>Doug wrote:
>
>> But this would suggest that 2% of the US pop can outweigh the
>> influence of the US capitalists taken as a whole? That's
>> really hard to believe.
>
>Not necessarily if one considers that there's division of labor,
>comparative advantage, and the like. What percentage of the U.S.
>population is really driving (and benefiting from) the changes in
>fiscal policy introduced in the last 5 years (tax cuts, etc.)? Doing
>what they do best when others are minding their own business allow the
>parasites to amass much power.
The beneficiaries of the tax cuts are the very rich, a category that overlaps substantially with what we'd think of as the ruling class.
>In "normal" times, the expected return (positive or negative) on
>foreign policy in the Middle East would be negligible for most U.S.
>capitalists. I imagine that even for large U.S. capitalists, it will
>be rather modest.
Except for one little sector - oil, an interest that figures very heavily in Republican politics, and which cares about the Middle East very much. It's hard to see how one of the most oil-soaked administrations in history would pursue a foreign policy that harmed petrocapital.
Doug