We have immortals amongst us. Or at least, people who have a better chance of immortality that you or I because they are not made up of flesh and bone but rather contracts and ideas and legal documents maintained by an ever-changing team of real live humans.
Meet The Corporation.
The Corporation has only a sole reason for existence, woven into its very being: to relentlessly pursue without exception its own self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequence it might cause to others.
Joel Bakan’s central premise is that the legally defined mandate for corporations to pursue profit makes them psychopaths.
What kind of person would a corporation be?
The kind of person who acts without regard for safety. The kind of person who can murder and kill with minimal consequence. The kind of person who is immortal and does not have an actual body to be imprisoned.
Bakan’s case is compelling and as the evidence piles up so does the feeling of intense anger … and then depression, which I suppose is the acknowledgement of problems and our near total inability to do anything about the situation.
We go to Nike sweatshops and the cold calculations of how many pieces of clothing must be made per minute in buildings surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by guards. We go to children’s fetes where corporate sponsorship has covered everything with logos. We see over and over again the crimes of corporations and just how little they have been punished.
This girl has no business here ...
The first chapter detailing the rise of the corporation has a kind of unstoppable inevitability to it. Humans working together started to make devices to help us in our work. One device was the use of legally binding documents to raise money for a certain purpose (like building a bridge). The bridge would be tolled until the money was paid back and this was written into law. The corporation building the bridge only existed for as long as the task did. Once completed, the corporation was dissolved.
In this chapter we see what has come before and we see the moment it all went bad: a court case where a corporation was declared a natural person who could behave like a real live human.
The Corporation is an excellent companion piece to Fight Club and covers the same territory: why is society arranged the way it is? If people created everything we have today, why can’t we remake it or uncreate it? Why do we tolerate companies who clearly engage in evil by propping up illegitimate governments or poisoning thousands upon thousands?
(Oh, and go to page 63 of the soft-cover version of The Corporation and you’ll see the cost-benefit analysis the narrator of Fight Club applies in his job as a recall expert for a car company. The car company in this case is General Motors who asked an engineer in 1973 to analyse fuel-fed fires in General Motors vehicles. The engineer multiplied the five hundred fuel-fed fire fatalities that occurred each year by $200,000 (the estimated legal damages for each potential fatality) and then divided this figure by 41 million (the number of GM vehicles on the road). He calculated that each fatality cost GM $2.40 per car. The cost of ensuring the fuel tanks did not explode in crashes was $8.69 per car. The company could save $6.19 per car if it allowed people to die in fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid fires. So this is what they did.)
Nor does this one ...
No Death Penalty for the Immortal Corporation
If a person commits a terrible crime such as murder then they may be put to death themselves as punishment (depending on the country the crime is committed in). If not killed, a person can be physically locked up for thirty years and only released when they are old (or they die in jail).
Why is there no death penalty for corporations? Corporations often are fined for their crimes but while their profits from crime exceed the punishment it is a clear benefit to continue to commit crime. Make $300 million and happen to poison 10,000 people – get fined $4 million. That’s still $296 million in profit!
The overwhelming anger builds
The Corporation doesn’t stop with the obvious crimes like sweatshops. We take a grim tour of marketing, privatisation and the unchecked ability of corporations to manipulate governments, alter laws and generally overrule and warp democracy. If you’ve never read about lobbying this is a good book to blow your mind out with (also check out Don’t Eat this Book by Morgan Spurlock, the guy who ate McDonald’s every day for a month in SuperSize Me – he covers food lobbyists getting sugar and fat into schools and everything we eat. Did you know there is a salt lobby? I own this book and will be reviewing in the future.).
Are all Corporations Evil?
Consider the beef industry. Cows are raised for their meat which feeds millions of people around the world. This is good in terms of feeding people. People want meat, they deliver meat. All fine (unless you’re PETA or a vegetarian but we’ll get into that some other time) … until some problems are detected with some meat. The quality is a bit down … or there are high levels of antibiotics in the meat. Now, does the beef industry and the corporations therein work to reduce the levels of antibiotics or improve quality? These measures will cost money which will reduce profits. Or do they hire lobbyists who exert power on government to manipulate laws so they can continue to sell contaminated meat? Of course they do! But it doesn’t stop there. Some country in the European Union has high food safety standards and won’t import the beef? Use the lobbying power to influence the government who in turn attempt to make free-trade agreements and strike down the food-safety laws of the other country.
Some parent group is campaigning against you for pushing high-fat beef products on its children? Lobby lobby lobby!
Now, the people in the beef industry are probably not evil themselves. They care about people and health but when it comes to crucial decisions they will choose hard profits over soft and hard-to-define and measure human values. As these decisions accumulate, the behaviour of the corporation slides further toward evil and for as long as the beef industry is directed exclusively towards profit without consideration for people, it will behave in an evil manner.
I admit it is very hard to look at corporations that exist and not see them through the lens of negativity once you’ve read this book. The unchecked greed that we are surrounded with is hard to take.
The Cure for our Ills
Bakan finishes with a list of recommendations for change and as corporate scandals hit over and over you can’t help but pull this book out and see which of the changes would have prevented the latest mass destruction idiocy. The recommendations are systemic ones which all make sense … so very much so that you know they won’t be implemented until the near destruction of our entire economic system.
Accompanying the Corporation is a very excellent documentary covering the various chapters of the book. It is essential watching!
I’m not linking to a corporation to buy this from. Go to your local bookshop and ask them to order it!
Happy reading,
Mat
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does your boyfriend know you have entered into a dark compact?
