When Bernie Sanders offered up his definition of socialism in a speech at Georgetown University in 2015, he basically equated it with the governmental programs created by the New Deal.
The historic ground on which Sanders took his stand was the experience of the United States when New Deal programs were most effectual.
Before they'd been eroded by the financialization and globalization that commenced in the 1970s, FDR's New Deal gave the nation its one and only period of broadly shared prosperity.
Comes now Elizabeth Warren, like Sanders, seeking to re-create the New Deal's creation of a vibrant middle class-but in this instance, not through an updated version of governmental social provision, as Sanders suggested, but through that other dimension of New Deal success: bolstering worker power.
This week, Warren introduced a new bill, the Accountable Capitalism Act, which seeks nothing less than the compelled conversion of American corporations from their current creed of maximizing shareholder value to the friendlier confines of benefiting all corporate stakeholders.
As Warren noted in an op-ed she wrote for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, over the past 35 years the financialization of the American corporation has meant that shareholders now extract more funds from corporations than those businesses devote either to investment in their own enterprise or wage increases for their workers.
In tandem with expanding social provision, curtailing Wall Street, restoring progressive taxation, and rebuilding worker power, it could just give this nation a new birth of equality and prosperity.
http://prospect.org/article/elizabeth-warren-proposes-second-new-deal
The historic ground on which Sanders took his stand was the experience of the United States when New Deal programs were most effectual.
Before they'd been eroded by the financialization and globalization that commenced in the 1970s, FDR's New Deal gave the nation its one and only period of broadly shared prosperity.
Comes now Elizabeth Warren, like Sanders, seeking to re-create the New Deal's creation of a vibrant middle class-but in this instance, not through an updated version of governmental social provision, as Sanders suggested, but through that other dimension of New Deal success: bolstering worker power.
This week, Warren introduced a new bill, the Accountable Capitalism Act, which seeks nothing less than the compelled conversion of American corporations from their current creed of maximizing shareholder value to the friendlier confines of benefiting all corporate stakeholders.
As Warren noted in an op-ed she wrote for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, over the past 35 years the financialization of the American corporation has meant that shareholders now extract more funds from corporations than those businesses devote either to investment in their own enterprise or wage increases for their workers.
In tandem with expanding social provision, curtailing Wall Street, restoring progressive taxation, and rebuilding worker power, it could just give this nation a new birth of equality and prosperity.
http://prospect.org/article/elizabeth-warren-proposes-second-new-deal
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