Word: barnet
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...CONSEQUENCE OF these developments, argue Barnet and Mueller, is the simultaneous appearance of inflation and declining employment in the American economy during the late 1960s--a puzzling phenomenon for economists here, but a familiar problem in underdeveloped countries. The distribution of income, which had leveled slightly during and after the New Deal, has become increasingly unequal during the past ten years. The threat of corporations removing jobs from this country has weakened the bargaining power of organized labor: economists calculate that wages were approaching the "fair return" equilibrium price for labor before 1960, but have since been receding from that...
...MANY RESPECTS, Global Reach is a microcosm of the strengths and weaknesses of the American left. On the one hand, the book is very good on the level of values, of program, and of critique of corporate ideology. Barnet and Mueller are particularly eloquent in demonstrating the social costs of corporate planning and in refuting the technocratic claims of the global managers. They polemicize effectively for a holistic approach to the problems posed by global corporations and provide a suggestive interpretation of the consequences of the structural changes in the American political economy...
...other hand, Barnet and Mueller fail to present their program systematically. They mix arguments from different theoretical perspectives eclectically, conflating, for example, Daniel Bell's claim that manual labor in the "post-industrial" U.S. is becoming progressively less important with Stanley Aronowitz's that the labor force is being generally proletarianized. The book jumps from general to particular in so haphazard a manner as to make it easier to find anecdotes about Harold Geneen's world vision or the loss of shoemaking jobs in Lynn than precise information about the importance of the global corporations in the U.S. economy...
Furthermore, the formulation of basic concepts is confused, including Barnet and Mueller's concept of the state--they alternatively see it as the "executive committee of the ruling class," controlled by the corporations through interlocking directorates and political influence, and as a somewhat class-neutral group of economic managers who regulate the economy within the confines of the capitalist system. Since the growing independence of the global corporations from the nation-state is the central theme of the book, it is particularly disturbing to find that the authors lack a coherent idea of what exactly the state is doing when...
...other central conceptual confusion in Global Reach is on the subject of nationalism. Barnet and Mueller rightly attack global corporations as a form of internationalism whose social costs are unacceptable. But as a result, they tend to be overly sympathetic to economic nationalism, and to the anti-trust tradition of American populism, though they recognize that the notion of trust-busting is "quixotic" and not historically possible. Not only does an anti-oligopolistic strategy, such as that Barnet and Mueller in part propose, lead nowhere, but it is also directly at odds with other strategies they suggest which might...