On the Edge with Dr. Michael Hudson

Interview with Dr. Michael Hudson. Hudson maintains that President Obama’s second-term plan is to shrink US wages by 30% because his Chicago-school casino capitalist backers demand it. The Chicago School is the economic model the U.S. exports globally and it is a business model of cheating and free lunches. Today’s global inflation in commodities is a direct consequence of this global financial war by the Chicago School of economics against the workers, savers and producers of the world.

67 thoughts on “On the Edge with Dr. Michael Hudson”

  1. Flopot

    Race to the frickin’ bottom as official policy. I knew it.

    Looking forward to watching this…

  5. F. Beard

    I liked the interview but Dr. Hudson seemed to dodge the debtor bailout solution that you suggested, Max.

  8. Youri Carma

    Obama has no vision at all. He just does what his masters ask him to do. Takin vacations and read his teleprompter.

  11. YoLithos

    When in Brazil, he insisted on visiting some common people, in the favelas. In more than one city. He visited. They talked. When interviewed, later on, a number of comments coincided – a bit awed – in what a simple man he was. How simple. So, so very simple. I’m practically quoting. …

  16. YoLithos

    The people, milling around in a post-apocalyptic scenario. Financial apocalypse video. The Invasion of the Money Snatchers. Financial – not Nuclear – Armaggedon. In many of the Science Fiction stories I’ve actually read, humanity starts losing technological know-how. Science, engineering, medicine, infra-structure, pharmaceuticals. Morals, principles, art, all sort of civility and society start going the way of the Dodo. Looter warlords will still prosper, apparently, in their doomed little mountaintops and bunkers. Or tin-can (nuclear) … etc.

  18. a.e.

    AMEN!
    The Chicago School is the ‘think tank’ behind more world economic chaos, misery, desperation,and suffering and devastation.

    The Business School predicted ALL of this years ago! They predicted this, because they planned it! Read Naomi Klein’s book, Shock Doctrine.

    Obama, Bush, Reagan, all followers of the so-called ‘free markets’ Milton Friedman ideology. Dr. Hudson knows what’s going on.

    Reagan ruined the American sovereign economy and Obama is finishing it off.

  24. SilverCondom

    Professor Ha-Joon Chang’s revealing book was: “The Myth of Free Trade and the History of Capitalism”.

  27. Chris

    Okay interview, but which tea party is this guy talking about? The real one that took to the streets after TARP was passed, or the one the GOP took over and emasculated? People need to make this distinction when they throw the ‘tea party’ term around. After all, Max is a tea party icon- the real one I mean.

    Further, he reinforces this tired, transparent left/right crap. Stop it already.

  29. a.e.

    This is THE most important, interview you have ever posted! This guy KNOWS what he’s talking about. Please leave this up front and center until everyone on this planet gets it!

    P.S. Why is your site so slow right now???

  34. wtf

    Michael Hudson – An absolutely brilliant economist who brings his international balance of trade experience to a dischiphering of financial schinanigans played by the banker class upon unwary mankind. :)

  35. rawnrawn

    @Youri. my whole life, i knew something was wrong. no time then to think about why. too busy raising kids and getting fucked. :-)

  37. wtf

    I suppose anybody who is ‘stacking’ will eventually win just as a broken clock is right twice a day. :)

    - – - ancient Chinese prophesy :)

  44. a.e.

    Max & Stacy-

    You really need to monitor this site more. Commenters are frequently off-topic and constantly redirecting the conversation to links that are marginally related, if at all.

    This interview just breaks the surface of what has really been going on behind the scenes.

    ‘The Chicago School’ has completely hi-jacked global economic policy. They play hard-ball and they play dirty. Just as Dr. Hudson points out they control the economic academic journals. Not only that, they control the Nobel prize in economics and related disciplines. They have brain-washed generations of students, here and abroad. They hand-pick elite students from every nation to carry on their plan to destroy sovereign governments and privatize the wealth. They have embedded their brain-washed students in public policy positions, not only in the USA but literally all over the world.

    War-making is big business and ‘the Chicago School’ is one of the major ‘think tanks’ behind the war horrors we have all witnessed. They totally promote pre-emptive war and many of Obama’s people are right on board.

    So, Max & Stacy & Dr. Hudson are valiant humanitarians and honest truthseekers, but what can possible be done to counteract all the damage that has been done by ‘the Chicago School’? All I can say is dig deeper, name names, expose the role ‘the Chicago School’ plays in the game.

