More at The Real News Edited transcript Michael Hudson: Obama's "bargain" on social security reform will push more retirees into poverty in exchange for a minor increase in high end income tax - a class that receives most revenue from capital gain. Obama's Social Security reform April 11, 2013. PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. President Obama released his budget, and the most controversial piece of it is he wants to make some cuts to Social Security. Now here's a little bit of what he said: "Most economists agree that the chained CPI provides a more accurate measure of the average change in the cost of living." This chained CPI is at the heart of the controversy, because critics are saying this is in fact ...
Thatcher – ‘Sorry You’ve Lost Your Job’
More at The Real News Edited transcript PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher has passed away, and of course around the world people are debating her legacy. Henry Kissinger said she was a great defender of Western interests. She's known as the woman who stood her ground, the Iron Lady. I guess the question is: stood her ground for whom? Now joining us to give his take on Margaret Thatcher is Michael Hudson. He's a former Wall Street financial analyst. He's a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His latest books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. Thanks very much for joining us, Michael. MICHAEL HUDSON, ...
“Let us glory in our inequality.”
Failed Privatizations - the Thatcher Legacy By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond”. This is from my book on privatization, written some 15 years ago, never published. As in Chile, privatization in Britain was a victory for Chicago monetarism. This time it was implemented democratically. In fact, voters endorsed Margaret Thatcher’s selloff of public industries so strongly that by 1991, when she was replaced as prime minister by her own party’s John Major, only 35 percent of Britain’s voters supported the Labour Party – half the proportion registered in 1945. The Conservatives sold off public monopolies, used the proceeds to cut taxes, and put the ...
Mrs. Thatcher’s Mean Legacy
The Queen Mother of Global Austerity and Financialization Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers We typically honor the convention to refrain from speaking ill of the recently departed. But Margaret Thatcher probably would not object to an epitaph focusing on how her political legacy was to achieve her professed aim of “irreversibly” dismantling Britain’s public sector. Attacking central planning by government, she shifted it into much more centralized financial hands – the City of London, unopposed by any economic back bench of financial regulation and “free” of meaningful anti-monopoly price regulation. Mrs. Thatcher transformed the character of British politics by heading a democratically elected Parliamentary government that permitted financial planners to carve up the public domain with popular consent. Like her actor contemporary Ronald ...
