earl rusty butz

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Consider the following events from the perspective of working people, who, in early 2024, are said by pollsters to align themselves more with Trump’s Republican Party than with Biden’s Democratic Party.

• President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz exhorts family farmers to “get big or get out,” urging them to take on new debt and buy heavy equipment to “farm fencerow to fencerow.” He derided their grandparents’ fiscal conservatism assuring them their loans would be protected by rising land values. They do so.

• Less than 10 years later, Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chair under President Jimmy Carter, raised interest rates five points in a single day to fight inflation. The unintended consequence was that hundreds of thousands of small farms were forced into bankruptcy. Farmers’ houses, land, and equipment were sold at auction as part of the court proceedings to relieve their debt. It frequently was snapped up by larger corporate agribusiness firms.

As displaced farmers moved to the cities, or sought employment from the new owners, the toll depleted rural America. Small towns in the Midwest and South became depressed zones, vulnerable to the opioid and crystal meth pandemics.^[25] For every five farms that went down, a local business closed. Town after town in once stable farm belts hemorrhaged school principals, doctors and other professionals. Main streets became vacant and young people left home—and farming. Where do we suppose these citizens will place their faith in the future —in the government and its agencies that failed them? Or in charismatic conspiracists salving broken spirits by convincing them that they did no wrong, but were betrayed by the ‘Deep State’ and can return to past glory?

• As a result of Reagan’s bank deregulation, corruption in the community-oriented savings and loan industry became endemic. Loan officers were “loaning” themselves clients’ money. When the sector collapsed nationwide, it cost mom-and-pop investors more than $250 billion dollars of savings and pensions. Five people went to jail for a nationwide scandal.

• Two 1990s updated trade agreements, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, shipped American jobs and infrastructure—especially in manufacturing—to nations without health, safety, and environmental standards. Combined with cheaper wages, diminished costs proved to be an irresistible allure to America’s corporate sector. The exodus effectively doubled down on the damage wrought by the destruction the farm collapse and weakened union movement had already inflicted upon workers. What was good for corporations and shareholders was not so good for American workers.

• During the 1990s, Clinton administration Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers and his top aide, Robert Rubin, determined that the Democratic Party would have access to more money for political campaigns if they adhered to the tenets of neoliberalism and made the party’s policies more attractive to banking, finance, insurance, real estate, and energy sectors.

A strategic adjustment ensued. As Democratic policies began to favor hedge funds, finance, insurance, real estate, technology, and energy interests, the money flowed into Democratic coffers. The internet boom swelled the economy temporarily. At the same time, mass incarceration of young non-white men (who Hillary Clinton had called “super predators”) decimated minority communities. A new and privatized prison industrial complex emerged. Amid the feeding frenzy, somehow urban and rural blue-collar folks were forgotten.