Preface xiii
Introduction:
The Power Elite on the
Promenade 3
- Each One Is One in a
Million: Meet the Superclass
- The Corporate Side of
the Superclass
- Vilfredo Pareto's
Enduring Insight: The 80/20
Rule and the Superclass
- A Snapshot of the
Superclass
- What Does
Disproportionate Power Look
Like?
- What the People Who Have
Everything Really Want
- Six Central Issues
Associated with the Superclass
Ceteris
Non Paribus: Inequality, Backlash,
and the New
Order 51
- Not All Boats Are Lifted
- Not a Country But a
Country Club
- Not Just a Chilean
Paradox
- And After the Easy Part
...
- Ceteris Non Paribus:
Inequality of Power,
Inequality of Wealth
- War of the Rich and the
Superrich?
- The Inequitable
Distribution of Luck
- Premium Pay in the
Executive Suite
- Inequality Revisited
Lessons
of History: The Rise and Fall of
Elites 77
- The Power of History
- The Power of
Institutions
- The Power of Money
- The Power of Politics
- The Power of Force
- The Power of Networks
- From the Wanaxes to the
Robber Barons: The Rise and
Fall of Elites
- Stirrings of Democracy:
Greece from 2000 to 323 BCE
- The Forbidden City
Opened from Within: China in
the Seventeenth Century
- Robber Barons or
Inventors of Modernity:
America After the Civil War
The
Multinational Moment: When Finance
and Business Became the Center of It
All 111
- The Corporate Cluster
Within the Superclass
- The Interlinked
Corporate Elite
- What Global Power Can Do
- Energy Elites: A
UniquePublic-Private Network
- From the "Sun King" to
the "God Pod"
- Global Industry, Global
Leadership
Globalists
vs. Nationalists: Political Fault
Line for a New
Century 145
- The Power Vacuum
- Gangsters for
Capitalism?
- The Rules Change But the
Game Stays the Same: Political
Elites Worldwide
- Behind the Scenes: The
Globalization of the
Smoke-Filled Back Room
- Tangled Webs and
Tottering Institutions
- An Informal Affair: The
Sovereignty vs. Democracy
Trade-Off
- The Global Network of
Antiglobalists
The
Age of Asymmetry: Decline of the
Titans and the Rise of Shadow
Warriors 190
- The Terrorist Threat in
Perspective
- The Roots of Global
Networks
- Green Is Not Just the
Color of the Uniforms
- Consolidation and
Concentration of Military
Power
- Networks Among Defense
Firms
- They're All in a Tiny
Room
- The Privatization of the
Military: A Two-Way Street
- Permanent War's Bottom
Line: A Country and an
Alliance Beyond All Others
- The Fly and the Lion
The
Information Superclass: The Power of
Ideas 221
- Fresh and Yet Strangely
Familiar
- An Ascendant Voice of
Change in the Middle East
- New Media Monkey-Gland
Injections: A Quick Shot of
Sizzle
- Pro Bono
- Saving the World One
Idea at a Time
- The Reenchantment of the
World
- Pastor of Partying
- The Telemuslim
- Dissident Spirituality
or Subversive Cult?
- The Pragmatic Fanatic
How
to Become a Member of the
Superclass: Myth, Reality, and the
Psychopathology of
Success 254
- A Very Short History of
Things That Didn't Really
Happen-And Their Very Real
Consequences
- When Is a Trowel Just a
Trowel?
- Can It Be Considered an
Academic Elite Society If
George W. Bush Was a Member?
- The "Ex-Presidents'
Club"
- The Big Events: Less
Than Meets the Eye?
- The Clinton Global
Initiative and the Power of
Global Philanthropy
- California's Superclass
Summer Camp
- Asian and Latin American
"Wannabes" or Harbingers of
the Supermeetings of Tomorrow?
