Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Joan Walsh is with us now, national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine, who is here from time to time, along today with Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of the advocacy group In the Public Interest. They are two of the co-authors now of a book whose title we can't actually say on the radio. It's called Corporate Bull something: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America. We'll just start with that slightly edited title and welcome Joan back and Don Cohen to WNYC. Hi, Joan. Hi, Don.

Joan Walsh: Hey, Brian.

Donald Cohen: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having us.

Brian Lehrer: Joan, you're usually writing about politics when we have you on and the politics sector is where so many of the threats that people feel these days are coming from. Why a book now about corporate bull something?

Joan Walsh: Because that's where the threats really are coming from, Brian. I'm going to defer to Don because he's the one who started collecting this compendium, this amazing handbook of corporate lies that are used to thwart genuine, political progress. A lot of the political stalemate that we're living with right now, and it's not just stalemate, but a real reactionary anti-democracy thread in the Republican Party now comes from this backlash of corporation's against the New Deal, the Great Society, human rights, civil rights, et cetera. We were able to trace it back-- you can go back to the early 1800s when the very early laws that were trying to help very poor people on the streets of New York City were being criticized by the people running those programs as encouraging idleness, indolence. If you help these people, they won't help themselves.

That's a strain that we were able to combat for a lot of different reasons during the New Deal through the Great Society, but corporations got the upper hand in the 70s and began recycling these old lies that they'd use to stymie progress. They go hand in hand. It's not just oh, corporations are bad. Look at what they're saying. It's also hilarious. We think the book is funny, but no, it's what's led to our current political nightmare. I don't even think that's too strong most days.

Brian Lehrer: Part of the serious, funny frame of the book, which we'll get into, is that you identify six patterns of-- maybe we should call it public relations patterns or denial patterns that corporations often engage in, and we're going to go down to six because they're interesting and illuminating, and to some degree funny. Don, let me give you a shot at the same question that I asked Joan first. Why a book now about corporate bull something? Maybe you want to take her general frame there and give us an example or two from the book that you feel are very relevant right now or that don't get enough attention.

Donald Cohen: Well, yes, I appreciate that. The reason today is important is because every day when I open the newspaper, I see the same arguments that are identified in the book, the six arguments or storylines that you mentioned. Today, there's a lot of news about the GOP going after the IRS. One of the things that the Biden administration was able to do with the IRS recently was just begin to-- they're going to pilot a Free File program, that we can file our taxes directly with the federal government, with the IRS, instead of paying into TurboTax or H&R Block or whatever the other programs. The arguments against that from the big tax prep corporations and software companies are exactly the same as the arguments we heard when we tried to eliminate child labor or establish food safety laws or the past Medicare or Social Security, so exactly the same. The book is relevant because it's exactly what we're hearing every day in the paper.

Some of the quotes, "There is no scientific evidence showing a threat to health from automotive emissions in the normal, average air you breathe, not even in crowded cities." That's from an advertisement that Chrysler took out in 1972. We could go back further. "I've seen children working in factories, and I've seen them working at home and they were perfectly happy." That's from a woman who ran a canning company. We can take those arguments all the way today back to the Free File and when they say this is a problem. They literally say this. This is a problem that doesn't exist. People are happy buying TurboTax. Why should we provide free service to the public?

Brian Lehrer: Your book identifies six patterns of denial that corporations often engage in, as I said. Let's go down to six because they're interesting to identify as such, and to arm people to decode corporate speak that maybe they haven't seen for what it is before. Joan, pattern number one you have here is, and maybe this is what we were just hearing from Don about auto emissions, but pattern number one, it's not a problem.

Joan Walsh: It's not a problem. We have mining executives saying, "It's just the natural course of events that mining accidents happen. It's going to happen. We can't do anything about it. It's really not a problem because basically the profit to us outweighs any loss of life." Again and again, it's not a problem. Climate change is not a problem. It's being exaggerated. We go all the way back to slavery, which is not a problem and in fact is actually good.

