Naked Capitalism has published a transcript The Destiny of Civilization: An Interview with Michael Hudson on Economic Development, Rentierism, Debt, China.

There is an audio that only goes to about 1 hour and 17 minutes. The transcript goes way beyond that. Here are numerous excerpts worth noting.

The idea of the Biden Administration — really of both the Republican and Democratic Parties — is that since America has moved its industry and manufacturing to Asia in order to lower the wages here, how can Americans continue to get high-living standards, if it doesn’t produce raw materials or manufacturers? How can it be a post-industrial society, getting rich on economic rents and interest on and profits paid by foreign countries? How can America get rich by being a parasite? That was a problem that the Roman Empire had, and we know what happened to the Roman Empire. It was a problem that the British Empire had, and we know what happened to that: it can’t be done. This attempt to make America into a post-industrial society means a rent-seeking, neo-feudal society, treating the rest of the world as a colony under globalization. How can that work? Well, It’s not working. Biden’s war, the NATO war, against Russia in the Ukraine is the catalyst dividing the world into two. That’s why Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that the Ukraine war is part of a process that will go on for at least two decades, because it takes time for the world to split away into a neo-feudal West and a productive, basically socialistic Asia, or industrial capitalist and socialist Asia, and Eurasia, along with much of the global South.

Another:

You can’t say, I’m a libertarian, I’m against strong government, and then hope that the landlords are going to end up being taxed. That’s an oxymoron.

Another:

You need a state to act as the agent of social planning, so that it’s not the banks and the rentier sector that does it, as occurred in the U.S. and Western Europe. China is doing what most of the world was doing before Western civilization took off and in an oligarchic form.

Another:

The U.S. now is in a state of political paralysis locking itself into the current status quo, which means that the U.S. cannot have any kind of an industrial recovery, because that requires a federal policy to check the overhead of the banking system, the real estate sector, and the insurance sector. You can’t have a Supreme Court that would prevent any kind of a public health system, a single-payer public health system, and yet 18% of America’s GDP is for medical care. America has priced its labor and its industry out of world markets by having to pay so much debt service, so much insurance for medical care, home insurance, and real estate rents. As long as this revenue is paid out in the form of rent, you’re not going to develop.

Another:

There’s no group in America, no political party, that is offering an alternative to the current political and economic system in America. The fact that you have two parties in America that are really the same party, means that there’s no room for a new party to come and, as it would in Europe, get represented in Congress. In Europe, you can have any number of parties, and they would be represented in Parliament in proportion to their votes. A third party would be kept off the ballots in the U.S., and that’s why Bernie Sanders and others decided not to run as a third party; there’s no way we can meet the court challenges by the Republicans and the Democrats together. Sanders had to pretend to run as a Democrat. But we’ve seen that the Democrats don’t want any part of anything progressive. There’s an illusion that somehow the Democrats can be progressive because they have people who can’t find any alternative, who are running as a Democrat. Whereas in Europe, they are running as nationalists, as third parties, e.g., Alternative für Deutschland.

Closing quote:

There cannot be any progress in America today led by the Democratic Party, which is today the ideologically Right-wing party that has turned what should be an economic problem into an ethnic and non-economic problem. It’s like the old industrial capitalist was supposed to have said, “if I can get half the working class fighting against the rest of the working class, then we have won.” That’s the Democratic Party. They asked, “how do we do it?” We divide the working class into ethnicities, ethnic identity, gender identity.

I recently was reminded of this video that I posted on December 30, 2020 as A Hard Look at Rent and Rent Seeking with Michael Hudson & Pepe Escobar.

An interactive discussion on wealth inequality and the “Great Game” on the control of natural resources.

In this webinar organized jointly by the Henry George School and the International Union for Land Value Taxation, Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar will unpack one of the most destructive features of our economic system and the many different ways it drives wealth inequality.

I will embed the video here again.

I learned so much from watching this again. Maybe because I have grown my understanding in the intervening years. There is an education here about why the western media cannot give you an accurate report on any of this. What China and Russia are trying to do is so far from western concepts of how the economy ought to work that people steeped in western economic ideas cannot conceive of what China and Russia are trying to accomplish. I do not know how many western viewers can let go of what has been taught to them to get as much out of this video as I have.

This is the debut of Glenn Greenwald’s new stream on Rumble. It is a bit lengthy, but he has some really good things to say. It does take an annoying 3 minutes and 40 seconds before he actually starts speaking.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has the article A Nobel Award for the Wrong Model.

This one is going to require a lot more thinking on my part. I have to reconcile this description with my thought that private banks do not create money, but they create promises of money.

The Institute for New Economic thinking has this great interview – How Corporations “Get Away With Murder” to Inflate Prices on Rent, Food, and Electricity.

Antitrust expert Hal Singer shows how big businesses in certain industries are taking advantage of inflation worries to jack up prices far beyond their cost increases, all the while raking in robber-baron profits.

This is a nice complement to my previous post Federal Trade Commission chair Lina M. Khan is interviewed by Mark Glick

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has the article Federal Trade Commission chair Lina M. Khan is interviewed by Mark Glick.

A very informative interview. Lina Khan’s appointment was hailed as an unusually good choice for this agency. I have not been hearing much about what she has been doing since her appointment. This interview fills the void that I have felt. She also discusses many tools that the FTC had that had not made it to my attention before. Anti-trust is not the only tool as I had been assuming.