Image by Julian Stallabrass via Flickr
with Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
October 7, 2016
TheRealNews on Oct 7, 2016
The IMF foretells of vulnerable banks in US and EU while enabling unsustainable debt-leveraging, says economist Michael Hudson.
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 Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com.
from the archives:
Ellen Brown: Breaking Through the Money Power
What Will A Socialist Society Be Like? by Jessica Hansen-Weaver
Abby Martin: Rejecting Neoliberalism and Imperialism
Dandelion Salad 
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Easier said than done but…for the sake of all, those banks that should have gone under long time ago…let them, before all are pulled into this abyss with no one to pull us out again.
Lo, I love that photo. All I meant to say about it is this: My first glance at this page took in the headline and the photo, and so at first I thought the “illusion” discussed in the video would be capitalism itself. And it sort of is, but not quite, and so I felt a need to comment on that fact.
Glad you like the photo, too. I’ve briefly thought about putting up cute cat photos for blog posts to get more interest. Blogging has been difficult these past 3 or more years. The titles and photos are so important. To put a number on it, views are down 80% from the highest views in 2008, 8 years ago!
The “illusion” mentioned in the title is not capitalism (in the photo) but the much more specific problem that Hudson talks about in this video, i.e., the continuing financial crash that began in 2008. And when he posed the question, I think he was talking about a slightly more educated audience — i.e., bankers, corporate executives, world “leaders.”
But if you pose the broader question, how long will the general public be willing to live in the illusion of capitalism, I’d say it’s a misformed question, because most of the general public isn’t aware that it =IS= an illusion. Most of them are fooled by the illusion. Most of them still believe that capitalism can be reformed, and that the crash of 2008 was not man-made, but was something unpredictable and temporary, like rain. To be “willing to live in” something implies knowing what it is that you’re living in.
A better question would be, “will the public ever wake up from the illusions of capitalism?” And I don’t know the answer to that. If they just watch FOX and MSNBC, there is nothing to wake them.
And even if they ever do wake up, I don’t know if they can free themselves from capitalism. Perhaps it will then be imposed on them by brute force rather than by propaganda. But I guess then it is no longer called “capitalism.” I guess then it is called “feudalism.” Hudson actually mentioned something like that in his interview, though he didn’t mention the brute force involved.
Thanks, Lefty.
As editor, I make up the titles and choose which photo/picture to use. I took his direct quote from the transcript to use as the title and added the photo. It takes a lot of time to choose a photo and it’s has to be one with a Creative Commons license (copyright free). I’ve used this photo a few times before because I like it. So, it’s an editorial decision. Both WordPress Reader and Facebook need a photo of a certain size to show in their respective feeds, otherwise there is no picture and that means less people will bother to click to read/view the blog post.