all human societies have always had one cultural feature in common: the highest evil is greed and the highest good is giving and not taking. After WWII, and the ascent of Thatcher Reaganism and Harvard Business School Wharton, greed has been institutionalized as our culture's aspiration of aspirations, while giving to the poor, oppressed, and deprived has been demonized and criminalized. We all pay the price, with the climate catastrophe the final installment
The people who put forth the capital to establish the company says, " We put up the money to start this business and had we not done so there would be no product to sell and you would not have a job.
Therefore we deserve to reap the profits from this enterprise.
Labor responds with, " What you say is true, but don't forget, without our labor there would not be a product to sell either. And, you need to provide us with a living wage, safe working conditions, and a retirement program as an award for our life-long devotion to your company.
True. But how you explained to brainwashed people. I worked at Bealls Florida warehouse and they hired a guy to come and talk about how bad unions are. This after giving a free lunch and after he talk free ice cream and most part of the employees where cubans immigrants. Sad. They know what they doing. And now days people educate themselves by Facebook or YouTube.
Professor Reich apologized for the long explanation - but that is part of the problem: the truth is "stranger than fiction" and doesn't fit in a soundbite; the forces of bozo evil prey upon the public leveraging that very fact - as evinced by their hypervigillence regarding "defund the police" & radicalization of a dim-witted, otherwise unassuming base.
Who knew exploitation could be so ugly (and obvious)?
While I've pretty much lived through the chapter in American History described in Dr. Reich's "Great Power-Shift" posting I, obviously, lack the detailed understanding of this era. (I'm at that age where I forget a lot of stuff) Yet, every bit of what he points out makes total sense to me as "lived experience" from an observational perspective. However, in my simple mind, I just feel all of this traces back to the so-called "Powell memo" to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1973 (I think - maybe 72) setting the guideposts to turning America away from the "New Deal" into the "marriage" of the board room, the court room, and the political caucus "room." (Put into "full bloom" by the Reagan administration) It's been a while since I read Powell's "memo" and I don't remember the details, nor the details of the two books which focused on it but, to me, it's not hard to put the impetus of the previous 40+ years' assault on America's Middle Class right at Lewis Powell's "feet." In fact, Powell, shortly after laying the "groundwork" for turning America into a corporatist state, was nominated to the Supreme Court. We've had this discussion here before - but this is a true recipe for fascism.
I would like to add just a few things to your outstanding summary of how we came to find ourselves in our present predicament. First. Trumpism is a convenient term to describe the descent of the Republican Party into authoritarianism. It was there before Donald Trump and will continue after he leaves the scene. It is a process that began in 1912 when the GOP turned away from any notions of social justice and came under the sway of Big Business and plutocrats. Dedicated to destroying the New Deal order, it accelerated in 1964 when the libertarian right mounted it’s unsuccessful takeover attempt during the Goldwater campaign. But it really took off during the Reagan years and continued apace during the administration of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, abetted along the way by Democrats like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. It is a campaign that has been orchestrated by the masters of the dark money universe whose central operator is Charles Koch and many others of great wealth. Second. These malefactors have been able to do what they’re doing because the American constitutional system is seriously flawed. Most notable among its many defects is the role money and the private sector play in American politics and public policy making due to certain constitutional structures. Third. What you so well describe is really late-stage capitalism, a system that is social Darwinistic and exploitative by nature. One, that if we allow it to stay the course ,is going to destroy not only the United States, but the entire planet as well.
I feel like I'm reliving a nightmare. "HolloweenETC" The factory I grew up with from the'60's through 2000is a slab of concrete on the side of a highway where everyday residents of bedroom communities drive a hundred miles to warehouses in the sky. I don't miss the work but I hate that international corporations bought American institutions and gutted them. All trends can be reversed but where is the will (incentive and hope) to take it away from the nightmare back to the "DREAM"?
