(singing)
The country's major corporations seeking to crush union organization have filed legal papers to shut
down the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, the federal agency that enforces labor rights
and oversee unionization efforts. Elon Musk, SpaceX, as well as Amazon Starbucks, and Trader
Joe's have targeted the NLRB after it accused Amazon Starbucks and Trader Joe's of breaking
the law and battling against unionization, as well as accusing SpaceX of illegally firing eight
workers
for criticizing Elon Musk. The attempt to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old
National Labor Relations Act, which has governed labor relations since Franklin Roosevelt was
president, is one more assault in the war against workers by corporations and Wall Street. Laws and
regulations put in place by the New Deal have been steadily dismantled. The NLRB, for example,
has already been rendered largely toothless. It is unable to fine corporations for breaking the
law, including w
hen corporations fire workers who are attempting to organize. If NLRB judges are
declared unconstitutional, the goal of the legal challenge, it would halt judges from hearing
hundreds of cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws. This latest attack
on workers is part of a broader decades long assault that includes the mass layoffs of workers
and costly stock buybacks to enrich shareholders at workers' expense. This assault has not only
caused financial distress among the w
orking-class, it has not only seen wealth funneled upwards
into the hands of the billionaire class, but has had negative repercussions for our society
and our democracy. The Democratic Party's abject betrayal of the working-class, especially in
rural America, lies at the heart of the rise of a demagogue like Donald Trump. Rather than
halt this corporate pillage, the victims of this assault are demonized as ignorant, racist bigots.
Those Hillary Clinton called deplorables. They are written of
f as a lost cause politically. The
statistics, however, point to a strong correlation between the decline of the Democratic Party and
mass layoffs along with onerous trade agreements that ship manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China.
The claim by many Democrats and pundits such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, that
there is a massive reactionary working-class populist base in America is a fiction. Even the
January 6th, 2021 storming of the US Capitol, it turns out, was not in fact a
white
working-class riot, but it is easier to dismiss the white working-class rather than
ameliorate their very real suffering. This failure to act is ominous. As labor journalist Hamilton
Nolan writes, "The people who fancy themselves as the captains of the ship are actually the
wood eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from the inside until it sinks."
Joining me to discuss the war on workers and how it imperils what is left of
our anemic democracy is Les Leopold, who co-founded t
he Labor Institute and is the
author of Wall Street's War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the working-class
And What to Do About It. So your book, I think, makes a very convincing case that the defection
of the white working-class in particular, which is largely often rural, is caused by this
economic distress, and you have lots of data and statistics and charts to back it up, but I
want to begin, as you do in the introduction, you lay out the cost, the emotional cost
to
workers who lose their jobs. You write that it's the seventh considered the seventh most stressful
life event ranked more stressful than divorce, than recovery from the psychological trauma of job
loss takes two years on average. You talk about developing new health conditions rise by 83%. And
I've seen that among my own family in Maine. Let's talk about just to begin what that job instability
does to one's physical and emotional state. Well, I saw this in my own family. My father
was a
factory worker. When he was laid off through a mass layoff, it was traumatic. He felt
terrible about himself. We were fortunate that my mother had a full-time job, and so we didn't
completely crash economically, but he just felt pretty worthless. Another fortunate thing was
this happened to be during the recessions of the early 1960s and when the economy picked
up, he got a job and he basically was able to hold it for the rest of his career. But today
what's happened is then it was during
recessions. That's when you'd see mass layoffs. Corporate
CEOs were embarrassed to do mass layoffs. They thought it was a sign of their own failure. Now
it's a sign of financial prowess. Good times, bad times, it doesn't matter. So you're seeing
people go from one mass layoff to the next mass layoff and it's totally debilitating. You
feel terrible about yourself. It's hard. It becomes increasingly hard to make ends meet and
you feel let down by your society. Everybody talks about the econom
y, the economy, the economy.
What does it mean if a democratic country and its economy can't produce a modicum of stable
employment? You are in trouble and the people start losing faith in the system all around them.
