theAnalysis.news

We Destroyed International Law - Col. Larry Wilkerson on Iran War

Paul Jay — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:52:08 -0400

In this conversation with Barry Stevens, Col. Larry Wilkerson argues that the United States has utterly destroyed the international legal order it once led in creating, eroding its legitimacy, and turning it into a global pariah. He says the war with Iran is strategically self-defeating: to win, Iran only has to survive, while the U.S. and Israel require a decisive victory that remains elusive. One consequence could be a global recession. Meanwhile, China benefits from American overreach without direct confrontation. In the long run, Wilkerson warns, the real danger is not just war itself but the collapse of cooperation on the defining challenges of climate change and nuclear weapons—problems no country can solve alone.

Modern Iran: National Identity as a Tool of Resistance or Coercion?

Paul Jay — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:17:15 -0400

This interview was originally published on May 19, 2023. We are republishing it as the war in Iran continues to escalate.

Historian, Assal Rad, explores identity formation in modern Iran, both under the Pahlavi dynasty as well as after the 1979 Revolution under the Islamic Republic. Her book “State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran” examines top-down and bottom-up manifestations of national identity as narrated by state structures and popular culture, respectively. Her fascinating analysis is based on a historical assessment of how modern state-building in Iran inculcated a sense of national belonging in the population, as well as on interviews with people in Tehran and examples taken from popular music and film. Can national identity play a positive role in liberation struggles?

Israel's War - Trump's Disaster - Miloud Chennoufi

Paul Jay — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:37:42 -0400

Miloud Chennoufi, professor of International Relations at the Royal Military College of Canada, tells host Barry Stevens that the rapidly escalating war on Iran is not about democracy or self-defense, but a dangerous and illegal conflict driven by Israel, which has long sought to reshape the Middle East while avoiding a resolution of the Palestinian question. He claims the United States has been drawn into a war it did not need to fight, launched despite ongoing diplomacy and in the absence of any imminent threat. Far from bringing freedom, Chennoufi warns, such violence is more likely to produce shattered states and prolonged chaos. He insists that non-violent political solutions are not just morally preferable but strategically smarter—offering the only real path away from endless violence and toward an elusive peace.

US Military Commanders: Iran War Is GOD'S PLAN for Armageddon - Mikey Weinstein of MRFF

Paul Jay — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:09:00 -0400

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), joins Barry Stevens to discuss the alarming wave of complaints from U.S. military personnel. Over 200 service members from 50 installations have reported that commanders in their chain of command are framing the war in Iran as part of God\'s divine plan to bring about the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming. Weinstein describes how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth holds monthly Christian Nationalist prayer services in the Pentagon\'s largest auditorium during the duty day, and how this top-down signaling is emboldening commanders to push religious ideology on their subordinates. Weinstein also confirms that some of the Christian Nationalists within the military are in positions involving nuclear weapons.

Iran: War Crimes and Chaos Are Very Profitable - Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

Paul Jay — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:14:00 -0500

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson — former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell at the State Department and Joint Chiefs — joins Paul Jay and gives his unfiltered assessment of the U.S. war on Iran. Wilkerson argues the conflict is unconstitutional, unwinnable, and strategically catastrophic. Topics include: Iran\'s military resilience and long-term strategy, Israel\'s nuclear threats, the depletion of U.S. and Israeli air defense munitions, China\'s push to replace the dollar with the renminbi, the collapse of American alliances worldwide, the threat to the 2026 midterm elections, and whether impeachment proceedings against Trump are inevitable.

Faith, Power, and Foreign Policy: A Christian Nationalist Vision - Gerald Horne & Jonathan Katz

Paul Jay — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:11:00 -0500

Trump’s State of the Union and Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference reveal a sweeping — and deeply troubling — vision for American foreign policy. Historian Gerald Horne (University of Houston) and journalist Jonathan Katz (The Gangsters of Capitalism) join Paul Jay to break it down.

What emerges is less a foreign policy than a neo-colonial project: regime change in Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba; a reordering of Europe under American dominance; and an ideology rooted in Christian civilization, white supremacy, and the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt’s concept of Grossraum — the world divided into spheres where great powers do as they please.

Katz decodes the fascist dog whistles embedded in Trump’s speech — including a number that traces directly to Nazi message boards — while Horne connects Rubio’s Munich address to a broader rollback of the anti-colonial gains of the post-WWII era and the civil rights movement at home.

Is this the return of unapologetic imperialism — a neocon project stripped of any pretense of democracy and freedom? And what does Trump’s self-styled role as “king of the world” through the so-called Board of Peace mean for the United Nations and global governance?

Do You Trust Epstein Elite With Nuclear Weapons? – Matt Korda & Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:00:00 -0500

The Epstein files are naming names — CEOs, politicians, a current and former president. This is the stratum of people making decisions about nuclear weapons in an uncontrolled arms race with no arms limitation treaties, no diplomatic channels, and AI now integrated into nuclear command systems.

Paul Jay talks with Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists about where the U.S. nuclear modernization program actually stands — the Sentinel ICBM, hundreds of billions in cost overruns, the Golden Dome fantasy, and a launch-on-warning doctrine that even its defenders can’t rationally explain.

The logic behind ICBMs collapses under scrutiny. The Golden Dome can’t work. The real objective, as with every arms race boondoggle from SAGE to SDI, is the money. As Paul puts it, “It’s not about the dome, it’s about the gold.”

Meanwhile, Russia and China aren’t talking to Washington. The arms control architecture is gone. And the media is barely covering any of it.

We need an anti-nuclear movement like the one that existed in the early 1980s. Midterms and a presidential election are coming. Make this an issue.

Matt Korda is a senior researcher at the Federation of American Scientists.

The Cold War Lie That Built the Nuclear Weapons Industry – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:34:41 -0500

Paul Jay joins Maria Hall, Jim Lafferty, and Michael Smith on the Law and Disorder radio show. They discuss his upcoming documentary How to Stop a Nuclear War, based on extensive interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and narrated by Emma Thompson. Jay reveals how post-World War II economic decisions drove nuclear weapons expansion, explaining why the Soviet threat was largely manufactured according to declassified CIA documents. He breaks down why Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system actually increases nuclear war risk, discusses the dangers of AI in nuclear command and control, and outlines seven concrete steps citizens can demand to reduce the threat of nuclear catastrophe, including ending presidential sole authority to launch nuclear weapons and negotiating new arms control treaties. Learn more at stop-nuclear-war.org or visit theAnalysis.news for ongoing investigative journalism.

The Golden Dome Scam: How Defense Contractors Are Selling a $2 Trillion Nuclear Lie | Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:07:31 -0500

In 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the “Doomsday Clock” to draw attention to the existential dangers posed by human technology. The time was set to seven minutes to midnight, with midnight symbolizing the destruction of life on Earth. Just two years before, in 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world saw firsthand the potential of nuclear annihilation. As World War II was ending, a different kind of conflict was underway: the Cold War. And over the next four decades, the United States and Soviet Union competed for nuclear dominance—not only through foreign policy and military strategy, but also on the home front, using propaganda and retaliation against critics. Throughout this period, people of conscience, like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the early 70s, repeatedly sounded the alarm. Ellsberg and others warned that there was no way to “win” a nuclear war. If one side launched a nuclear weapon, the other would inevitably respond, leading to mutual destruction. Today, more than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race continues. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, nine nations continue to stockpile nuclear weapons, including the US, Russia, China, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, France, the United Kingdom, and North Korea. On January 27, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock forward to 85 seconds to midnight—the closest humanity has ever come to global catastrophe. The question remains: Is there time and the will to change our trajectory, to learn from the past, and avoid a path to global destruction?

Is ICE a Crack in Trump’s Mussolini Project? – Gerald Horne, Jonathan M. Katz, Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:55:17 -0500

Gerald Horne, Johnathan M. Katz join Paul Jay: Trump’s ICE killings in Minneapolis have exposed deep splits inside the Trump camp and among business and political elites, many who now see him as dangerously unstable for capitalism itself. These fractures create a rare opening: massive street protests and sustained organizing can push harder than ever, while progressives use the crisis to run bold anti‑ICE, pro‑worker campaigns and turn elite disunity into real electoral gains.

Carney’s Bold Davos Speech—Where’s the Bold Policy? – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:35:24 -0500

Mark Carney’s Davos speech was widely praised as a bold stand against the breakdown of the so-called “rules-based order” and the rise of naked great-power politics under Trump. But speeches do not change power relations. In this wide-ranging analysis, Paul Jay argues that Trump did not rupture the global order so much as strip away its cover—exposing a U.S. system in internal crisis, increasingly authoritarian at home and openly coercive abroad. From hemispheric dominance to trade war and militarization, Jay situates Canada inside that system: deeply embedded in U.S. military strategy, financial capitalism, and projects like missile defense and Arctic militarization. Without a break from those foundations, talk of sovereignty and middle-power independence risks becoming performance rather than substance. The issue is not tone, but whether Canada—and others—will challenge the economic and military structures of U.S. power, or merely bargain for a safer place within them.

The Cold War Didn’t End – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:57:07 -0500

Director Paul Jay discusses his upcoming documentary How to Stop a Nuclear War, featuring Daniel Ellsberg's final interviews before his death. In conversation with Cole Smith, a former Air Force nuclear missile operator, Jay explains why Ellsberg's journey from Cold War hawk to whistleblower provides the perfect lens for understanding our current nuclear crisis. The discussion covers Cold War lies, the risks of AI-controlled nuclear systems, and concrete steps toward disarmament, including phasing out ICBMs and ending launch-on-warning policies. TranscriptListenDonateSubscribe Cole SmithIt's a privilege to be here, obviously, in a space that's strange for me because I used to work in these silos or ones that were very similar to these. For five years, I was a nuclear missile operator in the Air Force from 2012 to 2017, during which time many journalists, including Geoff Brumfiel, who's here somewhere, did fantastic reporting on some of the shortcomings of the missile force. Anyway, that's a whole other story.It does strike me after the last panel that what we've moved into after lunch is something that is sort of a tone shift in some ways. There's an old quote that you might have heard that a lot of people attribute to Damon of Athens, which is, "Show me the songs of a people, and I care not who writes the laws." I think in some ways, that is not to say that policy is not important, but that one of the ways that we have to move forward on this subject is through the stories that we tell.So, Paul, if you could begin by telling us where you're at with your film. If you could also just catch us up on how you came into your career to be a filmmaker on this subject.Paul JayHi. I think it's a brilliant idea to have the meeting here. Seeing that missile out there. I grew up at a time when I was... I have a young son, he's 13. He's actually up here. I made a deal with him. If he sat through all the panels, he gets to go trail riding in Bentonville.Cole SmithCan I get in on that deal?Paul JayAbsolutely. Please, because I won't get on a bike. He could use some company. So I was around his age during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I was well aware. I was into newspapers when I was six, seven years old, so I was as scared to death as everyone was during that time. By the time I was in high school, I had quit in grade 10 and never went to university because I was absolutely sure I'd be dead by the age of 20.It's interesting because my film features Daniel Ellsberg. When he worked at RAND Corporation, he was offered a pension, and he laughed and said, "I'm not putting money into a pension fund. We're not going to be here."But by the '90s and the end of the '90s, I was pretty much in as much denial about the risks of nuclear war as most others. Then, in around 2018, I read Dan Ellsberg's book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, and that book scared the shit out of me. I said to myself, "This is the most important book I've ever read in my life because of what's at stake." So, I interviewed Dan, and eventually he agreed that I could make a documentary film featuring him, and so the more I get into the topic, the more I realize how dangerous the moment is.Before we watch the trailer, I would like a promise from everyone. Of course, you're not going to make it, but I'm going to ask anyway. Can everyone please stop saying, since the end of the Cold War? It did not end. The Cold War wasn't just about the Soviet Union. The Cold War was about suppressing domestic dissent, weakening workers' unions. It was about exaggerating the external threat, whether it was the Soviet Union or now China.Listen to the rhetoric of President Trump. Is it different than McCarthy's? Is it different than the 1950s? How about Joe Biden saying he's going to defend Taiwan and risk nuclear war? How is that different than what we heard all throughout the Cold War? The Cold War didn't end. We are in the midst of it, and most of us are looking at the world through the filters that we were taught as children, a fabric of lie after lie after lie.If I had more time, I could give you the whole history of the lies, but Dan Ellsberg asked us with this film, he said directly, he said he thought we had the opportunity to do what the Pentagon Papers did, which is uncover the lies of the nuclear era. And then we also want to propose solutions, which you'll see a little bit teased in the trailer, because I am a clinical optimist. Every rational bone in my body says there's nothing to be very optimistic about, and we'd better face up to this.You know, the danger of the moment we're in, yes, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and probably far more dangerous because maybe we'll talk a bit about AI. We're at a convergence of the existential threat of climate, the existential threat of nukes, we don't know about new pandemics, and the financial architecture. '07, '08, if you listen to the business community that really knows, '07, '08, it was a whisper of what's coming. It's all coming at the same time.So are we humans going to make it? Well, every rational bone in my body says, probably not. As I said, I'm a clinical optimist, and I really do think we can make it, but we'd better face up to this crazy fabric of bullshit that we swim in.Cole SmithTo pivot back to you, Paul, a trusted voice to me, and obviously to you as well, one of the most trusted voices in terms of patriotism to this country, for me, is Daniel Ellsberg. But one of the things that I come up against as a former nuclear missile operator is when I talk to people under a certain age and tell them what I used to do, they look at me like, "What are you... People still do that?"Not to be disrespectful, but Daniel Ellsberg may fall into that category as well for a lot of Americans, where it's become a name that means a lot to maybe fewer amount of people, which, of course, is all the more reason to make a film about him. But I wonder if you could speak a bit about Daniel Ellsberg, and the question that every filmmaker gets is, why now? And so why is it important to lead into this conversation with his voice, specifically at this point in time?Paul JayWell, first of all, it's not a film about Daniel Ellsberg. It's a film about our current moment, what's at risk, and what we can do about it. My approach, my belief is we cannot really face up to the reality of the risk and what solutions are if we don't get past our Cold War mentality. Because we have such a built-in belief system that's been deliberately fabricated, promoted, and inculcated in Americans, in Canadians, and Europeans, right from 1945, '46, at the very least. The reason Ellsberg is a good way to tell the story, part of the story, is because he was a true believer. Ellsberg was the most militant Cold Warrior you could possibly find. I don't know if you know who Curtis LeMay was, but he was almost on the same page. He didn't want to launch. Curtis LeMay was, for people who don't know, the head of STRATCOM, the guy who actually firebombed Japan, ordered the dropping, and actually engineered the dropping of the nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ellsberg was on his page.And then over the course of his time working at RAND Corporation, advising the Pentagon and the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he started to realize this is all based on lies. They lied about the bomber gap. They said the Soviets had 1,000 nuclear bombers, when the Americans only had about 300, 400. The truth turned out to be completely the opposite.Then they had, and out of that, by the way, I'm going to cover some things pretty fast here, but if you want to know more, I'm around. They created something called the SAGE Radar System that came out of the bomber gap, where, "Oh, they're going to come get us with bombers. We're going to have a radar system in Northern Canada that's going to have BOMARC missiles. When they come in, we're going to shoot them out of the sky because they have the advantage; they have more bombers."First, it was a lie. There were no bombers. Second of all, the bloody thing never worked because they never figured out how to deal with radar jamming. But get this, and how come none of you... Raise one person who has ever heard of the SAGE radar system before. Maybe Matt. Not even Matt. Okay, here's one. Oh, two, three. That's remarkable. I almost never get-Cole SmithYou're in good company today.Paul JayI don't know if you know this, but the SAGE Radar System... Now, the Manhattan Project was the biggest industrial project in the history of the United States, and SAGE cost three times more than the Manhattan Project. Did you know that? I didn't know that until recently. It was a boondoggle. It was a scam. It never worked.Then they have the missile gap. You saw it here. "Oh, they have a thousand. We only have 40." It turned out the Soviets had four. But out of that, they created a program called BMEWS, B-M-E-W-S. This was linked to SAGE, and it was going to have a system that could knock out ICBMs on the way in. Never worked. The whole thing was nonsense. Another in today's dollars, billions and billions of dollars.It's been lie after lie, and you can draw a line from this lying right to the Golden Dome, because the anti-ballistic missile systems... I mean, my line about it is, "It's not about the dome, it's about the gold." These are boondoggles, but they're very dangerous boondoggles because they can destabilize the whole balance of nuclear power. Because the problem... I'm jumping way faster, but we don't have much time. The problem with the Golden Dome is that it's SDI of Reagan, but with AI.So, is it possible, and you know that they've always said it's impossible to hit a bullet, meaning an incoming missile, with a bullet, meaning a missile. Now they're saying, "Oh, no, with AI, now we can hit a bullet with a bullet." But it's an entire lie, because even if you can,

Trump–Rodríguez Oil Talks Test Venezuela’s Sovereignty

Paul Jay — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:14:34 -0500

Venezuela’s oil industry has long been a site of struggle—between national sovereignty and foreign control, between social development and extraction for profit. In this wide-ranging conversation, Gregory Wilpert situates today’s crisis in that longer history, from the Chávez government’s effort to reclaim PDVSA for Venezuelans to the current U.S. strategy of tying sanctions relief to oil exports. As Washington pushes Caracas to increase production and redirect crude away from China, Wilpert examines whether interim leadership in Venezuela is navigating an impossible economic bind—or whether the country’s oil and sovereignty are once again being bargained under coercion.

Ukraine: Peace In Our Time? – Volodymyr Ishchenko & Richard Sakwa Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:57:43 -0500

Richard Sakwa and Volodymyr Ishchenko on what is misunderstood about this war — and why it matters for the peace we need so badly. In Part Two, Sakwa and Ishchenko turn to NATO’s expansion, Russia’s internal politics, and the peace proposals now being pushed. Sakwa dismisses the claim that NATO is merely defensive and rejects the idea that Russia poses a serious military threat to Western Europe. He traces the crisis to post-war settlements that shut Russia out of Europe’s security order — even after Moscow sought NATO membership. Ishchenko argues that Central European states joined NATO less out of fear of Russia than from a desire to become “European,” while Putin’s own political fears at home partly shaped the invasion. Both are skeptical of existing peace plans — yet argue that Trump’s blunt proposal, however imperial, may come closer to confronting reality. The priority: stop the killing, save as many people as possible, and prevent the ultimate catastrophe.

The Deep Roots of the Ukraine War – Volodymyr Ishchenko & Richard Sakwa Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:04:40 -0500

Richard Sakwa and Volodymyr Ishchenko on why peace was lost—and who helped destroy it. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine did not come from nowhere. In this first of two parts, Richard Sakwa and Volodymyr Ishchenko cut through the common narrative that reduces the war to Putin alone, without excusing the invasion itself. The failure — and in key moments, US sabotage — of an inclusive European security order after the Cold War helped lay the ground for conflict. Inside Ukraine, post Soviet class conflicts led to the weaponization of language, identity, and nationalism. And the far right used the threat of violence to block President Zelensky’s early efforts to pursue peace. Sakwa and Ishchenko show that understanding history is not justification — it is indictment.

Trump’s Oil Heist in Venezuela – Steve Ellner & Ricardo Vaz

Paul Jay — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:28:13 -0500

President Donald Trump entered office backed by fossil-fuel executives, hedge-fund financiers, and the AI-military industrial complex, then used sanctions, military pressure, and trade coercion against Venezuela to dismantle national control over its oil sector—culminating in a $2 billion crude deal that redirects Venezuelan exports from China to the United States and rewards major political donors. Prof. Steve Ellner and Journalist, Ricardo Vaz explain, this outcome is not an aberration, but rather the latest chapter in a long-standing struggle over PDVSA, oil sovereignty, and U.S. hemispheric dominance—where economic warfare supplants diplomacy and state power is deployed for private gain.

Venezuela: Trump’s War for Oil and Domination is a War Crime – Steve Ellner & Ricardo Vaz

Paul Jay — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:09:26 -0500

Following overnight U.S. airstrikes on Caracas, the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro, and President Donald Trump’s declaration that Washington will take control of Venezuela’s oil and effectively run the country, analysts Steve Ellner and Ricardo Vaz warn that the operation constitutes an unlawful use of force. They cite the combination of military assault, extraterritorial abduction, resource seizure, and alleged extrajudicial killings at sea as violations of international law and Venezuelan sovereignty.

Why Working-Class Consciousness Is the Real Threat to Elite Power – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:57:34 -0500

Paul Jay and host Barry Stevens analyze rising progressive movements, from Mamdani's victory in New York City to Sanders and AOC drawing massive crowds in red states, and why working-class consciousness has always been the real threat to American elites. They discuss why fossil fuel companies have known about the climate crisis for decades but chose denial, why AI could plan a sustainable economy, but is being used for profit and war. They examine the specific dynamics of Christian nationalism, the role of Silicon Valley in the authoritarian turn, and why the 2026 midterms could see significant progressive breakthroughs.

The Ukraine War is a Crime – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 14:31:55 -0500

Paul Jay rejects the false choice between "Putin as a new Hitler" and the anti-NATO Left's defense of Russia. Under the UN Charter and Nuremberg principles, Russia's invasion is a war of aggression — there was no imminent threat and no "sphere of influence" justifies it. At the same time, NATO expansion was provocative and deceptive, and the U.S. refusal to take it off the table helped set the stage for war. The discussion highlights: •The Ukrainian people's right to self-determination and to overthrow their own oligarchy; • how the Iraq War normalized lawless aggression and weakened global norms; • the role of Russian, Ukrainian, U.S., and European oligarchies in prolonging the conflict; • why parts of the Left blur first principles by excusing one imperialism to oppose another; • China's strategic interest in sustaining the conflict; • Ukraine and Gaza serve as "battle labs" for AI weapons and companies like Palantir. • NATO functions as a "protection racket," getting Europe to increase military spending to 5%. • and why a negotiated peace — even with territorial concessions — may be necessary to create space for democratic struggle against oligarchic power on all sides. With host Barry Stevens.

Why Trump Is Going After Venezuela (It’s Not About Drugs) – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:58:17 -0500

Paul Jay breaks down what’s really driving Trump’s aggressive moves against Venezuela in 2025. Spoiler: it’s not about drugs or democracy—it’s about pushing China out of Latin America. In this conversation with Barry Stevens, Paul explains how China has become the dominant trading partner across South America without military projection, why the US is reviving the Monroe Doctrine, and how manufactured pretexts (from “Soviet expansionism” to “weapons of mass destruction” to “the war on drugs”) have justified American intervention for decades. Also discussed is why the Venezuelan economy is such a mess.

License to Kill: Washington’s War on the Constitution – Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 14:45:54 -0500

In Part Two, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson confronts the U.S. attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific—killings now broadcast openly on television—and says they violate not only international law but the military code he lived by as an Army officer. With Pete Hegseth installed as Secretary of War, Wilkerson argues that the United States is sliding into a new era of impunity, where the drug “war” becomes a pretext for murder, the laws that govern armed conflict are discarded, and the nation risks its own Constitution and a real war.

The DONroe Doctrine – Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:02:13 -0500

In Part One, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson explores how Trump’s new National Security Strategy revives the Monroe Doctrine in a sweeping attempt to reassert U.S. dominance across the Americas. Pushing China out of Latin America, he argues, will not prevent a showdown—only shift its timing, as the United States simultaneously pours resources into Indo-Pacific military power. With Washington drawing back from Europe and targeting Venezuela and its neighbors under the convenient banner of the "war on drugs,” Wilkerson suggests that this doctrine risks undermining the Constitution and edging the country toward a real war. With host Barry Stevens.

Venezuelans Prepared to Fight US Invasion – Ricardo Vaz

Paul Jay — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 08:00:00 -0500

Opposition figure María Corina Machado dedicates her Nobel Prize to Trump, even as analysts argue her path to power has relied on destabilization rather than peace, according to Venezuelanalysis Ricardo Vaz.

Trigger Warning: Trump, Testing, and the New Arms Race – Hans Kristensen Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 14:10:28 -0500

In part two of his conversation with Barry Stevens, nuclear weapons expert Hans Kristensen warns of mounting tensions with China, driven by exaggerated fears of its nuclear buildup and the growing risk of a Taiwan conflict. The U.S. response — including Trump’s push to resume nuclear testing — is dangerously accelerating the arms race. A critical failure, Kristensen says, is the near-total lack of Congressional oversight, with defense policy shaped by the entrenched power of the military-industrial complex. In this climate of collapsing arms control, he makes a powerful case for renewed public pressure to help prevent catastrophe.

How to Stop a Nuclear War — and Why We’re Not Talking About It – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:47:43 -0500

In this powerful and timely conversation, Dr. John Izzo and Alain Gauthier sit down with award-winning filmmaker and journalist Paul Jay, whose upcoming documentary How to Stop a Nuclear War dives deep into the existential risks humanity continues to ignore. Together, they explore why the Cold War never truly ended, how nuclear weapons remain an urgent and immediate threat, and what each of us can do to break the silence and reclaim our collective future. This episode is not just about nuclear war — it’s about truth, power, media silence, and our responsibility as citizens of a shared planet. Jay shares the untold story behind the nuclear threat and the making of his new film inspired by Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine. He argues that the Cold War didn’t end — it simply evolved — and that the same forces of fear, profit, militarism, and denial continue to push humanity toward catastrophe. You’ll hear why policymakers rarely talk about nuclear weapons, how media myths shape public perception, why dialogue with our “enemies” is essential, and how ordinary citizens can influence extraordinary change by confronting the “house of dynamite” we all live in before it explodes.

WITH A BANG: Trump’s Deadly Decision To Resume Nuclear Testing – Hans Kristensen Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 12:42:55 -0500

As Trump vows to resume nuclear explosive testing, Hans Kristensen — Director of the Nuclear Information Project at FAS, the world’s most authoritative source on global nuclear arsenals — joins host Barry Stevens for an urgent conversation. Kristensen calls the move “chest-thumping,” with no strategic justification, warning it would likely trigger a disastrous chain reaction of testing by China and others.

Cheney’s Death, Mamdani’s Victory: Wilkerson on War Crimes & Change

Paul Jay — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:29:16 -0500

Dick Cheney, architect of the Iraq War, died on November 3rd. The next day, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won New York's mayoral race. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, calls the timing symbolic of America's potential turning point. Speaking from inside the Bush administration, Wilkerson delivers a scathing account of how Cheney became "co-president," systematically lied about Iraqi WMDs, and led the nation into an illegal war. He explains why Powell's UN presentation was built on false intelligence, how the administration abandoned international law and authorized torture, and why Obama failed to hold anyone accountable. "We should have all been tried for war crimes," Wilkerson states. From the lies that killed a million Iraqis to complicity in Gaza's genocide, this is essential viewing on American empire and accountability.

The Risk of Nuclear War is Far From Zero | Paul Jay & Christian Appy Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:12:21 -0400

Filmmaker Paul Jay discusses his upcoming documentary "How to Stop a Nuclear War" with historian Christian Appy. They explore why the nuclear threat remains largely ignored in public discourse, how Cold War lies continue to shape our worldview, and why Daniel Ellsberg's journey from insider to Pentagon Papers whistleblower matters today.

A Fabric of Lies: From Cold War Deception to Nuclear Apocalypse | Paul Jay & Christian Appy

Paul Jay — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:02:41 -0400

Complete recording of filmmaker Paul Jay's presentation and Q&A at UMass about his upcoming documentary "How to Stop a Nuclear War," based on Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's book "The Doomsday Machine." Moderated by historian Christian Appy, Jay traces American militarization from slavery and westward expansion through the Manhattan Project to today's trillion-dollar nuclear modernization. The discussion explores why nuclear threats remain taboo in public discourse, BlackRock's role in nuclear financing, how the climate crisis amplifies nuclear risk, the dangers of AI-controlled missile defense, and why elite interests might actually align with working people on this issue.

How Trump Bodyslammed America: Heels, Faces, & the Kayfabe of Politics

Paul Jay — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:54:49 -0400

In this episode, Jay Shapiro opens with a fast essay on kayfabe, heels and faces, and why the ring is the best way to read the national psyche. He looks at Trump’s WWE arcs, from Battle of the Billionaires to the “I bought Raw” storyline, and how that performance grammar ported into real politics. Then Jay Shapiro speaks with Paul Jay about the theater of power, the post-9/11 security state, nuclear policy, and why the official script keeps breaking.

The China Syndrome: The US History of Fear as Foreign Policy – Peter Kuznick Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 12:51:41 -0400

In part two of this interview, historian Peter Kuznick — co-author (with Oliver Stone) of The Untold History of the United States — joins Barry Stevens to reflect on the USA’s lost chances for peace. He traces a throughline from the sidelining of VP Henry Wallace to the aggressive Cold War policies of Eisenhower and Reagan, who, while avoiding outright nuclear war, escalated militarism to unprecedented levels. Today’s panic over China, Kuznick argues, revives that same dangerous playbook — but with even fewer constraints and less public awareness.

Don’t Count on Agribusiness and Techno-Fixes to Feed the People: Brazil Showcase

Paul Jay — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:33:32 -0400

Raj Patel and his fellow IPES-Food experts stress the centrality of addressing food systems, a key pillar of the Action Agenda for the COP30. The message uncovered by Lula’s bold policies is clear: ending hunger rather than perpetuating it under agribusiness goes hand-in-hand with tackling inequality and climate change. Lynn Fries interviews Raj Patel on GPEnewsdocs.

History Repeats Itself: First as Tragedy, Then as Trump – Peter Kuznick Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 14:39:58 -0400

In part one, Peter Kuznick warns that Trump 2.0 is more dangerous than the original. The generals and advisors who once called him a "moron" are gone — replaced by sycophants in what Kuznick calls a “kakistocracy,” government by the worst people. From threatening to seize Panama, Greenland, and Canada to leading the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, Trump now faces little resistance from Congress, courts, or his own party. Kuznick and Barry Stevens explore how the takeover of cultural institutions mirrors past fascist movements — and how America’s lack of historical memory leaves it vulnerable to repeating old disasters. The most urgent threat: Trump’s unpredictable stance on Ukraine could trigger the war he claims to oppose.

Trump Threatens Generals: (Martial Law) My Way, or the Highway – Wilkerson and Jay

Paul Jay — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 14:02:49 -0400

In this episode, Paul Jay and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson analyze a chilling message from Donald Trump to roughly 800 generals: a straight-up demand for loyalty — “If you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future... we know everything about everybody.” Fall in line or be purged — as Trump lays out a plan to use U.S. armed forces to occupy large American cities labelled “radical left” strongholds.

Paul Jay: How 80 Years of Lies and Profiteering Built the Doomsday Machine

Paul Jay — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:05:38 -0400

In this talk, Jay exposes the hidden history of U.S. nuclear policy—built on lies, profiteering, and Cold War paranoia—and explains how those same forces shape today’s politics, from NATO and Trumpism to the growing danger of war with China. Journalist and filmmaker Paul Jay speaks at the Emergency NGO conference in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Sign up for the “How to Stop a Nuclear War” mailing list at stop-nuclear-war.org.

From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock: Paul Jay on Finance, Militarism, and the Next Apocalypse

Paul Jay — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:10:31 -0400

Paul Jay joins Patrick Lovell to trace how Wall Street profiteering—from slavery and the Civil War to J.P. Morgan in World War I and today’s BlackRock and Vanguard—created the militarized economy driving nuclear risk.

A Golden Dome While the Earth Burns – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 23:37:05 -0400

This episode examines how Trump's futuristic promises - impenetrable missile shields, Mars colonization, weaponized AI - mask an old playbook: funneling public wealth into private hands through military contracts. While selling fantasies of space salvation, the same system commits atrocities in Gaza, while the earth burns.

From DC Streets to Gaza’s Ruins: Inside Trump’s Unholy Alliance

Paul Jay — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:06:37 -0400

On August 12, 2025, Donald Trump sent the National Guard into Washington, D.C., just months after deploying troops and Marines into Los Angeles. While militarizing U.S. cities, he stands by as a genocide unfolds in Gaza — shielding Israel diplomatically while U.S. defense contractors profit. This republished investigation, Trump's Unholy Alliance, exposes the billionaire-tech, Christian nationalist, and far-right networks behind Trump’s rise. They plan to weaken — or dismantle — what’s left of American democracy. From Peter Thiel’s Palantir AI systems aiding Gaza airstrikes, to Lockheed Martin’s jets and bombs, these same firms stand to cash in on Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense and militarization of space — a project that could make nuclear war more likely. January 6 was only the rehearsal. This is the playbook — at home, abroad, and in orbit. Watch the full investigation now.

From the Fossil-Fuel Civilization Into …? A Biophysical Reality Check

Paul Jay — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 10:30:33 -0400

James K. Galbraith (Entropy Economics) argues that economics cannot keep ignoring that energy and resources for production are no longer abundant and easy to access. Drawing from the fundamental laws of nature, he proposes a viable framework of economic analysis to envisage the future of human society. Produced by GPEnewsdocs.

The Real Antisemitism: Starving Gaza in the Name of a Jewish State – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:35:50 -0400

Israel’s war on Gaza has led to mass starvation, with over 85 children confirmed dead from hunger and hundreds more killed while waiting for food. In this essay, journalist Paul Jay argues that defending such atrocities in the name of Jewish survival is itself a form of anti-Semitism—one that aligns Jewish identity with brutality. He exposes how starvation is being used as a deliberate weapon of war, backed by U.S. military aid, sanitized by Western media, and tolerated by global powers, including Saudi Arabia. This is not a humanitarian crisis. It’s a state policy—designed, funded, and enforced.

Housing a Basic Right or Playground for Global Capital? – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:56:32 -0400

In this video, we explore how Wall Street firms, REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts), and private equity giants are reshaping housing markets—treating homes as hedge funds and tenants as revenue streams. The result? Displacement, skyrocketing rents, and the collapse of housing as a public good. But it doesn’t have to be this way. What if we took housing out of the hands of corporate landlords and made it public infrastructure—like schools, libraries, and transit systems?

U.S., Israel, and a Lawless New World Order – Nader Hashemi

Paul Jay — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 16:22:08 -0400

Israel struck Iran — but could this war set off something far more dangerous? Middle East scholar Nader Hashemi joins Paul Jay to break down what’s really behind the so-called '12-Day War.' Far from a clean victory, Hashemi warns the strikes have likely strengthened Iran’s hardliners, accelerated the push toward nuclear weapons, and crushed the country’s democratic opposition. But this may not be a simple case of Western overreach — it may reflect a deep strategic split between the U.S. and Israel. As Jay argues, Trump may be seeking to normalize relations with Iran, not to promote democracy, but to pry Tehran away from China and regain leverage in the great power rivalry — especially with most of Iran’s oil flowing to Beijing. Israel, on the other hand, appears willing to risk regional chaos to achieve regime change and eliminate its last major regional adversary. What’s lost in the Western media narrative is the reality that the Iranian people — not the regime — are paying the price. And what’s collapsing before our eyes is not just diplomacy but the very idea of a rules-based international order. This war may be just beginning — and its consequences could reshape the global balance of power.

Dress Rehearsal for a Police State: Fifteen Years Ago at the Toronto G20 – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:17:59 -0400

In this introduction, journalist Paul Jay reports on several cases where police provocateurs incited violence during otherwise peaceful demonstrations—providing authorities with the pretext they needed to justify mass arrests and repression. As federal troops crackdown on peaceful protests in Los Angeles, we revisit the Toronto G20—15 years ago—when police beat peaceful demonstrators, arrested over 1,100 people, and suspended civil liberties under the pretext of security. Journalist Paul Jay connects what happened in 2010 to what’s happening now: the criminalization of dissent, from the mass raids on pro-Palestinian activists in Toronto to the militarized repression unfolding in U.S. cities today. This video includes a newly recorded introduction and the original 2012 report: “No Accountability Yet for Toronto G20 Police Crimes.” What happened in Toronto wasn’t an exception—it was a warning.

Empire Abroad, Autocracy at Home: Col. Wilkerson on the U.S.-Israel Attack on Iran

Paul Jay — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 13:21:02 -0400

Former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, joins Paul Jay and condemns the Israeli attack on Iran as an unprovoked violation of international law—and a dangerous step toward full-scale regional war. Wilkerson argues that the U.S. is complicit, acting through Israel as a proxy. Wilkerson analyzes the use of the military in L.A. and doesn’t mince words: the Empire is collapsing into autocracy and militarism, and the consequences could be catastrophic. TranscriptListenDonateSubscribeGuestMusic Paul JayHi, welcome to theAnalysis.news. I'm Paul Jay. In just a few seconds, we'll be back with Colonel Larry Wilkerson to discuss the Israeli attack on Iran.Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu, who says this is not an attack on the Iranian people. It's an attack on the Iranian regime. But in fact, it's exactly that, an attack on the Iranian people. The sovereignty of a country is not the sovereignty of a government. It's the sovereignty of the people, and it's the sovereignty of Iran that has been illegally attacked by every piece of the UN charter and international law, an unprovoked attack on the people's sovereignty.Now, I've been very critical over the years of the Iranian government. I'm not going to call it a regime. I don't know why it's more of a regime than most of the other governments or states that call themselves governments. My guest and I, Larry Wilkerson, who will be here in just a few seconds, we've both been very critical of the Iranian government and its repression of people and opposition movements in Iran. That has nothing to do with what's going on here. This is an out-and-out, unprovoked attack on Iran. We're going to talk about the reasons for that, but let me just add one other small thing, which we'll talk about. It's maybe not that small.Critiquing this Israeli attack is not anti-Semitism. In fact, this is just like the Cold War. When people condemned the Vietnam War, they were called communists. They're being soft on communists. Well, now, if you critique the crimes of the Israeli government, and now this unprovoked war, and of course, the genocide in Gaza, the bombings in Lebanon, now you're an anti-Semite. It's being thrown around just the way it was, the anti-communist rhetoric of the Cold War.Now, joining us to talk about this current conflict is Larry Wilkerson. Thanks for joining us, Larry.Col. Lawrence WilkersonGood to be with you, Paul. Long time.Paul JayFor people who don't know, Larry was the Chief of Staff for Colin Powell, both at the Joint Chiefs and at the State Department. So, let me start by asking you, Larry, what do you make of the way the media is covering this? I was a little surprised over the last year that there were at least some reports on how Gaza was being devastated. You saw quite a few pictures of the killing of children, and there was a glimmer of legitimate reporting for a while. Now, this is so one-sided. I watch CNN, and guest after guest is essentially from the Israeli government or the Israeli ambassador, and the fact that this is a complete violation of international law is not even mentioned.Col. Lawrence WilkersonWell, this is truly a disgusting display of the Empire's degradation and profound slippage from world leadership. There's no question about that. Not only have we violated international law, consistently, we have ignored even those or punished even those who didn't want to ignore it or were trying to do something about it, like South Africa and their application to the court with regard to the genocide in Gaza. I think it's appalling that we did a Yamamoto. We did a Pearl Harbor. We did a Saddam Hussein on Kuwait attack on Iran. We, not Israel, the United States of America, using Israel as its foremost in the frontline proxy, if you will, just like we're doing with Ukraine. We said, diplomacy was going to continue. We achieved tactical surprise, an enormous advantage for an Air Force attacking,

Will AI Kill Us—or Help Save Us? It Depends On Who Owns It – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:39:11 -0400

Paul Jay explores the growing danger of artificial intelligence not as an evil superintelligence but as a system reflecting the values of those who control it: corporate monopolies, military planners, and billionaires racing for dominance. Jay connects AI to nuclear weapons, Trump’s so-called “Golden Dome,” and the broader logic of profit-driven power. But he also argues there’s a different path—one grounded in public ownership, democratic oversight, and AI that serves human needs, not corporate greed.

“It Will Take 100 Million Deaths” Hedge Fund Billionaire Warns of AI Threat

Paul Jay — Mon, 26 May 2025 11:20:44 -0400

Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones recently warned that artificial intelligence poses an “imminent threat” to humanity, with a 10% chance it could lead to catastrophic loss of life within 20 years. But while Jones acknowledges the danger, he stops short of identifying the real cause: the reckless, profit-driven race among Big Tech firms and national powers to dominate AI at any cost. We also reveal what Jones doesn’t mention: the growing integration of AI into nuclear command and control systems. AI doesn’t have to lead us over the edge. Under democratic public ownership, it could help solve the climate crisis—but in the hands of tech monopolies and the military, it could destroy us.

Part Five – Building a Real Alternative: Get Organized

Paul Jay — Fri, 16 May 2025 10:09:06 -0400

Trump’s anti-“radical left” rhetoric is aimed at grassroots activists fighting for a more just and democratic future. By reviving Cold War fears, he seeks to divide working people and weaken the labor movement. But across the country, workers are fighting back — organizing unions, running for office, and demanding real solutions to the crises we face. Part five of this essay dives into why a militant, democratic labor movement is essential to challenging corporate power, combating climate change, and resisting the slide toward authoritarianism. From Amazon warehouses to AI ethics protests, from rail yards to classrooms — workers are getting organized.

Trump Tariffs: The Madman Theory Applied to Economics (and what we should do about it)

Paul Jay — Thu, 15 May 2025 13:31:15 -0400

In part one, Paul Jay exposes how Trump’s tariff policy, far from protecting American workers, is a calculated strategy to fund militarization, crush labor, and entrench corporate-nationalist rule. Behind the chaos lies a coherent project—driven by Trump’s allies—to weaponize climate denial, exploit regressive taxes, and funnel billions into AI-driven warfare and fossil fuel expansion. The so-called “Golden Dome” is revealed as a trillion-dollar boondoggle enriching tech oligarchs under the guise of missile defense. This is not economic protectionism—it’s the financial architecture of authoritarianism.

Part Four – Cracks in the Trump Coalition: Civil War Among the Elites

Paul Jay — Wed, 14 May 2025 13:11:38 -0400

Trump’s coalition is unraveling. What was once sold as a unified right-wing project is now fracturing into open conflict between legacy arms manufacturers, Silicon Valley militarists, Wall Street financiers, and ideological operatives like Bannon and Leonard Leo. As Trump’s chaotic tariffs wreck global supply chains, even key backers like Charles Koch and Peter Thiel are hedging their bets. Meanwhile, Corporate Democrats offer no real alternative—caught between donor loyalty and popular discontent. But beneath the elite infighting, there is a growing hunger for a real alternative—one rooted in democracy, solidarity, and working-class power. This episode exposes the fault lines of U.S. power—and why their shared refusal to confront climate catastrophe or nuclear danger puts us all at risk.

Can Labor Stop Trump and Musk? | Eric Blanc on theAnalysis.news

Paul Jay — Mon, 12 May 2025 14:42:21 -0400

On this episode of theAnalysis.news, Frank Hammer speaks with labor scholar and activist Eric Blanc about the growing role of organized workers—especially federal unions—in confronting the Trump-Musk authoritarian agenda. They discuss the resurgence of May Day protests, the push for a general strike in 2028, and the urgent need for mass resistance now, not later. Blanc outlines how Trump’s attacks on federal unions are a warning shot for the entire labor movement, drawing historical parallels to Reagan’s PATCO firings. He also calls on union leaders, including the AFL-CIO, to move beyond court battles and into coordinated, disruptive action.

Part Three – The Global Axis of the Far Right

Paul Jay — Mon, 12 May 2025 12:23:55 -0400

Trump’s tariff war isn’t about protecting jobs — it’s part of a global strategy to empower a far-right alliance with Putin, Orbán, and nationalist movements across Europe. This episode exposes how economic sabotage and weaponized antisemitism fuel authoritarianism — and how workers and students are fighting back.

Part Two – Boast About Jobs, Suppress Worker Power

Paul Jay — Sat, 10 May 2025 13:54:03 -0400

Trump sells his tariff agenda as a jobs boom for American workers — but it’s a smokescreen for a global attack on labor. At home, new factories are routed to anti-union states, while Trump’s appointees quietly dismantle the NLRB to block worker organizing. Abroad, tariffs target export economies like China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, fueling layoffs and driving down wages to benefit U.S. corporate margins. It’s a calculated campaign to suppress labor power worldwide. But the chaos it’s unleashed — from domestic legal battles to global economic disruption — suggests the plan may be backfiring. Even some of Trump’s allies are starting to question whether the madness is strategic… or just madness.

