1.Take the example of clothes, noted by Chossudovsky in his book The Globalisation of Poverty. They may be marked up in the US ten times in order to allow the retailers, advertisers, and models to take their cut but the value was produced elsewhere. The import only seems to be a neglible part of US GDP; the value only seems to be created within the US; in this case of imported clothes, surplus value is only claimed here but it shows up as gross domestic production. Which if course not to say that the proleriat US capital exploits is not concentrated within US borders. But what about the mark ups on coffee beans after they have entered the US? A dollar seems to buy a whole lot of third world labor and surplus labor (while the dollar may have been falling vis a vis the mark and the yen, it has appreciated against most third world currencies); may that not be the secret behind why trade with third world seems neglible in the GNP accounts or why it seems too insignificant to have displaced any first world unskilled labor
(I think Galbraith shows that Adrian Wood's thesis is quite plausible at some significant level, but note an interesting irony here. Where the economics profession once made itself respectable by controverting Ricardo's analysis of displacement by technological change, today they invoke the idea of displacement by skill intensive technological change as they again try to achieve respectability by controverting the Adrian Woods who in demonsrating the possibility of displacement by globalization have aided protectionist forces--of course Wood supports globalization as Ricardo supported mechanization and probably thinks of himself as having achieved the scientific impartiality on the matter).
2. What about repatriated profits? Licensing fees? Royalties? Interest on loans? Profits from arms sales? The monopoly prices US sellers of knowledge intensive goods (e.g., drugs) and in particular capital intensive goods enjoy on the world market?
3. Raw materials may be really cheap and getting cheaper but this may be no indication of the actual labor time that has gone into their procurement--perhaps everal times more actual labor time than it takes to replicate an exported software program for which a mass of those raw materials exchange. We may have a misleading sense of how much labor time has gone into the production of several imports as we estimate how much labor they embody by reference to the more mechanized techniques of production used in the first world to produce seemingly roughly similar goods--and more mechanized technique may be used here because of how cheap the labor is abroad that went into these competing imports insofar as the US companies are really still competing with them.
4. This international flight to quality has allowed bond yields to drop and thus equity prices to soar (or however this connection works), enabling a gross form of top down overconsumptionism. This capital drought in the third world thus makes an important contribution to first world fictitious prosperity.
5. And aside from material prosperity, what impact has US militarism had on the world? What kinds of concessions was the US able to win because it had proven itself able to drop nuclear weapons on civilians in a country already willing to surrender? What global impact did the annihilation of Vietnam have?
best, rakesh