Corporate Europe Observatory Interview
Companies often behave like a psychopath does. Here are 3 signs of a psychopath, which many companies embody:
- Manipulating to win against others
- Not really caring about what is right or wrong
- Showing little or no empathy towards others wellbeing
Why do companies behave in this way?
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November 5, 2020
Why Do Companies Behave Inhumanely?
Why Do Companies Behave Inhumanely?
In this episode of Great.com Talks With… Martin Pigeon, who works at Corporate Europe Observatory, explains how they are exposing the power of corporate lobbying in the European Union.
Companies often behave like a psychopath does; but why do companies behave in this way? Martin explains that the core reason for a company to exist is to make money, which allows companies to act in strange and inhumane ways. This is why we need laws to regulate how companies do business.
The problem with laws is that they can be influenced by interest groups, like a company in a specific market. And since the primary goal of interest groups is to make more money, someone needs to make sure that the laws are not being manipulated by lobbying firms; and that’s what Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) is doing, by producing research on how companies are actually trying to influence decision making.
In this interview Martin gives answers to questions like:
- How much power do law making institutions like the European Commission have?
- How much power do lobbyist groups have?
- Why do law making institutions depend on lobbyism?
- What can you and I do to counteract the lobbying in the EU with grassroot lobbying?
If you want to understand more about the lobbying taking place in the EU and what can be done to stop this, you can listen to the full interview. Or why not read the Lobby Planet which guides you through the murky world of corporate lobbying: Who are the biggest players, where do they meet and what issues do they focus on?
Want to learn more about Corporate Europe Observatory? You can subscribe to their newsletter, checkout their news section and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
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The topic of today is why is it important to expose the power of corporate lobbying and to understand more about this topic, the topic of how vulnerable are our law making institutions towards lobbying? We have invited Martin Pidgeon, who works as a researcher at Corporate Europe Observatory. So, Martin, welcome to the show.
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Thank you.
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If I understood your background, you’ve been kind of helping ordinary people, helping policymakers to understand why lobbying is a problem for quite some time now.
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Well, I’ve been doing what I’m doing for about a decade, I think, and a bit more than that, actually. And it’s a very long time in many ways. What we do at Corporate Europe Observatory is research and advocacy. That means that we produce a lot of information about what the corporations are doing and how they try to influence policy making
so that the decisions of the European Union in particular suits their interests as much as they can. And then we also do a lot of advocacy to change the regulation of lobbying itself. So in that sense, in that sense, in that capacity, you could say that we are lobbyists ourselves, which is a contradiction and a sort of irony we have to live with. We are partly part of the problem that we denounce, starting with the way we are funded. We are 95 percent funded by philanthropy, but neither us, neither philanthropists have been elected by anybody just like this podcast, for example, which is an icon of philanthropy as well. This is brought to you for free. But as you know, as digital activists know quite well, if it’s free, you’re the product most of the time. So who’s paying and why? And this is where you immediately bump into very interesting questions.
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The European Union, as you probably know, is primarily a market organization. It is not a state. So if you’re a federalist, you’re going to say not set the state. If you’re a Eurosceptic, you’re going to say it’s never, it shouldn’t be a state, but it’s a it’s an it’s a difficult animal politically because there’s nothing else like it. It’s something in between. It is very powerful when you come to regulations on businesses, but also on other things like public health or the environment. You have to see that about 60, 70 percent of national law comes from EU law. On matters of business. I think it’s around 50, 60 percent when it comes to environmental regulations. So it’s really a lot. And for countries that belong to the eurozone, they have their currency in common, which is also an essential element of sovereignty for a state to share with others. So it’s definitely more than, say, the UN or any international organisation, but it is less than a state. It doesn’t have an army, for example, even though this is changing actually for the better or the worse.
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But it’s almost an entire discussion that I won’t answer it now.
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But what you have what I would like your auditors to to understand is that even though the EU institutions have. Big powers that are very small.
