Just perfect...

Best movie ever!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Its quite funny how many concepts are brought into this movie. From psychology of psychopaths to pricing everything to environmental recklessness to marketing manipulation. So many in fact that its impossible to properly explain to a layperson why some of these ideas might make sense in a single documentary. In fact this seems to be purposefully done to give a biased view of the world so as to create more radical nuts in the world. This review is mostly just a few things I specifically remember being misrepresented. If someone were to read some philosophy on moral dilemmas one would have an interesting framework with which to compare some of the points made in this film. Some of the famous moral dilemma's have to do with someone about to get run over by a train and the actor(you) have the option to save them by pulling a lever, which will kill someone else. There are then things that pile on top of this that I can't possibly explain in a review however the point is that most philosophers would agree that it would indeed be ideal if the person making these decisions were a cold calculating psychopath without much regard for human emotion, so just calling someone a psychopath is not an argument. It might indeed be best if the corporation looked only at profits, for instance if you have one good and two people, chances are by finding who is willing to pay more, you are also maximizing value for that good to society. There's a segment where they explain how a company studied how nagging affects sale and the documentary concluded that this is a horrible thing to do. Sure its terrible to manipulate children to nag more but the company did no such thing, it merely wanted to understand what is driving the demand for their products, maybe it can help them predict something in the future, nothing bad about that. There was a segment in which I thought the film would dig for interesting solutions when it started talking about externalities but it totally just used the concept to further manipulate the layman.There is such a thing as a positive externality and you can make the market have such a thing. For instance on pricing revolting transactions, watch Alvin Roth's Nobel prize speech, to see why putting a price on Kidneys could be a good thing. Its frustrating because the movie gives you some concepts unknown to the layman(except in its more intuitive form) yet fails to help him piece together how these things are combined into a wonderfully synergistic process. There was a short segment on how privatization is bad and public institutions are bad but ALL the MIT/Harvard economists/business people who talked in this movie would tell you that only under certain circumstances is making a good public a good idea, such as the fire brigade example. Its annoying because all this simultaneous cutting in interviews can lead you to think that credible people hold these opinions, because they were talking a few seconds earlier. I think its a good exercise to leave those who disagree to imagine industries which have thrived under privatization. There is honestly a lot of bad things going in the corporate world and some of the issues are mentioned here, maybe limited liability needs to be rethought, maybe patent law as well but advocating that people go out into the streets and "take action" without understanding the issues at hand is the reason why Democracy can fail. Micheal Moore is an idiot by any standard and sensationalism should not triumph over reason, having him be the role model of the story shows the ignorance of the maker of this film. I invite anyone who wants to know more about any of the issues raised to message me for studies/discussion.