Can the Green Transition Work for Workers? – Robert Pollin

Paul Jay — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:50:47 -0400

This interview was produced by INET. Robert Pollin presents a compelling case for a global Green New Deal that fights climate change without sacrificing jobs. He explains why the shift to renewable energy is not just technologically possible, but economically beneficial—creating far more jobs than fossil fuels. But without strong labor protections and guaranteed wages, pensions, and reemployment for fossil fuel workers, the transition risks political backlash. Drawing from work in West Virginia and beyond, Pollin outlines the real costs, benefits, and global financing strategies needed to meet the 2050 net-zero target—while ensuring no community is left behind.

How to Stop a Nuclear War — with film director Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 12:00:58 -0400

On April 12, Paul Jay attended the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, where he discussed his upcoming documentary How to Stop a Nuclear War, based on the book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. The film, narrated by Emma Thompson, reveals how U.S. nuclear policy was built on secrecy, deception, and the willingness to risk global annihilation—and explores what can be done today to reduce the danger. Jay examines the fabricated threats and Cold War lies that justified the arms race and how these narratives continue to shape policy and public perception today. Jay will also discuss NATO and U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome."

Exposing the Lies and Secrets of the Nuclear Era | Nobel Peace Talks

Paul Jay — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 09:38:05 -0400

In cooperation with the Outrider Foundation, the Nobel Peace Center invites you to a unique conversation with Paul Jay about his work with the new documentary film about Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Paper whistleblower and author of “Doomsday Machine”.

The Decline of American Journalism – Robert McChesney

Paul Jay — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 13:59:00 -0400

In remembrance of Robert W. McChesney, the esteemed media scholar and activist who passed away on March 25, 2025, we are republishing an interview that delves into his profound insights on media, democracy, and society. McChesney, co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press and author of influential works such as “Rich Media, Poor Democracy,” dedicated his life to challenging corporate control of the media and advocating for a more democratic communication system. Through this conversation, readers can revisit McChesney’s enduring contributions and the critical perspectives he shared throughout his career.

What Does the Ukrainian Working Class Want? – Paul Jay & Denys Gorbach

Paul Jay — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:53:21 -0400

As the U.S. and Russia discuss a possible ceasefire, what role do the Ukrainian people—especially the working class—have in shaping the outcome? Paul Jay speaks with Ukrainian political scientist Denys Gorbach about the war, class dynamics, and the neoliberal assault on workers’ rights during the conflict—a rare, progressive, class-conscious look at the war in Ukraine.

Can Iran Kick Its Oil Addiction? – Djavad Salehi Isfahani Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 15:29:07 -0400

In part two, economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani outlines what's necessary for Iran to have a just energy transition and sustainable future. Salehi-Isfahani urges a reversal of destructive U.S. sanctions in order for Iran to better tap into its highly-educated workforce. He also argues that Iran is in a much more advantageous position to move away from its oil-export model, especially when compared to other oil-producing Gulf countries.

How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare – Djavad Salehi-Isfahani Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 16:01:06 -0500

U.S. President Trump has extended the aims of his first presidential term’s “maximum pressure campaign” by slapping additional sanctions on Iran. Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech, describes the detrimental effects of U.S. sanctions on Iran’s economy and society. Salehi-Isfahani illustrates how the sanctions’ differentiated effects often result in them being “invisible” to certain segments of Iranian society, leaving some Iranians convinced that their government is solely to blame for the country’s economic woes. In addition, he asserts that the combined effects of U.S. sanctions and Iran’s policy choices continue to hollow out the Iranian middle class: while the government has assisted the poor with large direct cash transfer programs, it has largely ignored the demands of its middle class.

How South Africa’s Coal Exports to Israel Undermines Its Palestine Solidarity – Patrick Bond Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 15:32:04 -0500

In part two, political economist Patrick Bond outlines the activities of Glencore and other South African energy corporations which continue to ship coal to Israel’s electricity grid. Despite the historic efforts of South Africa to bring a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, as well as its involvement in the Hague Group to demand enforcement of international rulings on Israel’s unlawful occupation, Bond discusses South African policies and crony capitalist transactions which ultimately undermine these Palestine solidarity initiatives. With corporations such as India’s Adani Group heavily invested in Israel’s economy, Bond exposes the contradictions in BRICS’ stance towards Israel.

The Failure of Global Finance is Systemic

Paul Jay — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 15:26:39 -0500

Jane D’Arista walks us through a comprehensive analysis of a global economy flooded with US dollar liabilities, economies bound to damaging export-led growth models, and vulnerable households piling up useless debts. She offers a rigorous template of policy and regulatory solutions encompassing reform of the US Federal Reserve and the International Payments System and calls to continue fighting to get ideas out. Produced by GPEnewsdocs.

Trump’s Weaponization of Space & the War in Ukraine – Wilkerson & Jay Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 17:55:16 -0500

In part 2 of Paul Jay’s discussion with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, they examine Trump’s push for a new missile defense system—a step toward the weaponization of space that heightens the risk of nuclear war. They also analyze the roots of the war in Ukraine, the failure of U.S. foreign policy, and what’s needed now to prevent further escalation. TranscriptListenDonateSubscribeGuestMusic Paul JayHi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. This is part two of my interview with Larry Wilkerson about whether Trump is building, should I say, is the American political-economic system giving birth to a new made-in-America Mussolini-styled state. We're going to talk in this episode more about Trump's Iron Dome, nuclear weapons, and foreign policy, particularly Ukraine. Please join us.All right, let's focus on some of the foreign policy and military stuff because they're connected, obviously. I just want to start a little bit on the supposed cuts to the Pentagon. I think they're being very smart about various things, one of which they're talking about how Musk is going to go in and cut the Pentagon budget. I think it's pretty clear, and there's been even some straightforward admissions by some of the officials, that this isn't really about cuts. It's about moving the money around. It looks like there's a conflict developing between the old legacy's Lockheed and Northrop Grumman's, and the new Silicon Valley, SpaceX and Musk, Palantir of Peter Thiel, although they both invest in each other's stuff and which all want this new high tech AI weaponry. This weaponization of space. And they want to take money away from the old guys and give it to the new guys. Now, there is an easy answer if you're Trump. Give money to both.Col Lawrence WilkersonYeah.Paul JayMaybe that will be his answer because they don't really give a damn about the deficit anyway. I don't know. What's your thinking?Col Lawrence WilkersonThat's true. Well, I've seen the lines, and there's been much controversy over the lines amongst people like the Pentagon Budget Campaign, POGO, and others. There was euphoria in the beginning because it was just announced as cuts, but then very quickly, when the budgeteers got into it from all these groups, they saw, no, they're not cuts. It's just transferring money. It's going from this account to that account. This account over here is high-tech, and Elon Musk or somebody like that has a lot of stake in it. This account over here is old, and that's what he's doing. No cuts at all. There are zero cuts so far in terms of the top line. In fact, there's going to be a $100 billion-plus increase in the top line forced by Wicker and others in Congress.So we're going to be close to a trillion dollars. It's going to be clear it's over $900 billion, but it's going to be close to a trillion. And you're right. What you might call the vested contractors do not like the fact that, in many cases, the money is going away from accounts over which they have the profit-making capacity to accounts where other Silicon Valley, smaller startups, or whatever have the capacity because Hegseth thinks, and he may be right in this, these people are agile. They move fast, they move quickly, and if they make a mistake, they fix it. They don't charge you necessarily for fixing it, which has become a practice of the big guys. He's got some people in the Pentagon who are not necessarily displeased with this shifting of funds, but it's clear, and people need to understand this: there's no cutting going on. In fact, as I said, with Congress beefing it up by 100 plus, it's going to be an even bigger top line than last year.Paul JayOkay, so what do you say to people, whether they're Trump supporters or not? Because I think a lot of people don't understand the issue. Okay, you're going to weaponize space, but what you're really doing, according to President Trump, is creating, finally, after so many failures, an effective anti-ballistic missile system.

Gaza Whistleblowers: U.S. Officials Who Resigned in Protest

Paul Jay — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 14:16:33 -0500

The Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy webinar featuring three U.S. government officials who resigned in protest of American military and political support for the Israeli war on Gaza. Whistleblowers Harrison Mann, Annelle Sheline, and Alexander Smith will explain their motives for resigning, the consequences of their actions, and their views of U.S. policy in the region. The discussion will be moderated by Kelley Vlahos, senior advisor for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The Trump Coup Didn’t Fail: It’s Just Getting Started – Wilkerson and Jay Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 17:00:45 -0500

Is the U.S. heading toward a Mussolini-style corporate fascism? Colonel Larry Wilkerson joins Paul Jay to expose the power struggle shaping America’s future. From Trump’s influence to billionaires pushing for a CEO-run government, they break down the real coup happening in plain sight.

How Capitalism Pillages the Planet and Creates Chaos – Patrick Bond Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:50:31 -0500

Following decades of ongoing mineral extraction, environmental plunder, and the subsidization of the fossil fuel industry, the second Trump administration’s aggressive pro-drilling agenda unapologetically seeks to seize as many foreign and domestic minerals and dirty energy sources as possible. Patrick Bond, political economist and Director of the Centre for Social Change in Johannesburg, discusses the mix of neoliberalism and paleo-conservatism undergirding Elon Musk’s corporate takeover of the US government. Bond also discusses the motivation behind US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision to skip the solidarity-equality-sustainability G20 in South Africa, and the implications of the US’ withdrawal from international climate agreements, slashing of emissions-reduction goals, and support for destructive carbon-intensive industries.

Israel’s Prison Network Detains and Tortures Palestinians with Impunity – Jenna Abu Hasna

Paul Jay — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 13:53:07 -0500

Israeli military raids on the West Bank have intensified ever since the fragile ceasefire agreement came into effect in Gaza. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, Israeli forces have killed over 70 Palestinians in the West Bank this year alone and displaced thousands from their homes. These IDF raids not only target and kill Palestinians of all ages but serve as a pretext to launch mass arrest campaigns. Jenna Abu Hasna, international advocacy officer at the Ramallah-based NGO Addameer, describes Israel’s longstanding practice of mass arrests in the occupied Palestinian territories. Abu Hasna outlines Israel’s systemic torture of Palestinians in Israeli jails and its widespread practice of placing Palestinians under administrative detention for months – even years - without filing formal charges. Israel’s system of mass incarceration is not only a violation of international norms but serves as a tool to dispossess Palestinians of their rights, dignity, and land.

FDR’s Wartime Strategies Can Power a Just Transition Now – Martin Hart-Landsberg Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:08:28 -0500

In part two, economist Martin Hart-Landsberg underscores the importance of planning for a just transition and transformation of socio-economic relations. Hart-Landsberg examines FDR’s Defense Production Corporation and War Production Board which were established to coordinate the U.S. economy’s rapid conversion from civilian to military production. The entrepreneurial class largely opposed these changes, fearing cuts to their bottom line. Yet FDR’s government, through experimentation with different strategies, was able to successfully allocate resources towards wartime production and negotiate enough procurement contracts to drive the conversion. Hart-Landsberg’s historical analysis of the successes and challenges of FDR's WWII production model lends important insights for solidaristic organizing and eco-socialist activism.

Despite Gaza Ceasefire, Israel Accelerates Its Annexation of the West Bank – Rami Khouri

Paul Jay — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 12:12:31 -0500

Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri outlines the Israeli far-right’s longstanding opposition to Palestinian self-determination and, as he says, the very right of Palestinians to exist. Khouri discusses how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, together with President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have shredded international law at every opportunity in their genocidal slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. Yet despite Trump’s success in pressuring Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire deal, the agreement itself is on thin ice: Israel’s resumption of strikes in Gaza could lead to an unraveling of phase two negotiations, precluding the possibility of a permanent ceasefire and ultimately of any effective Palestinian governance and statehood.

Trump, God, and the Techno Philosopher Kings

Paul Jay — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:40:44 -0500

Trump’s inaugural speech avoided direct war rhetoric with China but signaled dangerous trends: a growing alliance between corporate elites and government, imperialist ambitions, climate denial, and authoritarian overreach. With tech CEOs at the forefront and Musk in a key government role, the fusion of state and corporate power mirrors Mussolini-style corporatism. From threats to seize the Panama Canal to deploying emergency powers domestically, Trump’s vision risks U.S. democracy and global stability. This analysis unpacks the implications of a presidency rooted in power, profit, and peril.

Debunking the IMF Myth: South Korea A ‘Free Market Miracle’? – Martin Hart-Landsberg Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 10:12:22 -0500

Despite being (mis)characterized by the IMF as a free-market "success story," South Korea's development model involved state planning and import controls for decades prior to the 1997 East Asia debt crisis. Economist Martin Hart-Landsberg, Professor Emeritus at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, explains how capitalist globalization materialized and morphed in East Asia, often to the detriment of its worker population. With Trump's inauguration nearing, Hart-Landsberg sheds light on why contemporary U.S.-China hawks view China as a threat rather than a technological competitor.

Why Greenland? How Trump Learned to Love the Bomb

Paul Jay — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:42:03 -0500

Trump’s interest in Greenland is closely tied to his plan to build a nationwide anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, which he calls the "American Iron Dome." It could trigger a nuclear war.

How the Left Won Sri Lanka – Devaka Gunawardena Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:20:41 -0500

In part two, political economist Dr. Devaka Gunawardena outlines the political dynasties in Sri Lanka that governed the country until the National People Power’s (NPP) recent electoral victory. Gunawardena discusses how NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake has garnered widespread support across different ethnic and class lines despite being a political outsider.

Historic Victory for Sri Lankan Left – Can They Deliver? – Devaka Gunawardena Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:46:32 -0500

In November 2024, Anura Kumara Dissanayake's National People's Power (NPP) coalition won a two-thirds majority in Sri Lanka's general elections, marking a historic win for the Sri Lankan left. NPP's victory came at a time of prolonged economic crisis exacerbated by the crushing terms of Sri Lanka's IMF agreement. Political economist Dr. Devaka Gunawardena traces the factors leading to Sri Lanka's economic woes and how international sovereign bonds (ISBs) held by private equity firms such as BlackRock constitute a large segment of Sri Lanka's debt. Given the government's recent private creditor debt restructuring agreement, can the NPP still deliver on its campaign promises of wealth redistribution and reversing austerity?

Lawyer Who Won $9.5B Case Against Chevron Spent 993 Days Under House Arrest – Demands Biden Pardon

Paul Jay — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 08:00:00 -0500

Steven Donziger, an American environmental and human rights lawyer, won a landmark case against Chevron, requiring it to pay 9.5 billion USD in damages to indigenous communities in Ecuador for destroying and polluting their land. In retaliation, Chevron launched a suit against Donziger, accusing him of fabricating evidence in the case. In an unprecedented move, a U.S. judge appointed a corporate prosecutor, paid for by Chevron itself, to litigate a case against Donziger after the U.S. Justice Department refused to prosecute the case. Donziger was released after spending a total of 993 days under house arrest for a bogus criminal contempt of court charge but has yet to be pardoned. Donziger urges viewers to call the U.S. White House at (202) 456 - 1111 and demand a pardon from President Biden to undermine Big Oil's corporate prosecution of climate justice.

Paul Jay – Reflections on Daniel Ellsberg and Nuclear War

Paul Jay — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 08:00:00 -0500

How did a Cold War nuclear planner become one of its biggest critics? Paul Jay traces Daniel Ellsberg's journey from nuclear war planner to discovering the lies behind the "missile gap" with the Soviets. Jay exposes how defense industry executives and government officials manufactured the Cold War to keep military spending flowing after World War II. While the Soviet Union posed an ideological challenge, its military threat was deliberately exaggerated. The real goal? Using massive defense spending to stimulate the American economy while suppressing domestic opposition. The nuclear systems Ellsberg warned about remain active today. Jay's upcoming film exposes how Cold War thinking continues to endanger us all - and what we can do about it.

Israeli, U.S., and EU Tech Firms Uphold Global Power Hierarchies – Petra Molnar Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 08:00:00 -0500

In part two, Petra Molnar, anthropologist and human rights lawyer, speaks about the dangers of high-risk AI systems and state efforts to sabotage its regulation, as seen in the recent watering down of the European Union’s AI Act. Molnar explains how Israeli and U.S. surveillance tech firms market their drone technology and other AI products as “solutions” to state “problems.” The lucrative border and surveillance tech sector has grown exponentially as a result of governments deploying these technologies to experiment on the world’s most marginalized populations – from Palestinians in Gaza to migrants at the U.S. and EU’s deadliest land and sea borders.

Genocide Scholar: U.S. Policy Undermining Post-Holocaust International Law – Omer Bartov Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 12:01:12 -0500

In part two, historian and genocide scholar Omer Bartov discusses the U.S.' gross rejection of numerous human rights organizations’ reports substantiating Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, as well as France’s comical rebuttal of the ICC arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Bartov contends that the West’s dangerous sabotage of international legal norms flies in the face of the very post-WWII edifice of international conventions established in response to the Nazi genocide of the Jews and designed to prevent state actors from committing such atrocities. He also discusses Trump’s victory, highlighting Biden/Harris’ Middle East policy as a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party, which greatly alienated young voters.

Israel’s Elimination of Palestinians from Northern Gaza Continues with Impunity – Omer Bartov Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 15:20:40 -0500

According to recent Lebanese Health Ministry figures, Israel has killed a total of 4,047 people in Lebanon since October 2023, with 3,402 people killed in the past few months alone. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared Israel’s invasion of Lebanon a political victory for his coalition of right-wing fanatics. Omer Bartov, Israeli American genocide scholar and historian, characterizes Israel’s war crimes in Lebanon as a political exercise in saber-rattling for Bibi’s domestic audience, while the IDF prioritizes the elimination of Palestinians from northern Gaza and the starvation of Gaza’s besieged population. Will the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire— now on shaky ground after numerous Israeli violations— actually hold?

Big Finance, Big Tech AI Titans Ride Next Wave of Colonization at COP16

Paul Jay — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:30:07 -0500

Jim Thomas portrays the 2024 Global Biodiversity Convention as a struggle between the interests of the world’s biggest profit makers and the interests of people struggling to safeguard their planet, their food and their economies. Blandishing promises of technofixes and a meager fund, the profiteers got their way. Produced by GPEnewsdocs.

U.S. Threatens ICC, Undermines International Legal Norms – Triestino Mariniello Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:26:19 -0500

In part two, Triestino Mariniello, Legal Representative of Gaza Victims at the International Criminal Court, discusses U.S. hypocrisy in accepting the ICC's jurisdiction to issue arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin but not for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Mariniello discusses how international legal instruments, such as the ICJ rulings on the risk of Israel committing genocide in Gaza, have been effective when not subject to U.S. intervention, unlike proceedings in the UN Security Council. Whatever is left of international law, he argues, is due to the perseverance of the Global South in pursuing justice for Palestinians.

Gaza Victims’ Lawyer Rebuts Western Objections to ICC Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant – Triestino Mariniello Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 13:30:56 -0500

Following the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor's release of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Germany, France, and the U.S. falsely characterized the warrants as inapplicable. International lawyer Triestino Mariniello, who represents Gaza Victims at the ICC, explains the legal obligation of state parties to the Rome Statute to enforce these arrest warrants. Mariniello exposes the U.S.' false statements around the ICC's supposed lack of jurisdiction over the State of Palestine and Israeli nationals.

AI Border Surveillance Tech Profits Soar, Human Rights Across the Board Sink – Petra Molnar Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 13:58:12 -0500

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's promise to deport millions of people draws attention to longstanding practices of tracking and intercepting migrants using artificial intelligence and high-risk surveillance technologies. Petra Molnar, human rights lawyer and anthropologist, underscores how border surveillance tech firms drive and profit from the U.S., Canada, and the European Union's criminal migration policy agenda. Yet the application of these insidious technologies, largely developed by Israeli tech firms and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, is not limited to borderlands and has dystopian human rights impacts in everyday life.

The Corporate Coup Against FDR – Jonathan M. Katz Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0500

In part two, journalist Jonathan M. Katz discusses the financial elite and fascist sympathizers who were conspiring to undo FDR’s economic reforms in what is known as the foiled Business Plot of 1933. Retired U.S. Marine General Smedley Butler, who outed the coup plotters in Special House committee hearings in 1934, subsequently published War is a Racket, a pamphlet critiquing the monied interests behind America’s imperial war machine. Katz describes Butler’s transformation from “racketeer for capitalism” to anti-war critic and underscores the political salience of working-class issues in the Great Depression’s aftermath, as demonstrated in the Bonus March of 1932 and in FDR’s New Deal.

Gangsters of Capitalism – Jonathan M. Katz Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0500

U.S. interventions at the turn of the 20th century were numerous and widespread, including bloody operations in Cuba against the Spanish and then against the Cubans themselves, in northern China against the Boxer Rebellion, and most notably, the Balangiga massacre on the island of Samar in the Philippines. General Smedley Butler, a decorated U.S. marine, was stationed on all these fronts and was subsequently involved in invasions of Mexico, Nicaragua, and Haiti in 1915. Jonathan M. Katz, author of Gangsters of Capitalism, recounts the story of Butler and how he ultimately turned against the American war machine, describing himself as "a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism," who had propped up the pillaging of Latin America by monopolists and bankers such as J.P. Morgan.

War is Not About Truth, Justice and the American Way (1/8)

Paul Jay — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 10:39:32 -0500

This interview was originally published on June 3, 2011. Lawrence Wilkerson, Collin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, reflects on his life journey from “cold warrior” to harsh critic of US foreign policy.

Wilkerson & Jay: Don’t Despair, Organize

Paul Jay — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 18:08:27 -0500

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson and Paul Jay analyze Trump's 2024 victory, attributing Harris's failure in part to a campaign that avoided progressive policies that would lower the cost of living - to please billionaire donors. Wilkerson warns of a climate catastrophe and a draconian Trump administration that leads to the collapse of American society. Jay argues Harris's defeat creates an opening for a broad democratic, independent movement that takes control of the Democratic Party at state and local levels. Both emphasize organizing in major cities in Democratic-controlled states, focusing on mobilizing the working poor, urban and rural, who usually don't vote - a potentially game-changing constituency the Democratic establishment has ignored. TranscriptListenDonateSubscribeGuestMusic Paul Jay Hi, welcome to theAnalysis.news. I'm Paul Jay. As you'll notice, I'm in my brand new artificial intelligence studio. In the last interview I did with Larry Wilkerson, I got so many complaints about how everything looked. Justly so. I did something about it, so I hope this is at least an improvement. Joining me in just a few seconds will be Larry Wilkerson. We're going to talk about the election results. Don't forget, there's a donation button you can click. If you'rae on YouTube, please subscribe. Although most of our subscribers are constantly complaining that YouTube never notifies them of a new video and continues to try to suppress what we do. The best way to watch us is on the website at theAnalysis.news. If YouTube takes down any of our videos, which they have done in the past, we have other ways to feed the website. You'll always get to see us there. We'll be back in a few seconds with Larry Wilkerson. Now, joining us to talk about the election results in the United States, which is the beginning of a new era of a return- was that back to the future? Now, joining us is Larry, who doesn't need any introduction to our normal viewers and to most people who follow the news. Thanks for joining us, Larry. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Good to be with you, Paul. By the way, did you get my cheque? Paul Jay No. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson I mailed it about 10 days ago, so it should be getting there. Paul Jay Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, that's terrific. If people want to donate, that'd be great. All right, so let's talk about what happened. I'm blown away at what an awful campaign the leadership of the Democratic Party conducted. It wasn't something I said once I saw the results. I was saying it all through the campaign. Kamala Harris simply would not answer in any straightforward way almost any real question, but particularly the most important economic question. She would not answer why inflation is coming down, but the cost of living is not on the whole, especially food, rent, and other basic necessities. She never answered why that's happening, and she never said what she would do about it. There's some talk about price gouging, but she actually never said how she would stop that and more or less stopped talking about that as the campaign came to its conclusion. The most important things that need to be talked about, i.e., the existential threats facing America and the world, the climate crisis, almost not a word, and the issue of the threat of nuclear war. In fact, the only person to mention it at all, really, was Trump, and only when he's talking about his crazy Iron Dome proposal to create a new anti-ballistic missile system, which we'll talk about as we get into the interview. In the course of this, let's talk about these three things I'd like to talk about. But first, just your basic reaction, and then we can get into these three areas. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson Frankly, I was stunned by the results, and not because I wasn't watching the polls. I was, but I don't trust the polls anymore. They're too much aligned with interests that back them.

Who Owns America’s Debt? – Bob Pollin Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 11:38:15 -0400

In part 2, Bob Pollin, economist and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), lays out policies to increase workers’ wages and bargaining power and bring down the price of food items such as eggs. He tackles the issue of U.S. government debt, as well as fiscal conservative and MAGA Republican claims that China owns most of this debt. These falsehoods deflect from Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich and his high military expenditure, which ran up U.S. debt far more than under the Biden administration. Pollin asserts the best way to reduce high-interest payments on U.S. debt and support social services is to increase government revenue via capital gains and income taxes.

Inflation Control and Curbing Workers’ Power in the Neoliberal Era – Bob Pollin Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 16:07:48 -0400

Following the inflationary period of the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation is largely down and currently at 2.1% in the U.S. Bob Pollin, economist, and Co-Director at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), explains the causes of inflation, including demand-side and supply-side factors. He illustrates how the economic models used to tackle inflation are essentially tools to chip away at workers' bargaining power. Pollin recounts the history of policies of inflation control, tracing their development to the era of globalization and neoliberalism championed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan.

Inequality Causing Social Fabric to Unravel, Rebellion in Military Possible – Wilkerson and Jay

Paul Jay — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 15:25:16 -0400

Former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, says if he lived in a swing state, he would vote for Harris, in spite of having no sympathy for the leadership of the Democratic Party. He analyzes how America's social fabric is unraveling and how this explains Trump's mass appeal. He warns that rebellion within the military remains possible, discusses the role of Christian nationalism in the armed forces, and examines how economic inequality has destabilized American society.

Which Billionaires Are Pulling Trump’s Strings?

Paul Jay — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 15:57:26 -0400

Donald Trump called himself a “self-funder” in 2016 in an effort to show Americans he could not be bought off like the rest of Washington. Eight years later, Trump has yet to pledge even a dime of his own money to his campaign, instead relying heavily on the big-money donors he said could never influence him as president.

Class Struggle and Palestinian Self-Determination – MK Ofer Cassif part 2/2

Paul Jay — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:53:25 -0400

In part 2, Member of Israeli Knesset Dr. Ofer Cassif discusses the regional class interests that actively oppose Palestinian statehood and equality for Israelis and Palestinians. He describes the U.S.-backed bilateral Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE, and Israel and Bahrain, as agreements to further entrench class inequalities and capitalist military-industrial interests in the Middle East and foreclose the possibility of Palestinian self-determination.

Is Trump the Greater Danger? – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 15:53:40 -0400

This episode of Oats for Breakfast Podcast interviews journalist and filmmaker Paul Jay. Paul discusses why a second Trump term would be significantly more dangerous than previous Republican presidencies, including Trump’s first term in office. He also talks about what it might take, over the long term, to beat back the advances that the far-right has been making in the U.S. and Canada.

America’s Twisted Iran Policy – Barbara Slavin

Paul Jay — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 11:58:51 -0400

The Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), which the United States was a signatory to but abandoned under former President Trump, is unlikely to be revived. Barbara Slavin, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center and journalist with extensive experience reporting from Iran, underscores Iran's desperate need for sanctions relief. She argues that the JCPOA is an outdated framework, given President Biden's refusal to sign an executive order to bring the U.S. back into the deal, and that current twisted American foreign policy greenlights Israel's maniacal plans to target Iran.

Member of Israeli Parliament: “After Sinwar’s Killing, Netanyahu Doubles Down on Genocide” – MK Ofer Cassif Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 14:24:55 -0400

Following Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, U.S. President Joe Biden asserted that Sinwar’s death could represent an opportunity to reach a political settlement in Gaza. Yet member of Israeli Knesset Dr. Ofer Cassif argues that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will continue his spree of massacring Palestinians and Lebanese with impunity. Cassif represents the Hadash-Ta’al political faction, which is a union of the Arab-Jewish far-left party Hadash, and the Arab nationalist party Ta’al – comprising the only remaining opposition in Israel’s right-wing political sphere.

Trump’s Unholy Alliance – (Full Version)

Paul Jay — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 10:06:00 -0400

Above is our short documentary film, “Trump’s Unholy Alliance.” Generous individual donors funded it. It is not associated or aligned with the Democratic Party. It is released for educational purposes because mainstream media mostly ignores these critical issues. We are not suggesting how, or even if, you should vote. Paul Jay is a veteran independent journalist and filmmaker. He is best known for his film “Hitman Hart, wrestling with shadows,” which Jordan B. Peterson called “one of the best documentaries about anything I have ever seen.” Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) said the film is “brutally honest. A must see.” This is not to suggest that either gentleman endorses “Trump’s Unholy Alliance.” On the contrary, we expect they would both disagree with most of what you will see. Watch and judge for yourself.

U.S. Approval of Israel’s Assassinations Enabling War Against Iran – Richard Silverstein part 2/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 13:49:13 -0400

In part 2, Richard Silverstein, analyst and author of the Israeli security state blog Tikun Olam, breaks down the Biden administration’s explicit support for Israel’s war crimes in Lebanon and efforts to eliminate Hezbollah. Unlawful U.S. approval for Israel’s extrajudicial killings of Iranian IRGC leader in Lebanon and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil propelled Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel, which inconveniently degraded Israeli military assets. Will Israel now strike Iran’s nuclear facilities?

IDF to Eliminate Palestinians from Northern Gaza – Richard Silverstein part 1/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 15:33:27 -0400

Israel's genocidal war on Gaza continues unabated and has been expanded to a second front in Lebanon. American writer Richard Silverstein, author of Tikun Olam, a blog reporting on the Israeli security state, describes how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is weaponizing national grief over the attacks of October 7 to legitimize its murderous regional project. He reports on IDF general Giora Eiland's blueprint to eliminate Palestinians from the north of Gaza and ultimately build illegal Israeli settlements.

Big Digital Tech Moves Into Synthetic Biology: The Generative AI Rush/Black Box Biotech – Pt 1/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 09:54:58 -0400

Jim Thomas says profit driven generative biology, Big Tech integration of artificial intelligence with synthetic biology, raises serious challenges for global oversight of biotechnology and governments need to separate hype from reality at the upcoming 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference (CBD COP16). Produced by GPEnewsdocs.

Wilkerson: U.S. Fuels Netanyahu’s Criminal War Machine

Paul Jay — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 13:45:58 -0400

The Biden administration has been pursuing a reckless policy in the Middle East in which Israel's massacres in Gaza and now in Lebanon are unconditionally supported with deliveries of 2,000 lb bunker-busting bombs and diplomatic cover. Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as former Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, discusses Iran's policy of strategic patience in which a response to Israel's extra-judicial killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, as well as a fatal strike on Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, possibly came too late according to Iran's hardliners.

Price Gouging, Greedflation, and Monopolization – Bob Pollin part 2/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:12:30 -0400

Given voters’ concerns over rising food and housing costs, Kamala Harris has pledged to combat price gouging if elected president, though she has yet to clearly lay out the hallmarks of the rest of her economic policy. In part 2, Bob Pollin, economist and advisor to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Pramila Jayapal on Medicare For All, explains the meaning of price gouging and delves into the causes of inflation during the COVID pandemic.

Dark Money Aligned with Neofascists in Catholic Church – Matthew Fox (former Catholic priest) part 2/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 13:06:20 -0400

In part two, American theologian and priest Matthew Fox traces out the links between the fascist wing of the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, American Cardinal Burke, and Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor and former Executive Chairman at Breitbart News. He explains how Cardinal Burke and other neofascists in the Catholic Church opposed the Second Vatican Council, which sought to update the Catholic Church. He then explains how both Co-Chairman of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo, who drew up lists of potential conservative judges to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and President of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, share a right-wing Catholic ideology.

The Political Economy of Saving the Planet – Bob Pollin part 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 12:33:59 -0400

The issue of banning (or not banning) fracking has been at the forefront of the 2024 presidential debates between former President Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Fracking, a technique that involves horizontal drilling to extract gas and oil from shale rock, risks methane leaks and other environmental hazards. Professor Bob Pollin, economist and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), lays out the elements of a Global Green New Deal to avert climate catastrophe and achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Can we frack and still reach this goal?

Trump & the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ – Matthew Fox (Theologian and Priest) part 1/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 14:57:27 -0400

At first glance, an impressive fresco in San Brizio’s Chapel in the Orvieto Cathedral appears to show Christ addressing a crowd – but after closer inspection, one realizes that the main figure is, in fact, the Antichrist, with a demon speaking into his left ear. Luca Signorelli’s painting, The Preaching and Punishment of the Antichrist, inspired artist Michelangelo and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud to produce some of their greatest works. It also inspired American theologian and priest Matthew Fox to write his new book Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election. In part 1, Fox argues that the archetype applies to the darker sides of MAGA and its Christian-nationalist backers.

Project 2025 Will Decapitate Civilian Oversight of the U.S. Military – Mikey Weinstein

Paul Jay — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 14:43:12 -0400

The First Amendment guarantees religious freedom and the separation of Church and State, basic tenets of American democracy which conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation is intent on undermining. Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, describes how the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 would upend military protocols to eliminate civilian oversight. He believes a dystopian future in which the rights of racialized and marginalized groups are denied would be in store under a second Trump presidency. TranscriptListenDonateSubscribeGuestMusic Talia BaroncelliHi, I'm Talia Baroncelli, and you're watching theAnalysis.news. I'll shortly be joined by Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. We'll be speaking about Project 2025 and the implications it has for the U.S. military. If you'd like to support the work that we do, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you're on our mailing list; that way, you're always up to date every time a new episode is published. You can like and subscribe to the show on YouTube or on other podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify. See you in a bit with Mikey. Project 2025 is a lengthy policy agenda authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative and Christian nationalist think tank. Investigative outlet ProPublica recently obtained Project 2025 private training videos, which involve several former Trump officials. This corroborates the connection between former President Trump and the Heritage Foundation. One of the videos features Bethany Kozma, a former Deputy Chief of Staff at USAID during the Trump administration. In this video, she discusses Project 2025's opposition to legislation trying to mitigate the effects of climate change. She reads from page 364 of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership, which states that "In the name of combating climate change, policies have been used to create an artificial energy scarcity that will require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a problem that government and special interests themselves created." They don't perceive climate change or carbon-intensive industries as posing a threat to society or to the environment but as a set of policies meant to create energy scarcity and benefit a certain segment of the elite. Joining me to discuss these issues is Mikey Weinstein. He is the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the constitutional right of religious freedom for the U.S. Armed Forces. He is also a lawyer and a former Air Force officer and served as White House Legal Counsel to the Reagan Administration. He also served as first general counsel to Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who ran for president twice. He's the author of several books, including Was God on Our Side and No Snowflake in an Avalanche. It's great to have you again, Mikey. Mikey WeinsteinThanks, Talia. I'm looking forward to it as well. Talia BaroncelliBefore we get into Project 2025, can you explain to our viewers what you do at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation? Mikey WeinsteinAbsolutely. We are a weapon, and we've been fighting Christian nationalism and calling it out before anybody else did, that I'm aware of, going back to the early 2000s. Our job is to protect the U.S. Constitutionally mandated wall, separating Church and State in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is the U.S. military: the Marine Corps, Navy, Army, Air Force, and Space Force.We have clients in all 18 national security agencies. Some are well-known, like the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, etc. We have clients in the U.S. Coast Guard, which is not the DOD; that's the Department of Homeland Security, and even the U.S. Maritime Service,

New Apostolic Reformation: Firebrand Trumpers Galvanizing a Multi-Racial Evangelical Base – André Gagné

Paul Jay — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 14:58:40 -0400

Throughout his recent presidential campaigns, former President Trump has garnered widespread conservative Evangelical support and the endorsement of powerful televangelists such as Paula White-Cain. André Gagné, Professor of Theology at Concordia University, explains the New Apostolic Reformation and its ties to the Neo-Charismatic Pentecostal movement, which constitutes the largest growing sector of Christianity both globally and within the United States. In the U.S., Neo-Charismatic Christianity has been largely hijacked by New Apostolic Reformation firebrand Trump supporters who push a radical conservative agenda.

What Is the State & the Challenge to Transcend It?

Paul Jay — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 13:11:08 -0400

John Bellamy Foster points to "Beyond Leviathan" by István Mészáros for insights into the ancient origins of the state and nature of its evolution over thousands of years, the necessity to move beyond the state, and how to meet that challenge. Produced by GPEnewsdocs.

Trump’s Unholy Alliance – Risking the Apocalypse for Dollars

Paul Jay — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 15:38:59 -0400

In this essay, Paul Jay unravels the alliance of tech billionaires and religious zealots behind the Trump/Vance campaign and their plans to build an American “Iron Dome,” a new ABM system that threatens nuclear war. This exposé reveals why Silicon Valley tycoons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are bankrolling a Trump/Vance ticket that promises to make voting obsolete and impose a religious techno-authoritarian state. Does this represent the teachings of Jesus?

War Criminal Netanyahu’s Reckless Provocations – Omer Bartov part 2/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 15:24:14 -0400

In part two, historian and genocide scholar Omer Bartov discusses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decisions to prolong the plight of the Israeli hostages and the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza in order to remain in power. Bartov also derides the U.S. billionaires who pressured university presidents to break up pro-Palestine student encampments.

Israel’s Abu Ghraib – Omer Bartov part 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:33:17 -0400

In a much-anticipated ruling, the ICJ has unequivocally denounced the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as illegal. Israeli-American historian and genocide scholar Omer Bartov contextualizes Israeli society's widespread justification of the occupation and how Israeli politicians and mainstream media pundits are cheering on the torture of Palestinian detainees. He discusses the recent release of footage documenting the rape of Palestinians at the Sde Teiman detention center and the storming of several detention sites by Israeli far-right mobs in defense of Israel's "right to torture."

Is Macron Orchestrating a Coup? – Yasser Louati

Paul Jay — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 14:08:47 -0400

By calling snap parliamentary elections, French President Emmanuel Macron took a political gamble: it resulted in the left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front, winning the most seats, and Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally failing to obtain a majority. Political analyst Yasser Louati breaks down Macron's crushing electoral defeat and his undemocratic tactics in delaying the appointment of a new Prime Minister until after the Paris Olympics. The results reflect an increasing rejection of Macron's neo-liberalism and anti-Muslim policies, such as his hijab ban for French female athletes at the Olympics.

Paul Jay – Elon Musk’s Trump Card: Unmasking the Billionaire’s Political Play

Paul Jay — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 14:33:18 -0400

Tune in as we peel back the layers of Elon Musk's surprising support for Donald Trump. Is the tech titan really championing meritocracy and free speech, or is there a hidden agenda? From self-driving cars to space rockets, we'll explore how Musk's business empire might benefit from a Trump presidency. We'll dive into the contradictions between Musk's green tech image and Trump's climate denial, and examine how the world's richest man views unions, regulations, and the future of AI. Plus, we'll uncover the personal drama fueling Musk's political shift. Get ready for a wild ride through the mind of a maverick billionaire and the potential consequences for us all. Is Musk's vision of "Making America Greater" a technological utopia or a dystopian nightmare? Listen now and decide for yourself!

Netanyahu Hell-Bent on a Wider War – Trita Parsi

Paul Jay — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:06:23 -0400

The assassination of Hamas' top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, on Iranian soil was an embarrassment to the Iranian regime and its new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, lays out how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to corner Kamala Harris - should she win the presidency - into steering U.S. policy in the direction of an all-out war in the Middle East. Yet neither is her bearhug of Netanyahu, nor a war, inevitable.

France: What Does Far-Left and Far-Right Mean? – Sari Hanafi Pt. 2/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 15:01:41 -0400

In part 2, French-Palestinian sociologist Dr. Sari Hanafi discusses right-wing movements in France and Italy and the misuse of the descriptor "hard left" or "extreme left" to misrepresent the platform of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Unbowed.

Trump and Vance’s “Pro-Worker” Rhetoric a Cover for Tech Billionaires – Jonathan M. Katz

Paul Jay — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 14:28:24 -0400

During the hyper-masculine clown car that was the Republican National Convention, Trump and his VP nominee, J.D. Vance, spewed absurd anti-migrant accusations and supposed pro-worker policies. Journalist and author Jonathan M. Katz breaks down the reactionary rhetoric of MAGA Republicans and argues that Vance’s populism is anything but worker-friendly, given his well-established ties to Silicon Valley.

Exporting Extinction: The Global Political Economy of Biodiversity Loss

Paul Jay — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 14:50:18 -0400

Why governments further policy agendas that entrench and expand extractive industries that drive biodiversity loss is revealed in Exporting Extinction, a report exposing structural drivers incentivizing this extractive agenda and constraining what states can do to address economic development and ecological crises.

Weaponizing Antisemitism to Politically Assassinate the French Left – Sari Hanafi Pt. 1/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 13:31:03 -0400

Against all expectations, the left coalition, aptly calling itself the “New Popular Front,” was able to win the most seats - 182 out of 577 seats - in the final round of the French parliamentary elections. French-Palestinian sociologist Dr. Sari Hanafi explains how the left quickly formed a political alliance to keep Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, the National Rally, from gaining enough seats to govern in the French parliament. He delves into the weaponization of antisemitism to smear Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed, which is the largest leftist party within the New Popular Front.

Pentagon’s Outrageous Anti-China Operation Threatened Lives in the Philippines – Col. Larry Wilkerson

Paul Jay — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 12:14:56 -0400

A recent Reuters investigation uncovered a scandalous Pentagon operation that sought to discredit the Chinese Sinovac vaccine and sow distrust among the population in the Philippines towards China. Col. Larry Wilkerson discusses previous unlawful Strategic Information Operations (SIOs) launched by the Pentagon and the particular depravity of this operation initiated in Spring 2020 under President Trump’s administration, at a time when countries such as the Philippines did not possess their own vaccine manufacturing capacity and were accepting a free supply of vaccines from China.

Russia Out of Ukraine, Disband NATO – Latvian Politician’s Plan for Peace

Paul Jay — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 12:59:37 -0400

As the war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine continues to exact a catastrophic death toll for civilians and military forces alike, the prospect of a lasting peace remains elusive. Latvian politician Igor Pimenov denounces President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, calling it a colonial war that also adversely affects the Russian population. Pimenov lays out his proposal for a multilateral peace agreement between Ukraine, Russia, and its European neighbors.

Left Alliance Challenging Far-Right Takeover in France – Renaud Lambert

Paul Jay — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 12:48:52 -0400

In recent EU parliamentary elections, Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party won 31.4% of the vote, while the coalition representing President Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance party garnered an embarrassing 14%. Renaud Lambert, journalist at Le Monde Diplomatique, contextualizes the rise of the far-right, and how President Macron's decision to call snap legislative elections on June 30 and July 7 has prompted the left to form the New Popular Front, an unlikely coalition of four left-wing parties. Will this left alliance garner enough support to torpedo a far-right victory in the French parliament?

Beyond Genocide in Gaza: Settler Violence in the West Bank – Omer Bartov

Paul Jay — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:01:26 -0400

As Israel continues its campaign of destruction in Gaza, the situation in the West Bank has deteriorated, with the Israeli Defense Forces as well as settlers killing over 500 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7. Holocaust and genocide studies scholar Dr. Omer Bartov unpacks Israel’s genocidal strategy in the Gaza Strip, and describes the surge of settler violence towards Palestinians. Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has not only armed the settlers but has been incorporating them into Israeli forces operating in the West Bank.

Workers’ Movements in Revolutionary Iran and Europe – Saeed Rahnema part 2/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 16:52:09 -0400

In part 2, political scientist Dr. Saeed Rahnema discusses his experience in the workers' council movement leading up to and during the Iranian Revolution of 1979-1980 and addresses the Islamic Republic's opposition to unions. He also contends that modern-day working classes in the West are ideologically and culturally segmented and that the left has failed to mobilize at numerous historical junctures.

