Speaker 1: Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with
Speaker 1: me your girl Danielle Moody recording from the home bunker. Folks,
Speaker 1: I'm excited for today's guest because I gotta tell you,
Speaker 1: you know, I interview authors all the time. I hope
Speaker 1: that many of you are like me, with your Amazon
Speaker 1: carts or local bookstore carts consistently filled with the people
Speaker 1: that I bring on to WOKF. Today's guest I think
Speaker 1: wins right now in terms of the titles that I've heard.
Speaker 1: As of late, Joan Walsh, along with her co authors
Speaker 1: Nick Hanoer and Donald Cohen, put out the book Corporate Bullshit,
Speaker 1: exposing the lies and half truths that protect profit, power
Speaker 1: and wealth in America. It is a book that is
Speaker 1: not like your normal dry academic reads let me bring
Speaker 1: you through history. But it is funny, it is entertaining,
Speaker 1: it is thoughtful, and what it offers for where we
Speaker 1: find ourselves right now, at a time when we have
Speaker 1: witnessed multiple industries go on strike push back against corporate
Speaker 1: overlords who want the ability to be able to buy
Speaker 1: their fifth sixth home and their fucking rockets to go
Speaker 1: to outer space, but not provide a living wage, healthcare,
Speaker 1: or any decent benefits for workers. And what we've seen
Speaker 1: in particularly over the last three years with COVID is
Speaker 1: this assertion and this realignment of people recognizing that workers
Speaker 1: truly do have power when we work in community with
Speaker 1: one another. That frankly, where our society finds itself is
Speaker 1: that the chasm between the haves and the have nots
Speaker 1: has grown so fucking large that even the illusion that
Speaker 1: folks who still have the ability to call themselves middle
Speaker 1: class or dare I say upper middle class, believe that
Speaker 1: they were just one side hustle, one gig, one a
Speaker 1: lottery ticket away from being wealthy, recognize that they are
Speaker 1: generations away from the kind of wealth that we have
Speaker 1: seen accumulated over the last few years and consolidated by
Speaker 1: just a small handful of people. And so in this
Speaker 1: book Corporate Bullshit, and in my conversation with Joan, we
Speaker 1: get into some of the history that we have known,
Speaker 1: things that we have understood over the past few years,
Speaker 1: and whether or not we believe that this space that
Speaker 1: we are in is just another moment or is it
Speaker 1: really the worker's movement right This idea that we're not
Speaker 1: going to continue to fall for the lie and the
Speaker 1: ropodope that, oh, if we were as wealthy as these
Speaker 1: billionaire shareholders and CEOs, that we too will continue to
Speaker 1: vote against our best interest because we just might make
Speaker 1: it there one day. We ain't making it there. That's
Speaker 1: the joke, that's the punchline. And so what are we
Speaker 1: doing collectively to create a better society that sees the
Speaker 1: full humanity of workers and understands that the bridge between
Speaker 1: the overlord and the worker should not be so fucking
Speaker 1: long and so big and so deep. So coming up next,
Speaker 1: my conversation with one of the authors of Corporate Bullshit,
Speaker 1: Exposing the lies and half truths that protect profit power
Speaker 1: and wealth in America, Joan Walsh. Folks, I am very
Speaker 1: excited to welcome to OKF Daily four, I believe the
Speaker 1: very first time Joan Walsh, who is the National Affairs
Speaker 1: correspondent for the Nation, the co producer of the Emmy
Speaker 1: nominated documentary The Sit In. Harry Belafonte, hosts The Tonight Show,
Speaker 1: and author of What's the Matter with White People? And
Speaker 1: co author of the new book Corporate Bullshit, Exposing the
Speaker 1: lies and half truths that protect profit power and wealth
Speaker 1: in America. Joan. First off, love the title. I love
Speaker 1: the title of the book because you know, I find
Speaker 1: that it drives me crazy. I will say this, it
Speaker 1: drives me crazy when people workers defend corporations, defend the
Speaker 1: lies that have been told around the reasons why we
Speaker 1: all needed to sit inside of cubicles and offices for
Speaker 1: nine to ten hours a day until lo and behold,
Speaker 1: there's a global health pandemic and we can't make it
Speaker 1: into work, and we can't go to school, and lo
Speaker 1: and behold, we figure out a way to adapt, a
Speaker 1: way that is actually human centered and not profit centered.
