Robert W McChesney, John Nichols - People Get Ready - The Fight Against A Jobless Economy and A Citizenless Democracy (2016, Nation Books) PDF
Robert W McChesney, John Nichols - People Get Ready - The Fight Against A Jobless Economy and A Citizenless Democracy (2016, Nation Books) PDF
Robert W McChesney, John Nichols - People Get Ready - The Fight Against A Jobless Economy and A Citizenless Democracy (2016, Nation Books) PDF
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Robert W. McChesney
and
John Nichols
NATION BOOKS
NEW YORK
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
T
he future is now. Here’s how it works. A chip im-
planted in your finger (it’s about the size of a grain of rice,
you won’t even remember that it’s there) is going to open the
door and start the ignition of the driverless car that will take you to
the drive-thru window of a restaurant where you’ll grab the breakfast
you ordered, paid for, and scheduled for pick up with a phone app.
Next stop: the community college job retraining center where you
have been required to put in a few hours each week since automation
wiped out your part-time job at the last plant still making anything
in what’s left of your hometown. The center is pretty much empty;
has been ever since the last big free-trade deal was approved and peo-
ple started to realize that the good-paying jobs weren’t coming back.
Besides, most training is done online now, with instructors working
from the distant call centers of offshored multinational corporations.
A pleasant if rather too-well-armed security guard informs you that
the center will be closing next week. You ask her what she will do next.
“I don’t know,” she answers. “I’m not in charge.”
It is not “think different” or “be what’s next” or “lean forward” that
is the defining statement of the future that is now. It is that last line:
“I’m not in charge.” We are not in charge. In the midst of a technolog-
ical revolution that is every bit as disruptive as the industrial revolu-
tion of two hundred years ago, the gadgets are all new, but the power
relations are all old. We’re back to the Gilded Age, back to the age
before the Gilded Age, back to a future of plutocrats and peasants, of
masters and servants. We are told that this is a time of income inequal-
ity, and it is. But it is also a time of power inequality, where the ability
to determine what the future will look like and feel like and sound like
and taste like is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Every decision
that matters about our lives is being made by a corporate CEO or a
campaign donor or a programmer or a hacker or someone else we have
never met. We “choose” politicians by rote after elections so crude in
their messaging and so vapid in their content that most of us do not
bother to participate in them. The politicians themselves—with the
exception of an occasional Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren—have
become rubberstamps for the trade deals, tax rates, and deregulations
demanded by an enriched and empowered one-tenth of one percent.
The rest of us are mere spectators. Many of us are not even aware that
the game we are watching isn’t entertainment, isn’t virtual reality. It is
our lives.1
Americans, like peoples across the world, must understand what
is at stake in this time of change. This book will speak about new
technologies, about virtual reality, about digital destinies, about the
automation of everything, and about the moment, not far from now,
when all the trends of the future that is now give way to what comes
next. Some things we know will occur. Tens of millions of Americans
who have the education, the training, and the ethic to do what we
thought would be the work of a modern age will no longer be able to
find that work. They will, as economist James Galbraith explains, be
“not only unemployed but also obsolete.”2 Some of the disrupted and
the discarded have felt obsolete for years, as they have slipped down
the economic ladder from the assembly line to the warehouse to the
convenience-store counter to the fast-food prep station. But their ex-
perience is being generalized. We will begin to recognize that what
comes after the acceleration of automation that is only now beginning
will not be some new way of working, some new industry, some new
sector of the economy. The “genius” of the digital revolution—with all
of its apps and smart technologies and advances in automation, with
all of its blurring of lines between humans and machines, with all of
its progress—is its exceptional efficiency. The changes that define the
future that is now have nothing to do with job creation. Why would
they? They are being developed and implemented by behemoth cor-
porations that seek to maximize profits, not employment.
Despite what five justices on the United States Supreme Court
might imagine, corporations are not people.3 Corporations do not fret
about the fact that millions of American workers have already been
displaced, and that millions more will be displaced. They celebrate
that fact. If a multinational corporation makes its product or delivers
its service without having to pay as many human beings, all the better.
That’s why the value of the corporation’s stock rises when it shutters
factories and lays off workers. And if a big corporation can become
huge by eliminating an industry, even wiping out a whole sector of
the economy, then it is heralded as visionary and truly modern. And
if that’s a problem for the great mass of Americans who need work
to sustain themselves and their families, it’s a problem that will work
itself out, eventually, thanks to the magic of the profit system. But the
evidence is now in: technology writer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur
Martin Ford is right when he notes that “there isn’t another big sector
of the economy to absorb all these workers.”4
Yes, of course, that’s a dystopian notion. But, remember, we live in
the future that is now. Every day a virtual reality becomes just plain
reality. There are miracles and there are marvels, but there are also
reminders of what made those old science-fiction films so scary. What
could be imagined, what can be imagined, is happening. Young men
really are inserting grain-of-rice-sized microchips in their fingers in
order to unlock doors and start cars—hoping that they will increase
their employment prospects.5 Fast-food restaurants really are taking
orders with apps (“centralized ordering systems” that could “make
cashiers redundant”) and preparing them with robots (“automated
kitchen equipment”).6 Multinational corporations really are investing
in global knowledge-sharing schemes that openly propose to replace
universities and community colleges—liberal arts and poetry, history
and political science—with distance-learning “certificate” programs
that train workers for a task, not a career.7
This is the story of now. And much of it is very fine, indeed. There is
nothing wrong with disrupting drudgery, nothing wrong with making
it easier to communicate, nothing wrong with trying new approaches
that might work better than what came before.
But there is something wrong, something that is destructive rather
than disruptive, something that is simply absurd about engaging in
the wishful thinking that says a capitalistic system that by its nature
prioritizes profit will somehow evolve for the better. It does not work
like that. It never has and it never will.
So you have come to the wrong place if you are looking for another
anti-technology rant. This is a book about the digital age and automa-
tion, about technology and technological change. But the real focus
is on capitalism and politics, and on the fundamental question of how
to bring the rest of us into the process of shaping a future that cannot
be well or wisely shaped by the CEOs and bankers and bottom-line
speculators who are now calling the shots. Seemingly endless stagna-
tion, unemployment, underemployment, inequality, and growing pov-
erty are the result of contemporary capitalism and the narrow range
of policies countenanced by the political system, independent of the
technological revolution we describe herein. The digital revolution
is in the beginning stages of dramatically aggravating trends already
firmly in place. We are concerned with the storm that results when
these elements are put together.
We have participated in and written about the digital revolution
from its early stages, and we remain highly engaged with it, but we do
not come to this discussion as tech utopians. We have written about
American and international political affairs for decades, but we do
not come to this discussion as political utopians. We are realists, who
have heard too many promises to imagine any technology—old or
new—will change the political and economic realities that must be
dealt with in order to assure that the changes now taking place will
yield a just and equitable circumstance for the great mass of humanity.
This explains our response to writer Paul Mason’s powerful argument
that “The End of Capitalism Has Begun,” in a much-discussed 2015
article for the Guardian. Mason’s rumination was introduced with a
reassuring premise: “Without us noticing, we are entering the post-
capitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information
technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old
ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian.”8
Mason explained that
Instagram had thirteen million customers, who did almost all the work
of snapping, editing, and sharing photos. How many actual human
beings did Instagram employ when it was elbowing Kodak toward the
dustbin of history? Thirteen. So it was that, while Kodak was crum-
bling, Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion, bringing what
might have developed into a rival social network within its burgeon-
ing monopoly. Kodak, the historically innovative company that em-
ployed those pioneering engineers and 145,000 other workers, was
the past. Instagram, the company that let consumers do the work of
sharing while employing just thirteen people, was the future. Yes, In-
stagram would grow as part of Facebook, but it would add employees
at a microscopic rate: total Facebook employment as of March 2015
was 10,082, or only about 7 percent of the old Kodak figure. “This, in
a nutshell, is why digital technology is changing our societies in such
a profound way,” explains Australian journalist Ian Leslie. “In a wired
world, it costs virtually nothing to reproduce a photo or an e-book or
a piece of software or to send it across the world. Small teams of de-
signers or engineers can make products consumed and paid for by bil-
lions, creating vast wealth for their originators like Mark Zuckerberg.
But the wealth doesn’t ‘trickle down’ because digital goods require so
few people to make them, and digitally organized workplaces require
fewer people to run them.”13
Or consider this: In 1964 AT&T was the nation’s most valuable
company, and was worth $267 billion in 2015 dollars. It employed
758,611 people. In late 2015 Google was the nation’s second-most
valuable company doing much of what AT&T did fifty years earlier,
and a lot, lot more. It had a market value of $430 billion and employed
around 55,000 people, which is 7 percent of AT&T’s paid workforce in
1964. For every Google employee today, AT&T had fourteen workers
five decades ago.14
This is reality. But it is not a reality that discredits utopian dreams
or confirms dystopian cynicism. Rather, it is a reality that demands
that Americans adjust their thinking about democracy such that the
evolution of how we express our popular will keeps pace with the evo-
lution of how we communicate, shop, and work. We cannot prevent
that will not be well met by delaying action until after we are kicked in
the head by an increasingly jobless economy. The condition in which
some of us find ourselves already, and in which many of us will soon
find ourselves, extends far beyond shuttered workplaces and boarded
up Main Streets. It goes to the very marrow of our lives and our soci-
ety, to questions of hope and hopelessness too profound to ignore. We
have to get serious about addressing it before it metastasizes.
The great challenge of historical moments such as these, historical
moments when we are experiencing economic and social change in
something akin to real time, is that our attention is so easily drawn
away from broad trends and focused on the evidence of those trends.
It is the technological equivalent of noting the weird weather but
missing the fact of climate change. Most of us recognize the changes
that are taking place not as part of something bigger but as a “new
normal” that may be vaguely frustrating at times (how many “devices”
does it require to change the channel on a “Smart TV”?) but that
keeps upgrading us so quickly that we barely bother to think about
what it all means. This limits necessary questioning about whether we
have the wherewithal and the authority to accept good change, reject
bad change, and forge our own change. We get rid of our landlines
and upgrade our iPhones, we kick the cassettes and CDs to the curb
and download in a digital format the music we have always loved, we
deposit our checks and pay our bills and schedule our travels with-
out ever talking to human beings, we gather our information about
politics from websites that reinforce our beliefs—or worse yet from
negative ads and cable spin—and then we make decisions from a range
of options dictated by the elites who manage the websites, pay for the
ads, and produce the spin.16
The one thing Americans are in overwhelming agreement on, in
poll after poll and election result after election result, is that neither
major party has a plan for the future.17 They’re right. Neither party
has a plan. Nor do most prominent politicians. The dissident cam-
paigns that gained traction in the run-up to the 2016 presidential
election, especially that of Bernie Sanders, connected with Americans
who are deeply frustrated with an empty partisan discourse and a
part workers and activists are not. For the workers and their allies to
negotiate effectively, they need to know what CEOs know, and they
need to evolve their demands so that corporations cannot cynically
raise wages for a handful of employees—with the ensuing favorable
headlines that firms such as McDonald’s and WalMart have already
garnered for minute upticks in what they pay their workers—while
eliminating jobs for the great mass of workers.22 This evolution of
demands must never go to the downward default position of accept-
ing poverty wages as inevitable in a so-called new economy. Rather,
demands must evolve upward to combine the requirement of a living
wage with scheduling protections that renew the historic promise of
“eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what
you will” (such as those contained in the innovative “Retail Workers
Bill of Rights” that we discuss in Chapter 5), with a broader societal
recognition of the immediate need to provide support for workers
who are displaced by automation, and with the longer-term recogni-
tion of the need for establishing economic structures that ensure that
the benefits of the new economy are shared by all.
Instead of the narrowly defined elite discussion about “faster,
cheaper, and more dynamic applications in foodservice,” there needs
to be a wide-open national discourse about what matters to Americans
of every race, every ethnicity, every region, and every class. That is the
discourse this book seeks to open because in this discussion can be
found the seed of both political and economic democracy.
If we the people are going to make the future that is now our own,
then we must begin a knowing, conscious fight for shared prosperity,
genuine opportunity, and the full realization of the promise of new
technologies. That full promise is being denied us at this point in
our history. Through that denial, the promise of technology is be-
ing turned against us. The oppressive prospects of technology—to
spy on us, to profit off our desperation and misery, to make us work
harder for less, to control rather than to free us—are only beginning
to be fully realized. Americans are unsettled by the realization. Polling
shows that they see their circumstance as bad—and they fear that it is
destined to get worse.23
I
n January 2014 Google chairman Eric Schmidt appeared
before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and
acknowledged that due to rapid advances in technology, including
some of the projects Google was working on, countless middle-class
jobs that had seemed beyond the reach of computers and automation
were going to be at risk in the near future. More and more middle-
class workers were going to lose their jobs and there was little on the
horizon to suggest there would be new jobs for them. This would be,
according to Schmidt, the “defining” issue of the next two to three
decades.1
Schmidt had no reason to raise this issue unless there was a basis for
his concern. And he was not alone. At meetings of high-level technology
executives and engineers, some public, some private, around the world
over the past several years, few topics have garnered more attention
than the radically changing nature of work and the prospect that it will
change even more radically in the near future. But these issues are
rarely raised with even the muted level of alarm expressed by Schmidt.
13
More often than not, the automation of whole sectors of the economy,
and the ensuing displacement of workers, is discussed as “creative de-
struction,” from which will emerge tremendous opportunities to cut
costs and increase profits. These discussions of the jobs that are cer-
tain to be eliminated—and the whole industries that will be altered
beyond recognition—are robust and enthusiastic.
Yet, they do not include the citizens, the workers, and the commu-
nities that are headed for creative destruction. That’s jarring because
Schmidt and his CEO compatriots are not futurists imagining some
distant prospect. They are hard-edged business executives speaking
about the here and now. And they speak about a reality that is well
understood by the titans of the new tech monopolies and among the
scholars who study labor and technology.2 It is a reality that has pro-
found significance for America, although there remains considerable
disagreement about the precise nature of that significance. There are
still tech utopians who say that the changes that are coming will invari-
ably lead to the best of times—that people will work much less and en-
joy greater access to healthcare, education, and economic security due
to the vastly increased economic output. They tell us that society will
generate the necessary tools to address environmental damage, over-
come poverty, and turn the page to a glorious new chapter in history
where economic scarcity no longer defines the human condition. But
many of these utopians also acknowledge, as Schmidt does, that the
transition to this new era will likely be marked by social upheaval the
likes of which have only rarely been seen.
If there is consensus developing, it holds that an already troubling
situation is about to get considerably worse. Harvard economist Ed-
ward L. Glaeser was blunt when he wrote in a 2014 paper that Amer-
ica’s “most worrying social trend” was “the 40-year secular rise in
the number and share of jobless adults.”3 And what comes next is an
explosion of automation that will eliminate millions of additional
jobs. That is an alarming notion that merits attention, debate, and
intervention.
The sense of urgency ought to be heightened by the fact that the
existing American political and social circumstance is ill prepared to
not know who the sitting vice president was.14 But this is not the
cause of citizenless democracy; it is the effect. This is what one would
rationally expect in what political scientist Sheldon Wolin character-
ized as a “politically demobilized society, that is, a society in which
the citizens, far from being whipped into a continuous frenzy by the
regime’s operatives, are encouraged at virtually every turn to be po-
litically lethargic.” It is a society in which people get precious little
from the government, where austerity and rollbacks are the order of
the day. Citizens are constantly reminded of the “political futility” of
popular involvement in politics.15 “There is a widespread sense,” the
scholar Tony Judt wrote in 2010, “that since ‘they’ will do what they
want in any case—while feathering their own nests—why should ‘we’
waste time trying to influence the outcome of their actions?”16 As the
journalist Bob Herbert observed in his 2014 chronicle of contempo-
rary America, “Something fundamental in the very character of the
United States had shifted. There was a sense of powerlessness and
resignation among ordinary people that I hadn’t been used to seeing.
The country seemed demoralized.”17
In this context, it is rational that one abandon an interest in poli-
tics, or social life broadly construed, and concentrate on looking out
for number one. And in a context in which governments are increas-
ingly felt to be divorced from responding to the expressed social and
economic needs of its common citizens, that makes the focus on one’s
own bank account all the more important. But that is no way to live,
for a person or a society. To paraphrase a point once made by the
philosopher John Dewey: once an organism loses the sense that it can
affect its environment, it starts to weaken and die.18
This is the context in which the next wave of automation is arriv-
ing, and it could not be worse for the prospect of having the potential
bounty shared with everyone and used for the benefit of building a
healthy sustainable society. Unemployment, inequality, and poverty
are best understood not, in the end, as economic problems, but instead
as political problems. They require political solutions. And it would
seem then that the United States, lacking those solutions, is poised for
disaster.
But a country that is “poised for disaster” need not accept its fate.
It can change. And there is reason to believe that it will, as Americans
change.
Let’s begin by looking at the bright side. It would be far worse if
all the economic, environmental, and political problems of this nation
were the triumphant result of an informed and enthusiastic citizenry,
with voter turnouts the highest in the world, rather than the lowest.
But such is not the case. The silver lining is that the demoralization
and disconnect most Americans are experiencing within their citizen-
less democracy is, in fact, the crack in the façade of an elitist political
economy that activists can exploit to create a humane, sustainable, and
citizen-run democracy. A credible roadmap to a much better future
is being developed as extraordinary ideas, extraordinary movements,
and extraordinary prospects are being developed by citizens who are
almost never covered in what little remains of the news media. The
common theme is that while challenges posed by an unprecedented
wave of automation can be met, the solutions will not be cosmetic.
They will require structural change in our political economy, and
policies that are far outside the range countenanced by the nation’s
rulers. And there’s the rub. If that is going to happen, it is going to
take an army of aroused and informed citizens, rather than the mar-
ginal, though growing, coterie that presently exists.
One need not be a wild-eyed optimist or a naïve romantic to be
certain that Americans can get this right. There is no need to deny
that the coming years will be unusually turbulent, or that we will see
a wrenching reconstruction of many institutions. The status quo is
going to be turned upside down. Whether it is going to land in a good
place will be determined by what the citizens of this nation do. If they
fail to act, if all or most hands are not summoned to the deck, what
awaits us may make the present day look like good times.
The state of present-day capitalism and what appears to be its likely
future is one of stagnation—meaning ever-increasing inequality, pov-
erty, austerity, and social insecurity. There is a crisis of unemployment
and underemployment. Full employment, meaning, as economist Rob-
ert Pollin puts it, “an abundance of decent jobs,” is “fundamental to
part-time; accept jobs far below their skill level; or else undertake
skilled work of the sort traditionally assigned to immigrants and the
young.”26
Unemployment and underemployment of this magnitude have a
way of capturing a person’s attention like almost nothing else. With
apologies to our friend Naomi Klein, this changes everything.
CAPITALISM ON STEROIDS
It is ironic that the digital revolution is central to the jobs crisis, be-
cause these same technologies have been roundly heralded heretofore
as democratizing agents that shift power from the few to the many.
Although we believe it is difficult to exaggerate the value that digital
communication has brought to society as a whole, we also believe the
evidence is clear that these technologies are not magical; how they are
developed owes largely to the political economic context.27 They can
be forces for surveillance, propaganda, and immiseration as much as
tools of liberation.28
What is striking is that the digital revolution exponentially in-
creases one of the longstanding problems of capitalism—what the
Irish engineer Mike Cooley terms “the gap between that which tech-
nology could provide society (its potential) and that which it actually
does provide for society (its reality).”29 The potential is wondrous.
Artificial intelligence expert Neil Jacobstein notes that “exponential
technologies may eventually permit people to not need jobs to have a
high standard of living.” He enthuses that “the emphasis will be less
on making money and more on making contributions, or at least cre-
ating an interesting life.”30 Nor is this very far off in the future. One
2011 CNN report observed that “America is productive enough that it
could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for
its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.”31 The
barrier to this brighter future, of course, is capitalism itself.
This gap between potential and reality is a long-term tension in
capitalism that a number of our greatest economists—including some
who in their times were among capitalism’s mightiest champions—
have understood for the past 150 years. Today, the former chief econo-
mist of the International Monetary Fund, Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff,
bluntly states that with the technological revolution the “struggle for
subsistence will no longer be a primary imperative and capitalism’s
numerous flaws may loom larger,” leading to its possible demise.32
Capitalism’s “structural crisis,” as economist David M. Kotz puts it,
“has no easy path to a desirable solution. This historical moment may
be a turning point for humanity.”33 Economist and technology scholar
Jeremy Rifkin puts it baldly: “At the heart of capitalism there lies a
contradiction in the driving mechanism that has propelled it ever up-
ward to commanding heights, but now is speeding it to its death.”34
In a nation with a democratic governing system, one would rea-
sonably expect that debates and study concerning the best uses of
these radical technologies to benefit all of society would dominate
political life. It certainly dramatically shifts the nature of progressive
and socialist analysis and strategic thinking. As prominent leftist the-
orist David Harvey notes: “An anti-capitalist movement has in the
current conjuncture to reorganize its thinking around the idea that
social labour is becoming less and less significant to how the eco-
nomic engine of capitalism functions. Many of the service, adminis-
trative and professional jobs the left currently seeks to defend are on
the way out. Most of the world’s population is becoming disposable
and irrelevant from the standpoint of capital.”35
The role of markets and corporations and employment—indeed,
everything—would need to be reconsidered. Discussions would have
to occur concerning what the good life would be in a world where
work is largely unnecessary. Experiments would need to be conducted
on alternative types of enterprises and economic models. It would be,
in effect, the mother of all constitutional conventions. Where society
ended up would be impossible to predict, but wherever it did would
likely be the best possible place, because it would the product of dem-
ocratic deliberation. And it is safe to say it would be a very different
place than where the current US political system is taking us.
Such an economic debate is unthinkable in the citizenless democ-
racy of the United States, where the range of legitimate deliberation,
to quote media critic Jeff Cohen, extends all the way from GE to GM.
There will be an “elite” debate on these issues—a debate premised
on protecting elite interests—because the very system of capitalism is
going to be in the crosshairs of history. “Today, the ability of free-
market democracies to deliver widely shared increases in prosperity is
in question as never before,” a 2015 report by a commission co-chaired
by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers announced.
“This is an economic problem that threatens to become a problem for
the political systems of these nations.”36 The natives are going to get
restless. As the Economist notes, “squeezing out” the middle class “could
generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous pol-
itics.”37 Cato Institute researcher Brink Lindsey writes that “there is
the threat that widening disparities between the elite and everybody
else will prompt a political backlash against the whole system.”38
The problem of a political system that is defined as a market,
where issues can be made “important” or “unimportant” via the in-
fluence of campaign donations, lobbying, spin, and media manipula-
tion, is that discussions of those disparities—and of their causes—are
taken off the table. The level of corruption in contemporary politics
would make Gilded Age icons like Jay Gould and Mark Hanna blush.
American elections have become a disgrace, where a handful of un-
accountable and often unknown billionaires finance the candidates,
and the coin of the realm has become the entirely asinine negative
political advertisement. America spends vastly more on its elections
per capita than any other nation—and has made the ability to raise
enormous amounts of money the sine qua non of political success
for politicians of both major parties—yet it has extraordinarily low
levels of voter turnout.39 The American news media—including dig-
ital journalism—is in freefall collapse, as the number of paid report-
ers per capita has plummeted over the past twenty-five years.40 What
coverage remains of politics and elections tends to be superficial, and
spoon-feeds the public what elites are saying. Most legitimate debates
occur when elites disagree with each other. If elites are in agreement
on an issue, or do not wish to talk about it, it almost never appears
as a significant story in the news media. Nowhere is this more true
than with economic issues, where corporate power and capitalism are
off-limits to critical assessments.
Popular mythology—urged on by corporate public relations—has
it that what is good about the economy is the result of entrepreneurs
operating in free markets, and that the government’s function is sim-
ply to screw things up with its endless barrage of counterproductive
regulations. In fact, contemporary capitalism is very much a product
of government policies and subsidies and the federal government is
as necessary to the system as corporations and Wall Street. The US
government, for example, every day works assiduously to advance the
interests of the nation’s largest corporations and wealthiest investors.
Most of this work takes place within an elite consensus on goals and
with the explicit desire that the public not interfere in the govern-
ment’s work. Nowhere is this more transparent than in the numer-
ous major trade treaties that have been negotiated in the past three
decades.
What is clear from our analysis is that there needs to be a rethink-
ing of the relationship of capitalism to democracy, and a rethinking of
what exactly is necessary for democracy to effectively exist, if people
are going to make any progress in strengthening democracy. How can
we turn citizenless democracies into bona fide democracies?
Prior to the emergence of modern capitalism, politics and eco-
nomics were interchangeable; whoever controlled the government
controlled the economy, and vice versa. The most politically powerful
nobles were the wealthiest people. The idea of democracy prior to
capitalism was the radical notion of politics controlled by propertyless
citizens, which would give them command over property. “Democracy
is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers,”
Aristotle noted at its birth.41 It is why democracy was regarded as be-
ing synonymous with “communism” or some sort of one-class society;
when poor people gained political power they would understandably
reshuffle the property distribution and rules to eliminate wide dispari-
ties in property ownership and class privilege. It is why the very notion
of democracy was widely, even universally, detested by the wealthy and
the privileged throughout history. As recently as the founding of the
United States, for example, nearly all of those who wrote the Consti-
tution or are considered founders, including Thomas Jefferson and
James Madison, thought voting should be limited to property-holding
white males. It wasn’t even an issue for debate.42
One revolutionary change capitalism has brought to modern
democratic governance was to split the elected control over the gov-
ernment from direct control over the economy, which is now in the
hands of those with capital. The people who are elected to run the
government generally are only coincidentally the same people who
dominate in the marketplace and have the greatest fortunes. The
power of government to curtail private property rights is strictly
limited, compared to preindustrial societies. To capitalism’s stron-
gest advocates, like economist Milton Friedman, it was this core split
in the disposition of power that created the space for “freedom” to
flourish. It was one of the main reasons why markets and the sort of
limited democracy found in places like the United States were made
for each other.
But if capitalism changed the nature of the relationship of the econ-
omy to governance, it opened up a new defining debate concerning
the relationship of democracy to the economy, one that has persisted
since the dawn of the Republic. On one side is the classical position,
one championed in much of liberal democratic theory, and embraced
by much of the political left. This position holds that democracy is su-
perior to capitalism and that the sovereign people of a nation have the
fundamental right to determine through deliberation and debate what
type of economy would best serve the nation, and with that, what sort
of property ownership would be permitted. Many who advance this
position view capitalism favorably, but they nonetheless understand
that it must be the result of popular approval to be legitimate. And
they are often open to the idea that the capitalist economy could be
reformed and improved by political measures if that is the determina-
tion of the citizenry.
On the other side is the notion that property ownership, specifically
the existing capitalist property ownership system, is the precondition
for a free and decent society and that democracy is subservient to it.
DEMOCRATIC INFRASTRUCTURE
A debate persists over what we term democratic infrastructure. As Dahl
writes, “Political equality requires democratic political institutions.”48
The term infrastructure comes from economics. An advanced econ-
omy does not exist because entrepreneurs or businesses have the right
to invest and can do whatever they please. It exists because elaborate
communication, transportation, sanitation, energy, and legal infra-
structures provide a foundation that makes commerce possible. Estab-
lishing this infrastructure is largely the province of the government,
even if the state’s job is to coordinate private interests to get it done
effectively. The beauty of infrastructure projects is that they are acces-
sible to everyone and have tremendous “spillovers,” or “positive ex-
ternalities,” meaning they generate considerable value for others and
for society as a whole.49 Without such an infrastructure, an advanced
economy cannot exist.
So it is with democracy. The right to vote means little without
• corruption
• private monopolistic control over the economy
• significant economic inequality
• government secrecy and surveillance
• government propaganda
• militarism
Trust between people increases. Provocative new ideas are put in play
and subject to debate. When the democratic infrastructure is weak or
in decline, the political culture shrivels, self-interest reigns, and de-
moralization and pessimism ascend. Then the only rational reason to
enter public life is to use it as a way station to an eventual job in the
private sector where you can cash in your public-sector chips, or just
for purposes of flat-out corruption.
The battle over a democratic infrastructure has ebbed and flowed
over the course of American history, as it has in other democratic na-
tions. After four decades of relentless attack on the democratic infra-
structure, it has severely shrunk in the United States today, and much
of what remains is in jeopardy. This is the main reason why the great
existential economic crisis we are experiencing has been aggravated
by a pathetic and corrupt political response. For many Americans its
constituent parts now seem foreign or radical—or are even entirely
unknown—when they are in fact at the heart of the American struggle
for democracy.
The advocates of unrestrained capitalism and limited government
can and often do trump democracy. But the United States has seen
many circumstances in which democracy has won out and the dem-
ocratic infrastructure has been built out. We are in another moment
when this is going to happen. But to understand the task at hand, we
must begin by understanding the possibility itself. In our view, the
moral of the story is clear: if you win the battle for democratic infra-
structure, you almost certainly will win the war for controlling the
nation, and the economy. It is here, on this battlefield, more than any-
where else, that the outcome will determine whose future it will be,
or if there will be much of a future at all. It is where those concerned
about how America responds to the jobs crisis we are facing must turn
their attention. In a time of crisis, it means everything.
The historical review of democratic infrastructure and weltan-
schauung also contributes to a more productive understanding of how
social change is actually made. It reveals how each of the disparate
interests that work on one part of building a democratic infrastruc-
ture have a decided interest in seeing the other parts succeed as well.
efforts have been developing.”58 Because media coverage has been vir-
tually nonexistent, many Americans who might be sympathetic or cu-
rious are left entirely in the dark.
An understanding of democratic infrastructure and weltanschauung
can also help us pierce through the pessimism that overpowers count-
less Americans and renders them inactive because they believe social
change for the better is impossible. It is perhaps human nature to see
change as very slow and incremental. The belief that tomorrow will
look pretty much like today is awfully difficult to argue with most
days of most lives. So what we see around us today is what we will
very likely see when we wake up tomorrow. The problem with this ap-
proach is that it cannot account for social change except in retrospect.
No one saw the civil rights movement or the feminist movement or
the gay rights movement or the environmental movement erupting in
the years before they happened. If people did, the movements would
have happened earlier. The Knights of Labor and the Congress of
Industrial Organizations seemingly came out of nowhere when they
burst on the scene. No one anticipated the Occupy explosion of 2011.
After movements emerge, many people act like they saw them com-
ing all along and they were fully anticipated; the sense of surprise is
quickly forgotten.
There is something even more important about this. When fun-
damental social change comes, as Klein writes, “it’s generally not in
legislative dribs and drabs spread out evenly over decades. Rather it
comes in spasms of rapid-fire lawmaking, with one breakthrough after
another.” These are periods in which the democratic infrastructure is
built up and the weltanschauung has shifted dramatically. Klein cap-
tures this well:
When major shifts in the economic balance of power take place, they
are invariably the result of extraordinary levels of social mobilization. . . .
During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the after-
math of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the
usual categories dividing “activists” and “regular people” became
* Fascism has become a widely used term in many different ways over the years.