- How to Become a Member
of the Superclass
- The Psychopathology of
Success
The
Future of the Superclass-And What It
May Mean for the Rest of
Us 296
- In Praise of Our Elites
vs. Their Elites
- Disproportionate
Concentration of Power
- Agenda-Setting
- Informal Mechanisms of
Governance
- Elites vs. the
Disenfranchised
- Elites vs. Women
- Elites and Mobility
- Institutions vs.
Individuals
- The Emerging Superclass:
A Coming Culture Shock?
- Global Governance vs.
Global Government
- Is a Crisis Inevitable?
- On Balance
Notes 325
Acknowledgments 357
Index 363
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
ABOUT "SUPERCLASS":
From
the
Publisher
Each
of
them is one in a million. They number
six thousand on a planet of six
billion. They run our governments, our
largest corporations, the powerhouses
of international finance, the media,
world religions, and, from the
shadows, the world's most dangerous
criminal and terrorist organizations.
They are the global superclass, and
they are shaping the history of our
time.
Today's superclass has achieved
unprecedented levels of wealth and
power. They have globalized more
rapidly than any other group. But do
they have more in common with one
another than with their own
countrymen, as nationalist critics
have argued? They control
globalization more than anyone else.
But has their influence fed the
growing economic and social inequity
that divides the world? What happens
behind closed door meetings in Davos
or aboard corporate jets at 41,000
feet? Conspiracy or collaboration?
Deal-making or idle self-indulgence?
What does the rise of Asia and Latin
America mean for the conventional
wisdom that shapes our destinies? Who
sets the rules for a group that
operates beyond national laws?
Drawn from scores of exclusive
interviews and extensive original
reporting, Superclass answers
all of these questions and more. It
draws back the curtain on a privileged
society that most of us know little
about, even though it profoundly
affects our everyday lives. It is the
first in-depth examination of the
connections between the global
communities of leaders who are at the
helm of every major enterprise on the
planet and control its greatest
wealth. And it is an unprecedented
examination of the trends within the
superclass, which are likely to alter
our politics, our institutions, and
the shape of the world in which we
live.
Andrea
Sachs
- Time
There
are
just over 6,000 people in the
superclass. So says the author of this
fascinating book, a field guide to the
world's most élite citizens.
See the rich and powerful in their
natural habitats, from Davos and
Bilderberg to the Bohemian Grove....
sysop@TeamInfinity.com,
April 30, 2008,
SuperClass is a Must Read
If you want to be all you can be, you need to
understand what the world looks like through
the eyes of those at the top. SuperClass is an
excellent book that will help you to know
yourself better as you get to know the elites
better. Once you better understand the Elites,
you can then proceed to reach out to them,
because they are in the best position to
change the world in directions that perhaps
only those NOT at the top can fully appreciate
the need for. You must let them know you exist
and are important and that with their reach
and leverage, while adopting the correct
approach, they can change the world in ways
few fully appreciate. Specifically you want to
understand the coming 'Robotic Wageless
Economy', and then reach out to the elites and
persuade them to steer the world in the
direction where the 'Robotic
Wageless Economy' can become a reality
in our lifetimes, emancipating humans from the
machinery of economy and ushering in an Age of
Recreation never before possible, and more
likely if the SuperClass realizes its
potential to achieve it, so READ the book
SuperClass, you will enjoy it, and you will be
better positioned to change the world by
leveraging the SuperClass yourself !
Also recommended: Tragedy and Hope - Professor
Quigley, True Believer - Eric Hoffer, All
Franz Kafka Works, Mao: The Untold Story
|
Kirkus
Reviews
Some
6,000
people, about one for every million in
the world's population, drive the
decisions that directly affect the
global economic climate in which our
governments, corporations, military
leaders, technocrats and workers must
strive. In other words, they run our
lives. So declares Rothkopf
(International Affairs/Columbia Univ.;
Running the World: the Inside Story of
the National Security Council and the
Architects of American Power, 2005,
etc.), who dubs this elite the
"Superclass." Members may be found in
places like Davos, Switzerland, where
the World Economic Forum convenes
annually, or at gatherings in
California's Bohemian Grove, where
Republican powerbrokers howl and grunt
like Neanderthals. Though
international in origin, they share a
number of traits: wealth (sometimes
mega-wealth), blue-chip educations
garnered at world-renowned
universities and access to networked
ways of getting things done that few
of us can even imagine. Key clusters
of these individuals comprise the top
functionaries of national governments
and those who peddle influence among
them, the corporate elite, the power
media and the military/industrial
complex (now far more integrated and
tightly knit across national borders).
