good evening and welcome or politics i'm your host bill ford america strides the globe as an imperial power we actually fight in at least five countries afghanistan iraq pakistan colombia and the philippines the shadow of our military and corporations is everywhere why must capitalism morph into imperialism my guest tonight university of washington fessor of political geography mat explain crises of capitalism predicted one hundred fifty years ago by karl marx professor spork has written numerous articles and globalization his writing support the claim by karl marx that capitalism will bring about its own demise our current economic meltdown validate such claims it is my pleasure to welcome to more politics professor matt sparks thank you is america's so called war on terrorism actually an exercise in imperialism yes it is but it's an informal kind of imperialism not an old fashioned british imperialism that sends out just gun boats and bombs places from the a has a longer continuity a longer history connected to inform american imperialism through the twentieth century how would you define imperialism longdistance control of foreign lands and people is basically for the purpose of wealth extraction the landscape of our economy is not so well as ground hog how is it explained this is is indeed this is the wages of imperialism me repeat you said three trillion dollars to date on iraq alone a truly extraordinary number for an economy that's staggering out now does that explain the meltdown that we're witnessing it's connected to it but the explanations of the knot down that we're in today relate to it also simultaneously to a collapse in confidence in credit markets and the credit  industrial production and production of real estate all of those credit markets dried up in the latter part of two thousand and eight and suddenly we're facing a huge demand demand drop high unemployment and a disappearance of easy money easy credit and that's why that's basically why we have these auto companies in detroit declaring bankruptcy absolutely  then they're not alone a lot of other industries are in bankruptcy or close to bankruptcy and again this all relates to the imperial american imperialist policy there is a certain amount of imperial  overreach and some of the things the obama is investing in in now as a response to the crisis if it had happened instead of the iraq war i don't think this crisis would have taken the form it has taken so would this overreach as you call it is bankrupt american corporations banks brokerages insurance companies and the confidence of the consumer is basically broken which a lot of what the bush administration was doing so conspicuously in the middle east sort of tanishq that wall street side of the crisis but it spiraling into all or falling into the wider mainstream economy and the part of what is going to happen as a result of that is not just main street in the united states but main streets all around the world are going to be impacted as america's ability to function as the world's consumer of last resort which was itself predicated on easy money enough stuff for the germans what do you make of this tax cut fetish continues and it's basically limited to the very very rich what we've seen for the last well ever since carter regime is is a steady move away from a more redistributive welfare state way of organizing capitalism and more social democratic way of organizing capitalism in the us towards a system that has basically restored business cross power if we don't move towards more redistrict serious redistribution in america that gives real health care and real educational opportunity to everybody what we will see what we are  markets domestically they look for markets overseas you go you're creating more goods than there are consumers out there so you have to find new consumers in new markets for some of the capitals were in a frenzy to compete and what they did is it over built their productive capability ushering in a collapse the imperialism of that is it's not a good way of thinking about what we're seeing today big because the it's not just a national one country it could be a french member of the blues was a singaporean member of the blues was all and together on these trains national force riding the globalism the imperialism and the search for new markets mechanisms you get much more energy and economic activity that through finance then through actual production of goods and so it's it's not surprising that we saw this extraordinar you could also look at it very very simple terms as a fro back to the roman empire because there was that there was a sort of bread and circuses quality to easy money at the level of the consumer in the united states people had access to  two levels of borrowing that was unheard of by their parents and could take that borrowed money whether it was based on a home equity line of credit or just borrowing on credit cards and they take that cash and go and spend it at wal mart and get sells a big flat screen t ning that employment is not going to go away right and there's a lot of unemployment that's on scene there's a lot of underemployment where people are not working the as they really need to work to earn enough to  just american americanization of business and other lands right  that have to do that but what about in south america we see bolivia peru a whole block of countries that are saying yankee go home and they're doing a very effective what kinds of really represents a a much more encouraging kind of blowback as i'm saying it's not it's not blowback in the terroristic senses it's a real response to and genuinely humane response  less socialist responses you've seen in brazil is actually much closer to being a sort of i guess a scandinavian style we're going to have socialism white to organize the extraction of oil from this new fiat find that brazil has located off its shores and where he wants to create a nationally known oil company to extract that oil but water in bolivia they were kicked out in the in the going to ecuador where there are actually profiting off and dirty water dealing diseases just in efforts to make profit not putting investments basically taking from someone else what you want without doing strange value for it but also locking locking those people out from their means of production so that then they become dependent on  what you're selling and they become dependent on the privatized water they depict become dependent on in processed foods privacy previously they they had access to farm lands they could create their own food those markets such as china the chinese don't have a sort of a grand strategic plan to take over from the united states they're simply trying to stabilize the capitalist transformation of what was once but is no longer a communist country it will it's been a very successful capitalist production machine let's talk about russia had a dip before nine hundred ninety eight that shocked the world financial communit part of the world supposedly incorporate an unincorporated part of the world into a global capitalism as many radical marxist historians and job if is and political scientists have pointed out ways of supporting the their loved ones and basically supporting civil civil society in these countries this leads to the formation of regional blocs doesn't it i guess there with nationalism and racism and consumerism you could have probably less consumerism but you could have what precipitated world war two right as i said it at the beginning are i am worried that that might be where we had in the united states in the last we quickly moved to a more redistributive form of capitalism a new new deal if you like we need to restore  ordinary people's livelihoods and give them a chance to to to feed their families to keep their families healthy without resort to credit card debt or we in  of capitalist leadership that honest and and farenheit minded but of course a lot of the ways in which that order that global order the rover order of the clinton years was was set who defined themselves by themselves as neo conservatives they're also completely committed to market rule free markets market fundamentalism less taxation for the rich and so on so they are there aren't neo liberals world order that then fit for control for bombs what is the next stage of capitalism this one world one world rule or are we going to find socialism or or something is going to happen totally hundred percent certain we're going to continue to ruin the global environment there are a number of scenarios one can one can speculate on that i think the most likely unless we we actually  rise up and actually get involved in politics the more likely kind of scenario is is that we will muddle through this contemporary financial crisis and america's ability to continue to  buy its way out of trouble will diminish over time and china will grow as a capitalist power at the same time and there will be increasing commercial rivalry between china and the us an increasing tension between the two superpowers to tell the viewers how what's really important should be go on to get a books up a book on marx and understand capitalism not just from standing in an unemployment line waiting for the unemployment check that's about to run out that would cause some problems what do they need to do we talked about the new new deal with confronting the confronting money power putting taxes back on the people that have all the power curbing specular defining its which is how they're making their money right well i think you're right on both counts for both both suggestions of where we should be going as a as an academic  this accumulation by dispossession but he has a terrific book a brief history of neo liberalism which outlines what neo liberalism is much more detail than we've been able to go into today naomi klein's book on disaster capitalism and never to refer read but just reading these books about current state of affairs state of of the world isn't obviously going to do anything on its own one of the dangers i think that we have to learn from not buy into the immigrant bashing no that's red herring what about consumerism should we see that is a distraction as well yeah it's a it's a kind of bread and circuses and i think the temptations of consumerism  that danger oh well we can call the future whatever we want to call it but we have to act thank you very much i hope to have you back for a sequel on american capitalism and