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in enough money?” Barrientos also opposes the huge increases in tuition being proposed for out-of-state and foreign students, increases all too easy for constituent-conscious legislators to advocate. “There are some legislators,” Barrientos told the out-of-state students, “who don’t think you’re Americans evidently.” Said Guerrero: “We must encourage opportunity, not tax it. . . . We must not make checkbooks the passport to our universities.” Quadrupling tuition, she said, “raises four times more money than the tax on toxic producers and eleven times more than the tax on oil producers. Politicians would rather tax dreams of lower and middle-class students of this state than tax the oil and chemical producers of the state.” There’s the rub. The legislature, faced with large deficits, targets students to make up a large part of the shortfall because they are the least equipped to defend themselves, particularly out-of-state and foreign students. If Bill Hobby were really interested in ending taxpayer subsidies to an upscale user group, he would initiate some sort of profits tax on the information industry great beneficiaries of the state’s educational system and get behind a serious tax on toxic waste producers to pay for cleanup of the mess they’ve made. , Drastic tuition increases are a tax upon our future and will only serve to increase the disparities between have and havenot in this state. “They want students to pay for research,” says Eddie Reeves. “They’re looking at student tuition as a revenue producer. It’s never been that. Next year there will be a drastic drop in black and brown enrollment. That will create serious problems [in years ahead] in the political and economic infrastructure of the state.” G. R. FROM A global perspective, the fateful Orwellian year of 1984 was something of an anticlimax. Amid the dazzling series of triumphs and disasters that amused, appalled or angered the world in those 365 days, no single trend or event stood out as a unique or decisive turning point. But if future historians are unlikely to recall 1984 in the same bated breath as 476, 1066, 1492 or 1789, the past year has at least one definite claim to fame: In the United States it is likely to be remembered as the moment the New Deal finally ended, once and for all. This development is truly momentous. But because the ghosts of past liberal Democratic presidents still haunt both their party and the nation and because the new political order ushered in by Ronald Reagan’s sweeping reelection is still taking shape, the path by which the United States transited from there to here remains obscure. Many Americans recognize instinctively that neither the Republicans nor a potentially resurgent “Neoliberal” Democratic Party is ever again likely to be as solicitous toward organized labor, social welfare programs, minority Thomas Ferguson is associate professor of governthent at the University of Texas. He is completing a book on the beginning of the New Deal and is coauthor of Right Turn: The Future of American Politics, to be published this spring. This essay originally appeared in The Baltimore Sun. rights or, for that matter, free trade as were the old liberal Democratic regimes. But they do not understand why. Of course, like all complex historical processes, the breakdown of the New Deal had many causes. Many were and are linked crucially to major changes in the world economy and the relative position of the United States within it. Because the role of international economics in creating and then in destroying the New Deal is mostly unheralded, and because the new world political economy of the 1980s is increasingly posing hard, dangerous choices for public policy, it is time to look more closely at how the world 1984 is likely to be remembered as the moment the New Deal finally ended, once and for all. economy and American political party coalitions fit together. To really come to grips with the New Deal, it is necessary to break with most of the commentaries of the past 30 years. One has to go back to primary sources and attempt to analyze the political system as a whole. Then what stands out is the novel type of political coalition that Roosevel built. At the center of this coalition, however, were not the workers, blacks and poor that have preoccupied liberal commentators, but something else: a new power bloc of capital-intensive industries, investment banks and internationally oriented commercial banks. This bloc constituted the basis of the New Deal’s great and, in world history, utterly unique achievement: its ability to accommodate millions of mobilized workers amidst world depression. Because they were capital intensive, such firms were less threatened by labor turbulence and organization. Because \(with the exception of the chemical were world, as well as U.S., pacesetters, they stood to gain from global free trade. They could, and did, ally with leading international financiers, whose own minuscule work force presented few sources of tension and who had supported a more broadly internationalist foreign policy and lower tariffs since the end of World War I. In the darkest moment of the N6w Deal, as the so-called “First New Deal” collapsed in 1935 amid rising public criticism and turmoil, this bloc came dramatically together. The leaders included the heads of many of America’s most prominent companies, among them General Electric and Standard Oil of New Jersey, along with a host of prominent investment bankers \(such as and too many Texas oil barons to conveniently mention. By intervening in support of the Second New Deal’s meliorative social policies, the bloc spared Roosevelt the choice between socialism and the termination of a constitutional regime a choice then being forced on leaders of other countries with many fewer big, capital-intensive businesses. It also provided the decisive impetus for the New Deal’s historic break with the traditional Republican policy of high tariffs. The Democrats’ Dilemma Loaves and Fishes By Thomas Ferguson 4 APRIL 19, 1985