- Hudson II 5 June (inc url) Archived Message
- Michael Hudson 5 June - Keith-264 June 22, 2023, 11:28 am
Posted by Keith-264
on June 22, 2023, 11:29 am, in reply to "Michael Hudson 5 June"
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https://michael-hudson.com/2023/06/yellens-daydream/ Ctd...Eurasia and the rest of the world is going to be increasingly industrial-socialist. The way in which the world was evolving just before World War I and then stopped for the West. Asia is going to pick up this ideal of industrial capitalism evolving into socialism, treating money as a public utility in the hands of the government, not in the hands of a private 1%. You’re having military policy protecting the whole region, a kind of Eurasian counterpart to NATO to protect against the US military bases. You’re having trade dovetail. Production and consumption is going to dovetail among countries in a way that is going to be balanced as other countries develop their own ability to feed themselves, to provide their basic needs. They’ll treat health care as a public right, as a public utility and human right. They’ll treat housing as a public right and food as a public right. They’re not going to be people starving in the street or on the subways as we see in New York when they don’t have jobs. Everybody will be protected instead of polarizing. What you expect will be standards rising in Eurasia and the Global South. Production will be rising, productivity will be rising. Labor will become healthier, better fed, better educated in these regions. And the opposite will be occurring in the United States. It will polarize more. The cities here are pretty much going broke, especially as commercial property is being abandoned. The tax base of cities is going down and they’re having to cut back spending on transportation because people are now working from home instead of taking the subway or trains or buses into the cities. You’re having a whole economic restructuring, both in Asia and in the United States, but this restructuring is going in opposite directions. KC: Michael, you very beautifully presented a projected possibility for Eurasia to develop. What would be your advice or your warning about the kind of relationships among the different countries with different resources and developing levels? What would you warn against a certain replication of the kind of hegemonic relationships within this Eurasian bloc? You begin by realizing that these countries are different from each other. Because they’re different, the problem in putting together a BRICS bank or any international organization is who is going to be in control. The Americans have always insisted that they will not join any organization in which they don’t have veto power. Beginning with the United Nations and then the Americas vote in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, they can veto anything, according to the rules that set up these organizations. In Eurasia they have to realize that countries are very different. That’s going to make it politically difficult to decide when we allocate these credits to cover their trade and balance-of-payments deficits. Who’s going to get how much credit? Is there a limit to it? How are we going to enable countries to pay? If one country is going to run a sustained surplus, like China, and other countries are deficits, how do we prevent the debtor countries from ending up like they ended up today, owing dollar debts in Latin America and other countries? How do we create a financial system that’s not going to use finance as the new form of economic warfare to gain control of government? How are we going to make it politically run for the benefit of the real economy of production and consumption, instead of for the benefit of the financial investors who are in charge of buying up and privatizing these means of production? America and Europe are going to be privatizing more and more of the public domain, just as Margaret Thatcher began in England. America and Europe will end up like England after Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party when Tony Blair went even further. How do you avoid privatization? By guaranteeing certain economic rights to everybody. How do you guarantee health care, housing, and food? All this requires an economic ideology, a doctrine. You can’t just do it ad hoc. In the beginning, you do it ad hoc. You make it up as you go along, you see what’s the line of least resistance, what is easiest to do. But at some point there has to be a discussion of what is socialism today. Maybe you don’t want to call it socialism. Whatever you call it, it could be Eurasia with Eurasian characteristics. You have to have some basic bill of rights and a constitutional guide, not like the American Constitution that is set in stone, never to be changed, but a constitution that will be continually upgraded, continually modified, moving forward. How do you create a flexible institutional structure that can evolve going forward, to meet the increasing and the changing requirements of societies that are trying to industrialize, that are trying to cope with environmental problems like global warming and extreme weather? How are you going to cope with new diseases? How are you going to confront the United States and keep it out of your region? How is Eurasia going to have its version of the Monroe Doctrine saying, Eurasia for the Eurasians. There’s no need for the North Americans to be anywhere near Asia. You can have your own continent and you can destroy it all you want, but stay off