Filmmaker Jeff Cohen on His Latest Doc, ‘The Corporate Coup’

 The Corporate Coup d’État will soon be available 

to everyone on DVD and video-on-demand.

"The movie is about how our democracy has been hijacked 

by corporate power and how we arrived at Trump."       

A film not to miss! — Molly 

“In the last forty years the corporations have taken total control of one party and half or more of the other.”

By Ed Rampell

According to independent media advocate Jeff Cohen, the United States needs to “evolve” beyond predatory, corporate capitalism, because solving problems like climate change can’t happen with the status quo. He says we need to move toward something like “eco-socialism, democratic socialism, or libertarian socialism,” and assigns the media a big role to play in that shift.

Cohen, one of America’s leading critics of mainstream media, founded the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting and co-founded, with Norman Solomon, the online progressive activist group RootsAction.org. Cohen was a panelist on Fox News Watch, a show on media bias, and senior producer of Phil Donahue’s MSNBC program, until, Cohen says, he and Donahue were “fired for questioning the impending invasion of Iraq.”

Cohen is now producing documentaries, including 2016’s All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone and most recently, The Corporate Coup D’ État, both directed by Fred Peabody. 

I interviewed Cohen in West Hollywood before he presented the SoCal premiere of his latest film.

Q: Tell us about your most recent film, The Corporate Coup D’ État.

Jeff Cohen: It traces the last forty years of U.S. capitalism and politics, and how a handful of corporations have seized control over the economy and the political system. We contrast recent history with the period from the late thirties to the late seventies, which was an anomalous period in capitalism’s history. Union militants and socialist activists in the thirties led to one out of every three U.S. workers in a union. From the beginning of WWII to the next twenty-five years, real wages of average workers doubled.

Contrast that with what we’ve had since the corporate coup of late seventies, with corporations making war with unions, and taking control not just of the Republican Party, 98 percent, but half of the Democratic Party. The movie is about how our democracy has been hijacked by corporate power and how we arrived at Trump.    

Contrast that with what we’ve had since the corporate coup of late seventies, with corporations making war with unions, and taking control not just of the Republican Party, 98 percent, but half of the Democratic Party. The movie is about how our democracy has been hijacked by corporate power and how we arrived at Trump.       

Q: What are “sacrifice zones”?

Cohen: Journalist Chris Hedges, one of the stars of our movie, has written about sacrifice zones. They’re places where corporations went into a city or town or region, got the government to build them highways right to the factory gates, made decades of high profits, and then, thanks to NAFTA, just picked up and left, abandoning the communities, workers and factories for cheaper labor in Mexico, China, and Vietnam. These zones were basically sacrificed—they are now places of utter desperation, with no jobs, opioid addiction, et cetera.

The two zones in the movie are Camden, New Jersey, and Youngstown, Ohio. We interviewed union workers, Democrats, who voted for Trump. A bunch of them voted for Obama twice, voted in the 2016 Democratic primary for Bernie against Hillary, and then flipped to vote for Trump. The movie sheds lots of light on why Hillary lost to Trump, and why these “rust belt” communities, another way of saying “sacrifice zone,” in Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan went to Trump.

Workers who never voted for a Republican voted for Trump because he pretended to be this populist who was against the corporate elites. They connected Hillary to Bill Clinton, who brought us NAFTA. And if Joe Biden is the nominee they’ll do the same thing to him. It will be an election fought over the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement—a sore spot for anyone working in the auto and steel industries.   

Please continue this interview here: https://progressive.org/dispatches/jeff-cohen-on-the-corporate-coup-rampell-191019/?fbclid=IwAR0XQtZDXNKLn7pfG2VK064yLd3LoXPIL24aC3EgUi3Mzq1Pie0SyC8LMSs#.XayHPJEF938.facebook