How Texas Politics Really Works by Locander Bob & Bailey Kevin & Shaw Richard

Author:Locander, Bob & Bailey, Kevin & Shaw, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2017-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

Business Under Attack

At times some individuals will look back longingly to a past era when things appeared to be so much better. For laissez faire capitalists, the wish is to return to the day when business was king over government and labor as industrial giants with the last names of Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller ruled in America. It was a great shock to free enterprisers when President Franklin Roosevelt and Texas Governor James Allred upset their world in the 1930s. Roosevelt and Allred transformed the nation and the state political and economic systems that brought public praise and upper-class condemnation. The business reaction to the New Deal and its support of the working man took one form of counterattack with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. This anti-union law restricted national labor rights, and Texas quickly passed a state right-to-work law to further tie the hands of employees in the workplace.

No one should underestimate how important it is to business to have a union free environment. Without unions employers are free to be as good or bad as they choose to be to their employees. In Texas this has meant more bad than good for the masses as the state work history includes the days of slave labor, sharecropping labor, cheap labor, migrant labor, minimum wage labor, undocumented labor, part-time labor, and contract labor with no benefits. The one hope for workers to achieve a good job with good wages and benefits was through unionization. While unions offered a lifeline to workers, economic elites saw unions as a hangman’s noose killing off profits. With labor stymied by national and state legislators, business leaders were free to pursue profits without much political opposition until the 1970s.

The social movements of the Watergate decade centered on consumer, environmental, civil, and public interest rights. These rights movements offered a potential threat to the political and economic grip of business leaders in America and Texas. Truth be told, national elites had a great deal more to worry about than state elites where the Lone Star political history of top-down control was a stone unturned during this time of establishment upheaval.

Conservative voices friendly to business began speaking out in the 1970s against what they called a “new class” that threatened democratic capitalism in America. This new class centered in university, media, and public interest circles, and its challenge to business authority was as real as labor’s assault during the 1930s and 1940s. The early warning alarms against a new class political takeover and the rise of participatory democracy came from prominent pro-business figures like Michael Novak, Samuel Huntington, and Lewis Powell.

In The American Vision, Novak advocated that corporations go on the ideological attack against new class interests by supporting writers, commentators, and researchers who will get out the “business is good for all” message. For Huntington, his directive to economic leaders was to take seriously the excesses of democracy that encouraged increased political participation and government demands. As the author of the U.S. section of The

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