Few Americans know it, but during the Great Depression, a cabal of millionaire bankers and industrialists hatched a conspiracy to hijack the U.S. government and install a fascist dictatorship. It was, in the words of contemporary journalist John L. Spivak, "one of the most fantastic plots in American history." this is just a few of the facts put forth in this
One hundred and fifty years ago, the corporation was a relatively insignificant entity. Today, it is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today’s dominant institution. But history humbles dominant institutions. All have been crushed, belittled or absorbed into some new order. The corporation is unlikely to be the first to defy history. In this complex and highly entertaining documentary, Mark Achbar, co-director of the influential and inventive MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA, teams up with co-director Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan to examine the far-reaching repercussions of the corporation’s increasing preeminence. Based on Bakan’s book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, the film is a timely, critical inquiry that invites CEOs, whistle-blowers, brokers, gurus, spies, players, pawns and pundits on a graphic and engaging quest to reveal the 4corporation’s inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures. Featuring illuminating interviews with Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and many others, THE CORPORATION charts the spectacular rise of an institution aimed at achieving specific economic goals as it also recounts victories against this apparently invincible force.
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The Corporation wins Audience Award at Sundance. Read More
The Corporation will have its U.S. premiere at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. Read More
THE CORPORATION
In THE CORPORATION, case studies, anecdotes and true confessions reveal behind-the-scenes tensions and influences in several corporate and anti-corporate dramas. Each illuminates an aspect of the corporation’s complex character.
Among the 40 interview subjects are CEOs and top-level executives from a range of industries: oil, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, manufacturing, public relations, branding, advertising and undercover marketing; in addition, a Nobel-prize winning economist, the first management guru, a corporate spy, and a range of academics, critics, historians and thinkers are interviewed.
A LEGAL “PERSON"
In the mid-1800s the corporation emerged as a legal “person.“ Imbued with a “personality“ of pure self-interest, the next 100 years saw the corporation’s rise to dominance. The corporation created unprecedented wealth. But at what cost? The remorseless rationale of “externalities”—as Milton Friedman explains: the unintended consequences of a transaction between two parties on a third—is responsible for countless cases of illness, death, poverty, pollution, exploitation and lies.
THE PATHOLOGY OF COMMERCE: CASE HISTORIES
To more precisely assess the “personality“ of the corporate “person,“ a checklist is employed, using actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the DSM-IV, the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social “personality”: It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. Four case studies, drawn from a universe of corporate activity, clearly demonstrate harm to workers, human health, animals and the biosphere. Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a “psychopath.”
MINDSET
But what is the ethical mindset of corporate players? Should the institution or the individuals within it be held responsible?
The people who work for corporations may be good people, upstanding citizens in their communities—but none of that matters when they enter the corporation’s world. As Sam Gibara, Chairman of Goodyear Tire, explains, “If you really had a free hand, if you really did what you wanted to do that suited your personal thoughts and your personal priorities, you’d act differently.“
Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, had an environmental epiphany and re-organized his $1.4 billion company on sustainable principles. His company may be a beacon of corporate hope, but is it an exception to the rule?
MONSTROUS OBLIGATIONS
A case in point: Sir Mark Moody-Stuart recounts an exchange between himself (at the time Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell), his wife and a motley crew of Earth First activists who arrived on the doorstep of their country home. The protesters chanted and stretched a banner over their roof that read, “MURDERERS.“ The response of the surprised couple was not to call the police, but to engage their uninvited guests in a civil dialogue, share concerns about human rights and the environment and eventually serve them tea on their front lawn. Yet, as the Moody-Stuarts apologize for not being able to provide soy milk for their vegan critics’ tea, Shell Nigeria is flaring unrivaled amounts of gas, making it one of the world's single worst sources of pollution. And all the professed concerns about the environment do not spare Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists from being hanged for opposing Shell's environmental practices in the Niger Delta.
The Corporation exists to create wealth, and even world disasters can be profit centers. Carlton Brown, a commodities trader, recounts with unabashed honesty the mindset of gold traders while the twin towers crushed their occupants. The first thing that came to their minds, he tells us, was: “How much is gold up?“
PLANET INC.
You’d think that things like disasters, or the purity of childhood, or even milk, let alone water or air, would be sacred. But no. Corporations have no built-in limits on what, who or how much they can exploit for profit. In the fifteenth century, the enclosure movement began to put fences around public grazing lands so that they might be privately owned and exploited. Today, every molecule on the planet is up for grabs. In a bid to own it all, corporations are patenting animals, plants, even your DNA.
Around things too precious, vulnerable, sacred or important to the public interest, governments have, in the past, drawn protective boundaries against corporate exploitation. Today, governments are inviting corporations into domains from which they were previously barred.
PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT
The Initiative Corporation spends $22 billion worldwide placing its clients’ advertising in every imaginable—and some unimaginable—media. One new medium: very young children. Their “Nag Factor“ study dropped jaws in the world of child psychiatry. It was designed not to help parents cope with their children’s nagging, but to help corporations design their ads and promotions so that children would nag for their products more effectively. Initiative Vice President Lucy Hughes elaborates: “You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying your products. It’s a game.“
Today people can become brands. And brands can build cities. And university students can pay for their educations by shilling on national television for a credit card company. And a corporation even owns the rights to the popular song “Happy Birthday.” Do you ever get the feeling it’s all a bit much?
