Wall Street’s War on Workers

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ April 11, 2024  |  [Sign Up]( Wall Street’s War On Workers “In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.” – Matt Taibbi, author, The Long Con that Broke America [Reminder: In case you missed [our announcement]( The Essential Investor has merged with legacy contributors to Agora Financial. The new, larger, more inclusive project is called The Grey Swan Investment Fraternity. If you’re interested in the scope and benefits of our new endeavor, please see what prompted us to merge [here](. If you’ve been a member of The Essential Investor, keep an eye out for your new benefits.] Dear [Reader], April 11, 2024 – “I had heard of the book, White Rural Rage,” writes John H. from Lafayette, Colorado, “and was horrified at its premise.” John continues: It sounded like "evidence" for talking points on The View or MSNBC. Simply lending legitimacy to the truly stupid. Most rural and semi-rural Americans would wonder what these people are talking about. White Christian Nationalism? I think that became a "thing" about ten minutes ago, probably also on MSNBC. Frankly, most rural Americans live a life tied to small towns and cities that have not suffered the dysfunction of the blue American metropolises. Their lives are not dominated by "rage" of any type, being too busy with their jobs, businesses, kids, sports, church and their friends. These people are not burning their cities down. Do they feel ignored? Yes, which Donald Trump tapped into. All Americans have just suffered a 20% devaluation of the dollar. Hundreds of billions going to green energy subsidies, many for the wealthy, that do absolutely zero for anyone not getting the subsidy and less than zero for small town and rural America. Yes, they see this as stupid, and hold similar views on wide open borders. John was among a number of readers who chose to comment on yesterday’s White Rural Rage missive. The topic is hot to the touch. “The book and its “conclusions’,” John sums up, “are part and parcel of the propaganda meant to turn Americans against each other.  If you disagree with wild changes in election rules, you are a "terrorist", but if you burn down cities you are a peaceful protestor. Right. “To picture rural and small town America as a sinister force of white nationalism and terrorism is almost too stupid for words. And rural Americans know it.” “Great to hear from an obvious white tower academic,” reader Ron V. agrees  “who not too subtlety despises ‘rural’ people that he has obviously never deigned to meet much less get to know.” Mr. V expounds: Of course, it is most important to the author that “your” community be "diverse" (whatever that may mean) instead of cohesive in values and social and economic sustainability. I have experienced the most blatant and ingrained racism in urban areas (today a black woman was visibly upset having to interact with me in a .gov office. The ability to discern fraud seems to be more prevalent in areas where your survival may depend on it – Darwin in action – instead of areas with huge mitigation of poor choices. I witness far fewer incidents of 1st Amendment violations in rural areas as opposed to urban shout downs, closed "public" meetings, arrests of those voicing non "popular" opinions. But what do I know? I am just a working veteran who has to make a living by providing services better than others. “The term ‘racism’ was invented by communist jew Leon Trotsky,” writes Dave C. from Way Down South in Dixie, “so that people would be afraid to speak out against communism, Marxism, and jews.” As he continues: Oh, the irony. There's absolutely nothing wrong with white conservative Christians wanting to live around other white conservative Christians. I have no desire to raise my family around blacks who hate white people, Muslims who hate Christians, or communists who want to kill my family. It's a very simple concept. People with similar beliefs, morals and ideologies want to live near one another. Communist filth has destroyed this once great nation and our founding fathers would have never let it get to this point. Dave’s response includes a rather strong call to arms… or more to the point, defense of his way of life. It’s true, Trotsky was jewish and is credited with using the term “racist” to denounce critics of his communist theories in 1927. He was also fluent in French. The term raciste had been in vogue among French socialist academics since 1892. White Rural Rage “is a good example of gathering all  that data and then drawing the wrong conclusion,” said Lee F.  “The rural white voter is the one trying to save democracy.” As he concludes: We remember what America used to be before the current progressive administration started to tear down the constitution and everything sacred. Who opened the border and started lawfare against their enemies? Who spied on their fellow citizens and censored everything opposed to their evil plan? How many so-called conspiracy theories have been proven correct? How much damage can they do with still seven months to go? Coincidentally, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi was writing about the book White Rural Rage yesterday, too. Below I’ve included his introduction of a different book he believes provides a more realistic view of what has befallen white workers in the middle class. (Pre-order [Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed]( now available at [Amazon]( and[Barnes & Noble]( or if you prefer one of these sites:[Bookshop.org]( [Books-A-Million]( or [Target]( CONTINUED BELOW... >>ADVERTISEMENT<< Biden RETIRING August 19th? If you’re one of the people who believe Joe Biden isn’t up to the job… You need to see [this shocking retirement announcement]( Louis Navellier is expecting on August 19th. And, before you cheer… What’s waiting in the wings is far, FAR worse…  [Click here to see his warning]( and the steps he recommends every American take right now. CONTINUED... The Real Book About White Working Class [Matt Taibbi]( News]( on Substack In late February a new book by journalist Paul Waldman and University of Maryland professor Thomas Schaller called White Rural Rage hit the bookshelves. The book was a compendium of Hee Haw! caricatures of hayseed America mixed with a blunt diagnosis: rural Americans are disproportionately racist, conspiratorial, authoritarian, and supportive of political violence, key culprits in the rise of Donald Trump. “Rural Americans,” Waldman and Waller wrote, “are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.” Media response was instantaneous and ecstatic. Morning Joe hyped White Rural Rage as if it were a cross of What Happened and The Grapes of Wrath; Mika Brzezinski sat rapt as Schaller described rural voters as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” Echoing one of the book’s constant refrains, Paul Krugman at the New York Times wrote about “The Mystery of Rural White Rage,” complaining about the illogic of rural white disdain for Democrats, while Salon’s Amanda Marcotte after reading it felt emboldened to take off the “kid gloves” and pop rural America’s “racist, sexist, homophobic bubble.” I was grumbling about this book when author Chris Hedges connected me with Les Leopold, director of the Labor Institute, who’d just written an opposite sort of book called [Wall Street’s War on Workers]( which turns out to be a thorough deconstruction of most of White Rural Rage. Leopold has spent much of his career agitating for union causes. and though he’s persistently criticized the Democratic Party, it’s because he’s chiding them for too often advancing interests of wealthy donors over workers, which he sees both as a moral problem and bad electoral strategy. Wall Street’s War on Workers goes further, however, penetrating one of the chief media deceptions of the 21st century, namely that working-class voters are driven by racism and xenophobia, and not by a more simple, enraging motive: they’ve been repeatedly ripped off, by the wealthy donors to both parties. As we discuss below, Leopold is going to have a hard time getting booked on Morning Joe or receiving shout-outs in Paul Krugman columns when his book features sections like “The Mischaracterization of White Working­ Class Politics” and “The Continued Mischaracterization of Populism.” The book is in the tradition of Thomas Frank’s seminal history of anti-populism, The People, No, which described the original Populist Party clashing with New York banking interests on issues like free silver, and quickly found itself caricatured, forever, as bigoted, stupid, and dangerous. Leopold is telling a similar story, but is more focused on the idiosyncrasies of the current clash, which he sees as rooted in competing narratives about a number: 30 million, his estimate of the number of laid-off Americans since 1996: As Wall Street has routinized the financial strip-­mining of productive enterprises, more than 30 million of us have experienced mass layoffs. And even more have felt the pain and suffering as our family members lost jobs. As for where he got the number, he explains in a footnote that the “Bureau of Labor Statistics’ mass­ layoff database records 20.2 million layoffs for the years 1996–2012,” 2012 being the last year the stat was calculated. “If layoffs con­tinued at that rate through 2022, the total number of layoffs would be 32.8 million.” Even 20 million in 16 years is a huge number. But it’s the often unexplained reasons for those layoffs that illustrate the enormity of the gulf of political misunderstanding between college urbanites and rural America. Middle America has been screwed over in a hundred ways since the mid-nineties and