Speaker 1: And then when that pandemic is you know, under control,
Speaker 1: and I use quotation marks with that, with a vaccine,
Speaker 1: it's we got to go back to the offices because
Speaker 1: of what exactly. No one's profits have declined. As a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, the see CEOs and shareholders of major
Speaker 1: corporations got wealthier, right, But oh, there's another game at play,
Speaker 1: which is corporate real estate and the amount of money
Speaker 1: that they've paid for these places. And so everything that
Speaker 1: I realize in your book airs out. And I just
Speaker 1: want to start off with this question, which is why
Speaker 1: do we fall for the lives why do Why are
Speaker 1: they so able to manipulate us out of our human
Speaker 1: centered ideas of how we should work versus how they
Speaker 1: want us to work.
Speaker 2: I think because they've been perfecting these lies for you know,
Speaker 2: literally centuries. You know, our book starts with a lot
Speaker 2: of the early quotations about slavery, defending slavery something that
Speaker 2: is kind of back in vogue, and that they whether
Speaker 2: it's slave owners, landowners, corporate owners today, they managed to
Speaker 2: convince us that their self interest is in our self interest,
Speaker 2: that they have our best interests at heart. So you
Speaker 2: are you know, you know, our history of oh, slavery
Speaker 2: was just very good for the slaves. Slaves are happy,
Speaker 2: they're healthy, they're well fed. This is a good thing
Speaker 2: for these people who have been given religion and you know,
Speaker 2: pretending that people didn't have it before and all of that.
Speaker 2: I mean that in some ways is the most disgusting
Speaker 2: and the most obvious, although it's being recycled, so maybe
Speaker 2: it could still work. And I think, you know, one
Speaker 2: of the big issues we discuss in the book is
Speaker 2: that they've managed to convince so many workers that if
Speaker 2: they want to help us, they do, they really do.
Speaker 2: But you know, their profits would decline, they go out
Speaker 2: of business, and then we wouldn't even have the jobs
Speaker 2: we're complaining about, whether we're striking, union organizing, asking for
Speaker 2: you know, wage increases, as individuals asking for family leave.
Speaker 2: They'd like to do it. But you know, if you
Speaker 2: think your job is a problem, now wait till you
Speaker 2: don't have a job. And that comes out again and
Speaker 2: again in different kinds of iterations, and so I think
Speaker 2: that's that's the main thing that they've been They've been
Speaker 2: honing this set of lies around so many issues for
Speaker 2: hundreds of years, and working people catch up and you know,
Speaker 2: combat them, but then they have to face it in
Speaker 2: a different form or in a different in a different context.
Speaker 2: We chose to organize the book around the specific types
Speaker 2: of lies, the categories of lies, rather than okay, here's
Speaker 2: a chapter about climate change, or here's a chapter about
Speaker 2: the minimum wage, or here's medicare We have those examples
Speaker 2: throughout the book, and we have some case studies that
Speaker 2: are specifically about those issue choose, But we thought it
Speaker 2: was more effective to just show you how this is
Speaker 2: their playbook and they can adapt this set of arguments
Speaker 2: to virtually everything, and they're shameless and so you know,
Speaker 2: it's a kind of a handbook for fighting back. It's
Speaker 2: a kind of you know, one of our one of
Speaker 2: our reviewer called it kind of an inoculation, you know, vaccines.
Speaker 2: This is kind of a vaccine, potentially a vaccine against lies.