The (In)conceivability of Real Workers’ Control – Saeed Rahnema part 1/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 11:38:59 -0400

The workers' council movement took shape in several forms across Europe, Russia, Tito's Yugoslavia, Algeria, and Iran. Political scientist Dr. Saeed Rahnema discusses the failure of workers' councils in these different historical contexts and traces out the tensions between workers' control and workers' participation under capitalism. Is real workers' control feasible under capitalism, and do struggles for increased workers' participation and higher wages necessarily lead to workers' control?

Biden’s Loyalty to Israel Rooted in Cold War & Laced with AIPAC Money – Adolph Reed pt 2/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:51:17 -0400

Paul Jay welcomes Adolph Reed, an academic, author, activist, and organizer, for part two of their discussion. Reed says there should be no illusions about corporate Democrats’ aggressive foreign policies, especially in Gaza and Ukraine, but there should also be no illusions that Trump won't be dangerously worse.

Should the Left Vote for the Enemy? – Adolph Reed part 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 31 May 2024 17:23:03 -0400

Adolph Reed argues that the left should vote for Biden in the coming presidential elections, even though Corporate Democrats defend the underlying system, Trump and the forces that back him represent a more overt form of fascistization.

Why Did Biden Slam ICC Over Israeli-Hamas Arrest Warrants? – Assal Rad

Paul Jay — Tue, 28 May 2024 16:44:06 -0400

The Biden administration has denounced ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan for seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismael Haniyeh, and Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri. Middle East analyst Assal Rad underscores the U.S. government's complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza by arming Israel despite numerous ICJ rulings calling for Netanyahu's government to adhere to its commitments under the Genocide Convention, and most recently, to immediately halt its operation in Rafah. She also discusses the potential implications of the recent deaths of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

Bellicose British Foreign Policy in Ukraine and Gaza – Tom Stevenson part 2/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 24 May 2024 16:14:44 -0400

In part 2, journalist Tom Stevenson discusses the nuclear threat posited by the ongoing war in Ukraine, with Russia recently staging tactical nuclear exercises close to the Ukrainian border, allegedly in response to provocative statements made by U.K.’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron endorsing Ukraine’s potential use of British-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory. He also breaks down Israel’s destructive aims in Gaza and why certain bloody conflicts, such as the war in Tigray, have been forgotten.

Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony – Tom Stevenson part 1/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 22 May 2024 18:05:01 -0400

The post-World War II era was characterized by decolonization in Asia and Africa, with resistance movements leading to the unraveling of the British empire in colonies such as former British Kenya, where the Mau Mau launched a lengthy uprising between 1952-1960, as well as in former British India, with the dissolution of the British Raj and creation of an independent India and Pakistan in 1947. Journalist Tom Stevenson provides historical examples illustrating how the rise of American hegemony following the decline of Britain’s imperial power was bolstered by British foreign policy at every juncture.

How Indian, Chinese, and U.S. Corporations Vie for Control of Sri Lankan Ports – Asoka Bandarage part 2/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 22 May 2024 13:36:53 -0400

Due to its prime geographical location in maintaining global value chains and shipping routes, the U.S., via the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), as well as India’s Adani Group and China, are all investing in Sri Lanka’s ports. In part 2, sociologist Asoka Bandarage discusses how many countries and multi-national corporations treat Sri Lanka as testing and dumping grounds, exemplified by reports that the Dali ship, which crashed into the Baltimore Bridge, was carrying hazardous waste to Sri Lanka.

IMF & Private Creditors Subject Sri Lanka to Neo-Colonial Debt Bondage – Asoka Bandarage part 1/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 15 May 2024 14:22:21 -0400

The Sri Lankan government turned to the IMF for a near $3 billion bailout to repay loans provided by India and Japan, as well as international sovereign bonds issued by foreign creditors such as BlackRock. Dr. Asoka Bandarage, sociologist and author of Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World, suggests that Prime Minister Rajapaksa's declaration of bankruptcy in 2022 and the subsequent IMF bailout under Prime Minister Wickremesinghe was not an absolute necessity, but an attempt to shift Sri Lanka further under the umbrella of Western and Indian institutions, and away from Chinese loans.

Blood Gun Money – How America Arms Gangs and Cartels – Ioan Grillo

Paul Jay — Fri, 10 May 2024 13:37:20 -0400

Thousands of guns used by Mexican cartels, as well as other gangs throughout Latin America, have been traced back to U.S. gun manufacturers. Journalist Ioan Grillo describes how the flow of guns to Mexico from the U.S. exacerbates the drug war and its accompanying forced displacement of people. Baroncelli and Grillo debate drug legalization and whether it can break up cartels that use American guns to maintain global drug distribution. Cartels increase their profit margins by cutting their product with fentanyl and other lethal substances at the expense of people's lives.

Defunding UNRWA to Starve Gaza – Sari Hanafi part 2/2

Paul Jay — Tue, 07 May 2024 17:35:52 -0400

Israel's accusations against a total of 19 UNRWA staff members alleging their involvement in the October 7 attacks prompted 16 countries to pause or suspend $450 million in funding to the agency. A UN investigation resulted in one of the 19 cases being closed and four suspended due to a lack of evidence. Of the 12 staff members initially accused by Israel, 10 of them were fired by UNRWA, while the other two were killed. Israeli claims that 10% of UNRWA employees have ties to Hamas have yet to be substantiated. As Sari Hanafi explains, UNRWA provides critical infrastructure, housing, and education to Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza.

A Solution to the “Immigration Crisis” – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Tue, 07 May 2024 11:41:11 -0400

Paul is asked about the lack of healthcare resources and growing opposition to immigration in Canada.

Selective Outrage: Why the Slaughter of Palestinians is Ignored by Western Governments – Sari Hanafi part 1/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 01 May 2024 17:12:03 -0400

Following Israel's killing of 7 WCK aid workers, Western politicians appeared to reconsider their unwavering support of Netanyahu's government, if only for a brief moment. Iran's attack on military targets in Israel, in response to Israel's strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, has since been cited by the U.S. and Germany as a justification for continued military support for Israel. Sari Hanafi, Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut, discusses Germany's past genocidal war crimes as well as the ICJ case brought by Nicaragua examining Germany's complicity in genocide in Gaza.

To Rule the World, U.S. Tries to Control Every Region – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:23:30 -0400

Paul Jay says while the Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegal, brutal, and unnecessary for Russian national security, it takes place within the context of U.S. aims to suppress the growth of potential regional powers like Iran and Russia. Russia was not incorporated into Western Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union because it could have challenged U.S. dominance in the region.

Genocide in Gaza: When Does the History Begin? – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:38:20 -0400

Israel's objective is to maintain Jewish-Israeli dominance in the region by imposing inhumane conditions on Palestinians, resulting in the forced displacement of the entire population of Gaza. Paul Jay, the founder of theAnalysis, states that in order to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict, one has to view it from the context of U.S. global hegemony and monopoly capitalism.

Nitrogen, Agrochemical Corporations, and International Trade: A Perilous Mix

Paul Jay — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 12:59:18 -0400

Gilles Billen shows that industrial agriculture, propelled by international trade and specialization, has disturbed the nitrogen cycle. This has provoked the crossing of planetary boundaries and endangered the possibility of feeding the world. Alternatives do not require new technologies but different ways of organizing production and regional networks. Lynn Fries interviews Gilles Billen on GPEnewsdocs.

Boeing and Baltimore Bridge Scandals: Monopolization and Criminal Negligence? – Katya Schwenk

Paul Jay — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:59:39 -0400

The fatal crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX passenger aircraft and the recent Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 incident, in which a door-plug blew out after take-off, are consequences of Boeing's systemic incentivization of profits over safety. Katya Schwenk, reporter at The Lever, discusses the policies of recent administrations to enable Boeing's industry takeover and criminal negligence, as well as similar practices of covering up safety issues in the shipping industry, which potentially led to the Dali cargo ship's collapsing of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.

Genocide in Gaza Supported by Venture Capital’s AI Military Tech – William Hartung

Paul Jay — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 13:36:39 -0400

The Israeli attack on a civilian aid convoy, which killed seven World Central Kitchen workers, has pushed U.S. officials to entertain policy alternatives to unconditional aid to Israel. Bill Hartung, national security and U.S. foreign policy analyst at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discusses the Biden administration's weapons sales to Israel, many of which have not been reported to U.S. Congress. Hartung addresses the role of venture capital firms in shaping the U.S. defense industry, firms which advocate the development of dual-use technology or artificial intelligence as optimized tools to wage warfare.

Capitalocene: How Capitalism Created the Climate Crisis – Jason W. Moore pt 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:51:59 -0400

The current climate crisis emerged out of a specific set of historical and economic factors which have maintained capitalist accumulation and class inequalities to this day. Jason W. Moore, geographer and Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, explains how the development of capitalism fueled European colonialism and Western imperialism, resulting in a novel form of climate destruction.

The Assertion of Popular Power: A Climate Movement Imperative – Jason W. Moore pt 2/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:51:38 -0400

In part 2, historian and geographer Jason W. Moore explains why climate and revolutionary struggles must understand capitalist dynamics and deploy a language of universal class solidarity to overthrow transnational power structures perpetuating the climate crisis.

Corporations and Haiti’s Ruling Families Profit From Young Labour and Warring Gangs – Jafrikayiti (pt 2/2)

Paul Jay — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 16:57:29 -0400

Western interventionist policies in Haiti go beyond installing unelected government administrations: embezzling public funds earmarked for infrastructure and health purposes and providing illegal arms to gangs it claims to oppose. In Part 2, Jafrikayiti, an activist for Solidarité Québec-Haiti, discusses the various gangs operating on the streets of Port-Au-Prince, the differences between them, and their connections with Haiti’s notoriously decadent elite.

Catastrophic Foreign Intervention in Haiti – Jafrikayiti (pt 1/2)

Paul Jay — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 14:49:19 -0400

Following a disastrous UN mission in 2010, several Western-backed coups d'état, and the U.S. occupation of 1915-1934, the initiation of yet another foreign intervention in Haiti aligns with the longstanding imperial policy of the U.S., Canada, and European powers towards the country. Jafrikayiti, author and activist for Solidarité Québec-Haiti, underscores the broken social contract in Haiti, where installed leaders are neither elected by nor are accountable to the people but serve the interests of the private sector, over a dozen rich families, and the countries of the Core Group.

Julian Assange: Most Decisive Press Freedom Case of Our Time – Stefania Maurizi

Paul Jay — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 15:50:28 -0400

Facing extradition to the United States, WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange has been held in arbitrary detention under psychologically distressing conditions for years in the U.K. Stefania Maurizi, a journalist for the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, recounts what she witnessed at Assange’s most recent hearing at a U.K. High Court in London, where his lawyers argued for the right to appeal his extradition. She lays out the case for releasing Assange in the name of preserving press freedoms and serving the public’s right to be informed of war crimes and abuses of state power.

Ronald Reagan: “Small Government” a Smoke Screen for Racism and Smashing Unions – and Host, Paul Jay (pt 4/5)

Paul Jay — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 13:12:00 -0400

One of Reagan's geniuses was to convince people to vote against their own self-interest. In the name of lower taxes and the Cold War, he expanded investment in "defense" systems that benefited the oligarchs who brought him to power. Matt Tyrnauer, director of “The Reagans” on Showtime, joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news. This interview was originally published on February 17, 2021.

Haitian Ruling Families Create and Kill Monsters - Host, Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 07:53:05 -0400

The Haitian oligarchy colludes with the U.S., Canada, foreign corporations, and organized crime to exploit the labor and resources of the country. These families pick “black faces” to front dictatorships that do their bidding and kill them when they are no longer useful. Jafrikayiti joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news. This interview was originally published on July 16, 2021.

How Israel’s Bloodshed in Gaza Follows a Pattern of Demographic Engineering – Walid Habbas part 2/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:46:22 -0400

In part 2, Walid Habbas provides a detailed account of Israel's military operations in Gaza and its actions to separate Gaza into isolated areas with no public governance and little to no access to humanitarian aid. Not only is Netanyahu's government holding up the flow of vital aid into the Gaza Strip, it is weaponizing the provision of limited aid in order to accelerate the breakdown of civilian structures and the mass starvation of Palestinians. A scholar on the unequal relations between Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories, Walid Habbas also discusses the political landscape of Palestinian ruling parties and their conflicting positions regarding the path to Palestinian liberation.

Reagan’s Racism the Model for Trump – Matt Tyrnauer (pt 3/5)

Paul Jay — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:04:00 -0400

Reagan was the master of racist "dog whistles," plausible deniability that allowed Reagan to protect himself. It has allowed the Republican Party for the last four decades to deny who Ronald Reagan was and turn him into a hero. Matt Tyrnauer, director of "The Reagans" on Showtime, joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news. This interview was originally published on February 9, 2021.

How Israel Maintains Its Colonial Occupation – Walid Habbas pt 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 14:14:12 -0500

Israel has expanded its role as an occupying power in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip by building illegal settlements, establishing practices of indirect colonial management founded on military proclamations, and imposing checkpoints and blockades to control the livelihood of Palestinians since 1967 in particular. Walid Habbas, researcher at the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR), zooms out from the current atrocities and applies a bird’s eye view to flesh out the dynamics of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Besides military deployments enforcing the occupation, Walid delves into Israel’s control of Palestinian industry and the various forms of economic dependency that emerge from it.

Ronald Reagan: The Face of Racism & the Military-Industrial Complex – Matt Tyrnauer (pt 2/5)

Paul Jay — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 12:51:00 -0500

Reagan understood the American psyche from within it. He used his acting skills to sell right-wing “dog whistles” and militarism. Matt Tyrnauer, director of “The Reagans”, on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay. This interview was originally published on January 29, 2021.

A Viable Plan or Utter Delusion: Is the Two-State Solution (Still) Possible? – Assal Rad part 2/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 15:23:11 -0500

In Part 2, Assal Rad speaks to the importance of U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., where he stated that he would "not be complicit in genocide" in the Gaza Strip. Assal Rad, scholar of the Middle East, highlights the Biden administration's deceitful unwillingness to hold Israel to account in the face of the IDF's well-documented atrocities in Gaza while it simultaneously withholds funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) on the mere basis of allegations.

Defying the World: Why the West Won’t Stop Israel’s Slaughter in Rafah – Assal Rad part 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 13:57:55 -0500

Despite the ICJ's ruling calling for the prevention of plausibly genocidal acts against the Palestinians, the IDF continues its slaughter of civilians in the Gaza Strip with impunity. Assal Rad, historian, and Middle East scholar discusses the plight of 1.4 million Palestinians in Rafah and the absurdity of placing their livelihood in the hands of Israeli officials whose aim is anything but ensuring their safety. If Israeli government plans are not just another step towards ethnic cleansing, why won't Prime Minister Netanyahu propose evacuating Palestinians to Israel in order to ensure their subsequent safe return back to the Gaza Strip?

Reaganism is the Model for Trumpism – Matt Tyrnauer, director of ‘The Reagans’ pt 1/5

Paul Jay — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 12:54:16 -0500

The documentary series "The Reagans" shows that President Ronald Reagan's roots are corruption, racism, and corporatism. Trumpism is not an anomaly but walks in the footsteps of a right-wing construct to achieve tax cuts for the rich and undoing the New Deal. Director Matt Tynrauer joins theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay. This interview was originally published on January 27, 2021.

From Rafah to an Abyss – Israel to Continue Attack on 1.4 Million Palestinians – Joshua Landis (part 2/2)

Paul Jay — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:25:00 -0500

In part 2, Joshua Landis discusses Hamas' recent ceasefire proposal and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's planned ground incursion into Rafah. Netanyahu has rejected international calls to abandon a military onslaught on the densely populated area around the Rafah Crossing, where 1.4 million Palestinians from all over the Gaza Strip are seeking shelter in a 64-square-kilometer area. Landis contends that Bibi's explicit repudiation of a two-state solution, as well as lack of plans to guarantee the safety of civilians before launching an invasion of Rafah, does little to assuage concerns about the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

Should the U.S. Withdraw Its Troops from Iraq and Syria? – Joshua Landis (part 1/2)

Paul Jay — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 14:25:11 -0500

Joshua Landis is a historian and Sandra Mackey Chair and Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, as well as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Landis presents the case for an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal in the Middle East, arguing that many civil society groups as well as militant groups in Iraq are strongly opposed to the U.S.' military presence there. This is Part 1 of 2.

Why did UAW’s Shawn Fain Endorse Biden After Calling for a Ceasefire? - Frank Hammer

Paul Jay — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:04:28 -0500

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UAW president Shawn Fain called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza yet endorsed Biden, who has been accused of complicity in Israel’s genocidal war. Frank Hammer, a former president and chairman of the United Auto Workers local 909 in Detroit, joins theAnalysis to discuss the role of the UAW and the working class in balancing opposing Biden’s policies and a possible Trump victory.

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re tuned in to theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Frank Hammer to discuss the UAW and Shawn Fain’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza, as well as Shawn Fain’s subsequent endorsement of President Biden.

If you’d like to support the work that we do and give us a boost, you can do so by going to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hitting the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you get onto our mailing list and like and subscribe to the show wherever you watch us, be it on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. See you in a bit with Frank Hammer.

Joining me now is Frank Hammer. He is the former President and Chairman of the United Auto Workers Local 909, which is located at the GM transmission plant in Detroit. He used to be a former GM employee and worked for GM for 32 years. Frank, it’s great to have you back.

Frank Hammer

Great to be with you again. Thank you.

Talia Baroncelli

Shawn Fain, who is the President of the UAW, has called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and he recently endorsed President Biden. There are some groups within the UAW, such as Labor for Palestine, who are opposed to this endorsement as they see this as a contradiction of the UAW’s values and the UAW’s declared support for Palestine and for Palestinians. Would you characterize Shawn Fain’s endorsement of Biden as a respectability politics that’s perhaps misplaced? Would you call on him to rescind this endorsement?

Frank Hammer

Why don’t we start out with a non-controversial subject? Yes, I think, first of all, it was historic that Shawn Fain, on behalf of the International Executive Board in the UAW, came out with a declaration back in December, calling on a ceasefire. The resolution that the UAW endorsed was a resolution that had been originally circulated by the United Electrical Workers and has been signed on to by numerous labor organizations. It’s a broadly supported resolution. In that resolution, it calls for an immediate ceasefire, and it also calls for the end of the siege on Gaza.

It was a bold statement, and I want to add that historically, the UAW has supported zionist Israel. To venture into this territory and make that statement, and he’s done it repeatedly, is really a departure from what the UAW on their prior administrations may have done. This was part and parcel of the UAW rank and file electing a new president directly by membership votes.

Then we go to the declaration of the endorsement for Biden, that took place at the UAW’s bi-annual Political Action Conference. You could say it came as a surprise and that it didn’t come as a surprise at all. There was no qualification of Biden agreeing to a ceasefire, so that was greatly disappointing, especially to the UAW Labor for Palestine rank and file effort, which has been really pressing, especially in the East Coast, for the UAW, not only to declare the ceasefire, but to carry through with that resolution in the ways that the UAW can do, which include the UAW represents defense workers in the military-industrial complex. The UAW Labor for Palestine feels that the UAW can play an outsized role in preventing weapons and armaments being sent to Israel made with UAW hands.

We have to look at the larger picture, and it’s very painful for me to venture into this territory, but it’s going to be painful for all of us because right now, the slogan that has been projected not only by rank and file activist looking for the ceasefire but also in the Arab community here in the outskirts of Detroit, for example, in Dearborn, is we have the slogan of “Genocide Joe.” This is most unfortunate, but we’re also dealing with the reality that we have an election in November and wish as we might that there would be a third-party alternative, for instance, a labor party or some grassroots political party. We don’t have that. We don’t have that in November. We are faced with a stark choice of Trump, who has already openly declared that he intends to empower himself in a dictatorship. We have a Biden who is wedded to the genocide and the destruction that’s going on in Israel. These are very difficult circumstances that we face, but it’s clear that the UAW and the labor movement are going to want to endorse Biden, even with the difficulty of seeing daily images of the U.S. arm-in-arm with Netanyahu, who is perpetrating all this destruction and death in Palestine.

I think that supporting him does not mean that we cease in pressing Democrats, not only at the president’s level, the resolution also calls for pressing members of Congress, and I think that the UAW can do a lot to support the likes of Rashida Tlaib, and her call for a ceasefire in the U.S. House and pressing other Democrats who are not coming out on behalf of the ceasefire, and pressing on to do so. I think that we’re in a position of supporting Biden, but that does not in any way stop us from mounting a full-scale labor-led movement to reverse directions and to do it not down the road but soon, sooner rather than later, to stop all the destruction and the deaths.

I think the media is reporting that we have 30,000 Palestinians who have lost their lives. When is enough is enough? It needs to be done, and the UAW needs to continue to speak up in spite of the fact that there are other reasons why the UAW would support Biden.

Talia Baroncelli

I will ask you again because I don’t fully understand what the purpose is in endorsing Biden. Is it because after the strike, he did visit the picket line, whereas Trump didn’t do so? Is it a thank you for supporting us in our historic strike? Is that why Shawn Fain endorsed President Biden, or are there other strategic reasons to do so? Personally, as an outsider, I don’t see this endorsement as being in line with the call for a ceasefire and for an immediate ceasefire. I see those two things as being at odds with one another. I don’t fully understand the logic behind the endorsement.

Frank Hammer

I should add that the UAW Labor for Palestine has expressed the view why endorse President Biden now in February? Why not hold out and say, as a condition of our endorsement, you’re going to have to compel a ceasefire in Palestine? That’s a reasonable position to hold. To answer your question, I do believe that in the UAW negotiations, and this is speculation on my part, I don’t have insider information, that there certainly was a deal that was struck between the UAW and the Biden administration that enabled the UAW, for example, of rescuing the Stellantis plant in Belvidere, Illinois, which had been idled and was doomed to be closed. It seems that the Biden administration had a hand in assisting the UAW in convincing or negotiating with Stellantis to not only keep that plant open, but to add another plant nearby, a battery plant.

I know that the UAW and Shawn Fain early on held out for some federal intervention on behalf of the UAW and behalf of the union when the federal government gave all these subsidies to the auto companies for GM Stellantis in converting to battery production and electric power vehicles. That may have been also in the mix, although I didn’t detect that in the messaging that came out of the strike. Real-world, real politics, real reality; it’s possible that the federal government, and Biden specifically, carried the day for the UAW in these regards in exchange for the UAW agreeing to support Biden. I’m speculating, but I think that in the real world, I think that’s the kind of thing that happens.

The most troubling piece of it, of course, is that it really feels like a reversal for the Palestinians and certainly for the Arabic community here in Detroit because it was such a switch around. President Fain was here at the Martin Luther King event in Detroit and reiterated his call for a ceasefire. It was only literally a week later at the CPAC conference that no mention was made at all of the ceasefire resolution with Biden’s presence. I think it left a lot of anxiety. I certainly feel anxious about it myself. There are a lot of UAW members who feel anxious, never mind the broader community. That being said, I think that it behooves now the UAW rank and file and the labor movement as a whole, regardless of the endorsement, to press on with a mass movement to reverse directions in Israel.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, I think when the endorsement was announced, there were a few UAW Labor for Palestine members who were in Washington, and they disrupted one of Biden’s speeches. They were taken away by Secret Service members, and I’m assuming it was pretty violent. I haven’t actually seen footage of it. But I was then surprised to see that when Biden recently visited Michigan and visited a UAW meeting there with Shawn Fain, there was no mention of a ceasefire, as you just pointed out. I didn’t even see protesters there or UAW Labor for Palestine members there. Maybe they weren’t even allowed into the event. I’m not quite sure.

Frank Hammer

Yes, I can speak to that. So I wasn’t in town, unfortunately, but from all the reports that I received, Biden was scheduled to be in Michigan. The location was not disclosed. It was kept secret. It turns out that it was held at my region, region one, in Warren, Michigan, in Macomb County. But there were many protesters outside the complex where Biden spoke and glad-handed with UAW staffers and some UAW members who were there to make calls for Biden. But there was no indication, no connection. These were UAW Labor for Palestine. These were UAW members here in Detroit and supporters who came out to protest and demand the ceasefire and, of course, to denounce the endorsements. I believe that that’s going to follow Biden in any industrial city where he’s going to be and elsewhere, that he’s not going to be able to shed this demand, and that it needs to continue to follow him and continue to impress upon him that he is basically risking an election. He’s risking the November election, especially in the state of Michigan, where he only won by 150,000 votes in 2020. They have an Arabic community that has initiated an abandon Biden campaign.

I don’t know whether the Democratic Party establishment understands that they’re at the risk of losing the state of Michigan in November. This is one of the key states that’s going to decide the election in November. I think that for strategic reasons, for election purposes, Biden has to turn this around, never mind the moral arguments and the allegiance that he has to the working class. If he has an allegiance to the working class, he would be moving really quickly to demand a ceasefire and to cease equipping Israel and supplying more money as has been scheduled currently in the Senate, where they want to send another 14 billion to Israel to continue to perpetrate its genocide.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you just added some really important context because some of our viewers and listeners will know that in Michigan, there are lots of Muslim and Arab Americans. Recently in Dearborn, the mayor of Dearborn refused to meet with Biden campaign officials. He did say that he would meet with officials from the Biden administration, but not with people in the campaign because he wanted to impress upon them the idea that this ceasefire is so crucial and that there has to be some give or take here or listening, at least to Arab Americans and to Muslims, and that’s not happening at the moment.

Because Michigan is so crucial to Biden winning the elections, you do wonder what’s going on. Is he completely tone-deaf, or does he not even want to win the elections? Does he not care about actually winning? It’s just remarkable to see what’s going on. And then, of course, you have this horrible Wall Street Journal op-ed that was recently published calling Dearborn a jihadi capital or some nonsense because there are people with conscience who are calling for a ceasefire. They’re not terrorists. They’re average people who are calling for a ceasefire. I think this is an important context.

Given all that, given what’s going on in the background, I wonder whether that’s sown divisions or perceived divisions within the UAW or if you think that most members are actually on the side of perhaps even calling for Shawn Fain to rescind the endorsement.

Frank Hammer

Well, a couple of things on that note. Let me say that within the ranks of UAW Labor for Palestine, within the Arabic community in Dearborn, Muslim community, this is so personal. People are losing family members in Gaza, in the West Bank. It couldn’t be any closer to one’s heart to see how they would see what Biden has done as a betrayal. The Arabic community, 70% of the Arabic Muslim communities in 2020 voted for Biden. You can imagine that they’re going to be very, not just reluctant. They’re not going to have the stomach to vote for Biden in 2024 unless this is reversed. And even then.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, I was wondering, are there additional tensions within the UAW as a result of Biden’s policy and Shawn Fain’s endorsement of Biden?

Frank Hammer

I think that broad swaths of UAW members are not familiar enough with the dynamics of the history of the creation of the state of Israel. That history is something that, generally, workers have not been familiar with. The UAW, unfortunately, in the past administrations, has been a close supporter of the zionist State of Israel. Therefore, the UAW has never bothered to educate its own rank and file about it. If they were to do so, it was on the side of Zionism.

We, in the ranks of the UAW, have a lot of catching up to do. We’re beginning the reform caucus within the UAW, UAWD. The United Auto Workers for Democracy held its first teach-in Palestine 101. We had UAW members and auto workers in on the education that we provided. People were really learning things that they had never known about Israel because of the corporate media and the incessant pro-zionist messaging that we get through corporate media.

I think it’s incumbent upon the UAW to do a lot of education in the rank and file. I think the rank and file get told daily that Hamas is a terrorist organization. You react to it, “Oh, that is a terrorist organization,” without understanding the context or even whether that’s an appropriate label for what’s happened.

The elements in the UAW that have a much more ready understanding are, of course, the UAW members that are in the academic institutions, as many are, or for example, in the legal profession in New York, they’re part of the Legal Aid Society. They’ve had much more contact with the information about Israel and Palestine, and they’re much more readily under our understanding that the UAW must take the side of Palestine and demand an end to the genocide.

That’s the way I would describe it. I don’t think that there’s a groundswell on the UAW right now in support of the position taken by Shawn Fain. I think that the leadership should do everything in its power to create that groundswell to show that UAW members, once they have the facts, something that Shawn Fain has really emphasized that I don’t think I have any question that UAW members would be part of that groundswell in support of the ceasefire.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you recently attended the Martin Luther King Day event in Detroit a few weeks ago. You awarded Shawn Fain the Spirit of Flint Award. I was wondering if you could speak about the significance of that award, what it represents, and what you thought of the event in general.

Frank Hammer

Thank you. Yeah. By the way, that was a week before Shawn Fain endorsed Biden. There are very important reasons. First, as the Martin Luther King Day event has now entered, it was in its 21st year when, a couple of weeks ago, Shawn Fain accepted the invitation to speak at the event. First time. No other UAW president in the last 20 years has ever volunteered to speak at an event honoring Martin Luther King and honoring Martin Luther King in all of his manifestations, including in his opposition to the Vietnam War, including in his role in the labor movement, in support of the Memphis sanitation workers, etc.

Here is Shawn Fain; he brought other members of his leadership team with him and gave a very eloquent speech combining and putting together the labor movement and the Black liberation struggle, identifying Martin Luther King as such a key part in both movements and bringing those movements together. Even during the Martin Luther King event, as I stated earlier, he reiterated the call for a ceasefire.

Talia Baroncelli

Sorry if I can interject because I was listening to the speech. He not only called for a ceasefire, but the way he did it was very important because he was talking about Vietnam, specifically, and the speech that Martin Luther King gave, I think, a year and a day before he was assassinated, and how he was talking about what unites Americans and what affects American life is war abroad and how war abroad needs to be put to an end. He made that connection between Vietnam and Gaza. Hearing that and then hearing that a week later, he would endorse Joe Biden is what created some tension or at least caused cognitive dissonance for me.

Frank Hammer

Yes. I think that if Shawn Fain is going to be true to himself and the honor upon which he bestowed on Martin Luther King, he’s really going to have to re-examine what he’s doing regarding the support of the ceasefire. I say that because it was against all odds that King made the famous speech on April 4, 1967, during the Johnson administration, despite Johnson’s role in supporting Dr. Martin Luther King in the quest for the Civil Rights Act and so on. Even his people, associates, assistants, and advisors said, “Don’t do it, don’t do it.” King felt compelled, in spite of the fact that he got support from Johnson on other matters, to speak out about Vietnam, and he was denounced shortly after. He was denounced for this speech.

I think that Shawn Fain and the UAW as a whole, the UAW leadership, needs to look at that and say, If we’re going to meet that standard, that we’re holding up high, then we have to be willing to oppose Biden now, where we see him clearly in the wrong and clearly against the interests of the world’s people. He is clearly on the short end of the International Court of Justice, and the South Africans bravely going to that court and declaring that Israel is reasonably suspected of committing genocide and that we need to be on the side of South Africa. We were on the side of South Africa during their struggle against apartheid. We need to be against the Israeli zionists for the current apartheid against the Palestinians.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, I also want to ask you about Trump because, of course, Shawn Fain was very vocal about Trump. He’s come out against Trump, and he’s supported Biden. I think it’s pretty obvious or intuitive that he’d be speaking about Trump and how Trump doesn’t have the interests of the workers at heart.

You wrote a piece in 2015 for the Real News Network, and you were talking about an interview that Trump gave, and I think he gave it to Chuck Todd at MSNBC. He was saying, “Of course, I would bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States from abroad, and I would take them out West and ensure that people are paid a third of the wages or at least much less than what people were earning before.” He was pretty much exposing his position as being in cahoots with or in alignment with the transnational capitalist class.

Shawn Fain is aware of how horrible Trump is on these policies, but do you think he analyzes these policies as being part of a larger trend of global capitalism and how these capitalists have it out for the average worker? It’s not just Trump that has it out for them.

Frank Hammer

When I wrote that piece, it was interesting because, most recently, Shawn Fain has, in fact, referred to that interview that Trump did back in 2015. He spelled out that what Trump was promoting was that the corporations could show the unionized workforce in the Midwest a little thing or two by extracting the work from the Midwest. He said, “Oh, you don’t even have to go overseas. You can take it to a non-union area of the U.S. Within a couple of years, you could bring it back. Those workers, the unionized workers in the Midwest, would gladly accept the jobs at a third of the wages,” like you were saying.

What I was seeking to point out is that this wasn’t particularly unique to Trump. He was spilling the beans, so to speak, about what the capitalists have been doing in the last, certainly in the last neoliberal 40 years that we have been living through. Shawn Fain has wanted to contrast that with Biden, and I think that Shawn Fain falls short because this has not only been a Trump phenomenon, this has been a capitalist phenomenon.

In fact, Biden, along with Barack Obama and that administration, were instruments that Wall Street used to exact all these concessions during the bankruptcy of GM and Stellantis, or Chrysler than, I believe, that we have had to suffer with, including the multi-tier wages, including the loss of cost of living allowance. All these things that were extracted during the bankruptcy were done under a Democratic administration, under President Obama and Joe Biden. We can’t give it now. He’s being characterized. Biden has been characterized as, well, he had the backs of the workers, and I’m so sorry, but that’s simply not true.

Let’s face it: the UAW is confronted with two capitalist parties. We don’t have a labor party of our own. Although we attempted to do that decades ago, we’re stuck. In fact, I think that to Shawn Fain’s credit, he was able to undo the damage, a lot of the damage that was done through the bankruptcy by a Democratic administration. The Democratic administration during that bankruptcy didn’t put any time limit on any of the concessions that were extracted from the the UAW. The only time limit they placed was on suspending the UAW’s right to strike. That in the bankruptcy proceedings was slated to be reinstated in 2015, which it was. But no such time limits were put on the cost of living.

We had to go on a 40-day strike in 2023 to get back what was extracted from UAW members during the bankruptcy. We have to look it in the eye. We have to talk facts and say, I’m so sorry, but that was part of the Wall Street scheme, and the engineers of it were Biden as the vice president and Barack Obama as president. Like it or not, we have to deal with that. I was shocked when Biden came to a picket line here in Michigan. I was shocked to learn that he was the first president that had ever done that. I didn’t know that, but it’s a matter of optics. It was good optics. It was great optics, but it was optics. More substance has to come down the road.

The UAW should be pressing for what are we doing about the minimum wage? The minimum wage is the same now as it was under Obama. It’s a 7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage. Why isn’t the labor movement addressing that full force? That would help all workers if the minimum wage was raised to the level that we need at this moment in time. I think there’s a lot of work to do. This whole narrative about Biden had our backs, and Trump was a bad guy, and Biden was a good guy. Well, in reality, the Democratic Party administration, although they weren’t saying it, they were pretty much toeing the line quite like what Trump was announcing.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, a lot of it is optics, as you said. Joe Biden’s approval rating is currently at 37%, which is basically President Jimmy Carter’s level approval rate. It’s pretty abysmal. Not that approval rating necessarily determines the outcome of an election, but it’s an indication that things aren’t going so well.

The fact that he showed up at the picket line isn’t even surprising to me, even though, as you said, no president has done so before. I think he’s trying to score all the points that he can get because he’s clearly aging, he’s fumbling around, having falls, and a lot of people don’t agree with him on certain policies, especially Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. I think he was trying to score some points wherever he could.

I do want to ask you something, and if we don’t fully get into it now, I think we should do a separate episode on this in the future. That is the history of labor in the United States and the links that they have traditionally had to the sources of decision-making power within the United States government, as well as within the CIA, and how they’ve been involved in suppressing labor movements in other countries, such as countries in Latin America.

Frank Hammer

The question we can raise right now in that context is, where is the AFL-CIO in regard to the genocide that’s taking place? The AFL-CIO is also, again, very much connected with, as you were saying, the federal government, the Central Intelligence Agency, NED [National Endowment for Democracy], which is funded by the federal government for the AFL-CIO. There are state AFL-CIO councils that are passing resolutions in support of a ceasefire, but they’re not doing it because the AFL National Administration is promoting it. They’re not. They’re suppressing it.

I think it’ll be a very, very important conversation to talk about the role of the AFL-CIO, not just in line with Israel and Palestine, but certainly in line with other attacks on working classes in other countries, whether it be in Chile, whether it in El Salvador, whether it be in Venezuela, you name it. The AFL-CIO has been very key in promoting U.S. foreign policy. That obviously is a big challenge, but it’s something that needs to change if we’re going to have a real progressive labor movement in this country.

Talia Baroncelli

For those who don’t know, that stands for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. I guess they represent all the unions. Is that how you would best describe them, or how would you describe the function of the AFL-CIO?

Frank Hammer

The AFL-CIO is the largest labor federation in the U.S. It’s not the only one. Approximately 50 or 60 unions are part of the federation, including, for example, the UAW. But there are other elements in the labor movement, for example, the Teamsters; I forget which of the other ones. There are significant labor formations that are not part of the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO has a membership of about 14 million workers. It’s a sizable force that, if it was true to labor’s agenda, would be playing a much larger force in the U.S. on behalf of the working class of not only this country but the working classes of other countries, the international working class. That’s not been its role. It’s very important that U.S. workers who are, by and large, kept out of knowing anything about the AFL-CIO, that we begin to open that up and expose that and reveal that for people to know what we are supporting with our dues. Union members’ dues do support the AFL-CIO.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, we’ll get into that next time. I think that’ll be really fascinating. Well, Frank, it’s been great speaking to you. Is there anything else you want to reflect on about the UAW and calls for a ceasefire?

Frank Hammer

Well, I think that as angry as we might be in regards to the role currently being played by Biden and the Democratic Party, I think we have to really be mindful that what Trump represents is fascism. As such, It’s very clear that if he were back in the presidency, there would be no limits to his aggression against immigrants, which, by the way, Shawn Fain has been speaking on behalf of. There’s no question that there would be a tax on Muslims wholesale, that there would be a tax on workers. I think that we have to be extremely mindful of what that would represent for us, never mind the environment, never mind the climate crisis. Trump denounces Shawn Fain for pronouncing that we do have a global warming crisis and for supporting a transition away from ICE vehicles: internal combustion engines. Trump would do no such thing. A Trump election would surely doom the planet to a very grim future. But certainly, Biden has got shortcomings on that score as well.

Talia Baroncelli

I do agree with you for the most part. I just think that a lot of people, especially in Michigan, for example, who are Arab-American or Muslim-American, are worried that Biden actually uses that as a justification for his policies and saying Trump was the one who enacted the Muslim ban, and if Trump were to come back, then there would be a Muslim ban, and Muslim immigrants would not be able to come to the U.S., or they wouldn’t be welcome in the U.S. Yet, based on the conversations I’ve had with some people in Michigan who are Muslim, they have said that that’s not something they’re really worried about because what is currently going on in Gaza is just unspeakable horrors and a complete disregard for Palestinians, as well as a disregard for the opinion and the culture of a ceasefire by Muslim and Arab Americans within the United States. Not to say that I don’t think Trump represents a vile form of politics. At the same time, I feel like some people don’t really want to face the, I guess, trajectory that Biden comes from and the fact that he’s always been in support of these wars. He’s never really, despite what he says about criticizing trickle-down politics and saying that, food never trickled down to my table when I was a kid, but he still supports that broader capitalist class and warmongering machine. I think we have to be mindful of that, even when we’re pointing to the horrors of Trump.

Frank Hammer

I completely respect that position. It’s something that deserves more discussion and clarification. I’m very clear that we’re in a very difficult position with these two capitalist parties buying for control in the fall. I’m totally aware of that.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Frank Hammer, it was great speaking to you, and I’m looking forward to our next conversation. Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you enjoy this content and you’d like to support us, you can do so by going to our website, theAnalysis.news, getting onto our mailing list, and hitting the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Thanks for watching, and see you soon.

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Frank Hammer is the former president and bargaining chair of UAW local 909 and General Motors at Warren, Michigan. He’s a retired UAW–GM international representative. He’s co-founder of the Autoworker Caravan and co-chair of the International Auto Workers Council, GM section, and is a leading member of several worker solidarity networks within the UAW and in the U.S. and global labor movements.

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Arab-Americans in Michigan Denounce Biden’s Bankrolling of Destruction in Gaza – Shireen Al-Adeimi

Paul Jay — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 13:58:52 -0500

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Dr. Shireen Al-Adeimi is a Professor of Language and Literacy at Michigan State University and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Michigan is key to Biden’s presidential run, where Muslim and Arab-Americans in the state have withheld support from Biden due to his full backing of Israel’s genocidal project in Gaza.

Political Stalemate in Lebanon Exacerbates Hezbollah-Israel Tensions – Imad Salamey pt 2/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 13:44:51 -0500

Dr. Imad Salamey is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, and author of several books, including The Communitarian Nation-State Paradox in Lebanon and The Government and Politics of Lebanon. In part 2, Salamey points to issues arising from Lebanon's sectarian political system, such as the current political stalemate between the three power-sharing groups and how the status quo favors members of the political elite.

Israel's "Dahiya Doctrine” of Death - Imad Salamey pt 1/2

Paul Jay — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 07:59:50 -0500

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Dr. Imad Salamey is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, and author of The Communitarian Nation-State Paradox in Lebanon. Part 1 describes the nature of the cross-border attacks between Hezbollah and Israel, including a strike on Hamas’ deputy leader al-Arouri. He also addresses Israel’s “Dahiya doctrine,” a military strategy of targeting civilian infrastructure with the aim of forcing civilians to jettison their political leadership or kick out combatant groups residing in the area. It was first deployed by Israel during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon to evict the PLO and is now being unleashed in Gaza under the pretext of rooting out Hamas.

Political Stalemate in Lebanon Exacerbates Hezbollah-Israel Tensions – Imad Salamey pt 2/2

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Imad Salamey to speak about Hezbollah, as well as the recent strike in the south of Beirut, which killed Hamas Deputy Leader Saleh al-Arouri.

We just started a new year, so if you’d like to support us at the beginning of this year, you can do so by going to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hitting the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. You can also get onto our mailing list. Like and subscribe to the show wherever you watch us, be it on YouTube or other podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify. See you in a bit with Professor Salamey.

Joining me now to break down the developments ongoing in Lebanon is Professor Imad Salamey. He’s an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. He’s also the author of numerous books, including two books published in 2021 called The Government and Politics of Lebanon and The Communitarian Nation-State Paradox in Lebanon. Thank you so much for joining me today, Professor Salamey.

Imad Salamey

Great. Thank you, Talia.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, we’ve seen numerous strikes in the Middle East, or what some people are now calling West Asia, including two suicide bombings in Kerman in the south-eastern part of Iran, which attacked people who were commemorating the killing of Qassem Soleimani. At least 84 people were killed there, and over 284, I believe, were wounded. In addition to that, on January 2, we saw the Deputy Head of Hamas in the southern part of Beirut being taken out by a strike. That’s, of course, al-Arouri.

So far, Israel hasn’t claimed responsibility for that attack, though they haven’t actively denied any responsibility there either. So that’s maybe something that we could discuss throughout our discussion today.

In response to this strike and taking out al-Arouri, the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that there would be a full-scale war if Israel decided to invade and escalate. At the moment, it seems like there’s more of a strategic balancing, and there hasn’t been any warfare that goes beyond low-intensity attacks. It’s very difficult to say whether this will indeed escalate. How do you perceive what’s going on? Do you think that Hezbollah will decide to take this and make this into a much broader regional war?

Imad Salamey

Yes, Talia. Thanks for the question. It’s very important to think about these issues right now as we go into a very unstable and fluid situation here in Lebanon and the wider Middle Eastern region. Of course, the assassination of al-Arouri in Beirut, in the southern district of the city, was a major change in the rule of engagement, so to speak, that was governed— the confrontation on the Lebanese-Israeli borders for the past two months. Since October 7, there have been limited skirmishes, what we call a low-intensity conflict, taking place on that border. It’s a conflict or fighting that has been within seven kilometers of both sides of the borders.

The assassination of Saleh al-Arouri, Deputy Chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, was a major escalation, so to speak, by Israel, which went all the way to the capital city of Beirut to target or kill the leader of Hamas. Definitely, this is from a perspective on the various threats made by Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, that require some major retaliations on the party’s side.

However, if you listen to Nasrallah’s previous speech, and today he just gave a speech as well, it appears that Nasrallah has been trying, to any extent possible, to divert a major retaliation that could lead to a major retaliation by Israel or what we are calling here open warfare between both sides or open conflict that could lead to the utilization of more strategic weapons such as long-range missiles from Hezbollah or by Israel bombarding major infrastructure of the party all over the country.

