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occupy wall street
Trump and Musk Are Returning Us to the Age of the Robber Barons
For generations, the ultra-rich have been pushing to overthrow the Progressive Era’s and the New Deal’s utilitarian reforms. They have now found their moment.
Feb 20, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their ilk are returning the U.S. to the Gilded Age of robber barons, replete with railroad monopolies and no union protections. They are bringing us back to a time before the Progressive movement had instituted the first real wave of social reforms, which were later widely expanded by New Deal programs. These initial reforms offered workers’ compensation, free school meals for poor children, regulated working hours, and put antitrust laws on the books. They protected the everyday person, white- and blue-collar alike, and were a setback for the ultra-rich. For generations afterward, the ultra-rich have been pushing to overthrow the Progressive Era’s and the New Deal’s utilitarian reforms.
It started with deregulation in the 1970s and was then magnified during Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal presidency. The talking points behind deregulation duped people through bastardizing the concept of “freedom.” The U.S. is a free country, the argument goes, so there shouldn’t be regulation. Yet deregulation, in this sense, is focused on giving businesses and corporations free rein, screwing the rest.
Inevitably, the neoliberals’ free trade policies, the gutting of unions, the reducing of social programs, and the lowering of taxes for the very wealthy led to wide-scale disillusionment. It birthed the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements.
That brings us to today, where there is one option: resistance everywhere.
The Tea Partiers, mostly unwittingly, pushed for the policies of the late 19th-century robber barons, free of any regulation on business and extremely low (if any) taxes, as if these policies would help the average person. The Occupy movement failed in that, while offering an accurate critique of vast wealth inequality, it did not propose any concrete goals. There was the fear that its message would be branded, hijacked, or warped by the mainstream media. Fair point, I suppose. But a protest movement without policy objectives is like a tree falling in an empty forest. Luckily, the forest was not empty.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had been voicing the same message for decades. He rose to national prominence shortly after the movement’s demise, and his popularity was, in part, due to the Occupy movement raising the issue of wealth inequality to public consciousness. Unlike Occupy, Bernie had specific utilitarian policy goals.
On the other side, Trump voiced the radical Tea Partiers’ message of the robber barons, with more overt xenophobia and racism.
In 2016, both establishment parties tried to crush their mass movement candidates. The Democratic Party succeeded and had Hillary Clinton run as its presidential candidate. On the other hand, the GOP failed to stop Trump and held their nose, presuming Hillary Clinton would trounce him in the general.
When Trump won, most were surprised. Trump himself was unprepared, and the majority of institutions were unprepared to back him. His policy efforts, such as the Muslim ban and immigrant parent-child separation, were short-lived due to popular and legal pushback and sloppy execution.
During his first term, Trump’s core supporters remained steadfast behind him, but most mainstream institutions did not overtly support or cave to him.
For an unprepared presidency, dawdling along much like a toddler with a flippant mouth, the Covid-19 pandemic was icing on the cake for executive leadership failure. Because of Trump’s anti-vax rhetoric, inept health policies, and spewing of misinformation, the deaths of nearly half-a-million Americans can be attributed to him.
Unsurprisingly, Trump was booted out of office in 2020 and Joe Biden stepped in. Once again, the Democrat establishment coalesced against Bernie’s candidacy.
During Biden’s first three years in office, he was a good president, passing the most important climate change legislation in U.S. history, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. He supported unionization efforts and tried to eliminate student loan debts. He restored a sense of decency and aid for UNWRA.
As the 2024 election came closer, the Gaza genocide commenced, which Biden wholeheartedly backed. In Biden’s last year in office, when Trump became the clear GOP presidential candidate, he tried to outflank the GOP on the right on immigration, restricting asylum seeker border crossings and attempting to push an anti-immigrant bill that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) crafted. (Of course, Trump killed it to prevent Biden from getting “credit.”)
Throughout the Biden years, inflation increased dramatically, similarly to most of the world. Yet Biden could never adequately explain this phenomenon to the American people and was horrible at communicating his domestic accomplishments.
