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Monsters Inc.

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Monsters Inc. By Noy Thrupkaew, The American Prospect June 8, 2004 Blighted seeds, tiny children hunched over sewing machines, a nation in convulsive riots over the price of water: What shadowy entity could be behind all these horrors? The corporation, according to the documentary of the same name. Created by Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan, and Jennifer Abbott, and inspired by Bakan's book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit Of Profit And Power, the film takes on capitalism's juggernaut via two and a half hours of interviews with left-leaning academics, conservative CEOs, psychologists, corporate spies, and activists. Sweatshops, environmental degradation, political murders – you name it and The Corporation covers it. The film ranges over the collateral damage of profit-making with the passionate zeal – and the bewildering sprawl – of a lefty political rally. Early on, the film is organized around an intriguing conceit: A speedy history introduces the legal development that helped launch the meteoric rise of the corporation; after the Civil War, lawyers began to argue that corporations were "people." Therefore, the 14th Amendment, created to ensure the equal rights of freed slaves, was also applicable to their clients. As legally recognized "persons," corporations thus deserved the same rights and safeguards. So, the filmmakers ask, if a corporation is a person, just what kind of person are we dealing with here? An insane one, it turns out. Through a series of case studies on pollution, exploitative labor practices, and deceptive marketing strategies, the filmmakers make a convincing argument for putting the corporation in a straitjacket. The corporation is relentlessly selfish; its primary goal, to the exclusion of all others, is to turn a profit for its shareholders. Using up and leaving the cheap labor forces of poor countries? "An incapacity to maintain enduring relationships," according to the psychoanalysist's diagnostic guide, the DSM-IV. Spraying DDT all over people or lying much about antibiotics in milk? "Reckless disregard for the safety of others." The corporation, the film argues, suffers from a debilitating lack of empathy, an inability to accept responsibility for its actions or to feel sorrow or remorse for the consequences of what it does. The filmmakers' verdict: According to the DSM-IV, the corporation is ... a prototypical psychopath. Corporations may be crazy, the film says, but the people who work for them aren't. The Corporation's full, sensitive portrayals of the CEOs give the film much of its heft. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the former head of the Shell Oil Company, and his wife receive a batch of protesters on their front lawn. The activists came bearing a "murderer" banner, but Moore and his wife respond by sitting down for a chat over tea, apologizing for the lack of soy milk for their vegan guests. Another CEO comes across as positively revolutionary. After Ray Anderson of Interface carpets had an epiphany about environmental sustainability, he radically altered his company's environmental practices and began traveling to spread the progressive word to his fellow CEOs. People who work for corporations aren't amoral, the film asserts; rather, they are often good people who have been insulated within the depersonalizing structure of a corporation. Caught in a bureaucracy worthy of Max Weber or Franz Kafka, they forget their humanity – and the human cost of the larger corporation's actions. Too often, however, the film strays from these manageable dimensions. Eager to get in every nuance and nefarious act, the filmmakers fire off in every direction. Employees' rights, genetic sequencing, the evils of advertising, stifled press freedoms: The only thing missing is Mumia Abu-Jamal. Attempting to absorb all the information, my tiny brain whirled like a hamster on a wheel, distracted by the film's inventive culture-jammer style – tongue-in-cheek quotations from old-school educational films, the flashing introductory reel of logos, the clever checklist graphic for each pathological corporate trait. The talking heads yammered, the film cut from country to country, theme to theme, throwing me into a panicked, frothing gallop, all rolling, white-rimmed eyes and flaring nostrils. I cowered on my environmentally unsound carpet, barraged by footage of real-life product placements, Agent Orange birth defects, Kathie Lee Gifford sweatshops. The filmmakers would have done well to remember their own lessons about human scale. Unlike the empathy-devoid corporation, The Corporation is an orgy of empathy – but the effect is ultimately numbing. The explanation of the fascinating origin of corporate personhood, tied as it is to slavery, happens in the blink of an eyelash. The evolution of the prophet Anderson, the struggle of two reporters to air their milk-antibiotic story, the shattering poetry of a Bolivian water activist's convictions: Each of these could have been a brilliant stand-alone documentary, one that illustrates the filmmakers' ideas through human stories, human faces. For all of its unruly ways, though, the film often reveals moments of devastating clarity and unexpected optimism. One of their answers to checking the totalitarian nature of corporations seems unsatisfying; the filmmakers just swing the pendulum from big business to ... big government! But they build this solution out of their corporate critique: asserting the rights of the individual (who can choose to consume responsibly, vote with their dollars, and speak out in local government forums against the negative corporatization); building worldwide coalitions based on those individual rights; appealing to CEOs through progressive voices like that of Ray Anderson. The filmmakers recognize that they can't put the genie back in the bottle, so they argue for people to counterbalance companies' power, and for truly responsive corporate behavior. Despite the all-consuming sprawl of their film, its faint preaching-to-the-converted feel, the filmmakers still get their simple, powerful message across: If the corporation wants to be a person, it should try acting like a good one. Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent. Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Putting Corporations on the Couch By Ted Nace, Dragonfly Review June 10, 2004 In 1838, when a man named John Sanford assaulted the wife and children of a man named Dred Scott, Scott sought help from the courts. But Scott was black and Sanford was white. