The Corporation Documentary
The Corporation, is about the modern-day corporation. It critiques that it is considered to be a person, but since it has so many disregards to the human well-being and only cares about making as much money as possible, if it were an actual person it would be considered a psychopath. The documentary starts off with showing the development of the contemporary business corporation, from beginning as a legal entity to then having the entitlement of having most of the legal rights of a person.Since a corporation is said to be a “person”, the documentary then was assessing the corporation as a “personality” and showed viewers everything a corporation was doing wrong in harming a real person. The film showed diagnostic criteria of a human psychopath, and many corporations had what it took to be labeled one. Some examples the film used in labeling a psychopath are “callous disregard for the feelings of other people,” “the incapability to maintain human relationships,” “reckless disregard for the safety of others,” “deceitfulness,” “incapability to experience guilt,” and “failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.
The topics discussed that stood out most to me were when the soda Fanta by Coca-Cola was traded to Nazi Germany during World War II so that the soda company could make war profits like the car companies who were making machines and tanks for the war. Also during the same war, when IBM was sending over their machines that allowed Nazi’s working in concentration camps to have punch-card-like machines to help them keep track of their prisoners such as if their prisoners had been released, committed suicide, exterminated, sent to the gas chamber, etc.What bothered me most about it was someone from IBM had to come and set up the machine inside the concentration camp in order for anyone to use it. The topic that stood out to me the most was the use of Prosilac on cows. The drug Prosilac was given to cows to make them create more milk in order for dairy farms to make a bigger profit. Even though somehow initially the FDA approved it to be safe, the drug made the cows sick and it gave them an infection in the utters, called Mastitis. Having Mastitis can put puss in the milk produced by the sick cow which makes the milk have a lot more bacteria.
Then the cows were given antibiotics to prevent them from getting sick, but then the antibiotics ingested by the cows were then released through the milk. When people ingest the milk with all of the antibiotics still in it, the people can become immune to antibiotics for the future. If a person drinks this milk with all of the antibiotics in it and them somehow get a Staph Infection and need a simple antibiotic to get rid of it, they could die because they were immune to antibiotics. I always knew that corporations just wanted your money, but after watching the documentary I was pretty outraged at what many companies will do just to get it.The complete disregard for human health and well-being is flabbergasting to me. Kids in sweat shops, people dying from simple staph infections, and many more horrible things that companies do to make a buck are ridiculous. If companies are given most rights people do, then they should be given the same punishments that people would if they would do any of the things these corporations are doing.
Some of these companies aren’t getting away with it, but many are still and more needs to be done in order to stop harming the people.
