Contours of Descent by Robert Pollin

...Marjorie Kelly (The Divine Right of Capital) notes that even in pension funds—supposedly the most powerful force for economic democratization—62 percent of all value is held by the same wealthiest 10 percent of families...

...On the one hand, it expressed widespread hopes for democracy, worker self-management, pleasurable and meaningful work, and global harmony...

...participatory" internal governance that em-braces and even privileges workers...

...rather, they're "buying the right to extract wealth" by purchasing stock...

...In a matter of months, $3 trillion in stock-market value vanished...

...His charter (like Kelly's) includes ecological sensitivity...

...saw cyberdreams of the existential promise of the Internet...

...He is the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Cornell...

...Americans, and especially Catholics, have not asked such questions about the nature of capitalism for two generations, but economic justice is the most important moral, political, and religious issue of our time...

...a regime of work in factories, offices, and sweatshops that undermines the moral and spiritual integrity of individuals, families, neighborhoods, political and religious institutions...

...William Greider (The Soul of Capitalism) indicates that the median wealth of American house-holds actually declined in the 1990s, and that the primary investments of most Americans still reside in family homes and low-interest savings accounts...

...As Pollin details, "privatization" schemes indentured debtor nations to foreign investors (usually private creditors and multinational corporations) and tied them to the volatile capital markets...

...Stockholders do not provide significant amounts of corporate capitalization (1 to 2 percent, according to Kelly and Henwood...

...and the weakening of employee power through union busting, wage and benefit reductions, and other attacks on workers' capacity to challenge management...

...the enrichment of bosses, creditors, and stockholders...

...This was the real significance of New Economy discourse: labor discipline and cultural hegemony...

...Furthermore, as "factors of production" or "human capital," the people who actually do the work "are simply part of the property," Kelly reminds us...

...Consumers and workers have few real choices...

...the inclination to think of the human person as a factor of production or as an object of biotechnical investment...

...Among other measures, he calls for a living hourly wage of $8 to $11 minimum, and a sales tax on stock, bond, derivative, and foreign-currency transactions, designed to raise the costs of speculative trading and to gamer $100 billion in revenue for spending on education, infrastructure, and health care...

...Greider and Kelly see an auspicious moment for such a challenge, heralding a progressive capitalism that subordinates accumulation to social purposes...

...SCHWADRON I'd sign on to all these measures, but I also think that Greider and Kelly aren't daring enough...

...After the binge came the hangover...

...tlerrlcoorl The Divine Right of Capital Dethroning the Lconomic Aristocracy 1lvrl^'I/e tirlht Contours of Descent U.S...

...He berates moralistic critics of "consumerism" who evade that nettlesome matter of "the owner-ship and organization of production...

...our tawdry deference to money...

...And indeed, that Western social-gospel tradition—from Rauschenbusch, Figgis, Scudder, and Tawney to Day, Tillich, Weil, and Maritain—merits a forceful and imaginative restatement...

...watched the flowering of democracy around the world from the seeds of consumer goods...

...Second, contrary to the ubiquitous encomiums to "small business," "most product innovation," Henwood establishes, "comes from large firms, not perky start-ups...

...As Greider reminds us all too briefly, these concerns were once taken up with vigor and intelligence in the Social Gospel movement...

...Why not erase the line between "management" and "labor," by democratizing technical expertise and managerial responsibility...

...Stockholders aren't "creating" abundance through risky investment...

...Now there would be a new economy and an end to the same old story...

...Regardless of all the mission statements about "corporate responsibility," the legal status of American corporations (together with our uncritical reverence for the "rights" of prop erty) permits them to enforce what are, for the Western world, remarkably authoritarian workplaces...

...As for the alleged "de-cline of the nation-state" brought on by globalization, Henwood and Pollin assert forthrightly that governments have been prime actors in the creation of corporate-friendly trade rules, labor laws, environmental policies, fiscal practices—and military interventions...

...That "we," Henwood writes, is "first-person spurious...

...Pollin's reform agenda, rooted in an "employment targeted" conception of economic policy, is a revitalized New Deal order...

...Most other inhabitants of the planet weren't well served by the New Economy, either...

...Looking at six growth periods in the last century, both note that the 1990s come in fifth, and that the longest wave after 1945 was marked by all the horrors decried by true believers: sizable government spending, strong unions, and firm regulation of labor and financial markets...

...American capitalism," Greider writes, "is ripe for reinvention...

...What's more, Kelly reminds us, stock-holders are functionally irrelevant to contemporary capitalism, anyway...