This is an amazingly comprehensive and lucid summary. Thank you, Prof. Reich. Reflecting others' comments, I think we need to organize. Also we need forms of business enterprise where everyone can have a substantial ownership share. There are such models, I am not familiar with them and would love it if someone knowledgeable responds with more about that. And we need micro-financing too. These measures alone aren't enough. Today's news that Elon Musk took over Twitter sets off all the alarm bells. We're already in an economic environment where some individuals exceed the clout of nations and where monopolistic enterprises function as hostile sovereign states within our country. I wonder how that situation will evolve. Are we already at its culminating threshold? The thrust of this increasing divide and corporatization strikes me as something more than greed. This engine of power is structural, as Robert Reich points out. It's a complex runaway feedback loop. For the super-rich (read hyper-powerful), life can become a self-referential journey for those who aren't moved to consider the effects on everyone else. The destabilization of the engines of power is already evident in history when people in desperation revolt in one scenario. In another, the powerful turn masses of people against each other in war, conquest, colonialization (economic and otherwise) and the authoritarian elitism of totalitarian states. This leads me to another partial remedy. Get to know your neighbors, even those who disagree with you. Advocate for the poor and those who can't get ahead. I look forward to reading part II.
We are watching a return to the wealth distribution under medieval feudalism, with corporate ownership taking the place of land ownership. Such a discrepancy in wealth distribution has invariably led to class war and the systematic extirpation of the current oligarchy. If our history classes were more accurate in our public school systems, more Americans would know that.
Robert. Fascism is corporate rule and that’s where we are. When I lived in California, I called out a company for an illegal practice. They tried to convince me I was mistaken. I contacted the Attorney General & he sent a letter to the company. They fell over themselves making things right. In California, consumer rights were king. Now, that has dissipated.
I’ve been involved with 2 class action suits. They owe people money for their faulty products but you must have years old receipts, three attempts to contact company about issue, on and on. I had all of this with Kenmore (front load washer) and Audi. Audi wanted every single maintenance schedule on the car for 12 years. (I got it from the dealer). It took me one year of fighting!
Who else has the ability or records to do this? One payment was $500, the other $1200. In both cases I involved the attorney generals.
This is also harder to do because attorney generals only control companies in their states. Most are overseas now.
These changes flipped the protections from consumer to company!
Let’s not cower! Get out and vote! I did yesterday at an early voting location with a drop box for my mail in ballot!
I researched every single judge on the ballot..a page & half! Go to your Board of Election sites to look up any info.
WE’RE GOING TO WIN OR THEY GET A REVOLUTION OF SOME SORT…SHUT DOWNS, NON-COMPLIANCE ETC. THINK OF OUR IRANIAN SISTERS AND FIGHT!
Thank you, Professor, for the history of labor and working class and corporate power in the USA. Corporations seem to always win, to make sure their bottom line fills their pockets. As more women and people of color have been educated and entered the labor market, and unions have lost power, economic inequality is part of our government and corporate world. High school technical training is mostly not happening, so unprepared graduates without college degrees are very low on the income chain. As a female elementary teacher from 1980 to 2017, teacher salaries changed dramatically, but didn’t exactly keep up with inflation. There were more women teachers in the lower grades and pay was not only low, but wildly different in high schools and colleges than elementary. And even between Districts. And often teachers and teacher unions negotiated for benefits at the expense of salary to lower taxes. But that meant living with less income. They also were sold the idea to buy IRAs and annuities as tax shelters. This gave front end commission to financial sales people. Often the investments lost or only slowly gained because of market fluctuations, low fixed interest and contract agreements. Now we pay: taxes on the interest and withdrawals that increase our income. I should have paid taxes on my much lower salary. And for less educated or as Unions have lost power, untrained workers, those at the ground level working for wages and often no benefits or union protection, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “ Nickel and Dimed” https://
Thank you, Bob, for this succinct explanation of the economic and political forces producing the Great Inequality. One additional feature of this period is how we spent the great peace dividend that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union: on needless wars. The trillions "W" spent on the fiasco in Iraq could have been spent on public goods that had great returns: schools, roads, bridges, environmental reclamation, healthcare. Cui Bono? Certainly neither the people who fought nor the innocent bystanders
Corporate capitalism and Democracy are mutually incompatible, without a good public education system and higher education accessible to all, not merely to the well-to-do. We need more legislative regulation of capitalism, before a class war becomes both inevitable and desirable.
all human societies have always had one cultural feature in common: the highest evil is greed and the highest good is giving and not taking. After WWII, and the ascent of Thatcher Reaganism and Harvard Business School Wharton, greed has been institutionalized as our culture's aspiration of aspirations, while giving to the poor, oppressed, and deprived has been demonized and criminalized. We all pay the price, with the climate catastrophe the final installment
The people who put forth the capital to establish the company says, " We put up the money to start this business and had we not done so there would be no product to sell and you would not have a job.
