The Haves and Have Nots

As of late, Joan Walsh, along with her co authors Nick Hanoer and Donald Cohen, put out the book Corporate Bullshit, exposing the lies and half truths that protect profit, power and wealth in America. It is a book that is not like your normal dry academic reads let me bring

you through history. But it is funny, it is entertaining, it is thoughtful, and what it offers for where we find ourselves right now, at a time when we have witnessed multiple industries go on strike push back against corporate overlords who want the ability to be able to buy their fifth sixth home and their fucking rockets to go to outer space, but not provide a living wage, healthcare,

or any decent benefits for workers. And what we've seen in particularly over the last three years with COVID is this assertion and this realignment of people recognizing that workers truly do have power when we work in community with

one another. That frankly, where our society finds itself is that the chasm between the haves and the have nots has grown so fucking large that even the illusion that folks who still have the ability to call themselves middle class or dare I say upper middle class, believe that they were just one side hustle, one gig, one a lottery ticket away from being wealthy, recognize that they are generations away from the kind of wealth that we have

seen accumulated over the last few years and consolidated by

just a small handful of people. And so in this book Corporate Bullshit, and in my conversation with Joan, we get into some of the history that we have known, things that we have understood over the past few years, and whether or not we believe that this space that we are in is just another moment or is it really the worker's movement right This idea that we're not going to continue to fall for the lie and the ropodope that, oh, if we were as wealthy as these

billionaire shareholders and CEOs, that we too will continue to vote against our best interest because we just might make it there one day. We ain't making it there. That's the joke, that's the punchline. And so what are we doing collectively to create a better society that sees the full humanity of workers and understands that the bridge between the overlord and the worker should not be so fucking

long and so big and so deep. So coming up next, my conversation with one of the authors of Corporate Bullshit, Exposing the lies and half truths that protect profit power and wealth in America, Joan Walsh. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to OKF Daily four, I believe the very first time Joan Walsh, who is the National Affairs correspondent for the Nation, the co producer of the Emmy nominated documentary The Sit In. Harry Belafonte, hosts The Tonight Show,

and author of What's the Matter with White People? And co author of the new book Corporate Bullshit, Exposing the lies and half truths that protect profit power and wealth in America. Joan. First off, love the title. I love the title of the book because you know, I find

that it drives me crazy. I will say this, it drives me crazy when people workers defend corporations, defend the lies that have been told around the reasons why we all needed to sit inside of cubicles and offices for nine to ten hours a day until lo and behold, there's a global health pandemic and we can't make it into work, and we can't go to school, and lo and behold, we figure out a way to adapt, a way that is actually human centered and not profit centered.

And then when that pandemic is you know, under control, and I use quotation marks with that, with a vaccine, it's we got to go back to the offices because of what exactly. No one's profits have declined. As a matter of fact, the see CEOs and shareholders of major corporations got wealthier, right, But oh, there's another game at play, which is corporate real estate and the amount of money that they've paid for these places. And so everything that

I realize in your book airs out. And I just want to start off with this question, which is why do we fall for the lives why do Why are they so able to manipulate us out of our human centered ideas of how we should work versus how they want us to work.

was just very good for the slaves. Slaves are happy, they're healthy, they're well fed. This is a good thing for these people who have been given religion and you know, pretending that people didn't have it before and all of that. I mean that in some ways is the most disgusting and the most obvious, although it's being recycled, so maybe

it could still work. And I think, you know, one of the big issues we discuss in the book is that they've managed to convince so many workers that if they want to help us, they do, they really do. But you know, their profits would decline, they go out of business, and then we wouldn't even have the jobs we're complaining about, whether we're striking, union organizing, asking for you know, wage increases, as individuals asking for family leave.

They'd like to do it. But you know, if you think your job is a problem, now wait till you don't have a job. And that comes out again and again in different kinds of iterations, and so I think that's that's the main thing that they've been They've been honing this set of lies around so many issues for hundreds of years, and working people catch up and you know, combat them, but then they have to face it in a different form or in a different in a different context.

We chose to organize the book around the specific types of lies, the categories of lies, rather than okay, here's a chapter about climate change, or here's a chapter about the minimum wage, or here's medicare We have those examples throughout the book, and we have some case studies that are specifically about those issue choose, But we thought it was more effective to just show you how this is their playbook and they can adapt this set of arguments

to virtually everything, and they're shameless and so you know, it's a kind of a handbook for fighting back. It's a kind of you know, one of our one of our reviewer called it kind of an inoculation, you know, vaccines. This is kind of a vaccine, potentially a vaccine against lies. And you know, I also want to add that it's a fun read. Like we really we emphasize the quotes, the cartoons, the headlines. It's not a thick tome of

oh you know, oh no, oh my god. It's something you can dip into and out of and uh as you want to. You can sit there and read it through, but you can also go to your issues or to what intrigues you. And we thought it was important that it be like that to kind of get it out

of the hands of academics. God bless our academics, right, but you know, make it something that a union organizer or you know, or a nurse or a childcare worker or you know, somebody working on the hill in city hall can get their hands on it and get their minds around and be you know, smarter and more effective of fighting back.

