Labor Condemns Supreme Court Decision Overturning Roe v. Wade

https://popularresistance.org/labor-condemns-supreme-court-decision-overturning-roe-v-wade/






By Portside.

July 1, 2022
Resist!

Numerous Unions Condemned The Supreme Court’s Decision To End The Constitutional Right To An Abortion.

A Sampling, From Multiple Unions Representing Workers In Virtually Every Sector Of The Economy, Are Reprinted Below.

On June 27, The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 Majority took the extreme step of denying an existing constitutional right by overturning Roe V. Wade. This decision to deny women the right to an abortion is an attack on all women, is an attack on all working people The statements below by numerous labor organizations all make that point and all point to the necessity to resist and to organize.

No Justice, No Peace — CLUW Response to the Supreme Court Decision to Overturn Roe v Wade!
Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW)

The Coalition of Labor Union Women was founded in 1974, the year after Roe v Wade confirmed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. The CLUW founding mothers believed in a woman’s right to a safe termination of her pregnancy and we still believe every woman has that right. The six Supreme Court justices who leaked their intent to overturn Roe v Wade and then made it final today have no justice in their hearts for women’s reproductive rights. We will march, we will protest — and most importantly, we will vote!! We will mobilize millions of women across the country to exercise their right to vote out any elected official who stands in the way of our freedom to choose what happens in our bodies!

There is an old saying that goes, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” — we say, “Hell hath no fury like pro-choice women at the ballot box!” Get ready, because we are coming for every anti-choice candidate and we will vote you out so consider yourself warned!!

We invite all pro-choice people to join us in our work to affirm reproductive freedom!

Peace, love and solidarity forever,

Elise Bryant, President

—

Pride At Work

The decision of the radical right-wing majority on the Supreme Court in Dobbs vs. Jackson, that denies the fundamental right of women to make their own healthcare decisions will go down as one of the worst decisions in the history of the court.

With this decision, the extremists on the court have forfeited any remaining semblance of their claims to nonpartisanship, and have fully embraced the extreme agenda that does not represent the vast majority of Americans. The right to choose is fundamental to bodily autonomy and basic human freedom. We cannot let this stand.

The extremist majority on the Court shows it is willing to overlook decades of precedent to set aside the right to choose, and clearly shows where their future intentions lie. Obergefell, which legalized marriage equality nationwide, which was only decided less than a decade ago, is clearly in the crosshairs.

Even more concerning is the possibility of overturning Lawrence v. Texas, which banned draconian sodomy laws nationwide. 15 states have refused to repeal their sodomy laws since that decision in 2003. Justice Clarence Thomas directly referenced that these two decisions protecting LGBTQ+ rights should be overturned in his opinion. We must fight back now.

We can’t predict how future cases will be decided by this Court, but this bombshell ruling makes clear that nothing is safe from this radical conservative majority.

Pride at Work will fight every day until the right to choose is codified into law nationwide. Congress must act to protect access to abortion. If they won’t, then this November we must elect a Congress that will.
Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA)

Today, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling on Dobbs v Jackson’s Women Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision which established a constitutional right to abortion. Effective today, nearly 40 million women, girls, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people in 26 states will lose access to to abortion, a vital form of healthcare. APALA, as the first and only national organization for Asian American and Pacific Islander workers, condemns this decision and stands ready to join the fight for reproductive justice.

The resulting abortion ban disproportionately impacts AAPI access to abortion. Sixty-six percent of Asian Americans and 30 percent of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders speak a language other than English at home and experience difficulties in accessing health care due to language barriers. In addition, a third of AAPI pregnancies end in abortion, underlining the necessity of this care in our community. In 2019, APALA passed a resolution on bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health that reaffirms our belief that “every that individual have a fundamental right to make personal reproductive health decisions free from coercion, discrimination, and stigma.”

The violence of patriarchy obscures the root cause of this issue which is to control the bodily autonomy and family making decisions of working people. Bodily autonomy is essential to our freedom and is a working a class issue. APALA will continue to stand in solidarity with people of color and other marginalized groups fighting for this freedom. As the Movement for Black Lives wrote in their statement, “Black women, girls, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people have been subjected to a long history of reproductive control rooted in the brutal legacy of enslavement—and denying access to safe, legal abortion and gender-affirming health services is a continuation of that troubling history.” APALA stands in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives and recognizes the disproportionate impact this decision has on our black and brown siblings.

Jessica Tang, APALA National Treasurer and President of the Boston Teachers Union Local 66, said: “This ruling removes access to vital healthcare services, putting the health of women across the country at risk. In my journey to building my family, I was devastated to face choices that no expecting pregnant person wants to make. Due to a rare fetal anomoly that took a turn for the worse in my third trimester and medical complications resulting from this, I had to travel thousands of miles out of state to get a late term abortion. Access is already very limited, and I was lucky to have the ability and access to safe healthcare treatment, but under this ruling, many millions of families will be cut off from the treatment they need and it will become even more difficult for those who find themselves in situations like this. It is an economic justice issue and it is a health care issue, and our country has now gone backwards.”

Alvina Yeh, APALA Executive Director, said: “As a mother and someone who had an ectopic pregnancy that put my life in danger, I am grateful that I was given safe, legal options to terminate the pregnancy. Abortion access shouldn’t depend on how much you money you have or where you live. Yet, for too many, abortion is already too difficult to access. The Supreme Court’s opinion confirms our worst fears: the control of our bodies at the hands of the state. Reproductive justice is a worker’s right issue.”
Labor Council For Latin American Advancement (LCLAA)

LCLAA is highly disappointed and dismayed to learn about the Supreme Court decision, ending almost 50 years of federal constitutional protections of abortion rights. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, access to abortion will likely be banned or severely restricted in most states.

The loss of this right is part of the broader continued attack on women of color and other marginalized groups. LCLAA has worked diligently to promote inclusion and diversity in the workforce through efforts like our Latina Equal Pay and Trabajadoras campaigns and our involvement with the Paycheck Fairness Act Coalition. Our work has taught us that access to reproductive health services, including birth control and bodily autonomy, lead to higher education attainment and economic security.

Women denied control of their bodies are more likely to have an income below the federal poverty level, more likely to receive public assistance, and less likely to be working full time. Women’s economic options are further limited by the lack of affordable childcare and paid family leave policies nationwide. This is an economic issue; any restriction of this right will fall disproportionately on women of color and will prevent them from achieving their full potential.

LCLAA is concerned that this decision will allow and justify a massive rollback on fundamental rights that we have all collectively fought for. In the initial draft, Supreme Court Justice Alito supported the majority opinion stating that “until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for the constitutional right to obtain an abortion.” This language endangers us. If the Court sees progress as lacking precedence, it threatens the rights of the LGBT+ community and communities of color who have only gained many of their rights and liberties during the Civil Rights Movement. Who is to say that the right to abortion will be the only right that we lose?

The action of the Court today only shows us the repercussions of privilege, making a decision to strip the rights of communities that many of them have never been part of. We must remain vigilant, ready to mobilize the instant our labor rights and civil rights are jeopardized. LCLAA’s dedication to the labor movement is unwavering. We will not let the work of our movement, the progress that has taken communities decades to build, be undone so easily.
AFL-CIO

Statement from AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization:

Today’s decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade is a devastating blow to working women and families across this country. We strongly believe that everyone should have control over their own bodies, including decisions over their personal reproductive health care. At a time when we should be focused on expanding equity for all working people, particularly for marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, this ruling will only deepen racial and economic disparities. The burden of this decision will undoubtedly fall on low-income women and gender-oppressed people, and no one should be forced into financial insecurity because they have been denied reproductive health care. Our government also must prioritize overdue and necessary investments in our child care system, and family and medical paid leave; it must end the gender wage gap and increase access to jobs with high wages and good benefits.

This is just the latest in a harmful string of attacks on our fundamental rights, including the right to vote and to collectively bargain in the workplace, and points to an alarming trend that other well-settled rights like marriage equality may be taken away. The current conservative majority of the Supreme Court is bent on limiting bodily autonomy, freedom and self-determination to a select few, and that is fundamentally undemocratic. America’s unions remain committed to the fight for gender justice and economic equity for all people.
Actors’ Equity Association

Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union representing more than 51,000 professional actors and stage managers in live theatre, has issued the following statement in response to the news that the Supreme Court of the United States has issued a ruling repealing Roe V. Wade:

“Knowing that this decision was likely imminent has not made this news any less painful. This is a catastrophic step backwards for human rights in this country. Equity once again affirms that abortion is a necessary and often life-saving medical procedure that requires safe, legal and open access.

“Equity’s thoughts are with our members, knowing that populations that are already marginalized by society will suffer the most as a result of this ruling, and the anti-abortion movement especially targets groups like women and LGBTQ+ Americans. However, this is not a time to mourn, but a time for action. The union is determined to do everything in our power to serve our members, which includes helping them access abortion care.

“So much in the future is uncertain, as some states have already set into motion legislation that not only criminalizes abortion, but outlaws even providing care related to abortion access. Access to reproductive care is a labor issue, and a safe and sanitary workplace is not possible without the right to bodily autonomy. We are determined to find ways to protect our members, many of whom tour the country to earn a living, or who live or work in states that are about to become far more dangerous for those needing reproductive care. This will include connecting them to whatever resources are available that will help them secure abortions when they need them.”

“We also know that this fight will not stop with abortion. We will lend our voice to the important work already underway to protect abortion access, and we remain committed to combatting legislation that seeks to capitalize on this ruling and further impinge on human rights in the United States.”
American Federation Of Musicians (AFM)

In one of the most stunning reversals in the modern era of the US Supreme Court, a majority of the Court overturned a nearly 50-year precedent in Roe v. Wade and gave states a license to ban abortion. This ruling is an attack on women’s reproductive health and a dangerous setback for fundamental human rights.

The International Executive Board of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada believes that everyone should be able to make their own decisions concerning their reproductive rights, health, and future. We are at a time in our country’s history when voting is more important than ever. Our elected officials are making decisions that impact us for generations to come.

As we head into mid-term elections and prepare for the 2024 national election, ask your elected officials and local candidates where they stand on reproductive rights, demand commitments to protecting abortion access, and spread the word to other voters. Among the states banning abortion are those least likely to provide access to health care for low-income families and adequate safeguards for our most vulnerable children.

As a society, we must do better than this. We remain optimistic that we will see once again a future where every person is guaranteed access to quality and comprehensive reproductive care.
Association Of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA)

Today, the Supreme Court struck down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) President Sara Nelson released the following statement:

“If you believe women are equal, build your union with urgency.”

President Nelson’s statement from May 3 stands:
We Organized To Define Our Careers, Keep Our Personal Choices As Our Own, And Lift Up Our Role In Saving Lives As Aviation’s First Responders.

“Choice and self-determination are at the foundation of why we formed our union 75 years ago. In the earliest days of commercial aviation, we were allowed few choices in the workplace. Every part of our bodies and our lives were dictated by management. Airlines only hired white, single, childless women under age 32 who met specific height, weight, and male defined appearance standards. Even if you met those “standards,” getting pregnant, having a baby, choosing to marry or gaining a few pounds meant giving up your job and handing in your wings. Our first demands as a union were seniority-based scheduling, to stop managers from using schedules to coerce us to choose between sexual exploitation and earning a living.

“Today anyone with the heart of a Flight Attendant can choose this career, and through our unions we have a voice and legal standing on the job to protect our rights.
The Right For Each Of Us To Make Our Own Choices About Our Jobs, Our Bodies, And Our Futures Is Fundamental
They Will Strip The Freedom To Marry From Our LGBTQ Colleagues And Neighbors. They Will Strip Away Our Rights To Birth Control.
Now Is The Time To Demonstrate This Commitment To Their Employees And Passengers.
American Federation Of State County Municipal Employees (AFSCME)

AFSCME President Lee Saunders issued the following statement Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the landmark abortion-rights case Roe v. Wade:

“The Supreme Court’s decision overturns a precedent that has stood for nearly half a century, stripping away a foundational freedom that has allowed generations to enjoy dignity and economic security. The court’s opinion is also undemocratic, in brazen defiance of the views and values of a clear majority of people across the country.

