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Geopolitics and Political Economy

Michael Hudson

Economic theory and history

Listen Later

ecological restoration

Economic crisis in Europe created by predatory lending; European Central Bank stranglehold on the Eurozone; the Euro; foreign banks decimate Greece's social structure; Marx's industrial capital versus fictitious capital; Latvia as a model for the rest of Europe; Hudson's financial and fiscal plan for Latvia; the Cold War and its ruinous effect on progressive economic thought. 

Aired: June 16, 2010

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Europe’s Financial Class War Against Labor - Michael Hudson, #204

We discuss the Federal Reserve; money as debt; Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's misconception of the causes of the great depression of the 1930's; classical political economy versus anti-classical, so-called "neoclassical", economics; the labor theory of value; the dollar carry trade; government deficit spending; Greece. 

Aired: February 10, 2010

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The New Junk Economics - Michael Hudson, #195

Europe; the worsening financial situation and indebtedness; the history of banking and the criminalization of the banking system; tax policy; real estate asset inflation; US imperialism via the monetary system; neoliberal/neofeudal economics; classical political economy; finance capital breaking away from industrial capital; the financial crisis leading to a political crisis; similarities with the Roman Republic; what measures labor should take. 

Aired: April 15, 2009
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Financial Barbarians at the Gate - Michael Hudson, #171

We discuss in detail, the concept of debt deflation; housing, student loan and automobile debt; the oil market; the stock market; negative interest rates; currencies; and the shrinking of the real economy. 

Aired: April 6, 2016

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The Slow Crash - Michael Hudson, #344

This is part two of this week's episode with Rania Khalek and Ben Norton -- the Syria A-Team. We discuss the recent U.S. attack on the Syrian air base, the alleged chemical weapons attack in Idlib, and the media's lack of care when it comes to producing evidence for its claims.  Don't miss miss it!

The Syria A-Team, Part Deux: This Time, It's for Real

The General Election of June 2017, and the massive Labour surge under Jeremy Corbyn's socialist leadership, has provided a new sense of optimism for those hoping for an end to utilitarian approaches to culture and swingeing cuts to arts funding. This month, Juliet talks to Loraine Leeson, Hassan Mahamdallie and Hilary Wainwright about the concept of cultural democracy, the recent The World Transformed conference and the Arts for Labour initiative. What are Jeremy Corbyn's arts policies, and how are they informed by the anti-austerity movement? What has been learned from the Greater London Council's arts programmes of the 1980s, or the Attlee government's cultural policies? How did writers and thinkers such as William Morris, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams establish a long British tradition of 'cultural democracy', and what can we take from them in the 21st century?

WORKS REFERENCED:

Campaign to save The Cinema Museum: www.cinemamuseum.org.uk

'A Creative Future for All' - https://www.policyforum.labour.org.uk/news/a-creative-future-for-all
The Great Exhibition of the North - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-43324069

The Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company - http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/gay-sweatshop/
LORAINE LEESON, Art : Process : Change (2017) - https://www.routledge.com/Art--Process--Change-Inside-a-Socially-Situated-Practice/Leeson/p/book/9781138670631
KEN LOACH, The Spirit of '45 (2017) - http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/film-week-spirit-45
HASSAN MAHAMDALLIE on William Morris - https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1996/isj2-071/mahamdallie.htm
WILLIAM MORRIS, News from Nowhere (1890) - https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/may/17/guardian190-william-morris-news-from-nowhere
HILARY WAINWRIGHT, A New Politics from the Left (2017) - https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/persuasive-points-on-new-politics-from-the-left

Cultural Democracy

In this episode, Silvia Federici goes over many of the details and themes in her groundbreaking book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, an extensive history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Silvia discusses the conditions that led to the witch-hunts in medieval Europe, and the lasting impact these events have had on the trajectory of capitalist development into the modern era. Silvia provides a description of the social and economic system—feudalism—that governed societies in medieval Europe, and how the events and struggles that occurred during that time period led to the economic and social system—capitalism—that dominates our lives today.

// Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/silvia-federici

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106 / Caliban and the Witch / Silvia Federici

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This episode explores the new movement to regenerate the planet with "Ecosystem Restoration Camps", where groups of people set up temporary camps on degraded lands for education and implementation of ecological rehabilitation and permaculture. The first camp is now up and running in Spain, with many more in the works. John D. Liu, one of the ideas inspirations, shares much about his vision of the camps and movement to restore the planet's degraded lands and stabilize climate change through a massive social and ecological movement.

Show links:
WWW.ECOSYSTEMRESTORATIONCAMPS.ORG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Liu

John Dennis Liu full bio:
John Dennis Liu (born 1953 in Nashville, Tennessee) is a Chinese American film-maker and ecologist. He is also a researcher at several institutions. In January 2015 John was named Visiting Fellow at Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. John is also Ecosystem Ambassador for the Commonland Foundation based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Early career
Liu was born in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, as the son of a Chinese father and American mother. He spent most of his youth in Bloomington, Indiana.[1] Liu studied journalism.[2] In 1979 he went for the first time to China, after being pushed by his father to see his grandmother before her death. In China Liu helped set up the CBS News bureau in Beijing in 1981, at a time when tensions between the United States and China were lessening. He worked for CBS for more than ten years as a producer and cameraman. Liu has said that after the collapse of the Soviet Union he grew tired of journalism and wished to make films. He started working for European media as RAI, SRG SSR, ZDF[3] For RAI, ZDF, BBC World and National Geographic Channel he produced nature documentaries.[2] In 1995 he filmed the Loess Plateau in China, which was being transformed from a barren and eroded ground into an oasis by the government.[2][4] At this point Liu noticed the possibility of humans restoring ecosystems, rather than only destroying them.

Ecological recovery and ideas
Liu retired from journalism in 1997 and became the director of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP). With the EEMP he uses television to provide information about ecology, sustainable development, public health in China and other countries.[3] Liu emphasizes that the harmful effect of humans on the world is not only caused by greenhouse gasses, but is to a great extent caused by the destruction of biomass, organic matter and biodiversity. Liu claims that the decline in these factors has led to higher temperatures and loss of arable soil, in the end leading to desertification.[3] Liu sees a solution for these problems in the way people look at money, as people currently value the products and services derived from ecosystems higher than the ecosystems themselves.[3] The episode, Regreening the desert / Green gold of the show Tegenlicht, was aired by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO and co-produced by Liu. The episodes sees Liu traveling the world to countries as Jordan, China and Ethiopia and shows the possibilities in re-greening areas turning into desert. At the 65th Prix Italia, in September 2013, the episode won the Special Prize Expo 2015.[5][6] Since 2009, Liu is working together with Willem Ferwerda, former director of the Dutch office of IUCN, executive fellow business and ecosystems at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and founder of the Commonland Foundation an organization that works on large scale landscape restoration projects with a business approach, based on the 4 returns from landscape restoration framework developed by Ferwerda.

Episode 019 - John D. Liu: Ecosystem Restoration Camps

Despite decades of censorship and neglect, Peter Watkins (http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/) has created a body of work that marks him out as one of the UK’s greatest filmmakers. Born in Surrey in 1935, Watkins began his career pioneering the ‘docu-drama’ in two works for the BBC: historical drama Culloden (1964) about the final battle in the Jacobite rebellion, and The War Game (1965), speculating about a nuclear attack on the UK. The BBC refused to broadcast the latter, and after his feature film Privilege (1968) had a poor commercial and critical reception, Watkins spent the rest of his career in exile.

In his theoretical writing, teaching and filmmaking, Watkins has challenged the ‘monoform’ – a standardisation of Mass Audio-Visual Media that barrages its audience with a rapid flow of changing images and sounds, with the intention of preventing any real contemplation. Joining Juliet to discuss Watkins' work is Gareth Evans, former editor of Vertigo magazine and adjunct Moving Image Curator at Whitechapel Gallery.