And there is a valuable literature on the topic. In some cases it is applied to any
non-democratic authoritarian capitalist society—almost always military dictator-
ships—the kind the United States has routinely supported for the past seventy
years. See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and
Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I (Boston: South
End Press, 1979). For our purposes, we prefer Robert O. Paxton’s approach. Calling
fascism “the major political innovation of the twentieth century,” he regards it as
“dictatorship against the left amidst popular enthusiasm.” Mass support is a defining
feature, which is why the run-of-the mill police state does not qualify. “Fascism,” he
writes, “was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to
appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremo-
nies, and intensely charged rhetoric.” See Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 3, 16.
aggressively not only to create jobs but also to create the conditions,
including the markets, for profitable investment. The government
needs to make the system work with bold action because obviously
the traditional mechanisms to stimulate the economy have failed, or
else the economy would not be in a depression. The private economy
is dead in the water. As Thompson put it in his sober assessment of
automation, for Americans to effectively address the coming waves of
unemployment and underemployment, “it is almost certain that the
country would have to embrace a radical new role for government.”67
The only issue is what the nature of the radical new role will be.
In the 1930s and 1940s the solution of the worldwide democratic
Left to the problem of mass unemployment was the New Deal, or
Keynesianism, or what was termed social democracy. The government
would tax the rich or borrow their idle capital at very low interest
rates and then put that money to work on public-works programs, and
to fund numerous social programs that would benefit the poor and
working class. The government would support free trade unions and
progressive taxation and other measures to reduce inequality. Then
workers would use their incomes to purchase goods and services and
capitalists would make profits and have incentive to make additional
private investments. And, because many of these measures built out
the democratic infrastructure, the process of rejuvenating the econ-
omy also greatly strengthened effective popular participation in gov-
ernance. “We have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their
proper subordination to the public’s government. The legend that
they were invincible—above and beyond the processes of a democ-
racy—has been shattered,” FDR said in his second inaugural address
in 1937. “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad
morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”68
No one studied these policies at the time more perceptively than
Michal Kalecki, the brilliant Polish economist who synthesized the
work of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.69 In a 1943 essay,
Kalecki noted that Keynesian policies worked: “Clearly higher output
and employment benefits not only workers, but businessmen as well,
because their profits rise.” Yet, there was a paradox: in all democratic
Germany “the class which benefited most from fascist rule was the
layer of big industrialists and landowners.”78 The same was true in fas-
cist Italy, which has been described as a “crony capitalist, oligarchical
system.”79 For this reason the economist Harold J. Laski wrote in 1937
that “fascism is nothing but monopoly capitalism imposing its will on
those masses whom it has deliberately transformed into its slaves.”80
This was certainly how it was understood by anti-fascists in the
United States from the late 1930s until 1945, when the worldwide
struggle between fascism and democracy dominated everything. Fas-
cism was a global menace that threatened all capitalist democracies,
and not a foreign phenomenon explained by some opaque and ma-
cabre national characteristics of Germans or Italians. Germany was
not some backwater land filled with superstition and zealotry before
1933; it had Europe’s wealthiest and most advanced economy, and it
was roundly considered the beacon of European culture in the early
twentieth century. The idea that the Nazis could assume power was
considered utterly preposterous almost until the moment they did.
Many Americans, including President Franklin Roosevelt and Vice
President Henry A. Wallace, understood that in times of severe eco-
nomic crisis, all bets are off. Then a nation’s demons can be exploited,
and America had its share, starting with extreme white racism. “The
first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tol-
erate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stron-
ger than the democratic state itself,” Roosevelt said in 1938. “That, in
its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual,
by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”81
To FDR and Wallace, the domestic fascist threat in the United
States was a grave concern and it came primarily from “monopolists”
and “cartelists,” who to protect their privileges “would sacrifice de-
mocracy itself.” “If we define an American fascist as one who in case
of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there
are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States,” Wallace
wrote. He explained that “the American fascist would prefer not to
use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public informa-
tion.”82 In the view of FDR and Wallace, a fascist power grab would
hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror
before the rich and successful.”90
That is not what America should be. And that is not, we believe,
what America will be. We believe the majority of Americans are pro-
gressive and deeply desirous of living in a just, humane, and demo-
cratic society.91 But that does not guarantee that they do, or that they
will. For that reason, the battles to protect and extend elements of the
democratic infrastructure move front and center as battles for survival
in an age of daunting economic and social change. Only with a full
embrace of democracy can we put ourselves in position to turn the
economic revolution we are in the midst of experiencing into human-
ity’s greatest victory, rather than its worst nightmare.
We take as a point of beginning the message with which Naomi
Klein ended her most recent book. “There is little doubt that another
crisis will see us in the streets and squares once again, taking us all by
surprise,” she wrote.
The real question is what progressive forces will make of that moment,
the power and confidence with which it will be seized. Because these mo-
ments when the impossible seems suddenly possible are excruciatingly
rare and precious. That means more must be made of them. The next
time one arises, it must be harnessed not only to denounce the world as
it is, and build fleeting pockets of liberated space. It must be the catalyst
to actually build the world that will keep us all safe. The stakes are simply
too high, and time too short, to settle for anything less.92
A JOBLESS ECONOMY?
I
t is impossible for most of us to conceive of a society
without jobs. But it is not frivolous to ask whether there will be
anywhere near enough jobs to provide employment for all the
people who require incomes, and whether the wages and conditions of
the jobs that exist will be remotely close to satisfactory for a credible
economy or a democratic society. This requires examining the role of
technology and automation in the American capitalist economy and
the relationship of technology to the pursuit of profit.
43
44
Chart 1. Percentage of Quarters with 6 Percent or Greater Real GDP Growth, 1930–2015
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A Jobless Economy? 45
and output, people are put out of work and jobs become scarce. The
plethora of unemployed workers puts downward pressure on wages.
The foundation of our analysis of the jobs picture is provided in
Chart 1, which was developed by economist Fred Magdoff; it demon-
strates that the rate of growth in American capitalism has been on
a downward trajectory for a good five decades, and that the process
has accelerated in the new century.1 Our measure is the percentage
of quarters in a time period in which the real growth rate exceeded 6
percent.2 These quarters of 6 percent annual growth point to periods
that are boom times by any calculation. The Great Recession since
2008 has aggravated and highlighted the problem of slow growth,
such that economists across the political spectrum now speak openly
of the United States economy as being in a period of long-term secu-
lar stagnation.
Another way to express the downward growth trajectory of US cap-
italism is to look at private investment, which is the heart and soul of a
capitalist economy. As Chart 2 reveals, private investment has been de-
clining as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. It uses a ten-year
moving average to smooth out the fluctuations and provide a clearer
trend line. Unless there is a large increase in government spending to
compensate for the decline—which is a controversial policy option
in a capitalist economy—everything else being equal, slower growth
rates and higher levels of unemployment result. Indeed, even more
striking is the massive and increasing amount of cash that corpora-
tions are holding, as shown in Chart 3. This “unemployed” capital is
a sign of a stagnating economy, with profitable investment opportu-
nities growing so scarce that firms would rather sit on their cash than
risk it in real investments.
Why exactly US capitalism—and world capitalism, for that matter—
has been and is stagnant with no end in sight is a crucial issue that can
be traced in part to the way in which monopoly-finance capital pro-
duces stagnation. That’s another discussion, however.3 Our concern
at this point is with the jobs picture, and Chart 4 demonstrates that
unemployment has been increasing in general while capitalism has
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Chart 3 Cash and Short-Term Investments of the Top 1,200 Non-Financial US Firms, 1970–2013
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been tending toward stagnation. We provide here not only the total
amount of “official” unemployment, but a broader assessment that in-
cludes people who have dropped out of the labor market and are no
longer actively seeking employment—that is, people who constitute
the “hidden unemployed.”
What is important about these first four charts is that they reveal
that the employment situation in the United States is not simply a
function of a short-term boom-and-bust business cycle. It is, instead,
a longer-term problem of stagnation, such that even as the economy
recovers after a downturn, it takes longer to return to the levels of
employment seen in previous expansions, and the recessions can grow
more severe and last longer.
Chart 5 continues in this vein. It shows how many months it has
taken in each recovery since the early 1970s for the economy to regain
the jobs lost to the downturn. Every single recovery has taken longer
than the previous one, with the most recent Great Recession espe-
cially sluggish. On a weaker foundation, the system overall is more
susceptible to panics and crashes of the 1929 and 2008 variety. In this
scenario, there are other developments that reveal deterioration in the
employment situation facing workers, beyond the traditional official
rate of unemployment.
Consider the situation facing young workers. Chart 6 demon-
strates that the economy is generating fewer middle-class jobs, and an
increasing proportion of the jobs provide incomes at poverty levels.
This is what economists call “labor market polarization”—great jobs
for those at the top, a mountain of crappy jobs at the bottom, and fewer
and fewer jobs in between.4 Studies reveal that this is a phenomenon
across all sixteen European Union nations as well.5 This growth in
dismal jobs is not because workers are less productive. Chart 7 shows
the growing split between the growth in Gross Domestic Product and
household income since the 1970s. Put another way, from 1945 to the
early 1970s, as workers’ productivity increased, so did their wages by a
comparable percentage. Since the 1970s, worker output has grown, in
some cases sharply, but wages have stagnated.6
Chart 6 Changes in Job Growth by Median Wage for Selected Periods, 2000–2014
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Chart 7 Index of Real Median Household Income and Real GDP, 1967–2013 (1967 = 100)
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Chart 8 Median Wage and Salary Income of Persons 18–24 Years Old, Without College
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Experience, 1964–2014
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A Jobless Economy? 57
appearance of close to 7.2 million workers from the official labor force
in 2015 (see Chart 11 sources in the Statistical Appendix). However,
in this case (as in so many others), the official labor statistics are inad-
equate. Indeed, if we estimate how many more jobs would be needed
to maintain the level of civilian employment that existed in 2000, the
picture changes dramatically.11 Chart 11 does just this, revealing that
the economy would need to generate nearly 14 million more jobs in
2015 if all those workers who have left the labor market since 2000
had remained in it and had jobs. The number, not to mention the
trend, of these “missing jobs” is staggering and puts the employment
crisis in a very different light from the official pronouncements of the
officials who boast about “continual job growth.”12
This data creates a certain cognitive dissonance for those Ameri-
cans who spent much time in 2014 and 2015 listening to politicians
and pundits crow about how the unemployment rate was under 6
percent and the economy was partying like it was 1999. “Right now,”
Gallup CEO Jim Clifton said in February 2015, “we’re hearing much
celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about
how unemployment is ‘down’ to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this
number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White
House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you
to stay in the market.” Clifton, head of one of the top public opinion
survey organizations in the world, adds:
None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone
is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job—if
you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over
the past four weeks—the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as
unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can
possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not
counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news—currently 5.6%.
Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or
severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t
throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment.
58
Chart 11 Estimated Number of Missing Jobs Since 2000 Peak in Labor Force Participation
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Chart 12 Working Poor, Hidden Unemployed, and Officially Unemployed, 1968–2014
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A Jobless Economy? 63
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A Jobless Economy? 65
* This growing inequality and poverty makes liberal and progressive economists
apoplectic. Lower incomes mean there is less and less consumer demand for
products and services, so businesses have less incentive to make new investments,
and to hire more workers who then have more income, which reinforces stag-
nation and makes significant long-term growth all but impossible. It makes the
overall economy weaker and more susceptible to panics and crises. Despite the
existence of proven policies to counter stagnation, elite policymakers refuse to
countenance policies that would forcefully address inequality or strengthen the
power of workers to gain better wages and working conditions, not to men-
tion secure, long-term employment. The business-as-usual approach means
that nothing in this chapter is likely to change for the better going forward.
For that to happen, the narrow business-as-usual range of debate has to be
obliterated.
Chart 15 Average Change in Income Share for Selected Income Groups, 1935–2014
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Chart 16 Unemployed for at Least 15 Weeks as a Percentage of the Labor Force, 1962–2014
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Most Americans are aware that monopolized online sales and dis-
tribution operations (such as Amazon, for example) have decimated
local bookstores and record shops, as well as chain operations such as
Borders Books and Virgin Megastores. But disintermediation is also
wiping out jobs at small, medium-sized, and large businesses that used
to sell everything from computer hardware and software to airline
tickets, toys, and contact lenses.42
As Chart 17 indicates, the one hundred largest US companies (in
terms of total annual revenue) are able to generate more US revenues
and earn more US profits with fewer American workers, and the pro-
cess appears to be accelerating.* These one hundred firms accounted
for 43 percent of US GDP in 2013, up from 26 percent in 1950, so this
trend is hardly on the periphery of the economy.43 There is the palpa-
ble sense that technology is destroying more jobs than it is creating,
an issue we will take up in short order.
For young people it is arguable that the employment picture is as
dismal as it has been at any time since the Great Depression of the
1930s, and for college graduates it may be worse. The Federal Reserve
Bank of New York in 2014 determined that 46 percent of recent col-
lege graduates were working at jobs that did not require a BA.44 That is
bad news not only for college graduates but for high school graduates,
“who find themselves competing with college graduates for basic jobs
in service businesses.”45 Even before the Great Recession of 2008, the
Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast that two-thirds of the jobs available
between 2008 and 2018 would not require any post-secondary educa-
tion.46 As the journalist Derek Thompson concludes, “The job market
appears to be requiring more and more preparation for a lower and
lower starting wage.”47 The Economist announces that young people
* As the statistical appendix demonstrates (see notes to Chart 17), if the data is ex-
panded to the top one hundred global firms—that is all workers (foreign and do-
mestic) and all revenues (foreign and domestic)—it does not alter the pattern of
steadily increasing returns per worker. If anything it appears that the ratio of rev-
enues (or sales) to workers actually increases for these firms when foreign sales and
employees are included. We stick to the United States because the data is more
comprehensive for illustrating historical trends.
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A Jobless Economy? 71
Once the Great Depression had passed and was mostly forgotten,
Keynes’s concerns about technological unemployment did not find
much currency in the economics profession.70 The conventional wis-
dom concerning technology, especially technology that affects jobs,
is that it is a net positive. It is true that some people lose in the short
run because they are displaced, but as the economy grows, new indus-
tries arise and new employment opportunities appear. The lousiest
and most mind-numbing jobs are the ones that tend to get replaced
by machines, and the new jobs tend to require more education and
skill and be more rewarding, we are told. The huge percentage of the
population who would have worked in agriculture in the nineteenth
century or manufacturing in the twentieth century invariably move on
to bigger and better things when the nation needs far fewer workers to
grow the food or make the products. It is a sign of progress.
Our concern is not with routine technological innovation or even
with major product invention. What concerns us is what economists
call a “general purpose technology” (GPT). As business scholars Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee write, this refers to “a small group
of technological innovations so powerful they interrupt and accelerate
the normal march of economic progress.”71 In the past, economists
Joseph Schumpeter, Paul Baran, and Paul Sweezy characterized these
as “epoch-making” innovations because they so radically altered the
course of capitalist development.72 These GPTs tend to be energy,
transportation, and communication technologies, because radical
changes in those areas redefine all markets, not just a specific industry
or sector. They tend to have enormous geographical effects, extending
markets and increasing effective demands for products. The classic ex-
amples of GPTs are steam power, electricity, railroads, and the inter-
nal combustion engine. In some cases, like railroads and automobiles,
GPTs can drive massive waves of investment that lead to enormous
spin-off industries. In these cases, the new technologies can drive a
capitalist economy to much higher rates of investment, growth, and
employment than would exist otherwise.
Computers and digital communication, connected by networks,
are the newest GPTs, and by most accounts they are equal if not su-
perior to any that have preceded them. They not only expand the size
and scope of markets, they also radically lower the costs of production.
As the leading scholar on automation, David F. Noble, has empha-
sized, the emergence of computers and automation was driven to no
small extent by the military coming out of World War II and into the
Cold War. From that base, “it took hold within industry, especially
within those industries tied closely with the military and the mili-
tary-sponsored technical community.”73 In November 1946 Fortune
magazine published a large color spread on the “Automatic Factory.”
“The threat and promise of laborless machines is closer than ever . . .
all the parts are here,” it reported.74
Even at first blush, it was clear that something rather different from
previous mechanization and ultimately revolutionary was at hand, and
this was more than a little disconcerting. It is striking how sober the first
response to automation was, even, or dare we say especially, by the one
person closest to the science. On the heels of the very first computers
being built, MIT professor and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener
speculated in 1950 that it would probably take two decades for automa-
tion to overhaul and dominate the economy. He wrote that the process
be left for the present to the writers of science fiction.” To those who
dismissed computerization and automation as no big deal, Sweezy
responded, “Come back in another thirty years. The transformation
of society implicit in the new technologies will then be in full swing
and you will be able to see signs of it on every hand.” What Sweezy
grasped well before all others was that automation, unlike most other
innovations, ultimately saved on capital in a manner almost as striking
as how it saved on labor. This meant that it propelled the productive
capacity of society to incredible heights, and therefore exacerbated a
central problem under modern capitalism of firms being able to sell at
a profitable price all that they are capable of producing.90
By the early 1960s automation had burst into the popular con-
sciousness, and caution was thrown to the wind.91 One writer caus-
tically labeled it the period of “automation hysteria.”92 RAND
economist Richard Bellman predicted that in short order a mere 2
percent of the population would be able to produce all of society’s
material goods. One writer in 1964 noted that “Fortune, Newsweek,
the Advanced Management Journal, and many other periodical and
professional organs, indicate the potential of cybernation for wiping
out not only most blue-collar jobs but also most office and ‘middle
management’ positions.” Construction work, too, was projected as
soon to be extinct, or at least greatly reduced.93 “It is often claimed
that automation is nothing more than the latest stage in the evolution
of technological means for removing the toil from work,” Newsweek
editor Robert E. Cubbedge wrote in his popular 1963 book Who
Needs People? Automation and Your Future. “The assertion is mislead-
ing. There is a very good possibility that automation is so different
in degree as to be profoundly different in kind; that it poses unique
problems for society, by challenging patterns of work, education,
manufacturing, and distribution.”94
It also became the stuff of politics. The 1962 Port Huron State-
ment—the visionary manifesto of the newly created Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) and the 1960s New Left, written primary
by the young activist Tom Hayden—gave considerable attention to au-
tomation, which, he wrote, “is transforming society in ways that are
less and less labor and without any feeling [as to] what it may mean
to the whole economy.” The business trade publication Printers’ Ink
concluded in 1964 that the American workforce was “frightened and
uncertain of its future.”102
It was not only student activists, labor, and people on the left who
were concerned about automation, though they were at the forefront.
The eventual 1978 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Herbert Simon,
published his book The Shape of Automation for Men and Management
in 1965. A computer scientist and a pioneer in artificial intelligence
as well as an economist, Simon wrote that “in our time, computers
will be able to do anything a man can do.”103 President John F. Ken-
nedy referred to unemployment caused by automation as “the major
domestic challenge of the 1960s.”104 “If men have the talent to invent
new machines that put men out of work,” he stated in 1962, “they have
the talent to put those men back to work.”105
Yet there was considerable anxiety over the prospect that new
jobs might not appear to replace those being lost. In August 1964
President Johnson formally created the National Commission on
Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress to examine the is-
sues and file a report, first and foremost “on whether technological
change is a major source of unemployment.” The ultimate report,
published in 1966, extended its mandate to consider “the fear” that
eventually technology “would eliminate all but a few jobs, with the
major portion of what we now call work being performed automati-
cally by machine.” It was a prestigious fifteen-member commission,
including UAW head Reuther, IBM chair Thomas Watson, five
other corporate leaders, and the intellectuals Daniel Bell and Robert
Solow. The 1966 report concluded optimistically that government
policies could successfully address unemployment arising from auto-
mation. It asserted that automation was a progressive development,
and that “the vast majority of people quite rightly have accepted
technological change as beneficial.”106
What is perhaps most striking for our purposes is what the com-
mission did end up recommending in its report. It said that the tech-
nological threat to employment only underscored the crucial need
questions, framing, and even solutions that are being raised today; they
were simply fifty years ahead of their time. Why did the issue of auto-
mation drift into the background? The easy answer is that the alarmist
concerns of the early 1960s did not materialize, as the capacity for
firms to deploy automation to replace most human jobs was greatly
exaggerated. When we now see how laughably primitive computers
and digital technology were fifty years ago, the predictions made at
the time seem preposterous. This experience has probably been a fac-
tor in making economists and observers of all stripes gun-shy about
predicting automation’s elimination of most jobs, lest they be confused
with the tinfoil-hat UFO crowd from the same time period. Whatever
the precise reason for the shift, automation and displacement were no
longer “news” after the mid-1960s. Chart 18 documents the decline
in stories mentioning automation in the New York Times from 1955
through February 2015.
But the disappearance of automation as a political issue owes to
more than the exaggerated claims of the early 1960s. To a large ex-
tent it reflected the fact that organized labor, aside from a handful of
progressive unions like the United Electrical Workers (UEW), the
International Association of Machinists, and more recently National
Nurses United, threw in the towel. This shift in focus was encouraged
in the late 1960s by the virtual disappearance of unemployment with
the booming economy that accompanied the Vietnam War. It was
also encouraged by the persistent management stratagem to label any
critic of automation a “Luddite,” as if asking questions about whether
all automation was always good was tantamount to saying that society
should abandon cooked food, electricity, and indoor plumbing.109
In the decades that followed, when unemployment became a
political issue, the major public concern regarding job losses was
with the many millions shifted to overseas low-wage locales. This
aspect of globalization was not unrelated to computerization. Mar-
tin Wolf of the Financial Times writes that “information technology
has turbo-charged globalization by making it vastly easier to or-
ganize global supply chains, run 24-hour global financial markets,
and spread technological know-how.”110 As leading economists have
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technology, and more than a few were being lost to technology, but
until the Great Recession it did not seem to be much of a loss. And
even then, as Galbraith put it, “you can’t distinguish a job lost to tech-
nology from a job lost to a business slump. The two are, actually, the
same thing.”123
To some economists, who believe they can see what is in front of
them as long as they keep their eyes glued to the rear-view mirror,
this settles the matter. The future will look like the past. Technology
will have no fundamental effect upon employment levels and need
not concern policymakers when they address unemployment. But to
an increasing number of engineers, computer scientists, investors,
business leaders, business and economic reporters, and scholars—and
more than a few eminent economists—the economy stands at a prec-
ipice, and society is facing the type of revolutionary GPT that occurs
maybe once a century, if that. “There is a wave of what certainly ap-
pears to be labor substitutive innovation. . . . It appears technology is
permitting very large-scale substitutions,” Summers observed in 2015.
“Probably, we are only in the early innings of such a wave.”124
What does this mean? By the early 1980s, for example, the cost
of computer power relative to manual computing power was eight
thousand times less than what it had been thirty years earlier.126 It
took scientists a decade of intensive work to sequence the three billion
base pairs in the human genome by 2003. By 2013, a single computer
facility could sequence that much DNA in a day.127 More recently, the
Economist reports, “the new iPhones sold over the weekend of their
release in September 2014 contained 25 times more computing power
than the whole world had at its disposal in 1995.”128
What becomes clear is that if Moore’s Law is extended for an ap-
preciable period of time, the growth becomes mind-boggling. The fu-
turist Ray Kurzweil is famous for explaining this with the parable of
the person who invented the game of chess in sixth-century CE India.
The inventor presented the new game to the local emperor, who was
so impressed that he invited the inventor to name his reward. The
inventor asked for a single grain of rice on the first day—then two
grains on the second day, four grains on the third day, eight grains
on the fourth day, and so on, with the number of grains to continue
doubling every day for sixty-four days, to account for every square
on the chessboard. The emperor instantly agreed, surprised by such a
modest request. After ten days, the gift was around a thousand grains.
After twenty days it was a million grains. After thirty days it was a
billion grains, and then after thirty-two days, or halfway through the
chessboard, the total was four billion grains, about one large field’s
quantity. But thereafter the doubling became astronomical. By the
time one got to the sixty-fourth square, the number of grains would
be eighteen quintillion, vastly more rice than has ever been produced
in history. The emperor obviously could not comply. (In some ver-
sions of the story, the inventor is beheaded by the angry emperor.)
“Kurzweil’s point,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee write, “is that constant
doubling, reflecting exponential growth, is deceptive because it is ini-
tially unremarkable.”129
If we return to Moore’s Law, and begin in the 1960s, we are now
entering the second half of the chessboard. The “exponential growth
eventually leads to staggeringly big numbers, ones that leave our
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In this context it is almost banal to discuss Deep Blue, the IBM com-
puter that defeated Garry Kasparov, the world champion, in a game of
chess in what seems like the computer dark ages of 1997. Or even IBM’s
Watson computer from 2011 that was able to defeat all human compe-
tition in television’s game of Jeopardy. This was done in real time and
required the computer to interpret oral questions filled with wordplay
and irony.133 It was not just a gimmick. As Martin Ford notes, “IBM is
already positioning Watson to play a significant role in fields like med-
icine and customer service.”134 “Artificial intelligence has become vastly
more sophisticated in a short time,” the New York Times reports, “with
machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions,
and to respond to human language and movement.”135
Computers can now access an unimaginably large body of stored
information that is growing by leaps and bounds and process that
information almost instantaneously with ever more sophisticated al-
gorithms. This is what is referred to as “big data.”136 Computers, as
Nicholas Carr explains, may never be able to replicate “tacit” or “pro-
cedural” knowledge, which refers to the stuff we do without thinking
about it, like riding a bike or driving a car. Instead, computers are
very good at “explicit” or “declarative” knowledge, which is the stuff
we do that we can write down instructions for, like how to change a
flat tire or solve a quadratic equation. “The superhuman speed with
which computers can follow instructions, calculate probabilities, and
receive and send data,” Carr notes, “means that they can use explicit
knowledge to perform many of the complicated tasks we do with tacit
knowledge.” Driverless cars are just the tip of that iceberg. The impli-
cations for automation are striking, if not revolutionary. “Even highly
trained analysts and other so-called knowledge workers are seeing
their work circumscribed by decision-support systems that turn the
making of judgments into a data-processing routine.”137
Much of this “big data” is accumulated in the “cloud,” a group
of enormous “server farms” controlled by a handful of massive cor-
porations like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. The cloud
becomes the rational and most cost-effective way for businesses to
store and analyze their data. One of the great benefits and therefore
by less skilled contract workers.”159 “In case after case,” Carr writes,
“we’ve seen as machines become more sophisticated, the work left to
people becomes less so.”160 This was anticipated first by Harvard Busi-
ness School professor James R. Bright in his 1958 book Automation
and Management. “It seems that the more automatic the machine, the
less the operator has to do,” Bright wrote. “The progressive effect of
automation is first to relieve the operator of manual effort and then to
relieve him of the need to apply continuous mental effort.”161
In 1966 Bright filed a report for President Johnson’s National
Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress:
“The lesson should be increasingly clear; it is not necessarily true
that highly complex equipment requires skilled operators. The ‘skill’
can be built into the machine.” With his orientation toward manage-
ment, Bright was the first dissenting voice regarding the notion that
automation required workers to have better education and training:
“I suggest that excessive educational and skill specification is a serious
mistake and potential hazard to our educational and social system. We
will hurt individuals, raise labor costs improperly, create disillusion
and resentment, and destroy valid job standards by setting standards
that are not truly needed for a given task.”162 He was decades ahead
of his time.163 As Tyler Cowen puts it, most of these new jobs that
interact with sophisticated machines “won’t be much harder than, in
today’s world, operating a tollbooth on the New Jersey Garden State
Parkway, a job performed by both man and machines.”164 Thompson’s
examination of labor in the Atlantic concludes that “most jobs are still
boring, repetitive, and easily learned.”165
Indeed, as the Economist notes, the de-skilling of the remaining jobs
can be seen as providing a way station to their eventual elimination.*
“Gobbetising jobs with the aim of parceling them out to people who
don’t see or need to see the big picture is not that different from gob-
betising them in a way that allows automation. Often the first activity
* This insight is hardly new; it was made in 1776 at the beginning of the industrial
revolution by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, when he wrote how simplifying
labor processes made it easier to replace workers with machines. See Adam Smith,
The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 4.
Robots are getting much lighter, they can be repurposed easily and
can do delicate work humans find very difficult and once regarded as
impossible for machines. “One company promises its robots eventu-
ally will be sewing garments in the U.S., taking over one of the ulti-
mate sweatshop tasks.”183
The one proviso historically offered by economists was that low
wages slow down the incentive for businesses to turn to automation.
The “good news” for manufacturing workers was that, as long as they
did not press management for higher wages or better working con-
ditions, they might keep some of their jobs. How has this worked
in practice? A firm like Nissan relies upon robots for its factories in
Japan, but its factories in India rely on cheap local labor.184 Indeed, a
good deal of economic analysis of the speed and intensity of techno-
logical innovation and diffusion is based upon the cost of labor. When
wages are relatively low, innovation slows down, and when wages are
high, firms have a greater incentive to turn to automation. The logic
with 1.2 million workers. Foxconn grabbed its market share by pro-
viding a low-paid and heavily exploited workforce for Western firms,
working in conditions right out of a Charles Dickens novel. In 2010,
world attention shifted to Foxconn’s factories that produced Apple
products following a string of suicides by its workers. Soon thereafter,
Foxconn began an aggressive program to eventually replace many, or
most, of its workers with one million robots.190 Foxconn CEO Terry
Gou said in 2015 that the firm has been adding thirty thousand indus-
trial robots annually since then, and the process is being accelerated
to the point where he expects robots and automation to complete 70
percent of its assembly-line work by 2018. Gou eventually foresees a
“robot army”—Foxconn has invested heavily in robotics research—as
a way to offset labor costs. “I think in the future young people won’t
do this kind of work, and won’t enter the factories,” Gou says.191 Fox-
conn is not an outlier or some kind of “futurist” firm.192 It is part of a
trend. The headline of a 2015 New York Times report from China said
it all: “Cheaper Robots, Fewer Workers.” It explained that
combining low wages with the most advanced technology.195 For the
Foxconn business model to survive, it must ensure that the dominant
and unrivaled manufacturing infrastructure and networks built in
China remain attractive as automation increases in prominence and
lessens the importance of a cheap, non-unionized labor force. But
the historical clock is ticking. One industry analyst says that there
will be a few million manufacturing jobs left in 2040. In 2003 there
were 163 million manufacturing jobs worldwide.196
All of this is bad news for a capitalist economy, which needs work-
ers with decent incomes so they can become consumers who purchase
products. That is when capitalists make profits and have incentives
to invest and expand the economy. The loss of jobs and therefore the
shrinking of a consumer base with disposable income is a recurring
problem in capitalist economies, and it provides a good shorthand de-
scription of the Great Depression. It looks to be our fate again in
one form or another. As Galbraith puts it, the United States is experi-
encing “a permanent move toward lower rates of employment in the
private, for-profit sector.”197
But can the same computer technology that seems to be aggra-
vating the problems of capitalism also provide a solution? One of the
attributes of earlier GPTs, like railroads and automobiles, is that they
stimulated a massive body of investment (and employment) in related
industries that became powerhouses in their own right. Consider
automobiles. We both grew up in the industrial Midwest—in Cleve-
land and southeastern Wisconsin, respectively—during the heyday
of the Rust Belt, back before there was much rust. From Buffalo and
Pittsburgh in the east to Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, and Detroit in
the middle, and on to Gary, Chicago, and Milwaukee in the west, gi-
gantic factories producing steel, glass, rubber, machine tools, and the
like were ever-present, in addition to the iconic auto plants. Millions
of people earned good wages and the economies were strong, and at
the center of it all was the automobile. That doesn’t even begin to
factor in all the construction and real estate development—that is,
suburbanization—and other ancillary industries that resulted as well.
