raghu wrote:
Another article along the same lines: http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/26/barack-obama-taxes-budget-business-washington_taxes.html And it has this wonderful quote: Business groups don't like what they see. "We've all been invited to the dinner, but some of us turn out to be the main course," says Martin Regalia, chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Of course they don't like Obama. If you want a class analysis of the wing of the bourgeoisie that does like Obama, read Mike Davis's fascinating article in the latest NLR.
http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2769 The Silicon Presidency and its limits by Mike Davis (clip) At the end of the day, the Crisis itself, not the Election, did the ideological heavy lifting, sending elite opinion back in panic to the protective apron of Old Mother Keynes. (Not perhaps the real Keynes who wrestled with the paradoxes of liquidity traps and perverse market signals, but the Keynes who supposedly smiles whenever governments print money to save banks.) Ironically none of the currently prominent Keynesians or post-Keynesians, such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz or James Galbraith, have passed the qualifying exam for the new administration. In contrast to FDR’s One Hundred Days, when the President’s closest advisors included such trenchant critics of corporate power and managerial prerogative as Guy Rexford Tugwell, Gardiner Means and Adolf Berle, Obama’s economic-policy brains trust shares a defining conceit of the Hoover Administration: the architects of the crisis (Andrew Mellon then; Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers now) consider themselves its most competent doctors. [64] But if the central bankers and financial morticians are still ceded reign over the ruins of Wall Street, Obama has allied with technology icons to lay the cornerstones of an economic renaissance based on massive public investment in ‘Green Infrastructure’. So far this is the flagship idea of the new Administration, the one that owes least to Clinton precedents and most closely resonates with the idealism of the campaign’s volunteers and the expectations of supporters in the big tech centres. The near constant presence of Google ceo Eric Schmidt at Obama’s side (and inside his transition team) has been a carefully chosen symbol of the knot that has been tied between Silicon Valley and the presidency. The dowry included the overwhelming majority of presidential campaign contributions from executives and employees of Cisco, Apple, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and Ebay. But the promise of Green Keynesianism may turn out differently than imagined by radical economists and environmental activists. A fundamental power-shift seems to be taking place in the business infrastructure of Washington, with ‘New Economy’ corporations rapidly gaining clout through Obama and the Democrats while Old Economy leviathans like General Motors grapple with destitution and welfare, and energy giants temporarily hide in caves. The unprecedented unity of tech firms behind Obama both helped to define and was defined by his campaign. Through his victory, they have acquired the credit balance to ensure that any green infrastructure will also be good industrial policy for their dynamic but ageing and cash-short corporations. There is an obvious historical analogy. Just as General Electric’s Gerard Swope (the Steve Jobs of his day) and a bloc of advanced, capital-intensive corporations, supported by investment banks, enthusiastically partnered with Roosevelt to create the ill-fated National Recovery Administration (nra) in 1933, so too have Schmidt and his wired peers, together with the ever-more-powerful congressional delegation from California, become the principal stakeholders in Obama’s promise to launch an Apollo programme for renewable energy and new technology. [65] We should note that this realignment of politics by economics fits awkwardly within the Keys–Burnham paradigm, which asserts the primacy of public opinion and the durability of voter blocs. A ‘silicon presidency’, on the other hand, is perfectly accommodated by Thomas Ferguson’s ‘investment’ theory of political change which privileges political economy and class struggle within capital as modes of explanation. Analysing New Deal case-studies in his 1995 book, Ferguson—an intellectually supercharged descendant of Charles Beard—concluded that business elites, not voters, usually determine both the nature and course of electoral realignments. [66] The fundamental market for political parties usually is not voters. As a number of recent analysts have documented, most of these possess desperately limited resources and—especially in the United States—exiguous information and interest in politics. The real market for political parties is defined by major investors, who generally have good and clear reasons for investing to control the state . . . During realignments . . . basic changes take place in the core investment blocs which constitute parties. More specifically, realignments occur when cumulative long-run changes in industrial structures (commonly interacting with a variety of short-run factors, notably steep economic downturns) polarize the business community, thus bringing together a new and powerful bloc of investors with durable interests. As this process begins, party competition heats up and at least some differences between parties emerge more clearly. [67] But what