The War At Home: The Corporate Offensive From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush
by Jack Rasmus
Kyklos Productions, San Ramon, California, 2005, 534 pp.

REVIEWED by Harvey Schwartz
Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection and Sam Kagel Historian
Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University

Did you like Howard Zinns, A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES? If so, you are going to love the new book by Jack Rasmus, THE WAR AT HOME: THE CORPORATE OFFENSIVE FROM RONALD REAGAN TO GEORGE W. BUSH. Rasmus is a former local union president and a seasoned organizer who once directed a community college labor studies program. He also holds a Ph.D. in political economy. Here he employs the tools of that exacting science with rigor and insight to analyze the victorious thrust in recent decades of corporate power into every phase of American social, political, and economic life.

Like Zinn, Rasmus sees American history as a continuous struggle between the “haves” and the “have nots.” Zinn traces the rise of elite power and the organized response of various groups of exploited people from Columbus to, in the most recent edition of his best seller, Bush II. Rasmus would not dispute that approach to the past. On the contrary, by going into serious depth in several key areas of American life since Reagan, Rasmus effectively picks up the story where Zinn leaves off.

Rasmus differs from Zinn in looking at the political and economic policies of corporate America and the resulting deleterious impact on workers and unions rather than at any specific people’s opposition movements. Consequently, his book is an excellent complement and companion to Zinn’s popular work. Rasmus seeks to pull together the various phrases of what he calls “the corporate offensive” in a readable and comprehensive account that workers, progressive activists, and other non-specialists will find useful and informative. In this I think he succeeds admirably.

THE WAR AT HOME is not driven by any conspiracy theory of history. Instead, after briefly carrying the story back to 1929, Rasmus traces ebbs and flows in a quite public corporate push that more or less parallels the ascendancy of Republican presidents since Richard Nixon.

Early on, Rasmus also points out that acknowledging any such thing as “class war” is anathema to mainstream American politicians and media opinion-makers. He then convincingly demonstrates exactly how the elites have profited since 1980 at the expense of working class families in income and wage distribution, job loss, debasement and outsourcing, federal tax, trade, labor policies, and health care and pension benefits.

The final chapter of THE WAR AT HOME focuses on the evaporation of the once vast Social Security surplus over the last twenty-five years. This inquiry is especially riveting given President George W. Bush’s crusade to privatize and essentially hamstring the Social Security program, that best known remaining legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Rasmus has a lot to complain about, but he does not let matters drop there. He has suggestions for dealing with the corporate offensive at the end of several of his chapters, and a real battle plan for organized labor in his lengthy conclusion. There he challenges the AFL-CIO to improve the coordination of its member unions in several key areas.

Intending to stimulate fruitful discussion within the ranks of labor itself, Rasmus holds that American unions must henceforth work together and perhaps restructure their movement at the grass roots level. Only then, he argues, can they hope to expand significantly and to recapture the kinds of industry-wide or regional-wide collective bargaining agreements that re-enforced union power in much of the United States before 1980.

All this should give you a sense of the inclusive sweep of THE WAR AT HOME. The final verdict, it seems to me, is that if you want to get beyond the “big G” hot button issues successfully exploited by various reactionary politicians in recent campaigns—God, gays, guns and the like—and find out what has really been going on, give THE WAR AT HOME a look. It has some great labor cartoons by Jim Swanson and a few simple graphs even I was able to follow. Most important, it is a sobering and path-breaking effort to “put it all in one place.” As such, it is clearly a valuable service to “the people” in what is most assuredly their time of need.

THE DISPATCHER, June 2005

The War At Home: The Corporate Offensive From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush
by Jack Rasmus
Kyklos Productions, San Ramon, California, 2005, 534 pp.

REVIEWED BY Laurence H. Shoup, “Z” Magazine, October 2005

The dominant institution in American society is the corporation, an instrument of aggrandizement for the few that enriches its already wealthy owners through a never ending process of commodification and privatization. The corporation’s goal is to make everything, even life itself, into a salable commodity, and it tries to turn every type of public property into private property, owned by and for the few. As a result, the earth and all of its life giving resources, from land and water to ores and oil, is being privatized into fewer and fewer hands, with dire consequences for numerous life forms worldwide, including billions of poverty stricken human beings. Current statistics illustrate how successful the corporation has been in helping the several hundred thousand families that make up the core of the corporate rich to reach a level of wealth and power beyond what any ruling class has ever known. The U.S. corporate rich, the top 1% of the population, holds nearly 40% of the country’s wealth, the top 10% over 70%, while the bottom 80%, making up the core of the working population, controls only 16%.

