Upcoming “Corporate Bullsh*t”
David Dayen reviews an upcoming book by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, Donald Cohen and Zachary Roth. “Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America” examines the boilerplate arguments corporate shills have used to object “to virtually every government and social program, from the abolition of slavery to the increase in the minimum wage.”
Dayen writes:
These timeworn tactics have been successful, the authors write, because “they offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest.” It’s an attempt to set the terms of debate and to make those terms unchanging and unmovable. The endless repetition of these talking points is a source of their strength. But identifying their history and application to virtually everything can be a source of their weakness.
The six categories of corporate bullshit begins with pure denial. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually,” said Senator and later Vice President John Calhoun of South Carolina in 1837, about chattel slaves. Nineteenth-century slavery advocate George Fitzhugh called slaves “in some sense, the freest people in the world.” This up-is-downism was later used to justify child labor (“perfectly happy”), industrial water pollution (“purer than the water that came from the river before we used it”), households in poverty (“such families don’t really exist”), pesticides (“no reports of illness or death”), smoking (“not addictive”), climate change (“nothing but beneficial”), and lead in consumer products (“helps to guard your health”).
Even if these issues are hazards to public health or economic well-being, the market is the great arm of discipline rather than government. Alan Greenspan made an entire career of believing that business will engage honestly or else lose customers; when the housing market collapsed in 2008, he admitted a “flaw” in his thinking. But this hasn’t stopped his ideological compatriots through the decades from claiming that progressive taxation, drug and workplace safety, equal pay, and more are inferior disruptions of the free market’s ability to handle these matters. “Safety is good business,” reads a 1973 Chamber of Commerce newsletter. And anyway, some consumers may want to sacrifice safety and quality products “for a lower price tag,” the Chamber’s Lawrence Kraus said the same year. Federal civil rights protections, similarly, interfere with free enterprise’s right to be racist, which can only be combated through the market itself.
Etc., etc.
Times change. The arguments don’t. Trying to help people actually hurts them; giving the poor a leg up destroys individual initiative; unemployment assistance is “not fair to the people that are currently in the workforce”; taxes punish success and redistribute wealth (SOCIALISM!), etc. No matter how old, they never go out of style.
The public’s short memory and schooling for trades rather than for citizenship helps hoarders of wealth get away with spewing these arguments largely unchallenged decade after decade no matter how many times the sky does not fall.
Dayen tweets (take a flyin’ leap, Musk) that Hanauer (a classic “traitor to his class,”), Joan Walsh, et al. have written “a reference book covering two centuries of the same tired conservative arguments against making any progress in this country.”
Heather Cox Richardson’s “Democracy Awakening” covers some of the same ground from a historian’s perspective. One sees the same struggle by the wealthy to preserve a society that services them at the expense of people they consider their inferiors. They never believed “all men are created equal” was more than a rhetorical flourish by Jefferson. Some even declare outright that this founding (radical) principle was a gross error. Confederates certainly thought so, and their modern equivalents still struggle to enforce that belief even while embracing the Declaration.
Royalists have been with us since the founding.