the corporation

last night, i watched a lefty documentary called the corporation. i heartily recommend watching it, even if you are not sympathetic to its viewpoints. even though presented with a political slant, many of its factual aspects are irrefutable and very educational. (you'll have to get it on your own; i borrowed it from my mother-in-law. otherwise, i would lend it to anyone who wants to watch it.)

interesting facts in the film:

• the 14th Amendment was ratified to guarantee freedom of black freedmen (people) against local and state efforts to oppress them.
  
• private corporations were granted the status of legal persons in the 1886 Supreme Court decision santa clara county v. southern pacific railroad co.
• between 1886 and 1920 (if i remember that second date right) there were 307 u.s. supreme court cases dealing with the 14th amendment.
• 288 of those cases were about the protection of corporations.
• 19 of them were about the protection of actual people.
• 1 of those was plessy v. ferguson, which established the principle of "separate but equal" in declaring segregation laws constitutional. (using the 14th amendment to degrade the rights of people while exalting the rights of abstract entities is an ironic twist on the law if i've ever seen one.)
• many of these subsequent legal decisions about the corporate "personality" defined the principle legal obligations of corporations to the society in which they exist. the obligation with, by far, the highest priority: increasing returns to the owners of the corporation, the shareholders.
• thus, by law, when the profit-motive comes into conflict with other ethical obligations or moral concerns, our case law (uncontradicted by legislative law in 100 years) requires corporate officers to choose profit every time. i don't hear corporate officers complaining, though.
  
• externalities: a euphemism for displacing costs of operation onto the society at large. in a corporation's never-ending quest for profit, it seeks to reduce costs in any manner possible, often by letting others, outside the corporation, bear the burden. walmart is a great example of this. why should it pay its workers' health care programs when it can let them rely on public health care? (consider that the next time you evaluate walmart prices – you are subsidizing those lower prices and walmart profits through your tax dollars.) is it just for shareholders to take profits that are higher because many of the costs are born by those outside the corporation, who had no say in taking on that burden?
  
• extrapolating the legal concept of private corporation-as-person as a conceptual foundation for psychoanalysis (a rather big stretch, I know), an fbi psychologist concluded that the corporate person is a dangerous psychopath that should be removed from society.
• there is a fantastic slam on fox news' "fair and balanced" "journalism". it's the factual confirmation of what is obvious but unverified in nearly every broadcast.
  

as you can see, this film leans left and environmental. contrary to what my snapshots portray, it is not entirely anti-corporate in its thesis. we have all come to terms with the existence and benefits of the corporation as an entity. what this film advocates, what i feel passionately about, is the need we have as a society to exert much more oversight and control over corporations. they are amoral entities that will do good when it is profitable, and will do harm when it is profitable. we must require the people in corporations – from the shareholders, to the executives, to the employees, to the regulators – to be moral, otherwise there is no way the corporation will be. we must accept that morality sometimes makes things more expensive. that's a price we should be willing to pay.

there has been so much abuse in our own past, there is so much abuse around the world now, and there are serious doubts about how well we are acting as stewards of god's creation because we have allowed and we do allow corporations to go unchecked. we have sacrificed so much on the altar of competitive capitalism. as the wealthiest and most powerful people on earth we should be considering a little restraint for the sake of our well-being as well as those of our neighbors and descendants.

i encourage everyone reading this (all 3 of you) to evaluate what you can do as consumers (economically) and citizens (politically) to improve our stewardship over the earth and our neighbors. i boycott walmart as (in my opinion) the most egregious offender when it comes to sweatshop exploitation and exploitation of its employees.

we recently decided to budget just a little more money for food so that we can buy animal products made on farms where the animals are treated as creatures with souls (see d&c 77) rather than as simple commodities.

lastly, we limit the exposure of our children to advertising specifically and purposefully designed to indoctrinate them and manipulate their emotions in an attempt to make them into isolated individuals who consume products, services, and media to meet their emotional and spiritual needs (instead of the more traditional alternatives like, oh say, religion and family). (lest you think i am an alarmist conspiracy-theorist, the advertising industry executives themselves confess that that is exactly what they are doing and they are not required by their clients to question the ethics of it.)

[a disclaimer for those who would respond intensely to my intensity: these are not the naïve and ill-informed ramblings of a neophyte who watched a movie and got upset. i have been studying and debating these issues within myself and with others for many years now.]