digamma.net - notes

Growing up in Philadelphia, I used to watch all kinds of left-wing tripe on DUTV. Even when I was much more sympathetic to their ideology than I am now, I was still put off by the close-mindedness and self-congratulation of everyone speaking, and scared by the expression on their faces that said not only did it not matter how many eggs needed to be broken to make their omelet, but the fascist eggs have it coming to them.

I had high hopes that The Corporation would go beyond the Free Speech TV paradigm, either through humor, production values, or a genuinely new way of approaching certain issues. For the first half, my hopes came true despite a litany of objections I’ll get to in a moment. In the second half, the directors seemed to run out of material, and turned the film into the usual litany of horrible things corporations have done and how you – YOU! – have the power to stop them, if only you get into cool fights with cops wearing riot gear during trade summits, or something.

So here are all my quibbles with The Corporation:

• They love to tell you the cost of the labor that went into an article of clothing and compare that to its retail price. It seems to me that when you make something abroad and sell it in the U.S., your costs consist of a lot more than foreign labor. Transporting anything across large bodies of water is difficult, and presumably all retail workers in the U.S. are making at least the U.S. minimum wage (if they weren’t, I’m sure this film would have told me thirty times.) It’s possible that after all those costs, the company is still making a filthy amount of money, but why not tell us how much money that actually is instead of trying to compare apples to oranges?
• There’s a whole set of behaviors the film attributes to corporations with the intent of showing that they can technically be considered psychopathic. True, perhaps, but there is not one of those symptoms that does not appear tenfold in governments. “Ah,” say the democratic socialists, “But governments are accountable.” Well, then how the hell do they get away with all the horrible things they get away with, many of which go far beyond the wildest dreams of your favorite evil CEO.
• Jeremy Rifkin asks, “As the consumer, why should I take any risk?” Mr. Rifkin presumably recorded his interview inside a germ-proof fallout shelter, to avoid taking any risk.
• Commodities trader Carlton Brown says, “Our information that we receive does not include anything about the environmental conditions because until the environmental conditions become commodities themselves or are being traded, then obviously we will not have anything to do with that.” Well, Brown just (accidentally, of course) stated how free-marketeers want environmental policy to work. They want there to be a cost to polluting that can be fairly weighed against other costs. Later in the film, Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute tries to explain this concept, and the filmmakers are stunned.
• There’s one moment where it lists corporations and tells you what each one “was guilty of.” It seems to me that the standard way to express that in American writing is “was found guilty of", but I guess corporations are so evil that declaring them guilty has no margin for error.
• I laughed out loud at Marc Barry, the “corporate spy.” I expect to see guys like this in bars casually boasting to girls, “Yeah, I’ve probably worked for about 25% of the Fortune 500.” I don’t expect to see them in serious documentary films.
• Jeremy Rifkin romanticizes the “collectively-lived life” in England before the 14th century, in which land was “administered by the Church and then the aristocracy.” I’m not making this up. Tell me again why these people get to use the word “liberal"?
• If Elaine Bernard were a right-wing ideologue, she’d be referenced on Saturday Night Live every week for characteristics I would never write about. TBogg probably has pages of material on her ready to go just in case she pulls a Horowitz.
• Noam Chomsky says that privatization means “you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny.” You know what I hate about not living in Pennsylvania anymore? The unaccountable tyranny that lets me buy wine or beer anywhere I want. I wish the unaccountable tyranny that sold me my computer could be more like the public institution that got me my car registration. If only DVD rentals were controlled by a public institution instead of an unaccountable tyranny, I might not have been spared from watching this crap.
• More Chomsky: “If a public steel industry runs at a loss, it’s providing cheap steel to other industries. Maybe that’s a good thing.” Well, maybe it is. But last I checked, the free market’s been trying to provide cheap foreign steel to other industries, and government’s involvement in the steel industry has been to prevent that.
• I agree that it’s troubling that the filmmakers can’t use the song Happy Birthday to You because some corporation owns it. The excesses of intellectual property law are an important issue that should be discussed. It’s too bad this film wasn’t smart enough to take that subject any further.

There you go everyone. I’ve watched The Corporation so you don’t have to.