The Servant Economy
Where America's Elite is Sending the Middle Class
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Renowned economist Jeff Faux explains why neither party's leaders have a plan to remedy America's unemployment, inequality, or long economic slide
America's political and economic elite spent so long making such terrible decisions that they caused the collapse of 2008. So how can they continue down the same road? The simple answer, that no in charge one wants to publicly acknowledge: because things are still pretty great for the people who run America. It was an accident of history, Jeff Faux explains, that after World War II the U.S. could afford a prosperous middle class, a dominant military, and a booming economic elite at the same time. For the past three decades, all three have been competing, with the middle class always losing. Soon the military will decline as well.
The most plausible projections Faux explores foresee a future economy nearly devoid of production and exports, with the most profitable industries existing to solely to serve the wealthiest 1%The author's last book, The Global Class War, sold over 20,000 copies by correctly predicting the permanent decline of our debt-burdened middle class at the hands of our off-shoring executives, out of control financiers, and their friends in WashingtonSince his last book, Faux is repeatedly asked what either party will do to face these mounting crises. After looking over actual policies, proposed plans, non-partisan reports, and think tank papers, his astonishing conclusion: more of the same.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Economist Faux (coauthor of The Global Class War) records the decline of the American middle class and the inability of either political party to arrest it. This pessimistic but insightful book reviews U.S. economic history and the recent flattening of incomes and expanding debt leading to the Great Recession of 2008 from a leftist perspective. Faux dissects the role of bankers, real estate lobbies, and government policies in creating the disaster, fingering both the Clinton and Bush administrations' loose oversight of Wall Street and responsibility in the housing debacle. As Faux sharply observes, employee evaluation is more subjective in a service economy, a fact that gives bosses increased power to control and subjugate workers, leading to a "servant economy." But Faux's guiding lights show their age. Barbara Tuchman's decades-old warnings on public folly are dated and mundane. Using Howard Zinn to frame American history, Faux concocts an oppressive but nebulous elite. Channeling Karl Marx, he suggests that business-oriented intellectuals and U.S. corporate leaders seek a permanent army of the unemployed to keep wages low and employees docile. Faux deplores the corrupting impact of big money on government and the gap between the governing class and the American middle class. His unpersuasive solution is a constitutional amendment prohibiting corporations the rights of persons and mandating "hard limits on campaign spending."