even before. An even partial list of the scams I had to cover in the post-’08 period would turn this review into a novel, but a lot of investment schemes targeted middle-class, suburban and rural Americans (elderly urban minorities were also common marks) with a little bit of savings, and/or the institutional investors that held their retirement monies. The passage of NAFTA led to a lot of job losses, but a bigger cause is a phenomenon I’ve covered and which Leopold tackles: stock buybacks. Buybacks happen when big companies use cash or borrow funds to buy their own stock on the marketplace, then retire the shares. Both the buying and the retiring tend to drive share prices up, which is a good thing for executives compensated in company stock, but less advantageous for those not privy to the company’s plans. For this reason, the SEC barred buybacks as manipulation until 1982, when the administration of Ronald Reagan instituted rule 10b-18, creating a “safe harbor” for such transactions. Leopold, examining a Department of Defense study of what contractors did with excess cash when they had it, writes: Defense contractors increased their stock repurchases and dividends to shareholders by 73 percent in the last decade… Where to get all that money? For defense contractors it’s a no­-brainer—take it from our tax dollars. For the business sector, it is often extracted from the troubled companies through cost-­cutting—including mass layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, shifting production to low-­wage areas, and cut­ting spending on things like health, safety, environmental safeguards, and research and development. The implications of this are crucial. As Leopold notes below, most people assume layoffs are just cold hard economic reality, the unavoidable result of market forces taking their toll on uncompetitive businesses. But it’s not always true. Healthy companies will cut jobs just to up share prices for executives, who increasingly are compensated in company equity. Leopold cites a stat saying 85% of executive compensation comes in the form of stock awards, creating massive incentives to spend on buybacks. I’ve seen both higher and lower numbers, but even the low end (Harvard Business Review put the number at 59% globally and 75% in “the Americas”) is significant. In the end, Leopold posits that while Democratic voters believe they need to shift to more illiberal positions to win working class voters, they’d more likely need to emphasize mass layoffs as a root of rural anger, which would force them to choose between Wall Street donors and rural votes. Survey findings turned up the following two conclusions, for instance: - Some 10 to 25 million white working ­class people are liberal on social issues but don’t identify as Democrats. - These non­-Democrats are extremely worried about trade deals and imports, which likely reflects their concerns about job loss and job insecurity. There are elements of Leopold’s book with which I don’t fully agree. In places he seems to be trying to prove both that white working class voters have reasons to be angry and disappointed with the Democratic Party, and also that they’re not responsible for the Trump phenomenon, at least not exactly. For instance, he writes, “a higher percentage of white managers (30.4 percent) than of white workers (25.1 percent) say they voted in the Republican congressional primaries.” Trump is so toxic with progressive voters that I think it’s hard to write in an unembarrassed way for that audience about his success in connecting with those voters, or recent war veterans, for instance. Leopold spends time proving that the crowd on January 6th wasn’t working class. I wouldn’t have bothered — what if they were? — but Leopold is writing about the phenomenon of blame, to the people doing the blaming, so it makes sense on that level. ~~ Matt Taibbi (Pre-order[Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed]( now available at[Amazon]( and[Barnes & Noble]( or if you prefer one of these sites:[Bookshop.org]( or [Target]( CONTINUED BELOW... >>ADVERTISEMENT<< 2024 — The Real Election Year Surprise In 2016, the October Election Surprise was Hillary Clinton’s email scandal… In 2020, the October Election Surprise was the suppression of all the dirty material on Hunter Biden’s “forgotten” laptop… Now, in 2024, we’re forecasting an October Election Surprise that almost no one sees coming — and this time it’ll be way more devastating than anything you’ve seen before. [Click here to learn about 2024’s real October Election Surprise »]( It’s not at all what you think. CONTINUED... The Shell Game Revisited Addison Wiggin, Grey Swan You may recall, last year I issued a forecast that we called internally, The Shell Game. In quick summary, it forecast three trends that would culminate in political violence in 2024 during the election year: 1. The Banks Go First. The revolving door between “officials” in Washington and banks execs on Wall Street established easy money policies – ZIRP and  QE – leading to a sharp rise in the money supply which, coupled with pandemic lockdowns and massive government spending, ushered in historic inflation rates and weak and overly risk-tolerant banking system. In a debt crisis… banks go first.  