Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles

Wal-Mart is the world’s largest company and it sets the standard–both social and commercial–for a huge swath of the global economy. In this probing investigation, historian Nelson Lichtenstein shows how the company’s success has spread evangelical Protestantism into the workplace, made South China an American workshop, and pushed American politics to the right. At the same time, he anticipates a day of reckoning, when challenges to the Wal-Mart way, at home and abroad, are likely to change the far-flung empire. Insightful and original, The Retail Revolution gives a fresh and necessary understanding of the phenomenon that has reshaped international commerce.

Environment is now a key component of international relations and, given the rising attention climate change receives in particular (Welzer, 2012), a matter that now has high priority in diplomatic circles. With states in danger of disappearing below rising seas and major disruptions to water supplies and food systems projected for future decades if steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions are not taken soon, environmental matters have become central to contemporary international politics, and to their academic study (Webersik, 2010). Environment emerged after the Cold War as a priority matter for scholarly analysis because scholars are concerned with matters of pollution, conservation and resources; but also because there are interesting analytical puzzles surrounding how the international system deals with them and the changes resulting from the introduction of new modes of governance, institutions, agencies, knowledge and norms.

Our founding fathers worked hard to ensure that a small group of wealthy people would never dominate this country—they’d had enough of aristocracy. They put government to work to ensure a thriving middle class. When the middle class took a hit, beginning in the post-Civil War Gilded Age and culminating in the Great Depression, democracy-loving leaders like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower revitalized it through initiatives like antitrust regulations, fair labor laws, the minimum wage, Social Security, and Medicare.

So what happened? Air America Radio host Thom Hartmann shows that over the last twenty-five years, we’ve witnessed an undeclared war against the middle class. The so-called conservatives waging this war are only interested in conserving—and steadily increasing—their own wealth and power. Hartmann shows how, under the guise of “freeing” the market, they’ve systematically dismantled the programs set up by both Republicans and Democrats to protect the middle class and have replaced them with policies that favor the only the privileged few.

But the middle class is the very thing that makes America great. Thomas Jefferson himself believed that our very democracy depends upon our ability to play referee to the game of business, protecting labor and the public good. It is both our right and our responsibility, Jefferson wrote, to control “overgrown wealth” from becoming “dangerous to the state.”

We must not stand by while our democracy becomes a corporatocracy, serving an elite group of billionaire CEOs. There is another way. Thomas Jefferson knew how to build a middle class. Franklin Roosevelt knew how. We’ve done it before and we can do it, again. Following Hartmann’s commonsense proposals, we can recreate a prospering middle class that will ensure that our public institutions are not turned into private fiefdoms, meet people’s basic needs—for education, health care, a living wage—and keep America strong,