Populist television host Lou Dobbs, who once considered a run for the presidency, has died at the age of 78. His legacy of defending America’s working and middle class from Wall Street, open borders, and the donor class is more evident than ever in today’s politics.
Dobbs was known for his TV segments that waged war against free traders — the class of economists and politicians who defended opening the United States economy to rapid globalization that ultimately cost millions of American jobs across working- and middle-class communities in the heartland.
“This administration, its trade policies, I mean my contempt for their level of concern and care for the American people and for the good of this country in passing these idiotic [free trade agreements] … it’s just disgusting,” Dobbs said of President George W. Bush’s (R) administration following a 2007 segment regarding the growing number of food imports to the U.S. without proper safety regulations.
“What we have now is managed trade, it’s managed trade on the part of the European Union, it’s managed trade on the part of China,” Dobbs said in 2010 of the free trade consensus that reigned in Washington, DC, up until the last half-decade.
“It is time for Americans to understand that their elites have more than disappointed, they’ve actually tried to betray the very idea of the American dream by reducing the middle class to peons, in some cases trying to put them into a race to the bottom in competition with the cheapest labor in the world,” Dobbs described.
When Republicans in Congress sought to help give Bush and then President Obama fast-track trade promotion authority, Dobbs conducted several interviews calling out such politicians for what he said was an undemocratic process to enrich special interests while gutting more American jobs.
Perhaps Dobbs’s fiercest enemy was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable — the two leading big business groups representing the largest multinational corporations in the world.
In 2009, when a group of Democrats and Republicans were pushing to include rigorous “Buy American” provisions into a spending bill, Dobbs called out the Chamber of Commerce’s relentless lobbying against the provisions.
“[The Chamber of Commerce] bought a president for eight years for crying out loud, they know what they’re doing,” Dobbs said after then-Rep. Don Manzullo (R-IL) suggested the group simply did not understand the “Buy American” provisions.
“What does it say about this country if an organization that calls itself the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is opposed to the manufacturing of American products, is opposed to putting money … in the pockets of American workers and American businesses, particularly small businesses that generate 80 percent of the jobs? What kind of … what in the world is going on in this country? Are we that far gone?” Dobbs said.
In a 2007 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl, Dobbs called out corporate outsourcers as the betrayers of American communities.
“When you’re willing to sacrifice the stakeholders, the community that business is created in, the nation it is created in, the good of that community for the cheapest possible labor and put your middle class in direct competition with people anywhere in the world making 57 cents an hour, that’s horrible,” Dobbs said.
Going hand-in-hand with defending the nation’s workers, Dobbs was a patriot on the issue of immigration — arguing for decades that the U.S. must reduce legal immigration levels and eliminate illegal immigration to raise the wages of working- and middle-class Americans.
“The idea that corporate America has brought in … as many as 20 million illegal aliens into this country … to exploit, I just have a hard time accepting the idea that those illegal employers who, for example, in the meatpacking industry where 20 years ago the average wage was $19 an hour and today it’s $9. I have a hard time accepting the idea that employers ought to get away with that,” Dobbs said in an interview with Charlie Rose in December 2006.
“Wages at the lowest wage levels in this country are declining, not rising,” Dobbs said. “So when you talk about a guest worker program, which we already have one in this country it’s called the H2 program, there’s going to be a reason it’s not working. And when you say we need more guest workers and wages are declining at the lowest centile in this country, that suggests a surplus of labor, not a deficit of labor.”
“Who are the victims here? The victims are the working men and women of this country,” Dobbs continued. “Because they’re the ones paying the taxes, working for wages that are at best … stagnant for over the last three decades in this country. They’re the real victims.”
In late 2007, during a panel discussion, Dobbs assailed the H-1B visa program and the elected members of Congress who parroted corporate talking points to defend the program which is known for laying off Americans after forcing them to train their foreign replacements.
“Senator Ted Kennedy held a hearing at the beginning of the year in which he invited one guest witness and that was Bill Gates to talk about H-1B visas and Bill Gates responded … he wanted an infinite number of visas to bring in the ‘best and the brightest,'” Dobbs said.
“… the reality is, an infinite number of H-1B visas would just be exponentially destructive as you might expect as the current H-1B visa program in which 7 out of 10 H-1B visas are going to Indian companies domiciled in the United States with the purpose of domestic outsourcing to Indian H-1B visa-holders who are paid on average $12,000 less than their American counterparts,” Dobbs continued. “… the lies associated with the H-1B visa program, the myths that corporate America … has attempted to perpetuate around the H-1B visas is, I think, breathtaking and worthy of a federal investigation.”
“The borders are broken, the H-1B visa program is broken because corporate America and special interest groups have been driving policy,” Dobbs said. “… the facts are staring every one of us in the face. Both of these parties have ignored the will of the people, they’ve ignored their responsibilities. The officeholders that we’ve sent to Washington, DC are, for the most part, abject slaves to the interests of corporate America and the illegal employers.”
Just six years ago, Dobbs appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to explain the intended goal of mass immigration to the U.S.
“When it comes to illegal immigrants, they are a ‘preferred’ group. And it is so because of the establishment, the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, U.S. multinationals, they want cheaper labor, they want open borders, they want to ‘harmonize’ those borders,” Dobbs said.
“Under George Bush and most of the Obama administration, the ‘North American Union’ that is bringing Canada and Mexico together with the United States together was the goal … the reality is, Americans understand what’s happening … Americans know when they’re being lied to,” Dobbs explained.
Tucker responded, saying, “You’ve been saying this for 20 years and I remember vividly when we worked at another network and you said things like that and people laughed at you and you were completely right.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
