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[1] Hurd, R. W. (2006). Reflections on PATCO’s legacy: Labor’s strategic challenges persist. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 18(4), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-006-9044-3. “The 1981 strike by over 11,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) stands out as a symbol of union decline. This dismal legacy is a product of President Ronald Reagan's harsh response to the job action, an ultimatum for controllers to return to work followed by wholesale permanent replacement of the strikers. Although PATCO’s members were federal employees, their dismissal is typically portrayed as an invitation for all employers to emulate the President. The subsequent sharp drop in private sector strike activity has been traced (both rhetorically and statistically) to PATCO's demise, and even concessionary bargaining in industries far removed from the federal government and air transportation has been linked to this event. Although the direct negative effect of PATCO almost certainly has been exaggerated, there is no doubt that the strike symbolizes the dramatic shift in labor's fortunes in the 1980s. In the first half of that decade private sector membership fell by three million, for a loss in union density of nearly one-third (Hirsch & Macpherson, 2006). The decline was caused by a myriad of factors, twin recessions in the early 1980s, globalization, deregulation, a shift in the economy from manufacturing to services, and increased employer anti-unionism facilitated by the Reagan administration’s conservative National Labor Relations Board. Also culpable were unions themselves as they clung to outmoded methods and stubbornly resisted change. PATCO’s only link to this array of forces working against labor was the part it played in Ronald Reagan’s offensive on the labor movement. The penchant of journalists and academics to stigmatize PATCO by focusing exclusively on its role as fodder for the Reagan administration’s anti-unionism detracts from important aspects of the unorthodox strategy of this fascinating labor organization. Although there were fatal tactical flaws in the PATCO game plan, this is one union that refused to be captive to past practices, instead developing creative approaches and pursuing an aggressive change agenda. A review of the organization’s operations and priorities in the years leading up to the 1981 strike will facilitate an assessment of how PATCO’s strategy compares to subsequent initiatives to transform US unions.” (p. 207-208)

[2] Hurd, R. W. (2006). Reflections on PATCO’s legacy: Labor’s strategic challenges persist. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 18(4), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-006-9044-3. “Nearly 80% of the nation’s air traffic controllers walked off of the job on August 3, 1981 in an effort to achieve a shorter workweek and improved retirement benefits. The strike was precipitated by workplace stress and harsh management practices. Unfortunately for PATCO, the legitimate complaints of its members were lost in the furor surrounding the walkout, as the disruption in airline service and the illegality of a strike by federal employees overshadowed the actual bargaining objectives. Momentum for the 1981 strike actually began to build in 1978 shortly after PATCO signed a three-year contract that disappointed many members. In response to pressure from rank-and-file activists, President John Leyden appointed the seven-member‘1981 Committee’ to begin preparation for the next round of bargaining. Although the committee was charged with designing a public relations campaign and developing a political/ legislative agenda, its activist members reached the conclusion that, in spite of legal restrictions, the strike option offered the best potential source of bargaining leverage. Their preparations narrowed as they focused almost exclusively on internal mobilization in preparation for a possible strike. From the start the 1981 Committee’s members referred to themselves as‘choir boys’, and they were determined to design a program that would unify the geographically dispersed 15,000 air traffic controllers, primarily by recruiting other activists to join the choir.” (p. 208)

[3] Hurd, R. W. (2006). Reflections on PATCO’s legacy: Labor’s strategic challenges persist. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 18(4), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-006-9044-3. “For the first half of the 1980s private sector unions were nearly paralyzed by the myriad of economic and regulatory changes that confronted them. Rather than pursuing new approaches in response to the altered environment, the tendency was to blame problems on

the Reagan administration, on anti-union employers, and on other external forces (including PATCO), while doggedly sticking to established practices. In 1985 a shift in attitude began to take hold after the AFL-CIO Executive Council endorsed The Changing Situation of

Workers and Their Unions (AFL-CIO, 1985). This report was prepared by a select committee of national union presidents who had engaged over a two-year period in what was effectively a strategic planning exercise” (p. 210)

[4] Hurd, R. W. (2006). Reflections on PATCO’s legacy: Labor’s strategic challenges persist. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 18(4), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-006-9044-3. “The third key aspect of the Kirkland program was increased attention to political action, which included early endorsements of candidates, increased campaign contributions, and more effective coordination across unions. The hope for a political solution to labor’s plight proved irresistible, and Ronald Reagan’s actions assured that the Democratic Party was the beneficiary of the heightened attention. When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1990, many union officials were confident that their problems would soon be solved. PATCO’s endorsement of Ronald Reagan was clearly ill-advised, but the labor movement’s perpetual quest for political influence with Democratic officials is only marginally more realistic. The plight of private sector unions is linked directly to deregulation and free trade, and these policies have been embraced equally by Democrats and Republicans. Although both Jimmy Carter in 1978 and Bill Clinton in 1994 promised labor law reform to promote union growth, neither delivered on the promise.” (p. 211)

[5] Hurd, R. W. (2006). Reflections on PATCO’s legacy: Labor’s strategic challenges persist. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 18(4), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-006-9044-3. “After 10 years it was clear that the AFL-CIO’s attempts to implement the recommendations of The Changing Situation had been insufficient to stem the decline in union density. A challenge to Lane Kirkland’s presidency was mounted, and in October 1995 John Sweeney was elected to lead the federation. Although there have been important developments in the labor movement since Kirkland was deposed, there has been nothing that would alter substantially the interpretation of PATCO’s sacrifice. Indeed it is ironic that in spite of the fanfare surrounding the change in leadership, Sweeney’s New Directions program proved not to be substantially different from Kirkland’s” (p. 212-213)

[6] Hurd, R. W. (2006). Reflections on PATCO’s legacy: Labor’s strategic challenges persist. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 18(4), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-006-9044-3. “When assessing the potential for union revitalization 25 years after PATCO unwittingly ushered in an era of persistent union decline, it is the rejection of the organizing model that is most troubling. The key positive lesson of PATCO was the value of a comprehensive grassroots program to mobilize members around job-related concerns. Against all odds the choir boy network transformed PATCO from a small and inconsequential organization of technical workers employed by the federal government into a force that could not easily be brushed aside. An inspired, active rank and file committed to the union is insufficient to assure success, of course. Effective strategic leadership with perspective and a realistic plan to exercise economic and political leverage is also essential. Clearly it is the realm of union leadership and strategy where PATCO failed.” (p. 213)

[7] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “Writing to Richard Nixon, the man Kennedy had defeated in the 1960 election, Reagan lashed out at the sitting president and his policies. “Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx, first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all,” he wrote. Switching his registration to the Republican Party in 1962, Reagan began to map out the political career that would eventually carry him to the White House. 6 The same year Reagan switched parties, Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, which allowed millions of federal workers to join unions and bargain collectively with the U.S. government over many of the conditions of their work. Kennedy’s order inspired many states and localities to also allow their workers to join unions and bargain, prompting a massive wave of unionization across all levels of government in the 1960s and 1970s. It was the Kennedy order that cleared the way for a union organizing drive among aggrieved air traffic controllers, among them PATCO cofounders Maher and Rock, a drive that would eventually lead to PATCO’s founding in 1968 in a hotel ten miles from the site of the 1960 Brooklyn crash. Both the conservative movement, with which Reagan was identified, and the public sector union movement that produced unions like PATCO gathered strength as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s. In a sense, these two 1960s-spawned forces had been on a collision course for years. On August 3, 1981, the day of reckoning arrived.” (p. 9)

[8] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “The confrontation came at a crucial moment in American political and economic history. As the “Reagan revolution” began refashioning the role of government in American life in 1981, cutting back regulations and spending on social programs, American workers were entering a period of enormous vulnerability. Already the economy was sliding into a recession that would push the unemployment rate up to over 10 percent in 1982, its highest level since before World War II. Income growth had stagnated for most workers; indeed, inflation-adjusted hourly pay had begun to decline in the formerly vibrant manufacturing sector. Moreover, the labor movement, once the bulwark of the liberal order, seemed unable to resist these political and economic trends. Unions had been severely weakened by the economic developments of the 1970s, as container ships began disgorging imports in bulk on American waterfronts, oil prices skyrocketed, “stagflation” appeared, factories closed in waves, and employers began fighting unions with a level of determination unseen since the New Deal. As the share of workers organized in unions slipped to under 22 percent in 1981, down from its high point of 35 percent after World War II, the labor movement was losing clout.” (p.9-10)

[9] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “As automation and deregulation created new pressures in air traffic control in the second half of the 1970s, controllers’ economic prospects were eroded by the inescapable bane of those years, inflation. The average annual inflation rate more than tripled in the 1970s to 7.1 percent (rising from an average of 2.3 percent in the 1960s). Inflation placed a constant downward pressure on the earnings of all federal workers. While many private sector unions, such as the United Automobile Workers, had won cost of living adjustments (COLAs) that automatically raised wages to match the inflation rate, government workers lacked such protection. Not surprisingly, upticks in the strike rate of state and local government workers in the 1970s tracked inflation. Thus, when the inflation rate jumped by a point to 7.62 percent in 1978, the number of public sector strikes spiked 18 percent as workers pressured their employers for raises. Federal workers were in a unique bind in this period; like most other government employees, they lacked inflation protection. Federal workers depended upon yearly wage adjustments approved by Congress, yet they lacked the ability to pressure their employer with strikes the way municipal workers could. Between 1973 and 1981, federal raises regularly failed to keep up with rising prices. Over this span, federal employees actually saw their inflation-adjusted income cut by an average of 3.1 percent each year. For air traffic controllers, this erosion of real income seemed especially oppressive. They were highly skilled workers, who trained for years to do jobs

that they anticipated would provide a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Unlike government lawyers, computer programmers, or accountants, they did not have the option of marketing their skills in the private sector or, indeed, to any other employer in the United States. The FAA was their only option. Adding to their anger was the fact that the FAA at times seemed to

regard them as serfs. Controllers were incensed that the FAA monitored the personal indebtedness of those whose circumstances forced them to declare bankruptcy, condescendingly instructing controllers to “discharge their private financial obligations” in a manner that avoided creating “an unfavorable image of the Federal Government.” Failure to honor “valid debts” was deemed “grounds for disciplinary action against an employee.” Such policies only further embittered Vietnam-era controllers. But, unlike other federal workers in the mid- to late 1970s who felt helpless to improve their stagnating incomes, controllers’ jobs put them in position to resist what they saw as the government’s mistreatment. They stood at a bottleneck in the nation’s transit system. They knew they had the power to clog that bottleneck. And they were increasingly of a mind to use that power to defend their interests.” (p. 198-199)

[10] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “To be sure, controllers generally earned higher incomes, lived in better houses, and enjoyed more job security than their parents had known. Indeed, their objective economic positions were better than that of most American

workers. Yet this gave them little consolation. As the 1970s progressed and inflation nipped at their salaries, they felt increasingly undercompensated. According to an internal survey conducted by PATCO in 1977, only 40 percent felt that they earned enough to afford a few luxuries. The majority felt they were just getting by. In many ways, the issues male air traffic controllers faced in the late 1970s seemed like challenges to their manhood. In an open letter to air traffic controllers, one of their wives put it in just such terms. “All you macho types out there should be ashamed to claim your pride in your profession while allowing the FAA to govern your lifestyle,” she scolded. “You have no profession in that case!! You are simply a technician.” A “person who sits back and allows a superior (?!?) to degrade his position is a nothing, a no-count,” she continued. “Ask your wives, if you still have them, what would they opt for? . . . I’ve seen and heard of too many of you turning into cornered, trapped animals; snapping, snarling, sarcastic, and cynical,” she concluded. “And you’ve got to be kidding yourselves to think you’ll have a family around to put up with that if you don’t have the courage to stand up and fight for yourselves!” (p. 201)