our territory, just like we’re staying off your territory. It’s like the split that you had in religion 1000 years ago. But instead of a split in religion, you’re having a split in economic philosophy, a split in the decision of what’s worth doing and what are the priorities. How are we going to set priorities that are going to prevent the kind of depression and economic degeneration that is happening in the United States? We do want to learn from the United States, but we don’t want to learn how to become like the United States. We want to learn how to avoid the problems that have occurred in the United States. So you use the United States and Europe as an object lesson for what you want to avoid. The question is, how do you create a group of international organizations that are free from the economic polarization, privatization and financialization that have destroyed the American and European economies. KC: So you would characterize that as ‘socialism with Eurasian characteristics’? Yes, or the ‘future’. You could just say the ‘future with Eurasian characteristics’. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but it’s going to be a mixed economy. Many people have the idea that socialism means the government does all the planning. That’s not really what socialism is. Of course, there will be a mixed economy. Of course there will be private enterprise. Of course there will be individual ownership, but it will be subject to social constraints so that the fortunes that are made by some private individual will not be obtained at the expense of the rest of society. There will be limits and regulations to make private gains achieved in a way that creates social and economic gains in the process, not at the expense of the economy and society. You need to coordinate the private and public sectors. Instead of like in America and Europe, where the private sector’s objective is to take over the government to privatize and sell off the public domain. You have a one-dimensional economy, privatized and financialized. Asia will do very much like what China has been doing: a mixed economy. The government’s role is to provide services and goods that otherwise would be monopolies. You don’t want monopolized. You don’t want a rent-seeking class. You don’t want a class that makes income and wealth without actually working and providing any economic product. That’s what a rentier society is. That’s what a rent-seeking society is. That’s what a landlord society was in Europe until the 19th century, and what a financial gain-seeking society is in the 20th century today in North America. You want to avoid economic rent-seeking, real estate rent-seeking, and monopoly rent-seeking. Those sectors of finance, land tenure, and research and development, public health, belong in the public domain, not privatized. Or else you end up looking like England became after Margaret Thatcher privatized the social housing and drove London’s population out of London because it couldn’t afford the privatized council housing that was bought up and financialized. You look at what happened in London and Thatcher. Why dsn’t neoliberal economics work? You have to have an alternative to say there is an alternative to neoliberal economics. We can see that we’ve been inventing the alternative without really having a blueprint for how to do it. But now that we’ve seen what is beginning to work, certainly in China, we can develop a kind of basic model for an alternative to what’s happening in the financialized and privatized West. TY: Michael, when do you think these BRICS institutions are going to be robust enough to at least make what you’re saying a reality? There’s no way of knowing. I’m not a part of the implementation process, and being 84 years old and avoiding COVID, all I can do is make commentary from where I am in New York. I can explain what went wrong in the West, what went wrong in the United States and Europe since World War I. I can write about how the problems that are happening today are very similar to what happened in the 19th century. I can explain classical economics, classical value theory with the idea of rent is unearned income, predatory income. The classical objective of a free market is to make markets free from economic rent, free from land rent, free from monopoly rent, and free from financial overhead. These objectives of the 19th century classical economists, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Marx should be the guide for what’s happening. In order to do that, you have to have a knowledge of economic history. That’s what I’ve been writing. I’ve just published my book on why Greece and Rome fell as a result of their debt crisis and concentration of land ownership and real estate in the hands of a creditor class. All of this that’s happening has happened again and again in world history. The best way to create an alternative in a timely fashion is to familiarize yourself with ancient European history, with 19th century history, and with the fight for a more democratic economy in the West that failed. You want to prevent it from failing in the way it did before. That requires setting up your own curriculum. I don’t know if you’ll call it economics or if you call it something like “how the world works,” but you certainly don’t want your economic planners to be educated in the United States, where they say that the way to get an economy rich is to let Wall Street and the financial centers do the planning and concentrate wealth in the hands of financial billionaires. That’s the message of American