I believe Hezbollah and Nasrallah are hesitant to make the wrong move here in this battle. They are carefully calculating every action they’re making in this warfare and trying to divert a major war. Therefore, what we are hearing right now is a message that the retaliation of Hezbollah will be made based on their own timing and based on the positions or the place they feel is best to retaliate, maybe now, maybe in the future. This gives us a pretext for Hezbollah not to immediate retaliation and not to start a major conflict here in the country.

When you hear Hezbollah, and particularly Nasrallah, speaking about how they want or how they see the course of this warfare, their intention, as they say, is to back [inaudible 00:06:49] Hamas in Gaza rather than to become the fighting force against Israel or to have the front shifted from that of Gaza to Lebanon. Then, the whole political issue becomes that of Lebanon, Israel, or Iran. Iran is red because Iran supports Hezbollah on different levels: economically, militarily, and politically. I guess, for the moment, Hezbollah is trying to prevent this scenario from taking place. They are continuously trying to maintain a low conflict to play the supporting act or the supportive role to Hamas, fighting with them to become the military front in a fight [inaudible 00:07:49].

In a way, what I’m trying to say is that perhaps Nasrallah and Hezbollah do not want to retaliate in any major way that would spark a major war here in the south.

Talia Baroncelli

Right. They’re trying to avoid stealing the spotlight away from Gaza for various reasons. But Lebanon is no stranger to being attacked by Israel. There was the invasion in 1982, and even up to 2006, there was ongoing warfare between Israel and various groups in Lebanon. Of course, many civilians were killed in Lebanon. A lot of civilian infrastructure was destroyed.

I believe there was a doctrine that Israel developed in that fighting called the Dahiya doctrine, in which Israel would attack certain civilian areas where militants were residing. The whole purpose was to try and damage the civilian infrastructure so that those civilians would pressure the militants to leave those areas. Whether this is an effective strategy or not, I highly doubt it. Would you say that Israel is still using or deploying that strategy? Would you also say that Hezbollah’s response has been informed by decades of fighting between Israel and various groups in Lebanon?

Imad Salamey

Yeah, I mean, definitely what we’ve seen from Israeli actions in the past is what we call collective punishment. Similar to what’s happening today in Gaza, much of the military tactics utilized by the Israeli army is to attack major civilian infrastructure, to destroy every possible means of survival for the civilian population in the different areas of Gaza, therefore, to create local pressure by the civilian population against the militants.

This way, the civilian population becomes a position contradictory to those of the militants. This is how Israel calculated a way to undermine public support for Palestinian army groups. I think Israel has utilized the same tactics in southern Lebanon and many confrontations.

However, at one time in ’96, there was an agreement brokered by France at that time. There was an agreement that neither side would utilize civilian areas for the fight, and any retaliation would be exclusive to many of their positions. Of course, this was broken in 2006, again, in Lebanon, where we had major incursions by Israel, major fights that led to the destruction of power stations, the destruction of major bridges and roads. The target was civilians. Of course, Israel’s aim for those attacks was to create an anti-Hezbollah popular discontent against authority. Therefore, I guess right now this can develop in that direction.

However, till now it has remained very limited, the fight on the southern border between both sides and military installations. There hasn’t been an attack against civilian settlements or housing inside Hezbollah, nor has there been any real attack against civilian targets in Lebanon. That’s why we are calling this confrontation that both sides are fighting an understandable rule of engagement. A rule of engagement where the civilian sides are spared from this conflict. Thus far, this is how it has been going. But situations can easily get out of hand and the situation can become more volatile.

For any reason, if a mistake happened and a large number of civilians were hurt by any attacks, that would bring about a strong retaliation on either side and then we cannot control it anymore. But thus far, it has been low intensity skirmishes, attacks here and there without major bombardments on civilian targets.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, the situation is quite tense. As you say, we don’t know if there will be any additional escalations. The United States has been sending additional military assets to the eastern Mediterranean, as well as reinforcing some of the troops that are stationed there. How are these developments perceived by Hezbollah? Do they take this as a direct incursion into their space or as a threat, or are they really just worried about Israel?

Imad Salamey

No, of course. Hezbollah considers the United United States as part of the overall war in the region, being a main ally to Israel in terms of providing the Israelis with all types of support: political, economic, and military. The United States’ official position is to place Hezbollah on the terrorist list, similar to Hamas. In that sense, the party does not distinguish much between the United States and Israel.

Actually, in the latest assassination/targeted killing of Saleh al-Arouri, the leader of Hamas in the southern district of Lebanon, you’re going to find out that Saleh al-Arouri was listed on the U.S. list of terrorists, and there was a $5 million prize for any information leading to his arrest or killing. Therefore, there wasn’t much distinction, at least from a Hezbollah perspective, between the United States and Israel. They are both allies, and they’re both responsible for the atrocities taking place in Gaza today. They’re both orchestrating this fight against what Hezbollah considers the Axis of Resistance.

Therefore, you’re finding, in many ways, attacks against U.S. targets nowadays, especially in Iraq with U.S. bases, and they’re surrounded by many pro-Iranian and pro-Hezbollah groups who have been launching missiles against these bases because they consider the United States is responsible for what Israel is doing.

These feelings within Hezbollah and the so-called Axis of Resistance group are consolidated by the fact that the United States has repeatedly vetoed any resolutions, any direct national security councils to demand a ceasefire in Gaza or to open getaways, humanitarian assistance in any serious way or to open what is called to undermine a siege of Gaza. That’s to consolidate, so to speak, the convictions that the United States is part of this conflict when it’s backing Israel. It is what it’s doing.

When the U.S. passes through the Strait to come to the Mediterranean, Hezbollah considers this as a direct threat or a message to the party that it will be targeted if there is any conflict with Israel. Nasrallah has bowed to target these ships in case they join the fight, and they expressed fearfulness about the ship and military presence in the region. This is how it is unfolding here in the Middle East.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you mentioned the so-called Axis of Resistance, which is comprised of groups such as Ansar Allah or the Houthis, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah. As you mentioned, there have been numerous attacks on commercial vessels by the Houthis and the Red Sea. In response to these attacks, in order to ensure that there’s global trade and commerce, the United States has created a neighborhood watch, which doesn’t involve many countries in the Persian Gulf or the neighborhood. The only country that’s involved in that area is Bahrain. The United States and the United Kingdom are the other countries that are leading this initiative. Countries such as Italy in Europe have pulled out. You do wonder how well thought out this particular initiative was.

In addition to that neighborhood watch, Politico reported that the Biden administration has other plans to potentially escalate the conflict in response to what’s going on. They’ve been launching additional drone strikes in Iraq and in Syria. We just saw a member of the Popular Mobilization Front, which is an Iranian-backed group in Iraq, being taken out by a U.S. drone strike. I do wonder, these additional plans that the U.S. has, do you see this potentially leading to a full-out war with Iran?

Imad Salamey

I think the United States is quite concerned about the widening of this conflict were it to become a direct confrontation between the United States and Iran because then you are at full-scale war. Regional war with Iran means full mobilizations of U.S. troops, marines, and air force. That means that Iran may be able to close the Hormuz Strait. It may launch missiles against U.S. bases in other countries, i.e., Arab Gulf states. That means that Iran can devastate the U.S. presence in the region.

We were talking about a full-scale war. That means we were talking about thousands and thousands of casualties, which means the United States will have to engage in a war on a wide scale with various fronts. A fight with Iran doesn’t mean a fight just across the Iranian borders because Iran has many proxy groups, many militant-supported groups all over the world, but particularly in Lebanon, with Hezbollah, in Iraq with Hashd al-Sha’bi, in Yemen with the Houthis, so we can expect that any fight between Iran and the United States will become a regional war. The United States will have to have many fights on different grounds.

I guess this is one of the reasons why many European countries pulled out from this coalition that was meant to secure passage through Yemen. Many Europeans fear that if a confrontation starts with the Houthis in Yemen, this will prepare the ground for a wider confrontation whereby the Europeans will have to be pulled into this conflict against Iran. I don’t think the Europeans at this moment are ready for such a scenario. The Europeans are already overwhelmed by the instability that took place in Syria, which led to a massive migration of refugees to European states. These migration waves undermined the unity of the European Union.

Imagine what would happen if Iran became unstable and there were a lot of massive migrations at the same time due to the conflict of war from Iran to different European countries. Europe is much closer. It’s much closer to the conflict and much closer geographically to Iran and to Iranian allies. It’s much more concerned and much more cautious than how the United States would act vis-à-vis Iran.

Now, what we’re seeing is that Israel, in particular, is trying to encourage some regional confrontation because Israel recognizes full well that the different groups it’s confronting on its own are backed and supported by Iran, whether they’re Hezbollah or Hamas, Hashd al-Sha’bi, or the Houthis, these different groups Iran knows full well that they can fight with them, but they will never be victorious as long as Iran continues to support these groups. The lifeline to these groups is held in Iran.

Therefore, Israel recognizes each day that the only way to stop a security threat against its national security interest is to undermine Iranian military bases and military power and cut off this line of support to these proxies— from Iran to them. The only way to do this is perhaps to have a major confrontation where the United States becomes involved in attacking and bombarding Iran.

Definitely, however, one can see that any confrontation with Iran is not going to be a simple fight. It will be a major undertaking. We don’t know how other countries would react. We have to also factor in here Russia. We have to factor in here China. How would they behave if Iran was attacked by the United States? One way or another, if Iran were to lose this fight, these countries have many military cooperation agreements with Iran, especially Russia. They could come to Iran as an aid and prolong any regional confrontation with the United States. The United States would end up in the same boat as Russia and Ukraine; it would become the United States with Iran.

There are many factors to consider here in any region of confrontation that are very complex and can lead to serious repercussions if not well thought out. I guess everybody, particularly the Europeans, is concerned about this, but also the American military is concerned about venturing into [inaudible 00:25:58] with Iran.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, the Europeans are concerned, but I think these issues always have a different spin when you look at the domestic politics of each individual member state. I think you were talking about the issue of additional migration waves coming from Syria and how, in 2015, Europe was overwhelmed. But perhaps that was a bit of a fabrication as well because there wasn’t much solidarity between the European states to take in Syrians. There wasn’t enough sharing of the burden, so to speak, between member states, but also no real solidarity with the people who are in need, who are being displaced from countries like Syria. We see the opposite happening with Ukraine, where Ukrainians were taken in with open arms, as they should be. That should be the case regardless of the background of the asylum seekers in question, regardless of whether they have blue eyes, blonde hair, or a darker complexion. There’s always a domestic component to it.

Going beyond what the domestic issues might be for Europe and whether they want to support Gaza or support Israel or oppose Hezbollah, for example, if we look at what the domestic politics are in Lebanon, how is the population there responding to what’s going on in Gaza, but also to this potential escalation between Israel and Hezbollah? It’s a sectarian country, of course, and there are a lot of different groups. How would you say the response has been domestically from within Lebanon to these developments?

Imad Salamey

Yes, Talia. We are very concerned. The Lebanese, in general, are very concerned about this state of instability and the constant anticipations of what could happen at any time or any hour, i.e., whether we will be dragged into a major war with Israel or, a political solution to the conflict, or a ceasefire. The Lebanese are worried. There is a continuous concern about how the situation is developing. That’s why I see people always watching the news. They’re on Twitter. They’re trying to figure out what’s happening second by second. It is a very alert population.

This is really concerning what we’ve seen in the last two months. Much of the foreign population in the country, Europeans or Americans who were either working for international organizations in the country or were at university as students, have left. We have this feeling of anxiety. Business is not as usual. Not even Lebanese are coming to Lebanon from abroad. There are a lot of concerns. This is taking its toll on the economy for sure.

Now, in terms of how the Lebanese are thinking about the Gaza situation, of course, the Lebanese, like many people around the country, condemn, in many ways, what’s happening in terms of the civilian population taking the fall for the military encounters between Hamas and Israel. People stand in solidarity. They feel with the children, with the innocent lives that are being spared in this fight. Many consider Israel’s retaliation and actions as overwhelming, so they condemn Israel’s action. This is across all sectarian and confessions.

Nonetheless, there is a clear division, political division, on what to do. What should Lebanon do, given what’s happening in Gaza? Of course, Hezbollah, on its own, has decided to engage the Israeli forces as a form of solidarity with Hamas and with the Palestinians in Gaza. They consider this a duty of the Lebanese to support their brothers and sisters in Palestine and to undermine this military campaign by drifting or splitting Israeli forces between the south and north of Israel. Hezbollah and supporters of Hezbollah consider the defeat of Hamas and the occupation of Gaza by Israel to pave the way for another incursion against Lebanon because the same pretext used to destroy Hamas in Gaza can be used against Hezbollah in Lebanon next time around. This concern is a pretext for Hezbollah’s armed engagement with the Israelis and to display some solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Now, not all Lebanese take this position. Other Lebanese, especially on the Christian side of Lebanon, consider Hezbollah’s actions are not necessarily that of Lebanon or the country’s interest is not being taken with the consent of the Lebanese population and is not coming out from a government perspective. It is in violation of UN resolutions, particularly Resolution 1701, which called to disarm the government in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is operating right now. They think that Lebanon should take a neutral stance because it cannot afford a military confrontation with Israel.

We have that political division of what to do given the situation in Gaza: those who support Hezbollah’s actions of going into a confrontation with Israel and those who believe Lebanon is too weak and such a confrontation would cost a heavy price if Israel decided to militarily retaliate against Lebanon, so best to take on a neutral position and provide solutions.

There is quite a deep risk in the political scenery in Lebanon. Yet, this has not been manifested in any actions on the ground. People are still waiting in anticipation of what can happen in Gaza. Everybody is awaiting some solutions or resolution or international interventions that will stop the war and bring about a ceasefire so that Lebanon will be spared from this fight. Things will not deteriorate or escalate from there.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Professor Salamey, it was a pleasure speaking to you. Let’s hope next time we speak, there will be a ceasefire as well as a cessation in hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, and other actors in the region. Let’s hope next time things will be a bit more positive.

Imad Salamey

Great. Thank you, Talia.

Talia Baroncelli

You’ve just been watching part one of my discussion with Professor Imad Salamey. Part two will be about sectarianism in Lebanon and the consociational state.

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Imad Salamey is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University. Salamey is a widely published researcher and scholar.

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Biden: Sheepish Deference to Netanyahu and Unlawful Strikes on Yemen – Trita Parsi

Paul Jay — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 13:15:51 -0500

Dr. Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, says the U.S. and U.K. bombing of Yemen is illegal. He highlights the U.S. and U.K.’s spin doctoring of the Houthi’s stated objective of attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea until a ceasefire in Gaza is reached. He criticizes Biden’s disdain for obtaining Congressional authorization to launch offensive strikes in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.

Gaza: AI Targeting a Cover for Genocide

Paul Jay — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 13:42:00 -0500

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Shir Hever discusses investigative work by the Israeli/Palestinian magazine +972, which exposed the use of AI targeting to justify the Israeli bombing of apartment buildings and hospitals.

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Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. In a few minutes, Shir Hever will join us again to discuss the current situation and the Israeli onslaught against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, and specifically the use of artificial intelligence to target Hamas leaders militants without much care for how many civilians get killed. In fact, some people argue killing civilians might even be part of the objective. I’ll be back in just a minute.

The magazine +972, which is an Israeli Palestinian news magazine published in Israel, and as I say, with Palestinian journalists, published an article very recently about the use of artificial intelligence to target Hamas leaders militants in Gaza. It was not only about the use of AI, but the willingness, and policy even, to not care much about how many civilians are killed in the course of targeting the Hamas leaders and a great reliance on using AI to target an apartment building, school, or a hospital, with maybe 20 seconds of checking whether AI is actually telling you anything that makes any sense.

Now joining us to discuss the article and what this means, and also the significance in terms of the South African case of accusing Israel of genocide is Shir Hever. Shir was born in Israel. He now works for BDS in Germany and is, by training, a political economist. Thanks for joining us, Shir.

Shir Hever

Thanks for having me, Paul.

Paul Jay

So tell us what’s in the article, and then we can talk about what this means.

Shir Hever

Yeah, this is an article by Yuval Abraham, who is a Jewish Israeli working for +972 Magazine, a very serious investigative journalist who has received confidential information from anonymous sources. These anonymous sources are high-ranking officers in Israeli intelligence. He has put a picture of how the targeting acquisition mechanism works for this particular attack on the Gaza Strip, which amounts to the crime of genocide. I guess we’ll get to the point of why it is relevant to talk about genocide in this context.

What he found out from the testimonies of these officers is that the Israeli normal mechanism of acquiring targets by using military intelligence units that identify so-called desirable targets, which means some high-ranking militant or asset belonging to Hamas that they want to destroy or kill, then making a certain calculation of what would be the collateral factor for that attack. The collateral factor means how many civilians are going to be killed for the sake of killing one person that you want to assassinate. Normally, they would have a collateral factor limited to about five. So, five civilians are okay to kill in order to kill one person who is suspected not convicted in a court of being a member of Hamas.

This ratio has been used in previous wars. This time, they are using a different formula. First of all, the officers are saying that they are horrified to discover that the ratio has risen to almost 100, meaning that an entire apartment building can be destroyed. Sometimes, the objective goal of destroying this building is not to kill some high-ranking Hamas officer but to cause panic, dismay, and suffering among the civilian population as a way to pressure Hamas in a very tried, tested, and always failed method of colonial violence.

Paul Jay

When you say officer, to clarify a bit, the journalist from +972 states that he has talked to intelligence, military officials, or soldiers who are involved in the targeting. He’s talking to people with direct knowledge of what’s happening. I should add to this: he was interviewed on CNN, which, to their credit, gave him a fair amount of time to explain what was happening. He is quite a credible journalist.

Shir Hever

Yes. He also gave an interview to Democracy Now. His position is very moral and very ethical. He’s focusing on the needless killing of civilians, and he’s horrified by it, and for very good reason.

I think we should pay attention to something that came out of this article that didn’t receive enough attention, in my opinion, which is the fact that this is the first time in history that artificial intelligence has been weaponized and used as a weapon of war. You have entire units of intelligence officers who used to produce about five to six targets per day, mainly these five or six Hamas officers or militants that they wanted to kill, and established a certain collateral factor for each target. Now, there is an artificial intelligence tool that is manufacturing more than 100 per day. This is what is enabling the Israeli military to carpet bomb the Gaza Strip.

This is, first of all, unprecedented. But we also have to understand how this technology works. Artificial intelligence is sometimes seen as some kind of black box, something that we’re not able to understand. I do think that for our very safety, for our very understanding of what is happening to modern warfare, we need to know. We need to know how this works.

The way that artificial intelligence allegedly works, what the Israeli military is claiming while trying to promote this as a product, is to say that the artificial intelligence is using facial recognition software in order to go over thousands of pictures and videos from drones and surveillance cameras in order to get an analysis of every centimeter of the Gaza Strip. Then they can say, here we have identified a certain target, and we’ve also identified everyone around that target as a way to know how many civilians are there and what’s the collateral factor. A very important factor to this is that they also claim to be able to assess how many possible Israeli hostages are in the area. That’s very important that they say with facial recognition, we will be able to avoid accidentally bombing Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip. This is the product they’re selling.

Now, what we’re really seeing on the ground is something completely different. What we see is, in fact, an artificial intelligence model, which is very similar to Chat GPT. In this language model, because it has some kind of conversation with the officer, the artificial intelligence gathers these pictures and creates a target, but then it begins a process of teaching itself. That’s the whole idea of machine learning of artificial intelligence, that is teaching itself to see what kind of target would be more convincing for the soldier to squeeze the trigger. There’s a soldier sitting on a cannon or guiding a fighter plane to bomb a certain area, and the soldier receives the target from artificial intelligence and has to make a decision, yes or no. That’s those 20 seconds that you talked about. Sometimes, it’s less than 20 seconds, according to the testimonies of those soldiers.

Basically, artificial intelligence teaches itself how to condense the information in the most abbreviated form and in the most convincing form so that the soldiers don’t bother reading everything and squeeze the trigger right away. In a way, the manipulation here is on the Israeli soldiers themselves. They are the weapons that are being utilized by artificial intelligence to kill more people in Gaza. This is really a very dangerous development.

Paul Jay

If I’m understanding the technology correctly, AI does not have X-ray vision. They are going based on some photographs and some radar, but it’s probabilities. What they’re really feeding whoever’s going to actually fire, the soldier that’s going to fire, is that there’s a probability that so and so is in this building. It’s not like there’s some direct evidence, necessarily, maybe sometimes, but if you’re having so many targets, it’s mostly probability. Based on just probability, they’re willingly killing hundreds of people in these attacks, each one of them.

Also, anyone that’s worked with AI just on a text basis, and I’ve done quite a bit, it’s amazing how accurate it is most of the time, but it’s also amazing how often it makes shit up that’s completely, utterly wrong. In fact, they have a term for it in the AI world called hallucinating. AI tends, once in a while, to out and out hallucinate stuff that has nothing to do with reality, and it’s being relied on for targeting.

Shir Hever

It does have one thing to do with reality, and that’s the whole point because the way that artificial intelligence has been programmed is to study by interfacing with the user. If the AI comes to the conclusion that telling you something you want to hear, something you want to see, will create positive feedback, then the AI is more likely to go in that path. If it’s an uncomfortable truth that the AI is supposed to tell you, you notice that if you talk to Chat GPT, it will try to avoid giving you an uncomfortable truth. If you try to tell Chat GPT, I’m looking for a certain book on a certain topic. If that book doesn’t exist, you’re not going to get that answer. Chat GPT will invent a book to give you what you want to hear, even if that book was never written.

Now, this is exactly how it works with the bombing of Gaza because, as you say, AI doesn’t have X-ray vision. Theoretically, the soldiers can vet all of the pictures that the AI is using to make a decision to create a target. But as Yuval Abraham, the author of this article, says, the soldiers eventually, because they lack patience, because they don’t want to go through this very tedious process of vetting each and every picture, they end up just checking the gender of the main target. If it’s a woman, they don’t shoot because they don’t believe that it’s a Hamas fighter. If it’s a man, they shoot without checking anything further.

Now, this is something that would teach the AI to always show a picture of a man. That’s how you teach the AI to only show pictures of men. And that is why if there is a man somewhere in the radius of the explosion, that’s what the AI will focus on, and that’s how the soldiers can be convinced.

Now, I want to tie this to the issue of genocide because there’s a lot of debate in the legal world about why South Africa chose the crime of genocide, which is such a serious crime, as the focus of their lawsuit at the International Court of Justice. From a moral and ethical point of view, I think, of course, they were correct because this is what it is. From a legal point of view, from a strategic point of view, you could say this is a crime that’s difficult to prove. I do think that one of the most important issues about proving genocide is that societies that cross this red line, from waging war to committing genocide, have to go through a process of getting their own soldiers to cross that red line. That is one of the most difficult things.

If it was in Rwanda, where the Hutu have consistently called the Tutsi cockroaches in order to dehumanize them and to get the soldiers to not see them as human beings because that’s the only way you can get the soldiers to kill indiscriminately civilians. The Nazis, of course, had very elaborate mechanisms of dehumanizing Jews, dehumanizing Sinti and Roma as a way to get the soldiers to obey orders and to commit genocide. It’s very difficult. It’s much easier to convince your soldiers to defend your homeland in battle than to go around killing soldiers.

This is really the reason that Israel needs artificial intelligence because from the point of view of the soldiers, they are getting a target, and they’re making an educated decision based on data that they’re getting from the AI. But if you go to Gaza and you look on the ground as the reporters in Gaza who are dying every day but nevertheless continue to report our recording, this is just indiscriminate carpet bombing because you have these hundreds of soldiers, each one of them thinking that he’s unique and just got the best target, squeezes the trigger again and again and again. I’m hearing reports from the Israeli artillery units. They have these M-107 cannons, which have a rate of fire that allows them to shoot 500 shells, 155-millimeter shells per 24 hours. And that’s what they’re doing.

Paul Jay

Well, maybe the real point of AI is to give a fig leaf of justification for carpet bombing. In other words, instead of just calling it carpet bombing, we’re claiming we’re targeting, and this is now just collateral damage when we kill civilians when the reality is the objective is to kill a lot of civilians and make Gaza completely utterly unlivable. But you can say, oh, no, there was a Hamas leader in this building. Well, how do you know? Well, AI told us. It’s actually a fig leaf. Sorry, go ahead.

Shir Hever

For whom is this fig leaf intended? When the Israeli team has to defend themselves at the International Court of Justice, AI doesn’t help them. They cannot go to the International Court of Justice and say, “Our AI told us that this is a Hamas leader.” As these intelligence officers told Yuval Abraham many times, this so-called Hamas leader happens to be a guy with a gun, and that is enough. That’s all they can show. That certainly doesn’t justify demolishing an entire apartment building with the people inside it.

Paul Jay

But that is what they’re going to say. What other defense do they have?

Shir Hever

Yeah, but this is not going to help them. It’s not going to work. But for the soldiers, it does work. So, the fig leaf is a manipulation. Absolutely, they are lying. They are using AI in order to manipulate people, but they’re manipulating their own soldiers.

This is the first war in Israel’s history in which the soldiers are completely banned from contacting their own families and friends back home. This has been now 101 days, or 102-103, depending on when you’re going to broadcast this. During this time, the soldiers cannot call their girlfriends, cannot call their parents, and cannot tell them what’s happening in Gaza. Even more importantly, they cannot hear what people hear back home who can watch the news and follow the situation. It’s not just to prevent the public from knowing what’s happening in Gaza, but it’s even more importantly to prevent the soldiers from knowing that the whole world is watching and calling what they’re doing an act of genocide. Some soldiers who received a little bit of leave, not many receive leave to go and be with their family for a weekend or something, exhibit serious signs of PTSD because the reality clashes completely with what they saw on the ground in Gaza.

Paul Jay

I think there are two other parts to this, which I don’t think get discussed enough. Netanyahu and the Israeli propagandists try to compare what they’re doing to what the British and the Americans did in Germany. The firebombing of Hamburg or the American firebombing of Japanese cities, and then eventually the atomic bomb, which also had a fig leaf of a military target. We know without question that both of these things were done to try to break the morale of either the German people or the Japanese people, which means the civilians were the targets. That is a war crime. So if Israel wants to compare what they’re doing to that, then they’re comparing war crime to war crime. This doesn’t let them off the hook.

Then there’s another even more extenuating piece, if you will, which is the British and Americans vis-à-vis Germany or the Americans with Japan; they were at war with another state. Maybe you can make some argument that the populations of those states, maybe in some perverted way, are targets. Gaza is not a state. Gaza is under occupation. My understanding of international law is you cannot attack the population of a place that’s under your occupation.

The attack against the Israelis on October 7, which was a terrorist and murderous attack, you can use any adjectives you want, I condemn it. This was not an act from a state. To attack the population of Gaza when you’re the occupying power has no basis in international law, as far as I understand it.

Shir Hever

Yeah, well, I’m not the best person to talk about international law. To my understanding, it’s also very much illegal to tell the population of Gaza that you have 24 hours to leave the northern part of Gaza, and everyone who stays behind will be killed. That’s also something that neither the United States nor Great Britain or any of those examples did as part of their fighting, whether it was against Germany or Japan or whatever.

I do think that it is interesting from the point of view, especially the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s a very good example because the American administration at the time knew that they could not just send a pilot with an atomic bomb to destroy a civilian city. They had to lie to the pilot. They had to lie to the mathematicians, [John] von Neumann and [Oskar] Morgenstern, who later established RAND corporation, and told them, we need you to develop a model using game theory in order to find which targets would be least defended by air defense systems in Japan. They came up with the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but without being told what was the real purpose of this experiment, of this mathematical exercise. I think the American administration understood you cannot expect people to commit atrocities on their own. You have to lie to them and manipulate them. So that’s a very interesting example here.

When you say Hamas is not a state, a lot of Israelis would say this is just a technical issue because if Hamas is so strong and if we are so afraid and we have to defend ourselves and all that, then we should fight with all our force to survive. This sort of argument, which they tried to use at the International Court of Justice, is based on a fantasy, on a hallucination, as if Hamas can be defeated by killing a lot of children and a lot of unarmed civilians, and that will somehow weaken Hamas. Yet, it doesn’t. In fact, look at the rate of casualties in the Israeli army for 100 days. They’re being killed every day in Gaza by Hamas fighters, not by innocent, defenseless civilians. They’re being killed by Hamas fighters who keep controlling all these tunnels and have access to enough weapons, petrol, and everything they need in order to continue their fighting against the Israeli military.

The Israeli army failed to rescue any of the hostages. They failed to target or assassinate even one of the leaders of Hamas in Gaza. They only assassinated one in Lebanon. But in Gaza, all of this bombing has achieved nothing except killing a lot of civilians. So, that is also a hallucination. That is also a lie. There’s no number of thousands of families who will be trapped under the rubble, dying slowly, and prevented from being rescued by the Israeli military that will make Israel win this war.

Paul Jay

Did the testimony, not testimony, but the statements of the South African attorneys at the trial or the court, was any of that shown on Israeli television? And if yes, would it have any effect on people? Because it was quite eloquent and powerful, what was said there?

Shir Hever

It was not. Sadly, it was not. The Israeli defense was shown. The responses were shown, but not the actual accusations. You hear so many cries of indignation from the Israeli public, from journalists, from politicians calling it blood libel. How can you say that the state of Israel is killing children when they are killing a lot of children? How can you do this to the Jewish people when it was, in fact, almost the second sentence uttered by the legal team of Israel and the International Court of Justice? In fact, the whole convention for the Prevention of Genocide was for Jews and belongs to Jews, and therefore, Israel is above the law and cannot be targeted by this convention. This is the sort of argument you hear on Israeli media.

I am a little bit taken aback and am listening carefully to what I hear on Israeli media, and I’m following very closely. They are actually admitting each and every element in the accusation of the South African legal team. They’re saying, yes, there were calls for genocide, and yes, there was targeting of civilians and use of starvation as a weapon. This is something that you can’t actually see in the Israeli media. If you put all these things together, you’d say, well, did Myanmar commit genocide against Rohingya? Then the Israelis would say, well, absolutely. One, two, three. This is how genocide is defined. But they recognize the one, two, and three that Israel is committing but are not able to reach the same conclusion.

Paul Jay

The AI systems we have been talking about, are they Israeli manufactured and designed?

Shir Hever

I don’t believe so. In fact, there was this index of which countries have the most advanced artificial intelligence technologies in the world. Israel was lagging behind very low, even below the United Arab Emirates, because the Israeli so-called high-tech miracle is really developed as a weapon of oppression against Palestinians. Artificial intelligence is a different technology. They just don’t have it.

Paul Jay

Do we know where they’re getting it from?

Shir Hever

This is a very big question. I had some suspicions that the Nimbus Project, which is a project by Amazon and Google providing cloud services to the Israeli military, might also be providing artificial intelligence services. I haven’t found proof of this yet, so I’m not making the accusation at this point.

Then, the company Palantir, which you may know, is owned by Peter Thiel, a big Trump supporter. It is a company that is already well known for its technology of surveillance and oppression. They announced officially that they had signed a contract with the Israeli military to provide artificial intelligence. They’re not saying that it’s artificial intelligence for the purpose of acquiring targets, but I think that they are right now the prime suspects as to who is providing this technology.

Paul Jay

Okay. All right, thanks very much, Shir. We’ll pick this up again soon.

Shir Hever

Thank you, Paul.

Paul Jay

Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Don’t forget, if you come over to the website, get on the email list if you’re not on it. If you’re on YouTube, subscribe, and you can always hit the donate button if you’re so moved. Thanks again.

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Dr. Shir Hever studies the economic aspects of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory. He is the manager of the Alliance for Justice between Israelis and Palestinians (BIP) and the military embargo coordinator for the Boycott National Committee (BNC).

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Why Did Argentines Elect a Right-Wing Non-Establishment Extremist?

Paul Jay — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 14:50:36 -0500

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Argentina elected Javier Milei, a right-wing libertarian populist, as its president on November 19th. Milei won because he represented a clear alternative to Argentina’s untenable economic crisis, says political scientist Atilio Borón. While he will no doubt inflict more pain on Argentina, his ability to privatize everything, though, is not assured because he lacks a majority in Argentina’s legislature.

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Gregory Wilpert

Welcome to The World on Fire. I’m your host, Greg Wilpert. Argentina experienced a political earthquake on November 19th, when the right-wing TV commentator and libertarian economist Javier Millay, won Argentina’s presidency with 56 % of the vote. Millay could be considered a populist in the mold of Brazil’s Jaíp Bolsonaro or the US’s own, Donald Trump. He has promised to privatize all government services and also to dollarize the economy, among many other things. Joining me now from Buenos Aires to make sense of what happened in Argentina on Sunday, November 19, is Artullio Baron. He’s an Argentine social scientist and the author of numerous books on the neoliberalism, imperialism, and geopolitics. And he’s also Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires. Thanks for joining me today, Artullio.

Atilio Borón

It’s a pleasure to see you here. Yeah.

Gregory Wilpert

So Argentina has historically gone back and forth really between a right-wing, neoliberal paradigm and then also a more progressive or center-left paradigm representing basically the former President of Argentina, Juan Peron. But currently, the election of Javier Meylet seems to have represented a definitive break from the dominance of these Peronist parties. Now, how did that happen? And why did so many Argentines vote for someone so extreme who seems crazy both in terms of his political proposals and also in terms of his personality?

Atilio Borón

Well, I think that one crucial factor to understand this situation is the poor economic performance of the present government of Alberto Fernandes, which failed to control inflation, which is in this moment at the end of the year, the estimation is about 190% inflation rate for all the whole 2023. Very sharp decrease in the real wages and salaries of most of the population. People really wanted a change. And Mr. Massa, which did a very good political campaign, but was not able to convince large part of the electorate that his promises that he will stop inflation and recreate a more stable economic environment was not believed by the people, because for a very simple reason, he is still today, I’m sorry, the minister of economy. Many people say, Okay, if you know how to do it, do it now. Don’t wait until you are elected president and then we will see what happen. Do it now. So to some extent, Massa was seen as the continuation of the present government. And he was, in fact, a continuation with some new features, because he is not really a Permanista. But on the other hand, you have that most of the population wanted a change, no matter what the change meant.

They wanted something has to be changed. I want to make clear this because there is a mistaken analysis which says that 56% of the Andetain population went fascist. This is not true. Most of the people who voted, I would say the overwhelming majority of the people who voted for Millay just wanted to keep inflation low to increase their real wages to increase the security, citizen security in the slums and in the poor neighborhoods of the greater Buenos Aires area. And that’s all. They have nothing to do with this fancy idea, crazy idea. Millay revived some of the saints of Adolf Hitler. When Hitler talked about the superiority in terms of the white race, okay? And he, Millet, said that we are esthetically superior to the left wingers or to the collectivists, to the communists, Marxists, feminists. He has a lot of people who are absolutely blackmailed as the worst thing that happened in Argentina. People didn’t vote for that. They just wanted a change. Mass did not offer a likely change in the Colombia situation. Millay has all this gesticulation, this strong face. He was the angry man who went with a chainsaw to demolish the central bank and to fire all the hundreds of thousands of people working in the state, which were not working at all according to him.

And of course, people voted for him, that’s all. But his ideas are absolutely impossible to carry out in the practice. This is no question of that.

Gregory Wilpert

Now, who is Javier Millay and what can we expect from him? I mean, as you mentioned the number of his policies, they seem very extreme. He says of himself that he’s a libertarian. How many of his far-right ideas, libertarian ideas do you think he will be able to implement? What do you think will happen?

Atilio Borón

He want to demolish, to explode the Central Bank. That would be the first country except for Monaco and a few islands in the Pacific without a Central Bank. But of course, Monaco is part in practical terms of the French economy and they use the euro. That cannot be done. Secondly, he said that the major goal of his policies will be to achieve fiscal equilibrium and the state will not spend one penny more than the budget, which is likely to be raised with taxes and so on. This is impossible. Most of the countries, most of the countries run on a basis of some fiscal deficit, even Keynes made all these elaborations about the virtues of fiscal deficit to promote economic development. He said that no fiscal deficit, zero deficit, okay? For instance, in order to do that, he said that he will not pay the Aguinaldo, as we say it. I don’t know this, is the.

13- End-of-year bonuses.

Atilio Borón

End-of-year bonuses, which has been a historical conquest of the work, labor in classes in Argentina since the late ’40s, can you imagine? This is part of the basic compensation for the salaries and wage which are going down the drain. He said, I will not pay that. Well, that is ridiculous because this will create an enormous social explosion. The same he says, there is no money in the state. And of course, all the public works which are already in execution, which are already unfinished will be stopped. When people say, Well, but we need a sewage and we need fresh water and we need the pipes to run. That’s a problem of the major, the intendables, as we call in Argentina, the local authorities, they will have to talk to the private guys which are in their locality and see who is interested in doing business with all the sewages and the freshwater pipelines and all that. This is a lot of these ideas which have no sense. I must tell you, Greg, that he has zero experience, zero, okay? Not only as a public administrator, but also as an entrepreneur. Here is the guy who the only thing he has done has been writing books in which there is a lot of plagiarism, by the way, the nonsense of plagiarism in the books.

He has no idea for any time of the prices. If you ask him, Okay, how much is the one kilo of meat today in Argentina? He has no idea. You know, how is the value of the one liter of milk? No idea. And when the journalist, he asked, Are you planning to run the country? And you don’t know some basic things. For instance, the transportation ticket in urban, Buenos Aires. No idea. And he said, No, because all these shopings are done by my sister. He’s a single, he lives with his sister. I have an idea. What he has in his head is an Excel sheet, a worksheet, and looking at that, he said, Well, we need a fiscal equilibrium. We will stop spending money in science and technology. No more free university. We are going to privatize the public university. We have 57 public universities in Argentina. He wants to privatize all of them or introduce a fee which cannot be paid by. We have 50% of the population living under the poverty line. There are people which are among the poor, which because of this great development of local universities, are attending the university because the universities are free.

But if you impose now a fee to register in one of those public universities, most of those people won’t be able to pay. The ideas he have for it are also, well, if you have a problem with your salary, you can always sell one of your lamps. You have two, okay? The kidneys, you have two kidneys, just sell one. He also argued that, well, organ trafficking is a market and should not be interfered with the state. If somebody decided to send a lamb, he should be able to say, and the state has nothing to do with that. That’s a lot of crazy ideas. And of course, I see that this is very, very difficult to carry out in the practice.

Gregory Wilpert

Why do you think that’s so difficult? I mean, in terms of practice, of course, there’s the obstacles in terms of the population accepting it and of just whether it works, but also what’s the political situation in the Congress? I mean, will you have any support? What support will you enjoy there?

Atilio Borón

Well, he doesn’t have a single governor in a country in which governors are very, very strong. He doesn’t have a single mayor in all the countries, okay? In the Congress, his bloc is a minority, okay? But the traditional rights, led by Mr. Mauricio Macri, could support a few of those decisions, but very, very difficult he will get the support, for instance, to the abolition of the Central Bank, among other things, because that would imply a constitutional reform in which you need to have two-thirds of the members of the Congress supporting the decision. That would be very blah, blah, blah. He would talk about all things, making gestures and so on. But in real terms will be very difficult. But a few of those decisions will be carried out. For instance, I am very much afraid about the privatization of the pension funds, which in Argentina is a very significant part of the national income. Why I say this? Because we have for the population over 65 or 70 years, 70 if you are male, 65 if you are women, 93% of that population today is assisted with some pension or jubilation, as we say here in Argentina.

This is a huge business, okay? Very profitable business. It doesn’t work because look at the Chilean experience. The Chilean experience show that it has been a real failure. And most of the problems which erupted in October in Chile, October 2018, were in part due to the fact that people started to go to the pension fund and then receive only one fraction of what they expected. Even there are documents of the World Bank saying that the system is not working as it should and that the state pension funds are better, more reliable than private. But there are enormous interest groups surrounding Mr. Macri, which is the really mastermind behind all these using the figure of Millay. But Macri, what wants is some of these big chance of the Argentine economy. For instance, the pension system or the straight oil company, which is very profitable these days because of the new discoveries of oil and gas reserves in the Argentine South. I think that some changes will take place not without very strong popular resistance, because people really have a sense that we have already tried this medicine in the past, in the years of menin, and we know what happened with the privatization of the straight oil company in which practically there was really just a question of robbing all our assets and not making any real investment.

When the company was recovered by the state and they made more investment, they discovered this huge vacamuerta oil field. That means that really would be very against the current and against the public opinion, try to go back to a privatization scheme once again.

Gregory Wilpert

Now it seems like Argentines had a very difficult choice between Millay and Masa. I mean, one person representing this right-wing libertarianism and the other one representing economic failure, essentially. How did it come to that? I mean, what happened to other forces in particularly progressive forces, let’s say, why weren’t they able to present a coherent alternative?

Atilio Borón

Well, it was very, very difficult, okay? Because when you have the threat of an extreme right like Mr. Millay, then people try to rally around some which present a more or less palatable alternative. Even if I didn’t like the policies of Mr. Massa, and I think that he did not make the job we needed him to do in order to keep inflation low, when you have to decide between him and Millay, there are no choice. I use in one of my articles a letter written by Trotsky regarding the election of 1933 in Germany, in which he asked the communist and the socialist to support Mr. Brunig because he said, We have the absolute evil, which is Hitler. On the other hand, we have a bourgeois politician, but at least he will not shoot us and kill all of us. Now we have to prevent Hitler winning the election. This the same reasoning went on and on in Argentina among many people, very progressive. But we are very angry with this government and say, look, even if the other guy is the same as Hitler, but he will not do what he says he want to do.

For instance, many people say he’s talking about that, but he’s not doing that. They did not believe that that Millay was serious. And Millay is serious. Millay is a fanatic. He’s absolutely fanatic. Look, you know the story of the dogs. He has four dogs. All the dogs have the name of some of this Libertarium. The most famous this Libertarian, the most famous is the name of one of the dogs. He believes absolutely what I wrote in a paper, small article which was published today. Look, not a single conservative government ever applied the ideas of libertarianism in America or in the United States. Not even Reagan, not Trump, not Margaret Thatcher, no one. Because those are fancy ideas for a scholarly discussion. Greg, you know that in the academia, many times we are involved in very disantined discussions. They’re like the sex of the angels, we say it in Spanish, sex of Los Angeles. It’s a nonsense. Who believes really that markets can properly work without some state regulation? That markets are absolutely alone, because Millet repeat word by word, Rodbar, when Rodbar say that the state is an organization to rob the taxpayers. And he say exactly the same.

Yesterday evening he said, If your salary, if your wage is too short, it’s because you have too much estate. Therefore, well, those in front of that dilemma, people said the people who were in a very bad situation, they didn’t care too much about what Massa was saying, because Massa should have solved the inflation problem before, not promised that he would resolve the problem of inflation when he was President. That is the heart of the matter. But we are entering into a dangerous zone during the next three months. Because I’ve seen that Macry, who wrote a book called Second Term, which I read very thoroughly. He said in the last chapters that we have to try again what we did. But it didn’t come out well because we were very slow. Gradualism is is fatal to a process of change. Now my fears are that Millay may make an agreement with the people, the representatives in the chamber of deputies of Juntos por el Campio, which is all this organization created by Mr. Macri and approve two or three general laws, two or three general pieces of legislation. And on the basis of those legislations and advance in dismanting, for instance, the labor legislation, the Union legislation, social rights, minorities, and all that.

This is my fear. In the first three months, many people will say, Well, but let Millay rule the country to see what he wants to do. I think those three next months, December, January and February will be absolutely critical because he may get approved, approve some legislation, which will be very favorable for him to introduce major reforms in the organization of the state, in the deregulation of the economy, in the liberalization of the foreign trade, which produced huge amount of among the small and medium enterprises, which are the most important sources of labor demand in this country.

Gregory Wilpert

Now, I want to turn to what a MLA presidency would mean for the region and also what it might mean for Latin America’s relationship with the United States. What do you think? How is that going to develop?

