After spending most of my life in corporate boardrooms and then shifting to working on political causes like the $15 minimum wage, overtime protections, and gun violence prevention, I realized that our opponents use the same bogus corporate talking points over and over again — it never really changes.
Their B.S. is pervasive, but it’s also super predictable. So Joan, Donald, and I set about trying to track and develop a compendium of the lies they’ve always used to fight progress and protect profits. The remarkable thing we discovered is that over the course of 250 years of American progress, these claims have remained exactly the same.
Whether it’s a Subway restaurant owner arguing that Seattle’s $15 minimum wage would kill jobs in 2013, Lee Laccoca calling seat belts “a complete waste of money” in 1971, or Alexander Hamilton claiming that child labor is a character-building activity for children who “would otherwise be idle” in 1791, it's always the same story. Those who profit from immoral behavior always try to make the case that any effort to control their behavior is actually an injustice for the vast majority of Americans -- including those who are being exploited. It's all bullshit of course.
I’m proud of the work we did on this book – it’s a fun and easy read. It's also important: it's meant to inoculate us so we stop falling for the same old corporate lies.
