> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> >CB: Wouldn't controlling interest in the corp be an obvious first
> >approximation of this ? Seems a rather elementary question.
>
> Almost no one has a controlling interest in a large corporation of
> any consequence. Most Fortune 500-scale firms are owned by millions
> of shareholders, few with single shareholders even approaching even
> 5% of the total. There are some exceptions - the Ford family still
> has big power over Ford, the Sulzbergers over the NY Times - but not
> many. So is the U.S. capitalist class made up mainly of individual
> and family owners of small businesses? Is someone who owns a plastics
> plant in Tennessee more of a capitalist than the CEO of IBM?
>
> Doug
Based on purely personal, and therefore subjective experience, I think the guy who owns a plastic plant in Tennessee, or something similar in Houston, is more of a capitalist than the CEO of IBM.
I know a couple of wealthy Texans who made their money in the approved bourgeois fashion by hard work (and a lot of luck). They are very conservative but in a peculiar way. They are NOT family value freaks. The ones I know are Unitarians and if they did not live in Texas probably would not be church members. They support abortion, and Southern Baptists and Church of Christers horrify them.
>From what I can tell their viewpoints are 19th Century bourgeois
liberalism. Naturally, they strongly support the Republican party.
They actually pungle up money for it.
For the CEO of IBM: Well, I worked many years in a similar corporation. A guy in the Paris office and I were impressed by how much like the CPSU the internal politics of Similar Corporation were. I mean, that was our impression, and I'm sure there were a lot of inaccuracies, but so it seemed to us. The CEO of Similar had a more international outlook, and much less nationalistic, than my Texas friends.
-- John K. Taber