2. The End of Cheap. Decades of Wall Street offshoring good jobs to foreign labor markets hollowed out the middle class in America and created a classic debt bubble in China. China has been imploding for almost a year now. The era of cheap stuff built overseas is over. Efforts from the Fed to rein in inflation don’t work… further increasing economic anxiety among workers and the debt-addled middle class. 3. Political division, confusion, disillusion… violence… call it what you want. With as much economic instability as policy makers have encouraged, all it’s going to take is a spark to set the tinder alight. One scenario is: the incumbent party has done everything they can to stop their opponent, they resort to assassination. Another is the incumbents use wedge issues like abortion, race and woke ideology… mail-in voting… to keep their guy (whomever that may be) in... and boom! Of course, we’re not the first to see or say these things. But we’ve arrived at the possible “grey swan” events by observing trends in play on Wall Street in politics and in popular culture.  They are informed observations after years of studying the revolutions of the past – American, French, and Russian, notably. The biggest distinction between the American War of Independence and the French and Russian revolutions is that colonists were fighting against the British monarchy to preserve an independence hard wrought for generations in the colonies and on the frontier. Both the French and Russian revolutions were driven by revolutionaries with specious ideologies in an attempt to remake society. The latter two revolutions were far more bloody, destructive, and ultimately collapsed on themselves. Nasty political events come about every hundred years or so. It wasn’t long after the Russians tore their country apart that China endured the mid-20th century famine brought on by Mao Tse Tung or the utter waste of Pol Pot in Cambodia. In their youth, both Mao and Pol Pot studied their politics in France. In the United States, there’s already a noticeable decay in civil society, random violence, millions of new “asylum seekers,” debt insecurity, and rising interest rates for the foreseeable future. The conditions are set. If something wicked this way comes… the trends we’re observing are what historians will parse to create a narrative of what the hell happened. So it goes, Addison Wiggin, The Wiggin Sessions P.S. That said, we’re generally upbeat and maintain a positive approach to life. We’d like to agree with the status quo who shrug and say, “Nah, it can’t happen here.” And yet an actual nightmare a couple weeks ago belied hidden concerns. The dream shook us for a couple days. It was graphic enough that we couldn’t bring ourselves to write about it. In the dream, militias took to the streets. Gangs responded. Our bucolic neighborhood in Baltimore was caught in the middle. Our house sits atop “Ol’ Roundtop”... Pimlico race course… where the Preakness, the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown, runs every May. Once an enclave of wealthy railroad and shipping families' summer homes, our neighborhood is now a reasonably quiet combination of affluent Jewish, mixed-race, and African-American families. Big trees line the streets. The local school is good. There’s a park that hosts a farmer’s market on Sundays year round. There’s no Home Owner’s Association (HOA). One family has been hosting a garden party on the 4th of July every year for over 20 years. They dress in colonial outfits and read out a copy of the Declaration of Independence. A parade made up of resident families then winds its way over to the field of a local assisted living facility where an annual picnic commences. It's a peaceful place. It would be fantastic to keep it that way. Please send your comments and reactions to: addison@greyswanfraternity.com mailto:addison@greyswanfraternity.com The Daily Missive from The Wiggin Sessions is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. By submitting your email address, you consent to The Wiggn Sessions delivering daily email issues and advertisements. To end your The Daily Missive from The Wiggin Sessions e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from The Daily Missive from The Wiggin Sessions, feel free to [click here.]( Please read our [Privacy Statement.]( For any further comments or concerns please email us at feedback@wigginsessions.com. 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