|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Globalization : Labor : Political-Economy |
|
Corporations Are Psychopathic, New Documentary Argues... |
Current rating: 0 |
by Stephen Leahy
(No verified email address) |
20 Jan 2004
|
While the corporation has the rights and responsibilities of ā€¯a legal personā€¯, its owners and shareholders are not liable for its actions. Moreover, the film explains, a corporation's directors are legally required to do what is best for the company, regardless of the harm created.
What kind of person would a corporation be? A clinical psychopath, answers the documentary. |
TORONTO - Corporations are not only the most powerful institutions in the world, they are also psychopathic, a new Canadian documentary on globalization elegantly argues.
While the corporation has the rights and responsibilities of ā€¯a legal personā€¯, its owners and shareholders are not liable for its actions. Moreover, the film explains, a corporation's directors are legally required to do what is best for the company, regardless of the harm created.
What kind of person would a corporation be? A clinical psychopath, answers the documentary, which is now playing in four Canadian theatres.
ā€¯Everything we do in the world is touched by corporations in some way,ā€¯ says 'The Corporation' (http://www.thecorporation.tv/) writer Joel Bakan.
Six years ago he was researching a book on the subject and teamed up with documentary makers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, and then set out to drum up enough money to make the film and to do more than 40 interviews.
ā€¯Corporations are the most dominant institutions on the planet today. We thought it was worth taking a close look at what that means,ā€¯ Bakan told IPS.
In law, today's corporations are treated like a person: they can buy and sell property, have the right to free expression and most other rights that individuals have.
This legal creativity came as a result of U.S. businesses using the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- designed to protect blacks in the U.S. South after the Civil War -- to proclaim that corporations should be treated as ā€¯personsā€¯.
The filmmakers show four examples of corporations at work -- including garment sweatshops in Honduras and Indonesia -- to demonstrate that this ā€¯legal personā€¯ is inherently amoral, callous and deceitful.
The corporation, the film points out, ignores any social and legal standards to get its way, and does not suffer from guilt while mimicking the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.
A person with those character traits would be categorized as a psychopath, based on diagnostic criteria from the World Health Organization (WHO), points out the film.
Unlike 'Bowling for Columbine' -- to which it has been compared -- 'The Corporation' does not follow a shambling yet crusading interviewer (Michael Moore) into corporate head offices to ask tough questions.
Instead the filmmakers use simple but beautifully lit head and shoulder shots of its subjects against a black background. The interviewer is never seen or heard; the corporate chiefs, professors and activists speak directly to the viewer.
The technique is so compelling that not listening or turning away would seem impolite.
The interviews are interspersed with archival footage from many sources, including scenes from sweatshops and news conferences. It also includes some ironic and darkly humorous excerpts from corporate ad campaigns and training films from the 1940s and '50s.
But the film is not a rant. It gives ample time to corporate chief executive officers (CEOs) and representatives of right-wing organizations, like Canada's Fraser Institute.
Fraser's Michael Walker tells viewers that hungry people in the developing world are better off when a sweatshop pays them 10 cents an hour to make brand name goods that sell for hundreds of dollars.
And it is just good business sense that a corporation moves to seek out more hungry people when its workers demand higher wages and better working conditions, Walker argues.
Many others are less ruthless. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, is honestly concerned about protecting the environment. Under his guidance, Shell adopted many green initiatives and a commitment to developing renewable energy.
At the same time, Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists were hung in Nigeria for protesting Shell Oil's pollution of the Niger Delta.
Social critic and linguist Noam Chomsky -- the subject of Achbar's 1992 award-winning 'Manufacturing Consent' -- carefully points out that people who work for corporations, and even those who run them, are often very nice people.
The same could have been said about many slave owners, he observes. The institution -- not the people -- is the problem, Chomsky argues.
Eminent economist Milton Friedman sums up the role of the corporation succinctly: it creates jobs and wealth but is inherently incapable of dealing with the social consequences of its actions.
'The Corporation' documents a bewildering array of these consequences -- including the deaths of citizens who protest corporate ownership of their water in Cochabamba, Bolivia -- that demonstrate the extent and power of today's corporations.
It looks at the often-cozy relationships between corporations and fascist regimes, such as that of IBM and Nazi leader Adolph Hitler.
It demonstrates the power of advertising to create desires for luxury items, as well as how corporations can suppress information.
The documentary shows agribusiness corporation Monsanto successfully preventing the news media from airing a story about the potential health hazards of a genetically engineered drug given to many U.S. diary cows.
'The Corporation' also tells a number of success stories, including activists' successful fight to overturn corporate patents on the neem tree and basmati rice.
Bolivia's Oscar Olivera describes how citizens of Cochabamba city re-took control of their water. The lesson, he explains, is the people's capacity for ā€¯reflection, rage and rebellionā€¯ as an effective counter to corporate globalization
That is one of the film's messages, says Bakan. ā€¯We want people to understand that they can change things.ā€¯
ā€¯Everyone keeps thanking us for making the film,ā€¯ says Mark Achbar, from the Sundance festival of independent films in Utah state.
ā€¯People are fed up with being talked down to and enjoy being intellectually engaged,ā€¯ he adds, trying to explain the documentary's popularity and several international festival awards.
Despite its current limited distribution in Canada, 'The Corporation' has been sold as a three-part, one-hour TV series to international markets, and Achbar is hoping it will be translated into Spanish.
