And after the war, returning veterans would never have been able to find a job, buy a home, and start a baby boom if we didn’t have strong businesses to hire them.
That was the America my parents came to in 1956 – the place in which it was possible for poorly educated immigrants like them to find dignified work, purchase a house, raise a family, and leave all four of their children better off than themselves.
This is why I have always told their story: not because of what it says about me, but because of what it says about our country.
This is why since the day I entered public service I have been an unabashed believer in American exceptionalism and promoter of the American Dream.
But when I ran for president, I learned the hard way that many Americans did not share my optimism.
They were anxious, even angry at those they blamed for ignoring them, disrespecting them, and leaving them behind.
From cabinet-makers in Georgia to power tool factory workers in Pennsylvania, they are the people whose lives were turned upside down when companies exercised their right to make a profit by offshoring their jobs, with little regard for their corresponding duty to invest in their own workers.
They were the people who were told to go back to school, learn to code, and leave their extended family and community behind and get a job in the “new economy”.
These millions of Americans are the victims of an economic re-ordering which Pope Benedict in Caritas in Veritate described as the dominance of “largely speculative” financial flows detached from real production.
When we started only focusing on the right of businesses to make a profit and stopped recognizing the obligation of businesses to reinvest in America, large corporations became nothing more than financial vehicles for shareholders, managers, and banks to assert their claims over.
The right to return money to shareholders became a right above all others. And the obligation to invest for the benefit of our workers and our country became an afterthought.
