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This is not my usual topic, but the two videos posted below are worth hearing in order to be exposed to the thought of Michael Hudson, an economist. The interviewer is Presbyterian minister and journalist Chris Hedges, a member of the Green Party.
Michael Hudson is seen as coming from a Marxist critique of financial structures, and Chris Hedges is regarded as a writer and interviewer of the political Left in the USA. If you are a traditional Catholic or a traditional Christian, you may wonder why on earth I would recommend listening to these videos.
My purpose in posting these is that Michael Hudson points out problems with the crony capitalism of the USA that many of us would miss. We may disagree with some of his ultimate conclusions or ideas, but the mining and presentation of information will only enhance one's grasp of some of the problems and issues that must be addressed in order to deal with a political reality that is content to allow Goldman-Sachs and the like to feast on the dying carcass of the middle class in the USA.
Video Part One: How We Got Junk Economics
Video Part Two: Junk Economics and the Future
My posting of these videos is simply to break out of the usual echo box in which we tend to hear the same ideas repeated around us as if they were some sort of economic or political gospel. Michael Hudson is the sort of thinker who makes Clintonian Democrats and establishment Republicans very nervous, and it is very likely you have never heard of him.
Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy is Michael Hudson's most recent important book. Of all of my many friends across the USA who work in all sorts of fields of enterprise and learning, not one has read the book, and none knew who Michael Hudson was. This post is a very simple response to that lack of familiarity with an important thinker in order to try to broaden horizons and perspectives on the catastrophic economic situation in the USA and the West. The book is very sobering reading.
