“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become
a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen
McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a
one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.
“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg,
claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to
support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of
illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions
of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs
benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in
any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE
BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend
Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech
Billionaires
JOHN BINDER
The
Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against
“concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United
States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and
middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less
and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and
American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new
ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you
shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people
don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in
their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town …
they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give
their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to
kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and
big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has
happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other
sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business …
whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address.
[Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview
how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’
agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has
enjoyed more than 15 times as
much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Tucker
Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich
Polk/Getty
21 Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed establishment conservatives
for taking money from big tech companies to do their bidding, on Tucker
Carlson Tonight, Friday night.
The popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of
establishment conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by
the establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly
conservative group” controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to
stave off the closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook.
The ads targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were
investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate
Judiciary Committee with digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use
antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” reported
Carlson.
The Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly
“conservative” D.C. think tanks that take money from big tech, and often
advocate against regulating them over political bias or any other matter.
“In all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million
defending Silicon Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
“Google has given money to at least 22 right-leaning
institutions that are also funded by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those institutions include the American Conservative Union, the
American Enterprise Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson explained that this spending gets results.
“In September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and
three other groups funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to
the Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over
the DoJ’s plans to look into whether search engines and social media were
hurting competition and stifling speech.”
Carlson also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that
its shilling for big tech meant that it “no longer represents the interest of
conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”
“A recent paper by Heritage,
entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is
the Best Remedy For Online Bias Concerns,’ defends the special
privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And
if conservatives don’t like it, Heritage says, well they can just start their
own Google!”
This is despite the fact that Google
publicly snubbed the foundation last year, canceling the formation of a planned
“A.I ethics” council after far-left employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over the fact
that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its members.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other
tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at
your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com .
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at
Breitbart News.
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom,
with the
nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San
Francisco , which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities.
December 20, 2019
California
Preening
The Golden
State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change
course.
“We are
the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta.
California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future
. . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star
who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a
model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s
anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate , technology, gender, or
race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened
society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his
inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In
truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the
nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared
with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half
of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San
Francisco , which now has the highest property crime rate among major
cities. California
hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but it’s heading in a
troubling direction.
This
didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for it than the Golden
State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited from
comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto
manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software,
and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from
the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university
system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast
infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was
fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The
eighteenth-century French traveler
J. Hector St. John de CrèvecÅ“ur described the American as “this new man,”
and California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old
prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still
exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads,
schools, and universities are in decline.
I n the second half of the
twentieth century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity
from the coast into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe
poverty existed—urban barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they
were limited in scope. In fact, growth often favored
suburban and exurban communities, where middle-class families, including
minorities, settled after World War II.
In the
last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for
middle-class growth. State energy policies, for example, have made California’s
gas and electricity prices among the steepest in the country. Since 2011,
electricity prices have risen five
times faster than the national average. Meantime, strict land-use
controls have raised housing costs to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once
average, considering California’s urban scale—now exceed
those of virtually every state . At the same time, California’s economy has shed
industrial diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a
decade before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace,
finance, energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from
the tech sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of
its operations to Houston —have disappeared. Not a
single top aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century
California—retains its headquarters here.
Though
lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t resulted in that many
middle- and high-paying job opportunities for Californians, particularly
outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman University’s Marshall
Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of low-paying, as
opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs paid below the
median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover, California,
including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than the national
average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City, Seattle, or
Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the nation’s 50
largest counties.
N o state advertises its
multicultural bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state.
This is evident at the University
of California , where professors are required to prove their service to “people
of color,” to the state’s high
school curricula , with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s
anti-Trump resistance has a racial context. State Attorney General Xavier
Becerra has sued the administration numerous times over immigration policy
while he helps ensure California’s distinction as a sanctuary for illegal
immigrants. So far, more than 1
million illegal residents have received driver’s licenses, and they qualify
for free
health care , too. San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants to vote
in local elections .
Such
radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though
they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people.
California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in
manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United
Way study ,
over half of Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes
long-time political consultant Mike
Madrid ,
“the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the
past, poorer Californians could count on education to help them move up. But
today’s educators appear more interested in political indoctrination than
results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th
in the performance of low-income students. In wealthy San Francisco, test
scores for
black students are the worst of any California county. Many minority residents,
especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley
poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher
percentage than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians
and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps
the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For decades, California incubated youth
culture ,
creating trends like beatniks, hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art,
music, and cuisine. The state is a fountainhead of youthful
wokeness and rebellion , but that may prove short-lived as millennials leave. From
2014 to 2018, notes demographer Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew
from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles are increasingly in their family-formation
years. In the 2010s, California suffered higher net declines in virtually every
age category under 54, with the biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44
cohort.
As
families with children leave, and international migration slows to one-third of
Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since 2010,
California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the national
average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest of the
country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to
the Intermountain
West .
Low rates of homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend,
with California millennials forced to rent,
with little chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest
metros lead
the nation in long-term owners . California is increasingly a greying refuge for
those who bought property when housing was affordable.
A fter Governor
Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns
began driving state policy. His successors have embraced California
“leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently
told a
crowd in China that the rest of the world should follow California’s example.
The state’s top Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon,
Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential
candidate Tom Steyer, now compete for the green
mantle.