economic theory, and you want to avoid that. You’re really going to need your own body of economic theory and a body of economic statistics to describe what is happening in your economy. You’re going to need an alternative to the kind of National Income and Product Accounts. The Gross National Product statistics in America make no distinction between earned and unearned income, no distinction between production and overhead. They think that the more overhead you have, that’s the contribution to economic output. Since there’s so much waste and overhead in the United States, it appears to be having a GDP that’s much higher than other countries. But this takes the form of armaments, waste, financial and rent charges that are not really a part of output or production at all. They’re a burden on production and a subtrahend from national income, not in addition to it. You have to have to reconceptualize your economic national accounts in order to reflect this reality and so that you can trace what’s actually happening in the various countries that join this new Eurasian community. TY: Thank you, Michael. That was very good. There’s something you said earlier that’s, of course, very telling. This is the fact that the United States has, through its various organizations, basically captured the knowledge sphere, captured the knowledge domain where it sponsors a lot of young and promising intellectuals and politicians from the Global South. That’s another problem I suppose we have to overcome because they subsequently transplant those same knowledge institutions back in their home countries. Never mind about locals going overseas to obtain PhDs or education from the West. So this is another very practical kind of challenge that we face. It’s sort of like talent scouts for traitors, searching out opportunistic individuals that are willing to throw their lot in with the United States in order to get income from United States non-governmental organizations, foundations and think tanks, and gradually learn the party line to represent. They’ll realize they need to have US backing to get ahead, even to the point of becoming president or politicians, as a result of all the money that’s put into buying traitors. When Victoria Nuland said in 2015, we’ve spent $5 billion in Ukraine gaining control of the kleptocrats and the politicians to make sure that they serve American policies. If $5 billion is in Ukraine alone, you can imagine how much is in China, India, other Asian countries, all to sort of buy control there. Not to mention the prestige that having an American university degree has, even though the American universities are all trying to teach you how not to develop instead of how to develop, even though they’re teaching you that the way to develop is to privatize and to let the financiers and the bankers take over your economy and run the economy for the bankers, not for the population at large. Well, if you’re sponsored and bought up by America, given money to study that in the university, that’s how you’re going to think. The problem is how are Eurasian countries going to develop an educational system and public media and ideology and moral values that put the population first, not the 1% of bankers first. KC: So the question is, your comments on Yellen’s talk at the Johns Hopkins University have been made into videos and have been screened on air. And many Chinese audience had commented that Yellen’s strategy, economic strategy on China is just daydreaming because we do not need to mind what she’s saying because the US trade amount is only 10% of China’s trade. So there is nothing good for the US sanctions on China that would benefit the US. And the European allies would definitely not listen to the US strategies and sanction China because that will hurt Europe’s own interests. So for example, Macron said that Europe should get rid of America’s control and show goodwill to China. And then after he said that, he got the big contracts on Airbus from China. So this shows that the US allies are not really listening to the US. So how would you respond to such views? When Macron says that Europe should be independent of the United States, he’s being a demagogue. He says what voters want to hear. And the voters of Europe do want to be independent of the United States. But Macron does not want to be independent of the United States. Macron knows that he’s supported by the United States. His interests are not those of the voters. His interest is to get elected, despite having interest the opposite of the voters. He’s not to be trusted. He’s purely a demagogue trying to pretend to be in favor of Europe so that he can use his position as president to double cross Europe and support the United States as much as he can. He’s simply an opportunist, not a principled position. I guess you could say that of any politician. But Macron from the very beginning, by pretending to be a socialist, is actually a neoliberal financialist and is in the pocket of the United States. So instead of looking at what they say, look at what they’re doing. I think this is why China in the last few weeks has said, “We’re not talking to the American military.” What’s the point of China talking to military generals who simply lie and make up things? China says, “You say one thing, you’re doing another.” That was a big speech of one of China’s foreign ministry people two days ago. And they’re quite right. The Americans say what they think the world wants to believe, but they’re doing something else. So you might as well just look at what the