Naked Capitalism has republished this interview Michael Hudson on Truth Jihad Radio Discussing Super Imperialism, Rentierism, and the American Political Duopoly.

Michael Hudson has posted this on his web site as Falling into Line: Turning Endless Deficits into a Power Base.

I like Naked Capitalism’s title better than Michael Hudson’s title. The transcript is the same in both places.

Here he starts to explain that there are two opposing ways to go about the investment in infrastructure

Michael Hudson: There are two kinds of infrastructure spending. The United States in the late 19th century developed the whole philosophy of infrastructure spending. And Simon Patton, who was the first economics professor in the United States at a business school—he was a business school professor at Wharton School—said: “Infrastructure is a fourth factor of production alongside labor, land and capital. But the purpose of infrastructure isn’t to make a profit, it’s for the government to invest and provide low cost essential needs education, transportation, communication and to provide low cost infrastructure so that the American industrialists can employ labor that doesn’t have to pay a high cost for education, doesn’t have to pay a high cost for health care, doesn’t have to pay a high cost for communications or cable TV or telephones or anything else.” Well, all this changed after the 1980s with the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Here is more of the explanation of infarstructure.

Michael Hudson: So that’s part of the system. Infrastructure as the Democratic Party sees it is a travesty of what American infrastructure was a century ago. And they don’t realize that the way infrastructure is financed, and what it’s priced for, is the key. Of course, Bernie Sanders said, “look, American companies won’t have to pay their employees so much money if the government pays for all of their medical costs.” Right now, eight percent of America’s GDP goes for health insurance and health care. That’s higher than any other country, and the health care is much worse because it’s all done for profit and done as cheaply as possible, and it’s been financialized.

Here he makes a point I have been trying to convey in several articles on my blog (which you are reading). I have been castigating the MMT experts for not hammering on this enough.

This quantitative easing has created trillions and trillions of dollars, but it’s all been used to buy stocks and bonds and package mortgages. It hasn’t been used to spend into the economy, which is what Stephanie wants. So the question is: if the government’s going to create money, is it going to be spending into the economy, which is what the MMT group that I’m a member of is advocating? Or is it going to be given to Wall Street just to support stock and bond prices and promote financialization? That’s really the the great issue financially in economic policy today.

The above excerpt was Michael Hudosn’s answer to these misconceptions expressed by the interviewer. I decided to show you the right answer before I showed you the wrong question.

Kevin Barrett: Ellen Brown has been on the show many times, talking about the need to make banking a public utility. And I recently read Stephanie Shelton’s[sic] The Deficit Myth. She argues that we can fix all kinds of problems and bring back full employment and have all sorts of goodies simply by having the government spend more money. This is the modern monetary theory position. And maybe that is true to a certain extent in the U.S. due to these privileges that you describe in Super Imperialism. I doubt if it’s nearly as true anywhere else, for all these reasons that you’ve been describing. Do you think that if the U.S. ever does opt for more of a Bernie Sanders style modern monetary theory approach, would they quickly run into the limits of spending money due to these international factors?

The interviewer, Kevin Barrett, introduced this interview by claiming to have been a follower of Michael Hudson for years. Even people who think they understand MMT can sometimes get it so wrong that I almost want to cry. How could he have been reading Michael Hudson, and get this basic stuff so wrong?

I just realized that I know the answer to my last question. The interviewer said he has had Ellen Brown on his podcasts. Ellen Brown poses as an expert, but she gets a lot of this stuff very wrong. Having listened to Ellen brown myself, I tend to stay away from listening to her anymore.

By the way, the name is Stephanie Kelton.

CounterPunch has the Richard D. Wolff essay What China Learned From U.S. Capitalism’s Development.

U.S. capitalism was, in certain ways, the world’s most successful capitalism until recently. Better than the capitalist systems of Britain, Germany, and Japan, U.S. capitalism avoided two key traps. First, it found a remarkable way to manage the capitalist-worker class struggle for a long time before it lost that capacity. The United States also found a way to organize its imperial rule without the overt colonialism that provoked rising resistance that eventually became too costly and unmanageable for Britain, Germany, Japan, and other colonial powers. But in recent decades, U.S. capitalism failed to manage its class struggles or to reverse the decline in its informal imperialism.

Chinese leaders have learned, implicitly or explicitly, from how U.S. capitalism lost those capacities.

Wow, this explains how I have viewed recent economic history. Richard D. Wolff saves his speculative view on what the future holds until the very last sentence or two. I think holding that back is what makes this article so much more impressive than some of Wolff’s other essays.

YouTube has the video Fadhel Kaboub On Saving The Planet With #MMT — The Political Vigilante.

Graham interviews Professor of Economics, Dr. Fadhel Kaboub, about MMT and it’s impact on saving the earth from climate collapse.

Fadhel explains the key feature of Modern Monetary Theory in a way that would be hard not to understand. Specifically, the irrefutable explanation focuses on how the USA funded WW II. The audio from Graham Elwood’s side is not the greatest, but Fadhel’s audio is much better.

Richard Wolff presented this video China – US’s First Real Competitor in a Century.

For the first 30 minutes of this talk, I was thinking so highly of this video, that I almost couldn’t wait to share this on my Facebook page. It all turned sour at about 30 minutes. Here is the comment I posted about his attempt to explain USA debt to China.

I was going to praise this talk highly until you went off the rails at about 30 minutes. This is where you let your ignorance of Modern Money Theory get the best of you. You talked about the problem of the USA paying China for the money that China “lent” to the USA by its purchase of USA Government bonds. You wonder what will happen if China demands repayment of the loans. You should wonder more deeply about that very question. What kind of repayment of these loans can China expect? What do we have to give them to replay the loans? The only thing they are legally entitled to for repayment is more USA money. Who can create this money out of thin air? The USA Government agency called the Federal Reserve Bank creates this money. The money does not come from collecting taxes from the USA citizens who are also recipients of money created by the FED. Just having you think about this ought to be enough to give you pause.

As I post this, I am not sure I can stand to watch the remaining 20 minutes or so of this video. Now that I have gotten this off my chest, maybe my curiosity will take me through the rest of this piece.

Naked Capitalism has this great post Why the US Supply Chain Crisis Is Intractable and Will Get Worse

Readers bwilli123 and Carolinian flagged a must read post by Ryan Johnson, I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End. You really really really need to consume it in its entirely. It makes a detailed, cogent case as to why the America’s ports are a mess and why there is no simple and even not so simple way out. No wonder Pete Buttigieg is in hiding, um, on paternity leave, rather than putting his hands on the supply chain tar baby.
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Now the labor shortages are only one part of the problem, but the point is that this is more addressable than Johnson suggests if you assume a muscular government. That alternative likely did not occur to Johnson since it has been absent during his professional life, except to save the banking system during the financial crisis and mainly the well off in March 2020. It might take six weeks to two months to see across the board improvements in manning levels, while doing nothing assures more trucker attrition.

I have seen one network news story that goes anywhere near this issue. That story concluded that if we clear the ports, we are then faced with a warehouse bottleneck.