The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back

by Jeff Faux

Overview

Class warfare, not economic fate or national interest, best explains why Republican and Democratic leaders have encouraged the outsourcing, trade deficits, and energy dependence that are rushing America toward an inevitable decline in living standards. Jeff Faux breaks through the current stale debate with a compelling case for making globalization responsive to democracy, including an inspiring proposal for a radically revised NAFTA. Full of new insights, political drama, and crisp analysis, The Global Class War argues that only by confronting the realities of the global market will Americans —as well as the citizens of other nations—gain control of their economic future.

Conventional wisdom portrays globalization as competition among countries—America versus Mexico or China or Europe. But today the rich and powerful of every nation have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow citizens who must work for a living. What’s good for General Motors—or Microsoft, Exxon, or Wal-Mart—is no longer good for America.

In The Global Class War, Jeff Faux argues that the politics of the new world market is dominated by a virtual “Party of Davos,” the globe-trotting network of corporate investor and CEOs and the politicians and journalists who work on their behalf. Clinton and his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, and Bush and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, may use different strategies, but they promote the same globalization agenda in which the benefits go to America’s corporate investors—and the costs are paid by ordinary Americans in outsourced jobs, military casualties, and an unsustainable foreign debt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780470098288
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	12/01/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.22(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

JEFF FAUX is the founder and former President of the Economic Policy Institute. He is a contributing editor to The American Prospect and a member of the editorial board of Dissent. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, The New York Times, USA Today, and Harper’s.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.

Introduction.

Chapter 1. NAFTA: Class Reunion.

Chapter 2. "Good Jobs" and Other Global Deceptions.

Chapter 3. The Governing Class: America's Worst-Kept Secret.

Chapter 4. How Reagan and Thatcher Stole Globalization.

Chapter 5. A Bipartisan Empire.

Chapter 6. Allan, Larry, and Bob Save the Privileged.

Chapter 7. NAFTA: Who Got What?

Chapter 8. The Constitution According to Davos.

Chapter 9. America Abandoned.

Chapter 10. After the Fall.

Chapter 11. Imagining North America.

Chapter 12. Toward, and Beyond, a Continental Democracy.

Notes.

Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Globalization is a cover for American imperialism, but the beneficiaries are not the American people at the expense of foreigners but corporate executives at the expense of working and poor people wherever they may be. Jeff Faux offers a comprehensive and devastating analysis."
--Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire

"You will never think about 'free trade' the same way after reading Jeff Faux's superb book. This book should transform public discourse in America."
--Robert Kuttner, author of Everything for Sale

Editorial Reviews

Why, in 1993, did the newly elected Bill Clinton pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pro-business measure invented by his political adversaries and opposed by his allies in labor and the environment? The answer, according to Faux, is that Clinton was less devoted to his base than to his fellow elites, rewarding their donations to the Democratic Party with access to Mexico's cheap labor and lax environmental standards. With a fluid grasp of both history and economics, Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, critiques both Democrats and Republicans for protecting transnational corporations ""while abandoning the rest of us to an unregulated, and therefore brutal and merciless, global market."" Faux describes how free trade and globalization have encouraged businesses to become nationless enterprises detached from the economic well-being of any single country, to the detriment of all but transnational elites. He details the genesis of NAFTA and the failure of the agreement to deliver on its promises to workers, predicting a severe American recession as its legacy. But Faux sees hope for North America in the model of the European Union, a pie-in-the-sky conclusion to this incisive, rancorous book. (Jan.) (Publishers Weekly, November 7, 2005)

From the Publisher