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9. Business Interests, Conservative Think Tanks, and the Assault on Welfare We know why the welfare bill passed Why the Congress puts the moms last The bosses want more cash Off families they can trash. “stop tanf in 2002,” a song by Pat Gowens It certainly seems to me, in my most cynical moments, that there is a conscious effort to retain a serving class and that there is no real intention of thinking through how you effectively pull people out of poverty. Somebody’s got to serve McDonald’s [food], somebody’s got to do your dry cleaning. Somebody’s got to be there to meet the needs of the owning class. 9to5 welfare rights activist 150 By 1997, the year after PRWORA was enacted, outgoing secretary of Labor Robert Reich noted, “Almost eighteen years ago, inequality of earnings, wealth, and opportunity began to increase, and the gap today is greater than at any time in living memory.”1 Business leaders’ dogged pursuit of deregulation and the “low-wage” road to economic growth was apparently paying off. Since the late 1970s, corporations aggressively attacked any possible countervailing power that might get in their way, including organized labor, labor laws, environmental regulations, and welfare.2 By 1996, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business federation, made welfare reform one of its highest priorities. As it testified to Congress, a 1995 survey of their members found that “welfare reform was second (behind unfunded mandates) on a list of 64 issues ranked by importance.” An earlier survey of six hundred of their members had found that “99 percent advocated an overhaul of the current welfare system.While 76 percent said that welfare recipients should be eligible for federally funded education and training services, 98 percent believed that those who receive such services should be required to work. An overwhelming percentage— 94 percent—supported placing a limit on the amount of time that one can receive welfare benefits.”3 The chamber was primarily interested in strengthening work requirements and promoting time limits, the focus of its 1995 congressional testimony, but it supported all of the main components of PRWORA.4 The chamber’s testimony was the tip of the iceberg in terms of business efforts to promote welfare cutbacks. Of the nearly six hundred witnesses testifying in welfare reform hearings before the 104th Congress, about one hundred were business representatives.5 Corporatesponsored think tanks also shaped wider public debates about welfare, producing a barrage of antiwelfare books, editorials, and research reports, whose findings were picked up and spread through the mass media. In this chapter, I argue that the rise of a tightly integrated network of right-wing, or “ultra-conservative,” corporate-sponsored think tanks, starting in the late 1970s, played a crucial role in shifting political debate about welfare rightward and undermining public support for welfare in the 1980s and 1990s. These right-wing think tanks developed an emotionally powerful antiwelfare rhetoric that drew strength from widely held social values, such as the work ethic and individualism, and from public hostility toward poor minorities, unwed mothers, and immigrants. I then argue that business support for restrictive welfare policies, most concentrated among low-wage and ideologically conservative business elites, is linked to the rise of neoliberalism , economic restructuring, and economic globalization. The Rise of Right-Wing Think Tanks In response to rising international competition, falling profits, and the wave of environmental and labor regulations of the 1960s and 1970s, the corporate rich increasingly invested in right-wing think tanks.6 While the budgets of “moderate-conservative” think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution, also rose, they did not keep pace with the rising budgets of “ultra-conservative” think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hoover Institution, and the Heritage Foundation.7 Between 1970 and 1983, the budgets for AEI and Heritage grew tenfold, Hoover’s budget quadrupled, but Brookings’s budget only doubled. Funds for conservative think tanks came from bankers, oil barons, and a range of other large corporations, as well as an influential network of conservative foundations financed through family fortunes and corporate donations.8 The twelve leading conservative foundations donated more than $1 billion, awarded $300 million in grants, and used $210 million to support particular conservative policy goals between 1985 and 2000.9 As a result, the budgets of the leading conservative think tanks Business Interests and Think Tanks / 151 [18.117.182.179] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10:49 GMT...

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