INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER to the book, THE WAR AT HOME
INTRODUCTION
Convergence, Crisis, & Corporate Restructuring in America
Copyright 2005 Jack Rasmus
America is fundamentally divided! Like no time since the 1850s,
that ominous decade leading up to the Civil War a century and
half ago. And like a political slipknot, the rope strands will
continue to tighten before they loosen once more.
The vision that burned on TV screens across America on election
night 2000 remains. Changed in essence neither by acts of terror
or subsequent war. An electronic ghost, its shadow impixelated
still on our silicon culture. The story of our time—the struggle
between the remnants of the old Roosevelt tradition and the new
Reagan-Bush coalition, the latter resurrecting in yet another
form the 1920s Coolidge-Hoover vision of America.
A new physics has penetrated the molecular structure of America.
A new political equation for the 21st century. A political E=MC2
Now P=CM3. M for Money, Media, and uncompromising religious Morality!
C for chronic global economic crisis. P for Power. A dark energy
ripping apart the quantum structure of civil society in America.
A political entropy, growing in force as the various elements
of the American social fabric accelerate ever faster in opposite
directions.
THE DANGEROUS CONVERGENCE
At no time in the last century—not in the worst years of the
1930s Depression or the upheavals of the 1960s—has America faced
a potentially more dangerous convergence of several fundamental
forces.
Structural Economic Crisis
One such force is Economic. Economic crises are generally viewed
from the perspective of cyclical events. But underlying the periodic
cycles, known as recessions, are more fundamental longer term
structural change. Its laws of movement not always as well understood.
Today structural and cyclical forces interact in new, unforeseen
or unanticipated ways. And with each passing month we enter new
territory.
The twin phenomena of massive exportation of jobs and of jobless
recovery under George W. Bush are not new, but have been developing
in intensity and duration following each recession since1980.
More than five million quality jobs were lost on George Bush’s
watch between 2001-2004. Jobs that continue to disappear at an
alarming rate, churning over, being replaced by part time, by
temporary work, by the growing millions of marginally self-employed,
the uncounted millions of hidden unemployed, by the discouraged
and underemployed, and by lower paid service work at, or near,
minimum wage. American workers have not shared in general productivity
gains now for three decades. Real average hourly wages and earnings
of the 100 million plus workers that constitute the core of the
American working class have not risen at all for at least as long.
Working class families have compensated by working more than 500
hundred additional hours per family per year, and by taking on
historic levels of installment debt. More than forty five million
Americans have no health coverage whatsoever, and tens of millions
more barely any at all. Retirement income and security are fading
for millions, while social services are cut, tax burdens shift
from the rich to the rest, and education quality declines as costs
rise.
Meanwhile the world moves inexorably toward more deeply synchronized
economic cycles and intensifying global competition. New forces
sweep the American corporate elite along in an endless search
of new markets abroad. A search intensifying within the U.S. as
well, as the very interstices of American society itself are scoured
relentlessly for new possibilities for commodification—all corners
of culture, all manner of personal relationships, and all variety
of once available public goods and services. Education. Government
services. Public security. The military. Even trafficking in human
body parts. Nothing is allowed to remain outside the hungry maw
of the market.
This is not the Great Depression of the 1930s. But neither is
it the typical post World War II recession. U.S. monetary policy
has prematurely begun to turn restrictive once again, paltry tax
cuts for workers have been spent, the mortgage refinancing boom
as a source of household asset income is over, jobs in the millions
recycle from high paid to low, flow to east and south Asia at
alarming rates, while chronic high oil and gas prices continue
to decimate workers’ incomes—a short list of multiple factors
that all but ensure another recession in the US economy within
the next 24 months and a resumption of synchronized global downturn
among the major industrial economies, a number of which have already
turned the corner on the descending road to recession.
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have both publicly declared we
have entered a period of endless global warfare—with forces beyond
our shores intent on destroying the American way of life from
‘without’. Meanwhile the undeclared, unmentioned but no less endless
economic war continues being waged and intensified from ‘within’,
no less effectively destroying the material foundations of that
same American way of life.
Assault on Civil Liberties
A second fundamental force at play today is the current assault
on Civil Liberties and the destruction of the most basic rights
of American democracy. Skulking behind the screen of the War against
Terrorism are those in key positions of power in Government and
civil society who actually believe there is too much democracy
today in America. Their attitude and viewpoint slips through public
discourse periodically to revealing true intent.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, darling of the Radical
Right, in a speech in Ohio stated he believed that Americans now
had more democracy than that guaranteed by the original U.S. Constitution.
Some of it could therefore be taken back and still remain within
the guarantees of that Constitution, in his view. More ominous
still were the words of General Tommy Franks, commander of U.S.
forces during the 2003 Iraq War, who declared in his retirement
interview that the next major terrorist event in the U.S. would
mean the imposition of martial law. According to Franks, there
will always be a war between the Rich and Poor. It is the natural
order of things. Under cover of section 213 of the Patriot Act
government agents may secretly burglarize homes without notice,
and do so; obtain library records; seize bank, telephone and internet
accounts while issuing ‘gag’ orders on businesses preventing them
from notifying customers of such acts; and employ roving wiretaps
on citizens never accused of any crime. Meanwhile plans for expanding
the Patriot Act quietly move forward, below the public radar,
including draconian measures allowing the government to strip
Americans of their very citizenship and deport them to foreign
lands in the event of another terrorist attack.
At the same time and in violation of the 1876 Posse Comitatus
Act passed more than a century ago to prohibit military involvement
in U.S. domestic politics, the Army’s Special Forces are now engaged
in preparing police departments across America in the use of urban
warfare tactics. A new Northern (US) Command that never existed
before in US history has been established to deal with potential
conflicts within the continental U.S. For the first time in memory
the regular Army was ordered to standby for possible intervention
in social protests that occurred against the World Trade Organization
(WTO) meetings in Seattle and Miami. And ‘What If’ reports circulate
and are debated within American war colleges and among high levels
of the planning staff in the US Army considering scenarios for
a coup d’etat in the U.S. in 2012.
