The corporate rich and the power elite in the twentieth century: how they won, why liberals and labor lost

Table of contents


Introduction
The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions
The Uphill Battle for Unionism from the 1820s to 1932
The Origins of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935
Stronger Unions, a Weaker National Labor Relations Act, 1936–1960
Union Victories, Corporate Pushback in the 1960s
The Corporate Moderates Reorganize to Defeat Unions, 1969–1985
How the Corporate Moderates Created Social Insurance Programs, and Later Tried to Undermine Them
The Origins of the Social Security Act
Revising and Augmenting Social Security, 1937–1973
Social Disruption, New Social Benefits, and then Cutbacks, 1967–1999
The Circuitous Path to the Affordable Care Act, 1974–2010
The Rise of an International Economic System, 1939–2000
The Council on Foreign Relations and World Trade
The Grand Area and the Origins of the International Monetary Fund
The Grand Area Strategy and the Vietnam War
Rebuilding Europe in the Face of Ultraconservative Resistance, 1945–1967
From Turmoil to the World Trade Organization, 1968–2000
Conclusions
The Shortcomings of Alternative Theories

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 post-war 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.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429287527