Kudos to Joe Biden for joining the United Auto Workers picket line on Tuesday. He’s the first president to join a picket line in living memory.
But he shouldn’t stop there.
He should criticize the CEOs of America’s big corporations who are now raking in more than 350 times what the average American worker is earning. Blast corporations that are monopolizing their industries. Condemn firms that are using their profits to buy back shares of stock, polluting the planet with carbon emissions and polluting our democracy with big money.
He wouldn’t be the first Democratic president to do this.
On the eve of the 1936 election, President Franklin D Roosevelt warned America that business and financial monopolies and war profiteers had begun to consider the US government
as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.
The US is again in a populist age, when a vast army of Americans have been shafted by big corporations, Wall Street and a government corrupted by monied interests.
The biggest change over the last three decades – the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working middle class – has nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”-ism, immigration, critical race theory, transgender kids or any other current Republican bogeymen.
It has directly to do with a huge upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth.
Although total wealth is much greater now than it was four decades ago, the distribution of that wealth is far more unequal. The bottom 50% hasn’t budged. Wealth at the top has exploded.
Meanwhile, a declining share of the nation’s wealth has been going to workers, and an exponentially rising share to CEOs and big investors.
This change didn’t happen because of so-called “neutral market forces”. It happened because of policy decisions made over the last four decades. For example:
To open the American economy wide to imports from China. To deregulate Wall Street and allow it to make bets with other people’s money.
To dramatically cut taxes on big corporations and the rich. To let corporations bash unions and fire workers who try to organize.
To encourage activist investors and private equity companies to take over “underperforming” companies and then promptly fire workers and sell off assets.
To allow big corporations to become far larger, monopolizing entire industries.
To allow pharmaceutical companies to extend their patents and jack up the prices of critical drugs. To allow oil companies access to federal lands and to benefit from special tax write-offs.
To bail out the biggest banks but not homeowners who get caught in the downdrafts. To privatize higher education and force students to take out massive loans.
To encourage corporations to buy back their shares of stock rather than reinvest profits.
These policy decisions didn’t just happen, either. They were pushed by wealthy elites on Wall Street and in C-suites who made mammoth donations to politicians on both sides of the aisle – mostly but not exclusively Republican – to ensure that their wishes would be honored.
To Biden’s credit, he and most Democratic lawmakers in Congress have pushed for policies that will make the nation more equitable, such as childcare and eldercare subsidies, student-loan forgiveness and negotiated drug prices. Kudos.
But Biden seems reluctant to blame CEOs, Wall Street moguls and the super-rich for what’s happened.
Yet they are to blame, as are their lackeys in Washington.
They have turned their growing wealth into increasing political power to change the rules of the game in ways that further enlarge their wealth and power, while neglecting and exploiting the bottom half.
Biden should condemn them, as did FDR. He should name the CEOs, leaders of finance, heads of pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, internet moguls and “activist” investors who have profited at the expense of the rest of the US.
He should unambiguously be on the side of workers in their struggle for better pay and working conditions.
He should attack corporate welfare – the special tax loopholes, bank bailouts, unconditional subsidies, loan guarantees and no-bid contracts that have lined the pockets of the wealthy, paid for by the rest of us.
Let Republicans criticize corporate “wokeness”. Biden should campaign against corporate greed.
Let Republicans obsess about critical race theory, immigration and sex. Biden should campaign against how obscenely unfair and unequal the US has become.
It’s good that Biden’s joining the UAW picket line. But if he and other Democrats don’t tell the economic truth about what’s happened and place the blame squarely where it’s deserved, the lies of Republicans will fill the void.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
