Dad’s Many Proverbs

By Saturday, June 17, 2017 Diverse No tags Permalink

These proverbs were collected by my father, Carlos Hudson, during the time he was jailed under the Smith Act in 1941, ostensibly for “Advocating the overthrow of the government by force and violence,” It was called the “gag act” because it put a gag on what one could read or say. Guilt was determined by whether one had the works of Lenin and Trotsky on one’s bookshelf. The Stalinists urged the death penalty for the Smith Act, not realizing that it would be used against them after World War II. The Minneapolis 17 who were convicted had taken the lead in organizing the Teamsters Union and ...

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Harper’s Slow Crash

By Monday, June 5, 2017 Interviews , Permalink

As published in Harper's Magazine. Two years before the 2008 Wall Street crash that toppled the global economy into deep recession, Harper’s Magazine published a dark prophecy of what was to come. In “The New Road to Serfdom,” economist Michael Hudson laid out how millions of Americans had taken on huge debts to buy houses on the presumption that they could later sell them at a profit. “Most everyone involved in the real estate bubble so far has made at least a few dollars,” he wrote. “But that is about to change. The bubble will burst, and when it does the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find out that what they really signed up for is the hard servitude of debt ...

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