Full Description
The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century demonstrates exactly how the corporate rich developed and implemented the policies and created the government structures that allowed them to dominate the United States. The book is framed within three historical developments that have made this domination possible: the rise and fall of the union movement, the initiation and subsequent limitation of government social-benefit programs, and the postwar expansion of international trade.
The book's deep exploration into the various methods the corporate rich used to centralize power corrects major empirical misunderstandings concerning all three issue-areas. Further, it explains why the three ascendant theories of power in the early twenty-first century—interest-group pluralism, organizational state theory, and historical institutionalism—cannot account for the complexity of events that established the power elite's supremacy and led to labor's fall. More generally, and convincingly, the analysis reveals how a corporate-financed policy-planning network, consisting of foundations, think tanks, and policy-discussion groups, gradually developed in the twentieth century and played a pivotal role in all three issue-areas. Filled with new archival findings and commanding detail, this book offers readers a remarkable look into the nature of power in America during the twentieth century, and provides a starting point for future in-depth analyses of corporate power in the current century.
Contents
Introduction Section I. The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions 1. The Uphill Battle for Unionism from the 1820s to 1932 2. The Origins of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 3. Stronger Unions, A Weaker National Labor Relations Act 4. Union Victories, Corporate Pushback in the 1960s 5. The Corporate Moderates Reorganize to Defeat Unions, 1969-1985 Section II. How the Corporate Moderates Created Social Insurance Programs, and Later Tried to Undermine Them 6. The Origins of the Social Security Act 7. Revising and Augmenting Social Security, 1937-1973 8. Social Disruption, New Social Benefits, and then Cutbacks 9. The Circuitous Path to the Affordable Care Act, 1974-2010 Section III. The Rise of an International Economic System, 1939-2000 10. The Council on Foreign Relations and World Trade 11. The Grand Area and the International Monetary Fund 12. The Grand Area Strategy and the Vietnam War 13. Rebuilding Europe in the Face of Ultraconservative Resistance, 1945-1967 14. From Turmoil to the World Trade Organization, 1968-2000 15. The Shortcomings of Alternative Theories Archival Sources Consulted References
