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If Joe Biden Doesn't Intervene to Stop Mass Layoffs at John Deere, Who Will?
The greed of the John Deere company is giving President Biden the perfect opportunity to win back working-class voters. All he needs to do is put up a major fight to stop Deere from shipping U.S. jobs to Mexico.
Really, the company should be renamed “Greed R Us.” Amid layoffs totaling approximately 1,000 U.S. workers in Illinois and Iowa, the company has posted $10 billion in profits in the 2023 fiscal year and paid its CEO $26.7 million.
But the real motivation for Deere to can workers and flee to Mexico is to finance $12.2 billion in stock buybacks. What are stock buybacks? A way to boost the price of the company’s shares—a blatant form of stock manipulation that was illegal until deregulated by the Reagan Administration.
Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers.
Stock buybacks are a quick and easy way to shovel corporate money straight into the pockets of the company's largest shareholders, mostly hedge funds and other Wall Street entities, and to the top officers who receive most of their compensation in stock incentives. When the company rushes into the market and buys back its shares—as listed below—ka ching! The stock price goes up and the biggest shareholders get richer and richer. But it takes a lot of U.S. layoffs to pay for these buybacks over the last two years alone:
It’s time for Biden to take a page from the Trump playbook. Trump stopped the Carrier Air Conditioning company from moving to Mexico in 2017. Polling shows that Trump’s effort was extremely popular. Even a third of........
© Common Dreams
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