Felix H’rhager/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
By Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh & Donald Cohen
New Press
The Biden administration’s aggressive effort to enforce the nation’s antitrust laws has been met with an equally aggressive effort to defend the large corporations under scrutiny. Take the pushback on the Federal Trade Commission’s recent antitrust lawsuit against Amazon for tying access to its marketplace to its exorbitant internal logistics program, and rules that raise prices across the internet.
At Fox News, Chapman University professor and former FTC Bureau of Competition director Tom Campbell argues that going after Amazon abandons a framework that puts consumers first, in favor of untested and dangerous theories. The lawsuit “will leave shoppers and business owners feeling the pain,” asserts the Independent Women’s Forum. Longtime conservative activist Grover Norquist accuses the FTC’s Lina Khan of trying to “dismantle a popular company” and interfering with the free market. Punishing Amazon for its success is a solution to something that isn’t a problem, writes former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA). The undercurrent beneath all these contentions is that the administration is instituting a radical new collectivist theory that will destroy jobs, hurt the people it’s trying to help, and disrupt the system that made America great.
You may find these arguments familiar. In fact, the authors of a new book trace them back a century and a half. They’ve created a kind of reference book for conservative debating points, in an attempt to rob them of their rhetorical power.
The book is called Corporate Bullsh*t, written by anti-privatization advocate Donald Cohen, journalist Joan Walsh, and entrepreneur Nick Hanauer. Together, they slot the rebuttals that corporate mouthpieces, lobbyists, and their allies in government and media make to virtually every government and social program, from the abolition of slavery to the increase in the minimum wage.
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”).
Going all the way back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, corporate mouthpieces have argued that any attempt to protect workers or boost their wages will destroy jobs.
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.
If there is a problem that emerges within our economy, it’s the consumer’s fault, anyway. Coal mining accidents were due to “carelessness on the part of men,” the National Coal Association said in 1946. Nutrition labeling should be rejected, the National Restaurant Association said in 2003, because “there are not good or bad foods. There are good and bad diets.” When the ozone layer showed damage, President Reagan’s interior secretary, Donald Hodel, claimed that “people who don’t stand out in the sun—it doesn’t affect them.” The authors also detail the case of Stella Liebeck, who received a large settlement from McDonald’s after scalding her lap with hot coffee, which conservatives turned into the poster child for tort reform. (There’s a very good movie about this.)
The dangers of what government might do to alleviate these problems is far worse than the problems themselves, according to the corporate bullshit line. Going all the way back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, corporate mouthpieces have argued that any attempt to protect workers or boost their wages will destroy jobs. Auto industry titan Lee Iacocca said upon passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970 that it “is a threat to the entire American economy and to every person in America.” Social Security, welfare payments, and unemployment benefits will crush employment by reducing the incentive to work; minimum wages, despite increasing the incentive to work, will also destroy jobs. Throughout the book, the authors cite studies that show that none of these claims, including the idea that minimum wages reduce employment, are actually true.
Related to this is the idea that trying to help people will actually hurt them, going back to cash assistance in the mid-1800s. Unintended consequences coincidentally follow every single anti-poverty effort, by this view. Medicare, Sen. Milward Simpson (R-WY) said in 1965, would “destroy private initiative for our aged to protect themselves with insurance.” COVID relief programs for the unemployed were “not fair to the people that are currently in the workforce,” Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) said in 2021.
And if all of that fails, there’s always the standby of calling anything outside the status quo socialism. A tiny 2 percent tax on top incomes proposed by President Grover Cleveland (perhaps the most conservative Democrat to ever hold the office) was termed “communistic warfare against rights of property” by the New York Tribune in 1895. Child labor laws were socialism; Social Security was socialism (“the end of democracy”); minimum wages were socialism; the unpaid Family and Medical Leave Act, socialism too; and when Mussolini and Hitler rose in Europe, those same types of labor protections were now somehow “communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism,” the National Association of Manufacturers said in 1938.
The apotheosis of all of this, of course, is Ronald Reagan’s 1961 recording, funded by the American Medical Association, against “socialized medicine,” which features the memorable passage: “One of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
Hanauer, Walsh, and Cohen miss a couple of the more novel arguments—recently, attacks on Big Tech have led to a “national champions” defense that breaking up U.S. tech companies will only empower their counterparts in China. But in general, the authors pull together an impressive amount of evidence of hundreds of years of the same claptrap put in service of business elites acquiring and maintaining untrammeled wealth and power.
There is a lot of merit in seeing these strategies repeat themselves over and over. And it’s a great reference book to reach for to show your conservative uncle that, yes, even unequal pay was seen as the fault of women. Does identifying the patterns truly disarm them? I think to some extent, and it’s certainly good to anticipate these claims to better debate them. But it’s not going to stop the shamelessness with which these shopworn arguments are thrown around.
In the end, you need to tell better stories about our economy and government’s collective responsibility to its citizens, as Hanauer, a classic “traitor to his class,” has done for years. He has argued that job creation begins with consumers, and that keeping consumer spending robust is the best way to keep the economy strong. This flips the script on the notion of job creators that must not be disrupted, and makes the case for wealth redistribution, collective bargaining, and other approaches to make sure the real job creation engines can circulate money through the economy.
Corporate Bullsh*t opens a window to a secret history, an imagined gathering of lackeys and plutocrats who scheme to stifle progressive change through the constant slinging of garbage. After reading it, you’ll find yourself repeating to conservatives their bogus arguments before they even get a chance.
