[Kobi]

The documentary shows the development of the contemporary business corporation, from a legal entity that originated as a government-chartered institution meant to affect specific public functions, to the rise of the modern commercial institution entitled to most of the legal rights of a person.

One theme is its assessment as a "personality", as a result of an 1886 case in the United States Supreme Court in which a statement by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite led to corporations as "persons" having the same rights as human beings, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Topics addressed include:
- the Business Plot, where in 1933, General Smedley Butler exposed an alleged corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons;

-Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex;

-economic externalities;

-suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station;

-the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany;

-the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust);

-the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia's municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation;

- in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.

- most disturbing to me, how the corporate scientific corporations are "buying" the rights to human and other species genes.


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Best watched in pieces to catch all the overt and covert messaging. Freakin scary stuff when you realize how deeply they are shaping the people we are and the world we live in.