http://www.toomuchonline.org/weeklies2008/july2808.html
The Crime of the Century
Michael Perelman, The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From
Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression.
Palgrave Macmillan. 239 pp.
Economist Michael Perelman has written a whodunit about a heist, but not
just any heist. His new book dissects the grandest bit of thievery in
modern human history, the robbery that snatched away the economic
security of the great American middle class and made America’s rich the
richest rich the world has ever seen.
Perelman book
How did all this happen? Perelman takes us back to the initial crime
scene, the United States of the early 1970s, a society then completing a
quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity. Most Americans had shared in
those good times. Most expected them to continue.
But not everyone felt that way. Corporate America’s movers and shakers,
back in the early '70s, sensed a world spinning out of — their —
control. They feared marketplace challenges from abroad. Western Europe
and Japan had rebuilt their war-torn economies. They also feared
challenges at home, from social activists and angry workers. Even
consumers were organizing.
Corporate leaders, amid these challenges, panicked. They rejected the
basic assumption behind America's good times, that balance in economic
life — and prosperity for all — requires an active role for trade unions
and government regulators. Corporate leaders would instead link up with
radical conservatives and help speed what Michael Perelman calls a
“right-wing revolution.”
That revolution would rewrite the nation’s economic rules and leave in
its wake a deeply and ferociously unequal United States.
Michael Perelman names names as he fills in the outline of this broad
sweeping story with intriguing detail on who did what when. He
introduces us, for instance, to Lewis Powell, the corporate lawyer — and
future Supreme Court justice — whose 1971 memo for the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce rallied the nation’s power-suits to rise up and “save” free
enterprise.
“Each time the United States has increased income inequality,” author
Perelman reminds us along his story-telling way, “disaster has followed.”
And disaster, Perelman notes, will surely follow our contemporary
right-wing revolution. Perelman explains why, patiently laying out how
top-heavy distributions of wealth deflate broad-based consumer demand,
pump up speculative asset bubbles, and invariably invite a “culture of
corruption.”
Perelman ends his whodunit with a look at “the presumptive cops” on the
beat, his fellow economists, the academics who could have and should
have blown the whistle on the right-wing’s frontal assault on American
prosperity. They did not. Michael Perelman has. More power to him.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
www.michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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