‘Days of Revolt’: Chris Hedges, Michael Hudson Discuss How We Got to Junk Economics (Video)
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In this episode of teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt,” Chris Hedges interviews Michael Hudson on the history of classical economics and explores Marx’s interpretation of capitalism as exploitation.
Hudson is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.” Before becoming a professor, Hudson worked for many years on Wall Street.
“The essence of classical economics was to reform industrial capitalism, to streamline it, and to free the European economies from the legacy of feudalism,” Hudson said. “The legacy of feudalism was landlords extracting land-rent, and living as a class that took income without producing anything.”
Wall Street and the big-banking system have inverted classical economics. America is now over $19 trillion in debt, and the Congressional Budget Office projects that the debt will rise to $26.3 trillion by 2020. How did we get to this point?
“So we’ve turned the postwar economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out,” Hudson explained. “Somehow most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise in price. But you can’t get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end, the creditors always win. That’s why every society since Sumer and Babylonia has had to either cancel the debts, or you come to a society like Rome that didn’t cancel the debts, and then you have a dark age. Everything collapses.”
Watch Part I of the interview, posted by The Real News, below.