Their
policies have worsened
conditions for
many middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns,
Greens ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in
affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without
disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the
state’s proclaimed goal of building more
than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts to
reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in already-crowded
coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities like San Francisco,
the cost of building
one unit for
a homeless person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though
experiencing population gains, keep losing state
funding for decrepit
highways in
favor of urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated,
especially in greater
Los Angeles .
The
state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that would eliminate all
fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even Paris Accord levels
and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating everything from electric
cars to
electric homes will only drive more working-class Californians into “energy
poverty.” High energy prices also directly affect the manufacturing and
logistics firms that employ blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business
relocation expert Joe
Vranich notes
that industrial firms account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the
state this decade. California’s industrial growth has fallen to the
bottom tier of states ; last year, it ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to
one-quarter that of prime competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada,
and Florida.
Similarly,
the high energy prices tend to hit the interior counties that, besides being
poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities like Bakersfield , capital of the state’s
once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will
cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid
jobs, even as the state continues to import
oil from Saudi Arabia .
California’s
leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually every failure of state policy.
During the California drought, Brown and his minions
blamed the “climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility
for insufficient
water storage that would have helped farmers. When the rains returned and
reservoirs filled, this argument was forgotten, and little effort has been made
to conserve water for next time. Likewise, Newsom and his supporters
in the
media have
blamed recent fires on changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as
much to do with green mandates against control led burns and brush
clearance than
anything occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens
and others in blocking such
sensible policies.
Few climate
advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually help the planet. Indeed,
California’s green policy, as one
paper demonstrates,
may be increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and
industries to states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state
ranked 40th in per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is
minimal. Renewable energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state
policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy
investments of tech
leaders ,
even when their efforts—like the Google-backed Ivanpah
solar farm —fail
to deliver affordable, reliable energy.
I t’s not so surprising,
given these enthusiasms, that progressive politicians like Garcetti —who leads a city with
paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge
rat infestation , and proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk about
becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
Reality
is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs of restlessness with
the current regulatory regime and appear to be shifting employment
to other state s, notably Texas , Tennessee , Nevada , Colorado , and Arizona . Economic-modeling
firm Emsi estimates
that several states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their
tech employment faster than California. The state is losing momentum in
professional and technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands
roughly in the middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas,
Tennessee, and Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain
forms of contract
labor ,
reclassifies part-time workers. Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft , the legislation also
extends to independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some
point, as even Brown noted, the
ultra-high capital gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an
expanding welfare state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could
stumble, a possibility made more real by the recent
$100 billion drop in the value of privately held “unicorn” companies,
including WeWork. If the tech economy slows, a rift could develop between two
of the state’s biggest forces—unions and the green establishment—over future
levels of taxation. More than two-thirds
of California cities don’t have any funds set aside for retiree health care and
other retirement expenses. The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension
debt, according to former Democratic state senator Joe
Nation . U.S. News & Report ranks California, despite the tech boom,
42nd in fiscal health among the states.
And a
rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already under way.
Recently, 110
cities ,
with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes in
California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber of
Commerce and the three
most prominent ethnic chambers —African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have
joined this effort.
Californians
need less bombast and progressive pretense from their leaders and more
attention to policies that could counteract the economic and demographic tides
threatening the state. On its current course, California increasingly resembles
a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a
small population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.
Delusion and preening ultimately have limits, as more Californians are
beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time for the state to change
course is now.
OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And
it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as
Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as
Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant
ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and their apologists blew up the New
Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
A merica has long had a suspicious streak toward business,
from the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
It’s a tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36
percent of respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big
business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers
were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of
long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has
become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas
Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man . The title is a
reference to The Organization Man , an influential 1956 book on the
corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New
Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism professor (as well as
a Washington Monthly contributing editor), details the
development of the “Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a
member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that
despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so
corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their
shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control
resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction
Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth
of these mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also
believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus
argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness
the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence
on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He
was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to
directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before
it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a
disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to
build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal
social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s
and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the
other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public
goods like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then turns to his major
subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired
furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues
argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new
ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who
famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to
Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael
Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the
ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues
embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent
people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated
capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the
United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had
prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic
boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the
lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and
argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent
problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries
like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When
that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was
clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and
all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is
the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the
on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize about the
New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it
underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of
inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of citizens.
Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood
called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial
and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn
“worked because it was connected to the big organizations that dominated
American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning democratic political
economy.
Then came
the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level
as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and
proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract . Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their
factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even
destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the
hundreds of thousands.
And it all got much, much
worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack
Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead
restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering
white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods
drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives
imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella
for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents
desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they
were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway
government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
T oward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run
out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of
top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their
companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their
companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be,
at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction
Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by
devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism
industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as
the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann
argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be
subordinated to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good
guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and
political power.”
This is a peculiar
conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to
bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who
knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private
profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not
shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of
the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a
1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now that government by
organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power
is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly
strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones
makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of
management on the one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it
takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate
social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high
tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African
Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s
the United States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the
European model.” But there is actually great variation among the European
welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the
corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on
metrics like inequality, poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic
social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely, for how threadbare
it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to
the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American
welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families
are below the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This
happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country
would be without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall
Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many
people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence
unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more
than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent
writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous
importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the Week. His
work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He
was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
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