1
“Again.”
Greene County.
To get there you take I-87 south of Albany, a tricky highway in the wintertime and an
unfortunate place for infrastructure. Roads crack from ice and neglect under the power of heavy
weight engines going into the capitol region and repairs are scarce. Foreclosure signs dot the
local estates and what is left of the downtown areas of Coxsackie and Athens seem like carcasses
of old industry. The spirit of disrepair haunts Greene county in her abandoned houses, lots, office
spaces, and like other former centers of development, the economic tailspin of the United States
is not lost on the local inhabitants.
Similar to a lot of rural America, Greene county, within the boarder of a solid blue state
and only miles away from the Albany democratic machine, voted for Donald J. Trump in the
election of 2016. With the exception of Schenectady, every county surrounding Albany voted
Trump. It should be no surprise the votes casted in these counties were overwhelmingly white, a
reflection of the regional population, and mostly male. It should also be of no surprise that, not
so long ago, Greene County and areas just like it, were once the backbone of the American
consumerist and manufacturing state, now turned to ruin. The poor economic conditions created
by capitalism over the last 50 years were appropriated by the right wing and led to the election of
Donald Trump, who offered empty handed change to empty handed people.
Commented [HTK1]: Setting the scene. Explain the
background of the argument.
“Make America great again.” To understand why the nostalgia President Trump evokes
in his rhetoric is so successful, it is paramount to understand why white, working class America
is so attracted with “again.” In 1975 the real median personal income in the United States was
Commented [HTK2]: Main argument of the essay.
2
23,900 dollars, according to the federal reserve (FRED). Adjusted for inflation, that 23,900dollar value is a 2018 equivalent of 111,000 dollars. Today the median is less than half that (U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics). Wages decreased, jobs left, benefits were cut and all the while the
cost of living rapidly increased. That is of course not to say all Americans were thriving before
Commented [HTK3]: Background of the problemà reasons
why some Americans want America to be great again.
the 80s. Poverty was still rampant in large parts of America; African Americans still did not live
with the same socio-economic privileges as white Americans and income inequality and un
employment was still higher in black neighborhoods. And those who lived as outsiders in
America; those who opposed American wars overseas, people of color, feminists, political
dissenters, domestic worker, immigrants etc. did not receive the same status as the white, middle
class.
Richard Wolff, professor of economics and founder of Democracy at work, a “non-profit
advocating for worker cooperatives and democratic workplaces for a stronger, democratic
economic system”, is an open critic of capitalism. In a lecture at the levy economics institute, Dr.
Wolf described to his audience of intellectuals and fellow professors, the reason for the downfall
of American capitalism. “Before 1980 about 18% of U.S jobs were in manufacturing… now that
number is 8%.” (Dr. Wolff, April 22, 2016). Capitalists and wealthy business owners are
rewarded for finding cheaper labor abroad. Cheaper labor means more money, even if it is at the
expense of factory workers in Detroit and Baltimore. What Dr. Wolf expounds on is the other
side of the decline of manufacturing in the united states; automatization. Corporations will
automizer human labor to be more efficient then a person and cost nothing in the long run. What
automation means for industrial workers is mass layoffs. When Donald Trump says he will bring
back manufacturing jobs in the face of automation he is lying. Robots are much more efficient
and if the United States refuses to embrace the age of automation it will fall drastically behind
Commented [HTK4]: Introduce an expert to start a
literature review. This section is to show what experts and
scholars have discussed on this particular topic.
3
other nations that do. What automation should mean for American workers is more paid
vacation, higher wages for increased productivity and increased benefits. The goal of
manufacturing is for consumers to buy what is being made. It makes much more sense for a
nation to have a population that can afford what is being produced rather than to automatize and
layoff to find another county to sell in. The issue is these changes would take away from the
pockets of the very wealthy who hoard their money on off shore accounts and instead will go to
workers who spend it. For this reason, the president will not encourage any such policy
correcting this immediate flaw of capitalism and will go after immigrants and bad trade deals to
explain the open wound.
