As published in Counterpunch The Democrats could not have won so handily without the Citizens United ruling. That is what enabled the Koch Brothers to spend their billions to support right-wing candidates that barked and growled like sheep dogs to give voters little civilized option but to vote for “the lesser evil.” This will...
USA
Debt Ceiling Set For Progressive Repealing
Mr. Obama’s scare tactics to get Democrats to vote for his Republican Wall Street plan The Wall Street bailout melodrama should be viewed as a dress rehearsal for today’s debt-ceiling non-crisis. You know that the debt kerfuffle is as melodramatically staged as a World Wrestling Federation exhibition when Mr. Obama makes the blatantly empty...
Wall Street's Euthanasia of Industry
Michael interviewed on Guns N Butter with Bonnie Faulkner Listen here Transcription “When I was in Norway one of the Norwegian politicians sat next to me at a dinner and said, “You know, there’s one good thing that President Obama has done that we never anticipated in Europe. He’s shown the Europeans that we...
Greece now, US soon
Geithner says, wait a minute, American banks have made huge billion-dollar--maybe, for all we know, a trillion-dollar bet that the Greeks will repay. They've made derivative plays, they've made cross-party insurance, and American banks would lose money. Now, if there's a choice between American banks losing $1 and Europe going into neo-feudalism for a...
Obama's Bushism
I almost feel naïve for being so angry at President Obama’s betrayal of his campaign promises regarding taxes. I had never harbored much hope that he actually intended to enact the reforms that his supporters expected – not after he appointed the most right-wing of the Clintonomics gang, Larry Summers, then Tim Geithner, Ben...
Mr. Obama’s Most Recent “2%” Sellout is his Worst Yet
Now that President Obama is almost celebrating his bipartisan willingness to renew the tax cuts for the super-rich enacted under George Bush ten years ago, it is time for Democrats to ask themselves how strongly they are willing to oppose an administration that looks like Bush-Cheney III. Is this what they expected by Mr....
America’s China Bashing: A Compendium of Junk Economics
It is traditional for politicians to blame foreigners for problems that their own policies have caused. And in today’s zero-sum economies, it seems that if America is losing leadership position, other nations must be the beneficiaries. Inasmuch as China has avoided the financial overhead that has painted other economies into a corner, nationalistic U.S....
The Big Bank Job: The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway
Counterpunch The banksters’ plan now is for icing on the cake – to take Mr. Paulson’s $700 billion and run. It’s not a “bailout of the financial system.” It’s as giveaway – to insiders, to sell out all their bad bets. Companies across the board will get rid of their bad mortgages, and also...
A Cautionary Tale About Politicos and Financiers: Mr. Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal
Counterpunch Present discussions of the mortgage mess are lapsing into an unreal world. Advocates of the $700 bailout are now rounding up a choir of voices to proclaim that the problem is simply a lack of liquidity. This kind of problem, we are told, can be solved “cleanly” (that is, with no Congressional add-ons...
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout: Will the Cure be Worse than the Disease?
Counterpunch Saturday’s $700 billion junk mortgage bailout is the largest and worst giveaway since a corrupt Congress gave land grants to the railroad barons a century and a half ago. If it goes through, it will shape the coming century by giving finance unprecedented power over debtors – homebuyers, industry, state and local government,...
Books by Michael Hudson