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Which is ironic, this is not the way they are known, but, for example, the European Commission, which is the administrative body of the European Union, really I mean, it is the administration whose primary job is to create new regulations and to check that existing regulations are implemented. You’re talking about an administration that’s on certain issues regulating 450 million people. It’s bigger than the US. It’s huge. But you’re talking about an administration whose size is very modest. You’re talking thirty three thousand employees. That might sound like a lot, but this is less. Then the city of Paris, for example, it is about the same as the city of Brussels where I live. So, you know, and that is very important to understand, to understand how lobbying works. Lobbyists are very powerful because they are necessary and because the EU institutions need them, because they are too small for the powers they have and they lack internal expertise. And on top of that, the expertise that they had has been partially destroyed by member states in the series of administrative reforms that are now forcing high your employees, for example, to change topics every five, six years.
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So after a number. So basically that guarantees you that anyone working for the EU institutions is never going to is never going to be a real expert in his field. There are exceptions and the European Commission is trying to change that now because they have understood how bad this is.
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But it’s just to give you an idea, another another I can summarize before so we can grasp the whole concept we’re talking about. You’re saying the European institutions that are regulating laws around Europe and they have. Almost 50 percent of environmental laws in specific countries are coming from the European regulations. Yes, and even more so for business and markets. Yes. And you’re saying so these laws which are being made from this kind of small institutions they are dependent upon.
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People with certain interests like lobbying for certain interests, and so there’s there’s a dependence here which makes this kind of compromise and there is and the situation is that lobbyists are de facto co legislators, so to speak. They are. Largely helping the institutions write the laws, and the problem is that they are not accountable to anyone else other than the people paying them for this purpose and not everybody is equally rich, are equally connected. The two are not the same, but linked. Obviously, the name of the game is a phenomenon called the revolving doors.
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I don’t know if your auditors are familiar with this phenomenon. It means that it’s when, for example, to give you a real case example that took place two days ago, because that happens very often.
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Sadly, the former director, the executive director of the European Defence Agency, has become a strategy counselor to Airbus.
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To give you another example, the former executive director of the European Banking Authority, which is an important EU institution, has now become the executive, not the the executive director of the financial markets lobby.
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You know, so you’re talking about people in a situation of conflict of interest here. They are selling to the private sector, the network and the knowledge and the contacts and everything and the incompetence also that they have acquired while they were serving the public sector. And they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. And we are trying to tighten the screws of that particular regulation. That is very difficult, it is very difficult, I must say. And this is not exclusively an EU phenomenon, of course, but it is. You also find such moves at the national level. But I don’t think that’s blatant.
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That gives a better understanding of what you’re talking about, people who first served the public interest are then changing direction, now serving another company, and then they have all the information needed to to have all the influence to.
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Yes, yes. And of course, people have the individual right to have, you know, the career they want. But the problem is that not everything they learn is theirs to sell in this, you know, so in Brussels and Brussels is an expat community largely. You have. Yeah. Thirty three thousand people working for the commission. You have this number of thousand of people working for the European Parliament, which is the only institution that is elected. And you also have people working as diplomats for the European Council. The European Council is a very important and very uncovered institution because it represents member states and it is a crucial institution.
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And that every EU regulation is at the end of the process, is approved by the European Council, but it is approved.
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In an institution, the European Council, that is very secretive, it is intergovernmental, and that the E.U. regulations are by and large the outcome of negotiations between member states.
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For example, as I speak to you, they are fine tuning the negotiations around the Common Agricultural Policy. This is a huge file. You’re talking about the biggest budgets of the European Union. You’re talking about dozens of billions of euros that are going to farmers in Mlangeni to help them survive because the prices of agricultural commodities are to lower after they’ve been liberalized to cut. A long story short. So it’s an enormous public subsidy to the agribusiness industry, so to speak. And public money should be used for public goods. Right. So as citizens, we would want this money to be used to pay for agricultural practices that are not going to destroy biodiversity and wreck the climate, for example. We want what we want. But the problem is that the system is so entrenched and it is so easy for national governments to blame Brussels, this mysterious Brussels, whereas really it is them taking these decisions collectively and secretly, but then still, of course, more if you’re Germany, the matter, but still. That’s as we speak, I mean, there is a strong chance, unfortunately, that the next seven years of the Common Agricultural Policy are almost just as bad as the same as the same seven previous years.