We have John Calhoun, which your historians will remember as a vice president and a segregationist, pro-slavery more than segregationist, from South Carolina who was like, "Negro slaves of Central Africa are the happiest and the most morally developed, and it's great." I think what Don was saying too, I do want to go through the list because I think it's really interesting, but you open the paper and Ron DeSantis' Florida education officials are making sure that if you learn about African American history in Florida, you learn that slaves develop very beneficial skills or at least some of them did, so that you're still hearing echoes of this.

Brian Lehrer: Pattern number two, the free market knows best. Here's an example from the book. Employers do not deliberately allow work conditions to exist which cause injury or illness. Safety is good business. That quote from the US Chamber of Commerce. Don, want to elaborate?

Donald Cohen: Well, yes. I'll use the mining example that Joan referred to. The Upper Big Branch mine accident happened, I don't know, about a decade ago. Don Blankenship was the head of that company that ran that mine. 28 or 29 people died in that tragedy. It wasn't an accident. These are the things that he said. I don't have his direct quote, but these are the things that he said. It was the miners. They messed up. What also turned out to be true is that he actually spent a year in jail because of willful and repeated violations of mine safety rules and regulations. He controlled the working conditions in the mines. He says it's just-- the free market will take care of it. They wouldn't do it.

They also say that if a worker is not willing to put up with unsafe conditions, then they'll go find another job. They'll choose to go work in a place with lower wages and more safety. That's the free market at work in the labor market. Here's a good one. It's a different subject. The subprime mortgage market, which makes funds available to borrowers with impaired credit or little or no credit history, offers a good example of competition at work, competition being central to the free market. That was in the year 2000. I think we learned that that wasn't really a good example of the market extending credit.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, a little bit. All right. Pattern number three, Joan. It's not our fault, it's your fault.

Joan Walsh: Well, yes. We've already talked about this because mining accidents are the fault of the coal miners. Up to the present, we have the Sacklers, the opioid peddlers, saying, "Our product is not unsafe. Our product is being abused by addicts." We all, not just we the authors, but we all have these memos now where they just. planned this PR onslaught against addiction and addicts and the bad people who are misusing our product. We've seen that with auto safety laws, putting in seat belts, et cetera, can't stop the crazy guy behind the wheel.

These problems are caused by bad people using things wrong as well as we see that with guns. It's really not about the guns, it's about the people with mental health issues. The lineup between the anti-gun safety arguments, and the anti-auto safety arguments are really chilling in the wake of the main massacre. Any week we talk, Brian, you and I could both talk about the X Massacre, the Y massacre, because we seem to be always talking in the wake of mass shooting, and so they keep recycling this. They keep blaming people and we really want people to wake up and not blame themselves, for sure.

Brian Lehrer: All right, we're going down the six patterns of Corporate Denial, obfuscation, Bull-something, as is the title of the book, Corporate Bull something I can't Say on the Radio. Listeners, do you have any examples? Do you want to suggest any other categories, maybe for the second edition of ways that corporations obfuscate the truth? If you have a question for Joan Walsh or Donald Cohen, the co-authors 212433 WNYC 212-433-9692, call or text. We've gone through pattern one, it's not a problem. Pattern two, the free market knows best. Pattern three, it's not our fault, it's your fault. Pattern four, Don, it's a job killer.

Donald Cohen: Yes, we hear this all the time. I'm just going to read a couple of quotes because I think they say it. The Clean Air Act is what Lee Cooker was referring to, he said, could prevent the continued production of automobiles, and it's a threat to the entire American economy and every person in America. He said that in 1970. Here's another one, under the guise of civil rights for the disabled, the Senate has passed a disaster for US business.

That's about the Americans for Disabilities Act in 1990. Then when we were dealing also with the ozone crisis in 1990, the Clean Air Act of 1990, some DuPont Corporation representative said, if we pass these ozone restrictions on CFCs, entire industries could fold. We hear this every day. You pass a regulation to greater safety, greater health, could protect the environment, increase wages, it's going to destroy the economy, and it never does.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think the public is more wise to some of these things than it used to be in general? Because a lot of the examples that you're giving in all these categories are old. Slavery gave good skills to Black people. Well, maybe that's back in Florida, as you point out, to some degree in the educational system, but people don't support lead and gasoline anymore as consistent with rejecting what you cited before with auto companies or fossil fuel companies saying there's no problem with the emissions coming out of the tailpipe. Some of the other ones you were just citing Don, from the '70s, the CFCs which were causing the hole in the ozone layer, they did get banned. Are people more hip to this than maybe the book suggests?