Together they are essentially herding
the industrialized nations, including
Asian giants China and India, into a
corral that the author labels "global
governance." His book details the
means by which they acquire, negotiate
and exercise the clout to do this. "It
is hard to ignore the many ways they
are the primary beneficiaries of the
global order that they shape," opines
Rothkopf, partner in an international
consulting firm and a Washington
insider in the Clinton Administration
who boasts firsthand experience of how
power is wielded. An impressively
knowledgeable guide to the world's
elite and how they have coalesced as a
kind of natural order. Agent: Esmond
Harmsworth/Zachary Shuster Harmsworth
What
People
Are Saying
Richard
Holbrooke
"Whether you like it or not, there is
no way to deny the enormous,
disproportionate, concentration of
power and wealth in the hands of a
relatively small number of people in
the world today. David Rothkopf has
described who they are, and how they
operate and interact, vividly in his
valuable (and often disturbing) new
book."--(Richard Holbrooke, Former
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations)
Lawrence
Summers
"The activities of a growing
cosmopolitan elite are having profound
effects. They can be highly desirable
when they promote international
cooperation or more problematic when
the interests of the elites diverge
from those of their citizens. David
Rothkopf's Superclass skillfully
probes these issues and many more and
should be read by all those concerned
with the international economy and the
evolving global system."--(Lawrence
Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the
Treasury)
Ernesto
Zedillo
"Thanks to Rothkopf's special blend of
analysis, direct interaction with his
subjects and vivid writing, this is a
must read book for people interested
in understanding the genesis of
leadership in the new global
economy."--(Ernesto Zedillo, Director
of the Yale Center for the Study of
Globalization and Former President of
Mexico)
Clyde
Prestowitz
"David Rothkopf has written a super
book about the people presently
executing an historic shift of world
economic and political power and about
how they are doing it and why. If you
want to know how your choices are
being determined and the circumstances
of your life conditioned, you must
read this book."--(Clyde Prestowitz,
President of the Economic Strategy
Institute and author of Three Billion
New Capitalists)
Alan
Blinder
"No, no vast conspiracy runs the
world. But, according to Rothkopf's
book, a tiny but diverse global elite,
a Superclass, comes close. His
finely-honed prose takes the reader on
a joyous, entertaining, and erudite
romp around the globe in search of
that class."--(Alan Blinder, Former
Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve
Bank of the United States)
EXCERPTs
from
SUPERCLASS:
Page:
48
Overwhelming
and
perhaps
confusing as this list [of 6000]
may be, it reveals the complex
nature of connections among
members of the SuperClass. It is,
by necessity, a partial list for a
small cross section of people, but
already illustrates how tangled a
web of relationships between
individuals is. For all its
twists and turns and intricate
linkages, it explains in the
clearest way possible how
Schwarzman and others in the
SuperClass have come to see their
group as such a "small world",
with everyone just a connection or
two away from everyone else.
So
among
the roughly six thousand members
of the superclass there are
countless threads linking members
to one another. Business
associations. Investments. Board
Memberships. Old school
ties. Exclusive
neighborhoods. Aviation
terminals. Meetings.
Restaurants. Hotels.
In
fact,
spread around the world though
they are, rare as they may be
among the teeming billions on the
planet, it is easy to see them as
a community and to see the
geography of that community take
shape at least in the mind's eye -
a geography that stretches from
South Kensington to the Upper East
Side of Manhattan; from St. Tropez
to Dubai; from the breeding
grounds at Harvard, Yale,
Cambridge, and Tokyo University to
meeting place on the boards of
cultural institutions, banks, and
political bodies. Linked
together by common interests, a
common culture, and private
aircraft, these islands become a
glittering, superpowered
archipelago amid oceans of
aspirants and of the
disenfranchised - oceans of people
who work for them, are buffeted by
their market decisions, are swept
along by their political impulses,
are profoundly influenced by their
views.