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That means that, again, as taxpayers, our money that the one that we are earning with our work is going to be used to subsidize the destruction of nature. Who wants that? Not 90 percent of EU citizens, if you ask, you see, but the problem is that this system is so entrenched and so difficult to move and so secretive as well. And that’s really protected. So I want of course, we’re certainly not the only ones trying to do that on the cap. But this is an example of where, for example, yesterday we published an investigation on Farming Families Unions CEO to show what sort of positions they are taking and why. At the moment they are and they are going to succeed. Sadly, it’s likely they are trying to prevent the so-called greening of the cap. That is that if you run as a farmer to receive public subsidies for your work, you have to commit to not destroy nature or to destroy it less because agriculture will always destroy nature in one way or another. It’s unavoidable. But there are you know, there are shades of grey. You can napalm your field with glyphosate and other pesticides that are going to destroy all wildlife.
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All you can do in a more and more targeted manner and do agroforestry, for example, where you’re going to have different crops and different stages, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, it’s more difficult and you should be supported for that. But I mean, you see what I you see what I’m going to give you a bit of an example of what we do next year.
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We try to document what happens when other pressures, what are the likely consequences of these pressures. And we try to then inform the press, other NGOs, social movements about what’s coming on and if possible, what’s coming up, because there’s nothing worse than doing postmortems. Right. That is. Hello, we’ve lost. This is why I know this is horrible. This is, you know, the shooting. So we try to give people strategic and actionable information, but it’s not easy.
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So that’s how Corporate Europe Observatory, the organization that you’re representing, is fitting the postulant puzzle here. The power really becomes stronger if everything is kept in secret and you are just exposing the plants.
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We’re trying to, we’re trying to get 15 there, many more.
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I mean, there are other NGOs working as well, but we’re pretty much the only ones working on coal-fired power as such. I’m working on Agri-Business, but I have colleagues working on climate change and energy. I have colleagues working on finance. That makes it a very interesting environment to work in because it’s very diverse. We do many different things and we learn that we learned a lot as well as well. That’s the positive side. The negative side is that it is spiritually difficult to sustain this work for a long time because.
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Because corporations are crazy. They are not humans, they are not persons, they are legal fictions designed to maximize profit. You see, so they are psychopathic structures, of course, but you have real humans in there. And to adapt to these structures, humans have to negotiate. Right? They have to pretend that they are not doing what they’re doing. And that’s tiring.
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Explain more about that. How do you mean?
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What I want to say is that lobbyists are defending corporate lobbyists and defending very specific interests.
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So, for example, the pesticides industry has its own lobby group in Brussels.
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And I know I know them well because I work in agribusiness issues and they’re very well paid people.
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But if you tell them that, for example, they are working for merchants of poison, which is literally what they are doing and defending these interests, they will say, no, not at all.
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We are helping feed the world. You know, so but I mean, it’s human, it’s impossible to survive in an organization whose values you don’t accept, at least a little, you have to find ways to survive psychologically in an organization even when you don’t really agree with its core values.
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So that breeds a lot of cynicism, in fact, because a lot of lobbying is about lying, not necessarily directly, but more by omission, by not telling the whole story all directly. And then sometimes you have very conservative interests like the oil industry, for example, for a very long time, they’ve had a lot of power in the business or in the business circles.
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And as late as last September, for example, 2018, we got an internal document from BusinessEurope, which is the European Federation of European Employers.
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So really big business and their internal position on possible new EU ambitions to act on climate change and to reduce CO2 emissions, less to be positive as long as it remains a political statement with no real implication. And for as soon as we and the rest of the position was like as soon as it will become concrete, then we’re going to do everything we can to.
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Delayed, denied.
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You know, just when time and time, that’s that’s the name of the game, the time is money, right? Especially for corporations and for them. What is key is to keep regulation at bay, to win time before, for example, the toxic products are banned or limited or limited.
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And so what they do, for example, is a lot of something that’s something you hear about is CSR corporate social responsibility.
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Yeah, we’ve seen the light. We’re going to be good guys now. See you in five years.
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You know, and there’s this whole co-opting of their personal development discourse by CEOs. It’s quite interesting. And but really, it doesn’t change. The car industry, for example, has pretended that it would reduce CO2 emissions for their machines for 15 years now.
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They have not.
