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Harris Needs to Show She Will Fight Like Hell for the Working Class—There's Still Time
And the best way to do that is to... fight like hell for the working class.
Oct 18, 2024
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 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 saying she “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?
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 Trump to appear as the savior of working-class 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 tariff 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 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.
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Shady Loan Deals With JPMorgan Chase Put Chicago Schools in a Financial Vice
Big banks like Chase have repeatedly targeted communities, taxpayers, and even our schools with predatory debt. It's time to fight back.
Sep 16, 2024
Chicago’s school year kicked off amid a looming budget crisis that jeopardizes stability for both students and teachers. At the heart of the issue is a silent killer of public education: predatory bank loans, particularly from JPMorgan Chase.
During a bargaining session with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), I urged Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to stop allowing big banks to hold Chicago students hostage. Instead of delaying contract negotiations with teachers and risking program cuts that harm students, CPS and state officials should take legal action to recover the funds lost due to these toxic bank deals.
CPS has a deficit projection of over half a billion dollars, perpetuated by the several hundred million dollars in predatory loans from banks like JPMorgan Chase taken out nearly a decade ago. These loans have strangled CPS finances and prevented the district from providing the high-quality education Chicago's children deserve.
Predatory loans are a familiar problem for families in Chicago and around the country. These risky loans are hawked as a short-term solution to fill a gap in finances–with a steep interest rate buried in the fine print that balloons over time.
Chicago Public Schools should hold banks like Chase accountable for the harm they’ve caused Chicago’s schoolchildren.
Chase has repeatedly targeted communities, taxpayers, and even our schools with predatory debt. Chase and its predecessor banks pushed Black and brown Chicagoans into the predatory subprime mortgages that caused the 2008 financial crisis, leading to a tsunami of foreclosures that resulted in a massive loss of household wealth in communities of color.
And nearly 10 years ago, Chase closed a predatory deal with CPS that has haunted our finances ever since.
CPS was already reeling from drastic cuts to special education services in 2016, prompted by the immediate payment of $234 million in termination fees for bad deals they entered into a decade prior. An unfair school funding formula forced 50 schools to shutter three years earlier and continued to destabilize the same South and West side neighborhoods.
A twin set of threats were on the horizon: a potential takeover of schools by Governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican who was hellbent on making Illinois more like Texas, and a threat by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to lay off 6,000 teachers to close a budget gap caused by structural underfunding.
The school district desperately needed funds to pay for projects like lead abatement. Rather than face a takeover or mass layoffs, they decided to issue bonds in order to pay the termination fee. But because CPS’s credit rating had been downgraded to “junk” just a few months prior, financial giants like Chase and Nuveen exploited the opportunity.
Banks purchased the bonds from CPS at a lowball price but then sold them to other investors just months later for a much higher payoff. Over a span of two months, Chase bank made a 9.5% profit on $150 million in bonds through this arbitrage scheme, an annualized profit of 82%. This calls into question whether Chase met its legal obligation to give CPS a fair price for the bonds. Our schools are still impacted by these bad deals, paying $200 million annually for loans taken out during this moment of crisis.
CPS was also the victim of toxic interest rate swaps deals that cost the district, Chicago, and the state of Illinois hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 2000s. Banks had marketed swaps as a way for cash-strapped governments to save money, but they were laden with hidden risks that materialized as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, causing payments to skyrocket and costing taxpayers a fortune.
As with Chicago’s parking meter and Skyway deals, future generations of taxpayers were stuck holding the bag. From 2012 to 2016, the City of Chicago handed over $145 million to Chase Bank alone to terminate these toxic swaps.
CPS should hold banks like Chase accountable for the harm they’ve caused Chicago’s schoolchildren. There is strong reason to believe the banks that trapped CPS into these predatory deals violated their legal responsibilities to the district. While the district has improved its financial health since 2016, recovering the millions lost to predatory lending would help build on their progress.
Decades of underfunding and predatory banking have swallowed the district’s reserves. Now, faced with a federal reduction that could slash funding by $800 per student, the district has reached an inflection point: Will CPS hold banks accountable and fund the programs, resources, and staff that students deserve—or will they make cuts that set kids back?
Climate Inaction Is a Betrayal of the Young, and They Feel It
Our institutions—from the White House to the university president, from the bank CEO to the labor leader, from the newspaper editor to the religious leader—need to be willing to show some ability to change.
Feb 21, 2024
There’s no question that the rate of climate anxiety is growing—how could it not be, on a world where fires and floods are increasingly commonplace? And once your house has flooded—well, the next rainstorm, or even the next forecast, is going to bring back too many memories.
But I’ve found that a fair number of people, especially younger ones, are feeling really desperate anxiety even before they’ve had a traumatic experience, to the point where, for instance, they don’t want to have children of their own. My guess is that this has as much to do with the sense that they’ve been abandoned by the leading institutions—political and economic—of our societies, who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the scale of this emergency or break old practices.