The still unfolding assault on liberties and rights is more serious
than anytime in the last century—including compared to that of
the Cointelpro program of the 1960s, McCarthyism of the 1950s,
the illegal internments of American citizens without due process
in the 1940s, the aborted military coup against Franklin Roosevelt
in 1933, or the infamous Attorney General Palmer raids following
world war I. These latter were not official policy entrenched
across major government power bases in the Executive, Legislative
and Judicial branches. In contrast, today efforts to rollback
civil liberties and democracy are the institutionalized policy
of the current Bush administration, its many radical friends in
Congress, and its ultra-conservative supporters on the U.S. Supreme
Court. Only the politically gullible and naïve can believe there
are no plans, awaiting only the next provocative terrorist event
almost certain to strike America’s power grid or a major port
facility, to deny Americans even more of their basic civil liberties.
The growing threats to American democracy since September 11,
2001 have not taken place in an historical vacuum. Rather they
are the latest in a chain of events that include the brazen, politically
motivated impeachment of a President in 1998, the constitutionally
questionable selection of George Bush as President in 2000 by
the Supreme Court, and the passage of the most comprehensive legislative
assault on the Bill of Rights in all of U.S. history. Like an
undetected necrosis within the body politic, however, they spread
and undermine the sense of legitimacy in the U.S. political system
across large segments of the U.S. population.
Growing Cultural Divide
A third fundamental force converging with the above two is the
gaping Cultural Divide in American today which grows ever wider
with each new defining event. Fanning the flames of this divide
has been the conscious policy of the Bush regime and the ascendant
radical wing of the American corporate elite. At the heart of
this cultural polarization in America has been the damp pall of
religious morality descending upon the political landscape since
the latter years of the 1970s. The right wing of the Republican
party leadership has learned well, and has developed into a political
art, the ability to distract the American populace with fabricated
moral values and issues—as they pick everyone’s pockets while
backs are turned.
As their checkbooks and wallets shrink, American workers from
Kansas to California to the Carolinas are left debating and fighting
over peripheral issues such as gay marriage instead of the economic
destruction of the American family, abortion instead of the miscarriage
of American democracy, prayer in schools instead of the wholesale
failure and eventual privatization of the American education system,
stem-cell research instead of the absence of health care coverage
whatsoever for 45 million American citizens or the lack of adequate
health care for another 50 million more.
The problem of religion in politics today, as ever in the past,
is that religion is the enemy of democracy. Democracy is based
upon compromise. But how do you compromise with the ‘Word of God’?
Political compromise to the religious mind is synonymous with
heresy. Sooner convince a devout racist that all men are created
equal. Or a fascist that all men and women are born with the same
inalienable rights. And we know where that all leads.
With the lid on the bottle of the religion genie now removed,
cultural conflicts and divisions in America will continue to deepen.
Much of the cultural polarization growing in America today has
its ultimate roots in differences between secular vs. religious
morality and values. At this very moment the Radical Right are
financing and consciously promoting the splitting of traditional
religious organizations in America, protestant and catholic alike,
into conservative and liberal factions. Meanwhile George Bush
provides their organizations tax cuts and ‘faith based’ handouts
in payment for election assistance and political services rendered.
The cultural and religious polarization will therefore continue
to worsen, as the right wing of the Republican Party coalition
continues, as it has since the late 1970s, to promote religion
and religious morality as a domestic political weapon.
The Historic Confluence
The civil conflicts and disturbances of the 1960s were sporadically
political and marginally cultural, but never fundamentally religious—and
even less so economic. The conflicts of the 1930s were primarily
economic but did not produce a corresponding institutional restriction
of democratic rights. And the conflicts of those years were certainly
were not religious or cultural in character. In contrast, our
current period is, and will continue to be, characterized by growing
civil conflict over basic economic interests, over democratic
rights and civil liberties, and over secular vs. religious morality
and values.
The coming conflicts in America will therefore be at one and
the same time economic, political, and religious-cultural. Either
one would be serious development in its own right. Their confluence
therefore is of particular import. Furthermore, it is likely all
three will be exacerbated by constant war, continuing in the middle
east and possibly coming in the Caribbean basin as well.
THE CENTURY-LONG AMERICAN PERESTROIKA
American history shows that every few decades the corporate elite
and their political representatives restructure the economy to
exploit opportunities for expansion in a changing world. To assist
the restructuring, the domestic ‘rules of the game’ between Business
and Labor, the social relations between their respective associated
groups and constituencies, are redefined and changed.
Over the past century the restructuring and redefining of ‘rules
of the game’ have occurred on at least four separate occasions.
The First And Second Corporate Offensives
The first restructuring and change in the rules occurred at the
turn of the 20th century, as the U.S. began to reposition itself
as a newcomer and competitor on the global economic chessboard.
The Spanish-American War, the first offshore colonies in the Caribbean
and Philippines, the acquisition of the Panama Canal, the corresponding
growth of corporate trusts, and the creation of the income tax
and the Federal Reserve system to ensure revenues and to regulate
the flow of financing for the new economic expansion were the
most notable elements of this first restructuring.
A second restructuring and change in the rules of the game took
place in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression. Unlike
the first, now corporate interests found themselves on a definite
defensive and the rules of the game were changed again in order
to maximize the effectiveness of that defensive. Economic regulation
of business was introduced to reduce volatility and instability
in the economy, in particular in the critical sectors of Transport,
Communications, Energy, and Power generation. The Banking System
was overhauled, rules on foreign trade rewritten, and a new emphasis
on fiscal policy tools introduced. This was the ‘business side’
of what was then called the ‘New Deal’ at the time. At its core,
the New Deal of the 1930s was as much, if not more, about ensuring
business stability as about containing labor conflicts.
On the ‘labor side’ of the New Deal changes in the rules of the
game were also introduced to stabilize an increasingly volatile
labor force by providing minimal retirement guarantees, by allowing
workers and unions to collectively bargain, assuring minimal working
conditions, temporarily permitting government employment as unofficial
last resort, and a host of other measures—all ultimately necessary
as well to support the new focus on assisting U.S. corporations
dealing with cut-throat international capitalist competition and
ensuring general business stability.
A third restructuring took place in the immediate post World
War II period, as the American corporate elite repositioned itself
for the Cold War and prepared for an unprecedented, several decades-long
global economic expansion. At the heart of this third restructuring
of the past century was the establishment of the U.S. dollar as
the world’s currency, new rules and institutions governing world
trade and monetary regulation, the creation of bodies like the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other U.S. dominated
financial and trade institutions. Further hallmarks of the third
restructuring were new innovations in the U.S. financial system,
a thorough overhaul of corporate and investment provisions contained
in the U.S. tax code, and the completion of the close integration
of the U.S. government, industry, and military begun during the
second world war.
