转录:
民主现在奥巴马 2011 年 XNUMX 月
推动危机：共和党在债务上限上喊狼来了，以实施激进的亲富议程

据称，奥巴马总统和共和党众议院议长约翰·博纳即将达成 3 万亿美元的赤字削减计划，作为在 2 月 XNUMX 日最后期限之前提高联邦债务上限协议的一部分。但该协议遭到国会民主党和共和党的批评。其中一部分要求降低个人和企业所得税率，同时取消或减少一系列流行的税收减免，例如住房抵押贷款利息的扣除。一些民主党议员周四表达了愤怒，因为奥巴马-博纳协议似乎违反了他们不削减社会保障和医疗保险福利的承诺，也违反了奥巴马在不从富人那里获得一些税收优惠的情况下不会大幅削减针对穷人的计划的承诺。

经济学家迈克尔·哈德森 (Michael Hudson) 也加入了我们的行列。他是长期经济趋势研究所所长、堪萨斯城密苏里大学杰出经济学研究教授、《超级帝国主义：美国的经济战略》一书的作者。帝国。” [包括紧急记录]

胡安·冈萨雷斯：据说奥巴马总统和共和党众议院议长约翰·博纳即将达成 3 万亿美元的赤字削减计划，作为在 2 月 XNUMX 日截止日期之前提高联邦债务上限协议的一部分。但该协议遭到国会民主党和共和党的批评。

据《华盛顿邮报》报道，该协议的一部分要求降低个人和企业所得税税率，同时取消或减少一系列受欢迎的税收减免，例如住房抵押贷款利息扣除。一些民主党议员周四表达了愤怒，因为奥巴马-博纳协议似乎违反了他们不削减社会保障和医疗保险福利的承诺，也违反了奥巴马在不从富人那里获得一些让步的情况下不会大幅削减针对穷人的计划的承诺。

艾米·古德曼：与此同时，有关政府大规模救助银行业的更多细节已经浮出水面。周四，政府问责办公室发布了对美联储紧急贷款计划的审计报告。报告透露，美联储提供了超过 16 万亿美元的秘密贷款来救助美国和外国银行和企业。独立参议员伯尼·桑德斯在回应审计时表示，“这是一个针对富人和粗野的人的社会主义的明显案例，而对于其他人来说，你就是靠自己的个人主义。”

为了更多地讨论华盛顿的债务辩论，以及这里和欧洲的整体经济危机，经济学家迈克尔·哈德森 (Michael Hudson) 加入了我们的行列，他是长期经济趋势研究所所长、杰出经济学研究教授堪萨斯城密苏里大学教授，《超级帝国主义：美帝国的经济战略》一书的作者。

欢迎回到《现在的民主》！哈德森教授。这些最新的爆料怎么样？

迈克尔·赫德森：如果你谈论的是参议员的爆料，这是过去两周内出现的第二个重大新闻。第一个故事确实发生在两周前，当时希拉·贝尔 (Sheila Bair) 结束了她在联邦存款保险公司 (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) 的五年任期。现在她离开了，她可以谈论在所有这些钱都被捐出时发生的争论。她反对。她说这些钱，一分钱，都不需要捐出。她说，联邦存款保险公司的工作就是像华盛顿互惠银行和印地麦克银行那样做。他们本可以关闭花旗银行、美国国际集团和其他银行。接受 FDIC 保险的储户不会损失一分钱。她说：“这就是 FDIC 所做的事情。”

她被盖特纳和财政部，尤其是伯南克否决了，伯南克基本上说：“我们必须首先拯救富人。我们必须拯救赌徒。”所有银行都有足够的资金来支付企业和家庭的所有零售普通存款。没有钱用于他们对衍生品进行的所有交叉赌博——也就是说，利率将走向何方，货币将走向何方。所以，这确实是一个赌场。这些都是赌注。而像 AIG 这样的人却无力支付。问题是，你如何让这个赌场的赢家从破产的输家那里得到钱呢？所以这16万亿美元的贷款全都是垃圾证券。他们并不是为了能够退回存款的可靠证券。这些都是垃圾赌博，与实体经济毫无关系。

结果是，虽然 16 万亿美元中的大部分已经偿还，但自 13 年 2008 月所有这一切开始以来，政府债务中仍有 13 万亿美元的剩余债务。所有这一切都是在财政部的电脑键盘上简单创建的。所以问题是，如果他们可以在电脑键盘上创造出50万亿美元，接管房利美和房地美，而美联储可以简单地提供这笔钱，为什么他们不能在XNUMX年的时间里支付这万亿美元医疗保险和社会保障？显然，这是一个谜语。

胡安·冈萨雷斯：嗯，这正是我的问题。这13万亿美元从何而来？所以这基本上都是纸质贷款。

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迈克尔·赫德森：嗯，连纸都没有。它是电子的。我们已经升华了整个事情。美联储可以像银行一样创造存款。如果你去银行，你签署一张欠条，银行就会把钱存入你的账户。这是在电脑键盘上完成的。这就是货币——当今货币的创造方式。政府可以做银行能做的事情。他们可以在自己的电脑键盘上创造金钱。通常，他们通过预算赤字来做到这一点。这就是经济需要预算赤字才能增长的原因。当政府出现预算赤字时，就会将资金投入经济并帮助我们从衰退中复苏。这是很明显的。