“Reproductive rights are workers’ rights. Reproductive justice is economic justice. The decision about when and whether to bear children is fundamental to the ability to pursue self-sustaining work. That’s why AFSCME has worked to protect reproductive rights and access to family planning services of all kinds. And we have opposed any policies, legislation, regulation or constitutional amendment to restrict these core freedoms.

“Reproductive rights are an issue of life and death. The court’s ruling is an attack on individual humanity, autonomy and personal liberty. It will mean chaos and desperation in the lives of so many people. And the burden will fall most heavily on communities of color, low-income families, immigrant populations, people who are already marginalized. There will also be a chilling effect throughout the health care industry, affecting how providers can care for their patients.

“The court said today that the most deeply personal choices about your bodies, your health care and your future are not yours to make. We trust people to make the right decisions for themselves and their families – guided by their own moral and religious beliefs and not the political views of six judges.

“More than half of the states are poised to enact or implement cruel, draconian laws undermining the privacy rights and personal freedoms of millions of people. Working with coalition partners, AFSCME will do everything in our power to neutralize the impact of this decision, including working to elect candidates this year who will make it a top priority to protect reproductive rights.”
American Federation Of Teachers (AFT)

Statement by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on the U.S. Supreme Court decision today in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade and ruling that there is no constitutional right to abortion:

“In the span of one week, an extremist-dominated Supreme Court decided it has the authority to divine who in America has rights and freedoms and who does not.

“Upending decades of long-settled precedent that will impact the lives of millions of people, the court’s conservative majority this week took away the rights of those who rely on the constitutional separation of church and state to freely practice religion, took away the rights of states to protect children and families from gun violence, and, today, took away the rights of women and anyone who can get pregnant to decide when to have a family. In the span of 24 hours, this court ruled that states can’t regulate gun owners but can regulate the bodies of anyone who can reproduce.

“This revanchist view of their authority by extremist judges is a threat to freedom everywhere. Whose freedom is the Supreme Court coming for next? Justice Clarence Thomas already has a pen aimed at marriage, contraception and more. This decision has massive, far-reaching implications for every person in this country, and puts those of us who teach students, take care of patients and serve our communities in particularly precarious positions. We knew this decision was coming, but the damage of reversing Roe is shocking nonetheless. This is a dark day in American history.”
Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU)

Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) International President John Costa released the following statement condemning the Supreme Court ruling stripping away nationwide abortion rights in the U.S by rescinding the landmark 1973 case establishing the right to an abortion, citing the negative impact on women and workers.

“The unconscionable decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is a massive step backward for women and workers in our country. While our members hold a variety of personal beliefs regarding abortions, this decision is an attack on the freedoms and rights of women and working people. Access to healthcare, including the full range of family planning services, without fear is everyone’s right and reproductive freedom is a worker’s rights issue.

“At the bargaining table, and while on strike, the ATU fights to ensure our members can determine when they will start a family and how they will care for them. In order to ensure that our members can make their own decisions, we fight for family-supporting wages, comprehensive employer-paid family health insurance, paid parental leave, and paid family and medical leave. By placing our members’ family planning and medical decisions in the hands of state legislators and governors, the Supreme Court has abolished the fundamental rights of working people.

“This criminalization of reproductive healthcare will fall hardest on working-class people, particularly communities of color and low-income families in those states that are poised to immediately restrict reproductive rights and access to a full range of family planning services. Their only option will be to travel across state lines in order to get the health care they need. Unfortunately, our members who operate the nation’s interstate buses will witness firsthand the impact of this wrongheaded decision as they carry over long distances passengers in precarious health trying to cross state lines in order to exercise their right to make their own family planning and medical decisions.

“The right to make decisions about our health and families is at the heart of what we fight for as a union. Our Union will work to elect leaders who will condemn this attack on our constitutional rights and advocate for the low-income workers who will be hit the hardest.”
International Alliance Of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE)

In its outrageous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, SCOTUS has abandoned a 50-year precedent and the will of 70% of the American people to impose one of the worst contractions of freedoms in modern US history. Make no mistake, this will directly harm the welfare of our union sisters and kin, and therefore we must respond strongly.

We know well the catastrophic consequences that follow when authoritarians legislate control over our wombs, bodies, and lives. Taking away the option to receive compassionate reproductive care in the form of safe, legal abortions will disproportionally harm working-class people, force unwilling parents into poverty, worsen the already unacceptable maternal mortality crisis, imprison innocents for their biological functions (including miscarriages), and cut short far too many bright careers and lives.

If extremist justices will blatantly ignore established legal precedent and lie about it in their confirmation hearings, how far will they go? The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision shows the court is prepared to nullify the rights Americans fought and died for.

We stand together as sisters, brothers, and kin to ensure liberty and justice for ALL. Lawmakers at all levels must defend reproductive healthcare and Americans’ fundamental freedoms immediately, or face being replaced by those who will.
IATSE Women’s Committee Statement

The IATSE Women’s Committee believes in the right of all persons to make life choices based on the best information they have that impacts their immediate decision.

Having lived in this country as women, many of us know too well the injustices and inequities that we’ll face under this authoritarian move. Not that long ago, we fought for contraceptive insurance coverage, and it’s still not comprehensive. We still fight for equal pay. We still don’t have equal representation in our so-called halls of justice.

Let’s not forget that just a few short months ago we saw many Americans stealing the pro-choice slogan “My Body, My Choice” when it was convenient for them. Our bodies are no less valuable. Our contributions to this country are no less valuable. Our choices are equally significant. This is about controlling women.

The Women’s Committee is primed to take back that slogan and stand with the 70 % of Americans who support choice. We will stand together with our sisters, brothers, and kin to ensure …liberty and justice for ALL.

Joanne Sanders
IATSE VP & Chair of IATSE Womens Committee
IATSE DEI Committee Statement

The DEI Committee is dismayed and outraged by the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning Roe vs Wade. All five justices in favor spoke to Roe vs Wade being an established precedent in their confirmation hearings, and now blatantly ignore that precedent. BIPOC and working-class people will bear the brunt of this decision; autonomy and choice will be taken away, with no exceptions in at least 20 states across the USA.

The language of the decision and blatant disregard of established precedent is disturbing, and leaves opportunities to repeal established Civil Rights legislation on interracial marriage, marriage equality, equal opportunity and Title IX, and even Brown v. Board of Education. Decades of hard-fought progress on voting rights, equality, humanity and equity-building are at risk from the a stroke of a pen.

We must not let this happen. We will work together to protect choice and our collective Civil Right

In Solidarity,
― IATSE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee
The IATSE Pride Committee Stands With Our Sisters And Kin

As we prepare this weekend for the New York City Pride March, fifty-three years after the events of Stonewall, we are once again facing the uncertainty of our rights to live and love.

Today the US Supreme Court handed down a devastating decision, overturning fifty years of precedent that gave people agency over their own bodies via access to safe abortions. To be clear, this decision does not end abortion. It ends safe abortions and will be especially harmful to those that are already struggling to survive. The IATSE Pride Committee strongly denounces this decision, and we stand with our kin and commit to fighting this rollback of fundamental rights for people to make their own healthcare decisions.

We must also underscore that this is only the beginning. Conservative Justice Thomas made clear that other past rulings that should be overturned are Griswold (right to contraception), Lawrence (same-sex activity), and Obergefell (same-sex marriage).

Rights for which we have fought for over decades, can be taken away overnight. This weekend, as we march, we must remember that pride began as a protest. And as we watch rights being stripped away, we need to stand together to once again protest as if our life depends on it. Because, for many, it absolutely does.

The IATSE Pride Committee
International Longshore And Warehouse Union (ILWU)

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) strongly condemns the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning the longstanding precedent, Roe v. Wade, that protected reproductive health care rights for Americans for half a century. Since the late 1930s, the Supreme Court has expanded rights; this decision to take rights away represents a dangerous shift for all Americans and the rights we take for granted.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a direct attack on people’s fundamental right to reproductive health care and bodily autonomy. The impact of the criminalization of reproductive health care that some states will enact in the wake of this decision will be borne disproportionally by working-class people and people who do not have the means to travel to states with more rights.

It is clear from Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion that the Supreme Court is not going to stop here and the extremists on the Court intend to take more rights away from Americans. Justice Thomas explicitly calls on the Court to reconsider precedents that protect the rights to contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage.

The vast majority of Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive rights. Five of the nine sitting Justices were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote. The anti-majoritarian features of our Constitution are being wielded by the extreme right-wing to block policies supported by the majority.

The ILWU stands firmly in solidarity with all of those impacted by this decision and the right of all people to have access to reproductive health care and bodily autonomy. We urge Congress to pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.

An Injury to One is an Injury to All.
International Union Of Bricklayers And Allied Craft Workers (BAC

International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craft Workers (BAC) President Tim Driscoll issued the following statement today after US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade:

“Today’s Supreme Court decision to eliminate women’s constitutional right to make their own reproductive healthcare decisions is a direct assault on the right of individual self-determination — the essential right to control one’s own body without government interference.

“Labor unions are dedicated to the proposition that workers have a voice in promoting the physical, economic, and social welfare of their members and all other workers. And the right of workers to control their own bodies cannot be separated from the right of workers to control their own labor.

“BAC will remain engaged to support the right of women, and all workers, to make their own decisions about their health and body.”
International Union Of Painters And Allied Trades (IUPAT)

International Union of Painters and Allied Trades General President Jimmy Williams, Jr. issued the following statement in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade:

“Today is a sad day for democracy. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe is a direct attack on the working people of this country. This decision, made by unelected and unaccountable people, will hurt millions of people, particularly women, the poor, and disadvantaged. The extremists on the Supreme Court who don’t believe in reproductive rights also don’t believe in the most basic labor rights.

The unelected Supreme Court is intent on rolling back long-standing rights in an effort to advance their partisan agenda. Their majority opinion and concurrences imply that they are far from satisfied and intend to further erode our rights including access to birth control, to marry who we please, and love who we choose. This court could very well extend rulings leading to nationwide right to work in a similar manner.

I believe that we all have a responsibility to take part in the fight to come. Make no mistake, the courts have no intention of stopping here. The same Justices that are intent on overturning decades of rights believe firmly in eroding our rights at work. The labor movement cannot be silent on this issue, because it is coming for us too.”
National Education Association (NEA)

The Supreme Court today issued a decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, National Education Association President Becky Pringle released the following statement:

“The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the women they know and love should have the right to determine their own family planning and reproductive health. But today’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade shows once again how the current majority of the Supreme Court is continuing to put their radical ideological agenda above our basic human rights and freedoms.

“To all those who are out there scared, worried, and angry, I see you. I hear you. And I stand with you.

“This decision strips away from millions across race, place and gender identities, the right to make their own health care decisions and about when and how to have a family. The devastating results will be the loss of health, economic security, and even life for women and their families. Today’s decision strips away the fundamental freedom to decide for ourselves the care we need, and hands that power to state legislatures instead.

“It is an attack on rights deeply rooted in the promise of America, one that puts at risk fundamental civil liberties protected over the years through landmark Supreme Court decisions – including the right of interracial couples to marry, the right of unmarried people to use contraception, the right of same-sex couples to marry, and other rights that have been the bedrock of American society for generations.

“And this is another example of how, over the last few years, we have seen the same faction of politicians working overtime to reverse decades of progress on racial justice, on women’s rights, on worker’s rights, on LGBTQ+ rights, on voting rights, on our right to privacy, and on our students’ freedom to learn in our public schools.

“These attacks on our freedoms are designed to do one thing – consolidate unfettered power into the hands of a few. We must stand up for all of our rights.

