Wake up Democrats! Trump is Eating Your Working-Class Lunch
“The greed of the John Deere company is giving President Biden the perfect opportunity to win back working-class voters. All he needs to do is put up a major fight to stop Deere from shipping U.S. jobs to Mexico.”
I wrote that on June 12, 2024, and the Democrats ignored me. Donald Trump did not. He just called for a 200-percent tariff on all John Deere imports if the company exports U.S. jobs to Mexico.
How have the Democrats responded to Trump? In the worst way possible. They got billionaire Mark Cuban to say that Trump’s clumsy effort to save 1,000 jobs is “insanity…ridiculously bad and destructive.” Cuban didn’t even mention the plight of the workers.
Cuban’s argument is nothing short of embarrassing. He says that since the proposed tariff on Deere is higher than the one proposed on Chinese imports, Deere will be unable to compete with Chinese tractors and farm equipment. This will potentially lead, he said, to the “destruction of one of the most historied companies in the United States of America.”
What exactly is so insane? Trump’s goal isn’t to tariff John Deere out of business. His goal is to keep Deere from exporting 1,000 jobs. Why is it insane to preserve those 1,000 decent-paying unionized US jobs?
Cuban ignores the question of why Deere feels the need to ship jobs to Mexico. Deere argues that it must do so in order to stay competitive. That leads to a Catch 22 proposition: If Deere moves jobs to Mexico and faces a stiff tariff, it will go under. And, if it doesn’t move the jobs to Mexico, it will become uncompetitive and also go under. Cuban is in line with how Deere justifies layoffs to workers: If we don’t cut 1,000 jobs now and move to Mexico, more jobs will be cut later.
What’s wrong with this picture?
The big, bigger, and biggest problem is that the Democrats and Cuban are unable to put workers and their livelihoods front and center. They are unable to mouth these words: The 1,000 Deere workers should keep their jobs precisely because Deere, one of the greediest companies on Earth, is loaded with profits and is pouring billions upon billions into stock buybacks. Which is flat-out true.
Last year, Deere recorded $10 billion in profits and it’s CEO was paid $26.7 million. The company also spent $12.2 billion on stock buybacks that enriched its top officers as well as the big Wall Street funds that own loads of Deere stock. (What are stock buybacks? A way for a company to boost the price of its shares by buying them on the open market – a blatant form of stock manipulation that was illegal until deregulated by the Reagan Administration.)
And here’s the simple truth: The move to Mexico is designed to cut labor costs in order to finance those stock buybacks. It has nothing to do with competition, Chinese or otherwise. As any Deere worker would tell us, it’s all about greed. The sad thing is that Cuban, a critic of stock buybacks, knows this as well, but refuses to call out Deere.
Mass Layoffs are Destroying the Democratic Party
My book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, conclusively shows that from 1996 to 2020, as the mass layoff rate rose in any given county in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Democratic vote declined. In the rural counties, on average, one-third of the workforce suffered through mass layoffs. Losing your job in a county that has few decent employment alternatives does not lead to positive feelings about the party that is supposed to be the defender of the working class.
Trump’s intervention in 2017 to stop Carrier from moving an Indiana plant to Mexico was “wildly popular.” And yet the Democrats remain tone deaf to the plight of mass layoff victims.
The question is why?
The answer involves understanding what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the conventional wisdom.” There’s an entrenched sense within the Democratic Party of what kinds of interventions are acceptable in financialized capitalism and which are not. Here are a few of the internalized rules:
It’s OK to tax stock buybacks, but it’s not OK to outlaw them.
It’s OK to raise taxes on corporations, but it’s not OK to interfere with their power to lay off workers at will.
It’s OK to provide taxpayer funds to subsidize corporations to make investments, but it’s not OK to tell corporations that they can’t use taxpayer funds to lay off taxpayers or conduct stock buybacks.
It’s OK to regulate new technologies so consumers don’t get ripped off, but it’s not OK to protect worker livelihoods from such technologies.
It’s OK to bail out private big banks with taxpayer funds, but it’s not OK to turn them into public banks.
It’s OK to go after monopoly price gouging, but it’s no OK to stop monopoly mass layoffs.
It’s OK to ask for 60-day notice for mass layoffs, but it’s not OK to stop compulsory layoffs when they are used to jack up CEO pay, service harmful leveraged buyout debts, or fund stock buybacks.
On a deeper level what ties all this together is a profound faith in corporate power and efficiency. It will be for the better for all of us if billionaire CEOs are free to run their corporations as they see fit. That faith includes protecting the right of corporations to hire and fire at will. After all, new technologies and globalization inevitably involve the churning of jobs, don’t they? Trying to stop or slow down that process would only cripple the economy, wouldn’t it? And we certainly don’t want a country where government officials tell billionaires what to do, do we?
Therefore, a sober, realistic Democratic Party, trapped in its conventional wisdom, will refuse to intervene in corporate hiring and firing. Instead, they travel down the uninspiring and unconvincing path creating an “opportunity economy,” growing new jobs for the future from taxpayer subsidies to chipmakers and the like.
Not so with Trump. He swings a wrecking ball at the conventional wisdom. He acts as if he actually believes that jobs should not be exported to lower-wage countries, and that puts him in tune with nearly every U.S. industrial worker. To be sure many Democrats believe the same. The difference is that Trump has no built-in guard rails about intervening in corporate decision-making. You move jobs to Mexico, he bellows, and we’ll slap a tariff on your butt that is so high that it will be much cheaper for you to keep the jobs here.
That has to be music to the ears of every Deere worker facing the axe, and it certainly will get the attention of millions of workers who have seen their jobs shipped abroad.
It’s not too late for the Democrats to Act
Because Trump has difficulty focusing on a coherent message, the field is still open for the Democrats to put forth a new policy that directly affects the jobs of millions of workers. I’m a broken record on this because it’s so very simple. Harris should give a primetime talk and focus on the $700 billion in tax payer money that now goes to private corporations for goods, services, and subsidies: Here’s the line she should stress:
No taxpayer money shall go to corporations that lay off taxpayers or conduct stock buybacks.
To clarify the point, she should add some pragmatic flexibility:
For those companies receiving taxpayer money, layoffs must be voluntary, not compulsory, as is already the case for many white-collar employees.
That would seem fair and just to millions of workers, even if Wall Street would find it “insane.”
The Democrats must decide, and soon, whether they really are the party of the working class. If they are then they must fight hard to save worker jobs from unabated corporate greed.
Is that really too much to ask?
I’ll be giving a talk at Rutgers on October 1, 6:30 to 8:30 pm est. You can register here to join via Zoom. Hope to see you there.
And you can pick up my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers for a song right here. Amazon is just about giving it away. All royalties go to the Labor Institute. Thanks for taking a look.
According to the multiple panhandling notes I get every day from some ‘official’ Democrat, they desperately need voter money, my money, in order to win this election and keep the Senate. Always with a tone of feigned camaraderie, as if we’re best friends- as if we are in this together.
Unfortunately, as you so clearly show, protection of labor is not at all a factor in their idea of government, but labor does require little bits of wrapped candy to be thrown to it along the parade route.
Good piece as usual.
I should amend it with the fact that one of Mark Cuban's recent attacks on Trump is that he's a "socialist," more "socialist than Bernie Sanders" even! (https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/25/politics/video/mark-cuban-trump-is-more-socialist-than-bernie-sanders)
A billionaire Democratic Party loyalist, attacking Trump for being a socialist for putting forth worker-supporting trade deals is all that really needs to be said on this situation. It's done. The Republicans are now the party of the working class, as messy as that is. Biden, who had a few pro-union policies and at least paid the unions lip service (but was certainly not the "most pro-union president ever," as 22-year-old Brooklyn laptoppers like to claim), was probably the last non-laptop class leader the Democrats will ever see (although it seemed that the laptop class bureaucrats were ultimately calling the shots). He had the old Democratic Party in the back of his brain, but his time, and his brain, are nearly gone.
Trump is boorish, loud, incoherent, unable to stay on message, and lacks the smooth speaking style that we've come to expect from politicians. I'd argue that this is a feature, not a bug, in his popularity. Normie voters were sick of smooth-talking, do-nothing politicians, and love Trump's seeming inability to even play the game. Trump arguably single-handedly decimated the neoconservative movement within the Republican Party. Note that the Bill Kristols, David Frums, Lincoln Projects, Joe Scarbroughs, Bushes, Cheneys and other neocon scum are the people most mad at Trump, and will do literally anything to get their party back—but they'll settle for co-ruling the Democratic Party. Trump's support by working class, middle class and middle American normies caused the Democratic blue-bloods and the laptop class to reflexively hate the working class and the middle class, making the Democrats the home of the neoconservatives and the neoliberals, who are more interested in holding power than good governance. (The over-educated Brooklyn "laptop left" has tried, hysterically, to rebrand themselves as the working class.)
Kamala's refusal to take a position on anything is because she's going to take whatever position the Democratic Party does, which will change constantly, depending on the day, or the need. She has no ethics or principals or ideas. She's a party hardliner, a candidate and party that's only position is "we must win (to 'save democracy' from the non-interventionist, pro-worker, anti-globalist rabble-rousing TV star)." Her slogan might as well be "Vote for My Suit."
That JD Vance doc that Ken Klippenstein leaked (and was unceremoniously and unfairly removed from X for) seemed to mostly paint Vance as having Bernie Sanders-style economic policy. No wonder Dem-friendly media didn't want to leak it! They then get to claim they're "being ethical" by refusing to release "hacked materials" (though does anyone believe that if it had salacious details about affairs it wouldn't have been released?).
I'm still put off by some of the cultural conservatism, and some of the idiotic commentary, of this "new right," and I question how well they'll be able to govern. But this marriage of left-leaning economic policy with more traditional cultural ideas has southern black guys and southwestern Hispanics and many Asians moving into the Republican Party, and is honestly more representative of the makeup of the working and middle classes than the Dems' "luxury beliefs." The south for years voted for the parties along strict racial lines, and this marriage of left-leaning economic policy and more conservative cultural issues has done what no one thought possible: unite white and black rednecks, who culturally really aren't very different, in the same party. It's messy, but it's happening, and I don't see it changing now.
(The real dealbreaker for this old leftie is what most of the "new progressive" media—and often, unfortunately the ACLU—ignores: the encroaching censorship, the horribly one-sided propagandist reporting, and the insane turn against free speech, and all civil liberties really, among nearly every single Democratic Party leader. Everyone from Hillary Clinton to John Kerry, to the editors of the New York Times and the New Yorker, are calling for the end of the First Amendment. That was always a key part of being on the left, as far as I'm concerned. There seems to be a push to forcibly manufacture total consensus, and guarantee permanent single-party rule, and punish those who disagree, digress or rebel, and it's frankly terrifying.)