He and his staff ignored his mental decline, leaving former Vice President Kamala Harris little time to campaign. Simultaneous to Biden’s growing unpopularity, far-right institutions began crafting Project 2025 (now being instituted) for a new Trump administration. When the Dems lost this time, the far-right was prepared with institutional backing. For the most part, the establishment (media, corporations, etc.) caved to Trump and his anti-constitutional, authoritarian executive actions.
That brings us to today, where there is one option: resistance everywhere.
Resist on the streets, in Congress (wake up Jeffries and Schumer!), and the courts, to save a very flawed republic before it’s too late. Before fascistic robber barons steal it away, leaving the American people whistling in the desert wind watching a whiny rich snowflake asshole pretend that the United States is a reality TV gameshow.
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Beware the Faux Populism of Corporate Democrats
For the Democrats to become a truly populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. But that won't just happen. A movement must be built and harnessed.
Jan 08, 2025
Donald Trump’s victory is causing James Carville, the outspoken raging Cajun who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, to call for the Democratic Party to go all in on a populist agenda. He wrote recently in the New York Times,
“Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress, and force them [Republicans] to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”
Is Carville really agreeing with the Center for Working Class Politics, which in October published the results of their YouGov survey, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania?” That report found that:
“… working-class Pennsylvanians responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies. What’s more, we found little evidence that focusing on economic populism risks decreasing voter enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies outside the working class.”
Ezra Klein, another Democratic Party influencer, picked up on that survey just before the election in November, but then dismissed it as an outlier: “Surveys like that should be treated with some skepticism”, he wrote. “The Harris team is running plenty of its own polls and focus groups and message tests.”
But the results of elections matter, and there is now a chorus of Democratic Party nouveau populists, including Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, who went on to earn tens of millions on Wall Street.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class. As former Senator Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, to this day, workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class.
Emanual seems these days to have become a closet Sanders supporter, claiming that Obama was way too soft on the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008:
Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.
Some did, at the time, but Emanuel did not. Buy hey, people do change, don’t they? Why shouldn’t we believe that the old Democrats can become real populists?
Let’s start with an understanding of how that Harris polling could have been so wrong. Why did their results cause them to shy away from the kind of strong populism that the Center for Working Class Politics found attracted the most working-class support in Pennsylvania? A state Harris had to win.
I don’t know the Harris pollsters personally, but I do know how the Center for Working Class Politics operates. They are meticulous. They know that their polls will be ripped apart by establishment academics and party gatekeepers, so they can’t make mistakes. They can’t let their own personal beliefs tilt the survey towards what they’d like to believe is true. Their goal is to ask the questions others aren’t asking, to better reflect the opinions of people of all types about working class values and beliefs.
Not so with the pollsters who cashed in on the Harris campaign. They know what their client wants to hear (and is capable of hearing). And it’s not that a strong anti-Wall Street message sells, and therefore that she should mercilessly attack what Sanders calls “the billionaire class.” After all, Harris made a public point of holding a Wall Street fundraiser in the middle of her campaign, and her staff made clear that Wall Street helped to shape her agenda. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was special adviser to her election campaign, and has deep ties to Wall Street through Uber and Pepsico.
It’s not that Democratic Party pollsters cooked the books. They just knew to ask questions that hovered within the corporate Democratic comfort zone. They didn’t ask the strongest populist questions because they didn’t think those results would be welcomed within the campaign.
I once saw this process in action. I was watching a focus group through a one-way mirror. The topic was healthcare in the leadup to Obamacare, but it was stunning to see how the discussion was shaped by the types of questions the facilitators asked. They limited them to various types of health insurance and avoided more radical reforms of the healthcare system.
At one point a younger Black man expressed his frustration: “Why all this talk about insurance? I’m interested in health care and getting access to it.” He was thanked for his comment and then ignored, while I yelled at the mirror, “Talk about Medicare for All!” It didn’t happen because the group paying for the focus group, as well as the pollster, didn’t think Medicare for All was feasible, and therefore refused to discuss it.