[11] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “Like all unions in the federal sector, PATCO worked in an “open-shop” environment, meaning that while the union was obligated to represent all air traffic controllers, controllers were not obligated to join PATCO or pay dues in return for that representation. The situation frustrated Leyden, who found nonmembers “neither bashful nor reticent” in invoking the union’s aid on grievances, while “enjoying a free ride” on the backs of dues-paying PATCO members. Despite the federal rules that prevented the establishment of a union shop, PATCO achieved the highest union density ratio in the federal sector. In 1976, PATCO claimed 13,681 members, or 85 percent of the controllers who were eligible to join.” (p. 155-156)

[12] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “Federal sector unions and their members were the most obviously affected. Ken Blaylock called the destruction of PATCO “a disaster for collective bargaining in the federal sector.” Postal union leader Moe Biller bemoaned its “chilling effect on federal labor relations.” Unions found it more difficult to organize and retain members in the open-shop federal sector once Reagan demonstrated PATCO’s vulnerability. In the two years following the strike, the number of federal workers covered by union contracts suffered its biggest drop since the government began keeping track in 1963. Agencies also became noticeably tougher in negotiations. When the Postal Service took a hard line during negotiations in 1984, observers attributed it to the precedent set by Reagan in 1981. Faced with increased resistance, most unions scaled back their demands rather than risk a damaging confrontation. “If Reagan can destroy PATCO, he can destroy us too,” reasoned James M. Pierce, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. “Right or wrong, a lot of unions became less aggressive,” Pierce conceded. As unions lost bargaining leverage, they saw their ability to attract and retain members erode. The AFGE, the largest federal sector union, saw its membership drop by 30 percent between 1980 and 1987. The fallout also hit state and local government workers. Union opponents hoped Reagan’s example would “strengthen the hand of local governments everywhere,” and, judging by the mail the president received from mayors, such hopes were not unfounded. “Too often in the past we have ‘negotiated’ away what is right, because it was easier,” confessed the mayor of Romulus, Michigan. Reagan’s firing of the controllers would “make the work of municipal administrators easier in dealing with the public sector labor groups,” predicted the mayor of Garland, Texas. “Stick by your guns,” came the word from Waterville, Wisconsin; “I am behind you,” read a cable from Dyersburg, Tennessee; “remain firm in your resolve,” urged the chief executive of Snyder, Texas. A gathering of 50 Oregon mayors praised the firing of the controllers as “just great.” This groundswell led municipal union leaders to fear the emergence of “thousands of little Ronald Reagans across the country in every town saying ‘Fire them,’ whenever public employees confronted them in a labor dispute.”” (p. 339)

[13] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “The president’s success in replacing the striking air traffic controllers was taken by many as a sign that unionized government services were bloated and could stand serious cutbacks. Not only conservatives read it that way. “The strike provides proof, that’s right proof , that the government is a badly featherbedded as we’ve feared,” huffed liberal journalist Jonathan Alter. “If overstaffing occurs in an area where we didn’t really expect it, where the union had convinced a lot of people the workplace was under-staffed, then imagine how bad the featherbedding is in government offices where we do expect it.” As such views ascended to the status of conventional wisdom, elected officials took note: antiunion politicians pressed their attacks, and former union allies sought to distance themselves from anything that could be portrayed as giving too much to public employee unions. In the fall of 1981, teachers, the leading edge of government employee unionism in the 1970s, complained that school boards were demanding an unprecedented number of concessions in contract talks. A clear indicator of the worsening climate for government workers was the sagging curve of union density, the percentage of eligible workers who joined unions. Through the 1970s, public sector union membership continuously rose on a trajectory that would have seen half of all government workers becoming union members in the 1980s. But membership growth rates stagnated in the post-PATCO years, and public sector union density never crested 40 percent” (p. 339-340)

[14] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “Indeed, public sector union militancy pivoted abruptly around the PATCO strike. Throughout the 1970s, the number of state and local government workers’ strikes grew, setting a new record in 1979. In the aftermath of the PATCO strike, such walkouts fell precipitously. It is difficult to measure the dimensions of the decline in militancy with precision because the Reagan administration ceased publishing annual data on government workers’ strikes after 1981. But fragmentary evidence indicates a stunning drop off . Scholar David Lewin found a 40 percent decline between 1980 and 1982 in state and local government strikes and a 50 percent decline in the number of days public service workers were idled by strikes. The Public Service Research Council found a 42 percent drop in teachers’ strikes during the 1981–1982 school year alone. Some observers at the time believed that the dip in strike activity would be brief. But evidence from New York, the most densely organized state, indicates that there was no rebound. The number of government workers’ strikes recorded in New York during the seven years after 1981 was 90 percent less than the number recorded during the seven years before.” (p. 340-341)

[15] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “It is difficult to accurately measure the impact of the PATCO strike alone on public sector labor militancy in the United States, because government workers’ strikes declined elsewhere in the industrialized world after 1980, although less precipitously. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests a strong causal relationship between Reagan’s busting of PATCO and the change in U.S. strike patterns: employers, workers, and neutral observers alike credited Reagan’s action with the shift . Reagan’s firing of the controllers was “blessed by all elected officials from every level of government in the United States who have been faced with public employee strikes,” as one Fort Lauderdale official explained. In the 1970s, municipal officials had been reading manuals that urged them to make peace with their striking employees, even if their walkouts were illegal. After PATCO, this was no longer the case. “Breathes there a city manager with a soul so dead that they will not want to look like a hero when he sees the President of the United States being applauded for being tough and closing every door to a settlement in defiance of all the civilized rules of collective bargaining?” wondered AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Tom Donahue. Donahue accurately predicted the response of public officials. Their desire to emulate Reagan changed the calculus for workers. A year after the PATCO strike, the director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service attributed the steep drop in government strikes to the “chilling effect” of Reagan’s actions. Unionized teachers, among others, admitted feeling “intimidated” by the PATCO firings. Fear of waging strikes, in turn, changed the nature of public sector collective bargaining. After 1981, government employee unions substituted increased political action and campaign contributions for strikes as they looked for the best way to influence their employers.” (p. 341)

[16] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “The marginalization of the strike was a remarkable and unanticipated development. Strikes had been an indispensable weapon in the arsenal of U.S. unions since workers staged the first “turnouts” in the early nineteenth century. Withholding their labor provided workers the leverage they needed to win better wages and working conditions, and indeed the right to collectively bargain at all. As unions won legal protections in the years after the 1935 Wagner Act, workers’ right to strike was widely accepted as necessary to the proper function of labor markets. The strike “must be accepted as a commonplace on the economic scene wherever collective bargaining is to take place within a free market system,” economist Allan M. Cartt er observed in 1959. Strikes imposed costs on both sides, lost wages for workers, lost profits for employers, that prevented either side from exploiting the other, helping maintain a rough equilibrium in labor-management relations, Cartt er’s generation believed. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, that view held, and the strike remained a crucial element of private-sector labor relations. In the post-PATCO era, however, the strike weapon swiftly disappeared from the American labor scene, a development that held staggering consequences for private sector workers.” (p. 342)

[17] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “It took Reagan’s breaking of PATCO to thoroughly legitimize striker replacement in the eyes of most employers. By conferring legitimacy on strikebreaking Reagan decisively altered the course of U.S. labor relations. Not only did Reagan’s handling of PATCO dramatize the effectiveness of the replacement tactic on the grandest scale and in the most visible way possible, it demonstrated that even the most skilled workers were replaceable. No other employer but the federal government could have made this point so effectively, for no other employer could spend so freely for so long to demonstrate it. By the same token, with its widely publicized demand for $10,000 across-the-board salary increases funded by federal taxes and fees, no union could have provided a clearer illustration of Hutt ’s argument that strikes ultimately exacted costs not from employers but from other workers.” (p. 344-345)

[18] McCartin, J. A. (2011). Collision course: Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers, and the strike that changed America. Oxford University Press. “Martin Jay Levitt, a professional union-buster, immediately grasped the importance of Reagan’s action. In August 1981, he was working on an assignment for John Sheridan and Associates, a leading union-avoidance firm. Levitt’s job was to subvert a local union negotiating its first contract after winning the right to represent nursing home workers in Sebring, Ohio, midway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. He was stringing along the contract negotiations to the point that the frustrated union leaders began considering a strike just at the moment that Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Levitt could hardly believe his luck. Each night on the evening news, nursing home workers were treated to stories about what Levitt called “the biggest union bust in history,” one that “recast the crimes of union busting as acts of patriotism.” Given this fortuitous coincidence, Levitt decided that the best way to undermine the Sebring union was to dare its members to strike and “scare them into believing strikers would lose their jobs.” The strategy worked. After many weeks of stalemated talks, the union prepared to strike to try to jump-start the bargaining process. Levitt immediately ran ads for replacement workers in the local newspaper and spread word that there was a backlog of job applicants. As the strike date neared, the union’s members became anxious. When the deadline arrived, the workers lost their nerve. “Nothing happened. No one walked out,” Levitt recalled. “No one showed up with picket signs. No one.” Its strike threat exposed as a bluff, the union lost all bargaining leverage and soon folded. In short order, Levitt’s services were in high demand through the Midwest. Everywhere he went, he used the threat of permanent replacement workers “to fill the laborers of industry with dread.” The influence of the PATCO strike was also visible far from the shadowy world of union-busters behind the ivy-covered walls of America’s finest and most respected business schools. In 1982, three professors from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business brought out a volume titled Operating During Strikes: Company Experience, NLRB Policies, and Government Regulations. Charles R. Perry, Andrew Kramer, and Thomas J. Schneider opened their book by touting Reagan’s “dramatic handling” of PATCO as the best illustration of “a relatively new phenomenon in United States industrial relations, the determination of management to operate facilities when employees strike.” They went on to argue that replacing strikers could be a beneficial business move for any employer and urged executives to shed “the fear of failure and the fear of confrontation.” If they only summoned the will to break strikes, employers would acquire “enhanced power and control in union-management relations,” the professors promised. The tactic of replacing striking workers could then become what Perry called a new “management power asset.” Management’s embrace of strikebreaking fundamentally altered the calculus of U.S. labor-management relations. Since the Great Depression, strikes had become such a routine feature of the industrial scene that economists such as Sir John Hicks described their function with mathematical precision. In the 1930s, Hicks invented a way to graph strike dynamics. He depicted two intersecting lines: a downward-sloping “resistance curve,” which illustrated the degree to which union resistance diminished over time as the economic hardship of a walkout took its toll; and an upward-sloping “concession curve,” which illustrated employers’ increasing willingness to settle a strike as the economic costs of a prolonged shutdown escalated. When a strike began, and neither strikers nor their employer had paid a price for the shutdown, the curves were farthest apart. But as a walkout lengthened, they would begin to converge, Hicks argued. The costs endured by each side would push them toward settlement. Eventually the curves would intersect at point P, where each side would agree on wage W after a strike of S days. The value of W or S would naturally vary, depending on the circumstances of a strike, the workers who waged it, and the marketplace, but the basic structure of the intersecting resistance and concession curves would hold. The task for negotiators was to properly assess both their opponent’s curve and their own. In the best of all worlds, both sides could find wage W, “the highest wages which skillful negotiation can extract from the employer,” without having to reach a strike of S days, or ideally without striking at all. The Hicks model was not without flaws. Over the years, economists tweaked and refined it. But all revisions assumed that there was a point P to be found in any labor conflict. After 1981, that assumption crumbled.” (p.346-348)

