Michael Hudson on Why There is an Alternative to European Austerity

What else is there to say, really?

Michael Hudson on Why There is an Alternative to European Austerity:

(c. 54:27) “Whenever you have a misunderstanding of reality year after year, decade after decade, and now for a century, when a false picture of the economy is painted you can be sure that there is a special interest benefiting. A false picture of reality does not happen by nature; it is subsidised. And the banking sector has subsidised a junk economics that is taught in the universities, broadcast from your newspapers, mouthed by the politicians, whose election they sponsor, to try to make you believe, that you’re living on Mars in a different kind of a world—instead of the actual country that you’re living in—and to pretend that there is no financial class that is trying to grab what belongs to the public at large. This is what ends up with a difference between central bank creation by the government with the government aims of economic growth and full employment, as compared with commercial bank credit that aims at economic shrinkage, at austerity, at lower wages, at lower output, so that it can do to you what the commercial banks are doing to Greece, to say give us your ports and your land and your tourist areas and your water and sewer systems, so we can charge you for water and sewer. And we can take the money that you had expected to get in pensions and we can scale it down, so that we can pay ourselves.

(c. 56:10) “This is what it took an army in times past. And today it’s done without an army, as long as you will be passive and believe the science-fiction of the world that banks are painting. Thank you. [Applause]”