Corporations have invested billions to shape public and political opinion. When they own everything, who will stand for the public good?
THE PRICE OF WHISTLEBLOWING
It turns out that standing for the public good is an expensive proposition. Ask Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, two investigative reporters fired by Fox News after they refused to water down a story on rBGH, a synthetic hormone widely used in the United States (but banned in Europe and Canada) to rev up cows’ metabolism and boost their milk production. Because of the increased production, the cows suffer from mastitis, a painful infection of the udders. Antibiotics must then be injected, which find their way into the milk, and ultimately reduce people’s resistance to disease.
Fox demanded that they rewrite the story, and ultimately fired Akre and Wilson. Akre and Wilson subsequently sued Fox under Florida’s whistle-blower statute. They proved to a jury that the version of the story Fox would have had them put on the air was false, distorted or slanted. Akre was awarded $425,000. Then Fox appealed, the verdict was overturned on a technicality, and Akre lost her award. [For more information on the case see www.foxbghsuit.com]
DEMOCRACY LTD.
Democracy is a value that the corporation just doesn’t understand. In fact, corporations have often tried to undo democracy if it is an obstacle to their single-minded drive for profit. From a 1934 business-backed plot to install a military dictator in the White House (undone by the integrity of one U.S. Marine Corps General, Smedley Darlington Butler) to present-day law-drafting, corporations have bought military might, political muscle and public opinion.
And corporations do not hesitate to take advantage of democracy’s absence either. One of the most shocking stories of the twentieth century is Edwin Black’s recounting IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany—one that began in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continued well into World War II.
FISSURES
The corporation may be trying to render governments impotent, but since the landmark WTO protest in Seattle, a rising wave of networked individuals and groups have decided to make their voices heard. Movements to challenge the very foundations of the corporation are afoot: The charter revocation movement tried to bring down oil giant Unocal; a groundbreaking ballot initiative in Arcata, California, put a corporate agenda in the public spotlight in a series of town hall meetings; in Bolivia, the population fought and won a battle against a huge transnational corporation brought in by their government to privatize the water system; in India nearly 99% of the basmati patent of RiceTek was overturned; and W. R. Grace and the U.S. government’s patent on Neem was revoked.
As global individuals take back local power, a growing re-invigoration of the concept of citizenship is taking root. It has the power to not only strip the corporation of its seeming omnipotence, but to create a feeling and an ideology of democracy that is much more than its mere institutional version.
Spivak's assessment in his 1967, A Man in His Time, certainly continues to hold true sixty years after the fact: "What was behind the plot was shrouded in a silence which has not been broken to this day. Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories."
Although a congressional committee confirmed the allegations, the findings were hushed up amid murmurs of a coverup. No wonder. The plotters were brand-name American finaciers in the Morgan and Du Pont commercial empires, right-wingers bitterly opposed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and the president's sympathies toward organized labor.
Perhaps Americans would know all too much about the plot, and even celebrate it on "President Duce Day," if it weren't for a patriotic military man, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler. In the summer of 1933, the putsch plotters approached Butler, the retired commandant of the U.S. Marines and a popular war hero affectionately known as "the fighting Quaker." They offered him the job of transforming the American Legion veterans group into a 500,000-man marauding army, which was to spearhead an American coup d'etat.
Unfortunately for facism, Butler's appeal to the plotters also turned out to be the conspiracy's downfall. The conspirators apparently chose the former general because of his enormous popularity with rank-and-file soldiers; but it was Butler's antielitist leanings and reputation for honesty that had made him a populist favorite. In short, the conspirators couldn't have selected a candidate more unlikely to agree to lead a fascist takeover. Shrewdly, Butler decided to play along, feigning interest in the plans in order to draw the plotters into the daylight and expose the scheme to Congress.
As he told the House of Representatives' McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which was investigating Nazi and communist activities in America, Butler was first approached by one Gerald G. MacGuire, a bond salesman and former commander of the Connecticut American Legion. As journalist Spivak described him, "MacGuire was a short stocky man tending toward three chins, with a bullet-shaped head which had a silver plate in it due to a wound received in battle."
According to the former general, MacGuire described to Butler "what was tantamount to a plot to seize the government, by force if necessary." MacGuire, said Butler, explained that he had traveled to Europe to study the role played by veterans' groups in propping up Mussolini's fascist Italy, Hitler's Nazi Germany, and the French government. MacGuire lauded France's Croix de Feu as "an organization of super-soldiers" with profound political influence. Then the man with the silver plate in his cranium announced that "our idea here in America" is to "get up an organization of this kind" because "the political setup has got to be changed a bit."