    No time to waste.

  45. jimmytee

    I don’t know which one of you lined up this interview but, regardless, thank-you so muchy.

  46. Alastair Carnegie

    In 58 BC, the Roman Statesman an Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero addressed the Senate on the subject ofthe traitor ‘Catilline’. The translation reads:- “”A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” It is obvious that the souls of nations are now rotten to the core! The pillars of our cities have been undermined and are realy to collapse. Economic Warfare is generally imperceptible at the start, invisible as it gains momentum, and sudden and dramatic when the tipping point arrives. The purpose of economic warfare is to break the population’s trust in government. So far it seems to be working a treat. Those Chicago Economics Professors probably think they will be congratulated, indeed they will be! “Congratulations! you have been selected as the first to face the fireing squad!”… Traitors know too much! victors don’t allow venemous snakes to live in their newly aquired houses!

  47. Alastair Carnegie

    Oops! “Catiline”…Wikipedia has a good entry:-
    “…Promoting his policy of debt relief, Catiline initially also rallied many of the poor to his banner along with a large portion of Sulla’s veterans.[26] Debt had never been greater than in 63 BC since the previous decades of war had led to an era of economic downturn across the Italian countryside.[27] Numerous plebeian farmers lost their farms and were forced to move to the city, where they swelled the numbers of the urban poor.[28] Sulla’s veterans had spent and squandered the wealth they acquired from their years of service. Desiring to regain their fortunes, they were prepared to march to war under the banner of the “next” Sulla. Thus, many of the plebs eagerly flocked to Catiline and supported him in the hope of the absolution of their debts….”

    Nothing like an “Economic Crisis” to foment revolution!
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catiline

  48. Al Kyder

    Great interview with Mike Hudson

    I feel small now, after just commenting that the UK should use its gambling laws on the Casino Banks. Hudson puts it better than I can.

    The last part, about the separation between productive and non productive.

    This is a hot topic. The protestant work ethic zombie still walks among us.

    This distinction is going to have to be the basis of any new form of human endeavour. There is going to be a lot of unemployed Stock Brokers, investment bankers, real estate pushers etc etc.

    We need to revisit Nuremberg. Its My Job can no longer be used as an excuse. !!

  49. i_am

    I haven’t watched the episode yet, but this is all so goddamn ugly and the summary is absolutely right — I’m stuck here in the US and my efforts to wake up my family and friends haven’t been successful: TV, pharmaceuticals and fluoridated water seem to overpower any sort of mental function. Max and Stacey, PLEASE give me a job in France, I would rather serve you than die here in Holocaust part II, American Style. I am a (relatively) healthy 21 year old…god bless.

  50. Capt. Ray

    I think he’s better than Max! ;) LOL whatever ‘better’ means…
    Haha

    Anyway; enjoyed the show.

    Fwiw.
    Last week I was putting down 34^2m of deck.
    Today I’m putting up a fence. Did two pieces. Had to cut trees to make it happen. Had to chop up the trees and put on the curb. I aslo cut the grass.

    It’s 10pm+. 35*C. No mosqitoes.

    Shower and a beer… Budweiser, it’s just the best pil, imo.

    Living in the South, at the moment, is great!

    With all those haarp things going on; it turns out to be the lowest hurricane season ever!

    Thx folks who pop these things into the sky like fire crackers ;)

  51. Modern Money Mechanics

    >Commodity Futures Modernization Act
    Bill Clinton was president, but here are the salient facts. Michael Greenberger, the former Dir. of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1997-99), explained that it was the financial industry lobbyists who donated millions to Phil Gramm over his 24-year congressional career and drafted the 285-page bill called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. They used Phil Gramm as a vehicle since he was then the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

    On December 13, 2000 the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. Two days later, December 15th, President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown over a massive 11,000-page, $38
    4-billion, omnibus spending bill. It was the perfect moment for Gramm to slip in his 285-page measure sponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who was the chairman of the agriculture committee. They had tried to get the measure passed earlier and it had been considered dead. But remember, committee chairmen have the right to submit bills directly to floor without committee approval so the bill was never debated in committees or even by the House or Senate.
    Phil Gramm stood up on the Senate floor to hail the act’s inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert (or a lobbyist;-) could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the SEC nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swaps – and would thus “protect financial institutions from over regulation” and “position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century.”

