 Home Depot's 93-year-old billionaire co-founder Bernard Marcus has some thoughts about American workers and I'm sure that you'll be not very surprised to learn that what he has to say isn't just vapid and wrong, but it's also downright infuriating, so you've been warned. The Independent explains, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot has claimed Americans are too lazy, fat, and stupid to work and that socialism is to blame. Mr. Marcus, who has an estimated net worth of $8.9 billion said in the interview that socialism was now why nobody works, nobody gives a damn, just give it to me, send me money, I don't want to work, I'm too lazy, I'm too fat, I'm too stupid," he told the Financial Times. The woke people have taken over the world, he told the Financial Times, you know, I imagine today they can't attack me, I'm 93, who gives a crap about Bernie Marcus? Well, none of us give a crap about you, but we do care about the money that you stole from your workers. But I love how he's living in this alternate reality where the woke people took over the world and they installed socialism. I mean, I wasn't aware that we won, did you hear the news comrades? We have socialism, we have achieved socialism in the United States, and now because we have socialism, we can choose to not work and just collect a check from the government. I don't know if you got the memo, but he's telling us that now they lost and we won. I mean, it's ironic that he calls workers stupid when he claims that we have socialism in a late-stage capitalist society. But basically, when he says, just give it to me, send me money, I don't want to work, that's literally what he did, right? He may have co-founded Home Depot, but that company would be nothing without its workers. So while he just barked orders at them, he collected money while his workers did everything. His workers were being exploited while his wealth continued to grow and grow and grow. So it's ironic that he claims that workers are the ones who are lazy when executives and CEOs are the most useless additions to corporations. Now, I'm sure you'll be surprised also to learn that this billionaire has a strong affinity for capitalism. And I want to read what he has to say, because what he says here, it really gives us some insight into how twisted his mentality is. He says, Capitalism is the basis of Home Depot. Millions of people have earned this success and had success, Mr. Marcus told The Financial Times in an interview published on Thursday. I'm talking manufacturers, vendors and distributors and people who work for us who have been able to enrich themselves by the journey of Home Depot. That's the success. That's why capitalism works, except capitalism works for people like you, but not your workers who have not been able to enrich themselves. He's actually claiming that Home Depot's employees haven't enriched themselves because they work at Home Depot. Okay, well, we can actually look this stuff up. So let's look at how Home Depot has treated the executives compared to just rank and file employees. Bernie Marcus is worth an estimated $8.8 billion, although the independent claimed $8.9 billion. Still, he's worth billions of dollars. Home Depot's current CEO, Edward Decker, is worth an estimated $49 million. But let's look at the employees. So if you're a cashier at Home Depot, you'll be making an average of $13 per hour or $27,000 per year. That is, if you're lucky enough to achieve 40 hours per week. Now, merchandisers and sales associates make an average of $14.06 and $14.86 per hour or $29,031,000 nearly respectively. And these are estimates, by the way, warehouse associates only fare a little bit better at Home Depot, making over $33,000 per year. But senior management does do pretty well at $137,000 on average per year. But a majority of Home Depot employees believe that they're not paid fairly because they're not. With 46% of more than 1,000 people believing that they're not paid fairly. So Bernard Marcus is full of shit when he claims that Home Depot has enriched workers. It's enriched you and CEOs and executives and shareholders, but it has not enriched workers. To a lesser extent, it has enriched management, but still that pales in the comparison to the amount of money that the CEOs have been able to make from these corporations. And I say corporations more broadly speaking, because Home Depot isn't an exception to the rule. It is the rule. Lots of these multinational corporations exploit their employees and expect them to be perfectly happy working full time and still not being able to pay the bills. See, I don't know why Bernard Marcus came to this conclusion. I mean, aside from ignorance, but I'm assuming like he walked through a Home Depot and goes through these stores and he sees these really unhappy, sad people who are working there and he thinks, wow, it must be because they'd rather not work because they're lazy and they don't want to do anything. But in actuality, it's because they're being exploited. They're not lazy. And when you look at the Economic Policy Institute's policy pay gap, they dismantle this notion that workers are lazy. Workers are more productive than they have ever been, but their wages aren't rising with productivity and the gap has continued to widen since this trend began in the 1980s. But yet he incorrectly claims that workers aren't as productive and they're lazy and that laziness can be attributed to socialism that we've obviously achieved here in the United States in the year 2023. But no, we don't have socialism. And even if he hates socialism, I at least expect you to have like a somewhat coherent definition of it, especially if you are this much of a simp for capitalism. Wouldn't you know the main alternative to capitalism? But no, it's because he's ignorant, so he doesn't have to learn these things. But socialism is when workers own the means of production, when workplace democracy has been achieved. And given that corporations like Home Depot are still run as if they're authoritarian regimes by tyrannical executives