Not only is inequality in America grotesque, it is increasing due to an ongoing economic class war on poor and working people launched about twenty-five years ago by our nation’s dominant corporations. This class war has been very successful for the rich. As billionaire Warren Buffet recent exclaimed: “my class is clearly winning”. Working people, on the other hand, are clear losing. The corporate class war has been a disaster for the vast majority of our people.

In an important new book, THE WAR AT HOME: THE CORPORATE OFFENSIVE FROM RONALD REAGAN TO GEORGE W. BUSH, Jack Rasmus explores these key themes. Filled with facts and analysis, including 45 tables and 540 endnotes, and coming at a key historical moment, THE WAR AT HOME comprehensively illustrates the all-sided corporate attack on working people and their leading organizations conducted both historically and since 1980. In so doing, he makes a major contribution to our understanding of what has been going on, illustrating in depth how every societal institution which supposedly promotes the general welfare, from government at all levels, down through the Democratic Party and its trade union allies, has failed to protect the American working class from the disastrous consequences of unbridled corporate rule.

Rasmus uses the theme of periodic corporate offensives to good effect in reviewing the history of the last century to illustrate how we got to our present predicament. He sees four different corporate offensives since the 1890s, the latest and ongoing one dating from about 1980. In chapters which form the core of the book, Rasmus focuses on how the corporate power structure, using both top down legislation and bottom up actions at the point of production, has, over the past thirty years, been able to transfer about $9 trillion from over 100 million working class Americans to the wealthiest 5% of households. This has been done through tax cuts for the corporations and the rich (for example, the corporate tax rate was 23% in 1969 but is now only 7%), along with tax increases for workers; through ‘free trade’ and runaway shops, which has cost our country ten million jobs, seriously undermining our unions; through further reducing wages by contingent employment, reducing overtime pay and not raising the pathetically low minimum wage; through forcing workers to pay for health care or do without; and through reducing or eliminating pension benefits and stealing the Social Security surplus. Now they are even boldly attempting to privatize this program. Rasmus also suggests how to turn around the ongoing rout and disorganization of the U.S. working class, offering ‘suggested solutions’ at the end of most chapters, along with useful theoretical discussions of some key issues such as the ideology of ‘free trade’.

Rasmus also points out how American democracy itself is now threatened by the so-called ‘Patriot Act’ and the ‘War on Terror’ resulting, together with the impacts of the corporate offensive, in our nation’s most serious economic cultural and political crisis since the 1850s. Rasmus argues that part of this crisis involves the Democratic Party, which is increasingly influenced by corporate donations and lobbyists, is adrift with no clear ideology, or mobilizing approach to politics, and represents a weak ‘Republican lite’ approach overall. Largely taken over by the pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC) in the late 1980s, Rasmus correctly calls the Democrats an ‘organizational ally’, a ‘junior partner’, and frequent supporter of important aspects of the current Corporate Offensive. The War At Home documents key examples of this support, such as NAFTA, the 2000 trade deal with China, the sellout of health care for all in 1992-94, the theft of the Social Security surplus, corporate tax cuts, and two trillion dollars in tax cuts for the rich during George W. Bush’s first term alone. By 2004 the Democratic retreat from pro-working class economic positions had created such a vacuum that its former base had become confused and vulnerable to right wing appeals on cultural/social/religious issues. This is illustrated by 2004 poll numbers showing that core working class voters, those with a high school or less education, supported Bush over Kerry 57% to 38%.

Rasmus concludes THE WAR AT HOME by focusing on a reorganization of the AFL-CIO as the hope for a renewal of progressive class politics in America, proposing his own plan for restructuring the labor movement and its main federation. He points out that for at least thirty years the AFL-CIO’s political strategy has been characterized by “…an almost blind reliance on the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, to the exclusion of other forms of political and community organizing or inter-union coalition building” (p. 459).

