Monopoly capitalism and models of resistance. This week, author Michael Hudson on Donald Trump's fake economics. It's all coming up on the Laura Flanders Show, the place where the people who say it can't be done take a back seat to the people who are doing it. Welcome. Infrastructure, we're going to start spending on infrastructure big, said Donald Trump days before he unveiled his $1.5 trillion infrastructure budget proposed by his administration, but as economists have pointed out, Trump's proposed budget requests only $200 billion in federal funds and slashes billions in transportation funding, billions more from water, energy. The rest of the funds comes, supposedly, from the private sector and states. Well, last year I talked to economist Michael Hudson about this exact thing, infrastructure. That is our roads, ...
Tollbooth Trump
The Real News Network, February 13, 2018. SHARMINI PERIES: It's The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. President Trump presented his infrastructure plan on Monday. The long-awaited plan proposes to spend $200 billion in federal funds over the next 10 years. This is to be complemented with another 1.3 trillion in spending from cities, states, and private investors for a total of 1.5 trillion. Another major component of the plan is to reduce red tape and approval processes so that projects are approved much faster. Here's what Trump had to say in presenting the plan. DONALD TRUMP: This morning, I submitted legislative principles to Congress that will spur the biggest and boldest infrastructure investment in American history. The framework will generate an unprecedented $1.5 to ...
Alluring Infrastructure Income
'J is for Junk Economics': Michael Hudson on TRNN (2/5), February 28, 2017. Trump's infrastructure plan will privatize all the benefits for the financiers and make sure that the population at large gets zero benefit from it while paying the costs, says economist Michael Hudson SHARMINI PERIES: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm speaking with Michael Hudson, the author of, J is for Junk Economics, a Guide to Reality in the Age of Deception. Don't miss it. We're going to be talking about this book, and some of the misleading concepts that are out there, in terms of economics, and understanding economics. Being able to talk about economic concepts with a bit more knowledge than we have, requires reading this book. So, thank you for joining us, Michael. MICHAEL HUDSON: It's good ...
Trump Infrastructure Plan = Developer Welfare
SHARMINI PERIES: It's The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. While protestors and police are clashing on the inaugural parade route in Washington, D.C., the newly sworn-in President of the United States is lunching with the establishment in Washington -- Some of the very people he called out in his inaugural address. Let's have a look. DONALD TRUMP: We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people. CROWD: (applause) DONALD TRUMP: For too long a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. SHARMINI PERIES: On to discuss ...
“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 ...
Veblen’s Institutionalist Elaboration of Rent Theory
Michael Hudson's new book The Bubble and Beyond has just been released and can be purchased here. Speech given at the Veblen, Capitalism and Possibilities for a Rational Economic Order Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, June 6th, 2012 Simon Patten recalled in 1912 that his generation of American economists – most of whom studied in Germany in the 1870s – were taught that John Stuart Mill’s 1848 Principles of Political Economy was the high-water mark of classical thought. However, Mill’s reformist philosophy turned out to be “not a goal but a half-way house” toward the Progressive Era’s reforms. Mill was “a thinker becoming a socialist without seeing what the change really meant,” Patten concluded. “The Nineteenth Century epoch ends not with the theories of Mill but with the more logical systems of Karl Marx ...
Simon Patten on Public Infrastructure and Economic Rent Capture
Rentier income is now treated as just another profit opportunity to gain from investing tangible or financial capital. Land and monopolistic rent-seeking activities are lumped together as “capital,” stripping away the classical distinction between economic rent and normal profit.
