Chris Hedges: The Mafia State - Truthdig
Chris Hedges' latest discusses the US' emergence as a corporate mafia
state and where it is heading next: a return to feudalism. The piece
includes a fascinating comparison by economist Michael Hudson between
the operations of the west's financial parasites and the behaviour of
nature's real parasites.
Hedges:
“The head of Goldman
Sachs came out and said that Goldman Sachs workers are the most
productive in the world,” the economist Michael Hudson told me. “That’s
why they’re paid what they are. The
concept of productivity in America is income divided by labor. So if
you’re Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million a year in salary
and bonuses, you’re considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and
that’s enormously productive.”
“We’re talking with tautology,” said Hudson, the author of “Killing the
Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global
Economy.” “We’re talking with circular reasoning here. So the issue is
whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street and predatory pharmaceutical firms
actually add product or whether they’re just exploiting other people.
"That’s why I used the word ‘parasites’ in my book’s title. People
think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host
or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it’s much more
complicated. The parasite can’t simply come in and take something. First
of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host
doesn’t realize the parasite’s there. And then the parasites have
another enzyme that takes over the host’s brain. It makes the host
imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of
itself and hence to be protected.
"That’s basically what Wall
Street has done. It depicts itself as part of the economy. Not as a
wrapping around it, not as external to it, but actually the part that’s
helping the body grow, and that actually is responsible for most of the
growth. But in fact it’s the parasite that is taking over the growth.”
