Month: September 2023

The Chinese has a proverb, 天有好生之德，meaning Divine has the virtue of provision. Human’s responsiblity lies in living in harmoney with Heaven and Earth and have a congruency in coexistance everything else in nature, abiding by the great Tao (道）of Divine Principle, as all are the reflection of the diversity of cosmic love.

Like the rivers eventually returning to the ocean, individually we may be on differnt stage of development, different cycle of spiritual evolution, differnt path, but ultimately we are all on the same journey returning back to universal consciousness. In that sense we are one and the same.

As such we all have right to have access to basic necessity and human diginity: like clean air, unpolluted water, basic living condition like healthy food, a roof over your head to stay, and free education from K-12 and basic medical care provision. This is my understanding of the “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. It is injustice for America to control the world’s food supply (more on that by Professor Michael Hudson later of this blog). It is unjustice for a handful of elites to have 90% of the resources of the society while so many live in the street and plagued by drug abused untreated without clean water and food. Because every mental disorder, every drug addicted posts a further debasement/environmental cost of the whole society.

Of course, the popullation growing put a high pressure on the resources. So how to consolidate ways and means to live within budget is the challenge. GDP as a measure of national productivity which is often accompanied by tremendous waste, resources misallocation and huge disparity in distribution, is not a proper index to cover the basics for all. In this aspect we have a lot to learn from Indegenious people for living in community and sharing resources. We may need to have part of society to revive agriculture for organic food, vegetables and medical herbs in paralle to the industrialized plants and office employment. Organic plants grow without chemicals and non genetically modified organis food takes up more labor and produce less quantities. But the food will reduce many modern disease and help boost immunue system for the society, and thus reduce medical cost.

Government has a responsiblity to enforce and implement norms, customers and proper order for a functional society. Government also has the responsiblity to organize and help provide the public good mentioned above. Our time is prevalent with corruption. Different branches of the govenment spend a lot of time fighting on small details rather than work coherently towards a mission to serve the people. Not to mention abusing of the power and blantly violence. We should be ashame of our sin, but we should not ashame of our repenance. While God has patience with us, the Noah’s Ark is building, the flood will come. From the Dust we come, and to the Dust we shall return. There is judgement days awaiting. Day by day what we think, what we do, and what we talk forms files/records for the final judgement when we depart this world.

The government official has accountability not only towards their constituents, but also towards Divine’s order, Tao’s way, or whatever you name it in that sense.  Structurelly, U.S government do not have systematic way to select officials who are both decent and competent for the job.  Chinese has a idiom, 人贵有自知之明，which is similar to Know Thyself, know the strength and weakness of your ability and capacity to take up a certain position to serve.  The lack of a human resoures function in the govenrment open the door to unfair treatment and unjustified favorism.  Another function structurely lacking is the system of Independent Commission Against Corruption to monitor government officals’ conduct and finance， which should be different from the current FBI or CIA.

Professor Michael Hudson had degree in Germanic pilology and History and Linguistics. Most of his studies, apart from that, were at Roosevelt University and Depaul in Music. At early days, It never occurred to him to even tread an economics book. It was just like another world. He was into history of culture, art, music and literature. That explains a lot about his later use of economic history in terms of understanding economic theories. The use of deficit payment in terms of being an imperial state was the one of the three pillars that are very central to his thesis.

Michael Hudson explained Why the US has a unique place in the history of imperialism? Prof. Hudson speaks on the nature of US financial dominance, the role of World Bank in developing countries, USA’s ability to run a huge balance of payment deficit, changes in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, the problems of US economy with post-industrialization, and the role of neoclassical economics in all this.

Question: Contrary to the understanding of most people that world Bank as a very benevolent institution committed to developing the third world, ………….Actually the World Bank was directly complicit in restructuring the new imperial world order and particularly its effect on the deveoping world was terrible. It suppressed any radical restructuring of the agraian order.

Hudson: the World Bank was always been an arm of the U.S military and very often its president has been the former Defense Department head or a military head. The World Bank, upon its founding, had one basic purpose to make sure that other countries did not produce their own food. The idea was to hav eother countries produce goods, food, and services that United States didn’t produce, such as tropical climate crops or planation crops….. the state department fought any reform….. on the ground tat anywhere that there was a land reform, there was an anti-American policy.

The one heaviest element of America’s balance of payments was its food exports. It realized that here was a way to strangle the global south, Latin America, Africa, and what was called the Third world, by being able to cut off its food supply and starve it if it would decide to pursue any policy that the United States did not approve of. It wanted to use food like it’s using oil today against Europe by blocking access to Russian oil and by invading the Near East to seize the oil of Iraq, seize the oil of Syria, control the pipeliness in Afghanistan, and destroy the oil production in Libya. Agriulture was what the fight was all about in the 1950s and 60s and early 70s. I (Hudson) wrote my master’s dissertation on the World Bank missions to countries. All of the missions said you have to promote domestic agriculture, domestic family farming and food production. The World Bank wrote into its articles of agreement that it couldn’t do this. The World Bank only made foreign currency loans, maily in dollars for projects that would earn foreign exchange.