在克林顿的领导下，我们有预算盈余。这意味着，通常情况下，这会压低经济，但缺口都是由银行、商业银行在电脑键盘上以利息提供的。他们清理干净了。这就是奥巴马总统今天试图恢复的局面。政府不会在赤字的情况下在键盘上创造自由货币，美国经济使用的所有增加的货币都将由华尔街以利息创造。这是完全没有必要的。

胡安·冈萨雷斯：现在，让我问你有关 3 万亿美元交易的问题，目前还没有人知道该交易的具体细节，但我们已经逐渐泄露了它的轮廓。取消数百万美国人用于住房抵押贷款利息的税收减免的整个问题据说是帮助这么多人能够购买房屋的原因。在美国整个房地产业陷入危机的情况下，他们为什么要取消抵押贷款利息扣除，在我看来这意味着美国买卖的房子会减少？

MICHAEL HUDSON: The banks normally wouldn’t back anything that was going to lead to more foreclosures. But in this case the government has told the banks: “Yes, there are going to be a lot more foreclosures, but we’re going to bail you out, because we’ve insured the mortgages.” Eighty percent of the mortgages in America are now insured by the government, so the banks won’t lose the money. By cutting the deduction, this is going to lead to a huge—a higher bailout by the government to Wall Street on the guarantees that Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Authority have done.

Now, you said one thing, that making mortgage interest deductible makes homes more affordable. It really doesn’t. What happens is, it enables the banks to make a larger loan against the value of the home, and the buyer now has to pay more interest and take on a larger debt, because they have more free money to pay. Whatever the tax collector relinquishes is available to be paid to the banks as interest. So all this tax deductibility in the first place was an attempt to un-tax real estate, so that home buyers could take out larger mortgages. And 80 percent of banks’ business is making mortgage loans.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hudson, let me ask you about the Republican proposal dubbed “cut, cap and balance.” It passed the House earlier this week, and the Senate will vote on the measure today. This is House Speaker John Boehner.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Also this week, the House passed our “cut, cap and balance” legislation that represents exactly the kind of “balanced legislation” the President has talked about. It provides him with the debt limit increase that he’s requested. But it gives families and small businesses the real spending cuts and reforms that they’re demanding without any job-crushing tax hikes. What this legislation also shows, that it’s not only important to avoid default, it’s also important that we take a meaningful step toward real deficit reduction. This means, in addition to cutting and capping spending now, there should be real structural reforms to our entitlement programs. And there will be no tax increases.

AMY GOODMAN: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described the “cut, cap, balance” bill as one of the worst bills in the history of the country.

SEN. HARRY REID: I think this piece of legislation is about as weak and senseless as anything that has ever come on this Senate floor. And I am not going to waste the Senate’s time, day after day, on this piece of legislation, which I think is an anathema to what our country is all about. So everyone understand, we’re going to have a vote tomorrow. I’m not going to wait ‘til Saturday. We’re going to have a vote tomorrow, and I feel confident that this legislation will be disposed of, one way or the other. The American people should understand that this is a bad piece of legislation, perhaps some of the worst legislation in the history of this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hudson, your response?

MICHAEL HUDSON: He’s quite right. This is an awful piece of legislation, and it’s too bad that Mr. Obama supports it. But you could see it all coming even before Mr. Obama took office, when he appointed the Deficit Reduction Commission. He appointed opponents of Social Security to the commission: Republican Senator Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who was Clinton’s chief of staff. Obama really believes in trickle-down economics. He believes that Wall Street are job creators, not downsizers and outsourcers and foreclosures. That’s the tragedy of all this.

Now, how—the question is, how can a Democratic president put forth a Republican program? There has to be a crisis. Now in reality there is no crisis at all. In reality, raising the debt ceiling has been done for a hundred years automatically. There is no connection between raising the debt ceiling and arguing over tax policy. Tax policy takes many years to work out. All of a sudden, Mr. Obama is going along with the charade of saying, “Wait a minute, let’s create a crisis.” As his former manager Rahm Emanuel said, a crisis is too important an opportunity to waste. But Wall Street doesn’t like real crises, so there’s an artificial non-crisis that Obama is treating as a crisis so that he can put forth the recommendations of the Deficit Reduction Commission to get rid of Social Security that he has supported all along. That’s the problem. He believes it.

