We Make the Rules - Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal interview Michael Hudson

 

Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire with Michael Hudson

Source: Michel Hudson

excerpt:

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think you’re talking also about the Nord Stream Two pipeline that the Germans and the Europeans were blocking.

So when a European politician said we would rather all starve in the dark than have to buy from the Russians, what they mean is, we would rather take the bribes that we’re getting into our bank accounts from the Americans.
We would rarely get the high prices and all of the support from the Americans, and let our 99 percent of the population starve, so that we can get rich off what the Americans are paying us to starve the Europeans of energy and freeze in the dark, just so that Russia won’t get get the payment for this.

So obviously, Russia is thinking, well, it can now sell all the gas that it wants to China. At some point, it’ll decide, if Europe doesn’t want to buy our gas, if it’s not going to open the Nord Stream Two pipeline.

The pipeline is all there. All they have to do is open the pipeline, and the price of gas will come down.

And the Europeans are – what Putin recognized, and [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov have been saying is, the European Commission does not represent Europe; Brussels works for Washington.

Brussels is an arm of the U.S. State Department. It has nothing to do with the European population. Europe is not a democracy; it’s an oligarchy. But it’s also a militarized oligarchy controlled by the United States.

And so Europe is acting, is willing to have its houses freeze, its pipes freeze over, floods in houses, just in order to please the Americans.

How long can this go on without there being a revolution?

The amazing thing is that protest is coming from the right, not from the left. You have the Alternative für Deutschland party on the right, and Die Linke, the Left Party, has fallen.

The socialists have not taken an anti-American stand because America has gained such has control, has made the European socialist parties, just like it has made the British Labor Party under Tony Blair.

The socialist parties and left-wing parties of Europe are all pro-American. And they’re not talking about economics. They’re not talking about welfare. I can’t even summarize what they’re saying, because it’s a mush.
But the irony is that it’s the right wing that is becoming the nationalistic power in Europe to break away from the United States, not the left.

And I don’t see Europe ending up as much more than a dead zone.

And I think President Biden feels the same way. He is obviously pivoting towards Asia and has left Europe, and England, and Ukraine, and the Baltics just to go their own way.

And no matter how bad things look in the United States, I think things look worse for Europe right now.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, you see the same dynamic at play with the protests in Italy and France against the green pass, and the construction of what, in my opinion, is a kind of digital authoritarianism, just exploiting the emergency atmosphere of the pandemic.

The right is gaining power. A nationalist right is gaining power.

And there are workers and unionists involved in these protests. Trieste, the Italian port city, is seeing dock dockworkers rise up. But the left is, I mean, it seems to be largely absent.

And the same in the US, with the protests against government mandates. Whatever you think about them, we need to make this objective observation and determine what it means for left-right dynamics when workers are being intimidated.

This all is being guided, this policy, is being guided in many ways through the World Economic Forum.
And there is a vocabulary out there about a Great Reset, which is something that Klaus Schwab, the president of the World Economic Forum, has openly proposed in his latest book about the pandemic.

But it has been denounced as a conspiracy theory by Naomi Klein in The Intercept.

And I think a lot of what we have been talking about is kind of consistent with how people understand the Great Reset, you know, pivoting towards a kind of feudalistic and authoritarian capitalism that is highly digitized, in order in order to manage an impoverished middle class.

What are your thoughts on the Great Reset? Is it a conspiracy theory? Is it something real? And if so, what does it mean to you?

MICHAEL HUDSON: It would love to be a conspiracy, but not all conspiracies are successful. They’re hoping that they can bamboozle the world into believing rhetoric instead of reality.

And they’re hoping that people will think that the future is something that has never been in the world before. And what they’re calling democracy is a country without government.

There are only two kinds of governments possible in the world. One is the usual kind that you have had ever since Sumer in Babylonia: a mixed economy, with the government providing basic services, and the public private sector doing the trade and the innovation.

The other is something that you had briefly in Rome before it collapsed, and you’re now idealizing in the United States: it’s an economy with no government at all. You get rid of all government power to regulate or tax business.
You want all of the planning – you want a centrally planned economy, much more centrally planned than you have in China and even in Russia. But the central planner is going to be Wall Street, and the city of London, and the Paris Bourse.

You’re going to have financial planners take over the planning, and they’re going to do it with the corporations as a means basically of subduing, of squeezing out more and more of a surplus out of the people who produce it, labor, basically, and other countries that produce raw materials.

And that is the dream. Can they convince, can Klaus [Schwab] and the attendees who go to these [World Economic Forum] meetings really convince people that you can get along without government and let the neoliberals do to the world economy what Margaret Thatcher did for England, and somehow think that you’re getting richer?

Because the cost of your housing is going up, and your salary is going up, but even more than it goes up, you have to pay it for medical care, for housing, for your debt service, and for just the cost of living.

How do we convince the world that they’re getting better and better when actually they’re getting poorer and poorer, and we’re concentrating more and more of the wealth in our own hands?

Now you can call that a conspiracy. I think it’s sort of a pipe dream if they think they can get the rest of the world to go along with it.

And I guess it’s the Abraham Lincoln statement, you can fool some of the people some of the time, some of them all, but you can’t fool China and Russia, and Iran, and India, and North Korea, and South Korea all the time.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, it could be a conspiracy, but that’s in many ways how history is dictated.

I’d refer to Michael Parenti’s lecture on capitalism and conspiracy and class power from 1993, where he makes the case that history is really not an accident. And now more than ever, it’s being decided in Davos.

So I think that on that point – well I guess I’ll just pitch to Ben here. I know Ben as a question...