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

by Geoffrey P. Faux and Jeff Faux

Book Overview

Class warfare, not economic fate or national interest, best explains why Republican and Democratic leaders have encouraged the outsourcing, trade deficits, and energy dependence that are rushing America toward an inevitable decline in living standards. Jeff Faux breaks through the current stale debate with a compelling case for making globalization responsive to democracy, including an inspiring proposal for a radically revised NAFTA. Full of new...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470098287
• ISBN13: 9780470098288
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Trade Paper Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

An Important/Imperative Book

From a George Bush perspective, I read. Hence, I must be a Revolutionary. But for me reading is essentail. In Rafael's book, "Scaramouche", the establishment games the system by dueling the people's representatives with their skillfully commissioned swords. They literally kill the people's will. Today's fait accomplis are the skillfully commissioned penned instruments called NAFTA and WTO. The perpetrators behind these instruments were a political crew of bloodsuckers. On the American side they included: Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Lawrence Summers, Al Gore and Henry Kissinger. These penned agreements were inserted with poison pills designed to adversely effect constitutiions throughout the world, including ours. But you'll never hear a discouraging word about them from the corporate mainsteam news. Get the REAL down and dirty of globalization and read "THE Global Class War". Read it and weep... for those you had placed your trust in, and to the republic they signed off on. Learn to distinguish between the interests of stateless transnationals and we the people whose economic fate is bounded by the nation. The poor class has already lost what little they had. Now the middle class is in the cross hairs and slowly being squeezed out. Unfortunately, they have taken us all aboard their hellbound corporate express called the bottom line. A must read for those who want the truth.

Towards a Global Social Contract

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 thi

Why Elites Love Globalization, While the Middle-Class Slides

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.

Globalization and class struggle

Bipartisan debate can blind us to the deeper current: as this book makes clear from the record, the elite in both American political parties, 'left'(??) and right, have fairly well sold us down the river in the sweepstakes of globalization. The author starts with the Nafta agreement and the way it was packaged to succeed,its real implications deliberately hyped over. To this day, 'slick Willy', the one and only, gets kudos, while a carefal perusal of the record shows that he exhibits the sellout process quite exactly. At some point the music going to stop, and the swindle will be stand out for what it is in terms of long term trends of rising inequality and the shrinking middle class.