I love these conservative narratives - they fill the children's minds as the fox steals the chickens. How about this one? Carly Fiorina was given something like 20 million for failing to do good at HP/Compaq. Has anyone ever heard a right winger mention this sort of welfare? Or look at the salary and perks of our representatives who do really nothing? The right wing is so hypnotized they only look in one direction while the corporate crooks smile and off shore their livelihood.
"A great transformation of American politics began during the years that Ronald Reagan was in the White House. This might not, at first, have appeared the likely outcome of his two administrations. Conservative activists (the same ones who would in later years celebrate Reagan as a saint) struggled during the 1980s with various disappointments: as president, Reagan did not end abortion, he met with Soviet leader Mikhail Corbachev, and he failed to eliminate the welfare state or even notably shrink government bureaucracies. And the enthusiasm within the business community that followed his election did not last long, as the economy sank into a deep recession, with unemployment rising to nearly 10 percent in 1982. As the manufacturing belt began to rust over, political conflicts between industrial companies desperately seeking subsidies and protection and those businesses that were able to thrive in global free markets grew more heated and intense. Tensions erupted between the owners of stock - newly confident and aggressive about using their financial power to compel management to do anything to raise returns - and career corporate executives. Today, the economic changes that began during the 1980s have an air of inevitability about them - the advent of globalization, the shift to a service economy. But at the time these transformations proved devastating to many of the manufacturing companies that had once most vociferously protested the New Deal.
And yet over the course of the decade the old skepticism toward business that had been born in the Great Depression and reawakened for a new generation in the Vietnam era finally began to disappear.
The economic transformations of the decade would be interpreted through the framework of the free market vision. The 1970s campaigns to revive the image of capitalism among college students bore fruit in the 1980s. Universities created new centers for the study of business themes such as entrepreneurship. Students in Free Enterprise, a group started in 1975 to bring students together to "discuss what they might do to counteract the stultifying criticism of American business," thrived on small college campuses, funded by companies like Coors, Dow Chemical, and Walmart (as well as the Business Roundtable). The group organized battles of the bands, at which prizes would be doled out to the best pro-business rock anthems, helped silkscreen T-shirts with pro-capitalist messages, and created skits based on Milton Friedman's writings, which college students would perform in local elementary schools. In the workplace, the decline of the old manufacturing cities of [he North and Midwest and the rise of the sprawling suburbs of the Sunbelt metropolises marked the rise of a new economic culture, dominated by companies such as Walmart and Home Depot and Barnes & Noble." Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')