Plow to Plate Presents: The Corporation

One of the pleasures of The Corporation is listening to America’s foremost, left-wing, social critics, all gathered in one place and ganging up to support the film makers’ contention that if a corporation was a person (and legally it is), it would be a psychopath. It’s a rare film that features working-class documentarian Michael Moore, radical linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, and historian Howard Zinn, author of the famous A People’s History of the United States, among others, collectively voicing their opinions on this singular topic.

Corporations, first created in the 17th century, are now the dominant institution of our time. They represent a paradox, having brought the world great wealth, but also enormous problems. 

This film goes to great lengths to argue that these problems, including many around the food system, are not the result of “bad apples” as defenders of business and industry are likely to contend, and the media to echo, but rather because corporations are amoral, soulless constructs that are designed, and function, to explicitly benefit their shareholders, not the wider community of stakeholders. 

Corporations are not so much malevolent actors as they are extremely efficient machines created to maximize short- term profits and push external costs, for example pollution, to non-consenting third parties.

The Corporation makes this point through a series of case studies.  For example, Monsanto, in its rush to make money selling DDT which it developed in the 1940s, hid internal studies linking the pesticide to cancer and birth defects. 

Similarly, Monsanto attempted to trivialize risks linking rBGH, or artificial growth hormone, to ill effects on both animal and human health. Monsanto’s own files showed that Posilac, as rBGH was commercially known, caused stress and pain to cows due to mastitis, an utter infection. This, in turn, led to greater quantities of pus and medicines in milk products and the spread of antibiotic-resistant microbes. The Corporation shows how Monsanto used law suits to intimidate television networks and silence investigative reporters.

The Corporation also explores the patenting of genes and Monsanto’s development of “terminator seeds” that commit suicide rather than propagate, a “perversion of evolution,” according to environmental activist and anti-globalization author, Vandana Shiva.  

Also taken up is the privatization of “the commons” – land, air, water - with specific attention on Cochabamba, Bolivia, where Bechtel Corporation attempted to take over the public water systems and charge citizens a quarter of their daily wage of $2.00, spurring mass protests that forced the company and the complicit Bolivian government to back down.  

So too, The Corporation takes on GATT, the WTO, and free trade in general, and examines the links between fascism, Nazism, and corporations, specifically IBM, whose nascent punch card computer was used to catalog the atrocities and run the logistics of concentration camps. The Corporation’s method is to fling a lot of mud at the wall and to see what sticks.

Many of these stories have been told, in much greater detail, in other Plow to Plate feature documentaries. The Corporation, for all of its entertaining polemics, is like a sampler CD. You get a flavor for the different controversies around the food system and if you like the song, you go out and buy the album. 

In that light, for a closer look at a specific issue, poverty and hunger in America, come to November’s film, A Place at the Table, as well as this month’s feature.  A Place at the Table highlights that as corporate profits are at an all-time high, so too is hunger, even while politicians on the right are attempting to eviscerate Food Stamps. 

Corporations are likely here to stay. But as Michael Moore states at the end of The Corporation, so is the power of the people to keep them in check. Staying involved, seeing these films, and taking action is one way to do that.

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The Corporation: Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

Park Slope Food Coop – 2nd Floor

7:00 p.m.  Free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be serve