Speaker 2: And you know, I also want to add that it's
Speaker 2: a fun read. Like we really we emphasize the quotes,
Speaker 2: the cartoons, the headlines. It's not a thick tome of
Speaker 2: oh you know, oh no, oh my god. It's something
Speaker 2: you can dip into and out of and uh as
Speaker 2: you want to. You can sit there and read it through,
Speaker 2: but you can also go to your issues or to
Speaker 2: what intrigues you. And we thought it was important that
Speaker 2: it be like that to kind of get it out
Speaker 2: of the hands of academics. God bless our academics, right,
Speaker 2: but you know, make it something that a union organizer
Speaker 2: or you know, or a nurse or a childcare worker
Speaker 2: or you know, somebody working on the hill in city
Speaker 2: hall can get their hands on it and get their
Speaker 2: minds around and be you know, smarter and more effective
Speaker 2: of fighting back.
Speaker 1: Dig into some of the lies that the book is
Speaker 1: organized around. For us, because I think that to your point,
Speaker 1: the way in which corporate America has been able to adapt,
Speaker 1: regardless of the century, regardless of what is at play,
Speaker 1: that they are utilizing the same playbook, but they just
Speaker 1: iterate on it, right, And so you know what struck
Speaker 1: me before you get into that, what struck me at
Speaker 1: the beginning was when you said, you know, these are
Speaker 1: the justificate. It's a same justifications that they made for slavery.
Speaker 1: When your idea of work comes out of being able
Speaker 1: to have power over people, being able to press them
Speaker 1: literally until their breaking points, and that be the formation
Speaker 1: of your understanding around work and value, it's no wonder
Speaker 1: why we find ourselves centuries later in the place that
Speaker 1: we are, where you still have corporate overlords trying to
Speaker 1: get trying to best themselves back to a place of
Speaker 1: free labor, right.
Speaker 2: As close as close as possible, to free labor, to
Speaker 2: labor without any rights to labor, without any protections, any
Speaker 2: health protections, all the while insisting that you know, the
Speaker 2: workers are really are really, actually happy and they're doing well.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, the set of lies, you know, it
Speaker 2: starts with it's not a problem, you know, it's just
Speaker 2: it's it's not a problem. Coal mining accidents are just
Speaker 2: part of nature, you know, it's it's it's a law
Speaker 2: of nature. Uh. And you know cigarettes are not addictive. Uh,
Speaker 2: Nicotine is not a problem. There's no such thing as
Speaker 2: global warming and that and climate change. So you know
Speaker 2: that goes on to this day. Right, we're told that
Speaker 2: so many things that we identify as problems or problems,
Speaker 2: and then they you know, they flip if they really
Speaker 2: have to admit it's a problem. One of their really
Speaker 2: devilish and devious adjustments is, Okay, it's a problem, but
Speaker 2: it's not our fault. It's your fault. So okay, there
Speaker 2: are actually coal mining accidents, unfortunately, but it's because the
Speaker 2: workers are careless, uh and stupid. The workers won't wear
Speaker 2: protective gear in chemical factories. Uh. They they take chances,
Speaker 2: they come to they come to work drunk. You know,
Speaker 2: we don't need seat belts, we need care careful drivers.
Speaker 2: You know, car accidents are caused by bad, lazy drivers.
Speaker 2: And there's nothing you can't legislate that, you know, out
Speaker 2: of the landscape. And so you know, they're so good
Speaker 2: at blaming us. And there's I think there's something in
Speaker 2: our psyches. You know that we've sort of many of
Speaker 2: us have been working on in different ways personally and
Speaker 2: collectively that it's easy to get ourselves to blame ourselves,
Speaker 2: you know, at least for a time like that can
Speaker 2: be a phase of your development. Oh you know, really,
Speaker 2: I guess I really shouldn't have done X, Y or
Speaker 2: Z on the job. I cause that no, you do,
Speaker 2: you know you didn't. And this is what they do.
Speaker 2: And they have, you know, teams of management consultants to
Speaker 2: tell them that, so you know, it's it's your fault
Speaker 2: so we can't protect you. Then it's like, well, we'd
Speaker 2: like to protect you, but somehow we would only make
Speaker 2: things worse. And that is you know, that can range
Speaker 2: from uh, we talked about already, the you know, job
Speaker 2: killing nature of regulation that you know, that's one example.