Of course, there will not be a multi-million marketing campaign. The number of people who will see it will depend on those who have, spreading the word.
That is just one way to take back the power that corporations have usurped.
Ā© Copyright 2004 IPS - Inter Press Service
http://www.ips.org |
See also:
http://www.thecorporation.tv/
|
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
|
Multiple Corporate Personality Disorder |
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
20 Jan 2004
|
We hate to sound like your parents, but people must take responsibility for their actions.
Steal from the grocery store, go to jail.
Double park, pay the ticket.
But why doesn't this simple principle apply to corporations and their executives?
As of this writing, of all of the corporate crimes committed that have cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars over the past couple of years, only two top level executives are in prison.
That's it -- two.
Now, ask yourself, if working class people committed crimes that cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars -- inconceivable as it is -- how many would be in prison? The whole lot of them.
So, how is it that corporations and their executives get away with it? It's the nature of the beast.
And perhaps that's why we should consider doing away with it -- the corporation that is.
After all, if a corporation means a legal structure to allow human beings to get away with wrongdoing without paying a price, then it's a machine that produces injustice.
Let's say that a corporation is caught fixing its books, committing in effect a $2.7 billion fraud. That would be a case very similar to the case of HealthSouth.
Under U.S. federal law, if a health care corporation is convicted of a serious crime, that company can no longer do business with the government, in this case the Medicare and Medicaid program. And in HealthSouth's case, that means life and death.
So, the company hires one of the nation's best corporate crime defense attorneys -- Bob Bennett and says to him, "Save us from the corporate death penalty."
And Bob goes to the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case and says, "Hey, look, we blew it, here's my phone number, we'll give you everything you want. Just don't indict us. Please don't indict us."
And the U.S. Attorney indicts 16 top executives. And the company is on the road to getting off scot free.
That's one way a corporation morphs to get out of accepting responsibility for its sins -- blame the human beings.
But sometimes, the corporate executives say, "Hey, we don't have to take the heat. Let's cough up a defunct subsidiary to plead guilty -- and the government can ban that unit from doing business with Medicare. Who cares about a defunct subsidiary? That unit never did business with Medicare anyway."
So, there's a guilty plea, there's a corporate fine, there is a touch of adverse publicity -- but nobody's hurt. Crime without punishment.
Or let's say that the corporation wants to plea to a lesser offense, but not draw any publicity to the case. This too happens. The corporate lawyer can go to the Justice Department and cut a deal where the Department will agree not to put out a press release about the case. A number of criminal defense lawyers have told us they have done this.
The Justice Department issued a memo earlier this year titled "Federal Prosecution of Business Organization."
The memo gives prosecutors discretion to grant corporations immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation.
These immunity agreements, known as deferred prosecution agreements, or pre-trial diversion, were previously reserved for minor street crimes.
They were never intended for major corporate crimes.
In fact, the U.S. Attorneys' Manual explicitly states that a major objective of pretrial diversion is to "save prosecutive and judicial resources for concentration on major cases."
Since the memo was issued, there have been a rash of deferred prosecution agreements in cases involving large corporations, including a settlement with a Puerto Rican bank on money laundering charges and a Pittsburgh bank on securities law charges.
And some corporate crime defense attorneys believe that it is possible to enter these agreements with the Justice Department so as to avoid any publicity.
"This is a favorable change for companies," said Alan Vinegrad, a partner at Covington & Burling in New York. "The memo now explicitly says that pre-trial diversion, which had been reserved for small, individual, minor crimes, is now available for corporations."
Vinegrad said that while there have been a handful of publicized pre-trial diversion cases by corporations, it is conceivable that the Justice Department can cut these kind of deals with companies without filing a public document -- and therefore without any publicity to the case.
Harry Glasbeek is a professor of criminal law at York University in Toronto. He has studied corporate crime and written a book about it called Wealth By Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy.
Glasbeek says that the creation of the corporation allowed for this "fungibility of responsibility."
"Sometimes the executives plead the corporation to relieve the executives from responsibility," Glasbeek told us recently. "Sometimes the corporation causes the executives to plead, a couple of people take the fall. And it is very difficult. We have created a separate entity with separate property. So, you have multiple personalities with different legal duties and rights that the actors are allowed to take on at any one time. That allows a shifting of responsibility that we cannot control."
We call it Multiple Corporate Personality Disorder (MCPD).
Glasbeek says this disorder undermines our notion of responsibility, which "supposedly depends on the individual taking responsibility for his or her own actions."
"What we have designed is a creature that allows that responsibility to be shifted at the whim of those people who are actually operating that system," Glasbeek said. "That's an endemic design flaw."
Glasbeek has no illusions that criminal prosecution will bring corporate criminals to justice.
"My notion of prosecuting more often is to bring attention to this embedded difficulty -- it is not because I believe that this will actually change the situation in and of itself," he said.
We believe that justice can be done -- and must be done. But only two things work in bringing justice to corporations.
One is to criminally convict the corporate criminals and apply the death penalty in cases of serious wrongdoing.
And the other is to criminally prosecute high-ranking corporate executives who commit serious crimes and throw them in prison.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter (http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com). Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor (http://www.multinationalmonitor.org). They are co-authors of 'Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy' (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman |
|
