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

by Jeff Faux (Author)
Key Phrases: United States, North America, White House (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (January 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471697613
• ISBN-13: 978-0471697619
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #608,657 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

119 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Towards a Global Social Contract , February 18, 2006

By	Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

According to Jeff Faux, erstwhile president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC, with the enfeebled nation-state and the absence of world government, the 2,000 plus people who manage and own the worlds largest multinational corporations meet every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland to set the agenda for the global economy. Even though the event includes political leaders, academics, journalists, and an occasional movie star, they are mere window dressing accompanying the real movers and shakers. This elite is what Faux calls the "Party of Davos." There is no countervailing party other than the World Social Forum which celebrates the likes of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, but they are of no consequence in the real order of things.

The Party of Davos is primarily the party of international global investors, who do their best to promote globalization and free trade. Elites around the world have bought into it, including the leadership of both the Democratic and Rebublican parties in the US, with the expectation that globalization would raise all economic boats, or so they would have us believe. However, this has not happened.

Faux correctly points out that prior to the age of globalization the US economy was more or less self-contained, and capital and labor were forced to deal with each other, thereby creating a social contract from which all parties benefited. What was once good for GM was also good for America; now it is only good for GM. (This may not be a good example since even the global investor is not happy with GM.) The point being that GM can now find cheaper labor and lower environmental standards in other countries.

Faux argues persuasively that globalization went astray with the Nafta agreement, which was supposed to protect workers and the environment in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Instead, thanks to the Clinton administration, multinational corporations were given a free hand in overriding those very protections. It's almost as if Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" pulling high-wage jobs out of the US has been realized. Moreover, ten years and a WTO later, that giant sucking sound is pulling those jobs out of the entire Nafta block and ending up in China and India. The result is that workers' wages and middle-class living standards from all three Nafta countries have declined under "free trade".

Again Faux reminds us that rich countries have poor people and poor countries have rich people. The rich or the investor class in all countries have prospered whereas the middle-class and the poor have seen their fortunes decline.

To compound this problem, the US trade deficit was $726 billion last year and there is no evidence that it will decline in the future. Our manufacturing base is being hollowed out and the so-called knowledge economy is being outsourced. The primary job creation since the year 2000 has been in healthcare, government, finace, and the low-wage service sector. If this trend continues, it will become impossible to export our way out of this deficit, unless there is a significant devaluation of the dollar, which will inevitably lower our standard of living. This is going to happen no matter what policy is adopted in the near future, it is only a question of how much of a less prosperous future we will have.

Pat Buchanan in a recent article entitled "Our Hollow Prosperity" makes the same argument as Faux and indeed cites statistics from the Economic Policy Institute. Buchanan does not couch the argument in terms of class struggle (my main quibble with Faux's thesis), but he does believe when corporations are given the oppurtunity to find cheaper labor abroad they will do so and that the current free trade policy is undermining our prosperity. With the left and the right finding common cause against the corporate and political elite, there should be a significant political realignment when the next economic downturn hits.

What does Faux recommend? He is calling for a new global - or at least a regional, Nafta-wide - social contract. It looks something like managed trade. Let's face it, the economies that are running a surplus with us are practising managed trade. We should start bargaining for greater access to their markets and place a higher bar of entry to ours. Faux is not advocating protectionism, just smart policy instead of none at all.

We can now see the trajectory of globalization: Thomas Friedman proclaimed that it created a global and level playing field in the job market for workers heretofore excluded; Clyde Prestowitz proclaimed that the playing field was tilted against the industrialized world because our high wage requirements put us at a disadvantage; now Jeff Faux is saying that all workers are being sold short and that it's time to create a global social contract. Who says there is no such thing as progress?

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Borrowed Title, Missing Bits, Worthy Restatement of the Threat to Labor, June 15, 2006

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

The title appears borrowed from Sam Marcy's original work in 1979 on "The Global Class War and the Destiny of American Labor," but then, no one wanted to listen in the 1970's, when I did my first master's degree, to the three major themes in the political science literature:

1) Limits to Growth and need for Ecological Economics (Club of Rome, Herman Daly);

2) Global Reach of Multinational Corporations and the Home-Host Country Issues and Threats to Domestic Labor and Social Welfare (Barnett)

3) Need for World Government to address global issues (Falk).

This book is valuable for its one main point reiterated and documented over and over again: the American elite has joined with other elites world-wide to reach accommodations that favor the investors and the ruling elites over the individuals that are employees.

If I had not also read William Greider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy as well as John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and (over two decades ago), Lionel Tiger, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System I might have seen this book in a different light. In the larger context of the 700+ books I have reviewed at Amazon, this book sums up a key factor that the public must consider when going to elect its leaders over the next few years.

