Why Obama and his Banker Bosses Want a Depression

Via Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla, Economist and historian Michael Hudson explains why U.S. elites are trying to bring about a full-fledged depression (December 16, 2010).

From the transcript:

JAY: So President Obama’s deficit commission has reported. The press, the media, and most of the political punditry all seem far more worried about government debt than depression. Why?

HUDSON: Because they’re essentially appointed by the banking interest. When the government runs into debt, it has to borrow from the banks. They want to scale down government debt in order to scale down government taxes. So it’s part of a one-to punch against the economy, basically. To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem. That’s what they’re trying to bring about, because you need a depression if you’re going to lower wages by 20 percent.

JAY: And why do they want to do that?

HUDSON: Because they have the illusion that if you pay labor less, somehow you’re going to make the economy more competitive, and the economy can earn its way out of debts–meaning their employers, the banks and the companies–and make more profits and pay more bonuses and stock options, and somehow their constituency, Wall Street and the corporate economy, will become richer if they can only impoverish the economy.

So essentially you can think of it as between a parasite and the host economy. A smart parasite in nature actually is in a symbiosis with the host and tries to steer to new food. It wants the host to find new food, doesn’t want it to get bigger; the parasite wants itself to get bigger. But to do that, it has to take over the host’s brain and make the brain think that the parasite, in this case the host, is the industrial economy, the real economy, production and consumption.

The parasite is basically the financial sector. That’s the deficit commission. That’s the largest financier of the Obama administration. Obama appointed Wall Street lobbyists for the deficit commission, and basically their mind is a one-track mind: reduce labor’s wages. So what we have here is a dumb parasite, not a parasite. That’s the problem that’s facing the American economy today. The problem is that the parasite’s not only taken over the brain of the economy, which was supposed to be the government, but it’s taken over its own brain in the process. And it actually imagines that corporations can make larger profits and the industrial–the financial system can survive if they just bring on a depression. In fact, it’ll be the exact opposite.

Hudson predicted the housing crash in a cover story in Harpers’ Magazine in 2006: The New Road to Serfdom.

Another article he wrote for Harpers’ in 2005 was influential in killing Bush’s push for privatization of Social Security: The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid: Why Social Security won’t be enough to save Wall Street

It looks like the elites are already succeeding in turning the U.S. into a third world country. According to the LA Times, Swedish giant Ikea opened a plant in Virginia in order to take advantage of the U.S.’s slave wages and hostile atmosphere for union organizing.
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Steve Benen says that isn’t supposed to happen here in the “land of opportunity,” but according to Professor Hudson, that’s exactly what our government and the top 1% want.