Upcoming “Corporate Bullsh*t” David Dayen reviews an upcoming book by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, Donald Cohen and Zachary Roth. “Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America” examines the boilerplate arguments corporate shills have used to object “to virtually every government and social program, from the abolition of slavery to the increase in the minimum wage.” Dayen writes: These timeworn tactics have been successful, the authors write, because “they offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest.” It’s an attempt to set the terms of debate and to make those terms unchanging and unmovable. The endless repetition of these talking points is a source of their strength. But identifying their history and application to virtually everything can be a source of their weakness. The six categories of corporate bullshit begins with pure denial. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually,” said Senator and later Vice President John Calhoun of South Carolina in 1837, about chattel slaves. Nineteenth-century slavery advocate George Fitzhugh called slaves “in some sense, the freest people in the world.” This up-is-downism was later used to justify child labor (“perfectly happy”), industrial water pollution (“purer than the water that came from the river before we used it”), households in poverty (“such families don’t really exist”), pesticides (“no reports…