The resurgence of the labor movement in 2023 galvanized and emboldened unions around the country—and sent capitalists scrambling to squash the nascent militancy of their workers. Among the attempts of the billionaire class to retaliate is a major legal challenge to the National Labor Relations Board, the government body that has protected the right of workers to collective bargaining for 89 years. This latest attack on the rights of workers is the culmination of a decades-long assault on the working class in the US, which has been caught between an economic system hemorrhaging jobs and a political system that refuses to address their problems. Les Leopold, executive director of the Labor Institute and author of Wall Street’s War on Workers, joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the full-spectrum assault on worker power taking place before our eyes.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges:
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 when 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 working-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 off 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 the 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.
Les Leopold:
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 economy, 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 brave 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 between 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 Hillary’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 people 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 getting 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.
Chris Hedges:
We should just be clear, as you made clear in your 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.
Les Leopold:
[inaudible 00:11:56].
Chris Hedges:
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 corporation 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.
Les Leopold:
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 Reagan 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.
Chris Hedges:
Well, I just want to interrupt you. As you point out in your book, stock buybacks were used to be illegal.
Les Leopold:
Yeah, well, it was basically so 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 institutions 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 of 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.
Chris Hedges:
Right, they produce EpiPens for $10 and then sell them for hundreds of dollars,
Les Leopold:
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, average 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 born 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 what? 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 the 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 protect 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.”
Chris Hedges:
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
Les Leopold:
[inaudible 00:21:17] right in front of him.
Chris Hedges:
Yeah.
Les Leopold:
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 rural. 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 it’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.
Chris Hedges:
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.
Les Leopold:
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?
Chris Hedges:
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 candidates. 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.
Les Leopold:
I agree. I agree. The story in the book that we stumbled on there, really saddening, is the story of Mingo County, West Virginia. Can I dive into that one a little bit?
Chris Hedges:
Yeah, sure. This is the opioid capital.
Les Leopold:
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.
Chris Hedges:
Well, there was an armed uprising in Player Mountain for three days. They fought them off.
Les Leopold:
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 town, 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 minute, 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 drugstore. 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 can’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. They 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? They 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 stopped. 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.
Chris Hedges:
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 somewhere 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.”
Les Leopold:
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 liberal, 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.
Chris Hedges:
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 essentially 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.
Les Leopold:
Oh, absolutely. 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.
Chris Hedges:
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 instituted 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.
Les Leopold:
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 socialist 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.
Chris Hedges:
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.
Les Leopold:
It makes sense. What I see when I look at Trump, I see a basket full of lawyers, thousands of them.
Chris Hedges:
Well, they’re pretty deplorable.
Les Leopold:
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.
Chris Hedges:
But they stoke it because their actual policies have no popular support. There’s a reason they stoke this stuff.
Les Leopold:
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.
Chris Hedges:
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.
Les Leopold:
Good paragraph.
Chris Hedges:
Yeah. Well, you wrote it. It’s all right.
Les Leopold:
Yeah. Well, I stand by it.
Chris Hedges:
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.
Les Leopold:
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 system 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 community 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 another 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 really… 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-
Chris Hedges:
Well, that’s what a lot of people forget. One of the fundamental roles of labor in society is education.
Les Leopold:
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 sector 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 already said it.
Chris Hedges:
Lloyd Blankfein said, “If Bernie Sanders was the nominee, he’d work for Trump, one of a major Democratic Party donor.”
Les Leopold:
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 least 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-
Chris Hedges:
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.
Les Leopold:
Yeah. If they take that away, you’re going to see violence.
Chris Hedges:
Well, that’s what we’re watching it right now with the NLRB. That’s what they’re doing.
Les Leopold:
Anyway.
Chris Hedges:
All right. On that hopeful note.
Les Leopold:
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.
Chris Hedges:
Oh, I don’t know. I think we better face what’s in front of us.
Les Leopold:
You’re right.
Chris Hedges:
We’re not going to resist by selling hope.
Les Leopold:
You’re right.
Chris Hedges:
That’s not our job. Our job is to sell truth. Not sell it, but say it.
Les Leopold:
You can’t build something unless you face up to it.
Chris Hedges:
No. I learned that in war. People had a pollyannish 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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