THE CORPORATION

The modern day corporation is the most powerful economic institution in the world. Able to influence and dictate the social and economic policies of governments around the world. But how did this situation arise and what is the fundamental nature of the corporation? In this documentary the Canadian law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan analyzes and dissects the 150 year legal construct of the corporation as a 'person'. The corporation is not a normal 'person', it is a 'person' devoid of any moral or ethical considerations, devoid of any empathy or mercy for its victims. It is person geared towards the pursuit of one objective, the bottom line.
The modern day corporation has all the legal rights of a real person but cannot be held liable in the same way. As Baron Thurlow put it ''They have no soul to save, and they have no body to incarcerate''

Some quotes from the documentary:

'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 it’s bottom line ahead of everything else. Even the public good. '

'One day we found a big pile of Nike’s internal pricing documents. Nike assigns a time frame to each operation. The don’t talk about minutes. They break the time frame into ten thousandths of a second. You get to the bottom of all 22 operations to give the workers 6.6 minutes to make the shirt. It’s 70 cents an hour in the Dominican Republic that 6.6 minutes equals 8 cents. These are Nike’s documents..that means the wages come to 3 tenths of 1 percent of retail price. This is the reality. It’s the science of exploitation'

'..the corporation remains as it was at the time of its origins, as a mad business institution in the middle of the nineteenth century, and legally designated “person” designed to valorize self interest and invalidate moral concern. Most people would find its “personality” abnormal, even psychopathic, in a human being, yet curiously we accept it in society’s most powerful institutions.'







The link to the rest of the documentary: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87