[19] Jaffee, D. (2020). Disarticulation and the crisis of neoliberalism in the United States. Critical Sociology, 46(7-8), 1093–1111. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920519885540. “Most observers identify the mid-1970s as the point at which the Keynesian post-WWII political economic model, on which the autocentric capitalist concept is based, entered a crisis phase. This “social structure of accumulation” responsible for the post-WWII phase of capital accumulation is sometimes referred to as the “capital–labor accord” to denote that capital and labor had come to a mutual agreement on the distribution of the surplus where capital acknowledged the importance of the capacity to consume for the realization of profit (Gordon et al., 1982). Higher wages were considered both a cost and also a benefit which allowed for a non-zero-sum logic to prevail. But in the 1970s this began to unravel as the U.S. economy experienced stagflation, and capital began to disinvest based on the following litany of complaints: taxes too high, labor too strong, regulations too stifling, and welfare too generous. The profit squeeze associated with these deepening Keynesian conditions and policies, along with increasing international competition from Europe and Japan, prompted a backlash against the “capital–labor” accord. One can think of Reaganomics, supply-side economics and, ultimately, neoliberalism as the political economic policy response to remedy the perceived disincentives to capital investment aimed at reestablishing conditions for corporate profitability and competitiveness. There was a two-pronged approach to crisis resolution under the emerging neoliberal model – corporate restructuring and the use of finance to restore profitability. They have been mutually reinforcing. Under this emerging neoliberal regime – what became the new “social structure of accumulation” – there was both the policy response by the state and a strategic restructuring by American corporations.” (p. 3)

[20] Jaffee, D. (2020). Disarticulation and the crisis of neoliberalism in the United States. Critical Sociology, 46(7-8), 1093–1111. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920519885540. “Among select segments of the capitalist class there appears to be some growing awareness of the dysfunctional aspects of U.S. capitalism. For example, 13 CEOs including Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway Inc.) and Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan) signed on to a set of “Commonsense Corporate Governance Principles” (http://www.governanceprinciples.org). The “open letter” pointed to the need to reform corporate governance procedures away from the short-term shareholder value model with an emphasis on “companies being managed effectively for long-term prosperity” and fostering “economic growth that benefits shareholders, employees and the economy as a whole”. This would represent a significant positive break from the current corporate governance regime associated with neoliberalism and align with some of the proposals outlined above. Another indication is the formation of the “American Made Coalition” that includes 25 major corporations including GE, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer. The coalition has focused primarily on tax reform that would incentivize domestic production and disincentivize importation through, for example, a 20% border adjustment tax on imported goods.” (p. 14)

[21] Jaffee, D. (2020). Disarticulation and the crisis of neoliberalism in the United States. Critical Sociology, 46(7-8), 1093–1111. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920519885540. “It is difficult to imagine any simple solutions to these deep-seated structural maladies that are reinforced by an equally entrenched neoliberal ideology. Further, the distribution of costs and benefits from this disarticulated arrangement ensure that those most able to alter the patterns are the least likely to suggest an alternative political economic regime. Nonetheless, it is worth considering what two of the leading analysts of the macroeconomic consequences of neoliberalism, cited above, have suggested as needed reforms to address the obviously unsatisfactory economic performance of the U.S. economy as they relate to financialization and the operation of the private corporation. Multiple analyses of the macroeconomic dynamics of financialization have led Palley (2008) to a series of policy recommendations. To reign in rampant financial speculation, he proposes greater regulation of the financial sector through asset-based reserve requirements. To impact corporate behavior, he emphasizes addressing the misalignment of incentives so that managers are accountable to a greater range of stakeholders beyond the immediate shareholders and money managers. Lazonick (2011, 2013a, 2013b) has written extensively on the dysfunctional consequences of the “new business model” under the neoliberal political-economic regime, and the need to resuscitate the “innovative enterprise.” To facilitate this organizational form, Lazonick (2011) proposes three “social conditions” – strategic control, organizational integration, and financial commitment. Strategic control requires that knowledgeable managers can make decisions that will enhance the innovative capabilities of the firm along with incentives that align with such productive investment decisions. In theory this would redirect the capacity to produce toward the reinvestment of profits into firm-level, rather than financial, assets. Organizational integration would strengthen relations among the firm’s primary stakeholders – managers and workers – through incentives, compensation, and intrafirm human capital investment that encourage collective organizational learning. Ideally, with regard to the capacity to consume, this would provide levels of compensation to organizationally integrated employees reducing the reliance on debt-driven consumption. Finally, financial commitment would reinforce effective strategic control, promoting the “patient capital” required for long-term sustained innovation in product and process technologies.” (p. 12)

[22] Jaffee, D. (2020). Disarticulation and the crisis of neoliberalism in the United States. Critical Sociology, 46(7-8), 1093–1111. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920519885540. “On the offshoring dimension of the process, it is worth returning to the central contradiction between the capacity to produce (enhanced by low wages) and the capacity to consume (enhanced by high wages) to understand how this contradiction not only contributed to the profit squeeze, capital strike, and the supply-side crisis of the 1970s, but also served to fuel globalization strategies under deregulatory policies encouraging capital mobility. When viewed as a strategy to resolve the contradiction, this “spatial fix” (Harvey, 1982) exploits geographic variations in business climate conditions prompting corporations to relocate and restructure production to enhance the capacity to produce and restore profitable conditions of production in low wage, unregulated environments. When this involves offshoring to cheap labor sites, the capacity to produce and the capacity to consume are geographically segregated with the latter satisfied by returning the cheaply produced goods to the center state where the wage levels are sufficient to support demand. As we shall see, this strategy had its own built-in contradictions as offshoring would inevitably undermine, over time, the domestic capacity to consume in the center states through job loss and the expansion of a global labor market.” (p. 4)

[23] Cohen, D., & Mikaelian, A. (2021). The privatization of everything: How the plunder of public goods transformed America and how we can fight back. The New Press. “The Reagan-era privatizers succeeded in obscuring citizenship and aggravating consumer- style grievances. The president himself perfected the art of alienating the public from the government; citizens became mere taxpayers (a term that can be used to exclude the poorest among us), public servants became mere bureaucrats, and public services became handouts. Privatization became a universal solution, as evidenced by the staggeringly long list of services targeted for transfer to private control by the President’s Commission on Privatization,  public housing, federal loan programs, air traffic control, education vouchers, the Postal Service, prisons, Amtrak, and Medicare, just to name a few. The vision was enormous and comprehensive. It really was the privatization of everything. Reagan’s proposals amounted to “the greatest effort to return the provision of goods and services to the private sector that we’ve seen in this century,” boasted Richard Fink, president of Citizens for a Sound Economy, an organization created and funded by businessman and philanthropist David Koch.11 It’s worth pausing to parse one important part of Fink’s statement: many of the items targeted for privatization, like weather satellites, had originally been created, owned, and operated by the public and thus could not be “returned” to private control. But privatization advocates typically try to create a mythical golden age of free enterprise, dishonestly dismissing how much private enterprise owes to public investment. And it also helps make their plunder of public goods seem more like a reclaiming of the private sector’s due. Ronald Reagan reflected this thinking when he announced the President’s Commission on Privatization and claimed that privatization was in the “great tradition of free enterprise and private ownership of property” and was a descendant of the Northwest Ordinance and “homestead program.”12 Reagan was likening public things that the public had voted and campaigned to make public,  water, Social Security, trash collection, to “private property” that should rightfully be in private hands (and he further likened these public creations to land that had been taken from Native Americans). His sunny comment blithely ignored dark moments in American history while revealing an expansive view of what should be considered private property. It foretold of a privatization takeover.” (p. 26-27)

[24] Cohen, D., & Mikaelian, A. (2021). The privatization of everything: How the plunder of public goods transformed America and how we can fight back. The New Press. “Privatization’s next big moment would not come until the 1970s, when it emerged as a response to the country’s urban fiscal crises. Cities were going bankrupt, and conservative thinkers had a ready scapegoat and a ready solution. They blamed overspending on government pensions and social programs for the drain on funds; in fact, these deficits were largely the result of a diminishing tax base as white residents fled desegregating urban neighborhoods and schools. The conservatives’ solution was to slash services, but when it came to services that voters wanted they offered privatization. It was clear that what they really wanted was for the public to have no role whatsoever in providing services, but they settled for limiting government to being something that merely manages contracts and writes checks to private companies. Ultimately, privatization would be a way station on the road to the smallest government possible. In the early 1970s Emanuel Savas, a professor of public affairs who served as assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under Reagan, embedded privatization in the conservative movement by changing the way it was framed. In an essay co-authored with Friedman, he claimed that cities could lift themselves out of crisis by opening up “competition to reduce the monopolistic control many governments have over their customers.” Savas’s enticing but thoroughly dishonest language turned governments into “monopolies,” while citizens became “customers” and “competition” emerged as the panacea. Savas also perfected the art of the attack on public servants,  even teachers and firefighters, whom he saw as utterly self- interested to the point of, in the case of his hometown, “victimizing the entire city, and holding all eight million New Yorkers hostage.” The budget crisis, he wrote, was “a golden opportunity” for privatization.6 Savas’s influence cannot be overstated. Though hardly a household name, he has been one of the foremost advocates of privatization for over four decades. Prior to his post in the Reagan administration, he was the manager of urban systems at IBM Corporation and was a deputy city administrator from 1967 to 1972 under New York mayor John Lindsay. Today’s advocates of privatization consistently employ Savas’s language and lines of attack, including images of lazy, unionized bureaucrats; looming bureaucracies that are remarkably both inefficient and nefarious; and the utopian promise of competition. And Savas was more than a theorist; he helped found the Reason Foundation, a leader of antipublic thought that paved and lit the way for conservative free- market groups such as ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, all of which played major roles during the Reagan revolution. But the key to the ideological push for privatization was how it complemented an antigovernment political strategy. Robert Poole, a co-founder of the Reason Foundation with Savas, saw privatization as a way of “dismantling the state step by step.” He revealed in an interview how he believed that “socialism” in America would be undone “by privatizing one function after the other, selling each move as justified for its own sake rather than waiting until the majority of the population is convinced of the case for a libertarian utopia.”7 Shrinking government through privatization is a fundamentally dishonest strategy. It has to be. Small-government conservatives’ biggest problem has always been how voters tend to actually like government services (and somehow fail to see the totalitarian Bolshevism lurking behind the smile of their kindly kindergarten teacher). Privatization became a way to reconcile a small- government philosophy with voters’ embrace of public services. “Cities have been discovering that public services do not necessarily have to be reduced by government or paid for by taxes,” claimed the Privatization Council’s David Seader in 1986. Through the magic of privatization, we could have it all.” (p. 23-25)

