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Michael Perelman, The Confiscation of American Prosperity. From Right- Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 239 pages, $53.00 hardcover.
Yves Smith, Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 362 pages, $30.00 hardcover.
Some forty years ago, the American business empire viewed itself as under siege as a result of government interventions threatening its freedom of action, demands for annual wage increases in the face of declining corporate profitability, import penetration of its home markets, as well as by loss of global hegemony symbolized by defeat in Vietnam. The empire struck back. A conglomerate of right-wing forces proceeded to declare war on the social reforms and institutions that had taken shape since the 1930s under the wing of an expanding federal government.
As an operation in national politics, that war can be ranked among the most successful in U.S. history, and, in their lucid moments, its proponents must look back on it with some disbelief. The federal regulatory apparatus has been frozen in place, even pared back. Regulations in banking and finance have been abolished, and entire industries, from airlines and natural gas, to trucking and telecommunications, deregulated. The federal judiciary has been subverted, with lifetime appointments of right-wing ideologues, many of them in their thirties and forties; the power and reach of labor unions has been all but destroyed. The corporate income tax has been eroded to the point where several multinationals pay no taxes at all, and personal income taxes have been cut at both federal and state levels. Warren Buffett has expressed alarm over the serial tax cuts, mostly benefiting the rich: "If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning."1
In "How the Right Wing Captured America," Part Two of The Confiscation of American Prosperity, Michael Perelman shows us how the remaking of the economic and political landscape in the United States was accomplished. The initial spark appears to have been the wave of strikes in the winter of 1945-46 ("nothing less than catastrophic civil war," in the words of one business writer). It led straight to "the first blow against the New Deal... the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in...