In his deeply researched book Who Stole the American Dream?, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Hedrick Smith reports on the structural choices that have brought the United Stales to a crisis of inequality. He describes the heyday of the middle class: from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, when higher wages gave tens of millions of families steady income to spend generating consumer demand,
expansion of production and higher living standards.
Social movements of the 1960s, building on labor agreements from earlier decades, pushed forward new legal protections for consumers and the environment. Smith's detailed timeline from the book, excerpted and adapted here, charts how strategic lobbying and legislation over the next four decades gave corporations dominion over the economy and eroded the security of the American middle class.
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