An Economic Agenda
Lekachman, Robert
BOOKS An Economic Agenda A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT: THE ECONOMY AND GOVERNMENT AFTER REAGAN by Martin Carnoy, Derek Shearer, and Russell Rumberger Harper & Row. 243 pp. $14.95. by Robert...
...Unlike the maladroit and hapless Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan succeeded in scheduling his recession for the first half of his Administration and the subsequent recovery for its last two years...
...In Ronald Reagan they found the perfect agent for fighting workers, gutting the safety, health, and environmental regulations which protected them and the public at large, and abandoning those provisions of the internal revenue code which were even faintly progressive...
...For Rea-ganites, there is now a convenient excuse to inflict still larger charges on pensioners and still more onerous qualifications for Medicaid...
...Barring an unexpected 1984 recession, he is now a favorite to prolong his restful White House stay four more years...
...The escalating fiscal burden imposed by these programs then serves to justify a retreat from comprehensive coverage...
...I intend this year to repeat at therapeutic intervals these words: There really is life after Ronald Reagan...
...According to taste, proponents of industrial policy favor increased funding for hi-tech a la Gary Hart and Robert Reich or rescue operations for steel, automobile, and other older industries as preferred by the AFL-CIO...
...Ro-hatyn, economists like Lester Thurow, and labor leaders like Lane Kirkland have enlisted under the ambiguous banner of industrial policy...
...only by bribing physicians, hospitals, and insurers who since 1964 have been collecting larger incomes than ever before...
...Others have told this tale, but none, I freely concede as one who has tried, quite so well as Carnoy, Shearer, and Rumberger...
...If we survive until 1988, the predictable disasters of Reaganomics will transform the political landscape and establish an active political market for genuinely new ideas...
...corporations unilaterally abrogated this implicit social contract...
...A better solution, our three guides persuasively argue, requires a larger role for the Federal Government as a source of funds, guarantor of full employment, and setter of standards...
...Within this context, a "rational, fair, and democratic industrial policy" would emphasize plant-closing legislation and worker retraining, worker ownership and management participation, deliberate shaping of government purchasing and production policies to promote new products and open new markets, and a new collective bargaining climate in which unions can reasonably trade wage restraint for reversal of anti-union policies by government and business, as well as a share in crucial management and investment decisions...
...Carnoy and his colleagues crisply demolish this neoliberal "solution" on two major counts...
...by Robert Lekachman For the Left, analysis comes much easier than plausible prescription...
...Books like A New Social Contract will be part of the intellectual capital upon which less fearful politicians will draw, much as the New Dealers of the 1930s borrowed freely from the Wisconsin institu-tionalism of John R. Commons and Selig Perlman...
...In a determined campaign to shore up profit margins, they shifted plants to anti-union environments at home and abroad, deployed bankruptcy creatively to break union contracts, and imposed substantial givebacks in numerous industries...
...Politicians like Gary Hart, financiers like Felix...
...It's difficult to resist the temptation to drown in a puddle of one's own tears...
...The reasons are familiar and depressing...
...For such terminal despondency, Martin Carnoy, Derek Shearer, and Russell Rumberger offer an invigorating tonic in A New Social Contract: The Economy and Government after Reagan...
...What, then, is to be done...
...As Medicare and Medicaid demonstrate, Government extended a measure of health protection to the elderly and poor Robert Lekachman is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the City University of New York and author, among other books, of "Greed Is Not Enough: Reagan-omics...
...The first part of this concise, agreeably written volume offers one of the best explanations available for our recent economic and political conditions...
...During the 1970s, U.S...
...At the best of political times, the power of the corporate sector as job provider, campaign funder, and media controller shapes the legislative agenda and limits the capacity of populist Presidents like the Lyndon Johnson of the Great Society to modify the more glaring brutalities of market capitalism...
...Hi-tech provides few good jobs and makes it easy to transfer many of the low-paid, routine jobs to Latin America or Southeast Asia...
...Bad management was largely responsible for shrinking sales in domestic and export markets...
...Aided by the politicians whom they have rented or purchased, and abetted by the mass media which they operate, corporate executives shifted blame to unions and the Government...
...Moreover, at least in its most publicized versions, industrial policy is an elitist, top-down strategy, unresponsive to community concerns, and antidemocratic in its implications...
...During the 1950s and 1960s, American business accepted unions as legitimate institutions and abided by an exceedingly frugal version of the welfare state...
Vol. 48 • May 1984 • No. 5