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JUAN GONZALEZ: You know, I wanted to ask you specifically about that, because every time you turn on the TV now or you read a mainstream newspaper, there are all these quotations from Moody’s and this rating agency and this expert that August 2nd will be a financial Armageddon for the country. And I’m saying to myself, we’ve already been through a financial Armageddon for the last couple of years, and now they’re suddenly saying that, on this date, if this stuff is not passed, if a deal is not reached, suddenly the entire world financial system will be under severe strain.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you had this kind of debt ceiling come up, I think, maybe 20 times under Bush’s administration. It’s a non-threatening thing. It’s something automatic. It’s technical. It’s sort of like going to the corner and having a notary public certify what you’ve done. It’s a technical thing that has nothing to do with real economy or policy at all. They’re pretending it’s a crisis because they have a plan. And the plan is what Mr. Boehner has put forth. Just like after 9/11, the Pentagon pulled out a plan for Iraq’s oil fields, Wall Street has a plan to really clean up now, to really put the class war back in business and get rid of Medicare, get rid of the programs for the poor, and say, “There’s no money for you. We’ve given it all away in the bailouts.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, Michael Hudson, what could President Obama do?

MICHAEL HUDSON: He could say, “This debt ceiling has nothing to do with policy. You want to argue about the tax policy? Fine, let the Democrats and Republicans do it under non-crisis conditions. But this has nothing to do at all with the debt ceiling. If you want to refuse to increase the debt and plunge the economy into disaster, maybe you’d better talk to your campaign contributors and see what they want. Because I know what they say. Your campaign contributors in the Republican camp are my own campaign contributors: Wall Street. And they don’t like crises.” If he said this, you would find that the charade would pop, just like pricking a balloon.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about that? I mean, the very people that are supporting the Tea Party, you know, congressmen activists, are these very same financial institutions that, of course, are demanding a lifting of the debt ceiling.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What they’re pushing for really isn’t a default on the debt. They’re pushing for a crisis to let Mr. Obama rush through the Republican plan. In order for him to do it, the Republicans have to play good cop, bad cop. They have to have the Tea Party move so far to the right, take a so crazy a position, that Mr. Obama seems reasonable by comparison. And of course he is not reasonable. He’s a Wall Street Democrat, which we used to call Republicans.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the danger to Social Security and Medicare, how do you see the direction that they are hoping to go into, in terms of the reductions on this deal?

MICHAEL HUDSON: As Mr. Obama’s Deficit Reduction Commission said, we have to get rid of Medicare, we have to get rid of Social Security, put the Social Security funds into the stock market, create a stock market boom, create new business for his—for Wall Street. He believes in trickle-down economics.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the retirement accounts.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes. That’s what he believes in. And this would be a disaster, as people have already seen the last time the market crashed.

AMY GOODMAN: What about unemployment? How does it fit into this picture? We say 9.2, but in fact it is so much higher in so many communities. We’re talking 30 and 50 percent.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right. And it’s getting worse. The interesting thing is when you look at the press reports, the adjective you always see is “unexpected” or “surprising.” What that means is plausible deniability, as if nobody could have foreseen it, while every economist I know says, “Look, we’re in the middle of debt deflation.”

In fact, before he took office, Mr. Obama said he was going to fight to make sure that mortgages—relief was given to mortgage debtors, because if there were foreclosures, there was going to be unemployment. He then did absolutely nothing. He broke his promise. And everything that he warned about has taken place. So it really should not be surprising.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I also wanted to ask you about the connection to—from what’s going on here to what’s going on in Europe, and especially in Greece, the situation there. On Thursday, European leaders agreed to a new $155 billion bailout for Greece. Manuel Barroso, who is the European Commission president, said this:

JOSÉ MANUEL BARROSO: We needed a credible package. We have a credible package. It deals with both the concerns of the markets and of citizens. It responds also to the concerns of all member states of the euro area. It is a package that every government has signed up to. For the first time, the crisis, politics and markets are coming together. Now I expect every one of them to go out and defend and implement, with determination, this package.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The connections, if any, between what’s going on in Greece and Europe and the battle we’re having here?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Greece’s should be viewed as a dress rehearsal for the United States. It’s exactly the same thing. Greece didn’t really get any bailout funds at all. All of the bailout funds were given by European creditor governments to the banks that held the Greek bonds. And Greece was told, “Well, there’s a 50 billion euro loss on your bonds that have gone down. You have to sell off and privatize €50 billion of your land and property in the public domain.” So for every euro that the bankers lose, Greece has to sell off an equivalent amount. The idea is to carve up the government and privatize it, just like Illinois and Chicago and Wisconsin and California are doing. So it’s a dress rehearsal for what’s happening here.

AMY GOODMAN: If you talk about dress rehearsal, there are massive protests—there have been—in the streets of Greece, in Spain, when we were just in Britain, in London. What about here?

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MICHAEL HUDSON: You’ve seen the protests in Madison, Wisconsin. And in the Greek Parliament Square, in front of the parliament building, there were signs up to say, “We are Wisconsin.” There was a very clear connection they were making that this is a worldwide struggle. What’s happening across the world is an attempt by the financial sector to really make its move and say this is their opportunity for a power grab. And they’re creating this artificial crisis as an opportunity to carve up the public domain and to give themselves enough money. They’re taking the money and running, because they know that unemployment is going up. The game is over. They know that. And the only question is, how much can they take, how fast?

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hudson, we want to thank you very much for being with us, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and author of the book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.