Home > The Corporation: A Film Review
By Chris Parry
"The single most important documentary of modern times."
(Awesome) A lot of documentaries get a rise out of their
audience. Some even invoke social change, or at the
least some serious reflection upon our place in the
world. But I can safely say I’ve never seen an audience
so moved, en masse, to explore actual social activism on
a grand scale as the audience who watched this three
hour masterwork. The first standing ovation I’ve seen
delivered at the Vancouver Film Festival was not only
deserved, but also very long, and what followed the
screening overshadowed even that outpouring of emotion.
The Corporation could never have been made in the USA.
It took a Canadian team to put this work together, and
it’ll take far more than legal threats and intimidation
to kill it. An almost three hour look at the past,
present and future of corporations as a business entity,
you’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes and giving the
thing a miss if you only had a loose synopsis to go on.
But where this documentary matters is in the details -
the nasty, disgusting, gory details of what the
corporation has done to this world, what it’s doing
today, and what we can expect it to do tomorrow if we
don’t get our freaking act together.
The extreme right ’love it or leave it’ crowd are no
doubt already starting to yell "Lefty propaganda," but
this isn’t an Anti-Bush attack on all things capitalist.
This isn’t hippy rhetoric or new age spin or a call to
the communes. It isn’t hoity toity technospeak or boring
talking-head PBS filler. What The Corporation is, is a
healthy dose of well-researched, deeply explored,
stunning information that can not possibly leave you, as
an audience member, in any condition but stunned,
dismayed, and outraged.
Maybe you know it all already. If you’re like me, you
read the papers, you know who’s buying who and that the
unstoppable bulldozer of globalization is hurting a lot
of people. If you’re like me, you’re disgusted that TV
news has become a wrestling match to decide which party
has the best ’spin’, and you might have even learned
enough about global politics to be sick to death of what
you’re seeing in the world today.
But The Corporation will teach you things you never
dreamed of. it will change you. It will ruin your day,
but give you reason to get up in the morning -
determined to make change.
Imagine, if you will, that France had started injecting
their cows with a chemical hormone agent that increased
milk productivity, but had side effects that would cause
massive damage and pain to the cows, and would then be
passed into the milk in large quantities. Imagine that
the UK and Canada had banned that chemical from use
because it is absorbed by the human body and has a real
danger of causing cancer and other health issues in
humans. And imagine that France had approved it anyway,
after testing it on only 30 rats.
Got that? Now imagine that a French investigative
journalist had found proof of all this but had a big
news report quashed by his network because it might harm
advertising revenue from the chemical company.
And imagine that the journalist had documented proof
that his network had tried to alter his story to tell
lies about the chemical for their advertisers, and that
the journalist had been offered hundreds of thousands of
dollars to keep quiet about it and just "go away."
Would you be outraged? Would you be disgusted that the
French could poison their children and that their media
would cover it up? How outraged would you be if that
French milk ended up in YOUR child’s school?
Well, get ready to be outraged, but not at the French,
because the wouldn’t touch Monsanto’s RPGH chemical with
a forty foot cattle prod. No, instead Monsanto sells it
to American diary farmers. The FDA approved it despite
no human testing having been done. And Fox TV ordered
the journalists who were ready to break the story
nationally to rewrite their report *83 times*, before
finally sacking the journalists, offering them a huge
payout to shut up, and eventually appealing an almost
half million dollar award given to the journalists for
retaliatory dismissal.
Of course, Fox appealed the award, and won their case
when a judge deemed that it might not actually be
against the law to give the public ’false news’.
And what of the chemical? Well, suffice to say that a
large amount of the milk American children will drink
tomorrow morning has a cow hormone in it, and that
hormone will be ingested by those children. If your
daughter begins to grow udders, try orange juice.
But the state of America’s milk is small potatoes when
you consider what else is going on.
How outraged would you be if a major US computer
manunfacturer had been doing secret business with Saddam
Hussein, setting up a system that would allow Saddam to
categorize what torture would be given to which
prisoner, and which execution method would be doled out
after that? Imagine that Hewlett Packard had sent
engineers to Iraq to program all this for Saddam and
they’d kept it all on the hush hush. Would you be ready
to have the company broken up?