One can make the case that automobilization was a central factor
accrue to whoever owns the robots.”215 But the exact same conclusion
is being reached by many of those who are enthralled with capi-
talism and enamored with the new technologies, and who benefit
materially by what is taking place. Brynjolfsson and McAfee stand as
arguably the world’s greatest cheerleaders for automation and what
they refer to as “the second machine age.” But they acknowledge that
“the gains, however large, have been concentrated among a relatively
small group of winners, leaving the majority of people worse off than
before.”216 The Economist writes that “the prosperity unleashed by
the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of
capital and the highest-skilled workers.”217 It will continue into the
future and “will contribute to pressure to reduce labour rights in all
sorts of situations.”218 The Economist also notes there is a “squeezing
out” of the middle class, whose emergence in the twentieth century
“was a hugely important political and social development across the
world.”219
There are crucial existential questions that the new era of artificial
intelligence, robotics, and computerization brings to the forefront.
“It’s apparent,” Greengard notes, “that society is hitting a tipping
point where humans are engineering our own obsolescence.”220 What
is the relationship of humans to their machines?221 At what point are
they no longer “our” machines? What does human being mean? What
makes us happy? Or, the question that technology historian George
Dyson posed: “What if the cost of machines that think is people who
don’t?”222 Organizations like the Future of Life Institute, funded in
part by Tesla founder Elon Musk, the Lifeboat Foundation, and the
recently created Center for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge
University all address the “existential risks” for humanity posed by
genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, par-
ticularly as we approach the so-called singularity, the hypothetical
moment when artificial intelligence surpasses the human intellect. As
renowned Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees puts it, the risk is
exponentially greater because of “the ease with which a single person
or company can cause catastrophic harm.”223 In July 2015 the Future
of Life Institute released a letter signed by some three thousand artifi-
the basis for arguably Marx’s strongest and most persistent critique—
what David Harvey terms the “central contradiction” of capitalism in
the Marxist tradition—and the one that never goes away: the system
inexorably generates an increasing gap between what the economy
is capable of producing—both quantitatively and qualitatively—and
what it actually produces.227 In the present time, this inability for cap-
italism to successfully sell at a profit all that it can produce leads to
stagnation, underinvestment, unemployment, and never-ending de-
mands for austerity. But there is a larger, existential conflict between
the increasingly advanced capacity to produce and what the economy
actually produces as it awaits the green light from capitalists confi-
dent in their ability to maximize profits.
This insight was not reserved to those who were hostile to the cap-
italist system. The great nineteenth-century liberal economist John
Stuart Mill, a contemporary of Marx, regarded capitalism as ideally
suited for developing technology and expanding the productive ca-
pacity of a society, but he was dubious about its long-term suitability
for a decent society.
away?” Keynes’s pessimism at least for the short term is well founded.
“The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs,” Thompson
notes, “but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing.” This
leads Thompson to a provocative conclusion: “Most people do need
to achieve things through, yes, work to feel a lasting sense of purpose.
To envision a future that offers more than minute-to-minute satisfac-
tion, we have to imagine how millions of people might find meaning-
ful work without formal wages.”232
Keynes wrote before anyone anticipated how computerization and
digital communication networks would turn everything upside down.
“The development of automation and cybernation in the last two de-
cades signals the end of the long, long era in which the inevitability
of scarcity constituted the central fact of human existence,” Baran and
Sweezy wrote in their seminal 1966 work Monopoly Capital.233 Her-
bert Marcuse, a close confidant and frequent correspondent of Baran,
grasped the implications, much like Keynes: “Complete automation in
the realm of necessity would open the dimension of free time as the
one in which man’s private and societal existence would constitute
itself. This would be the historical transcendence toward a new civili-
zation.”234 But the outcome was not inexorable. “The central question
is whether the prevailing relations of production promote or block,
encourage or discourage the translation of these potentialities into
practice,” Baran and Sweezy added. “The appearance and the wid-
ening of the gap between what is and what could be, demonstrate
thus that the existing property relations and the economic, social and
political institutions resting upon them have turned into an effective
obstacle to the achievement of what has become possible.”235
The growth in the economy’s capacity to produce since the 1930s,
or even the 1960s, has been extraordinary, much as these economists
anticipated. If the experts we used as counsel for this chapter are any-
where near accurate, the next four or five decades could make the
twentieth century look like the twelfth century.
In popular economic theory, such revolutionary increases in pro-
ductive capacity are supposed to translate into higher living standards,
much shorter workweeks, richer public infrastructure, and a greater
overall social security. Society should have the resources to tackle vex-
ing environmental problems with the least amount of pain possible.
In fact, however, nothing on the horizon suggests that this is in the
offing. As automation and computerization take productive capacity
to undreamed-of heights, jobs grow more scarce and are de-skilled,
many people are poorer, and all the talk is of austerity and seemingly
endless cutbacks in social services. There is growing wealth for the few
combined with greater insecurity for the many. Washington, we’ve got
a problem.
The false assumptions, of course, are that the benefits of the tech-
nology accrue to more than the owners of the firms deploying the
technologies. And also that capitalists have incentive to produce far
more than they do to satisfy the needs of people worldwide. In fact,
Veblen had it right: capitalists produce as much as they do only as
long as it remains profitable to do so. Producing more than that low-
ers prices and lessens profits. In short, to follow Keynes’s logic to a
place he did not go, capitalism would seem to have little or no reason
to exist if the “economic problem” is solved, so it is imperative that
the economic problem remain. For business and wealthy investors to
continue to win, everyone else has to lose.
In our view, the evidence points in one direction: the economy
needs to be fundamentally reformed, if not replaced. Capitalism as
we know it is the wrong economic system for the material world that
is emerging. This is a radical conclusion, but it is not made merely by
radicals. The number of true believers who think leaving firms and
wealthy investors alone to do as they wish will ultimately solve the
employment problem and give us a great economy that can be the
foundation for a vibrant democracy is shrinking, primarily because it
is a faith-based position. There are also some who have a similar faith
that technology is innately progressive and all-powerful, so it can and
will solve capitalism’s problems for us. They tell us that all we have to
do is get out of the way, make some fresh popcorn, and grab a front-
row seat as the future unfolds.
But researching this book, what has been striking to us is that
many, perhaps most, of the people who have studied these matters—
CITIZENLESS DEMOCRACY
T
here can be no democracy in America without in-
formed, engaged, and active citizenry. Everyone knows this.
It’s an eternal construct that runs through the historical and
emotional understanding of the United States.1 But what if the citizens
are expunged from democracy? What if citizens are told that, on the
issues of greatest consequence, their services are no longer required?
What if politicians get completely comfortable with the fact that—
except perhaps for a few pre-election weeks when it is necessary to sug-
gest differently—they will always defer to concentrated wealth rather
than the popular will? What if, when citizens seek to engage, they are
overwhelmed by propaganda and victimized by voter suppression? Can
what remains be called a democracy? Of course not. Yet, this is the
current state of “democracy” in America. This is how it is experienced
now by the vast majority of Americans. And this is the essential chal-
lenge Americans face as they grapple with the pressing issues posed
by technological change, stagnation, and the threat of an increasingly
jobless economy.
115
President Jimmy Carter. “I could agree with that. Because the people
here really aren’t in charge. Wall Street is in charge.”2
Kaptur is right about the influence of economic elites on issues of
concern to their bottom lines—an influence that is now so immense
that, even when the wealthy cause a crisis, they are rewarded. But what
Kaptur says about relatively well-recognized catastrophes such as the
Wall Street crash and the economic meltdown that extended from
it goes double for catastrophes that are in the making. How can a
country that cannot have a reasonable, realistic, and ultimately useful
debate when an issue of enormous consequence is staring it in the
face—say, for instance, the collapse of the global economy—possibly
embark upon the necessary discussion about a digital revolution that
may be every bit as disruptive as the industrial revolution? How can a
political process that does not dare question the authority of economic
elites whose greed and lack of foresight so obviously created a crisis for
the great mass of Americans begin to ask the right questions about a
jobs crisis that is still in the making? How can citizens challenge a new
generation of cyber elites, often working in conjunction with the same
old investment bankers and Wall Street charlatans? How do people
who are struggling just to get by cut through the spin that claims that
the cruelest of cuts must be accepted as the “creative destruction” of a
new age? How can America possibly debate the future when so many
issues of consequence are taken off the table in the present?
After Wall Street speculators crashed the global economy in
2008, it was obvious that the people were not in charge. Instead of
cracking down on the speculators, Congress started writing checks
to bail them out. “Think about what these banks have done. They
have taken very imprudent behavior, irresponsible. They have really
gambled, all right? And in many cases, been involved in fraudulent
activity,” Kaptur explained. “And then when they lost, they shifted
their losses to the taxpayer.” The big banks are coddled. “Their bed
is feathered,” complained Kaptur, who explained that, when it comes
to representing the interests of the great mass of citizens who need
a strong government to counter the influence of corporate power,
“Congress has really shut down.”3
Kaptur’s assessment was correct. She got credit for her frankness.
But no real change. What was briefly repaired was broken again by
the same powerful interests that did the initial damage. The pulled-
punches “reforms” contained in the 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation
that attempted to impose a mild measure of regulation on big banks
were being undone just a few years later; so much so that Republican
lawmakers joked openly and unapologetically about the success of
their efforts to “undermine aspects of Dodd-Frank.”4 A 2014 Center
for Public Integrity study concluded that “less than six years after a
massive financial crisis drove the U.S. banking system to the edge of
collapse, leading to a $700 billion government bailout and a reces-
sion that destroyed as much as $34 trillion in wealth, bankers and
lawmakers are working in concert to undermine Dodd-Frank, an
849-page law designed to prevent another failure.”5
Even when the people win, they lose. And, eventually, a lot of the
people give up. This explains how, in the parlance of politics, issues
can be taken off the table. For the elites to prevail, it is no longer nec-
essary that the people accept all the spin, all the propaganda, all the
lies. It is sufficient if citizens are simply overwhelmed by an empty and
dispiriting politics that never seems to go right. If nothing that is fixed
remains fixed, why bother trying? Why bother voting?
The bank bailout in 2008 provides the most glaring example of
how this works, and of how a crisis of economic policy becomes a cri-
sis for democracy. Michael Moore made a movie about it and, to this
day, political figures on the left and right grumble about it—including,
notably, cynics like former House Budget Committee chairman Paul
Ryan, who engineered Republican support for the bailout in 2008 and
then decried the deal as his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012.
The cynicism is bipartisan. Former President Bill Clinton, who
signed legislation that eliminated the Glass-Steagall barrier against
risky banking practices (and who journalist Robert Scheer aptly ob-
served “bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst
economic crisis since the Great Depression”6) had the nerve to de-
liver a 2012 Democratic National Convention address in which he
complained about politicians who “want to get rid of those pesky
the tax code to avoid paying their fair share—and to literally redis-
tribute wealth upward. “[Every] few months there’s a new report on
big corporations working the system,” says Senator Elizabeth Warren.
“One recent report showed that, of the big corporations in the S&P
500, 115 paid less than 20% in taxes. Another report claimed that,
of 280 of the biggest corporations in the country, 78 paid nothing in
taxes during one of the last three years.”11 Billionaire Warren Buffett
reminds us that, thanks to loopholes that let investors like him avoid
taxes, his rate is lower than that of his secretary. Indeed, says Buffett,
he’s often “the lowest-paying taxpayer in the office.”12
For much of the twentieth century, this state of affairs would have
been unthinkable. Progressive income taxation—in which the richest
Americans pay at a higher marginal rate than those with lower in-
comes—was accepted as good for the economy and good for democ-
racy. Everyone knew that progressive taxation enhanced equality, and
that it communicated to rich and poor alike that Americans were “all
in this together.” Progressive tax policy was part of the democratic
infrastructure.
But no longer. Americans have been told for decades now that
they must accept supply-side strategies that are so convoluted in their
construction, and so obviously flawed in their execution, that former
President George Herbert Walker Bush—no liberal he—famously re-
ferred to them as “voodoo economics.” Anyone who pays attention to
the data knows that, as Rick Unger of Forbes has explained, while tax-
cut proposals “can save the wealthy a healthy chunk of money” they
“are highly unlikely to do much of anything for our economy.” Writ-
ing for one of the most pro-business publications in America, Unger
argues that, “we have an obligation to consider the benefits of a tax cut
versus the long-term damage to the country.”13
Yet, when it comes to tax debates, virtually all Republicans and
most Democrats refuse to adopt even this simple standard of fiscal
and social responsibility. In so doing, they shut down serious discus-
sion about how tax policy shapes our economic reality, and about how
tax policy could be used not merely to fund government but to address
issues that Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives,
more. A 2013 study of the inner workings of Wall Street mogul Pete
Peterson’s “long campaign to get Congress and the White House to
cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks
for corporations and the wealthy” found that many of the CEOs who
had signed on to letters calling for austerity “head firms that pay a
negative tax rate, like Honeywell, GE, Boeing and Verizon. And as the
Public Accountability Initiative notes, many lobby to preserve costly
tax breaks for the wealthy (including the ‘carried interest’ tax loophole
that made Peterson a rich man) and to prevent a tax on Wall Street
speculation.”16
“Fix the Debt” firms are even pushing for a “territorial tax sys-
tem” that will increase the debt by $1 trillion over ten years and en-
courage the offshoring of American jobs. Why would supposed debt
slayers favor this boondoggle? Because, the Institute for Policy Stud-
ies calculates, at least sixty-three “Fix-the-Debt firms would divvy up
a $134 billion windfall.”17 No way that proposal would get traction,
right? Wrong. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Re-
publican who formerly chaired that powerful House Ways and Means
Committee, has long been a staunch supporter of the “territorial tax”
scheme, which would let US-based multinational corporations avoid
paying taxes on dividends they receive from foreign affiliates—a huge
tax break for corporations and an invitation to offshore operations.
No surprise there. Ryan is always pitching proposals to balance bud-
gets on the backs of working people (Medicaid vouchers, raising the
retirement age, gambling Social Security money on Wall Street) while
opposing tax hikes for wealthy campaign donors and corporations.18
What was surprising was the 2013 Reuters report headlined:
“Obama might back territorial tax system: business chief.”19 The pres-
ident had just been reelected after he ripped Republican presidential
nominee Mitt Romney and Ryan—the party’s vice-presidential stan-
dard bearer—for proposing tax breaks for billionaires and corporations
that would not “invest in our children’s education or rebuild our roads
or put more folks back to work.”20 Now a White House official was
telling Reuters that, while the president was not up for “a pure territo-
rial system” he was “eager to ‘pursue corporate tax reform that lowers
the rate.’”21 Obama’s impure compromise of 2015 was to tax the off-
shore profits of corporations at a rate of 14 percent—as opposed to
the statutory federal income tax rate of 35 percent. Citizens for Tax
Justice, the watchdog and advocacy group responsible for ground-
breaking reports of corporate tax evasion, examined the Obama plan
and concluded that “it’s hard to see why his approach makes sense.
The companies currently holding profits in foreign tax havens accu-
mulated these profits over a period when the statutory federal income
tax rate stood at its current 35 percent. These companies shifted some
of their profits offshore to avoid paying the statutory rate on their U.S.
profits, and they should not receive a reward for dodging their tax bills
in the form of a substantially lower tax rate.”22
Yes, it is hard to see how this approach makes much sense, unless
of course tax proposals that ask wealthy individuals and corporations
to pay their fair share are off the table. And, for the most part, they are.
Not officially off the table, mind you. President Obama and others
still float tax-the-rich proposals, and they can even get a bit of trac-
tion. But the option of seriously taxing the rich, as happened in the
days of radicals like Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, is so far off the
table that it is ridiculed. The Washington groupthink is as ubiquitous
as it is favorable to the elites. In 2015, when Vermont Senator Bernie
Sanders and Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky introduced a
modest proposal to close corporate loopholes, with an eye toward rais-
ing needed revenues and removing incentives to move jobs overseas,
Forbes explained that the proposal was “swimming against the tide of
conventional thinking” because so many “policymakers today take it
for granted that foreign investment must be subsidized through the
tax code.”23
Not popular wisdom, mind you. Polls routinely show that there is
overwhelming support for taxing billionaires and banks at substan-
tially higher rates. A February 2015 AP survey found that “68 percent
of those questioned said wealthy households pay too little in federal
taxes; only 11 percent said the wealthy pay too much.” Fifty-six per-
cent of those surveyed favored substantial new taxes on the immense
capital gains of the rich (including 46 percent of Republicans) while
Unfortunately, the misery has not ended, even if the news media
coverage of it has. The official unemployment rate did begin to de-
crease after hitting its peak in the fall of 2009. Five years later, it finally
fell below 6 percent, and it continued to creep down to 5.5 percent
in mid-2015.30 As we note in Chapter 2, the “official” unemployment
rate is only one of the many strands of data about unemployment pro-
duced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While there is an “official”
unemployment rate identified as the “U-3” figure that is reported each
month as the measure of what percentage of folks have jobs and what
percentage do not, there is also an “unofficial” rate, the “U-6” figure,
that more precisely measures the number of Americans who are not
just unemployed but also those who have given up actively looking
for work and those so “underemployed” that are unlikely to be able to
support themselves or their families.31 Forbes says, and we agree, that
the “unofficial” U-6 number is “a better (though still flawed) indicator
of labor market conditions.” While the U-3 number is unreasonably
optimistic, the U-6 number is realistic.
The two numbers are very different. For instance, while the “offi-
cial” unemployment rate was 5.5 percent in March 2015, when there
was much celebration about the recovery from the Great Recession,
the “unofficial” rate was 10.9 percent. That’s right, almost six years
after the official unemployment rate “peaked” in 2009, the realis-
tic unemployment rate in 2015 was still at a level that 2009 reports
characterized as a “nightmare.” For many Americans this is indeed
a living nightmare of epic proportions. The pioneering analysts of
modern American inequality Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel long
ago argued that there is “economic apartheid in America,” producing
powerful evidence of connections between racial disparity and eco-
nomic inequality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the jobless
data of not just the recent past but right now.32 The Atlantic reminds
us that “the unemployment rate for blacks has always been at least 60
percent higher than for whites.”33 Among young African American
men today, joblessness is five times higher than for white Ameri-
cans.34 In deindustrialized urban communities, the number of people
who are out of work is generally high, but for the young people of
now service sector jobs, where the remaining two-thirds of all workers
are currently employed, are disappearing. Because of, but not limited
to technology advances, these middle-income jobs are not likely to
come back, effectively hollowing out . . . America’s middle class and
leaving millions of unemployed and underemployed workers with
limited future prospects. The effect of these trends on American jobs
were significantly aggravated by the “Great Recession.”43
moved from one plant to Canada and from the other to Mexico. As the
second plant was shuttered in Fenton in 2009, thousands of United
Auto Workers union members rallied outside it. The local UAW pres-
ident told the crowd, “This is no longer a business issue, but a social
issue. The corporations failed and they had to borrow from the U.S.
taxpayers. Now they want to carry U.S. taxpayers’ money across the
borders.”46
Which brings us to trade policy—the economic issue that presi-
dents since Reagan have worked hardest to keep off the table.
For Americans who seek the debate that must be had about the in-
tersection of technology and society—and about the damage that is
done when political and economic and media elites take issues off the
table—Kaptur has some counsel: consider how this country handles
trade policy. This, she says, is “where the real knife was put in the
flesh.”47
As with debates about technological change and the dislocation that
extends from it, debates about trade policy are portrayed as compli-
cated—too complicated for citizens and even for members of Congress
to understand. As with debates about technological change, debates
about trade policy are portrayed as delicate—too delicate to be trusted
to popular opinion or popular intervention. As with debates about
technological change, debates about trade policy are portrayed as es-
sential—too essential to question the deals that are done or the deals
that will be done. Those who raise concerns about the economic and
social disruption that results from flawed trade policies are constantly
portrayed as ill-informed or simply emotional about change that is
inevitable. Critics of specific free-trade agreements and the broader
model of international arrangement on which they are constructed
find themselves dismissed by the likes of Anne O. Krueger, a top Inter-
national Monetary Fund official, as having just two motivations: “One
was fear; the other a desire to protect vested interests.”48
that technocrats and the CEOs they work for are not inclined to put
issues on the table when citizens could still have a role in developing
policies. Best to tell the people after the fact that everything has been
settled and that their prospects for repairing the damage done are slim
because that horse is out of the barn.
As America approaches what must be a great debate about the
changes that a digital age will usher in; as we consider the implications
of technological changes that will eliminate millions of jobs, de-skill
many of the jobs that remain, and create only a handful of new posi-
tions for digital managers and robot repairwomen; and as we look for
ways in which to share rather than concentrate the wealth yielded by
reducing workforces, it is vital to understand that the United States
has been here before—frequently. And that the United States has
messed up—badly. The problem was not that the people were too
“protectionist,” too fearful, too confused to make the right demands.
The problem was that the people were aggressively discouraged from
making demands that were every bit as appropriate, and far more nec-
essary for society, than the demands of the CEOs and the bankers.
For more than thirty years, under Democratic and Republican
presidents, with the approval of Congresses controlled by both par-
ties, the United States has embraced trade and investment policies that
the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions argues “have reflected the influence of powerful corporate inter-
ests. They protect what’s important to corporate America but do little
or nothing to safeguard the rights of workers and the environment
here and around the world. They fuel a race to the bottom in living
standards.”52
That race to the bottom has been measured, charted, detailed, and
revealed. The data is devastating. Since Congress approved the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States,
Canada, and Mexico in 1993, after a push by Democratic President
Bill Clinton and Republican House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich,
presidents and “opposition” leaders have in remarkably bipartisan
fashion adopted a long list of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and re-
lated deals. Each of these FTAs has made it easier for multinational
tee of Americans for Financial Reform who writes about the impact
of trade policy on domestic regulations. “Under the North American
Free Trade Agreement, for instance, companies including Exxon Mo-
bil, Dow Chemical and Eli Lilly have attempted to overrule Canadian
regulations on offshore oil drilling, fracking, pesticides, drug patents
and other issues.”56
This is an extreme example of how issues are taken off the table—
and of how popular movements that beat corporations in domestic-
policy debates can still be thwarted. But it is increasingly popular in an
age of globalization and ever-expanding corporate reach. That reach
concerns progressive populists and honest conservatives. “[Under]
ISDS, U.S. investors abroad and foreign investors in the United States
can collect damages from the treasuries of their host governments by
virtue of the judgments of arbitration panels that are entirely out-
side of the legal structure of the respective countries,” observes Daniel
Ikenson, the director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Cen-
ter for Trade Policy Studies. “This all raises serious questions about
democratic accountability, sovereignty, checks and balances, and the
separation of power.”57
When progressive reformers from Americans for Financial Re-
form and Cato Institute libertarians are in agreement, that ought
to put issues on the table. In a functional democracy, where po-
litical parties compete on the basis of ideas and issues, revelations
about “secret tribunals” with the power to impose fines on Ameri-
cans for passing laws would be a call to the barricades. Yet, after the
2014 elections shifted control of the US Senate to Republicans who
had spent the previous six years seeking to derail Barack Obama’s
presidency, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
embraced Obama’s request for “Fast Track” Trade Promotion Au-
thority to allow the president to negotiate a sweeping new Trans-Pa-
cific Partnership trade deal without consulting Congress. Even as
he admitted that “it’s an enormous grant of power, obviously, from
a Republican Congress to a Democratic president,” McConnell said
he was comfortable letting Obama do the deal without the proce-
dural hurdles. Why? The Republican leader explained that “what
the American people are saying is they want us to look for areas of
agreement, and this certainly is one of them.”58
No, they’re not.
In 2014 Hart Research Associates and Chesapeake Beach Con-
sulting polled Americans on the question of whether Congress
should grant “Fast Track” authority to the president. Sixty-two per-
cent of those surveyed said they were opposed, while only 28 percent
expressed support—and only 12 percent were firmly in favor of the
idea. “Demographically, opposition is very broad, with no more than
one-third of voters in any region of the country or in any age cohort
favoring fast track,” reported the pollsters. Then they did something
fascinating. Recognizing that Americans get limited information
about trade debates, the pollsters set out “to simulate a public de-
bate over the merits of fast track and the proposed TPP trade deal,
by presenting each respondent with an equal number of arguments
made by organizations supporting and opposing fast track.” With
more information, overall opposition rose to 65 percent.59
McConnell was entirely wrong about the will of the people, a fact
that could not have escaped the wily career politician. But the sena-
tor had a clear sense of his political responsibility in a country where
men like McConnell understand the “democratic infrastructure” as a
network of campaign donors and lobbyists. The top donors to Mc-
Connell’s 2014 reelection bid were individuals and political action
committees associated with the “Securities and Investment” indus-
tries—ardent supporters of free trade.60 McConnell was also clear that
he would not be called out for rejecting the popular will. In an age
of steadily stenographic media coverage of economic debates, there
is little or no accountability on complex issues for politicians such as
Mitch McConnell—or Barack Obama.
When Obama was bidding for the Democratic presidency nomina-
tion in 2008, he defined himself as a candidate of “hope and change” in
a number of ways. He thrilled labor audiences in primary states such as
Wisconsin by denouncing policies that had saddled the United States
with NAFTA, the permanent normalization of trade with China,
and yawning trade deficits. Obama promised to scrap the secretive,
earlier, Obama sounded an awful lot like the free-trader the Cana-
dians had been assured he would be. All that primary-season rheto-
ric about fighting to protect workers, was just, Obama said, another
way of “opening up a dialogue.” Fortune was satisfied. “The general
campaign is on, independent voters up for grabs, and Barack Obama
is toning down his populist rhetoric—at least when it comes to free
trade.” Yes, of course, the business magazine observed, NAFTA would
remain “the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Mid-
westerners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in
their hometowns.” But the CEOs and the bankers could rest assured,
Fortune chirped, for “the presumptive Democratic nominee suggests
he doesn’t want to unilaterally blow up NAFTA after all.”66
Journalist and commentator David Sirota summed the whole cha-
rade up when he explained, “Here you have a policy—NAFTA—that
is among the most unpopular policies of the last generation, according
to polls. Here you have a candidate who campaigned against it in the
primary. And within weeks of getting the general election, here you
have that same candidate running to Corporate America’s magazine
of record to reassure Wall Street about that same policy.”67 President
Obama did more than that. Despite opposition from the workers and
environmentalists and human rights activists he promised to repre-
sent, he signed sweeping free-trade agreements with South Korea,
Colombia, and Panama.68 And in his 2015 State of the Union Address
the president announced that he wanted to work with McConnell and
the Republicans to enact the biggest trade agreements since NAFTA:
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Asian countries and a Trans-
atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe.
Members of Obama’s own party, led by Senators Elizabeth War-
ren and Bernie Sanders, raised objections. But the president was hav-
ing none of it. He ripped on his fellow Democrats and labor unions
that raised entirely legitimate democracy concerns about specific
threats to financial regulations—saying they “don’t know what they’re
talking about.” The president actually compared his own party’s pro-
gressives to the conspiracy theorists on the right. Recalling that Tea
Party activists had tried to derail healthcare reform with claims that
Think about it. The Republicans stand before the nation, malign our
president’s record of achievements, denigrate women and immigrant
families, double-down on trickle-down, and tell their false story. We
respond with crickets, tumbleweeds, and a cynical move to delay and
limit our own party debates. Four debates and only four debates—we
are told, not asked—before voters in our earliest states make their de-
cision. This is totally unprecedented in our party. This sort of rigged
process has never been attempted before.
Calling for more debates, O’Malley bluntly declared, “We are the
Democratic Party, not the Undemocratic Party. If we are to debate
debates, the topic should be how many, not how few.”84
As the stilted and dysfunctional 2016 campaign developed, it be-
came increasingly evident that both of the nation’s dominant political
organizations had become Undemocratic Parties.
reason: a great deal was at stake. Control of the US Senate was up for
grabs, and with it the ability of President Obama and his Democratic
allies to guide the legislative agenda of the nation, to secure approval
of nominees to the US Supreme Court and the federal bench, to open
up or shut down investigations, to force compromises on questions of
taxation and spending. At the state level, where the brutal battles over
labor rights, public education, and social services had played out over
the previous four years, the overwhelming majority of governorships
and legislative seats were up for election.86 Former Republican Na-
tional Committee chairman Haley Barbour announced that “the most
important election for Republicans is 2014, not 2016.” Vice President
Joe Biden echoed the theme. “Folks,” he shouted at a rally in Iowa,
“this election is even more important than the two elections [where]
you elected Barack and me.”87
Even allowing for election-season hyperbole, it was clear that this
election was a big deal. The wealthiest and most self-interested bil-
lionaires in America wore their hands out signing checks to finance
the most intense campaigning the country had ever seen in a midterm
election. The president jetted from battleground state to battleground
state on a frenzied final schedule that literally had him crossing paths
with top Republican campaigners on airport tarmacs. Thousands of
candidates ran themselves ragged, tens of thousands of volunteers
woke early and went to bed late in a final push toward an Election Day
that produced results so dramatic that they drew not just domestic
but international attention. The top-line results were good news for
Republicans who took control of the US Senate, held the US House,
and expanded their position of strength in the states. Yet, as the New
York Times noted in an editorial published a week after the election,
while the numbers were “bad for Democrats, [they were] even worse
for democracy.”88
If you met three Americans who were of voting age on the morning
after Election Day 2014, two of them did not cast a ballot. The two
nonvoters would, on balance, be younger and poorer than the one
voter—meaning that a small, older, and relatively affluent minority
picked the winners and defined the governance of the most powerful
country in the world for the next two years. According to an analysis
by U.S. News and World Report, “in exit polls from [the] midterms, for
example, only 13 percent of voters were under 30. Nonvoters are also
more racially diverse than the voting. . . . More than 40 percent of
likely nonvoters in the 2014 elections identified as Hispanic, black or
other racial/ethnic minorities, compared with 22 percent of likely vot-
ers.”89 Vermont Senator Sanders reflected on those figures and said,
“We should not be satisfied with a ‘democracy’ in which more than 60
percent of our people don’t vote and some 80 percent of young people
and low-income Americans fail to vote.”90
According to United States Elections Project estimates, just 33
percent of the voting-age population cast a ballot for the highest office
on the ballot. That’s less than the 36 percent turnout figure generally
reported after the 2014 elections because the United States disenfran-
chises millions of American adults who are imprisoned, on probation,
on parole, or who face other roadblocks to being able to vote.91 But
even using the restrictive standards that get us to the 36 percent figure,
the collapse in participation was dramatic. The nation’s most populous
states, all of which had contests for governor, lower-level statewide
posts, congressional seats, and in some cases US Senate seats, saw dis-
mal turnout: 28 percent in Texas, 29 percent in New York, 31 percent
in California. Forty-three states reported turnouts of less than 50 per-
cent, which meant that their elections were decided by a minority of
eligible voters.92
Turnout in 2014 was the worst since 1942, when the United States
had just entered World War II. And a number of states, as U.S. News
and World Report noted, “saw nosedives of crazy proportions”—drops
of 10 percent or more from the rates seen in the relatively low-turnout
2010 election.93
Let’s make this more concrete. Following both the 2010 and 2014
midterm elections, the pundits and news media were pontificating
about how Americans had rejected Obama’s policies and wanted a
more conservative approach to governing. The implication was that
millions of Americans got a taste of the Democrats and then switched
over to the Republicans. One could logically conclude that Ameri-
cans were clinically insane as they flip-flopped every two years from
Democratic landslides to Republican landslides. In fact, very little
of that happened. Instead, the younger and poorer Democrats sim-
ply stopped voting in midterm elections at much greater rates than
did older and wealthier Republicans. This point is well understood
in Republican circles, where repressing the voter turnout—especially
among younger, poorer, and non-white citizens—has become job one
for state governments over the past six years. But the approach is not
new. In 1980 conservative political strategist Paul Weyrich laid out the
strategy when he told a gathering of right-wing organizers, “I don’t
want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people.
