The Koch Brothers’ Governors by Jeffery Sommers and Michael Hudson

Image by Peg Hunter via Flickr

by Jeffery Sommers and Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
December 12, 2014

Butlers Selling the Public’s Silver…. A Dress Rehearsal for Hillary?

The Koch Brothers are the closest thing the United States has to Russia’s oligarchs. They fuse ownership of the economy and state, using the latter to enrich themselves while making private gains through the public’s losses. Their idea of a “market economy” is to buy government officials and the assets they privatize at giveaway prices.

Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers: Who In Ukraine Will Benefit From An IMF Bailout? Not the Workers

by Jeffery Sommers and Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
March 21, 2014

TheRealNews on Mar 21, 2014

Economists Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers discuss how provisions in an IMF deal, like cuts to gas subsidies and pensions, will hurt the average Ukrainian citizens and benefit kleptocrats.

Michael Hudson: It’s as if Obama has Adopted Dick Cheney’s Military Policy!

by Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
March 17, 2014

An interview with WBEZ on the one-sided view of economic reform.

WBEZ writes:

Both the U.S. and the E.U. have pledged aid packages to help Ukraine’s new government stabilize the country’s economy. The IMF also has a team on the ground in Ukraine, currently analyzing the country’s debt crisis. They expect to make recommendations for reforms that are required for Ukraine to secure an IMF loan.

Russia’s Economic Development to Offset Terrorist Fervor? by Jeffery Sommers and Michael Hudson

by Jeffery Sommers and Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
February 25, 2014

Image by Paulo Filgueiras via United Nations Photo via Flickr

The Sochi Olympics were the great success Russia hoped for. The opening ceremonies proved a radiant display drawing on Russia’s most compelling cultural assets. This artful look back to Russia’s past greatness proved both a reminder and challenge to its own people to reprise their historical greatness going forward. Meanwhile, its closing ceremonies reprised these themes, reminding the viewer of Russia’s continued vibrancy in the arts.

Mrs. Thatcher’s Mean Legacy by Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers + Thatcher Gave More Power to Finance

by Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
April 8, 2013

Image by chrisjohnbeckett via Flickr

We typically honor the convention to refrain from to speak ill of the recently departed. But Margaret Thatcher probably would not object to an epitaph focusing on how her political legacy was to achieve her professed aim of “irreversibly” dismantling Britain’s public sector. Attacking central planning by government, she shifted it into much more centralized financial hands – the City of London, unopposed by any economic back bench of financial regulation and “free” of meaningful anti-monopoly price regulation.

Latvia’s Economic Disaster as a Neoliberal Success Story: A Model for Europe and the US? by Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson

Image by To Uncertainty And Beyond via Flickr

by Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
January 3, 2013

A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were looted by the employer grupos by the end of the 1970s. In the last decade, the Bush Administration, seeking a Trojan Horse to privatize Social Security in the United States, applauded Chile’s disastrous privatization of pension accounts (turning many over to US financial institutions) even as that nation’s voters rejected the Pinochetistas largely out of anger at the vast pension rip-off by high finance.

Michael Hudson: Debt Deflation in Europe and America + Euro SOS

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

Image by Resident on Earth via Flickr

with Prof. Michael Hudson
Bonnie Faulkner
Guns and Butter
September 14, 2011

European banking crisis causing a constitutional crisis of the European Central Bank; Germany; the myth of Social Security in the US.; bank balance sheet crisis; food, fuel and climate crisis; the super congress; debt deflation; FHA lawsuit against the banks; criminalization the financial sector; Modern Monetary Theory; the coming lost decade; debt cancellation.

“Wisconsin Death Trip.” Mass Privatization as the “Final Stage” of Neoliberal Doctrine by Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

by Prof Michael Hudson and Prof Jeffrey Sommers
Global Research, March 12, 2011

Image by SEIU International via Flickr

On Wednesday evening, in a veritable Night of the Long Knives, Wisconsin’s integrity was brutally murdered on the floor of the state Capitol in Madison. On 9 March, integrity and trust built up over a century was obliterated as Wisconsin state senators quickly reversed course and cleaved its budget “repair bill” in half. Financial items require a quorum, thus, collective bargaining was split off from the budget repair bill and voted on separately so as to permit its being voted on now. Even so, this still broke the state’s open meeting law requiring 24 hours’ notice to ensure transparency. Instead, the Wisconsin senate Republicans pulled out this new legislation without advance notice and began voting, leaving only a stunned Democratic legislator, Peter Barca, to read the open meeting law out loud to prevent the senators from voting. The senate voted over his objections anyway.

The Spectre Haunting Europe: Debt Defaults, Austerity, and Death of the “Social Europe” Model by Prof. Michael Hudson and Prof. Jeffrey Sommers

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

by Prof. Michael Hudson and Prof. Jeffrey Sommers
Global Research
January 18, 2011

A spectre is haunting Europe: the illusion that Latvia’s financial and fiscal austerity is a model for other countries to emulate. Bankers and the financial press are asking governments from Greece to Ireland and now Spain as well: “Why can’t you be like Latvia and sacrifice your economy to pay the debts that you ran up during the financial bubble?” The answer is, they can’t – without an economic, demographic and political collapse that will only make matters worse.

World Economic Crisis: Latvia’s Neoliberal Madness by Prof. Michael Hudson and Prof. Jeff Sommers

[tweetmeme source= “DandelionSalads” only_single=false]

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

by Prof Michael Hudson and Prof. Jeff Sommers
Global Research, February 15, 2010

While most of the world’s press focuses on Greece (and also Spain, Ireland and Portugal) as the most troubled euro-areas, the much more severe, more devastating and downright deadly crisis in the post-Soviet economies scheduled to join the Eurozone somehow has escaped widespread notice.

No doubt that is because their experience is an indictment of the destructive horror of neoliberalism – and of Europe’s policy of treating these countries not as promised, not as helping them develop along Western European lines, but as areas to be colonized as export markets and bank markets, stripped of their economic surpluses, their skilled labor and indeed, working-age labor generally, their real estate and buildings, and whatever was inherited from the Soviet era.