Global Policy Forum

Max Castro

''Business is crime,'' Edwin H. Sutherland wrote.

Sutherland was arguably the premier American sociological criminologist of the 20th century. His radical statement is the opening line of White Collar Crime, the book that coined the term. It is a classic 1949 study of corporate wrongdoing.

In light of recent scandals and the strenuous attempts by pro-business ideologues to portray them as rare exceptions, this is a good time to revisit Sutherland.

Even in today's climate of skepticism, Sutherland's equation of business and crime still sounds, to most people, like a gross exaggeration. Perhaps one reason is that Sutherland's research about corporate crime was partially suppressed due to fear of retribution. Concerned that the powerful corporations that Sutherland had named as miscreants would sue, Dryden Press censored the identities of the offending companies out of the 1949 edition.

The names did not appear until the unexpurgated 1983 edition, published 33 years after Sutherland's death and half a century after the offenses were committed. Thus ''corporate power'' was able to effect a kind of ''social amnesia'' by suppressing into near irrelevancy data about itself and its misdeeds.

What did Sutherland's research reveal to pose such a dire threat? He found that corporate crime was more the rule than the exception.

Sutherland studied the 70 largest corporations in the United States over a 20-year period. He found that 90 percent of these corporations were habitual offenders of laws regulating advertising, labor, trade, patents, copyrights and more.

Sutherland uncovered a total of 980 violations, with an average of 14 per company. He concluded that corporate crime was no aberration perpetrated by deviant executives. Rather, just as novice street criminals learn their trade through association with more seasoned offenders, executives learn the attitudes that result in corporate crime in the course of normal business.

Sutherland's findings have been confirmed in more recent research by sociologists Amitai Etzioni and Marshall Clinard. Etzioni found that over a nine-year period (1975-1984), 62 percent of Fortune 500 companies had been involved in corrupt practices such as price fixing, bribery and violations of environmental laws. Clinard found 45 percent of the 582 largest U.S. corporations involved in some wrongdoing over a two-year period (1975-1976).

It is not surprising that these studies haven't received much publicity. The zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, has been one of laissez faire to the point of letting business get away with murder and of seeing no evil when it comes to capitalism and corporations. It is a mind-set that over more than two decades has produced public policy skewed disastrously in favor of corporations and the rich and against the interests of workers, the middle class, consumers and the environment.

The results of that policy are visible in deteriorating public education, massive incarcerations, increasing inequality of wealth and income, the domination of politics by money and mediocre performance on internationally recognized social indicators of national well-being.

But after the dotcom bust, the Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, et al., scandals and the imploding stock market, is there not at least a glimmer of hope that some consciousness is beginning to break through the social amnesia? Could that noise be more than a bubble bursting on Wall Street? Could it be an ideology collapsing, bringing in its wake a more balanced approach to the relationship between business and society, rich and poor, corporations and the state?

Perhaps the November congressional elections will provide some indication of the answer to that question.

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