Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. Today we're talking about the

problem of corporations, that is the actual corporate entity. My guest is Joel Baccon. Joel is a

professor of law at UBC, the University of British Columbia here in Vancouver,

with law degrees from Oxford, Dalhousie, and Harvard.

For our purposes today, he's also the author of The Corporation, the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.

His book inspired the excellent documentary, The Corporation, which won, among other awards,

the best foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.

Last year, Joel published the sequel, The New Corporation, How Good Corporations,

Are Bad for Democracy, which has also been made into a documentary.

Joel, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me on. I'm really happy to be here.

We have a lot of ground to cover.

In your first book, you described the problem of seeing corporations as people, and especially

people with no ethical foundation, with no conscience.

Can you walk us through that?

Yeah, sure.

The story really goes back to the mid-19th century when the modern corporation, the modern

publicly traded corporation came to be. As a result of industrialization, you had for the first

time, really mass industry, railroad, steamship companies, factories, and you needed

mass pools of capital to finance industry.

And the sort of predominant form for doing business, the partnership, didn't really do the trick because it was limited to investment from the fairly small group of people who also ran the

company.

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