On the labor side in the post-World War II restructuring, some
of the rules of the game previously introduced in the 1930s were
‘re-adjusted’ in a manner decidedly favorable to business. New
legislation in the form of the Taft-Hartley Act sharply shifted
back the balance of power between workers and their unions in
favor of companies and management. Rights to strike, organize
and bargain were fundamentally curtailed. The income tax was now
permanently extended deeply down into the working population—while
guarantees of employment by the government, promises of national
health care, and assurances of civil rights in education, housing,
jobs made during the World War II period were effectively abandoned.
The Third Corporate Restructuring & Offensive, 1946-1959
Corporate America has never accepted President Franklin Roosevelt’s
New Deal—that combination of policies and laws passed in the depths
of the 1930s recession that were designed to check the growing
militancy of American workers and unions while stabilizing the
worst extremes of the capitalist business cycle by means of regulatory
policies and other measures.
At the heart of the New Deal of the 1930s were laws that gave
American workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively
(National Labor Relations Act), that established the right to
a minimal retirement guarantee (Social Security Act), created
a minimum floor for chronically falling wages and hours (Fair
Labor Standards Act), provided emergency Government last resort
employment to the jobless (Works Progress Administration), while
simultaneously providing regulation for the worst abuses by corporations
in the utilities, energy, banking, Wall St., and other industries
that were a major cause of the Depression itself.
Since the New Deal, Corporate America has continually probed,
tested, and explored ways to neutralize and roll it back. At times
it has moved more aggressively in this direction. At other times
less so. But it has never surrendered the basic goal of reversing
the New Deal someday altogether.
With the return of a Republican Congress in 1946, yet another
effort was launched to change the ‘rules of the game’ between
Business and Labor at the sphere of production level. That effort
culminated in the passage of the anti-Labor Taft-Hartley Act of
1947. Taft-Hartley took back many strategic advantages unions
and workers had prior to its passage—not least of which
was the right of recently formed unions to provide jobs to workers
through a closed shop union hiring hall. As a consequence of Taft-Hartley,
workers in the newly formed, fast growing, and economically strategic
unions in the manufacturing sector would not be permitted to look
to the union for their jobs. The employer would henceforth be
the source of that most critical foundation of loyalty: the hiring
process.
With Taft-Hartley, unannounced strikes were now also declared
illegal. Strikes of major geographical or nationwide impact could
also be terminated for up to nearly 80 days by federal edict and
injunction. Management rights were expanded dramatically. Federal
government bureaucrats now by law were required to become involved
in all collective bargaining negotiations prior to and following
any strike. And occupation of corporate property by workers (i.e.
sit down strikes) was strictly prohibited, solidifying prior court
decisions outlawing the same.
Subsequent further revisions to the new ‘rules of the game’ were
passed later in the 1950s in the form of the Landrum-Griffin Act,
along with multiplying court and administrative decisions. These
deepened the original intent of the earlier Tart-Hartley Act—i.e.
the neutralization of union power at the point of production!
With Landrum-Griffin, remaining loopholes permitting strike action
previously not addressed by Taft-Hartley were disallowed. In particular
sympathy strikes were no longer tolerated. Nor would workers and
unions be allowed to refuse or handle products made by other workers
in a dispute with their employer.
By the end of the decade of the 1950s some of the most effective
means of expressing union power were thus stripped away. The back
of much of union and worker solidarity was thus broken. Key social
relations between corporations and workers had been fundamentally
restructured. The ‘rules of the game’ significantly changed. Union
membership growth, measured as a percentage of the workforce,
which grew until the economy peaked in the early 1950s, thereafter
began a decades long historic decline that has continued to this
day. Any rise in union membership after Taft-Hartley, Landrum-Griffin,
and the flood of court and NLRB decisions based on them would
come from the economic growth that might occur in industries already
organized. That net union growth would not result from union organizing
campaigns. But as those once growth industries themselves later
declined, so too would union membership begin to plummet en masse.
Union and worker economic power in private industry plateaued
in the early 1950s, never again to advance to any significant
degree as a direct outcome of union organizing initiatives in
the core sectors of construction, manufacturing or transport.
The drift downward would continue until 1980, after which the
drift itself became an accelerating decline due to corporate and
political policies initiated under the Reagan years.
The one exception to the above union membership decline was the
drive in the 1960s and 1970s to organize public sector workers
(city, county, state, federal,) and, shortly thereafter, farm
workers. It’s not surprising that both of these areas of the workforce
were left outside the control of Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin
laws’ restrictions on union power. But aside from these two exceptions,
Labor in its strategic base of construction, manufacturing, and
transport otherwise marked time throughout the decade of the 1950s.
The 1960s: The Hiatus
The 1960s represented a hiatus of sorts for corporate forces
intent on rolling back the New Deal and further restricting strikes,
organizing, and union bargaining.
With the overwhelming electoral defeat of right wing Republican
Party candidate, Barry Goldwater, in the 1964 elections those
among the corporate elite advocating a more aggressive offensive
were eclipsed for the moment by more moderate elements, now temporarily
ascendant, who believed there was little to be gained at the time
by unnecessarily aggravating union and worker opposition. There
were windfall profits to be made from the Vietnam War, from the
intensification of the Cold War, and from the Space Race with
the Soviet Union. Moreover, there were rising social protest movements
by minorities, students, and the emerging womens movement. To
attempt to directly dismantle or even restructure the key social
programs of the New Deal, or try to restrict further union rights
to bargain and strike, would only risk adding the protest weight
of American Labor to that of the other peripheral social groups
and movements in motion at the time.
With the more aggressive wing of the corporate elite thus temporarily
marginalized during the 1960s a modest extension, the ‘last hurrah’
of the New Deal occurred with the passage of the Medicare Act
at mid-decade. The New Deal’s original promise of comprehensive
Health Care for all proclaimed thirty years earlier, then cut
short by World War II and the post-war reaction which followed,
was reborn as Medicare—albeit now only in partial form as health
care only for senior citizens. Medicare would be the last expression
of the Roosevelt New Deal and the result of a unique confluence
of historical developments at that time which would not be repeated
since.
By 1970, the decision had essentially been made to extricate
the US from its Vietnam quagmire. The social movements of the
previous decade began to lose momentum. The US had won the Space
Race by landing astronauts on the moon and had compiled a massive
advantage in missiles and warheads over the decade. Thus the conditions
underlying the decade-long hiatus in the corporate offensive against
American workers and their unions began to dissipate.
