I saw someone posted this interview with Michael Hudson in this thread but is now deleted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSBvXCwUQYQ this is part 2 which is quite spicy especially towards the end).
God damn are these podcast hosts grad-school-brained losers. "Is there a good billionaire out there who can do good things?" "What if a company bought back stock and gave it to employees?" - Questions by the utterly deranged.
Okay. So, let’s say a corporation decided to do a long-term stock buyback. And what they did is instead of destroying the shares, they would then distribute them to the employees exclusively. So, you can take a public company…
Michael Hudson [Exasperated]
You don’t need to buy them back; you can just give it to them. I see you’re saying, that’s so utopian, I don’t even want to get into that. I’m good at describing how the economy works. There’s no way that I can get into this. You’re looking for a solution to the problems that there are today. We don’t have a problem; we have a quandary. There is no solution to a quandary.
You’re trying to solve it, forget it. You can’t solve it. It’s nice for you to think, “Wouldn’t it be nice if they could work this way?” Of course, it would be nice if corporations could buy back the stocks and give it to the workers. But look at how bizarre this would be for an oil company. Suppose you have 10 employees that make $10 billion a year for the company because the 10 employees run the well. Are you really going to say we’ll buy back the stock and 10 employees each get a billion dollars? That’s crazy.
And that would be the case with any highly capital-intensive corporation. It would make some labor people much richer than the rest of the labor force. It’s an anti-social solution to benefit a small group against the other, and it’s so dysfunctional, that I’m sure that the Chicago school would love to push it, because it can’t possibly be done because it’s so unfair and predatory.
lol get em
Anastasia Bendebury
But let’s take something like Walmart, for example. So, Walmart is notorious for generating an enormous amount of profit for the owners, very little profit for the wage earners. And so, let’s say that some revolutionary arm of the Walton family becomes the controlling CEO and takes over the board of the company. And they’re like, “You know what, we have a legacy of doing really really screwed up things to our workers. And so, what we’re going to do is we’re going to buy back all of our shares. And as we buy them back, we will redistribute them equally to the workers.”
Michael Hudson
Why not just pay the workers more? Instead of making the profits, why not ease the working conditions? Why not say we’re going to have a four-day work week and we’re going to have people work six hours a day. We’re going to pay them more. We’re going to give them more vacations. We’re going to give them free medical care. And we’re going to contribute to their pensions. Why do it financially? You don’t need a financial solution to a real economic problem. The real economic problem is workers’ conditions. What is their standard of living? It’s not how they’re going to own shares of a company that acts by being predatory and making money in a predatory way, big profit and profiteering, like a Walmart does.
like lol lmao, what kind of fucking question is that? What if the capitalist class acted in opposition to their own interests as a member of the capitalist class?
Michael Hudson
Well at least a revolution. Not a Constitution yet. A revolution.
Michael Shilo DeLay
Well, I don’t think a revolution is a good idea, unless we have a better idea of what comes next. I’m actually really opposed to revolution that doesn’t have a better solution in mind.
Idealism and its consequences... We have a solution, we have had it for a hundred fucking years.
Not to even mention all the brainless anti-China rhetoric they tried to slip in at every moment. Like my dudes, you live in the most powerful dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the history of earth. You are the bad guys.
Anastasia Bendebury
Okay, so I don’t want to create a dichotomy of you know, that the United States is better than China or China is better than United States, because I think that it’s one of those topics that you could probably start to take apart and point into totally opposite directions. But it seems like the state is particularly repressive in China. Like we saw what happened during COVID, right? And so, people were locked into their apartments. People were basically at the mercy of the government saying, you know, “No, this is what we’re going to do. You have no voice. You have no option.” And it was pretty dark to look at from the outside because for all of the problems that the United States has, and for all of the political wrangling that happened over the course of the last few years, at the very least, we weren’t barricading people inside their apartments.
I saw someone posted this interview with Michael Hudson in this thread but is now deleted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSBvXCwUQYQ this is part 2 which is quite spicy especially towards the end).
God damn are these podcast hosts grad-school-brained losers. "Is there a good billionaire out there who can do good things?" "What if a company bought back stock and gave it to employees?" - Questions by the utterly deranged.
Edit: I found the transcript: https://michael-hudson.com/2023/07/global-economic-history-in-2-5-hours/
some highlights
lol get em
like lol lmao, what kind of fucking question is that? What if the capitalist class acted in opposition to their own interests as a member of the capitalist class?
Idealism and its consequences... We have a solution, we have had it for a hundred fucking years.
Not to even mention all the brainless anti-China rhetoric they tried to slip in at every moment. Like my dudes, you live in the most powerful dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the history of earth. You are the bad guys.
1,170,006 Americans died from COVID.