It's no accident that the opioid epidemic grew up in this environment. It's no accident that people
started to abandon the Democratic Party. They just feel let down and they don't know where to
turn and frankly, where do we tell them to turn? I see a few politicians who are bra
ve enough to
take on Wall Street and they're doing well like Sharon Brown in Ohio, but most people just
duck. They want to talk about something else where they talk about jobs in the future. That's
the other thing I'm finding difficult to handle. I'm all for the infrastructure bills, I'm all
for the CHIPS programs, all these things that create jobs in the future, but what is it
going to do for the person that's laid off? Now, we had a plant go down in Olean, New
York that's on the southern
tier right above Pennsylvania, very rural, once very industrial.
So a plant goes down there and in a few years, a battery factory is opened up in Buffalo three,
four, five hours away. It doesn't do anything for you. You're being told, "Move. Take your family
your life and just rip it up and move." Anyway, this kind of pressure has been studiously
ignored. So that was one finding of our book is, as you've mentioned, explained it very well.
We found there was a high causal correlation betwee
n the rise of mass layoffs in especially
in the rural counties in the blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the decline
in the Democratic Party going back to 1996, not just during the Trump election. And the
second thing we found that you mentioned was that the white working, especially in these
rural areas, are not becoming more illiberal. They are not a basket full of deplorables.
Yes, there's some people like that. We estimate nationally, maybe max 3% would fit
into Hi
llary's basket full of deplorables. Let me just give you the one statistic that a
couple that just blew my mind. When asked 20 years ago whether gay or lesbian couples should be
able to adopt children, the white working-class, on average, only about 38% said they approved
of that. Now it's 76%. The other one's probably for religious reasons or something. Another one,
how about legalization. This is an important one, because this is the one you would think would
be completely hated by the pe
ople left behind. "Do you approve of granting citizenship to
illegal immigrants who've been here three years, no felonies and have been paying their taxes?"
Well, 15 years ago, only about 32% agreed with that statement. Now it's 61.6%. Almost two thirds
now say, "Yes, we believe that there should be a path to legalization for undocumented workers."
To me, that was phenomenal when I saw that. So President Obama said... There's a certain
mental gymnastics that goes on here to rationalize this
away. He said, "Yeah, we know that they've
been left behind economically A, there's nothing we can do about it because it's the forces of
trade. It's the globalization and technology, and besides that, it's their fault that they're
clinging to guns and religion. We're not making them do that." Well, it turns out we saw no
evidence that people are getting more religious. We saw no evidence that they're cling to their
guns. They're not more homophobic, they're not more racist, they're gettin
g more liberal, but
they're angry. And as you said that very well, they're disgusted that no one is reaching
out for them to them, not just to pat them on the back or wear a hoodie and make them feel
good like we look the same. No people that will actually intervene and stop mass layoffs. That's
what has to happen. Direct intervention to stop mass layoffs and the tricks that Wall Street plays
to promote them. Leverage buyout, stock buybacks. We should just be clear, as you made clear in
yo
ur book, that the financial structures have changed with the rise of corporate raters, we
now politely call them private equity firms, and I did a good interview with the Pulitzer
Prize-winning financial or business reporter, Gretchen Morgenson on her book on private equity.
[inaudible 00:11:56]. So the model changes where a private equity firm
comes in and harvest a corporation to sell off its assets, in essence to destroy it. They're
not trying to sustain it, and that has fueled, we'll go
back to certainly Clinton would go back
to Reagan probably, but that has over the last few decades, seen wave after wave of mass layoffs. I
wrote a book called America: The Farewell Tour, and wrote a chapter out of Anderson, Indiana.
That's where GM used to make its cars, good union paying jobs, a middle class city. They literally
packed up the equipment and moved it to Monterey, Mexico where they pay workers $3 an hour, and
the city has fallen into a death spiral with all of the attendant
problems that you point
out, opioid addictions, suicide's very high. And yet the Democratic Party just utterly
fails to address this issue. Right? Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders had golden
opportunities during the pandemic to stop two significant mass layoffs, one in Morgantown, West
Virginia, the other, as you mentioned in Olean, New York, the failure to act contrast sharply
with Trump's strikingly symbolic and partially successful effort to prevent the carrier global
corpora
tion from moving jobs from its Indiana facility to Mexico in 2017. And I think this
is an issue that many people who dislike Trump don't pick up on, although of course he's a
con artist, but he does speak to this pain directly in a way that no other democratic
politician does with maybe the exception of Bernie Sanders, and Sherrod Brown, of course.
