However, if that's all the selfish class had done to insure its dominance, then competing institutions, especially labor, would have been able to put up more resistance. However, workers, and the unions that represent them, have been severely weakened by another part of the process: the internationalization of business, and the creation of a corporate-controlled international trading and monetary system.
Cutting tariffs and other trade barriers began as a liberal program; conservatives, until the 1980's, were largely protectionist, a holdover from earlier periods when American business had developed behind trade barriers before it could compete on world markets. However, in the 1990's, both Presidents George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton promoted NAFTA, the "free" trade treaty that created a free trade zone in all of North America. Clinton, in a gesture towards his labor union and environmental constituencies, included some side agreements (subsequently proven unenforceable) to subject NAFTA partners to fair labor and environmental laws. In addition, Clinton and the Republicans both supported the founding of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.
Do you remember H. Ross Perot campaigning for president in 1991 and claiming that NAFTA would create a giant "sucking sound" of jobs disappearing from the US in their scramble into Mexico?
Even Perot didn't anticipate what would happen: not only were millions of jobs lost, but wage rates in Mexico went down; American and Canadian wages haven't been buoyed by NAFTA, either. Where did all those high-tech jobs go, the ones predicted by NAFTA proponents? To India, to China, to the Philippines, the result of new corporate-friendly trading rules set by the WTO? One thing is certain: the international labor environment has depressed wages and prices during the "jobless" recovery, because employers would much rather invest in contracted production abroad, where labor costs are lower and environmental regulations are laughable.
So, the effect of the developing international trading system has been to increase the power of corporate employers over their employees many-fold; it is so easy for a factory to pull up stakes and relocate to Mexico; in fact the US tax code even subsidizes such moves. This is really why labor unions have lost so much political power, and also so many of their members; their industries have been dismantled and sent abroad, or the corporations can threaten to do so if the workers don't capitulate to employer demands.
This kind of corporate "free trade" extended by the US to countries like China or Indonesia, or India has even more negative effects on US workers--and on Mexican workers as well. In fact, there are indications that Mexico is losing some of its new factory jobs to China, because Chinese workers can work for even lower wages than Mexican maquiladora workers. That may be another reason why Mexican wages haven't risen, and why US wages are held down.
A small sidelight: a conservative Republican Senator, Frank Murkowski, was outraged by the virtual slave labor conditions found on the Marianas, a US territory, and sponsored a bill (passed unanimously by the Senate) that would have imposed mainland labor laws on the territory. The bill was killed by Tom Delay, Republican Majority Leader in the House, who said of the appalling labor conditions, that they were "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island." His associate, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff spent several million dollars in that effort. Talk about a selfish class!
The winners of the "free" trade wars are the corporations and their owners, the selfish class. The process has paralleled the movement of peasants and decurions into the estates of the Senatorial class, that is corporations have reconstituted their production, have relocated much of their business, to sites all over the world, sites that are beyond the reach of whatever regulation the US can still enforce within its own territories.
Just like the selfish class in Rome, Corporations have also discoveredways to protect their profits from US taxes (by keeping them out of the US, by "realizing profit" in low tax countries through internal pricing mechanisms and much more), much as Senators protected their estates from the tax collector. In the process, they are destroying more and more of the manufacturing capacity of the US, much as the Senators destroyed Italy's peasant agriculture back in the expansive phase of the Roman Empire, when they imported so many slaves that free workers had to abandon the land for the cities and the dole.
Of course, just as the Roman legions tromped over the known world to make the world profitable for their selfish class, the aristocracy, so, today, US troops are stationed all over the globe and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, to make the world profitable for the multinational corporations (especially those closely associated with the US administration) and, of course, their owners, the contemporary selfish class. And just as the effect of the Roman Empire was to disfranchise and impoverish most of its people, while enriching the selfish class, so the contemporary US empire is working to the advantage of the few who are well-connected, and to the detriment of everyone else.
Empire, of course, has always been known as an opportunity for profit. In the good old days of the Roman Empire's expansion, both officers and men came back from campaigns with piles of loot, including slaves. It was this wealth, and the graft that succeeded it in the corrupt government of the provinces, that flooded into Rome, making it the wealthiest city in the world at that time. By the Fifth Century the Empire was in retreat and only occasionally offered new troves of loot, such as when Radagaisus, a Gothic leader, was defeated in his massive invasion of Italy at the beginning of the fifth century; his people were captured and sold into slavery and there were so many of them that the price of a slave went down precipitously. Nevertheless, the wealth already accumulated by Senatorial families had come from conquest, but most of it many years, even many generations before.
Now in Iraq the tales of corruption and of huge amounts of cash simply vanishing have become legion. Not only are there corporations like Custer Battles and Black Water Security that seem to be peculiarly free with public money, but there are the larger corporations, like Halliburton and the oil companies, that have benefited from the Coalition Provisional Authority's privatization of Iraq's public sector corporations. Even more egregious, however, was the shipment of $5 billion of frozen Iraqi funds, in cash, to the CPA to distribute to its political allies and cronies. A Fed official commented in an email on June 11, 2003: “Just when you think you’ve seen it all... the CPA is ordering $2,401,600,000 in currency to be shipped out on Friday, June 18.” C5A cargo planes airlifted the cash in shrink-wrapped pallet loads. Much of it is now unaccounted for.
So, we've covered how the Roman aristocracy, the selfish class, gained dominance in the fourth century, but how did the corporations and the radical conservatives, who speak for the contemporary selfish class interests manage to do so in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
In the case of the United States, the takeover of the selfish class began almost as a conspiracy, in reaction to the overreaching of the Johnson presidency in the late 1960's. This was when liberals attempted to remake society, through regulation, through institutions like the Office of Economic Opportunity, EPA and OSHA, through civil rights legislation, and through funding generally characterized as "the war on poverty," while at the same time ramping up the war in Vietnam. The economic effects were disastrous enough (triggering inflation and then "stagflation") to create a backlash harnessed first by Nixon and then by Reagan, but probably more important was the effect on the conservative movement: think tanks founded, direct mail organizations created, religious reactionaries mobilized as political allies.
I said "almost a conspiracy," because the conservative movement was not the creation of a few people conspiring to take power, but more like the consensus of a class, the selfish class, those who own capital or control large corporations. It's as if the descendants of the people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" had finally found a program, a mythos, an economics and a politics that would oust his successors from power and erase his (and LBJ's) legacy.
The takeover of the selfish class ranges far beyond the political and even the economic. Ask yourself: why do Americans acquiesce in the most unequal pay differentials on the planet, an average of 425 to one between CEO's and workers in 2003 (it may be much higher now, since CEO earnings have continued to escalate), when differentials in other wealthy countries were nearer 10 or 12 to one? Why do we agree to cut taxes on the wealthiest and institute other taxes which hurt the poorest and the middle class? Why is it that the sweetheart deals with firms like Halliburton and the Carlyle Group do not become huge corruption scandals? What about the nearly complete lack of accounting that has accompanied the Iraq occupation? Why can the administration shrug off scandals like Abu Ghraib and Guantànamo, and pillory its critics like Senator Durbin for "disrespecting" the troops? How did "liberal" become a dirty word?
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