When your idea of work comes out of being able to have power over people, being able to press them literally until their breaking points, and that be the formation of your understanding around work and value, it's no wonder why we find ourselves centuries later in the place that we are, where you still have corporate overlords trying to get trying to best themselves back to a place of free labor, right.

of nature. Uh. And you know cigarettes are not addictive. Uh, Nicotine is not a problem. There's no such thing as global warming and that and climate change. So you know that goes on to this day. Right, we're told that so many things that we identify as problems or problems, and then they you know, they flip if they really have to admit it's a problem. One of their really devilish and devious adjustments is, Okay, it's a problem, but

it's not our fault. It's your fault. So okay, there are actually coal mining accidents, unfortunately, but it's because the workers are careless, uh and stupid. The workers won't wear protective gear in chemical factories. Uh. They they take chances, they come to they come to work drunk. You know, we don't need seat belts, we need care careful drivers. You know, car accidents are caused by bad, lazy drivers. And there's nothing you can't legislate that, you know, out

of the landscape. And so you know, they're so good at blaming us. And there's I think there's something in our psyches. You know that we've sort of many of us have been working on in different ways personally and collectively that it's easy to get ourselves to blame ourselves, you know, at least for a time like that can be a phase of your development. Oh you know, really, I guess I really shouldn't have done X, Y or Z on the job. I cause that no, you do,

you know you didn't. And this is what they do. And they have, you know, teams of management consultants to tell them that, so you know, it's it's your fault so we can't protect you. Then it's like, well, we'd like to protect you, but somehow we would only make things worse. And that is you know, that can range from uh, we talked about already, the you know, job killing nature of regulation that you know, that's one example.

But you know, also I think one of the most formative lies like this to me was when Ronald Reagan said the federal government fought a war on poverty and poverty won. Well, that's a lie, it didn't. But by sounding like he really cared about poor people and he really would want to help them if he could, I think it was like sort of the new Reagan, because the old Reagan. The original Reagan was all about blaming poor people, blaming black people, a lot of rational beyond

dog whistling, you know, welfare queens, et cetera. But then the Reagan who got elected in nineteen eighty was kind of a he was a more genial Reagan, and now he really cared about poverty, except those bureaucrats, you know,

they broke up families u welfare cause quote illegitimacy. Although when we cut when we dramatically cut back welfare, we still have the same rates of you know, single parent households that we had back in you know, when welfare reformed passed under Democrats under Bill Clinton in nineteen ninety six. All of these cultural explanations have turned out to be bullshit. But learning how to couch your self interest, your corporate donors, self interest in the case of politician as we're really

looking out for other people. But this is the best way to do it. That's been profound and you can you see that kind of thing to this day.

The abuse that you would take from bosses and what have you. Is that that's what you do, right, That's called being a grown up. And yet you have this younger generation and I look at really gen Z because millennials are forty now, But you have this younger generation that is just like, wait a minute, actually no, I'll just not do that job. I'll just quit right because I'm never gonna have what is considered the the I guess the accoutrements that come with success. I'm not gonna

own a home. I can't afford it. You see mortgage rates right, like, I'm not.

But you see older generations kind of scoffing at Oh, well, they're just lazy in my generation, we you know, so how like that's that is also Joan, right, a part of the lie that we then regurgitate to ourselves and to younger generations. Because I endured you should have to too.

We've seen that real wages have declined. We've seen that purchasing power has declined. Home prices of sword, rent prices of sword, all the things that were in some ways subsidized, like college as well as home ownership, all of that

has either disappeared or dried up or retracted. And so the building blocks or the ladders of opportunity that really in the forties and fifties, in the post war period into the sixties really sort of consciously privileged labor over capital, really gave unions and workers generally more rights, really did

subsidize the building of homes, et cetera, et cetera. All of that post war apparatus was like, it was a structure of opportunity, and it literally built high tax rates, built the middle class as we have come to know it, and which has been in trouble since the you know, mainly Republican corporate backlash of the nineteen seventies. And you know, we can track the you know, the decline in wages and the decline in top tax rates, et cetera, and

the decline in the middle class. So I think it's that people who've kind of made it think, well, the same you know, effort will work for everybody that's part

of it. And then I think, you know, you said something that struck me before about the pandemic was such an interesting, horrible but it's socially interesting experiment because I, you know, am kind of an optimist, because you'd have to be to doing this to do this work this long, you know, And I remember feeling in my fear and my grief that well, hey, maybe we're seeing that, Wow,