“Together, we all must do our part to preserve our democracy and help our nation live up to the beautiful poetry of our Constitution. When we say, ‘We the people,’ we mean ALL the people. It is time for all of us to demand our freedoms by marching, by speaking out, and most importantly by voting for pro-public school, pro-freedom candidates up and down the ballot.”
Background:

NEA has a long history of advocating for the rights of our members – 78% of which are women — and that includes their reproductive freedom.

NEA develops policies at its Representative Assembly, the largest democratic gathering in the country. Each year, thousands of delegates (NEA members elected by their peers) debate and vote on establishing positions. Since 1978, we have supported the right of our members to choose whether to have children and how to have a family. Our official resolution says, “The National Education Association believes in family planning, including the right to reproductive freedom.”

Over the years, NEA has participated in litigation on behalf of members based on Roe v. Wade, including the cases of: Jeanne Eckmann, a teacher who studied to be a nun, became pregnant as a result of rape, and was fired by her school district for choosing to have a child out of wedlock. (NEA relied on Roe to argue that it violated her right to reproductive freedom for the school to fire her for exercising her right not to have an abortion.)
Linda Littlejohn, a Kentucky member fired for getting a divorce. (The Sixth Circuit agreed with NEA that her firing violated the right established in Roe to privacy in matters relating to procreation and marriage.)
Janice Dike, a Florida member denied the right to breastfeed her baby during her duty-free lunch period. (The Fifth Circuit agreed with NEA in relying on Roe’s recognition of a fundamental right to decide how to nurture and raise children, referring to breastfeeding as the “most elemental form of parental care.”)

NEA has also supported reproductive freedom in amicus filings in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

NEA will continue to support the freedom of its members to choose whom they will love and marry, when they will try to have a child and a family, and how they will raise their children.
National Nurses Union (NNU)

Registered nurses understand that abortion is a basic health care service, and as a union of health care providers dedicated to advocating for the best interests of our patients, National Nurses United opposes any efforts to restrict our patients’ control and choices over their own health care and their own bodies. The basic tenets of ethical medical care dictate that patients should enjoy autonomy, self-determination, and dignity over their bodies, their lives, and the health care they receive. Singling out this exception, the right to end a pregnancy, that targets only people with reproductive capacity, is not only bad health policy, it is immoral, discriminatory, misogynist, violent, unacceptable, and violates the nursing ethics we nurses pledge to uphold.

The Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling today in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a shameful and dangerous assault on women, other child-bearing people, and families at a sweeping scale. This decision is part of a coordinated rightwing effort to undo hard-won human and civil rights in the United States, and to control working people by removing their power and bodily autonomy. This decision goes against the beliefs and values of the vast majority of people in the United States and is an attack on democracy itself.

“Abortion is health care. Plain and simple,” said Jean Ross, RN and president of National Nurses United. “It’s outrageous and completely unacceptable to single out this one health care service, that’s only needed by people who can get pregnant, as illegal. We nurses have a duty to always advocate for our patients, and that’s exactly what we’ll continue to do: fight for our patients’ rights to make their own health care decisions and control their own bodies. We won’t rest until this right is restored to all.”

As nurses, we know that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will have devastating effects on our patients’ most basic access to health, safety, and well-being. For the more than 20 states that have trigger laws or constitutional amendments already on the books, abortion will be immediately banned. Yet as health care providers, we know from experience that abortions will not stop. They will continue underground because they are a vital medical necessity, a basic health care service. Abortions will simply become more expensive, harder to access, and in many cases unsafe. Those with money and resources will continue to be able to get safe abortions, and those without will not. Those who cannot find safe, clinical spaces to get abortion services will resort to DIY methods. As one of our nurse practitioners said, “Many people will unnecessarily die.”

This denial of health care will most violently harm and deepen existing inequalities for low-income people, and people who already suffer from lack of and inadequate health care, such as Black, Latinx, and immigrant women. We believe overturning Roe is only a first step: Reversing an almost half-century old health care right opens the door for the extremist Supreme Court and the authoritarian right to attack numerous other liberties that many take for granted, such as the right to contraception, interracial marriage, and LGBTQ+ rights. These assaults on basic human rights hurt all working people.

As a union representing a profession of predominantly women that has advocated relentlessly for gender and health care justice, we are keenly aware of how reproductive rights and justice are inextricably linked to our careers and work lives. Reproductive health care justice – which is bound together with economic, racial, and gender justice – is a priority for nurses and must be a priority for all working people. Organized attacks on abortion rights, reproductive decision-making, access to health care, and bodily autonomy are part of an anti-worker, anti-democratic, sexist, and racist political agenda.

“The responsibility to reverse the impact of this horrible Supreme Court decision rests squarely with the U.S. Congress,” said NNU Executive Director Bonnie Castillo, RN. “A majority exists in both the House and Senate to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade but it will require the Senate to eliminate the filibuster to allow for a vote. Senators who say they want to protect a woman’s right to control her own body must be willing to change Senate rules so a vote can be held on this crucial issue. Senators are faced with a stark choice: maintain the anti-democratic, archaic Senate filibuster rule or protect a woman’s right to choose. Now is the time to take a stand for women and for reproductive health care justice.”

Reproductive justice is requisite for any democracy where working people truly have a say in our workplaces and communities. For us to have a voice at work, to provide for our families, and to advocate for ourselves politically, we must have the human right to maintain bodily autonomy—to be able to make decisions about when and whether to have children, and to parent children in safe and healthy communities. As Rebecca Goldfader, NP, who is one of our members and a longtime reproductive justice activist, said, “The ability to have choice and ownership over our reproductive capacity is at the basis of a free society.”

Nurses and other health care workers advocate tirelessly for our patients and have won safe staffing ratios, Covid-19 protections, and countless other improvements to the health care system through collective action. However, all these advances are at risk as the authoritarian right encroaches on our most basic liberties.

Nurses will not tolerate these assaults. We will continue to act in solidarity with our coworkers , our patients, and our communities to defend the human rights that workers have fought for and won over centuries of struggle in the United States. And we will continue our relentless fight for social, political, and economic justice by working collectively, participating in our local and national elections, and never relenting in our workplace struggle to create an equitable and high-quality health care system.

National Nurses United is the country’s largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses, with more than 175,000 members nationwide.
Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry issued the following statement in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling today in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“We are angered and disgusted by today’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Joining hands with Republican politicians, the extremist majority of the court has taken away women’s fundamental right to abortion, sending us back 50 years. This reckless decision is yet another example of the nation’s highest court jettisoning its own precedent to cater to powerful right-wing and corporate interests while rolling back the rights of working people.

As a direct result of this ruling, more women will be forced to choose between paying their rent or traveling long distances to receive safe abortion care. Working women are already struggling in poverty-wage jobs without paid leave and many are also shouldering the caregiving responsibilities for their families, typically unpaid. This radical decision will impact all of us, especially those who already face barriers to accessing health care because of structural racism, sexism and corporate greed. Without the ability to determine whether and when to have children, essential workers serving their communities as child care providers, home care workers, health care workers, janitors and fast food workers can’t hope to join the middle class.

Right-wing politicians claim to support families, but they have taken every opportunity to undermine the progress made by working women and mothers, whether it’s taking away our reproductive freedom or failing to invest in child care and home and community care. SEIU’s 2 million members stand with our partners in the reproductive justice movement, with clinic workers who continue to provide essential services and with the people who need their care. We will keep fighting. This ruling is further motivation for working people to vote in record numbers at the midterms and elect leaders who will defend the rights of working women and all of us.”
The NewsGuild (TNG-CWA)

The NewsGuild-CWA vowed today to continue to fight for access to abortion as a fundamental health care right and as a matter of personal choice.

“The Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade strikes a devastating blow to the right to privacy and the right of women and all people to control their own bodies and make decisions about their own health care,” said NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss. “The court’s decision on abortion is likely the start of the destruction of many of our rights, including the right to marry.”

“We are encouraging our members to respond to this assault on their personal freedom and essential health care by doing what we do best: organizing to protect our rights in the workplace,” he said.

After a draft of the Court’s decision was leaked to Politico in May, Guild leaders said, “Comprehensive, reliable and affordable health care is a human right and access to abortion is a crucial component of comprehensive health care.”

NewsGuild members and staff have been meeting since then to develop bargaining approaches that provide coverage for abortion care in collective bargaining agreements and to equip our membership with the tools to organize their coworkers to take action on this core labor issue.

“It’s important for members to review their collective bargaining agreement to know their contractual rights and to understand any specific limitations that may have been bargained into the contract,” said Marian Needham, the Guild’s executive vice president. “However, members have a protected right to discuss any issues related to their union and their working conditions, within the context of what members are doing to address those issues. What could be more central than the scope of the medical coverage employees receive?”

Alongside concerns about diminishing rights, many of the Guild’s journalist members have expressed concern about their ability to speak openly about abortion access without being penalized by management for engaging publicly on a so-called “partisan issue.” When the draft decision was leaked, some employers sent notices asking people to refrain from tweeting about the decision. The federal National Labor Relations Act gives most private-sector workers the right to unionize and take collective action, including protecting the right of workers to speak publicly about their working conditions.
United Automobile, Aerospace, And Agricultural Implement Workers (UAW)
.

By disavowing a well-established right, the U.S. Supreme Court has also put everyone on notice that nothing is safe or secure. Elections have consequences, and we are seeing that bear out in front of our eyes. The political agenda of the far-right is now the template of juris prudence and that means the rights to join a union and collectively bargain for good wages, benefits, and safe working conditions are less secure today than they were yesterday.
United Electrical, Radio And Machine Workers Of America (UE)
UPDATE: On Friday, June 24, The Supreme Court Officially Released A Decision Overturning Roe V. Wade, Which Conforms In All Important Ways To The Leaked Decision Condemned By The UE Officers In This Statement.

We condemn unequivocally the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade that was leaked on May 2. It is an indefensible attack on the right of women and pregnant people to control their own bodies, one of the most fundamental of liberties. Furthermore, the leaked draft opinion, which overturns a half century of settled law, signals that this unelected group of six right-wing justices sees none of our rights as untouchable.

UE policy, approved overwhelming by elected rank-and-file delegates at our 77th Convention in September, “Supports the right of all those seeking reproductive healthcare, regardless of economic status, to choose whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy, to have access to free, confidential, and effective birth control and family planning services, to be protected against forced sterilization, and not be discriminated against because of reproductive health issues.”

Laws that criminalize abortion do not reduce its frequency, they merely make reproductive health care more expensive and dangerous, with the burden falling disproportionately on working-class women and women of color. Without the right to control their own bodies, women will face increased barriers to participating fully in society, including in their unions. Without the full participation of women, the unity that is essential to winning gains for workers and the working class will be weakened. As UE policy notes, “Until women have full and equal rights, all workers are held back.”

The attack on reproductive rights is being waged, cynically and hypocritically, by politicians who know that they and their families will always be able to access reproductive health care, and who regularly invoke “freedom from government intrusion” as a reason to oppose pro-worker legislation. Their aim is not to protect “life,” but to create cover for a pro-corporate political agenda that is unpopular with voters. Those who campaign most vociferously against women’s reproductive rights also refuse to support universal healthcare and paid family leave, and are some of the labor movement’s bitterest enemies.

In his draft opinion, Justice Alito argues that only those rights commonly understood to exist in 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, have constitutional standing. Alito specifically notes that constitutional rights to contraception, same-sex and interracial marriage, and freedom from government intrusion into our bedrooms do not meet this criteria. His claim could just as easily be used to justify undermining New Deal legislation establishing labor rights, the minimum wage, and Social Security — all of which were challenged as unconstitutional in the 1930s and survived only after massive outcry and widespread strikes convinced the court to change its mind.

This draft decision is also a product of some of the most undemocratic features of our political system, and of some of the most unethical political machinations in recent history. Three of the six justices joining the majority opinion were appointed by a president who did not win the popular vote, and two of those were confirmed by the votes of senators who collectively represent fewer Americans than the senators who voted against confirmation.

