Re: Fwd: [PEN-L] Blaming the lobby
Julio Huato wrote:
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