During this same period probably several billion dollars in resources have been given by the union movement to Democratic candidates instead of organizing and educating working people for an independent fight back based on the needs of the majority. As a result, there has been no coordinated response to the Corporate Offensive, with the dire results that Rasmus documents so thoroughly. To remedy this, Rasmus proposes that to rebuild union and worker power requires a rank and file grass roots democratic movement with an effective membership base working on solidarity activities at the community and point of production level, and implementing a new, “radical transformation of the organizing process” itself (p. 470).

To successfully achieve this requires a fundamental restructuring of the AFL-CIO. At the core of the Rasmus proposal is the creation of an ‘American Workers Congress’, a new legislative body gathered from the state and local levels to set overall policy quarterly, plus two new union structures replacing the AFL-CIO. These are the ‘American Federation of Unions’ with the primary task of political action, including elections, as its main focus, and the ‘American Council of Unions’ with organizing and other activities at the point of production as its main focus.

To implement this at the grass roots level, what Rasmus calls ‘Local Mobilization Committees’, composed equally of union and community forces, would drive local solidarity activities like strike and boycott coordination, major cross-union organizing drives against companies like Wal-Mart, anti-corporate campaigns, demonstrations and actions in defense of community interests, and similar point of production focused activities. Union and community groups would have equal weight in both the membership and leadership of these committees. A new kind of cross-union and even union-community membership would evolve, producing a new layer of ’shock troops’ for labor. And whereas current Central Labor Councils would carry out the political organizing tasks of the American Federation of Unions, the Local Mobilization Committees would carry out the point of production solidarity actions and report to the American Council of Unions in the new reorganized structure. Both parallel structures would cooperate closely but essentially remain independent in carrying out their primary focus and missions, whether political or point of production.

Rasmus also weighs in on the ‘union density’ debate, suggesting that to increase density and potential power, sectoral unions would need to begin to develop. At first voluntary and in a loose federated structure, such unions would operate within the American Council of Unions to enforce coordinated bargaining, develop organizing strategy and direction, resolve union jurisdiction issues, etc.. He sees the eventual necessity, however, of one union in all of transport (trucking, longshore, railroad, airlines, etc.), one union in all of health care, in hospitality, manufacturing, and so on. Neither craft or even industrial unions are adequate to deal with global corporate forms of organization. But the process of developing sectoral unions must be evolutional and voluntary, in his view, not forced from the top down.

One limitation of THE WAR AT HOME is the failure to discuss and suggest possible solutions to one of the central dilemmas facing the left in America: how to escape the clutches of the DLC/Corporate-controlled Democratic Party. There are alternative parties (the Green Party and the Labor Party come to mind) with solid programs now struggling to be recognized as the party of, by and for the working class. An infusion of major labor support would instantly make one, or a merger of these two major players, a viable alternative. There are also those who argue that the political system, with its corrupt financing, winner take all structure, non-transparent voting machines, and partisan political supervision is fraudulent at its core and should be boycotted as not democratic enough even to participate in. A creative discussion of the entire political situation to stimulate a larger debate about what to do in this key area is lacking in the book.

Despite a few shortcomings, THE WAR AT HOME is a path breaking work which will stand as a milestone on the road to a fight back by and for working people, the vast majority of the American population. Jack Rasmus has performed a major service to the movement by starting what needs to be a great debate about our collective future. Those who do not want us to connect the dots about the profound transformation now occurring due to the economic warfare of the corporate rich hope that the majority now being marginalized into oblivion never find out about and read this book. Of course, this is the very reason that it is so important that we all should read it and spread the word about The War At Home.

Laurence H. Shoup is an Historian and author of the book, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and U.S. Foreign Policy.

reviewed by Larry Shoup in the ILWU DISPATCHER, March 2004

The many-faceted play "Fire on Pier 32" takes its title from a dramatic historical event. Worker demands for an organized voice on the waterfront during the crisis of the Great Depression led longshoremen to burn their company union contract books, the infamous "blue books," on San Francisco’s Pier 32 in 1933.

This collective act of defiance was pivotal in the history of both the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the larger American labor movement. The blue books were concrete representations of the slave-like conditions imposed on working people. Their burning was a mass act of rebellion that posed larger questions of the union shop, of how jobs were to be allocated, (the workers’ demand for a union-controlled hiring hall),of pay and pensions, as well as bigger social and political questions.

Longshore Workers March Down Market St.