The blatant use of the Supreme Court to further a right-wing political agenda is a threat to all of our rights, including the rights of LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color, and all workers. It must be met by militant, collective action by working people and our allies, and by a demand to bring greater accountability to the least democratic branch of our government. UE stands with all those who are being attacked by this likely Supreme Court decision, and with all people who may come under attack in any future decisions by what has become a dangerously undemocratic institution.
United Farm Workers (UFW)

We want to recognize the heavy emotions faced by our communities in the United States given the recent news of the Supreme Court overturning Roe. V. Wade.

These issues cut across age, race, gender, and socio-economic status – and most certainly will have a wide impact on immigrant communities who already face barriers to health care. You may never know who this impacts, often a friend or family member who may be too afraid to ask for help or share their story. It is fundamental that our communities have access to the healthcare they need.

Israeli Live-Fire Military Training In Masafer Yatta Is Ongoing

https://popularresistance.org/israeli-live-fire-military-training-in-masafer-yatta-is-ongoing/






By Stop The Wall.

July 1, 2022
Educate!


For a week, Israeli soldiers along with their guns, bulldozers, military jeeps, tanks and helicopters have been invading Palestinian villages in Masafer Yatta. This is part of the live-fire military training that has started on June 21, 2022 and will last for two more weeks.

The Israeli army’s military training is being carried out in the villages of Jinba, Al-Markez and Al-Majaz. The three villages are among the eight located in what Israel classifies as Firing Zone 918. On May 4, 2022, Israel’s Supreme Court issued a decision to ethnically cleanse Palestinians living in the eight villages, who number over 1000 people.

According to local residents, the military training has badly affected their daily lives. Residents of the villages are no longer able to graze their herds as the military training is being carried out on their grazing land. Movement of people inside and outside the villages is highly restricted as the Israeli army has set up military tents between Palestinian homes.

At the entrance of the three villages, there has been a constant presence of Israeli soldiers who limit the access of Palestinians from neighboring villages and towns to the affected villages. In other words, Jinba, Al-Markez and Al-Majaz are under a three-week siege. The life of people, who have refused to leave their homes, and their animals is at risk. Israeli soldiers conducting the training keep shooting live fire in areas that are only a few meters away from Palestinian homes.

The last time the Israeli army held a military training of this kind in these villages was twenty years ago. Conducting an army training in the area less than two months after the court ruling in favor of the forcible expulsion of more than 1000 Palestinians is part of Israeli enforcement of the court decision.

The military training is compounded with other measures to squeeze Palestinians out of their homes. This includes home demolition and the fortification of the Apartheid Wall in the area.



To support the steadfastness of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, join in the Masafer Yatta World Tour here.

Economist Michael Hudson On Inflation And Fed Plan To Cut Wages

 

https://popularresistance.org/economist-michael-hudson-on-inflation-and-fed-plan-to-cut-wages-a-depression-is-coming/



Transcript:

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Hey, everyone, this is Ben Norton, and you are watching or listening to the Multipolarista podcast. I am always privileged to be joined by one of my favorite guests, Michael Hudson, one of the greatest economists living today.

We’re going to be talking about the inflation crisis. This is a crisis around the world, but especially in the United States, where inflation has been at over 8%. And it has caused a lot of political problems. It’s very likely going to cause the defeat, among other factors, of the Democrats in the mid-term elections in November.

And we’ve seen that the response of the US government and top economists in the United States is basically to blame inflation on wages, on low levels of unemployment and on working people.

We’ve seen that the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, has said that inflation is being caused by wages supposedly being too high. We’ve also seen that the top economist and former Clinton administration official Larry Summers has claimed that the solution to inflation is increasing unemployment, potentially up to 10%.

So today I’m joined by economist Michael Hudson, who has been calling out this kind of neoliberal snake oil economics for many years. And Professor Hudson has an article he just published that we’re going to talk about today. You can find this at his website, which is michael-hudson.com. It’s titled “The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages.” and I’m going to let Professor Hudson summarize the main points of his article.

Professor Hudson, as always, it’s a pleasure having you. Can you respond to the decision by the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 0.75%? It doesn’t sound like a lot – it’s less than 1% – but this was the largest rate hike since 1994.

And now we’ve already seen reports that there’s going to be a depression. The Fed chair is blaming this on wages. Can you respond to the position of the Fed and the inflation crisis in the US right now.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

For the Fed, the only two things that it can do is, number one, raise the discount rate, the interest rate; and number two, spend $9 trillion buying stocks, and bonds, and real estate mortgages to increase real estate prices, and to increase the amount of wealth that the wealthiest 10% of the population has.

To the wealthiest 10%, especially the 1%, it’s not only inflation that’s a problem of wages; every problem that America has is the problem of the working class earning too much money. And if you’re an employer, that’s the problem: you want to increase your profits. And if you look at the short term, your profits go up the more that you can squeeze labor down. And the way to squeeze labor down is to increase what Marx called the reserve army of the unemployed.

You need unemployment in order to prevent labor from getting most of the value of what it produces, so that the employers can get the value, and pay that to the banks and the financial managers that have taken over corporate industry in the United States.

You mentioned that while the Fed blames the inflation it on labor, that’s not President Biden’s view; Biden keeps calling it the Putin inflation. And of course, what he really means is that the sanctions that America has placed on Russia have created a shortage of oil, gas, energy, and food exports.

So really we’re in the Biden inflation. And the Biden inflation that America is experiencing is the result basically of America’s military policy, its foreign policy, and above all, the Democratic Party’s support of the oil industry, which is the most powerful sector in the United States and which is guiding most of the sanctions against Russia; and the national security state that bases America’s power on its ability to export oil, or control the oil trade of all the countries, and to export agricultural products.

So what we’re in the middle of right now isn’t simply a domestic issue of wage earners wanting higher salaries – which they’re not particularly getting; certainly the minimum wage has not been increased – but you have to put this in the context of the whole cold war that’s going on.

The whole US and NATO confrontation of Russia has been a godsend, as you and I have spoken before, for the oil industry and the farm exporters.

And the result is that the US dollar is rising against the euro, against sterling, and against Global South currencies. Well, in principle a rising dollar should make the price of imports low. So something else is at work.

And what’s at work, of course, is the fact that the oil industry is a monopoly, that most of the prices that have been going up are basically the result of a monopolization, in the case of food, by the marketing firms, like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, that buy most of the crops from the farmers.

The irony is that while food prices, next to oil prices, are the major factor that is soaring, farmers are getting less and less for their crops. And yet farmers’ costs are going up – up for fertilizer, up for energy, up for other inputs – so that you’re having enormous profits for Archer Daniels Midland and the food monopolies, of the distributors, and enormous, enormous gains for the oil industry, and also of course for the military-industrial complex.

So if you look at what’s happening in the overall world economic system, you can see that this inflation is being engineered. And the beneficiaries of this inflation certainly have not been the wage earners, by any stretch of the imagination.

But the crisis that the Biden policy has created is being blamed on the wage earners instead of on the Biden administration’s foreign policy and the basically the US-NATO war to isolate Russia, China, India, Iran, and Eurasia generally.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Professor Hudson, I want to talk about the increase in interest rates by the Fed. There has been a lot of attention to this, although, again, it’s 0.75%, which is not that big. But it’s of course going to have an outsize impact on the economy.

In your article, again, this is your column at michael-hudson.com, “The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages,” you talk about the Fed’s “junk economics,” and you say that the idea behind raising interest rates by 0.75% is that:


raising interest rates will cure inflation by deterring borrowing to spend on the basic needs that make up the Consumer Price Index and its related GDP deflator. But banks do not finance much consumption, except for credit card debt, which is now less than student loans and automobile loans. Banks lend almost entirely to buy real estate, stocks and bonds, not goods and services.

So you argue that one of the effects of this is that it’s actually going to roll back homeownership in the United States. You note that the rate of homeownership has been falling since 2008.

So can you expand on those arguments? What will be the impact of the increase of the interest rates by the Fed?

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, in order to get an economics degree which is needed to work at the Fed or at the Council of Economic Advisors, you have to take economics courses in the universities, and all of the textbooks say just what you quoted me as saying they say.

The pretense is that banks actually play a productive role in society, by providing the money for factories to buy machinery, and build plants, and do research and development, and to hire labor; and that somehow the money that banks create is all lent out for industrial economy, and that that will enable companies to make more money that they’ll spend on labor; and of course, as they spend more money on labor, that supports to bid prices up as the reserve army of the unemployed is depleted.

But that’s all a fiction. The textbooks don’t want to say that banks don’t play a productive role like that at all. And the corporations don’t do what the textbooks say.

If you look at the Federal Reserve balance sheet and statistics that it publishes every month, you’ll see that 80% of bank loans in the United States are mortgage loans to commercial real estate and mostly for home real estate. And of course the home mortgage loans have been nothing, like under 1% for the last 14 years, since 2008.

Only the banks and the large borrowers, the financial sector, have been able to borrow at these low rates. Homeowners all along have had to pay very high rates, just under 4%, and now it’s going above 4%, heading to 5%.

Well, here is the situation that the Federal Reserve has created. Suppose that you’re a family right now going out to buy a home, and you find out that in order to borrow the money to buy the home – because if the average home in America costs $600,000 or $700,000, people haven’t saved that much; the only way you can buy a home is to take out a mortgage.

Well, you have a choice: you can either rent a home, or you can borrow the money to buy a home. And traditionally, for a century, the carrying charge for financing a home with the mortgage has been about the equivalent of paying a rent. The advantage is, of course, that you get to own the home when it’s over.

Well, now let’s look at what’s happening right now. All of a sudden, the carrying charge of mortgages have gone way, way up. The banks are making an enormous gap. They can borrow at just around 1%, and they lend out at 4.5%. They get a windfall gain of the markup they have in mortgages, lending to prospective homeowners.

And of course, the homeowners don’t have enough money to be able to pay the higher interest charged on the mortgages that they take out. So they are not able to buy as expensive a home as they wanted before.

But they’ve been a declining part of the population. At the time Obama took office, over 68% of Americans owned their own home. Obama started the great wave of evictions, of 10 million Americans who lived in homes, essentially to throw them out of their homes, especially the victims of the junk mortgages, especially the lower income and racial minorities who were redlined and had to become the main victims of the mortgages.

America’s homeownership rate is now under 61%. What has happened? You’ve had huge private capital firms come into the market thinking, wait a minute, we can now buy these properties and rent them out. And we can buy them for all cash, unlike homeowners, we’re multibillionaires, we Blackstone, BlackRock.

You have these multibillion-dollar funds, and they say, well, we can’t make much money buying bonds or buying stocks that yield what they do today, now that the Federal Reserve has ground down interest rates. What we can do is make money as landlords.

And so they’ve shifted, they’ve reversed the whole shift away from the 19th-century landlordism to an economy based on financialization, and the wealthy classes making money on finance, to go back to making money as landlords.

And so they are buying up these homes that American homeowners can’t afford to buy. Because when you raise the mortgage rate, that doesn’t affect a billionaire at all. Because the billionaire firm doesn’t have to borrow money to buy the home. They have the billion dollars of their own money, of pension fund money, of speculative money, of the money of the 1% and the 10% to spend.

So what you’re having by increasing the interest rates is squeezing homeowners out of the market and turning the American economy into a landlord-ridden rental economy, instead of a homeowners economy. That’s the effect.

And it’s a windfall for the private capital firms that are now seeing that are making money as landlords, the old fashioned way, it worked for 800 years under feudalism. It’s coming back in style.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Professor Hudson, you point out in this article at your website that more than 50% of the value of U.S. real estate already is held by mortgage bankers. And of course, that percentage is increasing and increasing.

Now, you, Professor Hudson, have argued a point that I haven’t seen many other people make, although it’s an obvious, correct point, which is that there has actually been a lot of inflation in the United States in the past several years, but that inflation was in the FIRE sector: finance, insurance, and real estate.

We see that with the constant increase in real estate prices; they go up every single year; rent goes up every single year. The difference now is that there’s also a significant increase in the Consumer Price Index.