[25] Cohen, D., & Mikaelian, A. (2021). The privatization of everything: How the plunder of public goods transformed America and how we can fight back. The New Press. “In Donna, Texas, population 16,448, the city let its contract with CH2M Hill-OMI expire after watching the private company steadily raise the cost of its water management contract, from $1 million annually in 2001 to nearly $2 million in 2015. And as prices went up, the quality went down: the state environment commission dinged Donna four times in five years with water-quality violations. The city’s analysis projected ten- year savings of $4.5 million from taking over, even after the city hired an additional seven employees to rebuild the cost- slashing, profit- enhancing understaffing typical in these private contracts. The city looked forward to passing those savings on to the residents or investing in upgrades, and City Manager Fernando Flores added a note about intangible benefits accruing to the city as well: “I think sometimes it’s just about taking ownership. You do it, why not operate and manage it on your own? That’s the big underlying factor. That way you can get a better feel for things and adjust better.”2 Coeburn, Virginia, opted to take over from Veolia Water North America after comparing its $1.47 million town budget to the annual cost of the contract, $1.41 million. “When we ran the numbers ourselves, it was about $400,000 cheaper,” Mayor Jess Powers explained. With barely over 2,100 residents and a median income of $25,000, Coeburn had cut its spending by reducing police and town manager hours and freezing staff salaries. Taking over from Veolia was a matter of survival for Coeburn, but once it had regained control of the water system, it discovered that its assets had not been well maintained. Veolia, according to the town manager, “never actually cleaned [the system] and so here we are six years later having to pay for them now.”3 For these small communities, making the rational decision to take control of operating and maintaining their own waterworks was straightforward; they had not taken the more drastic step of actually selling their infrastructure to a for-profit corporation. For communities that did transfer these vital assets or entered long-term contracts, the road is much harder or at least more expensive. Atlanta, Georgia, gave United Water a twenty-year contract but ended it after four years. As is typical in these cases, United Water’s profits came from cutting corners, in this case they dropped half of Atlanta’s waterworks staff. Residents soon noticed orange and brown discoloration in their tap water, and the city had to hire its own inspectors (at $1 million) to get straight answers. Atlanta and United Water finally parted ways under a court settlement that awarded both parties much less than they’d originally sought.4 Indianapolis also got stuck in a bad contract, it took the city $29 million to get out ten years early, but it may well have been worth it. One million of the city’s residents got alerts telling them to boil their water during Veolia’s tenure. Former city waterworkers’ pensions evaporated. A federal grand jury looked into allegedly fraudulent water quality statements. Bills went out for “estimated” rather than actual usage, a practice that unsurprisingly led to overbilling and that skirted the state’s utility oversight commission. Unbeknownst to most residents, however, the water company was threatening to walk unless the city rewarded its poor performance with an additional $1.9 million per year, because it wasn’t showing enough profit. If it weren’t for a class-action lawsuit and dogged reporting, the company might have gotten away with it.5 Between 2003 and 2019, seventy-one U.S. communities took back their water, following a global trend that saw 2,400 cities in fifty-eight countries bringing water and other essential services under public control. The experiences of Atlanta, Indianapolis, and others have served as object lessons to cities like Baltimore, which stopped privatization in its infancy after a sustained public outcry. Only after Baltimore residents obtained documents under the Public Information Act did they learn how Veolia had met in secret with their city council members to propose an incremental, under-the-radar takeover of water services. Baltimore’s community organizations quickly responded in 2014 with facts and figures from previous Veolia debacles. They packed meeting halls, council sessions, and street corners, and they partnered with national organizations for research support. More than forty organizations got involved, and the pressure on the city’s elected leaders, many of whom were accused of having connections with the international water giant, was irresistible. As one resident wrote to the Baltimore Sun, “They say you can’t fight City Hall, but we did. . . . We can come together to prevent abusive corporations from gaining a foothold in this or any other city.” (p. 63-65)

[26] Cohen, D., & Mikaelian, A. (2021). The privatization of everything: How the plunder of public goods transformed America and how we can fight back. The New Press. “Privatization limits public access to essential public goods like public health, water, and safe food, and it interferes with public goods like infrastructure that create strong economies. It also undermines the public’s civil rights and limits access to democratic institutions and policy-making. Private interests can use the logic of contracts to trump civil rights, on a private street you accept the owner’s terms, which may include warrantless searches. Private business interests have no interest in transparency or in providing open access; they consider information to be proprietary. And when private interests get involved in the delivery of public goods, they suddenly have a stake in policy, skin in the game, and will muster their ample resources to influence laws and regulations. It’s rare that their interests will actually align with the public’s or with preserving democracy.In an era of unbridled privatization, we are facing the privatization of everything. That includes some of our most important institutions,  courts, prisons, the criminal and civil justice system, and the law itself. Private corporations that take up public services invariably embed themselves in our policymaking and governance; their policy preferences serve their own interests, not the common good. Privatization, sold to us as a way to avoid intrusive government, in fact actively creates distant, unaccountable, and inscrutable centers of power. This can only make our country less democratic and less free.” (p. 116)

[27] Cohen, D., & Mikaelian, A. (2021). The privatization of everything: How the plunder of public goods transformed America and how we can fight back. The New Press. “Privatization got a huge boost from racism. When African Americans won voting rights, access to segregated spaces, and public benefits, a racist core of the American public reacted by vilifying public goods. These goods became viewed, inaccurately, as things that white people gave to black people, and this racist segment of the public simultaneously denied that they themselves were also beneficiaries of public goods. We will only become a real public if we all share in not only public goods, but the power over them. That means we will have to confront racism as it pertains to everything public: underfunded schools, water systems laced with lead, limited access to higher education, restrictions to home ownership, and lack of access to health care. All of these have antipublic thinking and racist structures at their very center. Privatization also got a huge boost from consumerism. Mass production and mass marketing efficiently fulfill our desires for life’s non-essentials, and we make the mistaken assumption that they can do the same for basic public goods. Democratic and Republican political leaders exploit this by treating us as mere customers of public services rather than as citizens. As historian Lizabeth Cohen wrote in her groundbreaking book A Consumers’ Republic, “the market relationship” became “the template for citizens’ connection to government.” Bill Clinton’s Reinventing Government initiative, for example, sought to provide a “customer service contract with the American people.” This framework needs to change.” (p. 286)

[28] Bartlett, B. (2007). "Starve the beast": Origins and development of a budgetary metaphor. The Independent Review, 12(1), 5–26. “Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, lost -264.4” (p. 13)

[29] Bartlett, B. (2007). "Starve the beast": Origins and development of a budgetary metaphor. The Independent Review, 12(1), 5–26. “One possibility is that the deficit has not begun to bite yet. When it does, somewhere down the road, perhaps the starve-the-beast theory will then lead to large cuts in basic entitlement programs. Joshua Bolten, Bush’s OMB director who became White House chief of staff in 2006, suggested this possibility by writing in a Wall Street Journal article that projected spending is now so great that it will be impossible to eliminate future deficits on the tax side alone:“In the longer run, no plausible amount of tax increases could possibly close the enormous gap that will be created by the unsustainable growth in entitlement programs. Our real fiscal danger can be solved only by reform of the entitlement programs themselves” (2006). This statement is factually wrong. Almost every country in Europe has a tax/ GDP ratio high enough to cover all of the projected increase in spending in the United States through higher revenues alone. In 2004, the European members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) had a tax/GDP ratio of 38.3 percent, compared with a U.S. ratio (total government) of 25.5 percent (OECD 2006, 19). The difference between these figures would be more than enough to pay for all of the projected entitlement spending in the United States for many decades to come.17 Nevertheless, many on the political left have long charged that the ultimate goal of starve-the-beast advocates has been to create a deficit so massive that entitlements will have to be cut when a fiscal crisis finally emerges. In the words of Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic:“It’s middle-class entitlements, however, such as Medicare and Social Security, which make the federal government so big (and so popular). And the GOP’s only hope of undermining them is to create a fiscal crisis so huge that now-unpopular Republican solutions, such as privatizing Social Security and turning Medicare into a voucher program, become politically feasible. In roughly a decade, when multiple Bush tax cuts and an enormous defense buildup run smack into the baby-boom retirement, they might just get their wish” (2003, 6). Others on the left, such as economist Paul Krugman (2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2005), have made a similar argument, just as Daniel Patrick Moynihan did in the 1980s. This argument would have much more plausibility, however, if George W. Bush and a Republican Congress had not massively expanded Medicare spending in 2003 by adding a new prescription drug benefit to the program. Moreover, most Republican concern about federal spending these days tends to be channeled into demands that“pork-barrel” spending on public-works projects be curtailed, even though, perhaps because, it is a trivial component of overall spending.” (p. 18-19)

[30] Bartlett, B. (2007). "Starve the beast": Origins and development of a budgetary metaphor. The Independent Review, 12(1), 5–26. “Despite the apparent failure of the starve-the-beast theory to restrain spending in recent years, a theoretical argument may be made for it. One option would be to channel the desire for specific tax cuts into a mechanism that will reduce spending in some general way (Baron and McCaffery 2006), possibly by reviving interest in a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Clearly, if tax cuts were achieved under a hard, balanced-budget rule, then spending would necessarily have to fall into line (Sullivan 2005). If voters knew that a hard balanced-budget requirement applies, then presumably they would also know that their support for tax cuts would manifest itself in spending cuts as well. Poll data show some support for this idea. In September 2004, a Fox News and Opinion Dynamics poll asked likely voters if they would rather support a larger government that provided more services and required them to pay more in taxes or a smaller government that provided fewer services but allowed them to pay less in taxes. The former position received support from 38 percent of the respondents, the latter from 45 percent. A December 2003 poll by the same organizations found that 57 percent of registered voters would oppose paying more in taxes simply to reduce the budget deficit.” (p. 19)

[31] Bartlett, B. (2007). "Starve the beast": Origins and development of a budgetary metaphor. The Independent Review, 12(1), 5–26. “The starve-the-beast theory has evolved. In the beginning, it allowed fiscal conservatives traditionally wedded to a hard, balanced-budget requirement to rationalize their support for tax cuts unaccompanied by corresponding spending cuts. This rationalization proved extremely important to the modern development and success of conservatism in the political sphere. In the words of journalist Jonathan Rauch,“For modern conservatism and the country, the importance of Starve the Beast is impossible to overstate” (2006, 27). Later, the starve-the-beast idea manifested itself in opposition to tax increases to close budget deficits. Such tax increases would simply make fiscal conservatives tax collectors for the welfare state, as Newt Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the house, often put it. Another version of this form of the starve-the-beast theory is that tax increases are futile in reducing the deficit because they only fuel additional increases in spending, potentially making the deficit even worse.” (p. 19-20)

[32] Mishel, L., & Bivens, J. (2021). The productivity-median compensation gap in the United States: The contribution of increased wage inequality and the role of policy choices. International Productivity Monitor, (41), 61–97. “This article offers a narrative and supporting evidence on mechanisms that suppressed wage growth and generated a divergence of 43 percentage points (1.05 points per year) between net productivity and median hourly compensation growth between 1979 and 2017 in the United States. These dynamics reflect the strengthening of employers’ power relative to white-collar and blue-collar workers. We offer empirical assessments of the impact of particular factors on wage growth and wage inequality. The three factors with the largest and best measurement impacts, i.e., excessive unemployment, eroded collective bargaining, and corporate-driven globalization ,  explain 55 per cent of the divergence. Other factors ,  a diminished overtime salary threshold, employee misclassification, employer-imposed non-compete agreements, and corporate fissuring-subcontracting and major-buyer dominance ,  explain another 20 per cent. Together, these policy-related factors can account for three-fourths of the 1979-2017 divergence between productivity and median hourly compensation growth.” (p. 61)

[33] Mishel, L., & Bivens, J. (2021). The productivity-median compensation gap in the United States: The contribution of increased wage inequality and the role of policy choices. International Productivity Monitor, (41), 61–97. “Had median hourly compensation grown with net productivity it would have increased from $20.48 in 1979 to $33.10 in 2017 (2019$). In fact, median hourly compensation was $23.15 in 2017, a $9.95 shortfall from the net productivity benchmark.” (p.64)

