Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion.

The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change or “solve.” To answer this question, it helps to ask who initiates the war. There always are two sides—the attacker and the attacked. The attacker intends certain consequences, and the attacked looks for unintended consequences of which they can take advantage. In this case, both sides have their dueling sets of intended consequences and special interests.

Professor Hudson talked about his formative years, and his turn to economics from music as he found his mentor Terence McCarthy’s speech about economics beautiful and asethetic.

Economist Michael Hudson discusses the update of his book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire and the financial motivations behind the U.S. new cold war on China and Russia.

Resilience cannot be restored without public spending, but the rentier business plan is to minimize taxes by shrinking the government, especially by privatizing its public utilities and other functions to create opportunities for charging monopoly rents, and to oppose taxation of economic rent.