Vrettos and Hudson again at nakedcapitalism:
" it’s sort of like Obama’s bailout in 2009 and ’10 on steroids ... Trump simply lifted it wholesale from his campaign backers, who basically are the same as the Democratic National Committee."
" It’s not going to rescue the economy. The bill injures the economy, because the money ends up with the banks. Part of its $10 trillion – $2 trillion – goes to citizens to spend, but ends up largely being paid to the banks and landlords. Specifically, there is an enormous giveaway that makes real estate tax exempt for the next 30 years."
"The financial bailout aims to enable the financial sector to extract so much money from the economy and drive so many small businesses under that the big venture capital firms and private equity can pick them up at low all prices. "
"Profit you have to pay income tax on. Rich people don’t make profits. They make capital gains. Only the little people make profits."
"employers and creditors claim to be speaking for the workers. Their trickle-down economics says that “What’s good for us is good for the workers. We want to help the workers by lending them more money to afford nicer housing, and lend them enough money to afford to pay their rising debt charges.”
"The Chicago School says any government spending is the road to the gas chambers. I’ve heard that said literally. "
"Wall Street and England have discovered bad MMT [Modern Monetary Theory]. It’s Donald Trump’s or the Democratic Party’s Obama-style MMT version known as Quantitative Easing. This approach says that deficits are indeed wonderful, as long as the government is running a deficit to spend on Wall Street, not into the “real” economy ... You’re seeing an attempt today to turn the MMT that we all developed in the last three decades into a travesty of bailouts for Wall Street. "
"You really want the health sector to be public, because if it’s privatized, it’s going to be run with the objective of charging monopoly rent and lowering the quality. Basically it will be rife with the kind of fraud that we’ve seen whenever there is a kind of crisis."
"States and municipalities are so deeply in debt that this crisis is going to push them even deeper ... The State and local debt must be written off. "
"That is going to cost bondholders. They belong to the higher income brackets, because state and local bonds are tax-exempt. Somebody has to bear the costs, and the Republican and Democratic suggestion is the same: to make the 99% pay the the 1%. "
"The bailout has given an enormous giveaway to the real estate industry, and is backing its right to collect all the rents, or else to evict the tenants and grab their property and paychecks. This is a pro-landlord bill. What’s needed is nonpayment. "
"The 1% has no intention of letting its wealth trickle down. Its intention is to take even more wealth from the 99%. Its intention is to suck up, not trickle down. Its lobbyists write the laws to make sure that the wealth is sucked up, not trickled down."
"It wasn’t so much out of an idea of utopian idealism that the Mesopotamian rulers canceled debts. They wanted to prevent the economy from falling apart. They wanted to prevent the citizenry – the taxpayers and cultivators on the land – from falling into debt to an oligarchy that would use their money to overthrow the rulers and take over society, financial-style."
"The oligarchy in turn tends to our takeover religion. In Judaism, Jesus accused the Pharisees of loving money and replacing the Jubilee year with Rabbi Hillel’s prosbul in which debtors waived their rights to have a debt cancellation under the Jubilee Year."
" We are in a permanent depression. There can be no recovery without wiping out the debt overhead"
"today’s class consciousness of wage earners has to see that industrial companies have been turned into financial companies. They’ve been financialized. A relevant class consciousness must realize that it’s up to socialists to do what industrial capitalism failed to do – namely, to free society from the rentiersector, from the landlord class, the monopolists and financial creditor class. Without freeing society from them, you’re going to have a neofeudal economy."
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/finance-capitalism-vs-industrial-capitalism-how-financial-parasites-and-debt-bondage-are-destroying-us.htmlHudson refers to a another piece, "From Marx to Goldman Sachs" which discusses the flaw in Marx's prediction that industrial capitalism would reform and subordinate banking. Instead, the rentier class subverted, corrupted and destroyed industrial capitalism.
"Realizing that income not taxed is free to be capitalized, bought and sold on credit, and paid out as interest, bankers have formed an alliance between finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) to free land rent and monopoly rent (as well as debt-leveraged “capital” gains) from taxation."
