[lbo-talk] Boycott Japan and China (ws Fantasy That Drives US Politics)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Aug 8 15:58:45 PDT 2006


On 8/8/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Yoshie wrote:
> > It would be interesting to look at where individual members of the
> > ruling class in a given country invest their money -- what proportion
> > goes to investment in the government of, and corporations that make
> > money in, the country whose citizenship s/he holds, and what
> > proportion goes elsewhere. By now it is possible that a majority of
> > the ruling class do not feel that their fortunes are tied with that of
> > any single country, their own or even that of the United States of
> > America.
>
> Doug would have more information about this, or know where to look for more
> detail. Most individual investment is portfolio investment, and mostly done
> indirectly through managers of mutual, hedge, pension, endowment, and other
> funds.

That basically means that individual members of the majority of the ruling class, American or otherwise, have no way to conscoiusly control the US power elite through their economic power.

On 8/8/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Sure, the US elite invests abroad, but most of its holdings are of US
> securities. More importantly, almost all of them live here and are
> not about to relocate to the Isle of Man or the Netherlands Antilles.

Two of the richest individual members of the American ruling class, Bill Gates (Net Worth: $51.0 billion) and Warren Buffett (Net Worth: $40.0 billion), have betted against the dollar, but they have lost money.

The largest institutional investors, Tokyo and Beijing, have continued to support the dollar*:

MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES (in billions of dollars) HOLDINGS 1/ AT END OF PERIOD

Country May 2006 Japan 637.9 China 326.1

<http://www.treasury.gov/tic/mfh.txt>

Essentially, Tokyo and Beijing, state capitalist actors, are the largest individual members of the multinational ruling class, but they can't participate in US elections, and they can't easily wield their economic power to put pressures on the US government, even if they had any misgivings about Washington's Iraq War, Iran campaign, or Middle East policy in general (it is not clear that they do), for that will result in momentous upheavals in Japan and China as well as the USA.

That's the most important gap between the power elite who directly run the multinational empire, who are American, and the ruling class, who are multinational. In essense, the multinational ruling class can't control the US power elite, for the most powerful members of them need the USA as their most important export market.

* It would be a different story, of course, if I were running Japan.
:-> I'd build nuclear weapons (surely they could be built in Japan in
no time, unlike in Iran), abolish Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, beef up the military (hardware must be replaced and soldiers must be retrained, for Washington will no longer provide Japan with them) -- all pleasing to the Right -- and sign new mutual defense treaties with Beijing and Moscow (sweetened with generous bilateral treaties on investment and technology transfer), establish a Yen bloc, make even better freinds with oil producers than Tokyo does now, reestablish lifetime employment, and promise a Constituent Assebly to rewrite the rest of the Constitution -- all pleasing to the Left -- and tell Washington to pack up its military and leave -- pleasing to the Left and the Right! Now, it's time to whip up a new Japanese nationalism -- against America, which would be easy because by then Washington will have become apoplectic, started calling names (a New Tojo!), and begun to put quotas on Japanese goods and other sanctions on Japan -- for it is necessary to get the people ready for temporary sacrifices to come; and then it's time to dump the dollar. The birth pangs of a New Multipolar World.

-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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