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, $30.00 hardcover.
Yves Smith, Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 362 pages, $30 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 | more…
“Global hegemony” might be defined as a situation in which one nation-state plays a predominant role in organizing, regulating, and stabilizing the world political economy. The use of armed force has always been an inseparable part of hegemony, but military power depends upon the economic resources at the disposal of the state. It cannot be deployed to answer every threat to geopolitical and economic interests, and it raises the danger of imperial overreach, as was the case for Britain in South Africa (1899–1902) and the United States in Vietnam (1962–1975) | more…
A new surge of corporate concentration is in process in the United States and abroad, driven in large measure by a restruc- turing of global markets through mergers and acquisitions (M&A~). Announced worldwide merger deals reached $3.4 tril- lion in 1999, an amount equivalent to 34 percent of the value of all industrial capital (buildings, plants, machinery and equip- ment) in the United States in 1999. Of this total, nearly a third were cross-border transactions that involved companies based in different countries, up from an average of one-fourth of all mergers during most of the 1990s | more…
Not only do we reject [so-called “weak” and “strong” versions of “globalization”], we reject the arguments used to support them, namely, that globalization has little basis in economic fact, is no more advanced than it was during the pre-1914 years, and has no significant political consequences. Our version, both “strong” and “nuanced,” would be that since the early 1970s changes in technology and politics have greatly increased the ability of capital to do what it has always wanted to do—turn the world into one “free market” for finance, production, and wage labor. Ideologically strengthened by the collapse of communism, corporate capital has used its initiatory power in the realms of investment, employment, pricing, industrial location, and selective implementation of new technologies to leapfrog ahead of the ability of progressive forces to mobilize and fight back—which takes time, organization, and, if history teaches us anything, decades of struggle. This is not exactly the first time workers, and the entire left, have faced this situation; nor is it the first time that capital has been able to use the nation-state to accomplish its ends easier and faster, this time in significant measure through the creation of supranational institutions promoting the needs of transnational finance and production (NAFTA, EU, WTO, MAI, and multilateral trade agreements, including the latest “Uruguay Round”) | more…