The arts are taking the opportunity to hit the American corporation when it’s already at an historical low.
In books, film documentaries and even Broadway musicals, corporations are taking a heavy dose of bombardment that’s getting increasing public attention.
Coincidentally, for it could not have been planned, these anticorporation treatises have popped into the public consciousness as real corporate scandals have unfolded before us in the last three years.
While the embarrassment of Enron, World Com, Adelphia and yes, even Boeing (corporate espionage and insider hiring), the Chicago Sun-Times (false circulation figures) and The New York Times (plagiarism and biased reporting on the Bush administration’s claims of banned weapons in Iraq) are based on well-founded fact, much of the art world’s corporation-slamming often is bitingly satirical.
The story line of Australian Max Berry’s novel “Jennifer Government” (Random House, 2004) is so preposterous you could be excused for tossing it into the trash (like a friend did until she remembered she’d borrowed it from me).
Set in the “near future,” the world (except France) is part of the United States, a free-market nirvana where taxes are banned, two competing megacorporations run the world, government is impotent and irrelevant, and the police will investigate crime only if victims’ families pay for the investigation.
So pervasive are corporations that employees take the last name of their company, hence John Nike of that company’s guerrilla marketing department hoodwink a naive underling into agreeing to arrange 10 inner-city street murders to build “street cred” for a new line of $2,500 sneakers that cost the company just 85 cents to make.
Jennifer, a committed consumer watchdog investigator who has a bar code tattooed beneath her right eye, uncovers the plot and launches a global chase of the corporate evildoers.
Despite a double-digit body count by book’s end, the bad guys elude Jennifer, who runs out of funding while a battle ensues between the two corporate armies (Oh, I forgot to tell you there’s no U.S. Army or Navy, for that matter), where Wal-Mart customers must take cover as actual artillery is lobbed store-to-store across town.
Like “Jennifer Government,” the Broadway musical “UrineTown” owes much of its charming innocence to the satirical implausibility of its plot, as well. Also set in the near future, where a prolonged drought has caused all private toilets to be banned, forcing people to pay a monopolistic private company to use one of several public toilets scattered around the city.
Police track down “violators” and banish them to UrineTown. They never return. Meanwhile, the fiendish CEO is busy paying off elected officials to maintain the relentless cash flow into the water company coffers.
Just as you are about to proclaim the absurdity of the story lines comes the sobering powerful documentary “The Corporation.” This 2 1/2 hour film dissects the history, power, abuses and economic successes of the modern corporation.
It focuses on the corporation’s unique legal status as an individual – like you and me – that allows them to buy and sell, make or lose money, to sue and be sued. But when a corporation is sued or criminally indicted, no one person inside it is held responsible because of its legal structure.
With over 40 interviews with noted economists, historians, CEOs and big business critics such as filmmaker Michael Moore, “The Corporation” seeks to explain corporate behaviors while never relinquishing its main contention that corporations exists for one, and only one, reason: to make money for stockholders.
Through a well-organized menu of profiled corporate excesses, the film demonstrates that corporations have effectively few legally imposed limits on who, what or how much they can exploit to generate revenue and profits.
Remember the “outlandish” story lines of “Jennifer Government” and “UrineTown?” While not accusing it of any crime, “The Corporation” details how paperwork found outside of a burned Dominican Republic clothing factory revealed how a Nike contractor paid seamstresses 3 cents to make one T-shirt every 6.8 minutes. That works out to 25 cents an hour for a shirt that would retail for more than $20.
Another story centers on how the World Bank insisted on privatizing the water department of the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, as a condition to finance the rebuilding of its crumbling infrastructure. Water prices soared from nearly nothing to 25 cents for every dollar earned by city residents (about $2 a day). The company also would “own” the rainwater. The people rebelled and ultimately prevailed, although two people were killed and several were injured in the rioting.
The documentary film “Super Size Me” is said to be similar in scope of “The Corporation,” but focusing on the fast-food industry. Reviewers say the film gives ample opportunity to food corporation CEOs to explain why their companies produce so many fat-laden products. I look forward to hearing their answers.
Write Eric Zoeckler at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206 or e-mail mrsribe@aol.com.
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