Title: The Corporation
Narrator: Having acquired he legal rights and protections of a 'person', the question arises, 'What kind of person is the corporation?
Narrator: ... All publicly traded corporations have been structured, through a series of legal decisions, to have a peculiar and disturbing characteristic. They are required by law to place the financial interests of their owners above competing interests. In fact, the corporation is legally bound to put its bottom line ahead of everything else, even the public good.
Noam Chomsky: That’s not a law of nature; that’s a very specific decision, in fact a judicial decision. So they’re concerned only for the short-term profit of their, stockholders who are very highly concentrated.
Robert Monks: To whom do these companies owe loyalty? What does loyalty mean? Well, it turns out that that was a rather naive concept anyway as corporations are always owed obligation to themselves to get large and to get profitable.
Robert Monks: In doing this, it tends to be more profitable to the extent it can make other people pay the bills for its impact on society. There's a terrible word that economists use for this, called 'externalities'.
Milton Friedman: An externality is the effect of a transaction between two individuals on a third party who has not consented to, or played any role in, the carrying out of that transaction. And there are real problems in that area there’s no doubt about it.
Narrator: To determine the kind of personality that drives the corporation to behave like an externalizing machine, we can analyze it, like a psychiatrist would a patient. We can even formulate a diagnosis, on the basis of typical case histories of harm it has inflicted on others selected from a universe of corporate activity.
Text: Harm to Workers: Lay-offs (Termination Notice)
Text: Harm to Workers: Union Busting
Text: Harm to Workers: Factory Fires
Text: Harm to Workers: Sweatshops
...
Text: Harm to Human Health: Dangerous Products
Text: Harm to Human Health: Toxic Waste
Text: Harm to Human Health: Pollution
Text: Harm to Human Health: Synthetic Chemicals
...
Text: Harm to Animals: Habitat Destruction
Text: Harm to Animals: Factory Farming
Text: Harm to Animals: Experimentation
Text: Harm to Animals: rBGH/rBST Posilac
...
Text: Harm to Bioshpere: Clearcuts
Text: Harm to Bioshpere: CO2 Emissions
Text: Harm to Bioshpere: Nuclear Waste
Text: Harm to Bioshpere: Corporate Paradigm
Robert Monks: Again and again we have the problem that whether you obey the law or not, is a matter whether its cost-effective. If the chance of getting caught and the penalty are less than it costs to comply, people think of it as being just a business decision.
Robert Hare: One of the questions that comes up periodically is to what extent could a corporation be considered to be psychopathic. And if we look at a corporation as a legal person, that it may not be that difficult to actually draw the transition between psychopathy in the individual, to psychopathy in a corporation.
Robert Hare: We could go through the characteristics that define this particular disorder, one by one, and see how they might apply to corporations.
Text:
Personality Diagnostic Checklist:
- World Health Organization ICD-10
- Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV
Subject: The Corporation
- callous unconcern for the feelings of others
- incapacity to maintain enduring relationships
- reckless disregard for the safety of others
- deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit
- incapacity to experience guilt
- failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior
Diagnosis of Personality Disorder: Psychopath
Robert Hare: They would have all the characteristics, and in fact, in many respects, the corporation of that sort is the proto-typical psychopath.
Narrator: If the dominant institution of our time has been created in the image of a psychopath, who bears the moral responsibility for is actions?
Michael Moore: How much is enough? How much is enough? If you are a billionaire, wouldn’t it be okay just to be a half a billionaire? Wouldn't it be okay for your company to make a little less money?
Carlton Brown: In devastation there is opportunity.
Narrator: The pursuit of profit is an old story, but there was a time when many things were regarded as too sacred or too essential for the public good to be considered business opportunities. They were protected by tradition and public regulation.
Elaine Bernard: One of the things I find very interesting in our current debates is this concept of who creates wealth, that wealth is only created when it’s owned privately. What would you call clean water, fresh air, a safe environment? Are they not a form of wealth? And why does it only become wealth when some entity puts a fence around it and declares it private property? Well, you know, that's not wealth creation, that's wealth usurpation.
Lucy Hughes: You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying your products. It's a game.
Narrator: Some of the best creative minds are employed to assure our faith in the corporate world view. They seduce us with beguiling illusions designed to divert our minds and manufacture our consent.
Narrator: In a world economy where information is filtered by global media corporations keenly attuned to their powerful advertisers, who will defend the public's right to know? And what price must be paid to preserve our ability to make informed choices.
