I believe Democrats paved the way for Trump’s re-election by overemphasizing identity issues such as race and gender, which alienated many working folks. In this regard, I’m on the same page with Cornel West, a prominent public intellectual and professor at Harvard.
While West readily acknowledges that race and gender are major contributors to oppression in America, he argues that class position is the root cause of wealth inequality: the top 1% of Americans now hold as much wealth as the bottom 95%. As a result, too many of us are blocked from access to a good education, a decent job and a home of our own.
A recent essay by Matt Stoller in The Lever points out a little-discussed consequence of this shift: “The government has drastically slashed funding for investigating white-collar crime and allocated vast new resources to immigration enforcement through ICE, a selective application of state power to heavily police vulnerable populations.”
As a result, ICE is now our country’s most heavily funded law enforcement agency. It is using that funding to acquire the latest tools, including biometric trackers, mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones to monitor and investigate not only legal immigrants but also anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.
Categorizing the damage ICE is causing, the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation is organizing “mutual aid for families who can’t safely work with food, rent relief, rides, and legal defense for detained workers and constitutional observers.” It warns, “Even if ICE leaves Minneapolis tomorrow, rebuilding our communities could take years.”
Stoller calls this ICE rampage “blue-collar policing,” contrasting it with the “broad defunding of the agencies that investigate and regulate political and economic elites,” causing the privileged to escape from prosecution and even investigation.
When Joe Biden succeeded Trump, he refused to turn a blind eye to corruption, unlike Trump. Here’s one example: Biden sought to restore fairness to our tax system by going after high-income earners and large corporations that were getting away with murder. In 2022, he allocated $80 billion over 10 years to modernize technology for auditing the superrich and private equity firms.
Biden’s plan, cracking down on tax avoidance by the rich and well-connected, was estimated to generate an enormous windfall: $700 billion over the next decade. Of course, the ultra-rich and the Wall Street Journal raised a ruckus about the injustice of it all. Needless to say, when Trump was elected to a second term, he gutted Biden’s program.
So it goes. I mourn for the old days.
Stoller mentioned a little-known policing agency once legendary for taking down white-collar criminals: the Postal Inspector Service — now underfunded and forgotten. These cops were the heroes who arrested Charlie Sheen’s character, Bud Fox, for insider trading in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.” I just watched it again: it is a great movie that depicts an atmosphere eerily like today.
As Yogi Berra once famously said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.