1 Branding Citizens: The Logic(s) of A Few Bad Apples Jennifer Wingard The 2003 documentary The Corporation contains a compelling segment wherein directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot assemble news media clips blaming corporate financial and ethical misconduct on the behavior of “a few bad apples” instead of systemic problems of corporate oversight. Achbar and Abbot’s pacing of the segment draws attention to the branding work of “bad apples,” and by the end of the segment, they have created a rhythmic montage of major news outlets uttering “bad apples” and “a few bad apples” repeatedly. Their focus on the language of “a few bad apples” argues that the media is complicit in protecting corporate interests by disarticulating wrongdoing from the greater corporate logics which govern our world. Instead, “a few bad apples” take the blame for the wrongdoing that is enabled by the legal and economic systems that allow corporations to behave “like psychopaths with no regard for others and no remorse for their harmful behavior” (Akbar et al. 2003). The Corporation argues for an understanding of and resistance to the overbearing and non-humanist control corporations have over governments and private citizens’ daily lives. It exposes the intricate neoliberal logics that undergird corporate behavior as well as the governmentality that enables the wholesale adoption of those logics. The work of Achbar and Abbot demonstrates how neoliberal nation-states organize the daily lives of citizens in the name of economic gain for a small group of individuals. In other words, much like corporations whose only requirement is to make profits for their shareholders, the nation-state that adheres to neoliberal governmentality works solely to create surplus value without much regard for the collective lives of its citizens.