They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are
not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite can-
didly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”94
Mission Accomplished! In the 2014 election the Republicans won a
whopping 59-seat advantage over the Democrats in the 435-member
House of Representatives. Thanks to gerrymandered district lines—
drawn largely by Republicans who won control of statehouses in the
low-voter-turnout off-year elections of 2010—the Republicans were
able to win 57 percent of the House seats with only 51 percent of
the total votes for the 435 House races. But this is where it gets in-
teresting: 2014 Republican House candidates nationwide—winners
and losers—received the votes of only 16 percent of the voting-age
citizens of the United States, less than 1 in 6 Americans. Things are
around the same in the Senate, where all the Republican candidates
for the hundred Senate seats received votes from just under 21 percent
of the voting-age population, or one in five Americans.95 And, again,
this is the “majority” party, with commanding control of Congress
and a determination to use its power. But what sort of “mandate” did
they really have with such flimsy popular support?* Matters were only
marginally better for the Democrats the last time they controlled both
the House and the Senate, following the 2008 election. The party’s
*Note to pundits: Can we please stop using the phrase “the people have spoken” after
each of these low-turnout elections? How about: “If you meet six people, maybe
one of them wanted this result.”
his supporters are talking about when they speak of “a political revo-
lution.” No change of consequence, certainly no change for the better,
will come within the narrow confines of the low-information, low-
engagement, low-turnout politics that now defines our “democracy.”
How did America’s politics become so decayed and dysfunctional?
Why is this country barreling toward citizenless democracy? The way
to answer that question is to examine the democratic infrastructure,
and to recognize the necessary role it plays in sustaining a strong de-
mocracy. America has a rich and notable history in this regard, one that
has played a prominent role in the nation’s development and that has
inspired the world. Today’s rulers prefer that this history be ignored.
If, on the other hand, the history is restored to the people, it provides
a remarkable set of tools for renewing and extending democracy in
America. It is time to exhume the tools. With this history of the de-
velopment of democratic infrastructure we can better understand the
current predicament, and generate a vision and a roadmap for truly
empowering citizens to make the essential economic issues that are now
off the table the essential political issues they must be. This is the key to
making the United States into a self-governing society, and to making
the United States of the twenty-first century a place of prosperity and
hope for all Americans.
DEMOCRATIC INFRASTRUCTURE
T
he immense economic problems that are being aggra-
vated and accelerated by the technological revolution
raise fundamental issues that require popular involvement
to be resolved in a humane and sustainable manner. Ours is a citi-
zenless democracy, where core political and economic decisions are
made by the wealthy few for the wealthy few. Consequential eco-
nomic issues are off the table. Voting is hard. Money rules the day.
Instead of guiding the ship of state, the vast majority of Americans
are on individual rafts in the middle of the ocean watching that ship
sail off into the distance. Citizens need democratic infrastructure to
be effective participants in governance, but the democratic infra-
structure of the United States seems to be disappearing faster than
the polar ice caps.
The good news is that there is a rich and underappreciated tradi-
tion in American history that respects the importance of a credible
democratic infrastructure, and that has fought for its development—
151
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its
most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant peo-
ple who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into
slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their
transportation hither. . . . And he is now exciting those very people
to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he
had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also ob-
truded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit
against the lives of another.
* In the early days of the American experiment, each state was required to establish its
own constitution. Since then, it has been a standard that states have constitutions.
As we will explain later in this chapter, they are much more dynamic documents
than the US Constitution. Many states have held, and continue to hold, constitu-
tional conventions not just to write the documents but to update them. Others have
established relatively easy processes for amending constitutions by petitioning to
schedule referendum votes on particular issues.
historian Alexander Keyssar puts it, was “that men who were financially
strapped would band together to defend their own interests.”11
The revolution against Britain had been fought by the poor and
those of limited means, and they did so inspired by the radical dem-
ocratic words of Thomas Paine in Common Sense. It is for that reason
that Benjamin Franklin told Paine that he, Paine, “was more respon-
sible than any other living person on this continent for the creation
of what are called the United States of America.”12 The vision of the
farmers and artisans who attended to battle was not a war to simply
switch flags and end up with a native ruling class over them. It was
to create a far more egalitarian and fair society that they participated
in governing. Shays’ Rebellion of 1786–1787 is the best known of a
number of popular uprisings throughout this period that alarmed the
elites that gathered in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution in the
summer of 1787.13
Indeed, the federal Constitution was in significant part a reaction
to a series of more democratic state constitutions that had already
been drafted and approved in the new Republic. The most radical was
written in the summer and fall of 1776 in Pennsylvania by a group
that included Franklin and Paine. Much of the momentum came
from rural farmers, the poor, artisans, and the mid-level merchants
of Philadelphia, who by 1775 had become, as William Hogeland puts
it, “a powerful street constituency in favor of American independence
as a way to promote economic equality.”14 The Pennsylvania con-
stitution allowed for universal male suffrage and the election of a
powerful unicameral legislature for one-year terms. The judiciary
and executive branches were weak, and no bill could become law af-
ter being passed until it had been in print for a year so citizens could
respond to it. It also called for the state to promote public education
and the establishment of universities. The first assemblies elected
under this constitution “began passing laws to regulate wealth and
foster economic development for ordinary people.” Laws specifically
were passed, according to Hogeland, to “restrict monopolies, equal-
ize taxes, abolish slavery, and otherwise pursue, now through legiti-
mate government, the old goals of popular agitation.”15
have emerged from the deliberations.”34 That same year, noting the
Constitution’s complicity with slavery, future president John Quincy
Adams wrote, “The constitution is a compact with Hell, and a life
devoted to its destruction would be a life well spent.”35
CONSTITUTIONS ON MILITARISM
It is ironic and colossally tragic that the two areas where the US Con-
stitution and Bill of Rights anticipated and spoke most directly to rag-
ing perennial threats to democracy—threats that preceded capitalism
and that will survive it as well—are today those provisions that are
almost entirely ignored. These are the limitations on militarism and
the recognition of the crucial role of the government in guaranteeing
the existence of a viable independent press, or news media. Both relate
strongly to the deep concern of the framers to prevent corruption,
which they regarded as a deadly threat to any governing system. “My
wish,” Madison said, “is that the national legislature be as uncorrupt
as possible.” The Articles of Confederation, which preceded the Con-
stitution, strictly prohibited any person working for the United States
or any state government from accepting “any present, emolument,
office or title of any kind.” As law professor Zephyr Teachout writes,
“Charges of corruption and its variants were an essential force in the
creation of the Constitution, and part of almost every debate about
government structure.”36
The first great imperative for promoting (or protecting) a demo-
cratic infrastructure are the sections in the federal Constitution lim-
iting the capacity of the government to engage in war. At least six of
the state constitutions drafted prior to 1787 had phrases similar to
this one from the Pennsylvania and North Carolina constitutions:
“As standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they
ought not to be kept up.”37 The US Constitution strictly limits the
war-making power of the president and puts the power to declare war
and the obligation to raise funds to pay for war in the hands of Con-
gress. The Constitution’s purpose was “clogging rather than facilitat-
ing war,” as delegate George Mason stated to broad approval during
of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be
dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and
armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing
the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretion-
ary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out
offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of
seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the
people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced
in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing
out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals,
engendered in both. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst
of continual warfare.42
In his 1796 “farewell address” to the nation—a letter written with the
assistance of Alexander Hamilton and read before at least one branch of
Congress annually for the past 150 years, and a great inspiration to the
warfare head-on, and the wisdom and counsel of the framers provides
the necessary starting point.
rance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm
themselves with the power knowledge gives.”51
An institution this important to the very existence of democracy is
not something you roll the dice on and hope you get lucky. There was
no sense in this period (and for a long time thereafter) that as long as
the government did not censor newspapers, private citizens or busi-
nesses would have sufficient incentive to produce a satisfactory press.
Indeed, the Constitution’s creation of the Post Office was above all
else a commitment to seeing that newspapers were distributed effec-
tively and inexpensively. That is why Jefferson and Madison met with
President Washington and urged him to name as the first postmaster
general the most prominent and radical of the country’s pamphle-
teers, Thomas Paine.52 For the first century of American history most
newspapers were distributed by the mails, and the Post Office barely
charged newspapers anything to be delivered. (In around 10 percent
of the cases, newspaper delivery through the mails was free.) It was
quite consciously a subsidy by the federal government to make it eco-
nomically viable for many more newspapers to exist than would other-
wise be the case. Newspapers constituted more than 90 percent of the
Post Office’s weighted traffic, yet provided only about 10 percent of
its revenues. If the United States government subsidized journalism in
the second decade of the twenty-first century as a percentage of GDP
to the same extent it did in the first half of the nineteenth century, it
would spend in the area of $35 billion annually.53
This was the case through much of the nineteenth century. The
Post Office was by far the largest and most important branch of the
federal government, with 80 percent of federal employees as of 1860.
Delivery in major cities was often two or three times daily, six or
seven days per week. Newspaper subsidies constituted a policy that
worked magnificently; the United States had vastly more newspa-
pers than any other nation on a per capita basis during this period.
When Alexis de Tocqueville made his journey across America in the
1830s, he was astounded by the prevalence of newspapers far be-
yond that to be found anywhere else in the world. “The number of
newspapers,” he wrote, “exceeds all belief.” He wrote of the close
CHANGING CONSTITUTIONS
There is one aspect of the Constitution that has not been ignored, to
the resounding approval of those who like the status quo: it is noto-
riously difficult to revise or update. The US Constitution has been
amended only sixteen times in the past 220 years; two of those were the
prohibition amendments that cancelled each other out, and six other
amendments were largely noncontroversial bookkeeping measures.
Consequently, the 1791 document including the Bill of Rights re-
mains largely intact, with a mere eight significant amendments since
George Washington left office, and three of those were the great
Reconstruction amendments that passed on the heels of the nation’s
bloodiest war—when defeated Southern states could not participate.60
Not only is the Constitution out of date, constitutional scholar Daniel
Lazare writes, but “by imposing an unchangeable political structure
on a generation that has never had an opportunity to vote on the sys-
tem as a whole, it amounts to a terrible dictatorship of the past over
the present.” Because it is “virtually impossible to alter the political
structure in any fundamental way,” Lazare adds, Americans have “one
of the most unresponsive political systems this side of the former So-
viet Union.”61
Before anyone reports Lazare to Homeland Security or the
National Security Agency, recall that this was precisely Jefferson’s
position as well. “Each generation is as independent as the one pre-
ceding, as that was of all that had gone before. It has then, like them,
a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most
promotive of its own happiness,” Jefferson wrote in 1816. He called
on the Constitution to be amended so that there would be a new
constitutional convention every “nineteen or twenty years,” such
that every generation would have the opportunity to create its own
politics and governance.62
This is, again, where states provide a rich alternative approach in
American history; unlike the federal Constitution, popular involvement
in state constitutions is encouraged. “The realm of state constitutional
law is a beehive of activity,” one scholar writes.63 This began back in
the 1770s and 1780s, when states were routinely meeting to draft and
redraft constitutions, and has continued to this day.64 By 2005 the fifty
states had held a combined 233 constitutional conventions, adopted
146 different constitutions, and ratified over six thousand amendments
to their existing constitutions.65 Around ten thousand amendments
have been submitted to voters for consideration. As Zackin put it in
her cleverly titled book, Americans have been “looking for rights in all
the wrong places.”66
If you want to see what democracy looks like, put Washington
DC in your rearview mirror and head to the states. It is here that the
battles for a democratic infrastructure have been waged. In general,
what one finds when examining state constitutions is that “Americans
have used their constitutions to demand protective and intervention-
ist government,” beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.67 In the
constitutions of the various states one finds provisions to address the
concern that Jefferson and Madison highlighted, the need to improve
the lives of those without property. It is here, for example, that nu-
merous states, as a result of popular organizing, have put in place
big businesses that Roosevelt saw as the motor force for fascism. And
for that reason he authorized a comprehensive study of economic con-
centration with an eye to breaking up monopolistic power. “The power
of a few to manage the economic life of the nation must be diffused
among the many or be transferred to the public and its democratically
responsible government. If prices are to be managed and administered,
if the nation’s business is to be allotted by plan and not by competition,
that power should not be vested in any private group or cartel, however
benevolent its professions profess to be.”77
This anti-monopoly thrust was curtailed as the nation entered full
war preparations with the start of the European war in 1939. The
United States entered the war in 1941, and it was at this moment,
with clarity and conviction, that President Roosevelt and others laid
out a vision of how to ensure the survival and growth of democracy.
Of course FDR had incentive to define the war effort in noble terms
to galvanize enthusiasm among the mass of the population for the
immense sacrifices required during wartime. But historians who have
studied the matter are convinced that it was far more than that; this
was an issue dear to FDR and to many people in the United States at
the time.78 The signal statements were the “Four Freedoms” and the
“Second Bill of Rights.” It was a part of the weltanschauung, or dom-
inant world view, that crystallized in the later 1930s—a period with
a thriving labor union movement and immense popularity for gov-
ernment programs like Social Security—that saw the United States
become a much more progressive and democratic nation. “For the
past several years,” Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie
wrote in 1940, “practically everybody claims to be a liberal.”79
FDR unveiled the Four Freedoms in his January 1941 State of the
Union Address to Congress. He offered up four universal principles
for a free and democratic world, which he hoped would define the war
against the Axis powers:
In short, the war was not being fought merely to defeat an enemy.
It was a pivot point after which nothing would be the quite the same.
Countries would change, and for the better, recognizing that the
best defense against totalitarianism was the shaping of a good society
where poverty and militarism were to be eliminated. These were core
freedoms that all people deserved. And Roosevelt was certain that, af-
ter struggling through the Great Depression and World War II, that
Americans were ready for the change.
The Four Freedoms became a big deal. “The people of the United
States through their President have given the world a new Magna
Carta of democracy,” wrote newspaper editor William Allen White.81
By early 1942, after America entered the war, it was these criteria that
would be used by a majority of Americans to explain why the nation
was at war. A May 1942 Intelligence Survey showed that the Four
Freedoms “have a powerful and genuine appeal to seven persons in
ten.” It became a battle for public opinion, albeit a bit one-sided.
Even the conservative Saturday Evening Post—whose president Wal-
ter D. Fuller was chairman of the board of the vehemently anti–New
Deal National Association of Manufacturers—threw in the towel. It
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy
for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an Amer-
ican standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be
content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if
some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or
one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength,
under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among
them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury,
freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our
rights to life and liberty.
As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our in-
dustrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate
to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual
freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
“Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out
of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-
evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under
which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all
regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must
be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights,
to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part
upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice
for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot
be lasting peace in the world.83
Few would question that FDR is one of the three or four most
important presidents in American history, and by many accounts he
and Lincoln are the greatest. Here he is calling for radical, even rev-
olutionary, additions to the rights guaranteed to all Americans, with
the spectacular policy implications that necessarily follow. In effect he
is saying that unemployment and poverty should be unconstitutional,
a massive amount of democratic infrastructure must be created, and
monopolistic big business is now officially a dubious force.
FDR did not seek constitutional amendments. Instead he asked
Congress to “explore the means for implementing this economic bill
of rights—for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress so to
do.” FDR recognized that there were dangers of a “rightist reaction”
that would not only oppose the Second Bill of Rights but would seek
“to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s.” FDR was un-
sparing in his assessment of his opponents. He famously had said in
communism was every bit as evil, as Patman did in his foreword to the
1947 fascism report.97 And eventually anti-fascism just became suspect,
period. The liberal New Dealer Durr, who had a distinguished career
at the FCC, was redbaited out of office and had trouble finding suitable
employment for years.98
That last hurrah for the issues in the Second Bill of Rights came
in 1948. Wallace bid for the presidency on the ticket of a new Pro-
gressive Party, opposing President Harry Truman and more cautious
Democrats on a third-party platform that not only embraced the
component parts of economic bill of rights but also included a strong
call for demilitarization that was right out of the Four Freedoms.
Wallace also called for an end to Jim Crow, recognizing and em-
bracing much of what Willkie and civil rights campaigners such as
A. Philip Randolph were saying how racial division had to be ended
for the nation as whole to progress. Though polls showed him to be
competitive early on, Wallace’s numbers declined as the former vice
president faced relentless redbaiting attacks. Historians suggest that
Wallace’s candidacy forced Truman to support integration of the
military and wage hikes.99 But Wallace, and the drive for a Second
Bill of Rights, were finished.
By the end of the 1940s the country experienced a massive red
scare—“fear itself” returned with a vengeance—which ended labor’s
surge and put it on the defensive, and established a continual warfare
economy. By 1949, if not earlier, to advocate loudly what the president
had proposed in January 1944 might be enough to cost a person her
job, and it certainly would have stigmatized someone as insufficiently
patriotic, if not a red. The weltanschauung had seemingly turned on a
dime. But, crucially, the Red Scare was not a return to the normalcy of
the 1920s, as FDR feared; most of the existing New Deal reforms and
much of the democratic infrastructure were too popular to be rolled
back. They provided the foundation for the next democratic surge in
the 1960s.
The Four Freedoms and the Second Bill of Rights were most influ-
ential abroad. The United States occupied Japan and oversaw the Allied
occupation of Germany. In both cases the occupiers were concerned
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands
an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally commit-
ted in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowl-
edge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where
leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of
boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves
not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the
desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place
which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the un-
derstanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned
with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
world, the democratic socialist Martin Luther King Jr. and eventual
Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader were the moderates.*
Astonishingly, organized labor, the longstanding nemesis of capital
and organized wealth, where socialists frolicked, often was cast in the
uncharacteristic role of conservative bastion, or at least as a defender
of the status quo. To some extent this owed to the immediate postwar
purging of the radical and communist organizers who built up many
of the great American trade unions in mid-century; this stripped the
movement of many of its most principled and visionary activists. Or-
ganized labor still aggressively supported liberal candidates for office,
and some elements of it were strong proponents of civil rights, but it
tended to be uncomfortable with criticism of the military-industrial
complex and the war in Vietnam, and had little apparent sympathy for
the student left, black militants, or the counterculture. It did not ap-
pear to enjoy being outflanked on the political left, and was very cool
toward the 1972 McGovern campaign, despite that campaign’s having
what was possibly the most pro-labor platform for a major party in US
presidential election history.
* Here is a sample of the voice of moderation, from King’s 1967 speech announc-
ing his opposition to the war in Vietnam: “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom
of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering
reality, we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen concerned’ commit-
tees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru.
They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned
about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen
other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and
profound change in American life and policy. . . . This is the role our nation has
taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to
give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of
overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of
the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-ori-
ented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights,
are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme
materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolu-
tion of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many
of our past and present policies.” Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,”
New York, New York, April 4, 1967, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php
/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s several reforms were en-
acted to expand and deepen the democratic infrastructure. As noted,
voting rights were extended to all Americans over eighteeen. The
primary process was opened up so voters could have more influence
over their party’s nomination process. Congress passed the toughest
federal campaign-finance laws ever, all with the intent of getting the
influence of wealth out of the electoral process.125 Public broadcasting
was finally authorized in 1967, with the implicit charter to provide
a voice to the underserved parts of the population.126 Colleges and
universities were serving an enormous number of first-generation stu-
dents, with what seems today like virtually free tuition at great public
universities. The federal government began funding public education
in 1965 to bring poor school districts closer to those standards found
in schools in more affluent communities.127 Poverty was in decline
and both parties were committed to the war on it. Economic inequal-
ity was at an all-time low, assisted by high rates of unionization and
progressive income taxation. Only the war, and the stain of militarism,
stood as an intractable barrier, and the antiwar movement and New
Left had that scourge in their sights.
And that’s not all. Scholars like Cass Sunstein persuasively argue
that had Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 presidential election—he
came very close—the Supreme Court would have ruled soon thereaf-
ter to, in effect, make FDR’s Second Bill of Rights part of the Consti-
tution: that is, given that the Constitution required the establishment
of a number of democratic infrastructure initiatives, and given that
all people are entitled to a basic standard of living so they can effec-
tively participate in society, poverty and excessive inequality were, in
effect, unconstitutional.128 Likewise, it probably would have mandated
equal public-education spending for all children, thus ending the
class-biased system that had been aggravated by suburbanization.129
Outside the court, activists came close to having television commer-
cials aimed at children prohibited, and even launched a debate about
whether prisons were necessary any longer.130
Everywhere one turned it seemed that wealth and privilege were
on the defensive and the democratic infrastructure was being built out
* It was left to the entirely unrepentant Milton Friedman to grab big business by
the collar, much like when Don Corleone shook Johnny Fontane and told him to
stop crying and to “act like a man” in The Godfather. In a 1970 article in the New
York Times, Friedman wrote that businessmen who think they are protecting free
enterprise by accepting that their businesses have a social responsibility to solve
social problems like discrimination and pollution “and whatever else may be the
catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers” are only making matters worse.
“Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces
that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.” He in-
troduced, instead, the Friedman doctrine: “The Social Responsibility of Business is
to Increase its Profits.” Period. See Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of
Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times, September 13, 1970, p. 33.
that it has been unable to use or has refused to use ever before, it is in
for the most disruptive, most disheartening season since the earliest
New Deal days of 40 years ago. The important thing to understand
from the business point of view is that the old ways of dealing with
Congress just won’t hack it anymore.”138
Harlow did have a carrot at the end of his stick: “The hard fact is
that, each time American business does unify, does weld together its
thunderbolt, it wins hands down in Washington. That very fact gave
us the Taft-Hartley Act . . . passed over a veto by a two-thirds vote.”139
Harlow did more than talk. He played a large role in the formation of
the Business Roundtable in 1972, a lobbying group with membership
restricted to the most powerful corporate CEOs, which is chartered
to think in class terms.140
Message received, and then some. There was a tenfold increase in
corporate federal lobbying by the 1980s—such that it eventually be-
came a $9 billion industry by 2014—and K Street became synony-
mous with this burgeoning major industry, much like Madison Avenue
or Wall Street.141 Where better to find insider lobbyists than from
former members of Congress? In the early 1970s, 3 percent of retiring
or exiting members became lobbyists; by 2012 the figure was more
like 50 percent, often earning seven-figure incomes after their stint in
“public service.”142 Washington, DC, accordingly, went from a sleepy
middle-class town of bureaucrats to a booming metropolitan area of
high-rolling lobbyists and fat cat government contractors.143 By 2014,
according to Forbes magazine, the greater Washington, DC, metropol-
itan area housed six of the ten richest counties in the nation.144 And
thanks to a process initiated on the Supreme Court by Justice Lewis
Powell in the late 1970s, beginning in 2010 the US Supreme Court
overturned a century of legislation and jurisprudence and allowed, in
effect, unlimited and unaccountable corporate and individual dona-
tions to political campaigns. With this newly shaped and decidedly
less-democratic infrastructure, the business domination and control
of governance was all but guaranteed.
But that was far from clear in the early 1970s. While the loudest
voices of the radical left had disappeared or were speaking in quieter
tones, and the student left all but vanished, two related developments
threatened to put US business in an even more precarious position.
First, not all young white workers got the memo that they were
supposed to be a bunch of Archie Bunker lunkheads, easily manip-
ulated by politicians using jingoistic and dog whistle racist rhetoric.
The Vietnam War had been fought largely by poor and working-class
Americans, and that experience had a radicalizing effect on more than
a few of them.145 By the early 1970s some of the troops in Vietnam
were in semi-open revolt against their commanders, while for many
of the rest cynicism abounded, and it was very difficult for the war to
be prosecuted. An extraordinary report on the “collapse of the armed
forces” by Marine Corps Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr. was published
in a June 1971 edition of the Armed Forces Journal. It begins with the
following and then goes into detail, particularly about the widespread
“fragging”146 (i.e., murder) of US military officers by the soldiers un-
der their command:
Afros and mod clothing along the line,” Newsweek observed after a
visit to the Lordstown, Ohio, GM plant, “it looks for all the world like
an industrial Woodstock.”150 By 1970 the “situation exploded in an
upsurge of pent-up rank-and-file militancy,” as historian David Noble
explained.151 The early 1970s saw the greatest wave of strike activity,
work stoppages, slowdowns, and wildcat strikes since 1946. In 1970
alone 2.4 million workers engaged in large-scale work stoppages of
one kind or another. The Wall Street Journal characterized the situa-
tion as “the worst within memory.”152 There were aggressive attempts
led by young workers to take over the steelworkers and mineworkers
unions, among others, and throw out the traditional leadership. Man-
agement was “dealing with a workforce,” Fortune informed its readers,
“no longer under union discipline.”153
The concerns of the workers were far more than wages and ben-
efits; after all, real wages for male workers hit their historic peak in
1972. Automation, both in its elimination of jobs and dehumanization
of those that remained, was a huge issue for the young workers. As
Noble put it, workers were not happy with “management’s obsession
with and struggle for control over workers.”154 “It is imperative for
labor,” dissident young longshoremen wrote in a 1971 pamphlet op-
posing union leadership and management, “to challenge the notion
that the employer—in the name of ‘progress’—can simply go ahead
and slash his workforce or close his factory or, as is being planned in
our industry, close an entire port, and to do so without any regard for
the people and community involved.”155
“At the heart of the new mood,” the New York Times reported,
“there is a challenge to management’s authority to run its plants, an
issue that has resulted in some of the hardest fought battles between
industry and labor in the past.” The symbol of this new wave was the
three-week-long 1972 strike at the Lordstown plant led by “a group
of young, hip, and inter-racial autoworkers” whose primary issue was
opposing the “fastest—and most psychically deadening—assembly
line in the world.”156 There were efforts to link this working-class rad-
icalism to student and antiwar activists and liberals in general. As pro-
gressive journalist Jack Newfield put it in 1971, the way to unite these
forces was to build around “the root need to redistribute wealth and
the commitment to broaden democratic participation.”157
The crisis in America’s workplaces grew so severe that in 1971 Nix-
on’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Elliot Richardson,
appointed a special task force to study and propose recommendations
to address the emergence of “blue-collar blues” and “white collar
woes.”158 The subsequent January 1973 report, Work in America, began
with a quote by Albert Camus—“Without work all life goes rotten.
But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”—and went from there.
“Productivity increases and social problems decrease when workers
participate in the work decisions affecting their lives, and when their
responsibility for their work is buttressed by participation in profits.”
The “keystone” of the report was a call for “the redesign of jobs,”
to make them more fulfilling, and there was an important role for
unions and workers and government to play in doing this redesign in
conjunction with business. “It would give, for the first time, a voice to
many workers in an important decision-making process. Citizen par-
ticipation in the arena where the individual’s voice directly affects his
immediate environment may do much to reduce political alienation in
America.”159
This extraordinary report, generated by the Nixon administration
no less, was in many senses a last hurrah for the era’s weltanschauung.
The second development that made the position of US business
more uncertain was that in 1974 the United States entered the worst
recession since the 1930s; it lasted until 1975 and the official unem-
ployment rate climbed to 9 percent, the highest it had been since the
Great Depression. The Watergate scandal as well as the recession
gave the Democrats overwhelming control of the Congress after the
1974 elections. The progressive wing of the Democratic party went
on the offensive and in the middle of the 1970s advocated strongly
for guaranteed full employment, tax reform to make the system more
progressive, excess-profits taxes on large corporations, Ralph Nad-
er’s proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Consumer Protec-
tion, same-day voter registration to encourage and increase turnout,
labor-law reform to benefit unions, and national health insurance
(Medicare for all), among other things.160 Polling revealed large cor-
porations were singularly unpopular institutions deep into the 1970s.
Business was in a precarious position as it sought policies to reestablish
profitability and make it lucrative to invest, especially as it saw auster-
ity—cutbacks in wages and social services for the many and reductions
in taxes on business and the wealthy—as the only possible course. In
1974 Business Week magazine explained the dilemma facing business:
“Some people will obviously have to do with less. . . . It will be a bitter
pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that
big business can have more. Nothing that this nation, or any other na-
tion, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling
job that must be done to make people accept this reality.”161
There was growing elite consensus on the importance of this point.
In 1973 the Trilateral Commission was established by business inter-
ests to examine the “crisis of democracy” facing the leaders of advanced
capitalist nations as they attempted to deal with the problems associ-
ated with the ongoing “democratic surge,” especially in the United
States. This was far from a wingnut operation; it was from the heart of
the establishment and was thoroughly bipartisan. Its 1975 report on
the United States written by Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington
stated that “Al Smith once remarked that ‘the only cure for the evils
of democracy is more democracy.’ Our analysis suggests that applying
that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.
Instead, some of the problems in the United States today stem from
an excess of democracy.”
So the crisis of democracy was . . . too much democracy: “The
effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires
some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some indi-
viduals and groups.”162 F. A. Hayek, the noted free-market economist,
agreed. “Our system of unlimited democracy,” he noted despondently,
forces “persons at the head of government . . . to do things that they
know to be permissive” and wrong, but they must do them to retain
their positions.163
But how realistic was it to believe such a world-class sales job was
possible? The strategy had emerged: an effective sales job by business
and its allies on the glories and primacy of “free enterprise” and the
evils of big government should be complemented by ongoing efforts
to shrink the democratic infrastructure—generating the necessary
amount of “apathy and noninvolvement”—such that people would be
less likely to interfere with governance. “The effort was undertaken,”
as political scientist Sheldon Wolin puts it, “to hammer home the as-
tounding principle that a democratically chosen government was the
enemy of ‘the people.’”164
As for the sales campaign, any timidity was cast aside and the op-
erating logic by the late 1970s was that the best defense is a good
offense. A tidal wave of material not only promoted the genius of
free enterprise, but it also found a new scapegoat to blame for all
the nation’s increasing economic and social problems: liberals, espe-
cially liberal intellectuals. All problems in the nation could be traced
to the loony half-baked ideas of liberals and their effete supporters
in the media and academia. Now that the economy was broken, the
problems there could also be attributed to labor unions and their
lazy, pampered, overweight chieftains. Business was a heroic, All-
American, job-creating institution that all these deadbeat parasites
could never appreciate and wrongly stigmatized. Entrepreneurs and
corporate CEOs were the real heroes of society. Milton Friedman,
fresh off his 1976 Nobel Prize in economics, argued that liberals, like
the kind he was forced to cohabit with at the University of Chicago,
were the “intellectual architects of the suicidal course” the country
was on.165 If the Powell Memo was confidential, former Treasury
Secretary William E. Simon made the same case in a 1978 bestseller
that said what was required was “nothing less than a massive and
unprecedented mobilization of the moral, intellectual and financial
resources” from those who understood the life-and-death imperative
to defend the free enterprise system.166
The campaign was a smashing success.167 The very term liberal,
which had only a few years earlier been embraced by most Demo-
crats and many Republicans, went from a place of respect for a great
political tradition to being filed between drug dealer and pedophile in
the popular lexicon. It became unmentionable; the “L” word. And on
Second, beginning in the 1980s, for the first time in US history, the
federal government began to systematically “privatize” public services
and “outsource” to private firms what had traditionally been govern-
ment activities.175 States and local governments have followed suit,
and both parties participate in the process.176 The purported reason
for privatization and outsourcing was to bring market efficiency to
the public sector; it followed from what Tony Judt described as “the
intellectual shift that marked the last third of the 20th century . . .
the worship of the private sector and the cult of privatization.”177 Re-
search suggests that politics and greed had the most to do with what
the government privatized, and that the efficiency claims were rarely
realized and often flat wrong. Instead, this became a cash cow for
large corporations and wealthy investors and has fanned the flames of
corruption.178 For investors and corporations hard-pressed to locate
profitable investments in the sainted “free market,” having a chance
to grab a fistful of taxpayers’ dollars and take over military functions,
prisons, public schools, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down is a
gift from the heavens, especially when the terms are invariably gen-
erous, with all-but-guaranteed high rates of return. This also creates
powerful lobbies with a decided interest in more militarism, more
prisons, and more privatization of schools, so more public money can
go into their coffers.179 The US government, under Republicans and
Democrats, seems to be dedicated to fattening the bank accounts of
crony capitalists above all else.