Atilio Borón

Well, as I mentioned to you, he’s a person with very strong conviction. He’s a fanatic. He’s a true believer, the classic true believer, so much studied in the American political science guy. He will reduce the contacts. He said, at least this is what he was boasted to say, that he will not deal with communist regimes. China is one communist regime. Brazil is also to him. Lula is a communist leadership. You have to bear in mind that for Millay and the small sector of fanatics which surround Millay, any form of collectivism is communist. Okay, any kinds of Keynesian politics is collectivist. He is a fanatic leader of the road to serve the book by von Hayek. You remember that book is dedicated to the collectivist of all parties. Well, he believed. He will try to reduce the relationship between China and Brazil. He said that the first visit of President will be to Israel. He will plan to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He is a real enemy of the Chinese. This is, for instance, for that reason, Millay is a celestial music to Washington bureaucrats for Blinket and Biden and all that because he’s a cold warrior against China.

But my question is, will he be able to go ahead in that program anti-China when China and Brazil are the first and second commercial partners of Argentina? What will be the reaction of the entrepreneurial leaders, the big corporations which have been supporting, supporting Millay? Not to break the ties with China, but to increase their business with China, which is one of the largest markets for Argentine product. The same with Brazil. Argentina and Brazil economies are very, very strongly intertwined. Therefore, I think that he will try to do that. But summing up the answer to your question, this will imply a weakening of the capacity of Latin America and the Caribbean to play a role in the international chessboard, as Brazil used to say. Brazil needed to have Argentina side by side in order to make a better negotiation with the great powers of the West and also with China, Russia and India. Now, Lula is alone. I am concerned also because Argentina was accepted as a member of the Brigs, which is a very important achievement of this government. Very likely, Mr. Millay will decide not to accept the invitation and just slam the door and going out of the brief, which will be a major, or I would say, a catastrophic mistake in terms of foreign policy.

In addition, the people who are advising him in foreign policy, Greg, are students of International Relations 100 and all of them will be flanked in examination because they don’t understand absolutely nothing of what happened in the world. Absolutely nothing. We are extremely concerned that you can say because given all my wordings of the situation.

Gregory Wilpert

Well, we’ll definitely continue to follow the situation and hopefully have you back again. But we’ll leave it there for now. I was speaking to Professor Atilia Boron, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires. Thanks again, Atilia, for having joined me today.

Atilio Borón

Thank you, Greg. I’m sorry I was giving such a grim picture of the Argentine situation, but I hope that perhaps in a few months we could have a more enjoyable conversation. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Gregory Wilpert

Thank you to our audience for joining us on The World on Fire. Until next time.

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Atilio Borón is an Argentine Marxist sociologist. He worked as a Professor of Political Science at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute and at the University of Buenos Aires. He also served as Secretary General of CLACSO, an academic umbrella body for Latin America.

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Colleague of Imprisoned Boris Kagarlitsky on Russian Anti-War Opposition – Anna Ochkina

Paul Jay — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 12:09:38 -0500

Anna Ochkina is a Russian sociologist and colleague of Marxist sociologist and dissident Boris Kagarlitsky, who has been held in prison by Russian authorities since July 25. She says the authorities don't actually believe he is a terrorist threat, but it is fear among the elite of his anti-war activism that led to his arrest.

Growing Up Privileged in Apartheid, Colonial Israel – Shir Hever on Reality Asserts Itself (pt 1/4)

Paul Jay — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 14:20:32 -0500

This interview was originally published on July 9, 2014. Mr. Hever says he became politically active after the Second Intifada was repressed with extreme violence by the Israeli military and police.

Israel, World Capital of Homeland Security Industries – Shir Hever on Reality Asserts Itself (pt 3/4)

Paul Jay — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 14:15:43 -0500

This interview was originally published on July 11, 2014. Mr. Hever says Israel sells weapons and equipment of repression to countries with extreme inequality.

Fear and Loathing in Israel – Shir Hever on Reality Asserts Itself (pt 2/4)

Paul Jay — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 14:15:04 -0500

This interview was originally published on July 10, 2014. Mr. Hever says in colonial conditions the master fears and hates the servants who might rise up and demand their rights.

An Occupier’s Peace or a Just Peace – Shir Hever on Reality Asserts Itself (pt 4/4)

Paul Jay — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 14:02:24 -0500

This interview was originally published on July 13, 2014. Mr. Hever says the occupiers always want peace – a peace that strengthens the status quo.

The Russian Oligarchy and the “Civilization State”

Paul Jay — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 13:44:55 -0500

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Historian Jeffrey Sommers analyzes the plunder of public resources in the ‘90s and how the Putin-led state has embraced a toxic mix of religion and nationalism. Hosted by Paul Jay.

Why the Soviet Union Imploded – Jeffrey Sommers (pt 1)
Why the Soviet Union Imploded – Jeffrey Sommers (pt 2)

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Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. In a few seconds, I’ll be joined by Jeffrey Sommers. We’re going to talk about the Russian state, the rise of Putin, and what it means in terms of the current war in Ukraine. Be back in just a few seconds.

As Israel continues its bombing of Gaza, Russia continues its attack on Ukraine. These wars have some things in common, but that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about Ukraine, the Russian invasion, and the rise of the state as led by Putin and what we make of it today.

Now joining us again to talk about this is Jeffrey Sommers. If you haven’t watched my previous interviews with Jeff, you really should because they help set this one up. You’ll find them in the links below.

Jeffrey Sommers is a professor of political economy and public policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he also serves as a senior fellow at the Institute of World Affairs. In addition to his academic work, he’s been published in outlets such as the Financial Times, the New York Times, Project Syndicate, the Guardian, the Nation, Social Europe, and often in Counterpunch. Thanks for joining me, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Sommers

Paul, great to be here.

Paul Jay

So, in the previous segments, we talked about the end of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the rise of this new version of Russia. We talked to some extent about the ’90s, but I left off the last interview asking a question that I think leads to the issue of the rise of the oligarchs and the rise of the state under Putin.

The question I was left off with was, as the ’90s unfolded, certainly at the beginning of the selling of public assets, the big privatization that took place after the fall of [Mikhail] Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a lot of assets were sold to individual Russians, many or most of whom had been in the party or certainly were seniors in the bureaucracy, which probably meant in the party. Assets that might have been worth hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, were sold for two or three million, I’m told. If I’m right about that, where did these people get two or three million? Nobody was supposed to have individually two or three million dollars entering the ’90s. So, what had happened prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union that there were such people?

Jeffrey Sommers

It’s a good question, and it’s a fascinating one, and one which I think can still see you probably wearing concrete shoes and finding yourself at the bottom of a deep river if you ask too many questions along this line of inquiry. But nonetheless, it is fascinating.

Under Joseph Stalin, actually, even under this period of totalitarianism, we saw periodically the rise of millionaires. Stalin, when he did discover them, had them typically shot. But nonetheless, you’re absolutely right. We’re not supposed to see people in possession of much money during the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, it happens.

Well, how so? First of all, I would like to set this up in terms of a brief political economy of the 1980s and 1990s, and just very cursorily looking at the differences, again, between China and Russia and the very different trajectories that they took. Thinking about how both of them played an essential role in the creation of this neoliberal, globalized order that emerged in the 1980s out of the crisis of the 1970s— crisis being relatively low profits in the Western capitalist world.

Just to rehearse that different set of trajectories and their importance for launching a 40-year period of profitability and some prosperity for some in the world system thereafter, we have China playing the role of a large state with a massive reserve army of labor. A state that is strong can impose its authority, can put in place the infrastructure that is needed, and can bring in all of this industry from Western capitalist states where labor costs had become uncompetitive, at least according to their owners. It provided a vehicle for restoring profitability within the global system by providing high-quality manufactured goods at relatively low labor costs, delivered efficiently onto markets. And, of course, as we know, China was able to use its leverage as a supplier of these essential goods to get the majority share, 51% plus ownership of many joint ventures with foreign firms, and to have significant degrees of technology transfer from abroad to them. So that puts them on this launching pad for a mission to economic development and prosperity, which, of course, as we know, over the past four decades, they’ve been wonderfully successful with something that I don’t think anyone else could really do. They had a unique set of advantages at a specific point in history, which allowed them to leverage neoliberalism and globalization into this project of national development, which delivered such fantastic results for them.

By contrast, the Soviet Union was an entirely different animal. As much as living standards were not on par with the richest countries in the world, they were nonetheless still too high in order to have a workforce that would be competitive in terms of the global system, and this desire to set up new production facilities and take advantage of very low-cost labor.

Number one, there was not a lot of excess labor in the Soviet Union, at least not to the extent that there was in China. Again, it was far too expensive. But what did the former Soviet Union have, and especially Russia? Well, as we know, that was raw materials. Those raw material prices when depressed from their very high levels in the 1970s. We have to remember that the 1970s crisis was not only caused by too much competition driving profits down and wages which kept going up but also rising raw material prices. Well, in the 1980s, the Soviet Union began to supply an increasing quantity of these raw materials at low prices, and this helped to return the global system to profitability. And, of course, this continues in the 1990s. This is why the 1990s are often referred to as the peak of neoliberalism, the point where we had a unipolar world in which the United States prevailed over the system almost without peer competition, profits were very, very high, and there was much prosperity.

Now, getting us back to your question, how does Russia fit into this system as continuing to provide these raw materials? Well, as we had mentioned in our last talk, as the 1980s unfolded and as we get the Gorbachev reforms, which were designed to restore some efficiency and competitiveness in the system within the Soviet Union, they had exactly the opposite effect. Again, Gorbachev pursued this model of restoring or creating democracy. He’s always got his face in the works of [Vladimir] Lenin. He’s trying to figure out where the system went wrong and how to write it. He’s convinced that, more or less, the recipes for success are located there. We see this dramatic flourishing of democracy at this time. It was thought that this would also give rise to innovation, and this would save the Soviet economy. Instead, it launches this period of rampant rent-seeking and theft. It takes the tendencies that had emerged and fully flowered of corruption throughout the late 1970s and through the 1980s and throws gasoline on it. It’s in this environment that you get this new class of people that emerge, that begin to accumulate capital.

They create, within the early Soviet Union under Gorbachev, things such as cooperatives. We discussed this a little bit last time: these economic cooperatives, which were like subdivisions, oftentimes within existing enterprises. The idea that Gorbachev had was that there were probably all sorts of goods and services that the existing Soviet enterprises could deliver if they just had more freedom of latitude in which to act. So what they essentially did was to say, “Hey, guys, look, if you got a factory that’s producing so many metric tons of steel rebar for construction, if you can do something else with that steel as well and bring it into the market and sell it at whatever market price it will command, you can keep those profits and continue to find these new, un-heretofore discovered areas of need in the economy.” So that’s how it was supposed to work.

To do this, the Soviet authorities also began allowing the creation of banks to provide some of the capital needs of these newly emerging cooperatives. The money that was provided, oftentimes, for investment and expansion into certain areas was backed up by the state, by the government. So, in a sense, this was a license to create money in the late Soviet Union and then to steal it if you chose.

Now, how did you steal the money? Well, you had to turn it into a foreign hard currency and send it abroad. We discussed this a little bit last time, that it was the KGB that was tasked with this job of showing some of these new managers or managers of existing state enterprises that were beginning to create these cooperatives how you dealt with international finance. Sometimes, you might need to buy electronics from abroad or whatever it is. You needed to engage international finance in order to do this. The KGB was the only area where the resident’s skills and knowledge existed of how to work the system of banks, especially offshore banks, and one has to remember that this was another element of overcoming the 1970s crisis of profitability, which was to begin avoiding your tax bills.

We see this really big explosion, especially in London, of the offshore banking industry, which, again, goes all the way back to the 1950s in terms of the euro-dollar market and the need to deal with the intricacies of rebuilding Europe after World War II. Europe has all these countries, and you can’t have all these multinational companies getting taxed every time they cross the border. So, everyone does a wink and a nod to tax avoidance every time you cross the border. That was more or less, I think, legitimate.

They created in that process in the 1950s the offshore banking structures, which in the 1970s and the 1980s would be used for much larger scale tax evasion and all sorts of dubious activities. The KGB provides this skill set to this emerging class of managers and entrepreneurs. They weren’t always the new owners of these enterprises in the [Boris] Yeltsin years. They did not always come from within these enterprises. Some did of the type that I just referenced, but others were figures in the Komsomol. So, in other words, energetic young members of the Communist Party. They had a really great Soviet Union-wide network. They were engaged in all these conferences all the time. They knew each other. They could use that same network for all sorts of practices, corrupt and otherwise. And they did. And then there were also some academics of talent, often coming out of physics, which today still produces, along with philosophy, they have the two highest sets of standardized test scores for aspiring new students. P&P, physics and philosophy, produces a lot of smart people. Some of them find their way into these activities as well. Some of them do things really simple, like selling flowers, of which, in the Soviet Union, that was a really big deal. You were always bringing flowers for some occasion, i.e., Names Day.

Paul Jay

The same thing happened in the U.S. A lot of people who studied physics wound up either in Big Tech or on Wall Street.

Jeffrey Sommers

Wall Street, right. Exactly. Yes, Wall Street and Big Tech; that’s exactly right. So there were people who started off young, energetic, small, and from these rather humble beginnings. Just through a lot of hustle, ended up acquiring quite a bit of money that way as well. Not enough money to buy a state nickel company or something like that. It wouldn’t be worth a massive sum of money. This is where we started to see some of the initial capital accumulation.

What I am trying to lay out are the various ways in which this initial capital accumulation started. It was with these commercial banks that were set up, as I was explaining, it was with these guys that got into these entrepreneurial activities. Simple as, again, selling flowers and honey at markets. Next thing you know, their operations go big, and they’re starting to operate across the entire width and breadth of the Soviet Union.

I think I might have even mentioned the case of Latvia last time, which became really the hub of offshore banking activity for the post-Soviet oligarchs that were looking to get their money to places like New York and London. Of course, thinking about the political economy and overcoming that crisis from the 1970s and maintaining profitability in the 1990s, something like a full $250 billion comes out of Russia and ends up in the equity markets of New York alone. So, that really boosts asset prices. Then, of course, in London, we have the purchase of all this real estate and all the rest.

Now, in the case of a place like Latvia, to give a concrete example of how this initial capital accumulation could work, we had, as I think I mentioned before, this bank called Parex, which would go on to become the biggest bank in Latvia in the 1990s up until the financial crash of 2008 wiped it out. You had two enterprise and Komsomol members, young communists, and they get their humble start by filling duffel bags full of rubles and taking the train and going between Riga, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. What they discover is that on the street markets, there’s different— it’s ever so slight— but there’s this arbitrage. Different levels at which they can exchange this currency for others; that’s how they get their start. As I indicated before, these guys then start, they get the first official approval for a currency exchange within the Soviet Union in 1990. They become then the clearing house for these cooperatives and some of the state managers who are running some of these cooperatives. Throughout the entire Soviet Union, the money is flowing into Riga again.

As I think I mentioned last time, they were not very subtle. Parex used to have a sign in the front of its bank. Now, this would have been in the early 1990s, after they established a bank in addition to their Soviet-era currency exchange. But when they create this bank, they have this sign that says, “We take all currencies. We ask no questions.” It’s right on the sign in front. Another of their signs, as I think I’d mentioned before, was, “Riga, we are closer than Switzerland.” They had a bit of a sense of humor. And, of course, they were also very direct about what they were doing. They both became people who ended up with— their net worth was estimated around $800 million each.

Now, how this then unfolded in the 1990s is that we had this privatization period that began. There were friends of ours, like Boris Kagarlitsky, who is now in jail just east of the Urals for his criticisms of Putin’s government. He, as I think I mentioned before, was in the Moscow City Council. It’s called the Moscow Duma between 1990 and 1993, arguably the most democratic period in Russia’s history. He tried to expose what was going on. I think I may have mentioned this example before. For instance, just to highlight, this is great public relations. Boris really was smart with this kind of thing. Just to highlight the level of theft, he went to this one hotel near the Kremlin that was being sold for next to nothing. Boris had the chandelier alone in that hotel appraised, and then he gave a speech saying that they were privatizing and selling this hotel for less than the chandelier was worth, which was true. So that speaks to your point regarding the kopecks on the ruble.

Paul Jay

Let me jump ahead a bit. During this period, which was in the ’90s, there was a very chaotic grab by anyone who had some capital, can get hold of these private enterprises and get super rich, and they did. If I understand it correctly, at this point, the state and Yeltsin are fairly subordinate to the power of the oligarchs in the midst of all this chaos. When Putin came to power over the years, did that relationship change? Because it seems like now, we’re at a point where the oligarchs are subordinate to the state to a large extent, and Putin has been able to establish the state as the most powerful force, and the oligarchs better get along with it. If I’m right about that, how does that process take place?

Jeffrey Sommers

Well, you’re absolutely right about that, Paul. I remember some of these resentments that started to be expressed. A friend of mine used to be the head of publishing, which, in effect, was all information for the Soviet Republic of Latvia during Gorbachev’s period. She started reporting to me in the late 1990s that the KGB guys were getting really restless, and they were getting, frankly, pissed off about what had transpired in the 1990s, not because the country had been sold out but because they didn’t get theirs.

Paul Jay

There’s an interesting thing. Do you know the show The Americans? I’ve been rewatching it because I think it’s one of the best series that’s ever been on TV and shockingly nuanced for an American network dealing with Soviet spies in the United States. We’re up to the last season now rewatching it, and there’s a split in the KGB, pro-Gorbachev and anti-Gorbachev. With the anti-Gorbachev saying these reforms, especially democratization, are going to lead to the end of the Soviet Union. Well, in some ways, I guess maybe they did. It certainly was followed by the end of the Soviet Union. This kind of split in the KGB that thought democratization was a big mistake, does Putin come out of there?

Jeffrey Sommers

No. He’s really, to my mind, a very distinctive figure because he bridges so many different groups. That is his tremendous advantage or has been his tremendous advantage. He understood so many different groups, and he was seen as credible with so many different groups. So he gains credibility with the military, who definitely comes out of that wing of this has been a huge disaster, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the West is going to just run roughshod over us. That’s the message that they’re telling him all along. We’re really seeing the country being screwed. These oligarchs are the ones that have done this to us, along with the West. Then there are the oligarchs. In other words, he’s referencing Yeltsin. He was somebody who could not control the oligarchs; you are absolutely right about that. But he was also not so much seeking to control them. In other words, as they used t

Radical Transformation is Needed for an Israeli-Palestinian Peace – Nadim Houry

Paul Jay — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:01:34 -0500

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Nadim Houry, Executive Director of the Arab Reform Initiative, discusses the role of Arab countries in the Middle East in demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and negotiating the release of hostages taken by Hamas. Normalization between Bahrain and the UAE with Israel, in addition to negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, has been disrupted as the Israeli bombardment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza continues. Houry also addresses previous attempts to advance peace, such as the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, and argues that a regional rather than bilateral approach with Israel is necessary, one which requires a non-negotiable end to settlement expansion in the West Bank and brings Iran and other regional actors into the fray.

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m your host, Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. Joining me today is Nadim Houry, who will be speaking about the effort of Arab countries in the Middle East to bring about a ceasefire. Please don’t forget that we rely on your support to make this content. If you’d like to donate to the show, you can do so by going to theAnalysis.news. Also, don’t forget to get on our mailing list; that way, you’re always updated every time there’s a new episode. Help us beat the algorithm by liking and subscribing to our YouTube channel and like and subscribe to the show wherever else you listen to it, whether it be on Spotify or Apple. See you in a bit with Nadim Houry.

Joining me now is Nadim Houry. He is the Executive Director of the Arab Reform Initiative in Paris and has also worked as a human rights lawyer for Human Rights Watch for over 13 years. Thank you so much for joining me again, Nadim.

Nadim Houry

Thank you for having me.

Talia Baroncelli

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is getting progressively worse. The death toll is now over 10,000 innocent Palestinian civilians, of whom over 4,000 are children. In response to Israel’s continued bombardment and siege of the Gaza Strip, we’ve seen several countries recall their ambassadors to Israel. Bahrain, Turkey, and Jordan recalled their ambassadors to Israel, and several countries in South America, such as Chile, Colombia, and Honduras have done the same. I believe Bolivia went a step further and completely cut diplomatic ties with Israel. How would you characterize the efforts on the part of Arab countries in the Middle East to bring about a ceasefire?

Nadim Houry

We’ve seen different initiatives from different Arab states, but these initiatives have remained, I would say, quite shy. I think there’s a high level of rhetorical condemnation from the official states. There’s a high level of anger in the different capitals and streets. But in practice, a lot of the efforts have been trying to convince the U.S. to put pressure on Israel to stop, frankly, the insane retaliation and attacks that we are seeing on the ground.

One interesting role has been the one played by Qatar, which has become the central mediator on the issue of hostages and trying to link the issue of hostages to a ceasefire. We’ve seen both the U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian leadership, because Qatar actually has some Hamas leaders there trying to figure out a way to negotiate this.

Another foreign role, and again, it’s not a common position because each country has different priorities, we’ve really seen Egypt very worried about what’s happening in Gaza. We will talk about it as well because Egypt is very concerned that part of the Israeli plan is to, again, force, relocate, and in some ways commit ethnic cleansing by pushing all Palestinians into Sinai, into Egypt, which is something that is a red line not just for Egypt, for the Palestinians, but also for the Arab States, and particularly amidst some of the more right-wing government of Israel. Also, we’re hearing messianic voices from some people, or actually ministers in the government.

Talia Baroncelli

Right, and you’re alluding to a leaked report by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, which is a think tank body within the Israeli military. It was suggesting that Israel should forcibly displace Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula, which would, of course, be in contravention of international norms.

Most noticeably, a few days ago, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu was on ABC News, and he said that Israel should take control of it’s of its own security as well as the security of Gaza and potentially occupy Gaza for an indefinite period.

Now, up until that point, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had not drawn any red lines for Israel, but perhaps in response to the prospect of an indefinite occupation of Gaza, he did lay out some conditions for a durable peace. He did say that there should be no forcible displacement of the Palestinians, that the territory of Gaza should not be reduced, and that neither Israel nor Hamas should have a presence in Gaza after the war comes to an end, whenever that will be. It remains to be seen as to whether there will be any policy backing this up or if these are meaningless words by Blinken. Do you see this response as being far too little too late? Is Blinken too late to the show?

Nadim Houry

Are these words late? Definitely. Now, I’m not sure what too late means because the fighting is still ongoing, and there’s a real question mark about what is the Israeli game plan beyond bombarding and doing a military incursion.

I think the U.S. has been worried about it since the beginning, but unfortunately, and this is where I think they are too late, they went along with the Israeli plan of attacking without actually having any gain. As the death toll quickly increased in dramatic fashion, and as it became clear that there is actually no clear plan in Israel about what they’re trying to do beyond simply bombarding and trying to attack Hamas, I think the U.S. has started to roll back, and I would say, indicate what are its own views on the issue. It’s good that they’ve articulated this because I think they’ve realized as well, given the opposition of many of its allies in the region, chief of them, Egypt, but also realizing that this will just not pass.

Now, whether this becomes a red line, whether they will exert enough pressure on Israel, and again, here the U.S. is not just a bystander. They’re actually providing weapons, intel, and financial support to Israel. In a way, that’s on them as well. There’s a responsibility. If they can try to shape where this is going, they’ll be positive.

On the other hand, what we’re still seeing, and what is clearly lacking and what is immediately needed, is a ceasefire. What is the U.S. saying? The U.S. is saying, “Down the line, we don’t want to see another Israeli occupation of Gaza. We don’t want to see a forced displacement of Palestinians.” But at the same time, they’re also saying, “We don’t foresee any real ceasefire right now.” In a way, they’re giving mixed messages. They’re still telling the Israelis, “Go and bombard more, but you should know you cannot re-occupy.”

But what if the outcome ends up being a complete and total destruction of Gaza? The footage from northern Gaza right now is very telling. Then what? What does that solution look like? It was good to hear Blinken say that, but it was clearly insufficient, and what is needed is an immediate ceasefire to provide the space to start thinking about the next steps. But also, frankly, just to stop the killing, to stop the displacement, because, with each passing day, my concern is it becomes even harder to think about mediation in the long term.

Talia Baroncelli

Many people are also saying that the U.S. is culpable in this conflict, in this slaughter of the Palestinians, because they’re giving even more money, as you mentioned, and more arms. They’re approving $14 billion [USD] to give to Israel with no conditions tied to the use of that money. In a way, they’re wholly responsible as well for perpetrating this ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinians.

Why don’t we move to the role of normalization in the region? Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates signed the Abraham Accords with Israel. Thinking back to the ’80s, for example, Egypt still had diplomatic ties with Israel when the massacres of refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps were taking place under Israeli watch. Would you say something similar might happen in the Middle East with ongoing normalization while there is no ceasefire? Or do you think that the already agreed-upon normalization might be put into question?

Nadim Houry

I think we’re clearly seeing, at minimum, a pause button for the normalization process. If we take a step back, what we saw in the last few years was, in a way—and this was something that Israel very much pushed for with the U.S., particularly with the Trump administration—I would say creating a disconnect between normalization between Arab states and Israel and the Palestine question, the rights of Palestinians. The clearest manifestation was the Abraham Accords, which, as you mentioned, the U.A.E. and Bahrain signed, but also Morocco and Sudan. Lately, there have been a lot of bilateral negotiations facilitated by the U.S. for potential Saudi normalization.

What these deals were premised on was somehow you make peace with Israel as an Arab state, and the Palestinian issue is sidelined or is left to some nice sounding words, i.e., the standards of living of Palestinians should get better, but really nothing about Palestinian rights, the right to self-determination, the right to move, and even the rights for Palestinian refugees.

In a way, what happened in Gaza now, more than a month ago, blew the strategy apart, literally. Because one, it has exposed many of these Arab normalizing states to internal anger, and they realized they could not continue with that popularly. Two, it has also shown the limits of this, even for Israel, because Israel’s strategy was to say, “Look, we don’t need a comprehensive deal with the Palestinians. We don’t need it for our security. We don’t need it for our economy. We don’t need it for our acceptability in the region. We’ll just sign deals with the other Arab states.” In a way, that approach and that strategy was not only short-sighted; it was frankly ineffective, in addition to trampling on the basic rights of Palestinians.

What will happen the day after remains to be seen. I think Bahrain’s withdrawal of its ambassador is also tied to the fact that Bahrain, of all the different normalizing states, has had a majority of its population that was unhappy about the normalization deal. It’s a way for the regime in Bahrain to create some buffer vis-à-vis its opinion. We haven’t heard much from the Emirates. The Emirates can better control, I would say, what gets expressed in terms of public opinion there. Also, what’s clear is that the Saudis are very pissed off, and any process of normalization with the Saudis is probably now on hold until there’s more clarity on what comes next.

Is that normalization with the Arab states today reversible? I think it’s hard to tell. The feeling I’m getting right now from these states is that it’s a pause. What would be interesting is whether part of what comes next is a move away from this bilateral approach where each country signs a separate deal with the Israelis, often sweetened with the U.S. Morocco benefited because the U.S. then turned a blind eye to what happens in western Sahara. Bahrain gets different benefits. Saudi would have gotten some defense pack with the U.S.

Whether what we’re seeing in Gaza now leads the Arab states to move away from this bilateral approach to go back to something a bit more regional, similar to the Arab Peace Plan, which the Arab state had proposed in 2002, which was a full normalization with Israel, but as a package deal, like getting to a two-state solution to a state for Palestine, Israel withdrawing from occupied lands, at the time, it included Lebanon, but also the Golan Heights. In return for that, Israel would benefit from a full normalization, not just with a handful, but with all the Arab states. This was adopted by all of the Arab states at the time.

Will we see a return to a more regional approach by the countries? That remains to be seen. This is something I would call for. If you want to think about the rights of the Palestinians, a package deal that actually recenters Palestine and Palestinian rights, this would lead to a real resolution of the conflict with all its issues. I think this is what the region needs today, and not these piecemeal deals while the settlement continues and the occupation continues.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, what would this package mean for Palestinian leadership? Because we did see Blinken say the day after, whenever that actually happens, that neither the Israelis nor Hamas should remain in Gaza or have any role in the governance of it. Would it be the Palestinian Authority? I mean, Abu Mazen, he’s very old, and I think a lot of Palestinians view him as a corrupt figure with not a lot of legitimacy. Who do you see taking the mantle from there?

Nadim Houry

I think this is part of the issue right now is the lack of legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority. How did we get there? I mean, this was the reason why today the Palestinian Authority is looked at by most Palestinians as simply collaborators or an implementing arm of the Israelis, of the occupation because the Israeli successive governments have done everything to undermine the capacity of the PA to administer, let alone to govern Palestinians in the West Bank or obviously Gaza where they were pushed out.

I think this is the challenge today. You have a government in Israel that is not only far right-wing but that has adopted as key elements of its government and its platform really messianic, biblical references to base their claim. [inaudible 00:16:59] to national law. They’re basically saying the Bible gave us, and you’re hearing biblical references left, right, and center, not just by some key ministers, but by [Benjamin] Netanyahu himself. Interestingly, the West is not reacting to this.

On the other hand, as you mentioned, part of the challenge is that on the Palestinian side today, the PA is no longer seen as legitimate by a very large swath of the Palestinian population. In a way, that also weakens. What you need to do is to think of a process that would recreate a form of legitimacy in Palestinian leadership and what would do so in a relatively quick time. How can you do it?

Particularly, is it realistic to think that Hamas is just going to disappear? If we think about it, maybe Israel will manage to defeat Hamas militarily. But we know that Hamas has supporters, it has administrators. People say Hamas is an idea at some level. Are you just going to be able to say, “No, you’re not part of any deal in the future?” And if so, what would be their advantage to have that deal stand and not act as spoilers? This is going to be really, really challenging. It will require a lot of creative diplomacy. It would require, frankly, not just conflict resolution but a conflict transformation approach.

I think everyone is realizing we’re at a dead end here. It’s an impasse. Israel is at an impasse with its approach to Palestine and Palestinian rights. Frankly, the West as well, because they’ve gone along with this folly of thinking, you can keep repeating the mantra of a two-state solution while you change facts on the ground day in and day out. That has a hidden impasse.

Now, how do you get out of that impasse? That’s the hard part. That’s the hard part that would require, in my view, nothing short of complete conflict transformation. You almost need a positive shock, something dramatic to happen to change the equation of the different key actors, because otherwise, at best, what you’re doing is conflict mitigation. You pacify things by using a lot of violence, by the way, not just during armed conflict but even afterward. You pacify until the next explosion.

I really hope… the Palestinians have suffered too much. The conflict has simmered for too long, and there needs to be much more, I almost want to call it a radical approach to peacemaking, to transform the conflict, to rethink it. This could end up with a two-state solution, or it could be a one-state solution with equal rights. At the heart of it, it has to be listening to what the Palestinians have to say and not thinking you can just tell them, “Oh, this is an acceptable interlocutor. This is what your government should look like. This is who we think is a legitimate representative of the Palestinians.” These approaches have shown their limits, and frankly, they have failed, and they have failed spectacularly.

Talia Baroncelli

Just quickly before you have to go, how would you say the international institutions would contribute to this radical solution or getting out of this impasse? The U.S. and Israel do not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. What do you think the role of the ICC could be in this?

Nadim Houry

Look, the ICC was given a role a few years ago because Palestine basically gave jurisdiction to look at the crimes. Unfortunately, the ICC has been procrastinating. Literally procrastinating now for years. “Oh, we’re trying to investigate. Oh, we can’t.” Only because of political pressure on it not to investigate.

Does the ICC have a role? Definitely. Did the Palestinians already give it authority? Definitely. Should justice be an essential element of any peace deal? Definitely. Let the ICC do its job and investigate and hold accountable all those who’ve committed international crimes, regardless of the side they follow. I think that’s very important.

Now, there’s another element to your question, which is, what about international institutions? This situation usually is the priority that the Security Council would be focused on. This is affecting obviously the security of Palestinians and Israelis, but this is also about the region and frankly, even the world. But we’ve seen, and this is not new, that Security Council is completely paralyzed and is unable to move. Here again, specifically, the U.S. using its veto, but because of the divisions between, on the one hand, the U.S., Russia, and China, which predate this immediate conflict, it’s impossible to look at the Security Council as a door to promote any solution.

We’ve seen the General Assembly step up with a vote that is actually very strong, pushing for a ceasefire, pushing for humanitarian aid, pushing for some resolution, but that’s not binding. Where does that leave us? I think for me there’s a real moment today to think creatively about possibly more active regional diplomacy. Fortunately, the Arab states are not yet playing that role. But I think as part of this conflict transformation, my view is there may not be satisfactory answers if we keep using the same variables we’ve been dealing with for the last few years in Israel and Palestine. Maybe we need to look at this from a regional lens and go back to a regional pact. That would come with regional security assurances for Palestinians, for Israelis, and something where the different players would be involved. I would say this would probably require not just the Arab League but also Iran, which has emerged as a key regional player in this conflict.

Can we think of something like that? People who are listening to us say, “Okay, this is so naive. This is so far-fetched.” It may be far-fetched, but I wouldn’t say it’s naive because we’ve tried a lot of other things, and it’s those who keep pushing for a two-state solution while Israel continues its settlement expansion in the West Bank and continues to punish and have Gaza as an open-air prison; that is to me, the naive thinking and saying, “Yes, this system can continue managing the conflict like this forever and ever.”

Talia Baroncelli

Nadim Houry, Executive Director of the Arab Reform Initiative, it was really great to get your views and insights on what’s transpiring in the Middle East right now.

Nadim Houry

Thank you for having me.

Talia Baroncelli

Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you’d like to contribute to the show, you can do so by going to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hitting the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. We appreciate all the help you give us. See you next time.

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Nadim Houry is the executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI). Prior to ARI, Nadim was at Human Rights Watch (HRW) for 13 years, where he started and ran HRW’s Beirut office for a decade before taking on the role of director of HRW’s Terrorism and Counter-terrorism Program. During his time at HRW, he worked across the MENA region, particularly on Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, on a range of human rights issues ranging from freedom of expression to abuses by security forces to labour rights.

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Massive Protests in Panama Against Canadian Mining Company

Paul Jay — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 12:38:10 -0500

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Protesters have practically shut down Panama for over two weeks now in an effort to keep the Canadian mining company First Quantum Minerals from operating Central America’s largest open-pit copper mine. Michael Fox tells the story and analyses its implications.

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Greg Wilpert

Welcome to The World on Fire. I’m your host, Greg Wilpert. Earlier this week, two anti-mining protesters were shot and killed in Panama, bringing the death toll during anti-mining protests to four. The protests, which have been ongoing for over two weeks now, have pretty much shut the country down. The issue that the protesters are opposing is a mining contract renewal for the Canadian mining company, First Quantum Minerals, which hopes to excavate copper in Panama from an open pit mine.

Joining me to talk about what is happening in Panama and what it means is Michael Fox, who is based in Panama at the moment. He is a freelance journalist and host of the soon-to-be-launched podcast Under the Shadow. Thanks for joining me today, Mike.

Michael Fox

Thanks so much, Greg.

Greg Wilpert

So let’s start with the latest developments. What happened this past week, and what’s the situation like in Panama at the moment?

Michael Fox

The big thing that’s been covering the news, which you just touched on, was this killing of these two anti-mining protesters, where someone, a Panamanian, it went back and forth on whether he was actually an expat from the U.S., but he was not. He is a Panamanian citizen who was born here in Panama. He walked up and shot two people in the protests. It’s a sign of the tension that the extension of these protests, particularly the blockades, is having in Panama.

Right now, I’m in the Western province of Chiriquí. I’m in a town called Boquete, which those who are retired might know of it because it’s a retirement community. A lot of expats are here. We’ve been out of gas for the last two weeks. Products at supermarkets are running short; gas, like heating fluid or heating oil and propane gas in order to cook with your stoves and things like that have been out for several days. There’s no end in sight of when things might be coming back. I was at the store yesterday trying to buy eggs, and you can’t get those. The one positive here is that this is a bread basket for the country. We’ve got lots of vegetables and fruit that elsewhere around the country do not have.

The protests and the blockades have continued. When we talk about the blockades, basically, the Pan-American Highway is the main artery that cuts through Panama, east to west, from the east coast to the west coast. It’s been blocked up and down the Pan-American Highway over the last two weeks at this point. It means that major buses can’t get in, and shipments of goods; that’s why we don’t have gas here as of the last week and a half. In fact, people are now selling gas on the street, but other people are claiming it might be watered down, so don’t use it because it might hurt your car.

It’s a pretty intense situation. Schools are out. They’ve now gone online. University classes have been postponed. Basically, here and in cities across the country are shut down. We’ve been staying at this one local spot by this restaurant and hotel, and they’ve been completely shut for the last few days.

This is really hard, Greg, because it’s the middle of the country’s Independence Day month. Independence celebrations were just last Friday, and they were expected to run throughout the weekend. What that means, this is the biggest tourist moment of the year. This is when restaurants and hotels really make back the money they’ve been losing throughout, and everything has been shut down. It’s been shuttered. There haven’t been any parades. There’s nothing that is happening. For the business community, for commerce, for local communities, it’s been really hard. The fact that there is almost no end in sight is also really concerning. That’s what it looks like now. Protests are still happening. The roadblocks continue, and it’s a hard moment.

Greg Wilpert

Sounds almost like a general strike. How did it come to this? My understanding is that the mining company, First Quantum Minerals, has been operating in Canada for a very long time already. What is it about this latest contract and this copper mine in particular that is causing so much opposition? What are the protesters demanding from the government?

Michael Fox

The most important thing you need to remember here, Greg, is there are several layers of why people are so upset, and we can dive into those in the next few minutes.

The most important thing is this all harkens back to the role of the U.S. government and the Panama Canal. Bear with me for a second. I’ll get to First Quantum in a second. The reason why is because the Panama Canal wasn’t just a canal. It was a whole canal zone that was essentially U.S. property in Panama. It meant that the whole region around the Panama Canal, Panamanians, could not come in. It was not authorized. It was a U.S. enclave within Panama. Panamanians fought for 100 years to get that zone back and to kick the U.S. out. The reason, the thing that every single person in the streets is talking about, is this is a reminder of that. They do not want a foreign company to come in to be authorized and basically cede a piece of Panamanian property, of Panamanian land, to do with whatever they want.

Part of the thing with this contract is the fact that the previous contracts actually said that the Panamanian government or Panamanians could not overfly the area of the mine. Even now, the contract says that the port that is supposed to take out this copper directly from the mine, Panamanians, aren’t authorized to use that without the authorization of the mine, First Quantum. That’s what people are so upset about. This is a handing over of a piece of Panamanian property, and it is a reminder.

It was not so long ago, we’re talking about just 20 years ago, that Panama basically got back that territory that used to be the canal zone. They’re saying, “No, we’re not going to do this again. We are not going to hand this over.” That’s the bigger vision, and that’s really what’s at stake.

I was trying to wrap my brain around it too. Most countries I’ve been in, like Brazil or elsewhere, okay, there’s a mine. People aren’t going to shut down the country for weeks around one mine. Maybe they should, but they’re not going to. But that is what is at stake.

Now, I’ll talk about the environmental stuff in a second. So what happened was going back to the previous contract, and you’re right, since 2019, First Quantum has been extracting copper from this mine. It’s been under operation. It’s been happening for several years. Now backup several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the contract with the previous contract with First Quantum over this mine was unconstitutional because it was not to the benefit of the Panamanian good. That first contract, essentially, First Quantum was giving to the Panamanian state something like $35 million a year, which is just chump change, when you think about it, for the major extraction, the size of this mine. Remember, Greg, this is the largest open-pit copper mine in Central America. This thing is huge. It’s a massive amount of territory. In one of my reports talking about it, it’s roughly two times the size of Manhattan. It’s not just a tiny neighborhood or a piece of land. It’s very, very big. That is important. The Supreme Court said, “No, this contract is not working. You need to go back and rewrite the contract.” That’s what the government’s been doing for the last two years.

Now, throughout this entire time, First Quantum has continued to extract coal. It’s continued and has extracted roughly 300,000 tons of copper a year. The government, over the last two years, has been renegotiating the contract. They solidified it. They came to it. They signed an agreement. Then, it came up to Congress on October 20.

Now, Congress can take a long time to debate this thing, but they essentially approved it in three debates over one week. At the exact same time, the very next day, the President signed it into action. That was part of what people were so upset about. Now, the government says that they got a lot of input from the community. People said that is just not the case. They’re extremely upset with the fact that this was approved so fast by Congress. Literally, just in three days, and then they signed in. That also made people say, “Look, they’re willing to just give over a piece of our land for nothing.”

Now, the new contract, what it does, and the government’s been very clear about heralding this as a huge win for the Panamanian state. The new contract basically increases the amount that the state is going to be receiving from this mine per year by 10 times. Now, it’s $375 million a year that the Panamanian state is supposed to be receiving. A good chunk of that money, the President Laurentino Cortizo has already said, should be going to shore up the social security system, which is having a really hard time here. In fact, he came out just days after the protest started and said that by November, by this month, they’re going to be ensuring that pensioners in the country, 120,000 pensioners, are going to be receiving at least $350 a month because of the windfall profits from this mine. That’s, in some cases, as much as 80% higher than what they’re receiving right now. The government’s really looking at this as a profit gainer for government coffers as a way to bring in funds. Of course, it’s really good for the government itself and its image abroad.

Now, of course, it’s also true that the Vice President has long ties with the First Quantum, with the mine itself. A lot of people are saying, “Hey, this is only happening, it’s only being pushed because of the involvement of the Vice President, because of his ties with First Quantum.” There’s been a lot of rumors that First Quantum paid money to the congressional representatives. We don’t have any facts or information about that, but those are rumors that a lot of people are talking about and more reason why they’re out in the streets and so frustrated.

Right now, they’ve got the new contract. People say that this one is just like the old one, except the states are getting a little bit more money. There now have been eight different lawsuits brought before the Supreme Court here in Panama, and they’re waiting for the Supreme Court to make a ruling. That’s really where things stand right now.

Laurentino Cortizo, the President, came out after about a week of the protest and said, “Listen, I’m going to call for a referendum in December, and we’ll let the people decide if you want the contract or not.” People said, “No, we don’t want that. We don’t want the mining contract.” Well over the majority of the population, something like 65% of the population, does not want this and would rather protect the environment in those areas. We’ll get to that in a second. That’s where things stand.

Laurentino Cortizo says, “We’re going to do a referendum.” It went back to the Supreme Electoral Court, which said, “We don’t have the means nor the agenda to be able to do a referendum.” Congress then went and approved and said, “If you want to do a referendum, we can do it, and we authorize the Supreme Electoral Court to do it.” In fact, it looked for a second like Congress might be moving to gut, to recede the contract they had just signed. Then they stopped after two different votes and said, “You know what, we’re going to leave it in the hands of the courts.” That’s where everything is right now.

Now it’s unclear, as you know, Supreme Courts can move slowly. It’s unclear how long it’s going to take them. Many people are saying that it is looking like we might get word from the Supreme Court by late next week, sometime in mid-November. But in the meantime, things are shut down. Like I said, gas is out, propane is running out, food is running short, and tensions are running really high. This is interesting, Greg.

In the very beginning, when the protests launched and hit the streets, this was a wide swath of the population. I’m talking about activists. The major construction union, SUNTRACS, was really involved, and they’re extremely radical. They’ve been out in the streets from day one. You also have students, teachers, indigenous groups, including upper-class folks saying, “We don’t want this. We don’t like the President.” They were banging their pots and pans, which is often time seen as an act of protest from the upper classes—even white business people. Everybody was in the streets. That’s extremely interesting, Greg.

One of the things that nobody has been talking about is why this has not been covered at a deeper level. Obviously, this is touching interests that have to do with Canada, a Canadian corporation, with U.S. financing. Now, if this was something or a situation that the U.S. government didn’t like, I’m sure that we would have heard much more about how these protesters have been in the streets because this has been shutting down the country. Yet outside of Panama, you really have heard very, very little. But it is a massive thing. The big issue is that we don’t know what the end game is or what’s on the horizon and how this is going to end up.