And there is an interesting study published by the Economic Policy Institute, which is, you know, a center-left think tank, affiliated with the labor movement; they’re not radicals, they’re progressives. And they did a very good study.

And they found – this was published this April – they found that corporate profits are responsible for around 54% of the increase of prices in the non-financial corporate sector, as opposed to unit labor costs only being responsible for around an 8% increase.

So they showed, scientifically, that over half of the increase of prices in the non-financial corporate sector, that is in the Consumer Price Index, over half of that inflation is because of corporate profits.

Of course, that’s not the way it’s discussed in mainstream media. That’s not the way the Fed is discussing it all. We see Larry Summers saying that we need to increase unemployment. Larry Summers, of course, was the treasury secretary for Bill Clinton.

He’s saying that the U.S. has to increase unemployment; the solution to inflation is increasing unemployment. Even though these studies show that over half of inflation in the Consumer Price Index is because of corporate profits.

I’m wondering if you can comment on why so many economists, including people as revered as Larry Summers, refuse to acknowledge that reality.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Most economists need to get employment, and in order to be employed, you have to give a picture of the economy that reflects how well your employer helped society at large. You’re not allowed to say that your employer is acting in ways that are purely predatory. You’re not allowed to say that the employer does not earn an income.

You talked about corporate profits and the classical economists. If you were a free-market economist like Adam Smith, or David Ricardo, or John Stuart Mill – these are monopoly rents. So what you call corporate profits are way above normal corporate rates of return, normal profits. They’re economic rents from monopoly.

And that’s because about 10 or 15 years ago, the United States stopped imposing its anti-monopoly laws. It has essentially let monopolies concentrate markets, concentrate power, and charge whatever they want.

And so once you’ve dismantled the whole legal framework that was put in place from the 1890s, from the Sherman Antitrust Act, down through the early 20th century, the New Deal, once you dismantle all of this state control, saying – essentially what Larry Summers says is, we’re for a free market.

A “free market” is one in which companies can charge whatever they want to charge for things; a free market is one without government regulation; a free market is one without government; a free market is a weak enough government so that it cannot protect the wage earners; it cannot protect voters. A “democracy” is a country where the bulk of the population, the wage earners, have no ability to affect economic policy in their own interests.

A “free market” is one where, instead of the government being the planner, Wall Street is the planner, on behalf of the large industries that are basically being financialized.

So you’ve had a transformation of the concept of what a free market is, a dismantling of government regulation, a dismantling of anti-monopoly regulation, and essentially the class war is back in business.

That’s what the Biden administration is all about. And quite frankly, it’s what the Democratic Party is all about, even more than the Republican Party. The Republican Party can advocate pro-business policies and pro-financial policies, but the Democratic Party is in charge of dismantling the legacy of protection of the economy that had been put in place for a century.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Yeah, and this is an article in Fortune that was originally based on an article in Bloomberg: “5 years at 6% unemployment or 1 year at 10%: That’s what Larry Summers says we’ll need to defeat inflation.” That’s how simple it is, you know, just increase unemployment, and then inflation will magically go away!

Now, I also wanted to get your response, Professor Hudson, to these comments that you highlighted in a panel that was organized by the International Manifesto Group – a great organization, people can find it here, their channel here at YouTube. And they held a conference on inflation. And you were one of several speakers.

And you highlighted these comments that were made by the Fed chair, Jerome Powell. And this is according to the official transcript from The Wall Street Journal. So this is not from some lefty, socialist website. Here’s the official transcript of a May 4 press conference given by the Fed chief, Jerome Powell.

In this press conference, he said, discussing inflation, he said, in order to get inflation down, he’s talking about things that can be done “to get wages down, and then get inflation down without having to slow the economy and have a recession and have unemployment rise materially.”

So this is another proposal. Larry Summers says 6% unemployment for five years, or 10% unemployment for one year. The Fed chair, Jerome Powell, says the solution is “to get wages down.” I’m wondering if you can respond to that as well.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, the important thing to realize is that President Biden re-appointed Jerome Powell. President Biden is a Republican. The Democratic Party is basically the right wing of the Republican Party, the pro-financial, the pro-Wall Street wing of the Republican Party.

Why on earth, if the Democrats were different from the Republicans, why would would Biden re-appoint an anti-labor Republican, as head of the Federal Reserve, instead of someone that would actually try to spur employment?

Imagine, here’s a party that is trying to be elected on a program of, “Elect us, and we will create a depression and we will lower wages.” That is the Democrat Party slogan.

And it’s a winning slogan, because elections are won by campaign contributions. The slogan is, “We will lower wages by bringing you depression,” is a tsunami of contributions to the Democratic Party, by Wall Street, by the monopolists, by all the beneficiaries of this policy.

So that’s why the Supreme Court ruling against abortions the other day is a gift to the Democrats, because it distracts attention from their identity politics of breaking America into all sorts of identities, every identity you can think of, except being a wage earner.

The wage earners are called deplorables, basically. And that’s how the donor class thinks of them, as sort of unfortunate overhead. You need to employ them, but it really it’s unfortunate that they like to live as well as they do, because the better they live, the less money that you will end up with.

So I think that this issue of the inflation, and what really causes it, really should be what elections are all about. This should be the economic core of this November’s election campaign and the 2024 election campaign. And the Democrats are leading the fight to lower wages.

And you remember that when President Obama was elected, he promised to increase the minimum wage? As soon as he got in, he said the one thing we cannot do is raise the minimum wage. And he had also promised to back card check. He said, the one thing we must not do is increase labor unionization with card check, because if you unionize labor, they’re going to ask for better wages and better working conditions.

So you have the Democratic Party taking about as hard a right-wing position as sort of Chicago School monetarism, saying the solution to any any problem at all is just lower wages and somehow you’ll be more competitive, whereas the American economy is already rendered uncompetitive, not because wages are so high, but because, as you mentioned before, the FIRE sector, the finance, insurance, and real estate sector is so high.

Rents and home ownership, having a home is too expensive to be competitive with foreign labor. Having to pay 18% of GDP on medical care, privatized medical care, prices American labor out of the market. All of the debt service that America has paid is pricing America out of the market.

So the problem is not that wages are too high. The problem is that the overhead that labor has to pay in order to survive, for rent, for medical care, for student loans, for car loans, to have a car to drive to work, for gas to drive to work, to buy the monopoly prices that you need in order to survive – all of these are too high.

None of this even appears in economic textbooks that you need to get a good mark on, in order to get an economics degree, in order to be suitably pliable to be hired by the Federal Reserve, or the Council of Economic Advisers, or by corporations that use economists basically as public relations spokesmen. So that’s the mess we’re in.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Professor Hudson, in your article at your website, michael-hudson.com, you have an important section about the quantitative easing policies. We were talking about how there has been inflation in the past decade, but then inflation was largely in the FIRE sector, pushing up, artificially inflating the prices of real estate and stocks.

You note that:


While home ownership rates plunged for the population at large, the Fed’s “Quantitative Easing” increased its subsidy of Wall Street’s financial securities from $1 trillion to $8.2 trillion – of which the largest gain has been in packaged home mortgages. This has kept housing prices from falling and becoming more affordable for home buyers.

And you, of course, note that “the Fed’s support of asset prices saved many insolvent banks – the very largest ones – from going under.”

I had you on to discuss, in late 2019, before the Covid pandemic hit, we know that the Fed had this emergency bailout where it gave trillions of dollars in emergency repo loans to the biggest banks to prevent them from from crashing, trying to save the economy.

I do want to talk about this as well, because sometimes this is used by right-wingers who portray Biden hilariously as a socialist. You were just talking about how the Democrats have a deeply neoliberal, right-wing economic program.

But of course, there is this rhetoric that we see from Republicans and conservatives claiming that Biden is a socialist. They claim that the reason there is inflation is because Biden is just printing money and giving money to people.

Of course, that’s not at all what’s happening. What has happened is that the Fed has printed trillions of dollars and given that to stockholders, to big corporations, and to banks.

And this is a point that I saw highlighted in that panel I mentioned, the conference on inflation that was organized by the International Manifesto Group. A colleague of yours, a brilliant political economist, Radhika Desai, she invited everyone to go to the Fed website and look at the Fed balance sheet.

And this is the Fed balance sheet from federalreserve.gov. This is the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System website. And it is pretty shocking to see this graph, which shows the total assets of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Back in 2008, the Federal Reserve had around $900 billion in assets. Now it’s at nearly $9 trillion in assets.

And we can see, after the financial crash, or during the financial crash, it increased to around $2 trillion. And then around 2014, it increased to around $4.5 trillion. And then especially in late 2019 and 2020, it skyrocketed from around $4 trillion up to $7 trillion. And since then, it has continued skyrocketing to $9 trillion in assets.

Where did all of that money go? And what was the impact on the economy, of course?

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, the impact on the economy has been to vastly increase the wealth of the wealthiest 1% of Americans who own most of the stocks and bonds.

Sheila Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, pointed out that a lot of this $8 trillion is spent to buy junk bonds.

Here’s the problem. The problem really began with President Obama. He inherited a system where you had the largest wave of commercial bank fraud in American history.

As my colleague Bill Black at the University of Missouri at Kansas City has pointed out, everybody knew that there was a bank fraud on. The newspapers referred to junk mortgages and “NINJA” borrowers: “no income, no jobs, no assets.”

So banks had written mortgages way above the actual value of homes, especially to racial and ethnic minorities, without any ability of the borrowers to actually pay.

And then these banks had packaged these mortgages, and sold them to hapless pension funds, and other institutional investors and to the European banks that are always very naive about how honest American banks are.

You had this whole accumulation of what the 19th century called fictitious capital. Mortgages for property that wasn’t worth anywhere near as much as the mortgage is for.

So if the mortgage was defaulted, if homeowners had jingle mail – in other words, you just mail the keys back to the bank and say, ok, take the house, I find I can buy a house now at half the price that Citibank or one of these other banks lent out.

Well, normally you’d have a crash of prices back to realistic levels, so that the value of mortgages actually reflected the value of property, or the value of junk bonds issued by a corporation reflected the actual earning power of the corporation to pay interest on the junk bonds.

So by the time Obama took over, the whole economy was largely fictitious capital. Well, Obama came in and he said, my campaign donors are on Wall Street. He called in the Wall Street bankers and he said, I’m the guy standing between you and the crowd with the pitchforks, the people who voted for me. But don’t worry, I’m on your side.

He said, I’m going to have the Federal Reserve create the largest amount of credit in human history. And it’s all going to go to you. It’s going to go to the 1% of the population. It’s not going to go into the economy. It’s not going to build infrastructure. It’s not going into wages. It’s not going to reduce the price of homes and make them more affordable to Americans.

It’s going to keep the price of these junk bonds so high that they don’t crash back to non-fictitious values. It’s going to keep the stock market so high that it’s not going to go down. It’s going to create the largest bond market boom in history.

The boom went from high interest rates to low interest rates, meaning a gigantic rise in the price of bonds that actually pay interest that are more than 0.1%.

So there was a huge bond market boom, a huge stock market, a tripling of stock market prices. And if you are a member of the group that owns 72% of American stocks, I think that’s 10% of the population, you have gotten much, much richer.

But if you’re a member of the 90% of the population, you have had to go further and further into debt just in order to survive, just in order to pay for medical care, student loans, and your daily living expenses out of your salary.

So if American wages were at a decent level, American families would not be pushed more and more into debt. The reason the personal debt has gone up in the United States is because families can’t get by on what they earn.

So obviously, if they can’t get by on what they earn, and they have to borrow to get by, they are not responsible for causing the inflation. They’re being squeezed.

And the job of economists, and of Democratic Party and Republican politicians, is to distract attention from the fact that they’re being squeezed and blame the victim, and saying, you’re doing it to yourself by just wanting more money, you’re actually creating the inflation that is squeezing you.

When actually it’s the banks, and the government’s non-enforcement of the monopoly policy, and the government support of Wall Street that is responsible for what is happening.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Very, very well said.

