SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
occupy wall street
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Organizing for Debt Cancellation Can Be a Gateway to Systemic Change
The elimination of student debt is just the first step in mitigating the pervasive effects of racial capitalism.
Nov 20, 2022
On a sunny and cool September Saturday in 2011, hundreds of activists and protestors took to Zuccotti Park in New York City's Financial District. They set up tents, mutual aid stations, and more, occupying the space to protest inequality and corporate corruption. Occupy Wall Street brought the terms "the 99%" and "the 1%" into the mainstream American consciousness. When police raided Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night that November, the movement's flagship occupation came to an end. But what it sparked lives on today.
Many of the activists and organizers at the forefront of today's debt cancellation and forgiveness movement got their start at Occupy, either in that first New York demonstration or subsequent actions across the country. Natalia Abrams, who started Occupy Colleges, went on to found the Student Debt Crisis Center. Andrew Ross, an activist and social and cultural analysis professor at New York University, and Hannah Appel, an economic anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, went on to start Strike Debt, a nationwide debt resistance movement. From Strike Debt, the Debt Collective--a debtors union primarily focused on student debt, carceral debt, and tenant debt--was born. A decade later, their efforts saw a small but significant victory when the White House announced federal student loan forgiveness in August.
In the years following Occupy, Strike Debt and the Debt Collective's efforts included producing The Debt Resistors' Operations Manual and launching a Rolling Jubilee that has bought $32 million of debt from secondary markets and canceled it. "It's a drop in the ocean, obviously," Ross says. In the U.S., 45 million current and former students hold $1.6 trillion in federal student debt, which accounts for 92% of all U.S. student debt. "But it was a proof of concept that people could actually take relief for themselves through mutual aid."
Canceling debt wasn't all the jubilee did. It also highlighted the insidious nature of the debt market, the ready availability of solutions, and the depth of a problem that's been centuries in the making.
The Advent of Student Debt
The cost of attending U.S. college and universities remained relatively stable until the 1960s and '70s. When Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967, he swiftly proposed that the University of California system charge tuition for the first time, while also cutting state funding for the schools by 10%, signaling the beginning of the end of state support for universities. Across the U.S., state appropriations for public universities dropped 29% from their peak in 1988 to 2013. In 2018, overall state funding for two- and four-year public colleges was $6.6 billion less than it was in 2008.
The Debt Collective and other entities working in the debt cancellation and forgiveness space are questioning the very foundations of our society, culture, economy, and the racial capital system that underpins them--and they're achieving victories.
Reagan came into office just as Black and Brown students began finally gaining access to higher education in the 1970s and '80s. It's then that the national education ethos seemed to pivot from viewing higher education as a public good to considering it a private investment. Jalil Bishop, an assistant professor at Villanova University who studies racism across institutions and markets, doesn't think the timing was a coincidence. Instead, he calls the phenomenon "racial capitalism."
Because communities of color "have been cut off from ever privately accumulating the wealth to pay for higher education," Bishop says, those communities had to "rely on student loans in a way that communities who have always had access to privately accumulated wealth, through homeownership and businesses they've inherited, [did not need] to rely on student loans." This lack of intergenerational wealth has led to entire families being saddled with student debt, in the form of Parent PLUS loans, in order to finance their children's higher education.
Those racial disparities are reflected in many forms of debt. Black and African American graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than their white counterparts, according to the Education Data Initiative, and are most likely to struggle financially in repaying that debt. The National Consumer Law Center also reports that 27.9% of Black households carry medical debt, compared with 17.2% of white households. Americans as a whole hold at least $195 billion in medical debt.
Because communities of color are disproportionately burdened by student, medical, and carceral debt, all of which are compounded by the growing racial wealth divide, they stand to gain substantially from debt cancellation and forgiveness, not only financially, but psychologically, too.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when student loan repayments were put on pause, Bishop set out to uncover the mental toll of looming debt that feels impossible to pay off. He found that Black borrowers across income levels were suffering psychologically. "They were feeling like they once again found themselves in a debt trap, shackled to some type of arrangement that they couldn't escape and, to them, it really reflected other types of racial traps they had heard about in history. They felt like this was their subprime moment."
Borrowing Everywhere
Thanks to the rise of both financialization and securitization, after the early 1970s, it became more profitable for banks to invest in consumer debt, rather than their focus on the steel and railroad industries of previous decades, for example. Today, consumers can borrow for just about everything, from small purchases made with credit cards to large, durable goods, like cars, homes, and associated maintenance programs, the sellers of which often offer their own financing.
Debt has become a central element of the U.S. criminal justice system, too, largely in the form of fines and fees that total an estimated $26.7 billion in carceral debt held by those currently and formerly incarcerated. "If you look at any one household, there are numerous kinds of debt--medical debt, housing debt, credit card debt, auto debt--flowing through the household. They're all interdependent in a way," Ross says, since the ability to pay one debt impacts the others. As the debt market grew, so did myriad scams and predatory practices that fed off it, including for-profit colleges, like Corinthian College, which used deceptive marketing tactics and often left former students and graduates with worthless degrees and mountains of debt.
Corinthian students made up a significant portion of the Debt Collective's first Rolling Jubilee in 2014. But single-handedly erasing debt isn't Debt Collective's goal, explains Hannah Appel, one of the Debt Collective's founders. "We cannot crowdsource away everybody's debt," she says. "The endgame here is to put the potential power, the potential collective leverage of debt, into the hands of debtors to actually change the systems that indebted us in the first place."
