She says:
> That's what we might be interested in if we were running the empire.
> But people who are running the empire do not think like profit
> maximizers.
[...]
> Those who run the empire, too, don't care about which way of running
> the empire might give higher rates of return. What they really enjoy
> and want to hold onto is class power, even if more of class power
> leads to lower rates of return than less of it.
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If by "those who run the empire", you mean, as you should, the political
apparatus - the government and the other state institutions - then, of
course, they are more interested in class power than rates of return. That
is their function. Dick Cheney has been entrusted with ensuring that the
system he administers is, above all, responsive to the needs of the Fortune
500, and he looks like he "enjoys" it. But when he was part of the Fortune
500, as CEO at Haliburton, and entrusted more narrowly by its shareholders
with being a "profit maximizer", he was necessarily more interested in
higher rates of return. That was his function then, and he probably enjoyed
it equally while he left the responsibility and satisfaction of maintaining
class power to others in Washington.
Cheney is not unusual. There is a constant stream of two-way traffic between the economic and political institutions dominated by the ruling class, and those who make the round trip - the Cheneys, Rubins, Paulsons, Bakers, etc. - and they have different functions and responsibilities depending on whether they are wearing their government or corporate hats.
You draw an artificial distinction between the two spheres, and moreover have had, I think, a tendency to favour the political over the economic, to subordinate Wall Street to the state - certainly insofar as the Bush administration's conduct of foreign policy is concerned.
This may have been true to some degree when Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney first came to power, and were susceptible to the blandishments of the ideologically-driven "neocon" intellectuals who played to their own wishful thinking about the possibilities of American power. But there was nervousness among the more worldly lords of Wall Street and the "realist" national security establishment about where the administration's overweening confidence and stated intent to make a radical break with traditional US foreign policy might lead. Everyone found out soon enough in Iraq. That the administration subsequently dumped its neocon schoolboy advisors in favour of Wall Street types like Paulson and Josh Bolton, and reverted to a more bipartisan, pragmatic, and multilateral approach to foreign policy issues should give you some idea of where ruling class power, in the final analysis, is centred.
I'm not suggesting the state doesn't enjoy any relative autonomy - as it showed especially until the aftermath of the Iraq invasion - but it is Wall Street which is the dog and Washington which is the tail, not the other way round.