So far as the timid American mass media
goes, the best kept secret of the last 30
years in the US is the perfectly legal
swindle that the super rich and the
corporations have pulled off through slick
insider lobbying within the corridors of a
pliable state that they pretend to fear and
loath. So the tax burden shifted from the
wealthy to everyone else, class mobility
froze, job insecurity (called 'flexibility'
in the business press) intensified,
inequalities worsened, average incomes
stagnated, unions retreated, environmental
protection eroded, the welfare state was fed
into a shredder, and the two income family
became a necessity if you had any ambition
of raising a family in conditions other than
squalor.
Nothing in this dismaying shift is owed to
blind economic forces or accident but rather
to a sustained campaign by major
corporations to persuade public authorities
to award them freedom to do whatever they
please.
All the while, a massive advertising
apparatus incessantly told bewildered
Americans that they never had it so good and
an awful lot believed what they heard. It
didn't start with the arrival of George W.
Bush and his merry band of predatory
ideologues either. Though America is a far
richer nation today the real income of the
average earner is 10 per cent less than the
day Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. All
economic gains since then were captured by
the top ten and even more so by the top one
per cent. (Over 1981-92 alone the average
wage fell five per cent while the top five
per cent of earners got a 38 per cent
increase and the top one per cent got a 78
per cent rise.) All the ballyhoo about rapid
job growth during the Clinton years
disguised the pathetic fact that one usually
needed several of them in order to make a
living. How did it happen, and why aren't
more Americans aware of it?
In More Equal Than Others, seasoned
America watcher Godfrey Hodgson strips away
the celebratory market imagery and reveals
the hard realities of maldistribution,
inequity and strife. All the disturbing
facts Hodgson mentions are easily available
to those few who bother to look, but he
packages them neatly and explosively in this
thoughtful tome. Hodgson's narrative focus
is on a ferocious, well-funded, and cunning
attack on the welfare state (excepting
generous 'corporate welfare' payouts). Here
is the story of the rise and decline of a
'social democratic consensus', which he
describes as a swap of acceptance of the
welfare state by conservatives in exchange
for acceptance of a 'warfare' state by the
hoi polloi. In practice, however, the
welfare and warfare states overlapped. In
post-war America every subsidized programme
from education to highway building to home
construction were justified politically in
terms of national security. American
arch-conservatives can't part with a penny
for anyone for any other purpose.
Hodgson's useful warning 'Beware of hype' is
probably too fatiguing to follow in as much
as there is little else. He handily
demolishes the fanciful vision of a nation
of stockholders; the top one per cent alone
own half of all stocks and 38 per cent of
all wealth. The real 'magic of the
marketplace'. to invoke Ronald Reagan's
mawkish phrase, is how well such gassy
rhetoric disguises an agenda of socially
destructive greed. Hodgson disposes of the
popular misconception that the computer
revolution was a product of quirky young
entrepreneurs unhindered by the stodgy
bureaucratic state. To the contrary,
computerization and the Internet, like
hordes of technical innovations, were the
result of generous government subsidies and
contracts. Nothing, as is aptly remarked
about investors, is so cowardly as a million
dollars. Hodgson also issues mordant
post-mortems on the frothy dot.com craze and
the recent stock market bubble.
Where did things go awry? Since the late
1960s a racist backlash, Hodgson observes,
resulted in too many white voters being
gulled into gutting the public policies -
generated from FDR's New Deal up to Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society - that lifted them
into the middle class in the first place.
Racism remains a woefully reliable device
for pitting ordinary Americans against each
other. Hodgson argues that a consequence of
enfranchising black in the 1960s was the 'conservativisation'
of American politics when white southerners
bolted to the Republicans and insidiously
spread their racist, conservative and
ultra-pseudo-Christian values northward. But
that is hardly the whole story. Where does
pro-market evangelism stem from? Largely
from robust networks of conservative
foundations, think tanks and media
organizations who tirelessly peddle their
prescriptions to politicians and the public.
The oil crises of the 1970s provided a
thrilling pretext for a concerted corporate
counterattack on regulations and protections
that ordinary Americans had achieved over
previous decades. Today tariff and tax
policies encourage capital and job flight
abroad while Americans increasingly are
forced into debt to make up for wages
foregone. Beneath the glossy ruling tale of
capitalist triumphs since the fall of the
Berlin wall, a 'winner take all' economy is
fraying the fragile fabric of society. These
smug folks espouse the same market
utopianism that brought us the Great
Depression of the 1930s.
Hodgson has a bit of a weakness for
pronouncements about Americans seeing
themselves as this or that (pilgrims,
pioneers, etc) but has the saving grace of
saying that for almost any generalization
about America that one finds the opposite is
as likely to be true. Hodgson is susceptible
to hype on occasion, such as overestimating
the 1960s Great Society programmes, which
never amounted to one per cent of GNP. Of
course, as Hodgson wryly notes, you can
count on the average voter to overestimate
welfare payments to the poor at home and
abroad but blithely to ignore subsidies and
breaks to oneself or to huge firms. Do
nations, as he expresses it, have 'volatile
mood swings' ? Only if there is a
coordinated media or government campaign to
induce one. Despite all the gloom Hodgson
detects encouraging signs of a serious
counter-movement to curb corporate excesses
and restore a degree of social sanity but
9/11 temporarily derailed it. Books like
this ought to stir a sorely needed political
revival |
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