Economist Michael Hudson describes how the Western powers designed the international financial, legal, and political system in a way that benefits North American corporations at the expense of the countries of the Global South.
Hudson also proposes ways for the Global Majority to resist US neocolonialism, in this interview with host Ben Norton.
 | These new Global South-led organizations like BRICS represent the Global Majority. But there’s still a problem, which is that the most powerful international organizations today are largely dominated by the United States and the Western powers. This includes institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank. These are organizations where the U.S. is the only country ... www.unz.com |
MICHAEL HUDSON: The international legal system that the United States and Europe have put in place prevent other countries from exerting the national sovereignty over their own tax system. It prevents them from recovering the valuation of their oil output and their mineral output; it prevents them from recovering the monopoly extraction from the railroads, and airports, and ports, and other public utilities that have been turned into monopolies, because their economies have been Thatcher-ized.
The Global South countries have been suffering from Thatcherism and Reaganomics, just like England and the United States have been devastated by neoliberalism.
So what is confronting the Global Majority and the Global South is not only moving to free itself from its equivalent of inheriting feudalism. It didn’t inherit feudalism like Europe inherited a domestic landlord class, but something even worse: the landlords and the investors in the Global South countries are foreign, not domestic.
To some extent, of course, their client oligarchies are part of all this, to support this whole system of rent extraction. But basically the governments do not have the power to operate their own economy, and that is not sovereignty.
