Sunday, April 22, 2012

The Corrupt Left and Austerity: Thus Spake Michael Hudson

(By Joshua)

I recently discovered economist Michael Hudson. I've been exposed to him in the past, but I never really paid attention to him. Currently he is hitting banks and government austerity measures with a vengeance. Browsing through many of his lectures one in particular caught my attention. I was riveted by his attack on the so-called Left. He lashes out at European Socialists for being the true implementers of recent reinvigorated pillage-capitalism. (In my opinion it is reminiscent of Social-Democrats' betrayal of international solidarity, in favor of nationalist-war during World War I.) This video I'm posting is from the Modern Monetary Theory summit in Italy last month. I'm also adding a short interview with him on RT about the summit. As I fished around the web I also found some great transcripts from other parts of his presentation. The one I have here I think is especially herculean.  
Whenever you have a misunderstanding of reality year after year, decade after decade, and now for a century, when a false picture of the economy is painted you can be sure that there is a special interest benefiting.  A false picture of reality does not happen by nature; it is subsidised.  And the banking sector has subsidised a junk economics that is taught in the universities, broadcast from your newspapers, mouthed by the politicians, whose election they sponsor, to try to make you believe, that you’re living on Mars in a different kind of a world—instead of the actual country that you’re living in—and to pretend that there is no financial class that is trying to grab what belongs to the public at large.  This is what ends up with a difference between central bank creation by the government with the government aims of economic growth and full employment, as compared with commercial bank credit that aims at economic shrinkage, at austerity, at lower wages, at lower output, so that it can do to you what the commercial banks are doing to Greece, to say give us your ports and your land and your tourist areas and your water and sewer systems, so we can charge you for water and sewer.  And we can take the money that you had expected to get in pensions and we can scale it down, so that we can pay ourselves...This is what it took an army in times past.  And today it’s done without an army, as long as you will be passive and believe the science-fiction of the world that banks are painting.  Thank you.

MMT Summit Italy 2012 (9/12) - Michael Hudson - Corrupt Left



Michael Hudson, MMT: World's First Major Conference, Rimini



No comments: