Pathology of Commerce

"The Corporation" Not the Citizen Holds Sovereignty Under the US Constitution - A Film Review

In the past few weeks the U.S. press has been filled with stories that claim that the U.S. government has now transferred sovereignty in Iraq to the Iraqi people. In the context of such claims it is particularly relevant that the film The Corporation has recently opened in the US.

Traditionally sovereignty is a word describing who determines what happens in their country. The Corporation, directed by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan, explores what sovereignty means in the US. Based on Bakan's book "The Corporation: the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power," the film is devoted to an examination of the nature of the Corporation. This 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."1 This constitutional amendment was intended to guarantee the rights of people recently freed from slavery to citizenship. But in 1886 the US Supreme Court interpreted the amendment to guarantee the rights of corporations, too.

The problem with such a misinterpretation of the US constitution by the Supreme Court, is that it gives to corporations rights that are specifically reserved for persons born or naturalized in the US. By so doing, the Supreme Court has changed the nature of sovereignty in the U.S. Instead of sovereignty residing with the people, as Thomas Paine and others who sought to create a new form of democratic process in the US intended, the sovereignty in the US resides in the corporations.

Considering early laws to allow individuals to form a corporation, the film takes a historical focus. The nature of the corporation has been changed over time, and is temporal. This temporal nature, however, doesn't change the harm being done by the usurpation of the rights of sovereignty from the human person, to the legal construct known as the corporation.

The film uses a check sheet of traits of a pathological person, to organize its argument. Fundamental to the argument is the fact that the corporation is a sick individual not a social being.

Included in the film are examples of the unbridled power that corporations can wield and examples of how they do so. One such example is the case of Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, two investigative reporters hired by Fox News in Florida. They researched and developed a story about the harmful effects of Monsanto's rBGH, a synthetic hormone on cows, the milk they produce, and the humans who drink the milk. Fox News advertised the story prior to airing it, only to receive letters from Monsanto lawyers threatening legal action. The reporters not only lost their jobs trying to defend the integrity of their story, but they also lost the appeal of their whistleblower lawsuit in Court, even after a lower court had affirmed their charge and awarded them damages for the harm they suffered. Other struggles presented include the actions of farmers in India to assert their right to the seed from their crops, and the struggle of the Bolivian people against the privatization of their water supply, which is documented with footage of demonstrations and interviews with activists in the struggle.

The film also has its weaknesses. One serious problem is demonstrated by Michael Moore commenting on how the auto workers of Flint are also responsible for the damage to the environment from auto pollution. Moore comes from Flint, Michigan. Flint is the home of the Flint Sit Down strikers, the auto workers who challenged the unbridled power of General Motors, in 1936-1937. At the time, GM was the most powerful corporation in the world. From December 1936 to February 1937 Flint auto workers occupied several factories, risking their lives in the process.

The Sit Down Strike of the Flint auto workers is part of the progressive tradition of the American people. Moore, however, fails to make any reference or link to this tradition. Neither do the film makers. Instead they refer to people as "couch potatoes" who require someone to come and save them from their passivity.

A recent showing at the Walter Reade film theater at Lincoln Center in New York of the Italian film, "The Soul's Haven" (Il posto dell'anima), directed by Riccardo Milani, helps to identify the problem with such an attitude toward people. Milani's film is about the struggle of rubber workers in a small town near Rome to challenge health and safety problems and the plant closing of the tire factory where they worked. When asked why he made the film, the filmmaker responded that his film is intended as a criticism of the Italian left. While workers in Italy are experiencing difficult conditions of work and life, Milani observed that the left is not concerned with workers or with their plight. His film is his effort to support workers. The workers involved in this struggle helped him to write the screenplay, and to cast the roles. They came to the opening and participated actively in the process of creating his film.

A criticism similar to the one Milani makes about the left in Italy, can be made about a film like "The Corporation". The plight of workers in the US is of little consequence to the film makers. They glibly include Michael Moore's condemnation of Flint auto workers near the end of their film. Instead of learning from the experience of the Flint auto workers who fought the unbridled power of General Motors in 1936-1937 and stimulated a massive wave of sit down strikes across the U.S., the film makers ignore the difficult conditions of workers in the U.S. and their struggles against these conditions.

While the film "The Corporation" makes a contribution to the struggle against the corporate usurpation of the rights of the citizens in the US, it focuses on the vision of the enlightened CEO as the solution. Such a focus helps to highlight the problem, but not to identify the solution to it.