Joan Walsh: I'll take that.

Brian Lehrer: Okay, Joan?

Joan Walsh: I think we allow for that in the book and not allow for it, we narrate that in the book, that people have gotten more hip to this and that these arguments, they wear off on a certain issue like lead. Lead is good for you. Oh, yes. We don't really think that anymore. Pumping chemicals into our rivers and streams and drinking water does not make it better. We all get that. Many of us have fought for the legislation and the regulations that have changed all that.

What's important is that you can fight it and we have fought it, but at the same time, they just keep recycling these things, and it's not just about how you teach about slavery. Child labor is back, and we're seeing arguments that well, working-- yes, some young people have died working in the fields, but it's because this literally-- Don probably has this quote at his fingertips because he is much better at this than I am. There literally was a whole argument that, well, air conditioning has made young people soft and that's why sadly they're dying. That was a way that child labor was defended before it was made illegal. Now, it's being expanded because kids need it. It's good for them, it's good for their families. If they are dying, well, again, it might be their fault.

I think it's both things. Brian, you're right to call out that we've fought these things before we've put them down, but as Don and I have been waiting for the book to come out, we text each other every day with a new example of, "oh my God," he already used the tax filing example. Republicans turned against the child tax credit and let it expire, forced it to expire. Even though it was a Republican idea, it came from the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation recycled their favorite argument. It makes parents less likely to work. You help their children, you give them more money, they won't work. That makes everything worse. It goes on and on, and it's great that people have fought it and we applaud that in the book, but we also say, "Keep watching."

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Go ahead, Don.

Donald Cohen: If I could just add one thing, Brian. Every example in the book is about a law or a regulation that we now take as common sense, but it wasn't before that. The arguments were powerful. Take the example of lead. It took 70 years of lies and propaganda, but also when they actually had the evidence that it was damaging to health, it took 70 years to eliminate it from gas and paint and all of that. The point is, they take these arguments that sometimes sounds plausible in some cases. Well, maybe it will kill jobs. Maybe it will hurt jobs if we raise minimum wage. They use that to delay, to deny, to obfuscate, and essentially, as the title of the book says, to protect their profits because they don't want the regulations. Yes, we look back and say, "Sure, that was before," but the question is what's next? What we're saying here is the arguments are exactly the same that we see every day in the paper.

Brian Lehrer: As I look at your list, I'm thinking about how each of these could apply to climate change policies. Number one, it's not a problem. The fossil fuel companies are running ads that say we're investing in green energy technology. What they don't say is green energy technology too, so we can keep producing fossil fuels because you'll think, well of us. Pattern number two, the free market knows best.

Well, if people want electric stoves instead of gas stoves, they'll buy them. Pattern three, it's not our fault, it's your fault. You can recycle your way out of this. Pattern four, it's a job killer. We just saw that in the UAW strike, a reason not to go to an electric car policy in this country is because it takes more workers to build gas guzzlers. Pattern five, you'll only make it worse. I don't have an immediate climate example to plug into that off the top of my head, but I'm sure you have some.

Donald Cohen: Well, here's one that I've heard. If we make cars more efficient, people will just drive more.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Let's go on to your last pattern. Pattern number six, we hear it all the time, Joan. It's socialism.

Joan Walsh: Yes. It goes back to at least to FDR, maybe before, but every good thing that's ever occurred in our country has been denounced as socialism, at the beginning. That really applied throughout the New Deal. All of the social security, socialism, fair labor standards, it's socialism, it's bringing in Bolshevik policy. It's socialist, it's fascist, it's communistic. During World War II, they were able to combine all three. It's socialist, it's fascist, it's communistic, and all the way through today. I really enjoy the fact that Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, perhaps-- well I'm not going to insult him, not a great senator, but he does get reelected, he calls Joe Biden a socialist like regularly, and Biden has one of the best reactions.