Watkins on the monoform and the global media crisis: https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/library/documents/the-dark-side-of-the-moon-the-global-media-crisis/

SELECTED REFERENCES

FILMS BY PETER WATKINS
The Forgotten Faces (1960) - https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-the-forgotten-faces-1961-online
Culloden (1964) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkxW-nB0nNU
The War Game (1965) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02zy7nt/the-war-game
Privilege (1966) - https://player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-privilege-1967-online
The Gladiators (1969) - https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-gladiators
Punishment Park (1971) - https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2005/jul/08/4
Edvard Munch (1974) - https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/art-of-the-real-edvard-munch-by-peter-watkins/
The Journey (1987) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsYLt9bSRbw
The Freethinker (1992-94) - http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2012/01/freethinker.html
La Commune (2000) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ1S18jsyyw

WILLIAM BLAKE, ‘Jerusalem’
Blowup (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
BERTOLT BRECHT, The Days of the Commune (1955) - http://daysofthecommune.com/pages/play.html
A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
GUY DEBORD, ATTILA KOTÁNYI & RAOUL VANEIGEM, ‘Thesis on the Paris Commune’ (1962) – http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Pariscommune.htm
End of Days (dir. Peter Hyams, 1999)
Future Revolutions: New Perspectives on Peter Watkins (2018) - https://wolfberlin.org/en/wolf-shop/book-new-perspective-on-peter-watkins-future-revolutions
If … (dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1968)
It Happened Here (dir. Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo, 1965) - https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/interviews/it-happened-here-kevin-brownlow
Jubilee (dir. Derek Jarman, 1978)
V. I. LENIN, ‘Lessons of the Commune’ (1911) – https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mar/23.htm
The Living Dead (dir. Adam Curtis, 1995) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xoM6-1SWl4
Manfred Mann
KARL MARX, ‘The Civil War in France’ (1871) – https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm
Ralph Miliband - https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/index.htm
The New Babylon (dir. Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg, 1929) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyOhcTuFYe0
O Lucky Man! (dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1973)
Stanisław Przybyszewski - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Przybyszewski
Role of a Lifetime (dir. Deimantas Narkevičius, 2003) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69EREtDfYoM
August Strindberg
Threads (dir. Mick Jackson, 1984)
West of the Tracks (dir. Wang Bing, 2002) - https://theartsofslowcinema.com/2017/05/16/west-of-the-tracks-wang-bing-2003/
Who is America? (TV series, 2018)
ÉMILE ZOLA, La Débâcle (1892) - https://readingzola.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/la-debacle-the-downfall/

Peter Watkins: Filmmaking against the global media crisis

Claire Bishop's Big Ideas lecture at the Whitechapel Gallery on Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop - Artificial Hells

Writer John Pat Leary translates the new language of capitalism in the 21st century, and explains how the words and ideas of market logic inject themselves into our vocabulary and values - narrowing the horizon of political possibility and and reducing the social into a series competitive transactions between precarious, atomized individuals.

John is the author of the forthcoming book Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism from Haymarket Books.

Between euphoria and desperation: Finding capitalism's logic in our words and minds.

Since October 2017, America experienced three of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history. This epidemic coincides with a frightening resurgence of white nationalism. Sometimes the two trends overlap.

But why here? Both phenomena can be explained by a common historical thread—to unravel it Abby Martin sits down with indigenous scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to discuss her latest book “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment”.

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Episode 74 - Why America? Mass Shootings & White Nationalism Share Roots

“How to Choose the Most Electable Democrat in 2020,” advises Politico. “Amy Klobuchar's best argument for 2020: Electability,” CNN reports. “Is Electability The Only Thing That Democratic Voters Want?” WGBH, the Boston NPR affiliate, wonders. These articles, all from a one-week stretch this February, speak to a prevailing compulsion in our politics, boosted by our media.