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney explained the difference with cold, pedantic clarity, writing that Scott and his family were "beings" rather than legal persons, since "they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." In short, before the eyes of the law, their existence was no more compelling than that of a teacup or a canary. No corporation has ever suffered such an indignity. From the thump of a bureaucrat's stamp that brings it into existence, every corporation by definition enjoys the status of legal personhood that Dred Scott could only dream of. As one T-shirt slogan puts it, "Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. The corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person." Corporate personhood traces back to the invention of corporations in Britain in the 1500s. What's new in the past century is that courts have extended the idea of "personhood" considerably further than mere legal recognition, adding various Bill of Rights protections such as freedom of speech (thus thwarting campaign finance reform laws), the right to privacy (frustrating government safety inspectors), and so on. Having bulked up on legal steroids, corporations are now capable of feats no mortal can match. They can shape-shift, morphing into new entities at will. They're immortal, outliving generations of humans. They can teleport, dissolving in one country only to reappear in another. None of these powers is inherent in the corporate form; each is the result of specific legal victories by corporate attorneys. Critics decry the steady encroachment of corporate power on democracy, yet the advance continues as global trade agreements define still more corporate rights and create institutional mechanisms to implement them. In The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, $25), which formed the basis of the research and writing for the film The Corporation (co-created with Mark Achbar), legal theorist Joel Bakan adds a new twist to the debate over corporate personhood. Rather than taking us through the labyrinths of corporate legal personification, Bakan instead poses a simple question: OK, so a corporation is person. But what kind of person? Bakan suggests that society answer this question by giving the corporation the same sort of routine quiz employers use to spot potentially good workers and avoid hiring nut cases. His aim isn't to pump the bottom line or to put any particular corporation on the couch. It's the corporation as an institution that he's intent on scrutinizing, using a book found on the desks of psychoanalysts everywhere – The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. First published in 1952, the DSM is now in its fourth edition, with 382 distinct diagnoses. Of course, none of these entries was conceived as a way of diagnosing an institution. But Bakan finds a trait-by-trait match between the standard actions of corporations and the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath. Like the classic psychopath, corporations are singularly self-interested, driven solely by the profit motive. They're manipulative, even toward children. And they're shallow in their relationships, laying off workers and wasting communities, incapable of remorse or empathy toward those they hurt. When breaking laws such as pollution controls appears to cost less than obeying such laws, they routinely break the laws. But wait. Isn't Bakan being a bit too harsh? What about the symphonies and libraries funded by corporations? The scholarships, homeless shelters, public radio shows? Bakan doesn't deny that most corporations have embraced the practice of doing good works. But he cites two key legal cases to explain what "corporate responsibility" really means. The first is Ford v. Dodge (1919), in which the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that profit maximization must be considered the sole criterion for corporate actions. The second is the Hutton decision, a 19th-century British case brought by stingy shareholders who were angry at a railway company for paying for occasional tea parties for its porters. In allowing the practice to continue, the court ruled that acts of charity are permissible if they serve a bottom-line interest such as securing employee loyalty or burnishing a company's public image. But the wary reader need not fear the occasional foray into legal theory. Bakan is a first-rate storyteller, and his tales are compelling and even hair-raising. One such story – well documented but certainly not found in high school textbooks – concerns the attempt by a group of Wall Street businessmen to organize a fascist takeover of the United States government in 1933. The plot, a reaction to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, collapsed after being exposed by Gen. Smedley Butler, the Marine hero the group had recruited to handle the coup's military aspects. Turning to the present, Bakan sees an even worse threat in the steady seepage of corporate values into the smallest, most intimate spaces of culture. He describes the "Nag Factor," a marketing strategy based on careful studies of the ways children cajole parents into buying products. There is the "persistent whine," effective with "indulgers." Or the "nag with importance," effective with parents who want a "good reason for buying something for their child." To some, the fact that highly educated marketing professionals are spending their days crafting ad campaigns that attempt to match the right sort of nag to the right sort of parent may seem more an annoyance than a threat. But to Bakan, such examples of moral autism, multiplied through every relationship and across every level of society, are hollowing out the very core of civilization. In its closing pages The Corporation offers a different vision. "The best argument against corporate rule," Bakan writes, "is to look at who we really are and to understand how poorly the corporation's tenets reflect us." Quoting scientist and activist Mae-Wan Ho, he goes on, "We are basically organisms of feeling, of empathy." Bakan ends on an optimistic note: "No social and ideological order that represses essential parts of ourselves can last – a point as true of the corporate order as it was for the fallen Communist one." In other words, we may be sharing Planet Earth with a psychopath that has gained superhuman powers. But as long as we retain our own humanity, there is still hope. Ted Nace is the author of Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2003). « Home « Top Stories --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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