Well, if a country like India or Pakistan feeds itself, this doesn’t earn foreign exchange. Feeding yourself did not even qualify for loans from the World Bank. Only if you make exporet crops or produce things that America wants to import, low-wage manufacturers will do it. I (Hudson) published an article along those lines in a periodical, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Catholic Church became one of my major supporters in the years leading up to the publication of Super Imperialism in 1972 because their liberation theorlogy came out in favor of land reform. The United States said if there’s land reform, then the American corporations can’t control the bananas in Guatemala and Ecuador.

One of the first regime changes right after iran was the coup d’etat that the CIA overthrew the government in Guatemala, where people wanted to feed themselves. And the United Fruit Company said if they feed themselves, then where are we going to grow our bananas? The World Bank from the beginning was even more destructive of the Global South and Third World countries than the IMF because it just blocked any attempt to be self-sufficient. And it loaded down these countries with debt. The projects that the World Bnak funded with U.S. dollars and U.S. engineering companies was raods to the export facilities, ports. The World Bank funded electricity that would serve the American companies there, lower the cost of producing exports for firms that Americans bought control of. So if the American company would buy into a country, the World Bank wold suppoly all of the external costs so that the American company would not have to build roads, would not have to build port facilities. None of this actually helped the Third World countries develop at that time. But they did help the American investment and it was always looked at that. The idea was to make American investment in foreign countries more profitable, prevent other countries from becoming independent in food. In the 1950s, America tried to starve China by blocking all grain exports to China. Canada broke the blockade and enabled China, fortunately, to obtain its grain elsewhere. but the United States wanted to use that tyhreat against countries.

That’s now coming to be very beneficial for the American military today. The Charles Schwab and the World Economic Foundation says the world population ahs to drop by 20%, wha tthey mean is not the white population, they mean the global south population. The United States is trying to prevent Russian grain, as you’ve seen in Ukraine, from getting to the global south countries. only letting Russian grain be exported to help Europe and the united States, not to anyone outside of NATO. you have the result of warped one-sided development of the World Bank is funded, resulting in today’s crisis throughout the global south countries. While these countries are running a balance of trade deficit for their food and energy, they also are still paying the World Bank and foreign bondholders in dollars, where the dollar is going way up against their own currency. You’re seeing a massive kind of default that the United States is trying to use as a godsend to force countries into dependence on another military agency, the Internatiuonal Monetary Fund, whic will only mkae them loans to be able to import the food and the energy they need, if they agree U.S to control their infrastructure and complete the privatization takeovers that have been taking place for the last 30 years. The world Bank is run essentially with a neoliberal economic philosophy, strongly by the pentagon, by the military and the state Deartment interests, as a tool of American economic neo-colonialism….. the World Bank was structurally in favor of unbanizing projects and that led to a massive unstable immigration to the cities.

Origins of debt: Michael Hudson reveals how financial oligarchies in Greece & Rome shaped our world. Many people think debt and the payment of interest, the fact that all debtors have to pay their debts. It is assumed that the rules of Finance are Universal, they’ve always been this way, and there is no alternative. The political message of modern economic history is there is no alternative, and there has never been one. Therefore there isn’t any alternative in the future, all debt have to be paid.

The common theme that made Western Civilization different from everything that went before was the fact that they didn’t cancel the debts. In the ancient time, the near Eastern counties had a common practice, which was a Jewish religion called the Jubilee or the cancellations of debts in 50th year, that was put at the very center of Mosaic law in Leviticus Chapter 25. Jewish laws were taken word for word from the Babylonian practice. You cancel a personal debts (not the commercial debts) that were due, liberate the bond servants that were pledged and you restore lands to people who lost them. That way you prevented an oligarchy from developing and taking over all of te land. what happend was a very bad climate from 1200 BC -800 BC. Population couldn’t make it on the land that they lived on.

Western Civilization let an oligarchy take over, and instead of the basic rule that debts have to be written down to the ability to pay, Rome introduced a pro-creditor law. All the debts have to be paid no matter what the social consequences are. No matter how much Society is injured by families losing their land, and the land being concentrated, the money being concentrated, wealth being concentrated, political power being concentrated in the hands of a creditor oligarchy. Debt is a debt and it has to be paid. Roman law is still the philosophy of modern law, the whole modern legal system is still based on that of Greece and Roman.