Well, look, that's an excellent point. First of all, it was a very self-conscious effort on
the part of the Democrats and the Republicans from Re
agan on to rip up the new deal
controls, get rid of the guard rails, just like you talked about the NLRB, that's
another one they're now trying to get rid of, but basically these corporate raiders, the harvesters
that just wasn't going on before deregulation, that was frowned upon, that was easily stopped.
SEC would walk in and say, no, you can't do that. Well, I just want to interrupt
you. As you point out in your book, stock buybacks were used to be illegal.
Yeah, well, it was basically s
o controlled that no more than 2% of corporate profits could
go to stock buybacks. Now we're talking close to 70% of all corporate profits in society, and
some companies, not just a handful, but hundreds and hundreds spend more than a hundred percent of
their profits on stock buybacks. They're basically taking their money and returning it... Returning
it. Giving it to the largest stock owners. They're not investors. These are stock sellers and these
are the hedge funds and other large insti
tutions that swoop in demand the stock buyback.
Actually, that's why Carrier was moving to Mexico, not to keep up with the competition,
but its parent company and I, technologies had a bunch of hedge funds took a position in that
company and said, "We want a $6 billion stock buyback." So they figured, "Oh, we can save
$60 million by moving our most profitable division to Mexico," and Trump did intervene. The
story of, it's so painful to bring this one up, but I connected with the president o
f the union
at the Morgantown West Virginia facility. It's a mile in pharmaceuticals, and there's a whole
CD history there with Joe Manchin's daughter, and she got like a hundred million.
Right, they produce EpiPens for $10 and then sell them for hundreds of dollars,
But there's a whole bunch of... Let's put that aside. She was gone and the new owner wants to
move it to India in the middle of the pandemic, and they're making generic products.
So this local union was steel workers, former oil
, chemical atomic workers, progressive
organized, and they got Bernie Sanders crew, our revolution to support them. They appealed to
Biden administration, they appealed to Bernie, they appealed to Manchin. They even suggested
to the state government, why don't you buy the company and then we'll produce generic products
for the VA and for Medicaid? Pretty smart, right? Nobody did anything. So 1500 of the
probably the best blue collar jobs other than coal in all of West Virginia 1500
jobs, a
verage pay, 70 grand goes under, and this was when they could have used the
Defense Production Act. They did that with the baby formula just before this period, but they
didn't want to do it, and I can't figure out why. This was such an easy way to bring national
attention to, "We're not going to put up with mass layoffs." It's funny, the president of United
Technologies had a great line when they asked him, "Well, why did you give into Trump?" He goes, "I
was born at night, but I wasn't bo
rn last night." We get 10% of our revenue comes from federal
contracts, right? So there's 760 billion a year in federal contracts. What if you told them, "Guess
what, from here on in, no more mass layoffs, no more stock buybacks." You don't want to do
that. Don't take the contract. We'll find somebody else set up. You can use the bully pulpit. You can
use the federal contract. Now, people will say, whoa, wait a second. You're messing with
capitalism. It's not going to work. Well, you know w
hat? These large corporations are
enormously flexible. The other thing we found, this is another sad one, that Olean plant
in upstate New York was Siemens Energy. 90,000 employees was spun off, but still connected
to Siemens, which has 400,000 employees, a German based company. Well, 1700 US workers lost their
jobs when they stopped making a certain kind of compressor for oil rigs or fracking or something.
In Germany, 3000 were going to lose their jobs, but because they have codetermination
there, half the board members are workers, including high-level union officials. They did
all these investigations, they did all these pressure tactics, and the company agreed to no
compulsory layoffs, plus, this is the part that was really mind-blowing. In other words, you
have to buy the worker out before they leave, otherwise you can't get rid of them. The six
facilities that were making the product that they were shutting down, they agreed to put something
else in the plant and keep t
he six plants open, so that could be part of your federal contract.
No compulsory layoffs, no plant shutdowns, no stock buybacks. But you have to interfere
with capitalists and Wall Street prerogatives. That takes guts. And I keep asking myself, "Don't
they see that it really works for Sherrod Brown in Ohio?" Bernie in Vermont and Elizabeth Warren
in Massachusetts, those are democratic states, but Ohio Brown outpaced Trump by 15% in 2020. So
people respond to those who are really trying to p
rotect their jobs, and it just has to happen.
My big fear is that the right is going to wake up. They're going to see what Trump did.
