"Corporatism" is the Latest Hysterical Right-Wing Accusation
Last edited Sat Jan 11, 2014, 11:48 AM - Edit history (1)
Right-wing critics have a new favorite word to malign President Obama’s economic policies: corporatism. Naturally, it’s an ugly word. Whether it evokes Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy or just an image of the rich growing richer through government collusion, it’s a vision nobody would defend. Nobody is for corporatism.
Starting with Tim Carney’s 2009 book Obamanomics the idea that Obama is either consciously or accidently enriching the well-off has become a conservative meme. The right-wing blogosphere uses it, as does conservative intellectual heavyweights like Yuval Levin. Thus liberal readers were surprised the other week to learn that the contraception mandate in health-care reform was “corporatist.” Likewise, it may have been news to you that the Dodd-Frank financial reform overhaul—the one Wall Street is perpetually fighting against—is a corporatist sop to the big banks. The Federal Reserve’s efforts to move the economy closer to something like full employment? Yet more corporatism. Ditto immigration reform, the stimulus and cap-and-trade.
There won’t be any left-right convergence on how to fight corruption as long as the concept of corporatism is hiding a reactionary agenda behind its mask. The netroots left and the libertarian right made big waves about the possibility of teaming up to oppose President Obama’s “insider” “corporatist” agenda back in 2009. One of the few victories of this was an audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending facilities passed into law. But instead of using a small but important victory to build onto new goals and expand a movement, the left wanted to know why the Federal Reserve wasn’t doing more to jail bankers and boost the economy while the right demanded harder money. There was simply no place to go next, as one side wants to use the government and the other wanted to bury it.
This is in no way meant to downplay the serious challenges of corruption and hijacking of public policy by elites and the rich in this country. What it does mean is that liberals will need their own language for how to combat these problems. This language will need to be focused on public accountability, collapsing the distance between those with power and those who are impacted, choosing how politics will be structured by political power, and equality. What it won’t mean is using the fact that political power is everywhere, and everywhere a challenge to reform, to retreat into a reactionary fantasyland of how the world works that was already an anachronism by the time the right-wing used it to delay the arrival of the modern state a century ago.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115932/corporatism-latest-right-wing-obama-smear
Those of us who hang out at DU might be surprised that the 'populist' right uses the charge of 'corporatism' against Obama. Though "netroots left and the libertarian right" may both use the term but they, of course, largely mean something totally different by it.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Response to pampango (Original post)
Big Pharma will benefit from that, so why isn't it bad? 
Corporations are a business entity that have their uses as such; it allows many people to go into business. They aren't all big, in fact, likely most aren't. So it's a silly meme. Use the rich or the capitalists or something more descriptive of what they really mean. That would help.
basically use Marxist analysis to support their free market stands. In this case Marx would agree with the proposition that the fictitious capital built up during the real estate bubble previous to the Great Recession would need to be destroyed in order to restore profitability to the capitalist system. And only after profitability is restored will the capitalist economy recover.
And yes, I know overall profits are high, but the RATE of profit is low and that's what counts for reinvestment, the return on that reinvestment. The only place that the return is nearly big enough is in MORE fictitious capital, which is why the stock market is doing so well. If the ROP is not enough, capitalists will sit on the profits already made rather than put them into the productive sectors, the sectors that actually create jobs.
Of course the proscriptions of Marx and his followers for fixing this problem of capitalism are quite different from the free marketeers. 
