Killer companies

By far the most convincing aspect of "The Corporation" is that much of its critique comes from current and former corporate insiders, not merely from sideline commentators or anti-corporate activists. Former Goodyear Tire CEO Sam Gibara explains how frustrating it was to run a major corporation and discover that his urge to change the way Goodyear did business was at odds with his mandate to serve shareholder interests above all else. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the avuncular head of Royal Dutch Shell, meets a party of Earth First! protesters at his English country house with tea and lunch. Even Milton Friedman, the Reagan-era guru of free-market economics, agrees that corporations cannot be relied upon to be socially responsible without government regulation.

"It was very important to portray corporate insiders in their complexity and diversity," says Abbott. "That was the strategy we used so that corporate insiders wouldn't say, 'No, I'm not engaging with these issues, I'm not seeing this film.' So many corporate insiders have seen the film and really loved the film. Not all, but those that have this thing inside them where they know something is wrong."

Most striking is Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, the world's largest manufacturer of commercial carpeting. A buttoned-down Southerner with a velvet-toned Jimmy Carter accent and the manner of a small-town Presbyterian minister, Anderson has become one of the corporate world's leading apostates. He dares to suggest that if people like him cannot make their businesses environmentally sustainable, they ought not to be in business. He becomes the movie's implausible, almost Christ-like hero, addressing a convention of North Carolina business leaders as "my fellow plunderers" and gently suggesting that at some point in the future executives who have created as much pollution as he has will be sent to prison.

Anderson proves to be an irresistible centerpiece for the film, but Bakan remains privately skeptical about the long-term viability of his vision. "Ray Anderson has made money by being sustainable," Bakan says. "He's a very smart man, a very driven man, a very committed man. He's using recycling now. Rather than selling carpet and saying, 'That's it,' he effectively leases the product and then recycles it. He saves a lot of money on raw materials -- he doesn't have to buy them anymore -- and on waste disposal. He's actually become more profitable by becoming more sustainable. Now the question of how far he can go with that, or how far that can be a model in general, is a real question."

When Bakan asked Goodyear's Gibara if he could imagine a similar model in the tire business -- taking responsibility for a potentially toxic product from manufacture to disposal -- the former exec just laughed at him.

"I take my hat off to the Ray Andersons of the world," Bakan goes on, "people who are embedded within the corporate structure and trying to push the envelope. But it's important to remember that there's always an envelope. Mark Moody-Stuart [of Shell] can't get up at an annual meeting and say, 'You know, I'm an environmentalist. So we're going to stop drilling in Nigeria even though we're reaping huge profits. And I'm going to take money out of the shareholders' pockets in order to serve my environmental vision.' It would be illegal. He'd get his ass sued. That's what the best-interests principle of the corporation is all about. He does not have authority to act in a way that does not benefit the shareholders. Personally, he could be a member of Earth First!, you know? It doesn't matter."

As preposterous as Bakan's psychopath diagnosis may sound, the central point of "The Corporation" is difficult to argue with. Corporations have been designed to be avaricious and self-serving; why should we be surprised if, when we leave them in charge of the world, they loot the place? "The fundamental diagnostic idea of a psychopath," Bakan says, "is a person who's incapable of being concerned about others. In the corporation, we have created an institution that is deliberately programmed, legally, to be incapable of being concerned about others. That's a fact. Any corporate attorney will tell you that: Yes, of course, corporations have to serve their own self-interest even if it means exploiting or harming others. I challenge anybody to tell me why the metaphor is inaccurate."

Next page: Imelda as self-deluded heroine in the mode of Blanche duBois