"What they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment"

[JohnyCanuck]

How the Chicago boys wrecked the economy: An interview with Michael Hudson
By Mike Whitney

Sep 4, 2008, 00:17

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation). In 1990 he helped established the world’s first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark.

Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002

SNIP

MW: The housing market is freefalling, setting new records every day for foreclosures, inventory, and declining prices. The banking system is in even worse shape, undercapitalized and buried under a mountain of downgraded assets. There seems to be growing consensus that these problems are not just part of a normal economic downturn, but the direct result of the Fed’s monetary policies. Are we seeing the collapse of the Central banking model as a way of regulating the markets? Do you think the present crisis will strengthen the existing system or make it easier for the American people to assert greater control over monetary policy?

Michael Hudson: What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down? The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10 percent now own 85 percent of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90 percent been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.

You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite. (my emphasis /jc)

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3702.shtml

[Growler]

1. Excellent article! K&R

[Hekate]

2. KnR

[Waiting For Everyman]

3. Are there still any questions on whether this disaster is intentional after

reading that? The lies from experts on financial tv and newspapers are just for conning the peasants. And everybody believes the financial lies (from credit reports to the global economy) - there are very few who don't think they're "written in stone", or laws of the universe, or somesuch.

Nobody who is less than a multi-millionaire has any business voting Repub. That's the only interest served, or ever going to be.

[FatDave]

4. Wow. That makes so much sense.

A friend and I have been trying to figure out what the conservative endgame is. I think this is it.

[DontTreadOnMe]

6. They WANT to bankrupt the Federal System

...wait until the REPUGs start suggesting that we need to cut Social Security & Medicare... in order to "save" the country.

[Waiting For Everyman]

7. That was the mantra in the 1990s.

That's what they're really sending McC in to do... throw Social Security at their bottomless hole deficit. Then they can run it up again one more time, just to make sure we're screwed enough. Pretty soon, the only jobs will be in the military or its subcontractors... we're almost there now.

[alfredo]

25. "the Shock Doctrine."

[Waiting For Everyman]

5. The Club for Growth is behind Palin & her Lt. Gov.

Nuff said on that.

I've been a fan of Henry Liu's (mentioned in the article) for some time because he's one of the few who admits a global minimum wage is necessary. His website's an education in itself, and he's very good at explaining these things...

http://www.henryckliu.com/

[JohnyCanuck]

23. Thanks for the link n/t

[Kablooie]

8. They are marching forward. They've already rolled back the Magna Carta.

[Mnemosyne]

33. Carlyle Group actually bought it last year or earlier this year.

:puke:

[deutsey]

9. High-tech feudalism

Keep you doped with religion, and sex, and TV
And you think you're so clever, and classless, and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

[pnorman]

10. EXACTLY!

Many hard-core conservatives are quite open about "rolling back the New Deal", and even rolling back the 20th Century (about the same thing). Check this out: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030512/greider

But it's the Neo-con "base", the whacked-out "fundies", who want to roll back the entire Age of Enlightenment"!

pnorman

[ladjf]

11. Ignorance and faulty cognitive processing are their tools of

choice. "Keep em dumb and confused so that we can control em."

[Solly Mack]

12. K&R

[bemildred]

13. Yeah, "Neo-feudalism" is what it is, based on corporations instead of land.

The corporation is the hew fiefdom. The CEO is the new feudal lord, and we are the peonage.

[JohnnyBoots]

22. I am waiting for these fieifdoms to hook up with Blackwater and their ilk.

[bemildred]

26. Mercenaries are a very feudal sort of thing, and very un-democratic.

It's the only way to be sure the guys with the guns have their loyalties in the "right" place. It is very telling that after the VietNam war, the US abandoned its citizen army in favor of an employee army, which has been continually transitioned towards a predominantly "private" military. The current situation is the result of a 30+ year effort that began BEFORE Raygun was elected. The primary impetus for the change, IMHO, was that the citizen army back then rebelled, they killed their own officers and refused to fight the stupid imperial war that our "leaders" were so intent on. That is also a major element in the pursuit of high-tech war and expensive weapons, the desire to circumvent the need for citizens on the battlefield willing to fight and die for their country.

The loss of the VietNam war is blamed on a lot of things, but not on the one true cause, the US citizen soldier is what ended that war, a high point of real democracy for the USA. Since then it has all been reactionary propaganda and increasing disfunction and illegitimacy in the ruling classes.

One can have fun drawing parallels to the post-Napoleonic reactionary period in Europe leading up to 1848.

