Movie theaters are certainly brimming with political documentaries these days, but few of them are as sweeping in scope as The Corporation which examines the dominant institution in our society, the transnational shareholder-owned business.
The Canadian film uses for its springboard the US Constitution's 14th Amendment, which prevents states from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." It was intended to guarantee the rights of black males, but in 1886 the Supreme Court interpreted the amendment to guarantee the rights of corporations, too.
The documentary then goes on to ask, "If corporations are legally people then what sort of people are they?" To answer that question, it marches through a laundry list of corporate misdeeds, such as lying to the public and operating sweatshops, and it solicits the comments of talking heads, many of whom are familiar to anyone who follows this debate, like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. Unfortunately, the few corporate defenders in the mix are used mostly as punching bags.
As a clever joke, the filmmakers run down a list of the traits of a psychopath and find a corporate action to match each one. Diagnosis: psychopath. It's cute, but it's a logical fallacy equivalent to saying that if you can find one person per symptom, then all people are psychotic. Nevertheless, while a pile of anecdotes doesn't prove anything, this pile is so high and so broad that the movie demands answers to some pretty basic questions about the economic system that we've put our faith in. As Americans, we pride ourselves on a form of government that may be imperfect but that gives representation to all citizens and defines some basic rights. At the same time, we've given increasing power to corporations that have a laser-like concentration on a very different guiding principle: increase shareholder wealth. The movie argues that it's dangerous to give so much control to an entity whose morality differs so much from our own.
Ah, the capitalist says, that shareholder wealth doesn't come out of thin air. It comes from people like you and me who do have a conscience. Therefore, you still have your say; you just say it with money. But the movie notes that a system that asks people to vote with their dollars is pretty different from a democracy because some people have far more votes than others. It's a compelling point, but the movie isn't always so insightful. When Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute defends the use of low-paying labor forces by saying that the practice applies funds to where they're needed most, the filmmakers' only rebuttal is to show the poor living conditions in third-world countries while he speaks, which doesn't fully address his point.
The hero of the movie is one of those evil CEOs himself, Ray Anderson, the head of the world's largest carpet manufacturer. A soft-spoken, self-effacing man, he tells of an epiphany that he had while reading Paul Hawken's book The Ecology of Commerce. He began to realize that his company's balance sheet didn't accurately reflect the resources that the business was taking from the earth without replenishing. But rather than leave his company in protest, he set a goal of making his company sustainable by 2020, and he's encouraged other CEOs — "fellow plunderers" — to do the same.
Lacking any clearer solution to the hydra-headed problem that it documents, the movie does well to focus on Anderson as a beacon of hope who has found a way to bridge the gap between personal responsibility and an impersonal corporation. But ironically it holds Walker up for ridicule a second time when he suggests that the solution to many of these problems is for all natural resources to be owned, an idea that's within hailing distance of what Anderson and Hawken are talking about. They may disagree on the details, but they're all seeking to use and improve — but not discard — the market system by making sure that it properly accounts for all affected resources.
Whether you agree or disagree with The Corporation's conclusions, its complaints are worthy of careful consideration. It may even encourage the warring factions to take Anderson's example and find some common ground.