[34] Mishel, L., & Bivens, J. (2021). The productivity-median compensation gap in the United States: The contribution of increased wage inequality and the role of policy choices. International Productivity Monitor, (41), 61–97. “New empirical examinations of employer monopsony power have identified a growing (at least since the late 1990s) and pervasive employer ability to mark down wages from 20 per cent to 50 per cent and to exert more power over low-wage workers than others. This new monopsony literature provides a top-down empirical approach, estimating the aggregate potential employer power to suppress wages and then examining the contributing role of countervailing forces like unionization, high-pressure labour markets, and high values of minimum wages in explaining an aggregate net metric of employer power. In contrast, we provide a bottom-up empirical approach examining the impact of many specific factors and gauging their contribution to the overall divergence between productivity and median compensation growth.” (p. 64)

[35] Mishel, L., & Bivens, J. (2021). The productivity-median compensation gap in the United States: The contribution of increased wage inequality and the role of policy choices. International Productivity Monitor, (41), 61–97. “The last four decades have seen a systematic divergence between the growth of economy-wide productivity (the amount of income generated in an average hour of work) and the growth of hourly compensation (wages and benefits) for typical workers. We proxy the wages of “typical” workers as either wages for nonsupervisory workers (roughly 80 per cent of the private-sector workforce) or wages for the worker earning the median wage. Chart 2 shows the growth of economy-wide productivity (net of depreciation, measured with consumer prices) and the typical worker’s hourly compensation since 1948, It uses the hourly compensation of private production-nonsupervisory workers because that is the only series available for the entire period since 1948. While productivity and a typical workers’ compensation grew in tandem over the 1948-1979 period, they diverged thereafter, splitting entirely after 1979. In the latter period productivity growth decelerated significantly, but much more rapid deceleration (or even stagnation) occurred in growth of a typical worker’s compensation. Net productivity grew 118.4 per cent from 1948 to 1979, accompanied by 107.5 per cent growth in a typical worker’s compensation between 1979 and 2019 net productivity grew 59.7 per cent (1.18 per cent annually) further, but a typical worker’s compensation (wages and benefits) grew only by 13.7 per cent (0.38 per cent annually). This divergence was first pointed out in the early 1990s (Mishel and Bernstein, 1994) to demonstrate that stagnant wages for the typical worker over the previous decade or so could not be explained solely by the slowdown of productivity growth. This section updates the Bivens and Mishel (2015) analyses of the wedges between typical workers’ pay and productivity and the decomposition of the main factors generating it, drawing on previous work” (p. 67)

[36] Mishel, L., & Bivens, J. (2021). The productivity-median compensation gap in the United States: The contribution of increased wage inequality and the role of policy choices. International Productivity Monitor, (41), 61–97. “In the most recent period from 2000 to 2019 the inequality factors can explain 92 per cent of the divergence and the difference in deflators was much less important (8 per cent).The net productivity-median hourly compensation divergence, exclusive of the price deflator differences (line 3-6), reflects the rising inequalities we seek to explain. We focus on the 1979-2017 period because that best fits the various studies information available on the impact of various factors. Over 1979-2017 net productivity grew 56.2 per cent (1.18 per cent per year) while median hourly compensation grew 13.5 per cent,0.33 per cent per year a gap of roughly 43 percentage points or 1.05 percentage points per year. We rely on this divergence of 43 percentage points to measure the extent of wage suppression. This divergence simply reflects the impact on the median hourly compensation of the growth of wage and benefit inequality and the loss of labour’s share and thus measures the counterfactual of how much faster median hourly compensation could have grown had inequality not grown. A situation where productivity and median hourly compensation progress at the same pace is not offered as a description of how we expect the economy to work nor as a normative statement.” (p. 68)

[37] Mishel, L., & Bivens, J. (2021). The productivity-median compensation gap in the United States: The contribution of increased wage inequality and the role of policy choices. International Productivity Monitor, (41), 61–97. “Labour’s share fell from 82.4 per cent in 2000 to 77.9 per cent in 2007, the last year before the Great Recession. By 2016, when unemployment had reached levels comparable to what had prevailed in 2006 and 2007, labour’s share remained roughly 2.5 percentage points below its 2007 level. The fall in labour’s share from 82.4 per cent in 2000 to 75.5 per cent in 2016 is the equivalent of an 8.4 per cent across-the-board cut in compensation for every employee; equivalently, it would require an across-the-board compensation boost of 9.1 per cent to restore labour’s share to its 2000 level. This shift toward greater capital income and returns is even more impressive given that real interest rates have fallen sharply in recent years, a development that should (all else equal) be accompanied by a lower return to capital (Farhi and Gourio,2018).” (p. 69)

[38] Hyman, L. (2011). Debtor nation: The history of America in red ink. Princeton University Press. “As lenders sought to expand their loans, consumers had new reasons to borrow. While protestors demanded fair credit access for all Americans, innovations in basic financing and lending techniques enabled lenders to profitably extend that access. Home equity loans enabled home owners to borrow against rapidly inflating values of their houses. Credit cards, using new statistical credit scores, allowed more Americans access to plastic than ever before. Mortgage-backed securities, created in the Housing Act of 1968 to fund development in the inner city, paved the way for the easy resale of debt as a financial investment, even as the original development intentions were forgotten. All forms of personal debt became sold as securities, allowing the world to invest profitably in American debt. As wages fell, Americans continued to borrow ever- greater amounts, making up the gap between incomes and expectations. Through home equity loans, consumers could easily turn their rising home prices, growing even faster than the inflation that eroded their wages, into money to pay off their credit card bills. Historians who have seen the increase in debt outstanding in the 1970s as a result of increased borrowing, rather than a decrease in ability to repay, have interpreted this rise as a strategic response to inflation. Borrow today and pay back tomorrow when the money is cheaper. Yet few borrowers self-consciously responded to the rise in interest rates. While inflation did not have this strategic consequence for borrowers, it did have an important strategic consequence for lenders, who, in their fixed-rate portfolios, felt the rising interest rate most keenly as they watched their profits fall. Lenders’ business responses to inflation, more than consumers, pushed household debt in new directions that previously, in the most literal sense, had been impossible.” (p. 221)

[39] Hyman, L. (2011). Debtor nation: The history of America in red ink. Princeton University Press. “The instruments of debt changed after 1970, but the more essential difference for borrowers was their place in the productive economy. While critics of the credit card industry have pointed to the Marquette decision as harmful for consumers, the decision allowed a more competitive industry to develop that ultimately lowered interest rates for consumers. The balance of power in capitalism was not determined by the interest rate caps for consumers, but whether they were able to pay back what they borrowed. Thirty years of wage stagnation made paying back those debts through anything but accidental asset inflation, homes and home equities, impossible. In the 1990s, the full flower of deindustrialization pummeled not only blue- but white-collar America as well. While a generation of postwar consumers could safely borrow against rising incomes, the promise on which American prosperity had been built now cracked. The evanescent promise of getting a good-paying job that a generation earlier would have been seen as a sure path to upward mobility, only led in the 1990s to increased debt and certain bankruptcy after that job was downsized.275 Even those with college educations found themselves downsized in the 1990s as information technology increased the efficiency of office work, and their wages converged with high school graduates. The only educational group that received a substantial increase in income during the 1990s was those with graduate degrees. These best-educated workers, who could multiply their efforts through the new information technology of models and data, produced tremendous profits for their firms, and were amply rewarded.276 If their models put others to the brink of bankruptcy, for those who created them the models produced untold fortunes. Credit issuers may have found the revolvers, and even pressured them to borrow, but the labor markets kept them in debt. While issuers struggled to push and to prod borrowers into not paying their bills, capitalism did their job for them, and did so effortlessly. Consumers borrowed more because their lives were more volatile and because more credit was made available to them. More credit was made available because credit card debt, on average, was a more profitable investment for banks than other investments. The same banal and brutal process of allocating capital that had made postwar America prosperous had come to undermine its long-term viability.” (p. 279-280)

[40] Hyman, L. (2011). Debtor nation: The history of America in red ink. Princeton University Press. “hile at earlier moments consumers could have lived without credit, by the 1970s it was no longer possible to be without credit and live in mainstream American society. Consumers denied credit in the 1960s had fought for greater access, not only because of credit’s convenience but because of its perceived necessity in achieving the American dream. Consumers’ achievement of the middle-class dream in the 1950s had been enabled by debt. Debt policies and practices underpinned a consumer order by the 1970s that made it difficult for consumers to extricate themselves from indebtedness even if they had wanted to. The lifestyle of debt was as inscribed in the built environment as it was in the habits of the shopping public. As the economy began to erode in the early 1970s, just after the federal census announced that the majority of Americans then lived in suburbia, the debt requirement of suburban living began to take its toll. Even if people wanted to reduce their borrowing, the very environment in which they lived made reduction difficult. Consumers needed mortgages to buy houses, and they needed installment credit to buy the cars required to travel the unwalkable distances created by suburban living. While borrowing became more compulsory, paying back what was borrowed proved more difficult. The 1970s, while not the first time Americans worried about consumer debt in American history, was the first time that households became unable to repay their debt. The post-1970s debt expansion of unpaid debt differed from those that preceded it because late twentieth-century debt was borne not of business cycles but of unexpected structural changes. Although credit institutions continued to change, as they had for half a century, in response to the demands of capitalism and the state, the growth of debt in the 1970s resulted more from Americans’ decreasing ability to pay back what they borrowed than from an increase in borrowing. Instead of seeing extravagant spenders in debt, we should see underpaid workers trying to keep up.6 Americans’ personal debt problem resulted not from a choice to borrow but from the rising inequality of income and wealth that had occurred since the 1970s, even as capitalist expansion relied on increasing consumption in an era of declining wages. Personal debt was no longer a private choice, but a structural imperative. For those who control and regulate these structures today, the choices remain as they always have, within limits. The state has the power to make markets and guide the profitable flow of capital, as has been shown throughout this book. When policymakers acknowledged this flow, their policy ambitions have been successful. In the 1920s, small loan reformers helped channel capital to the working poor, to give them cheaper, yet still expensive, access to credit. In the 1930s, federal policymakers channeled this capital to create the suburbs, surpassing even the most grandiose of tax-funded programs. In the 1960s, Great Society reformers created mortgage-backed securities that expanded the lending pool for American homeowners. Yet, when policymakers sought to dam the river of capital, to push back against it, to pretend it was something other than the callous miracle it is, they have realized only failure. Regulation cannot substitute for market discipline, all it can do is imitate market opportunity. Sticks without carrots do not work. Regulations need profits as much as rules to accomplish their goals. During the 1940s, Regulation W failed because it did not provide a profitable alternative for business, pushing the American economy toward the hybrid revolving credit. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Housing Act of 1968 provided new sources of mortgage funds, but it could not make the investment of those funds in the inner city profitable. Intervention is neither doomed to fail, nor is it guaranteed to succeed. Only by recognizing the limits of government’s administrative capacities, and the realities of capital’s tendencies, can government make successful and necessary interventions in the economy. Even as legislators made policies to alter capitalism, the full consequences of these policies in an untidy market were not always understood at the time. Legalization of small loans drove out loan sharks, but expanded the numbers of Americans in debt and legitimated borrowing as an alternative to saving. Mortgage loans may have expanded available housing, but they also taught consumers to owe vast sums of money to impersonal lenders, to say nothing of the long-term devastation exacted on many American cities as whites fled to the subsidized suburbs. During World War II, policymakers sought to restrain consumer credit only unintentionally to promote a new form of credit, revolving credit, which ultimately enabled consumers to increase their spending to limits never before seen. Legislators of the Great Society program sought to help welfare recipients gain a stake in owning their housing, only to inaugurate the era of subprime mortgage loans.” (p. 282-284)

