The Corporation, 2003

Appropriately presented with the sterile impersonality of a canned, droning informational video business presentation, Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s The Corporation is a wry and acerbic sprawling meditation on the psychology of a corporation as a human entity (as defined by the judicial system with respect to legal rights and responsibilities). Citing examples of blatant irresponsibility and suppression of information towards public and animal health and safety (such as the effects of bovine growth hormones, rBGH and rBST), greed, exploitation of third world countries (such as Walmart’s employment of child labor in the Kathy Lee Gifford clothing line), destruction and usurpation of the environment (such as Bechtel’s leasing of water rights to Cochabamba, Bolivia that allowed them to tax the public for all water, including rain), biological patenting (including human DNA), and moral culpability towards the economic and material support of dictatorships, corrupt regimes, war criminals, and even genocide (such as the Third Reich’s use of IBM’s punch card system to process – and disposition for “special treatment”, i.e. the gas chamber – prisoners into concentration camps), the film provides an intelligent and incisive discourse on the need for moral and ethical responsibility, vigilance, awareness, and informed activism.

© Acquarello 2004. All rights reserved.