Michael Hudson: Wall Street Parasites Have Devoured
Your Retirement Plan and the U.S. Economy
Michael Hudson
By Pam Marten
September 01, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "WSOP" - The riveting writer, Michael
Hudson, has read our collective minds and the simmering anger in our hearts.
Millions of American have long suspected that their inability to get
financially ahead is an intentional construct of Wall Street’s central
planners. Now Hudson, in an elegant but lethal indictment of the system,
confirms that your ongoing struggle to make ends meet is not a reflection of
your lack of talent or drive but the only possible outcome of having a
blood-sucking financial leech affixed to your body, your retirement plan, and
your economic future.
In his new book, “Killing the Host,” Hudson hones an exquisitely gripping journey from
Wall Street’s original role as capital allocator to its present-day
parasitism that has replaced U.S. capitalism as an entrenched,
politically-enforced economic model across America.
This book is a must-read for anyone hoping to escape
the most corrupt era in American history with a shirt still on his
parasite-riddled back.
Hudson writes from his most powerful perch in
chapters describing how these financial parasites have tricked our society
into accepting them as a normal, productive part of our economy. (Since we
write about these thousands of diabolical tricks four days a week at Wall
Street On Parade, poignant examples came springing to mind with every
turn of the page in “Killing the Host.” From the well-placed articles in the Wall Street Journal toa front group’s pleas for more Wall
Street handouts in
a New York Times OpEd, to the dirty backroom manner in which corporate speech was placed on a par
with human speech in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision,
to Wall Street’s private justice
system and the Koch brothers’ multi-million
dollar machinations to instill Ayn Rand’s brand of “greed is good” in university economic departments across
America — America has become a finely tuned kleptocracy with a sprawling, sophisticated
public relations base.)
How else to explain, other than kleptocracy, the
fact that Wall Street’s richest mega banks collect the life insurance
proceeds and tax benefits on the untimely deaths of their
workers – all
codified into law by the U.S. Congress – making death a profit center on Wall
Street. Or, as Frontline revealed, that two-thirds of your 401(k) plan over a working
lifetime is likely to be lost to financial fees.
Hudson writes: “A parasite’s toolkit includes
behavior-modifying enzymes to make the host protect and nurture it. Financial
intruders into a host economy use Junk Economics to rationalize rentier
parasitism as if it makes a productive contribution, as if the tumor they
create is part of the host’s own body, not an overgrowth living off the
economy. A harmony of interests is depicted between finance and industry,
Wall Street and Main Street, and even between creditors and debtors,
monopolists and their customers.”
What has evolved, says Hudson, is that Wall Street
banks have “become the economy’s central planners, and their plan is for
industry and labor to serve finance, not the other way around.”
To gloss over the collapse of this depraved economic
model in 2008, Hudson says these Wall Street central planners simply depict
“any adverse ‘disturbance’ as being self-correcting, not a structural defect
leading economies to fall further out of balance. Any given development
crisis is said to be a natural product of market forces, so that there is no
need to regulate and tax the rentiers.”
Similarly, when citizens rise up en masse to demand
a realignment of their economy, as happened with the Occupy Wall Street
movement, first the public relations masterminds dismiss them as an unhinged
gathering of smelly hippies, followed by their violent eviction in the middle of the night, with military
precision, by the Praetorian Guard of the kleptocracy. In Manhattan, the
Praetorian Guard (NYPD) has a high-tech surveillance center mutually staffed
by cops and Wall Street personnel – and mainstream media find nothing
unusual about this.
Hudson correctly calls 2008 a “dress rehearsal,”
writing that “Wall Street convinced Congress that the economy could not survive
without bailing out bankers and bondholders, whose solvency was deemed a
precondition for the ‘real’ economy to function. The banks were saved, not
the economy.” Hudson adds that the “debt tumor” was left in place. (This is
the nightmare we are presently watching unfold.)
The result of the systemic disabling of regulations
on Wall Street has resulted in the following, says Hudson: “…the wealthiest
One Percent have captured nearly all the growth in income since the 2008
crash. Holding the rest of society in debt to themselves, they have used
their wealth and creditor claims to gain control of the election process and
governments by supporting lawmakers who un-tax them, and judges or court
systems that refrain from prosecuting them. Obliterating the logic that led
society to regulate and tax rentiers in the first place, think tanks and
business schools favor economists who portray rentier takings as a
contribution to the economy rather than as a subtrahend from it.” (But, of
course, those business schools are
financially incentivized to think that way.)
The outgrowth of these tricks to make parasites
appear to be a natural appendage to a well-functioning economy results in a
“veritable Stockholm Syndrome.” Hudson explains:
“Popular morality blames victims for going into debt
– not only individuals, but also national governments. The trick in this
ideological war is to convince debtors to imagine that general prosperity
depends on paying bankers and making bondholders rich – a veritable Stockholm
Syndrome in which debtors identify with their financial captors.”