Speaker 2: But you know, also I think one of the most
Speaker 2: formative lies like this to me was when Ronald Reagan
Speaker 2: said the federal government fought a war on poverty and
Speaker 2: poverty won. Well, that's a lie, it didn't. But by
Speaker 2: sounding like he really cared about poor people and he
Speaker 2: really would want to help them if he could, I
Speaker 2: think it was like sort of the new Reagan, because
Speaker 2: the old Reagan. The original Reagan was all about blaming
Speaker 2: poor people, blaming black people, a lot of rational beyond
Speaker 2: dog whistling, you know, welfare queens, et cetera. But then
Speaker 2: the Reagan who got elected in nineteen eighty was kind
Speaker 2: of a he was a more genial Reagan, and now
Speaker 2: he really cared about poverty, except those bureaucrats, you know,
Speaker 2: they broke up families u welfare cause quote illegitimacy. Although
Speaker 2: when we cut when we dramatically cut back welfare, we
Speaker 2: still have the same rates of you know, single parent
Speaker 2: households that we had back in you know, when welfare
Speaker 2: reformed passed under Democrats under Bill Clinton in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 2: All of these cultural explanations have turned out to be bullshit.
Speaker 2: But learning how to couch your self interest, your corporate donors,
Speaker 2: self interest in the case of politician as we're really
Speaker 2: looking out for other people. But this is the best
Speaker 2: way to do it. That's been profound and you can
Speaker 2: you see that kind of thing to this day.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the things that stick out to
Speaker 1: me too in the ways that we have as a
Speaker 1: society allowed the bullshit to prevail, is this idea that
Speaker 1: because I had to deal with it. You should too.
Speaker 1: I think about the difference in terms of how this
Speaker 1: is the first time I think in work life where
Speaker 1: you have a multitude of generations in the workforce at
Speaker 1: the same time. The Boomers are there, gen X is there,
Speaker 1: Millennials are there, and now you have gen Z all
Speaker 1: working at the same time and in the same space.
Speaker 2: Right, because we can't afford to retire.
Speaker 1: Because you all can't afford to retire, and.
Speaker 2: Well for ourselves compared compared to other generations. But it's
Speaker 2: still kind of hard anyway.
Speaker 1: And but the reality is that you have this generational
Speaker 1: divide where gen Z and millennials are saying, we don't
Speaker 1: want to take workplace abuse. That isn't a that isn't
Speaker 1: par for the course for you to be able to
Speaker 1: email me at ten pm and expect, you know, me
Speaker 1: to be on call all the time. Right that this
Speaker 1: type of you need to put the company, the firm,
Speaker 1: the business, the school, this, that and the other thing
Speaker 1: before your own needs, right, is just par for the course.
Speaker 1: The abuse that you would take from bosses and what
Speaker 1: have you. Is that that's what you do, right, That's
Speaker 1: called being a grown up. And yet you have this
Speaker 1: younger generation and I look at really gen Z because
Speaker 1: millennials are forty now, But you have this younger generation
Speaker 1: that is just like, wait a minute, actually no, I'll
Speaker 1: just not do that job. I'll just quit right because
Speaker 1: I'm never gonna have what is considered the the I
Speaker 1: guess the accoutrements that come with success. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: own a home. I can't afford it. You see mortgage
Speaker 1: rates right, like, I'm not.
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna own a car because I'm gonna live
Speaker 1: in a city, So I'm not gonna have that either.
Speaker 1: So the trappings, and I'm not gonna get married, right
Speaker 1: because I see no benefit. I'd see no real benefit.
Speaker 1: Everybody's everybody's divorce rates are high. So the trappings that
Speaker 1: used to keep people in these jobs, right, and my
Speaker 1: healthcare is shit anyway, right right, So are no longer there.