Part 1 of The Corporation is the build-up. You listen to them talk about the origin of corporations, and notions like sense of community. You're sympathetic, but at times it seems a tad too idealistic, and moralistic, and vague.Then Part 2 starts, and all the threads regarding corporate greed and destructive nature come together, and it's like someone front-kicks you in the solar plexus full-force, because the sudden and total horror of it all makes it hard to breathe. You realize where Part 1 was going with all of its sentiments, and it's a shock. There are a couple of moments when it seems like you can see all of social reality as the true Hell.What really got to me was the patenting of human and other genes by corporations. Did you know about this? In a nutshell, in 1980 an industrial chemist went to patent a microbe he cooked up in a lab, and after a brief fight, the judges, - obviously ignorant of stuff like biology, but authorized and ready to make rulings on biological issues nonetheless, - ultimately allowed this. After that, for more than 3 decades, companies in USA have been busy cutting out bits of the human genome, and getting patents on individual genes. Yup, it's insane, I know. The most they do is cut out the introns (extra bits interspersed with the gene) - and then say: "We own this". Well, imagine that companies would have patented organelles in human body cells when scientists first gained the capability to go that small? Patenting of genes is the same thing! (I'll do a small October 2014 update for you: The only small consolation is that The Corporation was made in 2003, and a decade later, - in 2013, - the US Supreme Court finally ruled that individual genes cannot be patented. The reason: the company Myriad owned patents on certain cancer-related genes, and was therefore the only entity legally allowed to work with those genes in ways like running prophylactic tests. Neat, right?However, the Supreme Court judges still showed considerable ignorance of the issues, - souring the potential victory of common sense in the ruling, - because they added: "cDNA can be patented...cDNA does not present the same obstacles to patentability as naturally occurring, isolated DNA segments." Just so you know: cDNA is simply a type of copy of genetic material. So essentially there is a door-sized loophole in the ruling that potentially renders it pointless. The Myriad stockholders, for example, celebrated upon hearing the verdict.Be informed. This theme might affect you and your family members and friends, should the horror of cancer suddenly become relevant for you... and thanks to our world being poisoned with chemicals, the chances of that are rising fast.) This is just one of the absolutely infuriating examples examined in The Corporation. They also talk about corporate whistle-blowers, Nazi-business collaboration, child labor, and so on. Trust me - you need to know this stuff, because the prevalence of narrow-minded, short-sighted behavioral patterns among mankind's leaders concerns every being on the planet in a profound manner. 100/10.

Today bashing big business is increasingly appealing. Specifically, the mismanagement of government is blamed on multinational corporate takeovers. A case in point is the privatization of the water supply in Banzer Suàrez's authoritarian Bolivia presented as evidence of this argument in 2004's The Corporation, where Noam Chomsky compared the entity of the modern multinational corporation to the slaving enterprise of a former age.That Banzer's rule led to such a dire financial situation where, in order to appease foreign creditors and continue receiving World Bank loans, he was forced to concede and privatize Bolivia's national water supply in La Paz/El Alto in 1997, and then Cochabamba in 1999, is not mentioned. We are to interpret the 'water wars' that then took place in 2000 and 2005, respectively, as solely the result of Suez, and Biwater/Bechtel's inherent greed.In this documentary the much-maligned Export Processing Zones (EPZs) are also the subject of inflammatory rhetoric. Naomi Klein emphatically points to these largely tax-free areas in low-cost, labour-abundant cities around the globe in which large multinational corporations are enticed to operate, where "the workers rarely make enough to buy three meals a day let alone feed their local economy".If we consider basic economic trade theory, we know that, in the real world, national wage rates do, in fact, reflect differences in productivity. In 1975 South Korea was a low-wage-rate low-productivity country, where workers earned 5% of what they did in the US; by 2007 its productivity was around 50% that of the US and its wages had, accordingly, risen.Where, then, does the blame for the appalling living conditions of labourers in certain Central American and Southeast Asian countries lie? In the corruption of their governments, the weakness of their financial sectors, capital markets, judiciary – in short: the inefficiency of their institutions. That poor people in rich countries should be subsidizing rich people in corrupt poor countries, to paraphrase the late Sir James Goldsmith, is not the result of the liberalization of trade. Rather, it is the fruit of systemic problems in less-developed societies.I would advise anyone who wishes to watch this documentary to do so with an open mind (i.e. remember that it is very skewed to a particular viewpoint). Because of that, and the fact that it doesn't really offer an objective analysis, I give it 5.

Succeeds on countless levels. A groundbreaking work which is as important and significant as any of which I'm aware, and theatrically perfect. So brilliant, absorbing, enlightening, and enabling, is this documentary; that in my opinion, it ranks with The Beatles, Shakespeare, sex, whipped cream, kittens, and the mini-skirt. The audience with whom I first saw it (Philadelphia Film Festival) immediately stood and applauded at the films end. I myself had tears of satisfaction and felt inspired by it beyond any telling. The 2-part DVD-set version will continue to educate one for many hours on end. So, please, please, please; everyone, see "The Corporation" and then pass it around. You really must do this thing!!