In this environment circa 1970-71 two new developments of strategic
import absent in the previous decade began to emerge. The first
of these was a new wave of capitalist competition in Europe and
Asia that had not heretofore impacted U.S. corporations in the
post World War II period. By the late sixties the American corporate
elite was finding that it actually had to compete with foreign
rivals for the first time in many years.
Labor’s Last Hurrah: 1969-1971
The second new development at the close of that decade was the
re-emergence of union and worker militancy. It marked a newfound
willingness by unions in the strategic sectors of construction,
transport and manufacturing to strike aggressively for wage and
benefit gains—a development not seen since the mid 1940s.
The union bargaining and strike wave at the end of the decade
was led by the construction trades unions, who achieved first
year gains in wages and benefits of more than 20% as a result
of a series of regional strikes in late 1969-70. Their gains overlapped
with the expiration of contracts by Teamsters and west coast Longshore
workers, who also struck in 1970-71 and achieved similar significant
improvements in wages and benefits.
Following the successful strikes and negotiated gains in Transport,
unions in basic manufacturing, in particular Auto, consequently
sought to match the gains in construction and transport before
them. Worker and union militancy in one sector thus immediately
influenced another. ‘Pattern bargaining’ within an industry (eg.
GM contract settlement influencing Ford influencing Chrysler settlements)
was one thing, and bad enough from the perspective of the corporate
elite. But to allow a similar development to occur between industries
like Construction, Transport and Manufacturing was unacceptable!
Not since 1946 had anything similar happened. It was a situation
the corporate elite could not, and would not, tolerate.
While prohibiting sympathy strikes and limiting the right to
strike and the scope bargaining, the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin
legislation of the 1940s and 1950s did not succeed in prohibiting
the strike per se. Nor did such legislation prevent the still
loose but growing coordination of strikes between unions. Those
laws could not effectively address the successful leapfrogging
across industries and the wage and benefit gains produced in 1969-1971.
It was a loophole that needed closing. With Nixon now in office
the corporate elite once again closed ranks. The hiatus was over.
To help resolve the problem they turned to Nixon to check the
nascent challenge from Labor. Nixon’s response was to impose wage
controls on the construction unions in 1970, followed by a general
90 day freeze on all wage increases for all workers in August
1971.
Under the wage freeze workers and unions could still strike.
They just couldn’t get anything if they did. That made the strike
effectively meaningless. Led now by the Executive Branch of government
in 1970-71, instead of Congress as in 1947 and 1959, it was a
new way to restrict strikes and determine the outcome of bargaining
in favor of corporations and management. Following the ‘shock
event’ of the initial 90 day freeze, subsequent strict controls
on union bargained wage increases were imposed and remained in
place for more than two years. Negotiated average wage increases
in union contracts were reduced by more than half, and in some
industries like Construction more than three fourths, during 1971-73
as a consequence.
The mysterious death of militant auto union president, Walter
Reuther, in a plane crash in 1970 and the stripping of militant
Teamster president, Jimmy Hoffa, now incarcerated, of his position
as head of the that union in 1971 helped ensure that the brief
historic 1969-1971 experience of Labor strike and bargaining militancy
would not be repeated again.
In contrast to the decidedly negative impact of wage controls
on wages and union bargaining, nominal and totally ineffective
controls on prices were also imposed but did nothing to stop the
record inflation of 1972-73 that surged to double digit levels.
As a result of the cuts in negotiated wage increases and the acceleration
of inflation, the prior gains of workers in terms of real wages
achieved during the previous three years, 1969-1971, were wiped
out. Workers without unions fared even worse.
The true underlying plan and intent of the wage controls program
under Nixon was summed up by Arnold Weber, who headed up the Nixon
Payboard during those years, 1972-1974. Years after, in 1979,
when it was all but history, Weber admitted in a Business Week
magazine interview that “The idea (of Nixon’s wage-price controls)
was to zap Labor, and we did!”
Following the wage freeze and controls, the corporate elite and
U.S. government followed up with plans to ensure the experience
of 1969-1971 would not be repeated. The first target was the construction
unions who initiated the strike wave in 1969. The plan was called
the ‘double breasted operation’. It was an open shop drive much
like that which occurred during the 1920s in that sector. Led
by the Construction Business Roundtable, which would later morph
into the influential Business Roundtable interest and lobby group,
the construction industry during the remainder of the decade of
the 1970s was successfully de-unionized, beginning especially
in the residential housing sector and outside major metropolitan
areas but later extending within metropolitan areas as well. In
the process what were previously region-wide contracts within
the construction industry, which were once the rule, were more
and more ‘balkanized’—i.e. broken up into smaller geographic area
contracts that further reduced union bargaining power. By the
end of the 1970s the backs of the construction trades unions were
broken. They would never lead a strike wave again.
By the time the wage controls were formally discontinued in 1974
the economy was already headed into a sharp downturn. Controls
on wages were no longer needed in an economy entering the steepest
recession to date since the Great Depression of the thirties.
Negotiated gains in wages, benefits and other conditions by unions
were minimal during the recession of 1973-75, well below what
would have been the limits of formal wage controls had they been
continued.
If the wage controls and accelerating inflation of 1971-73 wiped
out the wage and benefit gains achieved during the strike wave
of 1969-1971, then the recession of 1973-75 set in motion what
would become a long wage march backward. For more than three decades
since 1971 there has not been anything resembling coordinated
strike action across industries between unions and workers in
America. Nor is it a historical coincidence that real wage gains
of American workers from 1973 on halted, stagnated, and then began
to decline for the next thirty years as well, despite three decades
of record productivity gains by corporations over the same period!
Thus three years of formal wage controls turned into three decades
of informal, but no less effective, real wage stagnation and decline!
A virtual thirty year pay freeze.
The cross industry bargaining and strike militancy of the 1969-71
period can thus be seen as a ‘last hurrah’ of union power at the
level of the sphere of production—much like the passage of the
Medicare Act a few years earlier marked the high point and ‘last
hurrah’ as well of the New Deal in the sphere of social legislation.
Nixon’s ‘New Economic Program’
Nixon’s wage freeze, wage controls, and subsequent neutralization
of the 1969-71 gains of workers and unions in construction, transport
and manufacturing marked a return by the corporate elite to a
more direct and aggressive offensive not seen since the passage
of Taft-Hartley in 1947.
