Billion-dollar babies: The new global ruling class

[Dover]

Billion-dollar babies: The new global ruling class


THE ECONOMIST

Who rules the world? The most familiar answers to this question are so poisoned by paranoia that it is tempting to dismiss the question itself. If the Jews are so powerful, then why have they had such a dreadful time of things? If the men and women of Davos are so mighty, then why do they keep messing everything up?

Yet the fact that so many people give foolish answers to a question does not discredit the question.

The rise of nation states produced national ruling classes. It would be odd if the current integration of the world economy did not produce new global elites -- business people and financiers who run global companies and global politicians who steer supra-national organizations such as the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues in his new book "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making" that these elites constitute nothing less than a new global "superclass."

They have all the clubby characteristics of the old national ruling classes, but with the vital difference that they operate on the global stage, far from mere national electorates.

They attend the same universities (Rothkopf calculates that Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago are now the world's top three superclass producers). They are groomed in a handful of world-spanning institutions such as Goldman Sachs...cont'd

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/362340_rulingclassonline09.html

[crimsonblue]

1. damn.. and I coulda gone to Stanford or U o C....

Me thinks me chose the wrong school... :P

[Hardrada]

2. Didn't Goldman Sachs just about bite the big one a few weeks ago?

Isn't the climate going right down the toilet? What a great superclass! I think billionaire hedge fund manipulators deserve prison rather than glorification.

[izzie]

3. It has always been so.

Capitalism has its own way of doing things and before that it was the Church with the royals. Church long ago tied itself to capital, such as you are 'Godly' if you work hard and make money. It is called power and getting and keeping it. Even Lenin did it. The powerful marry into the powerful. Keeps the riches and power in the hands of a few. It was one of the things the this country was trying to get away from. We have done a little, to some good, but it is hard to fight history and how things work for powerful people. One of the things for taxing great wealth at death was so the riches would be spread in to the pop. We did not want a few rich families as in Eur. and Eng. Once we let great wealth hand down money and power the society seems to become stale with no new genes or thought coming into it. It is interesting to think that China and India are sending any one who can do the work to school of science where we have falling back where so many 'rich' can only get in or pay for it. It will show up in your children's life what that has done. Some times people should read about the fight for the GI bill after WW2 and just what this did.