The Nation has a great piece out about U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D. OH) and his real populist message standing for workers and standing up against Wall Street:
The speech that mattered was delivered by Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, and it came during a debate preceding Tuesday’s Senate vote to repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s forced-arbitration rule. In an especially noxious sell-out to banking interests, 50 Republican senators voted to prevent the CFPB from banning most of the “mandatory arbitration clauses” that are slipped into the fine print of agreements that consumers are encouraged to accept when the get a credit card or open a bank account. Those clauses make it difficult for customers who have been mistreated—or ripped off—to organize themselves into a group and sue an offending bank or credit-card company.
The proposed legislation was so indefensible that two Republican senators—Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Kennedy of Louisiana—joined Democrats in opposing it. Only a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence carried the day for the Trump administration and the banking interests.
Brown, the ranking Democratic member of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, led the charge in opposing what the American Association for Justice decried as “a disgrace” that would force consumers “into a rigged system where they have no recourse.”
Brown’s address to the chamber echoed the honest populist passion of senators who once saw it as their duty to protect working people on Main Street from the the plundering plutocrats of Wall Street: Robert M. La Follette, George Norris, Edward Kennedy, Howard Metzenbaum—and too few others. Brown thundered with righteous indignation at the injustice that was proposed.
“What Congress is trying to do today is, frankly, outrageous. Our job is to look out for the people we serve—not Wall Street banks and corporations trying to scam consumers,” Brown began, before explaining that “Forced arbitration takes power away from ordinary people, and gives it to big banks and Wall Street companies that already have an unfair advantage.”
Here is the whole speech Brown delivered on the Senate floor regarding forced arbitration:
What Congress is trying to do today is, frankly, outrageous.
Our job is to look out for the people we serve – not Wall Street banks and corporations trying to scam consumers.
Forced arbitration takes power away from ordinary people, and gives it to big banks and Wall Street companies that already have an unfair advantage.
Just look at Equifax. In early September, we learned it had compromised the personal data of more than 145 million Americans– names, dates of birth, addresses, Social Security Numbers and Drivers’ licenses.
How did Equifax respond? By immediately trying to trick consumers into signing away their rights to access the court system in exchange for credit monitoring. Only after Senators and consumer groups led a public outcry did they back down.
So you’d think after that public shaming, Equifax would have learned its lesson.
But just last week, they sent a representative to testify in front of the Banking Committee, and he said he still thinks it is appropriate for Equifax and the other credit bureaus to use forced arbitration clauses that prevent the Americans they’ve hurt from having their day in court.
Even after the huge harm that Equifax has caused 145 million Americans – including 5 million Ohioans – they still defend their use of forced arbitration clauses.
Or take a look at Wells Fargo – in 2013, they used a forced arbitration clause to silence a customer that had accused the company of opening fake accounts in his name.
Now we know Wells Fargo opened as many as 3.5 million of those fake accounts by subjecting their employees to harsh sales goals and threatening to fire anyone who didn’t keep up.
But because Wells Fargo had the power of a forced arbitration clause, they were able to sweep the 2013 lawsuit under the rug, allowing the scandal to continue for years.
Think about how much damage could have been prevented if that customer was allowed to take Wells Fargo to open court four years ago.
Even when the scandal was finally brought to light, customers found out that forced arbitration was such a powerful tool for banks that Wells Fargo was able to use them against customers who had accounts opened without their consent.
The Economic Policy Institute studied people who went into arbitration with Wells Fargo, and found that, on average, they ended having to pay the bank almost $11,000.
You heard that right – the customers ended up paying the bank. The same bank that cheated customers into opening fake accounts.
So not only does forced arbitration take away your right to hold Wells Fargo accountable when they’ve harmed you – you might end up having to pay Wells Fargo for the privilege of getting scammed.
Studies show that Wall Street and other big companies win 93 percent of the time in arbitration. Regular people don’t stand a chance against those numbers.
And when Wells Fargo’s CEO came and testified in front of the Banking Committee earlier this month – on an entirely new scandal by the way – he said that Wells Fargo plans to keep using forced arbitration. It is amazing that a bank that has hurt so many Americans would continue to crusade against consumers’ right to a day in court.
These forced arbitration clauses are powerful, and they are everywhere – in student loans, in credit card agreements, in nursing home agreements – even in employment agreements.
Gretchen Carlson, a well-known news anchor, was prevented from suing her employer for sexual harassment by a forced arbitration clause in her employment agreement.
She’s been urging Senators today to vote against repeal of the Consumer Bureau’s rule. In her words, forced arbitration is “has silenced millions of women who otherwise may have come forward.”