[41] Williams, J. J. (2008). Student debt and the spirit of indenture. Dissent, 55(4), 73–78. https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2008.0076. “INDENTURED SERVITUDE seems a strange and distant historical practice, like debtors' prison. But there are many ways that col- lege student-loan debt revises for the twenty- first century some of its ethos and features: • Prevalence Student-loan debt is now a prevalent mode of financing higher education, applying to two-thirds of those who attend. If upward of 70 percent of Americans attend college at some point, it applies to half the rising population. Like indenture through the seventeenth century, it has be- come a common experience of those settling the new technological world of twenty-first- century America, in which we are continu- ally told that we need college degrees to compete globally. • Amounts Student debt has morphed from relatively small amounts to substantial ones, loosely paralleling the large debt entailed by colonial transport. The average federal loan debt of a graduating senior in 2004 (the most recent year for which statistics are available) was $19,200. Given that tuitions have nearly doubled in the last decade and grants have barely risen, and that debt more than doubled from 1994, when it was $9,000, not to mention from 1984, when it was $2,000, one can assume that the totals will continue to climb. Also consider that, as happens with averages, many people have significantly more than the median- 23 percent of borrowers attending private and 14 percent attending public universi- ties have over $30,000 in undergraduate loans. Added to federal loans are charge cards, estimated at $2,169 per student in 2004, quite often used for necessities; private loans, which have quintupled in num- ber since 1996, when 1 percent of students took them, to 5 percent in 2004, and which have risen in total to $17.3 billion in 2005, a disturbingly large portion in addition to the $68.6 billion for federal loans; and, for over 60 percent of those continuing their educations, graduate-student debt, which more than doubled in the past decade, to a 2004 median of about $28,000 for those with master's degrees, $45,000 for doctorates, and $68,000 for professional degrees. • Length of term Student debt is a long- term commitment, fifteen years for stan- dard Stafford guaranteed federal loans. With consolidation or refinancing, the length of term frequently extends to thirty years, in other words, for many returning students or graduate students, until retirement age. It is not a transitory bond, say, of a year for those indentured in England or of early stu- dent debtors who might have owed $2,000. To be sure, it is not as concentrated as colo- nial indenture, but it is lengthier and weighs down a student debtor's future. • Transport to work Student indebtedness is premised on the idea of transport to a job, the figurative transport over the higher seas of education to attain the shores of credentials deemed necessary for a middle class job. The cost of transport is borne by the laborer, so an individual has to pay for the opportunity to work. Some businesses alleviate debt as a recruiting benefit, but un- fortunately they are still relatively few. (Another factor is the precipitous rise in stu- dent work hours, as Marc Bousquet's stun- ning indictment, How the University Works, recounts. According to recent statistics, stu- dents at public universities work an average of twenty-five hours a week, which tends to lower grades and impede graduation rates. Servitude, for many current students, begins on ship.) • Personal contracts "Indenture" designates a practice of making contracts before sig- natures were common (they were torn, the tear analogous to the unique shape of a person's bite, and each party held half, so they could be verified by their match); stu- dent debt reinstitutes a system of contracts that bind a rising majority of Americans. Like indenture, the debt is secured not by property, as most loans such as those for cars or houses are, but by the person, obligating his or her future labor. Student-loan debt "financializes" the person, in the phrase of Randy Martin, who diagnoses this strategy as a central one of contemporary venture capital, displacing risk to individuals rather than employers or society. It was also a strat- egy of colonial indenture. • Limited recourse Contracts for federal student loans stipulate severe penalties and are virtually unbreakable, forgiven only in death, not bankruptcy, and enforced by se- vere measures, such as garnishee and other legal sanctions, with little recourse. (In one recent case, the Social Security payment to a person on disability was garnished.) In England, indenture was regulated by law, and servants had recourse in court; one of the pernicious aspects of colonial indenture was that there was little recourse in the new colonies. • Class Student debt applies to those with less family wealth, like indenture reinforcing class differences. That this would be a practice in imperial Britain, before modern democracy and where classes were rigidly set, is not entirely surprising; it is more disturbing in the United States, where we ostensibly eschew the determining force of class. The one-third without student debt face much different futures, and are more likely to pursue graduate and professional degrees (three-quarters of those receiving doctorates in 2004 had no undergraduate debt, and, according to a 2002 Nellie Mae survey, 40 percent of those not pursuing graduate school attributed their choice to debt). Student debt is digging a class moat in present-day America. • Youth Student debt incorporates prima- rily younger people, as indenture did. One of the more troubling aspects of student debt is that often it is the first step down a slope of debt and difficulties. Tamara Draut, in her exposé Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead, shows how it inaugurates a series of strained conditions, compounded by shrinking job prospects, escalating charge card debt, and historically higher housing payments, whether rent or mortgage, resulting in lessened chances for having a family and estab- lishing a secure and comfortable life. The American Dream, and specifically the post- Second World War dream of equal opportunity opened by higher education, has been curtailed for many of the rising generation. • Brokers Student debt fuels a financial ser- vices system that trades in and profits from contracts of indebted individuals, like the Liverpool merchants, sea captains, and planters trading in contracts of indenture. The lender pays the fare to the college, and thereafter the contracts are circulated among Sallie Mae, Nellie Mae, Citigroup, and four thousand other banks. This system makes a futures market of people and gar- ners immense profit from them. The federally guaranteed student loan program was originally a nonprofit corporation, Sallie Mae, but in 2004 Sallie Mae became a private, for-profit corporation, reporting record profits in its first three years. • State policy The British crown gave authority to the Virginia Company; the U.S. government authorizes current lending enterprises and, even more lucratively for banks, underwrites their risk in guarantee- ing the loans (the Virginia Company received no such largesse and went bankrupt). In the past few years, federal aid has funneled more to loans rather than any other form of aid (52 percent of all federal aid, whereas grants account for 42 percent). My point in adducing this bill of particu- lars is not to claim an exact historical corre- spondence between indentured servitude and student indebtedness. But, as I think these particulars show, it is not just a fanciful analogy either. The shock of the comparison is that it has any resonance at all, and that we per- mit, through policy and practice, the conscrip- tion of those seeking the opportunity of education, especially the young, into a signifi- cant bond on their future labor and life. While indenture was more direct and severe, it was the product of a rigidly classed, semi-feudal world; student debt is more flexible, varied in application, and amorphous in effects, a prod- uct of the postmodern world, but it revives the spirit of indenture in promulgating class privi- lege and class subservience. What is most trou- bling is that it represents a shift in basic political principle. It turns away from the democratic impetus of modern American soci- ety. The 1947 Report of the President's Com- mission on Education, which ushered in the vast expansion of our colleges and universities, emphasized (in bold italics) that "free and uni- versal access to education must be a major goal in American education." Otherwise, the com- mission warned, "If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening them." Their goal was not only an abstract one of equality, but also to strengthen the United States, and, by all accounts, American society prospered. Cur- rent student debt weakens America, wasting the resource of those impeded from pursuing degrees who otherwise would make excellent doctors or professors or engineers, as well as creating a culture of debt and constraint.” (p. 74-76)

[42] Scholarship America. (2022, September 1). The far-reaching impact of the student debt crisis. https://scholarshipamerica.org/blog/the-far-reaching-impact-of-the-student-debt-crisis/. “1.7 trillion dollars. That’s a massive number. To put this figure into perspective, it’s larger than the gross domestic product of all but 11 countries. No company in the Fortune 500 produces even 1/3 that much in annual revenue. It’s enough to buy the Yankees, Lakers, Cowboys and Real Madrid ,  90 times over.  And it’s how much America’s college graduates owed on their student loans at the beginning of 2022.”

[43] Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. “Race had become, yet again, a powerful wedge, breaking up what had been a solid liberal coalition based on economic interests of the poor and the working and lower-middle classes. In the 1968 election, race eclipsed class as the organizing principle of American politics. By 1972, attitudes on racial issues rather than socioeconomic status were the primary determinant of voters’ political self-identification. The late 1960s and early 1970s marked the dramatic erosion in the belief among working-class whites that the condition of the poor, or those who fail to prosper, was the result of a faulty economic system that needed to be challenged. As the Edsalls explain, “the pitting of whites and blacks at the low end of the income dis tri bu tion against each other intensified the view among many whites that the condition of life for the disadvantaged, particularly for disadvantaged blacks, is the responsibility of those afflicted, and not the responsibility of the larger society.”62 Just as race had been used at the turn of the century by Southern elites to rupture class solidarity at the bottom of the income ladder, race as a national issue had broken up the Democratic New Deal “bottom-up” coalition, a coalition de pen dent on substantial support from all voters, white and black, at or below the median income. The conservative revolution that took root within the Republican Party in the 1960s did not reach its full development until the election of 1980. The decade preceding Ronald Rea gan’s ascent to the presidency was characterized by political and social crises, as the Civil Rights Movement was promptly followed by intense controversy over the implementation of the equality principle, especially busing and affirmative action, as well as dramatic political clashes over the Vietnam War and Watergate. During this period, conservatives gave lip service to the goal of racial equality but actively resisted desegregation, busing, and civil rights enforcement. They repeatedly raised the issue of welfare, subtly framing it as a contest between hardworking, blue-collar whites and poor blacks who refused to work. The not-so-subtle message to working-class whites was that their tax dollars were going to support special programs for blacks who most certainly did not deserve them. During this period, Nixon called for a “war on drugs”, an announcement that proved largely rhetorical as he declared illegal drugs “public enemy number one” without proposing dramatic shifts in drug policy. A backlash against blacks was clearly in force, but no consensus had yet been reached regarding what racial and social order would ultimately emerge from these turbulent times.” (p. 46-47)

[44] Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. “Crime and welfare were the major themes of Rea gan’s campaign rhetoric. According to the Edsalls, one of Reagan’s favorite and most-often-repeated anecdotes was the story of a Chicago “welfare queen” with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards,” whose “tax-free income alone is over $150,000.”66 The term “welfare queen” became a not-so-subtle code for “lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.” The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let “some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,” while “you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.”67 These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it. Rea gan portrayed the criminal as “a staring face, a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.”68 Reagan’s racially coded rhetoric and strategy proved extraordinarily effective, as 22 percent of all Democrats defected from the party to vote for Rea gan. The defection rate shot up to 34 percent among those Democrats who believed civil rights leaders were pushing “too fast.”69 Once elected, Rea gan’s promise to enhance the federal government’s role in fighting crime was complicated by the fact that fighting street crime has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local law enforcement. After a period of initial confusion and controversy regarding whether the FBI and the federal government should be involved in street crime, the Justice Department announced its intention to cut in half the number of specialists assigned to identify and prosecute white-collar criminals and to shift its attention to street crime, especially drug-law enforcement.70 In October 1982, President Rea gan officially announced his administration’s War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation.71 This fact was no deterrent to Rea gan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Rea gan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”, the undeserving.” (p. 48-49)