But the corruption surrounding privatization and outsourcing is
only the beginning of the damage it does to the democratic infra-
structure. By removing the government from important functions,
it lessens the ability of the citizenry to play a role in the economy
and it locks in business domination. Privatization and outsourc-
ing lessens the ability of government to solve social problems and
therefore generates cynicism toward it. And, to top it off, evidence
suggests privatization has contributed to the rapid escalation of eco-
nomic inequality.180 Ironically, the administration of the government
by the “free market” crowd proves their exact point: government is
corrupt, incompetent, and not to be trusted.181 The end result is a
Furthermore, the present rulers have spent the past forty years
trying to convince everyone that becoming part of an aroused and
engaged and organized citizenry is unnecessary and a waste of time.
Arguably their greatest victory of the past four decades has been con-
verting the longstanding American optimism that democracy can lick
any problem before it into a morose pessimism that there is no alter-
native, and resistance is futile.
Of course it is frustrating for citizens to be fighting old fights for
rights that should have been secured long ago. But the elites know
something that should give us all encouragement: the current rulers
cannot win a fair fight so they must rig the game. In times of crisis,
like the 1970s, their contempt for democracy comes to the surface.
In their hands, the United States has become a nation that, as FDR
warned it might, is coming to share far too many attributes with fas-
cist societies. Unless there are major structural changes, even those
liberties and privileges we enjoy today may be in jeopardy. This is a
frightening proposition. But the world the current rulers have made is
ill-equipped to address the crisis of unemployment and underemploy-
ment, and in no position to advance democratic practices and values.
It has to go.
The humane and effective solution to the economic crisis requires
that (1) the political system be rejuvenated into a powerful democratic
infrastructure that (2) draws people into public policy debates as effec-
tive participants. That is the route to the best possible outcomes. Then
a frank and effective debate over how best to restructure the economy
to serve human interests can occur. In that process the weltanschau-
ung will change, and the crisis will appear as more of an opportunity
than as a threat, and human imaginations will be unchained. We can
use the technologies to build an egalitarian, humane, sustainable, and
democratic society as has never before been seen.
The good news is that nearly all the elements of a democratic in-
frastructure that we list in Chapter 1 and return to in Chapter 6 have
deep roots in American political history. Indeed, what is required to
have a credible democracy is well known across the planet.
The other good news is that there is no mystery about what creates
democracy and democratic infrastructure. They advance primarily
with energy from dynamic popular social movements, as we discuss
next, in Chapter 5. Social activism changes everything.
Just as history tells us much about how a democratic infrastructure
can and should be constructed, so it tells us much about the forma-
tion of those dynamic social movements in times of great economic
and social turbulence. In that history, and in the movements that have
already taken shape in contemporary America, we see the outlines for
the movements to establish the necessary democratic infrastructure
for our times.
OVERCOMING
THE DEMOCRATIC DISCONNECT
S
omething scary about America, really scary, and really
unsettling, became evident to us as we traveled the United States
on extensive national tours for our two previous books—one of
which examined the collapse of mainstream journalism as a source
of the information that is necessary and sufficient to sustain democ-
racy, and the other of which examined the collapse of democracy
itself under the weight of a campaign-finance system so broken that
it has become the plaything of rogue billionaires and self-interested
CEOs.1 Everyone understood what we were talking about. We were
examining the fundamentals of the political process as it currently
operates, and condemning that process as a travesty that no longer
serves citizens or communities or the country as a whole. Yet, we
got almost no pushback. Even when we appeared as unapologetic
progressives on conservative or libertarian talk-radio programs, even
when we responded to callers from across the political spectrum,
even when we “debated” those who had positioned themselves as
209
sponse to the challenges that are coming our way. These same people
recognize that rebuilding the democratic infrastructure is necessary
and long overdue, and would go a long way toward making it possible
to reform the economy so we could dramatically improve the human
condition. But then the despair sets in. This is impossible, we are told.
People will never rise up and make social change. This is as good as it
gets. Remarkably, even people who are working hard for change tell us
that, in all likelihood, their efforts are for naught. They will struggle on,
for reasons of morality and solidarity, they say, but, really, it’s hopeless.
These good citizens are experiencing the poet Allen Ginsberg’s sad,
resigned calculus: “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”2
The resulting depoliticization may well be the greatest victory of
the counterrevolution launched in the 1970s by the web of corpo-
rate-funded think tanks, policy networks, political action committees,
and media that has come to dominate the discourse. It has so disillu-
sioned those who know the current system is not working that many
of the Americans who should be our most engaged and active citizens
see no hope at all. This represents the greatest challenge Americans
face today as a people. Yet, it is not a new challenge. Rulers have always
found that having their subjects be quiescent of their own volition is the
preferable means of maintaining the status quo. But history also tells
us that a time comes when the people can stand it no more—when it is
not just optimism but necessity that inspires a reaction against condi-
tions that have grown unbearable—when, as Thomas Jefferson wrote
in the Declaration of Independence, “evils” are no longer “sufferable.”
This will be the case again, and soon. Indeed, there are signs all
around us that the roots of a new activism on behalf of economic de-
mocracy are growing underneath the corporate media radar. There
was no movement for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage when
we were touring in 2010, and only the barest hints of one when we
were touring in 2013. Now, that movement is everywhere. There
are parallel movements for a Retail Workers Bill of Rights, for new
unions, for a new economy. These movements are not yet so powerful
as they will be, and they are not yet so linked together as they will be.
But the remarkable response to the presidential candidacy of Bernie
a little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore
their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime
we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war
and long oppressions of enormous public debt. . . .
It was then that workers and farmers would no longer settle for
old inequalities dressed up in an emperor’s new clothes of industrial
“progress.” They began to identify as Chartists, joining their disparate
protests, their disparate energies, their disparate fears, and their dis-
parate hopes to the campaign for a “People’s Charter” that demanded
the democratization of politics and governing:
insights into social evils which we have yet to cure. Moreover, this
period now compels attention for two particular reasons. First, it was
a time in which the plebeian movement placed an exceptionally high
valuation upon egalitarian and democratic values. Although we often
boast our democratic way of life, the events of these critical years are
far too often forgotten or slurred over. Second, the greater part of the
world today is still undergoing problems of industrialization, and of
the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many ways to
our own experience during the Industrial Revolution. Causes which
were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.20
Thompson penned those words more than half a century ago, be-
fore there was a Google or a Facebook or a Twitter, before there were
cellphones or personal computers. Yet, we would update his proposi-
tion only in two ways. First, we are certain that Thompson’s view of
political formation is appropriate not merely to an industrial age but
to a digital age. Second, we fear that the timelines Thompson worked
on are speeding up, as barriers once thought insurmountable are col-
lapsed in a chaotic age when historian of science James Gleick charts
“the acceleration of just about everything.”21
no sane man who has been familiar with the government of this coun-
try for the last twenty years will complain that we have had too much
of the rule of the majority. The trouble has been a far different one
that, at many times and in many localities, there have held public of-
fice in the States and in the nation men who have, in fact, served not
the whole people, but some special class or special interest. I am not
thinking only of those special interests which by grosser methods, by
bribery and crime, have stolen from the people.
I am thinking as much of their respectable allies and figureheads,
who have ruled and legislated and decided as if in some way the vested
rights of privilege had a first mortgage on the whole United States,
while the rights of all the people were merely an unsecured debt. . . .
Now there has sprung up a feeling deep in the hearts of the
people—not of the bosses and professional politicians, not of the
beneficiaries of special privilege—a pervading belief of thinking men
that when the majority of the people do in fact, as well as theory,
rule, then the servants of the people will come more quickly to answer
and obey, not the commands of the special interests, but those of the
whole people.24
the owning class alone. To the rest it means only greater hardship
and misery. The high cost of living is felt in every home. Millions of
wage-workers have seen the purchasing power of their wages decrease
until life has become a desperate battle for mere existence.
Multitudes of unemployed walk the streets of our cities or trudge
from State to State awaiting the will of the masters to move the wheels
of industry. The farmers in every state are plundered by the increas-
ing prices exacted for tools and machinery and by extortionate rents,
freight rates and storage charges.
Capitalist concentration is mercilessly crushing the class of small
business men and driving its members into the ranks of property-less
wage-workers. The overwhelming majority of the people of America
are being forced under a yoke of bondage by this soulless industrial
despotism.27
which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the
general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a
fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised
with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. Again, comrades over
there, take the lesson from your own experience. Not only did you not
grudge, but you gloried in the promotion of the great generals who
gained their promotion by leading the army to victory. So it is with
us. We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained
and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained
without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be
gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the commu-
nity. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental
interference with social and economic conditions in this country than
we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an
increase in governmental control is now necessary.30
the violence that was visited upon miners and railway men who sought
to organize unions. “The poor man who takes property by force is
called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor
pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as the friend of a
sound currency,” growled the Great Commoner. “The man who wants
the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist, but the man
who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot.”38
Bryan anticipated the New Deal and the modern Democratic Party
when he explained to the Democratic delegates of 1896 that “there are
two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will
only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will
leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been
that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity
will find its way up through every class which rests up on them.”39
Yet, Bryan was in most senses a nostalgic politician who framed his
advocacy in deeply religious and romantic terms, pouring his heart
and soul into the defense of an agrarian age that was rapidly passing.
In effect, he ran against the future, declaring that “you come to us
and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we
reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn
down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up
again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in
the streets of every city in the country.”40 This was a proper diagnosis,
but not a proper appeal.
Against the “money power” assembled by Mark Hanna, the Re-
publican kingmaker who contemporary political grifters such as Karl
Rove cite as their hero, Bryan’s hapless Democrats were defeated
in 1896—and Bryan would lose again in 1900, and again in 1908.
The 1896 Democratic platform was thick with talk of gold and silver
“standards,” but devoid of a vision for how to make a politics that
would deliver a new economy.41 Bryan accepted the political struc-
tures that had been assembled to defeat him, and he was, predictably,
defeated. The Bryan Democrats, with their emphasis on state’s rights,
never captured the energy of the burgeoning New Nationalism of
the dawning twentieth century. Often more urban, and more adept
been forced into the political debate by low-wage workers, union ac-
tivists, and proud radicals like Seattle City Council member Kshama
Sawant.51 They aren’t settling for incremental change; they are fight-
ing for $15-an-hour wage rates. And they are winning in Seattle and
San Francisco and Los Angeles and other communities across the
country.52 The most powerful retailer in the United States, Walmart,
has felt the pressure and moved to raise wages for most workers above
$10 an hour—significantly more than a supposedly pro-labor presi-
dent was proposing two years earlier.
This is a movement that has displayed political skills, but it has
also embraced old-fashioned direct action. After Seattle’s Sawant was
arrested at a protest that demanded wage hikes for airline workers,
the city councilmember said the airline should be on trial—not her.
Asked if it was appropriate for elected officials to be arrested in pro-
tests against corporations, Sawant declared, “When workers and faith
leaders and community activists are putting their own lives on the
line to fight for the rights of workers, it’s appropriate for me as an
elected public figure to join them in the struggles.”53 She’s right. And
the struggles in Seattle and other cities are having a dramatic impact.
Hundreds of thousands of workers are being lifted above the pov-
erty line not just by organizing to “Fight for 15” but by sophisticated
new initiatives—such as a “Retail Workers Bill of Rights,” which was
enacted in San Francisco after a 2014 campaign spearheaded by the
Jobs With Justice movement and its allies. This bill of rights addresses
the abusive scheduling and workplace uncertainty that has become
endemic in the increasingly app-driven fast-food and retail sectors. It
forms a rough outline for a movement not merely to hike wages but
to humanize work—and to ensure that workers are not merely whip-
sawed by that rapid restructuring of traditional industries.54
This country has a more militant labor movement than at any
time since the early 1970s, possibly even the 1930s. Despite the end
of labor reporting by most major media and the replacement of tra-
ditional business reporting with “coverage” that is best understood
as cheerleading, there are still almost fifteen million union mem-
bers in the United States today.55 They are under brutal assault by
gies to utilize and how. “The American health care system already lags
behind other industrialized nations in a wide array of essential health
barometers from infant mortality to life expectancy. These chang-
ing trends in health care threaten to make it worse,” explains NNU
Co-president Jean Ross, RN. “Behind every statistic is a patient, and
their family, who are exposed to unnecessary suffering and risk as a
result of the focus on profits rather than what is best for individual
patient need.”58 The nurses aren’t opposed to technology; they use it
all the time. But instead of merely considering the bottom line, they
are considering the life-and-death consequences of automation and
adding a human component to the equation. And they are expending
considerable resources on education campaigns that publicize their
conclusions. They fill at least some of the void created by the collapse
of serious journalism and the decay of traditional oversight by regula-
tors and legislative and congressional committees. It’s not enough, as
the nurses were the first to tell us. But this is an important model that
ought to be embraced by other unions and activist groups–and that
foundations and donors that are serious about getting to the heart of
the matter should fund.
Getting workers directly involved with how automation is deployed
was considered enlightened thinking in the 1960s, and accepted across
much of the political spectrum, at least in principle. It is high time
people organize to get us back to that point, and to abandon the sui-
cidal notion that the corporations have an innate right to do whatever
they please, social consequences be damned, as long as they are max-
imizing profits.
This country is seeing the renewal of historic ideals of public and
cooperative enterprise. New movements are taking on what Gar Alp-
erovitz, the cofounder of the Democracy Collaborative, refers to as
the “huge and agonizing long-term task” of developing and popular-
izing alternative models for ownership and job creation that involve
“nothing less than transforming the underlying institutions that
are producing the outcomes we see—in short, one way or another,
transforming the system over time, beginning, as always [and as we
shall see], in local communities where the pain is greatest.”59 This
is big bold stuff, and it has moved way beyond theory. The United
States has a vibrant Slow Food movement that has established itself
in every state and every major city, along with many small towns.
This movement is developing and supporting sustainable models for
farming, food production, and eating out—or in. And there is an ex-
panded vision of cooperative enterprise that has begun to renew old
ideals of worker ownership and consumer involvement in a country
where almost thirty thousand cooperatives have issued almost 350
million memberships.60 Across the country, there are proposals to
democratize finance, with public banking at the state and local levels
(along the lines of the century-old and highly successful State Bank
of North Dakota), and a coalition of unions and consumer groups is
working to renew postal banking as a vehicle to strengthen the US
Postal Service and provide access to necessary (and responsible) fi-
nancial services to low-income and rural communities.61 “Essentially,
a new strategic paradigm—the idea that democratizing ownership
can begin locally—is emerging around the nation,” argues Alpero-
vitz. “Just beneath the surface of most public reporting, in fact, an
explosion of experimentation like this is going on in all parts of the
country. It is also beginning to demand—and get—backing from
larger institutions, and political backing as well. Such efforts include
groups like Prospera, in San Francisco, and Cooperative Home Care
Associates, in New York, that bring together women who do home
cleaning and home health work, respectively; cab driver co-ops in
several cities; food co-ops in most parts of the country; advanced
manufacturing co-ops like Isthmus Engineering and Manufacturing
in Madison, Wisconsin; and many, many more.”62
Extending the democratic infrastructure to the economy is the log-
ical next step. It is a topic that requires study and experimentation.
And, though you would not know it from media coverage of economic
debates, that study and experimentation is burgeoning in communi-
ties across the country.
So, too, are movements that refused to be boxed up in neat pack-
ages of partisanship. These are the big-picture movements that “get”
that the organizing of the future requires a challenge to both major
parties and to all of our politics. It’s the only way to address essential
issues of our time.
This country has a movement to address climate change that recog-
nizes the economic and political challenges outlined by Naomi Klein
and Bill McKibben and other visionaries. And it has drawn millions
of Americans, especially young Americans, into the streets to demand
not merely a transition off fossil fuels but, in the words of Climate Jus-
tice Alliance co-director Cindy Wiesner, “an economy good for both
people and the planet.”63 An estimated four hundred thousand people
joined the September 21, 2014, People’s Climate March in New York,
and hundreds of thousands more participated in hundreds of marches
in communities across the United States—in solidarity with millions
more at thousands of rallies across the planet.64
This country has a new civil rights movement that has drawn mil-
lions of young people—and many of their elders—into the streets
and onto social media to declare that “Black Lives Matter.” This
movement is challenging policing models that have left too many
young African American men dead, criminal “justice” models that
have substituted mass incarceration for mass employment, and polit-
ical models that seek to “win” elections by undoing the progress made
by the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. In states across
this country, unprecedented multiracial, multiethnic, multi-religion
coalitions that link unions and students and seniors together have
surged onto the political scene, declaring as does the Reverend Wil-
liam Barber of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement that “we
need a transformative moral fusion movement that’s indigenously
led, state-based, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist,
anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor movement that brings people
together, that doesn’t wait for somebody to rescue you out of Wash-
ington DC, but [that] you mobilize from the bottom up.”65
This country has a democracy movement that has evolved into the
most vibrant crusade for constitutional reform in a century—since the
days when progressive reformers sought an elected Senate and votes
for women. More than six hundred American communities have for-
mally demanded congressional action to begin the process of undoing
ing the alarm, making the case, winning the argument, and even win-
ning the election. But they have not succeeded in making big-enough
change—or even in creating the space where the change might be
possible.
There is more to this than the simple challenge of coordination.
Of course this is an issue, but not as much of an issue as might once
have been the case. Climate-change campaigners get that there is an
economic-justice component to their work. Living-wage advocates
understand that there is a racial-justice component to their work. Yes,
there is still a tendency on the part of advocates to imagine that one
issue must go first. We hear powerful and poignant arguments for this
model of prioritization or that. We have made some of them ourselves.
But, if history is any indicator, we know that the defining and uniting
issue will be economic. And we know that the crisis of a jobless fu-
ture will bring millions of Americans who are not currently engaged
into a fight that extends from the First Amendment–sanctioned di-
rect action of assembling and petitioning for the redress of grievances
through the organizing of new-model labor unions and cooperatives,
to the casting of ballots on behalf of candidates who really are better
than their opponents. But we also know, as was the case two hundred
years ago on the moors of Yorkshire, and one hundred years ago in the
sweatshops of New York, that the political process is weighted against
this activism—indeed, against all activism.
Hence the electoral system is generally the last place social change
leaves its mark. It is a crucial and necessary stage to lock in change,
and election campaigns can be valuable in pushing movements for-
ward, but electoral success is best understood as part of the of the
process. And in these times, where money has corrupted the system
almost beyond belief, the process is frequently frustrating. This is
why the extraordinary enthusiasm generated by US Senator Bernie
Sanders’s campaign for the presidency has been so striking. As the
Sanders campaign gained traction in the summer and fall of 2015,
massive crowds and rising poll numbers provided tangible evidence
of the deep reservoir of support for radical social changes that would
reconstruct the economy to suit the needs of the poor and working
A DEMOCRATIC AGENDA
FOR A DIGITAL AGE
C
hange is never the issue. Change is inevitable. The
only real question is whether we will manage change in our
own interest and in the interest of society—or whether we
will simply let it happen to us. Unfortunately, this is the issue that is
most often neglected as we are dazzled and dumbfounded by evo-
lution in real time. The magnitude of the technological, economic,
and social changes that are buffeting us can be so overwhelming, on
so many levels, that it is difficult to grasp what they will mean for
our lives and our futures. It is even more difficult for many of us to
determine whether we will have any say whatsoever regarding the
character and the scope of these changes—let alone when and how
we might intervene on our own behalf. A great fear among envi-
ronmentalists is that, decades from now, when people fully experi-
ence the consequences of decisions that are made today with limited
debate, the sea levels will be rising inexorably, the damage will be
245
racing out of control, and the range of options for action will be dra-
matically narrower and dramatically bleaker. Yet, because the threat
is so daunting, because the requirements of a response are so great,
it all becomes an abstraction. Even when people read the details of
what is coming their way in ten or twenty or thirty years, even when
those details are outlined by our best scientists, there is a powerful
temptation to wait for a clarifying moment before leaping into ac-
tion. The trouble is, environmentalists fear, that when the clarifying
moment comes, it will be too late.
We fear that the same could be true when it comes to reports
about how the technological revolution under the auspices of con-
temporary capitalism is going to create new waves of unemployment
and underemployment—with more poverty, wage stagnation, and
inequality, and with devastating implications for society and democ-
racy. The changes are unfolding now, in our own lives, in our own
communities. The apps are being downloaded, the robots are rolling
into the hospitals. We’re not talking decades. Two years from the
moment you read these words, the planet will add more computer
power than it did in all previous history. By the late 2030s there will
likely be a thousandfold increase in computer power from where we
are today.1 In just a few years Watson, the incredible IBM computer
than won at Jeopardy in 2011, will compare to other computers like
a state-of-the-art 2011 Tour de France bicycle would compare to
the race cars at the 2021 Indianapolis 500. That is how fast change
is coming.
If the great mass of Americans are going to have any role what-
soever in the shaping of this future, if there is to be any chance at all
that the twenty-first century will belong to the whole of humanity as
opposed to the monopolists of a new Gilded Age, then the defining
economic issues of the age must become the defining political issues of
the age. That is not the case now, and there are no guarantees that
it will be the case. Americans must recognize that our contemporary
political discourse stifles rather than encourages the debates about
economic and social responses that might benefit the overwhelming
A PHONY SOLUTION
Imagine we were writing a book like this about an ancient civiliza-
tion, or even some fairly recent society like the Soviet Union in the
middle of the twentieth century, that had an economic system that
was antithetical in key respects to that of the United States. Assume
we provided clear evidence of how the introduction of a technology
had radically transformed the society and of how, under the control
of the society’s unaccountable rulers, the results were disastrous. The
conclusion would be obvious: the social structure in the ancient soci-
ety or in the USSR was a clunker, and for that reason alone technol-
ogies that could have advanced civilization by empowering the many
instead became tools of repression and scorching societal decay. In
such a case study, there would be little debate among contemporary
scholars about the nature of the crisis or about what would have been
best for those societies: the people should have created a superior eco-
nomic system that worked for the whole of society and its future, not
just the needs of the rulers who were locked into their destructive and
short-sighted paradigm.
Existing US capitalism is similarly a dubious fit for the present tech-
nological revolution, and it is a bad fit for democracy. This evidence
is drawn from scholars and experts who acknowledge that a tension
exists between capitalism as currently practiced and what passes for
democracy in America. They understand that this puts considerable
strain upon the democratic values and institutions of the country. Yet,
for the most part, the notion that capitalism itself must be subject to
no-holds-barred political debate is unspeakable, even unthinkable. A
similar intellectual paralysis among the wise men of an ancient civili-
zation or Soviet scholars would be derided by these same observers as
a sign of the society’s corruption and the bankruptcy of its intellectual
class. Yet there is little self-awareness in the United States today among
those who ponder the jobs crisis and the incompatibility automation
has with our current political economy.
Indeed, most writers assume capitalism as it has come to be known
is the basis for democracy and freedom, and that whatever happens
within cities and between them free and ubiquitous. Make all educa-
tion free and ubiquitous. The list goes on and on. At some point, down
the road, inequality is eliminated and humans enter an entirely new
phase of their history. The economic problem will have been solved.
Which, of course, is why it will be such a difficult political fight to get
there.
Education is where the major battle for the future is going on to-
day. A coalition of right-wing, union-hating, high-tech billionaires and
hedge-fund managers looking to get rich as schools get privatized is
working aggressively to “reform” and effectively end public education
in the United States. Most of the arguments are economic: that Amer-
ican kids, who are primarily educated in public schools, are falling
behind children worldwide and making the nation less competitive.
This is a largely utilitarian view of education that sees it as developing
labor skills and high incomes for students. The one reliable measure
is testing, and “reformed” school districts have children prepare for
and take tests much of their time in schools. Technology is offered
as a way to reduce the reliance on human teachers—and in the form
of so-called distance learning to eliminate schools themselves. One
can only wonder where this leads when there are far fewer jobs and
people are increasingly living off basic-income vouchers. There cer-
tainly doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for schools to exist, except
as holding pens for children until they get old enough to collect their
own basic-income vouchers and begin shopping around for health in-
surance companies that will take them.
What is lost in this calculus are the two reasons the United States
implemented public education in the first place: (1) to educate young
people so they can be engaged and effective citizens and participate
fully in the governance of society, and (2) to provide education for all
as a great equalizer that gives poor and working-class children a chance
to maximize their potential. School reformers often claim they want to
create schools to help poor kids become rich adults, but commonly they
send their own children to exclusive private schools, with hardly any
testing and, ironically, very little technology. Indeed, research shows
that a disproportionate percentage of tech billionaires and CEOs went
Likewise, having an ecology that can sustain human life is not some
premium channel a society can select in addition to the democratic
basic package. It is not like having satellite radio added to your new car
purchase. It is the very foundation for human existence for all societies
and must be regarded as such. Environmental movements have come
to understand and advance the idea that their success rises and falls
with movements for democracy and social justice worldwide. Today’s
environmental activists recognize that a new more accountable and
community-oriented economy is mandatory for human survival, and
that the only way to achieve such an economy is through the dramatic
extension of democratic infrastructure. As author and environmental
activist Bill McKibben argues, it is imperative to “break the intellectual
spell under which we live.” This is what we have termed weltanschau-
ung, and it is joined to the hip of democratic infrastructure. McKibben
explains that “the last few decades have been dominated by the prem-
ise that privatizing all economic resources will produce endless riches.
Which was kind of true, except that the riches went to only a few peo-
ple. And in the process they melted the Arctic, as well as dramatically
increasing inequality around the world.”10
As the rough outlines of the damage done on a host of environ-
mental, economic, and social issues come into stark relief, a sense of
urgency is increasing exponentially. Also increasing is the sense that
we are all in this together, and we have common interest in a demo-
cratic infrastructure. Elite solutions for the environment, just like the
economy, will tend to serve elite interests. As the saying goes, if you
are not at the table when decisions are being made, you are the dish
that is being served.
A full democratic infrastructure provides more than the right to
vote. Full democratic infrastructure provides economic and social
security, a free flow of information, and absolute protection against
discrimination and corruption so that every citizen—not just those
who are wealthy—has the freedom to engage fully in the politics and
governance of the nation. None of this presupposes a particular type
of economy, yet all of it presupposes that every American will have
the right to participate fully and meaningfully in determining what
type of economy best serves her—and best frames the future. When a
crisis causes a jolt, as will surely be the case with the technological and
social transformations that are now unfolding, citizens must retain the
power to put economic options on the table—and to embrace the best
of those options. If we want to make it through the changes that are
headed our way, and to come out on the other side as a nation that
enjoys what the New Economy Coalition describes as a “new econ-
omy . . . where capital (wealth and the means of creating it) is a tool
of the people, not the other way around,” then there must be a demo-
cratic infrastructure that is sufficient to foster economic democracy.11
DEMOCRATIZE JOURNALISM
While constitutional reform is as necessary now as Jefferson sug-
gested it would be, many of the changes that are required to create
a full democratic infrastructure do not require any constitutional
amendments. Let’s start with the information that people need to
be their own governors. To get to democracy, there has to be a de-
mocratization of communications that ensures that all Americans are
sufficiently informed to fully engage as citizens. The great majority
of Americans are not getting this now. Old media has been dying
slowly for decades, and there is no evidence to imagine that the me-
dia that democracy requires will be delivered by app newsrooms or
robot reporters. There are no market solutions, no technical fixes,
no new economic models. There is only one way out of this mess,
and it is to put the people in charge of demanding the solutions that
media conglomerates and “click-chasing” reporters will not demand.
People—citizens—will need to be in charge of the funding of the next
that sustains democracy. So the United States should give the people
the tools to subsidize independent, not-for-profit journalism.29
How? Begin with supercharged funding of public broadcasting and
robust support for community media—along the lines already out-
lined by the most energetic campaigners on behalf of maximized fund-
ing for what should be “an American BBC.”30 Those are givens. But
we dare not stop there. A democratic agenda must demand substantial
public investments in journalism as a “public good.” This is nothing
new for America. The United States developed a press system that was
the envy of the world in the early nineteenth century through massive
postal and printing subsidies for newspapers.31 These subsidies made
the cost of production so low that the United States eventually had
more newspapers per capita than any other country in the world. The
founders of the American experiment were not familiar with the term
public good, but they treated the press as just that. And they did so in the
only way that made democratic sense, by providing generous postal
and printing subsidies to all publications—even those that dissented,
even those that, like the abolitionist press, proposed radical change—
so that none were puppets of the government.32
What’s the modern model for establishing a nonprofit, noncom-
mercial, competitive, uncensored, and independent press system that
embraces digital technology, that recognizes the potential of new-me-
dia platforms, and that, above all, provides a journalism that is suffi-
cient to sustain genuine democracy? How about this: every American
adult gets a two-hundred-dollar voucher she can use to donate gov-
ernment money to any nonprofit news media of her choice. She can
split her two hundred dollars among different qualifying nonprofit
media, indicating her choice on her tax return or a simple form. This
program would be purely voluntary, like the tax-form check-offs for
funding elections or protecting wildlife. Simple universal standards
can be developed for media that qualifies for voucher funding, erring
always on the side of expanding rather than constraining the number
of qualifying newsrooms. A small existing agency, such as the Postal
Regulatory Commission (which has some history in this area), could
provide necessary oversight and administration.
anyone can use it as needed. Suddenly old media and new media are
working together to produce journalism that matters, and that does
not have to rely on advertising or subscriptions or the vagaries of the
market. And the people who need information are paying journalists
to go out and gather that information and to deliver it to them.
Too good to be true? No. Democratic necessities are never too
good to be true. They are simply hard to get. Net neutrality was sup-
posed to be too good to be true. Plenty of pundits said it would be
impossible to beat the world’s most powerful telecommunications
lobbies in a fight to preserve a free and open Internet. Yet, in an era
when corporations so frequently get so very much of what they ask
for, media reform, civil rights, and community activists made the fight
for net neutrality an issue. They put it on the table. They were out-
spent and out-lobbied. But in February 2015 they won a victory that
Free Press president Craig Aaron identified as “the biggest win for
the public interest in the FCC’s history.” Aaron explained that “it’s
the culmination of a decade of dedicated grassroots organizing and
advocacy. Millions of people came to the defense of the open Internet
to tell Washington, in no uncertain terms, that the Internet belongs
to all of us and not just a few greedy phone and cable companies.”34
Absolute protections for a free and open Internet were impossi-
ble to get. Then we got them. The information we need to utilize
and maintain a democratic infrastructure will be ours if we make the
struggle for that information part of an agenda that recognizes the
necessity of political and economic democracy. And if we hoop our-
selves together to advance that agenda, we can get it. Indeed, if we
hoop ourselves together at a moment when people will be demanding
transformative change, we can get a whole lot more.
seems like everyone gets it. When the Occupy movement exploded
onto the scene in 2011, even Republicans talked about inequality
as a problem, albeit for a split-second.35 For those old enough to
remember the 1960s or early 1970s, today’s America feels increas-
ingly like a feudal or Third World country, the kind few thought
possible fifty years ago. Dramatically lessening economic inequality
is required to have a functional democracy; there is no two ways
about it. That is one theme that has been central in every period
of democratic surge in the nation’s history, and it must be so today,
because indications are that unless we the people act rapidly and
boldly, the current circumstance is only going to get worse, possibly
much worse.