    It worked! Just prior to the Christmas holiday, the act found its way into the The Consolidated Appropriations Act for FY2001 (Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill) (H.R. 4577). 157 Democrats and 133
    Republicans voted for the appropriations bill. 51 Republicans and 9 Democrats opposed the appropriations bill vote results in the house. The Senate version passed by “Unanimous Consent.” President Clinton signed it into Public Law (106-554) on December 21, 2000. and the rest is history.

    Earlier in his career Phil Gramm sponsored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act which, in turn, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed traditional depository institutions (banks) to speculate in financial markets just as they used to do before the Great Depression.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89338743
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Gramm
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization_Act_of_2000
    http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/foreclosure-phil.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley
    http://thomas.loc.gov/home/omni2000/

  52. Mark Lytle

    The meaning of Peak Oil should nullify much of the machinations of the Chicago School and everybody else. What will the wage differential between Chinese labor and American labor mean when it is no longer affordable to ship anything long distances?

    My understanding is that this condition should hold by the end of the decade (not many years away), so hey Chicago boys, please find another hobby…

  53. Dante

    Saturday, August 20, 2011
    More on Cover Ups and Fraud At The Highest Levels of Government
    A reader asked how history will record these times. I believe history will say that the past few decades – and especially the decades of 2000 to 2011 – were America’s darkest and MOST CORRUPT. Corruption in government is rampant, obvious and evident.

    Here now a few links provided us by readers that need attention.

    http://www.goldmansachs666.com/2011/08/more-on-cover-ups-and-fraud-at-highest.html

  54. Mark Lytle

    Put another way, Globalization is dying (not quite dead yet, though), so what will unemployed Globalists be doing with themselves, when their gig goes down, a few years from now

  55. Mark Lytle

    The HAARP comment above is funny, because of the lack of storms across the U.S. at the moment. HAARP goes on, but no storms, no rain. Who’d a thunk it?

  56. Capt. Ray

    Correction to my previouse post:

    Pil = Pils

    (Budweiser, the best pils… pils like ‘beer’ …it’s no medicine!)

  57. Janice Barcklow

    Just wanted to say that Dr. Hudson says there is no regulation in Chicago economics, which I interpret as no government interference. If that were really true then the gamblers would be wiped out when they lost on their bets. But there is government interference in the “too big to fail” model. This is to say that the “Tea party” he claims is helping Obama is not the true libertarian model. It is adulterated by the fact that some are protected while others are not.
    And on a topic not addressed here at all, lets elect Ron Paul without media coverage or permission. So what if they are ignoring him. We know he is the only one who has any plan that would help the people and let the gamblers fail. Don’t worry that the media says he is unelectable, that he can’t win. Just vote for him and see what happens. If we all ignore the media and do whats best for us, Ron Paul will be President.

  59. farang

    Thanks for having Michael on again, Maxwell, always an educating session.

    He is a highly educated and experienced financial expert, and moves in academic circles, and uses the lexicon of the university crowd *wisely* to ease his thoughts across verbally on the “Chicago School” economic philosophy. That is understandably as far as he can take it.

    I noted well what he was telling us about how his students must conform to a certain “standard” of belief system to get promoted into higher positions of education.

    I am not so restrained: It is ZIONISM. The Chicago School is a financial wing of a radical cult that thinks they are appointed by “god” to rule over the human cattle: goyim. And when the goyim fight back? They scream bloody murder about the unfairness of it all…how “oppressed” they have been through the ages….from Akhenaton closing their corrupt temples where priests called Cohen Gadols sold *entry to heaven*…to Aristobolus (aka the historical figure known as “Jesus) whipping the money-changers in temple in Herusalim.

    Banking, MEDIA, Academics, Law (enforcement, prosecutors, attorneys, judges), Politics, Regulatory enforcement, control of the currency, this is no *coincidence*

    81 members of the US Congress (12%) decided the economic crisis is such a severe situation….that they packed bags and headed off to Tel Aviv to discuss it…right?

    Virtually no one but Auntie Semmite seems to recall JFK was going to make the Zionist organization of America aka AIPAC register as a foreign lobbyist group….which now insists on giving official blessing to any D.C. political candidate…or it turns it’s previously listed divisions upon you. Viciously…without mercy, but very predictably.

    Once you recognize the pattern…it is obvious….and easy to counter (which drives the scum crazy, they ain’t so smart… just ruthless)…..and which is why farang is constantly battling to even post comments now…I am being hacked every day, comments disappearing, signing in denied at disqus and other comment sites….emails not being “sent” until I remove anything that speaks of the corruption…obvious nonsense (read Norman Finklestein’s blog to see what he goes through to post the truth about Zionism)…. just post my thoughts on this obscenity.