Speaker 1: But you see older generations kind of scoffing at Oh, well,
Speaker 1: they're just lazy in my generation, we you know, so
Speaker 1: how like that's that is also Joan, right, a part
Speaker 1: of the lie that we then regurgitate to ourselves and
Speaker 1: to younger generations. Because I endured you should have to too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that, you know, especially for boomers. And
Speaker 2: when you see that to some extent, it's it's a
Speaker 2: two edged sword, because comparatively, boomers are doing well. We
Speaker 2: were the last generation that college was affordable. You know,
Speaker 2: more of us were able to buy homes, We didn't
Speaker 2: graduate with a ton of student debt. To the extent
Speaker 2: that the system worked for us, then it's just like,
Speaker 2: why don't you little whiners buckle down and it'll work
Speaker 2: for you. Now, that's just patently untrue. We've seen it.
Speaker 2: We've seen that real wages have declined. We've seen that
Speaker 2: purchasing power has declined. Home prices of sword, rent prices
Speaker 2: of sword, all the things that were in some ways subsidized,
Speaker 2: like college as well as home ownership, all of that
Speaker 2: has either disappeared or dried up or retracted. And so
Speaker 2: the building blocks or the ladders of opportunity that really
Speaker 2: in the forties and fifties, in the post war period
Speaker 2: into the sixties really sort of consciously privileged labor over capital,
Speaker 2: really gave unions and workers generally more rights, really did
Speaker 2: subsidize the building of homes, et cetera, et cetera. All
Speaker 2: of that post war apparatus was like, it was a
Speaker 2: structure of opportunity, and it literally built high tax rates,
Speaker 2: built the middle class as we have come to know it,
Speaker 2: and which has been in trouble since the you know,
Speaker 2: mainly Republican corporate backlash of the nineteen seventies. And you know,
Speaker 2: we can track the you know, the decline in wages
Speaker 2: and the decline in top tax rates, et cetera, and
Speaker 2: the decline in the middle class. So I think it's
Speaker 2: that people who've kind of made it think, well, the
Speaker 2: same you know, effort will work for everybody that's part
Speaker 2: of it. And then I think, you know, you said
Speaker 2: something that struck me before about the pandemic was such
Speaker 2: an interesting, horrible but it's socially interesting experiment because I,
Speaker 2: you know, am kind of an optimist, because you'd have
Speaker 2: to be to doing this to do this work this long,
Speaker 2: you know, And I remember feeling in my fear and
Speaker 2: my grief that well, hey, maybe we're seeing that, Wow,
Speaker 2: we're all in this together. The fact the health inequities
Speaker 2: that we have perpetrated on you know, low income, working class,
Speaker 2: poor people of color are now having ripples that are
Speaker 2: affecting all of us. We can turn society in a
Speaker 2: way on a dime. We can all. I can't say all,
Speaker 2: but many of us can work at home. I remember
Speaker 2: thinking we would have vastly greater both empathy for each other,
Speaker 2: for healthcare workers, you know, banging the pots and pans,
Speaker 2: would would give way to better wages for people especially
Speaker 2: at the bottom, the essential workers, people in body bags,
Speaker 2: as well as holding their hands when they died, we
Speaker 2: would we would understand that they really were doing God's
Speaker 2: work and give them a living wage. All these things
Speaker 2: that I thought, And that also we could remake the workplace.
Speaker 2: And you know, whether you're a student, whether you have
Speaker 2: whether your mom or dad, whether you're a middle aged
Speaker 2: person caring for an elder family member, that you could
Speaker 2: have a more humane approach to work and working from
Speaker 2: home and hours, work life balance. It could all be
Speaker 2: done because we did it, you know, and then we
Speaker 2: decided it was too expensive, uh, and so we had
Speaker 2: to stop doing it. And so, you know, I really
Speaker 2: think that that was profoundly dispiriting, to say the least.
Speaker 2: And again, right, we're supposed to go into the office
Speaker 2: because you know, uh, the big land, the big office building. Uh,
Speaker 2: you know, monarchs can't get the same rents. You know,
Speaker 2: I actually have more sympathy for this the you know,
Speaker 2: the businesses, the small businesses, yes.
