This passage captures at a somewhat abstract level the transition from the postwar Keynesian settlement between labor and capital to the neoliberal regime that governs the global political economy today. By reorganizing itself politically and smashing the power of the organized working class and its allied political parties in the 1970s, the capitalist class was able to restore profitability and consolidate its political power. But in doing so, it also sowed the seeds of the contemporary economic crisis and the crisis of legitimacy that the slump has triggered. Capital's attack on the working class has recoiled upon itself. It lost sight of the fact that the system's stability depends on the existence of a working class with a modicum of power in the workplace, in politics, and in the labor market. In bringing the working class to its present state of abjection, the system has placed barriers in the way of its own growth. And when growth slows to a crawl, the system's claim to legitimacy is called into question."
Mr. Maisano continues later in his article:
""The global economy is stuck in a deep economic malaise that shows no signs of abating any time soon. The European Union's sovereign debt crisis threatens to tear the Eurozone apart, with dire implications for the global economy. Here in the U.S., the situation is dismal. The economy created only 18,000 jobs in June, a poor performance by any standard but an especially dreadful one at a time when over 14 million people are looking for work. State and local governments are cutting thousands of jobs and slashing core public services as tax revenues remain low and federal aid dwindles. Last year, $2 out of every $10 of personal income in the U.S. came from government payments, and much of that aid will dry up by the end of the year. Workers have been completely cut off from the fruits of the very shaky "recovery." Since June 2009, when the recession ended in a narrowly technical sense, 88% of national income growth has gone toward corporate profits, while only 1 percent has gone toward wages and salaries."
Remember what I wrote earlier about Roman dignitas, --insult any but a former slave's dignitas, and you had made an enemy for life." We Americans are not that different from the ancient Romans. We will bite back a reply to protect our immediate self-interest, but as Jefferson wrote, --when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism," we will take action. In the case of the ownership class and their surrogates: the mega-corporations, their shareholders, and officers; that time has come.
James Madison explicitly believed in the need for checks and balances in a political system. He implicitly believed in that self-same need for checks and balances in the social system, e.g., freedom of religion. And both he and Thomas Jefferson feared the unchecked power of corporations, and the need for checks and balances against them in our economic system. In fact, until the last part of the Nineteenth Century, economics was called "political economy," and is referred to by that term by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. It is only in the last century and a quarter that the ownership class has succeeded in divorcing economics from its political repercussions. So, when our third and fourth Presidents wrote of politics, and the need for checks and balances, they were also including political economy, modern day economics, within the purview of politics.
Without the checks and balances provided by workers in the form of organized labor that is vastly stronger than what we have today, an empowered group of small business owners, and a government that places the interest of the common man ahead of the plutocrats ever increasing desire for power; the inhuman, multinational corporations (surrogates for the plutocracy), without--as Jefferson pointed out--loyalty to anything save increasing their own wealth, will in the end become the masters, and the rest of humanity the servants. At that moment, when Edmund Burke's vision of the world of a "natural society," where the rich are served by the poor, has become reality, and all hope of liberty and equality lies dead, then the dream of the Founders and Framers will have disappeared. Forever.
And that would be an indignity indeed.
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