The Informant is coming, hot on the heels of Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story. While Moore's grandstanding always carries the risk of detracting from his message, Matt Damon's note-perfect performance as Mark Witacre in the film adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald's investigative classic The Informant may actually be the thing that finally, finally, convinces Americans that we are in our current economic mess largely because of the criminal culture of our corporations.
This all arrives against the backdrop of a paradigm-shifting case before the U.S. Supreme Court that was itself sparked by a piece of celluloid called Hillary the Movie, an attempt to "Swift Boat" the Secretary of State when she was a presidential candidate in 2008. Should the high court rule that Hillary the Movie is a political ad, protected by "free speech" because a corporation is legally a "person," then campaign finance reform is over: the corporations will officially own America. (As Stephen Colbert explains: "Corporations do everything people do except breathe, die and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs in the Hudson River.") Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, George W. Bush's gifts to America, are expected to side with the corporations, as will the other "conservatives" on the bench.
So here we are, on the brink of democracy's demise, with two movies that spill the beans on what went wrong. See them while there's still breathing room, or at least check out the trailer to The Informant, Steve Soderbergh's feature film release, which you can easily find on YouTube. Damon's deer-in-the-headlights performance perfectly embodies the two-pronged attitude that has been so prevalent for so long within corporate culture: 1) everybody does it, so why shouldn't I?; and 2) it's legal if we don't get caught.
This did not start in the Bush era, of course. Eichenwald, a New York Times reporter, documents the chronic abuse of corporate power, global price fixing and the criminality that was pervasive at Archer Daniels Midland during the Clinton 1990s. Ultimately, ADM was guilty of the largest antitrust fraud in world history and settled out of court. The most curious aspect of that whole house of cards that eventually fell at "The Supermarket to the World" was that one of the major players (Witacre, the "informant") got the idea for his own embezzling after being scammed by a Nigerian who managed to convince him to transfer hundreds of thousands of dollars into his bank account.
Rather than go to the authorities, Witacre simply turned around and pulled the same scam on his own corporation. Nobody noticed (except the FBI) because almost all the executives at ADM were corrupt. Further covering their collective asses was the fact that, for the previous three decades, ADM had used their money to enter the corridors of governmental power. They owned government officials the way they owned the market for lysine and citric acid. Thus, the chances of getting caught were nil. Soderbergh, correctly, plays the film as a dark comedy or, rather, a comedy of darkness.
ADM has not been chastened by this disgrace, though. Despite paying out half a billion dollars in fines, ADM is still very much in business. Since that time, they have flagrantly violated environmental laws (fined $1.46 million for this in 2001 alone) and clear-cut Brazilian rain forests to grow crops for biofuels. They're now lining their pockets with ethanol and farm subsidies. How can the same companies that exhibit chronic criminality continue to be able to do business in America?
Here's how: the same corporations that have looted the rest of us have also enriched the 535 men and women in Washington, D.C. whose job it is to protect us. Those who leave Congress are instantly hired, at five times the salary, to work for the lobbies that then return to the scenes of their earlier crimes and spread the wealth under the table.
Like I said, a comedy of darkness.