Speaker 1: The small right that relied on you know, it's an ecosystem.
Speaker 2: It is an ecosystem, and so you know, you'd have
Speaker 2: to really think big about how to how to rebuild it.
Speaker 2: But it can't be on the backs of making people
Speaker 2: you know, face horrible commutes, be separated from their families,
Speaker 2: their dogs. As mine sleeps here. I would never go
Speaker 2: back into an office and leave my dog. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm joking. I mean, I'm not joking, but that's trivial.
Speaker 2: You know. We could do that for a while when
Speaker 2: it benefited the owners, but we can't do it now
Speaker 2: when it benefits the workers. But you know, I just
Speaker 2: I do feel again semi optimistic because we've seen such
Speaker 2: a wave of labor activism and such a wave of oization,
Speaker 2: whether it's Starbucks and Amazon to you know, the Writer's
Speaker 2: Guild and sag Aftra. More people are seeing themselves as workers,
Speaker 2: not you know, somebody who's gonna have the secret sauce.
Speaker 2: And whatever your job is, you know you're gonna be
Speaker 2: brown nosing enough or you're gonna work hard enough, or
Speaker 2: you're gonna be brilliant enough that you will get well
Speaker 2: paid for your efforts, and those people who don't are
Speaker 2: just you know, slackers, and you know they deserve their fate.
Speaker 2: I think we've seen a real reduction in that kind
Speaker 2: of really anti social attitude, and that's a good thing.
Speaker 1: I think that the chasm became so clear and deep
Speaker 1: and stark between the haves and the have nots that
Speaker 1: even the illusion of like the lottery thinking that many
Speaker 1: people have that I'm just one ticket away, one step away,
Speaker 1: right from uber wealth, and if I were them, I
Speaker 1: would do the same thing. That that attitude has shifted
Speaker 1: because we realized that you were not one ticket, one step,
Speaker 1: one job away from that obscene amount of wealth. You're
Speaker 1: actually really far from it, and you're closer to the
Speaker 1: people who are in poverty. That what we all recognize,
Speaker 1: particularly during the pandemic, is that most people in this
Speaker 1: country were one step away from a food line, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I think that we all fail to remember that the
Speaker 1: food lines in neighborhoods that we didn't even know how
Speaker 1: had food banks, right were wrapped around.
Speaker 2: In the suburbs. You know, people were lining up in
Speaker 2: their cars. You know, parking lots were full, and you know,
Speaker 2: for you'd see cars for miles. You know, in the cities,
Speaker 2: you'd see lines around the block, and you'd see people
Speaker 2: you formerly wouldn't see. I mean, you know, if you
Speaker 2: if you live in most cities, you know there's a
Speaker 2: food bank near you. You know, you know that, but
Speaker 2: you know, I would see the lines were two and
Speaker 2: three times what they used to be, and you would
Speaker 2: see people who you maybe wouldn't have seen before, or
Speaker 2: maybe you were seeing everyone anew. So, so yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: I still don't think we're finished with reckoning with all
Speaker 2: of that, and I do think that there's an opportunity
Speaker 2: to you know, spread some of this new wisdom that
Speaker 2: you know, we are all a step away from the
Speaker 2: food bank. And I think the you know, the persistently
Speaker 2: American idea that hey, we can all get rich. So
Speaker 2: don't begrudge the you know, the founders of Google or
Speaker 2: Uber or Amazon or you know back in the day
Speaker 2: that the Robert Barons the oil companies. Don't begrudge in
Speaker 2: that because you know that could be you. It's not
Speaker 2: just yes, it's a lottery ticket, but it's also I
Speaker 2: don't know, you know, some miracle, you know, more your
Speaker 2: worth will be rewarded someday. So I'd rather keep taxes
Speaker 2: on those people low because someday I could be one
Speaker 2: of them. No, probably not, you probably are almost certainly can't.
Speaker 2: And I think there's a little bit more realism about that.
