Eat the Rich: Corporate Greed, Tax Dodging, and Why We're All Paying for It

In this episode of Messy Liberation, feminist coaches and best friends Becky Mollenkamp and Taina Brown dig into the corporate greed crisis, from the Starbucks founder fleeing a state income tax to Oprah's "let them eat cake" energy at Paris Fashion Week. With a sharp intersectional lens, they connect wealth hoarding, stolen women's labor, a broken tax system, and the urgent need to build real community as an act of resistance.

In This Episode, We Get Into:

• The Starbucks founder Howard Schultz announcing he's leaving Seattle for Florida after Washington state passed a new income tax — and what that says about corporate greed in America
• Oprah's out-of-touch social media presence during Paris Fashion Week while the world is literally on fire (including oil refinery disasters in Iran)
• The jaw-dropping data on CEO pay vs. worker pay — a 1,000% increase since 1978, with top CEOs now making ~285–300x more than their average employees
• How corporations exploit crises (like COVID-era supply chain disruptions) to normalize price gouging and shrinkflation
• The real history of International Women's Day as a labor movement — not a "girlboss" celebration — and how women's unpaid and underpaid labor has always been systematically stolen
• The pay gap breakdown: 78 cents on the dollar for white women, even less for Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Latina women — and how women in care fields don't even have a comparable male wage to measure against
• How the U.S. tax system is deliberately made incomprehensible, who benefits from that confusion, and why 1 in 5 Fortune 500 companies paid zero federal taxes between 2018–2022
• The red state/blue state tax welfare dynamic — and why blue state taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the tax-dodging rich who move to Florida
• Why U.S. hyper-individualism keeps the kindling from igniting — and how building real community is the counter to late-stage capitalism

Resource:

• How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong

🎤 JOIN US IN THE FEMINIST PODCASTERS COLLECTIVE