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So, the only way to avoid all of this is to say: okay,we the government are suspending all of the debt service, all the taxes, and all the rents owed during the period when nobody can earn an income to pay.
If you don't wipe out the arrears of the debt that have accumulated for the back rent, people running into debt in order to live while they're unemployed, running up their credit card rates, borrowing from the banks or borrowing against the house; if you don't wipe out this debt, then you're going to have the economy shut down with debt deflation. Because there won't be any money to buy goods and services and it'll be just an accelerating unemployment and a shrinkage of markets.
Now, when Margaret Thatcher said there was no alternative what she meant was: well, wait a minute. If you don't pay the debts to the banks, they'll have to lose money. The richest 1% has made a trillion dollars in gains since the virus hit last spring. They've made a killing. In the last 10 years all of the growth in the American economy has accrued to the top 5%. All the growth in GDP, Gross Domestic Product, has accrued to the top 5%. Since Obama took office, GDP for the 95% of the population has actually gone down.
And the banks are saying: well, wait a minute; we've made a lot of money. We don't want to have to lose any of it. And they are saying that: well, if you cancel or write down the debts, then we're just going to close up shop. And we'll pull out all of the connections of the economy and the banks will go under. They pretend that this is a crisis.
Actually, this is a great opportunity to save the economy. Sheila Bair said in 2009 that the most badly run bank and crooked bank was Citi,Citibank. She wanted to close it down and take it over by the FDIC. There was plenty of money in Citibank to pay all of the insured depositors.
But then, she was overruled by Obama and Tim Geithner, the lobbyist for Wall Street who was connected to Citibank in a shameful conflict of interest. And they didn't close it down. And Sheila Bair wrote in her biography about this. She found out it was all about the bond holders.
The 1% are the bond holders of the banks and they're refusing" they would rather have the economy shut down and 10 million more people thrown into the street than lose a single dollar. All of this is what the classical Greeks called wealth addiction, the love of money. They said that the more money you have, the more addicted you are to get more and more.
Now the good thing about canceling the debt is that you cancel savings on the other side of the balance sheet. And the savings are all this immense amount of money that's accumulated by the rentier sector since Obama took office, really since the 2008 & 2009 crisis. And you'd restore balance to the economy. You would restore a much more equal distribution not only of income but of wealth by having the wealthy people bear the costs of the economy being shut down for the virus.
The rentier sector opposes all of this. And in fact, Biden has already said that because of the huge $8 trillion give away to the financial sector by the Federal Reserve under Trump, we're going to have to balance the budget.
The cities and States are near bankruptcy. In New York City they're talking about cutting down the subway system to maybe only 40%. It'll be very crowded. You'll be risking your life to go on it because of the virus. The Washington subway system has been closed down on weekends and I think many stations have been closed down.
You're going to have a breakdown of state and local finance because the landlords are not able to pay the property tax. The cities and states are not getting the income tax because of the unemployment.
You're going to have a spreading a financial crisis. And again, finance capital firms are going to be able to come in. And you can make, it's much easier to make a billion dollars off a crisis than it is off a boom. Most of the big fortunes have all been made when the rest of the economy are in crisis. Because everybody's in distress, you can buy assets at distressed prices.
And that's why the crisis that's coming to the United States almost engineered by Wall Street as a grab bag. And it'll be a grab bag where they're expecting 50,000 New Yorkers to be homeless. They're going to be out on the street. Where are they going to go? Crime is already rising here.
You're having a disaster. And it's a disaster that is welcomed by the government that is refusing to do any bail out for the cities and states. Refusing any support of the infrastructure system, the transport system. That is only providing money to support the stock and bond holders so that they don't lose money. And to support the banks so that they remain solvent with quantitative easing, money creation. But without any attempt to revive the industrial economy, the restaurant owners, the few factories that remain and of course the labor force.
FRIES: What do you think is in store for the US barring some sort of progressive change in US political leadership?
HUDSON: The donor class, mainly the financial class and the rentier class controls who's nominated for the Presidency and their campaign contributions determine who's elected to Congress. And so at the beginning of the epidemic here, they said: well, we can see that the economy's going to be closed, you know, pretty much closed down. The first thing to do; it's okay to close down the economy. It's okay for people to be fired but we want to make sure that the stock and bond and the bank's real estate market is supported.
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