Professor Hudson, I should have highlighted another part of this graph here. This is, again, this is at the Federal Reserve Board website. It’s even more revealing when you look at the selected assets of the Fed, and you see that all of these assets basically are securities, securities held outright by the Fed.

We see that around 2008, the Fed had less than $500 billion in securities. And you have this policy of quantitative easing. And since then, basically all of the increase has been in securities. Of the roughly $9 trillion in assets the Fed holds, about about $8.5 trillion is in securities.

I’m wondering if you can compare this to central banks in other countries. We’ve seen, for instance, that the Western sanctions on Russia were aimed at trying to destroy the Russian economy.

President Biden claimed they were trying to make the ruble into rubble. In fact, the ruble is significantly stronger now than it was before the sanctions. To such a degree that the Russian government and Russian national bank are actually trying to decrease the value of the ruble, because they think it’s a little overvalued; it makes it a little harder to be competitive.

So how does this policy of the US Fed having $8.5 trillion worth of securities compare to the policies of other central banks?

You have experience working with the Chinese government as an advisor. Do other governments’ central banks have this policy?

And and that $8.5 trillion in securities, what are those securities? Even from the perspective of these neoliberal economics textbooks that you were talking about, that people are taught in universities, this seems to me to be totally insane. I don’t see how there is even an academic, neoliberal textbook explanation for this policy.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Very few people realize the difference between a central bank and the national treasury. The national treasury is what used to perform all of the policies that central banks now do. The national treasury would be in charge of issuing money and spending it.

Central banks were broken off in America in 1913 from the Treasury in order to shift control of the money supply and credit away from Washington to New York. That was very explicit.

The original Federal Reserve didn’t even permit a Treasury official to be on the board of directors. So the job of a central bank is to represent the interest of the commercial banks.

And as we just pointed out, the interest of the commercial banks is to produce their product: debt. And they create their product against existing assets, mainly real estate, but also stocks and bonds.

So the job of the central bank here is to support the financial sector of the economy, and that sector that holds wealth in the form of stocks, bonds, and loans, and especially bank bonds that make their money off real estate credit.

Same thing in Europe, with Europe’s central bank. Europe is going into a real squeeze now, and has been going into a squeeze ever since you had the Greek crisis.

In Europe, because right-wing monetarist designed the euro, part of the eurozone rule is you cannot run a budget deficit, a national budget deficit of more than 3% of gross domestic product.

Well, that’s not very much. That means that you can’t have a real Keynesian policy in Europe to pull the economy out of depression. That means that if you’re a country like Italy right now, and you have a real financial squeeze there, a corporate squeeze, a labor squeeze, the government cannot essentially rescue either Italian industry or Italian labor.

However, the European central bank can, by the way that it creates credit, by central bank deposits, the European central bank can vastly increase the price of European stocks, bonds, and packaged mortgages. So the European central bank is very much like the commercial bank.

China is completely different, because, unlike the West, China treats money and credit as a public utility, not as a private monopoly.

And as a public utility, China’s central bank will say, what are we going to want to create money for? Well, we’re going to want to create money to build factories; we’re going to want to create money so that real estate developers can build cities, or sometimes overbuild cities. We can create money to actually spend in the economy for something tangible, for goods and services.

The Chinese central bank does not create money to increase stock market prices or bond prices. It doesn’t create money to support a financial class, because the Communist Party of China doesn’t want a financial class to exist; it wants an industrial class to exist; it wants an industrial labor force to exist, but not a rentier class.

So a central bank in a Western rentier economy basically seeks to create credit to inflate the cost of living for homebuyers and for anyone who uses credit or needs credit, and to enable corporations to be financialized, and to shift their management away from making profits by investing in plant and equipment and employing labor to produce more, to making money by financial engineering.

In the last 15 years, over 90% of corporate earnings in the United States have been spent on stock buybacks and on dividend payouts. Only 8% of corporate earnings have been spent on new investment, and plants, and equipment, and hiring.

And so of course you have had the economy deindustrialized. It’s this idea that you can make money financially without an industrial base, without a manufacturing base; you can make money without actually producing more or doing anything productive, simply by having a central bank increase the price of the stocks, and bonds, and the loans made by the wealthiest 10%.

And of course, ultimately, that doesn’t work, because at a certain point the whole thing collapses from within, and there’s no industrial base.

And of course, when that happens, America will find out, wait a minute, if we close down the economy, we’re still reliant on China and Asia to produce our manufacturers, and to provide us with raw materials, and to do everything that we need. We’re really not doing anything but acting as a world – well, people used to say parasite – as a world rentier, as getting something for nothing, as a kind of financial colonialism.

So America you could look at as a colonial power that is a colonial power not by military occupation, but simply by financial maneuvering, by the dollar standard.

And that’s what’s being unwound today as a result of Biden’s new cold war.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Professor Hudson, you criticized the strategy of simply trying to increase the interest rates to bring down inflation, noting that it’s going to lead to a further decline in homeownership in the United States. It’s going to hurt working people. I think that’s a very valid criticism.

I’m curious, though, what your take is on the response of the Russian central bank to the Western sanctions. We saw that the chair of the Russian central bank, Elvira Nabiullina, she – actually this is someone who is not even necessarily really condemned a lot by Western economists; she is pretty well respected by even, you know, Western neoliberal economists.

And she did manage to deal with the sanctions very well. She imposed capital controls immediately. She closed the Russian stock market. And also, in a controversial move, she raised the interest rates from around 9% up to 20%, for a few months. And then after that, dropped the rates.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

A few days, not a few months. That was very short. And now she has moved the interest rates way down.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Back to 9%.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

She was criticized for not moving them further down.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Yeah, well go ahead. I’m just curious. So she immediately raised it to 20%, and then has dropped the interest rates since then. I’m curious what you think about that policy. Yeah, go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

There is very little that a central banker can do when the West has declared a war, basically, a war on a country that is completely isolated.

The response has come from President Putin and from Foreign Secretary Lavrov. And they pointed out, well, how is Russia going to going to trade and get what it needs. And this is what the recent meetings of the BRICS are all about.

Russia realizes that the world is now broken into two halves. America and NATO have separated the West. Basically you have a white people’s confederation against all the rest of the world.

And the West has said, we’re isolating ourselves from you totally. And we think you can’t get along without us.

Well, look at the humor of this. Russia, China, Iran, India, Indonesia, and other countries are saying, hah, you say we we can’t get along without you? Who is providing your manufacturers? Who is providing your raw materials? Who is providing your oil and gas? Who is providing your agriculture, and the helium, the titanium, the nickel?

So they realize that the world is breaking in two, and Eurasia, where most of the world’s population is concentrated, is going to go its own way.

The problem is, how do you really go your own way? You need a means of payment. You need to create a whole international system that is an alternative to the Western international system. You need your own International Monetary Fund to provide credit, so that the these Eurasian countries and their allies in the Global South can deal with each other.

You need a World Bank that, instead of lending money to promote U.S. policies and U.S. investments, will promote mutual gains and self-sufficiency among the countries.

So already, every day in the last few weeks, you have had meetings with the Russians about this, who said, ok, we’re going to create a mutual trading area, starting among the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

And how are we going to pay? We can’t pay in dollars, because if we have money in a dollar bank, or a euro bank in Europe, they can just grab the money, like they grab Venezuela’s money. They can just say, we’re taking all your money because, essentially, we don’t want you to exist as an alternative to the finance capital world that we are creating.

So essentially, Russia, China, and these other countries are saying, ok, we’re going to create our own international bank. And how are we going to fund it? Well, every member of the bank will contribute, say, a billion dollars, or some amount of their own currency, and this will be our backing. We can also use gold as a means of settlement, as was long used among countries.

And this bank can create its own special drawing rights, its own bank order, is what Keynes called it. It can create its own credit.

Well, the problem is that, if you have Brazil, for instance, or Argentina, joining this group, or Ecuador, that sells almost all of its bananas to Russia, how is it going to get by?

Well, if there is a BRICS group or a Shanghai Cooperation Organization bank, obviously the Western governments are not going to accept this.

So Russia realizes that as a result of Biden’s Cold War Two, there is going to be a continued rise in energy prices. You think gasoline prices are not high now? They’re going up. You think food prices are not high now? They’re going up more.

And Europe is especially the case, because Europe now cannot buy Russian gas to make the fertilizer to make its own crops grow.

So you’re going to have a number of countries in the Global South, from Latin America to Africa, being squeezed and wanting to trade with the Eurasian group.

And the problem is Russia says, all right, we know that you can’t afford to pay. We’re glad to give you credit, but we don’t want to give you credit that you’re going to simply use the money you have to pay your dollar debts that are coming due.

Because one of the effects that I didn’t mention of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates is there is a huge flow of capital from Europe and England into the United States, so that if you’re a billionaire, where are you going to put your savings? You want the highest interest rates you want. And if the United States raises interest rates, the billionaires are going to move their money out of England, out of the euro, and the euro is going back down against the dollar. It’s almost down to a dollar a euro.

The British pound is heading downwards, towards one pound per dollar.

This increase in the dollar’s exchange rate is also rising against the currencies of Brazil, Argentina, the African countries, all the other countries.

So how are they going to pay this summer, and this fall, for their food, for their oil and gas, and for the higher cost of servicing their dollar debts?

Well, for Eurasia, they’re going to say, we want to help you buy our exports – Russia is now a major grain exporter, and obviously also an oil exporter – saying we want to supply you and give you the credit for this, but you’re really going to have to make a decision. Are you going to join the U.S.-NATO bloc, or are you going to join the Eurasian bloc?

Are you going to join the White People’s Club or the Eurasian Club? And it really comes down to that. And that’s what is fracturing the world in these two halves.

Europe is caught in the middle, and its economies are going to be torn apart. Employment is going to go down there. And I don’t see wages going up very much in Europe.

You’re going to have a political crisis in Europe. But also you’ll have an international diplomatic crisis over how are you going to restructure world trade, and investment, and debt.

There will be two different financial philosophies. And that’s what the new cold war is all about.

The philosophy of US-sponsored finance capitalism, of making money financially, without industrialization, and with trying to lower wages and reduce the labor force to a very highly indebted workforce living on the margin.

Or you’ll have the Eurasian philosophy of using the economic surplus to increase productivity, to build infrastructure, to create the kind of society that America seemed to be growing in the late 19th century but has now rejected.

So all of this is ultimately not simply a problem of interest rates and central bank policy; it really goes beyond central banks to what kind of a social and economic system are you going to have.

And the key to any social and economic system is how you treat money and credit. Is money and credit going to be a public utility, or will it be a private monopoly run for the financial interests and the 1%, instead of a public utility run for the 99%?

That’s what the new cold war is going to be all about. And that’s what international diplomacy week after week is trying to settle.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Very, very well said. And I really agree about this increasing kind of bipolar order, where the US-led imperialist system is telling the world they have to pick a side. You know, as George W. Bush said, you’re either with us or you’re against us; you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.

That’s what Biden is saying to the world. And we see the West has drawn this iron curtain around Russia. And now they’re threatening to do the same around China.

Now, of course, the difference is that China has the largest economy in the world, according to a PPP measurement. It’s even larger than the US economy. I don’t know how they can try to sanction the Chinese economy, considering China is the central factory of the world.

But this is related to a question I had for you, Professor Hudson, and this is from a super chat question from Manoj Payardha, and it’s about how Chinese banks say they’re not ready yet to develop an alternative to the SWIFT. He asked, how will the Third World pay Russia for resources?

And we’ve seen, maybe you can talk about the measures being implemented. India has this rupee-ruble system that they’ve created.

But I want to highlight an article that was published in Global Times. This is a major Chinese newspaper, and this is from April. And it quotes the former head of China’s central bank, who was speaking at a global finance forum in Beijing this April.

And basically he said, we need to prepare to replace Swift. He said the West’s adoption of a financial nuclear option of using SWIFT to sanction Russia is a wake up call for China’s financial development. And he said, “We must get prepared.”

