Our Neo-Feudal System Is on the Verge of Collapse — Michael Hudson

Transcript of Michael Hudson in conversation with Ellen Brown and Walt McRee.

Neo-feudalism masquerading as "capitalism and democracy."

The Unz Review
Our Neo-Feudal System Is on the Verge of Collapse

Michael Hudson | 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 Guest Professor at Peking University

See also

Reminiscence of the Future
Any Silver Linings?
Andrei Martyanov

How We Stay Blind to the Story of Power — Jonathan Cook

I had a mentor who emphasized the necessity to understand power. At first I didn't quite know what he was talking about. Subsequently, I discovered that he was correct. For example, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite was a real eyeopener.

Counterpunch

How We Stay Blind to the Story of Power

Jonathan Cook

David Ruccio and Jamie Morgan — Capital and class: inequality after the crash

The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.2 However, the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. This has continued into the“recovery” in the United States and globally. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even more unequal.

Those in the small group at the top have long been able to put distance between themselves and everyone else preciselybecause they’ve been able to capture the surplus and then convert their share of the surplus into ownership of wealth. And the returns on their wealth allow them to capture even more of the surplus produced within global capitalism. This is accompanied by growing income inequality.

However, although people are aware of inequality, they are typically unaware of its real extent, and mainstream economics and the popular press contribute to this situation, which in turn leads to the reproduction of the system that produces ever-more-grotesque levels of inequality.

Both class and ideology underpin this worsening situation. The tiny group at the top, both nationally and globally, have both an interest and the means to maintain the economic and social rules and institutions that allow them to capture the surplus, and thus create more distance between themselves and everyone else. Meantime, mainstream economic and political discourses, inside and outside the academy, tend to ignore the class conditions and consequences of inequality – and to undermine the possibility of a real debate about the kinds of changes that are necessary to give the majority of people a say in how the surplus is utilized....

Real-World Economics Review

Capital and class: inequality after the crash
David Ruccio and Jamie Morgan

Simon Wren-Lewis — Neoliberalism: How Seeing Markets as Perfect Turned into an Ideology Justifying Crony Capitalism

That idea, that the market ensures that only the most efficient prosper, is a central message of neoliberal ideology, and it has held UK and US governments under its sway since the time of Thatcher and Reagan. But that ideology contains a large and deep internal contradiction, which applies particularly to large firms like Carillion. To see what that contraction is, we need to talk about ordoliberalism and Ronald Coase.

Ordoliberalism is widely known as the German version of neoliberalism. It too celebrates the benefits of the market. It, like neoliberalism, ignores many of the failures of markets that Colin Crouch eloquently outlines and which economists spend a lot of time studying. But ordoliberalism does recognise one potential problem with their market ideal which neoliberalism ignores, and that is monopoly. Crouch makes a similar distinction in talking about market-neoliberals and corporate-neoliberals.

Asymmetrical powers enable rent extraction.

One of the paradoxes of liberalism is that limiting the power of government limits corruption. But corruption is not limited to people in government. As Adam Smith observed, business people have not only an incentive to collude but also a tendency toward it if not restrained.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. — The Wealth of Nations 1.10.82

Freedom entails responsibility, and responsibility depends on accountability.

Evonomics

Neoliberalism: How Seeing Markets as Perfect Turned into an Ideology Justifying Crony Capitalism
Simon Wren-Lewis | Professor of Economics, Oxford University

Constantin Gurdgiev — Asymmetric Conflicts and U.S. 'Learning Curve'

Money is not the solution to all problems, and neither is either materials or technology, at least geopollitically.

true economics
Asymmetric Conflicts and U.S. 'Learning Curve'
Constantin Gurdgiev | chairman of the Ireland-Russia Business Association, contributor and former editor of Business & Finance Magazine, and lecturer in Finance with Trinity College, Dublin

Ezra Klein — Krugman: soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power

Krugman lays the ""p"-word on the table.

"All the big gains are going to a tiny group of individuals holding strategic positions in corporate suites or astride the crossroads of finance," writes Krugman. "Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power."

VOX
Krugman: soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power
Ezra Klein