Joel Bakan

"Corporation Stock Soars: Nobody Gets Hurt". This unlikely headline could soon appear in Forbes, Variety, or the TLS, as both book and film versions of The Corporation continue to find wider global audiences. And, as this locally made take on the inherently amoral "nature" of the modern multinational corporation shows, more than animals are harmed during the production of wealth and power. Written by UBC law professor Joel Bakan, the book and the multiple award--winning film/TV miniseries he co-created with director-producers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott are complementary, differing slightly in material and emphasis (the visual shock of a boy born eyeless from chemical contamination wouldn't play the same on a page), but each capitalizing on its form's strengths, with an on-line component (www.thecorporation.com/) promising further convergence.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Penguin Canada, $37) details the corporate form's evolution, from limited charters under close state control through achieving personhood status in law (with all the attendant privileges) to now being the planet's dominant institution. Using psychological criteria and a top FBI expert, Bakan concludes that if the corporation is a person, that person is a psychopath: who else acts purely from self-interest, denies liability for any possible harm, lies and manipulates, feels no empathy, is shamelessly self-aggrandizing, and relates to others superficially?

Bakan advances this argument rigorously in The Corporation, balancing interviews with major corporate CEOs against the expected leftists, and his careful distinction between the institutional and personal characters involved may partly explain why, as he tells the Georgia Straight by phone, "we have had some very positive response from the business community." The Wall Street Journal, Canadian Business, and the Harvard Business Review agreed there are important issues raised here, the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business is building a curriculum package around the material, and Bakan is in high demand globally as a speaker on corporate responsibility.

Asked if he sees any link between The Corporation and another Canadian-produced project, Bowling for Columbine, Bakan points to our country's historical willingness to regulate and tax in order to create public and social goods, including funding documentary filmmaking through groups like Telefilm and TVO, and our "intimate distance" from the U.S. Both, he believes, result in a climate well-suited to spawning effective analyses of the world's economic engine.

While carefully avoiding any futurist label or specific prescription for fixing the systemic problems he details, Bakan remains optimistic that change is happening. "When you look at the way that social change happens, it builds slowly and then happens quickly....Look at the Berlin Wall. Systems can seem infallible and omnipotent, and then suddenly people don't believe in them anymore. There's a growing discontent in the eclipsing of all other values in that of wealth generation...as we take away the regulations, the casually brutal nature of corporate capitalism shows itself, and people reject it."

With the film still playing in Canadian theatres (the take is nearing $1 million) and set to open widely across the U.S. in June and the U.K. in July, and with the book selling in the top 10 nationally and being translated for many European and Asian countries, The Corporation seems to be meeting the growing need for "big picture" analysis in the wake of collapsed WorldCom, Enron, and the World Trade Center towers. And as a relatively subdued Michael Moore says at the film's closing, the success of work like his and The Corporation proves that even major media will support an attack on their own legitimacy if there's profit to be made, presumably believing that people will see and read these critiques but not go change anything. Millions may yet prove them wrong.

The Corporation is a finalist in the Vancouver Public Library's One Book, One Vancouver program. The winner will be announced on Wednesday (April 28). Info is at www.vpl.ca/.

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