[45] Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. “In September 1986, with the media frenzy at full throttle, the House passed legislation that allocated $2 billion to the antidrug crusade, required the participation of the military in narcotics control efforts, allowed the death penalty for some drug-related crimes, and authorized the admission of some illegally obtained evidence in drug trials. Later that month, the Senate proposed even tougher antidrug legislation, and shortly thereafter, the president signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack, associated with blacks, than powder cocaine, associated with whites. Few criticisms of the legislation could be heard en route to enactment. One senator insisted that crack had become a scapegoat distracting the public’s attention from the true causes of our social ills, arguing: “If we blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the malign welfare programs, the desolate neighborhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it.”85 Critical voices, however, were lonely ones. Congress revisited drug policy in 1988. The resulting legislation was once again extraordinarily punitive, this time extending far beyond traditional criminal punishments and including new “civil penalties” for drug offenders. The new Anti-Drug Abuse Act authorized public housing authorities to evict any tenant who allows any form of drug-related criminal activity to occur on or near public housing premises and eliminated many federal benefits, including student loans, for anyone convicted of a drug offense. The act also expanded use of the death penalty for serious drug-related offenses and imposed new mandatory minimums for drug offenses, including a five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession of cocaine base, with no evidence of intent to sell. Remarkably, the penalty would apply to first-time offenders. The severity of this punishment was unprecedented in the federal system. Until 1988, one year of imprisonment had been the maximum for possession of any amount of any drug. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) were mixed in their assessment of the new legislation, some believing the harsh penalties were necessary, others convinced that the laws were biased and harmful to African Americans. Ultimately the legislation passed by an overwhelming margin, 346 to 11. Six of the negative votes came from the CBC.86 The War on Drugs proved popular among key white voters, particularly whites who remained resentful of black progress, civil rights enforcement, and affirmative action. Beginning in the 1970s, researchers found that racial attitudes, not crime rates or likelihood of victimization, are an important determinant of white support for “get tough on crime” and antiwelfare measures.87 Among whites, those expressing the highest degree of concern about crime also tend to oppose racial reform, and their punitive attitudes toward crime are largely unrelated to their likelihood of victimization.88 Whites, on average, are more punitive than blacks, despite the fact that blacks are far more likely to be victims of crime. Rural whites are often the most punitive, even though they are least likely to be crime victims.89 The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.” (p. 52-53)

[46] Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin's Press. “That afternoon in Atlanta, Don Francis again wrote a memo to Dr. Walt Dowdle, offering a far different assessment of the federal government's response to the AIDS epidemic. “Our government’s response to this disaster has been far too little, " wrote Francis. “Much of this is because the slope of the epidemic curve has been gradual, lasting years instead of days. We are not accustomed to dealing with outbreaks having long latent periods. But these situations require even greater speed because even after discovery of the cause, we will be so far behind and control will be even more difficult. . . . “The inadequate funding to date has seriously restricted our work and has presumably deepened the invasion of this disease into the American population. ... Because of the slow and inadequate funding process, it seems that after we get funds and recruit staff, we are always too late, the disease has passed us up again and we are again understaffed and underfunded. “There must be some way to do it right.... In this vast and wealthy country there must be a way to get $10 to $20 million immediately for this disease. I stress speed because the usual government funding and spending processes are so slow as to be unacceptable in such an emergency situation. “For the good of the people of this country and the world, we should no longer accept the claims of inadequate funding and we should no longer be content with the trivial resources offered. Our past and present efforts have been and are far too small and we can't be proud. It is time to do more. It is time to do what is right. "” (p. 273)

[47] Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin's Press. “On November 6, Ronald Wilson Reagan was reelected president with the biggest electoral-vote landslide in nearly fifty years. Democratic candidate Walter Mondale carried his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia; Reagan won the rest. Throughout the campaign, the burgeoning AIDS epidemic never became an issue of import. Neither candidate made any public pronouncement on the administration's "number-one health priority, " and no reporter thought the issue significant enough to raise. In fact, President Reagan had never publicly spoken the word AIDS or ever alluded to the fact that he was aware that an epidemic existed. When claiming victory on election night, President Reagan told a cheering crowd, "America's best days lie ahead. " It was during the month of Reagan's reelection that the nation's AIDS caseload surpassed 7,000.” (p. 495)

[48] Time. (1983, March 7). Superfund, supermess. Time. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,925874-5,00.html. “The numbers are telling. The total on the payroll of the agency was nearly 14,075 when Reagan took office. For the current fiscal year, Gorsuch's budget has only 10,396. In the area of hazardous waste enforcement, figures show a personnel drop from 311 in 1981 to 75 in 1983, with the budget plummeting from $11.4 million to $2.3 million over the same period. Moreover, although Gorsuch often says she wants the financially strapped states to contribute more to cleanup efforts, her proposed 1984 budget slashes state grants by 26%, from $233 million to $172 million. In fiscal 1980, the last full year of President Carter's Administration, 200 civil cases against air and water polluters were referred by the EPA to the Justice Department. Last year 100 were referred. The number of both chemical- company and hazardous-waste-facility inspections has fallen sharply. Efforts to enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act have virtually ceased.”

[49] UPI. (1981, August 20). Interior Secretary James Watt and the legal firm he once led are conspiring in a legal ploy designed to open a Montana federal wilderness area to oil exploration. United Press International. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/08/20/Interior-Secretary-James-Watt-and-the-legal-firm-he/6452367128000. “Interior Secretary James Watt and the legal firm he once led are conspiring in a legal ploy designed to open a Montana federal wilderness area to oil exploration, environmentalists charged Thursday. The Wilderness Society raised the issue of collusion between Watt and the Mountain States Legal Foundation of Denver at a Monday hearing in a suit being litigated before U.S. District Judge William Jameson in Billings, Mont. Peter Kirby, a Society representative, said Thursday his group will prove to Jameson that the suit Mountain States filed against Watt's closing of the Bob Marshall wilderness area to oil and gas drilling is really 'a sweetheart suit' in which Watt is tacitly cooperating. 'Watt criticized (President) Carter for sweetheart lawsuits filed by environmentalists against the Interior Department,' said Kirby. 'This could be just the flip side of that. It's the first time it's been challenged in court.' The Justice Department, meanwhile, released a July 22 letter in which the Pacific Legal Foundation of Sacramento, Calif. -- another conservative and pro-development group participating in the litigation against Interior's drilling ban -- hinted it had Watt's blessing.”

[50] Frantz, D., & Woutat, D. (1990, May 24). 60 billion more needed for rescue of S&Ls, U.S. says: Thrifts: Total bailout costs estimated at 132 billion. About 1,000 institutions may fail, Treasury chief reports. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com:443/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-24-mn-265-story.html. “The Bush Administration, acknowledging that it vastly underestimated the cost of bailing out the savings and loan industry, told Congress Wednesday it will need as much as $60 billion in additional cash to complete the job. S&Ls; are continuing to fall as their real estate investments turn sour, Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady said in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. He added the debacle could claim more than 1,000 institutions--fully one-third of the once-proud industry--before it ends. Brady blamed much of the disaster on past real estate and lending practices that contributed to “overbuilding,” adding that the nation will spend years working itself out from under the burden of the S&L; industry’s collapse. “The S&L; problem is totally a function of how much overbuilding there has been in this country,” he said. Current estimates by the Resolution Trust Corp., the government junkyard for failed S&Ls;, now range from $89 billion to $132 billion, Brady said, far above the $73 billion the Administration said it was granted by Congress last August to dispose of dead or dying thrifts and to close down institutions that fail in the future. Independent analysts, however, argued that about $15 billion to $20 billion of that amount is committed to other S&L; bailout expenses and is not available to close down institutions and pay off borrowers. This fact, they contend, will force the Administration to seek even larger amounts of borrowing authority from Congress.”

[51] Frantz, D., & Woutat, D. (1990, May 24). 60 billion more needed for rescue of S&Ls, U.S. says: Thrifts: Total bailout costs estimated at 132 billion. About 1,000 institutions may fail, Treasury chief reports. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com:443/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-24-mn-265-story.html. “The need to finance the soaring costs of the S&L; cleanup, combined with the government’s new strategy aimed at selling off thrift assets quickly, is pushing next year’s federal deficit far above the $74-billion ceiling established by the Gramm-Rudman budget law. That is adding to the challenge facing budget negotiators from Congress and the Administration, who face months of closed-door struggles over how to avoid the automatic spending cuts this fall called for by Gramm-Rudman if lawmakers fail to pare the deficit themselves.”

[52] Feinberg, A. (1990, July 29). The looting of Wedtech. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/29/books/the-looting-of-wedtech.html. “The notorious Wedtech fiasco cost taxpayers and investors about $300 million, which by Reagan-era standards seems like a fine on an overdue library book. Despite its low-rent status, however, the scandal remains a wonderfully sleazy and improbable tale, with a hallucinatory ''only in America'' quality.”

[53] Feinberg, A. (1990, July 29). The looting of Wedtech. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/29/books/the-looting-of-wedtech.html. “So Wedtech's executives began to take a series of outrageous shortcuts. They falsified the company's minority status, freely handed out bribes and gave huge campaign contributions to those politicians who preferred to take their bribes in a legally sanctioned form. Wedtech threw money at the system and, in return, it received large contracts to build Army engines and Navy pontoons. Once corrupted, the Wedtech crew showed little restraint. Top executives began looting the company shamelessly, stealing millions while the accountants and investment bankers casually looked on. Wedtech had some good civics teachers, such as former Congressman Mario Biaggi, who told the company how much influence a $20,000 annual retainer to his law firm would buy. The loathsome legislator, whose greed was unseemly even by criminal standards, eventually demanded $5 million in Wedtech stock plus 5 percent of the dollar value of all Government contracts - far above the going Congressional rate. (Mr. Biaggi got the stock, plus eight years in prison.) Wedtech always managed to find such people. ''Destiny sometimes seemed to escort Wedtech through the world with a lantern, looking for yet another dishonest man,'' writes Mr. Traub, a New York City journalist.”

[54] Feinberg, A. (1990, July 29). The looting of Wedtech. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/29/books/the-looting-of-wedtech.html. “One of the tragedies of Wedtech is that Mr. Mariotta and his colleagues really did take society's castoffs and give them decent jobs and self-respect. Mr. Mariotta was a charismatic leader who inspired tremendous loyalty. The workers were never the problem at Wedtech. Edwin Meese 3d wasn't the problem, either. Both Mr. Traub and Marilyn W. Thompson, author of ''Feeding the Beast,'' suggest that Mr. Meese's actions in the case probably should have been rewarded with an indictment. The former Attorney General directed one of his deputies to help Wedtech win its $32 million Army contract. (According to Mr. Traub, Mr. Meese later lied to investigators about his actions.) And, by discussing Wedtech's status ad nauseum with his best buddy and Wedtech consultant E. Robert Wallach, he gave the clear impression to everyone involved that he was willing to use his public office for his friend's private benefit. Mr. Traub and Ms. Thompson think the special prosecutor was far too gentle with Mr. Meese. (Two of Mr. Meese's top aides did resign because they agreed with Federal prosecutors that their boss was ''a sleaze.'') Intriguingly, what seems to infuriate both authors most about Mr. Meese is his astonishingly casual assumption of virtue for everything he did - no matter how great the stench of impropriety. Mr. Meese emerges as a hypocrite of grotesque proportions - our Mr. Pecksniff or Uriah Heep.”

[55] The New York Times. (1989, August 4). Files show Pierce helped friends and the G.O.P. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/04/us/files-show-pierce-helped-friends-and-the-gop.html. “Samuel R. Pierce Jr., the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was instrumental in providing Federal assistance to friends, former aides and prominent Republicans who sought his help, correspondence from his eight-year tenure shows. The documents, contained in nearly 50 boxes of Mr. Pierce's office files, provide the strongest evidence so far to contradict his assertions that he had only a limited role in the selection of projects that received billions of dollars in Federal aid. Mr. Pierce suggested to a Congressional panel in May that he left to his senior aides the selection of projects for grants and subsidies. He insisted that he knew of no political favoritism during his tenure and said that if there were political abuses, his aides were probably to blame. Available, Even Eager”

[56] The New York Times. (1989, August 4). Files show Pierce helped friends and the G.O.P. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/04/us/files-show-pierce-helped-friends-and-the-gop.html. “The documents, which were made available this week to The Times and to Congressional investigators, also show previously undisclosed contacts between Mr. Pierce and several other prominent Republicans whose involvement in H.U.D. programs had already been known, including former Senator Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, former Interior Secretary James G. Watt and Carla A. Hills, the United States trade representative, who is a former H.U.D. Secretary. After the department approved millions of dollars in subsidies for a Maryland housing project on which Mr. Watt had been a consultant, the former Interior Secretary wrote to thank Mr. Pierce in June 1986. ''Dear Sam,'' the letter said. ''Thanks! You are a man of your word.'' Mr. Watt was paid $300,000 in lobbying and consulting fees on the project. Asked for comment today, Mr. Watt referred a reporter to his testimony before Congress last spring, in which he insisted that his contacts with Mr. Pierce were proper. Internal audits and news reports have shown how tens of millions of dollars in H.U.D. funds were directed to developers who retained prominent Republican consultants like Mr. Brooke, Mrs. Hills and Mr. Watt.”