Forced arbitration is about big companies silencing victims. It’s about giving more power to corporations that already have too much power over the lives of working Americans.
I’ve had the chance to hear from people in Ohio that have been victims of forced arbitration, like George from Mentor, Ohio.
George’s wife suffered physical and mental abuse in a nursing home, but the nursing home’s arbitration clause denied him and his family their day in court. Forced arbitration clauses are so powerful and so effective that lawyers told George he didn’t stand a chance fighting against it.
Veterans and servicemembers have a lot of experience with this issue. A big Wall Street bank called Santander was illegally repossessing cars from servicemembers all over the country several years ago. When servicemembers spoke up about their rights – special protections they earned by serving our country– Santander used forced arbitration to keep them out of court.
The American Legion held its national convention in August, and adopted a resolution supporting the Consumer Bureau’s rule and opposing today’s attempt to repeal it.
The assistant director of the American Legion’s Veterans Employment and Education Division said:
“Our membership has stated unequivocally that we will not accept a future where our military veterans’ financial protections are chipped away to increase the margins of the financial sector.”
How will members of this body look those servicemembers in the eye and explain that they chose to stand with Wall Street over our military members and their families – over hardworking people all across this country?
Forced arbitration hurts the 3.5 million people who had bank accounts fraudulently opened by Wells Fargo.
Forced arbitration hurts the 145 million Americans who had their personal data put at risk by Equifax.
It hurts employees who have been hurt by their employers, it hurts students who have been cheated by for-profit colleges, it hurts our family members in nursing homes. Forced arbitration hurts the millions of Americans with student loan debt and credit cards.
So who does forced arbitration help? Wall Street banks and other huge corporations that never pay the price for cheating working people.
I urge my friends to ask yourself, whose side are you on? The people we serve who get hurt by forced arbitration, or Wall Street CEOs who cash in? Choose to side with the people we serve and vote against repeal of the Consumer Bureau’s rule and give some power back to regular Americans.
Yahoo recently released an article about the future of the Democratic Party and compared Brown to former U.S. Attorney General, U.S. Senator, and Presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy:
If anyone embodies that vision today, it’s probably Ohio’s senior senator, Sherrod Brown.
As a recent BuzzFeed profile put it, Brown, 64, has “combined a fierce populism and unapologetic progressive ideals to repeatedly win local and state elections — even as Ohio has trended increasingly conservative.” He’s won in cities and rural communities; old manufacturing hubs and college towns; diverse districts and mostly-white districts.
First elected to Congress in 1992, Brown secured reelection two years later by picking off Republican-leaning workers who’d previously backed Ross Perot’s anti-NAFTA presidential bid. In 2012, running for a second Senate term, he earned 95 percent of the black vote and outperformed his GOP rival, state Treasurer Josh Mandel, in many white, industrial parts of the state — including Mahoning and Trumbull counties, where Brown took 66 percent and 62 percent of the vote respectively.
Brown didn’t accomplish this by moderating his staunchly liberal views on social and cultural issues. He was one of only two members of Ohio’s congressional delegation to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996; he’s pro-gay, pro-choice, pro-gun-control, and pro-criminal-justice-reform. (He was the first senator to oppose Jeff Sessions’ nomination as attorney general.)
Instead, Brown keeps winning in Ohio — he’s gearing up for a rematch with Mandel next November — because has spent his entire career obsessing, first and foremost, over the concerns of workers.
Not just white workers, the way Trump did. All workers.
“I do my very best to fight for working people in this job,” Brown told me last week. “And that means all workers — whether you punch a time sheet or swipe a badge, make a salary or earn tips. Whether you’re on payroll, a contract worker, or a temp — working behind a desk, on factory floor, or behind a restaurant counter. The fact is, all workers across this country are feeling squeezed.”
Other, higher-profile Senate populists — Sanders, Elizabeth Warren — tend to view the world through an anti-Wall Street lens. Brown sees everything from a pro-worker perspective. To the casual listener, Sanders and Warren can sound like they’re bashing billionaires or bankers because they’re billionaires or bankers — a message that might resonate in liberal enclaves like Vermont or Massachusetts but doesn’t play as well in middle America.
In contrast, Brown is always careful to remind voters that the real problem isn’t corporate profits, per se — it’s that “workers,” as he told me, “are no longer sharing in the wealth they help create.”
“Look at what Bank of America did this week — downgrading Chipotle because it pays its workers too much,” he added. “This view that American workers are a cost to be minimized instead of a valuable asset to invest in is everything that’s wrong with Wall Street and our economy.”
