ABSTRACT
The right-wing offensive of the last twenty years has been a gold mine for big business. The enormous cuts in taxes for corporations and the wealthy, the record-breaking federal payments to military contractors and other favored industries, the shredding of regulations on everything from toxic dumping to antitrust policy—such measures have put billions of dollars into corporate pockets. Employer bargaining power over a vulnerable workforce has been dramatically enhanced by an array of rightist-initiated campaigns, including social service cuts, attacks on unions, anti-immigrant racism, and expansion of the prison labor system. The collapse of the Soviet bloc, brought on partly by the costs of an intensified cold war, has opened vast new areas for corporate penetration and has removed a major counterweight to multinational capitalism in the Third World. Scapegoating of oppressed groups for real and imagined social problems has helped to deflect attention away from those who benefit most from human misery.