[57] Los Angeles Times. (1987, November 27). Deaver trial offers window on inner circle power-brokers. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-11-27-mn-16673-story.html. “The perjury trial of former White House aide Michael K. Deaver, now in its second month, is providing a captivating look inside the rarefied world of high-level Washington power-brokering. In the spotlight is a man who had the ultimate lobbying asset to sell--access to President Reagan’s inner circle--and who eagerly collected fees that vastly outstripped his old government salary. Deaver’s access was unquestioned. He had served Reagan for 19 years, starting with Reagan’s two terms as California governor, and his wife, Carolyn, was personally close to Nancy Reagan. At the White House, his bureaucratically unimpressive title-- deputy chief of staff--belied his role as the keeper of the Reagan image, the man who, said former Budget Director David A. Stockman, busied himself with “stage- managing” the presidency. After resigning from the White House in May, 1985, to set up his own public relations business, Deaver became a fast-moving quick-fix artist who tried to put in the right words for his clients with top officials, according to evidence presented in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. Prosecution witnesses said that phones in Deaver’s old colleagues’ offices promptly began to ring.”

[58] Parry, R. (2013, April 16). Tales of Reagan’s Guatemala genocide. Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/16/grichilling-tales-of-reagans-guatemala-genocide/. “The first month of the genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt has elicited chilling testimony from Mayan survivors who as children watched their families slaughtered by a right-wing military that was supported and supplied by U.S. President Ronald Reagan. As the New York Times reported on Monday, “In the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr. Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil population was a military target, children included. Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas fighting the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished Ixils and reached ‘100 percent support.’” So, everyone was targeted in these scorched-earth campaigns that eradicated more than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands. But this genocide was not simply the result of a twisted anticommunist ideology that dominated the Guatemalan military and political elites. This genocide also was endorsed by the Reagan administration.”

[59] Parry, R. (2013, April 16). Tales of Reagan’s Guatemala genocide. Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/16/grichilling-tales-of-reagans-guatemala-genocide/. “However, Reagan remained committed to supplying military hardware to Guatemala’s brutal regime. So, the administration welcomed Gen. Efrain Rios Montt’s March 1982 overthrow of the thoroughly bloodstained Gen. Lucas. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, Rios Montt impressed Official Washington where the Reagan administration immediately revved up its propaganda machinery to hype the new dictator’s “born-again” status as proof of his deep respect for human life. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.” By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his “rifles and beans” policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get “beans,” while all others could expect to be the target of army “rifles.” In October, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations in the cities. Based at the Presidential Palace, the “Archivos” masterminded many of Guatemala’s most notorious assassinations.”

[60] Parry, R. (2013, April 16). Tales of Reagan’s Guatemala genocide. Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/16/grichilling-tales-of-reagans-guatemala-genocide/.  “The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres, but ideologically driven U.S. diplomats fed the Reagan administration the propaganda spin that would be best for their careers. On Oct. 22, 1982, embassy staff dismissed the massacre reports as communist-inspired “disinformation campaign,” concluding that “that a concerted disinformation campaign is being waged in the U.S. against the Guatemalan government by groups supporting the communist insurgency in Guatemala.” Reagan personally joined this P.R. campaign seeking to discredit human rights investigators and others who were reporting accurately about massacres that the administration knew, all too well, were true. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as “totally dedicated to democracy” and added that Rios Montt’s government had been “getting a bum rap” on human rights. Reagan discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Maya villages being eradicated. In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in “suspect right-wing violence” with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt’s order to the “Archivos” in October to “apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.” Despite these grisly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. “The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year” 1982, the report stated.”

[61] BBC News. (1986, June 27). 1986: US guilty of backing Contras. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/27/newsid_2520000/2520535.stm. ”The United States has been found guilty of violating international law by supporting armed Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The International Court of Justice ruled that the US should compensate the country, although it has not yet fixed an amount. But the Reagan administration has boycotted the case and says it will ignore the verdict of the United Nations court. In the US there have been demonstrations against a vote by Congress in favour of aid to the Contras. About 40 people were arrested during a protest in Minneapolis, and in Cleveland a group of demonstrators lay on the pavement to block the entrance to the federal building. The UN court found the US guilty of contravening law by training, arming and financing paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua. These activities included the laying of mines in Nicaraguan waters in early 1984, as well as attacking a naval base and patrol boats. The court held, by 12 votes to three, that the US was "in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to use force against another State, not to intervene in its affairs, not to violate its sovereignty and not to interrupt peaceful maritime commerce". It ruled the US was under an obligation "to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused" by the breaches.”

[62] Windrem, R. (2013, December 7). US government considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist until 2008. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-government-considered-nelson-mandela-terrorist-until-2008-flna2d11708787. “Until five years ago, however, the U.S. officially considered Mandela a terrorist. During the Cold War, both the State and Defense departments dubbed Mandela’s political party, the African National Congress, a terrorist group, and Mandela’s name remained on the U.S. terrorism watch list till 2008. Presidents Carter and Reagan and Congress had all instituted sanctions against the white minority South African government because of its policy of racial apartheid. But in 1986, Reagan condemned Mandela’s group, the ANC, which was leading the black struggle against the apartheid regime, saying it engaged in "calculated terror ... the mining of roads, the bombings of public places, designed to bring about further repression." After the apartheid regime in South Africa declared the ANC a terrorist group, the Reagan administration followed suit. In August of 1988, the State Department listed the ANC among "organizations that engage in terrorism.” It said the group ''disavows a strategy that deliberately targets civilians,” but noted that civilians had “been victims of incidents claimed by or attributed to the ANC.” Five months later, in January 1989, the Defense Department included the ANC in an official publication, "Terrorist Group Profiles," with a foreword by President-elect George H.W. Bush. The ANC was listed among 52 of the "world's more notorious terrorist groups." (One of the others listed, Yasser Arafat's Fatah, is now the ruling party in the West Bank.)”

[63] Magumbane, B. (1982). Constructive engagement or disingeneous support for apartheid. Issue: A Journal of Opinion, 12(3/4), 8–10. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166711. “The Reagan administration has taken a number of concrete steps, or "gestures" as Crocker calls them, to change South Africa's isolation and "polecat" status and make it a respectable member of the charmed circles of the civilized, god-fearing, Christian West. These gestures included the meeting in March 1981 between the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick, and five military and intelligence officers of South Africa. When word of the meeting came out, the White House covered up by saying that the South Africans had traveled incognito. The U.S. is also giving South Africans Coast Guard training and has added more consultants and military attaches to its South African embassy. Export regulations restricting the sale of "non-military" items to South African police and military (e.g., most types of communications equipment and electronic products for controlling riots) have been loosened, and loopholes have been widened for export of "dual-base" items (with civilian as well as military application) such as light aircraft and computers, and other equipment that can be used in fabrication of nuclear weapons. The ultimate goal of "constructive engagement" in Crocker's words is to "end South Africa's polecat status in the World" and to lead to the "greater acceptance of South Africa within the global framework." Why does the U.S.-the self-proclaimed holder of the torch of human rights and human freedom, a country that is eternally self-righteous about its motive-close its eyes to, and make money out of a system which at heart is tantamount to the slow genocide of the black people of South Africa? The answer lies in the very nature of the so-called Western civilization -"Christian" civilization-as it has been shaped by almost five centuries of bourgeois rule and morality. The profit motive that sent the bourgeois scouring the four corners of the earth has brutalized him in the true sense of the word; it degrades him, it awakens in him the buried instincts such as covetousness, violence, racism, and moral relativism. Each time those referred to negatively as "non-whites" or "natives" have their brains blown out by a member of the so-called civilized West, the crime is accepted and/or rationalized.” (p. 10)

[64] Magumbane, B. (1982). Constructive engagement or disingenuousjhergk support for apartheid. Issue: A Journal of Opinion, 12(3/4), 8–10. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166711. “Fundamentally, however, U.S. policy since the end of WWII has always been motivated mainly by economic considerations, e.g., markets, sources of raw materials, investment outlets, cheap labor, and by security of an environment conducive to its objective. A corollary motive has been to prevent the spread of communism which is believed to emanate from the Soviet Union rather than from internal socio-economic conditions of the countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The presence of the Cuban internationalist force in Angola (invited there because of the South African invasion in the first place) provided that section of the U.S. ruling establishment which wants South Africa as a surrogate power with the best card for its position. For instance, as part of its policy of constructive engagement the Reagan administration has linked the settlement in Namibia with the pull-out of Cuban forces from Angola. The escalating and sharpening conflict in South Africa, however, creates a dilemma for U.S. policy planners, especially between those forces favoring reform in South Africa and those who favor almost total reliance on the white minority regime. The latter group understands that within is professor of Anthropology, University of Connecticut. Southern Africa and despite the diversity of circumstances, all national revolutions are interlinked. That compromise only postpones the day of an inevitable show-down. Therefore, the best way of dealing with the revolutionary movements is confrontation, with a view to rolling them back and/or breaking their momentum. The Trilateralists under Carter, Vance, and Young tried a policy of compromise, whilst the U.S. was trying to recover from the trauma of Watergate and the Vietnam debacle. The practical result of the policy of disingenuous engagement has not only stalled the Namibian negotiations and independence, it has also encouraged South Africa's intransigence and aggressive belligerence. The London Times (10/10/82) reports one of the key elements in the shuttle diplomacy being conducted by Crocker and others is to curb raids into South Africa by the ANC. The U.S. plan was put to South African leaders in Pretoria during a recent secret visit by the head of the CIA, William Casey, when he met the Prime Minister, P. W. Botha, the foreign minister, Pik Botha, the defense minister, Magnus Malan, and senior army chiefs. The plan, writes the Times, "is based on the creation of a cordon sanitaire on the borders of South Africa's northern neighbors to end ANC infiltration." The new American counter-revolutionary role in the world in general, and in Southern Africa in particular, brings a special urgency to the debate about the ultimate purpose of the U.S. in the modern world. No longer the subject of relaxed academic reflection, the confrontation between the forces of progress and counter-revolution is an immediate issue of practical political choices. In this crisis-like atmosphere, all intellectual bluffs are called and starkly-posed questions demand quick yet sophisticated responses. Our perspective of U.S. foreign policy must be based not simply on its history and circumstance in one area of the world, but on its trust in the world as a whole since WWII. This view regards the U.S. as the premier capitalist power in the world today, with all its inequities, as the guardian of the status quo. Not only in Southern Africa, but in every part of the world the struggle against injustice, against oppression, exploitation, and social equality is perceived as a threat to U.S. interests. Thus every "tin-horn dictator," every monarch, sheik, or guardian of decadence becomes an ally of the U.S.” (p. 8)