‘It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way’

“How do you expect this to play out over the next few years?” host Thom Hartmann asked economist Michael Hudson on “The Big Picture” this week. “That’s what everybody’s wondering,” Hudson replied. “The economy is going to shrink and shrink and shrink, and the question is whether people are going to go out in the streets, like they have in Greece, and just protest, or whether there’s going to be an actual response saying it doesn’t have to be this way.”

The subject between Hartmann and Hudson was the trust the U.S. government has placed in the financial industry with respect to managing the economy.

“I think what has to happen is the labor unions have to take the lead in saying ‘Look, we are going to manage our own pensions’ — not the way that the corrupt unions have done — but somehow, the pension funding and Social Security and Wall Street have to be reorganized along what people expected 100 years ago,” Hudson continued. “Everybody expected savings to be spent on new factories, new means of production, increasing output and employing labor. There has to be a renewal of classical economics.”

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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