Corporate Power vs. Common Good

2016 TURNED OUT to be the year that the American people woke up and realized that most of them hadn’t had a real pay raise in more than 40 years while the oligarchs in our top 1 percent had been making out like bandits. As a result, millions of our fellow Americans voted for a democratic socialist presidential candidate. But, as you may have noticed, even more just got really mad, then went to the polls and did something really crazy.

Sadly enough, we all could have avoided many of our current problems if we had just been reading In These Times magazine for the past 40 years.

That’s the takeaway from the recent book The Age of Inequality: Corporate America’s War on Working People, a Forty-Year Investigation by In These Times, edited by ITT contributing editor Jeremy Gantz. The book compiles chronologically arranged excerpts from the Chicago-based publication’s coverage of labor and the economy from its 1976 launch through the dawn of the Trump era. The result is a sweeping chronicle of the slow-motion coup by which the billionaire class seized all the levers of power in our erstwhile democracy and used them to siphon wealth upward from ordinary workers to the corporate elite.

In These Times was founded as a broadsheet newspaper by James Weinstein, a longtime socialist activist and historian. For the first 13 years of its life, the paper called itself an independent socialist newsweekly and this statement appeared on its masthead: “We believe in a socialism that fulfills rather than subverts the promise of American democracy, where social needs and rationality, not corporate profit and greed, are the operating principle.”

From the beginning, ITT was distinguished from the other secular Left news and commentary outlets by its deep coverage of the labor movement and grassroots community organizing and by a perspective that, while avoiding any hint of doctrinaire rhetoric, clearly sees the conflict between corporate power and the common good as the central fact of public life. In 1989, the paper quietly dropped the “socialist” label, and, sometime between then and now, it became a monthly magazine. But, as The Age of Inequality demonstrates, not much else has changed.

The book is organized into chapters focused on issues such as trade, the decline of unions and the rise of Wall Street, with a shorter section focused on stories of grassroots campaigns for economic democracy. Here you can learn that the role of “free trade” in the deindustrialization of America was visible as early as 1977 to anyone who went out and talked to factory workers and their elected union representatives. And way back in 1979, Manning Marable was calling out the Democratic Party for becoming “the governing wing of the GOP.”

A couple of the more amusing moments on this walk through history come circa 1993-1994 when we encounter Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, Robert Reich, pleading earnestly for neoliberal economic policies that he has long since renounced. But there’s nothing funny about ITT senior editor David Moberg’s prophetic assertion in 1993 that the North American Free Trade Agreement would “haunt Clinton and the Democrats who support it for years to come.” The “Clinton” in that sentence was Bill, but you get the idea. And, speaking of prophecy, in the chapter on “The Rise of Finance,” you can find economist Dean Baker, in 2003, predicting the burst of the housing bubble, several years before those guys in The Big Short.

The Age of Inequality and the magazine from which it’s drawn are both indispensable resources for anyone who wants to understand how we arrived in this baffling era of “populist” billionaires, and how we might move forward toward a nation ruled by “social needs ... not corporate profit and greed.”