Up to 1970 the Executive Branch of the federal government had
left the task of such offensives pretty much to corporations on
a company-to-company or industry basis to implement directly at
the sphere of production, or to Congress and the Courts at the
legislative level. Now, however, with Nixon the Executive branch
of government was fully engaged. The new phase of the Corporate
Offensive that appeared initially to emerge in the early 1970s
under Nixon represented a renewed consensus that set new precedents
in Corporate-Government cooperation. This deepened direct coordination
between corporations and government, important for our analysis,
focused on three policy areas in particular—not only on restructuring
labor-management relations and thereby on controlling labor costs
at the level of production level, but also on trade relations
and tax restructuring as well.
This broader Corporate Offensive embracing taxes, trade, as well
as wages was called Nixon’s ‘New Economic Program’, or NEP. Introduced
in August 1971, the NEP targeted rolling back of union wage gains
resulting from the strikes and bargaining of 1969-71, as noted
above.
However, a second element of the NEP was a broad initiative to
cut corporate taxes. The Nixon NEP tax cuts established new precedents
in tax policy that would be resurrected again by Reagan in 1981
and expanded upon even further by George W. Bush after 2000. In
fact, 1969-71 marks a watershed in US tax policy history. For
it is in this period that the Great American Tax Shift begins
to accelerate. More and more of the overall burden of taxation
in the US would henceforth shift to the working class, while lightening
the load for corporations and wealthy taxpayers. The tax rate
on corporations, for example, peaked in 1969 at 23% and has been
declining ever since, until today it is barely 7%. Within the
structure of the overall Federal Tax burden, a similar shift from
the more wealthy to workers has also occurred over the same time
period.
The NEP’s third set of policies involved trade relations and
programs. Trade policy can be understood simply as those measures
which lower costs for US-based corporations in world markets and/or
raise costs for their competitors in the same markets (including
the US home market). Additionally, trade policy means forcing
open foreign markets on favorable terms to the US corporations
previously restricted or denied them. And conversely it can mean
inhibiting market entry by foreign competition in those markets
in which US corporations dominate. Like the renewed direct offensive
against union wages and the beginning of the great tax shift,
the aggressive trade policy that has been a hallmark of the Corporate
Offensive for the past twenty-five years had its initial origins
as well in the Nixon NEP.
At the heart of the NEP trade policies was the decoupling of
the US dollar from the gold standard. This move gave US corporations
a strategic weapon with which to browbeat other nations and economies
when trade disputes arose. The world was now indisputably on the
dollar standard. No intermediary ‘currency’ like Gold to enable
foreign central banks or corporate competitors to hide behind.
They could either purchase U.S. dollars or not. The consequence
of the Nixon move was to force other countries to invest more
in the US as well as directly purchase more US government securities
to maintain a trade balance. Buying gold was no longer an option.
Buying dollars was now the only game in town. Foreign currencies
now had to peg to the dollar, which permitted the US to indirectly,
albeit partly, to control the value of those currencies—a tremendous
advantage in maneuvering in disputes over trade and in allowing
the US to export its inflation abroad.
An even more direct ‘trade’ measure announced as part of the
NEP was the imposition of a 10% imports surtax, which resulted
in immediate windfall gains for big manufacturers like GM, US
Steel, and others in textiles, electronics, and other import sensitive
industries.
The various trade related measures of the NEP were designed to
provide a clear cost advantage to US companies in international
markets, which they did at the time. Their direct effect was in
one sweep to reduce an over-valued US dollar in world markets
and make US corporations competitive once again in those markets.
This was the ultimate trade objective of the NEP, the same objective
all Free Trade policies of the US corporate elite since the NEP.
The NEP trade measures thus may be viewed as the historical predecessors
to the aggressive trade measures undertaken later by Reagan, the
development and passage of NAFTA under George Bush and Bill Clinton,
the opening of imports from China, and to efforts currently underway
by the US corporate elite and Bush to replicate NAFTA throughout
the Americas by extending it to the Caribbean basin (CAFTA) and
expanding it throughout the southern hemisphere (FTAA), and by
forging in the interim multiple bilateral, country trade deals
designed to outflank and drive still resistant nations into CAFTA-FTAA
trade blocs dominated by the U.S.
Just as there is no ‘free lunch’, there is nothing ever free
about Free Trade. Someone always pays—either the foreign capitalists
or the American worker—when it comes to reducing costs and/or
opening markets. All the academic theory, rationale, justifications
and claims that everyone gains from Free Trade in the long run
is either ideology or obfuscation covering up the fundamental
reality that Free Trade, in the short run, is essentially a zero
sum game regardless what the clever ‘long run’ arguments and defenses
may be. And while some arguments for Free Trade may be true in
a purely logical sense in the long run, the ‘long run’ may in
fact be very long indeed. As the 20th century guru of the economics
profession, John Maynard Keynes, has said: “In the ‘long run’
we’re all dead.”
If the decade of the 1960s can be described as a hiatus in the
postwar Corporate Offensive, the early 1970s and the brief Nixon
period can be understood as a kind of dress rehearsal for what
would later emerge under Reagan and other Presidents after 1980
as a renewed aggressive phase of that Offensive. The NEP shows
clearly the ground pioneered by Nixon in this direction. Other
possibilities he may have planned that were cut by the events
of the last years of his administration also reveal the historical
transitional character of his term in office with regard to the
current Corporate Offensive.
In his 1972 re-election campaign Nixon spoke about a ‘New American
Revolution’ that would take place in his second term. The focus
of this revolution would be domestic policy. While not all elements
of this potential radical redirection of domestic policy were
clear at the time, one proposal that was frequently raised by
Nixon in his first term was his desire to impose mandatory arbitration
in all union contract negotiations.
There is some evident that Nixon’s plans for a New American Revolution
in his second term also intended to address the restructuring
the welfare system, a further overhaul of the corporate tax system,
plans to open up more trade with China, and the introduction of
further business deregulation. All these would later become initiatives
under Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush. The close relationship
between Nixon and Reagan in particular, both on a policy and personal
level, is often overlooked.
The Interregnum: 1974-1977
But Nixon’s ‘New American Revolution’ follow up to his ‘New Economic
Program’ did not happen, notwithstanding his 1972 re-election.
It was abruptly cut short by his Watergate scandal, impeachment,
and his ultimate resignation in 1974. The Gerald Ford caretaker
Presidency that followed was consequently preoccupied with the
fall of Vietnam and the steep recession of 1974-75. The election
of a little known Democrat, Jimmy Carter, in 1976 further delayed
any resumption of plans for a domestic New American Revolution
and any renewed Corporate Offensive that may have been envisioned
along such lines. By mid-decade of the 1970s the corporate offensive
initiated briefly by Nixon stalled. A kind of Interregnum set
in between late 1973-early 1977.
