The Corporation

For someone with an MBA, I tend to have a fairly negative opinion of American business leaders. So watching The Corporation was right in line and held few surprises for me; despite relying a bit more on Michael Moore, Noah Chomsky and Jeremy Rifkin than I would have the material is well-organized and delivers clearly the message that modern corporations have simply become uncontrolled and unhinged.

Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan were the documentary’s key collaborators and realized that the story is so provocative that restraint in its telling was the best choice. Mixing interviews with CEOs, labor leaders, political activists and academics in between onsite footage, the first half is structured as a checklist of symptoms that add up to what would be diagnosed as psychotic in a real person.

Especially effective were the comments from Ray Anderson, Chairmen of Interface, Inc., the world’s largest carpet manufacturer. This is a man who realized that his products were literally plundering the earth and decided to overhaul the entire system to completely change its environmental impact. One scene was a clip of Anderson speaking to a group of North Carolina business leaders and I was sad to see many of them yawning out of boredom.

recommended