I’ve been thinking all week at my anger at America’s big banks, the companies that represent the capital in capitalism—as I explained last week, they’ve now backed away even from their very scant climate commitments, fearful it might cost them a bit at the margins. And this week the Biden administration let it be known it was going to relax the timetable for getting rid of internal combustion engines, because of combined pressure from the auto companies and the auto workers union.
I remember debating a wind power opponent at Dartmouth years ago; when he was done making his case that no one should have to look at these “monstrosities,” the first question from a student was: “Could you please explain how you managed to get your head so far up your butt?”
I have no more sympathy for the car companies than the banks—they’ve opposed every regulation anyone has ever proposed, at least as far back as seat belts. And I have lots of sympathy for the UAW—they deserved and needed a new contract, which is why many of us tried to play at least a tiny part in helping their successful fall strike. They fret that moving too fast could cost jobs, which is a real worry. But moving too slow has a huge cost too, on a planet that has just come through its hottest year in the last 125,000: Passenger vehicles contribute almost a third of America’s carbon emissions. In a world that understood the climate crisis as an emergency, UAW president Shawn Fain, and the car company CEOs, and the Biden administration would be out on the stump together, doing everything they could to get people to buy EVs.
No need to single out the UAW, especially since they’re doing their best to undercut the Trump campaign (he’d love to make electric cars, which he insists grind to a halt after 15 minutes of driving, a centerpiece of his campaign). After all, we could say the same thing about all those universities that have fought fossil fuel divestment because it’s easier just to keep investing as you have in the past, or those insurance companies that continue to underwrite new pipelines even as their data show the inexorable rise in climate damage, or those longtime residents of cities and suburbs who oppose denser housing in their communities even though it’s clearly a key part of both cutting emissions and letting the next generation have an affordable place to live. If you’re a young person you could look at them all and think: They don’t want even relatively small changes, and in the process they’re guaranteeing that absolutely everything will change for us.
I think older people underestimate how often their resistance to change is read as disregard for the future. I remember debating a wind power opponent at Dartmouth years ago; when he was done making his case that no one should have to look at these “monstrosities,” the first question from a student was: “Could you please explain how you managed to get your head so far up your butt?” There are occasions when I despair that the motto of my beloved Vermont, oldest state in the union, should be “change anything you want once I’m dead.”
A global study in The Lancet a couple of years ago attempted to quantify this sense of what the authors called “betrayal.” The researchers found deep-seated climate anxiety around the planet. Read the findings just to let them sink in:
A large proportion of children and young people around the world report emotional distress and a wide range of painful, complex emotions (sad, afraid, angry, powerless, helpless, guilty, ashamed, despair, hurt, grief, and depressed). Similarly, large numbers report experiencing some functional impact and have pessimistic beliefs about the future (people have failed to care for the planet; the future is frightening; humanity is doomed; they won’t have access to the same opportunities their parents had; things they value will be destroyed; security is threatened; and they are hesitant to have children). These results reinforce findings of earlier empirical research and expand on previous findings by showing the extensive, global nature of this distress, as well as its impact on functioning. Climate distress is clearly evident both in countries that are already experiencing extensive physical impacts of climate change, such as the Philippines, a nation that is highly vulnerable to coastal flooding and typhoons. It is also evident in countries where the direct impacts are still less severe, such as the U.K., where populations are relatively protected from extreme weather events.
And they also found that that feeling of abandonment was a huge part of the problem:
Distress appears to be greater when young people believe that government response is inadequate, which leads us to argue that the failure of governments to adequately reduce, prevent, or mitigate climate change is contributing to psychological distress, moral injury, and injustice.
Such high levels of distress, functional impact, and feelings of betrayal will negatively affect the mental health of children and young people. Climate anxiety might not constitute a mental illness, but the realities of climate change alongside governmental failures to act are chronic, long-term, and potentially inescapable stressors. These factors are likely to increase the risk of developing mental health problems, particularly in more vulnerable individuals such as children and young people, who often face multiple life stressors without having the power to reduce, prevent, or avoid such stressors.
Humans are remarkable creatures. Though we can, uniquely, worry about the future, we can also, uniquely, feel the kind of solidarity and support that lets us carry on even amidst great travail. But isolation, lack of connection—they crack us.
Our institutions—from the White House to the university president, from the bank CEO to the labor leader, from the newspaper editor to the religious leader—need to be willing to show some ability to change in the face of an emergency. We’re not even talking huge sacrifice—the difference between making EVs and making old-school SUVs, or investing in a fossil-free index fund, or ending loans to oil companies, is not existential to any of the parties involved. They are small hits indeed compared with the hits that are headed our way if the planet keeps heating. And the willingness to change would not only help us weather this crisis physically—it would also help us weather it emotionally.
We only get one life. The thought that young people are having to live theirs under this shadow—damaged by the climate crisis even before its fully hit them—should give all of us real pause. There’s a generational theft underway: of water and ice and coral, but also of security and ease.
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