Eleven days before the primary election began in Iowa, Donald Trump outlined his
Commented [HTK5]: Provide the connection between
capitalism, automation and why manufacturing jobs will not
come back and make American great again.
political platform on Sean Hannity’s fox show. The theme of his discussion was assigning the
downfalls of American capitalism with foreign malevolency. “Mexico is killing us as the border,
they are also killing us at trade… we have companies that are leaving the United States, I mean
they are leaving, major wonderful companies, because of taxes,” The president to be professed,
“we will bring our jobs back into this country” and that “We are going to stop being the country
that gets pushed around” (Fox, Mar 9, 2016). In an article for BillMoyers.com, Wolff wrote,
“Donald Trump, like Obama, once again offered hope for change to those hurt over the last 40
years” (Dr. Wolff, Nov. 16, 2016). Trump seduced white America, while vilifying outsiders as
colluding with anti-American values, by convincing people he could offer them the same
socioeconomic privileges they had 50 years ago.
The issue with Trump’s political platform is that it does not identify the major
contradictions of capitalism. Trump creates strawmen to convince his supporters the issue is not
capitalism-the system that enriched him and the rest of the one percent-but rather a string of un
Commented [HTK6]: Pointing out the flaws.
4
related political scapegoats. In Trump’s presidential campaign announcement, he asserted,
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re
sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them.
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good
people” (Schwartz, Ian). In her book, White Trash, Nancy Isenberg details the complex history of
class and racism and how these two principals have been at the heart of the American system of
control, “Poor whites are still taught to hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line”
(Isenberg, 315). This insight is certainly reflected in the president’s fervent hatred of
immigrants. President Trump supporter, Fox news commentator and employee of Donald Trump
super PAC, “Great American Alliance”, Tomi Lahren, tweeted, “Bum-rushing the border is a
CHOICE and has consequences. Watching the USA FINALLY defend our borders was the
HIGHLIGHT of my Thanksgiving weekend” (Nov 26, 2018), after asylum seekers, trying to
enter the U.S, were tear gassed at the border.
In April of 2017, 1,470 economists wrote an open letter to the President, explaining the
immense value of immigration to re-ignite a damaged economy. They cited, “Immigration brings
diverse skill sets that keep our workforce flexible, help companies grow, and increase the
productivity of American workers” (3 Aug. 2017). Yet despite this, despite Trump himself being
the son of an immigrant, despite most Americans being descended from immigrants and asylum
seekers, despite the prophetic words of Steinbeck, Sinclair and Jacob Riis who recorded the
struggles of migrants traveling huge distances to seek better lives for their children in different
parts of America. Despite all of these things, Trump and the conservative right still seek to
scapegoat the issue of immigration and highlight it as the reason for the economic failures of
capitalism.
Commented [HTK7]: Another source to help
analyze/explain the reasoning of the current argument.
5
Trump reinforces a capitalist agenda by not blaming capitalism for its pitfalls. Companies
left so they could pay poor people in faraway lands much less to do the same work. The
economic policy institute finds a nearly 700,000 net job loss to Mexico as of 2010, a country
with a minimum wage of only $4.71 (Puzzanghera, Jim, Dec. 2016). The centers of capitalism
are shifting away from North America because capitalism has little thought for sustainability, it
only cares about profit. Companies like General motors, who just this last month announced their
plans to lay off more than 14,000 jobs in the United States and Canada, are concerned with their
decline in sales, which can be attributed to joblessness and fleeting wages in the U.S.
The American right-wing blames taxes and democrats and immigrants and conspiracies
for capitalism’s short comings. Ben Shapiro, Harvard grad, writer, lawyer and political
commentator on several media platforms including his YouTube channel, The Ben Shapiro
Show, calls on Americans to reject any type of progressive agenda to help mend the wounds of
capitalism. On conservative talk radio, Ben argued for the abolition of a minimum wage. The
pundit stated that minimum wage laws destroyed incentive to work and all Americans need to do
to be economically successful is “Graduate high school, don’t have kids before marriage, get a
regular job. You will be able to rise in the work world if you do these things” (Simeona,
Michael. 2014). On the campaign trail, Donald Trump changed his minimum wage position, but
settled on leaving the decision to the states. By not enacting federal legislation and allowing the
issue to be settled regionally, large parts of the U.S will not see wage increases. More right
leaning regional governments, like Greene county and areas like it, will favor big business over
government intervention. But There is no evidence to suggest corporations, in general, will
equate wage compensation with productivity, like Shapiro says. Just because you work hard does
not mean you will be paid well. According the economic policy institute, the gap between
6
productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has increased dramatically since 1973. While
productivity rose rapidly over the last 50 years, wages fell or stagnated (U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics, Aug. 2018). Companies making billions, even trillions of dollars in profit, while wages
for the working and middle-class fall, is a defining characteristic of capitalism and a shift away
from the labor friendly reforms enacted during the Great Depression.
