BF: Yeah, it was absolutely considered a legitimate industry. And actually, the overlap between tobacco and psychology is a particularly interesting one, and it goes on throughout the chapter that I've written on that. Because the industry dipped into whatever psychological insights them could find at the time; they did studies. What I find more appalling are some studies, for example, done in the 1970s where they had people trying to understand what motivates teenagers to smoke. And they did these surveys of, you know, high school kids basically, or 16-year-olds, I think. And talked to them about the pressure that made them want to smoke, and how they all assumed that they would someday be able to quit because they wouldn't be addicted. And it was just so clear they were trying to use whatever psychological understandings they could of these, you know, vulnerable young people to get them addicted to something deadly, at a time when they knew it was very addictive and very deadly.
RS: So let's talk -- because your book has the strength of wedding psychology to greed. And we're talking about not just snake-oil salesmen hustling the innocent rubes out of a tent. We're talking about -- you know, the movie Mad Men captured it, the series on television. We're talking about very sharp, very well-compensated people, in the case of Bernays using the latest advances of psychology and so forth, to basically manipulate people. To co-opt them, to create a culture that was not good for them. And that was true whether it was driving unsafe cars; it was true, as I say, about using aero sprays that would destroy the ozone; it was true about fossil fuels and destroying the climate, ultimately.
And what we're really talking about is the profession of co-option that these corporations could tap into. And they could get very respectable people, including the movie-makers -- including most of the journalists, because they didn't really write very critically about this. When they did that Fifth Avenue parade with women lighting up these torches of freedom, the New York Times celebrated it. They thought, it's just a great story, and women finding their freedom. There wasn't much reporting about the danger of these activities. So we're really talking about corporate co-option of the culture. Isn't that really what your book's about? That it's not just that they make a lot of money; they have a lot of power. And with that power, they coopt everyone.
BF: They have tremendous power. One of the points I make in the book is that in many cases, you see a response that seems to be very much a simple human reflex based on what we know about psychology. For example, if somebody criticizes you, it is natural to get defensive, and it is natural to imagine that whoever is your critic might have some ulterior motive, and they can't be telling the truth. What happens, I think, is that those reflexes then turn into a corporate strategy. So suddenly the corporation is trying to undermine the credibility of its critics, not just an individual's reflect, but a corporate strategy. Then I think an industry forms to serve that corporate strategy -- the public relations industry, advertisers, lawyers. And then it goes from reflex to strategy to industry, and finally into an ideology. And then you know it's really taken deep roots in your culture, and it's going to start having lots of political impacts, quite independent of the original denial.
In fact, if you think about this in the context of climate denial, you had the oil majors being, you know, raising all kinds of doubts about this for a very long time. Now they're actually sort of accepting that this is a real problem, and we have to do something about it. But they've raised so many doubts, and they funded all of these groups that were so anti-regulatory, and those groups essentially took over the Republican Party and now control the White House and the Senate. So you know, ExxonMobil can say, yes, we support the goals of the Paris Accord -- but at this point, it's kind of too late, because the denial that they fostered for so long has taken such deep root that we just have these enormous barriers to overcome.
RS: Right. So, but even before the Citizens United decision of the court, and way before Donald Trump, the fact of the matter is -- and you mentioned the Republican Party -- the political process. Not just advertising and public relations. And much of university life gets corrupted by the power of money; after all, they can support all sorts of scholarship, including scholarship that justifies their activity. People like Ralph Nader, who is in your book, who dare challenge the automobile industry, are vilified by this industry. And they can buy off the best and the brightest; they can buy off very talented lawyers, advertising people, public relations, and so forth. And now, you mentioned, they can also buy or co-opt a political party.
But in the case of one chapter in your book that I do want to discuss here -- the banking meltdown, the Great Recession -- it wasn't the Republican Party that got bought off by these corporations. Because they were already there; they believed in the mantra of deregulation. Ronald Reagan tried to do it; he wasn't very successful, because he had the savings and loan scandal, and so it was not the right time to deregulate banks and Wall Street. It actually remained for Bill Clinton as president, and for the Democratic Party, to make this opening to Wall Street and to do what's described in your chapter on banking: the reversal of the New Deal, another great Democratic president, FDR. To reverse Glass-Steagall, to reverse the, breaking up the investment bank and the commercial bank. To allow all of these phony collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps to flourish, and the packaging of subprime mortgages. All of that was basically enabled by an alliance between the Bill Clinton administration and the Republicans in the Congress, was it not?
BF: Yes, that's absolutely the case. And I think it's an illustration of an industry with way too much power, in part because we have a political system that is way too responsive to money, and that's where the money is.
RS: Yeah. But, I mean, to -- because sometimes it's convenient to think that we know the enemy. [Laughs] The enemy is boorish, the enemy is -- you know, is Donald Trump. He says offensive things, he's overt and so forth. But actually, in your chapter on the housing meltdown and the scamming of Wall Street -- which was massive, and so many people lost their homes; the economy wasn't even fully recovered by the time this pandemic comes along, and we just were making up for lost time. The fact is, it was the more enlightened people, the more liberal people, the more Democratic people who went along with it. And I think, by the way, throughout all of the chapters in your book, whether it was Hollywood supporting smoking, you know, Hollywood's advertising or the government not regulating, there's responsibility on the part of both political parties. Certainly on the issue of slavery; the bedrock of slavery and segregation in this country was the Democratic, not the Republican party. So we're talking about a process of corporate cooption that extends across the political spectrum. Is that not the case?
BF: That's the case in many respects. But at the same time I wouldn't want to minimize the distinction, in almost all of the campaigns that I mention, between what the Democratic Party was promoting at the time and the Republican. And certainly that's the case right now, with climate change; I mean, there really are very huge differences. So --
RS: Well, that's true.
BF: -enough corruption across the spectrum, but it isn't equal on both sides, that's for sure.
RS: Right, but in -- you know, in the interest of providing balance here, when I read your chapter on the financial meltdown, the fact of the matter is that deregulation was signed off by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
BF: Right.
RS: And Lawrence Summers -- who you don't mention, but he's still around, he's still an advisor to Joe Biden; he was a big player in Barack Obama's administration. And as secretary of the treasury, who had replaced Robert Rubin-who went off to work for Citibank, a bank made legal by this deregulation-Lawrence Summers is the one who in Congress, under the Clinton administration, said that, oh, we should deregulate Wall Street because they know what they're doing. He attacked somebody named Brooksley Born, who was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who warned about all this, as did Warren Buffet. And yet in your book, as you point out, these people on Wall Street were pretending they knew what these packages were. You know, and yet it was under Clinton that we passed the Financial Services Modernization Act, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000 when he was a lame duck president, that made all of this stuff -- and with AIG, and with Goldman Sachs -- all of that was made legal by bipartisan legislation that Bill Clinton pushed for very energetically. And Lawrence Summers, the secretary of the treasury, was the main advocate. That's just the record.
BF: Yeah, I would agree, it would have been nicer to have a much clearer perspective on this within the Democratic Party, and certainly as well within the Republican Party. Again, I guess I would just point out that with Dodd Frank, for example, you passed that with almost no Republican support at all. So even after the crisis, at least you had many Democrats in Congress trying to regulate this industry, whereas Republicans even after this crisis were still quite resistant to do so.
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