[WS:] You are right, of course. My problem with Charles' train of though was of a slightly different nature - that he seems to think that there is some strategic thinking on the part of the elites, some kind of hedging against popular discontent. Frankly, I doubt. There was certainly this kind of strategic thinking when the empire was in it ascendant phase (cf. FDR "New Deal") but I do not think much of is left anymore now, when the empire is in its decline. I think it mostly opportunistic thievery and apres moi le deluge. Just like in the x-USSR - the strategic empire-building thinking was replaced by progressing corruption and thievery. So what that Russia was degraded from a world superpower to a second-rate regional player? The elites did well in the process by pilfering what the empire had accumulated.
I think that the same thing is happening in the US. In the past, the US business elites sucked blood out of the working class, but they built an empire that eventually improved the lot of all, including most of the working class. But that is over now, and the elites are coasting and pilfering what has been accumulated while everybody else's lot is deteriorating. This is not the productive capitalism that Karl Marx was talking about anymore, but gangster and crony capitalism in which parasitic elites live off of the handouts given to them by corrupted politicians without adding much value to the production process.
I this context, this whole talk about laws of capitalist "system" is way to abstract to my taste - like talking about theological problems while the Catholic Church was slaughtering heretics and pilfering the New World. I prefer to focus on business elites and their stooges, not on capitalism or some other abstract "laws" or "systems." "Systems" do not rob people of their wealth and rights, other people do. And those who do do not do so because of some "systemic law" or other functionalist abstraction, but because they can and can get away with it.
Wojtek