Debt in Discussion with Michael Hudson. Professor Hudson said people are trying to compliment him by saying he is an economist, but he said he has not spoken with economists for the last 50 years. Since 1972, he decided call himself a futurist or historian. Professor Hudson said he is NOT an economist who have to get rich by making other people poor, and get richer off them, basically that is why they give Nobel prizes for. We need a name for a new discipline, Professor Hudson said he does not know what to call it, he was at Harvard University’s anthropology department for 25 years doing the five colloqui on ancient economics and det cancellation. Professor Hudson said he could say he is an anthropologist, but then he remember the joke in the 1960 that when governmet suspicious of somebody as a government agent, the jobk is: is he FBI or is he an anthropologist, meaning CIA? that is why Professor Hudson said we need an other terms for Economist.

Professor Hudson worked outside of mainstream, David Graeber was drawn to Michael Hudson’s work, because of its brilliance, and the kind of brilliance that often has to come from outside of mainstream. Hudson was not appease any aprticular trend or try to game the Tanger track game, instead were researching trends that he had been studying for decades. And so he had conviction of the soundness of his arguments. People in the mainstream are unable to see just how complicit they are in the problems that they are supposed to be solving, but are in fact creating through means of capital accumulation.

Based on his decades of work in the area, Professor Hudson take the view that the debts can’t be paid. He argues for debt cancellation. Especially now because of the sanctions against Russia on World War III. Obviously rising energy and food prices forces Global South countries to make a choice, either they pay the U.S dollar debts and impose austerity or they don’t pay the debts and put their own growth first. That is the big political fight, Professor Hudson is working with several European economists to write a book on debt cancellation, and how this can be done from the members of the Shanghai cooperation organizaiton, how the rest of the world can become independent from the dollarized debt.

Professor Hudson had been teaching history of economic thought, and he was using Marx’s theories of surplus value, and that infuriated the marxists, they say you are not a member of any marxist group, only their member can teach Marx……. Hudson’s main concept is focusing on economic rent is unearned income. and extend the concept of economic grant to interest Financial charges to the rentier economy and almost all the work he had been publishing in the last two years have been were not in industrial capitalism, were in a retrogression of Finance capitalism, in a way is rolling back all of the historical tasks of industrial capitalism to free economies from the legacy of fedalism – to free it from Land Run Monoploy rent and privatized banking to go back to the same kind of rentier economy that you ad under the landlors except now rent is for paying interest and landlords paying in the 19th century has been taken over by bankers and the financial sector. Professor Hudson want to integrate his analysis of finance and debt with the concept of economic rent which is basically what the banks in the financial sector Finance. They finance real estate and capital gains, actual asset price gains for Real Estate housing, they finance the oil and gas natural resource mining industries and finance technology monopolies. Hudson wanted to revive classical economics. Hudson said he can say he is a n economist as long as he say he is a classical economist.

Basically that is Adam Smith in the whole 19th century emphasis on Price and Value Theory where price is the excess of market price of economic rent, in excess of the cost value….That was what people like Henry George had no concept of. Paul Krugman was a reader for a book yale University press wanted Hudson to publish. Krugman thought Hudson is a follower of Henry George. Well, Henry Georgedidn’t have a Price and Value Theory. He was against the big government without realizing that the only way you’re ever going to be a le to tax the renties, the only way you’re going to make money and credit a public utility instead of a priate monoply is to have a government strong enough to check the oligarchy and that’s what the classic antiquity is about. That’s really the prolem of western civilizations.

So what David was doing in his book and where he and Hudson both were at the time he was riting it, and afterwards, was to say, well, if you look at anthropology, look at all the damage that does, look through ages how societies cope with debt, either of us made the logical jump to say this is the path that western civiliztion went that become a unique totally new detour around the 8th century BC and ever since we’re still living in the aftermath of Rome’s oligarchy, and the creditor-oriented law that developed.

So Hudson really developed his own ideas quite further when he began to write the book on Antiquity and just to a higher level of abstraction, and then when he began to look at the Crusades and find how awful they were, he forgotten what evil the Vatican had been in the early centuries – the second, third, fourth, fifth all the way down to last week. He forgot the utter evil of the popes and trying to be emperors, and it was a Crusades that brought in the Inquisiition. When Hudson looked at the Wikipedia, people think Crusades were to free holy land Jerusalem from Muslim, that wasn’t it! …. The crusade were against Christians!

