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The increase in college tuition has been driven by the colleges’ boards of directors, comprised of corporate leaders who forced a move away from faculty governance by installing corporate management in university administration. Which demands C-level salaries.

In addition, you’ll find many of the board members come from the local construction companies, who then win the contracts for demolishing and constructing new university buildings.

In principal, this is all driven by the competition for consumers, I mean students, who are hyper-focused on college ranking prestige in the name of future employment with, well...

Out of curiosity, which “barren economy run by labor unions” do you speak of?

I would rather not say because it'll spur an entire subthread arguing over whether the root cause was unions, state corruption, foreign intervention, or any other host of plausible (or not) theories.

I will concede that other people may explain that country's economic failures differently than I do. However, my view is not a fringe one, and since I have left, decreasing worker power has been correlated with a period of relative growth for the middle class.

I've made the jump in the other direction: from an almost-US-style hyper-capitalist country to relatively social democratic countries (first Austria then Germany) & my life here is astonishingly better than in my country of origin (level of economic development is similar, in fact I'd probably be earning more in the country I was born in while paying lower taxes).

So whose anecdotal evidence do we take, yours or mine?

Considering that your anecdotes are about four different countries, rather than two, your last paragraph is needlessly antagonistic.

I was not making a universal claim, so your experience does not contradict my point.

What is your point (asking earnestly)?

My point is that the fates of the working class cannot simply be explained by the US Chamber of Commerce deciding to lobby for themselves in 1970 or the economic organization that might represent. For one, many ailments of low and middle income families can be explained by citizen lobbies: healthcare employs a lot of people, neighborhood groups are famously exclusionary.

You are making a strong claim with fairly weak evidence.

I suggest that you work two 400 Euro "jobs" in two different bakeries simultaneously in Germany and report back after a year.

That wouldn't be legal. There is a minimum wage of 9,35 Euro per hour in Germany. You cannot legally work more than 48,13 hours per month on a 450 Euro mini job in Germany.

I used to speed every day on my way to my under the table construction job. What's legal and what happens are different things.

I assure you such & worse also exists in my home country. It's true that the German speaking countries still have a lot of issues, but it's also true that it's much worse in the more economically right-wing countries.

That is pretty much how the 1970s are portrayed in the UK media - any vaguely left wing policy is usually derided with accusations that whoever is proposing it want to return to the 1970s.

Of course, like all good propaganda there is an element of truth to it but I believe the political situation of the time was a lot more nuanced that current portrayals would have you believe - Dominic Sandbrook's books are rather good.

e.g. Right wing accounts of the UK industrial failure usually omit the effect of absolutely awful senior management in the lot of industries. Of course, left wing account similarly fail to mention the appalling behaviour by some unionised workers.

The astounding thing about the stock rightwing 1970s unions-caused-inflation narrative is that it completely ignores the role of oil price shocks.

Without renewables, oil was an absolutely bedrock commodity, directly influencing the prices of energy and raw materials.

At their peak, oil prices increased by 400%.

But apparently we're supposed to believe that greedy unions were entirely to blame, and oil prices and shortages had no effect on inflation whatsoever. Because cost-push isn't a thing, or something.

> I simply don’t read the same vast conspiracy in the memo that you imply.

Even if it was a conspiracy it isn't obvious it is a conspiracy against the common good. The American economic system has been a powerful force for good in the world - America is a hugely popular migration destination because of their superior economics and the alternatives at the time of the letter were places like the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Europe re-emerging from the rubble of their failures to maintain order and prosperity.

They weren't talking about "Communists" who were advocating for "like, life sucks for the poor, man" or modern "fascists" who want less immigration. The communists had just finished killing millions of people and their signature accomplishment were some of the greatest mass famines in history. Everyone knew someone who died fighting actual militant fascists. A rational person would have been very interested in protecting the American economic system as one of the few shining lights of progress in 1971.

Your second paragraph makes an important point: when reading texts from the 70s it's important to remember that they're using "Communists" and "Leftists" to describe groups who, in the public imagination at the time, were extremely destructive and pervasive. Big cities had hundreds of bombings, weird leftist cult leaders would commit unequivocal crimes and get sympathetic, top-tier legal representation. These were not the relatively subdued Tumblr leftists or Scandinavian socialists of today, even after accounting for COINTELPRO distortions of the historical record.

A particularly striking example is the case of Lincoln Hospital in NYC which was taken over by a leftist group named the Young Lords that received a million bucks a year from the famously bankrupt city government to run a putative methadone clinic and Marxist education intensive. The details are a bit of an aside, but long story short the clinic had poor outcomes for patients, doctors dying of heroin overdoses, staff absentee rates in the 70%s, and about 4x more in spending per patient than city run hospitals. Yet it still kept getting funding renewed until 1978 through a variety of lobbying schemes. Some contemporary publications write of this medical failure fondly: https://filtermag.org/how-the-young-lords-took-lincoln-hospi....

You should source your claims, especially when they're heterodox. Calling the People's Program clinic a failure is pretty heterodox, and you've already admitted you have an axe to grind.

I have no axe to grind. Where did I admit that? Is it simply by saying that I've lived through regimes where worker power was itself a (if not _the_) problem? For what it's worth, I am generally on the left end of the spectrum; certainly economically if not socially.

You’re right - I should have offered a source. You can reference the extensive reporting here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307365/days-of-rage...

Calling Days of Rage "reporting" is hardly without controversy [1].

[1] https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/fictionalizing-radical-...

Your source generally disputes the framing of the book but not the facts. Do you have evidence that the facts I cited about Lincoln Hospital’s expenses, lack of accounting controls, and death and drug abuse rates among providers are incorrect?

Oh, it disputes a lot of the facts, too. So do at least some of the people who gave interviews to Burroughs, interviews whose content the interviewees later described his having misquoted or in places outright fabricated.

Do you have any reasonably sturdy evidence that the claims you made are correct? Until you can prove them, you have cited no facts, but only made claims. Those claims are yours to support. Asking me to prove a negative doesn't really accomplish anything in that regard.

Please point me to where in the article Dan Berger claims the book’s facts about Lincoln Hospital are wrong. Until then, I am inclined to trust the fact checking apparatus of Penguin Books over your vague suspicions. I’m not asking you to prove a negative; my claims about the hospital were specific, falsifiable, and straight from a book printed by a reputable publisher.

Nonfiction publishers have fact-checkers? That's new. (That is pretty new, and still quite rare: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/publishing-books...)

I'm still not sure why I should be regarding Burrough's account as more likely to be true to historical fact than all of the other accounts I've been able to find. If nothing else, he, and you, have got an uphill battle in convincing anyone that his account is right, and everyone else's is wrong. You don't seem to recognize that. Perhaps he does. You seem to be quite familiar with the book; maybe he's more willing to support the claim than you so far have been, and has something better to offer than simple assertion. If you don't want to go to the trouble of trying to find references of your own, why not at least copy out whatever on the subject can be found in his bibliography?

What do you mean by heterodox? I haven’t seen this word before — is it the same meaning as unorthodox?

Essentially, yes. The two words' connotations vary slightly.

Really compared to the PIRA the "leftist" organisations that did direct action in the USA are a bit of a joke.

And you know everyone is entitled to representation

As an aside - the IRA was itself a very left wing organisation - something that they didn't emphasise when collecting money in the US!

I remember stories of the office hiding the posters of Lenin when us donors visited.

We did a black cab tour of Belfast a few years ago and I paid for a book in the Sinn Féin bookshop with my debit card - no doubt getting my MI5 profile off to a good start....

You're missing the fact that, by the 1970s, the rate of US-caused murders and famines (abroad, to be fair) had far outpaced anything the USSR was doing [0]. Ruthless capitalist imperialism has been at least as destructive as any other imperialist style in history, if not more so.

The American economic system has always lived on the shoulders of the American Empire - with almost free access to exploit resources within and outside the US with little regard for human life, especially the lives of non-citizens (slaves, foreigners). Combined with public research being funneled into private hands, usually under the guise of military research (see the entire IT industry in the 1960s-70s, and bio-engineering today); and with vast subsidies, either direct or as government guarantees of financial products; the capitalist system owes much of its success to the vast power of the American state, and has never been successfully replicated in significantly weaker countries (though it has been tried time and time again, usually under American guidance).

Utterly ridiculous. Capitalist imperialism is certainly not without major issues, but comparing the harms to other imperial styles like colonialism is insane. Show me where US imperialism did anything comparable to the Holodomor or the atrocities of the Congo Free State.

Vietnam, Indonesia, lots of Latin America in the 1980s? The US was also an actual colonialist power in the Philippines.

For a start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras#Atrocities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...

Oh, there are many.

Look at the Banana Republics, entire countries ruthlessly operated by US banana companies.

