[lbo-talk] Developments in the world economy and the concept of foreign ownership

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/27/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> I've just been reading Sven Beckert's excellent history of the New
> York City bourgeoisie's emergence in the 19th century. It's
> impressive how eager New York merchants and bankers were to appease
> the South during the 1850s: they just wanted to do business. (A
> hideous business it was: exporting slave-grown cotton to England, and
> importing the textiles and apparel made from that cotton, and selling
> it to the rest of the U.S.) It makes me wonder who really drove all
> that inter-imperialist war in the 19th and early 20th centuries. My
> pal who's doing a diss on the City of London says the City didn't
> want WW I - the politicians did. The City was making too much money
> floating securities for Germany. More recently, I don't think it was
> even the oil industry that pushed for the invasion of Iraq; that came
> from politicians and right-wing intellectuals. Now they may have a
> "better" grasp of the long-term interest of capital than the
> capitalists themselves, but a lot of capitalists just prefer the
> status quo to something as risky as war.

You'll make more money if you say the same thing for the Cato Institute.
-- 
Yoshie