"By Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott & Joel Bakan"
The movie "The corporation" we watched on the last class is a documentary that shows a critical issues of the modern last years corporations, considering its legal issues as a individual and evaluating all the behaviour and environment towards the nowadays societies and the world. This is explored through specific examples that the documentary give us to show a clear explanation of the power and the dominance of the corporations in the last century and how are they growing. "The Corporation" movie is used as a pathological pursuit of power and big amounts of profits.
1. Should corporations be entitled to the same legal rights as individuals? Where should the line be drawn?
In the documentary "The Corporation", which consistently show the development of large corporations power in modern societies and how they follow some pathological patterns of fulfill their selfish interests, sometimes regardless of the means to achieve their objectives. This demonstrates clearly that in the legal field, corporations should never be treated as individuals, because they must obey to taxes, rules and different laws, which are much more demanding, and can control the excessive power they have over modern societies. In the middle 1800s the corporations emerged as legal persons imbued with personalities of only self interests to dominance. The corporations really generate unprecedented wealth and capitals, but at what cost?... Here is where the line should be drawn in order to maintain the balance of power in the socities, because if the legal field is not enough to balance this powers, it is going to increase the ranks of illness, deaths, poverty, exploitation, pollution and corruption in the whole world.
2. How can we ensure corporations are held accountable for their actions?
Nowadays we can really see that the corporations does not have a clear head or responsible for their acts, what it makes strongly difficult to held someone as a encharge of the corporations actions that harm or damage the general public and the socities. If the countries laws get modified in the constitutions, we can reach to build the proper systems and specific laws where the actor marginalized by corporations can have a voice or a clear head, and preventing corporations from becoming uncontrollable forces, growing with no much control; could be possible to make corporations accountable for their actions, and also available them to be punished about their wrong actions. If we want to see nowadays real cases about this, lets talk about the case of the United States of America, where they gave corporations almost unlimited power, which goes of the hand with the hidden support of politicians, that start going out of control. Only when corporations where stop and confront about what they were doing, the government can handle the situations and began to find out the responsables of it.
3. Should individuals bear any responsability for the actions of a corporation? If so, to what degree?
In the actual system world individuals are always going to bear responsability for the actions of a corporation, because as we see in the domuntary " The Corporation" what at the end matters inside the cause and effect rule is that they are the decision makers of the corporation actions that should respond for the actions taken on their lead. Over the corporations they puts the interest of the stakeholders around it at the same level of those ones that could have the shareholders. By this, all is a process of transparency inside the actions and desicions of the corporation. Finally, we can see that the leader managers should be open to be investigate for their actions if they are a threat to world societies.
4. What are the benefits of the corporate form? could an alternative model offer these as well?
In the last century it have been appearing some big corporations that has to be acknowledged that they have helped to change our nowadays world, some big enterprises as Microsoft, General Electric, Mc Donals, Coca cola, Starbucks, burger king and the pretoleum multinationals, are constantly changing our way we live, our perspective of life and our reality. Since they are really enourmous, they have access to many resources to produce cheaply in the foreign markets and at great amounts, which allow more people to afford these products. People of our societies could enjoy this benefits of the goods and services offered today by big corporations, but what would be provided by smaller companies which were closer to the public and that also want to share markets and growth with their supply. The corporation of this days tends to do not care more about humane needs and prefers to create their own demands. Also, all the environmental damages, the shady worker conditions, and the lack of accountability would probably disappear if there is not a constant control over the growing and extend of the corporations.
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