The polling, by the way, after that show, that was enormously popular with the American
public and with Democrats for that matter, they're going to wake up and say, "You know
what? Instead of going after these companies because they're too woke or for diversity,
let's go after them because of their layoffs." Now, you make an interesting point that... Reminds
me of Gaza, actually. So we have no leverage over Israel unless we stop the arms shipments,
but it isn't going to happen so we have no leverage. So the Democrats have no leverage
over these large corporations because they won't halt these massive government contracts.
And you have, I forget the name of the CEO, but when Biden does his infrastructure bill, signs
it. He's standing next to, what's the name of the woman, who just eradicated all sorts of jobs
[inaudible 00:21:17] right in front
of him. Yeah.
I'm afraid that's what's happened is Schumer's famous line from
2016 has become the defacto policy. He said, "For every blue collar worker we lose in
western Pennsylvania, we're picking up two Republicans in the suburbs," and that goes for
Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin as well. So that's essentially telling people, you're writing
them off. That there are more suburbanites than there are rural working-class people or
working-class people in general. By the way, it's not just ru
ral. You're talking about Staten
Island and Queens and other places in heavily urban areas. We found no difference, by the way,
in people's attitudes, whether they were urban, rural, or suburban amongst the white
working-class. People are pissed. They don't want to be buffeted from their
job. I can't remember who just wrote this, a recent study, and they were asking people what
they felt about the economy and almost to the person, they said, "Greed, it's rigged." It's
rigged. People feel i
t's rigged against them, and that the Wall Streeters are walking off with
the money and the CEOs and that the politicians are too eager to get campaign donations and
frankly also have their eye on, well maybe get a good Wall Street job after they leave office. Too
many people are geared up that way, and it's now permeated into the political culture. Everybody
feels it, unless they're really benefiting from it, and that's a very small number of people.
Well, they feel it because it's true. It
's not a feeling, it's a fact. And so not only do
these corporations lavishly fund politicians like Barack Obama or the Clintons, but
they take care of them as soon as they leave office. There's payback. Speaking fees,
the hundreds of thousands of dollars, insane donations to their foundations, which allow them
to spend their life flying around in Learjets, et cetera. It's just legalized bribery.
Well, again, I keep asking myself, but why do they want to lose? Why would so many Democrats
in
swing states with large rural populations, working-class populations, why do they want
to lose? Sherrod Brown put out three essays with the title Wall Street's War on Workers. He
did this before the 20 election he did in '17, '18, '19. Why don't people see that they could
actually do something to help working people by stopping these mass layoffs opposing Wall Street
using that framework? That's what I'm saying. What blew my mind is I believe that that framework
was incredibly powerful. It
showed up in all the statistical work that we did to sort of prove
that it was powerful. Then you get a guy like Mike Luxe, the Democratic pollster. He's no
radical. He did this report just recently a year ago called Factory Towns, and his conclusion
is this. I'm close to the exact phrase. He says, "The working-class wouldn't care that much about
the woke thing if the Democrats gave a about the economy." Substitute the word mass layoffs for
economy, and I think he's exactly right. And now
we discover that Sheriff Brown's onto this
framework as well. What's holding everybody back? Well, plus they'd win by a landslide if
they actually push through FDR type new Deal reforms. But the Democratic leadership
as it exists, 80-year-old Biden, Nancy Pelosi, they wouldn't exist because they're creatures
of Wall Street and their power comes from one that they're funded by corporations, but
even more importantly, they control the flow of campaign or corporate donations to
anointed candi
dates. So I think they'd rather go down in their privileged first class cabins
then become politically irrelevant because if there was a pivot where they actually challenged
corporate power, the democratic leadership as it exists presently would be eradicated. In a fair
election, not one saturated with corporate money, Bernie Sanders would've beat Hillary Clinton
and probably would've beaten Donald Trump. I agree. I agree. The story in the book
that we stumbled on there, really saddening, i
s the story of Mingo County, West Virginia.
Can I dive into that one a little bit? Yeah, sure. This is the opioid capital.
Yeah. So Bill Clinton wins Mingo County, a small county in West Virginia.