According to Butler, MacGuire elaborated on the plot: "Now, did it ever occur to you that the president is overworked? We might have an assistant president; somebody to take the blame." MacGuire called the new super Cabinet official a "secretary of general affairs." And, he said, "You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the president's health is failing. Everybody can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second…."
Although MacGuire denied Butler's account under oath, corroborating testimony came from Paul Comly French, a Philadelphia Record reporter. Butler had asked French to look into MacGuire's plot and shed some light on "what the hell it's all about."
After checking with Butler, the voluble MacGuire agreed to see French. French testified that MacGuire told him, "We ned a fascist government in this country…to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight."
French continued: MacGuire "warmed up considerably after we got under way and he said, 'We might go along with Roosevelt and then do with him what Mussolini did with the King of Italy.'" If Roosevelt played ball, French summarized, "swell; and if he did not, they would push him out."
According to French, MacGuire dropped names to give the impression that American Legion brass were involved in the plot.
To impress Butler, MacGuire had flaunted a bank book itemizing deposits of more than $100,000 available to pay for "expenses." Later, he flashed a wad of eighteen $1,000 bills and boasted of "friends" who were capable of coughing up plenty more dough where that came from.
One of those friends was Robert Sterling Clark, a prominent Wall Street banker and stockbroker. When Butler demanded that MacGuire produce his superiors, the tubby intermediary made the introductions. According to Butler's testimony, Clark spoke of spending half his $60 million fortune in order to save the other half. What's more, Clark purportedly waxed ominous about the misguided FDR: "You know the president is weak. He will come right along with us. He was born in this class, and he will come back. He will run true to form. In the end he will come around. But we have got to be prepared to sustain him when he does."
Amazingly, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee (a forerunner of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee) never bothered to haul Clark in for questioning. And the committee's members - who exhibited considerably more zeal ferreting out two-bit commies than they did big-shot American fascists - failed to frill a half-dozen other suspects named by Butler and French. In fact, the committee suppressed many of the names, even though French's newspaper articles caused a stir by naming the well-heeled conspirators (at the height of the Depression).
In addition to MacGuire and Clark, the leading plotters included:
Grayson Murphy, a director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel, and a panoply of Morgan banks. Murphy was the original bankroller of the American Legion, which he and other wealthy military officers formed after World War I to "offset radicalism." He was also MacGuire's boss at the New York brokerage firm.
William Doyle, former state commander of the Legion and purportedly the architect of the coup idea.
John W. Davis, former Democratic candidate for president of the United States and a senior attorney for J.P. Morgan and Company.
Al Smith, former governor of New York, a Roosevelt foe, and codirector of the newly founded American Liberty League, an organization described by MacGuire as the matrix on which the plot would by executed.
Other prominent businessmen lurked in the background, including Smith's codirector at the American Livery League, John J. Raskob, who was a former chairman of the Democratic Party, a high-ranking Du Pont officer, and a bitter enemy of FDR, whom he classified among dangerous "radicals." And in even deeper shadows was right-wing industrialist Irenee Du Pont, who established the American Liberty League. Grayson Murphy - MacGuire's boss - was treasurer of the same group. Clearly, this was no penny-ante whiner's club. Most astonishing was the presence among the plotters of heavy-hitting politicos from FDR's own party.
Mysteriously, though, the congressional probe expired with a whimper. The McCormack-Dickstein Committee released heavily edited excerpts from Butler's testimony but claimed it had uncovered "no evidence" other than "hearsay" linking prominent Americans to a fascist plot.
Had the committee backed down rather than take on a klatch of power-drunk millionaires? Did high-ranking Democrats - possibly one in the White House, as some reports had it - put the kibosh on the investigation for similar reasons, or to stave off political embarrassment, or to protect Democratic muckamucks who were in on the scheme?
All of the above would seem likely, for in fact the McCormack-Dickstein Committee's public report was utterly contradicted by its internal summation to the House. That document might have been lost to history had Spivak not somehow managed to liberate a copy. Contrary to the public whitewash, privately the committee acknowledged Butler's accuracy and MacGuire's lying. The report concluded:
In the last few weeks of the committee's life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country….
There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient….
MacGuire denied [Butler's] allegations under oath, but your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made to General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various form of veterans' organizations of Fascist character.
Alas, as is so often the case, when truth finally emerged it was greeted as yesterday's news - or worse, as last year's outmoded fashion, which clashed with the committee's public dismissal of the charges. Spivak's reporting appeared in a small left-wing publication where it went largely unnoticed. After all, Time magazine - hardly what you would call antagonistic toward right-wing industrialists - had already dismissed the allegations as a joke.
"The fighting Quaker" went on national radio to denounce the committee's deletions of key points in his testimony, but history's loaded die had already been cast.
Ultimately, the plot's failure owes as much a debt to Butler as it does to the Hubris of the super-Wealthy. Lacking a Mussolini-calibre proxy, but swimming in ample cash to buy one, America's elite fascists dispatched the man with a plate in his head to build a better Duce. Of course, the revolution went south when, in an act of inspired stupidity, they decided to buy a dictator who happened to be a notorious democrat with a small d. |
