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/>