Unions Radicals And Democratic Presidents

Author : Martin Halpern
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 031309408X
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents written by Martin Halpern and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-11-30 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social change advocates won a remarkable series of victories during the 20th century. This study examines both successful and unsuccessful efforts, ranging from the women's suffrage movement of the 1910s to the divisive debate between Gore and Nader supporters during the 2000 election. Halpern details the ingredients essential to shaping progressive campaigns. While left-wing activists sustained grass roots movements and worked with allies in left-center coalitions, trade unions energized by progressive activists gave the efforts institutional weight with crucial assistance from Democratic presidents committed to liberalism. Frequently facing repression, left-wingers nevertheless managed to pass their values on to their children, who in turn sustained new sets of social movements. Leftists worked alongside other progressives to form left-center coalitions on issues such as Civil Rights and labor law reform. Influenced by liberalism, Roosevelt, Johnson, and Kennedy gave crucial assistance to the social change process. Shying away from liberalism, Carter and Clinton and Vice President Gore failed to provide comparable assistance, disappointing progressive activists and unions and leading to important setbacks. Whether the Democratic Party will once again seek to elect a president with a liberal vision to assist a revitalized labor movement, a newly energized left, and left-center coalitions in the social change process remains to be seen.

Author : Martin Halpern
Publisher : Greenwood Publishing Group
ISBN 13 : 9780313324710
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents written by Martin Halpern and published by Greenwood Publishing Group. This book was released on 2003-11-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlights key episodes in the struggles of labor unions, radicals, and progressive coalitions to produce reforms of benefit to working people, particularly during the terms of Democratic presidents.

Author : David Milton
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0853455708
Total Pages : 191 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Politics of US Labor written by David Milton and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were coopted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. And, as he demonstrates, crucial to the outcome was the specific nature of the political coalitions contending for supremacy. In analyzing the politics of this struggle, Milton presents a fine description of the major strikes, beginning in 1933-1934, that led to the formation of the CIO and the great industrial unions. He looks closely at the role of the radical political groups, including the Communist Party, the Trotskyists, and the Socialist Party, and provides an enlightening discussion of their vulnerability during the red-baiting era. He also examines the battle between the AFL and the CIO for control of the labor movement, the alliance of the AFL with business interests, and the role of the Catholic Church. Finally, he shows how the extraordinary adeptness of President Roosevelt in allying with labor while at the same time exploiting divisions within the movement was essential to the successful channeling of social revolt into economic demands.

Author : Thomas Frank
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1627795405
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Listen, Liberal written by Thomas Frank and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of What's the Matter With Kansas, a scathing look at the standard-bearers of liberal politics -- a book that asks: what's the matter with Democrats? It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming. With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.

Author : James Oakes
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393061949
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Radical and the Republican written by James Oakes and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opponents at first, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln gradually became allies, each influenced by and attracted to the other. James Oakes brings these two iconic figures to life and sheds new light on the central issues of slavery, race and equality in Civil War America.

Author : Nancy MacLean
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101980974
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy in Chains written by Nancy MacLean and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic “This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be.”—NPR An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

Author : Philip F. Rubio
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807833428
Total Pages : 474 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book There's Always Work at the Post Office written by Philip F. Rubio and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. Philip Rubio, a former postal worker, integrates civil rights, labor, and left m

Author : Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691245509
Total Pages : 544 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Fabulous Failure written by Nelson Lichtenstein and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he was surrounded by advisors with radical ideas about everything from economic management to health care reform to labor relations to social policy. With the White House and Congress under full Democratic control, a new, more equitable vision of American capitalism seemed possible-even likely. And indeed, over the course of the 1990s, the economy performed remarkably well, real wages rose, and unemployment was at a 25-year low. In a 2001 book, Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen would term it "The Fabulous Decade." And yet today, Clinton's 8 years in office are seen by those on the left as a monumental failure, with these short-term gains achieved thanks to a full-sale capitulation to the neoliberal ideology of the right, which brought with it financial deregulation, privatization of government services, and the growth of class inequalities. In this comprehensive and sweeping political history of the 1990s, Nelson Lichtenstein considers why the Clinton White House ended up embracing neoliberalism so fully, despite the array of other options available-options being championed by those around Clinton, and sometimes even Clinton itself. Exploring the major issues of the time-deficit politics, NAFTA, labor relations, tech regulation, mass incarceration, and more-Lichtenstein reveals an "intellectual history of an economy that wasn't," and explores why neoliberalism was cemented into the US's economic and financial system by the end of Clinton's term in office"--

Author : G. William Domhoff
Publisher : Touchstone
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Who Rules America Now? written by G. William Domhoff and published by Touchstone. This book was released on 1986 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author is convinced that there is a ruling class in America today. He examines the American power structure as it has developed in the 1980s. He presents systematic, empirical evidence that a fixed group of privileged people dominates the American economy and government. The book demonstrates that an upper class comprising only one-half of one percent of the population occupies key positions within the corporate community. It shows how leaders within this "power elite" reach government and dominate it through processes of special-interest lobbying, policy planning and candidate selection. It is written not to promote any political ideology, but to analyze our society with accuracy.

Author : Bill Fletcher Jr.
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520934741
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Solidarity Divided written by Bill Fletcher Jr. and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-06-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. trade union movement finds itself today on a global battlefield filled with landmines and littered with the bodies of various social movements and struggles. Candid, incisive, and accessible, Solidarity Divided is a critical examination of labor's current crisis and a plan for a bold new way forward into the twenty-first century. Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin, two longtime union insiders whose experiences as activists of color grant them a unique vantage on the problems now facing U.S. labor, offer a remarkable mix of vivid history and probing analysis. They chart changes in U.S. manufacturing, examine the onslaught of globalization, consider the influence of the environment on labor, and provide the first broad analysis of the fallout from the 2000 and 2004 elections on the U.S. labor movement. Ultimately calling for a wide-ranging reexamination of the ideological and structural underpinnings of today's labor movement, this is essential reading for understanding how the battle for social justice can be fought and won.