One of the essential explanations for mounting economic inequal-
ity in the United States is the increasing monopoly power over the
economy. This was well understood in the Progressive Era, the New
Deal, and even in the 1960s. Monopolies themselves were recognized
as singularly anti-democratic constructs that needed to be weakened.
Economic concentration is far more prevalent today than in any of
those earlier times. The digital economy is nothing if not a hothouse
for monopoly. Yet the issue gets barely any serious discussion; mas-
sive monopolistic corporations are treated as if they are part of the
unchangeable scenery, like the Rocky Mountain range. It shows just
how powerful these firms are that they can buy their way out of critical
analysis. But the populists, the Progressives, the New Dealers, Ralph
Nader, and the 1960s activists all had it right (as did Jefferson and
Lincoln): concentrated economic power is not only a threat to smaller
businesses, workers, and community enterprise, it is a direct threat to
democratic governance. It must be addressed squarely or any hard-
earned popular reforms will be fleeting.
Fortunately, the current crisis is sparking a renaissance in thinking
with regard to corporate power and monopoly.36 What’s even more
encouraging now is that the talk is turning from identification of the
crisis toward consideration of what to do about it. When the tele-
communications giant Comcast proposed in 2014 to take over Time
Warner Cable, in a $45 billion deal that would further monopolize
DEMOCRATIZE PLANNING
In view of the nature of the economic challenges that Americans are
experiencing today, and the economic calamity they will experience in
coming years, putting economic issues on the table is about more than
gently guiding and assisting the private-sector economy, under the
assumption that “what is good for Apple is good for America.” To this
end, we would link the elements of the democratic infrastructure that
have already been described to the development of what the United
States has never really had: a national industrial policy that
If it is fair that all citizens should have a say with regard to the pol-
icies that shape their future, then it is practical for society to take steps
to strengthen that contribution. The quality of the contribution that
those citizens will make to the debate increases as they enjoy a measure
of economic and social security—and the stability that both provide.
One of the top excuses for Americans who do not vote is that they
simply do not have the time to gather information, get to the polls,
and cast a ballot. “When pollsters have attempted to ask non-voters
why they haven’t voted, two of the common answers have been ‘too
busy’ or ‘schedule conflicts’,” notes long-time political writer Eric
Black. “A lame excuse by some, perhaps, but not for all.”51 The day-to-
day burdens placed on low-wage workers who put in long hours, often
at some distance from their homes and the neighborhoods where they
would vote, make it hard to meet even the most basic requirements of
democratic engagement, argues Congressman Steve Israel, who ex-
plains that millions of Americans simply cannot “find time to vote.”52
It is true that making voting easier, as Israel and others propose, could
increase turnout. But it is even more true, to our view, that giving
people more job security, steady hours, more workplace flexibility and,
above all, more time away from work, will dramatically increase their
freedom to participate in democracy. That fuller participation ensures
that elections produce governments and policies that are more reflec-
tive of the popular will and more responsive to popular needs. Eco-
nomic security begets greater economic security, as it allows working
Americans to shape responses to questions about public investment,
planning, and trade that are in the public interest—as opposed to the
often misguided and invariably self-serving whims of CEOs who can
hire lobbyists and fund politicians to do their bidding.
is to develop a broad strategy that not only ends the downward spiral
but also gives rise to something different: steadily changing who actu-
ally owns the system, beginning at the bottom and working up.”54
In recent years, Alperovitz has been a happy warrior on behalf of
burgeoning movements for worker ownership nationwide. But, as
he explains, “The current goal is not simply worker ownership, but
worker ownership linked to a community-building strategy.” Alpero-
vitz argues that
the strategy must take up the challenge of rebuilding the basic insti-
tutional substructure of the local economy in ways that are efficient,
effective, stable, redistributive and ongoing. This will include:
them. “When people start thinking about how they would organize
their own workplaces if they had the opportunity and the tools to do
it, they get so excited,” says Rebecca Kemble, the president of the
federation’s board. “It frees them up from so much that beats people
down, that depresses them. Suddenly, there are possibilities.”55
There are a lot of possibilities: in new movements by teachers and
parents who seek to end the overemphasis on high-stakes testing and
rote learning in favor of programs for educating children to think and
to act as citizens, in movements to rethink backward models of train-
ing and retraining displaced workers for jobs that will soon disappear,
in smart thinking about sharing jobs and dialing back the length of the
work week, in fresh proposals for full employment and serious infra-
structure investment (which recognizes that the infrastructure of the
future will require both concrete and fiber optics), and in a renewed
understanding of the power and value of public ownership and utili-
ties that meet human needs.
That’s a very good start—precisely the sort of thinking that the
United States is going to need to address technological change, auto-
mation, and the threat of a jobless economy. At the local level, where
Kemble says it is still possible to make change, activists are on the
move.56 She was elected in April 2015 to the Madison, Wisconsin, city
council and is already working with Mayor Paul Soglin to invest $5
million over five years in “planning, research, grants, loans, and even
forgivable loans” to get worker-owned cooperatives up and running.
Based on a similar project in New York City, but significantly larger in
scale and ambition, the Madison project will focus on both economic
and racial justice. “Building a great local economy is not reserved for
white males,” says Soglin. “We’re hoping this will be part of our eco-
nomic development strategy in areas where there’s food insecurity,
where there isn’t a concentration of jobs, and where significant num-
bers of households are below the poverty line.” Kemble and the mayor
hope to shape a new understanding of twenty-first-century econom-
ics. “One of the benefits of a program like this is it gives us another
opportunity to show that the economics of aggrandizing wealth in the
top one percent is stupid,” says Soglin.57
To bring projects like the one in Madison to scale, to take them na-
tional so to speak, remains the challenge. And it is a challenge where the
threat of a jobless economy comes into direct conflict with the politics
of citizenless democracy. This is where, no matter how beautiful it may
be, the dream gets deferred. “[What] we call traditional politics no lon-
ger has much capacity to alter most of the negative trends,” explains
Alperovitz. “To be clear: I think projects, organizing, demonstrations
and related efforts are important. But deep down, most people sense—
rightly, in my view—that unless we develop a more powerful long-term
strategy, those efforts aren’t going to make much of a dent.”58
IMAGINE DEMOCRACY
Imagine if that changed. Imagine if a justifiably frightened and an-
gered American people were to look up from their gadgets and their
unemployment forms. Imagine if they realized that the present is
unsatisfactory and that the future looks terrifying. Imagine if these
Americans recognized that what is terrifying is not the technology,
nor even the fact that everything is going to change. What is ter-
rifying is that they have no say about the scope and character and
direction of that change. What is terrifying is that they cannot put
proposals for a new economy on the table and make them the law of
the land and the frameworks for our future. What is terrifying is that
the essential economic issues of the time are not the essential political
issues of the time. Imagine if the people recognized that they must
have a say or they will have nothing at all. And imagine if they were
hooped together, finally and fully, across what were once considered
lines of division. Imagine if the people were ready to demand a new
Constitution, a new politics, a new economy. Imagine if the people
were ready, finally, to demand democracy—and all of the freedom,
fairness, and human potential that extends from the moment when
the profiteers and the pretenders are pushed aside and we, the people,
forge our future.
R. Jamil Jonna
277
Table A-1 totals the various elements of labor market distress in the US econ-
omy for selected years. More important, it contains notes explaining each vari-
able and concept used in both the table and chart.
a
Civilian non-institutional labor force 16 years and older. The age condition
is used on all subsequent calculations. LABFORCE=2; AGE (>= 16).
b
Not in the labor force but has looked for work sometime in the past year.
LABFORCE=1; NWLOOKWK (1 ≥ 52).
c
Not in the labor force and has not looked for work in the past year but wants
a job now. LABFORCE=1; WANTJOB (2 ≥ 4).
d
Prisoners under state or federal jurisdiction (see source notes above).
e
Discouraged + Long-Term Unemployed + Incarcerated
f
Official Labor Force + (Discouraged + Long-Term Unemployed + Incarcerated).
g
Jobless but has looked for work in the past month. EMPSTAT=20, 21 or 22.
h
Employed workers under the poverty line. EMPSTAT=10; OFFPOV=1.
i
Officially Unemployed / Official Labor Force.
j
(Hidden Unemployed + Officially Unemployed + Working Poor) / Recalcu-
lated Labor Force.
Table A-2 presents the wage ranges (in 2013 dollars) used for calculations in
Chart 6. The OCC variable used in the above calculations reports occupations
according to the scheme of the given year. It is important to note that the Cen-
sus Bureau made significant changes to the occupational categories in 2011. As
a result occupations are not directly comparable with previous years (in terms
CHART 8 MEDIAN WAGE AND SALARY INCOME OF PERSONS 18–24 YEARS OLD,
WITHOUT COLLEGE EXPERIENCE, 1964–2014
Chart 8 uses CPS microdata (King et al. 2010) to estimate the wage and
salary income of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds who have not attended col-
lege. The age and “Educational attainment recode” variables (EDUC<80) were
used to estimate median wage and salary income in 2013 dollars (inflation factors
taken from Sahr 2015).
the BLS site starting in 1984) there is a distinction between “Total Wage and
Salary” and “Private Wage and Salary.” These distinctions do not exist for ear-
lier years (1944–1974), which makes it impossible to distinguish public from
private sector membership.
Sources: Union Members: 1944–1974: “Union membership: 1880–1999” (see
Rosenbloom 2006). Prior to 1974, figures are taken from table column
Ba4783 (BLS, “Union members”); for 1974, figures are taken from table
column Ba4787 (CPS, “Union members among wage and salary workers”).
Union Members: 1983–2014: BLS. “Total wage and salary workers, Members
of unions” (Series LUU0203161800) and “Private wage and salary workers,
Members of unions” (Series LUU0203182000). Total Workers: BLS. “(Unadj)
Employment Level, 16 years and over” (Series LNS12000000). http://data
.bls.gov. Retrieved March 2015.
Table A-3 Gross Profit and Revenue per Employee with Case
Counts (thousands of 2013 dollars)
Year Average gross Average
profit per Case revenue per Case
employee Count employee Count
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288
we traveled extensively in the United States and internationally. We met with top
CEOs of tech companies and with some of the savviest innovators in the world.
Our thinking was informed by conversations with scholars and writers who have
explored these issues, such as Frank Rieger and others associated with Germany’s
Chaos Computer Clubs (CCC). Discussions with Nick Bostrom, the director
of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, were
incredibly instructive, as were conversations at the forums and events organized
by Johannes Winkelhage. Discussions with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Joel
Rogers, Harvey Kaye, and many other thinkers helped us to put the moment in
perspective. We were informed, as well, by discussions with labor leaders and ac-
tivists, including RoseAnn DeMoro, Michael Lighty, Charles Idelson, Jean Ross,
RN, and Ken Zinn from National Nurses United, and Joseph Geevarghese of the
Change to Win Labor Coalition and the Strategic Organizing Center. We also
appreciate the insights provided by Congressmen Keith Ellison and Mark Pocan
regarding employment issues, and those we got from the National Employment
Law Project, Demos, and state-based research projects such as the Center on
Wisconsin Strategies at the University of Wisconsin and Policy Matters Ohio.
Several dear friends gave us many hours of their time to read and comment
on several chapters in the book. They include Victor Pickard, John Bellamy
Foster, Richard Powers, Dan Schiller, Jeff Cohen, and Matt Rothschild. We
received help on specific points in the text from the following friends, jour-
nalists, and scholars: Robert Pollin, Timothy Noah, Richard V. Reeves, James
Galbraith, James Baughman, David Howell, John Schmitt, Daniel Bowman
Simon, Bernie Sanders, Matt Stoller, Inger Stole, Des Freedman, Sigurd Al-
lern, Robert Hackett, Richard Wheeler, Ben Scott, Sundiata Cha-Jua, Fred
Magdoff, Robert Reich, and John Murphy. We received invaluable research as-
sistance from Nathan Gerth, Amy Holland, Ali Moll, and Grace Hebert. And,
of course, R. Jamil Jonna’s talents are on full display in Chapter 2 and in the
Statistical Appendix. This book could not exist without the generosity, talent,
and wisdom of all these people, though we alone are responsible for any flaws
with what lies within.
Our editors at The Nation—Katrina vanden Heuvel, Roane Carey, and Rich-
ard Kim—were always engaged and encouraging, as were fellow writers such as
Naomi Klein, Sarah Jaffe, and William Greider. Ed Schultz and Chris Hayes
welcomed our efforts to broaden discussions of employment and workplace
rights, as did Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez and radio
hosts John “Sly” Sylvester at WEKZ and Joy Cardin on Wisconsin Public Ra-
dio. The same goes for Ruth Conniff at The Progressive, and of course for Dave
Zweifel, Lynn Danielson, and Judie Kleinmaier at the Madison Capital Times.
Generous research support from the University of Illinois was essential to mak-
ing the book possible.
Robert W. McChesney
John Nichols
Madison, Wisconsin
November 2015
291
21. Ibid.
22. Kaja Whitehouse and Paul Davidson, “McDonald’s Raises Pay for 90,000
Workers,” USA Today, April 1, 2015.
23. The Real Clear Politics collection of polling data on the direction in
which the country is headed—and on a host of other issues related to the mood
of Americans with regard to the economy and the country—can be found at
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/direction_of_country-902.html.
The “wrong direction” sentiment generally outpolls the “right direction” senti-
ment by about 2–1. Of course, there are many measures that can be taken and we
recognize that there are different ways of assessing personal and societal frustra-
tion, but we believe the “wrong direction” numbers provide a strong indication of
the extent to which Americans are unsatisfied with their collective circumstance.
24. Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1985).
7. Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
(New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2014), pp. vxiii, xix.
8. See, for example, the recent work of economists and scholars like Paul
Krugman, James Galbraith, Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, Juliet Schor, Jared Bern-
stein, Robert Pollin, Jeffrey Sachs, and Robert Reich. They have all influenced us
a great deal. One recent book that strikes us as eminently sensible, yet entirely
outside the boundaries of legitimate debate, is Ralph Nader, The Seventeen Solu-
tions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future (New York: Harper, 2012).
9. See, for example, Steven Hill, Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way Is the
Best Hope in an Insecure Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) and
Lane Kenworthy, Social Democratic America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2014).
10. See David Broockman and Christopher Skovron, “Politicians Think
American Voters Are More Conservative than They Really Are,” Scholars Strat-
egy Network, 2013, http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/content/politicians
-think-american-voters-are-more-conservative-they-really-are. See also Bren-
dan James, “Study: Lawmakers Assume Voters Are Way More Conservative than
They Are,” Huffington Post, May 21, 2015, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news
/study-lawmakers-liberal-conservative-assume.
11. Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady, The Unheav-
enly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democ-
racy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2008).
12. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Pol-
itics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, 12, no.
3 (September 2014): 564–581.
13. Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political
Power in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 1.
14. Reid Wilson, “Only 36 percent of Americans can name the three
branches of government,” Washington Post, September 18, 2004; “Political
Commentary from the LA Times,” latimes.com, September 28, 2010; “Two-
Thirds of Americans Can’t Name ONE Supreme Court Justice,” Huffington
Post, June 3, 2010.
15. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter
of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 64, 65.
16. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 131.
17. Bob Herbert, Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America
(New York: Doubleday, 2014), p. 2.
18. John Dewey, Art as Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1934), ch. 1; we learned of this passage from Thomas Geoghegan, Only One
Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (New York:
The New Press, 2014), p. 122.
19. Robert Pollin, Back to Full Employment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012), pp. 12, 6.
20. See Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein, Getting Back to Full Employment: A
Better Bargain for Working People (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and
Policy Research, 2013).
21. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 2014), p. 16.
22. Herbert, Losing Our Way, p. 254.
23. Ben Way, Jobocalypse: The End of Human Jobs and How Robots Will Replace
Them (Ben Way, 2013), p. 132.
24. Randall Collins, “The End of Middle-Class Work: No More Escapes,”
in Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian,
and Craig Calhoun, editors, Does Capitalism Have a Future? (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), p. 51.
25. Derek Thompson, “A World without Work,” Atlantic, July-August 2015.
26. Judt, Ill Fares the Land, p. 177.
27. See Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning
the Internet against Democracy (New York: The New Press, 2013).
28. For a good discussion of how the Internet is a crucial part of political cal-
culations and machinations by the powerful, see Shawn M. Powers and Michael
Jablonski, The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015). See also Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L.
Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2015).
29. Mike Cooley, “Introduction,” in Peter Brodner, The Shape of Future Tech-
nology: The Anthropocentric Alternative (London: Springer-Verlag, 1990), p. 1.
30. Cited in Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is
Better than You Think (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 301.
31. Ibid.
32. Kenneth Rogoff, “Is Capitalism Sustainable?” Project Syndicate, December
2, 2011.
33. David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 218.
34. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2013), p. 2.
35. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 110.
36. Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, co-chaired by Lawrence
H. Summers and Ed Balls (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress,
January 2015), p. 1.
37. “The Onrushing Wave,” Economist, January 18, 2014.
38. Brink Lindsey, Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us
Smarter—and More Unequal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 72.
39. We have written about these issues in considerable detail in John Nichols
and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Com-
plex Is Destroying America (New York: Nation Books, 2013). See also: Robert E.
Mutch, Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014); Kenneth P. Vogel, Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One
Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp—on the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American
Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014).
40. See Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of Amer-
ican Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again (New York:
Nation Books, 2010).
41. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Stilwell, KS: Digiereads, 2005),
p. 60.
42. This is not to say it was not a raging issue across the nation at the time.
It was, as Alexander Keyssar documents. It just was not a big debate among the
framers of the Constitution in Philadelphia, where the notion of property re-
quirements for white, male-only suffrage was roundly accepted. See Alexander
Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
(New York, Basic Books, 2000), p. 15.
43. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1962), p. 3.
44. Lewis F. Powell Jr., “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” confi-
dential memorandum for the United States Chamber of Commerce, August 23,
1971. Widely available online.
45. Quotation in P. W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized
Military Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 49.
46. The classic example is the elected socialist government in Chile under
Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. For committed democrats, this was the ideal
outcome: a free democratic society had determined to change its economy over
time following its constitution and the rule of law. It was at all times a democracy
and would ever remain so. If the people disapproved of the socialist direction,
they had the power to elect a government that would change course. For those
who hated communist dictatorship but desired a more egalitarian democracy,
this was a development to be embraced.
To those who regard capitalism as sacrosanct, however, Allende’s elected
government had crossed the line. The United States government surreptitiously
organized and bankrolled all sorts of protests meant to disrupt the economy and
make life difficult, hence discrediting the government. When those efforts failed,
it helped organize a bloody military coup in 1973—with the strong support of
the wealthy and upper-middle class in Chile—that installed one of the most bar-
baric dictatorships of the twentieth century under General Augusto Pinochet.
Friedman and some of his fellow economists at the University of Chicago ac-
tively supported and advised the Pinochet regime, because it was installing “free
market” economics. It was therefore a “free” country. Democracy did not have
a right to alter capitalism, and Chile was only allowed to return to democracy
when the property system was safe.
In contrast, Friedman and conservatives worldwide applauded the new
democracies of Eastern Europe in the 1990s when they rejected Soviet-style
communism and embraced markets and a profit-driven economy. That was de-
mocracy at its best, and they were its loudest champions. But once those democ-
racies made that decision, they forever lost their right to revisit the matter again.
Capitalism was inviolate. You can opt in, but you can never opt out.
47. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989), p. 322.
48. Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 139.
49. It is because of these factors that private interests tend to find infrastruc-
ture projects unprofitable to pursue, unless as a government contract, yet all
private interests benefit greatly from their existence. See Brett M. Frischmann,
Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012), p. 5.
50. Recent research by Jong-Sung You on East Asian democracies con-
firms that economic inequality is a crucial factor that increases corruption, and
that inequality also makes it much more difficult to implement effective anti-
corruption measures. Matthew Jenkins, “Inequality and Corruption in Democ-
racies: A Vicious Cycle,” Anti-Corruption Research Network, February 5, 2014.
51. Elliot Sperber, “Preconditions for an Actually Democratic Society,
CounterPunch, July 4–6, 2014.
52. Zoltan Tibor Pallinger, “Democratic Infrastructures in the Service of
Citizens’ Rights: The Swiss Experience,” Working Papers Liechtenstein-Institute,
No. 13, July 2007, p. 11. For a discussion of how the decline of democratic in-
frastructure has weakened Norwegian democracy, see Tommy Tranvik and Per
Selle, “More Centralization, Less Democracy: The Decline of the Democratic
Infrastructure in Norway,” in Lars Tragardh, editor, State and Civil Society in
Northern Europe: The Swedish Model Reconsidered (New York: Berghahn Books,
2007), pp. 205–228.
53. Wendell Lewis Willkie, An American Program (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1944), pp. 16–18. For Willkie’s devotion to free enterprise, see Wendell
L. Willkie, Free Enterprise (Washington, DC: National Home Library Founda-
tion, 1940).
54. Widespread unionization tends to raise everyone’s wages. A 2015 report
by the International Monetary Fund demonstrates how those societies with the
highest rates of unionization have the lowest rates of economic inequality. See
Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron, “Power from the People,”
Finance & Development, March 2015, pp. 29–31.
55. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), p. 406.
ton Friedman acknowledged that Nazi and fascist regimes were “fundamentally
capitalist,” where “private enterprise was the dominant form of economic orga-
nization,” but he thought fascist regimes allowed more space (and hope) for free-
dom than communist nations, where the government controlled the economy
directly. See Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, p. 10.
76. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2004), pp. 207, 10.
77. Hitler quotation from Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer, translated by Ralph
Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1944), p. 287.
78. Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999),
pp. 39, 33.
79. Carlo Celli, “Introduction,” in Carlo Celli, editor, Economic Fascism: Primary
Sources on Mussolini’s Crony Capitalism (Edinburg, VA: Axios Press, 2013), p. 4.
80. Harold J. Laski, “Foreword,” in Robert A. Brady, The Spirit and Structure
of German Fascism (New York: The Citadel Press, 1971; originally published in
1937), p. xiii.
81. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies.”
82. Henry A. Wallace, “The Danger of American Fascism,” New York Times,
April 9, 1944.
83. Ibid.
84. George Seldes, Facts and Fascism (New York: In Fact, Inc., 1947); George
Seldes, Freedom of the Press (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1935).
85. Wallace, “The Danger of American Fascism.”
86. We take up most of these issues in later chapters. As for the point about
the increased degree of economic concentration in the economy today compared
to decades past, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless
Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
87. Many writers have looked at these and other phenomena and raised
thoughtful concerns about the drift of the country in such a troubling direc-
tion. See, for example, Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power
in America (Boston: South End Press, 1980); Linda L. Smith, On the Edge of
Fascism: An American Tragedy (Linda L. Smith, 2013); Eric D. Williams, The
Puzzle of Fascism: Could fascism arise in America or could it already be a Fascist
State? (WhatReallyIsTheMatrix.com, 2007).
88. Robert S. Lynd, “Foreword,” in Robert A. Brady, Business as a System of
Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p. xvii.
89. Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, “Across the Globe, a Growing Disillu-
sionment with Democracy,” New York Times, September 15, 2015.
90. Taibbi, The Divide, p. xx.
91. Considerable research demonstrates that Americans across the political
spectrum and people worldwide wish to live in far more egalitarian societies
than what actually exist. See Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael I. Norton, “How
Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire for More Equal Pay,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9 (2014): 587–593.
92. Klein, This Changes Everything, p. 466.
18. See Stephanie Luce, Labor Movements: Global Perspectives (Malden, MA:
Polity, 2014).
19. Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, editors, New Labor and New York: Precarious
Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2014), p. 3.
20. Amanda Becker, “U.S. union membership steady at 11.3 percent in 2013:
Labor Department,” Reuters, January 24, 2014; “Union Members–2014,” US
Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 23, 2015. Even as the recovery supposedly
picked up the pace in the 2010s, union membership declined, or at best remained
steady.
21. Ibid.
22. Schmitt, “Inequality as Policy,” p. 5.
23. In addition to income, there has been a striking amount of growth over
the past several decades in the concentration of wealth—meaning savings and
capital—in the smaller number of hands of very rich people. Wealth is the most
important measure of economic power in a capitalist economy, because expand-
ing one’s wealth is what the system is all about. By 2013 the Credit Suisse Global
Wealth Databook determined that the United States had the most unequal distri-
bution of wealth among all advanced economies, and was grouped in a cluster
that included India, Indonesia, and South Africa. See Credit Suisse Research In-
stitute, Global Wealth Databook 2013 (Credit Suisse, October 2013), p. 146.
24. Nicholas Kristof, “The Cost of a Decline in Unions,” New York Times,
February 19, 2015.
25. Robert Reich, “Why Wages Won’t Rise,” Huffington Post, January 13, 2015.
26. This is not an accident; those atop the economy understandably desire a
healthy dose of unemployment and economic insecurity to keep wages down and
workers in line. It also reduces working-class political power. As utilities magnate
Samuel Insull famously put it a century ago: “My experience is that the greatest
aid to the efficiency of labor is a long line of men waiting at the gate.” From
Richard Norton Smith, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick,
1880–1955 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 118.
27. Data cited in Nicholas Kristof, “The Cost of a Decline in Unions,” New
York Times, February 20, 2015.
28. Point made by Lawrence Summers in Wonkblog, “Robots Are Hurting
Middle-Class Workers and Education Won’t Solve the Problem,” Washington
Post, March 3, 2015.
29. Noam Scheiber, “Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anx-
ieties,” New York Times, July 13, 2015, p. B8. The quote is Scheiber’s assessment
of the study.
30. Yen, “4 in 5 in USA Face Near-Poverty.”
31. Ibid.
32. Lane Kenworthy, Social Democratic America (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2014), p. 56.
33. This increase in poverty and inequality has the additional effect of
making it far more likely that children born into these circumstances will
have a much greater likelihood of poverty themselves. See Robert Putnam,
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2015).
34. As James Galbraith has demonstrated, most of the income growth over
the fifteen years running up to the Great Recession of 2008 went to a small num-
ber of people in a few sectors—most notably military contracting, technology,
and finance—who live in a handful of counties that have experienced booms.
Virtually everyone else has been left out in the cold. See James K. Galbraith,
Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy before the Great Crisis (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
35. National Employment Law Project, “The Low-Wage Recovery and
Growing Inequality,” NELP Data Brief, August 2012, p. 2.
36. Felix Salmon, “Wall Street’s Dead End,” New York Times, February 13,
2011.
37. Victor Luckerson, “HP’s Massive Layoffs Are Doing Wonders for Its
Stock Price,” Time, May 23, 2014.
38. “Coming to an Office near You,” Economist, January 18, 2014.
39. Reich, “Why Wages Won’t Rise.”
40. The Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz notes that “the reason
we have a problem is we’re so successful in technology. . . . There’s no enemy
here.” Both quotes from Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman, “Millions of Mid-
dle-Class Jobs Killed by Machines in Great Recession’s Wake,” Huffington Post,
January 23, 2013.
41. Michael Spence, “Technology and the Employment Challenge,” Project
Syndicate, January 15, 2013.
42. Brad Tuttle, “12 Iconic Stores and Restaurants that Are Rapidly Disap-
pearing,” Time, July 30, 2014
43. For the source of this data, see addendum to Chart 17 in the Statistical
Appendix.
44. Allison Schrager and Peter Coy, “Measuring the State of America’s Hu-
man Capital,” BusinessWeek.com, December 5, 2014.
45. Gary Girod and Eliza Shapiro, “Generation Screwed,” Newsweek, July 23,
2012, pp. 40–41.
46. Cited in Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization
Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2013), p. 88.
47. Thompson, “A World without Work.”
48. “Generation Jobless.”
49. Girod and Shapiro, “Generation Screwed.”
50. Even enthusiastic supporters of the market acknowledge that this is
“Generation Jobless,” though they generally try to find ways the market can
accommodate the tens of millions who are unemployed and underemployed. See
Peter Vogel, Generation Jobless? Turning the Youth Unemployment Crisis into Oppor-
tunity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
51. For pioneering work, see Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat:
Virtual Work in a Real World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003); for fur-
ther developments, see Huws, Labor in the Digital Economy (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2014).
52. “There’s an App for That,” Economist, January 3, 2015, p. 18.
53. Guy Standing, “On-Demand Taskers: Expanding the Ranks of the ‘Pre-
cariat,’” Working-Class Perspectives, February 16, 2015.
54. Edelman Berland, Freelancing in America: A National Survey of the New
Workforce, independent study commissioned by Freelancers Union and Elance-
oDesk, 2014.
55. Ilana Kowarski, “Freelance Jobs: Half of All New Jobs in Recovery?”
Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 2011.
56. Noam Scheiber, “Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxi-
eties,” New York Times, July 13, 2015, p. B8.
57. Natasha Singer, “Check App. Accept Job. Repeat,” New York Times, August
17, 2014, sec. B, p. 1.
58. Kowarski, “Freelance Jobs.”
59. Kevin Roose, “Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem?”
New York, September 18, 2014.
60. Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, pp. 12, 31.
61. Jessica Barrett, “The Death of Lifelong Jobs; Young People Face Uncer-
tainty as the World of Work Changes,” National Post’s Financial Post & FP Investing,
November 1, 2014.
62. Simon Baribeau, “Rise of the ‘Flex’ Economy,” Christian Science Monitor,
June 8, 2014.
63. “There’s an App for That,” p. 18.
64. Ursula Huws, “iCapitalism and the Cybertariat,” Monthly Review 66, no.
8 (January 2015): 50.
65. Cowen, Average Is Over, pp. 229–230.
66. James K. Galbraith, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of
Growth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), p. 133. For an excellent history
of the relationship of capitalism to technology, see David F. Noble, America by
Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977).
67. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 2014), p. 31. As the economist Allen Sinai explained to the New York Times in
2010, “American business is about maximizing shareholder value. You basically
don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to re-
place them.” See Peter Goodman, “Despite Signs of Recovery, Chronic Jobless-
ness Rises,” New York Times, February 20, 2010.
68. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2014), p. 68.
69. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,”
in Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), pp. 358–373.
70. As the Economist notes, “nowadays, the majority of economists confidently
wave such worries away” (“The Onrushing Wave,” Economist, January 18, 2014).
The way technology is developed, specifically labor-saving technology, is so
closely connected to profit criteria that it is not always easy to determine where
the influence of technology ends and the importance of the profit motive begins.
They are intertwined, and this can lead to confusion in analysis. At the same
time, this explains how critics of what is happening to jobs due to technology are
not necessarily critics of technology per se, but per quo. Their real target is the
economic system. Technology is malleable, especially in its early stages of devel-
opment; once it gets on a specific path, it can be difficult to change its course.
71. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race against the Machine (Lexing-
ton, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011), p. 20.
72. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Rout-
ledge, 1943); Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on
the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966),
ch. 8.
73. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automa-
tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 57. See also Noble, “Com-
mand Performance: Military Influences on Technological Development and
Their Sociological Consequences,” in Noble, Progress without People: In Defense
of Luddism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1993), pp. 110–124.
74. Noble, Forces of Production, p. 67.
75. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), pp. 187–189.
76. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952).
See also David Standish, “Interview: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” Playboy, July 1973.
77. Cited in Carr, The Glass Cage, p. 39.
78. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1955), p. 289.
79. R. H. MacMillan, Automation: Friend or Foe? (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1956), p. 1.
80. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine (1948; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), p. 38.
81. Automation and Technological Change (Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office, 1955).
82. Michel Crozier and Georges Friedmann, “Foreword,” International Social
Science Bulletin 10 (1958): 7.
83. Carr, The Glass Cage, pp. 159, 37–38.
84. Wiener told Reuther that he had turned down at least one offer from an
industrial corporation to advise it on how best to use automation, and he offered
to meet with Reuther to discuss the matter. Norbert Wiener to Walter Reuther,
August 13, 1949, in Noble, Progress without People, pp. 161–163.
85. “Report of the Director-General, Part I,” in Automation and Other Techno-
logical Developments: Labour and Social Implications (Geneva: International Labour
Office, 1957), p. 3.
86. Cited in Frederick Pollock, Automation: A Study of Its Economic and Social
Consequences, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (New York: Frederick
A. Praeger, 1957), p. 242.
87. Cited in Noble, Forces of Production, p. 253.
88. [Paul M. Sweezy,] The Scientific-Industrial Revolution (New York: Model,
Roland, and Stone, 1957).
89. To support himself on top of his professional salary and to obtain funds
for research, economist Paul Baran occasionally wrote reports for the Wall
Street firm of Model, Roland and Stone. He was commissioned to do a report on
technology but was pressed for time, so he asked his frequent coauthor Sweezy
to do it for him. The resulting report was issued by the firm with no author in-
dicated, but Sweezy considered it one of his best pieces of writing. The original
copy is in the Sweezy archives at Harvard University. Harry Braverman made use
of Sweezy’s argument on the scientific-industrial revolution in this pamphlet to
construct much of his own argument on the scientific-technological revolution.
See Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1999), p. 115.
90. The German Frankfurt School scholar Frederick Pollock made a detailed
study of American automation in the mid-1950s, and was more optimistic than
Wiener, but he was struck by the damage that automation would do to smaller
businesses and competitive markets. He, too, was alarmed by the likelihood that
automation could lead to economic calamity. “The present situation has been
summarized in the statement: ‘Machines can do practically everything in the
economy except buy the goods that are produced.’ One might add that—in cer-
tain phases of technical progress—there is actually a tendency for new machines
to deprive people of their power to consume goods.” To Pollock, the solution was
economic planning that would “integrate automation with a free and democratic
society. Success in such planning would mean that the second industrial revolu-
tion could help establish a social system based upon reason.” Frederick Pollock,
Automation: A Study of Its Economic and Social Consequences, trans. W. O. Henderson
and W. H. Chaloner (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), pp. 240, 253.
91. The economist Robert A. Brady completed what was arguably the most
comprehensive field examination of automation and the “scientific revolution in
industry” in 1961. Like Sweezy, he anticipated a much longer time frame than
most contemporary commentators, though he had no doubt about the impor-
tance of automation. “In the larger industrial sphere, what appears to be shaping
up, with the inevitability of glacial action, is the gradual de facto application of
one or another of the aspects of automatic machine-operations to the industrial
system at large. . . . The machine takes over, step by step, the entire round of
factory operations.” Brady, Organization, Automation, and Society: The Scientific
Revolution in Industry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1961), pp. 233, 236.
92. George Terborgh, The Automation Hysteria (Washington, DC: Machine
and Allied Products Institute, 1965).
93. Todd Gitlin, “The Triple Revolution: Some Questions and Answers,”
Monthly Review, December 1964, p. 524.
94. Robert E. Cubbedge, Who Needs People? Automation and Your Future
(Washington, DC: Robert B. Luce, 1963), p. 12.
95. Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s
Revolution (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2005), pp. 79–81. The anarchist
Murray Bookchin wrote widely on these themes as well in the 1960s. His work
concentrated on “post-scarcity” economies and how technology could be put to
humane purposes. See Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ram-
parts Press, 1971).
96. See Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How
Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2004), p. 1. Text of the memo available at https://www.marxists.org/
history/etol/newspape/isr/vol25/no03/adhoc.html. See also The Editors, “The
Triple Revolution,” Monthly Review, November 1964, pp. 417–422.
97. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake through a Great Revo-
lution,” Presentation at National Cathedral, Washington, DC, March 31,
1968. Congressional Record, April 9, 1968, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index
.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_remaining_awake_through_a_great
_revolution/.
98. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p.
28. Marcuse is quoting the French writer Serge Mallet.
99. George and Louis Crowley, “Beyond Automation,” Monthly Review, No-
vember 1964, p. 423.
100. The Editors, “The Triple Revolution,” p. 422.
101. Noble, Forces of Production, pp. 249–250.
102. Ibid., pp. 250–251.
103. Herbert A. Simon, The Shape of Automation for Men and Management
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. xii-xiii.
104. Cited in Noble, Forces of Production, p. 259.
105. Quote in Thompson, “A World without Work.”
106. National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic
Progress, Technology and the American Economy, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: US Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1966), pp. xi, xii.
107. Ibid., pp. 110–112.
108. Ibid.
109. As one labor leader said, “we must, of course, accept the inevitability of
automation.” Noble concludes that “the unions were on the defensive, and union
leaders knew that their own efforts were not enough.” This transition is covered
well in Noble, Forces of Production, pp. 257–261. See also Noble, Progress without
People, pp. 127–129.
110. Martin Wolf, “Same as It Ever Was: Why the Techno-optimists Are
Wrong,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2015, p. 19.
111. Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, p. 11.
112. Charles P. Alexander, “The New Economy,” Time, May 30, 1983.
113. Gene Pylinsky, “The Race to the Automated Factory,” Fortune, February
21, 1983.
114. Another factor in the decline of automation as a public issue, for rea-
sons we discuss in the next two chapters, is that beginning in the 1970s there
was a concerted campaign by big business and its allies to remove anything that
might threaten the economic status quo from legitimate political debate. In that
environment, the environment Americans still experience today, anything that
challenged the right of businesses to use automation to maximize profit or simply
to lay off workers as they pleased would be outside the boundaries of legitimate
debate. The idea that people were entitled to have a good-paying job if they were
willing to work went from being in the heart of the mainstream to the lunatic
fringe. With the decline of organized labor, the idea that workers should actively
participate in developing technology that gave workers more autonomy, creativ-
ity, and satisfaction was similarly tossed into history’s dumpster. This is discussed
in Seymour Melman, After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), ch. 7. How could American business remain
competitive if the inmates were given the keys to the asylum?
115. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (New York: Tarcher Putnam, 1995), pp.
xv, xiii.
116. http://www.iweblists.com/us/commerce/MarketCapitalization.html. One
of us assesses the emergence and nature of Internet monopoly firms in detail in
Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet
against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2013).
117. To some, including frustrated workers, this obsession with control made
no sense. “The specific form that automation is taking,” Barbara Garson ob-
served in a 1988 study of white-collar automation, “seems to be based less on a
rational desire for profit than on an irrational prejudice against people.” Garson,
The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future
into the Factory of the Past (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 13.
118. “The New Automation,” Christian Science Monitor, February 24, 1983,
http://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0224/022411.html.
119. Wassily Leontief and Faye Duchin, The Future Impact of Automation on
Workers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 25.
120. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2014), p. 123.
121. Ibid., p. 125.
122. As Dan Schiller, perhaps the leading analyst of the role of informa-
tion and communication technologies in the economy, put it in 2014: “During
the final decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, a Hercu-
lean reorganization of work tore through corporate production in factories
and fields, offices and laboratories. It could never have taken place without
ever-more versatile and far-ranging computer-communications. . . . Across an
ever-widening front of systems and applications, what was sometimes called
“information resource sharing” catalyzed qualitative changes in labor pro-
cesses, as capital redefined skill requirements across innumerable industries
and occupations.” It was not just computerization but the connection of these
technologies through networks that was key: “Networks participated in this
triply: by enabling productivity increases, through shared use of resources and
automation of tasks; by enhancing administrative oversight of and intervention
into labor processes that had escaped this previously; and by forging linkages
between hitherto isolated production processes.” Dan Schiller, Digital Depres-
sion: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2014), pp. 20–21.
123. Galbraith, The End of Normal, p. 141.
124. Wonkblog, “Robots Are Hurting Middle-Class Workers.”
125. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 42.
126. Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and
Power (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 215.
127. Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution
That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2013), p. 7.
128. “There’s an App for That,” p. 18.
129. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Race against the Machine, p. 19.
130. The emergence of quantum computers in the coming years could pos-
sibly assure the rate of growth does not slow down appreciably. See “A little bit,
better,” Economist, June 20, 2015, p.p. 77–78.
131. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, p. 47.
132. Gill A. Pratt, “Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?” Journal
of Economic Perspectives, 29, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 51–60.
133. As of 2015, scientists believe they have developed an unbeatable algo-
rithm for playing poker, by incorporating game theory, such that it can success-
fully navigate whatever opponents might do. See Philip Ball, “Game Theorists
Crack Poker,” Nature, January 8, 2015.
134. Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
(New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. xiv.
135. Miller, “As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up.”
136. Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, Big Data.
137. Carr, The Glass Cage pp. 11, 17.
138. Vincent Mosco, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World (Boulder,
CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), pp. 164–166.
139. Carr, The Glass Cage, p. 118.
140. Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 20–21.
141. “There’s an App for That,” p. 20.
142. Michael Miller, The Internet of Things: How Smart TVs, Smart Cars, Smart
Homes, and Smart Cities Are Changing the World (Indianapolis: Que [Pearson Ed-
ucational], 2015), p. 7.
143. Samuel Greengard, The Internet of Things (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015),
pp. xiii–xv. For a more decidedly optimistic vision of the Internet of Things, see
David Rose, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things
(New York: Scribner, 2014).
144. Philip N. Howard, Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us
Free or Lock Us Up (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. xii.
145. Carr, The Glass Cage, p. 195.
146. Alex Webb, “Can Germany Beat the U.S. to the Industrial Internet?”
Bloomberg Businessweek, September 18, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/news
/articles/2015-09-18/can-the-mittelstand-fend-off-u-s-software-giants- .
147. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, p. 73.
148. W. Brian Arthur, “The Second Economy,” McKinsey Quarterly, October
2011. We learned of this piece from Carr, The Glass Cage, pp. 196–197.
149. Ford, Rise of the Robots, p. 6.
150. Ben Way, Jobocalypse: The End of Humans Jobs and How Robots Will Replace
Them (Charleston, SC: Ben Way, 2013), p. 23.
151. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, p. 89.
152. Cited in Diane Ackerman, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 235.
153. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, pp. 37, 90.
154. “The Onrushing Wave.”
155. “Coming to an Office near You.”
156. Federico Pistono, Robots Will Steal Your Job, but That’s OK: How to Survive
the Economic Collapse and Be Happy (Lexington, KY: Createspace, 2012), p. xvii.
157. “The Onrushing Wave.”
158. Zoe Corbyn, “Robots Are Leaving the Factory Floor and Heading for
Your Desk—and Your Job,” Guardian, February 9, 2015.
159. “There’s an App for That,” pp. 18, 20.
160. Carr, The Glass Cage, pp. 110–112.
194. For a detailed assessment of the massive increase in the global labor pool
in the past three decades, especially from China, see Foster and McChesney, The
Endless Crisis.
195. Thanks to John Bellamy Foster for this specific point. See also Robert
Sidelsky, “Labor’s Paradise Lost,” Project Syndicate, June 21, 2012.
196. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, p. 125.
197. Galbraith, The End of Normal, p. 142.
198. Ibid., p. 144.
199. Ibid., pp. 138–145.
200. Lars Mensel and Max Tholl, “Jeremy Rifkin: In New Economy, ‘Social
Skills Count More Than Work Skills,’” The European, March 2, 2015.
201. Thompson, “A World without Work.”
202. Noam Scheiber, “Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anx-
ieties,” New York Times, July 13, 2015, p. B8.
203. Joe Talton, “Are Robots Better Than Humans? Not If Jobs Are Lost,”
Seattle Times, March 14, 2015.
204. See, for example, Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon:
Wrestling Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestlingbig
-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=.
205. Sidelsky, “Labor’s Paradise Lost.”
206. Max Nisen, “Robot Economy Could Cause up to 75 Percent Unem-
ployment,” Business Insider, January 28, 2013.
207. Sidelsky, “Labor’s Paradise Lost.”
208. Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,”
www.pewinternet.org, August 6, 2014.
209. Pistono, Robots Will Steal Your Job, p. 69.
210. Miller, “As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep
Up.” Or as Jason Pontin, editor and publisher of the MIT Technology Review, put
it: “There’s no economic law that says the jobs eliminated by new technologies
will inevitably be replaced by new jobs in new markets.” See Smith and Ander-
son, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs.”
211. Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, pp. 28–29.
212. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employ-
ment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?” Oxford Martin School,
University of Oxford, September 17, 2013.
213. For Amara’s law, see Joel Mokyr, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth,
“The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth: Is
This Time Different?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29, no. 3 (Summer 2015):
48. MIT economist David H. Auter, for example, is skeptical that automation is
about to take a qualitative leap and argues that “a significant stratum of middle-
skill jobs” will continue for decades, but he cautions even that will not necessar-
ily transpire unless the education system produces workers with the necessary
skills, which is by no means assured. See David H. Autor, “Why Are There Still
So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation,” Journal of
Economic Perspectives, 29, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 3–30.
214. Wonkblog, “Robots Are Hurting Middle-Class Workers.”
215. Cited in Carr, The Glass Cage, p. 33.
216. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, p. 134.
217. “Coming to an Office near You.”
218. “There’s an App for That,” p. 20.
219. “The Onrushing Wave.”
220. Greengard, The Internet of Things, pp. 151–152.
221. Grave concerns regarding the fate of humanity in this regard have been
registered by the likes of Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Steve
Wozniak. See Peter Holley, “Apple Co-founder on Artificial Intelligence: ‘The
Future Is Scary and Very Bad for People,’” Washington Post, March 24, 2015.
222. Carr, The Glass Cage, pp. 18, 113.
223. Nick Bilton, “Ava Is Just Sci-Fi (for Now),” New York Times, May 21,
2015, p. D2.
224. Future of Life Institute, “Autonomous Weapons: An Open Letter from
AI & Robotics Researchers,” July 28, 2015, http://futureoflife.org/AI/open
_letter_autonomous_weapons.
225. Ford, The Lights in the Tunnel, p. 106.
226. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in
Harold J. Laski, The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels (New York: Seabury
Press, 1967), p. 135.
227. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 91–111.
228. All taken from bk. IV, ch. VI of John Stuart Mill, Principles of Politi-
cal Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, 6th ed. (London:
Longman, Green, 1865).
229. Thorsten Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B. W.
Huebsch, 1921), pp. 8, 9, 68, 121.
230. Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”
231. Ibid., 373.
232. Thompson, “A World without Work.”
233. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, p. 352.
234. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 37.
235. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, “Some Theoretical Implications,”
Monthly Review, July-August 2012, pp. 26–27. This essay was not published
until 2012; it was originally written for inclusion in their book Monopoly Cap-
ital but was not signed off on by both authors before Baran’s untimely death
in 1964.
236. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “Will Humans Go the Way of
Horses? Labor in the Second Machine Age,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2015,
p. 14.
13. Rick Ungar, “The Numbers Don’t Lie—Why Lowering Taxes for the
Rich No Longer Works to Grow the Economy,” Forbes, September 16, 2012.
14. Katie Sanders, “Bernie Sanders says 99 percent of ‘new’ income is going
to top 1 percent,” Tampa Bay Times PolitiFact, April 19, 2015.
15. Justin Wolfers, “The Gains from the Economic Recovery Are Still Lim-
ited to the Top One Percent,” New York Times, January 27, 2015.
16. The Editors, “Stacking the Deck: The Phony ‘Fix the Debt’ Campaign,”
Nation, February 20, 2013.
17. Ibid.
18. Paul N. Van de Water, “Ryan Plan Makes Deep Cuts in Social Security,”
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 21, 2010. See also, “Rep. Paul
Ryan: No Friend of Social Security,” Fact Sheet from Social Security Works,
http://www.strengthensocialsecurity.org/ryan
19. Kim Dixon, “Obama might back territorial tax, business chief,” Reuters,
January 31, 2013.
20. Jim Provance, “In Ohio, Obama rips Romney tax plan,” Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, August 2, 2012.
21. Dixon, “Obama might back territorial tax.”
22. “Under Obama’s Proposed 14% Transition Tax,” Citizens for Tax Justice
report, February 3, 2015.
23. Robert Goulder, “Bernie Sanders: Swimming against the Tide,” Forbes,
April 27, 2015.
24. Stephen Ohlemacher and Emily Swanson, “AP-GfK Poll: Most back
Obama plan to raise investment taxes,” February 22, 2015.
25. Aaron Blake, “Elizabeth Warren says the system is rigged for the rich,”
Washington Post, January 9, 2015.
26. Bernie Sanders, “Of the Rich, By the Rich, For the Rich,” June 25, 2012,
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/of-the-rich-by-the
-rich-for-the-rich.
27. “The Great Recession and the jobs crisis,” United Nations Department of
Economic and Social Affairs (DESA)–Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC),
2011, http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2011/chapter2.pdf.
28. Matthew Bandyk, “Is Unemployment the Worst since the Great Depres-
sion?” US News and World Report, August 27, 2009.
29. Bob Herbert, “A World of Hurt,” New York Times, September 15, 2009.
30. “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: Unemploy-
ment Rate,” Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data extracted on: April 28, 2015.
31. John Nichols, “As Unemployment Spikes, Obama’s Got a Bigger Prob-
lem Than the Debt Ceiling,” Nation, July 8, 2011. Also: Robert Barone, “Why
Jack Welch Has a Point about Unemployment Numbers,” Forbes, October 16,
2012.
32. Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer
on Economic Inequality & Insecurity (New York: New Press: 2005).
33. Philip Bump, “The Unemployment Rate for Blacks Has Always Been at
Least 60 Percent Higher Than for Whites,” Atlantic (The Wire), March 7, 2014.
34. “Table A-2. Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and
age,” Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data extracted on: April 28, 2015.
35. Ben Casselman, “How Baltimore’s Young Black Men Are Boxed In,”
fivethirtyeight.com, March 28. 2015.
36. Annie Lowrey, “Do Millennials Stand a Chance in the Real World?” New
York Times, March 26, 2013.
37. “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: Unemploy-
ment Rate,” Bureau of Labor Statistics. Data extracted on: April 28, 2015.
38. “Mondale’s Acceptance Speech, 1984,” www.cnn.com, http://www.cnn.com
/ALLPOLITICS/1996/conventions/chicago/facts/famous.speeches/mondale
.84.shtml.
39. Ibid.
40. Bill Curry, “Neoliberals are killing us: The TED talk, techno-utopian,
Thomas Friedman-economy is a lie,” Salon, April 29, 2015.
41. John Conyers Jr., “H.R. 1000, the “Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment
and Training Act,” http://www.johnconyers.com/hr-1000-humphrey-hawkins-full
-employment-and-training-act#.VT_nJyFViko
42. William Darity Jr., “Federal Law Requires Job Creation,” New York Times,
December 4, 2013.
43. Conyers, “H.R. 1000”
44. Ibid.
45. Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on the Economic Recov-
ery Program,” February 5, 1983.
46. K. O. Jackson, “UAW members rally against plant closure,” Kokomo Tri-
bune, July 25, 2009.
47. Michael Barone, “Marcy Kaptur,” The Almanac of American Politics (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), http://www.nationaljournal.com
/almanac/member/254?print=true.
48. Anne O. Krueger, “Willful Ignorance: The Struggle to Convince the Free
Trade Skeptics,” address to the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Ge-
neva, May 18, 2004. Krueger was then acting managing director of the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund.
49. Paul Gigot, “Opinion Journal: Will Obama Step Up for Free Trade?”
March 9, 2015, and Eduardo Porter, “Globalization that Works for Workers at
Home,” New York Times, February 24, 2015.
50. Richard A. McCormack, “President Obama, Wall Street Financiers,
Corporate CEOs and Members of Congress Meet Together to Plan Strategy
to Sell and Pass Free-Trade Agreements,” Manufacturing and Technology News,
December 17, 2014. For a full text of the president’s speech, see “Remarks by
the President at Meeting of the Export Council,” December 11, 2014.
51. Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Me-
dia,” documentary film by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, 1992.
52. “Trade,” AFL-CIO, January 1, 2015, http://www.aflcio.org/Issues/Trade.
53. Congresswoman Betty Sutton reviewed the figures, did some quick cal-
culations, and went to the floor of the House to deliver a stark message to the
Congress and the American people on the eve of the 2012 election campaign,
“Many big companies have not created jobs in the U.S. Instead, they’ve taken
many of their jobs to countries with the cheapest labor, the least regulations and
few employee rights,” Sutton explained. “On that point, every day in the United
States, we are losing 15 factories.” Congressional Record–House, October 25, 2011,
HR7063.
54. “Job-Killing Trade Deficits Surge under FTAs: U.S. Trade Deficits Grow
More than 425% with FTA Countries, but Decline 11% with Non-FTA Coun-
tries,” Public Citizen report, February, 2015.
55. Sherrod Brown, “Not Another NAFTA,” newsletter, April 6, 2015.
56. Zach Carter, “Elizabeth Warren: Obama Trade Deal Could Undermine
Wall Street Reform,” Huffington Post, December 18, 2014.
57. Daniel J. Ikenson, “Hyperbole Aside, Elizabeth Warren Is Right
About the Risk of Investor-State,” Cato At Liberty (Cato Institute), February
26, 2015.
58. Michael McAuliff, “Mitch McConnell Pledges Fast Action for Secretive
Trade Deals,” Washington Post, January 7, 2015.
59. Hart Research Associates and Chesapeake Beach Consulting, “Voters’
View of Fast-Track Authority for the Trans-Pacific-Partnership Pact,” January
27, 2014.
60. “Sen. Mitch McConnell” profile, “Top 20 Industries contributing to
Campaign Committee,” Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.
org/politicians/industries.php?type=I&cid=n00003389&newMem=N&recs
=20&cycle=2014.
61. John Nichols, “Obama Talks Tough on Trade,” Nation, February 13, 2008.
62. Michael Luo, “Memo Gives Canada’s Account of Obama Campaign’s
Meeting on Nafta,” New York Times, March 4, 2008.
63. Ian Austen, “Trade Pact Controversy in Democratic Race Reaches into
Canadian Parliament,” New York Times, March 7, 2008.
64. Luo, “Memo Gives Canada’s Account of Obama Campaign’s Meeting on
Nafta.”
65. Nina Easton, “Obama: NAFTA Not So Bad After All,” Fortune, June 18,
2008.
66. Ibid.
67. John Nichols, “Obama Goes Soft on Trade,” Nation, June 19, 2008.
68. Roger Runningen, “Obama Signs Trade Deals with South Korea, Pan-
ama, Colombia,” Bloomberg Business, October 21, 2011.
69. Peter Schroeder, “Warren to Obama: Stop making ‘untrue’ trade claims,”
The Hill, April 25, 2015.
70. Sarah Green, “How Campaign Finance Reform Could Help Business,”
Harvard Business Review, April, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/09/how-campaign
-finance-reform-co/.
71. We provide long and detailed critiques of contemporary journalism in
our last three books: John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy: How
the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America (New York: Nation
Books, 2013); Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of
American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again (New
York: Nation Books, 2010); and John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Trag-
edy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democ-
racy (New York: The New Press, 2005).
72. John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, “Dollarocracy: Special Inter-
ests Dominate Washington and Undermine Our Democracy,” Nation, Septem-
ber 11, 2013.
73. Matt Isaacs, Lowell Bergman, and Stephen Engelberg, “His Man in
Macau: Inside the Investigation into Sheldon Adelson’s Empire,” Investigative
Reporting Program of the University of California and FRONTLINE, July
16, 2012; Hannah Groch-Begley, “Bribery, Money-Laundering, and Islam-
ophobia: The Sheldon Adelson Story the Media Forgot,” Media Matters for
America, March 31, 2014.
74. Luisa Kroll, “Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Was Year’s Biggest Winner,
with Fortune Jumping $15 Billion,” Forbes, December 23, 2013.
75. Igor Bobic, “Koch Brothers Plan $300 Million Spending Spree in 2014,”
Huffington Post, June 14, 2014.
76. “Sheldon Adelson No. 8 in Forbes’ Billionaire Rankings; Bill Gates No.
1,” Associated Press, March 3, 2014.
77. Nichols and McChesney, Dollarocracy, pp. 35–66.
78. Nicholas Confessore, “Koch Brothers’ Budget of $889 Million for 2016
Is on Par with Both Parties’ Spending,” New York Times, January 26, 2015;
“Democrats Daunted by Conservative Group’s $900 Million for 2016 Cam-
paign,” Reuters, January 28, 2015.
79. Elizabeth B. Wydra, “Roberts Court: Easier to Donate, Harder to
Vote,” Reuters, April 4, 2014. We have long argued that mass movements to
address this reality are essential to restoring and renewing the battered dem-
ocratic infrastructure of the United States—in fact, we wrote a bluntly titled
2013 book on the subject: Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election
Complex Is Destroying America. But it is important to recognize that undo-
ing the Citizens United, McCutcheon, and Shelby decisions would only get the
United States back to 2010, which was not exactly the high water mark for
American democracy.
97. Howard Steven Friedman, “American Voter Turnout Lower than Other
Wealthy Countries,” Huffington Post, July 10, 2012.
98. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (In-
ternational IDEA), “Voter turnout data for Germany,” http://www.idea.int/vt
/countryview.cfm?CountryCode=DE.
99. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (Interna-
tional IDEA), “Voter Turnout,” http://www.idea.int/vt/.
100. Rafael López Pintor and Maria Gratschew, “Voter Turnout since 1945:
A Global Report” and “Voter Turnout in Western Europe since 1945: A Regional
Report,” International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (In-
ternational IDEA), http://www.idea.int/publications/voter_turnout_weurope
/index.cfm.
101. United States Elections Project, “Voter Turnout,” http://www.elect
project.org/home/voter-turnout.
to William Branch Giles, December 26, 1825, Founders Online, National Ar-
chives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98–01–02–5771.
24. Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, November 12, 1816, Papers of
Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series, Vol. 10, p. 522, http://tjrs.monticello.org
/letter/1392; http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib022651.
25. Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and
Why We Need It More than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 115.
26. Emily Zackin, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitu-
tions Contain America’s Positive Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2013), p. 12.
27. Even Alexander Hamilton, the “pro-capitalist” framer who advocated a
strong manufacturing sector, was hardly a proponent of laissez faire; he thought
the federal government had to take an active hand in establishing a manufac-
turing sector, and had no qualms with its doing so. See Robert Heilbroner and
Aaron Singer, The Economic Transformation of America, 4th Edition (Boston: Wad-
sworth, 1999), pp. 85–87.
28. Matthew J. Hegreness, “An Organic Law Theory of the Fourteenth
Amendment: The Northwest Ordinance as the Source of Rights, Privileges, and
Immunities,” Yale Law Journal, 120, no. 7 (May 2011): 1823, 1841.
29. John Adams to John Jebb, September 10, 1785, http://rotunda.upress
.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA-03–01–02–0254. In John Adams, The Works of
John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes
and Illustrations, Volume 9 (Little, Brown, 1854), p. 540. In his essay on John
Adams’s defense of constitutions, Neal Pollack wrote: “The idea of equal access
to education, to the great intellectual advancements of the Enlightenment, to
reasoned inquiry, is at the core of all Adams’ writing, and indeed was the intel-
lectual core of this country’s founding. Without it, the specter of tyranny begins
to cast its shadow.” Neal Pollack, “Introduction,” in John Adams, A Defence of
the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (New York: Akashic
Books, 2004), pp. 20–21.
30. Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016 (New York: Twelve, 2014), p. 64.
31. Sunstein, Second Bill of Rights, p.116.
32. Cited in Michael J. Thompson, The Politics of Inequality (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2011), p. 57.
33. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, pp. 34–37.
34. Ibid., p. 37.
35. Quoted in Thomas Geoghegan, Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why Amer-
ica Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (New York: New Press, 2014), p. 34.
36. Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff
Box to Citizens United (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 14,
20, 5.
37. Publius (Alexander Hamilton), “The Danger of a Standing Army: ‘An
Intention to Mislead the People,” The Federalist XXIV, December 19, 1787. In
The Debate on the Constitution, Part One (New York: Library of America, 1993),
p. 576.
38. Madison Debates, “In Convention,” August 17, 1787, Avalon Project, Yale
Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_817.asp.
39. Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 1998), p.59.
40. Cited in Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You (New York: Na-
tion Books, 2015), p. 194.
41. Cited in John Nichols, The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for
Royalism (New York: The New Press, 2006), p. 121.
42. Cited in John Nichols, editor, Against the Beast: A Documentary History of
American Opposition to Empires (New York: Nation Books, 2005), p. 14.
43. George Washington, “Farewell Address,” 1796, http://en.wikisource.org/
wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address.
44. Walter Dean Burnham, “The Constitution, Capitalism, and the Need
for Rationalized Regulation,” in Goldwin and Schambra, How Capitalistic Is the
Constitution?, p. 81.
45. This episode and tradition are covered in Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of
Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: Metro-
politan Books, 2013), ch. 9.
46. The Editors, “War Profiteering,” Nation, May 12, 2003, http://www
.thenation.com/article/war-profiteering#.
47. Sunstein, Second Bill of Rights, p. 239.
48. For two classic statements, one from the 1960s and the other from 2010,
imploring the United States to reject its new imperialism and return to its pre-
1940s ways, see Eugene J. McCarthy, The Limits of Power: America’s Role in the World
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967), and Chalmers Johnson, Disman-
tling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).
49. See Andrew P. Napolitano, Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presiden-
tial Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty (Nashville: Nelson Books,
2014). See also William F. Grover and Joseph G. Peschek, The Unsustainable Pres-
idency: Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
50. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11: 48–49, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu
/founders/print_documents/amendI_speechs8.html.
51. Nichols and McChesney, Tragedy and Farce.
52. It was a radical notion, too radical it would turn out for Washington, who
was ill at ease with Paine’s challenges to organized religion, consolidated wealth,
and authority in general. All of this history is covered in detail in McChesney and
Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism.
53. Covered in detail in McChesney and Nichols, The Death and Life of Amer-
ican Journalism.
54. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Penguin, 2003),
pp. 215, 604.
57. Potter Stewart, “Or of the Press,” Yale Law Report, 21, no. 2 (Winter 1974–
1975): 9–11.
58. Cited in Donald R. Simon, “Big Media: Its Effect on the Marketplace of
Ideas and How to Slow the Urge to Merge,” John Marshall Journal of Computer
and Information Law 20, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 273.
59. These points are developed in detail in Robert W. McChesney, Digital
Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy (New York:
The New Press, 2013). The proposal we favor was inspired by the work of
Milton Friedman, such that we sometimes term it the Milton Friedman News
Voucher plan. See Robert W. McChesney, Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First
Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2014), pp. 230–236.
