Who Owns the World?

Recently, renowned US political analyst, Noam Chomsky, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), spoke with publisher David Barsamian, on the new American imperialism which seems to be substantially different from the older variety in view of the fact that the United States is a declining economic power and is therefore seeing its political power and influence wane.
Excerpts of this article titled: “Who Owns the World?” is as follows:
I think talk about American decline should be taken with a grain of salt. World War II is when the United States really became a global power. It had been the biggest economy in the world by far for long before the war, but it was a regional power in a way. It controlled the Western Hemisphere and had made some forays into the Pacific. But the British were the world power. World War II changed that. The United States became the dominant world power. The US had half the world’s wealth. The other industrial societies were weakened or destroyed. The US was in an incredible position of security. It controlled the hemisphere, and both the Atlantic and the Pacific, with a huge military force. Of course, that declined. Europe and Japan recovered, and decolonization took place. By 1970, the US was down, if you want to call it that, to about 25 percent of the world’s wealth – roughly what it had been, say, in the 1920s. It remained the overwhelming global power, but not like it had been in the 1950s. Since 1970, it’s been pretty stable, though of course there were changes.
Within the last decade, for the first time in 500 years, since the Spanish and Portuguese conquest, Latin America has begun to deal with some of its problems. It’s begun to integrate. The countries were very separated from one another. Each one was oriented separately toward the West, first Europe and then the US. That integration is important. It means that it’s not so easy to pick off the countries one by one. Latin American nations can unify in defense against an outside force. The other development, which is more significant and much more difficult, is that the countries of Latin America are individually beginning to face their massive internal problems. With its resources, Latin America ought to be a rich continent, South America particularly. Latin America has a huge amount of wealth, but it is very highly concentrated in a small, usually Europeanized, often white elite, and exists alongside massive poverty and misery. There are some attempts to begin to deal with that, which is important – another form of integration – and Latin America is somewhat separating itself from US control.
There’s a lot of talk about a global shift of power: China is going to become a new great power, perhaps the wealthiest power. Again, one should be pretty reserved about that. For example, many observers comment about US debt and the fact that China holds so much of it. A few years ago, actually, Japan held most of the US debt, now surpassed by China. Furthermore, the whole framework for the discussion of US decline is misleading. We’re taught to talk about a world of states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations theory, there’s what’s called the “realist” school, which says there is an anarchic world of states, and those states pursue their “national interest.” It’s in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like survival. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. Part of the doctrinal system in the United States is the pretense that we’re all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that’s radically false.
In the 18th century, Scottish political economist, Adam Smith, had said that the people who own the society make policy, that is, the “merchants and manufacturers.” Today power is in the hands of financial institutions and multinationals. These institutions have an interest in Chinese development. So if you’re, say, the CEO of Walmart or Dell or Hewlett-Packard, you’re perfectly happy to have very cheap labor in China working under hideous conditions and with few environmental constraints. As long as China has what’s called economic growth, that’s fine. Actually, China’s economic growth is a bit of a myth. China is largely an assembly plant. China is a major exporter, but while the US trade deficit with China has gone up, the trade deficit with Japan, Taiwan and Korea has gone down.
The reason is that a regional production system is developing. The more advanced countries of the region – Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – send advanced technology, parts and components to China, which uses its cheap labor force to assemble goods and send them out of the country. And US corporations do the same thing: They send parts and components to China, where people assemble and export the final products. These are called Chinese exports, but they’re regional exports in many instances, and in other instances it’s actually a case of the United States exporting to itself. Once we break out of the framework of national states as unified entities with no internal divisions within them, we can see that there is a global shift of power, but it’s from the global workforce to the owners of the world: transnational capital, global financial institutions.