Greg Wilpert

You said you were going to say something about the environmental impact. Open-pit mines, of course, are pretty notorious for being extremely damaging. Just how bad is it in this case?

Michael Fox

Well, notorious for being damaging, absolutely. Remember that this is a high, biodiverse region. The Caribbean coast here is running up and down and is extremely important. According to the contract, what we understand is that as much as a billion cubic meters of water can be used by the company for this mine a year. Remember, this is times of drought.

We just saw a few months ago, where literally the Panama Canal, the water was so low that there was a ship that ran aground and people couldn’t get through it. Now, it has been raining in recent months, and that’s been a godsend for many Panamanians. But remember that at least a quarter of the country does not have running water 24 hours a day, potable running water. People see the ability of this mine to be able to use as much water as it wants, essentially, whereas Panamanians don’t have that same access. People are obviously up in arms. There have been images of tapirs, animals, and the mine plays that who are extremely bad off. The images of the mine are just massive. It’s an open pit mine. It’s what you imagine. The environment is an important thing for many Panamanians.

It’s a fascinating thing, Greg, because the major, maybe the top three issues why people are in the streets have to do with sovereignty and the role of a foreign government. It has to do with the environment. It has to do with the Panamanian Canal, which is a huge source of income for the country. When you think about the fact that people are protesting about these things and willing to stand up in defense of the environment and in defense of their sovereignty is really huge. I think it says a lot about this moment.

Also, Panamanians, they are not going to give up. This is not the type of protest where you say, “Okay, fine, we’ll make some agreements, and then we’ll go home.” That doesn’t happen here. Even more importantly, it’s important to remember just last year, Panama saw three weeks of massive protests that shut down the country roughly from July until August. Those were regarding inflation and high gas prices. It took the government a long time and created a dialog with social movements to be able to sit down and say, “Okay, listen, we’re going to try and resolve this.” Many Panamanians feel that that situation did not actually improve. Things did not improve that much. They’re also weary of entering into dialog with the government about this, the same government, Laurentino Cortizo, that everybody is so upset with. Remember that this isn’t just a one-off, but this comes after these massive protests that people saw last year.

This is the other issue that many business people are talking about, hotel and restaurant owners, is the fact that Panama hasn’t really had its moment after the end of COVID. It’s been in the thick of it for four years. First, you had COVID in 2019-2022. As soon as things started to come back last year, you had three weeks of protests that shut down the country. Now you have three weeks of protests or two and a half, but it’s obviously going to be at least three weeks by the time this is over. Again, this is really hitting the business sector really hard.

Greg Wilpert

What can you say about the government? Laurentino Cortizo, it sounds like he’s being a bit inept in handling this. Apparently, his party is considered to be center-left, but he’s not really known to be part of the so-called Second Pink Tide in Latin America. What’s on his agenda, and who’s behind him?

Michael Fox

Yeah, well, these are great questions, Greg. First off, he’s the former head of the National Assembly and former Ag[riculture] Minister. As you said, his party is center-left but much more centrist. As we’ve seen out in the streets, indigenous folks, unions, workers, social movements, as well as the upper class, everybody’s against him. He really doesn’t have much support at this time. He also has cancer. Many people are pointing to that as a possibility of why he’s unable to handle this situation at the moment, and things have gotten out of hand.

Now, keep in mind also, Greg, that the elections are only six months away. May 5, 2024, are the elections here. It is an interesting moment because with all these protests happening already, what we saw from the protests last year is that some members, more radical, progressive members of the left, really have risen to the fore of this network of roughly 10 people that are going to be the 10 top candidates for the elections next year. Obviously, Laurentino Cortizo is not on the ballot. It’s going to be really interesting to see what an impact these protests could have.

If you look at what’s happened in many other countries that have seen turmoil and protests in the lead-up to elections that are happening, you either have the possibility of someone much more on the left, much more radical, coming into power, or you have the possibility of something like [Jair] Bolsonaro happening, somebody much more on the right. That’s my prediction for next year. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but people are upset with the traditional parties right now. They blame them for passing this through Congress. They blame Laurentino Cortizo for signing it immediately. They say this whole system is messed up and screwed up, and we need a massive change. I think that in next year’s elections, we’re going to see a shake-up. The big question is, is this going to be a shake-up more in the direction of [Nayib] Bukele in El Salvador? Are we going to see a shake-up more in the direction of Lula [da Silva], say, in Brazil?

Greg Wilpert

Now, finally, you have a podcast that’s coming up called Under the Shadow. What shadow are you referring to here? Is this shadow present in Panama at the moment? And if so, how?

Greg Wilpert

The shadow is present everywhere across Latin America and has always been. The shadow is the United States. In fact, the political and economic movements and tools of the United States. It’s also the Monroe Doctrine. Remember the Monroe Doctrine? We go back, James Monroe, basically, exactly 200 years ago this year said that the United States had a right to intervene across the region, that the foreign powers, the European foreign powers, could not no longer intervene in Latin America. It was the United States that was essentially going to. This was the United States realm. Latin America was the United States’ backyard. This shadow is U.S. and U.S. policies, whether that’s coups and foreign policy abroad or the innumerable invasions that have happened to almost every country in the region. This is obviously the shadow here.

Now, what’s interesting about the shadow is the fact that in Panama, remember, the shadow is obvious. Literally, the United States helped to break Panama away from Colombia and then took over the Panama Canal region for 100 years. You cannot talk about what’s happening, even though many news outlets do, but you cannot talk about what’s happening in Panama right now, as I mentioned at the beginning, without talking about the 100-year-long occupation by the United States of the Canal zone and what that enclave meant to Panamanians across the country because having that enclave of a foreign country inside their own country has made them absolutely resentful of the possibility of this happening again. That’s on the minutia of what we’re seeing, but it’s extremely important. That’s what everybody is feeling when they’re marching out in the streets of the possibility of having a foreign company or a foreign country come back here and do the same thing.

Also, don’t forget, Greg, and this is really important. First Quantum Minerals, it’s a Canadian company with Chinese and Korean backing, but also U.S. investment companies, including, I’m looking down at my notes right here, U.S. capital groups, Fidelity, Vanguard, and BlackRock. All these people have investments in First Quantum. Stocks have dropped. They’ve tanked just over the last month by 50%– First Quantum stocks. The mine itself is largely invested by First Quantum. But then you have other investors, and we don’t actually even know who the other investors are in the mine. We know who the investors are in First Quantum, but we don’t know necessarily who these other investors are involved in the mine. All these things are extremely important. They’re all foreign investors. This is why those people are in the streets.

If you’re listening right now, you can actually hear some horns because it’s another protest that’s starting this afternoon. This is deeply, and it’s profound for people across Panama. Obviously, the shadow looms large everywhere, everywhere across the region.

Greg Wilpert

Well, just one more follow-up on that. The United States government, of course, I imagine, is watching the situation very carefully, precisely because Panama is the location of the Panama Canal. Apparently, this is having, or it’s very possible that it will have, a spill-over effect that is the protest movement, perhaps for the elections and what that could maybe mean for the Panama Canal in the future. Has there been any reaction from the U.S. government? Have you seen any movement or any efforts to interfere or influence the situation?

Michael Fox

We haven’t seen much from the U.S. government. They have been obviously sending messages to foreigners in Panama, which is usual, telling people to be wary about protests and things like that. Stay away from the protests. Stay at home if you can. We haven’t seen a major push by the U.S. government in this situation. I think they’re trying to stay out of it.

But absolutely, how this is resolved in the next few months and what happens for the elections next year is going to be extremely important for the future of Panama and the future of the canal. As far as I understand, shipments are still happening. I’ve been in touch with people and companies that are shipping outside of Panama and shipping elsewhere. What it’s meant is that at least those in Panama City have had to bring shipments or be bringing cars and elsewhere to Colón and elsewhere overnight so that they’re not involved in the major issues with the big blockades, getting those from Panama City to Colón. As far as I understand, there hasn’t been a major interruption with the canal itself. But obviously, these are major concerns because this is Panama, and it’s a massive hub for transportation internationally and what that could mean.

Greg Wilpert

Okay, well, we’ll leave it there. I’m speaking to Michael Fox, a freelance journalist currently based in Panama. Check out his upcoming podcast, Under the Shadow. Thanks again, Mike, for having joined me today.

Michael Fox

Thanks so much, Greg. Appreciate it.

Greg Wilpert

And thank you for joining The World on Fire. Until next time.

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Michael Fox is a freelance reporter and video journalist based in Brazil. He is the former editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas and the author of two books on Latin America.

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Wealth Supremacy vs. The Democratic Economy with Marjorie Kelly

Paul Jay — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:41:47 -0500

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Renowned social theorist, systems thinker, and organizer, Marjorie Kelly, gives an early look at her new book: Wealth Supremacy. Speaking with Colin Bruce Anthes, she details the entrenched ways our current system is built around myths that make giving more wealth to the already wealthy seem necessary— even when we try to use our institutions for the common good. Kelly contrasts this with an outnumbered but successful democratic economy with many forms of democratized ownership and participation: public utilities, employee-owned companies, community land trusts, cooperatives, and more. We can create an economy that works for everyone, she argues, but only if we systematically discredit the moral status of wealth supremacy and turn towards a democratic economy paradigm.

Wealth Supremacy vs. The Democratic Economy with Marjorie Kelly Seeking Full Employment Without Falling Prey to Neoliberal Traps BRICS: Talk Left, Walk Right – Patrick Bond (pt 2/2) UAW: Historic Demand to Eliminate Wage Tiers – Frank Hammer Debt and Climate Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World – Asoka Bandarage Corruption in Lebanon Propped up by the Transnational Capitalist Elite – Nadim Houry Non-Aligned Movement +G77 (Group of Developing Countries) versus G7+NATO+OECD+World Economic Forum Practical Radicalism: Community Wealth Building with Neil McInroy Paul Jay and Freddie deBoer Discuss Independent Media, Censorship, and Hate Speech Laws Debt Ceiling Theater and the Trump Parallel Universe Honest Government Ad | Reserve Bank of Australia Part 2: Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Michael Hudson Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Michael Hudson (pt 1/2) Detroiters Fight to Reclaim Their City From Real Estate Vultures – Linda Campbell Bill Black on SVB: A Bipartisan Clown Car Crash Federal Reserve is Throwing Workers Out of Work to Save the Rich Exposing Apocalyptic Economics with Steve Keen No Evidence to Support FED 2% Inflation Target – Robert Pollin 50 Years After Allende at the UN: A Corporate Triumph Named Multistakeholderism Time Bomb in Global Finance – Rob Johnson Monopoly Power vs Democracy – Matt Stoller Real Climate Solutions are No Mystery – Pollin How to Fight Inflation Without Attacking Workers – Pollin Worker’s Wages & Leverage are the Real Targets – Ferguson Repairing a Fractured World Economy? The Fed Attacks the Working Class – Robert Pollin Capitalism’s Structural Crisis and the Global Revolt Biden’s Bill has Significant Funding for Climate but 10% of What’s Needed – Bob Pollin No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World (pt 1/3) No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World (pt 2/3) No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World (pt 3/3) Progressive Running Against a Corp Dem in Boeing Country Organizing in West Virginia Get Organized to Win! – Jane McAlevey pt 1/8 25,000 Gather for Moral March on Washington Rising Interest Rates Intended to Create Unemployment – Bob Pollin The Story Behind “The Con” The Power of the Strike – Jane McAlevey pt 8/8 Power Analysis and Whole-Worker Charting – Jane McAlevey pt 7/8 To Win We Need Strong Militant Unions – Jane McAlevey pt 6/8 Is China’s Trade Predatory or for Mutual Benefit? – Hudson and Bond pt 2/2 Mobilizing is Not Organizing – Jane McAlevey pt 5/8 Nationalize Fossil Fuel to Fight Climate Change and Inflation – Bob Pollin In 2020, Trump Propped Up His Rural Vote with Massive Subsidies to Agribusiness – Tom Ferguson Pt 4/4 Fossil Fuel and Private Equity Love Trump – Thomas Ferguson Pt 3/4 theAnalysis.news in 2022 – Paul Jay In 2020, Elites Bailed on Trump, Not on Republican Party – Tom Ferguson Pt 2/4 The Making of Global Capitalism with Leo Panitch Risking Apocalypse for the Spoils of War – Andrew Cockburn pt 1/2 Is the U$A a Democracy? with Tom Ferguson Hard Bargaining in Las Vegas Hospitals – Jane McAlevey pt 4/8 Organizing for Power – Jane McAlevey pt 3/8 Respecting the Genius of Ordinary People – Jane McAlevey pt 2/8 Get Organized to Win! – Jane McAlevey pt 1/8 Stop Subsidizing Wall St., Start Subsidizing Workers for High Energy Costs – Bob Pollin Why the Media Doesn’t Understand Control Fraud Biden Heads to COP 26 Throttled by Manchin and Trumpists – with Bob Pollin Michael Hudson: Biden Between BlackRock and a Hard Place Imperialism Then and Now: Wealth, Unemployment, and Insufficient Demand- Pt 1/3 Prabhat Patnaik Imperialism Then and Now: Capital Relocation, Inequality, Encroachment and Protracted Crisis -Pt 3/3 Imperialism Then and Now: Drain of Wealth, Depression, Role of the State and Globalization-Pt 2/3 Bill Black pt 9/9 — The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One To Get Us Out of Poverty, We Need a Massive Infrastructure Plan – Ann Morrison / Wisconsin How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions – Chuck Collins Bill Black pt 8/9 — The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 7/9 -The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 6/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 5/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 4/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is To Own One Bill Black pt 3/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Modest Inflation is Good for Workers – Bob Pollin Why Biden Won’t Cancel Student Debt – Michael Hudson E.U. is Split Over “Strategic Autonomy,” China and U.S. Hegemony – with Mark Blyth Mark Blyth – An Inflated Fear of Inflation? Bill Black pt 2/9 – Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 1/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One Can You Destroy $20 Billion in Wealth Without Committing a Crime? – Bill Black Workers and Communities vs Amazon Polarization, Then a Crash: Michael Hudson on the Rentier Economy Democrats Stuck Between “BlackRock and a Hard Place” – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth Peoples’ Lives vs. Profits of Pharmaceutical Monopolies – GPE Newsdocs What is to be Done to Save the Planet – Robert Pollin Financialization and Deindustrialization – Michael Hudson Is Trump the Tip of a More Coherent Fascist Spear? How Deep Will the Depression Get? – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth Regenerative Agriculture and Massive Planting of Trees is Our Only Hope – Earl Katz Stabilizing an Unstable Economy – Jan Kregel on Hyman Minsky Will Unions Respond to the Pandemic Moment? Bill Black: Cities Face Catastrophe; Finance a Cancer on Real Economy FED’s $10 Trillion Defends Assets of the Rich – Michael Hudson The Irrationality of the System Has Been Fully Revealed – Leo Panitch Thomas Ferguson: Big Business Takes Cash as Workers Laid Off, States and Cities Go Bust Artificial Intelligence in Whose Interests? – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 6/6 The Rich Have an Escape Plan – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 5/6 Sociopaths Rise to the Top RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 4/6 Clinton’s ‘Committee to Save the World’ Unleashes Wall Street – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 3/6 Apple, Market Manipulation and the Cult of Personal Finance – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 2/6 The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 1/6 Capitalism Will Hit the Wall Again, Hard – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 5/5 The Necessity for Higher Wages – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 4/5 The U.S. Dollar and the Search for a Reasonable Capitalist – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 3/5 Racing to a Dead End – Heiner Flassbeck on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/5 Reaganism and Thatcherism were Intellectually Dishonest – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 1/5

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Colin Bruce Anthes

Welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Colin Bruce Anthes. In a minute, we’ll be speaking with the renowned social theorist and organizer Marjorie Kelly on her new book about wealth supremacy and its democratic economy alternatives. Please remember to like, subscribe, ring that bell so you get notifications, and consider hitting the donate button to support our work. Stay tuned.

It’s been 15 years since the financial crash that brought the global economy into the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Despite steady outrage across the political spectrum, inequality, and concentration of ownership, the financialization of assets continues to skyrocket. According to the new book by Marjorie Kelly, that won’t change until we address the system-wide problem of wealth supremacy and begin bringing democratic forms of ownership and participation to every aspect of the economy. The good news is many of the alternatives already exist, are functioning well at a smaller scale, and are ready for prime time.

Marjorie Kelly’s own story and evolving career have included co-founding Business Ethics magazine in the 1980s, inspiring the creation of the B Corporation, and co-founding Fifty by Fifty, which seeks to see employee ownership reach 50 million American workers by the year 2050. She is a distinguished senior fellow at the Democracy Collaborative. Marjorie Kelly, welcome.

Marjorie Kelly

Thanks for having me, Colin.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Can we begin by contextualizing how you came to write this book because, in many ways, you’re one of the original canaries in the coal mine regarding what we might call “friendly capitalism.” You come from a business family, you worked at Business Ethics magazine for 20 years, you handed out Business Ethics awards, and you had quite a name for yourself there. Yet, you end up concluding, and I quote from the book, “Moral capitalism is as impossible as moral racism.” How do you end up at this point?

Marjorie Kelly

This book is a turning point for me, Colin. I have spent more than 30 years writing about and advocating the positive. I know so many progressive business leaders, socially responsible investing these days called impact investing or ESG [Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance]. I’ve tracked these fields really since their infancy. Community wealth building is a new form of economic development that the Democracy Collaborative is advancing, and it’s catching on really widely. There’s so much happening. There are so many visionaries building out the positive. That’s what I’ve wanted to focus on. But I’ve become discouraged.

I see now that we’re losing ground faster than we’re gaining it. The reason is that we have yet to turn and morally discredit the existing system and its core value, which is wealth supremacy. We really live inside an economic system designed to make the wealthy wealthier. That’s not hand-waving.

I’ve been like a spy inside of business for a couple of decades. I ran a small company for 20 years, and I sold my dad’s business after he died. I know how business works. I’ve lectured at a lot of business schools. What I can see and what I do for the reader is to unpack the granular ways that the system is rigged.

We have this sense the system is rigged against us. It is in very specific ways. I call them seven myths. They really form the operating system of capitalism, which we accept is normal. It’s taught in business schools. It’s the fundamental corporate governance structure and investing aims. I mean, it’s really built in. This wealth supremacy is built in all over. Until we turn and challenge that, I think our efforts are going to fail.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Let’s get to the quick and dirty definition of wealth supremacy because it sounds like a concentration of capital. Of course, every day in the news, there’s something about terrible billionaires, and people are familiar with the huge amount of inequality that we see. But wealth supremacy, as you’re alluding to there, actually goes a little deeper. It goes into the quasi-invisible infrastructure of the system.

Marjorie Kelly

Yes, that’s right. I use two terms: wealth supremacy and capital bias. Wealth supremacy is the cultural ethos that admires wealthy people and empowers them. Wealthy people have power in philanthropy. There’s a power over government to political donations, and corporations are seen as the property of shareholders rather than as human communities, which is what they are. There are so many ways that our culture valorizes wealth.

Then, there are the very specific ways that wealth has power inside the economy. This is what I call capital bias. In corporate governance, only shareholders vote. Workers are not considered members of the corporation, which is odd. It’s very much like women at one time who were not considered members of society. You accept this as a norm. The income statement, which every corporation uses to guide its activity, says to pay capital as much as possible. That’s called profit. It’s good. Drive it up. Pay workers as little as possible. That’s called expense, and you need to drive it down. There are various ways that are built into the structure of power in our economy; it favors capital and disfavors workers, the community, and the environment.

Colin Bruce Anthes

That’s a very important point because it speaks to how quickly things that we know can become invisible. We all know that workers tend to get shafted by the economy. Most of us have experienced being the workers getting shafted. Yet when I am working at a company, I am, of course, thinking of myself as a contributor, not an expense. At the same time, that’s not the way the company is organized.

Marjorie Kelly

Yes. How we think of this as a corporation, as an object owned by shareholders, that has consequences. For example, when the big tech firms hit a downturn in their stock price a little bit ago, the first thing that they did was throw thousands of workers out of their jobs. This is so standard. What they were doing is they were saying, “Okay, our share price is down. Share price is related to your profit, so you need to boost your profit; that means you need to cut your expenses.” They’re basically transferring income from labor to capital very deliberately, and it’s very, very common. We just accept this as normal.

Colin Bruce Anthes

One of the examples that you give in the book that’s really concrete and shows how deep and how invisible the roots of wealth supremacy can be is Harvard College and Harvard University. One might think at first glance that Harvard is a registered charity, producing some of the best post-secondary education in the world, certainly in the United States. What could be wrong with that?

Marjorie Kelly

Harvard is about… 66-67% of its endowment is invested in private equity and hedge funds. These are the predatory bleeding edge of capitalism right now. When we try to regulate capitalism or enforce change, it flows around whatever barriers we put in place.

When there were Superfund laws saying you can’t dump toxic chemicals in waters, well, what did the chemical companies do? They moved to China. They’re like, “Fine, we’ll dump in the waters off of China.”

What’s happening here? There have been a number of investors who’ve said to the big oil companies, “You need to get rid of your dirty assets. You need to divest these dirty assets.” Some of the big oil companies have done this. But those assets, these dirty operations, are not going away. They’re being sold to private equity. What’s happening is they’re shifting into the shadows, and private equity, in some cases, is tripling production on these really dirty fossil fuel operations. Yet, private equity is opaque, it’s non-transparent, it’s non-accountable. I’m not even convinced that Harvard knows what’s going on inside the private equity funds that it’s investing in because what they’re focused on is the return. This is how the system… you could call it a willful blindness. You could call it an inadvertent blindness. But there’s a built-in blindness to the effects of what we’re doing.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Because some people are just being professionals, doing their job, making sure that the company or the organization gets what it’s supposed to get.

Marjorie Kelly

Yeah, that’s right. We have narratives that tell us this is seeking maximum returns for investors. That’s benign. That’s normal. That’s technically necessary. You have asset managers who are moving assets up the risk-return spectrum; that’s how they say it. We’re going from the public markets to the private markets. What they don’t say, what they don’t see is that we might be destroying jobs, we might be trashing the env

The Roots of American Fascism and the Domestic Objectives of the Cold War – Peter Kuznick pt 2

Paul Jay — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 13:51:57 -0500

Historian Peter Kuznick and host Paul Jay discuss Smedley Butler and the 1934 attempted coup against FDR, the real objectives of McCarthyism, and the purge of the trade unions.

Strategically and Morally Bankrupt: U.S. Policy in the Middle East – Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

Paul Jay — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 12:25:05 -0400

Retired U.S. Colonel Larry Wilkerson discusses the Biden administration's unconditional support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bombardment of Gaza and large-scale indiscriminate attacks on Palestinian civilians. He points to state-sanctioned torture and other unlawful acts committed by the U.S. after 9/11 and asserts that the Israeli government is responding to Hamas' attacks in a similar fashion by wholly disregarding international legal norms. In doing so, Israel is putting its own population at risk, as well as collectively punishing the Palestinians.

Christian Nationalism Unleashed in the U.S. Military – Mikey Weinstein

Paul Jay — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 12:38:17 -0400

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a non-profit organization, explains why proselytizing in the U.S. military is both dangerous and unconstitutional. Christian nationalist and dominionist ideologies are espoused by high-ranking officers in the military, some of whom are involved in nuclear war and military planning. This highly disturbing reality, Mikey argues, is largely ignored by policymakers. As was reported following the U.S. Capitol attack on January 6th, 2021, an unusually high number of those charged in relation to the attack had a military background, and some of them adhered to radical Christian views.

Justifying Genocide – Shir Hever pt 2

Paul Jay — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 13:42:15 -0400

Why is most of Israeli society supporting the imminent genocide against the population of Gaza, knowing that 40% of the population are children? Shir Hever says Israel is disintegrating as it tries to wipe Gaza off the map.

Seeking Full Employment Without Falling Prey to Neoliberal Traps

Paul Jay — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 11:14:42 -0400

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William Mitchell exposes the many ideological maneuvers progressives need to confront in disputing the supremacy of profits over employment and people’s dignity. That goes for disciplining the state to appease foreign exchange markets, the problems with Basic Income proposals, and much more. Lynn Fries interviews William Mitchell on GPEnewsdocs.

Seeking Full Employment Without Falling Prey to Neoliberal Traps BRICS: Talk Left, Walk Right – Patrick Bond (pt 2/2) UAW: Historic Demand to Eliminate Wage Tiers – Frank Hammer Debt and Climate Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World – Asoka Bandarage Corruption in Lebanon Propped up by the Transnational Capitalist Elite – Nadim Houry Non-Aligned Movement +G77 (Group of Developing Countries) versus G7+NATO+OECD+World Economic Forum Practical Radicalism: Community Wealth Building with Neil McInroy Paul Jay and Freddie deBoer Discuss Independent Media, Censorship, and Hate Speech Laws Debt Ceiling Theater and the Trump Parallel Universe Honest Government Ad | Reserve Bank of Australia Part 2: Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Michael Hudson Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Michael Hudson (pt 1/2) Detroiters Fight to Reclaim Their City From Real Estate Vultures – Linda Campbell Bill Black on SVB: A Bipartisan Clown Car Crash Federal Reserve is Throwing Workers Out of Work to Save the Rich Exposing Apocalyptic Economics with Steve Keen No Evidence to Support FED 2% Inflation Target – Robert Pollin 50 Years After Allende at the UN: A Corporate Triumph Named Multistakeholderism Time Bomb in Global Finance – Rob Johnson Monopoly Power vs Democracy – Matt Stoller Real Climate Solutions are No Mystery – Pollin How to Fight Inflation Without Attacking Workers – Pollin Worker’s Wages & Leverage are the Real Targets – Ferguson Repairing a Fractured World Economy? The Fed Attacks the Working Class – Robert Pollin Capitalism’s Structural Crisis and the Global Revolt Biden’s Bill has Significant Funding for Climate but 10% of What’s Needed – Bob Pollin No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World (pt 1/3) No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World (pt 2/3) No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World (pt 3/3) Progressive Running Against a Corp Dem in Boeing Country Organizing in West Virginia Get Organized to Win! – Jane McAlevey pt 1/8 25,000 Gather for Moral March on Washington Rising Interest Rates Intended to Create Unemployment – Bob Pollin The Story Behind “The Con” The Power of the Strike – Jane McAlevey pt 8/8 Power Analysis and Whole-Worker Charting – Jane McAlevey pt 7/8 To Win We Need Strong Militant Unions – Jane McAlevey pt 6/8 Is China’s Trade Predatory or for Mutual Benefit? – Hudson and Bond pt 2/2 Mobilizing is Not Organizing – Jane McAlevey pt 5/8 Nationalize Fossil Fuel to Fight Climate Change and Inflation – Bob Pollin In 2020, Trump Propped Up His Rural Vote with Massive Subsidies to Agribusiness – Tom Ferguson Pt 4/4 Fossil Fuel and Private Equity Love Trump – Thomas Ferguson Pt 3/4 theAnalysis.news in 2022 – Paul Jay In 2020, Elites Bailed on Trump, Not on Republican Party – Tom Ferguson Pt 2/4 The Making of Global Capitalism with Leo Panitch Risking Apocalypse for the Spoils of War – Andrew Cockburn pt 1/2 Is the U$A a Democracy? with Tom Ferguson Hard Bargaining in Las Vegas Hospitals – Jane McAlevey pt 4/8 Organizing for Power – Jane McAlevey pt 3/8 Respecting the Genius of Ordinary People – Jane McAlevey pt 2/8 Get Organized to Win! – Jane McAlevey pt 1/8 Stop Subsidizing Wall St., Start Subsidizing Workers for High Energy Costs – Bob Pollin Why the Media Doesn’t Understand Control Fraud Biden Heads to COP 26 Throttled by Manchin and Trumpists – with Bob Pollin Michael Hudson: Biden Between BlackRock and a Hard Place Imperialism Then and Now: Wealth, Unemployment, and Insufficient Demand- Pt 1/3 Prabhat Patnaik Imperialism Then and Now: Capital Relocation, Inequality, Encroachment and Protracted Crisis -Pt 3/3 Imperialism Then and Now: Drain of Wealth, Depression, Role of the State and Globalization-Pt 2/3 Bill Black pt 9/9 — The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One To Get Us Out of Poverty, We Need a Massive Infrastructure Plan – Ann Morrison / Wisconsin How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions – Chuck Collins Bill Black pt 8/9 — The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 7/9 -The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 6/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 5/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 4/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is To Own One Bill Black pt 3/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Modest Inflation is Good for Workers – Bob Pollin Why Biden Won’t Cancel Student Debt – Michael Hudson E.U. is Split Over “Strategic Autonomy,” China and U.S. Hegemony – with Mark Blyth Mark Blyth – An Inflated Fear of Inflation? Bill Black pt 2/9 – Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 1/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One Can You Destroy $20 Billion in Wealth Without Committing a Crime? – Bill Black Workers and Communities vs Amazon Polarization, Then a Crash: Michael Hudson on the Rentier Economy Democrats Stuck Between “BlackRock and a Hard Place” – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth Peoples’ Lives vs. Profits of Pharmaceutical Monopolies – GPE Newsdocs What is to be Done to Save the Planet – Robert Pollin Financialization and Deindustrialization – Michael Hudson Is Trump the Tip of a More Coherent Fascist Spear? How Deep Will the Depression Get? – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth Regenerative Agriculture and Massive Planting of Trees is Our Only Hope – Earl Katz Stabilizing an Unstable Economy – Jan Kregel on Hyman Minsky Will Unions Respond to the Pandemic Moment? Bill Black: Cities Face Catastrophe; Finance a Cancer on Real Economy FED’s $10 Trillion Defends Assets of the Rich – Michael Hudson The Irrationality of the System Has Been Fully Revealed – Leo Panitch Thomas Ferguson: Big Business Takes Cash as Workers Laid Off, States and Cities Go Bust Artificial Intelligence in Whose Interests? – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 6/6 The Rich Have an Escape Plan – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 5/6 Sociopaths Rise to the Top RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 4/6 Clinton’s ‘Committee to Save the World’ Unleashes Wall Street – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 3/6 Apple, Market Manipulation and the Cult of Personal Finance – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 2/6 The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 1/6 Capitalism Will Hit the Wall Again, Hard – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 5/5 The Necessity for Higher Wages – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 4/5 The U.S. Dollar and the Search for a Reasonable Capitalist – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 3/5 Racing to a Dead End – Heiner Flassbeck on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/5 Reaganism and Thatcherism were Intellectually Dishonest – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 1/5

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LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. Today’s guest is William Mitchell. He will be talking about a progressive vision of society for a post neoliberal world.

William Mitchell is a Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity, at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Some of his recent books include Eurozone Dystopia, and Reclaiming the State. Welcome, Bill.

WILLIAM MITCHELL: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

FRIES: We are going to be discussing a progressive vision of society, as opposed to that of the neoliberal world. The obvious place to start seems to be the role of workers. What would a progressive concept of productive labor look like in the private and public sector respectively?

MITCHELL: If you go back to the sort of 1930s, when a lot of these ideas started to be developed, there was a concept called the gainful worker. And a gainful worker was defined as someone who really contributed to the creation of private profit through their labor.

So already it was a biased or a loaded concept that was explicitly associated with capitalist surplus value production and realization of profit. And so, if you think about that, then it excluded a whole lot of other things that, uh, people could do with their labor power, that didn’t contribute to private profit. And that really became the, the dominant concept of productive work.

That if you weren’t doing that, then you were unproductive. And so, a whole lot of biased concepts and opinions about, for example, public sector employment that aims to provide services to the community. That was considered to be somewhat suspect.

And going one step further, if the government sought to use its fiscal capacity to introduce job creation programs when in times of high unemployment (then was the sort of work that we saw during the Great Depression and subsequent downturns), that work was dismissed as make work or boondoggling or leaf raking. You know, a number of pejorative descriptors that were designed to bias the opinion of the listener or the reader to: well that work is useless and it’s not productive.

And that’s really biased the way we’ve thought about what prospects we have for solving mass unemployment and the options that governments have. Because governments then, particularly in this neoliberal era, have become incredibly fearful of being dismissed as supporting make work schemes. And it’s really turned our attention away from really useful policy implications.

Now if you then take that orthodoxy and think about, well, what’s wrong with it? Well, what’s wrong with it is it evaluates worth in terms of private costs and benefits. So what’s good for the bottom line of a corporation is equated with what’s good for society. Now there’s a whole body of literature that tells us that that can’t possibly be true.

That there are so many things that can be done in a societal sense that don’t have anything really to do with advancing the profit potential of corporations that add value to our lives and our society which can be undertaken. And so in my view, we have to broaden our concept of worth into social benefits and social costs and consider things not in terms of private terms but in terms of social terms.

Now there’s a whole range of activities then that immediately become productive and worthwhile, that will never be done as an outcome of the calculus of whether it’s profitable for private companies or not, and are incredibly beneficial to society.

So once you start thinking like that, a very broad concept, then the options that open up to policy makers and our response to those options in a political sense become quite different to the way we think now.

FRIES: Explain how we got to this way of thinking. How as you say our way of thinking about work has changed from thinking of work as something that’s beneficial to society to thinking work is only valuable if it contributes to profits in the private sector, so private profit. And that public sector work is worthless, a boondoggle.

MITCHELL: Well, I think in the immediate post Second World War period, the role of the state was really different to what it is now. The state in my view in broadly the 30 years after the end of the Second World War was a mediator in the conflict between labor and capital.

And so it stood between those two conflict conflicting classes and sought to appease that conflict in various ways, but with a definite bias towards lifting the material prosperity of labor. Through a number of ways but broadly through ensuring there was true full employment. That everybody who wanted a job could find a job. Ensuring that there was a safety net for those who for some short period couldn’t find work.

That was then broadened into concepts of welfare states that ensured the people who couldn’t work were able to be supported in sickness, in incapacity of some sort or another through age. And the expansion of public education, public transport, public health systems.

All the things that we identify with that period of material prosperity, falling inequality. And, you know, pretty strong economic growth, and very high levels of employment, and major reductions in poverty after the destruction of the Second World War.

Now, you know, that didn’t appease; that didn’t satisfy the interests of capital. But they were really stuck because that social democratic era was a very powerful political force. That we were as voters and citizens, we were pretty engaged in ensuring that our governments would honor the agreements, you know, the visions that they had outlined in 1945, 46, 47.

Now towards the end of the 1960s, there was a major counter attack from capital. It was organized. In the United States, there was a so called Powell Manifesto that was released. And that manifesto outlined a multi pronged way in which capital could fund initiatives to restore the political balance in their favor.

And the rise of think-tanks and the infiltration of the media and the creation of what we now see as Fox News in America and, you know, the, the derivatives elsewhere. The infiltration into the education programs and, and a range of other strategies that were very well funded and very well executed.

And the state didn’t go away; it didn’t wither away with globalization. It just became reconfigured to serve the interests of capital. The accomplishments or the changes that we deem to be characteristic of neoliberalism were really accomplished through the legislative power of the state.

And the state has really become an agent of capital working to benefit that class and using the working class as fodder.

And, progressively what that strategy has done has created the so called gig economy; has retrenched a lot of welfare provisions that the state provided. Privatized a lot of the utilities and turned them into profit making bonanzas for capital. A range of other things that have accompanied that retrenchment of the social democratic era.

And that’s where we are now. And you know we’re in a parlous state because of it.

FRIES: So with the retrenchment of the social democratic era, you are saying the state did not go away. Bit in keeping with a planned strategy from the late 1960s, capital reconfigured the state to serve its interests. From the gig economy to the privatization of public utilities, you have given us a diverse range of examples of the outcome.

Your argument being a progressive framework would place society rather than private profits at the center of public decision making. And that to advance this kind of progressive vision, progressives will need to re-establish a core focus on the main contradictions of the neoliberal paradigm.

So expand on that and also give us a sense of whether or how such contradictions and so conflicts can be resolved within the capitalist system. Start with some history on how this paradigm became mainstream in the first place. And so what you see as deep roots to the current challenge facing progressives.

MITCHELL: I think the progressive side of the debate really sold out in the 1970s. And they bought the line that the pressures of global capital and the globalization of supply chains, etcetera, had rendered the state ineffective. And that the role of the state had to be modified. So that it initially appeased the foreign exchange markets or else those markets would retaliate and cause currency havoc within the countries.

And so at that point, the progressive side of the debate really abandoned the macroeconomic terrain as a contestable terrain. And started to focus research and activism on all sorts of things like identity and methodology and a whole range of important but distractions from the main game.

We evolved into progressive writers even saying that the old framework where class conflict was the organizing framework for discussion was irrelevant now. And so you had progressive writers sort of talking about, to use an example, saying that working class women had more in common with their female bosses than they did have with their fellow male workers.

And, you know, the abandonment of economic class as an organizing framework has been very pronounced. The issues about identity or race and sexuality and gender, they’re not unimportant areas of inquiry. But I don’t consider that they should subjugate the starting point as being economic class in a capitalist system.

And so what we’ve had is a few decades of progressive discussions that are really conducted within the framework set at the macro level by the neoliberals, by the mainstream, by the orthodoxy. And that becomes a straitjacket.

I’ve <

Demand a Cease-Fire in Gaza – Shir Hever pt 1

Paul Jay — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 16:57:33 -0400

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Israeli-born political economist Shir Hever joins host Paul Jay to discuss the urgent need for a cease-fire, humanitarian aid, and a negotiated end to what’s becoming a genocide.

Justifying Genocide – Shir Hever pt 2

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Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. In a few minutes, I’ll be back with Dr. Shir Hever. He grew up in Jerusalem. He now lives in Germany, and we’re going to discuss the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza and the roots of this conflict. Be back in just a second.

Shir Hever is an economist and journalist. He’s the coordinator of the Military Embargo campaign at the Palestinian BDS Movement. Shir grew up in Jerusalem, and he’s now joining us from Heidelberg, Germany. Thanks very much for joining us, Shir.

Shir Hever

Thanks for having me, Paul.

Paul Jay

In this interview, we’re going to divide it into two parts. The first part is going to be about the current situation and what could be done to stop the bloodshed, particularly the assault on the people of Gaza. In part two, we’re going to talk more about the political and economic roots of this conflict, why the occupation of Palestinian territory has gone on for decades, why Hamas is in power in Gaza, and more about Israeli society and how it’s responding to this conflict. Shir, the audience hasn’t seen you for a while because you haven’t been on theAnalysis for a little while. Tell us a little bit about your background, and then we’ll get into what’s going on.

Shir Hever

Well, I don’t want to get too deep into my background right now, but let’s just say that as much as I enjoy speaking with you, I’m coming now on the show because it’s burning for me right now to call for a ceasefire because people are dying as we speak. The way that it connects to my background is that people that I know have been killed and possibly taken hostage. The thing is that I don’t know who they are because there is so much chaos. It’s often the case on the Palestinian side in Gaza, where the names of the dead take some time to be released. I know that good friends of mine have lost family members, and this time also on the Israeli side.

I lived for a year in the town of Sderot. Sderot is very close to Gaza and was one of the places that was attacked on October 7. I worked in a school, and some of the pupils in that school who were in primary school when I was teaching them are today adults. Statistically speaking, it’s clear that their names are among the people who were killed. Some of my pupils must be on these lists, but the lists are not published. Even the Israelis are not able to list the victims yet. This is a very difficult time, and I think it’s important that we have this conversation so people will know what’s going on and take action.

Paul Jay

The position of the American government is as aggressively pro-Israel as one has seen in a long time. The vote in the UN Security Council, where, in fact, even the Western countries that traditionally vote in support of Israel did vote to have a kind of ceasefire and allow humanitarian aid to get to Gaza. The Americans vetoed this. The Americans seem to be trying to turn this into another East versus West controversy. Even the Chinese were– I shouldn’t say even the Chinese– the Chinese on Ukraine have not said much, but on this, the Chinese were in support of aid to Gaza. What do you make of the aggressive position of Biden while he was there? He paid a little bit of lip service to innocent Palestinians who shouldn’t be lumped in with Hamas, but that’s exactly what’s happening.

Shir Hever

Yeah, I take some criticism when you say that this is a pro-Israel position to veto the ceasefire as if it is in the interests of Israel that more bloodshed will happen. Even though the current atmosphere in the Israeli public is very much bloodthirsty and calls for vengeance and calls for genocide, that doesn’t mean that it’s in the interests of Israel. Yeah, the United States, especially Biden, made it very clear that their interest is to increase the bloodshed. The sending of two aircraft carrier groups to the region or very close to the Israeli coast in order to threaten neighboring countries not to intervene is, in fact, giving the Israeli government the permission and the umbrella to go on a ground offensive.

Biden said that the ground invasion shouldn’t happen while he’s visiting, but his visit is not there forever. So he left. Then British Prime Minister Sunak has taken his place, but he’s not going to stay there forever either. When Sunak leaves, then who’s going to stop the Israelis from launching a ground invasion? We’re already at the stage where the UN published a genocide warning. The OIC, the Organization of Islamic Countries, which represents 57 states around the world and more than 2 billion people, has said this is the beginning of a genocide. What’s going to happen when ground troops enter Gaza?

The real question is, why is the United States pushing for so much bloodshed? This is something that is not completely clear to me. I think there are other voices coming from the United States as well. One explanation is the military industry. The big arms companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, their share prices increased by 30% when Israel launched its offensive. Yeah, it is American weapons that are being showcased, that are being sold, but this is a very short-term perspective. There is no way that the Israeli offensive is going to be successful at a strategic level. It’s only shedding blood in the name of vengeance and killing innocent civilians.

The thing is that Biden last year made a call, an executive decision, to ban the use of Israeli spyware on U.S. citizens. These are very dangerous programs that are used to hack phones. Israel is the only country in the world that allows private companies to sell spyware because it’s a very dangerous tool for spreading disinformation. Biden has nevertheless himself been a victim of Israeli disinformation. On the one hand, he’s saying we want to protect American citizens from disinformation spread through spyware. But when the Israeli institutions, the Israeli military, started to spread fake news, atrocity stories about the attack of October 7, things that have been refuted so far– I’m not going to repeat the details because they are gruesome and offensive. I don’t want to do this to the listeners to listen to those details. Biden repeated those lies in his speech. He didn’t recant it. He didn’t apologize for that. Then, there was the bombing of a hospital, the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, in the northern Gaza Strip. Once again, just before leaving, Biden made another statement repeating the Israeli lies. So either he’s very, very stupid, or he knows that these are lies, and he willingly spreads them because it gives the Israeli army a free hand to use more violence and kill more civilians.

Paul Jay

I take your point about not lumping this all as Israel’s interests. Israel is a class society, as is every other country on Earth. We’ve seen some splits about what’s going on in Israel and some interesting ones. Former Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert came out and said the reason there is a Hamas that committed– and I’ll say this in my own voice– terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians at the very beginning of all this. Hamas is more or less the government of Gaza. You can call it a form of state terrorism, but it has to be seen within the context of decades of Israeli state terrorism against the people of Gaza. We can get more into that, maybe in part two. Olmert says that Bibi Netanyahu and the far right of Israel have for decades deliberately nurtured Hamas and wanted Hamas as the enemy in order to avoid any legitimate negotiations with the Palestinian Authority [PA] and other forces in Palestine. PA isn’t the only organization or force that could have been negotiated with if there was any serious intent to negotiate. What do you make of this? Olmert is not the only one who came out and denounced this morbid relationship between the Israeli far right and Hamas. What do you make of that going public like that now? What do you make of the substance of it?

Shir Hever

Yeah, let’s put aside Olmert’s own opportunism here because let’s not forget that he commanded an invasion of the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009.

Paul Jay

None of these guys are peaceniks.

Shir Hever

At the time, he was criticized by Netanyahu, who said what is the point of invading Gaza and killing so many people if you’re not going to destroy the Hamas movement? But then people have reminded Netanyahu that he has not destroyed Hamas, and of course, he cannot. That’s not something that can happen any more than the U.S. can destroy the Taliban; that’s simply not a physical possibility. But of course, the very simple quote from Netanyahu where he said openly that anyone who wants to prevent a Palestinian state should support Hamas as a kind of divide and conquer strategy. This is something every Israeli knows. You don’t need to go to Olmert for this. It’s common knowledge, but that’s not the point.

