PA American Water keeps reminding me with their many commercials, now the ads on Youtube seem to be claiming that they Scranton from the EPA or some shit. They’re only just reminding me how they tricked government officials into using trickle down economics lies to let them get out of accountability for polluting the stream and river here in Scranton. That’s not just a narrative, it’s the truth about this privatized public utility. I think of this private water company every time I hear about how corporations use PR to spin things to cover up their wrongdoing and trick the public. Fresh in my mind after listening to the recent episode of the Citations Needed Podcast where they had on someone from The Revolving Door Project.
Episode 224: Corporate Self-Regulation and the Fine Art of ‘Preempting’ Public Outrage Citations Needed | July 16, 2025 | Transcript · Jul 16, 2025 Adam: And we’re going to start by talking about one of the, if not the first, examples of industry self-regulation that emerged in the 1780s, that of the British slave trade. There was an effort gaining steam in the 1780s prior to the Napoleonic Wars, which was kind of put on ice for 20 years or so, to abolish slavery in the British colonies, either gradually or at once. And the pro-slavery trade group, the West India Committee, which, incidentally, is still around as a charity organization, supposedly. You can look it up. And if you go to their About history page, they have a very like, Well, we started off with a little bit dicey origins. They were a pro-slavery lobbying group. Nima: [Laughs] They’ve self-regulated themselves, Adam. Adam: They understood this, and they got ahead of the movement by claiming that they were actually going to institute reforms into slavery. As Adam Hochschild noted in his 2005 book Bury the Chains, this West India Committee wanted to get ahead of the abolitionist tide. That was a moral outrage that was stirring at the time.
In the podcast they go on to talk about AI and crypto… because of course!
“In today’s corporate culture major PR firms promote crisis management as a necessary business expense. Whenever something bad happens to a corporation, often its first move is not to deal with the actual problem, but to manage the negative perception caused by that problem.” – Toxic Sludge is Good for You 2002