Part two of a Hudson interview by Norton and Blumenthal: how the empire works
" the more America fought militarily, it was depleting its own gold stock, until finally, in August 1971, it said, “We’ve been using gold as the key to our world power ever since World War I, when we put Europe on rations. So we’re going to stop paying gold.” "
“We’ve told the Saudi Arabians that they can charge whatever they want for their oil, but all the money they get, they have to recycle to the United States. Mostly they can buy Treasury bonds, so that we’ll have the money to keep on spending, but they can also buy stocks, or they can do with the Japanese did and buy junk real estate and lose their shirts.”
"when America spends money abroad, central banks really don’t have much — they don’t speculate. They don’t buy companies; they buy Treasury bonds. So we run a monetary deficit; the dollars are spent abroad; the central banks lend them back to the Treasury; and that finances the budget deficit, but it also finances the balance of payments deficit. So we just keep giving paper"
"George W. Bush, said, “Well we’re never really going to repay this. They get counters, but we’re not going to repay it.” "
" that’s why China, Russia, and other countries are trying to de-dollarize"
"America has been buying up Europe, Asia, and other regions with paper credit, US Treasury IOUs that it has informed the world it has little intention of ever paying off."
“And there is little Europe or Asia can do about it except to abandon the dollar and create their own financial system.”
"gunboats don’t appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn’t have gun boats in them, or the crime sector"
"Does there have to be an armed revolution here to cancel the debts? Do they have to eat the rich? That’s the whole question for the politics of America."
"If it is not solved by the indebted people simply starving to death, committing suicide, getting sick, or emigrating, then there will have to be a revolution. Those are the choices "
"we’re in the Orwellian world that works through the organs or the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, National Public Radio, the real right-wing of America."
"China doesn’t threaten the American people, but rather the chokehold that the US has on the international financial system."
"what makes China so threatening is that it’s following the exact, identical policies that made America rich "
"we don’t want American banks to come in, create paper dollars, and buy out all of our industries. We’re not going to let America do that.”
"America says China is a vicious threat because it’s not letting us exploit them and victimize them"
"So by essentially waging this economic warfare against China to protect America monopolies, America is integrating China and Russia. "
"The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture."
"So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern in history — more evil than the IMF. "
“You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops that can’t be grown in temperate zones like the United States.”
"The purpose of the World Bank is to make other countries’ economies distorted and warped into a degree that they are dependent on the United States for their trade patterns."
"First with the School of the Americas graduates staging a coup, and Bill Clinton reinstalls Jean-Bertrand Aristide ... Aristide is forced to sign off, basically sign away Haiti’s domestic agricultural production capacity. And the next thing you know, their rice economy’s wiped out, and they’re importing rice from Louisiana ... the only economy left, the only economic opportunity left, is to work in these free trade zones for US companies"
"When you have the same problem occurring after 50 years, it’s either insanity — and we know it’s not — or it’s the intent."
"And when you isolate the United States, China realizes that what will be isolated is the neoliberal philosophy that is the cover story, the junk economics that justifies all of these destructive policies."
" the cold war was an attempt — it’s neoliberalism and privatization. It’s Thatcherism. It’s, “How do we make China and Russia look like Margaret Thatcher’s England, or Russia in the 1990s under Yeltsin?” "
"The cold war really is about what is going to happen to Europe. Because we have already isolated China and Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization ... The question is what will happen to Europe, and what will happen to Africa."
https://moderaterebels.com/transcript-economics-american-imperialism-michael-hudson/Part 1 is about the corona virus bailout
https://moderaterebels.com/transcript-us-coronavirus-bailout-michael-hudson/I have posted a summary elsewhere.
sidd