The Crusades was to kill the French catheters who said that the rich people are evil. No, that is our constituency to fight the German kings. He said we want to be independent of the Popes. And we don’t want the churches to send all their money to Rome to fund the wars against people that don’t want Roman leadership. The Crusades were to destroy Constantinople and destroy Eastern Orthodox, the real Christianity that had survived. The Crusades were to introduce them, we dont know what call it, but it was not Christianity. That was why the Pope has not invited Hudson to help him write a new encyclical on this topic. But that really is what is needed. Hudson realized that it was The Crusades that led to the Pope saying, well, we’ve got to finance the wars so that we can fight Germany, France, Spain, Sicily,… that doesn’t accept our dictatorship. In order to fund these wars we need Bank to support, so let’s get rid of all the church’s anti-usery law, let’s say credit is good, not bad. Like the animal farm with Orwell.

All of a sudden a total inversion of everything that Christianity western Christianity was about. You get the key to this inversion as Hudson at the end of the Collapse of Antiquity with the Lord’s Praye saying: “Forget our sin, in other word, Lord. Don’t screw around sexually, instead of forgive us our debts they’ve done.” ….. It is just a travesty of mistranslation that Western Christianity suffered for the last thousand years, all that comes from the Crusades.

It hadn’t occurred to Hudson until he actually began to study Saint Augustine and as Peter Brown, the biographer of St. Augustine at 5th century pointed out: it was really Augustine that founded the spirit of the Inquisition, although it didn’t really come through until the Dominicans. The Dominicans realize the genius of the Pope was you can’t have Christianity unless you’re willing to kill everybody who can read the Bible. You have to prevent it from being translated so people can read it, because if people read the Bible, they are going to realize that we (Dominicans) are the opposite of everythg that Jesus was fighting for.

Yet, Hudson was supported by all of the various Christian groups. They were publishing, sending him across the country at a lecture. So there was a kind of thinking in the late 1960s and early 70s that somehow there was some hope for Christianity. But again that was befor ethe Pope from Hell, the Polish Pope came in, and the German Pope from hell that followed him, before the Catholic church was captured by the Spanish fascists. Hudson hope he haven’t offened anybody.

You can’t not have reindustralization with the labor under pay. you can not reindustralize without reversing this whole philosophy of past industrial society as a class war against labor.

In the last chapter of Hudson’s book, he showed the battle isn’t about Democracy and anti-democracy. The battle is really oligarchy and autocracy. In light of post-1970 world, one of the point Graber makes in the last chapter is that now that we’ve gone off the gold standard, and we’re decoupling ourselves from bullion, and are gong to a more virtual credit oriented kind of economy, in Graber’s mind, it allows for the opportunity of volume, so it doesn’t necessarily guarantee it, but if these historical patterns are accurate, it will at least open up a possibility. Graber said there are two conditions to Democracy. One that you’ve got to have people want to act democratically – basically an assumption that Pluralism is better than one person rule. But he also argues that you’ve got to have a strong government in order to bring about the kind of changes that Democratic change implies. Hudson think the concept of democracy and autocracy today has gone way beyond what it was even five years ago. …….. the value of study classical antiquity is that you realize that Aristotle was very clear that democracy evolves into oligarchy.

What the oligarchy wants to do is prevent any kind of central power strong enough to challenge its control of society. They called in Greece that any reformer wanting to have a strong enough ruler to cancel the debts and redistribute the land was called a tyrant. Because that’s what the tyrants did in 7th and 6th century BC. Well, the tyrants were who introduced democracy to Greece. They were the people who got rid of the mafiosi type leaders and cancelled the debts and redistribute the land. Now all of a sudden Tyant became a bad word, sort of like communist. In Rome, anyone wanting to cancel the debts and redistribute the land like Julius Caesar or Catalan were called seeking kingship. The Roman Kings, according to the Roman historians, cancelled the debts and supported access to the land by the people in the Bible. The Jewish rabbinical class, the Pharisees wanted Rome to Crucify Jesus, they said, well Jesus wants to be king. He want to be the king, the king of the Jews. they knew that for Rome saying somebody wanted to be king, is to do what Jesus said, his mission in life was to do to bring about the debt cacellation of the Jubilee year, and to restore the laws of leviticus against the rabbinical school wanting people to sign the prose pool of Rabbi Hillel where you waived all of the rights under the Jubilee.

The internal econonic dynamics is such that democracy leads to oligarchy, and so democracy is essentially ends up leading to what you have in the United States today. It’s led to finance capitalism overpowering the progressive tendencies of industrial capitalism. So when you have community party led China trying to support policies to raise producivity raise living standards provide a health care, education, transportation, alll the basic public utilities, that is called autocracy. American will say, well, under democracy you have to have a free market, meaning you have to let the American oligarchs buy control of transportation, you have to make America Banks create your money at interest, you can’t have public banking, you can’t have a central bank creating money. You need that to be aprivate monoply. That is democracy. That is what the whole term means today.

Webinar with Michael Hudson: a 4000-year perspective on economy, money and debt

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