Americans are doing, especially at the terrorism that they’re doing in the Ukraine. That is an example of what they could do in China, just as they did it to Libya and to Iraq and Syria. You look at the way that they are treating other countries, the way that even they’ve treated their number one ally, Germany, by attacking its oil and gas and fertilizer imports and other imports from Russia and strangling Germany’s economy. As Kissinger said, it’s dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but it is fatal to be its friends. You really don’t want to be too friendly with the United States, as Mr. Macron is, or to believe what pro-American politicians are saying. You want to look at what they’re doing. And sometimes they’re so self-confident in what they’re doing. You want to look at what Victoria Nuland is saying. She comes right out and says, we’re willing just to kill anyone who disagrees with us. We’re willing to do what America did to Salvador Allende in Chile when we put in Pinochet. We’re willing to back a coup d’etat in Ukraine. We’re telling them to kill the Russian speakers. We’re really willing to destroy the world. And then you have the Christians in America saying, you know, blowing up the world with atomic warfare isn’t that bad a thing, because when you blow up the world, Jesus will come. And he will send the Americans up to heaven and all the foreigners down to hell, meaning the Christians up to heaven and all the non-believers to hell. And the non-believers are those who do not believe that economies should be run by the banks, basically. This is the kind of death wish you’re hearing from the United States. It’s why the American military is a little hesitant compared to the State Department when it comes to what they’re going to do militarily. But again and again, when the State Department and politicians, the Secretary of State Blinken says, “Russia does not really have any red lines. If they had a red line, they would have done something by now. We can do whatever we want because we’re America.” This is the same policy that can be used against China or any other country. Jade: Michael, I have a question about the de-dollarization. And now we have some discussion about the RMB pegging. How it pegged to natural resources? I think that when there’s a talk of linking the new artificial money to be used among governments, how are you going to price this New Special Drawing Right? It seems fair to price it in terms of the value of natural resources, because right now that’s what the Global South is producing. And you want to price it in a way that you’re going to provide enough credit to the natural resource exporters so that they can broaden their economy – not simply end up with a hole in the ground when their natural resources are gone, but to actually use their natural-resource exports to replace them with industrial means of production, with agricultural means of production, with commercial means of production. How do you actually enable them to use their raw materials exports that they will get the credits for and securitized to be able to exchange for help in creating a kind of industrial economy that you have most obviously in China, but also in other countries that have gone beyond being natural resource producers and want to end up with an economy that is ongoing and self-sustaining instead of emptying out into a hole in the ground? I don’t know how to elaborate it more, but that’s as far as it can go right now. The broad outlines are that you want these countries to become balanced overall economies. You don’t want them to be monocultures. Monocultures were misshapen the way they are because of World Bank support only for raw materials export sectors, not for them to feed themselves with their own grain, not for them to produce their own consumer goods, but to become trade dependent on the United States for food and consumer goods. You want to make the rest of the world independent from North America and from Europe, its colony, so that America and Europe can no longer threaten you with sanctions, can no longer destabilize your economy by simply not selling you food and you’ll starve to death. Countries can produce their own food, just like when the United States sanctioned Russia, and Russia ended up being able to produce its own food, cheese, wine and other agricultural production. And you want to make sure that the sanctions to disrupt economies will have no effect on the Eurasian economies, but will only affect Europe, which is the part of the world that America is trying to lock into dependency as earlier it locked in Latin America to dependency. The hard thing will be how to get Latin America to become part of the world’s growth instead of breaking away from American financial imperialism. At some point these countries are going to have to stop paying their dollar debt. They’ll have to say that the debt that we owe foreign bondholders was a predatory debt, a bad debt by an occupation government. We are not going to pay the World Bank. We’re not going to pay the IMF and we’re not going to pay bondholders. We’re now part of a different world. We’ve left the dollar world into what is the new world of the 21st century. KC: I think Michael you made a very important point just now, that is in this new bloc, maybe which is what we call the BRICS bloc or the Eurasian bloc, the relationships among the different countries should be different, that they would not be repeating just the status quo of one providing just raw materials and natural resources and others taking