Well, don’t get all angry at Hewlett Packard - save your
ire for IBM. Not only did that company do secret
business with the Nazis during World War II, but they
actually had engineers work with the Germans to set up a
punch card system that could categorize the
imprisonment, transportation and method of death of
Jewish prisoners. To be sure, killing six million Jews
is no easy task, but IBM made it a whole lot easier for
Herr Hitler to do his work by building a punchcard
system that had settings for ’execution’, ’death by
labor’ and ’special treatments’.
Along similar lines, what it Pepsi had decided that,
rather than do business with Iraq openly, they’d simply
start a new brand of soft drink, call it something like
"Alla Cola", and rake in big dollars keeping the enemy
from getting thirsty while allied GI’s were dying in
large numbers fighting them on a battlefield.
You’d be a little shocked, right? Well, Pepsi did no
such thing, but Coke did. When Coca Cola decided they
couldn’t sell Coke to th Germans openly, they instead
opted to set up a new brand - Fanta - and sell it
secretly to the enemy. Remember the gas chambers next
time you sip into that cool orange flavor...
But it goes on. If Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and
Lockheed Martin got together and decided to finance a
private army of 500,000 people to overthrow the US
Government, you’d not only be outraged, you’d call for
their directors to be hung by the ankles and beaten with
lead pipes - yet JP Morgan, Firestone and Dupont did
exactly that in the 1930’s, and were only stopped in
their plot when one of the main architects of the scheme
experienced pangs of guilt and ’fessed up. That man was
a General of the US Army.
Disney wants you to be born, bred and die loving their
products, to the point where they built their own city -
Celebration, Florida. Now you can do more than simply
buy a $35 Mickey Mouse T-shirt when you next go to
Disneyland, now you can buy an apartment there.
And in perhaps the most vile demonstration that nothing
is sacred anymore - AOL Time Warner owns the song, Happy
Birthday to You. You can show it in a film for the low,
low price of $10,000.
What’s the point of all this? Well, it’s really pretty
simple. As The Corporation points out, when the term
’corporation’ was created, it was intended to denote a
company that would be ’granted’ the right to limited
liability in return for serving the greater public good.
For example, if the government needed a railway built
from the west coast to the east coast, they’d allow a
corporation to form to get the job done. If they needed
a power station, likewise. But the catch would be that
the corporation was subservient to the general public.
It would charge a set price, serve a set service, it
couldn’t buy property, sue someone in court, or receive
political favors, and if it failed in its mission it
could be dissolved, fined, closed, whatever the
government thought proper.
That was until a court case was lodged claiming a
corporation has the same rights as a person.
Surprisingly, the corporation won. Nowadays,
corporations control the political process, the
information we get in the media, the very genetics of
the food we eat, the morals we pass on to our children,
our ability to communicate, and they even topple
governments when it suits them.
And that’s the basis of this documentary. All too often
we take the standpoint that if al we do is follow the
rules, we’ll live long fruitful lives and nobody will
ever do us wrong in government or in big business. But
the truth is far different, and seemingly always has
been. American companies sell seed to third world
countries that has a ’suicide gene’ added, so that the
seed will never reproduce. Rather than help these
countries and farmers become self-sufficient, the
corporation prefers to make them dependent for the rest
of their lives.
In Bolivia, a dire financial situation saw the
government told that they could only get World Bank
loans if they privatized everything - from railways to
oil companies to hospitals to water. But privatization
brought new problems. Bechtel, a US company, claimed
that since the water supply came from rain in the
mountains, that even rainwater was now their private
property. Can you even believe that - the act of
collecting rainwater was seen as theft of Bechtel’s
property!
The company duly increased the price of the national
water supply to 1/4 of the average monthly wage, leading
thousands to be unable to afford to drink tap water, and
legally obliged not to collect rainwater. Needless to
say, this kind of corporate disgrace resulted in the
topple of a government and the reclamation of the
country’s water supply from the company in question, but
how far down have we sunk when it takes a national
revolution for a corporate criminal to get lost?
