Sunday, January 22, 2017

Material people taking over in the Grand Alliance


We can see the Trump speech stressing infrastructure and seeing it also as a means to a political ends:


it was telling how much time he spent talking about infrastructure and jobs for ALL Americans, twice sounding racially inclusive notes. 
Stephen Miller, the speech's principal writer, and Steve Bannon, whose worldview dominated and who helped with the prose , see a huge infrastructure bill as a way to attract voters, especially minorities, who opposed Trump in 2016. 
They argue privately they will shake up voting coalitions if they run new roads, repair tunnels and provide web access to other classes or regions of forgotten Americans.



And UK's May coming over this week as Trump's first visitor has a similar plan in mind for the UK domestically:


The prime minister has promised to deliver a blueprint to “get the whole economy firing”, and cover themes such as training, research and development, “place”, and infrastructure. 
 The strategy aims to tackle a “long tail” of underperformance in industries, places and individuals in a bid to reduce inequalities, Mrs May will announce.  It will include a £170m boost for technical education. 
The prime minister will say she wants to “extend the same opportunity and respect we give university graduates to those people who pursue technical routes”. 
 The cash will be used to set up Institutes of Technology across the country to deliver high-level training in STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 
There will also be an expansion of maths education in secondary schools, a review of regional inequality in STEM graduates, and more centralised information about technical training courses for potential applicants.



So you see the non-material people getting thrown out and now some material oriented people taking over.

Material system outcomes will accordingly improve over the next 4 years.





8 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Canadian governments have been doing MODEST infrastructure spending for years now. More talk than spending, but still...

lastgreek said...

Remember the Red Book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(Liberal_Party_of_Canada)


PS: I am saddened to say that quotes from the movie Avatar for his inaugural speech are false. Damn! :(

PPS: Also note that rumours that Trump's grandfather ran a brothel in one of the boroughs of NY (Queens?) have not been confirmed :)

Matt Franko said...

Greek let's go to the tape:

https://twitter.com/uberfacts/status/822512617067450368

Jake C said...

These are great policy directions,

left wing ideas brought in from the right.

building up capital developing infrastructure and the ability to expand the productive capacity of the domestic economy and it's ability to create real wealth
(not paper or asset nominal wealth) for the public good.


I've never heard of the phrase material systems before,but it makes sense.

Tom Hickey said...

The right has always known that this would work. They have an ideological bias against government "intrusion" in the economy other than for national defense and domestic security, and to enforce morality aka "traditional values."

They only backtrack on this (temporarily) when the table gets restless and the peasants start sharpening their pitchforks and lay in a store of torches.

It's even got a name — cooptation.

Thomas Frank, Conquest of Cooll:

And from its very beginnings down to the present, business dogged the counterculture with a fake counterculture, a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the titillation of the TV-watching millions and the nation's corporate sponsors. Every rock band with a substantial following was immediately honored with a host of imitators; the 1967 "summer of love" was as much a product of lascivious television specials and Life magazine stories as it was an expression of youthful disaffection; Hearst launched a psychedelic magazine in 1968; and even hostility to co-optation had a desperately "authentic" shadow, documented by a famous 1968 print ad for Columbia Records titled "But The Man Can't Bust Our Music." So oppressive was the climate of national voyeurism that, as early as the fall of 1967, the San Francisco Diggers had held a funeral for "Hippie, devoted son of mass media."

This book is a study of co-optation rather than counterculture, an analysis of the forces and logic that made rebel youth cultures so attractive to corporate decision-makers rather than a study of those cultures themselves. In doing so, it risks running afoul of what I will call the co-optation theory: faith in the revolutionary potential of "authentic" counterculture combined with the notion that business mimics and mass-produces fake counterculture in order to cash in on a particular demographic and to subvert the great threat that "real" counterculture represents. Who Built America?, the textbook produced by the American Social History project, includes a reproduction of the now-infamous "Man Can't Bust Our Music" ad and this caption summary of co-optation theory: "If you can't beat 'em, absorb 'em."


katie said...

Gee, pretty sure the environment is part of the material.

This blog has become infested with cray cray people. Sad.

Peter Pan said...

Is that what Roosevelt did - co-optation?

Tom Hickey said...

Yes, the fear at the time was rising socialism and social unrest resulting from the failure of markets under capitalism.

FDR, Keynes and others teamed up to save capitalism by co-oping the workers so they would not take up torches and pitchforks.