...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.