At the time that Bill Clinton won, it had 3,300 coal jobs, he got 69.7% of the
vote, a landslide. Every four years thereafter, the Democrat got less and less and less and less,
and Biden ends up with 13.9%. that's a pathetic amount. You'd get more than that by far. If
you were a writing candidate
in that area, I could run your campaign and get you more than
13.9%. So this county has an incredible history. This is where Mother Jones came and spoke during
the Cold Wars of the early 20th century. There was basically a war going on there between the United
Mine Workers who was trying to organize and the thugs that were hired by the coal industry. In
fact, state and federal troops had to come in there to basically put it under martial law.
Well, there was an armed uprising in Player Mount
ain for three days. They fought them off.
Yep. And finally with the New Deal in Roosevelt, unions were recognized. The United Mine Workers
started to prosper. Workers started doing better, and they rewarded the Democrats with their votes.
All right, so what was going on between 1996 and 2020 in a county that has 23,000 people in it?
The coal mining jobs went from 3,300 to 300, so this was the perfect place for the Democrats
to do a real workers work progress administration, go from town to t
own, ask people what they need,
and then create public jobs to produce what they need. They're going to say, we need better
schools. Okay, build new schools. Our roads are falling apart, build new roads. We don't have
internet. Wire them up. We need better healthcare facilities, produce more healthcare facilities.
The strip mining legacy has to be cleaned up. Bring conservation corps in, clean those places
up, get the rivers below or polluted, fix them. There were tens of thousands of jobs
to be
created in Appalachia in West Virginia and thousands that could have been created just
in Mingo County, and the Democrats didn't do anything nor did the Republicans, but we didn't
expect them to do anything, so they relied on where they rely on the private sector. What did
the private sector do to enterprising? You can't this up. A guy who just got out of prison being
a pimp, set up a drugstore, got some doctor to fill out prescriptions so that he could put out
a prescription per min
ute, and then a second drugstore competed with the first. That's free
enterprise, right? You come in and take advantage of the market. This little county became the pill
Mill of America put out more. That one drugstore was the 22nd largest distributor of opioids
in the whole country. You're talking New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, no,
Mingo County, West Virginia in the top. Number 22. You think these people are going
to reward the Democrats for creating a huge handful of jobs in a d
rugstore. This is,
if I were to try to write a spoof about how to destroy yourself politically, I couldn't
have made this up. And then on top of that, Wall Street came in and fed on the carcass
of these coal mines that were going under and tried to rip the health benefits away from the
coal mining retirees, and that was all legal. UMW Union fought them very hard, but a lot of coal
miners lost their retirement healthcare benefits. And we have to stop that. Progressives have to
stop... You c
an't call yourself a progressive and not fight mass layoffs and not fight Wall
Street. You just can't. You can't say, "Oh, this is all okay, and the system's going to work
itself out by itself." It doesn't. Left to itself, it flows to the bottom, not to the top.
It takes human will undo that regulation that allows those stock buybacks. Don't let them put
debt on a company when they do a leveraged buyout, a corporate rate. Don't let them use borrowed
money. They have to use their own money. T
hey play a completely differently, and there wouldn't
be immediate mass layoffs. The other big fiction, then I'll stop pontificating here, is that, "Okay,
get an education, get a job in high-tech." This is what we've told people to do. "Maybe you can't
do it, but your kids will do it and then things will be fine." Have you have a bright new
future stable employment? Well, last year, the high-tech industry did probably a hundred
billion dollars in stock buybacks. How did they pay for it? The
y did 260,000 mass layoffs.
260,000 workers lost their jobs in the high-tech sector through mass layoffs another 50,000 so
far this year. These are the jobs of the future. Don't get me going. Then people say, "Well, no,
no, no, you can't... It's AI. It's new technology that's doing it." Baloney. There's no indication
at all that any of these jobs are lost to AI. Oh, I take it back. Maybe the dismissal notices
were sent to people through an AI type program, but that's not why these jobs were
lost. Stock
buybacks are why these jobs were lost. The history of technology is that, yes, jobs change, but it's
over a much slower period of time. There've been dozens of studies done on technology that's not
the driver of mass layoffs and job insecurity now. By the way, I don't think trade is either. I think
it's the deregulation of corporations. Of course, the corporate trade agreements, the kind of which
you're very familiar with that have taken place over the years. This all can be st
opped. Human
will created this, human agency created this, human agency can stop it, but we need a movement
to deal with it, and that's got to be built. So the Democrats and the Republicans in every
election fight over this very narrow slice of the electorate that could have undecided voter,
which we're seeing again, and as you point out in the book, they write off a whole segments of
the electorate, and I am just going to read from the book. "The Democrats currently are leaving
behind som
ewhere between 20 and 50% of white working-class non Democrats who are moderately to
very liberal on the most divisive social issues. This translates into approximately 10 to 25
million socially liberal white working-class people who are non-Democrats. Given how close
elections currently are, neglecting these workers should be considered political malpractice."
