If you wish to step into the light and actually understand who engineered and runs our economy and for whose benefit it is run, this video is for you.

In this 63-minute video two brilliant economists destroy the economic myths that are sold to Americans by Wall Street as well as its captured politicians and academicians. A current myth is that greedy workers are the core of the inflation problem which can be cured by driving up interest rates causing greater unemployment and a less demanding cohort of workers. Interestingly, even Federal Reserve research has now documented how some 50% of inflation comes from companies padding profits by needlessly gouging consumers.

If you care about why you don’t receive the wages you deserve and how much of your monthly bills are intrinsic to our predatory financial system, this discussion by two of the world’s great economists is for you.  However, if you cling to the simplistic propaganda lines manufactured by the 1% and the cable news economists they feed, skip this searing expose:  A compelling refutation of the lies of government and quasi-government spokespeople, the corporate media and captured academics.  Pay special attention to minutes 34, 43, 46, and 56.

Tragically, most Americans cling to the erroneous beliefs that the politically engineered redistribution of wealth up the economic pyramid is either slowing or impossible to stop without making things worse, i.e. Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no alternative.” Cling to the belief that we still live in an age of industrial capitalism rather than an age of predatory financial capitalism.  Most of all they cling to the idea that the institution created by, of and for bankers, the Federal Reserve, puts the interests of working Americans before billionaires. That when chairs of the Federal Reserve talk about the dangers of “upward wage pressures” as Alan Greenspan repeatedly did that they are pro-labor and not, first and foremost, protectors of the value of the assets owned by the 1%.

However, if you want to learn why inflation is not simply too much money chasing too few goods, why wages have not kept up with inflation — or profits – for decades, this discussion by two brilliant economists will bring you out of the cellar to understand the anti-worker and anti-family economy that Wall Street has engineered.

You have a choice. You can again tune in to your cable channel and listen to the economists who have been wrong at nearly every turn for decades or listen to economists who have been repeatedly right.  For example, it is well documented that Michael Hudson was one of the eight economists in the world who clearly warned of the collapse of the housing market with the cover story in Harper’s Magazine before the collapse. Who has clearly explained in extensive treatises and books how our financial system is a return to feudalism in which the majority live at the mercy of the few.

He clearly explains how payments made for taxes, mortgages, credit cards, student debt, health care and utilities are all part of a financial system engineered to siphon the wealth created by workers to a predatory financial class that produces nothing of value – just debt and interest charges for the already wealthy.

Radhika Desai has also punctured plutocratic propaganda, especially the belief that pandemic-related payments went into the pockets of ordinary people in her books and articles.  Instead, she has shown how the little that made it into the hands of working families went into paying down debt and had little to do with inflation because the payments had a limited role in increasing demand for goods.

These thoughtful discussions by Desai and Hudson should be part of a deprogramming course for those listening to cable news or, more specifically, Chicago School economists. And perhaps even more important, they should be the basis of policy recommendations by politicians such as the proposal by former Congressman Dennis Kucinich for Medicare for All (HB 686).

Dave Kelley

Policy & Issues Advisor to Dennis J. Kucinich