is evidence that we have not yet achieved socialism. I mean, these corporations, if you think about it, aren't any different than these authoritarian countries that are resource rich, where you have a dictator that just like keeps all of the profits from oil, for example, and doesn't share that wealth with the population. The same is true for these corporations, where they exploit their employees and they don't give them back the money that they make for the company. So there is an alternative to capitalism. And yes, that is workplace democracy. That is socialism. So I want to share a video from Professor Richard Wolf where he explains this alternative. And then when we come back, I have a couple of examples of how that would work and what that would look like in practice that I'll share with you. We would like enterprises to be governed not only by the workers who work there. In other words, we're focused on democratizing the workplace. And step one is stopping a small and accountable minority capitalist way from running enterprises and giving that over to the democracy of all those who work there. But that's only step one. Step two is to make enterprises also accountable and responsible to the communities in which they exist and the customers whom they serve. And there has to be a way to make the decision making democratic first in terms of the workers who work there and who in the most immediate and total sense depend on that enterprise, but also also the community where the enterprise is located, which is affected by its decisions, and the customers who are likewise affected by its decisions. So we tend to move in the direction of a kind of co-determination, if you like, co-decision making in which a particularly important place because of their important dependence on these decisions is given to the workers. But there has to be representation, voting authority veto power, if you like, on the part of the communities and the customers, because they too are stakeholders in what a good democratic economic system would work like. So it's a process of moving democratically away from the autocracy of capitalism inside enterprises, opening it up first to the workers and then step two to the communities where they're located and the customers whom they serve. Beautifully put, now the reason why this system is preferable and why more and more people want a socialist system is because capitalism isn't benefiting them. So let's say, for example, a corporation makes $10 billion in profit in a year. Rather than just having the executives unilaterally choose what to do with that extra money, oftentimes they buy back their own stocks, you can have workers collectively vote on what to do with that money and it can benefit everyone as opposed to shareholders or executives. Workers can choose to instead increase pay for everyone across the board or increase benefits. But the difference is a democratic decision is being made in this system. Whereas with capitalism, you don't get to choose what your company does. They just impose their will on you and you are forced to do what they want. They even control your speech. They control what you can say, how you express yourself with your clothing. They can choose whether or not you're allowed to have tattoos, what types of hairstyles you have. These are tyrannical organizations, but yet we don't view corporations as authoritarian or democratic in the same way that we view countries as authoritarian and democratic. And I think that we need to view them that way because we're at these corporations, these jobs, our employers, for the majority of the days of our lives. So we should at least have more of a say over what they do, what decisions they make. We should be able to, if we live in a community, say that a particular oil company can't frack in our backyard and poison our water because these are decisions that are being made by executives that have no stake in the communities that they're exploiting. So if we had democratic control of these corporations, you can imagine how things would be a little bit different. I don't believe in utopia, so it wouldn't be the end all be all, but it would be much better than the current system where we just have corporations as dictatorships. I mean, why do you think so many corporations like Starbucks and Amazon are against unionization? It's because this employer employee relationship is inherently exploitative. And when workers collectively bargain, they have more leverage and the nature of that relationship changes. So these corporations, they function more effectively for themselves in the current state if they're able to just unilaterally make decisions about what the company does with the wealth that their workers produce. But when workers get a say, that's when things change. And that's what they're afraid of. That's why they're so afraid of socialism. But ironically, as I stated earlier, individuals like Bernie Marcus don't realize that people wouldn't be interested in socialism in the first place if they weren't so damn greedy, but they have had to have it all. Every penny that they could extract from their employees, any way that they could cut corners, cut benefits, they did it all because they were so greedy, leaving people desperate. So no, workers in America aren't fat, stupid and lazy. They're exploited. And they're tired of the exploitation. And that's why they're currently dissatisfied. But people like Bernie Marcus don't realize that because they live in a bubble. And if capitalism was so beneficial to them, then why change it? Why would you not fight to maintain the status quo that made you grotesquely wealthy? So that's what we're seeing here. But just the fact that he's so worried about socialism is a really good sign. And this is why we have to educate our co-workers, our peers about workplace democracy and the importance of socialism. Because the current system isn't just unsustainable for workers. It's unsustainable for the planet and the quicker that we move on from capitalism, the better off humanity will be.