He's like, "Hello. I beat the socialist, Bernie Sanders." He and Bernie are friends and allies, but it's like, "Guys, this is not going to work with me," and I don't think it really has worked very well. I don't think the socialism slur is that toxic anymore because we do have real-life socialists like Bernie, like AOC here in New York. I don't agree with them on everything, but they're doing some great things. It's obviously still scary to the right, but I don't think it really has-- we see polls now that young people are like, they're okay with socialism, but they still think it works and they still use it.

Brian Lehrer: Angela in Brooklyn has a question for you. Angela, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Angela: Hi. Thanks. This subject is so infuriating to me because what's there to be done about it because the whole corporations are people. Argument, we protect corporations' rights about the individuals in this country. I just don't get it. What can we do about it?

Joan Walsh: Well, Angela, if I can take that, first of all, Brian, who is not a co-author, injected real hope, which is, we've done it before. We've taken these arguments on before, we've won before, we can win again. Humbly, I would say what this book adds is this framework for understanding these things that they just keep getting recycled. Not in a good way, in a bad way. We talk about the book as an inoculation against these lies. Once you see them, I think it's Robert Reich who says this, who loved the book, who said, "Once you see them, these arguments, you can't unsee them." I think that's one possible hopeful outcome.

We fight them, we also mock them. I don't want to be mean, but I feel like mocking people, humiliating people on a certain level, just on a political level, not personal is helpful. I really think that just saying-- Ronald Reagan did. We don't like Reagan much in the book, but there you go again, it's helpful. I think giving people both the sense that we've beaten this before but here the lies are again, and we can beat it again, I hope that that helps. I understand your frustration.

Brian Lehrer: Couple of ones and Angela, thank you. Coming in on text message, some other examples that would fit into some of your patterns, listener rights. This is about the gig economy. Counting workers as employees rather than contractors will raise costs, which will be passed on to consumers. We've heard that before as an argument against good pay for people like Uber drivers, et cetera. I guess that falls into your you'll only make it worse pattern. Another one. Let's see, where did this go? Oh, it's a caller. Emily in Asinine has another example from the past. Emily, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Emily: Thank you, Brian. Great show. I was just thinking about the big kerfuffle over smoking in bars and restaurants in New York City. I think it started in New York City, I think it's all over the country now. People don't smoke in bars and restaurants all over the country, I think.

Joan Walsh: Well, Emily, I have to say, as a native New Yorker, I lived in California at the time. I think it started in California, and Don will jump in and correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember coming out here and it hadn't happened yet, but New York had the most intense lobbying against it. We all know that bars and restaurants are doing really, really well. That's a great example though.

Brian Lehrer: That fits into your pattern number two, the free market knows best. I remember that debate when Mayor Bloomberg wanted to ban all smoking in bars and restaurants, and people said, well, customers who don't want a smoking environment will go to restaurants that voluntarily set themselves up as no-smoking restaurants. People who want smoking environments will go to ones who do. Of course, what that ignored, that Mayor Bloomberg rightfully pointed out is that it's about the workers, not the customers. It's about those who have no choice but to be there in a smoky environment eight hours a day.

Joan Walsh: Smoking in airplanes, I mean the poor flight attendants.

Brian Lehrer: Smoking section in airplanes seems so absurd now.

Donald Cohen: What we're seeing now is people are calling in and texting in, is that you begin to-- when you see the patterns, you start to see them everywhere. The idea of the book is to remove the patina of plausibility because you're identifying the game plan, right? It is a game plan, right? It's a set of arguments that have worked for decades, worked for centuries. They believe they still work, and they do still work in certain circumstances. Taking off that sheen of plausibility and pre-bunking rather than just debunking, they say something and we say, "No, you're wrong." We say, "No. There they go again, you said it before, give me a break."

Brian Lehrer: There they go again. All right. There we will leave it with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen, co-authors of Corporate Bull something we can't say in the radio, Exposing the Lies and Half-truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America. Congratulations on the book, just out. Thanks for coming on and sharing it with us.

Joan Walsh: Thanks for having us.

Donald Cohen: Thanks.

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