It
is
not a geography visible on any
map, [except
perhaps in books like this]
yet it
touches the lives in
the global era more
surely than do the
fading borders and old
distance scales found
on any common
globe. Over the
course of the next
several chapters, I
try to put that
geography into context
- in terms of issues,
history, and a more
detailed look at the
membership of this
emerging SuperClass.
Synopsis
Each
of
them is one in a million. They number
six thousand on a planet of six
billion. They run our governments, our
largest corporations, the powerhouses
of international finance, the media,
world religions, and, from the
shadows, the world's most dangerous
criminal and terrorist organizations.
They are the global superclass, and
they are shaping the history of our
time.
Today's superclass has achieved
unprecedented levels of wealth and
power. They have globalized more
rapidly than any other group. But do
they have more in common with one
another than with their own
countrymen, as nationalist critics
have argued? They control
globalization more than anyone else.
But has their influence fed the
growing economic and social inequity
that divides the world? What happens
behind closeddoor meetings in Davos or
aboard corporate jets at 41,000 feet?
Conspiracy or collaboration?
Deal-making or idle self-indulgence?
What does the rise of Asia and Latin
America mean for the conventional
wisdom that shapes our destinies? Who
sets the rules for a group that
operates beyond national laws?
Drawn from scores of exclusive
interviews and extensive original
reporting, Superclass answers
all of these questions and more. It
draws back the curtain on a privileged
society that most of us know little
about, even though it profoundly
affects our everyday lives. It is the
first in-depth examination of the
connections between the global
communities of leaders who are at the
helm of every major enterprise on the
planet and control its greatest
wealth. And it is an unprecedented
examination of the trends within the
superclass, which are likely to alter
our politics, our institutions, and
theshape of the world in which we
live.
Read
a
Sample Chapter
Superclass
The Global Power Elite and the World
They Are Making
By Rothkopf, David
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2008
Rothkopf, David
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374272104
Excerpt
Gentiana is a small restaurant that
would scarcely warrant a second glance
in any other village in Europe. It is
rather traditional, only slightly more
charming than the bland shops and modest
hotels around it. One nearby storefront
offers a remarkable array of Swiss Army
knives, another boxes of chocolates,
another fur hats and mountain gear. The
restaurant has a cozy, neighborhood feel
to it. Beside the door there is a
blackboard highlighting a few specials,
and on the ground floor there may be
seating for twenty if they are both thin
enough and friendly enough. Upstairs
there are a few small rooms for private
parties, the biggest of which seats ten
people squeezed in on either side of a
long narrow table. Most of its character
comes from a feel of woody intimacy, the
dark wood façade, dark wood
floors, dark wood tables. In fact, for
all its charm, it is definitely not a
place for claustrophobes—or people with
an extreme fear of splinters. The
reason to go to Gentiana is the fondue,
especially the cheese fondue, which is
offered in robust portions that recall
an era before cardiologists. My wife,
Adrean, has a special weakness for
fondue, and every year that we have gone
to the annual meeting of the World
Economic Forum in Davos we have gone to
Gentiana for her birthday. We make
reservations long in advance because
during the week of theJanuary meetings,
which are attended each year by more
than 2,000 business and government
leaders from around the world, getting a
table at Gentiana is not much easier
than getting one at renowned eateries
like Aragawa in Tokyo, Gordon Ramsay in
London, or Le Bernardin in New York.
Perhaps more surprisingly, for that one
week the clientele at this humble Swiss
bistro looks pretty much the same as
what you might find at those world-class
restaurants. Of course, even during
that week, there are still a few tables
at Gentiana occupied by locals. One
regular is a particularly garrulous
drunk who loves to hobnob with the CEOs,
heads of state, and rock stars who are
wedged in, elbow to elbow, spinning
hunks of bread on long forks in the pots
of bubbling Gruyère. The local
speaks only Swiss-German to the polyglot
crowds around him, and few understand
him, although judging by his demeanor
the casual observer is not sure whether
that has to do with the language he
speaks or the local beer that he favors.
