s killing the world.
For one who has never thought of our principal institution
this way, the prospect that society’s dominant cultural system is psychopathic
and forcing us to become psychopaths ourselves by behaving the way we
do, is unnerving.
The question is, what does one do about it?
First, you can start by seeing this film. The nearest
place it’s in the theatre is Rhinebeck, in the Hudson Valley, or New
York City. I saw the CBC television version on videotape. It’s in very
limited release in the U.S. despite having won numerous awards, including
one at Sundance. Encourage your local independent theatre owner to show
the film (hint! Hint! Amherst Theatre and North Park), and get involved
by going to The Corporation’s support site at http://www.thecorporation.com/about/moreonhelping.php.
Finally, realize that one can’t bring about the political
changes one desires without also nurturing the equivalent psychological
or spiritual changes within one’s self.
The Corporation serves as something of an unsentimental
mirror image of America’s perception of the world and its existence.
It’s time we help ourselves heal before others intervene for us.
Chuck Richardson is
a freelance writer whose work is archived at www.bastardpolitics.com. His first
from Apartment 5, is now available in most online