Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: Trump’s Brilliant Strategy to Dismember U.S. Dollar Hegemony.

The end of America’s unchallenged global economic dominance has arrived sooner than expected, thanks to the very same Neocons who gave the world the Iraq, Syria and the dirty wars in Latin America. Just as the Vietnam War drove the United States off gold by 1971, its sponsorship and funding of violent regime change wars against Venezuela and Syria – and threatening other countries with sanctions if they do not join this crusade – is now driving European and other nations to create their alternative financial institutions.

14 hours ago I posted a question “How long can the USA wage economic war against other countries before they band together to rebel?” Now I see the answer in this article.

Here is that previous posting on my Facebook page Internal US Gov’t Document Outlines Program of ‘Economic Warfare’ on Venezuela

The Real News Network has a 5 part series Michael Hudson on TRNN ‘J is for Junk Economics’.

Economist Michael Hudson, author of the newly released ‘J is for Junk Economics,’ says the media and academia use well-crafted euphemisms to conceal how the economy really works.

I am just now getting to understand why I want to read this book.

Here is the first segment.

Michael Hudson on TRNN ‘J is for Junk Economics’ 2 of 5

Michael Hudson on TRNN ‘J is for Junk Economics’ 3 of 5

‘J is for Junk Economics’: Michael Hudson on TRNN (4/5).

Michael Hudson on TRNN ‘J is for Junk Economics’ 5 of 5

Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: He Died for Our Debt, Not Our Sins.

As many people turn towards their Christian and Jewish faiths this Christmas and Hanukkah in an attempt to make sense of the year that was, at least one economist says we have been reading the bible in an anachronistic way.


In fact he has written an entire book on the topic. In And Forgive them their Debts: Credit and Redemption (available this spring on Amazon), Professor Michael Hudson makes the argument that far from being about sex, the bible is actually about economics, and debt in particular.

When I first read this article and then posted it on Facebook, I remarked that this may be a bit much for some people to take. I have no opinion on him myself. I then stumbled across another interview with Michael Hudson, The history of debt forgiveness, that I almost didn’t watch because it just would have been repetitive. I didn’t realize how much it would enlighten me about the book in ways that I had not yet understood.

Najed Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: The Vocabulary of Economic Deception.

For a long time, I have suspected that rising GDP was no longer a measure of a growing economy. Somehow, the non-productive income being “earned” by the financial sector was getting added to the accounting of GDP. This article is the first time that I have seen an expert confirm my suspicions.

But the rentier classes have taken over the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) to depict their takings as actual production of a service, not as overhead or a transfer payment, that is, not as parasitic extraction of other peoples’ earnings.
.
.
.
Classical economists would have subtracted this financial rake-off from output, counting it as overhead. After all, it simply adds to the cost of living and doing business. Instead, the most recent statisticians have added this financial income to the Gross National Product instead of subtracting it, as the classical economists would have doneit or simply not counted it, as was the case a generation ago.
.
.
.
Today’s ‘reformed’ GDP format pretends that the economy has been going up since 2008. A more realistic description would show that it is shrinking for 95 percent of the population, being eaten away by the wealthiest 5% extracting more rentier income and imposing austerity.

As for federal government deficits, Michael Hudson posed the question this way:

The great question is, what is the government going to spend money on, and how can it spend money into the economy in a way that helps growth? Imagine if this trillion dollars a year that’s spent on arms and military – in California and the districts of the key congressmen on the budget committee – were spent on building roads, schools, transportation and subsidizing medical care. The country could become a utopia. Instead, the rentier classes have hijacked the government, taking over its money creation and taxing power to spend on themselves, not to help the economy at large produce more or raise living standards. Special interests have captured the regulatory agencies to make them serve rent extractors, not protect the economy from them.

Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: Ukraine’s “Operation Vulture” and Labor Protests.

Emptying out Ukrainian business bank accounts will leave empty shells. With Ukraine’s economy broken, the only buyers with serious money are European and American. Selling to foreigners is thus the only way for managers and owners to get a meaningful return – paid in foreign currency safely in offshore accounts, outside of future Ukrainian clawback fines. Privatization and capital flight go together.

So does short-changing labor. The new buyers will reorganize the assets they buy, declare the old firms bankrupt and erase their wage arrears, along with anyother bills that are owed. The restructured companies will claim that bankruptcy has wiped out whatever the former firms (or public enterprises) owed to workers. It is much like what corporate raiders do in the United States to wipe out pension obligations and other debts. They will claim to have to “saved” Ukrainian economy and “made it competitive.”

Who could have predicted this would be the result of the Ukraine taking the West’s deal instead of the deal Putin offered? Well, just about everyone whom I quote on this blog, and they did predict exactly this. But seriously, who could have predicted this?

Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson on the IMF’s Tender Ministrations in Ukraine and Greece.