As the author documents and discusses, the combination of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism has led to government being in the service of corporations and the wealthy, rather than the public and especially the working public. The author suggests, citing another author, that the working class is 62% of America, the middle class 36%, and the ruling class 2%. He also notes that America is no longer a mobile society, with 77% of the people "stuck" in their parent's rut, and with wages now BACK to where they were in the 1970's--in other words, no real gains in quality of life or purchasing power across the land.

The author spends a great deal of time on NAFTA, and his views are all negative. He is passionate on the topic of Mexico being a socio-economic bomb waiting to explode, and on how NAFTA and the deliberate tolerance of illegal immigration have essentially served as a pressure value, where the US imports poverty from Mexico in order to keep it from a worse explosion.

The author is quite provocative when he examines the "rescue" of Mexico by Secretary of the Treasury Rubin. He "follows the money" and discovers that the U.S. taxpayer did not bail out Mexico per se, but rather Goldman Sachs and all the other investors in Mexico, investors who were supposed to evaluate risk and take risk and accept the consequences, but instead used their Goldman Sachs brother in arms to bail them out at taxpayer expense. Today of course President Bush has just appointed another Goldman Sachs leader to be Secretary of the Treasury (after the more honest Paul O'Neil resigned when he discovered that Vice President Dick Cheney was making all the policies without regard to the Cabinet process (see my review of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill)

The author is compelling in discussing how the Reagan Revolution broke the backs of the labor unions and also broke up the postwar social safety nets. The author discusses how there is no corporate mind-set that puts the home country, the USA, first. He discusses at length how we are coming off decades during which multinational corporations, aided and abetted by their class collaborators in government and the media, have essentially broken the social contracts with each country's public, and disconnected their global investments from any social benefit for labor.

The author is very illuminating when he points out that it is NOT China that is flooding the US with cheap goods, but rather Wal-Mart and Wall Street, investing US dollars in China to leverage low-cost Chinese labor while off-shoring jobs and driving both salaries and quality down across the board within the USA where Wal-Mart has been proven to destroy small businesses for 50-100 miles around any one of its main stores (see my review of both the DVD Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and the book The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy).

The author is an optimist and an idealist, and I will end my review with a quote that I hope a future enlightened President will support. The author says on page 246:

"To this end, a conference, or congress, of North American civil society, state and local officials and representatives of labor, and small businesses, should be held every year. One of its functions would be to do a public review of the state of continental integration and to discuss, debate, and make proposals for the future."

I am reminded of Falk's genius in knowing in the 1970's that we would one day need global council for both religions and peoples. Government has failed to be just or to represent the public. This book comes at a good time. In America, November 2006 is a necessary pre-requisite to electoral reform and getting an honest wise President and a Coalition Cabinet in 2008. To do that, enough people have to vote so as to defeat the extremist Republican skill at stealing elections that are close. It has to be a landslide.

I venture to say tha there is a very tight connection between Congress being broken and corrupt, and the global class war. Labor unions and the middle class have been rolled back, standards and protective regulations have been rolled back, and on every front, "We the People" have been abused by those we have entrusted.

EDIT of 10 Dec 07: As I write this, Lou Dobbs on CNN is urging every American to register as an Independent, and Jim Turner, #2 Naderite, is telling me he hopes 100 million Americans will come back to vote the two broken parties out of office. Amen!

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Elites Love Globalization, While the Middle-Class Slides, February 4, 2006

By	Fred C. (Doe Bay, Washington) - See all my reviews

Jeff Faux's superb book helped me understand better why the political, corporate, and media elites love globalization while the rest of us feel so uncertain about our economic futures. He argues very effectively that there is a "Party of Davos"--an alliance of the top business leaders and government officials from throughout the world.
These elites basically set the rules for global commerce to benefit themselves, rather than the worker citizens of their various countries. Thus, deals like NAFTA have actually worsened the economic lives of the majority of workers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, while the elites have prospered from them. Faux is an excellent writer who cuts through the jargon of economists to describe cogently the need for a global "social contract" to force some of the benefits of globalization to go to working families. He urges a focus on North America as a starting point for a new global social contract.
I came away from "Global Class War" both optimistic that the rules of globalization can be shifted so that more people benefit, but also a little frightened that the interests of the top Republican AND Democrats as well as the corporate class have become so de-coupled from those of middle-class America. If you read Tom Friedman's "World is Flat" and felt uneasy about how great Globalization 3.0 will be, then read Jeff Faux and you'll understand why. In the debate over the jungle of globalization, Faux is the lion and Friedman the gazelle.