Speaker 1: Finally, so joan last question for you, what are your
Speaker 1: hopes you and your co authors for corporate bullshit? What
Speaker 1: do you hope that people take from it?
Speaker 2: I hope that people get a sense of of the optimism, uh,
Speaker 2: and the paradigm shift that we're discussing Danielle, that they
Speaker 2: really do have more power, that these uh, these people
Speaker 2: have been putting out these self serving lies for so long,
Speaker 2: and uh, you know, I think it's it's the great
Speaker 2: economist Robert Robert Reich says, uh, we blurbed the book
Speaker 2: for us, which is lovely, and he says something like,
Speaker 2: you know, once you see this, once you see this pattern,
Speaker 2: the way they lie, there are arguments you can't unsee it.
Speaker 2: And we've you know, we've had you read it now
Speaker 2: saying yeah, it's like you know, I even had Tim Miller,
Speaker 2: who's you know, Bulwark founder and a former Republican who
Speaker 2: you know is now mostly you know, come over to
Speaker 2: our side. Say. You know, as he was reading it,
Speaker 2: he felt bad about not just what he did as
Speaker 2: a Republican, UH strategist, worker whatever, but you know he
Speaker 2: did in between times he did some work for corporations.
Speaker 2: And he's like, yeah, we really did use these bullshit
Speaker 2: arguments and they did work, but they were lies. And
Speaker 2: you know, so I love moments like that where even
Speaker 2: people who used to do this stuff or like this
Speaker 2: is really unconscionable. I'd like, I mean, every day we
Speaker 2: have another example of you know, Ron DeSantis wants it
Speaker 2: to be taught that slavery benefited some the enslaved. Great,
Speaker 2: we have child labor is making a comeback and it's
Speaker 2: reviving the you know, the old arguments in favor of
Speaker 2: child labor, that this is good for kids, makes them stronger,
Speaker 2: it's good for their families who we don't want to
Speaker 2: pay living we don't want to pay their parents living wages.
Speaker 2: I mean that was also that was true back then
Speaker 2: they needed the extra income. How dare we take that
Speaker 2: away from those poor parents? You know, the child tax credit,
Speaker 2: which you know again those one of those paradigm shifts
Speaker 2: in a heartbeat. We reduced not white, but quickly, we reduced.
Speaker 2: We cut child probably in half. But people ranging from
Speaker 2: Republicans to Joe Manchin who's close to a Republican, they
Speaker 2: were against it because it was going to discourage work. Again,
Speaker 2: back to that welfare you know it causes poverty thing, Well,
Speaker 2: this is going to cause more child poverty because they're moms,
Speaker 2: mostly moms, and dads are going to work less. Even
Speaker 2: though there's no we've ran this experiment, there's no evidence
Speaker 2: that the child tax credit did that, but they're still
Speaker 2: using this pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You know,
Speaker 2: you'll get soft and lazy if we coddle you. Get
Speaker 2: out there and work. They're still using the arguments, and
Speaker 2: I'm sorry to say they worked. We don't have that,
Speaker 2: you know, the level of credit we had. So I'm
Speaker 2: hoping that people can see that and that these arguments
Speaker 2: will work less and that this will be a handbook
Speaker 2: for you know, activists. I was going to say, young activists, no,
Speaker 2: old activists, everybody, everybody to really begin to see the
Speaker 2: power that we have to construct new narratives based on
Speaker 2: truth and also based on what's good for most of
Speaker 2: us and not just good for the wealthy.
Speaker 1: So brilliant, folks. The book is corporate bullshit, exposing the
Speaker 1: lies and half truths that protect profit, power and wealth
Speaker 1: in America, and you should pick it up immediately. It is,
Speaker 1: as she said, not a dry academic read. I think
Speaker 1: you guys will enjoy it. Joan, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for making the time for wok F Daily, and I
Speaker 1: hope that you will come back again and join us.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it was really fun. Thank you for the conversation.
Speaker 1: That is it for me today. Dear friends on Woke
Speaker 1: af AS always, power to the people and to all
Speaker 1: the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.