Mark Blyth is in the pub tonight, played by Sean Connery, as usual, and demonstrating again how far a man can go in political economy just by talking fast and infallibly with a strong Scots' accent.
Listen to our conversation:
Photo from Mark Blyth's Austerity video
MB: It depends on what you mean by "empire," right? This is the funny thing about American Empire. As an immigrant to the United States, along with hundreds of millions who have done it over the past hundred years, it's this funny empire that people keep wanting to join. It's a really weird thing. The Italians are the best at this, they got six US military bases on their soil that fly unimpeded missions to Afghanistan and God knows where else, whatever the Americans want to do, and then they come over here, probably flying Business Class to get here, and then moan about the American Empire. It's a strange creature, this one.
CL: Some of them come here to get out of range of American foreign policy.
MB: When the British had an empire you knew where you stood. You had no rights, you had only responsibilities. We owned the stuff and you got shat on. When the French had an empire it was even clearer. This is a very odd empire where you get preferential trading agreements, better access to markets, technology transfers, and then all the sort of benefits that go along with hanging around in the dollar club. Oh, and then we'll also do this thing called NATO where basically we'll bankroll your militaries for 35 years and we'll keep it going 20 years after the Cold War because it's just a good idea. If you had to design an empire from scratch and you could do whatever you want, this would not be it. This is a seriously funny empire.
One example of this. So let's go into Iraq for oil, right? Okay... But if you went out in 2002 and went on the spot market, and basically bought oil future contracts at about $36 a barrel, you could have bought the entire Iraqi oil stock for one quarter of what we spent on the war. This is the stupidest empire the world has ever seen. If there really was an empire, it should have fallen years ago.