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The only way they’ve done it is through regulation, through hard binding regulation. And that’s what they don’t want. So, you know, you always have you always have this game of businesses trying and pretending and sometimes trying in good faith with in the case of some individuals to be good guys and to be, you know, part of the solution. And then you have the reality of structures and hard economic facts and perverse incentives that time and again make these structures betray their words and not do not work for the common good. And in a way, it is normal because they’re not designed to work for the common good, for the common good.
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They are designed to maximize profits.
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So if you want to interact in a healthy way with the corporations, I think you have to mainly talk about money because that’s really what’s driving them.
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And got news for, you know, I want to summarize there, due to the timing of this episode, this really helps understand the psychological effects. You think that you’re doing something good or you’re the belief system that you’re actually improving the world, one, that you’re still in the same game of destroying it.
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Yeah, you just try, you’re just managing in in the best of cases to find a way to survive where you in the work that you’re doing, you’re in society is called post rationalization.
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Like you, you develop a narrative.
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That comforts you, that gives you justifications and that finds you excuses for what you’re doing.
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And many of us I mean, that’s the society in which we live for many of us. You know, I have the extreme privilege from afar of being paid to do what I do. But it really is a privilege. Most of us don’t have that look. And I’m you know, I have an MBA and I have studied political science and I’m paid after ten years, a ten years career as a teacher for young children at the very, very beginning of this career.
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But I don’t mind. I don’t care because the satisfaction I find in doing a job where I can express what I think is just too strong.
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So that’s also why I’ve kept working for the same organization for more than a decade.
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And I’m not considering leaving for now because change is good as well as because you know that there aren’t many places like this.
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Very true, very few people are paid to not have interest in money. So if you could help us after listening to today’s explanation of lobbying, what can ordinary people do? And this.
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So the first thing that needs to be understood is that corporate interests fear voters , fear public opinion, because that might convince regulators to act. So it is very important to not underestimate the power of direct action, the power of elections, the power of political activity. I told you earlier that the lobbying world breeds cynicism, but it also breeds it also brings realism.
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Their citizens have much more power than we think, the problem is that they don’t have a lot of time to exercise this power because they’re too busy surviving their own lives and working, but they really have a lot of power.
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And so that’s important when it comes to elections.
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Of course, it’s important to vote for those who you think are going to best defend your values. But that’s of course, that’s not it.
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Like it is important to hold the people you elect accountable and to write to them, for example, to express what you think or what you think they should be doing for this. There’s a very important tool that’s the media, that the media are professionals.
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And in doing this but the media are an economic activity and they’re not doing well. So something you can do, ironically, is to take a subscription to a good media, to pay good journalists, to do good reporting on what politicians are doing. It sounds easy and simple, but it is not really. Media are really struggling these days to just survive economically because that business model is being eaten alive by the GAFFA.
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Other things and really what you can do is I mean, there’s so many things you can do, you can support us. You, of
of course, because we welcome individual donations and more generally, the individual financial support you can give to NGOs is very precious, because this is money that is not attached, that is not tied to particular objectives. It is money that makes these organizations more free.
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And as I said, direct action, because voting is very important and you have to defend and exercise your right to vote, but its democracy doesn’t end there and mobilizing for the causes you believe are just is also crucial and very empowering.
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Thank you, that helps us understand, could you end this by giving some kind of, um, is there anything extra important you want people to to live with to understand about this?
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You know, it’s a very broad issue, so it’s difficult to point to just one thing, two things perhaps.
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One is you’re very welcome to visit our website where there’s a lot of additional resources to understand what I’ve been talking about. One in particular that is called The Lovely Planet, which is a little guide of the Brussels neighborhoods where the EU institutions are located. That’s to be downloaded for free. And that will tell you a lot about the way the EU institutions are working and interacting with lobby groups and what can be done to improve the system.
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And it sounds very cheesy, but I think it is very important to believe also in optimism and in the freedom to do what you think is right.
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And to not, you know, just fall prey to easy, lazy explanations about the world, like conspiracy theories and all cynicism, like, you know, it’s all about brute force and only force should decide.
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Because that’s not true simply humans are more complex than that.
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Martin, thank you very much for taking time to break down and what’s actually going on behind lobbyism and why that would be so hard to tackle, I guess.
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Yeah, well, thanks for inviting me and all the best for you and for the next ventures.
END OF TRANSCRIPT