Therefore we deserve to reap the profits from this enterprise.
Labor responds with, " What you say is true, but don't forget, without our labor there would not be a product to sell either. And, you need to provide us with a living wage, safe working conditions, and a retirement program as an award for our life-long devotion to your company.
Don't mourn: organize!
True. But how you explained to brainwashed people. I worked at Bealls Florida warehouse and they hired a guy to come and talk about how bad unions are. This after giving a free lunch and after he talk free ice cream and most part of the employees where cubans immigrants. Sad. They know what they doing. And now days people educate themselves by Facebook or YouTube.
Professor Reich apologized for the long explanation - but that is part of the problem: the truth is "stranger than fiction" and doesn't fit in a soundbite; the forces of bozo evil prey upon the public leveraging that very fact - as evinced by their hypervigillence regarding "defund the police" & radicalization of a dim-witted, otherwise unassuming base.
Who knew exploitation could be so ugly (and obvious)?
While I've pretty much lived through the chapter in American History described in Dr. Reich's "Great Power-Shift" posting I, obviously, lack the detailed understanding of this era. (I'm at that age where I forget a lot of stuff) Yet, every bit of what he points out makes total sense to me as "lived experience" from an observational perspective. However, in my simple mind, I just feel all of this traces back to the so-called "Powell memo" to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1973 (I think - maybe 72) setting the guideposts to turning America away from the "New Deal" into the "marriage" of the board room, the court room, and the political caucus "room." (Put into "full bloom" by the Reagan administration) It's been a while since I read Powell's "memo" and I don't remember the details, nor the details of the two books which focused on it but, to me, it's not hard to put the impetus of the previous 40+ years' assault on America's Middle Class right at Lewis Powell's "feet." In fact, Powell, shortly after laying the "groundwork" for turning America into a corporatist state, was nominated to the Supreme Court. We've had this discussion here before - but this is a true recipe for fascism.
I would like to add just a few things to your outstanding summary of how we came to find ourselves in our present predicament. First. Trumpism is a convenient term to describe the descent of the Republican Party into authoritarianism. It was there before Donald Trump and will continue after he leaves the scene. It is a process that began in 1912 when the GOP turned away from any notions of social justice and came under the sway of Big Business and plutocrats. Dedicated to destroying the New Deal order, it accelerated in 1964 when the libertarian right mounted it’s unsuccessful takeover attempt during the Goldwater campaign. But it really took off during the Reagan years and continued apace during the administration of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, abetted along the way by Democrats like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. It is a campaign that has been orchestrated by the masters of the dark money universe whose central operator is Charles Koch and many others of great wealth. Second. These malefactors have been able to do what they’re doing because the American constitutional system is seriously flawed. Most notable among its many defects is the role money and the private sector play in American politics and public policy making due to certain constitutional structures. Third. What you so well describe is really late-stage capitalism, a system that is social Darwinistic and exploitative by nature. One, that if we allow it to stay the course ,is going to destroy not only the United States, but the entire planet as well.
I feel like I'm reliving a nightmare. "HolloweenETC" The factory I grew up with from the'60's through 2000is a slab of concrete on the side of a highway where everyday residents of bedroom communities drive a hundred miles to warehouses in the sky. I don't miss the work but I hate that international corporations bought American institutions and gutted them. All trends can be reversed but where is the will (incentive and hope) to take it away from the nightmare back to the "DREAM"?
