Please Vice-President Harris, Stay Away from Wall Street!

Whoops, too late.

The Harris campaign hauled in a staggering $24 million in one night of fundraising on Wall Street. Rather than bragging about it the campaign she should be pointing out that Wall Street has killed the jobs of millions of working-class voters, exactly the kind of voters who are needed to defeat Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

During her talk to the financial barons, Harris said what they wanted to hear: That she would “encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets while protecting our consumers and investors.”

Unfortunately, she failed to say anything about protecting the jobs of working people who have been virtually slaughtered by Wall Street’s financial maneuvers since the 1980s.  Let us count the ways

• Wall Street’s totally insane and unconscionable derivatives game crashed the economy in 2008-09, leading to more than six million lost jobs in a matter of months. Many have never forgiven the Democrats for bailing out Wall Street, while homeowners went under.

• Wall Street’s private equity companies turned leveraged buyouts into a job-killing art form. Big investors buy companies with borrowed money and then put the debt onto the companies. Inevitably, workers are laid off to service the debt.

• Wall Street successfully lobbied for corporate-friendly trade deals, so that they could make enormous fees by financing the movement of US industrial facilities away from the US. An estimated five million manufacturing workers, many in the Midwest, lost their jobs in the process.

• Wall Street pressures corporations to buy back shares of their corporate stock, which artificially raises their price and makes billions for Wall Street giants. Worker jobs are sacrificed again and again to raise money for those stock buybacks.

In total, 30 million workers have gone through mass layoffs since 1996. Add in their families and about half the working class have been impacted by Wall Street’s shenanigans. (See Wall Street’s War on Workers for how mass layoffs, not racism, sexism or homophobia, have moved workers away from the Democratic Party in key swing states.)

It’s not too late for Harris to show she cares more about worker jobs than Wall Street’s profits

The Harris campaign has an establishment problem: The Democrats look like they are the establishment. Of course, they see it all as win-win:  You can let Wall Street profit wildly from AI and crypto-BS, and still protect the rest of us.  But not many working-class voters believe that. They resent elites because corporate elites, Wall Street elites, and yes, Democratic Party elites, have been prospering while they have struggled.

It would be far better if Harris showed a willingness to challenge Wall Street, even if it cost her some of her campaign cash she has plenty of already.  She could do it with one simple sentence that I’ve been harping about for months.  All she has to do is focus on the $700 billion in tax payer money that now goes to corporations for goods, services, and subsidies:  Here’s the line:

No taxpayer money shall go to corporations that lay off taxpayers or conduct stock buybacks. 

To clarify the point, she should add

For those companies receiving taxpayer money, layoffs must be voluntary, not compulsory, as is already the case for many white-collar employees.

I am confident that such a message would be noticed and welcomed by working-class voters of all persuasions and colors. To be sure, Harris would be attacked as a Marxist, a socialistic flame thrower, but so what?  All she would have to say in response is “my first loyalty is to protect the jobs of all Americans.”  And then keep repeating, “I am not going to allow taxpayer dollars to go to corporations that are laying off taxpayers.”

Will voters believe her? 

That depends in large part on what Harris actually believes. At least she is not burdened with taking personal donations, as was Hillary Clinton after she accepted $675,000 from Goldman Sacks for three speeches.  Thank goodness.

What Harris needs to do, and soon, is give a major prime-time address that does more than just talk about “the economy.”  She needs to talk about job stability and how she will protect working people from being sacrificed on Wall Street’s insatiable profit pyre.

Today, polling shows that 70 percent of all workers are expecting job cuts in the near future. It is political malpractice not to address this tangible fear. The very fact that we’ve got to remind the Democratic Party to put jobs in the center of its messaging tells us why the race is so pathetically close.   

Is Trump is filling the breach?

While Harris was playing footsie with Wall Street, Trump called for a 200 percent tariff on the John Deere company if it moves jobs to Mexico. A thousand jobs may be at stake. Back in June, I begged Joe Biden to intervene to stop this highly profitable company, which does billions in stock buybacks, from needlessly eliminating those jobs.

In my next newsletter, I will explore how the Democrats’ failure to directly intervene may cost them the election.  Why are Democrats so blind about job loss?  Why are they leaving the working-class field wide-open to Trump? Stay tuned.

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.