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Barbara Freese: Something's Rotten in the Corporate States of America

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RS: And there's a common theme in all this, which is a systemic denial of both, as I said before, causality and responsibility. They didn't do the damage, they didn't intend to, it would have been worse without them. And then even when there confronted with the disaster, there's a denial they have a big responsibility, or a major responsibility, to set things right. So why don't -- and the process, and the strength of the book, is you try to get into the psychology of the corporation. Its incredible ability to rationalize, to not be held accountable, to just turn around and say oh, well, that's life. And they get these huge salaries, bonuses, rewards. And they fail, actually, succeed by failing. It doesn't matter, they're still going to retire with considerable wealth.

BF: Hm. Well, that has certainly happened. We certainly saw that with the financial crisis.

RS: Yeah. But take us back to slavery. Because that -- you know, everybody forgets that this most heinous of human economic activity -- you know, the most disgraceful in human experience of enslaving people for commerce, was actually justified by very well-educated, sophisticated people. And just by coincidence, yesterday I read the majority decision in the Dred Scott decision, affirming slavery -- and what they drew upon was English common law, the experience of civilized nations beginning with England, and then the U.S. under its Constitution. And embracing the idea that no person, no slave brought from Africa had any human rights or right to consideration as a human being. And the slave trade really was as American as apple pie. And we tend to make a disconnect with that history, which is your first chapter. So just bring us into the discussion, as you do in your book with that first chapter.

BF: Sure. I focused on the slave trade, actually, in Britain, or the campaign to defend the slave trade in Britain. Because Britain became the dominant force in the slave trade around the late 1700s, or in the 1700s. In the late 1700s, there was an abolition movement that was extremely effective, trying to make the, what should have been obvious point, that the slave trade is really quite brutal and very, very difficult on the slaves themselves. And that solicited from the industry this very organized and fairly modern campaign of denial, where they could deny on many different levels.

But one of the things that really, I think, unleashed them to be super creative in their denying was that the British public had no way to see what was really going on. They were not there in Africa, they were not there on the ships crossing the Atlantic, and they weren't in the New World plantations, so they could be convinced of things that I think you would not have been able to convince an American audience of, or at least an audience in the South where they could see something about what was going on with slavery.

So for example, the slave lobby -- and they did this in these lengthy pamphlets that they published -- told the British public and the British policymakers that the Africans wanted to be purchased. That they sort of marketed themselves, that they enjoyed crossing the Atlantic on these sort of festive slave ships with singing and dancing, and that the plantations themselves were very comfortable, and they had terrific health care and wonderful diets, and life was actually easier for the slaves than it was for the poor people in Britain. That was actually a very common thing for them to do, to try to redirect sympathy and redirect attention to other people and other causes. But that was only one of many different kinds of denial that they used, including lots of techniques that would appear in later campaigns as well.

RS: Yeah, but it's a mythology that was carried over to the New World.

BF: Right.

RS: And actually no country brought in as many slaves as the United States, the colonies and then the new government. And the fact of the matter is, this uncomfortable fact, is that the people who gave us this very much celebrated Constitution and system of governance and wrote the Declaration of Independence, bought into the very mythology that you're describing. The fountainhead of American democracy was the South, and these Southern, slave-owning, racist founders. And they justified it in terms that were brought over from England. It was not part of the English empire experience that they were rebelling against. They were in fact embracing, and as it turned out, England for its own reasons during the colonial war and later in 1812, actually developed a more tolerant, or opportunistic view toward the slaves, than our founding fathers.

BF: Right. And of course, many of our founders were slave owners, and of course in this country it would take a war to put an end to it.

RS: Yeah, but I'm talking about the process of rationalizing, and it's interesting that you begin your book, before you get to radium and nicotine and all the other things, to really show the capacity of so-called civilized people, when they're in the pursuit of profit, to rationalize really abhorrent behavior. This is really a study of irresponsibility, beginning with slavery but extending right up to the climate change denial. Or right now, the pandemic denial.

BF: Yes -- I think that's a fair way to put it. And I would stress that it isn't just about how lucrative this industry is, but about a lot of the social factors. This was a very respected industry; this was considered a totally legitimate industry, and there was all of this social support for doing it. And part of getting rid of this industry meant really trying to confront that social norm head-on, and persuade the British public and British policymakers that this was intolerably brutal.

RS: Right. And then, again, I'm trying to get the North American narrative here, because there's a continuum in your book, going from slavery up through corporate irresponsibility to the present, or recent history, that gets at the reality that corporations act in a certain inherently amoral, irresponsible way even though they may be part of this great American democratic experience. They are inherently institutions of corruption of that experience.

BF: I think it's very clear that they're institutions that are designed to reward the profit motive -- we could call it greed -- and to suppress our natural instinct to not cause harm to others, our natural prosocial instincts. So you have, you know, among these incredibly powerful organizations, exactly the wrong set of incentives if you're trying to create a society that is fair, and not taking crazy risks, and honest.

RS: Yeah, but -- OK, but I want to -- the book carries a very strong punch. These corporations engage in actually heinous behavior. That lives are put at risk, in every one of your examples -- and you should briefly go through the different examples, whether it's leading people to have cancer through cigarette smoking, or driving unsafe cars, or denying that you're destroying the ozone layer with your hair sprays and your aerosol and so forth, or the banking meltdown. In each one of these chapters, they are a case study of absolutely horrible outcomes for society, for the environment, for the planet, that are justified by very reasonable-sounding people.

Let me take one example. So to cut to the chase here, you don't deal with it at great length, but you have the case of selling cigarettes to women. Women were not thought to smoke -- should not smoke cigarettes, and so forth. And here I want to bring in the enablers of corporate behavior. The public relations industry, the advertising, our major cultural institutions. The university. And then ultimately, the politicians. And what happened here -- and you discuss it only for a couple of pages, but they're very powerful. It involves Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays. And he is thought to be the founder of public relations as a profession. And in the 1920s, he got the idea that you could double the market for cigarette consumption if you could make it respectable for women to smoke. And he thought up a campaign to define women smoking cigarettes, that these are torches of freedom. And he got women to be in a Fifth Avenue parade, and suddenly light up, these debutantes to light up cigarettes, and make it fashionable. And then of course the entertainment industry, and Hollywood after, embraced that idea. And what we did is lead the half of the population that was not inclined to destroy their bodies with nicotine, would now be doing that. And again, it was a respectable activity. And it gave rise to even a profession, and the whole advertising community, the entertainment community -- they all supported it. And the political community didn't feel the need to regulate it. This was not treated the way, say, marijuana was. No -- this was a good thing.

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Robert Scheer is editor in chief of the progressive Internet site Truthdig. He has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy (more...)
 

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