Hudson has much to say on
the perversity of
corporations buying back their own stock. In one chapter, Hudson writes:
“In nature, parasites tend to kill hosts that are
dying, using their substance as food for the intruder’s own progeny. The
economic analogy takes hold when financial managers use depreciation
allowances for stock buybacks or to pay out as dividends instead of
replenishing and updating their plant and equipment. Tangible capital
investment, research and development and employment are cut back to provide
purely financial returns.”
On the timely debate over wealth and income
inequality, Hudson writes that “Asset-price inflation is the primary dynamic
explaining today’s polarization of wealth and income. Yet most newscasts
applaud daily rises in the stock averages as if the wealth of the One
Percent, who own the great bulk of stocks and other financial assets, is a
proxy for how well the economy is doing. What actually occurs is that
financing corporate buyouts on credit factors interest payments and fees into
the prices that companies must charge for their products.”
Where this leads, says Hudson, is that “Paying these
financial charges leaves less available to invest or hire more labor.
Likewise for the overall economy, the effect of a debt-leveraged real estate
bubble and asset-price inflation is that interest payments and fees to bankers
and bondholders leave less available to spend on goods and services. The
financial overhead rises, squeezing the ‘real’ economy and slowing new
investment and hiring.”
Hudson is clearly on to something. The U.S. seems to
be crashing like clockwork every 8 years with the crashes gaining in
intensity. The 2000 dot.com crash wiped $4 trillion out of investment
accounts while, 8 years later, the 2008 crash brought down the whole
financial system, the U.S. and global economy, and it’s still producing a
dead weight on economic growth. Next year will mark the eighth year since the
2008 crash and if last week’s market convulsions were any indication, we’re
in for some very rough sledding.
Chapter 8 of “Killing the Host” begins with this
quotation from John Maynard Keynes: “When the capital development of a
country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely
to be ill-done.” Hudson expands further:
“Instead of warning against turning the stock market
into a predatory financial system that is de-industrializing the economy,
[business schools] have jumped on the bandwagon of debt leveraging and stock
buybacks. Financial wealth is the aim, not industrial wealth creation or
overall prosperity. The result is that while raiders and activist shareholders
have debt- leveraged companies from the outside, their internal management
has followed the post-modern business school philosophy viewing ‘wealth
creation’ narrowly in terms of a company’s share price. The result is
financial engineering that links the remuneration of managers to how much
they can increase the stock price, and by rewarding them with stock options.
This gives managers an incentive to buy up company shares and even to borrow
to finance such buybacks instead of to invest in expanding production and
markets.”
The net result of this, says Hudson, is an effective
“debt-financed takeover from within.”
Hudson writes about the revealing September 2014 Harvard Business Review article by William Lazonick, who noted:
“Consider the 449 companies in the S&P 500 index
that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period those
companies used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back
their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market. Dividends
absorbed an additional 37% of their earnings.”
“This management strategy created financial wealth
by elevating the stock price,” writes Hudson, “not by producing more
goods. Earnings per share rose not because companies actually earned more,
but because there were fewer shares outstanding among which to spread the
earnings. Many of the companies downsized and outsourced their employment and
production. The immediate beneficiaries were corporate officers exercising
their stock options.”
Hudson quotes another prolific writer on the subject
of our bankster-controlled society, Paul Craig Roberts, who has noted the
following about corporations buying back their own stock: “The debt incurred
will have to be serviced by future earnings. This is not a picture of
capitalism that is driving the economy by investment.”
Hudson says that what is happening today in
corporate America is very different from the corporate raiders of the 1980s
who used leveraged buyouts to gobble up companies. Today, says Hudson,
“corporate executives raid their own company’s revenue stream. They are
backed by self-proclaimed shareholder activists. The result is financial
short-termism by managers who take the money and run. The management
philosophy is extractive, not productive in the sense of adding to society’s
means of production or living standards.”
Make no mistake about it: this is a dangerous book
to the status quo. It is truth-telling at its finest in America’s darkest age
of entrenched lies. Michael Hudson has clanged the alarm bells over more
continuity government from the likes of Hillary Clinton and her fellow Wall
Street Democrats. He’s also scuttled the chances that Donald Trump will be
able to reengineer America from “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled
masses yearning to breathe free” to the evil fortress that kicks out infants
by directing hatred and blame for America’s woes to impoverished immigrants
running from their own leeches.
Hudson’s masterful book comes at the perfect
juncture of stock market convulsions and an early election season when
Americans are turning out by the tens of thousands to hear what the
candidates for the Oval Office plan to do to return the wealth and the soul
of America to the people.
“Killing the Host” is available as an e-book at CounterPunch and in print at Amazon.com.
© 2015 Wall Street On Parade
|
Paul Craig Roberts Translations
What part will your country play in World War III?
CROATIAN ENGLISH GREEK NEDERLANDS POLSKI PORTUGUESE ROMANIAN SPANISH РУССКИЙ
What part will your country play in World War III?