I think what you say about the causes, let’s put aside the issue of moral judgments. In the end, we can have this discussion, and we can have our opinion on this, but we cannot change the reality. If a Palestinian uses violence, they’re not brought to trial; they’re killed. Of course, for each Palestinian who is killed in this way, there are ten Palestinians who are killed without resorting to violence at all. There is no idea of justice here. The same applies to Israelis, who commit war crimes and crimes against humanity and kill thousands of Palestinians. They’re also not brought in front of a judge. They’re also not charged with a crime. They’re simply allowed to get away with it.

This is not, I think, the time for moral judgment of which Palestinian faction is good or bad. The question is, what can be done? Of course, you’re correct about the issue of–

Paul Jay

I want to jump in on something you said. I think there is a way to root out Hamas, and I think there was a way to root out the Taliban. The way is to actually give a damn about what happens to the people.

I was in Afghanistan. I made a film there in 2002. If there’d have been any serious intent on the part of the U.S. to actually rebuild schools, to actually rebuild people’s lives, to actually give people a living, there was a way to rebuild the Afghan economy by getting it off poppies and use the poppies for legitimate pharmaceutical needs. If Afghan society, even half or a quarter of what had been promised, the Taliban never would have come back because the people hated the Taliban on the whole. No, the U.S. much preferred to chase the Taliban around, to have a war go on for 20 years and do next to nothing to rebuild Afghan society. I would guess it’s not that different. If there had actually been life for people in Gaza, if it wasn’t a desperate ghetto for decades and people had a way to have their own sovereignty, rights, and livelihood, I don’t know how much there would be or at least there would be a very different Hamas, if there was still a Hamas. This was solvable, obviously, if the Israeli elites wanted to solve it in a different way, but clearly, they didn’t.

Shir Hever

Yeah, I agree with you. It is, in fact, a very important point that you make when you say the word ghetto because you and I are Jews, and we have some concept of what a ghetto is. The slow starvation of a population in an open-air prison where they don’t have access to enough water, enough food, and enough medicine is something that is akin to a very gradual death sentence for the civilian population. This is something that started before Hamas was even created. So that’s true.

But also, what do you say about what way it is to defeat Hamas? I’m not an advisor to the Israeli military or to the Israeli government. I’m not going to tell them what to do, and I’m not going to advise them in any way. But I do see what Palestinian public opinions say about public support for the Hamas movement, which is about 20-30% of the population who express support. What I hear from all of my Palestinian friends is what would actually eliminate Hamas completely is not material goods, as you say, but freedom, just basic equality and human rights. That is much more important.

They say if there’s going to be just a voting right, “one person, one vote,” in a democratic situation, then Hamas will get zero votes because nobody would support them under these conditions. So, yeah, in that sense, I completely agree with you. I don’t think the Israelis are capable of even contemplating that kind of approach right now. What makes them so strong in their aggression, in their blindness, and in their willingness to intensify the violence indiscriminately is the United States. Not just the United States but other Western countries as well. Germany, absolutely. They are willing to basically send bombs. Germany is sending naval bombs to Israel. Britain is sending warships and other ammunition. The United States is sending more than everybody else combined with the clear understanding that these are weapons which are going to be used to kill civilians. The Israelis understand it as well.

Within the Israeli discourse right now, every gesture of support, when the German Minister of Foreign Affairs said, we are all Israelis now, or when Biden held his speech, then they say, okay, this means international law doesn’t apply to us. This is how they interpret it. They’re saying it. I’m listening to the news reports in Hebrew, and they are saying it with these words.

Paul Jay

As far as the American situation goes, whenever you analyze U.S. foreign policy, you have to begin with American domestic politics. It’s not just about the military-industrial complex. I mean, of course, it’s always about the military-industrial complex, but they’re doing quite well right now with Ukraine. I don’t know that they needed an assault on Gaza to get what they wanted out of American foreign policy.

No, I think the main thing driving this is Biden’s absolute number one priority. Don’t look weak. Don’t look weak on China. Don’t look weak on Russia. Don’t look weak in your relationship with Israel. Of course, there’s a factor that doesn’t get talked about enough. We don’t need to get into it much now. But just to say it, the forces of white Christian nationalism in the United States are very strong, and it’s what’s giving Trump his momentum. They’re very scared of these forces. They being the Democratic Party and the elites associated with them. Legitimately and rightly, they should be afraid, although they helped give birth to these forces with their economic policies toward, at least, the 75 million people who voted for Trump.

One of the concepts, as you know, of white Christian nationalism is the role of Israel and support for Israel because Israel has a role to play in the final apocalypse and so on. It’s an important part of the narrative.

Shir Hever

It’s a very bloody role.

Paul Jay

Of course, I don’t know; it’s a crazy, unholy alliance.

Shir Hever

[crosstalk 00:18:56] enlightenment for the Christian Evangelical.

Paul Jay

It is nuts. Why the Israelis play ball with this and the right-wing Jews is amazing because they’re all going to hell when this happens. It’s not like all of a sudden, these Jews are going to be accepted next to the lap of God, but whatever, none of this has to make sense. Let’s set the U.S. politics aside for now.

Let me just ask: understandably, given the Hamas attack on civilians, and especially the way Israeli media has been pounding a bloodthirsty response, are there forces calling for a ceasefire? Don’t the Israelis get to see that even in the U.S., the media is starting to get sympathetic to the situation of the Palestinians? If you watch American mainstream media right now, you would actually conclude there should be a ceasefire, at least for humanitarian aid. It’s been an interesting switch in the U.S. media.

Shir Hever

There are absolutely these voices within Israeli society. First of all, of the 199 families of the people who have been taken hostage, we don’t know exactly how many hostages are there and how many are still alive after the Israeli bombing. It is very likely Israel is killing the Israeli hostages with the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian homes. There are 199 families, and some of these families have more than one person who was taken captive. We don’t know how many, but these families, most of them are saying with a very clear voice that there must be a ceasefire and they want a prisoner exchange. There are a lot of Israelis who support the idea of a ceasefire, humanitarian corridor, and prisoner exchange. Israel is holding about 6,000 Palestinian political prisoners. Over a thousand of them are held without a trial. There are no charges pressed against them. There’s no reason that Israel shouldn’t just release these people. They should have released them anyway, and this is now a good time to get the hostages back. These voices are certainly strong. The voices that are the strongest are coming from the survivors of the kibbutz and the towns close to Gaza, who have really suffered the most and lost family members.

There are heartbreaking videos and statements by these people, not just the ones who say, please bring the hostages home because they’re family members, but also those who don’t have family members who are hostages at stake. They’re saying, look, this attack on our home, on our family, it was completely the responsibility of the Israeli government. What else were they expecting to happen? Palestinians are held in ghetto-like conditions. If there is now continual violence and indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in Gaza, just a couple of kilometers away from us, what reason do we have now to think that this will be over, that it’s not going to happen again and again? We’ll never have safety as long as this happens. So, these are the voices that also exist in Israel.

There is a problem with the Israeli media which I’ve never seen before, a level of silencing, a level of McCarthyism that is unprecedented in Israeli society, even though, of course, it has never been a democratic and freedom of the press. There was military censorship, but now the Minister of Communication used an emergency order according to the state of emergency that exists in Israel, which allows the government to seize the equipment and to arrest journalists if they express opinions that the government does not approve of. People are being arrested. Mostly Palestinian journalists with Israeli citizenship. Israeli citizens, but not Jewish citizens, are being arrested already. Because of this, what you described, this shift in the U.S. public discourse and the media discourse in the United States is not reported in Israel. Israelis who don’t read English and are not able to look at the international media don’t know that this has happened. They still read the Hebrew translation of Biden’s speech, and that’s what they believe is still the case in terms of public opinion in the United States.

Paul Jay

Egypt has announced they’re going to have some trucks with some aid sent to Gaza. The Arab countries, on the whole, have some rhetoric in support of the Palestinians, but there is not much concrete pressure, it doesn’t seem. Yes, the Saudi-Israeli detente seems to be on the back burner for a little while, but everybody expects it sooner rather than later to get back on board again.

What’s happening amongst the people, especially in the neighboring countries, in Egypt, and in Jordan? Jordan has a massive Palestinian population. To what extent are people in or are going to be in the streets? Are these governments feeling some pressure from their own people?

Shir Hever

I’m not the best guest for you to pose this question to. You should find a guest who’s an expert on these Arab countries and can read the newspapers in Arabic and so on. What I read is absolutely yes. There were several mass demonstrations in Jordan that the German police were crushing with violence because people felt a strong solidarity with Palestine.

Egypt is also in a very difficult dilemma in a way because there’s pressure on them. The U.S. has offered a large bribe if they would allow and absorb Palestinian refugees from Gaza into the Sinai Peninsula. Everybody knows that if this happens, these refugees will never be allowed to return. It’s going to be a second Nakba. Palestinians will be expelled from their homes once again. Some of these people are already refugees, most of them actually from inside Israel from ’48. Now, they’re going to become refugees again.

On the one hand, Egypt says, okay, we’re not going to open the border and are not going to allow these people through. Then again, this could mean that these people are going to be killed.

You mentioned the humanitarian assistance, which is very desperately and urgently needed. The Gaza Strip has been split by the Israeli forces into two parts. In the northern part, the Israelis said everyone had 24 hours to evacuate, or they would all be killed. Everyone was trying to get to the south. There were several convoys of people taking their families and trying to escape to the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Those convoys were bombed by the Israeli air force. People don’t know what to do. In these conditions, how can you send trucks of aid to the northern part? They could be bombed along the way. It’s not enough that Egypt will allow the aid to go into Gaza. There also has to be pressure on the Israeli government to allow the trucks to actually get to the people who need food, medicine, and water very urgently.

Paul Jay

To get back to how this unfolded, there have been reports that Hamas never expected to meet so little Israeli resistance in terms of the Israeli military. They never expected to be able to actually take over the kibbutz and be in a situation, I don’t know if you know, but it sounds like they lost control of their own fighters to some extent. Some of the bloody stuff that happened wasn’t planned. The objective was to kidnap people, if you want to use that term, and use them as hostages as part of a prisoner exchange. Then, the whole thing spiralled into something far bigger.

I know there are theories that, to some extent, Netanyahu or part of the far right military, because, like society, all countries’ militaries reflect the fractions and factions within the society. It’s the same thing in the U.S. You’ve got a far-right faction in the U.S. military, and then you have another one that’s more centrist. Certainly, it seems in the short term, at any rate, what has happened benefits the far right. Whether it’s Netanyahu personally or not, the far right seems to benefit. In Israel, they’re going to have a kind of stronger, at least for a time, even if they get condemned for what happened, a far more overt theocratic dictatorship emerges out of this with a more united, anti-Palestinian Israeli society. It already was pretty racist to begin with. What do you make of this?

Shir Hever

Yeah, the first part of your question referred to the Hamas fighters maybe overestimating the resistance on the Israeli side and not expecting it to be so easy. I think we have to be a little bit careful. I’ve heard these arguments from Israeli generals for many, many years, where they again and again underestimate Palestinians and underestimate their intelligence. They think, okay, Palestinians don’t know what we’re capable of. They don’t know how to organize an effective strategy. Again and again, the Israeli generals are proven wrong because Palestinians are human beings and just as intelligent as Israelis and capable of understanding. If anything, in this colonial relationship between a very arrogant and powerful colonial state and the indigenous population, the indigenous Palestinian population, Palestinians have a much deeper understanding of Israeli society than Israelis have of Palestinian society. There are a lot of Palestinians who speak Hebrew much more than Israelis who speak Arabic. So because of this, I am very careful about saying, oh, Hamas didn’t know exactly what they were going to find on the other side.

Paul Jay

Well, listen, attacking a concert of kids, a music concert, and slaughtering kids does not seem part of a very smart, coherent strategy to me.

Shir Hever

It could have been their intention, but I don’t know. We’re not talking about kids exactly, young adults.

Paul Jay

Yeah, well, either way.

Shir Hever

One of the things that Israelis were surprised about was how Hamas fighters even knew about this concert. How did they know about this party? Well, because they can read the online invitations and the advertisements just like anybody else. That’s something that didn’t even occur to them.

What you said about the far right in Israel and the far right in Israel is now part of the government in an unprecedented way. Smotrich, the Minister of Finance and the Chairman of the Party of Religious Zionism, referred to himself as a fascist homophobe. This is something that we’ve never seen before so much in the mainstream. There have always been far-right parties in Israel and far-right movements, but they’ve never been allowed into such key positions such as the Minister of Finance.

What you said about them becoming stronger, that actually didn’t happen. That’s very interesting. When those far-right politicians were confronted with an indigenous population which is capable of uprising and using force, they panicked themselves.

Their concept is that Palestinians can be swept out of the way with overwhelming Israeli force. They assume that the power relations are so overwhelmingly on the side of Israel that it’s going to be very easy. Now they realize it’s not going to be very easy. The public is responding in a very similar way. One of those ministers made the mistake of going to one of the kibbutz and trying to speak to the survivors and show support and solidarity with them. They shouted him out. It’s very interesting what he was trying to say to them. He said, look, the state needs to provide you with support and relief and protection. They told him, you are the state, and you failed in doing all of that. You come to us and try to protest what the government is doing when you are a government minister. This is just untrustworthy and unbelievable.

Paul Jay

We’re going to do a part two, as I said, to conclude part one for people watching this. I am sure most were outraged to see the attacks on Israeli civilians and are now, I would think, even more, outraged at the collective punishment that’s happening against the people of Gaza. What should they say? What should they do?

Shir Hever

We have to stop a genocide. There is a very clear recipe for genocide that we see. First, there is dehumanization of the Palestinian side. There is outright racism, a fervor of nationalism, overwhelming military power, and a feeling that there is a free hand and there are not going to be any consequences. Then the killing starts, the blood is spilled, and, of course, disinformation is part of it. Blaming the victim and saying, oh, Palestinians have brought this upon themselves. These are the components of genocide. This is already happening. What we need to do is to stop it in whatever form we can. Whether it’s through our unions, churches, synagogues, if we have access to political actors, if we have connections with political actors, but also through economic pressure, by just showing that the eyes of the world are watching and the Israelis are not going to be allowed to get away with committing genocide against Palestinians.

Paul Jay

Okay, thanks, Shir. So, in part two, we’re going to talk more about why the occupation continues decade after decade. There was another way for this to happen. I mentioned this to Shir off-camera just before. There could have been a more, quote-unquote, “normal capitalist development” here. A more South African style where the Palestinians were incorporated into, whether the state would have been called Israel or even a two-state solution. But one way or the other, a solution that reinforces capitalist relationships and allows a certain amount of the Palestinians into the elites, as has happened in South Africa. Some Blacks have now entered the South African elites and help rule on behalf of the tiny minority that actually owns stuff. There could have been that kind of development in Israel, but clearly, there were forces in Israel that didn’t want that.

One of the questions I will be asking Shir, not now, but just to tease it. When I was in Israel 30 years ago, I went to a film festival. I went because I was told a dozen Palestinian filmmakers were going. I figured if they’re going, I’ll go. They actually pulled out a couple of days before I got there. What I heard at that point, and I’m guessing is still true, that if it wasn’t with a, quote-unquote, “existential threat of Palestinians to Israel,” and I put quote-unquote because I don’t think there ever was or is an existential threat to Israel from the Palestinians. But without that as a threat, Israeli society itself would explode with the secular versus religious sections at war at just who and what kind of society Israel is going to be. So we’re going to talk about that in part two. For now, thank you, Shir.

Shir Hever

Thank you, Paul.

Paul Jay

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Renowned Russian Marxist Economist Aleksandr Buzgalin Dies

Paul Jay — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 12:34:18 -0400

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Aleksandr Buzgalin, Russian Marxist, professor at the Moscow State University, and the coordinator of the Social Movement “Alternatives,” passed away on October 18, 2023. He was 69 years old. In his honor, we republish his interviews with host Paul Jay.

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Paul Jay

Hi. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. I’m Paul Jay. In just a few seconds, I’ll be joined by Aleksandr Buzgalin to talk about the significance of the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. Please don’t forget there’s a donate button on the website. If you support what we do, please go and click. If you already have, thank you. If you haven’t subscribed on YouTube, please do or on one of the various podcast platforms. Most importantly, sign up for the email list. Be back in just a few seconds.

On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and dissolved the Soviet Union itself. With his death on August 30, Gorbachev has been mostly praised in the Western press for his vision of a social democratic Soviet Union within Europe, much like a Sweden or a Finland. Of course, that’s not what happened. What actually followed was a period of rapacious capitalism where public assets were looted by former leaders of the party and the bureaucracy.

Aleksandr Buzgalin was a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU in its last year and fought for quite a different vision of a reformed Soviet Union. Buzgalin is currently a professor and director of the Center of Modern Marxist Studies at Moscow State University. He joins us now from Moscow. Thanks for joining us again, Aleksandr.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

I’m very glad to be with you and discuss very important questions, as you know.

Paul Jay

The death of Gorbachev is, in some ways, more about the end of the Soviet Union than it is about the figure of Gorbachev. I know you had a very direct experience in the days and months before the end of the Soviet Union. You once told me the story about this. Maybe you could start there, and then we can get into the bigger question. You were not in the party, am I correct? But you went to a party congress, and you were part of a reform group that proposed certain reforms. Gorbachev didn’t agree with your reforms. What was that about?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

It’s not exactly the model of my life. The logic is as follows. In 1985 the Soviet Union started some reforms. The first was very mild, and then it became deeper. In 1989, it became a real opportunity to be in a position officially without [inaudible 00:02:46].

Paul Jay

By reforms, do you mean more openness in terms of how you could speak?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Different reforms. By the way, I want to talk about this a little later. Gorbachev is not only glasnost, freedom of speech, and political pluralism. It’s a much more complex problem in the economy and ideology. Later we will talk about this.

In 1988, I think I became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union because it was possible to be in a position inside the Communist Party. In the winter of 1989-1990, we created a so-called Marxist platform. It was democratic, socialist, and, I can say, even communist opposition to both Stalinism and Bourgeoisie reforms. Gorbachev, in that period, was the leader of social democratic reforms, but in a very pro-western style. It was more western social democracy than, let’s say, a social democracy of [Georgi] Plekhanov or even [Karl] Kautsky. It was a very pro-western model of social democracy, the center or right-wing model of social democracy.

First and second, he was a leader of a huge bureaucratic machine, and he did not want to reform this bureaucratic machine. The Communist Party and Central Committee were organized very bureaucratically, and they could not react to very deep contradictions in the country. That’s why we established the Marxist platform.

Paul Jay

For people who don’t know too much about the period, what do you mean when you say organized very bureaucratically? What are some examples?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

First of all, it was the same huge apparatus as the Central Committee. If you wanted to make any changes, it was necessary to go through different departments and sub-departments. In the region’s party, leaders could not make anything without permission from the center, and they didn’t have initiative. They were part of a machine, and they could not work without the machine. They could not work without the KGB. They could not work without the police, and it was very difficult to change this machine.

We were talking about the necessity to radically reorganize the party-state on an anti-bureaucratic basis. The main question was about the development of real, not formal, self-management in enterprises. Real economic democracy. Real democracy, grassroots democracy. Gorbachev was playing with bourgeois forms of democracy. It was possible to say blah, blah, blah for intelligence. Still, there was no voice for the ordinary people and people who became poor in the Soviet Union Gorbachev period because of the shortage of commodities. Many real forms of democracy were not developing grassroots democracy. We were doing a lot in this sphere. It’s important, by the way. It was a movement of self-management, organs of enterprises, big enterprises, and small enterprises.

In 1990 we had all of the Union, Soviet Union, Congress of the leaders of self-management. It was 1,000 people from all over the country. It was intelligent, very democratic people who wanted to have democratic socialism, but they didn’t have power. Real democratization– and the economy was not powered by workers or engineers. There was more power to the directors who started the underground privatization during the Soviet period. Workers and engineers were fighting against this, and they didn’t have support from the Communist party, and they didn’t have support from Gorbachev.

Paul Jay

Let me just highlight this. You said the privatization began underground even during the days of the Soviet Union. This is from higher-level party bureaucrats, am I correct? They were already trying to develop private ownership amongst that class.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

They were not against it, I can say. If we are talking about party bureaucrats– it’s easier to explain. In the Gorbachev period, there appeared two wings of bureaucrats in the Communist party. One part was old-style bureaucrats who had communist, socialist illusions and formal socialist ideology in their brains. At the same time, they were very cynical. They were, let’s say, corrupt. Not because of bribes but because they wanted to go anywhere and have money. They were oriented on the transformation of their power to the property, to the capital, but not very radically. They were passive and not active, this whole generation of Communist party bureaucrats. We had young generations mainly in the Komsomol youth communist organization and also part of directors and leaders of formerly state enterprises. But because Gorbachev allowed so-called [inaudible 00:08:08] leasing, directors took enterprises in leasing. It was a strange situation when an enterprise with equipment for billion of dollars was in the leasing of a director who had, I don’t know, maybe a few thousand dollars. So it was a very unbeautiful story. I’m trying to find a polite way to say this.

Paul Jay

One, you don’t need to be polite. Two, what is the term you’re using?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Leasing. Rent.

Paul Jay

Oh, leasing.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

I’m sorry for my pronunciation. Yes, leasing of enterprises. Also, it was the growth of separatism among regional leaders. It was not a liberation of people in different regions of the former Soviet Union in Ukraine. Not in Ukraine. In Ukraine, it was not very radical. In Baltic republics, Georgia, and in some regions of Caucasus, there were more attempts of bureaucrats and communist and non-communist leaders in these former Soviet republics. It was not for former Soviet republics to take power. It was not liberation from below. It was a struggle of bureaucrats for their power in former Soviet republics, which became independent states. We will regain this. We were for the support of recreation, rebirth, and renaissance of the Soviet Union as unity based on initiatives from below. We will support real self-management of enterprises and regional self-management for grassroots democracy, not for bureaucratic games in a multiparty system, definitely against Stalinism and definitely against bourgeois transformation.

Paul Jay

By bourgeois transformation, you mean the Western capitalist model. In fact, what actually happened in the ’90s?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

It’s another story, which is also very important to understand why people don’t like Gorbachev now. Finally, it became terrible. I want to say terrible catastrophe in the economy, living standards, social life, geopolitics, ideology, and culture. In the early ’90s, our country had a decline in the gross national product by nearly 50%; one-half. There was a decline in real incomes for the poor population by one-half. There was enormous growth of social polarization during a few months, not even years. It was a criminal atmosphere.

The Gorbachev period was a period of discreditation of the police in all spheres, including the militia. Of course, it was not a very democratic organization. Without control, without the militia, without punishment of criminal elements, it’s impossible to live in society. Especially when primitive accumulation of capital leads to enormous violence everywhere. If you remember the primitive accumulation of capital in the United States, it was mass [inaudible 00:11:36], and you had all these western movies about the primitive accumulation of capital. The gun is the main tool for the accumulation of capital. Gorbachev is responsible for the decline of the real power of the police. I’m a very democratic person, but in some respects, it’s necessary to have police against organized bandits. It was all negative things.

Paul Jay

When Gorbachev is deciding, preparing to step down to dissolve the Soviet Union, he must know there’s going to be a free for all. Looting of publicly owned enterprises and wealth. He has to know that’s what’s coming.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

It’s a story that is a miracle to hear. I cannot explain his personal behavior. In most public opinion in modern Russia, even from the 1990s, this is the case. In Russian, we have the word ‘baba’. It’s a woman who cannot make something herself. I’m sorry, it’s not anti-feminist; it’s just Russian content. So a woman who is under the oppression of men, who is not decisive, who cannot make real actions, and who cannot take responsibility. This is the main negative feeling to Gorbachev. Why I said I could not understand, I don’t think that he is ‘baba’. What I think is he started with a very good slogan in 1985 when he became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He said the main factor of our rebirth, of our new epoch, is the social creativity of the masses. He made quotations from [Vladimir Ilʹich] Lenin. He said we must have an acceleration of economy, and we must use plans, strategic planning, socialist methods, and some forms of democracy in order to open the energy of the people. It was not bad words at all. Some steps in this direction really appeared. Until 1988, there was more democratization in the sphere of enterprise management. There were more opportunities for the self-organization of people in regions, the creation of new forms of green movements, and so on. There were some positive changes.

But then, step-by-step, he started moving in the direction of, firstly, Western-style social democracy. Then he did not support, but he did not criticize, he did not attack those who were for bourgeoisie restoration. It was direct, but maybe not subjective, of leaders like Yeltsin, like Gavriil Popov, leader of Moscow in the 1990s, like [Anatoly] Sobchak, the leader of St. Petersburg in the 1990s. All these so-called leaders of [inaudible 00:15:05] opposition.

They were speaking in the late ’80s about the necessity to have a Swedish model of socialism and even more socialism than in Sweden, more socialism than in Finland. They never talked about total privatization. They never talked about the primitive accumulation of capital. I don’t know, maybe they were really stupid or primitive not to understand what really would take place. For me, for my comrades, we were 30 years old, by the way, not very old people in that period. We were absolutely sure that it would not be social democracy. It would not be Sweden. It would be a third-world country with all criminal forms of capitalism in the periphery.

It was not the case for Gorbachev, for Communist Party bureaucrats, and for the opposition. That’s why we created this Marxist platform with all these critiques and predictions. Three of us became members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It is the main ruling organ. When there was a planned meeting of the Central Committee– the Central Committee was big, with nearly 300 people. It was one of the first meetings after [inaudible 00:16:25]. It was 1990, and they said if we continued the same politics, the Communist Party would collapse, and the Soviet Union would disappear.

By the way, when it was the case in 1992, some old leaders of the Communist Party said Aleksandr, you are responsible for the destruction of the Soviet Union. You are responsible for the destruction of the Communist Party. You said one year before that it would be destroyed, and it was destroyed. You son of a bitch, Sasha. It was not clear to Gorbachev, and it was not clear to Communist Party bureaucrats.

I want to stress another aspect if it’s possible to move from Gorbachev to real contradictions of the country.

Paul Jay

Well, before you do that, let me just explore this Gorbachev thing a little further. His vision, which is being praised now in the Western media that Russia / the Soviet Union would become a social democracy, part of Europe and part of the West essentially. It seems to me if Gorbachev really believed that it’s so naive and so delusional that western capital would ever allow Russia to become that kind of player in Europe. Given everything the Soviet Union had in terms of size, resources, and manpower, it wouldn’t have been long in that situation where the Soviet Union would have been equal to Germany. It would have been a powerful player in Europe. I can’t imagine the Germans and Americans ever allowing that.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

So I don’t know if he was naive or he was not smart enough. I don’t know him personally. I only saw him in the Tribune or the Congress. We never met. I met some leaders of the party and members of the political bureau. It was little more than ten people. Some of them were not bad and did not support Gorbachev. Gorbachev, I didn’t meet myself closely. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we met, but not in that period. I think that he was not smart enough. He was not decisive enough. I cannot say naive. Naive is a word for a young girl. A sixteen years old girl who dreams about romantic life. He was not a young girl at all. He was a political leader. So I don’t know what I can use here, but it’s not naive. It’s maybe blind, better to say.

Paul Jay

At some point before the coup in– what is it, August of 1990. He comes back for a few months, and then he steps down. At some point, is he more or less captured by the forces that are preparing for this big privatization and looting of the economy? In some ways, does he wind up being their tool?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

It’s a complex question. I think Gorbachev was not the captain of the boat. He was in the boat, which was moving according to the streams. This boat didn’t have– I don’t know how to say it. Like in the car when you move.

Paul Jay

A steering wheel?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Steering wheel, yes. This car didn’t have an engine. It was like a piece of wood moving in the river. Gorbachev was not a captain. That’s why he is responsible for not being a captain. Is it clear?

Paul Jay

Yeah.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

In the period of radical changes, when the streams are very different, and the dominant stream is negative or reactionary, the captain of the boat must be decisive, strong, and must create a team that will fight against this negative trend. Gorbachev destroyed the bureaucratic system of management. It was necessary to transfer this bureaucratic system, but not to completely destroy the system of governing, not management, governing in the country. He really destroyed governing. No change from bureaucratic governing to democratic governing, but he destroyed governing. Not him personally, but he did not fight against its destruction. That is what I can say.

Paul Jay

Did the privatization, the development of this class of oligarchs, does that begin while Gorbachev is still there, or it all happens afterward?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

It was the underground genesis. When a tree is growing, first, the seed is in the land. The seed is growing, and then first, small green elements appear. So here it was not a tree; it was something ugly and terrible. It was a dragon growing from these seeds. The seeds of dragons were developing in the Gorbachev period. It was not a big huge dragon of oligarchs, but it was the beginning because of the so-called freedom, but it was really disorganization and not freedom. Because of the disorganization of governing, we had an enormous growth of shadow business and criminal shadow business in the late ’80s. We had the underground privatization with the leasing of enterprises by directors.

Paul Jay

Now, what does that mean? They’re charging outside forces to come in and use the enterprise. What does it mean, leasing? Renting.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

The director of the enterprise, the manager of the enterprise, received the power to be the executive owner of the enterprise; to buy, to sell production, to reorganize production, to decrease production, and to change production. They became class owners, not formal owners, but real owners. They made the first accumulation of capital on this basis. Not all enterprises, but many big enterprises and small enterprises in the country.

Paul Jay

This was supposed to be done in the name of opposing bureaucracy?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Yes, it was the growth of democracy, economic democracy. It was not the growth of economic democracy. Democracy powers people, demos kratos. Here was the power of directors instead of the power of [inaudible 00:23:20]. I don’t know what is worst.

Paul Jay

Well, maybe this starts to answer my next question. After Gorbachev stepped down and they started privatizing, supposedly, these public assets were purchased. Where do these guys get the money to buy anything?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

They did not buy anything. They steal everything. It’s not a joke, unfortunately. Future enterprises like [inaudible 00:23:48], enterprises with 40, 20, 50,000 workers. The metal in these enterprises is– just metal from the machines cost, I don’t know, billions of dollars. Not enterprise, but simply to sell the metal, they sold equipment, it will be billions of dollars. They bought these enterprises for 5-10 million dollars, which they accumulated during primitive, criminal shadow business in the Gorbachev period. Then it was a game. It was a so-called auction. When you pay very small money, you buy an enterprise, and then you must pay it back because you have an enterprise, and you will pay it back from the saving of the products produced in this enterprise.

Paul Jay

Somebody told me that, I think, it’s 1990 or 1991, there is a loan from the IMF. It was supposed to go to the Russian government to help pay the debt, but it was actually diverted into private hands and then used to buy public resources.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Yes, it was after the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991. Western money and big money, it was billions of dollars that went to these goals. It was a lot of illegal privatization. It’s also important; there was enormous inflation. In one year, prices grew 30 times, not 30%, 30 times. Every month it was growing two, three, or five times per month. So it was enormous.

In the beginning, it was an official estimation of enterprise in rubles. After a few months, it was 100 times less or 50 times less than it was in the beginning. So there were a lot of these speculations which led to the privatization of enterprises by criminal leaders, shadow economy leaders, and some young Communist Party bureaucrats. Young, decisive, strong, and aggressive. I can say even aggressive. Let’s say a talented entrepreneur came to this game. Thousands of them were killed, but one, two, or three of them became big businessmen.

Paul Jay

They were killed because they were fighting each other over the wealth?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Yes, maybe not directly killed, but destroyed. Their capital was completely destroyed. They became absolutely poor. It was a very brutal period.

Paul Jay

So Gorbachev’s argument was, as I understand it, that the Soviet Union’s economy, politics had become so bureaucratic and the Soviet republics wanted out. He had no choice but to step down and do what he did. Otherwise, there would have been a civil war. Did he have a choice?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

The problem is not him. The problem is the situation in general. He was his team. In some aspects, Gorbachev was a puppet in the hands of the whole team of bureaucrats who really wanted these changes. They really wanted to change their power and receive capital and private property. He was a puppet in these hands.

Why wasn’t he a leader and instead a puppet is another question. It’s a problem with his personal qualities. This team of leaders with Gorbachev did not prevent the destruction of socialism. It’s better to say it in another way. I want to repeat this. It was necessary to transform the bureaucratic system, change so-called bureaucratic socialism, and create a democratic model of socialism from below. Instead of that, it was the destruction of the system of governing. Not the destruction of bureaucratism, but the destruction of government. Bureaucratic governing is governing that works in the interests of the bureaucrats, not the people’s interests. If you want to change the boat’s course, it’s not necessary to destroy it. Something like that. Some first intentions were very important and positive, as I said, in 1985-87. Then forces that led to the destruction of socialism and the Soviet Union came to power step by step.

Here it’s important to explain why, in general, the Soviet Union collapsed or disappeared, better to say. There are different explanations, but my position is the following. Socialism is like a bicycle. It’s necessary to move all the time and move forward. To move forward, socialism must have a basic engine. The engine of socialism is not the market. It’s not private activity, competition, and so on. The engine of communism, socialism, as the first step is social creativity if you want enthusiasm.

In the beginning, it’s impossible to build a new society on the basis of only enthusiasm. Without enthusiasm, it’s impossible to move in the direction of socialism and further to communism. It’s necessary to have social creativity. When we had social creativity, there was very rapid development and positive developments even in bureaucratic systems. Even inside all these mutations, all these negative features, like in the [Nikita] Khrushchev period during the late ’50s and early ’60s.

By the way, I will make a small important remark. In the West, there are a lot of positive words about Gorbachev, but I never hear positive words about Khrushchev. During that period, we had the Spring. We had much more freedom for culture, science, and education. There was an enormous jump in technologies, the cosmos, nuclear power stations, new types of transportation, and automatic enterprises. We had our first automatic enterprise in the 1960s with robot productions. It was a so-called enterprise producing some elements for machines. It was an enterprise producing these elements of machines without men at all in the late ’60s.

There were a lot of decisions in culture, cinema, fundamental sides, and it was another atmosphere in the country. Of course, it was a bureaucracy and had a lot of negative features. It was a one-party system, and there was a growth in the popularity of the Soviet Union in the world. Anti-colonial revolutions in all countries. In Africa, Asia, in Latin America, they struggled to face this dictatorship. Everywhere supported the Soviet Union. There were millions of students in Russian-Soviet universities during this period. It was a wonderful country with wonderful development. Why didn’t the West like it? Because it was a strong country. When Gorbachev came to the United Nations, he took a shoe and boom, boom, and said you will have–

Paul Jay

You mean when Khrushchev came?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Khrushchev, yes. By the way, when you said do they like Gorbachev in the West, mainstream West, not Left. I want to propose another fantastic story. What would it be like if today in our country and in former Soviet republics (Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan) if they had wonderful leaders with strong political forces who wanted to create a new Soviet Union with democracy, real grassroots democracy, with real self-management in the state enterprises, with free education, but with a strong army based on the enthusiasm of the people, with development of high-tech and so on? Will the West applaud the leader? Look, he is for the freedom of speech. Look he’s for real democracy. Look, he’s building a just society with good people. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan want to create a new, peaceful, huge, big country with strong weapons, strong technologies, and wonderful computer tech for all other countries in the world. Will they be happy? No. That’s why they liked Gorbachev. Not for democracy but for the destruction of the country. Destruction of the system. Not the country, but the destruction of the system. The socialist system with all the negative features, but the socialist system was a real opposition to world capital.

There is one more important aspect that I want to stress. It was not only Gorbachev who led to the destruction of the, let’s say, mutant socialism, bureaucratic socialism. In the former world, the socialist system, even earlier than the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia, in other west-east European countries, we had changes. These countries had different leaders. Some were more strong, some were less, some were smarter, some less, but everywhere it was this change. Why?

Let’s come back to the question of why the Soviet Union disappeared. The Soviet Union in the Leonid Brezhnev period– not in the Gorbachev period. In the Brezhnev period, the late ’60s and ’70s, the Soviet Union lost its engine. The bicycle stops, and the bicycle cannot stand; it must move. It was an attempt to add the market engine for socialism. It doesn’t work. It creates private business inside socialism. It’s possible to have markets as one of the tools to move, but not as the dominant force.

Paul Jay

To do what you say, to do what you’re recommending requires a real democratization of the politics. You can’t have any enthusiasm for self-management if you’re still dealing with the bureaucratic, more or less, police state.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

It’s true, but not 100%. I will explain why. In the 1920s, even in the early 1930s, the Soviet Union was not a 100% democratic state. It was a one-party system. There was no freedom of speech for anti-socialist forces. There was no mass repression, but if you started a coup d’état, you would be imprisoned or killed. We had enormous enthusiasm because we had democracy on the grassroots level. Politically on the top, it was not pure democratic in a bourgeoise sense. In the lower level of enterprises, opportunities to create different social initiatives in jewels and so on were possible.

Paul Jay

You’re talking about the 1920s?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Yes, the 1920s and early 1930s. Step by step, there was a growth of bureaucratization, Stalin’s dictatorship, and so on. Even in the period of 1930, when all these repressions started, when 100,000 people to 2 million people were repressed, and some of them were killed. When the Gulag appeared– only in that period we had [inaudible 00:36:57] from below because it was a very contradictory mixture of the creation of a new state, new economy, new society, new education, a new culture for people, on the one hand, I don’t know left hand, and it was bureaucratic dictatorship from another.

Finally, it led to big enormous contradictions. When the Second World War started, for us, the Great Patriotic War, there was again a very strange model of enthusiasm. Not strange, I can say, beautiful but extremely tragic model of enthusiasm. People were dying for peace. We had millions of people who went to war voluntarily. They went and died. They were real heroes. Young boys and old men, like 60 years old, 70 years old when Hitler was near Moscow. Old people, 60-70 years old, nobody made the order to go and be killed. It was enthusiasm if you want.

There was a lot of enthusiasm in the production sphere. [inaudible 00:38:19] wrote a beautiful article about a lot of new projects, forms of organization of management, and technology. It was a dictatorship because it was war. So it’s a very contradictory process. Then after Stalin, it was Russo Spring, and there was less dictatorship, less oppression of people, and less ideological pressure. There was, but it was less. There was a very rapid growth of laws, science, and culture.

During the Brezhnev period, it was stopped because it was a real threat to bureaucracy. This destruction of enthusiasm from below led to the transformation of leaders. In the beginning, the leaders of the Soviet Union were a mixture of bureaucrats with communists. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and all these people were bureaucrats. They were, in some aspects, brutal dictators, but they came from World War II, and many of them were heroes of this war. Brezhnev was not killed. He was wounded but not killed. Many people like Brezhnev were killed in this war. That’s why they had bureaucrats and communists. Then because of the absence of enthusiasm from below and the absence of control from below, this bureaucratic party grew and became the whole head, and communism disappeared.

When I was in the Central Committee– I don’t remember if I said this, or if I was just thinking about it, but it was no one communist, except maybe a few people. Three hundred leaders of the communist party, 20 million communist parties. They were not communists. They were not real, and to the creation of a new society, they were bureaucrats with some illusions. More or less cynical.

Paul Jay

For them, being a communist meant defending the party and the state. It didn’t have a lot to do with the social content of that.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Yes, and to receive different privileges. By the way, not very big, but still, it was privileges. So that’s why it was from both sides. It was a growth of conformism from below and the growth of bureaucratism from the top. Gorbachev was a result of this transformation.

Paul Jay

There’s still another level of why. Why does it become so bureaucratized? Is it partly because you can’t have central planning and such control of the economy when you’re using a pencil and paper? There were just the very beginnings of the computer. How could you possibly have such centralization with such primitive technology?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

First of all, it was not necessary to have absolute centralization.

Paul Jay

But they did.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Yes, and that was one of the reasons. The key problem was not even centralization in the economy. The key problem was the relatively low level of culture and the relatively low level of social creativity of the masses when the revolution took place.

For socialism, the best way for a socialist revolution is when you have a strong Left party with millions of people inside capitalists. You have huge trade unions, not bureaucratic trade unions. You have real initiatives from below the sphere of a Green movement and other social movements. You have Left intelligence inside capitalism. You don’t have a political party or political power, but you have all the necessary prerequisites. Opposition is strong, democratic, educated, cultural, you have a salary, you have actors, you have experience, and then you have victory in the elections. It’s wonderful; we are moving in the direction of socialism. Step by step, from market to plan, from private property to social, from formal bourgeoisie democracy to grassroots democracy. Miscontradictions, but we are moving. It’s a wonderful picture. Really, when you have highly developed capitalism, you have enormous control of capital and bureaucracy over all spheres of life.

It’s another topic, but with Andrey Kolganov, we wrote our book Global Capital. By the way, it is published in English with a strange name, Twenty-First-Century Capital. It’s very similar to this famous book. In Britain, it’s published by Manchester University Press. I’m not advertising it; it’s too expensive to buy. So if anybody wants, I can say send the manuscript for free. I’m not asking you to buy it for $400.

It’s important; we wrote that it is a totalitarian market. The market is a totalitarian force that controls every step and every idea of personality. It’s global hegemony of capital in all spheres, from birth to death. In this situation, it’s very difficult to build a position. The position is growing mainly in this sphere, in the countries where there are very deep contradictions of capitalism but where there is no totalitarian power. Sometimes there is a dictatorship, but there is no totalitarian power of the market and capital.

In Latin America, they don’t have enough prerequisites. They are like Russia before the socialist revolution, and they cannot build new real socialism. They have these limits. So we move far from Gorbachev, but it’s an important question.

Paul Jay

Let’s get back to Gorbachev. Let me ask you another question, people are talking about. Even Putin has sort of suggested this in a way. Why couldn’t Gorbachev and the leadership done something more like what happened in China? Now, I’m not necessarily a big fan of the restoration of capitalism in China, but clearly, something had to be done. They say why couldn’t Gorbachev manage this process the way Deng Xiaoping did it in China?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

First of all, he could. Not him personally, but it was possible from an objective point of view, except for very important aspects. It was impossible to make, let’s say, more markets even with these elements of capitalism. A model of the Soviet Union after, let’s say, Gorbachev or during.

I’m sorry, let’s start from the beginning. It was possible to move in the direction of the development of markets and even private property. The Soviet Union in the ’80s was not a country dominated by peasants. It was not a country dominated by uneducated people. It was a country with one-half of the people with high education and with a very high level of culture. To continue a bureaucratic dictatorship with market and capitalism, I think, was impossible. It was possible to move in the direction of socialism with more real grassroots democracy, market, and some elements of capitalism. At the same time, with strong control of socialism or, better to say, a people’s state over capital and market.

When I was in China, I said the market is not– you know, it’s a very famous quote by Deng Xiaoping. He said it doesn’t matter what the color of the cat is; it’s important that the cat catches the mouse.

Paul Jay

“No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.”

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Red cat, black cat; it doesn’t matter. It does matter because the market is not a cat. It is a tiger, as I said in China. Tigers are very dangerous. Or lion if you want. It’s necessary to control. It’s necessary to restrict. It’s necessary to have strong power, democratic but strong. Gorbachev made some forms of democracy, but they didn’t make democracy power. Democracy means demos-kratia. Demos means people. Real people. Not the intelligence who is saying something. Kratia means power. If we decide something, we must do it. If you don’t support us, you will be punished. This is democracy. This is real power.

Paul Jay

This is clearly just the beginning of a series of conversations we need to have. Let me ask you one final question for today. I know you’re going on a trip, but when you come back, we’ll schedule another session, and we’ll keep going. So here’s the final question for today. During the period of the lead-up to the dissolving of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s resignation, what is the role, and how important is the role of the U.S. and the West in encouraging a more open market, shock therapy, and looting of public ownership? How important was the West in the demise of the Soviet Union?

Aleksandr Buzgalin

It was not the main role, but it was an important and a very negative role. You know, sometimes when there is nearly balance, even small additional money, small additional power can change the equilibrium. So it was a very big struggle. By the way, it was not only one way– Gorbachev and then the destruction of the Soviet Union. We had another objectively possible scenario of development. One of them was real democratic socialism with many contradictions but democratic socialism.

