The movie “The Corporation” WINNER OF 26 INTERNATIONAL AWARDS! 10 Audience Choice Awards including the 2004 Sundance Film Festival starts out trying to define exactly what a corporation is. It spends the movie doing so not by creating a definition but by examining the effects of corporations and drawing a conclusion based on those effects. “If it looks like a horse, talks like a horse, and walks like a horse… then it must be a horse.” It does however, before chronically documenting the effects of corporations, begin with the legal definitions and the histories of how corporations have developed.
One of the things that I found most interesting was the historical aspects of how the corporation was developed and grown, from its beginnings as an organization with a charter, with clearly stated life terms and temporary goals, to an organization that began to shape policies that bestowed the rights of individuals to corporations to eventually becoming a permanent entity with the rights of individuals, but very little of the responsibilities that we as individuals have. The only responsibility it seems that is required by that of a corporation (and this is oh so present in today's economic turmoil) is the responsibility to create a profit for its shareholders.
As Indiana focuses on economic growth and creates incentives for corporations I urge my fellow Hoosiers, to bring to the attention of corporations, that they have a responsibility to the community as well as their shareholders and that their responsibilities to the shareholders should not come at an expense to Hoosiers and the world at large.
Another thing that I learned, that I had heard before, but never really made the big connection, was the economic term “externalities” ( Wikipedia):
In economics, an externality or spillover of an economic transaction is an impact on a party that is not directly involved in the transaction. In such a case, prices do not reflect the full costs or benefits in production or consumption of a product or service. A positive impact is called an external benefit, while a negative impact is called an external cost. (according to the movie what corporations do best is externalize their costs in order to increase profits) Producers and consumers in a market may either not bear all of the costs or not reap all of the benefits of the economic activity. For example, manufacturing that causes air pollution imposes costs on the whole society, while fire-proofing a home improves the fire safety of neighbors.
In a competitive market, the existence of externalities would cause either too much or too little of the good to be produced or consumed in terms of overall costs and benefits to society. If there exist external costs such as pollution, the good will be overproduced by a competitive market, as the producer does not take into account the external costs when producing the good. If there are external benefits, such as in areas of education or public safety, too little of the good would be produced by private markets as producers and buyers do not take into account the external benefits to others. Here, overall cost and benefit to society is defined as the sum of the economic benefits and costs for all parties involved.
EOEarth.org also has an interesting article and some examples and effects of “externalities” and there is a very good paper titled “Negative Externalities and Electricity Prices: Exploring the Full Social Costs of Conventional, Renewable, and Nuclear Power Sources” by Benjamin K. Sovacool PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT MARCH 19-21, 2009 ISSN: 2070-3740.
A DVD boxed set with extra footage can be purchased here:
Along with the 145 minute theatrical version, the extensive two-disc set has over five hours of never-before-seen footage. Interview clips, including 165 new, are sorted by person and by topic.
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