> Michael Cohen wrote:
>
> >Certainly American elites appear deficient from close up
>
> In what sense? They seem ruthless and successful, enjoying the greatest
> empire ever seen. That's ugly, but I wouldn't call it deficient.
>
> Doug
There is considerable social unrest here just beneath the surface.A serious crisis and the left will arise overnight given considerable unemployment. The Vietnam War was crazy from even the plunder stanpoint, and caused large scale economic and social unrest. It also dissillusioned an entire generation myself among them depriving the governing elite of needed skills. This was the same done by the Way of the same portion American elite i.e. Harvard MIT graduates and associates responsible for the Russian fiasco. We simply could have walked away like the British imperialists would have done.
The S & L situation was straight plunder and my opinion is the aftermath of this is widespread distrust of the economic system by most of the population. The Clinton and Iran fiascos has incompacitated the govenment. Paul Voelker who was running the Fed a while back broke inflation and probably what remained of labor militancy caused by the bottlenecks of the Vietnam War but nearly put the US into a depression while esposing a monetary doctrine which made about zero sense given the evidence.
Efficiency of US markets is terrible. The economy squanders hugh amounts of resources etc. The only skill the current batch as opposed to Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy???, even Nixon, none my fans but supported by more "competant" elites, probably due to a more substantial left wing and labor were less likely to run the country into the ground. It appears the current generation has substantially more skill at Plunder. As people pointed out at least Clinton was relatively neutral on that score but we can quibble.
A "shining light", Greenspan who is extremely conservative but at least has some understanding of what he is doing at the Fed. Also heads of US multinationals may know how to run their business and may be better than before. Then you give hugh freedom to finance capital to squander and allow them to margin up to infinity using new electronic insturments and control trillions in paper assets forgetting what happened last time this was done you have a depression. For all we know you now have the likes of Joe Kennedy, deliberately driving the markets down and plundering off the top.
In short, and this is an emotional response and not substantiated. However, this is not what I would do even from a ruthless cruel standpoint if I was dictator and extremely pro-capitalist. I would try to preserve and strengthen my class not by decimating everybody else because at a certain point we are all in the same boat. You may argue that these contradictions are inherent in Capitalism, I personally don't believe this, although I think these are tendencies. I think especially the American political elites are foolhardy, and irresponsible, and incompetant. I think this is the default situation, you only get a vaguely intelligent running system in times of bad crises.
--mike --- Michael Cohen mike at cns.bu.edu Work: 677 Beacon, Street, Rm313 Boston, Mass 02115 Home: 25 Stearns Rd, #3 Brookline, Mass 02146 Tel-Work: 617-353-9484 Tel-Home:617-734-8828 Tel-FAX:617-353-7755