The Saker has published the article Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place.

Michael Hudson’s Major Lecture at the Global University in China on July 11th, 2022 – and posted with Dr Hudson’s permission

Micheal Hudson has laid it all out in blunt terms in a single lecture. I have selected a few excerpts to give you some idea of what is in this lecture.

The lesson of history is thus that a strong government regulatory power is required to prevent oligarchies from emerging and using creditor claims and land grabbing to turn the citizenry into debtors, renters, clients and ultimately serfs.
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The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank monetized $8 trillion to save the financial elite’s holdings of stocks, bonds and packaged real estate mortgages instead of rescuing the victims of junk mortgages and over-indebted foreign countries. The European Central Bank did much the same thing to save the wealthiest Europeans from losing the market value of their financial wealth.

But it was too late to save the U.S. and European economies. The long post-1945 debt buildup has run its course. The U.S. economy has been deindustrialized, its infrastructure is collapsing and its population is so deeply indebted that little disposable income is left to support living standards. Much as occurred with Rome’s Empire, the American response is to try to maintain the prosperity of its own financial elite by exploiting foreign countries. That is aim of today’s New Cold War diplomacy. It involves extracting economic tribute by pushing foreign economies further into dollarized debt, to be paid by imposing depression and austerity on themselves.
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NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the catalyst fracturing the world into two opposing spheres with incompatible economic philosophies. China, the country growing most rapidly, treats money and credit as a public utility allocated by government instead of letting the monopoly privilege of credit creation be privatized by banks, leading to them displacing government as economic and social planner. That monetary independence, relying on its own domestic money creation instead of borrowing U.S. electronic dollars, and denominating foreign trade and investment in its own currency instead of in dollars, is seen as an existential threat to America’s control of the global economy.

U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall. Imposing trade and financial sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries that resist U.S. diplomacy, and ultimately military confrontation, is how America intends to “spread democracy” by NATO from Ukraine to the China Sea.

YouTube has the short video Where The Term Redneck Comes From.

If you don’t know this story, you’ll never look at the word the same again.

This is just a window into the sometimes shocking, subversive and untold history of the United States, from the film Plutocracy by Scott Noble.

Watch the full documentary here: https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/plutocracy/

Sometimes learning just a little history is good to refresh the society’s memory of how we got to where we are. Sometimes we really need the Second Amendment.

Richard Medhurst has the video Are You Criticising the West, You Commie? | Red Scare 3.0

Some people have been so scared by the ridiculous propaganda that they can’t think straight anymore.

One thing I recognized when the Soviet Union collapsed was that the threat of communism had been so scary to the oligarchs that it forced them to treat their workers better than they wanted to. Once the threat of communism was gone, the oligarchs could treat workers as badly as they could get way with. It made no difference if communism worked or not, it was the fear that workers would like it that kept western oligarchs in check.

Once west’s workers start to understand the mixed economies of China and now Russia, they will realize how badly they are being treated. This is why the oligarchs in the west feel that they need to restart the red scare.

Once Hillary Clinton realized that her invention of Russiagate could serve two purpose, she charged full speed ahead. One purpose was to absolve her of any possible blame for running a disastrous campaign for President in 2016. The other purpose was to justify her neoliberal philosophy of suppressing the workers, some of whom she called “the deplorables”.

CBS News is one source that has covered the news story Supreme Court marshal wants crack down on picketing, protests outside justices’ homes.

The marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court has asked Maryland and Virginia officials to step up the enforcement of laws she says prohibit picketing outside the homes of the justices who live in the two states.

“For weeks on end, large groups of protesters chanting slogans, using bullhorns, and banging drums have picketed Justices’ homes,” Marshal Gail Curley wrote in the Friday letters to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and two local elected officials.

Oddly enough, this activity is covered in the USA Constitution in the First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Can the Supreme Court be charged with violating picketers’ civil rights? Who would arrest them? Who would try them? Where would they be jailed to serve out their sentences?

Naked capitalism has the article The Fed Tackles Kalecki.