So it seems that they’re not yet prepared. But this is something that you’ve been talking about for years. Or maybe you disagree and maybe you think they already are prepared with the SWIFT alternative?

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well they’re already using an alternative system. If they weren’t using an alternative system – Russia is adopting part of the Chinese system for this – they wouldn’t be able to have banks communicate with each other.

So, yes, they already have a rudimentary system. They’re making it a better system that can also be immune from U.S. computer espionage and interference. So yes, of course there’s already a system.

But I want to pick up on what you said about Biden, how Biden characterizes things.

Biden characterizes the war of the West against Eurasia as between democracy and autocracy. By “democracy,” he means a free market run by Wall Street; he means an oligarchy.

But what does he mean by autocracy? What he means by autocracy, when he calls China an autocracy, an “autocracy” is a government strong enough to prevent an oligarchy from taking power, and taking control of the government for its own interests, and reducing the rest of the economy to debt peonage.

An “autocracy” is a country with public regulation against monopolies, instead of an oligarchic free market. An “autocracy” uses money and credit, essentially, to help economies grow. And when debts cannot be paid in China, if a factory or a real estate company cannot pay debts, China does not simply say, ok, you’re bankrupt, you’re going to have to be sold; anybody can buy you; the Americans can buy you.

Instead, the Chinese say, well, you can’t pay the debts; we don’t want to tear down your factory; we don’t want your factory to be turned and gentrified into luxury housing. We’re going to write down the debt.

And that’s what China has done again and again. And it’s done that with foreign countries that couldn’t pay the debt. When a debt that China has come due for China’s development of a port, or roads, or infrastructure, it says, well, we understand that you can pay; we will delay payment; we will have a moratorium on your payment. We’re not here to bankrupt you.

For the Americans, to the international funds, they’re saying, well, we are here to bankrupt you. And now if we lend you, we the IMF, lends you money to avoid a currency devaluation, the term is you’re going to have to privatize your infrastructure; you’re going to have to sell off your public utilities, your electric system, your roads, your land to private buyers, mainly from the United States.

So you have a “democracy” supporting bankruptcy, foreclosure, financialization, and privatization, and low wages by a permanent depression, a permanent depression to keep down wages.

Or you have “autocracy,” seeking to protect the interests of labor by supporting a living wage, to increase living standards as a precondition for increasing productivity, for building up infrastructure.

You have these two diametrically economic systems. And, again, that’s why there’s a cold war on right now.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

And there’s another super chat question here, Professor Hudson. You mentioned the International Monetary Fund, the IMF. We have talked about that many times. This is from Sam Owen. He asked, why do countries continue to accept bad IMF loans when they have such a poor track record? Is it just the US government meddling in the national politics? Are there cases of good IMF loans?

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, what is a country? When you say a country to most people, people think, ok, let’s talk about Brazil; let’s talk about all the people in Brazil; you have a picture in the mind of the Amazon; you have a big city with a lot of people in it.

But the country, in terms of the IMF, is a group of maybe the 15 wealthiest families in Brazil, that own most of the money, and they are quite happy to borrow from the IMF, because they say, right now there’s a chance that Lula may become president instead of the neo-fascist Bolsonaro. And if Lula comes in, then he is going to support labor policies, and he may stop us from tearing down the Amazon. So let’s move our money out of the country.

Well, normally this would push the exchange rate of the cruzeiro (real) down. So the IMF is going to make a loan to Brazil to support the cruzeiro (real), so that the wealthy 1% of Brazil can move their money into dollars, into euros, into foreign currency and offshore bank incentives, and load Brazil down with debt, so that then when there is an election, and if Lula is elected, the IMF is going to say, well, we don’t really like your policies, and if you pursue a pro-labor, socialist policy, then there’s going to be a capital flight. And we’re insisting that you pay all the money that you borrowed from the West right back now.

Well, that’s going to lead Lula either to sit there, follow the IMF direction, and let the IMF run the economy, instead of his own government, or just say, we’re not going to pay the foreign debt.

Well, until now, no country has been in a strong enough position not to pay the foreign debt. But for the first time, now that you have the Eurasian group – we’ll call it BRICS, but it’s really Eurasia, along with the Southern groups that are joining, the Global South – for the first time, they can say, we can’t afford to stay in the West anymore.

We cannot afford to submit the economy to the IMF demands for privatization. We cannot submit to the IMF rules that we have to fight against labor, that we have to pass laws banning labor unions, that we have to fight against laborers’ wage, like Western democracies insist on. We have to go with the Chinese “autocracy,” which we call socialism.

And of course, when America accuses China being an “autocracy,” autocracy is the American word for socialism. They don’t want to use that word. So we’re back in Orwellian double-think.

So the question is what, will the Global South countries do when they cannot afford to buy energy and food this summer, without an IMF loan? Are they going to say, ok, we can only survive by joining the break from the West and joining the Eurasian group?

That is what the big world fracture is all about.

And I described this global fracture already in 1978. I wrote a book, “Global Fracture,” explaining just exactly how all of this was going to happen.

And at that time, you had Indonesia, you had Sukarno taking the lead, the non-aligned nations, India, Indonesia, were trying to create an alternative to the financialized, American-centered world order. But none of these countries had a critical mass sufficient to go their own way.

Well, now that America has isolated Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey, all these countries, now it has created a critical mass that is able to go its own way. And the question is, now you have like a gravitational pull, and will this Eurasian mass attract Latin America and Africa to its own group, away from the United States? And where is that going to leave the United States and Europe?

BENJAMIN NORTON:

And we saw one of the clearest examples yet of this bipolar division of the world between, you know, the West and the rest, as they say, with this ridiculous meeting that was just held of the G7.

Of course, the G7 are the white, Western countries. And then they’ll throw in U.S.-occupied Japan in there, to pretend they’re a little more diverse.

But we saw that the G7 just held a summit, and basically the entire summit was about how can we contain China? How can we expand the new cold war on Russia into a new cold war on China?

And here’s a report in BBC: “G7 summit: Leaders detail $600bn plan to rival China’s Belt and Road initiative.” Now, I got a chuckle out of this. The idea that the US government is going to build infrastructure in the Global South, I mean, it’s pretty laughable.

It’s also absurd considering that China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which involves over half of the countries on Earth, is estimated at many trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects. So the US and its allies think that they can challenge that with $600 billion in public-private partnerships.

I should stress, of course, what they announced is going to be a mixture of so-called public initiative and then contracts for private corporations.

So it’s yet another giveaway to the private sector, in the name of building infrastructure.

But I’m wondering if if you can comment on the G7 summit that just was held.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, nothing really came out of it. They all said that they could not agree on any more sanctions against Russia, because they’re already hurting enough. India, in particular, stood up and said, look, there’s no way that we’re going to join the sanctions against Russia, because it’s one of our major trading partners. And by the way, we’re getting a huge benefit from importing Russian oil, and you’re getting a huge benefit by getting this oil from us at a markup.

So the G7 could not get any agreement on what to do. It is already at a stalemate. And this is only June. Imagine the stalemate it’s going to be in September.

Well, next week, President Biden is going to Saudi Arabia and saying, you know, we’re willing to kill maybe 10 million more of your enemies; we’re willing to help Wahhabi Sunni groups kill more of the Iranian Shiites, and sabotage Iraq and Syria. We’ll help you back al-Qaeda again, if you will lower your oil prices so that we can squeeze Russia more.

So that’s really the question that Saudi Arabia will have. America will send give it more cluster bombs to use against Yemen. And the question is, is Saudi Arabia going to say, ok, we’re going to earn maybe $10 billion less a month, or however much they’re making, just to make you happy, and so that that you will kill more Shiites who support Iran?

Or are they going to realize that if they throw in their lot with the United States, all of a sudden they’ll be under attack from Iran, Russia, Syria, and they’ll be sitting ducks? So what are they going to do?

And I don’t see any way that Biden can actually succeed in getting Saudi Arabia to voluntarily earn less on its oil prices. Maybe Biden can say it’s only for a year, only for one or two years. But as other countries know, when America says only for a year or two, it really means forever. And if you don’t continue, then somehow they have a regime replacement, or a regime change and a color revolution.

So Biden keeps trying to get foreign countries to join the West against Eurasia, but there is Saudi Arabia sitting right in the middle of it.

And all that Europe can do is watch and wonder how it’s going to get by without without energy and without much food.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Yeah, in fact, Venezuela’s President Maduro just confirmed that the Biden administration has sent another delegation basically begging Venezuela to try to work out some deal because, of course, the U.S. and the EU have boycotts of Russian energy.

So it’s really funny to me that, after years of demonizing Venezuela, portraying it as a dictatorship and all of this, the U.S. had to decide, well, the war in Venezuela is not as important as the war on Russia right now; so we’re going to temporarily pause our war on Venezuela to stick the knife deeper into Russia.

But on the on the subject of the the G7 meeting, this was the hilarious comment made by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in an article in Reuters titled “Europe Must Give Developing Nations Alternative to Chinese Funds.”

So echoing the same perspective that we hear from Biden, U.S. government officials constantly say that the US needs to challenge China in the Global South. So Europe pledged €300 billion – however, once again, important asterisk – “in private and public funds over five years to fund infrastructure in developing countries.”

So once again, we see another neoliberal private-public partnership. It’s going to be another public giveaway to private corporations.

And “she said that this is part of the G7’s drive to counter China’s multitrillion-dollar Belt and Road project.”

Now, this is really just tying everything together that we have been talking about today, Professor Hudson – in your article “The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages,” you conclude the article noting that the depression that people in the United States are on the verge of facing because of these neoliberal policies – telling workers in the U.S. that they need to decrease their wages and be unemployed in order to stop inflation – you point out that:


Biden’s military and State Department officers warn that the fight against Russia is just the first step in their war against China’s non-neoliberal economy, and may last twenty years. That is a long depression. But as Madeline Albright would say, they think that the price is “worth it.”

And you talk about the new cold war against the socialist economy in China and the state-led economy in Russia.

So you predict not only a depression is coming. We have seen that in mainstream media outlets. Larry Summers said, you know, a depression could be coming for a few years. But you say, no, not only is a depression coming; it’s going to be a long depression. We could be seeing 20 years.

And basically the U.S. government and other Western leaders, as we see Ursula von der Leyen from the EU, they’re basically telling their populations, tighten your belts; we have decades of depression coming, because we have collectively decided, as Western leadership, that we are going to force the world through a long depression economically, or at least forced the West through a long economic depression, in order to try to halt the rise of China and Russia.

They’re basically telling their populations, suck it up, tighten your belts for decades, because in the end, the price is worth it in order to prevent the collapse of our empires.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

That’s right. When they’re talking about private-public initiatives, they’re talking about Pentagon capitalism. That means the government will give trillions of dollars to private firms and ask them to build infrastructure.

And if they build a port or a road in a Global South country, they will operate this at a profit, and it will be an enormously expensive infrastructure, because to make financial money off this infrastructure, you have to price it at the cost of production, which is Pentagon capitalism, hyper inflated prices; you have to pay management fees; you have to pay profits; you have to pay interest rates.

As opposed to the Chinese way of funding as equity. The Western mode of funding is all debt leverage. China takes as collateral for the infrastructure that it pays, an equity ownership in the port or whatever infrastructure in the Belt and Road that it’s building.

So you have the difference between equity ownership, debt-free ownership, where if it can afford to pay, fine; if it doesn’t make an income, there are no dividends to pay.

Or you have the debt leverage that is intended that the government cannot pay it, so that the government that will be the co-signer for the debt for all of this infrastructure will somehow be obliged to tax its whole population to pay the enormous super-profits, the enormous monopoly rents, the enormous debt charges of von der Leyen’s Margaret Thatcher plan.

Von der Leyen thinks that she can do to Europe and to America what Margaret Thatcher did to England. And if she does, then then America and Europe deserve it.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

And Professor Hudson, as we start wrapping up here, I know you have to go pretty soon, just a few short questions here at the end.

