As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America’s main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration’s plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China’s own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the

Image with acknowledgment to Needpix . “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day… But give him a loan to buy a boat and net to fish, and he will end up paying you all the fishes he catches.”

By Michael Hudson, with Dirk Bezemer, Steve Keen and Sabri Öncü This article first appeared in Naked Capitalism  on 10th April  2020Summary After being attacked by monetarists and others for many decades, MMT and the idea that running government budget deficits is stabilizing instead of destabilizing is suddenly gaining applause from the parts of the political spectrum that long opposed MMT: the banking and financial sector, especially the

This interview was conducted at Peking University for the Second World Conference, May 7, 2018. It was conducted by Lau Kin Chi of the Global University for Sustainability. A visual transcription is available here.
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I was born in Minneapolis, which is the only city in the world that was a Trotskyist city. During the 1930s it was a center of Trotskyism and my parents worked with Leon Trotsky in Mexico. When I was 3 years old my father was put in jail under the Smith Act as a political prisoner for having the works of Lenin and Marx on his shelves and for being one of the leaders of the Minneapolis general strikes from 1934 to 1936. So I grew up knowing many members of the Russian Revolution, members of the Central Committee when Lenin was in power.
When my father got