Super Imperialism. The Economic Strategy of American Empire. Third Edition

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So in many ways, it seems to me that Modern Monetary Theory is only really possible for the US because of super imperialism. But I think there is something else behind this fight against China and especially Russia. The Democratic leadership seems to have an almost emotional, passionate antagonism towards Russia that can’t be explained on objective grounds. But it’s obviously there.

This books focuses on the better-hidden economic terrorism of imperialism rather than the politics of military terrorism (although military spending plays a crucial role). Why use tanks when you can use banks? Of course, we need to pair this with the politics of democracy-bombs: Yeah, there’s definitely on the left a very long history of holier-than-thou kind of No True Scotsman sentiment, so I think that’s very refreshing. In 1949 the United States held three-Quarters of the world’s gold; by 1960 it had become a debtor nation. And yet, the United States has built history’s most powerful and affluent empire. Its techniques for world domination remained, at first, the conventional devices of the economic superstate. In recent years, however, the United States has sophisticated its strategy to the point here, although fallen into serious debt, it has retained and even expanded its dominance. The United States has pioneered a new form of imperialism in which the assets of its competitors have been employed for American ends. The or now calls the tune for the creditor. Well I think that, functionally speaking, cryptocurrencies are like Andy Warhol etchings; they have no intrinsic value, except the fact that other people want to buy them, and enough other people may them as trophies. Final question, and we’ll wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Hudson. This is another one of those questions that could go on forever, but we can just keep it brief, because we’re almost at 90 minutes here.

In addition, he has lectured at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C, before the National Association of Business Economists in New York, and elsewhere throughout the United States. He is currently writing a history of international trade and investment theory, and a study of the economic origins of the American Civil War. Well a question that is very interesting – we were talking in our discussion before the interview and Professor Hudson said he doesn’t follow cryptocurrencies a lot, but I’m just curious because we got a question over at Patreon, Professor Hudson, what do you think about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, also Dogecoin has become popular. And this is related to non-fungible tokens, NFTS.

And it doesn’t look like the government is going to find an alternative because they say there isn’t any alternative; iff you don’t like it here, why don’t you go to China? Whereas Americans are not good enough in language to go en masse to China. And we’ve seen that the US government, under Biden, and of course before under Trump, has imposed several rounds of sanctions on Russia and on China. Ultra-imperialism (occasionally hyperimperialism and formerly super-imperialism) is a potential, comparatively peaceful phase of capitalism, meaning after or beyond imperialism. It was described mainly by Karl Kautsky. Post-imperialism is sometimes used as a synonym of ultra-imperialism, although it can have distinct meanings.Well obviously if the United States functioned under the Eurozone rules, we couldn’t have had the Trump policies; we couldn’t have had the policies that President Biden is suggesting.

China is doing exactly what the United States did, and what the United States now says, no other country can do what we did; we’ve pulled up the ladder, and our wealthy rentier layer of the population that got rich, now, having gained control of the United States, and its politics, we want to control the whole world. And so the basis of most bank credit in the United States is to provide the ownership of companies or monopoly rights. Now, China doesn’t make loans for these things. The People’s Bank of China is the central bank. And the central bank doesn’t create credit for corporate takeovers; it doesn’t create credit for speculation; it doesn’t provide an economy that enriches itself off economic rents and exploitation. Michael Hudson’s in-depth and highly controversial study of U.S. financial diplomacy explores the faults built into the core of the World Bank and the IMF at their inception which — he argues — were intended to preserve the US’s financial hegemony. Difficult to detect at the time, these problems have since become explicit as the failure of the international economic system has become apparent; the IMF and World Bank were set up to give aid to developing countries, but instead many of the world’s poorest countries have been plunged into insurmountable debt crises.Ah, I know. You’ve gotta be careful about what’s working, you know… They have to somehow prepare the ground for the fact that things are not going to get better. Today, we’re going to talk about an issue that Michael Hudson has been writing about for decades, and something that you’re never really going to hear from other economists, especially mainstream neoliberal economists, and that’s what he calls super imperialism. Well and also as you mentioned, the micro-loans, the privatization of public education through charter schools, the cash-free system that he and other global oligarchs like Pierre Omidyar are trying to implement in places like India, where they’re trying to get the rural poor out of the cash system and get them in debt, and then I guess move them off their land. And we have seen suicides and social catastrophe already as a result of the implementation of this system. If you tax away the land rent, then this cannot be capitalized into higher value. And if you tax the land rent, number one, you don’t have to tax income, you don’t have to have a sales tax, you tax only the unearned economic rent.