" As economic planning has passed from government to the financial sector, the alternative to public price regulation and progressive taxation is debt peonage."
"the accrual of interest on savings and bank loans is constrained only by the ability of borrowers to pay the mounting interest charges on these debts."
"The problem is that the financial system, like military victors from Assyria and Rome in antiquity down to those of today, destroys the host economy’s ability to pay."
"Ignoring the debt dimension, Ricardo became the doctrinal ancestor of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of monetarists. The difference is that whereas they insist that there is no such thing as a free lunch, he defined economic rent as unearned income. "
"Defeat of Germany and the Central Powers in 1917 paved the way for Anglo-Dutch banking principles to become ascendant. "
"the banking practices of finance capitalism have regressed toward short-term predatory lending. Reversing an eight-century trend, financial laws have become more creditor-oriented. The tax system also has become regressive, reversing the Progressive Era’s financial-fiscal program by un-taxing property and wealth, shifting the fiscal burden onto labor and industry."
"Marx expected industrial capital to use its rising power over governments to nationalize land and use its rent as the basic fiscal revenue. But it has been the banks that have obtained the lion’s share of land rent, capitalizing it into interest-bearing loans to new buyers."
"the financial sector now stands behind real estate interests as their major lobbyist for property tax cuts. Mortgage interest now absorbs most of the land’s “free” rental value, which is capitalized into debt overhead rather than serving as the tax base."
"untaxing property and finance obliges governments to make up these tax cuts by raising taxes that fall on consumers and non-FIRE-sector business. This shrinks the economy, lowering its ability to pay the rent needed to pay the bankers on their mortgage loans. "
"The fight to minimize rentier rake-offs in the form of economic rent from land, commercial monopolies, banking and kindred rent-seeking “tollbooth” privileges has failed. It has failed largely because of the symbiosis between the financial sector and the rent-seekers that have become its major customers "
"the ostensible “free market” lobbying effort sponsored by banks to shift the property tax onto labor and industry has become a campaign against government itself. The aim is to shift planning – along with public enterprises and their revenue – out of the hands of public agencies to those of Wall Street "
"the financial sector destroys life on a scale similar to military conquest. Birth rates fall, life spans shorten and emigration soars as economies polarize."
"the endgame of this dynamic is a financial crash, wiping out savings that have been lent out beyond the indebted economy’s ability to pay."
"It is at this point that the financial sector wields its political power to demand public bailouts ... as environmental polluters seek to shift the cleanup costs onto the public sector, so the financial sector demands cleanup of its debt pollution at taxpayer expense. "
"The actuarial fiction is that corporate, state and local pension funds (and Social Security) invested financially can grow exponentially by enough to pay for retirement and health care. This goal cannot be met in practice, because the “real” economy is unable to grow at a rate required to support the growth in debt service. Widespread awareness of this fact has led to the corporate ploy of threatening bankruptcy if unions do not agree to replace defined-benefit pensions with defined-contribution programs in which all that employees know is how much is docked from their paycheck, not what they will end up with."
"the pretense that fictitious finance-capital claims can be paid must be dropped at the point where financial managers desert the sinking financial ship. Their last act before the bubble bursts is the time-honored practice of taking the money and running "
"Finance capitalism has become a network of exponentially growing interest-bearing claims wrapped around the production economy."
[Quoting Marx:] "The credit system, which has its focus in the so-called national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers surrounding them, constitutes enormous centralisation, and gives to this class of parasites the fabulous power, not only to periodically despoil industrial capitalists, but to interfere in actual in a most dangerous manner – and this gang knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it"
"Many Social Democratic and Labour parties have jumped on the bandwagon of finance capital, not recognizing the need to rescue industrial capitalism from dependence on neofeudal finance capital before the older conflict between labor and industrial capital over wage levels and working conditions can be resumed. That is what happens when one reads only Volume I of Capital, neglecting the discussion of fictitious capital in Volumes II and III and Theories of Surplus Value."
https://michael-hudson.com/2010/07/from-marx-to-goldman-sachs-the-fictions-of-fictitious-capital1/sidd