The Corporate Left

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Note on Terminology: I'm using "left" and "right" as relative, value judgement based, terms here. For most of the 20th Centrury, when the business community was more polarized towards one party, what passes for left today is nothing.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F6b5lmGfno&NR=1[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVINEgcnVz8&NR=1[/youtube]

This youtuber summarizes political economist Thomas Ferguson's "Investment Theory of Party Competition".

The main point is that the degree to which a business depends on actual labour is inversely proportional (in most cases) to the degree it is willing the support extensively labour and/or union rights. Businesses whose costs are affected by labour least (i.e. Hi-Tech industry, Financial capital) are the most willing to support a social democratic party.

Those least willing to support a leftish party are businesses in labour-intensive industries like manufacturing or resource extraction.

There are complicating factors - like a labour backlash against job loss due to mechanization. But - all in all - it has predictive power and rather elegantly explains the data.

If anyone is curious on how this pretains the Obama - that spineless Democrat - ask yourself "Who are his biggest individual donors?"

Well, they were all affilated with the places below.

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contr ... =N00009638

The Corporate Left is all in favor of privatizing profit and socializing losses.

ruveyn

I don't really think banks and other financial institutes constitute a "corporate left" whether they donate to Democratic campaigns or not. If anything, I'd associate a "corporate left" with green-technology and organic-food companies, but even that's a stretch.

"Corporate Left" is an oxymoron, it confuses "Democrat" with "Left". These guys certainly are not left wing, they are right-wing Fascist-lite. I call them the ConservaDems

The Economy is bad, and Obama has not/will not do anything to fix it. He has not kept his promises partly because he can't, either way the public is beginning to see him for who he is: An idiot, just like Bush.

Both the Corporate Left and Right believe in subsidies paid for by the taxpayers. Is this Free Enterprise?

ruveyn

Thanks Master_Pedant, I wasn't as acutely aware of these things as I was previously.

Bump.

Thanks to the so very many people who failed to read the note atop this post. You're pre-relativistic, absolutist concepts of political space and time never fail to amaze me.

I was talking - fairly clearly - about the elite spectrum. I was including the elite centre as markedly to the right of a popular centre. The absolute limit to leftism - the furthest left one can go on the elite spectrum - was what I meant by "leftwing" ("elites" or "power elites" are people - generally business owners or upper managment - hold the most political influence),

I know that the (elite) political centre in the US is markedly to the right of the (elite-popular) centres in Continental Europe. My use "left" was as it applies to US politics.