60. The three Reconstruction amendments are of great importance, as they
change the fundamental relationship of the national government to the states
and its citizens. They are outside the main concerns of this chapter, however.
See Eric Foner, “The Second American Revolution,” in Bertell Ollman and
Jonathan Birnbaum, editors, The United States Constitution (New York: New
York University Press, 1990), ch. 20.
61. Daniel Lazare, The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing De-
mocracy (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996), p. 9.
62. Paul Zummo, “Thomas Jefferson’s America: Democracy, Progress, and
the Quest for Perfection,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Catholic University, 2009, p. 116.
63. John Kincaid, “State Constitutions in the Federal System,” in State Con-
stitutions in a Federal System, Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, 496 (March 1988): 14.
64. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in
the United States (New York, Basic Books), pp. 15–21.
65. John F. Dinan, The American State Constitutional Tradition (Lawrence, KS:
University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 1.
66. Zackin, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places.
67. Ibid., p. 105.
68. For chapter-length discussion of each of these areas, see Zackin, Looking
for Rights in All the Wrong Places.
69. Katherine Twomey, “The Right to Education in Juvenile Detention un-
der State Constitutions,” Virginia Law Review, 94, no. 3 (May 2008): 788.
70. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites (New York: W. W. Norton,
1995), p. 147.
71. Cited in the remarks of Carolyn B. Maloney, Congressional Record, August
2, 2001.
72. Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and
the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), p. vii.
73. Ibid., p. 237.
74. In W. F. Doughty, “School Administration Problems in the South,” The
American School Board Journal, 44, no. 2 (February 1912): 19.
75. Because census data at the time does not permit an easy calculation of the
over-twenty-one population, we use the overall population for the vote assess-
ment in 1804.
76. See Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2004), for a discussion of this.
77. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies,”
April 29, 1938. From The American Presidency Project, University of California
at Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
78. For two superb studies, see Harvey J. Kaye, The Fight for the Four Free-
doms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2014), and Sunstein, Second Bill of Rights.
79. Wendell L. Willkie, Free Enterprise (Washington, DC: National Home
Library Foundation, 1940), p. 27.
121. Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House,
1970).
122. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
123. See Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1997).
124. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts
Press, 1971), pp. 50, 53, 54. Bookchin continued his work along these lines until
his death in 2006. See Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies
and the Promise of Direct Democracy (New York: Verso, 2015).
125. Mark Stencel, “The Reforms,” Washington Post, June 13, 1997.
126. See A Public Trust: The Landmark Report of the Carnegie Commission on the
Future of Public Broadcasting (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), ch. 2; Public Tele-
vision: A Program for Action: The Report of the Carnegie Commission on Educational
Television (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
127. Ravitch, Reign of Error, pp. 279–280.
128. See Sunstein, Second Bill of Rights, pp. 5, 107–108, 153–159.
129. Robert Lekachman, “Capitalism or Democracy,” in Goldwin and
Schambra, editors, How Capitalistic Is the Constitution?, p. 131.
130. See Molly Niesen, “From Gray Panther to National Nanny: The Kidvid
Crusade and the Eclipse of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 1977–1980,”
Communication, Culture & Critique (2015), pp. 1–18; for the debate over prisons
in the early 1970s, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
131. David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in Amer-
ica (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 59.
132. Ralph Nader, “Introduction,” in Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen,
America, Inc.: Who Owns and Operates the United States (New York: Dell, 1971),
p. 18.
133. “Analyzing Youth,” Richmond Times Dispatch, July 7, 1971.
134. We discuss Powell, his memo, and his subsequent career on the Supreme
Court in some detail in Nichols and McChesney, Dollarocracy, ch. 3.
135. Lewis F. Powell, Jr. “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” confi-
dential memorandum for the United States Chamber of Commerce, August 23,
1971. Widely available online.
136. “Remarks by Bryce N. Harlow at the Business Government Relations
Council Annual Meeting,” September 16, 1977. In Bryce N. Harlow Collection,
1960–1978, Box 3, Folder 19, The Carl Albert Center, University of Oklahoma.
137. Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis
and What We Can Do about It (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), pp. 118, 117.
138. “Remarks by Bryce N. Harlow at Conference on Government and
Business,” January 23, 1975. In Bryce N. Harlow Collection, 1960–1978, Box 2,
Folder 162, The Carl Albert Center, University of Oklahoma.
Wrong with the FISA Court? (New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York
University School of Law, 2015).
175. See Jacques V. Dinavo, Privatization in Developing Countries (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 1995), ch. 1.
176. For a discussion of Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s embrace of
privatization in Chicago, see Rick Perlstein, “How to Sell Off a City,” In These
Times, January 21, 2015.
177. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 107.
178. See Daphne T. Greenwood, “The Decision to Contract Out: Under-
standing the Full Economic and Social Impacts,” paper published by the Col-
orado Center for Policy Studies, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs,
March 2014.
179. See P. W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military
Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Jeremy Scahill, Black-
water: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: Nation
Books, 2007).
180. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equal-
ity Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Books, 2009), pp. 250–251.
181. This point was made most brilliantly in Thomas Frank, The Wrecking
Crew: How Conservatives Rule (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008).
182. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher championed this turn away
from community-mindedness and toward selfishness, once saying that her “free
market” economic policies were simply a method; “the object is to change the
heart and soul” (Ronald Butt, “Mrs. Thatcher: The First Two Years,” Sunday
Times, May 3, 1981). Mission accomplished, there and here. “As recently as the
1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that government existed
to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional
critics, but also by many of its staunchest defenders,” Judt observed. He noted
that a survey of English schoolboys in 1949 found that the more intelligent the
boy the more likely he would choose an interesting career at a reasonable wage
over a job that would merely pay well. “Today’s school children and college
students can imagine little else but the search for a lucrative job” (Judt, Ill Fares
the Land, p. 39). The same appears true on this side of the pond. UCLA’s annual
“Freshman Survey,” which has been conducted for decades, found that whereas
in 1974, 44 percent of college freshmen regarded “being very well-off finan-
cially” as “very important” or “essential,” that figure has steadily risen to where
it stood at 82 percent by 2014 (Dan Berrett and Eric Hoover, “College Fresh-
men Seek Financial Security Amid Emotional Insecurity,” Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 5, 2015).
While ignorance of politics and social life may be rational, it is by no means
bliss. There is little evidence that depoliticized and demoralized people—simply
looking out for number one—are especially happy or content. “In an age when
young people are encouraged to maximize self-interest and self-advancement,”
Judt notes, “the grounds for altruism or even good behavior become obscured”
(Judt, Ill Fares the Land, p. 130). Studies in the United States show a sharp de-
cline in empathy among young people over the past thirty-five years (Jamil Zaki,
“What, Me Care? Young Are Less Empathetic,” Scientific American, December
23, 2010). Nicholas Carr chronicles the mounting evidence—from the huge in-
crease in the use of anti-depression prescription drugs to the increase in the rate
of suicide—that suggests these are deeply troubled times for the American psy-
che (Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, New York: W. W. Norton,
2014, p. 220). This is a complex issue, of course, and cannot be attributed to
depoliticization or the changing weltanschauung exclusively, but it clearly plays
a role. In 1970, Americans, especially young Americans, were an optimistic people.
Far less so today.
183. See Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American
Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Company,
2015). For a detailed look at the 1970s, see Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the
United States Traded Factories for Finance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
184. Our argument complements in some respects that of Robert Putnam
and the decline of social capital. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Col-
lapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
10. Willard Sterne Randall, Jefferson: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1993), pp. 493–547. See also, Michael Kennedy, “The French Jacobin Club in
Charleston, South Carolina, 1792–1795,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 91,
no. 1 (Jan. 1990): 4–22.
11. E. P. Thompson, an independent historian who became one of the most
influential writers of his time, developed an approach to studying the formation
of political movements that paid close attention to both economic and social
trends. His writings placed a great emphasis on cultural shifts and the many fac-
tors that go into the formation of a clearly defined and understood working class.
12. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor
Gollancz, 1963), from the Preface.
13. Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on
the Industrial Revolution; Lessons for the Computer Age (Cambridge, MA: Perseus
Publishing, 1996). Sale’s book was highly influential in reintroducing the Lud-
dites, especially to Americans. Author Bill McKibben credits Sale with rescuing
the Luddites “from the old caricature of head-in-the-sand machine breakers, and
restores them to their rightful place: as prophets of what industrialism would
mean for most men, women and communities.” McKibben’s assessment is fea-
tured as a blurb on the paperback edition of Sale’s Rebels against the Future: The
Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age.
14. Arthur Redford, Labour Migration in England, 1800–1850 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1964) p. 103.
15. Paul Carter, “The Battle of Bradford 1837: Riots against the New Poor
Law,” The Bradford Antiquary (Journal of the Bradford Historical and Antiquarian
Society), volume 10 (2006), pp. 5–15.
16. “The People’s Charter,” British Library online resources, http://www.
bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/struggle/chartists1/historicalsources/source4/
peoplescharter.html.
17. The Chartist Movement,” U.K. Parliament: Living Heritage, http://www
.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting
/chartists/overview/chartistmovement/.
18. Ibid.
19. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolu-
tion (London: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 60.
20. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Preface.
21. James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York:
Vintage, 2000).
22. Platform of the Progressive Party, adopted August 7, 1912, http://www
.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/tr-progressive/.
23. Ibid.
24. Patricia O’Toole, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White
House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 156. O’Toole brilliantly puts
42. David Graham Phillips, “The Treason of the Senate,” Cosmopolitan, Feb-
ruary, 1906.
43. See Kevin Mattson, Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (Hobo-
ken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006), and Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the
Century: Upton Sinclair and the EPIC Campaign in California (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1991).
44. David Graham Phillips (edited with an introduction by George E. Mowry
and Judson A. Grenier), The Treason of the Senate (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964).
45. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “At Green Bay, Wisconsin,” Public Papers of the
Presidents of the United States: F. D. Roosevelt, 1934, Volume 3. See also: Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt, “Address Delivered at Green Bay, Wisconsin,” August 9, 1934,
American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14738.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Com-
munity (New York: Touchstone Books by Simon and Schuster, 2001).
49. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Right of the People to Rule,” address deliv-
ered March 20, 1912, at Carnegie Hall, New York, http://www.americanrhetoric
.com/speeches/teddyrooseveltrightpeoplerule.htm.
50. Leslie Shaffer, “Why We Can’t Measure Disruptive Technology,” CNBC
.com, March 19, 2015, http://www.cnbc.com/id/102521238. Ashish Dhawan, “A
Tale of Two Disruptive Technologies,” FirstPost, March 23, 2015, http://www
.firstpost.com/business/tale-two-disruptive-innovations-2168409.html.
51. John Nichols, “A Socialist Wins in Seattle: Kshama Sawant’s City Council
victory reflects broad trends: polls show voters are increasingly immune to red-
baiting,” Nation, November 26, 2013.
52. Chris McGreal, “Seattle minimum wage: $15 figure represents ‘historic
victory’ for workers: Move will benefit around 100,000 working people in city
and is expected to give momentum to campaigns across the US,” Guardian, June
3, 2014.
53. Hana Kim, “Seattle’s Kshama Sawant arraigned on disorderly conduct
charge stemming from wage protest,” Q13 FOX News, February 19, 2015.
54. John Nichols, “It Is Time for a Retail Workers’ Bill of Rights,” Nation,
December 1, 2014.
55. “Union Membership,” United States Department of Labor: Bureau of
Labor Statistics, January 23, 2015.
56. Interviews by John Nichols with Rose Ann DeMoro, May, 2014.
57. “Nurses Launch New Campaign to Alert Public to Dangers of Medical
Technology and More,” National Nurses United Press Release, May 13, 2014,
http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/entry/nurses-launch-new-campaign
-to-alert-public-to-dangers-of-medical-technology/.
58. Interviews with Rose Ann DeMoro, Jean Ross, and Michael Lighty
of National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association and the
the click and the vote” (Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo, “How the Net Party aims
to create a new UI for democracy in Argentina,” The Next Web [TNW Blog], May
11, 2013). We understand the appeal of the arguments made by the Net Party
and the various European Pirate Parties, as well as some of the more tech-savvy
young campaigners who have remade traditional liberal parties in Europe. They
are absolutely right to argue that “democracy has stagnated” and they are abso-
lutely right to imagine that one way to engage and excite citizens is with experi-
ments in direct democracy. We are as intrigued as they are by “a hybrid model of
representative and direct democracy in which candidates representing (a political
party) are elected to the country’s governing bodies but their vote on any given
issue is determined by the collective intelligence of the party’s members.” After
all, people had their doubts about shopping on the web and that came together
rather nicely for Amazon. Why not shop for policies, candidates, and parties?
There is no question that digital democracy has a future. There was every
reason to cheer on Iceland’s attempt—as part of a much broader and frequently
quite radical period of transformation following the country’s wrenching 2008
financial crisis—to cheer on the decision by drafters of a new national constitu-
tion “to use social media to open up the process to the rest of the citizenry and
gather feedback on 12 successive drafts.” As political theorist Hélène Landemore
explained, “Anyone interested in the process was able to comment on the text
using social media like Facebook and Twitter, or using regular email and mail. In
total, the crowdsourcing moment generated about 3,600 comments for a total
of 360 suggestions. While the crowd did not ultimately ‘write’ the constitution,
it contributed valuable input. Among them was the Facebook proposal to en-
trench a constitutional right to the Internet, which resulted in Article 14 of the
final proposal.” It was unfortunate that, despite broad popular support for the
“crowdsourced constitution,” as expressed in a 2012 referendum, Iceland’s par-
liament blocked its implementation. We share Landemore’s view that “although
it didn’t result in any actual constitutional change, the Icelandic experiment has
definitely challenged the view that a constitutional process must be exclusion-
ary and secretive, creating a precedent for a more democratic design. Let us
hope it will inspire more experiments of the kind in the near future” (Hélène
Landemore, “We, All of the People: Five lessons from Iceland’s failed experi-
ment in creating a crowdsourced constitution,” Salon, July 31, 2014). We highly
recommend Landemore’s deeper investigation of the Icelandic experience in her
article, “Inclusive Constitution-Making: The Icelandic Experiment,” Journal of
Political Philosophy, February 25, 2014.
4. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2014), pp. 232–239.
5. Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
(New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 257–279.
6. The Editors, “The Triple Revolution,” Monthly Review, November 1964,
pp. 417–422.
7. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Past the Age of the Great
Stagnation (New York: Plume, 2013), p. 233.
8. Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and
the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), p. 174;
Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 196–197.
9. Dwight Eisenhower, “The Farewell Address,” Eisenhower Archives, Jan-
uary 17, 1961, http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents
/farewell_address.html.
10. Bill McKibben, “The Commons Offers a New Story for the Future,” in
Jay Walljasper, All that We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons (New York: New
Press, 2010).
11. “What Is the New Economy?” New Economy Coalition, http://new
economy.net/about/what-is-the-new-economy.
12. John Bonifaz: “Restore Democracy to the People with 28th Amendment,”
Capital Times, December 4, 2011.
13. Thomas Jefferson to Robert Selden Garnett, February 14, 1824. National
Archives: Founders Online, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson
/98–01–02–4052.
14. John Nichols, “America’s Most Dynamic (Yet Under-Covered) Move-
ment: Overturning ‘Citizens United,’” Nation, July 5, 2013. Also, “Democracy
for All Amendment Resources,” Public Citizen: Democracy is for People, http://
www.democracyisforpeople.org/page.cfm?id=2.
15. “Pocan and Ellison to Introduce Right to Vote Constitutional Amend-
ment,” www.pocan.house.gov, January 22, 2015, http://pocan.house.gov/media
-center/press-releases/pocan-and-ellison-to-introduce-right-to-vote-constitutional
-amendment.
16. Ezra Klein, “If You’re from California, You Should Hate the Senate,”
Washington Post, March 11, 2013.
17. William A. Galston, “Four-Year House Terms Would End the Gridlock:
Eisenhower and LBJ knew members need more time to learn to govern,” Wall
Street Journal, February 25, 2014.
18. “DC Vote’s Mission, Vision and Purpose,” DC Vote. Link: http://www
.dcvote.org/dc-votes-mission-work
19. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1790, “Part 2.7 Chapter V. Ways and
means of improving the condition of Europe, interspersed with miscellaneous
observations.” From Eric Foner, editor, Thomas Paine—Collected Writings: Com-
mon Sense; The Crisis; Rights of Man; The Age of Reason; Agrarian Justice (New York:
Library of America: 1995).
20. A useful and instructive literature has emerged in recent years by scholars
making strong cases for how the Constitution should be amended to make the
US political system more functional and democratic. See, for example, Larry J.
Sabato, A More Perfect Union (New York: Walker and Company, 2007).
web is dominated by a handful of players, not unlike old media. Indeed, many
of the same players who ran old media into the ground are now in charge of
running new media into the ground (Nichols and McChesney, “How to Save
Journalism”). Journalism has to be recognized now as a classic “public good”—
something that society needs and that people want but that market forces are
now incapable of generating in sufficient quality or quantity. The institution
should be understood in the same way that we understand universal public
education, national security, public health, and transportation infrastructure.
Necessities that are not maintained and sustained by the market remain neces-
sities, and a civil society makes policies and appropriations to meet them.
30. See “Public Media,” Free Press, http://www.freepress.net/public-media.
31. From the days of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison through those of
Andrew Jackson to the mid-nineteenth century, enormous printing and postal
subsidies were the order of the day. The need for them was rarely questioned,
which is perhaps one reason they have been so easily overlooked. They were
developed with the intention of expanding the quantity, quality, and range of
journalism—and they were astronomical by today’s standards. If, for example,
the United States had devoted the same percentage of its GDP to journalism
subsidies in 2009 as it did in the 1840s, we calculate that the allocation would
have been $30 billion. In contrast, the federal subsidy in recent years for all of
public broadcasting, not just journalism, was around $400 million.
32. The argument for restoring the democracy-sustaining subsidies of old—
as opposed to the corporation-sustaining ones of recent decades—need not rest
on models from two centuries ago. When the United States occupied Germany
and Japan after World War II, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur instituted
lavish subsidies to spawn a vibrant, independent press in both nations. The gen-
erals recognized that a docile press had been the handmaiden of fascism and that
a stable democracy requires diverse and competitive news media. They encour-
aged news media that questioned and dissented, and even at times criticized US
occupation forces. They did not gamble that the “free market” would magically
produce the desired outcome.
33. “Citizens’ News Vouchers: $200 for Everyone?” The Benton Foundation,
April 6, 2010.
34. Nichols, “Activists Who Won Net Neutrality.”
35. “Mitch Daniels Response to State of the Union: Text & Video,” Huff-
ington Post, January 24, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/24/mitch
-daniels-response-_n_1228467.html.
36. Financial writer Barry Lynn has for a number of years been writing and
speaking about a “new age of monopoly,” and “an economy controlled by the
few.” Barry Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of
Destruction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010). Author William Petrocelli describes
“the relentless drive towards consolidation in almost every business and the
almost inevitable transfer of power to a few financial giants.” William Petrocelli,
“Monopolies on the Loose!” Washington Post, April 12, 2010. Washington Post
writer David Ignatius decries “financial giantism.” David Ignatius, “The Right
Roosevelt?” Washington Post, March 5, 2009.
37. Michael Copps, “Common Cause Hails Reported Collapse of Comcast/
Time Warner Cable Merger,” www.commoncause.org, April 23, 2015.
38. Zephyr Teachout, “Quashing the Comcast Merger Is Just the Beginning:
A new antitrust movement is on the march,” Nation, May 18, 2015.
39. Samuel Gibbs, “Does Europe have the power to break up Google? Reg-
ulatory matters have become a political issue as members of the European par-
liament clash with the European commission,” Guardian, November 26, 2014.
Franklin Foer, “Amazon Must Be Stopped: It’s too big. It’s cannibalizing the
economy. It’s time for a radical plan,” New Republic, October 9, 2014.
40. Teachout,“Quashing the Comcast Merger,” with comments from a draft
by Teachout of a broader article on monopoly reviewed by the authors.
41. Cited in Gar Alperovitz, “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate,” New York
Times, July 22, 2012.
42. Milton Friedman, “The Monetary Theory and Policy of Henry Simons,”
Journal of Law and Economics 10 (October 1967): 1–13.
43. H. C. Simons, The Chicago Tradition in Economics 1892–1945 (London,
Routledge, 2002), edited by Ross B. Emmett, p. 18. See also Gar Alperovitz,
“Nationalize Banks that Overwhelm Regulation,” New York Times, January 13,
2014, and Alperovitz, “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate.”
44. Alperovitz, “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate.”
45. “The true cost of the bank bailout,” Need to Know on PBS, PBS, Sep-
tember 3, 2010. “We all know about TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program,
which spent $700 billion in taxpayers’ money to bail out banks after the financial
crisis. That money was scrutinized by Congress and the media,” reported PBS.
“But it turns out that that $700 billion is just a small part of a much larger pool of
money that has gone into propping up our nation’s financial system. And most of
that taxpayer money hasn’t had much public scrutiny at all. According to a team
at Bloomberg News, at one point last year the U.S. had lent, spent or guaranteed
as much as $12.8 trillion to rescue the economy.”
46. Trades Union Congress, “German Lessons: Developing Industrial Policy
in the UK,” January 2012, published by TUC, Congress House Great Russell
Street London WC1B 3LS.
47. Jeremy Wiesen, “The U.S. Needs Its Own Industrial Policy: China’s gov-
ernment incubates business with capital and other incentives. So should Ameri-
ca’s,” Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2010.
48. Robert Pollin and Dean Baker, “Public Investment, Industrial Policy
and U.S. Economic Renewal,” Working Paper Series: Number 211 (produced for
the Political Economy Research Center/ Center for Economic and Policy Re-
search), December 2009.
49. Pollin and Baker, “Public Investment, Industrial Policy.”
50. The Green Party, “Economy: Indicators,” Green Party of England and
Wales, March 2015. See also Heather Stewart, “Beyond GDP: Greens spark de-
bate on a better measure of progress,” Observer, January 31, 2015.
51. Eric Black, “Why Is Turnout So low in U.S. Elections? We make it more
difficult to vote than other democracies,” MinnPost, October 1, 2014.
52. Steve Israel, “Weekend Voting Act,” http://israel.house.gov/issues
/weekend-voting-act.
53. It is worthy of note that, while today Americans often look to other coun-
tries for examples of innovation and efficiency, as recently as the 1960s European
intellectuals were writing books such as Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s Le Défi
Américain (The American Challenge), a 1967 bestseller that argued European na-
tions had to overcome their stodgy approaches to innovation and their aversion
to transnational cooperation.
54. Gar Alperovitz, “How to Democratize the US Economy: A long-term
plan to renovate the American dream begins at the local level and scales up,”
Nation, October 8, 2013.
55. Conversation with Rebecca Kemble, May 1, 2015.
56. Rebecca Kemble, “Northside Rising,” April 5, 2015, http://www.kemble4
district18.com/.
57. Jay Cassano, “Madison, Wisconsin, Is Investing $5 Million in Worker
Cooperatives: The best part: the businesses will stay local, because co-ops don’t
up and move to cities offering more attractive incentives,” Fast Company: Co.Exist,
February 2, 2015.
58. Alperovitz, “How to Democratize the US Economy.”
343
Black Panther Party, 190–191 end of, 5; and freedom, 25–26; and
Blau, Judith, 182–183 government policies and subsidies,
“Blue Book” campaign, 180 24; and politics, and economics,
Bookchin, Murray, 190 interchangeability of, 24–25;
Brady, Robert A., 41, 305–306n91 and production vs. production
Brandeis, Louis, 116, 168, 226–227 capacity, 108–113; and property and
Braverman, Harry, 305n89, 310n163 democracy, 25–26; and relationship
Bright, James R., 96, 310n163 of democracy to economy, 25;
Broockman, David, 16 and relationship of economy to
Brooke, Edward, 187 governance, 25; and relationship to
Brown, Sherrod, 134 democracy, 24; and social labour,
Bryan, William Jennings, 222, 22; and technology, potential vs.
228–230 reality, 21–22; and unemployment,
Brynjolfsson, Erik, 74, 88, 89, 90, 95, 35–36, 43–67; and US Constitution,
106, 114, 249–250 157–159, 158n; and wealth and
Buchanan, Brooke, 142 property, endless increase of,
Buckley, Ray, 143 157–159; in a world where work is
Buckley v. Valeo, 240 unnecessary, 22; as wrong economic
Buffett, Warren, 121 system for emerging material world,
Burke, Edmund, 215 113–114
Burnham, Walter Dean, 164 Capitalism: A Love Story (film), 117
Bush, George H. W., 121 capitalism, first use of term, 158,
Bush, George W., 260 321n19
Business Roundtable of 1972, 196 Carr, Nicholas, 20, 73, 77, 92, 93–94,
96, 304n70, 332n182
campaign contributions: from Carter, Jimmy, 118, 128, 202
billionaires and corporations, Carter, Zach, 134–135
23–24, 140–141, 145, 196. See also Cato Institute, 195
election(s) CEOs, 4, 10–11, 122–123, 132–133,
Camus, Albert, 199 138, 196, 201, 209, 272; education
Canada, 137–138 of, 251–252; wages of, vs. workers,
capitalism, 21–27; and automation, 63
73–74, 77–78, 79; and climate change, demand for, and meaningful
change and inequality, 32; and reform, disconnect between,
computer technology, and job 231–232
elimination, 102–106; and Chartists/People’s Charter, 218–219,
democracy, 26–28; and democracy, 222, 243
in Chile, 296–297n46; vs. Chile, 296–297n46
democratic socialism, and fascism, China, 100–102, 134, 136–137, 271,
38, 298–299n75; and depressed 311n192
environment, investors, and Chomsky, Noam, 132
government intervention, 35–36; Chrysler, government bailout of,
as dubious fit for democracy, 130–131
248–249; as dubious fit for Church, Frank, 204
technological revolution, 248–249; Churchill, Winston, 38, 298n74
and economic debate, 22–23, 24–25; Cisco, 94
Judt, Tony, 18, 20–21, 35, 205, Lewis Powell Memorandum of August
331–332n182 1971, 26, 194–195, 201
liberal as pejorative term, 201–202
Kalecki, Michal, 36–38 libertarians: and militarization,
Kaptur, Marcy, 117–118, 118–119 330n169; and party platform,
Karabarbounis, Loukas, 100 election 1980, 202–203; and US
Kasparov, Garry, 92 Constitution, 160
Katzman, John, 98 life-expectancy, 15
Kaye, Harvey, 8, 292n15, 326n82 Limbaugh, Rush, 142
Kemble, Rebecca, 275 Lincoln, Abraham, 158n, 177, 264
Kennedy, Anthony, 168 Lindsey, Brink, 23
Kennedy, John F., 82, 273 living wage, demand for, 11. See also
Keynes, John Maynard, 36, economic inequality; guaranteed
111–112, 113, 116, 130, 250; and basic income; income inequality;
technological unemployment, minimum wage
73–74 lobbyists, 195–196
Keyssar, Alexander, 156 Logan, George, 159
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 80, 187, 191, Looney, Adam, 63
191n Luddites, 8, 73, 84, 216, 218, 219,
Kissinger, Henry, 195 333n13
Klein, Naomi, 21, 32, 33–34, 42, 239 Lynd, Robert S., 41
Knights of Labor movement, 228 Lynd, Staughton, 153
Koch, Charles, 141
Koch, David, 141, 202 MacArthur, Douglas, 182, 340n32
Kodak, 6–7 MacMillan, R. H., 76
Kotler, Steven, 98 Madison, James, 25, 161, 162, 163,
Kotz, David M., 22 166–167, 169, 170
Krueger, Anne O., 131 Magdoff, Fred, 45
Krugman, Paul, 37, 105–106 The Making of the English Working
Kurzweil, Ray, 89 Class (Thompson), 215
management, challenge to authority
La Follette, Robert M., 149, 227, 231, of, 198–199
233, 258 Mann, Horace, 171
labor efficiency: and technology, 73, manufacturing co-ops, 238
303n67; and unemployment and Marcuse, Herbert, 81, 112
economic insecurity as aids to, Marx, Karl, 36, 108–109
301n26 Mason, George, 162–163
labor market distress, layers of, in US Mason, Paul, 5–6, 8
economy, 279 (table A-1) McAfee, Andrew, 74, 88, 89, 90, 95,
labor movement, 235–237 106, 114, 249–250
labor unions. See unions McCloskey, Pete, 187
Landemore, Hélène, 337n3 McConnell, Mitch, 135–136
Landon, Alf, 149 McCutcheon v. Federal Election
Laski, Harold J., 39 Commission, 142, 240, 318n79
Lazare, Daniel, 169–170 McDonald’s, 99; and raising wages
Leontief, Wassily, 87 while eliminating jobs, 11
Leslie, Ian, 7 McGovern, George, 185, 187, 191
McKibben, Bill, 239, 255, 333n13 Nader, Ralph, 188, 191, 193, 194,
Meany, George, 81–82 199–200, 264
media: and campaign contributions NAFTA. See North American Free
from billionaires and corporations, Trade Agreement
23–24, 140–141; and citizenless National Commission on Technology,
democracy, 139–140; and Automation, and Economic
government policies and subsidies, Progress, 82–83, 96, 247
167–169, 342n52; and political National Labor Union, 228
campaigns, 140; and voter turnout, National Monetary Commission, 230
140. See also journalism National Nurses United (NNU),
media reform movement, 240, 260 236–237
median wage: and job growth, changes Native Americans, 153, 166
in, 2000–2014, 50, 51 (chart 6), 280; Nazi Germany: and fascism, 35,
wage ranges used for calculations 37–38, 38–39; and full employment,
of, 280–281 (table A-2) 37–38
mercantile classes, interests of, Net Party, 337n3
155–156 New Deal, 36, 130, 181, 203, 227, 233
Mexico, 100, 137, 164 Newfield, Jack, 198–199
microchip implants, 1, 4 newspapers: and corruption, 230–231;
Microsoft, 92 government subsidized, 167–169,
militarization, 330n169 261, 340n31, 340n32, 342n52
military-industrial complex, 254 Nieman, Brent, 100
military industry, 75 Nixon, Richard, 124
military/militarism, 17, 204; and Nixon administration, 187–188
professional army, 197; and US NNU. See National Nurses United
Constitution, 162–165 Noah, Timothy, 195
Mill, John Stuart, 109–110, 250 Noble, David F., 75, 198
Miller, Michael, 93 North American Free Trade
minimum wage, 211, 234–235, Agreement (NAFTA), 130–131,
335n52; vs. corporations and 133, 134, 135, 136–138
automation, 10–11. See also living Northwest Ordinance, 160
wage Notes on the State of Virginia
Mondale, Walter, 127 (Jefferson), 159
monopoly: vs. democracy, 263–267, Nye, Gerald, 164
341n36; and economic problems,
and fascism, 173–174 Obama, Barack, 129, 145, 188, 210,
Monopoly Capital (Baran and Sweezy), 234, 260, 328n116; and the new
112 American Dream economy, 127;
Moore, Gordon, 88 and “territorial tax” scheme,
Moore, Michael, 117, 119 123–124; and trade policy, 132,
Moore’s Law, 88–90 135–139
Moral Mondays movement, 239 Occupy movement, 264
Mosco, Vincent, 93 O’Malley, Martin, 144
muckraking magazines, 231 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 81
Musk, Elon, 106 optimism, and realism, reconciliation
Myrdal, Gunnar, 80 of, 5–6, 8
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