A recent presentation to the Global University of Sustainability. Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
About: Michael
Recent Posts by Michael
The Looming War Against China
Economic Logic has been Replaced by National Security Overrides The July NATO summit in Vilnius had the feeling of a funeral, as if they had just lost a family member – Ukraine. To clear away NATO’s failure to drive Russia out of Ukraine and move NATO right up to the Russian border, its members tried to revive their spirits by mobilizing support for the next great fight – against China, which is now designated as their ultimate strategic enemy. To prepare for this showdown, NATO announced a commitment to extend their military presence all the way to the Pacific. The plan is to carve away China’s military allies and trading partners, above all Russia, starting with the fight in Ukraine. President Biden has said that this war will be global in scope ...
Can the US Re-Industrialize?
Ep. 232 Michael Hudson. Transcript Ep 232 Macro N Cheese - Hudson https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-232-is-the-us-a-failed-state-with-michael-hudson/ Michael Hudson [Intro/Music]: America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor. You can't have both. You can't have a class war against labor and reindustrialization with the labor unionization that goes with it. Countries who let an oligarchy develop end up pushing their own economies into obsolescence and a kind of dark age. It's policy, and most of all, it's the policy of the Democratic Party's administration here. Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let's see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here's another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine. Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today's guest is none other than Michael ...
Economic Interference in the Global South
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x13cSy8S8To RADHIKA DESAI: Hi, everyone, and welcome to this 13th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the fortnightly show on the political and geopolitical economy of our times. I'm Radhika Desai. MICHAEL HUDSON: And I'm Michael Hudson. RADHIKA DESAI: And today, as last time, we are joined by Anne Pettifor to discuss the urgent issue of our time, the third world debt crisis. And as I said last time, we couldn't find a more authoritative guest for this show. Anne hardly needs any introduction, but I do feel I should remind everyone of what she's done, particularly in relation to the debt and also the fuller range of her contributions. Anne is a prolific writer on issues of debt, finance and development. And she has also been one of the most important activists on the issue of third ...
ZIRP’s only Exit path is a Crash
The United States’ Financial Quandary: ZIRP’s only Exit path is a Crash Abstract Interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, in an upsweep. The non-financial economy of production and consumption grows more slowly as income is diverted to carry the debt overhead. A crash occurs when a large part of the economy cannot pay its scheduled debt service. That point arrived for the U.S. economy in 2008, but was minimized by a bank bailout, followed by a 14-year boom as the Federal Reserve increased bank liquidity by its Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP). Flooding the capital markets with easy credit quintupled stock prices and engendered the largest bond market boom in U.S. history, but did not revive tangible capital investment, real wages or prosperity for the non-financial economy at large. Reversing the ZIRP in 2022 caused bond ...
Should there really be a Supreme Court?
Its role always has been anti-democratic. Vested interests create “checks and balances” primarily to make political systems non-responsive to demands for social reform. Historically, therefore, the checks are politically unbalanced in practice. Instead of producing a happy medium, their effect often has been to check the power of the people to assert their interests at the expense of the more powerful. Real reform requires a revolution – often repeated attempts. The Roman Republic suffered five centuries of fighting to redistribute land and cancel debts, all of which failed as the oligarchy’s “checks” imposed deepening economic dependency and imbalance. The Supreme Court is America’s most distinctive check. Its deepening bias since its takeover by “conservatives” claiming to be “originalist” interpreters of the constitution, has led to the most widespread protests since Franklin Roosevelt ...
America has Just Destroyed a Great Empire
Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great. Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.” Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching ...
Third World-Like Debt Crisis
A new Third World debt crisis? The need for system change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uxyjIFqi4o RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to this 12th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the fortnightly show on the political and geopolitical economy of our times. I'm Radhika Desai. MICHAEL HUDSON: And I'm Michael Hudson. RADHIKA DESAI: And today we are joined by Anne Pettifor to discuss an urgent issue of our time, that of the third world debt crisis. As we record this, this is the topic of the Summit on New Global Financing Pact called by Emmanuel Macron in Paris. And we couldn't find a more authoritative guest for this show. Anne Pettifor does not really need any introduction, and I'm only going to give one to remind ourselves of the range of her contributions. She's a prolific writer on issues relating ...
Yellen’s Daydream
Discussion by Michael Hudson with Kin Chi Lau, Global University, Hong Kong, June 5, 2023 There's a big dam on the Dnieper River that supplies all of the water to Crimea and they blow it up. Thousands of homes have been flooded. Naturally, the Ukrainians said the Russians did it. The reason that Crimea was assigned to Ukraine by Khrushchev in the 1960s was because the water and electricity area all came from the dam in the north of Crimea. All of that was blown up and flooded. When you blow up a dam, imagine that was happening in China and how that would be blown up. That's what happened. They blew it up. The dam on the Dnieper River that supplies water as well as electricity to Crimea was blown ...
A Peculiar Grift
https://youtu.be/pEHrI_llP8I Patrick Lovell Hi, my name is Patrick Lovell, and I want to welcome you to our latest effort in this podcast that I find myself incredibly compelled to do considering the confusion that we're all in the midst of. I'm a producer of a five part docuseries known as The Con that is currently available at www.thecon.tv. It's going to be whitewashed from history here shortly because unfortunately, there's no market for truth, which has led me to try to do everything I can given the massive confusion in this world about how things actually operate, considering everything that has come down. Now, the working title of this, and we'll try to sort this out as we move forward, but I'm thinking to myself, this is either the mechanics of corruption ...