Time and again we hear about the primacy of “electability,” a nebulous but self-evidently important criteria, when selecting a candidate. But what does “electability” mean exactly? How can someone have, in effect, been elected in our minds before an actual election takes place? 

This week, we will drill down the origins of the term "electability": how it’s a concept embraced by brain-dead, horse-race-obsessed pundits, why it has inherently racist and sexist implications, and how it’s designed to draw voters away from candidates they actually agree with to ones more in line with the agenda of the corporate wing of the Democratic party party. 

Our guest is Anoa Changa, host of the podcast The Way With Anoa.

Episode 67: The Gate-Keeping, Power-Serving Tautology of “Electability”

In this News Brief we review the media coverage of Sanders and Clinton in 2016 and how this past is being written and rewritten to set the narrative for 2020.

News Brief: Let's Relitigate the Shit Out of 2016 -- with Thomas Frank

Barack Obama unleashes "kinetic strikes” on Libya, Hillary Clinton lobbies for "limited military coercion" in Syria, Congress passes “robust sanctions” on Iran, and Trump gives “US generals more room to run” as he “ramps up” “pressure” on ISIS. The Center for American Progress calls for a “no fly zone” to “protect civilians.” It’s important the US “engage” in the Middle East as it “reasserts itself” on “the world stage,” and backs up “diplomacy” with “military muscle.” While Russia "expands" its naval and nuclear capacity the US merely “modernizes” its fleet or stockpile. “All options are on the table” when discussing Venezuela and Iran. 

So much of how we discuss US militarism and imperialism is laundered through seemingly anodyne phrases, rhetorical thingamajigs that vaguely gesture towards an idea without drawing up unseemly images of what’s really being called for.

In this two-part episode, we examine what’s being said, what’s being left out when we use “foreign policy-speak,” and how writers can avoid these lazy euphemisms, and instead make a concerted effort to objectively describe the policy being advocated for rather than relying on well-worn thought-terminating cliches that are designed to do all of our thinking for us. 

Our guest is FAIR's Janine Jackson.

Episode 70: Laundering Imperial Violence Through Anodyne Foreign Policy-Speak (Part I)

Kinetic strikes. Limited military coercion. Robust sanctions. No fly zones. Military muscle. Modernization. All options are on the table.

So much of how we discuss U.S. militarism and imperialism is laundered through seemingly anodyne phrases, rhetorical thingamajigs that vaguely gesture towards an idea without conjuring the unseemly images of what’s really being called for.

In Part II of our two-part episode on “foreign policy-speak," we examine five more ubiquitous euphemisms and discuss what’s really being said (and what’s always left out) when the media uses banal phrases meant to mask military violence.

Our guest is FAIR's Janine Jackson.

Episode 71: Laundering Imperial Violence Through Anodyne Foreign Policy-Speak (Part II)

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, we showcase a July 2019 interview with financial economist, author and historian Michael Hudson addressing the financial instruments utilized by the United States to retain its post World War II position of dominance on the world stage, and ways in which foreign economies can survive the looming implosion of the U.S. The conversation also addresses the decisions made by Canadian governments to abandon the Bank of Canada as the country’s lender of choice and the prospects of progressive political candidates and popular movements  to pull the U.S. out of its death spiral. 

Michael Hudson is a prominent U.S. critical economist and President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst and a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

A History of U.S. Economic Warfare, from WWII to the Present: A Conversation with Michael Hudson

ON this week's Global Research News Hour radio program we explore the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy since the origins of the republic and determine how America's quest to displace the British Empire did not end with the Declaration of Independence and continued through World War II, the Cold War right up through the post-Cold War period. Our guest for the hour is Professor Michel Chossudovsky,  Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, and Editor of Global Research.

