Enron - Summary

A corporation is a company or group of people authorized to act as a

single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law. Despite not
being human beings, corporations, as far as the law is concerned, are
legal persons, and enjoy most of the rights and responsibilities that an
individual possesses. A corporation has the right to enter into contracts,
loan and borrow money, sue and be sued, hire employees, own assets and
pay taxes. Corporations can also exercise human rights against real
individuals and the state, and they can themselves be responsible for
human rights violations. Although a corporation does not necessarily have
to be for profit, the vast majority of corporations are setup with the goal of
providing a return for its shareholders.
Taking cue from an 1886 case in the United States Supreme Court, in
which the then Chief Justice, basing his judgement on the Fourteenth
Amendment to the US Constitution, stated that corporations were
"persons" having the same rights as human beings, The Corporation
attempts to put forward and work towards an answer for the question
What kind of a person is it? Sitting it down on the psychiatrist's couch,
the documentary endeavours to evaluate the nature and behaviour of this
person by way of diagnostic tools and specific examples. To that effect,
the documentary employs hard-hitting vignettes, and informative
interviews with prominent corporate critics such as Noam Chomsky,
Charles Kernaghan, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Vandana Shiva, and
Howard Zinn, as well as opinions from company CEOs such as Ray
Anderson (from the Interface carpet and fabric company), and viewpoints
from business gurus Peter Drucker and Milton Friedman.
In its assessment of the corporate behaviour, the documentary addresses
issues that include The Business Plot - an alleged political conspiracy in
1933 in the United States where the retired Marine Corps Major General
Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting a coup d'tat to
overthrow the then President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt;
the suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth
Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station at Monsantos
behest; the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust; the Cochabamba
protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of a municipal water
supply in Bolivia; the notion of limited liability where the shareholders
have the right to participate in the profits through dividends and the
appreciation of stock, but are not held personally liable for the company's
debts.
Central to the theme of the documentary is the use of diagnostic criteria
from the DSM-IV; Robert D. Hare, a University of British Columbia
psychology professor and a consultant to the FBI, draws eerie parallels
between a profitable business corporation and a clinically diagnosed
psychopath. Corporations, he hints, exhibits conventional symptoms of

psychopathy: callous and sheer disregard for the feelings of others,

inability to maintain lasting relationships, devoid of concern for the safety
of other people, use of deceit (repeated episodes of lying to and deceiving
others for its own profit), no capacity of feeling guilt, and utter failure to
conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours.
The documentary, in its entirety, is a critique on the modern-day
corporation, tracking the development of a corporation as a legal entity
from its origins as an institution chartered by governments to carry out
specific public functions, to the rise of the vast modern institutions
entitled to legal rights as that of a person. While the documentary
focusses primarily on corporations in the US, it takes little effort and
analysis to draw uncanny similarities with corporations worldwide. Will
we let this beast of a person have its way all along? Will a mighty 7.2
billion people let a handful legal persons get the better of them? are
some of the questions that the documentary tries to evoke. All is not lost,
as time and again, people with wit, moral integrity and character have
stood up to the tyrannical ways of the world and shown us the way.
While corporations may have been awarded the status of a person, and
the people working in them may have hid themselves behind the veil of
limited liability, it takes little effort to realize that these corporations are
run via collective attestation by real individuals. It is pertinent then to find
out if it is the corporation that moulds an individuals ethics, or if it is the
individuals running them that collectively guide the ethics of the
corporation.
To conclude, it is well known that if you are not a part of the solution, you
are a part of the problem; if you are not one of us, you are one of them.
The only question that remains to be answered today, and this is a
question each one of us needs to ask ourselves, Whose side are you on?