RS: Do you feel confident in that view?
BF: Confident that there's a difference --
RS: Yeah. That there -- because what you describe in your book is a general pattern of corruption that runs right through this society. That money talks. That these corporations have enormous power. They can shape the debate, they can basically get the best lawyers, the best PR people, they can get the Hollywood people, they can get the politicians to work for their interests. And in every one of your chapters, it's bipartisan. It's a process of corruption -- I mean, I didn't know that -- were there Democrats that opposed aerosol spray? Were there really Democrats who wanted to make automobiles safer and have seat belts?
BF: Sure.
RS: It's not in your book.
BF: Well, it isn't mainly about the political parties, of course. It's mainly about what the industries were doing. But you know, it was -- it would have been mainly the Democrats who were concerned about these issues. And over time, in the past, Republicans would sort of move further and further toward their position, and finally you'd pass a bill which would be, you know, watered down but would at least improve the situation. One thing that struck me kind of amazingly was how often Republicans in the past would in fact ultimately sign on to the legislation that is sort of the culmination of the dispute. Of course we don't see that anymore, and it strikes me as just a very vivid example of how far to the right the Republican Party has gone.
RS: So let me just push back a little bit on this. In your chapter, again, on the Great Recession, you single out Goldman Sachs. And you have Lloyd Blankfein as being one of the people -- one of the points you make, from a moral point of view -- wouldn't you expect these people to be embarrassed, to be apologetic, to criticize themselves, right? You say that very clearly. And you even hold it out and say, hey, they didn't do that. OK. But more to the point, when Barack Obama came in, he brought in these same -- you were very critical of the Federal Reserve action, and Alan Greenspan and so forth, OK. But the fact is, Barack Obama took Timothy Geithner -- who was the head of the New York Fed, who condoned all this, advocated all of this while Bush was president -- he made him his secretary of the treasury. And then in the famous incident, even in the last election when Hillary Clinton was running, she gave those speeches to Goldman Sachs -- and you vilify Goldman Sachs in your book. And in those speeches she said, I have to bring you with me to Washington -- and she's sitting right next to Lloyd Blankfein -- she said because you people really know how to fix these problems. That was what happened. And just in the last presidential election. And so in your book you say this was a terrible development, but it was a -- all I'm trying to push here, it was a two-party development. And in fact in the case of your chapter on the banking meltdown, it was the Democrats who took the lead on deregulating Wall Street.
BF: Well, I'm not sure they took the lead, but I know that they went along with it. I mean, I think that you had still very strong support in the Republican Party for that as well, and this was sort of a period where the Democrats were trying to be more moderate, more middle-of-the-road, and have a different perspective. And we ultimately -- we, the nation, ultimately came to regret that, I think. I think you're, you know, you're right; I could have written a book that went more into the Obama administration, or Hillary Clinton's perspective on Wall Street; that really wasn't my topic.
RS: No, but what I think is consistent with your topic -- and I do want to mention Industrial-Strength Denial, Barbara Freese, a very important book; I'm not taking anything away from it -- Eight Stories of Corporations Defending the Indefensible, from the Slave Trade to Climate Change. And what I think is so powerful about this book is you don't demonize the individual corporate leaders. You have, in fact, more modern ones who relate to the housing thing; Jamie Dimon from Chase Manhattan, you have a lot of them. I forget the fellow whose name that you had, who -- what was his name? Oh, ah -- goodness. Thomas [Midgley], who did both the leaded gasoline and the [chlorofluorocarbons] things-
BF: Oh, Midgley.
RS: Yeah, Midgley, sorry. And throughout your book, we're introduced to these corporate players as people that you could have dinner with. They're not, you know, foaming at the mouth. They're just doing what they say is their job. You know, they have an ideology. And they can rationalize anything. They can rationalize, you know, spreading cancer. And they live in a culture -- that's all I'm trying to get at here -- they live in a culture where rationalizing, evil behavior for profit, is the norm. And they are supported by an extensive cast of very smart, highly credentialed lawyers, public relations people, advertising people, university people, and ultimately politicians of every stripe -- every stripe -- who go along with them, and carry their message. Isn't that really what's so powerful about your book? I'm not trying to distort it. It just seems to me --
BF: Yeah, no, I think that's -- I appreciate that description of it. I think that's exactly right. I mean, I do talk about a lot of these individuals, but my hope is not to get people to focus too much on the individual. Because what happens is we'll tend to get angry, and we'll think oh, these are evil people. And once you start putting on that particular moral judgment hat, where you say these people are evil, you tend to stop your inquiry. And what I'm hoping is -- even though I know my book is in many respects kind of infuriating, in terms of what it describes -- I'm hoping actually to get folks to kind of step back a little bit, not look so much at the individuals, but to look at the context, as you described it. And to recognize that these folks are responding to a society that rewards this kind of denial, and punishes honesty and social responsibility. And so that we can, hopefully, start talking about how do we change those aspects of our system, both within the corporate structure and economically, and the kind of soft, fuzzy ideas of social norms, and of course our laws.
RS: Yeah, you just put it much better than I did. And your book puts it very clearly. It's "industrial-strength denial." But what's being denied is actually murder, sometimes; killing people; getting them sick; destroying the planet. And I keep getting back to this phrase in one podcast after another, from Hannah Arendt, the great critic of Nazism, as an extreme: the banality of evil.
BF: Mm-hmm.
RS: And your book reeks of --
BF: [Laughs]
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