EDITOR—In a series of extraordinary interviews with both Palestinians and Israelis, John Pilger weaves together the issue of Palestine. He speaks to the families of suicide bombers and their victims; he sees the humiliation of Palestinians imposed on them at myriad checkpoints and with a permit system not dissimilar to apartheid South Africa’s infamous pass laws. He goes into the refugee camps and meets children who, he says, “no longer dream like other children, or if they do, it is about death.”
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PATRICE GREANVILLE—Capitalism has always drowned and faltered on its unjust social relations. The outrageously lopsided way it distributes income, the product of society, continually augmented by advances in technology, is a contradiction that has no economic answers because it is really a question of power, a question of politics. The constant elimination of jobs by automation, and their hemorrhage toward cheap-labor zones cannot be “cured” by job training programs or even better education for all (as Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich, the main evangelist for this pseudo-solution, still preaches).
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MICHAEL HUDSON—Well, for many years I was at the center of the university that promoted modern monetary theory, the University of Missouri at Kansas City. And that was created with a contribution by Warren Mosler to bring the faculty there. So yes, I’m one of the original modern monetary theory faculty people….And the theory is that it’s not really a theory – it’s the description of how banking really works. And I guess the leaders outside of academia are Dick Cheney and Donald Trump. They said that deficits don’t matter, we can simply do what banks do. Just like when you go into a bank and you take out a loan, the bank doesn’t have to have any money in it. It will write you a loan and it will deposit money in your account. And so, the bank asset goes up by your deposit and your asset goes up by the deposit. The bank has a credit to you, the loan IOU that you signed at interest. And the debt, what it’s had to borrow the money from the Federal Reserve, or something. Banks create their own credit money…Governments can do the same thing. The government can print whatever it wants. In fact, every time there’s a war, like World War I, all the observers thought that World War I was going to end in six months because governments would run out of money. Well, they didn’t run out of money, they printed the money. Just like America printed greenbacks in the Civil War. And the people don’t have to borrow money at all.
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EDITOR—Dr. Michael Hudson is a professor of Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, political consultant, commentator, and journalist. His career has focused on the study of debt, both external and internal, with an eye on what happens when the exponentially growing debts of a society outstrip the profits from the real economy. We talk about GDP is a false marker of prosperity, the growing influence of the rentier class, fantasies of joining the one percent, and why there’s never going to be another debt jubilee, even if it means the whole system has to fall apart. We continue the conversation about possible solutions in part 2.
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The Australia Institute made no serious attempt to politically analyse its findings on the historic distribution of economic growth in Australia. The so-called progressive think tank is itself part of the political establishment, receiving funding from wealthy patrons as well as from sections of the trade union bureaucracy.
