The final paragraphs of the interview. (I'm a bit vague on who says what in the text since the roles are not labeled.) But I assume these paragraphs indicate shared opinion of the two:
***** Look at what Obama would like to do: Obama would like to keep the government funded and keep us paying interest on our Treasury debt. But he would also like the old Bowles-Simpson "Grand Bargain" of cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He came into office talking about that, and he hasn't really lost his drive to do it. So he's got what is essentially an orthodox austerity agenda, which would please most of the mainstream parts of Wall Street and the Fortune 500.
And on the other side, you've got these Republicans. Maybe the leadership is fairly rooted in reality, but you have 40 or 60 of them who - to the business mind-set and many other people as well - look completely bonkers.
They will just begin to see the Republican Party as an unreliable partner - they've caused nothing but turmoil, and they may have outlived their usefulness. They were very useful in getting tax cuts and deregulation, but the Democrats are now pretty reliable on that agenda - not tax cuts, but deregulation and business-friendly policies and austerity and budget-cutting and all that sort of stuff that business interests like. It may just make the Democrats look more and more like a saner, more reliable partner. And people who are not allied with Big Business, the traditional Democratic electoral base, will have nowhere else to go.*****
Tentatively: It seems to me that the whole interview revolves around the interests of "the capitalists" (meaning most of them), _not_ the interest of _capital_ as such, and certainly not the fate of _capitalism_. I doubt that anyone among either the ruling elites or (if Doug is right in this category) the small capitalists thinks in terms of the legitimacy or salvation of capitalism; they see no danger to it (nor even bother to wonder if there might be). I think they are correct in this.
The "worst" to be feared, it seems, is some sort of horrible financial panic, with lots of businesses going bust & millions of workers losing jobs or having pay/benefits reduced. And that, horrors, might mean loss of U.S. power.
How so? Doesn't U.S. power operate in the interests of Global capital? Is there any other power anxious to take over the disciplining of African states if they stray?
Lenin/Luxemburg style colonialism (imperialism) is long gone. There is not going to be a WW3 between competing capitalist power blocs.
And keep Rome, et cetera out of it. Capitalist empires (and particularly the Empire of Capital) are as different from tributary empires as gazelles are from mushrooms.
And there is one statement by Doug that I don't quite understand. Earlier in the interview he declares: " The financial markets are really core institutions of class power."
"Class Power" (I would assume) means power to maintain capitalist relations. Also, "financial markers" are still financial markets even in the worst panics. As such they would still be core institutions of capitalist relations. There have been panics before; I presume (assuming the continuation of capitalism) there will be panics in the future. The personnel of the "ruling class" might change radically, but that would not mean a change in "class power."
Carrol
P.S. Jim ("turbulo") is of course correct in his response to WS.