The silliness about Obama’s “socialism” and his deficient understanding of “Americanism” just keeps coming from the Romney campaign. In a recent Romney campaign conference call, Ohio businessman Kyle Koehler came up with this howler:
“It seems to me that the Obama America, there’s no risk but there’s plenty of reward. That’s called socialism to me.”
Never mind the mind-bending feat of imagination it takes to believe Obama — a man who’s arguably given big business more subsidies and monopoly protections than any president in the past century — is some sort of “socialist.”
More importantly, what Koehler describes is the very definition of American-style corporate capitalism — as American as apple pie and Swiss bank accounts. As far as I know, it’s certainly not any kind of “Kenyan Anti-Colonialism” Kwame Nkrumah would recognize.
Think about it. Just consider, one at a time, the major industries in the American — and global — corporate economy.
Software, entertainment, biotech and pharma are the dominant players in the global economy, all of them heavily dependent on draconian “intellectual property” law — law which the Obama administration, and particularly Joe Biden, have obsessively fixated on strengthening — as their main source of profit. Biotech and pharma, in particular, are dependent on large-scale subsidies to R&D.
Agribusiness is dependent not only on massive domestic subsidies in the U.S. (can you think of an easier real estate investment than owning land you get paid to not grow stuff on?), but on large-scale foreign intervention by the U.S. government. This intervention takes the direct form of a century of gunboat diplomacy and filibustering to make the world safe for landed oligarchs. It takes both the direct form of neoliberal trade policy and the indirect form of World Bank and IMF policy aimed at coercing Third World countries into “export-oriented development” (i.e. helping states transfer land from the people who work it to the landed oligarchs who collect rent on it, so they can collude with transnational agribusiness in producing cash crops for export).
The modern electronics industry, and a major portion of other forms of manufacturing as well, were originally offshoots of the military economy. By far the majority of electronics R&D during and after WWII, through the 1960s, was funded with “Defense” Department money. Microminiaturized electronics were introduced almost entirely in the original context of military technology. Electronics in particular and industrial technology in general are heavily dependent on patent law. And the military economy, with its hundreds of billions of dollars spent on procurement, absorbs a considerable portion of total idle capacity in the industrial economy.
Offshoring, in which actual manufacturing is carried out by independent sweatshops in Third World countries but the goods are sold under American trademarks, depends heavily on American muscle to enforce “intellectual property.” But it also depends on large-scale subsidies to the actual transportation and utility infrastructure without which profitably offshoring production would be impossible. Such infrastructure funding was the main purpose of foreign aid and World Bank loans in the postwar decades.
Every major industry is characterized by an oligopoly, in which most of the market is controlled by a handful of producers. Prices in such markets tend to be sticky, following a punctuated equilbrium of brief price wars followed by long periods of administered prices and tacit collusion via the price leader system. In industries where this oligopoly structure exists, it probably adds a 20% markup to the retail price of goods. And it exists in large part because of regulatory cartels — including the pooling and exchange of patents — enforced by the state.
If this is all “socialism,” it’s the kind of “socialism” mocked by Noam Chomsky as “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest of us” — in which the state “socializes” risk and cost to the taxpayers, while “privatizing” profit to big business.
Any American capitalist who complains — with a straight face — about “no risk” and “plenty of reward” for business, deserves an Oscar.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Capitalistas Criticam Obama por … Capitalismo?
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Capitalists Criticize Obama for … Capitalism?, Deming, New Mexico Headlight, 08/05/12
- Kevin Carson, Capitalists Criticize Obama for … Capitalism?, Military & Aerospace Electronics, 08/05/12
“It seems to me that the Obama America, there’s no risk but there’s plenty of reward. That’s called socialism to me.”
Actually that sounds like another day at the office for just about any corporate CEO. There is no risk if you're "too big to fail." And the Chomsky quote emphasizes the point nicely. Well done, Kevin.
Perhaps Obama and co reckon that giving "big business more subsidies and monopoly protections than any president in the past century" will edge the country towards outright state ownership of business?
I disagree.
Obama & co. aren't socialists in any form. Socialism, as I have mentioned many times, is a broad tendency-and it doesn't always translate into state ownership or even collective ownership. Capitalism is not incompatible with collective ownership; what is a corporation but a collectively owned and operated enterprise? Yet it is also very exploitative of its workers. This also demonstrates that individual or collective ownership is not inherently good or bad. It is the separation of different aspects of ownership that leads to problems.
Under so-called 'laissez-faire' capitalism of the nineteenth century (which was hardly laissez-faire), the separation was between bosses and workers. The people who owned the means of production were not the same people who worked on them. Corporate capitalism takes it a few steps further, where the person who runs the business is not the same as the person who owns it-who in turn is not the same person who actually tells the workers what to do. This is what socialists, broadly speaking, mean by 'alienation'.
To focus on business misses the point. The whole system is the problem.
Whatever future economic arrangement one should fight for MUST resolve this problem one way or another.
The majority of the "capitalists" you're talking about have no qualms with state intervention in the economy. Socialism is just a word they use to describe certain state policies they don't like, you're taking these words too literally.
While this "the free market is anti-capitalist" stuff is correct when it comes to small l libertarians, most of these people don't even want to completely abolish welfare.
Thanks for taking my comment totally out of context. My comment about socialism went with the comments I made before this line about the government providing everything for free.
Believe me at our small business we risk everything we own… Every day. My comments were not about big business or large corporate America. It was about small business. Compnies with 50 or less employees that make the country what it is.
Your list of titles at the end of your article tell me you have never probably done anything more than collected a paycheck for spouting of about how much you know and teaching others to believe the garbage you teach. This country was not built by people like you. You spend your time looking down on the people who built this country.
Enjoy life from your ivory tower…. We built that!
Out of context or not, you Republican small businessmen need to wake up and realize that the GOP does nothing, literally nothing for you. Taxes for the middle class are lower under Obama than Reagan, but all you want to talk about is Obama's "socialism" and Joe the Plumber/tea party tirades against the Democrats, while the GOP hands over all your wealth to the plutocracy. People like Kevin Carson are really your friend, not Mitt Romney. We want freed markets. Romney wants militarism and corporate welfare. Half of the national debt is Pentagon spending but we don't hear you talking about that. No, we hear about Obama's supposed socialism of "government providing everything for free." Yeah, they provide it free to the plutocracy, held as the result of the miracle of the free market, and the occasional Keynesian stimulus money we get is attacked by the very people who receive it as "socialism". But you're obviously so brainwashed that you think people like myself and Kevin Carson spit on innovators while rubber stamp politicians like Romney represent your best interests. Romney IS Obama. They both believe in socialism for the 1% and capitalism for the 99%. Get it? Hopefully one day you'll join us, but until then good luck risking everything you hold dear, every day, in the ravages of the free market, while subsidized CEOs make a hundred thousand dollars a day, their risk being socialized by your tax dollars. Call if for what you want, but don't point to Obama's welfare mom constituencies as the source of the problem and attack advocates of a bottom-up economy as "elitist" professors or whatever. The phrase "vulgar libertarian" would be very apt in such circumstances.