advantage. So I think that also has to tie in with some of what Samir Amin was proposing about delinking that each country would set its own agenda for development, for industrialization and not be subject to the logic or the rules of those hegemonic powers in the world division of labour. So just now what you are saying is proposing a different type of relationships and a different paradigm of development. So could you elaborate this a little bit more? I think this is very important what you were just saying, that this is not just building a bloc counter to the US Europe bloc, but actually repeating the same kind of logic. The problem is that the bureaucracies and the administrative departments of governments throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia have been trained not only in the United States, but as part of an economic doctrine, a neoliberal theory that’s been promoted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United States school system and the people who award the Nobel Prize for Chicago School financialized neoliberal thinking. You need to have a bureaucracy that is trained in realizing that there is an alternative way of development. What you don’t want is for Eurasia and the global majority simply to say we’re going to be independent of America and Europe, but we’re going to be just like America and Europe. We’re going to try to do it better. We’ll not be financialized like America and Europe, but we’ll be all by ourselves, not for the U.S. That would be a disaster because you would then in Asia and the global majority would end up just like the United States and Europe have ended up, without industry, economically polarized with a few billionaires at the top of your economy, lording it over the impoverished debt-ridden economy at large. So what you need is a whole administrative structure, an organization of government agencies and bureaucracies that are aiming to create a very different kind of society than you have in the United States and Europe. It’s not simply de-dollarlization, being just like America and Europe but using your own currency. It’s being a new civilization, a new kind of civilization that’s different from the detour that Western civilization has taken. That’s why I wrote my Collapse of Antiquity history, to show how Western civilization 2000 years ago took a different turn from what’s happened in Asia and the rest of the world. You want to realize that the West has taken a detour and you want to go back to a development that has a strong enough government, not a palace but something like a government party that will be in charge of structuring markets so that the whole economy benefits. You want to make sure that everybody can support their basic needs without running into debt. If somebody has to run into debt to get medical care, to feed themselves, to get housing, as they do in the United States, then they’re going to end up as a dependent class and lose their liberty. You want to create an alternative kind of society – not just a different economy, but a different society where people will not lose their liberty. It will be a public right to have public health, the ability to have housing of your own, to have an education of your own without running into debt. A lifetime of debt occurs in the United States where running into a lifetime of debt means that you have to take a job, no matter how little it pays and end up basically working in the financial version of debt dependency and feudalism. The West has sunk back into a kind of feudalism, financialized feudalism, neo-feudalism. You want an economy that doesn’t have a feudal rentier society, and you do this by preventing families and companies from getting rich by rent-seeking, getting rich without producing anything, but simply by exploitative means. You want to make economic statistics that distinguish predatory exploitation from actually making a profit. You don’t want to consider what an absentee landlord gets is adding to the national product, because that’s really just siphoning off income from the renters away. You want everyone to be able to have their own property, ultimately without running into debt. The best way to do that, instead of financing property with mortgage credit, you need a tax on rent-yielding resources. You need a land tax, a monopoly tax, a natural-resource tax and a financial tax. The tax system is absolutely critical to creating a really ‘free market’ such as the classical economists sought to create. It’s the opposite of the kind of free market that the United States and Europe talk about – that is a market free for Wall Street to do whatever it wants with the rest of the economy, free for monopolists to charge whatever they want, free for creditors to foreclose on the property of their debtors. You have a whole different concept of what a free market is, a different concept of what freedom is, a different concept of what human rights are and natural rights, and a different concept of what should be public infrastructure. All of this is a different way of thinking about how the world evolves, and you need to develop that alternative and to share it so that other countries can realize, ‘yes, there is an alternative to the America’s bank-run economy’. This is the outline of an alternative and our governments are going to create administrative agencies and regulating principles that promote overall welfare, not simply financial welfare. The real economy, not the financial claims on the real economy. |
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