In 2016 I spent time behind the picket lines of the Momentive plant in Waterford, NY
after workers went on strike. Workers at the plant walked out after Momentive industries
proposed large cuts in health care, 401Ks and other benefits. The strikers were unionized and to
my surprise at the time, mostly Trump supporters. In 2008 they voted for Obama, but after 8
years in office, their jobs are still being threatened and fear of outsourcing is constant. Donald
Trump offered them a trip back before the 80s, when workers like them would be making
enough to support a wife and kids, own a house, have no debt and live comfortably.
Coincidentally, before Reagan and the political shift to the right side of the aisle, union
membership in manufacturing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, and
Washington state was much higher. 1972 saw all of those states boast membership above 30%.
That number has since dropped to less than 20% and falling as the rest of the country saw even
steeper drops in union participation in places like North Carolina where less then 3% of workers
belong to a union (Bui, Quoctrung). “Unions represent all of the workers together… they have
been, for at least two centuries, a mechanism to get higher wage sand better working conditions”
(Wolff, Richard). Unions challenge the structural imbalance of capitalism by heightening the
status of the working class. In the last 50 years, union membership drastically declined, and the
working class suffered driving them to more and more fringe political solutions.
Commented [HTK8]: Use his own experience to connect
with the topic being discussed.
7
“America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.”- Allen Ginsberg's
poem, America, from which this line is drawn, replicates a frustrating feeling of forgotteness
a lot of Americans held during the cold war. War after war, diplomatic crisis after crisis, every
potential move the Soviets could make was covered by some paranoid news anchor or paper in
the States. The poverty at home, the prejudice, the racism, the despair of poor, desperate
Americans, was however left out of the nightly news. In 2018 it is a little different. Instead of
Soviets it is “radical Islamists” and a perpetual war on drugs that covers up the neglect for the
poverty in areas like Greene county or the economic depression in coal country or the desperate
state of American inner cities or crumbling American infrastructure or the far-right shift of
American politics.
Trump’s heavy-handed manipulation of what has caused the decline of the “American
success story” has taken the anger and rage of America’s working class and pointed it away from
unionizing, protesting and organizing social institution for the betterment of people’s wellbeing.
After the end of the American Civil War, the United States embarked on a revolutionary journey
as freed slaves took over legislative offices in the post war south and for a short while
transformed the power structure of the former salve states. The increased cost of living married
to the rise of powerful corporations in the post war economy offering pitiful wages and awful
working conditions led American workers to form the first national labor union and working
people began to organize rapidly. Howard Zinn has championed revising the epic of American
history in his books to highlight the point of view of the working class, disenfranchised, people
of color, women, immigrants and social and political dissenters. In his “People history of the
United States”, the post-civil war America is described as a time of massive social upheaval.
From textile workers in Troy, New York, to share croppers around Mobile Alabama, all the way
8
to the miners outside of Salt Lake City, people protested and organized for an eight-hour work
day, a five-day work week, higher wages, workers compensation, safer working conditions and
an end to corporate greed occupying the Government. Within a first few years after the Civil war
ended, 3,200 workers walked out of textile mills in Massachusetts (Zinn 241). In Chicago,
20,000 would march through the streets demanding “bread for the needy, clothing for the naked,
and houses of rate homeless” (243). In 1877 alone, 100,000 workers had gone on strike” (251),
cities like St. Louis and Pittsburg saw city wide shutdowns orchestrated by working people’s
movements. It was a time when droves of Americans, trapped in cycles of poverty by a system
designed to keep wages low, cost of living high and dissent under control began to rebel. All the
while profits for the Carnegies and Rockefellers of the world skyrocketed. But the powers that be
were patiently waiting on their heels for an opportunity to strike back and after federal troops
pulled out of the south in the 1870s, their moment came. Jim Crow laws were enacted, forcing
freed slaves out of positions of power and pitting Black against White. Anti-union laws were
singed and as the nation readied itself for war with Spain, vocal dissenters of the government,
including union organizers and progressive reformers, were locked up and silenced.