I'm really glad that you spotted that one. That was one of the most amazing findings we
came up with because we broke the electorate
. There's data long-term, not like polling before
an election, long-term voter surveys where you could break the electorate into seven different
political classifications. So we put all the Republican leaning people who were working
white working-class into one pool, and then we ran all these questions through that pool,
and it was stunning. It was stunning how many of these rabid Republicans and heavily leaning
Republicans were, in fact socially liberal. But the thing that triggered them,
the one problem
with these long-term surveys is they're not put together by people like you or Gretchen. So
they don't have a lot of job oriented questions, but they have a couple that hint that way. One
was on environmental job loss and the other one was on trade job loss, and the responses
to those questions went through the roof. People were really angry and worried about those
kinds of issues. So that again, I think goes back to the fundamental point. There are millions
of socially lib
eral, so-called Republican conservatives who are freaked out about job loss
and they want some kind of job stability and they don't. Here's the other little thing we noticed.
We do a lot of work with trade unions and a lot of workshops, and what I've noticed is that when
people feel that the union can't protect them and that the Democrats can't protect them, they lean
towards the Republicans figure, "Well, we might as well do deregulation or something because that's
the only group now that
could help protect my job. Let's help the companies." Maybe they'll protect
their jobs. That's what happens when you have only 6% of the private sector in trade unions. That's
what happens when the Democratic Party doesn't fight against mass layoffs. People start leaning
to the company for some sort of protection. And we have to talk about trade deals because
it was Clinton that pushed through NAFTA. It was Hillary Clinton that was trying to push through
the TPP. These trade deals essential
ly break down barriers so that sweatshops in China, Vietnam,
Mexico can mass produce products and they can be brought back into the United States at virtually
no cost. When they drive the new GM trucks up for Monterey, Mexico. They still sell at the same
price, but instead of the money going to workers, it goes in the pockets of the CEOs and the
upper echelon of these corporations. But these trade deals have been devastating to the
working-class, and the working-class knows it. Oh, absolute
ly. The idea of structuring a trade
deal to enrich corporations is obviously why the corporations help write these trade deals, and
it goes even more so for financial services, the Wall Street part of it, but we're finding
that behind a lot of these trade deals, the drive for profits to use them is not to fend
off the competition, but actually to create more cashflow for the stock buybacks. I'd like to
see somebody add a little clause to a trade deal that says, guess what? You can use this
trade deal, but you can't do any stock buybacks. We're not going to allow you to recycle money
that you make back into stock buybacks. We're not going to allow you to lay the other thing
saying, guess what? No forced layoffs add. Add those two things to a trade deal the
way you could to federal contracts, and you change the way trade happens globally.
But yes, they've been remarkably devastating, but in more recent years, they're often tied like
with to the desire to get more cash flow for
stock buybacks. So that little loophole that started
in 1982, they've driven a truck through it, the same Mack truck that's coming up from Mexico.
I want to talk about the Republican Party. I thought this was a very important point.
In your book, you talk about McCarthy's as ruthless anti-communist campaign, a campaign that
most liberals also supported Sidney Hook. I added that. That's not you. In less feral in forms, the
working-class masses did not create the federal loyalty oath institut
ed by President Truman's
Democratic administration, and those masses did not create the blacklist that harmed the careers
of so many in government education in Hollywood for McCarthy as the most primarily an elite
phenomenon, not a mass phenomenon. And you say the same is true today. Explain what you mean.
Yeah. I got turned onto this reading a book called The Intellectuals of McCarthy by Michael P.
