What follows here is an edited version of an article at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14922
Hudson has frequently described Wall Street as "parasitic". For example, in a 2003 interview, Hudson said:
"The problem with parasites is not merely that they siphon off the food and nourishment of their host, crippling its reproductive power, but that they take over the host's brain as well. The parasite tricks the host into thinking that it is feeding itself.
Something like this is happening today as the financial sector devours the industrial sector. Finance capital pretends that its growth is that of industrial capital formation. That is why the financial bubble is called "wealth creation," as if it were what progressive economic reformers envisioned a century ago. These reformers condemned rent and monopoly profit, but never dreamed that the financiers would end up devouring landlord and industrialist alike. Emperors of Finance have trumped Barons of Property and Captains of Industry alike.
According to Hudson, you can think of the financial sector as being wrapped around the real economy, almost like a kind of parasite, and that's why it's been called parasitic for so long. The financial sector extracts interest from the real economy, just as the property sector extracts economic rent. However, the key thing about parasites is that it's not simply that they extract nourishment from their host. This parasite takes over the host's brain, to make it think that it (the parasitic financial sector) is an integral part of the economy, to make the brain think that the parasite is part of the host's own body, and/or that it's almost like a child of the host, to be protected. And that's exactly what the financial sector has accomplished in recent years in the United States. In reality however the parasitic financial sector is bleeding the real economy to death, sucking out all its blood, even as the real economy protects it and continues to regard it as part of itself.
President Obama, who functions in this situation as little more than a totally duped shill, tells us that "we have to save the banks in order to save the real economy. The fact is, however, that you can't serve both the parasite and the host.
Besides, for all practical purposes, the giant financial institutions have already killed their host (the real American economy). And since they realize that the real American economy is practically dead, they are trying to suck as much blood out of it as possible, and will continue even while the corpse is still warm.
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