Abstract

The Need for a Global New Deal

For the past four decades, the problem of how to close the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor occupied an important place in the political discourse of the United States and the other industrialized nations. Yet in the turning inward that has afflicted all major economic powers since the end of the cold war, this concern has largely disappeared. In this cut-throat global economic atmosphere, the U.S. Government's rallying cry to U.S. companies and workers to out-compete other nations in a relatively "free trade" atmosphere becomes little more than a license for U.S.-based firms to bargain down wages and working conditions, and to slash work forces. U.S. workers and consumers elected U.S. President Bill Clinton a little over a year ago because he promised to focus his Administration's energies on the economic woes that had become the electorate's major concern. In his first year, Clinton raised the public's hopes and then largely dashed them because he failed to create a strategy that reflected the expanding linkages that bind the U.S. economy and work force to a shaky world economy.