Look at the numerous coups that the US orchestrated against democratic governments that weren't aligned to the interests: Iran (installing the Shah, arming him, convincing and aiding him to start a nuclear program), Vietnam, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba (unsuccessfully), Guatemala, Indonesia, and others.

Their support of/demand for Indonesian occupation and massacres in Timor.

Their support of Saddam Hussein's war against Iran (after the US-installed shah was deposed), including use of chemical weapons.

The numerous atrocities committed by the CIA all over Latin America, either directly or through the guerrillas they were controlling - in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala etc.

The many war crimes against Vietnam, including slaughter of civilians, burning crops and forests, destroying civilian infrastructure and hospitals.

The unquestioning support of Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine, of Israel's possession of illegal nuclear weapons.

The direct support of Saudi Arabia's slaughter of Yemeni civillians, with arms, know-how, embargoes, and diplomatic means.

The long years of Black slavery in the US. Medical experiments on black troops. Forced sterilization of black men and women, and of those considered mentally unfit.

I'm not going to spend my time investigating and debating the relative awfulness each of those atrocities, but I think if you spent the time to dig in, you would see that there are pretty clear differences between the events you mention and the ones I did. It's simply untrue to say there isn't a difference between supporting horrible people and actively planning and executing a genocide.

I grew up somewhere that was a victim of both European and American imperialism and they really aren't comparable. Even in some of the Latin American countries worst hurt by American capitalist imperialism, I think it would probably be unfair to say that it was equal to or worse than what European colonialism did.

Oen thing is clear - Stalin was an unspeakably disgusting human, and his regime committed atrocities that few have equaled (Hitler beeing among those select few). I am not arguing against that.

However, what the USSR did after Stalin is usually much milder than what the US did to their client states. It's true also that at least some, but most likely all, of the European colonial empires were atrocious as well. Discussing the relative merits of each disgusting atrocity is hard.

Still, the things that the US did in Latin America and Asia are absolutely on that level of human misery. Tortured children, imposed famines, indiscriminate killing, use of systematic rape as a form of punishment/deterrence, forced labor, ethnically motivated power structures, deliberate destruction of democracy and of the industrial power of some of these countries, the whole shebang.

So perhaps it would be unfair to say that it was worse than European colonialism, but it was certainly equal (though I fully admit, not as bad as Stalin: Probably worse than any later USSR leader)

Vietnam and Iraq are two that are very easy to bring to mind and widely known. Hundreds of thousands of people killed in and near their homes thousands of miles away from the U.S. for no real discernible reason.

There are, of course, hundreds of other examples.

You think the Iraq/Vietnam wars are comparable to the Holodomor or the Congo Free State?

Indeed. In fact, I just compared them.

The book Lobbying America details the history of Business Roundtable and replacing The New Deal with Reaganism. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17942038-lobbying-americ...

Sure, course corrections are always needed, but there's no denying the oversteer of the neoliberal policies since. We've learned a lot since the 70s and it's probably productive to update our mental models and worldview.

> Since when did the Fortune 500 coordinate to jack up tuition? Which S&P companies run local planning boards?

Since those large corporations funneled money and influence into parties and institutions that work tirelessly to cut government budgets and make the PR argument that government can never be employed to solve problems.

You’re saying this sarcastically but there is in fact a direct link between corporate power and politics at all levels.

Figure 1 on pdf page 10 of [1]

[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

If you think political takeover is so easy, then certainly the entire structure of the republic should be blamed. Why do we blame corporate lobbying and not the electoral college or bicameral legislature? At the minimum, it seems much more important to fix the latter than the former.

Those political systems are blamed.

Not up til this point in the thread.

So? People do blame those problems outside of this discussion. Calls to abolish the electoral college began in 2000 and have only snowballed since 2016. Does every thread have to encapsulate each facet of society at large?

This thread began with a bold claim about the causes of change in worker power. I challenged the poster to provided evidence commensurate to the claim. I was responding to someone who failed to provide sufficient evidence. You seem to be making an unrelated point. Perhaps start your own top level response?

Your entire argument is based on a series of false equivalencies and misdirections.

The SDS and the Weathermen had almost no mainstream political influence relative to the business lobby, so obviously they can’t be compared in this way. Public college administration increasingly became corporatized and managed by the same business interests. Elite universities always have been. Local planning boards are captured by the wealthy in their communities. The economic trouble was driven by the oil shock, not high rates of unionization. Many countries in Europe have high rates of unionization and are not in anyway “barren.”