Rogan and the Pluralist, the Political Science and Sociology establishment of basically the '
50s
and the '60s. We're trying to explain how did totalitarianism rise? Why do you have Mussolini
and Stalin and Hitler and then McCarthy? These people have no trash, minorities, trash, all kinds
of rights, civil rights of all kinds. Why do you have them? Well, the theory simply put was masses
run wild that this happens because the masses run wild, and the proof of McCarthy's masses run wild
was Wisconsin was a populous state. It had a lot of, had a populous governor, Congressman had a
soc
ialist mayor in Milwaukee, and it grew out of the populous movement of the 1880s and 1890s and
flowed into, and it still had remnants of that. And McCarthy was popular in Wisconsin, and
therefore the masses run wild, explains McCarthyism. Well, this guy Rogan did something
which I tried to emulate in writing this book, which is let's take a look at what actually
happened in the voting patterns. And he looks at the old populous districts, and it turns out they
voted against McCarthy. That's
not where he got his strength. The ideology didn't come from the
populace. The ideology came from the conservative Republican intellectuals. The base, the most
fervent part of his base were the small towns, doctors, lawyers, real estate agents and
such. And, he then kicks it up another level, he says the elites allowed him to do
what he did in Washington, his hearings, his attacks, his ruining people's careers.
As soon as he started to attack the army, Eisenhower for the first time turned on
him, and
in six months, McCarthy was gone. For example, had the Republicans turned on Trump, we wouldn't
be talking about him anymore, right? Anyway, we'll get to that in a second. So his claim was, it's an
elite phenomenon. So we then started to look at, well, you mentioned January 6th. Well, let's
take a look at that. Well, there's been some great work. On the surface, it looks like it's
a white working-class riot, and it would support this pluralistic argument that it's the masses
run
wild. Well, it turns out that the University of Chicago has a project where they look at the
demographic characteristics of those people who are arrested, and they're disproportionately
white collar and business owners. Let me just read the figures. I have them
right in front of me. 93% were white, 54% were white collar or business owners, only
22% were blue collar, non-business owners. No college decree and 25% at a college degree.
It makes sense. What I see when I look at Trump, I see a ba
sket full of lawyers, thousands of them.
Well, they're pretty deplorable. Thousands of them. That's the guts of his power
structure. I don't see a working-class person standing up anywhere front. Yeah, they put them in
their audiences and stuff like that to make them look a certain way, and he gets a lot of rural
support, but that's not the guts of his movement. And so I think that there's a strong parallel
between him and McCarthy, and I think it's the same thing if the elite opinion makers
in his own
party and let him run wild, which they clearly have done, you're going to have him succeed.
But they stoke it because their actual policies have no popular support. There's
a reason they stoke this stuff. See, I think if we just dig down one more level,
what is the motivation for each of these people? Well, I'm sure it's slightly different, but one
of the clear motivations is money and power, and riding Trump's coattails. If you see a
path to money and power, you're going to do
it, and if nothing's blocking it, you're going to
keep doing it. And the policies that you support are money and power policies, policies that
you think you're going to get good donations, good jobs in the future, prominence, fame,
power, and glory. There are a few, I'm sure, Republicans actually believe what they're saying,
but I have trouble. I think what they're really saying is, "I want fame, power, and glory,
and this is the way I'm going to get it. Well, as you point out in the book,
however uneasy
that relationship might be. Sometimes the business community in Nazi Germany had no problem working
with the fascists, especially since after mayday, they shut down all the unions. Capitalism, and as
you point out in China, can function quite well with totalitarianism. I just want to read this
paragraph for Democrats in the media to blame The white working-class for this dereliction of
duty by Republican elites is to make the same mistake the plural is made with McCarthyism.
The
white working-class does not have the franchise on authoritarianism, racism, sexism, xenophobia,
homophobia, religious intolerance or violence. Authoritarianism can only irreparably damage
society. If political leaders refuse to hold the authoritarians to account. Liberals too can
become unwitting enablers by blaming the white working-class for the sins of these elites.
Good paragraph. Yeah. Well, you wrote it. It's all right.
Yeah. Well, I stand by it. But you nailed it. That's it. And
that is the
kind of the most crucial political problem of our time in that unless the Democratic
Party is willing to accept responsibility, we're finished. when Trump comes back into
power and he may very well come back into power, it isn't going to be like the last time
and it's going to become a banana republic. Well, look, I came up through the 1960s, and
let's face it, there was a lot of chaos going on there, and there was a lot of struggle, but I
never thought that the democratic syst
em itself was going to break even with all the bombings
and the assassinations. it was just like 1968. I never want to live through that again, and
I was at the Democratic National Convention. I was in the South. I saw it firsthand, but I
had faith in the underlying support that people had for democracy. I am worried now because
after 40 years of job instability, you've now threatened the very essence of what people need
to live to not spiral down. The death spiral you talked about for a co
mmunity is also the death
spiral for each person feels really letting their family down, letting themselves down.