By mid-1977, however, corporate forces again began to plan a
renewal of what had begun earlier in the decade but was cut short
by the intervening political events of 1973-76. Organizations
like the Business Council, Business Roundtable, CFR, Manufacturers
Association, Chamber of Commerce, and others joined with more
aggressive ‘Sun Belt’ business forces and right wing oil entrepreneurs,
and once again together set about redefining new ‘rules of the
game’ and launching a new phase of restructuring.
New business political action committees (PACs) and lobbying
operations were set up circa 1977-78 and corporate money was funneled
in amounts previously unseen or even imagined. A new aggressiveness
in financing pro-business electoral candidates, instead of spreading
the money more equally around between Republican and Democratic
candidates as before, was adopted. A new alliance with grass roots
religious organizations that were pioneering direct mailing and
other fund raising techniques was forged, especially in the South,
which was now targeted in particular for Corporate-Republican
political initiatives. A new focus on polling, consulting, media
and public relations expenditures in political campaigns was adopted.
Radical right elements financed and founded dozens of conservative
‘think tanks’, whose primary task was to define a new ideology
of the Right wedding the old economic arguments with new political
and religious moral ideals, while simultaneously undermining in
the public mind any legitimacy associated with concepts of ‘liberalism’
or the benefits of business regulation. Cultural themes and moral
issues were introduced in a systematic manner onto the American
political landscape, primarily as vehicles for attacking the civil
rights revolution of the preceding decades and as a means for
mobilizing the religious right for a host of corporate objectives
at the grassroots level. A so-called ‘Committee on the Present
Danger’, composed of the most powerful corporate elements and
their surrogate representatives (including Ronald Reagan), was
formed during the decade to directly attack Carter’s policies.
This new political equation of money, morality and media was
tested out in the 1978 Congress and the final two years of the
Carter Presidency.
1978-79: The Corporate Elite Cross the Rubicon
While more overt elements of a new Corporate Offensive did not
begin to take shape until 1977, less obvious but no less important
piecemeal changes in the ‘rules of the game’ were being implemented
throughout the decade by the courts and Executive branch administrative
bodies like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). These incremental
but collectively significant developments further tightened the
screws on union organizing, political action, and workers’ rights
on the job, albeit still on a company by company basis. By the
late 1970s the construction unions and workers had already been
seriously impacted by the ‘double breasted operations’ union busting
strategy, launched by the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable.
Now it was the manufacturing unions turn to experience the negative
impact of the NLRB and the courts over the latter half of the
decade on union organizing and bargaining activities.
In response to the growing legal web restricting organizing and
bargaining, the AFL-CIO, proposed comprehensive Labor Law Reform
legislation to counter the growing restriction on and regulation
of union activities. With a Democratic Party now in power in 1976
both in Congress and the Executive branch it appeared there would
be no better time to pass general Labor Law Reform. Perhaps the
New Deal itself could be reinvigorated in other ways as well—just
as it was in the 1960s with the passage of progressive social
legislation in the form of Medicare.
But Labor Law Reform, as well as other worker and consumer rights
legislation, were resoundingly defeated in 1978 by a massive corporate
lobbying campaign reflecting the newly coordinated, well-funded
and aggressive Corporate attack on any legislation that in any
way seemed akin to the New Deal or protective of working class
interests. In terms of financing, organization, and its intensity,
nothing like the 1978 anti-Labor Law Reform lobbying effort had
been seen in post war memory up to that point. Leading the charge
was the renamed and expanded premier corporate lobbying group,
the Business Roundtable—the same business organization which earlier
in the decade in 1970 as the Construction Users Anti-Inflation
Roundtable had led the charge to establish ‘double breasted operations’
and the open shop in the construction industry.
Attempting to restore some of the original intent of the New
Deal ‘National Labor Relations Act’ of 1936, the AFL-CIO made
the Labor Law Reform bill of 1978 its central political and legislative
goal during the Carter administration. When both that goal and
the bill went down to humiliating defeat, it marked the first
of what would become a long string of failed legislative attempts
to resurrect progressive legislation in the decades to follow
under Reagan and Bush.
Union efforts to resurrect the New Deal legislative tradition
thus died with the defeat of Labor Law Reform. Henceforth, unions
and workers would be on a constant defensive at the social-legislative
level. 1978 was clearly the watershed with regard to the Corporate
Offensive at that level. Thereafter, union efforts would focus
on trying to prevent the further unraveling and dismantling of
the New Deal tradition and its progressive laws.
If the defeat of Labor Law Reform and the renewed targeting of
New Deal legislation by corporate interests marked a renewal of
the Corporate Offensive ‘from the top down’—then ‘from the bottom
up’ new corporate strategies at the point of production were being
rolled out and tested as well after 1978. The imminent fourth
Corporate Offensive in the 20th century would not only occur at
the legislative level, but at the sphere of production level as
well.
Earlier in the 1970s the corporate focus was on eliminating leapfrog
bargaining, strikes and settlements across industries. At the
end of the decade the focus would expand to breaking up within
industries what was called ‘pattern bargaining’. In intra-industry
wide bargaining, for example, a nationwide settlement with a company
like GM or US Steel would be replicated at a Ford or a Bethlehem
Steel. The test case for this occurred in 1979 at Chrysler Corporation
involving the autoworkers and their union, the UAW. Chrysler would
become the test model for a new corporate strategy and formula
at the sphere of production for undermining intra-industry bargaining
and contracts in manufacturing. It was a harbinger of things to
come.
In 1979 Chrysler Corporation was facing bankruptcy due to a series
of bad business decisions and a slow response to new competition
from Asia. Chrysler asked for a billion dollar bailout guarantee
by the U.S. government. Responding to demands by Chrysler’s bank
creditors, President Carter supported Chrysler management and
its banks’ insistence on major concessions by the UAW and auto
workers as part of the condition for the loans. Carter leaned
on the UAW to agree to concessions in exchange for the government
guarantee of the bailout of the company. From this strategic settlement
was born the new model that would spawn the corporate runaway
shop movement of the 1980s, widespread concession bargaining by
unions, and ultimately would produce what came to be known as
the ‘Rustbelting of America’
What the AFL-CIO and UAW did not realize at the time was that
the Chrysler bailout was not an isolated, one time event. It was
the pilot program. It was the test case of how to break the back
of union bargaining power in manufacturing. It would lead to the
decades-long corporate practice of unrestrained outsourcing. Combined
with Free Trade practices and policies at both the government
and sphere of production level, it would lead to subsequent exporting
of US manufacturing jobs on a massive scale.