    Note well how Obama is attacking the Whistleblowers and imprisoning them….note well. If you speak up: you will be punished.

    Yeah yeah…start calling for your Auntie Semmite again, WGAF? We’re supposed to just go with the herd…but you’ll notice all the attention and affection Britain is showing the cow that ran away from the farm on the day she was slated to take a ride to the slaughter house. Hiding in the forest. They can’t catch her.

    Let’s call her Robin Heifer. She’s this Auntie Semmite’s hero…”god” loves her.
    Don’t be afraid: Be the cow that fights back. Speak up. Criminals and their entire blatant in-your-face fascism and imperialism have no place in any civilized nation.

    Note well how conveniently Webster’s dictionary changed the definition of “anti-semitism” the month before 9/11/01 to include a hatred of Zionism…a radical cult that George Herbert Walker Bush forced to be removed from the UN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION LIST when in office.

    Note well.

  60. ZORRO LONDON

    The only rule now from the Elites perspective, is that there are no rules.

    If they have any rule at all, and you look at the indicators and trends, it is only too clear it’s… the rule of the jungle or, put another way, survival of the “fittest” or even more accurately the most corrupt, be it at the top or, the bottom of the social ladder.

    Its a race now for anyone and everyone to grab what you can before we go off the cliffs edge.

    Follow the bankers example!

    We now have CORPORATE-ZIO-NAZISM, in it’s purest form…………..Ooooh…CZN, you heard that from Z first………… Alex J…….you gonna pick that phrase up?

    Maybe some of Alex’s sponsors might not approve of the “ZIO” bit.

    Ahh well, you dont ask you dont get?

    Gonna be an interesting week when the markets open.

    Just waiting for the 1st “too big to fail” international bank to go under, then its stock up on yer toilet paper time and watch PMs go to warp speed!!! …………….Z

  61. stacyherbert Post author

    @Capt. Ray – except that at the moment, 2011 is due to be the busiest hurricane season on record; they are already up to the 9th named storm of the season, this is only the second time that has happened before August 20th; 80% of all hurricanes happen after August 20; so far, however, there have been no storm develop into hurricane strength simply due to an absence of vertical instability which is required for storms to develop into hurricanes

    http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1888

  62. acudoc

    @Modern Money Mechanics—

    Thanks for the research on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

    You know, Congress and the President, in whatever year, are really a bane on the country. (H.L. Mencken said something to the effect that nobody is safe when Congress is in session.) The mechanism of the passage of bills is totally corrupted, and the assumption is always made that Congress or the President must do something, anything, lest the ship of state sail into dire straits. These people are professional interferers and our democracy is a representation not of the people and their interests but of lobbyists of all shapes and sizes vying like pigs at the trough for a piece of the federal pie.

    The whole thing is supported by the corrupt practice of issuing money as debt. My only beef with Professor Hudson is that he clings to the liberal belief that if only the federal government were to due its proper job of regulating the markets and our lives, we could all sleep soundly at night. To my knowledge, he never strikes at the root of the debt-based monetary system. Has he read that famous essay by Frederic Bastiat entitled “The Law” in order to see how governments always pervert the law, and always, through their interference in the natural business transactions of people, screw the whole thing up.

    Has he ever called for a return to a Constitutional money in which the federal government only affirms the authenticity of gold and silver coin and their assay? Every other interference is counterproductive, as is surely being proven as we speak. The people through their state and local governments’ protection of property rights are capable of routing out fraud in free banking and the marketplace. The federal government, simply put, makes things too complicated. Our blind faith in the centralization of all state functions in Washington, D.C. is leading us like lemmings off a cliff of our own making.

    The politicos won’t be satisfied until they have destroyed the entire division of labor with their screwed up understanding of what really constitutes money.

  64. realaverageamerican

    All of this change from a productive economy to a non-productive financial “products” based economy was laid out and popularized in the 1982 book “Megatrends”, wasn’t it?

  65. Eric

    His political logic is a bit bent;
    Republicans are corrupt,
    Obama is corrupt,
    ergo, Obama is a Republican ???

    Democrats are corrupt too, ergo Democrats are Republicans.
    We are all sinners!

  66. Casey

    @Eric – agreed. It blows me away that Dems can see the corruption in the Republican camp but not in their own camp. Its time to strip the words Democrat and Republican from the discussion and start focusing on the phenomena.

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