Londons Falling

Corporations as People

Rating: 4/5
Comments:
This film can be boiled down to just a few main points:

1. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are legally counted as 'persons' under the 14th amendment (the same amendment that prevents human beings in the U.S. from ever being enslaved again).

2. If they are persons, corporations may be subject to psychological diagnoses based on their behavior.

Some specific examples of corporate behavior from the film are:
a.) Externalities (basically, any costs and consequences, economic and otherwise, that can be passed to an innocent, uninvolved third party (such as you or me). An example would be the reckless behavior of the banks, which caused the 2008 Meltdown and necessitated hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts for those same banks to keep them afloat. Another example would be widescale pollution, legally sanctioned and otherwise.

b.) Meddling in government. See The Business Plot of the 1930's, when a cabal of corporate leaders conspired to forcibly remove Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President and replace him with Gen. Smedley Butler, who quickly exposed the plot to the American people.

c.) Deliberately selling harmful products to an unsuspecting public. Monsanto's creation and sale of recombinant bovine somatotropin, or Bovine Growth Hormone (Prosilac), which was known by them to be hazardous and painful for cows and potentially harmful for human beings.

d.) The privatization of Bolivia's entire water supply by the Bechtel Corporation, which then held the country hostage by limiting the availability of water and charging outrageous prices, which culminated in widespread protests and the declaration of martial law; at least 6 people were killed by the army.

There are more examples in the film; I don't need to list them all here.

For it's final point, the film concludes:

3. If corporations are indeed persons under the law, and therefore subject to psychological diagnosis, then corporations can be said to be sociopaths, due to their disregard for the feelings and lives of others and their focus on profit to the exclusion of everything else.

While it is a bit long and at times repetitive, the perspective and insight it provides is extremely valuable, and in light of the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling on corporate speech, more timely than ever.
Highlights include interviews with Howard Zinn (who passed away yesterday), and Noam Chomsky.
I highly recommend this film!!! Your rights are being usurped more and more every day by massive corporations that do not care about anything but money. This film provides a perspective you need to hear.

Like a Michael Moore film made for a critical audience

Rating: 5/5
Comments:
The modern legal structure of the corporation has been very good for investors and, by fostering economic development and job creation, for the average citizen's standard of living. This movie makes you stop and think about what it means for some of the most powerful actors in a society or economy to be constrained to seek maximum profits by any legal means. It shows the importance of the legal structures that we create. After the Collapse of 2008-?, we complained about Wall Street bankers' greed but did not look in the mirror and ask who was it that prevented shareholders in public companies from nominating Board members (thereby allowing the CEO to put his golfing buddies on the Board and they in turn to give most of the company's profits to top managers). Nor did we ask what we should have expected when we gave trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds to big banks that existed solely to pay dividends to shareholders (a little) and bonuses to employees (a lot!).

An explanation

Rating: 5/5
Comments:
Ultimately, this serves as an explanation for 9/11 and the two resulting resource wars which followed.

Greed IS, in fact, more important than life itself... from the perspective of the modern multinational corporation. Until that fundamental paradigm changes, we (as a species) will continue to deplete, destroy and poison our very ecosystem.