[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 53 (Wednesday, March 22, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S4394]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        AMERICAN CLASS STRUGGLE

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, A.M. Rosenthal had a column recently 
in the New York Times titled ``American Class Struggle,'' that contains 
a great deal of common sense that we ought to be listening to.
  I am uncomfortable when people of either party start moving on 
economic class line demagoguery, and there has been some of that on 
both sides.
  I was particularly pleased to read in the Rosenthal column the 
comments by a highly respected economist Felix J. Rohatyn. He said in a 
speech at Wake Forest University:

       The big beneficiaries of our economic expansion have been 
     the owners of financial assets and a new class of highly 
     compensated technicians working for companies where profit-
     sharing and stock ownership was widely spread.
       What is occurring is a huge transfer of wealth from lower-
     skilled middle-class American workers to the owners of 
     capital assets and to the new technological aristocracy.
       As a result, the institutional relationship created by the 
     mutual loyalty of employees and employers in most American 
     businesses has been badly frayed. . . . These relationships 
     have been replaced by a combination of fear for the future 
     and a cynicism for the present as a broad proportion of 
     working people see themselves as simply temporary assets to 
     be hired or fired to protect the bottom line and create 
     ``shareholder value.''

  Mr. President, I ask that the Rosenthal column be printed in the 
Record.
  The column follows:
                        American Class Struggle

                          (By A.M. Rosenthal)

       When the Republicans took over Congress in the November 
     election, I didn't take it hard. I voted for candidates from 
     both parties, so I told my Democratic friends not to go into 
     mourning. After all, shifting control of Congress once every 
     few decades was not exactly destroying democracy.
       But I began to get nervous when I heard Representative 
     Newton Gingrich boast that he was a revolutionary, the only 
     one around.
       Myself, I think the first American Revolution was carried 
     out well enough to be the last. Any major-party leader who 
     prattles about being a revolutionary strikes me as stunningly 
     insensitive to the havoc that revolutions cause, especially 
     when they are rooted not in oppression but in the brain of a 
     politician afloat in self-esteem.
       I still give him the benefit of the doubt; put the 
     revolutionary talk down to a boyish pose. But sometimes a 
     pose creates a result a young fellow might not foresee.
       The fact is that the ambitions of the Newtonians, their 
     lust for the quick, dramatic change and their deep 
     fascination with themselves do have in them the makings of 
     one important ingredient of revolution. That is class 
     struggle.
       Done carefully, with each Federal program to be sliced 
     examined with the caring attention that we usually save for 
     our own self-interest, much of the Contract With America 
     could be of benefit.
       But absent that tenderness, the program is turning into 
     more than Americans who voted for it might want. They 
     expected to save some government money spent on other 
     Americans, give bureaucrats the scare of their lives, and 
     have a good housecleaning.
       But I doubt they expected the slash-and-burn campaign the 
     Republicans have mounted against so much of the economic and 
     social safety net created by Republican as well as Democratic 
     administrations since World War II.
       What's more, all this is going on when a particular kind of 
     economic expansion is also taking place. Felix G. Rohatyn, 
     senior partner of Lazard Freres, described it in a speech at 
     Wake Forest University last week:
       ``The big beneficiaries of our economic expansion have been 
     the owners of financial assets and a new class of highly 
     compensated technicians working for companies where profit-
     sharing and stock ownership was widely spread.
       ``What is occurring is a huge transfer of wealth from 
     lower-skilled middle-class American workers to the owners of 
     capital assets and to the new technological aristocracy.
       ``As a result, the institutional relationship created by 
     the mutual loyalty of employees and employers in most 
     American businesses has been badly frayed. . . . These 
     relationships have been replaced by a combination of fear for 
     the future and a cynicism for the present as a broad 
     proportion of working people see themselves as simply 
     temporary assets to be hired or fired to protect the bottom 
     line and create `shareholder value.'''
       All right, put this attitude toward workers as disposable 
     together with ``slash that net.'' Target people on welfare 
     wholesale, take important aid programs from immigrants, legal 
     or not, put Medicare on the cutting board and hint that 
     Social Security will be next. Reduce money for narcotics 
     therapy, summertime jobs for youngsters, health care and 
     other parts of the net created over the last five decades. 
     Cut very deep, very fast.
       Inevitably Americans who find themselves poorer or more 
     frightened, with nothing between them and the ground, will 
     look to business, a big beneficiary and supporter of the 
     cuts, to erect a new net.
       Too bad for them. Mr. Rohatyn warns that it won't work, 
     that being the social safety net of last resort is 
     government's business, which makes two of us.
       So: If they destroy too much of the government safety net, 
     Republicans will be loading business down with a job it 
     cannot do, with working-class expectations it does not want 
     to meet and cannot.
       As a bleeding-heart conservative, I believe that will be 
     not only the prescription for class struggle but the 
     beginning of its reality.
       Class struggle does not automatically bring revolution--
     real, not sound-bite. But in 1932, President Roosevelt 
     understood the danger of economic class struggle, and moved 
     to overcome it and save capitalism. Left unrecognized or 
     ignored, class struggle creates divisions that can undermine 
     society--any society.
     

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