The Corporation
... don’t take the usually dried out, humorless approach favored by public broadcasting documenters. Corporations are everywhere in modern industrial and post-industrial life. Their effects on public opinion, philosophy, and the environment are equally harmful to each other. As "The Corporation" insists, corporations are created and continued by a single, overriding goal, the pursuit of profit. "The Corporation" begins with a focus on history, with a late-nineteenth century decision by the United States Supreme Court. The Court determinedly accepted the legal argument that corporations were entitled to the status of “legal person.” With that Supreme Court decision, corporations could enter into contracts, impose those contracts in courts of law, and otherwise enjoy the privileges and rights of “actual” persons. That decision led to the extraordinary growth of the modern corporation, without regard to the public good. In short, with economic growth and success, with the massive attentiveness of wealth, corporations were under no legal obligation to control “externalities” (i.e., pollution, toxic and hazardous waste dumping, etc.), many of which have led to disease, poverty, exploitation, and the use of economic power and wealth to influence government decision making. Achbar, Abbott, and Bakan cleverly analogize the modern corporation to a psychologically disturbed individual. The filmmakers indicate six characteristics shared by most psychopaths, (1) callous unconcern for the feelings of others, (2) incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, (3) reckless disregard for t...