Michel Chossudovsky is a Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa. His website is Globalresearch.ca.
He is interviewed by Bonnie Faulkner on KPFA's Guns and Butter show. The title of the interview is "America's Fiscal Collapse - Obama's Budget Will Impoverish America".
Summary of the interview: The administration's 2010 budget will entail the most drastic curtailment in public spending in American history, leading to social havoc and the potential impoverishment of millions of people. Defense spending and bank bailouts will consume all government revenue resulting in fiscal collapse that will lead to the privatization of the state.
Key Points:
* Obama is presenting the bailout as reinvigorating the banks which will restart credit and lending back to the public is a fraud. The bailout was a give out of money into private hands.
* To fund the large budget deficit, privatization of infrastructure and other government assets will occur, just like in Russia. Government social programs will be cut.
* Interest rates are low because it's cheap to borrow for speculative activities.
* There will be the accumulation of assets by the corrupt bailout beneficiaries at firesale prices.
* We need to prosecute those behind the criminalization of the state and the financial fraud.
* The government is forecasting protests and has combat units returning from Iraq positioned in the country under US Northern Command with the specific task and mandate to assist civilian law enforcement agencies.
* HR645 bill in Congress will establish Fema camps on military bases.
* There will be protests against the financial agenda and the war.
* Heads of western states are deciding who are war criminals when in fact they themselves are the war criminals. It's upside down.
* There's a possibility of disintegration of world trading system, wherein, the economies would close in on themselves. The US and NATO military system will try to sustain the world financial and trading apparatus under coercion. Will countries be allowed to close their borders and return to a different type of management of their national economies? That will remain to be seen.
* The war and the financial crises are intimately related.
"Again, it's tied into the financial crises because it ultimately upholds the legitimacy. The legitimacy to kill. The legitimacy to impoverish. As I said earlier. the process of impoverishing through the free market is contiguous to the process of killing through military intervention in different parts of the world. It's the same people. It's the same institutions. It's the same power brokers. The same financial institutions and those are the structures of capitalism as we know it."
[MP3] Michel Chossudovsky: Interview with Bonnie Faulkner on KPFA's Guns and Butter 03-11-2009
LECTURE: THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS — The Great Depression of the 21st Century with Michel Chossudovsky Causes and consequence...all » LECTURE: THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS — The Great Depression of the 21st Century with Michel Chossudovsky Causes and consequences of the financial meltdown; The speculative onslaught; Financial fraud and the "bank bailouts"; Bankruptcy of the real economy; Impacts on employment, wages and social services; Towards a spiralling public debt; The economic crisis and its relationship to the Middle East war; The centralization of corporate power; The concentration of wealth; The globalization of poverty. What are the policy alternatives?
[Google Video] Michel Chossudovsky: THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS, Montreal 01-17-2009
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