★ 10 / 10
This is interesting, but dated. Back in 2003
GenerationofSwine
This is interesting, but dated. Back in 2003 the left was still anti-corporation, they didn't support the outsourcing of jobs, they didn't support the…
This is interesting, but dated. Back in 2003 the left was still anti-corporation, they didn't support the outsourcing of jobs, they didn't support the accountability that theses institutions had they were fairly unified in their condemnation of it.
Today there is a clear shift and we aren't seeing that much of it, Nike hasn't changed their practices of out-sourcing and sweatshops and are now an iconic brand on one side of the divide. Outsourcing is now supported by the left where "the jobs aren't coming back, deal with it" is a commonly heard phrase there. It wasn't back in 2003.
So, watching it in 2003 as opposed to 2018 it's interesting to see a lot of the same faces that once opposed it speaking on the news in favor of how the corporations work today.
If memory serves, Noam Chomsky is the only political voice that hasn't made an abrupt shift or dialed it back in the decade plus since it's release.
Despite the shift in some of the voices heard in the documentary, it does do an excellent job tracking the evolution of the corporation in the United States, how it started in our earliest days, straight through how it became an individual entity politically, and onto how that identity as a "person" effected our politics.
And, at times, it was moving, given that it did treat people who work for corporations very well, even interviewing them so that they can express that, yes, they too had the same concerns as the people protesting them, but were bound by the law to pursue policies that would generate the most profit for their shareholders, which illustrates an interesting problem that is often ignored with discussing the topic.
It remains educational today, even if there has been a distinct shift on how the topic and some of the corporations highlighted are handled by the people interviewed for the documentary.
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★ 9 / 10
Essential viewing...
MrGKB
...for anyone interested in the nature of our current planetary economic malaise, and what we might actually be able to do about it. "The Corporation," which…
...for anyone interested in the nature of our current planetary economic malaise, and what we might actually be able to do about it. "The Corporation," which illustrates and expands upon writer Joel Bakan's concurrently-written book, makes strong argument for the complicity of that economic entity known as the corporation and its inherent psychotic nature, and remains as trenchant now as it was nearly a decade ago when first made and exhibited/published, perhaps even more so in the light of the current swell of OWS demonstrations and other manifestations of global stress. It ought to be required viewing in high school classes across the land.
Presented in a chapter format, this fascinating (often akin to the hypnotic lure of viewing the aftermath of an automobile accident) documentary details the rise of the modern corporation from its beginnings as a state-sanctified entity intended to fulfill specific public functions, which is to say serve the public good, to its current domination of the global economic engine, i.e. the oligarchical behemoth that President Eisenhower warned us about decades ago. Through the extremely well-edited use of interviews and pointed visuals, the film presents an unnerving canvas of institutionalized rapacity, fecklessness, callousness, perfidy and prevarication, all in the name of the holy grail of maximizing profits; in short, institutionalized psychopathy. It's chilling stuff, quite thought-provoking.
A number of the "usual suspects" are a part of this dissection of trans-national corporatocracy: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Vandana Shiva; still, a fair representation of corporate interests are represented as well. Beyond that, it's a cast of multitudes, befitting the subject matter, which ranges across a broad swath of corporate malfeasance: pollution, market manipulation, complicity in war crimes, exploitation of workers, sheer greed, the shrugging off of "economic externalities" on the public, and much else. Anyone who's paid even cursory attention to the politico-socio-economic scene over the past decades will be at least passingly familiar with these topics, but "The Corporation" does a nice job of bringing everything together under one roof, so to speak.
The deluxe DVD edition, which I found at the library, is chock full of additional interviews, commentary, and the like. It's almost a bit of overkill, but then again, it's hard to ignore as well. Like the saying goes, "hold your friends close, but your enemies closer." Need I also say, highly recommended.
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Great movie. Ignore the pathetic haters