Film focuses on corporate world’s underbelly

One thing’s for sure, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce isn’t going to like “The Corporation.”

This documentary film by Canadian filmmakers Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar takes a long, comprehensive, intelligent and pointedly critical look at the business entity of the film’s title that has come to dominate life on planet Earth.

The easy conclusion to draw would be that Abbott and Achbar are anti-business. But that’s not so. They’re just opposed to a certain kind of business model, one that is separate from and essentially unaccountable to the world’s governments.

Based on a book by Canadian law professor Joel Bakan titled “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” Abbott and Achbar’s film makes the case that the corporation as it has evolved over the past 150 years has all the sensitivity to human life that, say, Ted Bundy did. And they’re only half joking.

They point out, for example, that clever business types were successful at using the Fourth Amendment to get the corporation legally defined as a person. And, they charge, the behavior of that person tends toward psychopathy – caring only for itself, willing to lie, interested only in profit and particularly uninterested in the effect it has on the world at large.

Think, the film says, of corporate entities drilling in natural preserves, clear-cutting entire valleys, polluting streams and rivers (not to mention the oceans), releasing chemicals that not only poison the land but also the animals and humans who live on it. Think, and then you decide.

As with all specific-perspective documentaries, “The Corporation” has a point to make and it works hard to do so. Using such disparate spokesmen as economist Milton Friedman and linguist/philosopher Noam Chomsky, with a few Michael Moore types (including the man himself) thrown in, it hammers home its theme. That it does so in ways that occasionally evoke laughter doesn’t make its message less frightening.

It does offer one bright spot: CEO Ray Anderson, a man who woke up and decided to change the way his carpet company did business.

Question is, will he be the business model of the future – or will Ted Bundy?