Posted on 01/20/2013 8:39:22 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
When President Obama takes the oath of office for the second time, he will also usher in a new era in American power politics. Whereas the old left-wing definition of “who rules” focused on large corporations, banks, energy companies and agribusinesses, the Obama-era power structure represents a major transformation.
This shift stems, in large part, from the movement from a predominately resource and tangible goods-based economy to an information-based one. In the past, political struggles were largely fought over how to divide up the spoils generated by the basic productive economy; labor, investors and management all shared a belief in the ethos of economic growth, manufacturing and resource extraction.
In contrast, today’s new hegemons hail almost entirely from outside the material economy, and many come from outside the realm of the market system entirely. Daniel Bell, in his landmark 1973 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, may have been the first to identify this ascension to “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.” This new “priesthood of power,” as he put it, would eventually overturn the traditional hierarchies based on land, corporate and financial assets.
Forty years later the outlines of this transformation are clear. Contrary to the conservative claims of Obama’s “socialist” tendencies, the administration is quite comfortable with such capitalist sectors as entertainment, the news media and the software side of the technology industry, particularly social media. The big difference is these firms derive their fortunes not from the soil and locally crafted manufacturers, but from the manipulation of ideas, concepts and images.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are far from “the workers of the world,” but closer to modern-day robber barons. Through their own ingenuity, access to capital and often oligopolistic hold on lucrative markets, they have enjoyed one of the greatest accumulations of wealth...
(Excerpt) Read more at newgeography.com ...
The "intellectuals" who know how to pull strings in Washington are doing OK. Open a solar power company, rake in some bucks, declare bankruptcy -- there's money in that. Sell propaganda for the Democrats, you'll do OK. Help write regulations for Obamacare -- there's money to be made.
None of this helps to grow national wealth.
Question - “How do you defeat Greedy, Sneaky, Back-stabbers?”
Answer - “Be aware of them, avoid them and then let them defeat themselves”. (In other words, let them overstep their own abilities and trip over their arrogance).
Ayn Rand was a secular prophetess, clearly.
Dem coalition, white liberals, blacks, hispanics, jews, arabs and asians. The jews, arabs, blacks, hispanics and asians will gang up and drive out the whites out of Dem leadership, then the jews and arabs will fight to settle scores from ME and the hispanics and blacks will fight over entitlements and power in Dem party. Meantime the GOP better find the means to create a Tea Party, and Libertarian coalition to vote out the Dems.
Agree
Fixed it.
Sorry. The new boss is the same as the old boss.
All through history, the cities that are enabled to emerge by reason of agriculture seek to enslave the rural people or at least to reduce them to serfdom or some other form of second class citizen. It’s always been an urban versus rural thing. From time to time, the elites in the cities have sought to placate the masses within them through bread and circuses, raised by taxes and other burdens placed on the rural people.
The emergence of a middle class - between the elites and the urban masses and rural peasantry - changed things for a time, and this enabled democratic governments to focus on production instead of on redistribution. Shop-keepers and skilled workers have a lot in common with the rural peasantry, even though they are city-dwellers. They may have cultural differences with their country cousins, but like their country cousins, they are productive.
But, now the struggle has shifted again, as the elites have nurtured urban masses sufficient in number to outvote the productive classes of both the urban and rural places. As a consequence, the U.S. is poised to repeat the fall of the Roman Empire, as the tax burden on the productive classes becomes oppressive, and the sheer number of urban masses demanding bread and circuses exhausts the means of the state.
In contrast to the trajectory of the U.S., the Germans and some others seem to have created producer-centered democracies, so that their main center-left parties (the Social Democrats in Germany) seem more sympathetic to those who work than to those who are supported by the welfare state.
There are companies that decry the lack of local STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) talent and demand to import more people to do the work. Then they don’t see the connection between the lack of new students who won’t study in a hard field only to be replaced by a foreigner slave to a visa.
Interesting thumbnail observation.
We need to clean up our party in the process by getting rid of the country club Republicans who just go with the flow and money.
We need to clean up our party in the process by getting rid of the country club Republicans who just go with the flow and money.
As a smart guy said on CNBC, China has central planning by scientists, mathematicians, and engineers; and the US has central planning by lawyers. Neither is good, but by definition we lose.
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