Global War on Humanity: America's Unceasing Pursuit of Hegemony

Dr. Jack Rasmus discusses his newest book, "The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump", with an emphasis on the practice of neoliberalism as opposed to the economic ideology which obscures its class basis; neoliberalism as the third major capitalist restructuring of the 20th century as a response to the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s; the four economic policy areas, i.e., fiscal, monetary, industrial and external, that require restructuring as capitalism evolves into a new crisis; the fallacies of neoliberalism; government policy encourages offshoring of US manufacturing; global dollar recycling into US treasuries to support the twin US deficits solution; financialization of the economy; shadow banking; deregulation and privatization; neoliberalism socially destructive.

Aired: January 22, 2020

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Guns and Butter 417

Neoliberalism:  From Expansion to Stagnation - Dr. Jack Rasmus, #417

Dr. Jack Rasmus discusses the last three chapters of his new book, “The Scourge of Neoliberalism: From Reagan to Trump” with a focus on the growing contradictions within the Neoliberal policy regime in the 21st Century; the deep technological and material forces undermining and driving the contradictions; and why the 2020s decade will require yet another, fourth restructuring of US capitalism that may fundamentally differ from the Neoliberal experience of the past four decades. Also discussed is how the material forces and Neoliberal policy are behind much of the decline and demise of US democracy form and political restructuring underway in the US since the mid 1990s.

Aired: January 29, 2020

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Guns and Butter 418

After Trump and Neoliberalism What's Next? - Dr. Jack Rasmus, #418

On Episode #322 of the Sunday Wire Radio Show:

We look at Microsoft founder and billionaire oligarch Bill Gates and the role he is playing in aggressively pushing for mandatory coronavirus vaccine for every person on the planet.

Listen to the full show here:
https://21stcenturywire.com/2020/04/12/episode-322-sovereign-immunity-with-guests-sir-julian-rose-and-clive-de-carle/

The Sunday Wire with Patrick Henningsen

Bill Gates Knows All About Viruses & Vaccines

Dmitry Orlov gives his view on the pandemic and ensuing economic collapse. He looks at the dire situation facing the U.S., its dollar status, and the disintegration of the political system. He talks about his changed view on the climate movement and its liberal dogma. He gives his take on China, Russia, Putin after 2024, and the potential for military conflict. Finally, he provides an outline for what people should be doing to prepare as the crisis gets underway.

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Websites
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Books
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About the Guest
Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American engineer and a writer on subjects related to “potential economic, ecological and political decline and collapse in the United States,” something he has called “permanent crisis”. Orlov believes collapse will be the result of huge military budgets, government deficits, an unresponsive political system and declining oil production.

Orlov was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and moved to the United States at the age of 12. He has a BS in Computer Engineering and an MA in Applied Linguistics. He was an eyewitness to the collapse of the Soviet Union over several extended visits to his Russian homeland between the late 1980s and mid-1990s.

In 2005 and 2006 Orlov wrote a number of articles comparing the collapse-preparedness of the U.S. and the Soviet Union published on small Peak Oil related sites. Orlov’s article “Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US” was very popular at EnergyBulletin.Net.

Orlov’s book Reinventing Collapse:The Soviet Example and American Prospects, published in 2008, further details his views. Discussing the book in 2009, in a piece in The New Yorker, Ben McGrath wrote that Orlov describes “superpower collapse soup” common to both the U.S. and the Soviet Union: “a severe shortfall in the production of crude oil, a worsening foreign-trade deficit, an oversized military budget, and crippling foreign debt.” Orlov told interviewer McGrath that in recent months financial professionals had begun to make up more of his audience, joining “back-to-the-land types,” “peak oilers,” and those sometimes derisively called “doomers”.

In his review of the book, commentator Thom Hartmann writes that Orlov holds that the Soviet Union hit a “soft crash” because of centralized planning in: housing, agriculture, and transportation left an infrastructure private citizens could co-opt so that no one had to pay rent or go homeless and people showed up for work, even when they were not paid. He writes that Orlov believes the U.S. will have a hard crash, more like Germany’s Weimar Republic of the 1920s.

*Podcast intro music is from the song "The Queens Jig" by "Musicke & Mirth" from their album "Music for Two Lyra Viols": http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)