Given the nature of the current supply shocks affecting our weak Covid-battered economies, orchestrating another Volcker-style scenario by creating yet another deep recession is chilling. Besides, it would appear to be somewhat in conflict with the above assessment of former US Fed Chair Janet Yellen in 2019 as well as with the research of these two US Fed economists, Ratner and Sim, who suggest that the slope of the Phillips Curve is actually relatively flat and it has remained so for decades, for reasons that have little to do directly with the Volcker shock of the early 1980s.

Does anybody factor in the de-industrialization of the USA economy which is facilitated by China’s ability to substitute its industry for the industry the USA is giving up? How long can this substitution continue to increase? As long as it is more profitable to let China do all the manufacturing, why should the USA capitalists put their money into less profitable increases in domestic capacity? Leaving out de-industrialization and de-dollarization is leaving out the main factors influencing our economy. How can you have a good analysis and prediction when you leave out the most important factors in your models.

The Register has the article Intel to sell Massachusetts R&D site, once home to its only New England fab.

I worked for DEC for 13 years from about 1974 to 1988. My office moved to HL02 when the building was first opened. The nomenclature of HL for the Hudson buildings was in memory of Henry Lemaire who was VP of semiconductors before he died shortly before the Hudson facilities were built.

Garland Nixon has this almost 2 hour episode UKRAINE UPDATE (June 18, 2022) – with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern.

I first learned about this episode from the Naked Capitalism post Oil Markets Could Face A Doomsday Scenario This Week. That post focused on the last 20 minutes or so of the video, but I think it is worth seeing the whole thing.

YouTube has the video A Philosophy for a Fair Society (Part I) | Michael Hudson & Jonathan Brown

Welcome to the Shepheard Walwyn podcast and a two part interview with Michael Hudson, perhaps to the world’s most influential (but rarely acknowledged) economist. Michael has had a remarkable career starting off as a practical or reality-based economist working for a variety of institutions looking and how banks really behave.

He looked at the balance of payments economics for David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank; worked for Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute, and advised the US State Department on how they could fund the Vietnam War when the gold was running out. He now advises the Chinese Government on how to maintain an industrial economy and avoid the traps the US Finance economy has fallen into.

Michael’s most famous work is Super Imperialism, the Economic Strategy of American Empire but has also written extensively on ancient economies in the Near East.

He is one of our longest running writers having co-written the soon to be re-released eBook, A Philosophy for a Fair Society with Kris Feder and the late GJ Miller and. Incidentally, this book is a great introduction to his whole body of work so do check it out!

In this first episode we looked at how economics got corrupted from industrial economics where people made money by making things, to a finance economy where a small elite group makes money by manipulating financial instruments. There’s some meaty topics but I promise it’s worth your time.

Michael Hudson goes into details that I have never heard before in any of his writings. There are a couple of places where he talks about things happening in the 1980s and 1990 when he actually means 1880s and 1890s.

Here is the second part of the interview.

The links to the two halves of the interview are published on Michael Hudson’s web site as Economic Rent and Exploitation

The Zero Hour has the interview, Prof. Richard Wolff: How to Fix Inflation.

A lot of babble that I can agree with, but some of it I don’t.

My memory of the time of Nixon was what he did not succeed in bringing down inflation. The combination of Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan succeeded in controlling inflation by creating such a deep recession that people couldn’t afford to buy things anymore. What they didn’t buy included gasoline which broke the power of OPEC.

In Nixon and in Roosevelt’s times we didn’t depend on outsourcing so much to supply consumer demand. We can’t put a price freeze on what China sells us. We can raise the prices of what China sells us by fighting a trade war, but that is the opposite of keeping prices down. We can also fight an economic war with Russia to take their energy supplies out of the market. Our economic war with Russia only makes inflation worse.

As Michael Hudson explains on so many of the posts that I have put on this politics blog of mine, the financialization of the USA economy puts such a debt burden overhead on our workers, that we can no longer compete in the international market for labor.

YouTube has the video The Return of Inflation – Michael Hudson.

On May 13, 2022, Michael Hudson spoke a panel discussion entitled “The return of inflation: Realities, Perceptions, Politics. You can watch the entire event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBtGIA4urDE&t=0s‘

Nobody has mentioned yet that if we can get a high enough inflation, business can start paying $15/hour in cheaper money in order to maintain the status quo.