we're all in this together. The fact the health inequities that we have perpetrated on you know, low income, working class, poor people of color are now having ripples that are affecting all of us. We can turn society in a way on a dime. We can all. I can't say all,

but many of us can work at home. I remember thinking we would have vastly greater both empathy for each other, for healthcare workers, you know, banging the pots and pans, would would give way to better wages for people especially at the bottom, the essential workers, people in body bags, as well as holding their hands when they died, we would we would understand that they really were doing God's

work and give them a living wage. All these things that I thought, And that also we could remake the workplace. And you know, whether you're a student, whether you have whether your mom or dad, whether you're a middle aged person caring for an elder family member, that you could have a more humane approach to work and working from home and hours, work life balance. It could all be done because we did it, you know, and then we decided it was too expensive, uh, and so we had

to stop doing it. And so, you know, I really think that that was profoundly dispiriting, to say the least. And again, right, we're supposed to go into the office because you know, uh, the big land, the big office building. Uh, you know, monarchs can't get the same rents. You know, I actually have more sympathy for this the you know, the businesses, the small businesses, yes.

when it benefits the workers. But you know, I just I do feel again semi optimistic because we've seen such a wave of labor activism and such a wave of oization, whether it's Starbucks and Amazon to you know, the Writer's Guild and sag Aftra. More people are seeing themselves as workers, not you know, somebody who's gonna have the secret sauce.

And whatever your job is, you know you're gonna be brown nosing enough or you're gonna work hard enough, or you're gonna be brilliant enough that you will get well paid for your efforts, and those people who don't are just you know, slackers, and you know they deserve their fate. I think we've seen a real reduction in that kind of really anti social attitude, and that's a good thing.

people who are in poverty. That what we all recognize, particularly during the pandemic, is that most people in this country were one step away from a food line, right, Like, I think that we all fail to remember that the food lines in neighborhoods that we didn't even know how had food banks, right were wrapped around.

food bank near you. You know, you know that, but you know, I would see the lines were two and three times what they used to be, and you would see people who you maybe wouldn't have seen before, or maybe you were seeing everyone anew. So, so yeah, I mean, I still don't think we're finished with reckoning with all of that, and I do think that there's an opportunity to you know, spread some of this new wisdom that you know, we are all a step away from the

food bank. And I think the you know, the persistently American idea that hey, we can all get rich. So don't begrudge the you know, the founders of Google or Uber or Amazon or you know back in the day that the Robert Barons the oil companies. Don't begrudge in that because you know that could be you. It's not just yes, it's a lottery ticket, but it's also I don't know, you know, some miracle, you know, more your

worth will be rewarded someday. So I'd rather keep taxes on those people low because someday I could be one of them. No, probably not, you probably are almost certainly can't. And I think there's a little bit more realism about that.

the way they lie, there are arguments you can't unsee it. And we've you know, we've had you read it now saying yeah, it's like you know, I even had Tim Miller, who's you know, Bulwark founder and a former Republican who you know is now mostly you know, come over to our side. Say. You know, as he was reading it, he felt bad about not just what he did as a Republican, UH strategist, worker whatever, but you know he did in between times he did some work for corporations.

And he's like, yeah, we really did use these bullshit arguments and they did work, but they were lies. And you know, so I love moments like that where even people who used to do this stuff or like this is really unconscionable. I'd like, I mean, every day we have another example of you know, Ron DeSantis wants it

to be taught that slavery benefited some the enslaved. Great, we have child labor is making a comeback and it's reviving the you know, the old arguments in favor of child labor, that this is good for kids, makes them stronger, it's good for their families who we don't want to pay living we don't want to pay their parents living wages. I mean that was also that was true back then they needed the extra income. How dare we take that

away from those poor parents? You know, the child tax credit, which you know again those one of those paradigm shifts in a heartbeat. We reduced not white, but quickly, we reduced. We cut child probably in half. But people ranging from Republicans to Joe Manchin who's close to a Republican, they were against it because it was going to discourage work. Again, back to that welfare you know it causes poverty thing, Well, this is going to cause more child poverty because they're moms,

mostly moms, and dads are going to work less. Even though there's no we've ran this experiment, there's no evidence that the child tax credit did that, but they're still using this pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You know, you'll get soft and lazy if we coddle you. Get out there and work. They're still using the arguments, and I'm sorry to say they worked. We don't have that,

you know, the level of credit we had. So I'm hoping that people can see that and that these arguments will work less and that this will be a handbook for you know, activists. I was going to say, young activists, no, old activists, everybody, everybody to really begin to see the power that we have to construct new narratives based on truth and also based on what's good for most of us and not just good for the wealthy.