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Episode 200:

CEOs like to play a three-card monte shell game. They want everyone to focus on their rhetoric about all the supposed wonderful things they do—say, creating a “green” friendly product—and, at the same time, when people aren’t paying attention, they run their company using fear, sexism and racism. That sums up the world of Elon Musk—which we talk about today.

Musk is anti-union and runs an operation that makes workers sick at sky-high rates, as I documented almost more than two years ago on this podcast in Episode 80. And it appears pretty evident he’s a sexist and a racist. He’s facing one federal lawsuit claiming that in 2015 and 2016, at Tesla’s factory in suburban Fremont, CA, black workers were subjected to repeated racial epithets, racist cartoons, and supervisors engaged in, or did little to stop, the racism.

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The same horrific environment is pretty apparent at the company’s plant in Buffalo, NY, a factory that got almost a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies to open up shop. To understand the ugly nature of what it’s like to work at the Tesla factory in Buffalo, I’m joined by two people. Sonny worked for Tesla until recently but “Sonny” is a pseudonym and we’ve obscured his face in this discussion because he fears retribution from other potential future employers. Linnea Brett is a community organizer with the Clean Air Coalition, which develops grassroots leaders who organize their communities to run and win environmental justice and public health campaigns in Western New York.

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I kick off with a short observation about American Exceptionalism: when it comes to moving away from fossil fuels, we are pretty puny compared to the far-reaching industrial policy pursued by China.

-- Jonathan Tasini

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