[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Financial Crisis and American Power

[Bill Totten]

Subject:  Missile Defense


An Interview with Leo Panitich

The B u l l e t (February 16 2009)


What is your assessment of the relationship between this serious financial crisis 
emerging foremost in the US and American power and economic decline?

I don't think that US hegemony has waned, and I don't think it's about to wane in 
the very near future, despite the current financial crisis.

In my view, the better term for the US role in the world is Empire. That captures 
in my mind the way in which the American state plays a role of coordination and 
oversight and crisis-managing for global capitalism, in the absence of a global 
state.

It managed to do that in my hemisphere, on this side of the Atlantic, by 
penetrating other, independent states, in South America and North America, before 
the Second World War. Its capital penetrated those states and encouraged the 
restructuring of those states in a way that was consistent with fostering trade 
and the protection of the property rights of US capitalists, or in fact of 
foreign capitalists in general.

That became generalised after the Second World War, not so much with the Third 
World as with Europe and Japan, which became increasingly Canadianised. European 
and Japanese capital, in different ways, were penetrated by American capitalists. 
Conditions for that were established politically. That penetration was very deep, 
and it was done in collaboration with the ruling classes of those countries. This 
was imperialism by invitation. The ruling classes saw the American state as the 
safest guarantor of capital's rights, especially in the countries where the 
labour movement was strong.