This is an amazingly comprehensive and lucid summary. Thank you, Prof. Reich. Reflecting others' comments, I think we need to organize. Also we need forms of business enterprise where everyone can have a substantial ownership share. There are such models, I am not familiar with them and would love it if someone knowledgeable responds with more about that. And we need micro-financing too. These measures alone aren't enough. Today's news that Elon Musk took over Twitter sets off all the alarm bells. We're already in an economic environment where some individuals exceed the clout of nations and where monopolistic enterprises function as hostile sovereign states within our country. I wonder how that situation will evolve. Are we already at its culminating threshold? The thrust of this increasing divide and corporatization strikes me as something more than greed. This engine of power is structural, as Robert Reich points out. It's a complex runaway feedback loop. For the super-rich (read hyper-powerful), life can become a self-referential journey for those who aren't moved to consider the effects on everyone else. The destabilization of the engines of power is already evident in history when people in desperation revolt in one scenario. In another, the powerful turn masses of people against each other in war, conquest, colonialization (economic and otherwise) and the authoritarian elitism of totalitarian states. This leads me to another partial remedy. Get to know your neighbors, even those who disagree with you. Advocate for the poor and those who can't get ahead. I look forward to reading part II.
A tour de force letter for explaining the labor situation today. I look forward to the second letter.
We are watching a return to the wealth distribution under medieval feudalism, with corporate ownership taking the place of land ownership. Such a discrepancy in wealth distribution has invariably led to class war and the systematic extirpation of the current oligarchy. If our history classes were more accurate in our public school systems, more Americans would know that.
Obama did a great job as president for 8 years. My major criticism was the bailouts “Too big to fail” shouldn’t be a reality.
Robert. Fascism is corporate rule and that’s where we are. When I lived in California, I called out a company for an illegal practice. They tried to convince me I was mistaken. I contacted the Attorney General & he sent a letter to the company. They fell over themselves making things right. In California, consumer rights were king. Now, that has dissipated.
I’ve been involved with 2 class action suits. They owe people money for their faulty products but you must have years old receipts, three attempts to contact company about issue, on and on. I had all of this with Kenmore (front load washer) and Audi. Audi wanted every single maintenance schedule on the car for 12 years. (I got it from the dealer). It took me one year of fighting!
Who else has the ability or records to do this? One payment was $500, the other $1200. In both cases I involved the attorney generals.
This is also harder to do because attorney generals only control companies in their states. Most are overseas now.
These changes flipped the protections from consumer to company!
Let’s not cower! Get out and vote! I did yesterday at an early voting location with a drop box for my mail in ballot!
I researched every single judge on the ballot..a page & half! Go to your Board of Election sites to look up any info.
WE’RE GOING TO WIN OR THEY GET A REVOLUTION OF SOME SORT…SHUT DOWNS, NON-COMPLIANCE ETC. THINK OF OUR IRANIAN SISTERS AND FIGHT!
Thank you, Professor, for the history of labor and working class and corporate power in the USA. Corporations seem to always win, to make sure their bottom line fills their pockets. As more women and people of color have been educated and entered the labor market, and unions have lost power, economic inequality is part of our government and corporate world. High school technical training is mostly not happening, so unprepared graduates without college degrees are very low on the income chain. As a female elementary teacher from 1980 to 2017, teacher salaries changed dramatically, but didn’t exactly keep up with inflation. There were more women teachers in the lower grades and pay was not only low, but wildly different in high schools and colleges than elementary. And even between Districts. And often teachers and teacher unions negotiated for benefits at the expense of salary to lower taxes. But that meant living with less income. They also were sold the idea to buy IRAs and annuities as tax shelters. This gave front end commission to financial sales people. Often the investments lost or only slowly gained because of market fluctuations, low fixed interest and contract agreements. Now we pay: taxes on the interest and withdrawals that increase our income. I should have paid taxes on my much lower salary. And for less educated or as Unions have lost power, untrained workers, those at the ground level working for wages and often no benefits or union protection, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “ Nickel and Dimed” https://
www.google.com/search?q=nickel+and+dimed+summary&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari Corporations have so much power and influence and we pay.
Thank you, Bob, for this succinct explanation of the economic and political forces producing the Great Inequality. One additional feature of this period is how we spent the great peace dividend that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union: on needless wars. The trillions "W" spent on the fiasco in Iraq could have been spent on public goods that had great returns: schools, roads, bridges, environmental reclamation, healthcare. Cui Bono? Certainly neither the people who fought nor the innocent bystanders
Corporate capitalism and Democracy are mutually incompatible, without a good public education system and higher education accessible to all, not merely to the well-to-do. We need more legislative regulation of capitalism, before a class war becomes both inevitable and desirable.