which was an economic situation
wherein the poor basically belonged to the rich.
The serfs had few or no rights, and slaved away
while the lord 'o the manor tool the fruits of their labour,
and borrowed a son or two whenever it was
time for warring.
When the Russians got out of feudalism in the 19th c,
they went directly into full indebtedness. They were charged
too much for the land that they wanted,
so they essentially worked for nothing.
This is the key, as Max Keiser has said. If
you're born in debt,
live in debt
and die in debt,
you're a serf.
a debt serf
There's one small chance at victory if you join the show
Debtors' got Talent
wherein you can compete with others for the biggest bankruptcy or the
month, or the person who died with the most debt. This means that
some rich guys lost out by enslaving you. Thus, you win.
Let's cut to the video: at 7:50 you'll see how much serfs mean to a king
IshitUnot: Michael Hudson
Learning from the Eurocrisis
May 10, 2012
By Michael Hudson
Transcript:
Headlines around the world greeted the election results in Greece and France as a rejection of austerity programs by the electors of those countries. Well, what can Americans learn from the results of these elections and from the crisis in the eurozone?
Now joining us to talk about all of this is Michael Hudson. Michael is a former Wall Street financial analyst, and he’s a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He has a new book coming out soon called The Bubble and Beyond. Thanks for joining us, Michael.
... JAY: So one of the arguments that’s made is that whatever Hollande, for example, or even Obama in the United States—but let’s talk about Hollande—whatever he may want to do, if he wanted to kind of defy the austerity programs more resolutely, that he really can’t, because the levers of power of the banks and the financial institutions and in European situation the German elite and German banks, they have so much power that if you actually really try to defy these austerity policies, they can simply—you know, they raid the currency, they drive up interest rates. They have so many levers of power that someone like a Hollande really can’t stand up to them. So unless there’s kind of a really major transformation of capitalism as we know it in Europe, there’s not a heck of a lot Hollande can do. Now, that’s an argument. What do you make of that argument?
HUDSON: The banks really have no power at all except the power to bribe, and in Europe—in South America, the power to assassinate, which they do quite frequently. All they can do is bribe....
HUDSON: The change over the last 30 years has been a drive by the finance sector to become more dominant steadily. So the finance sector has started a lot of think tanks, they’ve funded the research institutes, and they’ve bought control of the public media, so that they’ve been able to convince people that there really isn’t an alternative, and only talk about whether there is more austerity or chaos. But, of course, the alternative to austerity isn’t chaos; its economic democracy, it’s progressive taxation, it’s taxing the rich, it’s writing down the debts. There are many alternatives. And what they’ve done is make sure that none of these alternatives get discussed in the public press or in the media. That’s why we’re on The Real News Network talking about it, not in The New York Times or the Fox media.
JAY: Now, in one of your recent pieces, you wrote that the kind of grab, wealth grab, I guess, that’s going on right now is something akin to the way feudalism developed. What did you mean by that?
HUDSON: The—1,000 years ago, it took a military army to come in and conquer a country and grab the land and charge the people rent, to take control of the monopolies and charge people huge markups from the monopolies, and to essentially shift the taxes off the wealthy, onto the population that was conquered. Now, in today’s world, they can’t afford an army anymore. The Vietnam War showed that no country can afford a military occupation anymore. So finance today is the means of conquering a country and getting what in the past took an army. Financial conquest is how you shift the taxes onto the population to pay the financial sector, how you load a population down with debt and make a population pay interest and amortization and penalties on debt service, you make a population pay for schooling instead of getting it free or a low price as used to be the case, you make a population take on a lifetime of debt in order to get a home that used to be affordable, you make the governments go into debt for the banks, so that in Europe governments can’t—don’t have a central bank to monetize their own deficits but actually have to borrow money from banks. You achieve—you essentially empty out an economy, and you take its economic surplus financially without an army, just by trying to promote what really is junk economics and junk politics, if the economics of Rubinomics in America under Clinton and Rubenomics in America under George Bush, and now with a vengeance under Obama—.
