Then and Now…Why The American Dream Has Become a Nightmare

In 1953, General Motors chief executive Charles E. “Engine Charlie” Wilson famously declared, “…what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa…” That quote was immediately adapted and marketed by corporate media to become the popularly spoken slogan, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” And why not, they argued. GM at the time was the biggest and most profitable company in the world, directly employing 600,000 workers. It dominated the automobile manufacturing industry.
Industrial workers in America during that period enjoyed some of the side benefits that came from a three decade long, unprecedented, capitalist economic expansion that occurred following World War II. That economic expansion was made possible by the leading role played by American capital in the rebuilding of war-torn Western Europe and Japan, resulting in untold profits made by U.S. banks and industry.
Autoworkers, like their counterparts who worked in the steel, oil, rubber and electrical industries, as well as workers generally, argued for and got a share of the lucrative booty that American capital was extracting from the rest of the world. All these workers had to do was agree to politically support the corporate-led, U.S. foreign policy of the time and constant raises in their standard of living would be assured.
Working class identity and terminology were routinely replaced with “middle class” identity and terminology, proclaiming the “American Dream” for generations to come as the popular catchphrase of that heady, seemingly endless period of economic prosperity.
That was then and now is now! Over the last 30 years global corporations and our government have carefully and aggressively implemented a constantly accelerated, permanent replacement (“displacement”) of the American worker with electronic production, mainly through the rapidly increasing use of robotics and computers in production, supplemented by off-shoring other production to lower wage areas of the globe.
The ties that once bound American workers to their employers and the capitalist system of production in the past are now in the process of being broken forever. A new and rapidly growing economic class of dispossessed is being created from amongst the ranks of those workers who in the past loyally embraced a system that provided them with a reasonably stable economic existence.
A vivid example of this general process is certainly clear when examining the General Motors Corporation of today. Its combined hourly workforce in the U. S. and Canada now hovers around 50,000 workers and it announced last month that it will cut its North American salaried workforce by 15 percent by November 1 of this year, while it recently eliminated paid health care coverage for its non-union, salaried retirees.
The United Auto Workers Union negotiated a new contract late last year with General Motors that for the first time in history paid wages and benefits to new hires at less than half of what was then paid to existing workers. This was followed by its announcement last month of a record breaking $15.5 billion loss for the preceding quarter. Add to this that GM’s stock price has sunk 89% since the beginning of this decade and it’s not difficult to conclude that things are not likely to get better.
This kind of scenario is not just playing itself out at General Motors. It’s happening at Ford, Chrysler and a majority of corporations and companies, both large and small, across the country. Formerly stable working class families are being thrown onto the economic scrap heap by an economic system that is increasingly replacing them with more efficient, labor-less, electronic production.
This developing new class has an extraordinary historical challenge and mission in front of it as it defends itself and humanity from being destroyed. Either we develop a collective vision and program for saving humanity from those who are proving they are no longer fit to rule society, or we will fall victim to the untold misery and suffering that their broken capitalist system of production and exchange will increasingly heap upon us. The future is up to us.