Michael Hudson – Changes in Superimperialism: The Position of the USA and China in our Global Economic System Nearly 50 years after the original publication of “Superimperialism”, Michael Hudson revisits how the lucrative dollar-based economic system that the US set up after WWII has evolved with the rise of China and the Covid-19 pandemic. What financial weapons is the US likely to use, and does China’s de-dollarisation protect it from such attacks? The book provides a detailed analysis of how the US has used its economic might to control international relations. The book is complicated, but essentially documents how after WWII the US held an unprecedented amount of the world’s gold reserves (50%). These reserves were depleted with the incursion into Korea, and subsequent involvement in Viet Nam, requiring the US to abandon the “gold standard” for valuing world currencies. A failure that proved itself valuable, pushing the US to develop multiple strategies that today allow it to make other countries pay for its military dominance. Michael Hudson is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas, former balance of payment economist at Chase Manhattan, political consultant, and has written on many topics relating to the history of debt and the international financial system.
0:00 Introduction
2:16 Talk
40:13 Q&A
Michael Hudson – Changes in Superimperialism
Michael Hudson – Changes in Superimperialism:
The Position of the USA and China in our Global Economic SystemNearly 50 years after the original publication of “Superimperialism”, Michael Hudson revisits how the lucrative dollar-based economic system that the US set up after WWII has evolved with the rise of China and the Covid-19 pandemic. What financial weapons is the US likely to use, and does China’s de-dollarisation protect it from such attacks?
The book provides a detailed analysis of how the US has used its economic might to control international relations. The book is complicated, but essentially documents how after WWII the US held an unprecedented amount of the world’s gold reserves (50%). These reserves were depleted with the incursion into Korea, and subsequent involvement in Viet Nam, requiring the US to abandon the “gold standard” for valuing world currencies. A failure that proved itself valuable, pushing the US to develop multiple strategies that today allow it to make other countries pay for its military dominance.
Michael Hudson is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas, former balance of payment economist at Chase Manhattan, political consultant, and has written on many topics relating to the history of debt and the international financial system.
The Different Ends of NeverTrump
But an important group of NeverTrumpers identified with the right on a very specific set of issues — support for the 1990s-era free trade consensus, Wilsonian hawkishness, democracy promotion — that are unlikely to animate conservatism again any time soon no matter how the Trump presidency ends. These intellectuals and strategists aren’t particularly culturally conservative, they’re allergic to populism, they don’t have any reason to identify with a conservatism that’s wary of nation-building and globalization — and soon enough, they won’t.
.. Along with Rubin I’m thinking here of Max Boot, her fellow Post columnist and the author of a new book denouncing the Trump-era right, who self-defined as a conservative mostly because he favored a democratic imperialism of the kind that George W. Bush unsuccessfully promoted. I’m thinking of Evan McMullin, the third-party presidential candidate turned full-time anti-Trump activist, and certain Republican strategists from the Bush-McCain-Romney party, whose Twitter feeds suggest that they never much cared for the voters who supported their candidates anyway.
.. But observers trying to imagine what a decent right might look like after Trump should look elsewhere — to thinkers and writers who basically accept the populist turn, and whose goal is to supply coherence and intellectual ballast, to purge populism of its bigotries and inject good policy instead.
For an account of policy people working toward this goal, read Sam Tanenhaus in the latest Time Magazine, talking to conservatives on Capitol Hill who are trying to forge a Trumpism-after-Trump that genuinely serves working-class families instead of just starting racially charged feuds.
.. I don’t know if any of these efforts can pull the post-Trump right away from anti-intellectualism and chauvinism. But their project is the one that matters to what conservatism is right now, not what it might have been had John McCain been elected president, or had the Iraq War been something other than a misbegotten mess, or had the 2000-era opening to China gone the way free traders hoped.
Richard Rohr Meditation: A View from the Bottom
Only by solidarity with other people’s suffering can comfortable people be converted. Otherwise we are disconnected from the cross—of the world, of others, of Jesus, and finally of our own necessary participation in the great mystery of dying and rising. People who are considered outsiders and at the bottom of society—the lame, poor, blind, prostitutes, tax collectors, “sinners”—are the ones who understand Jesus’ teaching. It’s the leaders and insiders (the priests, scribes, Pharisees, teachers of the law, and Roman officials) who crucify him.
.. Brian McLaren is not afraid to say directly that it is time for us to acknowledge Christianity’s past fraught with imperialism and colonialism:
About forty years before 1492, Pope Nicholas V issued an official document called Romanus Pontifex . . . which serves as the basis for what is commonly called the Doctrine of Discovery, the teaching that whatever Christians “discover,” they can take and use as they wish. . . . Christian global mission is defined as to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue” non-Christians around the world, and to steal “all movable and immovable goods” and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”—and not only them, but their descendants. And notice the stunning use of the word convert: “to convert them to his and their use and profit.” [2]
.. In addition to this doctrine, selective use and interpretation of the Bible was used to justify slavery for centuries. Scripture is still used by some today to exclude and judge LGBTQIA individuals, even though Jesus said very little about sexuality and a great deal about other things we conveniently ignore.