No matter. He smiles and they smile, and
the general effect is cheerful and
relaxed. One afternoon during a
recent Davos, my wife and I were
hurrying along the sidewalk on our way
to Gentiana. This can be dangerous, as
the locals do not shovel away the snow
and ice lurks just about everywhere. In
fact, attendees at Davos can see with
some regularity central bank governors
and senior executives of the IMF and
other distinguished middle-aged men and
women swaddled in cashmere, calfskin,
and politically incorrect pelts of many
origins launched skyward, only to land
on their broader, softer regions. We
walked gingerly, therefore, but with
purpose, knowing we were meeting our
friends in just a few minutes. The
weather was typical. A light snow was
falling. It was very cold. But the
Alpine air was crisp and dry and
invigorating. We chatted about the
meetings, who we had seen and who we
hoped to run into. As we walked, we
reflexively did what most of the
visitors to this small mountain town do:
We glanced at the people passing us in
the street, trying to determine who they
were. (Given the nature of Davos, they
were likely to have been somebody.) It’s
a ritual made easier by the fact that
everyone at the meeting has to wear a
badge around his or her neck at all
times. The badge is used to get through
the many security checkpoints—there are
at least two Swiss soldiers and
policemen in Davos for every delegate
who attends the meetings—to register for
sessions, and to let everyone know who
you are. Your name is on the badge,
along with the organization you
represent. So too is your picture.
People tend to walk with their badges
dangling in plain sight so they don’t
have to fumble with them getting in and
out of buildings or past police. That’s
how it was for everyone except for the
universally recognizable—people like
Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Tony Blair,
Bono, or Angelina Jolie. The
badge-scanning move is so ubiquitous you
might call it the Davos dip: Bend the
knee slightly, cast a subtle glance
downward, assess and move
on. Leaving the Congress Centre and
walking along Davos’s main street, the
Promenade, we passed Thierry Desmarest,
the CEO of Total; a small cluster of
Harvard professors; a senior executive
of Saudi Aramco; and a woman pulling her
two small children on a sled. (She was
local and the sled seemed to hint at the
reason they don’t shovel the sidewalks.)
We stopped briefly to chat with Tom
Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, who happens to be my wife’s
boss, then paused a few steps later to
chat with an Indian-born U.S. venture
capitalist with whom I had some
business. It was a typical sample. Five
minutes along the Davos Promenade in
January offered a cavalcade of
freeze-dried economic leaders from three
continents. About two blocks from
Gentiana, I was grousing about how one
of the conversations that I had most
wanted to have had resulted in a
frustrating series of near misses. The
objective was a long-delayed chat with
Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian author of
The Alchemist. Coelho has sold more than
one hundred million copies of his books
worldwide and is, after the Harry
Potter author, J. K. Rowling, the
second-best-selling author on the
planet. He is also one of the few
cultural regulars at Davos, one of a
handful of people who might offer a
different perspective on the Davos
zeitgeist. We had intended to meet
almost a year earlier but, due to a
series of scheduling mishaps, had
repeatedly failed to do so. Finally, we
aimed for Davos, but I had yet to lay
eyes on him. What did I expect from a
man who lived on the other side of the
world and was constantly in motion—a
Brazilian who lived much of the time in
Europe and sold many of his books in
Russia? There was a little bit of hubris
in thinking we might ever be able to end
up in the same place at the same time.