For 18 years, Brown refused to enroll in a congressional health plan, saying he would not accept federally subsidized care until the American public could also avail itself of the same option. As a state representative in the mid-1970s, he spent long days as listening to tales of worry and woe at the steelworkers union hall in his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio. He went on to lead the bipartisan opposition to NAFTA, crossing then president Bill Clinton; more than two decades later, he helped torpedo the Trans-Pacific Partnership, defying Barack Obama. In between, Brown wrote a book called Myths of Free Trade. On election night 2016, he surprised his gloomy staffers by immediately offering to help Trump renegotiate NAFTA (a promise he’s kept). And when Brown rescued a shaggy black dog, he named it Franklin — as in Roosevelt, the Democrat who created the New Deal.
According to recent reports, Brown was Hillary Clinton’s initial vice presidential pick; some progressives tout him as a possible 2020 presidential nominee. It remains to be seen whether Brown’s moment on the national stage will ever come. But in March, the senator showed up at Ohio State University in Columbus and, with little fanfare, put forward a vision that could, he thinks, help lead his party out of the political wilderness.
“I can accept that the workforce is changing,” Brown said from behind a dinky podium. “But what we cannot accept is that more and more of our workers are paid less and have little economic security. We need to update our economic policies, our retirement policies and our labor laws to reflect today’s reality.”
The 77-page, footnote-heavy white paper that Brown released that day — Working Too Hard for Too Little: A Plan for Restoring the Value of Work in America — in some ways anticipated the “Better Deal” blueprint that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would unveil four months later. Both aim to combat the inequality of a system that “favors short-term gains for shareholders instead of long-term benefits for workers,” as Schumer put it.
But the Better Deal — a $15 minimum wage; paid leave; corporate tax credits for retraining; a crackdown on prescription drug prices; $1 trillion for infrastructure — isn’t as bold as it (repeatedly) claims to be; much of it consists of material recycled from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This is “a strong, bold economic program for the middle class and those working hard to get there,” Schumer insisted when he introduced the proposal. But the phrase “middle class” was a giveaway — the same old so-vague-its-meaningless rhetoric of a party that still fears the “class warfare” label.
Brown’s plan was bolder, his pitch stronger.
“Now, I can already hear the complaints coming from the corporate boardroom: ‘These ideas cost too much’; ‘We’ll have to raise prices,’” Brown said in Columbus. “Funny, you never hear those concerns raised over the cost of shareholder payouts or corporate bonuses.”
If enacted, the senator’s suite of populist policy proposals would strengthen key labor standards to reflect an economy that increasingly relies on alternative work arrangements (temps, subcontractors, freelancers, etc.). He wouldn’t just raise the minimum wage and require paid sick days and paid family leave. He would also expand collective bargaining rights. He would ensure that alternative workers get benefits too. And he would crack down on companies that force people to work off the clock; that refuse to pay the minimum wage; that deny overtime pay; that steal tips; that knowingly misclassify workers to avoid paying fair wages.
And finally — and perhaps most potently — Brown would implement what he calls a “carrot and stick” approach to big companies that slash labor costs to pad their profits.
“Republicans are going to cut taxes on the largest corporations and the wealthiest people in the country,” the senator recently explained on Pod Save America. “I think … those companies that pay a living wage and provide health benefits and retirement benefits and don’t outsource their jobs, they should get a lower tax rate. But the companies that pay $10 or $11 [an hour] so that their employees get food stamps and Medicaid and Section 8 housing vouchers? Those companies should pay a Corporate Freeloader Fee, because taxpayers have to subsidize those corporations’ wages.”
The chances of Brown’s Corporate Freeloader Fee actually becoming law? Nil under the current regime, and not much higher even if the Democrats take over. Both parties are loath to offend the business community. But as a statement of principle for the Age of Income Inequality — as a message to anxious workers that at least one party wants to make it less profitable for big companies to pay so little — it’s bolder than anything in the Better Deal.
Meanwhile, Trump himself may be providing the Democrats with some political cover. At a time when a Republican president and his allies are scoring points by railing against “global elites,” Democrats probably aren’t as susceptible to the whole class warfare attack as they used to be. And it’s highly unlikely that the party’s core class constituency — coastal, college-educated professionals — will defect to Trump’s GOP, which appalls and terrifies them, just because Dems start sticking up for workers instead of the slick “innovators” of Silicon Valley. Antagonism toward Trump will preserve the coalition; class politics could expand it.
