(This was written pre-Convention for the Gadflyer, but it looks like it might not ever make it up there so I'm putting it up here for now. If you read the Gadflyer, you may see it again in a newer incarnation sometime soon.)
This summer’s unusually bountiful crop of documentaries are an encouraging lot. The releases of The Hunting of the President, Control Room, OutFoxed and of course the $100m behemoth that once was a low budget Michael Moore movie seem to indicate a demand from the public for information and truth beyond normal election year posturing. The most recently released of these documentaries, The Corporation, presents an informative and engaging account of how corporate power and agendas have shaped American society. However, somewhere in the two and a half hours of talking heads, environmental disasters and ominous music, the real message of the movie gets lost.
The Corporation, made by the same people who brought us Manufacturing Consent in quite a different political climate and election year, provides a comprehensive look at the history and development of the American corporation. Riffing off of the legal fiction that a corporation is a “person”, the documentary engages in some rudimentary psychotherapy and determines that many corporations, were they truly persons, would qualify as classic psychopaths. Corporations have no concern for anything beyond their bottom line, and such trivial technicalities as national allegiance, human health or even obeying the law fall by the wayside in the headlong pursuit of profit. Into the cost benefit analysis go assets and liabilities, and more often than not corporations get away with (literal) murder when the accounts are totted up.
Take Halliburton, the monstrous corporate fetish of the left. Arguably one of the most relentlessly patriotic companies in America, with tributes on its web page to employees killed in the line of duty, one would think that protecting the national interest would trump any decision that might hurt the United States. However, Halliburton freely admits breaking traditional corporate rules of engagement. “Geographies are being redrawn. Boundaries are dissolving,” the first line of the 2003 annual report reads. “As companies find themselves competing in a global marketplace, the old business rules no longer apply.”
Did Halliburton have those words in mind when overcharging the US government $61 million for fuel importation into Iraq, $6 million for US Army logistics contracts, and up to $177 million for food services, with “additional review and allegations possible” in other areas of Halliburton activities? Perhaps when Halliburton set up shell companies in tax-friendly Caribbean countries to do business with countries under political embargoes in the United States, such as Iraq and Iran, it was only trying to help. The icing on the cake comes in the form of a comprehensive SEC investigation, examining Halliburton’s internal controls and possible cover-ups of overcharging and unapproved claims in large construction and engineering projects.
So much for the national interest. But Halliburton’s sins stretch further than importuning the US government to the tune of billions of dollars. Vice President Dick Cheney added a different sort of misdeed to Halliburton’s tally when, as CEO, he boldly acquired a company called DII Industries. Hidden beneath the company’s financial results was a long history of asbestos and silica liabilities. Charged with gross negligence for the health of consumers and employees, over the past 6 years DII and other international Halliburton subsidiaries such as Kellogg Brown & Root have been forced to cough up over $4.5 billion. But has Halliburton learned from its mistakes? Sadly, no: continuing operations in 2003 resulted in another $3 million of total asbestos and silica charges. After all, when you’ve got revenues of $16.3 billion in one year, a few million here and there isn’t much of a deterrent. The recent SEC fine of $7 million is, similarly, a joke and certainly won't cause Halliburton executives or shareholders to lose any sleep. The health of the claimants never enters into the calculation except as a number: how much they might be awarded in a class action law suit.
Halliburton’s woes are cheerfully dispelled by this sentence in the annual report: “We do not expect costs related to [all liabilities] to have a material adverse effect on our consolidated financial position or our results of operations.” Although DII Industries and Kellogg Brown & Root filed for Chapter 11 in December 2003, “all asbestos and silica personally injury claims [were then] stayed.” How convenient for Halliburton and its shareholders.
Conglomerates such as Halliburton appear to be unstoppable. It’s easy to leave The Corporation full of despair, as the movie stops conspicuously short of providing any prescriptive advice. There are some attempts to show examples of people power: in Bolivia, a small town successfully forced engineering giant Bechtel’s hand by descending into total anarchy when, in collusion with corrupt local government, the company tried to privatize the town’s water supply. At the price of thousands of dollars of damage, hundreds wounded and permanently disabled and multiple deaths, the city kept their water free of charge. By dwelling on these accounts, and showing footage of G-8 and May Day protestors, the movie appears to at least tacitly advocate violent protest as a means of change.
But even then this advice is immediately shown to have limited to no effect. At one point, the protests are dismissed by politicians inside a meeting of the Summit of the Americas. “It’s too bad it’s come to this,” they say, wagging their heads gravely at the dread locked and disheveled protestors getting tear gassed outside their convention center, as they head to the bar for some more Perrier and lemon, and crack jokes with the finance ministers of small Central American nations.
What the movie stopped short of saying was that politics is the only feasible people power today. Protests are useless at pushing a feasible agenda, as G-8 summit after G-8 summit shows. Only politicians that are voted in by a plurality of citizens can craft proposals that will be taken seriously by decision makers that can actually effect change. Currently, the US government’s attempts at curbing corporate excesses seem to be limited to well publicized show trials of handpicked CEO’s, while simultaneously cutting taxes for corporations and relaxing restrictions on pesky environmental hazards. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is useful if proof is ever needed against a company when a case is brought, but those cases are brought so seldom that Sarbanes-Oxley can easily be dismissed as whitewashing the unsolved problem.
Only a government that is not entirely beholden to corporate interests can have the independence and the wherewithal to truly reign in huge conglomerates. In the US, only the Federal government is large enough to stand up to a company like Halliburton and make it answer for its crimes in a meaningful way.
The message of this summer’s documentaries is this: people power is back, but it lies in the ballot box, not in the streets. It is more important than ever that we get it right this November.
UPDATE: How is it that I've had this in my hard drive for three weeks, decide to post it today, and then surf on over to my boys at Pandagon and find that Ezra has decided to post a review of the same movie on the exact same day??? That's just creepy - it's what happens when you spend all afternoon getting your hair done instead of blogging - I hadn't gotten any writing done, so decided to post this since it was lying around. Go read it, it's a very interesting review.
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