> I rather doubt that the East Asian bourgeoisie, especially the one in
> Tokyo, have any higher priority other than joining their "rentier" brethren
> in the financial plunder. And this is, after all, _calculated_ plunder,
If so, the Nikkei would be at 30,000 and Japanese investment would be at 15%. But the Nikkei is at 13,000 and rates of national investment are 28%. Amsden, Wade, Gerlach et. al. have shown pretty convincingly that East Asian keiretsu capitalism is organized differently, has different priorities, and thinks differently from Wall Street. The concept of the total system doesn't mean that everything is the same; it means there are global equivalences, which are unstable, they can emerge out of nowhere and also fall apart (markets, currencies, firms, etc.). South Korean elites invest in Korea, and not in Swiss real estate; NEC is getting into the systems-on-a-chip biz, not stock punting; VIA is eating up Intel's marketshare in mobos, etc. This needs explanation, not comforting thoughts that, anyway, the whole world is like the US. It's not, and that's why the US has a huge military machine and deploys it as regularly as it does.
-- Dennis