There was no turning back for the courageous workers who organized this waterfront bonfire. Their lives were now committed to the concept of democratic industrial unionism by and for the workers, and they now survived only through solidarity and struggle, through building their union. Their direct action and the actions of others around the country during the 1930s breathed life into a near moribund labor movement, showing that the way forward was militant democratic industrial unionism, organizing all workers irrespective of skill, race, gender or status.

The history of the ILWU represents one of the purest expressions of class consciousness and class militancy in the U.S., making its past, present and future of immense interest to us all. Perhaps no union in the U.S. has a more inspirational history for advocates as working people, real democracy and social justice. "Fire on Pier 32" reviews this dramatic history in three acts, with a cast of twelve, over two-and-a-half hours, covering the ILWU story from 1933 to 2003. It is about repeated employer offensives against labor and organized, militant solidarity as the only effective union response.

The play begins with the 1934 maritime and San Francisco general strike, then covers the epic "march inland" to organize warehouse workers, the successful organizing in Hawaii, and the great strikes of 1948 and 1971, using solidarity to turn back successive employer offensives. Final scenes of Act 3 include the lockout of 2002, when the union’s solidarity and strength was tested as the ILWU had to face down both the corporate bosses and the Bush faction of the national power structure.

In "Fire" National Writers Union playwright Jack Rasmus uses the Epic and American Musical theater traditions, as well as historic photo montage, to capture the conflict, spontaneity and passion of varied situations as the ILWU leadership and the rank and file collectively made history together. By establishing context using a narrator and ILWU archive photographs projected on an overhead screen, along with longshore workers and their key leaders as central characters, Rasmus is able to educate by provoking critical thinking and raising consciousness about social, economic and political relationships. His portrayals of boss and politician scheming at secret meetings expose the totalitarian impulses and venality of those who rule the corporate capitalist system. In another scene he shows how solidarity and the union’s collective democratic power enforce safety standards and make a real difference in people’s daily lives on the job.

At the same time, "Fire" entertains, with six new songs in contemporary musical styles, performed by a chorus of three singers-dancers and the cast of actors. The lyrics and music of the play’s two theme songs, "The Song of Solidarity and "Song of the New Unionism," are particularly memorable, representing in musical form the main premise of the play. Other key songs include "The Song of Desperation," "Government Man," "The Web," and "Moving the Money Around." These songs focus on secondary themes: government always siding with the bosses, the infamous Taft-Hartley law and how the corporations play games during negotiations.

The acting is also outstanding. "Fire’s" central protagonists, Frank and Joe, are two young workers who grow and develop as they build a union that resists corporate attacks through solidarity. Their passionate portrayals of the rank and file helps us feel in our guts what it must have been like to be a worker with only his fists, courageously facing police and National Guard machine guns and tanks during the decisive battles of July 1934.

This play is a powerfully important contribution to the entire American labor movement. In "Fire" historical events and the union movement live again through art, allowing our collective history to emerge clear and true. We see the personal and social transformations that take place as workers and their leaders debate the strategy and tactics of resistance while facing the manoeuvres of the bosses and the betrayals of some corrupted leaders.

The play succeeds in giving a human face and emotion to the meaning of solidarity—born of struggle, nurtured by sacrifice and cherished forever in the hearts of those who come to know it as more than just a concept. The universality of Rasmus’ art helps us see deeper truths about ourselves and our current predicament. The result is a useable past, helping us see that our ultimate goal must be democratizing the world, confronting the corporate capitalist usurpation of our inalienable rights and emancipating all working people everywhere.

It has been said that the theater houses a nation’s soul. If this is true, it can be said that "Fire on Pier 32" is one place where the soul of American labor resides. "Fire" is now on video and DVD, get a copy and see it with your union brothers and sisters. It is wonderfully entertaining and instructive at a time when we face the Bush-Leaguing and Wal-Marting of America.

About the Reviewer
Larry Shoup grew up in a union household, his father was a member of the Machinists Union. He has had a varied work career and has been a member of both the old Retail Clerks Union (today’s UFCW) and American Federation of Teachers. He now makes his living writing and is a member of the National Writers Union, serving on its steering committee and as its delegate to the Alameda County Central Labor Council. Shoup has written three books and numerous magazine articles. He is currently working on his fourth book: "Rulers and Resisters: A People’s History of California."