And then: “Oh, my God,” said a voice I
did not recognize, “it’s you.” A
smallish man in a fur hat was staring at
my name badge. He had a graying goatee,
and he greeted me like a long-lost
cousin. It was Coelho, appearing almost
miraculously out of the Alpine mist as
if conjured by our
conversation. Passing along the
sidewalk from the Congress Centre where
we had just heard an address by the
German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and
comments from the Indian steel magnate
Lakshmi Mittal, through the stream of
big name boulevardiers, and then walking
directly into this icon of the global
literary scene—it was made clear again
that Davos was truly the incarnation of
Marshall McLuhan’s global village. It
was like small-town Planet Earth, or the
once-a-year Brigadoon of globalization:
a community connected to everywhere and,
in one way or another, to everyone.
Indeed, during the course of this
meeting, top trade ministers would
caucus to try unsuccessfully to rescue
global trade talks, Africa activists
would meet with corporate chiefs and
political leaders to seek funding for
medical aid programs, global warming
would “go mainstream” as mostly American
skeptics were persuaded by session after
session of expert views, and proponents
of different solutions for dealing with
everything from anxiety about immigrants
to anxiety about terrorism would present
their views directly to those in a
position to implement them. If, as
Hillary Clinton has asserted, it takes a
village to raise a child, this seemed to
be the village it took to run the
world. Coelho and I had never met,
but thanks to the wonders of the
information age we had enough e-mail
history that our conversation was
familiar and fairly ebullient. He
offered to have lunch, but we gestured
toward Gentiana, explaining that we had
a prior engagement. I eagerly made an
appointment to sit down with him later
that afternoon at the Kongress
Hotel. Over the three and a half
decades of its existence, this
mountaintop gathering clearly had done
more than merely transform Davos from
sleepy ski town to cosmopolitan hub.
More than a meeting place for
international business, government,
media, and cultural leaders, it now was
a symbol for the knitting together of
the world, literally and figuratively a
summit of summits. The concept of what
the political scientist Samuel
Huntington called “Davos man”—the global
citizen, the leader for whom borders
were increasingly irrelevant—described a
new leadership class for our
era. When founded in 1971 by Klaus
Schwab, the organization that would
become known as the World Economic Forum
had a narrower mission. It was focused
on convening European business leaders
for a discussion of that continent’s
rather uncertain economic
fortunes. To put the moment in
context, it is worth recalling that in
1971, Europe was still living in the
aftermath of World War II and was on the
front line of the cold war, still more
the self-anointed seat of civilization
than the “modern” Europe of more modest,
less imperial, more multilateralist
inclinations. In fact, it was not until
three years later that the first of
Europe’s great colonial powers,
Portugal, granted independence to
Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique.
The United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark
did not join the European Union until
1973. Though the Treaty of Rome had
initiated the creation of Europe’s
Common Market in 1957, it would be more
than two decades before the Maastricht
Treaty institutionalized the idea of a
true single market among the nations of
the continent. Europe was clearly in
transition at the moment of the forum’s
birth. I was in high school at the
time, and in college when the World
Economic Forum was really gaining its
sea legs in the late 1970s. I’ll admit,
international conferences didn’t really
capture my imagination when I was a
teenager, but my education was
absolutely colored with the Western
worldview of those times, with classical
education built on the presumed
superiority of European ideas and the
history and cultural contributions of
other regions seen as exotic and
secondary. At Columbia University, we
were required to take the “core
curriculum,” which was built around two
major courses. One, Humanities, was a
survey course of the defining works in
literature. The second, Contemporary
Civilization, was a survey of the great
works in political philosophy and
related disciplines, beginning with the
Greeks and continuing through the modern
era. The two courses, in retrospect,
were undoubtedly the highlight of my
education and have benefited me probably
every day of my life since I took them.
(Of course, I did not recognize this at
the time.) In Contemporary Civilization,
we read—at the pace of one significant,
sometimes mind-blowing, occasionally
mind-numbing book a week—the writings of
everyone (male and white) from Plato to
Descartes to Darwin. Somewhere around
Max Weber and other analysts and critics
of modernity, the curriculum got more
varied, with different professors
assigning different texts, as it was
harder to agree on what qualified as
essential reading. One of the more
popular assignments at that point in the
course was The Power Elite by C. Wright
Mills, a 1956 book that explored the
national power structure in the United
States. Mills, a former Columbia
professor of sociology, wrote the book
as a study of how America really worked.
