Probably the least talked about political division in the United States today (in relation to its importance, at any rate) is the so-called "New Economy" - which might be described as industry that is emerging from the technological breakthroughs in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Alternative energy production, the biotechnology field, nanotechnology and distributed manufacturing, and several other high-tech innovations might all be considered part-and-parcel of this New Economy. And I'm fairly well convinced that our present crisis will ultimately lead, after a long series of protracted growing pains, into the normalization of this New Economy, and the gradual replacement of the Old in the United States and the developed world.
This article, despite being from the socialist press, makes a pretty good case for this:
The double standard is clear to see. Yet it would seem to contradict the notion, traditionally held in civics textbooks and popular lore, that the Democrats represent the "people" while the Republicans represent big business. With unionized workers being an important group in the Democratic "base," it would seem that Democrats are acting against their own best interests....
This conception assumes that the Democrats simply reflect the interests and aspirations of the people who vote for them. But this is actually the wrong way to look at the real Democratic Party, which is one of the two corporate parties that manage the American state.
ACCORDING TO political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, the Democrats emerged from the Great Depression as the favored party of a section of business--what Ferguson and Rogers called a "multinational bloc" of capital intensive, export-oriented industries (including auto).
This configuration of business political support lasted until the mid-1970s recession upended it, which led to the neoliberal era that gave the Republicans the upper hand as business's champions.
In the neoliberal era, the finance industry displaced manufacturing as a chief driver of capitalist profits. By 2006, profits from the finance accounted for more than 20 percent of all profits, compared to 12 percent coming from manufacturing--a reversal of their respective contributions to the mass of profits in 1980, according to analyst Kevin Phillips.
Since the days of the Clinton ascendancy of the 1990s, the Democratic Party has positioned itself to take advantage of this shift in the composition of American business. After reviewing campaign finance data from the 2000 presidential election, socialist writer Mike Davis drew a balance sheet of what "materially grounds partisan difference in the early 21st century":
The campaign finance figures for 2008 revealed a more pronounced version of the same pattern. The Republicans pulled in more money from "old economy" industries like agribusiness and energy, while the Democrats led among "new economy" industries like finance, health care and communications.
Seen from this vantage point, Obama's and the Democrats' genuflections to Wall Street are easier to understand.
With the finance, insurance and real-estate industries supplying almost 70 times the amount of money for the Democrats' presidential race than organized labor, Wall Street is a far larger part of the Democratic fund-raising base than is labor. So Obama and his advisers, like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and chief economic adviser Larry Summers, are going to be much more open to pleadings from Big Finance than they are to demands from "Big Labor."
The contrast between the auto industry's flagging influence and the still-strong hold of Wall Street on the Democrats is clear to see from another example. For decades, Rep. John Dingell of Michigan almost single-handedly held off calls for Detroit to raise its fuel efficiency standards. That ended this year, when Rep. Henry Waxman from California managed to dislodge Dingell from chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and announced that he would seek legislation to increase fuel efficiency.
But while Detroit lost its longtime protector in Dingell, Wall Street can rely on the likes Sen. Charles Schumer of New York to defend its parochial interests. Schumer regularly leads the fight to protect the unconscionable loophole in the tax code that allows the hedge fund managers' millions in compensation to be taxed at the rate of middle-income workers.[/quote]
This, essentially, underlines the reasons for my believing that the Republicans will eventually become Christian democrats: they increasingly represent the old heavy industries, owner
and worker, and will grow increasingly responsive to their demands.