...Taking the imago Dei as a reality and not as an ideal, they proposed that work honor our human dignity, not diminish it...

...For a while, pundits attributed the losses to "September 11...

...But when New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krug-man con-cedes that something is "rotten in the state of American capitalism," and that the scandals at Enron and WorldCom are not mere exceptions, it's time to ask what some were thinking when they raved about the New Economy...

...On the other, it concealed the real costs: the cheapening of labor through outsourcing...

...These were the sort of demands that syndicalists and guild socialists were making a century ago, and they arguably represent the most tantalizing roads not taken in the history of political and moral economy...

...Job export," they suspect, has been a specter used to frighten workers into wage and benefit concessions...

...Most of it comes from retained earnings...

...Some, like these authors, never in-haled the ideological helium that inflated the 1990s boom...

...The Old Economy lives...

...First, the "boom" was hardly spectacular in historical perspective...

...How do we—that's first-person, democratic—fight back...

...Henwood dismisses lecture-circuit localists who "rack I Commonweal 3 1 July 16, 2004 up the frequent-flier miles" while "telling the masses they should stay home and tend to their lentils...

...The New Economy, they demonstrate, was the latest chap-ter in the old story of accumulation and its discontents...

...Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity Robert I'ollirr Eugene McCarraher t was the Age of Clinton and the "New Economy," when, from 1991 to 2000, the U. S. economy looked as though it had repealed the law of the business cycle...

...These critics opposed industrial capitalism, not with pabulum about "values," ""compassion," and "consumerism," but with formidable economic and historical erudition...

...Commonweal 3 3 July 16, 2004...

...At the same time, Henwood and Pollin reject tariffs and import quotas, considering them "a poor substitute for direct forms of social protection...

...Pollin and Henwood refute every bit of this mythology...

...Reform depends, in their view, on a rejuvenated moral and political imagination, especially about property and the "corporation...

...I doubt that these reforms will inspire any political movement until "we" dispute the moral legitimacy of corporate capitalism...

...The rage to accumulate has raised a range of evils to a new level of visibility: imperial ambition...

...Our imaginative paralysis on this score stems, Kelly writes, from a notion of property that bestows semidivine status on "owners," and from our "assumption that corporations are objects, not human communities"—objects, moreover, which have had the legal fiction of "personhood" conferred upon them, but which are nonetheless "owned" by stockholders...

...In New Economy lore, "we" witnessed unprecedented growth, prosperity, and social equity, as more and more Americans became owners of stock and consumers of abundance...

...Both Greider and Kelly emphasize that these re-forms will not arise from our current political system...

...From GE Chairman Jack Welch to New York Times columnist Thomas Fried-man, the lords of enterprise and their media minions had beatific visions surpassing the most utopian of socialisms...

...The wealthiest 10 percent of house-holds hold 90 percent of all financial wealth, and the wealthiest 1 percent have doubled their share of that wealth, from 20 percent in 1976 to 40 percent in 1997...

...After interviewing dozens of "socially responsible" businesspeople, labor leaders, and economists, Greider formulates a "social trust" conception of the corporation (akin to Kelly's "economic democracy") that redefines property rights and transforms corporate power relations...

...Rather, small cooperative ventures, pioneering new relation-ships within and without business firms, are and will be the wellsprings of trans-formation...

...He is writing a history of corporate capitalism and the American moral imagination...

...and a commitment to real wealth creation—not "shareholder value"—as the corporation's raison d'etre...

...We heard millennial celebrations of "globalization" and "synergy...

...What's more, they even doubt the extent of globalization, since 80 percent of American workers are exempt from international competition...

...Both Doug Henwood (After the New Economy) and Robert Pollin (Contours of Descent) supply invaluable correctives to New Economy palaver about what "we" experienced in the 1990s...

...covenants" with local communities...

...Moreover, Henwood emphasizes that in finance, business services, and communications—the most computerized, college-educated, and hyped-up industries—productivity growth relative to manufacturing was "underwhelming...

...and cheered the spread of capitalist ownership through millions of new stockholders...

...If workers are the real creators and innovators, why not call for full workers' ownership and control of enterprise...

...Third, and most important, all the authors show how profoundly undemocratic this supposed era of prosperity was...

...Eugene McCarraher teaches humanities at Villanova University...

...entertained fantasies of "em-powered" workers...

...And he urges a revitalization of the labor movement as the primary (if now severely weakened) vehicle for a genuinely democratic workplace and economy...