[undeterred]

14. "roll back" just seems so inadequate to "The Enlightenment"

[L. Coyote]

15. I argue for incompetence and hyper-development.

The economic system has grown too complex to easily manage or control and the managers are political incompetents.
Many are in politics not because they know economics but because they want to impose their religion on the world.
And the managers gave themselves a big tax cut, and their excess capital speculations and government borrowing led to this point.

[Monk06]

16. See Marx was wrong. It's not feudalism > capitalism > communism

The correct model is feudalism > capitalism > feudalsm

[Ripley]

17. Drownin' it in the bathtub.

Sick fucks.

:nuke:

[lonestarnot]

18. A when does this next war start?

[crickets]

19. Excellent article.

MW: Do you see the Federal Reserve as an economic organization designed primarily to maintain order in the markets via interest rates and regulation or a political institution whose objectives are to impose an American-dominated model of capitalism on the rest of the world?

Michael Hudson: Surely, you jest! The Fed has turned “maintaining order” into a euphemism for consolidating power by the financial sector and the FIRE sector generally (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) over the “real” economy of production and consumption. Its leaders see their job as being to act on behalf of the commercial banking system to enable it to make money off the rest of the economy. It acts as the Board of Directors to fight regulation, to support Wall Street, to block any revival of anti-usury laws, to promote “free markets” almost indistinguishable from outright financial fraud, to decriminalize bad behavior -- and most of all to inflate the price of property relative to the wages of labor and even relative to the profits of industry...

The problem is that none of this appears in the academic curriculum. And the silence of the major media to address it or even to acknowledge it means that it is invisible except to the beneficiaries who are running the system.



Point by point, Hudson shows he has their number. It ain't pretty.

[PATRICK]

20. Global warming, etc.

yeah, they do believe it. This is a Road warrior state for you and me and splendid castles and islands for them replete with the last standing armies of Blackwater guards and push button finagling of terror weapons to make sure competitive nation states go at each other's throats. They deny nation state progress in alternative energy or climate control. They arm hot spots with nukes and nuclear plants. Even if all these things are not tied up in a coherent conspiracy, the sheer overwhelming thrust of greed makes it all of a piece, a castled kingdom united against the human race. They don't belong to what they rule. That whiff of dependency or relativity is absolutely abhorrent to them.

Like 9/11 the ruling theory is that disaster is inevitable, why not manipulate it now and game the suckers? Always the goal comes first before even the reality. Should a comet be moving to strike earth, inhibit all knowledge, all attempts to deal with it and prepare only to game the aftermath for PERSONAL advantage only. Repeat, only. The boldness of this is of course possibly suicidal, but being in the back of the line in order to be the top of the heap is the gamble they are always willing to take and sole(SOLE) talent they possess for success and domination over the sane who must relate somehow to the commons.

These are the people you must quickly throw out of the lifeboat, no matter your moral foundation.

[The Stranger]

21. This may be the best post and thread I have ever read.

I thank you.

[alfredo]

24. Leo Strauss, is the man who inspired the neo con movement. He gave

them the justification for their draconian policies. We are not smart or moral enough to self governing. A small elite should control all power and knowledge. Post enlightenment thought was wrong.
Read:

"The Shock Doctrine" Naomi Klein
"Conservative Without Conscience" John Dean

The man who inspired John Dean to write his book
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

[Romulox]

27. Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee are both "Chicago Boys", aren't they? nt

[hfojvt]

28. except that he is wrong

This crisis is not creating debt peonage. It is erasing it. Debtors are defaulting. When debtors default in droves, it is the creditors who feel most of the pain. It's the old saying "If you owe somebody $100, they can push you out a window. If you owe them $100 million, you can push them out a window." Except it is very easy to get to $100 million. That's only 1,000 people who each owe $100,000.

The Great Depression itself, more than the New Deal, wiped out a large amount of the inequality of the 1920s.

[Nikki Stone1]

29. This is exactly right!

The Catholic Church is also trying to do this.

[applegrove]

30. Yup.

[nichomachus]

31. What we are seeing is the tail end of Prescott Bush's attempt to overthrow the US government

in the Business Plot of 1934.

Had FDR hanged Bush and his co-conspirators, as he should have, we might have stopped these people in their tracks.

Instead, they went underground and didn't resurface until after WW2 -- everything since then has been the continuation of their goal of tearing down the US and rebuilding it as a modern feudal state.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

32. FDR did a lot of things right but not hanging...

the Bush clan wasn't one of them.

[live love laugh]

34. I always said a more fitting name for the Cons is Regressives--not conservatives. nt