Today, the Democratic elites not only run away from Medicare for All, but they refuse to acknowledge their financial ties to Wall Street. They are more than comfortable, however, accepting large consulting and speaking fees from what should be the targets of their populism. This goes back to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ tone-deaf acceptance of $153 million in speaking fees, including 39 speeches from the very banks that crashed the economy in 2008. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign she collected $1.8 million for eight speeches to Wall Street banks.
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all...
It's not hard to understand. The Wall Street barons who pay the speaking fees are the same kind of people who went to Yale with Hillary and Bill. They’re all from the same newly minted class of highly successful strivers. If there were any working-class roots in their backgrounds, they withered long ago. Nearly all Democratic Party elites are swathed within this moneyed class. During their leadership of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, author David Halberstam called them “the best and the brightest.” Now they are just the richest. In this milieu, light years away from the working class, getting $225,000 per speech seems like a trifle.
But let’s try to be fair. Can’t the party change its stripes now that Democratic influencers are talking populism in the wake of Trump’s victory?
Unfortunately, I don’t think their talk is credible. It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again. He really couldn’t care less what Wall Street thinks about him.
As for the nouveau populists, I’m waiting for Carville to say, “Look I was dead wrong when I helped Bill Clinton undermine unions through NAFTA.” Or for Emanuel to confess that “I was wrong to take millions in Wall Street fees while workers were losing their jobs through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks.” Or for Ezra Klein to admit in print that the Center for Worker Class Politics, “were right about populism. The Harris pollsters were wrong, and I was at fault for dismissing their solid work.”
Or maybe the Democrats could finally show some outrage about Wall Street-induced mass layoffs that are destroying the livelihoods of working people. (For more information, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all, as the original American populists, the Peoples Party, did in the 1880s. Today, that might look like a sustained, organized version of Occupy Wall Street, which fights against mass layoffs caused by Wall Street’s greed and for a $20 federal minimum wage.
Meanwhile, get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.
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'Do You Hear What I Hear?' When Will Democrats Listen?
With our latest holiday-themed comic, we seek not only to empower the voices of working people, but also to push the Democrats to do so as we work to rebuild the party in favor of taking back and democratically transforming America.
Dec 16, 2024
It gives us no pleasure in saying this, for we definitely wanted it to go differently, but the Democrats deserved to lose. We, however, did not. They ceased to be the party of the people—the party of working people—years ago and they hardly seemed bothered by what was happening. Apparently the Democratic leaders were not listening to what working people were saying. Or, if they were listening, they failed to hear what was being said.
Embracing neoliberalism, the party’s leaders and presidents cultivated the affections of their billionaire donors; rationalized the widening inequalities and intensifying concentration of wealth and power; joined in the assaults upon the democratic achievements of the Greatest Generation and the Long Age of Roosevelt; distanced themselves from the resistance expressed in the Wisconsin Rising of 2011 and the anger and hopes of Occupy Wall Street; failed the Fight for $15; and made nothing of the polling which showed that Americans wanted not just change—indeed, radical change—but also jobs at living wages, guaranteed healthcare, decent affordable housing for all, and free public higher education (all of which would have amounted to what the greatest of Democratic Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, projected as an Economic Bill of Rights in 1944).
In fact, even as workers began to organize anew and started demanding better deals from their bosses, the Democrats failed to act seriously to bolster their initiatives. Then, truly proving they had not been listening, they ran a 2024 presidential campaign that avoided calling out the billionaire bosses whose billions are growing ever greater and made little of the voiced needs and wants of the working class.
Situating our new comic in the Holiday season, we seek not only to remind liberals, progressives, radicals, and socialists to listen to and empower the voices of working people, but also to push the Democrats to do so as they/we work to rebuild the party in favor of taking back and democratically transforming America.
We close this installment of our comic-strip series with a portrait of FDR, the Democratic President who—for all of his tragic faults and failings—not only listened to and actually heard working people, but also encouraged them to progressively push him further than he might otherwise have gone and determinedly engaged their labors and energies to dramatically transform the nation and radically enhance freedom, equality, and democracy.
In upcoming comics for Common Dreams we intend to recount that history in hopes of inspiring and propelling Democrats and working people alike to take action.
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