This RT interview with Michael Hudson focuses on the appalling state of the Ukraine economy and the role of the IMF, both in its policy-violating rescue package there and on a more general basis.

The section with Hudson starts at 13:45.

Yes, I know RT is a Russian production. Skeptics are going to say, “What do your expect a Russian show to say about the Ukraine?”

The other side of that skepticism is that our lame stream media is a production of the oligarchs. What can you expect them to be hiding?

Another way to look at this is to realize that these are the true views of Michael Hudson. I have heard him express them in other venues, some of which are discussed on this blog. There aren’t any mainstream outlets in the US that will let him express these views, so where else could he possibly go to say what he thinks?

There just don’t seem to be any objective facts anymore that everyone can believe, if there ever were any.

Naked Capitalism has the post Michael Hudson: The War on Pensions – The US Budget Anti-Pension Law. He uses the Teamster’s Pension Fund as an example of  how the recently passed US  budget attacks pension funds.

But let’s look more closely at the alleged source of the problem. It’s not just that there are so many fewer employees per retiree. The Teamsters Central States Fund is a prime example of Wall Street mismanagement. Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust and other firms make the decisions, not the Fund’s own board. A recent report has found that “Roughly a third of the pension system’s shortfalls — or almost $9 billion – can be traced to investment losses accrued during the financial industry’s 2008 collapse. These losses were in addition to more than $250 million in fees paid by the plan to financial firms in just the last 5 years.”

To my friends who think that what this country needs is more political compromise, I say this is what political compromise looks like.  If you are wiling to give up your retirement security to pay for the financial benefit of the ultra-wealthy, then you should be pleased that President Obama did not veto this compromise.

Naked Capitalism has the article Jeffrey Sommers/Michael Hudson: Russia, Crimea and the Consequences of NATO Policy.

Russia today has watched covert attempts from the US State Department to the National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs to break up their country as part of what is becoming a triumphalist global pattern. This threatens to remake their “near abroad” into a neoliberal periphery. Today’s confrontation has taken on an existential character for Russia since it saw NATO’s moves toward Georgia as cutting too close to the bone. The prospects of NATO assimilating Ukraine (Kiev) represents a seizure of Russia’s “heart”: the very ancestral home where Russia was founded and on which it repelled the fascist invasion in the Great Patriotic War–as it had a millennium earlier against the German Crusading Knights pledged to exterminate the Russian-Greek Orthodox population.

Most Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the deal he made with NATO. Russian diplomats have stated clearly that Ukraine is a line that cannot be crossed regarding potential NATO expansion. It is as if foreign agents worked in Texas to mobilize a violent ethnic minority to rejoin Mexico and then place a hostile military alliance on the US border.

My purpose in publishing the links to these articles is not an effort to condone what Russia is doing.  Instead it is an attempt to understand what may be behind their policies.  Whatever actions we decide to take in response to Russian actions, they are unlikely to work if we do not understand the Russians.  An action we might think should encourage the Russians to change course in a direction we prefer, might just have the opposite effect if we do not understand Russian thinking.  In fact, I think this is exactly what is happening.  This is why I urge our own diplomats and leaders to try to understand what is happening from the other sides’ point of view.

Also tucked into this video is an explanation of why Occupy Wall Street wants to avoid making specific demands at this point in the life of the organization.

As I see it, there are two ways to treat the video below.  One way is to view it with the attitude that you are going to look for the flaws in the argument so that you can ignore what is being said. The other way is to try to learn something from what Hudson says and try to pick out the ideas that you find significant and worth more thought.

Even if you find these ideas more radical than your brain can manage, you can view this as only a mild extreme that could occur if the “system” refuses to respond to the concerns of the protesters.

Naked Capitalism has the article Debunking “The Big Short”: How Michael Lewis Turned the Real Villains of the Crisis into Heros by Yves Smith.

I hate to give any attention to Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, since the wildly popular book told a fundamentally misleading story of the crisis which sadly has become conventional wisdom. And it wasn’t just harmlessly inaccurate; it directed public and even lawmaker attention away from the real drivers of this debacle.

If you are going to see the movie, you can read this article first to inoculate yourself from falling for the “heroes”, or you can watch the movie without reading the article to see if you can figure out for yourself that the “heroes” were really just as vallainous as the “villains” of the movie.

Maybe I am giving myself more credit than I deserve, but I remember coming away from the book with the thought, “Wait a minute, those guys that made out like bandits by taking down the insurance companies really were bandits. Had poetic justice been served, they would have walked away with nothing, too.”

You can see in just what way Michael Hudson’s explanation Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. It is the classic case of the 1% rigging the system so that they avoid being left holding the bag. It could have been handled so that the 1% were left holding the bag they created, and the taxpayers were left with whatever real assets there were. In a true democracy, the 99% would have won.