Economist Michael Hudson discusses Super Imperialism

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/19/super-imperialism-economist-michael-h...

He wrote the first edition in 1972. China asked for an update so he wrote his third edition nearly 50 years later.

Great interview. If you take time to learn anything, learn what he teaches about economic strategies of the world super powers.

Learn how the US makes other nations finance our wars or how we treated England like we had defeated them in WW2 instead of Germany in order to supplant them.

Or how the whole thing is now unravelling.

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Lookout's picture

..but is 1.5 hours.
There is a transcript below the clip.

If you really want a course from Prof Hudson consider these lectures...
A 3 part lecture series for the Global University for Sustainability, Hong Kong
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4THv2qQjLhc]
part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAmZXtJfkQU
part 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xR02tPQBTM

I wish these also had a transcript.
I break these down into 30 min segments in order to make it through them.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Thanks for the recommendation. Really informative on how we got here and where we are probably headed.

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We claim to have a free market democracy, but we really have a neofeudal oligarchy, as Michael Hudson explains. The detail explanation of our extremely aggressive actions across the decades is a bit overwhelming. We have little interest in fairness, always with our fingers on the scale, the middle left finger on the scale of economic trade and the middle right finger on the scale of military intimidation. If you listen to when the US complains you can almost always see a reflection of ourselves. For instance, at the end of WWII our policy was to get Europe to switch from coal to oil. The reason was that the US was the major exporter of oil and we could use that as political leverage over European countries. We stated that explicitly. Fast forward to today and the US is warning Europe not to buy Russian energy, even though they are the most reliable exporters of energy in the world. The reason - Russia will use energy as a political tool.

The US is all about economic rent. Today that means capital formation through the Stock Market. We build virtual companies with virtual products and the capitalize them and then buy back stock. Real economies create value for their people, like China. It's really all about economic vampirism. And we've done it to everyone, especially our allies. We screwed the UK in the early 1950s. The enitire business with the Petrodollar. In this case it is an example of combining military power - we protect Saudi Arabia, in return all of their dollar sales go through the US. Certainly a deal with the devil, for both sides.

But what is really dangerous today is the complete misunderstanding of what is happening in our relationship with China. China produces most of our consumer goods. Our businesses decided to do that because having them produce the goods was much cheaper and resulted in less work, more profits and more competitiveness. So Chinese workers toil to produce goods for the American market at a much cheaper price. We all benefit in a richer lifestyle. In fact, it covers up some of the theft of the oligarchs of the wealth and income of the middle class. Then we buy those goods in US dollars. Since we don't manufacture nearly as many goods to ship to China, there exists a large trade imbalance. China is forced to eat the difference, in the form of holding dollars, buying US debt or investing in the US Stock market. This then becomes a double good scam on China.

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Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.