This document is online at: https://ratical.org/ratville/MichaelHudson-JunkEcon.html
Editor’s note: This is a transcript of the recording, D@W Exclusive Podcast: Michael Hudson on Junk Economics. Democracy at Work’s Paul Sliker and Dante Dallavalle talk with Michael Hudson, one of the world’s six economists who accurately predicted the 2007-2008 financial crisis —see “The New Road To Serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse” (Harper’s, May 2006). His new book, J is for Junk Economics (see review by Peter Koenig), reveals how mainstream economic vocabulary has been turned upside down in striking Orwellian fashion to mean just the opposite of what the words and terms originally described. Michael Hudson explains how the corporate media and academia use well-crafted euphemisms to conceal how the economy actually operates. The transcript includes select time markers relative to the start time. A local mp3 file is provided as well as articles/interviews and film links of/with Michael Hudson at the end of this file.
Michael Hudson on Junk Economics, Debt Cancellation, and Emptying Out Economies Interviewed by Paul Sliker and Dante Dallavalle Democracy at Work, April 3, 2017 local MP3 file (71.7MB)
“How a society defines economic terms and relationships will determine who controls it.”
—Michael Hudson, The Insider’s Economic Dictionary, Part A, July 2013
Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of many books including: J Is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception (2017), Absentee Ownership and its Discontents: Critical Essays on the Legacy of Thorstein Veblen edited with Ahmet Öncü (2016), Killing the Host – How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy (2015), Finance as Warfare (2015), The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis (2012), Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents: Interviews and Speeches 2003-2012 (2012), America’s Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy (New Edition 2010), Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, complete book in PDF (2nd ed 2003), Archeology of the Ancient Near East (Edited books) Labor in the Ancient World (2015) Creating Economic Order: Record-Keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East (2004) Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (2002) Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (1999) Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity (1996) The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations (1993) ISLET engages in research regarding domestic and international finance, national income and balance-sheet accounting with regard to real estate, and the economic history of the ancient Near East. Michael Hudson acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide including Iceland, Latvia and China on finance and tax law. He has been been associated with Harvard’s Peabody Museum for over thirty years in Babylonian economic archeology. For more than twenty years he has headed a group out of Harvard, the International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE), writing a new economic history of the ancient Near East. Beginning in 1994, the five colloquia volumes ISCANEE has published, was based on the decision of the necessity to re-write the history to free it from the modern ideological preconceptions that have distorted much popular understanding. His academic focus has been on financial history and since 1980 on writing a history of debt, land tenure and related economic institutions from the Sumerian period, antiquity, and feudal Europe to the present.
Now, it is clear the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes ... It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.... If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration ... —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language (1946) Michael Hudson on Junk Economics and Debt Cancellation
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