Organizing Against the Plutocrats

Sarah Jaffe has an interview with labor activist and overall genius Stephen Lerner that explores some of the campaigns he’s been involved with recently to connect labor organizing with targeting the plutocrats that dominate the New Gilded Age economy. The whole thing is well worth your reading and consideration. A brief excerpt:

We are doing a lot of work on mapping the different Trump worlds. There are the people, like Mnuchin and the Goldman Sachs folks that are directly in the administration and we map all the benefits that their companies will reap from that. Then, there are the Steve Schwarzmans and the Carl Icahns and this other set of players that run committees for him. So, they can essentially create government policies that will further enrich their companies. Then, there is a third set of people like John Paulson, who made all his money in the housing crisis, who may not be directly working for Trump, but who supported him and is now going to reap the benefits. For example, he is heavily invested in Puerto Rico.

What we have been looking at is, how do you identify the corporate collaborators with Trump, and then look at ways to start putting pressure on them so that they pay a price for the fact that they are in bed with Trump?

One thing is that many of these folks who are in bed with Trump have significant investments from public employee pension plans and college endowments. We have been ongoing running the campaign saying that pension funds and endowments basically are getting lousy deals from these guys, meaning they pay a lot of money to invest in them and they get lousy returns. We are going to escalate that, but we are also going to look at some of the hedge funds that have really atrocious policies and raise the issue that colleges and pension plans shouldn’t invest in racist companies. For example, this guy Robert Mercer whose family owns part of Breitbart. They are Cambridge Analytica, the secret polling apparatus for Trump. I think it is the city of Providence in Rhode Island has invested in one of his funds.

We want to start raising the issue for a bunch of these people that we should cut off their capital. Basically, public dollars or the dollars of progressive institutions shouldn’t be invested in them. Another thing we are doing is we have been introducing legislation on a state-by-state basis to tax the carried interest exemption. This is a loophole that lets them take the regular income that most people pay 30-35 percent on and they get to take 15 percent. I won’t bore you with the details of how they do it, except it is an $18 billion a year tax loophole.

Taxing it on a state level, on the one hand in New York it would produce $3.7 billion in revenue, but the other thing it does is it cuts off their capital. One of the reasons they can give so much money politically is because they have a special tax loophole that gives them $18 billion in cash to play with. One of the ways we can hurt them is cutting off tax breaks and cutting off investment. I think there is a sweet irony of their greed in getting in bed with Trump may make them much more susceptible to cutting off their capital.

Important stuff and a lot of room for organizing against these people. The bank workers organizing with the Communication Workers of America with significant support from overseas bank worker unions is one area that could lead to real success.