The Chrysler model was eventually replicated elsewhere throughout
manufacturing during the next two decades. Chrysler was the analog
for the manufacturing sector comparable to what was already underway
with the ‘double breasted’ open shop drive in the construction
industry. Both would decimate union membership. Not coincidentally,
UAW union membership peaked in 1979 at 1.5 million members at
the time of the Chrysler settlement. It has since declined to
624,000 at the end of 2003.
The Chrysler model made effective use of the threats of the plant
shutdown and the runaway shop to paralyze unions and workers with
a deep fear of losing their jobs. Once that fear was sufficiently
established, it then legitimized and helped promote the widespread
penetration into collective bargaining and union contracts of
new ‘rules of the game’ at the point of production. Increasingly
common in union contracts thereafter were corporate provisions
like two-tier wage systems, unrestricted outsourcing, expanded
management rights language, lump sum pay bonuses in lieu of scheduled
wage increases, and the steady elimination of Defined Benefit
Pension plans and their replacement with Defined Contribution
and Individual Pension plans based on 401Ks. All the above became
staple corporate demands and objectives in contract negotiations,
particularly in Manufacturing during the Reagan era and beyond.
Collective bargaining increasingly focused on concessions during
the new decade of the 1980s, and concession bargaining has continued
to deepen and spread ever since.
While concessionary bargaining did not originate in 1979, it
now became conscious corporate strategy from that point, practiced
by more and more major manufacturing corporations. The Chrysler
model thus marked the beginning of the decline of intra-industry
bargaining within the manufacturing sector. It ushered in concessionary
bargaining on a wide scale. At the point of production the new
corporate strategy was simple: threaten to close down the plant
and use the threat to break up industry-wide contracts, then install
two-tier wage schedules, expand managements rights clauses in
contracts to enable almost unlimited freedom to outsource and/or
remove entire groups of workers from the bargaining unit, give
workers lump sum payments instead of raises in their wage schedule,
and substitute pensions with no guarantees of retirement payments
for union pensions which guaranteed levels of benefits. Chrysler
became the model of what the Corporate Offensive could achieve
with the right combination of business-government pressure, threat,
and aggressive action.
Sources critical of Labor tend to blame the leadership of the
manufacturing unions as primarily responsible for allowing the
decline in union bargaining power in manufacturing since Reagan.
They cite the unwillingness of the leadership to directly confront
the plant shutdown/runaway shop developments of the 1980s due
to fear of a Reagan response similar to his destruction of the
Air Traffic Controllers at the time. They note AFL-CIO leadership
over-reliance on Democratic Party help, which was never delivered,
instead of taking action and developing its own industry level
counter-strategy. Or they point to more senior, better paid workers
too willing to agree to lesser pay and benefits (two-tier wage
schedules) for younger workers coming into the industries. But
American workers in manufacturing and elsewhere did fight. In
steel, rubber, meatpacking and elsewhere. They just did so in
a very fragmented, industry by industry, and more often company
by company approach. There was no coordinated effort to stop the
snowball effect of the plant closures-runaway shop strategy, or
the legislation and changes in tax and trade that made such corporate
strategy financially attractive.
These criticisms also overlook and greatly underestimate the
massive corporate effort that underlay that offensive launched
during the early Reagan years to undermine the manufacturing unions
in America. They assign little or no role to the Government policies
that provided the incentives, or the role of the courts and NRLB
in legitimizing and institutionalizing the various changes at
the sphere of production level reflecting the “new rules of the
game”. More than any other cause, it was the CEOs and governing
boards of corporations that took the lead in destroying industry-wide
bargaining agreements with their constant threats—frequently followed
by action—to shut down plant after plant and move them first to
the South, then to Latin America, and then elsewhere offshore.
Today outsourcing and offshoring are words the American public
has become increasingly aware of as more and more white collar
professional, business services, software engineering, and other
tech jobs are also rapidly being transferred abroad. But outsourcing
and offshoring have been devastating manufacturing jobs in America
since Reagan and the early 1980s. In mid-1979 there were 21.2
million manufacturing jobs in America; as of the end of 2004 the
number has declined to only 14.3 million. Just about 7 million
high quality, well paid, good benefits, mostly unionized jobs
have been lost in the U.S. in Manufacturing alone, nearly 3 million
of which occurred under George W. Bush during his first term.
By the end of 1978, barely two years after taking office, the
Carter administration was essentially played out as a force that
might establish an effective defense of the New Deal and protect
prior legislative gains. One of the great historic shortcomings
of the Carter administration was its failure to develop any strategy
whatsoever to revitalize the New Deal—as had been done, for example,
in the decade of the 1960s with the passage of Medicare. The conditions
certainly were there. The Democrats had control of the Congress
and the Presidency. Not since 1932 had the party in 1976 a better
opportunity to achieve something in the wake of Watergate, the
ending of the Vietnam War, and the severe recession of 1974-75—all
events on the Republican Party’s watch. Had they been able to
do so, the history of the past three decades might well have been
quite different. But the extraordinary weak leadership and lack
of vision by Carter and other Democratic Party notables allowed
a reopening for, and rigorous renewal of, a new fourth Corporate
Offensive once again at the close of the decade of the 1970s.
The final political coup de grace was then delivered to the Carter
administration. By late 1979, the decision had been made by the
corporate elite to force Carter out. Global business competition
was intensifying once again at the close of the decade and more
aggressive tax and trade policies were being demanded, none of
which Carter was capable of delivering.
In 1979-80 the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, spokesperson
for finance capital and the banking sector in America, adopted
a policy of driving up interest rates well beyond anything justified
by the general economic conditions. Volcker’s efforts had the
intended result. Inflation and interest rates fed off each other
in the short run, driving both to levels to 15% and more by early
1980, an election year. What quickly followed on the eve of the
November elections was the sharpest drop in the economy, more
than 4%, up to that point in the postwar period. Even a steeper
and more rapid recession than that of 1973-75. Volcker handed
Reagan his number one campaign slogan, the first ‘cue card’ for
the 1980 election campaign: “Are you better off today than before
the current (Carter) administration took office!”. It all but
ensured Reagan’s election that year.