It's through collective action, organizing, and legal pressure that the Debt Collective and other entities working in the debt cancellation and forgiveness space are questioning the very foundations of our society, culture, economy, and the racial capital system that underpins them--and they're achieving victories. In the summer of 2022, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would cancel $5.8 billion of debt owed by 560,000 Corinthian borrowers.
Technology is also playing a big role in debt cancellation efforts. The Debt Collective offers a suite of online tools that help debtors navigate the often complex legal process of disputing debt. Rather than navigating complicated processes alone, the Defense to Repayment app, for example, has borrowers answer questions to create state-specific legal arguments for debt disputes. Appel says an estimated 75,000 people used the app in the first eight months after its launch in February 2014.
Bigger Goals
The Debt Collective is far from alone in striving to eliminate debt. Groups like the Appleseed Network and The Fines and Fees Justice Center are working to oppose and reform the cost of criminal fines and fees and the debt associated with them. There are also RIP Medical Debt, Dream Defenders, Young Invincibles, Living With Conviction, and more organizations that are all, at least in part, organizing to address debt.
Their efforts are strategically intended to contribute to systemic reforms and goals, like abolishing student, medical, and carceral debt, and reforming the primary sources of that debt. Those efforts include supporting a single-payer health care system and tuition-free higher education--objectives that are "a lot closer than you might think," explains Andre Perry, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. "Community colleges in a lot of states are already there because Pell Grants generally cover their tuition," he says.
Bishop agrees. "Money is being spent right now to uphold a student loan industry where it's very clear that students don't win ... and it's possible for us to reallocate that," he says. "There is a need to ask questions around endowment sizes and our colleges being responsible with their funding."
Berea College in Kentucky, for example, hasn't charged tuition since 1892. Berea's students are largely from the surrounding Appalachia area, but many also come from across the U.S., and even from other countries. The college has aligned its admissions process with the needs basis outlined in the Pell Grant program. All of the college's students "bring some amount of the Pell Grant with them to help offset some of their costs," explains Luke Hodson, Berea's associate vice president of admissions. "Sometimes it may be [put] toward tuition costs, but most often it's toward covering some of their housing and meal expenses."
As Berea's provost Scott Steele notes, the college relies on student labor to supplement a lean staff. "Students work for the college on the grounds, as teaching assistants and in the financial aid office, the admissions office, the food service office," he says. To meet the college's annual operating expenses, returns from Berea's endowment constitute 74% of its funding, while 17% comes from federal and state aid and 9% comes from annual donations from supporters.
Ultimately, the debt cancellation movement is about grappling with questions of fairness and equality, both socioculturally and under the law.
When it comes to spending that money, Steele adds, "we're focused on the things that we think are bringing real value to the college experience and the education of our students, but we would not consider ourselves extravagant." Rather than building bigger and better stadiums and residence halls to attract tuition-paying students, Berea instead maintains the facilities it does have while funneling money toward services like its writing and student success centers.
"Not every college is willing to function that way or can function that way," Hodson says, noting that other institutions spend a lot of money to attract and enroll students. "I think we're starting to see that [cost] starting to outpace what the buyer, the student or family, are willing to really pay for."
Steele often fields calls from other institutions interested in replicating Berea's model, but he admits it's a hard transition to make. "It's very difficult to start from zero," he says. "I think other institutions could do something similar if they had the startup costs [covered], but it's really difficult to begin the model from scratch."
From Organizing to Systemic Change
Just like Berea's model can't immediately be replicated elsewhere, neither can many of the initiatives like the Debt Collective's Tenant Power Toolkit, which is focused on California, where tenant rights and consumer protection laws are stronger than most elsewhere in the country. However, the Debt Collective is also working with student law interns to replicate its California-centric services elsewhere.
It's fighting the law with the law on both a state-by-state and federal level that Eileen Connor, a lawyer and the president and director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, believes is key to securing systemic change. "The fact is that a good number of our clients have defaulted on their student loans," she says. "They are having the law applied against them. They're having their Earned Income Tax Credits seized, they're having their wages garnished, and they're having their credit ruined, all through legal means. ... You have to meet the law where it is."
The leap from organizing to systemic change is a long game, but in the meantime, incremental changes can point us in that direction. On the carceral debt front, Helen Ho, a research director at The People Lab at Harvard's Kennedy School, suggests instituting fines and fees that are proportional to income, as other countries do. "On lower levels, there's things that individuals and nonprofits can do, which is setting up a clinic for ability-to-pay hearings. ... And perhaps you can combine that with advocacy to build something bigger, like folks are doing with bail funds."
Bishop and Perry advocate for the expansion of the Pell Grant program, which is currently included in several legislative proposals in Congress. Connor agrees, adding that whatever the solutions are, some experimentation will be required. "There has to be tighter controls on which institutions even get access to that money," she says. "I think there [could be] some partnership with states where there's a system that's closer to Medicare and Medicaid, where there's federal money, but it's administered by states. Maybe we should have a slightly different tax structure where, if there's public investment in higher education, it comes back to the public in the form of taxation on individuals as they succeed because of that initial public investment."
Ultimately, the debt cancellation movement is about grappling with questions of fairness and equality, both socioculturally and under the law, and mitigating some of the generational effects of racialized capitalism. Debt relief and the organizing behind it can also play a key role in recasting our modern conception of education and other forms of advancement as an individual endeavor.
As Connor puts it, "I think it's under-theorized and under-quantified how there are benefits [to education and training] that are not individual, but collective"--how, when one person gets an education, it doesn't just benefit them, but also the whole community around them. It's this collective approach that gives Bishop "so much hope." This, he says, is "because we have borrowers and everyday people and community members who are really leading a movement that, in real time, is rewriting national policy in a way that we don't always get to see around key issues."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular