Harris Needs to Choose the Working Class over Wall Street

There's still time

Kamala Harris must win the former Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which are now up for grabs. And winning those battleground states requires reaching working-class voters who have been economically harmed and left behind by Wall Street’s insatiable greed.

The Harris campaign has not been courting these voters the way you would expect from the party of working people. Instead, she has managed both to kiss up to Wall Street and to allow Donald Trump to appear as the savior of working-class jobs. Those advising her on this strategy are either politically tone deaf or worse, blinded by potential Wall Street employment opportunities after the election.

The Vice-President’s first big gaffe was going to Wall Street for a highly publicized fundraising event where she said her administration “would encourage innovative technologies like AI.” Doesn’t her team understand that artificial intelligence is not a term of endearment to working people who fear automation will kill their jobs? 

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that behind the scenes her advisors have been moderating her proposals to please Wall Street. (“How Wall St. Is Subtly Shaping the Harris Economic Agenda”.) How is this the party of working people?

Fantasy Finance

The Harris team is suffering from several debilitating illusions.  They seem to believe that if Wall Street approves of her economic agenda, it will close the economic-approval ratings gap with Trump. That certainly isn’t the case in the more industrialized states, where most working people see Wall Street as the destroyer of jobs. 

There also is no lost love there for the big banks that are too big to fail and get bailed out whenever they rape and pillage the economy into disaster. If you ask the average worker in the Midwest to pick the one word that they associate with Wall Street, nearly all will say “greed.”  

The Harris team clearly believes that we live in a win-win economy – that when Wall Street does well, we all do well. They seem oblivious to the ways in which Wall Street’s leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks have robbed millions of working people of their livelihoods.

These workers are not stupid.  When a private equity company buys up the facility where they work, they know layoffs are coming to service the new debt load.  When a company pours corporate funds into buying back their own stock to artificially boost the stock price, they know that layoffs will be used to pay for shoveling all this money to the richest stock owners and executives. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for all the gory details.)

Blowing Off the John Deere Workers

The Harris team, however, has the perfect chance to show that they understand how important it is for the government to save jobs from rapacious corporations. The opportunity came when John Deere announced that it would send 1,000 jobs to Mexico, crying competitive pressure while in 2023 earning $10 billion in profits, paying its CEO $26.7 million, and conducting $12.2 billion in stock buybacks.

Donald Trump saw a big opening and called for a 200 percent tariff on Deere’s imports if it shipped those jobs to Mexico.  That threat, idle or not, certainly caught the attention of the workers who were about to see their jobs evaporate. And it certainly resonated with economically precarious workers all through the industrial heartland who could care less about whether tariffs are good or bad macroeconomic policy.

What did the Harris team do?  Exactly the wrong thing. It wheeled out Mark Cuban, the celebrity billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, to attack the tariffs as “insanity…ridiculously bad and destructive,” on macroeconomic grounds   Not a word said by Cuban or the Harris campaign about those 1,000 jobs that are about to be destroyed.  That shows “ridiculously bad and destructive” political campaigning.

I’m starting to wonder about the smarts of the Harris advisors. They seem willfully oblivious to the fact that Trump’s 2017 intervention to save jobs at the Carrier air conditioning company in Indiana was wildly popular among voters of all political persuasions. Guess what?  Having the government step in to save your job is what people want the government to do.  Why can’t Harris say she will do the same?

I’ve been begging, pleading, jumping up and down to get the Harris campaign to say she will stop corporations from taking our tax dollars, pouring it into stock buybacks, and then laying off millions of workers each year. The proposal is really simple. Add this one sentence to every federal contract:

“No taxpayer money in the form of federal grants, contracts, and purchases, shall go to corporations that layoff taxpayers and conduct stock buybacks.”

But my message is not penetrating the dense Democratic Party ecosystem this is distorted by Wall Street’s cash and future lucrative job opportunities.  

The Harris campaign clearly believes they are doing more than enough to attract working people in the key battleground states, and that it is wiser to placate rather than offend Wall Street.   

I sure hope they are right and, come election night, that my analysis is dead wrong.  

Amazon is just about giving away Wall Street’s War on Workers ($7.37, Hardback!) All royalties go to our Political Economy for Workers programs, including one for Amazon workers seeking to unionize. A virtuous circle of life.