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With the movement for economic justice growing across the country at various Occupy Wall Street solidarity encampments, corporate greed is a prime target. Placards and poster board scrawled with “People Before Profits” and “End Corporate Personhood” are widespread. A picture of young woman at Occupy New York holding a cardboard sign reading, “I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one,” has been widely circulated online. The 2010 Supreme Court Ruling in the Citizens United case, which opened the floodgates to independent corporate spending in elections, pushed the complex American institution to the forefront of today’s debate. However the corporation as a a unique institution has been radically empowered over the course of various Supreme Court decisions, dating back to the implementation of the 14th Amendment. The classic documentary by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan, The Corporation, explores the evolution of the corporation, how it has managed to hoard so much financial and political power, and the environmental and social devastation left in the wake of corporations relentlessly pursuing profit over all else. Before corporate personhood was discussed in the mainstream media and enthusiastically supported by GOP presidential candidates, the filmmakers of The Corporation asked the provocative question, ‘if a corporation is a person, what kind of person is it?’ In pursuit of an answer to that question, the film analyses corporate behavior with over 40 interviews with the most respected political philosophers of our time, and with corporate CEOs, Wall Street traders, and other individuals whose fortunes depend on the enigmatic institution. The Corporation stands in a class by itself as a documentary. Over 2 and half hours, the film is propelled as much by visually story telling as narration, and remains a relevant, engrossing expose on the mind-boggling power of the modern corporation.

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