His central claim was that at the top
tier of the business, government, and
military communities, there was a
remarkably small and overlapping echelon
of “deciders.” This national “power
elite” wascomposed of men whose
positions enable them to transcend the
ordinary environments of ordinary men
and women; they are in positions to make
decisions having major consequences . .
. They are in command of the major
hierarchies and organizations of modern
society. They rule the big corporations.
They run the machinery of the state and
claim its prerogatives. They direct the
military establishment. They occupy the
strategic command posts of the social
structure, in which are now centered the
effective means of the power and the
wealth and the celebrity which they
enjoy.Mills asserted that these elites
took similar paths to positions of
privilege, ensuring that many among
their homogeneous numbers knew one
another. In addition, they often crossed
sectors: from top roles in government to
top roles in business, from the the
White House cabinet to the boardroom,
from military commands to politics, from
one position of great responsibility to
another. Thus, Mills claimed, they
created a kind of interlocking
directorate for the United States of
America. Mills’s book was as much a
critique as it was a description of this
group and America’s midcentury
leadership. It explored, in meticulous
detail, the concentration of power among
a comparatively few corporations and
individuals, and the manifold links of
American leaders to key institutions.
The book then veered into polemic,
lamenting the disproportionate influence
of this group. One of the men who no
doubt inspired many of Mills’s points,
President Eisenhower, also best
illustrated them. A former supreme
allied commander in Europe as well as a
former president of Columbia University,
Eisenhower captured much of Mills’s
spirit in his farewell address as
president in 1961:[The] conjunction of
an immense military establishment and a
large arms industry is new in the
American experience. The total
influence—economic, political, even
spiritual—is felt in every city, every
State house, every office of the Federal
government. We recognize the imperative
need for this development. Yet we must
not fail to comprehend its grave
implications. Our toil, resources and
livelihood are all involved; so is the
very structure of our society. In
the councils of government, we must
guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial
complex. The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist. One
little-remembered aspect of Eisenhower’s
speech is that it contained not one but
two central warnings. While the first,
concerning the military-industrial
complex, is more often cited, he also
expressed equivalent concerns about the
emergence of what he called the
“scientific-technological elite.” His
concerns, like Mills’s, reflect the
zeitgeist of the 1950s, in which the
predominant historical memory was of
World War II and the subjugation of all
U.S. political, financial, and
industrial efforts to the goal of
military victory. The predominant fear
of the moment was of technology run amok
as manifested in the growing threat of
global thermonuclear war. Since
Eisenhower spoke in 1961, technological
innovation has not only fueled America’s
unprecedented growth but it has
empowered people in new ways; it perhaps
even helped to bring down the United
States’ cold war adversary, as the rise
of the information age made it
impossible for a closed society to
compete. Yet, despite the resilient
strength of America’s
military-industrial establishment,
defense spending and manpower have
receded from their highs during World
War II and the cold war years. In his
speech, Eisenhower speaks of a
3.5-million-person military; today the
U.S. military is only 1.5 million men
and women strong (with nearly 1 million
more in the reserves). He also notes
that at the time of his speech the U.S.
military budget exceeded the total net
income of all U.S. companies. Today,
while the defense budget exceeds $425
billion, the earnings of only the fifty
most profitable U.S. companies top that
number and, indeed, the combined
revenues of just the top two, ExxonMobil
and Wal-Mart, dwarf it, beating it by
more than 50 percent. Without a doubt,
corporate economic clout has grown
dramatically. Mills’s book is still
read and is now considered a classic
critique of America’s power structure,
but it is also clear that the world has
changed profoundly in the fifty years
since its
publication. Excerpted from
Superclass by David Rothkopf. Copyright
© 2008 by David Rothkopf. Published
in March 2008 by Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
Continues...
Excerpted from Superclass by Rothkopf,
David Copyright © 2008 by
Rothkopf, David. Excerpted by
permission.