has suddenly mobilized the self-identified New Economy as an ‘investor bloc’ in Ferguson’s sense? And why Obama? One answer is straightforwardly cultural: Obama ‘gets’ and likes tech and entrepreneurs. As Joshua Green pointed out in the Atlantic, the young candidate exemplifies the legendary outsider who reinvents American politics in his own garage and then launches a history-changing ipo with the help of visionary venture capitalists. In addition, Obama—unlike Hillary Clinton, who seemed more at ease in Hollywood—came to the mountain (or rather, Mountain View) and listened. He discovered a volcano on the verge of eruption. No sector of the corporate workforce, bosses as well as employees, has probably been more outraged by the endless carnage in Iraq, the wanton incendiarism of Rove’s culture wars, the attacks on immigrants, and the Republicans’ contempt for evolutionary and earth sciences. [68] But there were obviously deeper, more selfish priorities. Even before the crash, revered seers like Andy Grove (ex-ceo of Intel) were expressing fear about declining investment and innovation in the technology heartlands. As Business Week later summarized in a special report: ‘Federal funding of advanced computer science and electrical engineering research has dropped off sharply since the late 1990s, as has the number of Americans pursuing computer science degrees. And large technology companies are putting less emphasis on basic research in favour of development work with quicker payoffs’. [69] Pessimists worry that the Valley is locked into the first stages of the Detroit product-cycle syndrome: the heroic age of Henry Ford followed by tailfins and corporate sclerosis. (Thus Web 2.0 has been criticized as mere product development rather than technological innovation.) The Obama Presidency, from this perspective, can ride to the rescue with Kennedy-scale commitments to basic science as well as stable subsidies to markets like renewable energy, smart utilities and universal broadband that are otherwise whipsawed by volatile energy prices or abdicated by corporations. [70] The New Economy, like the Old, also recognizes that survival in the current economic hurricane depends upon presence at court: in the short term at least, Obama and the Democratic leadership will have extraordinary influence over the selection of winners and losers. The contrasting fates of Lehman Brothers and aig (one left to bleed to death, the other given a government iv) sent tremors down the spine of every ceo and large shareholder in the United States. Even more than in Ferguson’s case-study of the 1930s, the future of every corporation or sector depends upon wise investments to ‘control the state’; which is why K Street, the Wall Street of lobbyists formerly owned by the Republican Party, has turned so blue in the last year. But of all the new Democratic investors, only the tech industries, with their captive universities and vast internet fandoms, still retain enough public legitimacy (domestic and international) and internal self-confidence hypothetically to act as a constructive hegemonic bloc rather than as a mob of desperate lobbyists. But, then again, the tech industries may simply be swallowed up, with everyone else, in the Götterdämmerung of Wall Street, while Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke fight on in the bunkers until the last taxpayer’s bullet is spent. (The euphoric national unity of Roosevelt and Swope’s nra, it should be recalled, quickly dissolved into strikes, tear gas and bayonets.) Obama’s nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package provides urgently needed relief as well as a modest down payment on the green infrastructure, but few economists seem to believe that it can actually stop the domestic downturn, much less generate enough ‘leakage’ through imports to stimulate Asia and Europe. The American financial system, in recent years the generator of 40 per cent of corporate profits, is dead—a colossal corpse hidden from full public view by the screen debates of the fall presidential campaigns. The market-oriented centrists and reformed deregulators whom Obama has restored or maintained in power have about as much chance of bringing the banks back to life as his generals do of winning the war against the Pashtun in Afghanistan. And no contemporary Walter Rathenau or Guy Rexford Tugwell has yet emerged with a scheme for rebuilding the wreckage into some plausible form of state capitalism. Meanwhile, the financial press warns that trillions will ultimately be required to make a ‘bad bank’ or bank nationalization work. But if Obama’s domestic spending fails to produce significant collateral benefits for America’s trading partners, they may think twice about buying Washington’s debt or decide to impose some conditionalities of their own. (Beware the dogma that the Chinese are slaves of their trade surplus and undervalued currency and have no alternative but to subsidize the us Treasury.) At Davos, Putin and Wen reminded the new President that he is no longer the master of his own house in the same way that Roosevelt or Reagan were. The dollar threatens to become the dog collar on the new New Deal. In any event, the bubble world of American consumerism, as it existed at the start of Obama’s formal candidacy in 2007, will never be restored, and protracted stagnation, not timely tech-led recovery, seems the most realistic scenario for the era that may someday bear his name. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
