It's the Bryan Lair show on WNYC. Good morning and 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 Bowl 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. Hey, Bryan. Hi, Bryan. Thanks for having us.

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 about now? Why a book now

about corporate Bowl Something? Because that's where the threats really are coming from, Bryan.

I'm going to defer to Don because he is the one who started collecting this compendium,

this amazing handbook of corporate lies that are used to thwart genuine political progress. So,

a lot of the political stalemate that we're living with right now, or not just stalemate, but

a real reactionary anti-democracy thread in the Republican Party now comes from this backlash

of corporations against the New Deal, the great society, human rights, civil rights, etc.

But 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. And 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 used to stymie progress. So,

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