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Corporations as People 2010-01-28

Reviewer: Benjamin Kenon

This film can be boiled down to just a few main points:

1. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are legally counted as 'persons' under the 14th amendment (the same amendment that prevents human beings in the U.S. from ever being enslaved again).

2. If they are persons, corporations may be subject to psychological diagnoses based on their behavior.

Some specific examples of corporate behavior from the film are:
a.) Externalities (basically, any costs and consequences, economic and otherwise, that can be passed to an innocent, uninvolved third party (such as you or me). An example would be the reckless behavior of the banks, which caused the 2008 Meltdown and necessitated hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts for those same banks to keep them afloat. Another example would be widescale pollution, legally sanctioned and otherwise.

b.) Meddling in government. See The Business Plot of the 1930's, when a cabal of corporate leaders conspired to forcibly remove Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President and replace him with Gen. Smedley Butler, who quickly exposed the plot to the American people.

c.) Deliberately selling harmful products to an unsuspecting public. Monsanto's creation and sale of recombinant bovine somatotropin, or Bovine Growth Hormone (Prosilac), which was known by them to be hazardous and painful for cows and potentially harmful for human beings.

d.) The privatization of Bolivia's entire water supply by the Bechtel Corporation, which then held the country hostage by limiting the availability of water and charging outrageous prices, which culminated in widespread protests and the declaration of martial law; at least 6 people were killed by the army.

There are more examples in the film; I don't need to list them all here.

For it's final point, the film concludes:

3. If corporations are indeed persons under the law, and therefore subject to psychological diagnosis, then corporations can be said to be sociopaths, due to their disregard for the feelings and lives of others and their focus on profit to the exclusion of everything else.

While it is a bit long and at times repetitive, the perspective and insight it provides is extremely valuable, and in light of the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling on corporate speech, more timely than ever.
Highlights include interviews with Howard Zinn (who passed away yesterday), and Noam Chomsky.
I highly recommend this film!!! Your rights are being usurped more and more every day by massive corporations that do not care about anything but money. This film provides a perspective you need to hear.

Like a Michael Moore film made for a critical audience 2010-01-24

Reviewer: Philip Greenspun

The modern legal structure of the corporation has been very good for investors and, by fostering economic development and job creation, for the average citizen's standard of living. This movie makes you stop and think about what it means for some of the most powerful actors in a society or economy to be constrained to seek maximum profits by any legal means. It shows the importance of the legal structures that we create. After the Collapse of 2008-?, we complained about Wall Street bankers' greed but did not look in the mirror and ask who was it that prevented shareholders in public companies from nominating Board members (thereby allowing the CEO to put his golfing buddies on the Board and they in turn to give most of the company's profits to top managers). Nor did we ask what we should have expected when we gave trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds to big banks that existed solely to pay dividends to shareholders (a little) and bonuses to employees (a lot!).

An explanation 2009-12-06

Reviewer: MisterTee

Ultimately, this serves as an explanation for 9/11 and the two resulting resource wars which followed.

Greed IS, in fact, more important than life itself... from the perspective of the modern multinational corporation. Until that fundamental paradigm changes, we (as a species) will continue to deplete, destroy and poison our very ecosystem.

superb and dense examination of the rulers of today's world 2009-09-25

Reviewer: Muzzlehatch

Based on sceenwriter Joel Bakan's book, "The Corporation: A Pathological Pursuit of Power", this compelling documentary is a lengthy (145 minute) disquisition on the place of the corporation in the world today, a brief on its history and the disquieting notion that the profit motive of large transnationals has all but usurped the democratic voting processes of governments. Of course it is largely a left-wing work, but it is much more nuanced and wider-ranging than something like Michael Moore's works and contains long interviews with numerous luminaries from the academic, activist and corporate worlds. I wish that the filmmakers had chosen other, more eloquent and less out-of-touch intellectuals on the right than the sole example we see (Milton Friedman) but on the whole it's a stunning, depressing work with mere glimmers of hope near the end. Those that have read Kirkpatrick Sale (Rebels Against the Future) will be at home in this work.

The film is structured in a multitude of chapters; at first short, terse, more humorous and wide-ranging, but gradually building to a climax of sorts as it gives more detailed views of "case studies" to support its thesis that a corporation, if it really were a person (and, in the USA, it is in many ways a legal human), would be considered pathological in its total disregard for anything other than the profit motive. One great piece involves the whistleblowers who produced a significant documentary about Monsanto's pushing rBGH into milk production and lying about its harmful effects, only to see the powerful corporation for which they worked (FoxNews) rework the film to placate Monsanto, then fire them....an even more awful example of the negative motives of these transnationals is the story of how California-based Bechtel at one point owned the rights to all water in on of the largest cities in Bolivia -- including rainwater -- and forced people to pay up to a quarter of their pay to have the right to drink (and live).

Interviewees, besides Friedman and Moore (much more restrained and thoughtful here than usual) include Chomsky, Zinn, Janet Akre (former FoxNews correspondent), Naomi Klein and several current and ex-CEOs, most notably Ray Anderson the CEO of Interface, the largest commercial carpet manufacturer in the world and one of the few execs who seems to really be looking at the larger, environmental and holistic picture. Other CEOs come off as completely unaware, or uninterested in, anything besides their stockholders, and Friedman makes the cogent (if coldblooded and amoral) statement that corporations only know how to make profit, so why be involved in something they don't understand (like a healthy environmental outlook).

One of the best new documentaries I've seen in years, an absolute stunner. The film's website is excellent and a great resource.

Good Documentary - B+ 2009-09-23

Reviewer: Chris J

I did enjoy the film, but I felt there was plenty of uncovered material, and some stories which were too indepth. Extra feature seem to be outstanding, I have not viewed them all, but the material is there. Overall, I would definitely recommend this DVD, but I suppose it did not fulfill my expectations.