This work presents a predicted summary of major economic challenges facing the United States in the last years of the 20th century. Intended to shape the platforms of the major parties and the general public, it contains proposals by leading specialists aimed at resolving such challenges.

This work presents a predicted summary of major economic challenges facing the United States in the last years of the 20th century. Intended to shape the platforms of the major parties and the general public, it contains proposals by leading specialists aimed at resolving such challenges.

"You will never think about 'free trade' the same way after reading Jeff Faux's superb book. As Faux makes clear, the globalization debate is really about whose interests are served by global elites, and how we need to go about reclaiming a democracy that serves ordinary people. This book should transform public discourse in America."

--Robert Kuttner, founding coeditor of The American Prospect and a contributing columnist to BusinessWeek

"Faux is clearly correct that the balance of power between labor and capital has shifted dramatically. Today, investment capital moves at blinding speed, while labor still must go by boat, train, and plane--and that's if it's lucky."
--Michael Hirsh, The New York Times

"A persuasive and revealing framework for understanding globalization in terms of class. It's a much-needed corrective to the way in which most news about the changing world economy is viewed, usually through a free market fundamentalist or, less frequently, a nationalist lens."
--David Moberg, In These Times

"Globalization is a cover for American imperialism, but the beneficiaries are not the American people at the expense of foreigners but corporate executives at the expense of working class and poor people wherever they may be. Jeff Faux offers a comprehensive and devastating analysis."
--Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire

"Incisive, rancorous . . . with a fluid grasp of both history and economics, Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, critiques both Democrats and Republicans for protecting transnational corporations 'while abandoning the rest of us to an unregulated, and therefore brutal and merciless, global market.'"
--Publishers Weekly

"Jeff Faux's astonishing story of how class works will scandalize the best names in Wall Street and Washington--especially the much admired Robert Rubin, who along with other elites, colluded behind the backs of ordinary citizens in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The most cynical Americans will be shocked by the sordid details. This really is an important book."
--William Greider, author of The Soul of Capitalism and Secrets of the Temple

Featured on CNN, C-SPAN, FOX News, NBC's Today Show, Democracy NOW , News Hour with Jim Lehrer and other leading talk shows. In the late 1960s, the bipartisan Eisenhower Violence Commission, formed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson and extended by President Richard Nixon, warned that most civilizations have fallen less from external assault than from internal decay. Over recent years, the internal decay prophesied by the Violence Commission, but also by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his military-industrial complex farewell speech, has been reflected in American public policies. The fault lies on both sides of the political aisle. After Pearl Harbor, "Mr. Republican," Senator Robert A. Taft, said criticism is patriotic. Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Sense assembles more than three dozen patriots. They range from Kevin Phillips, chief political strategist for Richard Nixon's victory in 1968, and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, called a "true American hero" by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, to Jessica Tuchman Mathews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former Oklahoma Senator Fred R. Harris, who advocated grassroots, populist policies when he ran for president in the 1970s. Why have American policies failed? What alternative policies can return America to its promise, internally and in the eyes of a global community shaken by, among other things, American torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners in Iraq? Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense answers these questions in a preposterous way. It asks citizens and policy makers to actually connect the dots-to move America forward by developing mutually supportive and complementary foreign, national security, Middle East, economic, domestic, inner city, media, campaign finance and voting reform policies. Too much to expect of our civilization? This important and timely effort is published in cooperation with The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation. From Patriotism, Democracy, and Common Se