With interviews from the usual gang of lefties - Noam
Chomsky, Michael Moore, et all - The Corporation could
easily have been a yelling, screaming, chanting case of
shaking your fist at the wind, but it must be said that
the people constructing this film have done so with
academic impartiality and impeccable depth. Michael
Moore rightly points out that, though the company that
will distribute this film will undoubtedly not agree
with its contents, or Moore’s words, it will still sell
the film because it doesn’t actually believe in anything
but pure profit. Moore is pretty clear, and undeniably
right - a CEO will sell you the rope with which to hang
him, as long as there’s a profit in it.
But not every CEO it seems. Interface Carpet CEO Ray
Anderson had an epiphany a few years ago that not a
single corporation on the planet was a sustainable one.
Every large company takes more out of the earth than it
gives back, and when you come to grips with that point,
it’s no great leap to realize there has to be a limit
placed on that kind of imbalance if we’re to avoid
killing ourselves. Pump crap into the oceans for long
enough and you have an ocean of crap - so where do you
pump that?
Anderson has become an advocate for responsible
corporate life, managing to keep his company’s raw
material and pollution intake from rising at all over
the last few years, while still managing to increase
profits by $200m and maintain his company’s place as the
biggest carept manufacturer in the world. As Anderson
describes the way he used to run his business, he’s
almost in tears. If only a few other CEOs had a tenth of
his humanity.
The Corporation does look at the other side of the coin,
giving pro- globalization and pro-privatization types
plenty of air-time with which to air their views.
Strangely though, most of them seem to make absolutely
zero sense with a view to defending their cause. A
marketing expert tells the camera with beaming pride who
she performed a study that showed how valuable the ’nag
factor’ is with marketing to children. There she is
boasting that 40% of things parents buy are bought only
because she has convinced a child to nag for it. A
honcho from the Fraser Institute does a similar shit-
eating grin routine as he claims we’d all be better off
if every stream, every rock, every piece of air was
privatized and owned. You honestly want to punch him in
his fat, bald, white head when he does so.
The Corporation is comprehensive, damning, brilliant and
insane, all at once. The producers have put their money
where their mouth is, dared the big boys to find fault
in their arguments, and laid themselves bare to be sued
if legal action is warranted. To this point they’re
clear, but the directors did make note that Fox lawyers
were in attendance at the Toronto Film Festival, sending
electronic messages back to homebase as the film played
on the screen. For their part, Fox claims they’re simply
considering buying the film for distribution... right.
Look, you have a place on the planet right now that
isn’t necessarily going to be there forever. It’s great
that you’ve been born and bred in a country that allows
people to vote and talk and discuss and criticize, but
you also have a responsibility to protect those rights,
that country, and your place on the planet. How long can
we go on exploiting before the exploited rise up? How
many times can we mess with a seed before that seed
stops being functional and we lose a staple food source?
And before you answer, take into account that the
world’s banana supply will be extinct within the next
ten years, due to every commercial banana on the market
having the exact same DNA as every other banana. That
shared DNA means bananas are unable to adapt to defend
themselves against new diseases. In 2012, we lose our
most popular fruit source, yet we’re still toying with
nature tryin to squeeze an extra unit of productivity
out of everything we grow.
Set aside three hours of your life and watch The
Corporation. Hunt it down, find it, any way you can. I
just watched 750 people sit down as capitalists and
stand up yelling for change. I witnessed people throwing
brand name products into garbage cans afterwards in
disgust. I witnessed hundreds signing on to email lists
for more information about how they can help change the
world. I saw an audience moved to exact change on the
world around them, to take back what was once theirs and
maybe one day can be again.
Normal documentaries don’t have that kind of an effect
on an audience. Normal documentaries don’t give you
enough to get truly fucked off at what is being done to
us. The Corporation, to be sure, is far from a ’normal’
documentary. This is the kind fo filmmaking that could,
if seen on a large scale, change the society we live in.
Remember, it’s not unAmerican to require a company to
not hurt the people who keep it in business. It’s not
unpatriotic to require business people to take
responsibility for their actions. It isn’t wrong to put
people before profit. And most importantly, it isn’t too
late. You still can do something. Heck, if Bolivians can
overthrow a government because their water is too
expensive, just imagine what we could do if we got off
the corporate nipple and started taking the world back.
For more information on The Corporation, go to
http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=8248&reviewer=1