{"id":29230,"date":"2021-11-24T00:26:40","date_gmt":"2021-11-24T05:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=29230"},"modified":"2021-11-24T00:56:15","modified_gmt":"2021-11-24T05:56:15","slug":"michael-hudson-on-truth-jihad-radio-discussing-super-imperialism-rentierism-and-the-american-political-duopoly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2021\/11\/24\/michael-hudson-on-truth-jihad-radio-discussing-super-imperialism-rentierism-and-the-american-political-duopoly\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Hudson on Truth Jihad Radio Discussing Super Imperialism, Rentierism, and the American Political Duopoly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naked Capitalism <\/em>has republished this interview Michael Hudson on Truth Jihad Radio Discussing Super Imperialism, Rentierism, and the American Political Duopoly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Michael Hudson has posted this on his web site as Falling into Line: Turning Endless Deficits into a Power Base<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I like Naked Capitalism’s title better than Michael Hudson’s title. The transcript is the same in both places.<\/p>\n

Here he starts to explain that there are two opposing ways to go about the investment in infrastructure<\/p>\n

\nMichael 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\u2014he was a business school professor at Wharton School\u2014said: \u201cInfrastructure is a fourth factor of production alongside labor, land and capital. But the purpose of infrastructure isn\u2019t to make a profit, it\u2019s 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\u2019t have to pay a high cost for education, doesn\u2019t have to pay a high cost for health care, doesn\u2019t have to pay a high cost for communications or cable TV or telephones or anything else.\u201d Well, all this changed after the 1980s with the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan and Bill Clinton.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is more of the explanation of infarstructure.<\/p>\n

\nMichael Hudson: So that\u2019s 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\u2019t realize that the way infrastructure is financed, and what it\u2019s priced for, is the key. Of course, Bernie Sanders said, \u201clook, American companies won\u2019t have to pay their employees so much money if the government pays for all of their medical costs.\u201d Right now, eight percent of America\u2019s GDP goes for health insurance and health care. That\u2019s higher than any other country, and the health care is much worse because it\u2019s all done for profit and done as cheaply as possible, and it\u2019s been financialized.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\nThis quantitative easing has created trillions and trillions of dollars, but it\u2019s all been used to buy stocks and bonds and package mortgages. It hasn\u2019t been used to spend into the economy, which is what Stephanie wants. So the question is: if the government\u2019s going to create money, is it going to be spending into the economy, which is what the MMT group that I\u2019m 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\u2019s really the the great issue financially in economic policy today.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\nKevin 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\u2019s[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\u2019s nearly as true anywhere else, for all these reasons that you\u2019ve 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?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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? <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

By the way, the name is Stephanie Kelton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-29230","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29230"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29241,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29230\/revisions\/29241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}