Almost 20 years ago I donated to the making of a low budget film called The Corporation and in reward they sent me the final product. Later, I saw that the film won awards and succeeded reaching a large audience.
In it they explained how corporations have to focus on profit alone. They interviewed CEO's, some of whom were caring peopl, who said that even if they wanted to do the right thing, they could not. They had to focus entirely on profit. If they didn't, they'd be replaced by someone who would. It was the way the corporation was structured. The bottom line is profit, ever increasing profit.
I thought of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey horror movie where the computer operating a space ship became a monster. Our monster is the "free" market society's corporation - a monster that had no aim but it's own, humanness, heartless, insatiable growth.
It was unfair and inaccurate of me to call all these CEOs and their minions psychopaths. They serve a machine that is inhuman.
Oh, Jeanne,
What an awesome thing for you to be able to do and be a part of!
Reminds all of us that we can not only vote with our conscience but donate to causes and projects as well!
Yes, corporations are narcissistic and dictatorial by nature. That is why someone who primarily identifies as a businessman (e.g. Perot, Trump, Schultz) is a threat to democratic freedoms if he or she becomes president of the U.S. or any other democracy. They run on a platform of applying their skills/know-how as a businessman to running the government, but those business skills are narcissistic and dictatorial. On the contrary, one reason a democratic government exists is actually to keep the narcissism and dictatorship of business in check, giving employees the rights (and the power/venue to demand those rights) that they wouldn't otherwise have in their employment.