After the Civil war ended, the political revolution led by the working class and politically
repressed, was thwarted by a counter revolution of the conservative leaning capitalist class. I
urge you to consider we live in similar times. As the era of civil rights and Malcolm X and Dr.
King and Unionization and antiwar/antigovernment protests came to a close, big corporations,
banks, the monied class, military and prison industrial complex saw their opportunity and began
the counter revolution through anti-civil rights and labor legislation which gutted union
membership and reversed the progress that had been made by the revolution of the 1960s. I urge
you to consider the race bating of Donald Trump and the re-assurance to the working class of
9
their economic safety under his administration is a façade. There is a dire need to control the
anger of working-class America and point their frustration away from the tremendous flaws of
capitalism.
The working class of America has been left to fester in the coming reality of their
poverty. All around the world, far right “strongmen” figures have been growing in popularity. In
Brazil, it is Bolsonaro. The Philippine has its Duterte, and we have our Trump. History gives us
so many examples of progressive movements growing out of eras similar to ours. Radical
Republicans, muckrakers, international workers of the world, civil rights, SNCC; all were
responses to hardship and oppression. Now it is crucial to organize the same institutions of
resistance. The missing link Americans can’t seem to connect is that a lot of the same people
who voted for Trump are under the same boot as those who support Black Lives Matter and
Occupy Wall street, social justice, taxing the 1% and upholding social institutions like Medicare
for all. What we are missing, from the anger and frustration in Greene county to the rancor and
protests in East Harlem is, “the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression
works only to strengthen and knit the repressed”, John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. That is
only, of course, if we let it.
Commented [HTK9]: The argument is complex, and it comes
from thinking and reviewing all the sources. The argument is
moving beyond providing reasons why many Americans
elected Trump by pointing out problems that affect the
working class in America.
10
Works Cited
Bui, Quoctrung. “50 Years Of Shrinking Union Membership, In One Map.” NPR, NPR, 23 Feb.
2015, www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-years-of-shrinking-unionmembership-in-one-map.
“Capitalism Itself Is to Blame for Donald Trump – BillMoyers.com.” BillMoyers.com, 14 Nov. 2016,
billmoyers.com/story/capitalism-blame-donald-trump/.
“CPI Inflation Calculator.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.html
Institute, Levy Economics. “Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of
21st Century Socialism.” YouTube, YouTube, 25 Apr. 2016,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1WUKahMm1s&t=3s
Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash. Atlantic books, 2017.
News, Fox. “Donald Trump Talks Bringing Jobs Back to America.” YouTube, YouTube, 9 Mar.
2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpnnY5exStE.
NewsHour, PBS. “Trump's Fight against Federal Workers and the Health of Labor Unions.”
YouTube, YouTube, 3 Sept. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4HckXG9Oig
“Open Letter from 1,470 Economists on Immigration.” Equitable Growth, 3 Aug. 2017,
Commented [HTK10]: Use the term, “Work Cited” for MLA.
Commented [HTK11]: Last names of the authors are
arranged in an alphabetical order.
11
equitablegrowth.org/open-letter-from-1470-economists-including-me-on-immigration/.
Puzzanghera, Jim. “These Three U.S. Companies Moved Jobs to Mexico. Here's Why.”
Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 19 Dec. 2016, www.latimes.com/business/la-fimexico-jobs-20161212-story.html
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet. “The Productivity–Pay Gap.” Economic Policy
Institute, www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/.
“Real Median Personal Income in the United States.” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis,
13 Sept. 2017, fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N#0.
Simeona, Michael. “AM 770 KTTH $15 Minimum Wage Debate.” YouTube, YouTube, 15 Apr.
2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfLx6XMdCiY.
Schwartz, Ian. “Trump: Mexico Not Sending Us Their Best; Criminals, Drug Dealers And
Rapists Are Crossing Border.” Video | RealClearPolitics, RealClearPolitics, June 15th,
2016.www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/16/trump_mexico_not_sending_us_their
_best_criminals_drug_dealers_and_rapists_are_crossing_border.html.
Zinn, Howard. A Peoples History of the United States: 1492-Present. Harper Perennial Modern
Classics, 2005.
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