When we spoke, Brown insisted that “I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I don’t see it as my role to tell my colleagues how they should talk to people in their states.” But he has also suggested that if Democrats “don’t change,” the party could “wi[n] the national popular vote by 5 million instead of 3 million [in 2020] and still los[e] the Electoral College … because of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin.”
“We as a party have to fight for workers,” the senator has said elsewhere. “And this is the way to do it. Let some corporate lobbyists call us ‘antibusiness.’ Workers are going to hear this and they’ll say, ‘I’ll do better under the Democrats.’”
Who knows if workers outside of Ohio will ever hear a message like Brown’s. It’s possible, even probable, that Democrats will continue to shy away from so-called class warfare and resist even a progressive concept of class identity — a concept that sees class not as a way to turn white workers against the rest of the electorate, as Trump has done, but rather as a way to unite all working-class Americans, regardless of their other identities, around a set of reforms that might help them withstand a 21st-century economy that has rapidly and ruthlessly turned against them: black or white, gay or straight, blue-collar or white-collar.
It’s possible, even probable, that Democrats will run a couple of fairly conventional, and conventionally successful, anti-incumbent campaigns in the years ahead — that they’ll double down on the anti-Trump, anti-GOP outrage, motivate the base, promote a few Better Deal talking points in some races, ignore them in others, win the midterms and take back the White House in 2020.
But the question Democrats should be asking themselves is: What for? Millions of American workers — not just white workers, but black workers, Hispanic workers, women workers, gay workers, disabled workers — are being left behind. If the “party of the people” won’t represent them, who will?
“People in Washington like to put voters into categories: left, right, Republican, Democrat, etc.,” Brown said near the end of our interview. “But the truth is people don’t think of themselves on some sort of ideological spectrum made up by Washington. They think about ‘Who’s on my side? Who’s fighting for me?’”
“If you want to call yourself a populist, you better be ready to stick up for the little guy,” Brown insisted. “Because populism is for the people — not these people, or those people, but all people.”
And Brown continues to be a tenacious fighter for working-class families:
The US is one of the only developed countries in the world without a child allowance — a government program giving every family a set amount of money per child, no strings attached.
A new proposal by Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet (CO) and Sherrod Brown (OH) would change that. The American Family Act of 2017 would dramatically expand the child tax credit, which currently offers up to $1,000 a year for families with significant earnings but little or nothing for many poor people, to pay:
- $3,000 per year, or $250 per month, per child ages 6 to 18
- $3,600 per year, or $300 per month, per child ages 0 to 5
The benefits would be distributed monthly, in advance, so that families can pace out their spending and smooth their incomes. Because the CTC, like the earned income tax credit, is currently paid out through tax refunds, it sometimes leads to a perverse situation in which families use it to pay down debt they never would've had to incur if they'd gotten the money earlier.
The value of the new credits would be indexed to inflation, unlike the current $1,000 credit, which loses value every year.
The credits would phase out for high-income individuals, just like the child tax credit today does, with phaseout beginning at $75,000 a year in income for single parents and $110,000 for married couples. For a married couple with two young kids, to give one example, the credits would totally phase out if the couple makes $150,000 a year or more; for families with more kids, that figure is higher.
While other Democrats have proposed major expansions to the child credit, with Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) being the most public champion of a refundable credit for young kids, this is by far the most ambitious child allowance plan any major US politician has put forward in recent memory. And it comes at a time when Republicans are considering a major expansion of the child tax credit, setting up an arms race for the parties to try to outdo each other on expanding benefits for families with kids.
For middle-class families earning $40,000 to $100,000 a year, the plan would result in a huge increase in monthly income, especially when kids are young and need diapers, cribs, strollers, and new clothes to replace quickly outgrown old ones.
Right now, it’s looking like Brown will face a rematch against Tea Party Treasurer, Josh Mandel (R. OH), who is backed by the Koch Brothers, Ted Cruz, the Club for Growth, Alt-Right bloggers and Steve Bannon:
Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) was right to call former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon a white supremacist, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) contended on Sunday.
“I agree that Steve Bannon is a white supremacist, and [senior White House adviser] Stephen Miller seems to be. And I know that studies have shown that they have their allies sprinkled around the White House,” Brown said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” without naming the studies.
Brown’s comments come after Wilson, who is black, charged that President Donald Trump’s attacks against her over a phone call he placed to the widow of a black soldier were racially motivated.
“The White House itself is full of white supremacists,” Wilson told The New York Times on Friday.
We cannot let these forces win. Let’s help real populists like Brown stay in the U.S. Senate. Click here to donate and get involved with Brown’s re-election campaign.