April 20: Understanding the Right Turn in American Society

Give Me Liberty, 1036-1055

Voices of Freedom, 252-259

Jerry Falwell, “Listen America” (1978)

Richard Viguerie on how he built the New Right

“The Liberal Media”: The Poltergeist that will Not Die

Questions for reading: What caused Watergate, and what was its significance? Can you compare this with other scandals in Washington during your lifetime? How did industrial decline affect American perspectives? What is the “religious right” and how does Falwell’s document affect your views of it? Can you compare the developments in Iran (from text) to what happened in the U.S. with the growth of fundamentalism? What, according to the readings from these right-wing advocates (Falwell, Viguerie, Young Americans for Freedom, Goldwater) is wrong with America, and/or what do they propose to do about it, to solve what they view as America’s problems? Come Prepared with a list to add to a discussion. How did Viguerie plan to build a movement for right-wing political coalition? What are your own reflections on this, now that you have also studies the movement for rights?

Recommended:

Right Turn

· Conservative Foundations by Eric Alterman

· A list of the Religious Right, with links to individual organizations http://www.notso.com/rrlinks.htm

· Right Wing Think-Tanks are often quoted, rarely labeled

· The Money behind the Media http://www.mediatransparency.org/

· Example: Bradley Foundation Money and what it supports http://www.mediatransparency.org/funders/bradley_foundation.htm

· More evidence on the myth of the liberal media

· Theocracy and Policy—see for how the Christian Right has influenced foreign policy

· An Overview of the U.S. Political Right

· Decades of Distortion: The Right’s 30 years war on welfare

· The Education of David Stockman (David Stockman shaped Reagan's first budget, here, in the famous Greider interview, he revealed some of the startling greed and the class-conscious basis of that administration's decision-making)

· Whatever became of Jude Wanniski, of famous Laffer curve fame? He’s now viewed as a crank even by the right-wing

· Ronald Reagan Calls for New Economic Policies, speech before business,1980

· Star Trek-Klingons and Commies: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/st/original/commies.shtml

· The Tax Revolt by Thomas Edsall http://members.tripod.com/~anthony_giacalone/tax_revolt.html

· New Right by Alan Crawford http://members.tripod.com/~anthony_giacalone/new_right.html

· Studs Terkel Conversations With America

· Meltdown at Three Mile Island

· The Super 70s Nostalgia for the 1970s- movies, culture, etc

· Blackout in the 1970s

Labor, Capital and the growing inequality of wealth 1970-present

• Closing: The Life and Death of an American Town tackles deindustrialization from the standpoint of workers at the White Furniture Company in Mebane, North Carolina
• Chart of earnings 1820-2001 (to see the historic decline of wages 1970s-present)
• Deregulation and the Attack on labor –excerpt from Right Turn
• Concession Bargaining and the Decline of Unions in the 1980s Explodes myth that concessionary bargaining by unions saved jobs; shows how it started under Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan, and is related to corporate agenda in both parties; shows how it was politically, not economically conditioned
• Executive Pay Rises While Workers Stagnate Executive Pay Watch site
• Distributing the booty -- wealth distribution in the United States, graphically: examples: the bottom 40% of the population has just 1% of total wealth. The richest 10% of the population - about 10 million households - owned 84% of the stock and 90% of the bonds held by individuals (including that held indirectly through mutual funds). The democratization of ownership supposedly brought about by mutual funds has a long way to go. (these 10 million are more likely to vote—guess why?)
• The Widening Income Gulf from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Excellent graphs
• Concession Bargaining and the Decline of Industrial Unionism in the 1980s (great deal of information on how giving wage cuts did not save jobs), and on how the Democratic Party forced the concessions to start, then Reagan escalated with PATCO)
• Taxpayers have financed the erosion of jobs through OPIC
• How Bretton Woods Reordered the World
• Reagan and the mythical Welfare Queen story (Welfare Queens and Cadillacs)
• Excerpt from Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class by Barbara Ehrenreich (Yuppies) on the role of professionals
• How ideas were transformed by money— funding of popular books—“these people wrote books directed at a mass audience and received funding and support from conservative sources that understood the fundamental importance of the battle of ideas.”
• American Consumerism, 1970-present Excerpt from Juliet Schor, The Overspent American

· Joey’s problem --from Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift, (1993) this is a great story of how women’s personal problems are structured by expectations and demands of labor in and outside the home

· The Way We Never Were: Americans and the Nostalgia Trap “Historically, Americans have tended to discover a crisis in family structure and standards whenever they are in the midst of major changes in socioeconomic structure and standards. Today's family crisis follows a major economic and political restructuring going on since the late 1960s” –blame the family (and women) instead of the social structures that put pressure on it

• Maid to Order by Barbara Ehrenreich --critical examination of life of maids – material not in her book, Nickeled and Dimed
• Whatever became of Jude Wanniski, of famous Laffer curve fame? (The Laffer curve was the much heralded but totally unfounded basis of the Reagan Administration’s economic policies) Now he’s viewed as a crank even by the right-wing
• The Tax Revolt by Thomas Edsall --the story behind the revolt
• Chicago Tribune records “massive scale” of child labor
• Father Martin Mangan site –includes information from the War Zone strikes /lockouts of mid 1990s including Bob Sampson’s essay on the “Homestead of the 1990s”
• Economic Policy Institute --analysis of U.S. living standards, wage and hour patterns, benefits, trade and globalization statistics, etc --see for example, their report, “Inequality at the Starting Gate” on Kindergartners and the effect of disadvantages
• Income Inequality chart
• Executive Paywatch --follow the trends of executive pay
• Boom for Whom? Inequality dogged the “new economy”
• Wealth Distribution
• Household Debt
• Race and Money—statistics of income and jobs
• Prison Industrial Complex – 3 part series from the Atlantic
• Paul Street on PrisonsBRC website; powerful article about the role of prisons in respect to labor surplus
• Digital Atlas of Chicago and Cook County, Illinois

Brazil and neoliberalism ascendant

Death Squads and Capitalist development CIA intervention in Brazil

Brazil and the struggle against neoliberalism

Chile

CIA acknowledgement (limited) of what it did in Chile and ties to repressive Pinochet regime

Chilean coup - brief summary

Guardian story on intense corporate influence on Chilean policy –how Pepsi corporate officials helped to ensure the CIA coup in Chile that brought a dictator to power

Ahttp://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/South_America/Lessons_Catastrophe_Chile.html

For more on what we now know overthrow the democratically elected government of Allende in Chile http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/latin_america/chile.htm

Documents that implicate the CIA in the killing of American citizen Charles Horman Horman’s story is featured in the 1980s film, “Missing” (available for rental in many video stores); in addition, see these documents released in June 2000—Documents from 2000 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/South_America/Lessons_Catastrophe_Chile.html

The case for Kissinger as a War Criminal

Henry Kissinger Page

Kissinger, Pinochet and history –

Kissinger’s attempts to cover up what he really did

Norman Solomon on the media and lack of historical memory on Kissinger

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