Both the new political equation and the elements of a new Fourth
Corporate Offensive were now in place. All that remained was to
put Ronald Reagan in the White House and the corporate elite to
begin in earnest a new era of restructuring, a new offensive against
workers and their unions at the sphere of production level, and
a new legislative assault on the New Deal.
The Fourth Corporate Restructuring & Offensive, 1980-2005
The post-1980 restructuring is characterized on the Business
side by the rapid unraveling of the business regulatory rules
of the game established as part of the New Deal in the 1930s and
wholesale deregulation of entire industries and sectors of the
economy. Another hallmark has been the radical redistribution
of taxes and acceleration of shifting of tax burdens from corporations
and the wealthy to the American working class population. Other
major elements of the restructuring have been the introduction
of unprecedented financial innovations and communications technologies,
the transfer offshore of much of the US manufacturing sector,
the restructuring of much of the work force and jobs markets in
the U.S. from traditional, permanent full time work to forms of
part time, temporary, and otherwise ‘contingent’ work, the establishment
of new institutions and rules for world trade, and the closer
absorption of the U.S. Media into the U.S. Industrial-Military-Government
complex.
On the Labor side, the restructuring after 1980 has meant the
advent of corporate and government policies to contain real hourly
wages, to rollback various wage and hour guarantees legislated
in the 1930s, to shift rising health care costs to workers, and
to transform traditional group pensions into bank-administered
private plans. The restructuring and offensive has been especially
characterized by an increased regulation of workers and unions
in areas of organizing, political action, and strikes and a dramatic
decline in union membership and bargaining density. An expansion
of management rights by the courts and administrative bodies like
the NLRB, the institutionalization of concession bargaining and
the accelerating export of jobs to lower paid, non-union regions—
in particular to Central America and Asia—are additional key characteristics
at the sphere of production level.
Just as Nixon and the corporate elite in the early 1970s eliminated
leapfrog bargaining and strikes between unions across industries,
with even closer assistance by the Executive and Courts a decade
later a fourth Corporate Offensive would effectively undermine
and destroy intra-industry wide bargaining, break the back of
the power of the manufacturing, construction and transport unions,
radically change the character of collective bargaining strongly
in favor of management for decades to come, and usher in a long
period of concession bargaining by Labor in its once strategic
‘core’ industrial base.
In the 1970s the primary corporate-government means for checking
union bargaining power and workers’ pay and benefit gains were
the wage freeze, wage controls, the threat of compulsory arbitration,
and double breasted open shop operations. At the legislative level
corporate advances took the form of new corporate tax and Free
Trade policies and the checking of labor law reform that might
have assisted union organizing and growth.
After 1980, at the point of production the tactics used were
widespread threats and plant shutdowns, runaway shops, outsourcing,
offshoring, concession bargaining, and use of the courts and executive
to prevent union organizing, strikes, and to otherwise undermine
the growth of union membership. At the legislative level, after
Reagan it was new pro-corporate tax and Free Trade policies ultimately
facilitating shutdowns and offshoring, the rolling back of spending
on social programs, wage and protective legislation, and privatizing
the core of what remained of the Roosevelt New Deal.
In the political-electoral arena, after 1980 the new restructuring
and Offensive would also be accompanied by the transformations
of both the Republican and Democratic parties, albeit in different
ways and forms.
The Republican would become a ‘mobilizing’ party with a base
of religious branches able to field an army of grass roots volunteers
to turn out voters, push state-wide initiatives, organize recall
and referenda elections, and engage in other protest events. A
mobilizing party with new ideological elements and a widespread
communications apparatus effective at forming and manipulating
public opinion. A party with a strategy aimed at maximizing institutional
power and imbued with a new aggressive ‘take no hostages’ attitude
toward opponents and adversaries.
In contrast, the Democratic Party would drift under some of the
most ineffective leadership in its history, then turn toward its
pro-corporate wing as represented by its Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC). The DLC would assume party control and undertake
a reformation of the Party on a moderate Republican image, and
become increasingly beholden to corporate interests as it embraced
the modern trappings of money-dependent electoral campaigns (i.e.
polling, consultants, media time, etc.) requiring massive campaign
contributions. Under the DLC the party would transform itself
further from the ‘mobilizing’ party it once was under Roosevelt
into a mere electoral organization with a shrinking base, no clear
ideological focus, no media apparatus to deliver that focus, and
increasingly unable to defend itself against grass roots attacks
by its Republican opponent. One of the ironic consequences of
the new Corporate Offensive is not the direct transformation of
the Republican Party by corporate interests, but the indirect
transformation of the Democratic Party by those same interests
as well.
At the legislative level, the new Offensive would successfully
gut social programs, worker protective legislation, and the minimum
wage. Central elements would include a shifting of the total tax
burden and an opening of the floodgates of Free Trade, as well
as a transformation of the private pension system by dismantling
tens of thousands of defined pension benefit plans and eventually
a direct assault via privatization on the twin great achievements
of the New Deal—Social Security and Medicare.
In chapters one through ten that follow the details of the Fourth
Corporate Offensive—the offensive that has continued from Reagan
through George W. Bush—will be discussed. That Offensive will
be examined not only at the sphere of production level but at
the legislative level as well. Tax policies, Free Trade legislation
and practices, wage legislation and rules, health care costs and
coverage, private pensions, and Social Security will be addressed
in parallel with what has happened in terms of wages, unions,
bargaining, benefits, and jobs at the work level. The consequences
in the sphere of organization—whether in the form of the crises
in the AFL-CIO or the Democratic Party—will be discussed in the
concluding chapter.
The assault today on American workers’ standard of living, basic
economic interests, and political rights are coming more quickly,
from more directions, and are increasingly virulent and bold.
During the decade of the 1990s it was at times intermittent; at
other times aggressive, especially in terms of trade and job restructuring.
Since 2000, however, the assault has been steady, coming from
multiple directions, and gaining in momentum. For those on the
receiving end—American workers and their families—it is becoming
increasingly clear that something basic has changed. Something
fundamental is underway. In this, the first decade of the 21st
century the ‘rules of the game’ are once more in flux. The chapters
that follow are about those most recent changes in the ‘rules
of the game’—and what the consequence has been for 105 million
American workers and their families since Reagan took office through
the first term of George W. Bush.
Jack Rasmus
OBAMA'S ECONOMY: 
EPIC RECESSION: 
THE
WAR AT HOME:
