Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

ISBN-13: 9781612052564 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 320 str.

G. William Domhoff

Opis

It is commonly accepted that America saw the rise of liberalism in the wake of the New Deal, especially during the three decades after World War II. Based on new archival research, G. William Domhoff reveals this period instead as one of increasing corporate dominance in government affairs, affecting the fate of American workers up to the present day. While FDR's New Deal brought sweeping legislation, the tide turned quickly after 1938. From that year onward nearly every major new economic law passed by Congress showed the mark of corporate dominance. The influential Committee for Economic Development was a guiding force for presidential administrations and congressional leaders. Domhoff accessibly portrays documents of the Committee's vital influence in the halls of government, supported by his interviews with several of its key employees and trustees. In terms of economic influence, liberalism was on a long steady decline, despite two decades of post-war growing equality. Ironically, it was the successes of the civil rights, feminist, environmental, and gay-lesbian movements-not a new corporate mobilization-that led to the final defeat of the liberal-labor alliance after 1968. These cultural successes generated just enough backlash to turn whites toward the Republican Party. It then became possible for the corporate community to solve its emerging economic and political problems through the offshore manufacturing and high interest rates that killed off inflation and the power of unions.

Spis treści

Introduction The Myth of a Postwar Liberal-Labor Ascendancy 1 Demonstrating Corporate Dominance 2 The Rise and Sudden Decline of the Liberal-Labor Alliance, 1934-1938 3 Leadership for Corporate Moderates, 1939-1945 4 The Postwar Years and the Truman Administration 5 Corporate Moderate Frustrations: The Eisenhower Years 6 Corporate Moderate Successes in the Kennedy Years 7 Corporate Moderation and More Success: The Johnson Years 8 New Sources of Conflict between Corporations and Unions 9 Corporate Policy Success and Economic Failure in the First Nixon Administration 10 The Rise of the Business Roundtable and Tension within the CED, 1973-1976 11 Corporate Triumphs during the Carter Administration 12 The Reagan Culmination, 1981-1984 13 The Road to the Great Recession

O autorze

G. William Domhoff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and a Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has taught since 1965. He is the author or coauthor of fifteen books on power, politics, and social change in America, starting with Who Rules America? (1967) and The Higher Circles (1970), along with The Powers That Be (1979) and The Power Elite and the State (1990). His most recent books are The Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz (with Richard Gendron, 2009); Class and Power in the New Deal: Corporate Moderates, Southern Democrats, and the Liberal-Labor Coalition (with Michael J. Webber, 2011); The New CEOs: Women, African American, Latino, and Asian American Leaders of Fortune 500 Companies (with Richard L. Zweigenhaft, 2011); and Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich (seventh edition, 2013).