I’m wondering if what we’re also seeing is not only this fundamental crisis in the Western neoliberal, financialized economies, but it’s also this bubble that has burst, or at least this phase that is over.

At least this is my reading, I’m curious if you agree. In the 1990s, the peak of, you know, the so-called golden age of neoliberalism; we had Bill Clinton riding this wave, and it was the “end of history,” in Francis Fukuyama’s nonsense prediction and all that.

How much of that was not only based on this exorbitant privilege, as the French call it, of the dictatorship of the US dollar – we talked about that based on your book “Super Imperialism,” how the US was given this massive global free lunch economically because of dollar hegemony – but how much of it was not just that, but also the fact that in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, the US and Western Europe had access to very cheap consumer goods from Asia and very cheap energy from Russia?

To me, it seems like those two factors are some of the most important reasons why this golden age of neoliberalism in the ’90s and early 2000s was even possible.

It was on the back of low-paid Asian workers, and based on this idea that Russia would permanently be, what Obama called it: a gas station.

Well, we’ve seen that, one, East Asian economies have lifted themselves up of poverty, especially China has ended extreme poverty and raised median wages significantly.

And now, of course, the West has sanctioned itself against buying Russian energy, massively increasing the cost of energy around the world.

So do you think that that bubble, or that brief moment of the end of history, the golden age of neoliberalism, that can never come back?

Because unless the West can succeed in overthrowing the Russian government and imposing a new puppet like Yeltsin, and overthrowing the Chinese government, it seems like that that the golden in the 1990s is never going to come back.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, you’ve left out the key element of the golden age: that is military force, and the willingness to assassinate any foreign leader that does not want to go along with US policy.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Of course.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

You’re neglecting what America did to [Salvador Allende]; you’re neglecting how America took over Brazil; America’s meddling and control, and in Europe, the wholesale bribery and manipulation of Europe’s political system, to put in charge of the [German] Green Party a pro-war leadership, an anti-environmental leadership, to put in charge of every socialist party of Europe right-wingers, neoliberals.

Every European socialist and labor party turned neoliberal largely by American maneuvering and meddling in their foreign policy.

So it’s that meddling that was intended to prevent any alternative economic philosophy from existing to rival neoliberalism.

So that when you talk about the end of history, what is the end of history? It means the end of change. It means stop; there will be no reform; there will be no change in the neoliberal system that we have locked in.

And of course, the only way that you can really end history is by what Biden is threatening: atomic war to blow up the world.

That is the neoliberal end of history. And it’s the only way that the neoliberals can really stop history. Apart from that, all they can try to do is to prevent any change that is adverse to locking in the neoliberal order.

So the “end of history” is a declaration of war against any country that wants to go its own way. Any country that wants to build up its own economy as a way that will keep the benefits of its economic growth in its own country, instead of letting it go to the global financial class centered in the United States and Britain.

So we’re talking about, neoliberalism was always a belligerent, implicitly military policy, and that’s exactly what you’re seeing in the proxy war of US and NATO in Ukraine today.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Yeah, very well said. That’s the other key ingredient: overthrowing any government that is a challenge, that shows there is an alternative, to try to prove the maxim that “there is no alternative.”

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Yes.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Here’s an interesting comment from Christopher Dobbie. He points out that in Australia, the average age for their first homeowner was 27 in 2001; now it’s 35, and increasing more and more by the year.

Now, in the last few minutes here, Professor Hudson, here’s another brief question that I got from someone over at patreon.com/multipolarista – people can go and support this show. One of my patrons asked this question: who who is hurt most by the Fed or other central banks raising interest rates? People, average consumers, or companies?

And obviously, you talked earlier about how the US Federal Reserve is different from other central banks, but it’s kind of an open question. Who is hurt more by raising interest rates?

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, companies are certainly hurt because it means that any possibility of getting productive credit is raised. But they’re also benefited, because if interest rates raised go up high enough, then it will not pay corporate raiders to borrow money to take over and raid companies and empty them out, like they did in the 1980s.

So everything cuts both ways. Raising the interest rates have given commercial banks an excuse to raise the interest charges on credit card loans and mortgage debts.

So raising interest rates, to the banks, have enabled them to actually increase their margin of monopoly profits on the credit that they extend.

And that certainly hurts people who are reliant on bank credit, either for mortgages or for consumer debt, or for any kind of loans that they want to take out.

Basically, raising interest rates hurts debtors and benefits creditors.

And benefiting creditors very rarely helps the economy at large, because the creditors are always really the 1%; the debtors are the 99%.

And if you think of economies, when you say, how does an economy benefit, you realize that, well, if the economy is 1% creditors and 99% debtors, you are dealing with a bifurcation there.

And you have to realize that the creditors usually occupy the government, and they claim we are the country. And the 99% are not very visible.

Democracy can only be afforded if they population’s voting has no effect at all on the government, that it’s only symbolic. You can vote exactly which oligarch you want to rule your country. Ever since Rome that was the case, and it’s the case today.

Is there really any difference between the Republicans and Democrats in terms of their policy? When you the same central bank bureaucracy, the same State Department blob, the same military-industrial complex, the same Wall Street control, what does democracy mean in a situation like that?

The only way that you can have what democracy aims at is to have a government strong enough to check the financial interests, to check the 1%, acting on behalf of the 99%. And that’s what socialism is.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Very well said.

Here is another brief question from patreon.com/multipolarista – people can become a patron and help support the show over there.

This question, Professor Hudson, is about the proposal of an excess profits tax as an alternative to try to contain inflation. What do you think about the proposal of an excess profits tax?

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, only the little people make profits. If you’re a billionaire, you don’t want to make a profit; you want to essentially take all of your return in the form of capital gains. That’s where your money is.

And the way you avoid making a profit is you establish an offshore bank or creditor, and you pay out all of your profits in the form of interest, which an expense. You expense all of what used to be, what really is, income. And you show no profits at all.

I don’t think Amazon has ever made a profit. You have huge, the biggest corporations, with all the capital gains, have no profits. Tesla is a gigantic stock market presence, and it doesn’t make a profit.

So the key is capital gains, is financial gains, stock market gains, gains in real estate prices, unearned income. That’s what the free lunch is.

You want to prevent profits being paid out in the form of interest. So I would vastly increase profits, by saying you cannot deduct interest as a business expense. It’s not a business expense. It’s a predatory parasitic expense. So you’re going to have to declare all of this as profit, and pay interest on it.

Pricing your output from a foreign offshore banking center, so that you don’t seem to make any profit, like Apple does, pretending to make all its money in Ireland, you can’t do that anymore. You’re going to have to pay a real return.

So the accounting profession has made profits essentially tax free. So the pretense of making money by taxing profits avoids talking about capital gains and all of fictitiously low profits that are simply pretended not to be profit, like interest, depreciation, amortization, offshore earnings, management fees.

All of these should be counted as profits, and taxed as such as they were, I’d say back at the Eisenhower administration levels.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

And finally, the last question here, Professor Hudson, someone asked about the U.S. government pressuring countries in Africa not to buy Russian wheat. And the U.S. is, of course, claiming that this wheat is supposedly stolen from Ukraine.

This article, this headline at Newsweek, it summarizes pretty well: “U.S. Warns Starving African Nations to Not Buy Grain Stolen by Russia.” Again, that “stolen” is alleged by the U.S.

But you actually have a really good column about this over at your website, which again is michael-hudson.com: “Is US/NATO (with WEF help) pushing for a Global South famine?”

I know this could be a long point of discussion; it could be the entire interview. And I know you have to go soon. But just concluding here, I’m wondering if you could comment.

The United Nations itself has warned that there could be a famine, especially in Global South nations.

What do you think the role of these neoliberal policies and Western sanctions are in fueling that potential crisis?

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, the wealthiest families in the world used to go every year, now they go every few years, to Davos, to Klaus Schwab’s Davos World Economic Forum. And they say, the world is overpopulated; we need about 2 billion human beings to starve, preferably in the next year or two.

So it’s as if the wealthy families have got together and say, how can we thin out the population that really we, the 1%, don’t need?

And in all of their policies, it is as if they’ve decided to follow the World Economic Forum and deliberately shrink the world population, especially in Africa and Latin America.

Remember, these are white people at the World Economic Forum, and that is their idea of how to retain equilibrium.

They’re always talking about “equilibrium,” and equilibrium is going to be for countries that cannot afford to grow their own food, because they have put their money into plantation crops and cotton to sell to the West, instead of feeding themselves – they’re just going to have to starve to contribute to world “equilibrium.”

BENJAMIN NORTON:

And while we’re on the subject of the World Economic Forum, I guess I should just briefly add – we’ve talked about this a little bit, but I just feel remiss not mentioning it – it’s interesting to see how right-wingers have seized on the World Economic Forum and begun criticizing it a lot.

Obviously, it’s worth criticizing. It’s a horrible neoliberal institution that represents the Western capitalist class. But we’ve even seen, you know, Glenn Beck, the right-winger, former Fox News host, he published a book about the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.

I’m just wondering really quickly if you could respond to the idea that the World Economic Forum is like some “socialist” organization. Obviously, it’s the exact opposite.

But what do you say to these conservatives who have a right-wing critique of the World Economic Forum, and think it’s like secretly socialist, and Biden is a socialist.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

They look at any government or managerial power as socialist, not drawing the distinction between socialism and oligarchy.

The question is government power can be either right-wing or left-wing, and to say that any government power is socialist is just degrading the word.

However, as I mentioned before, almost all of the European “socialist” parties are neoliberal. Tony Blair was the head of something that called itself the British Labour Party. Gordon Brown was the head of the British Labour Party.

You can’t be more neoliberal and oligarchic than that. And that’s why Margaret Thatcher said her greatest success was creating Tony Blair.

You have the same thing in France; the French “socialists” are on the right-wing of the spectrum. The Greek “socialist” party, on the right-wing of the spectrum.

You have “socialist” parties around the world being neoliberalized.

So what does the word socialism mean? You want to go beyond labels into the essence.

And the question is, in whose interest is the government going to be run for? Will it be run for the 1% or the 99%?

And the right wing wants to say, well, the 1% can be socialist, because they’re taking over the government and that’s the big government, and we’re against it.

Well, the right-wing is taking over the government, but it’s not really what the world meant by socialism a century ago.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Yeah, very well said. I just always laugh when I see these right-wing critiques of the World Economic Forum. I mean, the World Economic Forum is the embodiment of capitalism. It is the group of the elite capitalists who get together to talk about how they can exploit the working class and help monopolize the global economy on behalf of Western capital.

So with that said, there still are many questions, but I know you have to go, and we’re already at an hour and a half.

I do want to thank everyone who joined. We’re at 1200 viewers right now, so it has been a really good response.

Professor Hudson, you’re very popular. You should do your own YouTube channel. Maybe we can talk about that, because every time I have you on, it’s always an amazing response that I get. And hopefully we can do this again more in future.

Aside from people going to your website, michael-hudson.com, is there anything else that you want to plug before we conclude?

MICHAEL HUDSON:

Well, the book that I just wrote, “The Destiny of Civilization,” is all about what we’ve been talking about. It’s about the world’s split between neoliberalism and socialism. So that was just published and is available on Amazon. And I have two more books that are coming out very shortly.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

Yeah, for people who are interested, I did an interview with Professor Hudson here at Multipolarista a few weeks ago about his new book, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism.”

And of course, anyone who wants to support this show, you can go to patreon.com/multipolarista. And as always, this will be available as a podcast, if you want to listen to the interview again. I’m certainly going to listen to this discussion again. You can find that anywhere there are podcasts.

Professor Hudson, it’s always a real pleasure. Thanks so much for joining me.

MICHAEL HUDSON:

I enjoyed the discussion.

BENJAMIN NORTON:

And like I said earlier at the beginning, for me, I truly think it’s always a privilege, because I do think you’re one of the greatest living economists. So I always feel very privileged to have the opportunity to pick your brain about all of these questions.

And I want to thank everyone who commented, who watched, and who listened. I will see you all next time.