The true origins of the two World Wars have been deleted from all our history books and replaced with mythology. Neither War was started (or desired) by Germany, but both at the instigation of a group of European Zionist Jews with the stated intent of the total destruction of Germany. The documentation is overwhelming and the evidence undeniable. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)
That history is being repeated today in a mass grooming of the Western world’s people (especially Americans) in preparation for World War III – which I believe is now imminent.
Labels
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Thursday, September 3, 2015
Killing The Host
sister site
CROATIAN ENGLISH GREEK NEDERLANDS POLSKI PORTUGUESE ROMANIAN SPANISH РУССКИЙ
What part will your country play in World War III?
The true origins of the two World Wars have been deleted from all our history books and replaced with mythology. Neither War was started (or desired) by Germany, but both at the instigation of a group of European Zionist Jews with the stated intent of the total destruction of Germany. The documentation is overwhelming and the evidence undeniable. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)
That history is being repeated today in a mass grooming of the Western world’s people (especially Americans) in preparation for World War III – which I believe is now imminent.
BRUTALITY
BRUTALITY IN ACTION
AND NO ONE REACTS AGAINST AND OPPOSES IT!!!....
BRUTALIDADE EM ACÇÃO
E
NINGUÉM REAJE CONTRA ELA E SE OPÕE!!!...
https://twitter.com/backtolife_2023/status/1589485984361873408?s=20&t=7vdffgzpUFi2yeU4FxCHng
What part will your country play in World War III?
By Larry Romanoff, May 27, 2021
The true origins of the two World Wars have been deleted from all our history books and replaced with mythology. Neither War was started (or desired) by Germany, but both at the instigation of a group of European Zionist Jews with the stated intent of the total destruction of Germany. The documentation is overwhelming and the evidence undeniable. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)
READ MORE
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2021/05/larry-romanoff-what-part-will-your.html
Discurso do Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin, na manhã do dia 24 de Fevereiro de 2022
Discurso do Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin, Tradução em português
Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin: Cidadãos da Rússia, Amigos,
Considero ser necessário falar hoje, de novo, sobre os trágicos acontecimentos em Donbass e sobre os aspectos mais importantes de garantir a segurança da Rússia.
Começarei com o que disse no meu discurso de 21 de Fevereiro de 2022. Falei sobre as nossas maiores responsabilidades e preocupações e sobre as ameaças fundamentais que os irresponsáveis políticos ocidentais criaram à Rússia de forma continuada, com rudeza e sem cerimónias, de ano para ano. Refiro-me à expansão da NATO para Leste, que está a aproximar cada vez mais as suas infraestruturas militares da fronteira russa.
É um facto que, durante os últimos 30 anos, temos tentado pacientemente chegar a um acordo com os principais países NATO, relativamente aos princípios de uma segurança igual e indivisível, na Europa. Em resposta às nossas propostas, enfrentámos invariavelmente, ou engano cínico e mentiras, ou tentativas de pressão e de chantagem, enquanto a aliança do Atlântico Norte continuou a expandir-se, apesar dos nossos protestos e preocupações. A sua máquina militar está em movimento e, como disse, aproxima-se da nossa fronteira.
Porque é que isto está a acontecer? De onde veio esta forma insolente de falar que atinge o máximo do seu excepcionalismo, infalibilidade e permissividade? Qual é a explicação para esta atitude de desprezo e desdém pelos nossos interesses e exigências absolutamente legítimas?
ARRIVING IN CHINA
J. Bacque
20 questions to Putin
The President of Russia delivered the Address to the Federal Assembly. The ceremony took place at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall.
January 15, 2020
State of the Nation
Joint news conference following a Normandy format summit
https://tributetoapresident.blogspot.com/2019/12/joint-news-conference-following.html
índice
PORTUGUÊS
GUERRA NUCLEAR: O DIA ANTERIOR
De Hiroshima até hoje: Quem e como nos conduzem à catástrofe
me>
THE PUTIN INTERVIEWS
The Putin Interviews
by Oliver Stone (FULL VIDEOS) EN/RU/SP/FR/IT/CH
http://tributetoapresident.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-putin-interviews-by-oliver-stone.html
http://tributetoapresident.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-putin-interviews-by-oliver-stone.html
TRIBUTE TO A PRESIDENT
NA PRMEIRA PESSOA
Um auto retrato surpreendentemente sincero do Presidente da Rússia, Vladimir Putin
CONTEÚDO
Prefácio
Personagens Principais em 'Na Primeira Pessoa'
Parte Três: O Estudante Universitário
Parte Quatro: O Jovem especialista
Parte Cinco: O Espia
Parte Seis: O Democráta
Parte Sete: O Burocrata
Parte Oito: O Homem de Família
Parte Nove: O Político
Apêndice: A Rússia na Viragem do Milénio
Daniele Ganser
Açores
Subtitled in EN/PT
Click upon the small wheel at the right side of the video and choose your language.
xmas
“Glory to God in the highest,
and on Earth
Peace, Good Will toward men.”
This Christmas, Give Peace
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