40 years of this, and I think that this system is now threatened. I hate to pin all my hopes on the
labor movement, but that's where I am, and I think that Shawn Fain at the UAW is onto something. He's
the first labor leader in decades that speaks for the class as a whole. When he talks, when he got
up and said, "Billionaires should not exist," just like that. That's a sign to me
that he understands
that a movement can be built. What I'd like to see him do is to create, in a sense, a nonpartisan
political movement for like a dollar a month or something anybody can join, and a very simple
platform. No more mass layoffs, no more stock buybacks, no more leveraged buyouts. Very simple.
I think millions of people would join and that would give him leads to organize. Look, I'm
trying to get into the ear of his assistance and comrades, but something has to break where
ano
ther movement gets built because there are not enough shared Browns or Bernie Sanders
or Elizabeth Warren. They're just not enough, and to get them to be enough, you need something
to I think come up from below. And what I saw, I was impressed with what happened with the UAW,
and it was also the communication. Workers of America are very, very good. By the way, they run
courses for a thousand workers a year based on my runaway and equality book, and now based on this
book as well. They real
ly... Day-long courses, they spend like a million dollars a year educating
their own members to run through these courses, that there's some hope there. But we need a lot-
Well, that's what a lot of people forget. One of the fundamental roles of
labor in society is education. Exactly. That was a trusted source of information.
It still is a trusted source, but with only 6% of the business sector and unions, we got problems.
We're better off in the public sector, but you need that private sect
or organized and where
you started this conversation with the NRB laws, if that goes, you are not going to see hardly any
more union organizing, and you're into the modern form of feudalism. You're back to the Mother
Jones period where you can't organize. It's going to be against the law to organize, and we
can't head in that direction. The scary thing is you've got a guy like Jamie Demon from a CEO of JP
Morgan Chase, supposedly liberal guy. He says, oh, we can work with Trump. He's alread
y said it.
Lloyd Blankfein said, "If Bernie Sanders was the nominee, he'd work for Trump, one
of a major Democratic Party donor." What's interesting, the UAW strike was really
popular. It's been a long time since the strike was actually a majoritarian support for a strike,
so there's something out there where people, it's that basic system, a little model I put
forth before, if you've got all the power with corporations and the Democrats aren't protecting
you, then you got to have it at lea
st a union. The Starbucks workers, we're working with these
Amazonian United workers right now providing education. They understand. They're telling
me I'm too conservative. I'm not attacking capitalism enough. He says, "Workers are totally
comfortable attacking it because they're living it every day." They're basically throw away people.
They're treated like you can just toss them away. Work them to death, and then get somebody else. We
need some sort of an uprising that is structured. Not
another [inaudible 00:51:44] Square, Arab
Spring or We Are the 99%. We need it structured. You need an organization that actually has
the infrastructure to hold us together- But we also need an organization that has
the power to strike, because that's the only weapon working-class people have to fight
against their overlords. That's it, the strike. Yeah. If they take that away,
you're going to see violence. Well, that's what we're watching it right
now with the NLRB. That's what they're d
oing. Anyway.
All right. On that hopeful note. I'm going to be a little optimistic.
For the listeners here, I'm trying to be optimistic. The book's not as
pessimistic as we are being right now. Oh, I don't know. I think we
better face what's in front of us. You're right.
We're not going to resist by selling hope. You're right.
That's not our job. Our job is to sell truth. Not sell it, but say it.
You can't build something unless you face up to it.
No. I learned that in war. People had a polly
annish view of their own immortality
didn't live too long. We have to see what's in front of us and then we have to resist. But I
highly recommend your book. I think you nailed it. I think it's a really, really important
book, and I want to thank you for writing it. That was Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor
Institute and author of Wall Street's War on Workers: How Mass layoffs and Greed are
Destroying the Working-Class and What to do About it. I want to thank The Real News Network
and
its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivera.
You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.
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