Let’s make a fantastic story. If we have no United States-Germany, western Germany, and NATO is counter partners of reforms and the Soviet Union but strong, really democratic socialist states. In the United States, it is socially democratic. In western Germany, it is socially democratic. In Britain, it is socially democratic. I don’t think that in the Soviet Union, we have this situation– Yeltsin’s power, brutal shock therapy, and so on. Of course, again, it was not because the United States intervened in the Soviet Union. It was not because Gorbachev was a spy or an agent of the CIA. It is also typical for some Russians to say that he was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency or, I don’t know, [inaudible 00:50:31], [inaudible 00:50:31] or something like that. It’s not true, of course, but it was very important additional pressure on our country in the direction of not even social democracy but in the direction of brutal primitive accumulation of capital in the form of liberal capitalism, but just form.

What is important, we did not discuss geopolitical or foreign policy aspects of Gorbachev relations. It was possible to have another model of transformation in this sphere, of course. Finally, I want to stress that this integration of the Soviet Union and collapse was not the end but defeat, not the final defeat, but the defeat of the socialist project in the late ’80s and 1991 led to enormous problems for the whole world.

After that, instead of peace, why wars? In Russia, capitalism. In the United States, capitalism. Everywhere capitalism. Why wars? Why were thousands, millions of people killed for six decades during these decades? Why? Because capitalism means militaries and wars. It’s the law of capitalism. Inside former Soviet Union territory, we had permanent wars. In Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, and between Azerbaijan and Armenia. There are an enormous amount of victims. The modern situation in Ukraine is also a result of this destruction. In the Soviet Union, it didn’t matter if Crimea or Donbass was part of the Russian Federation or Ukrainian. Not that it was. Russian socialist federation or Soviet republic or Ukrainian republic. It was really one state.

Territories were moving from one formal republic to another formal republic. Donbass was part of Russia until the 1920s, and then it became part of Ukraine. Crimea was part of Russia, and then it became part of Ukraine. There were a lot of transformations. In Kazakhstan, with Russia between different– it was no problem. When this separation started, it became the basis for the wars.

We didn’t discuss this question, and maybe people know in the West that in Russia, we have a lot of restrictions on the discussion about the situation in Ukraine. In Russia, we have got a special military operation. It’s the only possible word in Russia for this event. I said before this operation and said to the Russian public at the beginning of this operation– it was February 25 or 26; I don’t remember exactly when the video appeared. I don’t support this. In Russia, we have a majority– 70-80% according to official opinion polls who support this operation. Other people abstain or do not support it. So I belong to a minority, as I said. In order to analyze this situation, it’s necessary to have a real opportunity to speak without restrictions, without self-restrictions and formal bureaucratic restrictions.

It is a big problem because the information we have in Russia with video reports, figures, data, and observers is absolutely not the same as the information in the West. Honestly, I cannot say that Western information is 100% truthful. At least I know that in the West, information about wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, in Libya, there was a lot of, let’s say, falsifications. I cannot say that in Russia, it’s 100% facts. That’s why it’s very difficult to make real suggestions. It’s also necessary to remember prehistory and all these provocations, including the enlargement of NATO in 2014, which started the real war against Donbass. It is important prehistory, all this prehistory.

Finally, I said my position. I expressed my position. Simply, I ask people to remember that the destruction of the Soviet Union is the deepest reason for all these things. The military and nature of capitalism is the main fundamental reason for all these things. Now it’s possible, I think, in this form of capitalism which we have in the 21st century, it is very difficult to say how to make peace if we have such forms of capitalism everywhere. I think today it’s even more important than ever before to say that only socialist trends are a basis for peace and negotiation of war.

It’s hard work, but let’s remember it was World War One. Why this war really stopped was because of the revolution in the Russian Empire in Germany and mass Left movements everywhere. Now we are on the border of extremely deep and terrible conflicts. If we are not thinking about a socialist alternative, I’m afraid that based on one or another model of capitalism, more imperialistic, less imperialistic, it’s impossible to stop and maybe postscript.

I am afraid that now we have even a threat of regress capitalism from imperialism, regress from imperialism. Empires existed in the feudal epoch, with terrible wars, but wars for the territories, wars for the power of kings, and so on. So it was not imperialist these types of wars. Now we have different types of wars, forms of wars. They are all brutal and all destructive.

Why do Pakistan and India have an enormous conflict with thousands of victims? India was imperialist, no. Pakistan was imperialist, no. They are capitalist. So let’s remember this. I think it is very important.

Paul Jay

Alright, thank you, Aleksandr. When you come back from the trip, we’ll schedule the second part of what needs to be a long series. Thanks for joining us.

Aleksandr Buzgalin

Thank you so much. Goodbye, Paul.

Paul Jay

Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. If you appreciate this kind of content, please click the donate button and make a donation of some kind. Subscribe if you’re on YouTube. Most importantly, get on the email list. Come over to the website, whether you’re listening on podcasts or all the other platforms. Thanks very much for joining us on theAnalysis.news.

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“Aleksandr Buzgalin (1954-2023) was a Russian Marxist. He was a professor at the Moscow State University and the coordinator of the Social Movement “Alternatives”.”

theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“. Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay’s Documentaries Renowned Russian Marxist Economist Aleksandr Buzgalin Dies Gorbachev Paved Way for Oligarchs – Aleksandr Buzgalin Ukrainian Buzarov and Russian Buzgalin on the Conflict in Ukraine Part 2: A Progressive Russian on Ukraine – Aleksandr Buzgalin A Progressive Russian on Ukraine – Aleksandr Buzgalin pt 1/2 Stalin and the USSR – Alexander Buzgalin Putin and Navalny Both Represent Big Russian Capital – Alexander Buzgalin Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Socialism – RAI with Aleksandr Buzgalin (12/12)

A Brutal Occupation Begets a Brutal War Between Israel and Hamas – Trita Parsi

Paul Jay — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:50:10 -0400

Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, analyzes Iran's role in supporting Hamas’ brutal coordinated attack on civilians in Israel. Parsi unpacks Palestinian grievances, as well as Israel's indiscriminate bombardment and illegal blockade of Gaza. With host Talia Baroncelli.

BRICS: An Anti-Imperialist Fantasy and Sub-Imperialist Reality? – Patrick Bond (pt 1/2)

Paul Jay — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:35:18 -0400

Patrick Bond, political economist, Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg, and Director of the Centre for Social Change, discusses the recent BRICS summit in Johannesburg. The BRICS countries continue to call for greater representation within Bretton Woods institutions, while their opposition to US-dollar hegemony has been feeble at best. Patrick Bond lays out the complicity of the BRICS and soon-to-be BRICS+ elite in corruption networks as they profit from Big Oil and Gas contracts and accelerate environmental disasters. This is part 1 of 2.

UAW: Historic Demand to Eliminate Wage Tiers – Frank Hammer

Paul Jay — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 14:19:40 -0400

Frank Hammer, former President of United Auto Workers (UAW) local 909 in Detroit and retired GM worker, explains how “legacy” workers are standing up for new hires. This is critical to building working-class solidarity. He also reflects on the history of autoworker strikes in the U.S. and in Mexico, reminding us of the deadly incident at the Ford Cuautitlán plant, in which thugs dressed in Ford uniforms shot dead one of the workers and injured ten others.

Climate Lobbyists Hijack Progressive Climate Bills – Rebecca Burns

Paul Jay — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 12:34:25 -0400

Rebecca Burns, journalist at the investigative news outlet The Lever, discusses her reporting on extensive lobbying efforts to hold up legislation which would require companies to disclose all of their greenhouse gas emissions. In a recent report, she details how the same lobbyists who seek to derail progressive climate legislation in California are also getting paid by counties and cities along the California coast to deal with the impact of coastal erosion and fires.

September 11, 2001

Paul Jay — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:18:14 -0400

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Jay discusses his interviews with Sen. Bob Graham, who chaired the joint congressional investigation into the events of 9/11 and was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Graham outright accused Bush and Cheney of facilitating the 9/11 attacks. Jay also discusses his interviews with former NSA official Thomas Drake, who says intercepts that could have prevented 9/11 were never acted on. Paul Jay was a guest on Law and Disorder, hosted by Michael Smith. This interview was originally recorded on October 18, 2021.

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Michael Steven Smith

This is Law and Disorder.

Heidi Boghosian

Today on Law and Disorder, we interview Paul Jay for the full hour to discuss his investigative work about the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Michael Steven Smith

Paul Jay has been following the 9/11 story for 20 years. He’s read the documents. He’s interviewed the key players in it. He tells a story that I think the listeners will be extremely interested in hearing.

The events of 9/11 were a crushing blow to democracy and the rule of law in our country. The attacks paved the way for two illegal wars. First, the American war against Afghanistan and then Iraq. It opened the way for the national security state to develop expansively and implement a vast surveillance program on American citizens. The attack on the World Trade Center and then on the Pentagon happened 20 years ago and, in retrospect, was a turning point in American and world history.

Law and Disorder radio was launched three years after 9/11. Our mission was to defend both democracy and the rule of law. The 9/11 attacks were a crime against humanity, but instead of treating them as a crime, it was turned into an occasion to launch aggressive and illegal wars.

The Nuremberg trials against the Nazis who started World War II defined aggressive war as the ultimate crime because it held within it all lesser crimes.

In our show today, we examine the new evidence on who is responsible for the attacks on 9/11. The new evidence is a six-year-old FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] report released on President [Joe] Biden’s order last month. Biden was told by the families of the victims of 9/11 that unless this report was released, he would not be welcomed at any of the memorial services.

The FBI report demonstrates the complicity of the government of Saudi Arabia in the attacks. It was two Saudi Arabian government officials who helped the first two hijackers when they came to America. They were given money and help to get into flight school. Then, they hijacked an American airline plane and flew it into the Pentagon.

Senator Bob Graham was the Head of the Intelligence Committee that investigated 9/11. Whistleblower Thomas Drake was a top official at the National Security Agency [NSA]. Lawrence Wilkerson was the Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell. We speak today in a special one-hour show with journalist Paul Jay, who interviewed all three of them.

Paul Jay is a journalist and a filmmaker. He’s the founder and host of theAnalysis.news, a video and audio current affairs interview and commentary show and website. Jay was the founder of the Real News Network and is currently working on a documentary series with Daniel Ellsberg based on Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine. Paul Jay, welcome to Law and Disorder.

Paul Jay

Thanks for inviting me.

Heidi Boghosian

We want to talk to you today about the continuing unravelling of the cover-up of the Saudi Arabian government’s involvement with the attacks of 9/11. President Biden was told by the families of the victims of 9/11 that he would be unwelcome at ceremonies honouring the 20th anniversary unless he released a six-year-old FBI investigative report. He did so. What did the report reveal?

Paul Jay

First of all, let me congratulate both of you because most journalists and other people in the media don’t want to even look into what happened on 9/11. Maybe we can talk about why that is. It’s a topic worth discussing in itself. Let me add one more thing for context here about why all this matters. Why are we revisiting the Saudi role, and why, 20 years later, is 9/11 significant?

The answer is probably obvious, but let me state it anyway. I don’t know if there’s been an American war that didn’t begin with a bunch of big lies or to establish pretext for what was almost always, or perhaps always, wars of aggression. You can even go back to the beginnings of the Cold War and the lies that there was a missile gap and the Soviet Union was planning to attack the United States, which was all a fraud. The Gulf of Tonkin, Vietnam, and it goes on from there. More recently and obviously, the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. American wars begin based on lies.

Now, the other thing, and this goes along with lying, has there ever been a war anybody or any country waged that wasn’t a conspiracy? Countries don’t come out and openly say everything they plan to do or how they plan to engage in the war. So, this idea that there’s something outlandish about conspiracy theories is the most ridiculous thing that’s been out there in politics and media. Of course, there are conspiracies attached to warfare and other things. There are also phony conspiracies. Yes, there are conspiracy theories that have no basis, but what’s a bigger conspiracy than lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when they knew there weren’t any?

There were many people involved in that conspiracy, and it came out that it was a conspiracy. That’s the other side of all of this. There’s no accountability for what happened. Lying the United States into an illegal war, invasion of Iraq. Of course, there was a conspiracy to try to fake evidence and so on. Anywhere from the supposed yellowcake story and Niger trying to lean on the ambassador to lie about what he found. It goes on and on.

So the fact that there was, I think, a conspiracy in the surrounding and at the heart of the events of 9/11, it’s kind of ridiculous to say otherwise. You can’t get a bunch of hijackers coordinating their activities on airplanes without it being a conspiracy. Obviously, I think it goes much further than that, which means the involvement of the Saudi government and the involvement of the White House.

With all that being said, let me talk a bit about this recent reveal, or supposed reveal, in that declassified FBI document. I’m not completely in the weeds on this whole issue as much as I used to be. I’ve read through the recent FBI document, but I may have missed something. I don’t see anything in this FBI document that wasn’t already released by the Joint Congressional Investigation into the events of 9/11 that was released in 2002, Co-Chaired by Senator Bob Graham, who I interviewed. Almost everything that I saw in this recent FBI document, even though it’s dated and based on an interview with somebody who they don’t say, in 2015. When you read the 28 pages that were originally redacted by the White House of the Joint Congressional Investigation, the entire story that I see in this recent FBI release is all there in 2002, and it’s based on FBI documents, which means the FBI had all this stuff years ago.

What sparked this release now is that the 9/11 families are suing the Saudi government. I can understand why they wanted this document declassified. It’s perhaps harder evidence than the conclusions of the Joint Congressional Investigation. Still, it actually doesn’t say anything new about the involvement of Saudi officials in the Saudi Embassy and the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.

What’s missing? It is really critical what’s missing. In the media coverage of this recent FBI document, they don’t talk about the most important thing because it’s not in that FBI document, or it is, and it’s redacted. There are a lot of names redacted in this recent release, but the name is Bandar [bin Khalid Al Saud]. Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, whose nickname, if everybody remembers, was Bandar Bush. There’s this famous photograph of President Bush and Ambassador Bandar, Prince Bandar, sitting on the terrace of the White House just a few days after 9/11, smoking cigars and, frankly, looking very pleased with themselves.

So, the media coverage of this recent release is ridiculous, at least in the mainstream media that I’ve seen. They don’t hearken back to the conclusions of the Joint Congressional Committee [JCC]. Most importantly is the activity of these couple of people in the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles that this recent release talks about. Clearly, you put that together with what the Joint Congressional Committee found, and it’s all done under the auspices of Bandar. This isn’t some rogue character.

What the FBI found, it’s mentioned in this recent one, but it’s even more elaborated in the Joint Congressional Committee. These two guys, in particular [Omar al-]Bayoumi, I believe, is one, and the other one is [Osama] Bassan. In all likelihood, according to the FBI and many sources of theirs, they’re agents of the Saudi Intelligence Services, and they’re directly connected with facilitating the 9/11 hijackers, particularly, or specifically, in San Diego. There’s lots of evidence of a direct involvement, but it goes further.

If you go back to the Joint Congressional Committee, there are direct links between Prince Bandar and these guys. One of their wives was receiving, I think, it was two or $3,000 a month from Bandar’s wife. There’s a direct payment in the redacted 28 pages. A direct payment between Bandar’s bank account and one of the two people mentioned in this recent report. I think it was Bassan who got some money directly and then Bassan’s wife. Why the mainstream media isn’t using this as an opportunity to really, not just go after the Saudis, which is honestly so obvious that the Saudis were involved— I guess we’ll get into this, but clearly a direct line of connection to [Dick] Cheney and Bush.

Michael Steven Smith

Paul, you interviewed Senator Bob Graham some years ago. He was in an important position to learn about the Saudi Arabian involvement. Who’s Bob Graham, and what did he tell you?

Paul Jay

Yeah, the real significance of Graham’s interview is less about the Saudis and more about the role of Bush and Cheney. First of all, Senator Bob Graham was the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee [SSCI] for many years. He previously was governor of Florida. He’s the Co-Chair of the Joint Congressional investigation into 9/11, the one I was mentioning. They were at this for close to a year. They had millions of dollars and a team of investigators.

So, what I’m about to tell you is what Graham told me. It is not a view of some crackpot individual or even a rational individual. This is a guy who had a whole team of investigators looking into this stuff. He told me what went far beyond what’s in the 28 pages and the official report. I’m not sure why. There are other people who had to sign onto that report, including Nancy Pelosi, by the way, who signed that Joint Congressional Report. People were aware. Now, the report does not talk about the role of Bush and Cheney. It talks about the Saudis, so there’s nothing new. Pelosi and others in leadership, both on the Republican and Democratic sides, all know this stuff. But what he told me isn’t in the report and was an answer to my question.

I said to him in the first series of interviews. I’ve interviewed him about seven or eight times now altogether. The first series of interviews took place in 2010 if my memory serves me right. I said, “Do you think there was a deliberate attempt by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to create a culture within the intelligence agencies of not wanting to know?” I explained to him several examples of intelligence that had been generated prior to 9/11 that, if acted on, could have prevented 9/11.

In fact, Graham actually wrote a book about this, and he had a list of 10 reasons to impeach President Bush. Number one is failing to prevent 9/11. Anyway, his first answer to me was if all the players on a football team are running in the same direction, there’s got to be a coach.

Well, the first time I interviewed him, he was a little bit restrained with how far he would go. But after the declassification of the famous 28 pages— for people that don’t know this story, this congressional report, there were 28 pages the White House insisted on being redacted. It’s in those pages that you get very specific information about the Saudis and the role of Prince Bandar. Well, after a lot of pressure from the 9/11 families— again, they’re the ones that have forced this question out into the open or as open as it is. These 28 pages were declassified by [Barack] Obama, but still with a lot of redactions.

Once they were released, Graham felt a lot freer to talk, and I said to him— I actually played back that part of the interview where we talked about a football team and a coach. I said, “Listen, who’s the coach?” And he says, “President Bush and Vice President Cheney.” Then I said, “You’re saying they deliberately disorganized the intelligence committee?” I may not have used exactly those words, but more or less. He said, “Yes, but it goes further than that.” He said, “They did some acts that directly facilitated the 9/11 attacks, not just suppressed intelligence.” I’ll get into my interview with Thomas Drake about how intelligence got suppressed. Although I asked Graham about this, too. Listen to these examples; they’re outstanding. Outstanding. Outrageous, I guess, is the word. He gave me two or three examples of facilitating.

Number one, this famous memo, [Osama] Bin Laden plans to attack America. That is all that was talked about at the 9/11 hearings. It was read out on television during those hearings. Condoleezza Rice claims they’re a historical document. Ridiculous, after [George] Tenet and Richard Clarke: Tenet, Head of the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and Clarke, the anti-terrorism czar. They’re saying their hair was on fire all summer, telling Condoleezza Rice something’s coming. Then she thinks this is a historical document, which is a joke.

Anyway, the document goes to Rice and Bush. Well, Graham tells me that the normal protocol is after the presidential briefing; there’s another briefing that goes out. It’s called the principal’s briefing. It goes to heads of agencies and undersecretaries of certain departments. Any information that’s in the presidential briefing that might require action by any agency shows up in the principal’s briefing. Well, if Bin Laden plans to attack America, you would think it might require some action. So, in the next principals briefing, Graham tells me, it’s omitted. He took this, and he believes that this was a conscious effort to stop, for example, the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] putting the airports on heightened alert or immigration on higher alert.

Number two, never mind putting immigration on higher alert. Now, by the way, I have all this on camera. You can go to theAnalysis.news. I have all the Graham interviews up there. Graham tells me that far from putting immigration on alert about potential terrorists coming in and potential Saudis, it’s the opposite. Graham tells me that the White House issued orders to immigration not to stop any Saudi citizen from entering the United States. Any! They get in without questioning. One guy, according to Graham, one immigration officer in Miami, stopped the Saudi, which Graham’s investigators concluded was actually meant to be one of the hijackers. He did stop him because he hadn’t read the memo and was actually disciplined for not reading the memo. It goes on.

Number three, people that followed this story— it’s 20 years now, so people probably forget that within just a few days of 9/11, when the airspace of the United States, if memory serves me right, is still closed to at least commercial aircraft, a whole plane-load of Saudis is allowed to leave including many members of the bin Laden family. Graham told me there were many people on that plane that his committee would have wanted to interview as part of their investigation into 9/11 and couldn’t. When they asked the Saudi government to allow them to be interviewed, they were told no. There are other examples Graham told me about, so it wasn’t just a suppression.

Heidi Boghosian

Paul, you interviewed a top official in the National Security Administration, the NSA, and I’m talking about the whistleblower, Tom Drake. What did you learn from him?

Paul Jay

Well, this is the key that unlocks the dynamic of how all this worked. Graham essentially confirmed what Drake told me. Let me put this into a little context because people are sitting here listening to all this. Why would they do all of this? Well, the why is obvious. It was all about preparing American public opinion for the invasion of Iraq. If you go back to the document, the Project for the New American Century [PNAC], which a bunch of neo-cons wrote as a letter to [Bill] Clinton. That group of neo-cons who wrote that document, including [Donald] Rumsfeld and [Paul] Wolfowitz, formed the whole team around the Secretary of Defense. Cheney was a signatory to that document.

In that document, it says two things. This is the key to the why, and then I’ll get to Drake. Number one, the American people, I should say, will not support another major military intervention. Number two, they will not support a massive build-up of the American military, which means a large amount of money increase in the Pentagon budget without— and I’m quoting here, “another Pearl Harbor.”

Now, people who follow this story are well aware of this document, but a lot of people are not. Especially younger people. Well, it’s kind of obvious that 9/11 became Pearl Harbor, and it was the invasion of Iraq. It wasn’t just about Iraq. I think this is the critical issue to understand the Saudi interest here and the American interest. The ultimate prize was regime change in Iran.

In this document and other things that were written by these neo-cons, the agenda was to overthrow Saddam [Hussein] in Iraq and overthrow [Bashar] Assad in Syria. That’s to prepare the conditions for regime change in Iran plus a massive build-up, meaning a massive expenditure on the military-industrial complex.

Alright, so that’s the motivation here, and, of course, the Saudis are as interested in regime change in Iran, or even more than the Americans are or at least may still be, but certainly back then.

Alright, Drake. Drake was one of the American global leading minds in cybersecurity and dealing with digital data. He was hired by the NSA, and ironically, coincidentally, his first day of work was 9/11. In the morning, he goes there, and the attacks take place later that day. Within a week or two, a couple of analysts come to see him. Now, he’s very senior. He’s a Senior Executive who reports directly to the number three person in the leadership of the NSA. So, that’s a very senior position. A couple of analysts came to see him a couple of weeks after the attack. They show him, and they say— this is Drake telling me and again this on camera. We had the whole thing. According to Drake, the NSA had intercepted phone calls between all but three of the hijackers and an Al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen. The entire plot was known. They had recorded and intercepted telephone conversations and knew the whole thing. The analyst came to Drake and said, “This is crazy. We told the leadership of the NSA, and nothing was done with it.” Drake has told me this on camera.

He had actually seen the documentation of the intercept, and then I said to him, “Well, this doesn’t make any sense— the leadership of the NSA. Even if Bush-Cheney had created this culture the way Graham talked about, of not prioritizing terrorism, there’s no way they sit on something like this. They couldn’t take the responsibility.” He said, “Of course not.” He says there was a back channel to Cheney. This is the other kind of secret to understanding how they did this.

George Tenet testified at the 9/11 Commission Hearings that in his first presidential briefing, he told Bush the number one threat to national security was bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Now, let’s remember on the FBI’s most-wanted list, bin Laden had been number one for the previous five years. He was not some unknown quantity that just showed up on 9/11. The FBI already knew he was involved in the attacks on the Cole Navy ship. Whatever they knew about him was enough to say he was number one on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Tenet confirms he and Al-Qaeda are the number one threat to national security. So, what is one of Bush’s first moves dealing with national security? He demotes the anti-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke.

Richard Clarke, under Clinton, was in a cabinet-level position. He could call the principal— remember the principals. He could call a meeting of the principals on his own. He didn’t have to go through Condoleezza Rice. He gets demoted by Bush, now reports to Condoleezza Rice, and testifies at the 9/11 hearings that he couldn’t get a meeting of the principals called. Even though the quote from him and others, I think it was Clarke’s quote, “My hair was on fire.” There was so much intelligence coming in.

Now, there was a lot of intelligence coming in that Clarke was aware of, but some of the most critical intelligence he wasn’t aware of, for example— and this is a little piece of video, which I keep playing every time I do a report on this. I have to say here that I’ve offered everything I’ve got to mainstream media over and over again with no interest whatsoever, including my interviews with Clarke and Drake. I’m not like an unknown quantity here, even if they think I’ve been working in more independent, marginalized media. I come from CBC in Canada. I was the Executive Producer of the main political affairs debate show daily for 10 years. I’ve made documentary films for all the major broadcasters in the world, so I’m not a completely marginal character. Although I think they have tried to make me so. Anyway, nobody’s been interested in all this stuff I’ve got.

There’s a critical piece of video with Richard Clarke. I don’t know if he was drinking or what. He was interviewed by two University students, and he said the San Diego cell in California the FBI knew about and never told the CIA, and the CIA knew about and never told the FBI. The 9/11 Commission depicted that as if it was like Keystone Cops. They wouldn’t even talk to each other. Clarke says, “I was deliberately bypassed. Neither the CIA nor the FBI told me about the San Diego cell.” He says, “There’s absolutely no way that happens,” and I have him saying this on camera, “without a deliberate, conscious decision not to tell me, the anti-terrorism czar, who’s supposed to be the central repository for all of this information.”

What Drake adds to this is that they did report it to Cheney. What Cheney did was he got all the intelligence agencies to report to him, including military intelligence that also had pre-9/11 intelligence that could have prevented the attacks, and he just sat on it. He would let the information flow in, and he would give no instructions to any of the agencies to act. Quite the contrary, as I said earlier, he actually helped facilitate it, in other words.

Michael Steven Smith

What do you think was known by the intelligence community, specifically that part of the community that reported to Vice President Dick Cheney before the events of 9/11? Is there evidence that he manipulated the intelligence and set up a backchannel?

Paul Jay

Let me answer, first of all, by saying what I know. I know from the people I’ve interviewed, most importantly, Graham and Thomas Drake, and to some extent also John Kiriakou and some others, but those two are the key. They’re awfully credible sources. As I said earlier, Graham was the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Drake a Senior Executive at the NSA. So, I don’t have any ability to have my own investigators. I can’t subpoena anybody. What I can say is what I’ve been told by them, and they say, without doubt, that’s what happened.

As I said earlier, Richard Clarke is on the record saying that he was bypassed on critical intelligence, and Drake says it’s reported to Cheney. The inference from Clarke is that it was reported to Cheney. One of the arguments that’s given about why the administration didn’t focus on terrorism and why, even after being told by George Tenet that terrorism was the number one threat to national security, and it’s this de-prioritization, is the reason that there was such chaos amongst the intelligence agencies.

For example, there’s this Coleen Rowley story. If people remember, she’s an FBI agent, I think, in Minnesota. She gets a phone call from a flight school, and the guy who teaches says, “I’ve got this guy from the Middle East, and he wants to learn how to take off, but he doesn’t want to know how to land.” So, she finds this suspicious. She sends this to FBI headquarters. Then she asks for a warrant to go into the guy’s computer, and it’s denied. She later became one of Time Magazine’s People of the Year as a whistleblower. She’s completely credible. This is what had been explained as this is part of the FBI and others taking the lead from Bush-Cheney in deprioritizing terrorism and prioritizing big state actors, meaning Russia and China.

There’s always this talk that Condoleezza Rice didn’t focus on this because her background was about the Soviet Union and Russia, and that’s what they were concerned about. They just didn’t think terrorism was a big deal and all this. It’s such obvious B.S., because we know now from many sources, including Richard Clarke’s book, [Robert] Gates book and others, that their priority wasn’t Russia and China. Their priority was Iraq from day one. Within days of the attack of 9/11, Bush is telling both the CIA and the Pentagon, “Get ready for Iraq. Focus on Iraq.” It was never even about Afghanistan. That became a requirement to attack and invade Afghanistan when it became obvious to everybody that bin Laden had operated out of Afghanistan. That’s a whole other story, which I can get into.

As you know, I made a film about Afghanistan because there’s all this talk about how the Taliban wouldn’t hand over bin Laden, and that’s the reason for invading Afghanistan, which is actually not true. If you want to know more, I’ve actually interviewed a member of the Central Council of Taliban; they were ready to hand over bin Laden. So, the evidence of the backchannel is based on Drake, Graham. It’s based on Richard Clarke saying it was bypassed on critical intelligence, and there’s a certain logic. I mean, is it really possible?

This is where you get a need for an inquiry because what I’m about to say is not hard evidence, but, God, a lot of people have been convicted of murder on a lot less circumstantial evidence than what I’m about to say. Is it possible that all the intelligence agencies that had so much pre-9/11 intelligence that could have stopped the attacks and they just sat on it? I mean, is that possible? If it didn’t go to Richard Clarke, and he claims it didn’t, all of them decided, oh, I’m not going to tell.

There’s one of the military intelligence— this is a report Jason Leopold worked on. I released on video a lot of his reports. The Joint Military Intelligence [JMI] was asked to model in early 2001, late 2000, what might another terrorist attack look like? They modelled— get this. They modelled: planes get hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center, and the buildings fall down. They modelled this before 9/11, did a PowerPoint explaining their modelling, and they gave that up the chain of command.

Now, when the leadership of the military intelligence was called before the Joint Congressional Committee and asked, “Did you have anything that indicated that these attacks might take place?” They said, “No.” So, the guy who led the military intelligence team was furious, and he made a report to the Inspector General of the Army saying, “It’s not true. We modelled what happened, and we had a PowerPoint.” He sent the PowerPoint to the Inspector General.

Well, the Inspector General comes back and says, “Oh, the leadership of intelligence did nothing inappropriate.” So, this guy is furious, and he leaked the stuff to Jason Leopold, and I think the other guy’s name was Jeffrey Kaye. The guy from military intelligence makes a FOIA [Freedom of Information] request to the Inspector General to get his PowerPoint, and he gets it. You can go to my site. I have it there. Jason had the actual Inspector General’s report with a stamp on his PowerPoint explaining how planes were going to hit the buildings and the buildings fall down. So, is it really possible that so many intelligence agencies just sit on this information without passing it up somewhere? It’s just impossible.

So, yeah, it’s kind of a supposition, but I think it’s enough of a supposition that there still needs to be an independent inquiry into what really happened because the truth of this has not come out. As I say, this isn’t just a problem of some history; this is a problem of such deliberate lying about 9/11 and deliberate lying about the Iraq war. Are we going to see it again? This time, if Trump had had his way, in fact, if Bush-Cheney hadn’t been blocked by the Pentagon, in all likelihood, we would have seen another example, except this time they’ll try to pin it on the Iranians.

Heidi Boghosian

You interviewed retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff prior to 9/11. What did you learn from Wilkerson? How does he feel about the speech Powell gave at the United Nations promoting the attack on Iraq?

Paul Jay

Well, first of all, he feels culpability himself. He went along with what he had, by then, come to know wasn’t true: Powell’s thing about Scud missiles surrounding Beirut [ED: Baghdad] armed with biological weapons pointed at Israel. He knew that a lot of what Powell said was being manufactured. And it’s not one of, but the greatest regret of his life that he didn’t quit before that speech.

Let me add a little note of my own. It’s my belief that if they actually believed any of what they said at the U.N., they wouldn’t have invaded. You don’t invade a country that has Scud missiles with biological weapons aimed at Israel. That’s a pretty good deterrent. You don’t risk it. Also, you look at the pictures of American soldiers driving across Iraq towards Baghdad; almost none are wearing masks. Anyway, we know the whole thing was a big lie.

Wilkerson, he once said, and he said it to me, and I think he said it elsewhere, “The people who work for Powell, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are war criminals.” He said, “If they go to jail, I probably need to go with them.”

I’ve interviewed him many times now, and I believe he’s sincere in this. The other most important thing about how sincere he is, he’s almost the only one and maybe the only one, but certainly one of the only ones who didn’t cash in on all this. All the other people are millionaires, multi-millionaires. They all got jobs in the military-industrial complex. They’re fabulously wealthy, and he certainly could have been. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. He could have even just resigned and not said anything, but instead, he’s become one of the harshest critics of U.S. foreign policy and of the military-industrial complex.

I know he lives quite modestly at a professor’s salary. He got a job teaching afterwards, but nothing compared to what he could have been, I’m sure. He’s very smart and understands geopolitics. He easily could have been on the board of some big arms manufacturer. Basically, what he said, the essence of it, is how banal the whole motivation was. There was even less about the geopolitics of regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, which it was, but it was more about money-making. We know about Dick Cheney and his ties to Halliburton. He was the CEO of Halliburton. He still owns stock in a Blind Trust, supposedly after he became Vice President, but Halliburton got a no-bid $7 billion contract days prior to the invasion of Iraq.

In fact, there’s a woman named [Bunnatine] Bunny Greenhouse who oversaw contracts for the Pentagon. A civilian looking for things that were wrong, and she actually reported to the Inspector General. Why was this in a no-bid contract? Because there are at least three or four other companies that could have done the same work, which is restructuring the Iraqi oil industry after the invasion. I mean, that’s what they were focused on, grabbing the oil. She also reported that this contract was being directly steered and navigated by Rumsfeld’s office, which was completely out of the norm. Normally, it would come out of some normal Pentagon acquisition office. She was demoted. She was put into some job where she had absolutely nothing to do. She never got promoted again and never got a wage increase. She sued the Pentagon later and won. She actually won almost a million dollars in a lawsuit over the Cheney-Halliburton contract. It was about money, and it’s always about more than one thing. It’s not like geopolitics doesn’t matter, but even geopolitics is mostly about money-making, and that’s Wilkerson’s main theme. Of course, in talking to him and [Daniel] Ellsberg, who I’ve been talking to, we also learn about the whole nuclear weapons plan, which is mostly about money too, except there they can end life on earth.

Heidi Boghosian

Do you believe the 9/11 attack was a pivotal point in U.S. and world history?

Paul Jay

Yes. In one obvious way, it was. As I said, it became the rationale for a massive expenditure in the Pentagon and massive growth in the National Security State. From the Patriot Act to the NSA spying on everyone, it became a justification for unmitigated spying on Americans, and certainly everyone else in the world too. The kind of safeguards that had existed, everything gets thrown out. Torture is allowable, and, of course, the most important thing is the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Millions of people were displaced. So, one of the great war crimes since World War II, maybe the greatest war crime since World War II— well, I don’t know. The Vietnam War, I guess, is the biggest war crime, but after Vietnam, you’ve got Iraq. It created, and not just in the United States, it created a rationale for this great strengthening of the National Security States in most states, if not all.

But the other thing it did, which doesn’t get talked about enough, is that the media was intimidated. I think it’s one of the most important points of 9/11. The media has been intimidated in looking into what really happened on 9/11. The media was intimidated in playing ball in the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

A quote from Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor— unfortunately, he said this to the BBC, and he didn’t say it in the U.S.. But he said, “After 9/11, if you critique the White House, it was like,” and I’m quoting him, I think, pretty directly, “It’s like having a flaming tire of patriotism put around your neck.” This is using an example of what happened in the South African townships. If they thought somebody was working with the police, they would set a flaming tire around somebody’s neck. That was the ability of the White House.

Now, President Bush, prior to 9/11, there was a television show on ABC Network T.V. called That’s My Bush. It was a parody of the Bush family directly. He was held in such contempt that you could actually have a mainstream T.V. show ridiculing the Bush family. Well, after 9/11, all of a sudden, he’s a hero. That show goes off the air, and the media plays ball. Now, I’m not saying there’s no media that wasn’t critical. I would give McClatchy some props— is that the word? They didn’t buy the whole weapons of mass destruction argument, but we know the New York Times did, and almost the entire network television did. It hasn’t changed that much. 9/11 changed the media culture to a large extent. It’s not that they were always fantastic. Look at how much trouble and difficulty it was to get the Pentagon Papers out, but it did get out. The Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg’s thing. Finally, the newspapers had the guts to do it, but it took a hell of a long time for the mainstream media to deal with the lies about the Iraq war, and they still haven’t dealt with the lies of 9/11.

So, yeah, it’s a very pivotal event in many ways. But let me focus on that, is that all the wars, every one of them, the whole history of the national security state, of U.S. militarism, is mostly a fabric of lies. People just don’t get it. In the schools, of course, it’s never really exposed, and the media that does it like yours, mine, or some others that do get at this stuff, we get so marginalized that they don’t really care that we can poke through the fabric of Americanism. Once in a while, events tear the shredding of Americanism, but it doesn’t take long for the media to close ranks again.

Michael Steven Smith

Paul Jay, thank you very much. We truly appreciate your fine investigative reporting. This is what’s probably the biggest story of the last part of our lifetime.

Paul Jay

Thanks, Michael. Yeah, you can find me at theAnalysis.news, and it needs the, as in theAnalysis.news.

Michael Steven Smith

People will go to theAnalysis.news to fill in what you haven’t had a chance to tell us. Thank you so much, Paul Jay, for your extremely important work. We truly appreciate you being on Law and Disorder.

Heidi Boghosian

Thank you, Paul.

Paul Jay

Thanks very much.

Michael Steven Smith

If you have any comments or questions about this segment or any others, please visit us at lawanddisorder.org. One word, law and disorder dot O-R-G.

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Debt and Climate Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World – Asoka Bandarage

Paul Jay — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 12:58:26 -0400

Dr. Asoka Bandarage is an adjunct professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies and the author of a new book, Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World. Sri Lanka has had a minuscule carbon footprint, and yet the country is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, coastal erosion, and flooding. She discusses the convergence of existential climate and debt crises in Sri Lanka, the latter resulting from IMF debt restructuring and the lack of a globally coordinated multilateral sovereign debt mechanism that places traditional and private lenders on an equal footing.

Corruption in Lebanon Propped up by the Transnational Capitalist Elite – Nadim Houry

Paul Jay — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 12:13:42 -0400

Widespread corruption in Lebanon is fostered by the country's ruling class, whose business interests are enmeshed with those of international finance. Nadim Houry, executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative, explains how Lebanon's culture of political impunity is tied to the reconstruction agreements put in place in 1990, at the end of the 15-year civil war. The ongoing political deadlock shields the authorities from scrutiny and allows for vulture capitalists such as the former governor of Lebanon's Central Bank, Riad Salameh, to embezzle the country's resources. At the same time, ordinary people are faced with crushing inflation.

Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism

Paul Jay — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 11:49:29 -0400

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Justin Joque is a visualization librarian at the University of Michigan and the author of the book Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism. His book examines the statistical models on which our algorithms, machine learning, and financial systems are built, highlighting the mechanisms of abstraction which lend these models an air of misleading objectivity. Can statistical models be used towards emancipatory aims?

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. Joining me in a bit is Justin Joque, the author of Revolutionary Mathematics. We’ll be speaking about algorithms and the statistical models on which financial systems are based and other models of digital control.

First, before we get started, it would be great if you could go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and get on our mailing list. That way, you’re updated every time there’s a new episode. You can also donate to the show by hitting the red button at the top right corner of the screen. Also, like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, or whatever other podcast service you’re using. Stay with us, and we’ll be back in a bit with Justin Joque.

Joining me now is Justin Joque. He’s the author of Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism. He’s also a visualization librarian at the University of Michigan. Thanks so much for joining me, Justin.

Justin Joque

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Talia Baroncelli

It just so happens that it was an algorithm which took me to your book and a recommendation algorithm. It’s pretty fitting that we’re speaking about algorithms and statistical models today. Your book essentially looks at different statistical models and argues that there’s a metaphysical or philosophical assumption in a lot of these models that they are essentially trying to maximize a certain payoff or reward. This actually lends itself to capitalist accumulation and to the financialization of the markets that we’ve been seeing over the past few decades. Why don’t we start with what actually compelled you to write this book in the first place?

Justin Joque

Sure. The thing that compelled me was there was a growing literature about algorithms and especially algorithmic bias. Safiya Nobles’ book, Algorithms of Oppression and Virginia Eubanks has also written about this. I found a lot of this work really compelling and super interesting. It struck me that one missing piece was how these algorithms get their power, how the decisions are made, and then the larger questions of the political economy in which they function—also, thinking about the ways that algorithms pick up on what capital has already been doing.

There are all these systems for sorting workers, sorting people, and treating them in biased ways in terms of their access to capital, their access to jobs, and their access to housing. Many of these books and arguments about algorithmic bias showed how algorithms were repeating earlier forms of bias. I thought that there needed to be an extra step to think about the ways in which we couldn’t just fix the problem at the level of the algorithm, that it also was part of this much larger social problem.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, because we can observe different instances of that in the world that we live in. For example, populations being controlled by digital systems, such as workers, immigrants, and even inmates who have been newly released, they’re still controlled by these digital systems.

There’s one instance in your book, which you describe, which is great. Well, quite frustrating if you’re in that position. But think of yourself as being at an airport and going to the gate of an airport and essentially asking the worker there to help you change your flight. Then they say, “Sorry, I can’t override the system. I can’t do anything for you.” That’s an instance in which we’ve entrusted so much power to these computer systems.

Justin Joque

Right, yeah. One of the really important parts about it is that these systems are making these decisions, but then there are these much larger apparatuses of juridical power that are being used to enforce the decisions. Also, all of the mechanisms of auditing them or protesting decisions are now being stripped away.

One of the examples that happened around the time that I started thinking about the book, which was really informative for me, was this MiDAS, the Michigan Data Automation System. Part of what it did was try to detect, automatically detect, unemployment fraud. People who lost their job would get unemployment insurance, and if people were scamming the system, it was supposed to cut them off. They spent a couple of million dollars on it. It turned out this software didn’t work at all. It was tens of thousands of people who lost their unemployment insurance because the system said that they were committing fraud. They had gotten rid of all of the people who were making these decisions manually and all the people who could audit it. A lot of these people took five or six years in order to get the money back. They had to go through the court system. If you’re on unemployment insurance, you can’t wait five to six years for the money that you need.

I think it’s a really interesting example because it’s not even a question of the algorithm being biased or anything like that. It’s just completely, it was just flat out wrong, and the implications were horrendous for the people who were affected. Thinking both about the algorithms, but then also all of the political and economic power behind those decisions and the ways in which they affect people’s lives.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, as someone like me who only has a cursory understanding of statistics, I think your book really helped me understand the different models that are being used. You speak about frequentist statistical models, as well as Bayesian statistical models. You essentially argue that there really isn’t a thing that is probability. Aside from the complexities of quantum mechanics, something could be both a 30% probability of happening and 60% at the same time. Outside of that realm, that’s not really possible. You argue that probability is not really a thing. We set these parameters based on what knowledge we have and what we’ve observed, and we input that into these models. What it gives back to us is not, I don’t know, a scientific truth. It is something that’s interpreted within the context of these models. Maybe you can speak about frequentist versus Bayesian statistical models and the differences between the two.

Justin Joque

Yeah. That’s a central component of the book. It really does start with this insight that is in some ways counterintuitive but also very intuitive once you start thinking about it. It’s exactly like you said. In the real material world, there’s no such thing as probability. You flip a coin, and it lands on heads or tails— 50% land on heads or 50% land on tails. Probability really is, I think, definitionally a metaphysical category. It’s an intellectual supplement to the world we’ve created, partly because of a lack of knowledge. It’s because you flip a coin, and you can probably model physically the air currents and the forces and figure out how it will land. Normally when you flip a coin, you don’t know, and so the probability is this additional supplement that we add to the world in order to deal with situations that we don’t know.

In the book, I traced this shift from frequentist statistics to Bayesian statistics. There are a lot of important components to it, but let’s really try to boil it down to its essence. Frequentist statistics were very popular at the beginning of the 20th century up until about the ’70s or ’80s. Still, this is what’s taught in an introduction to statistics class. The way that probability is given a certain objectivity is called frequentist statistics. Frequentist statistics refers to itself as an objective theory of probability.

The idea is that you take a long run of something, and then you measure the frequency. So you can’t, under a really rigorous frequentist framework, you can’t assign a probability to an individual coin flip. You have to have a series of, let’s say, 100, 1,000, 10,000 coin flips, and if half of them are heads and half of them are tails, then the probability is 50% heads, 50% tails. It’s objective in the sense that it’s a measurement of our frequency, but it still, in a certain sense, has a lot of subjectivity to it because you have to define what’s called the reference class. You have to say, it’s only when I’m flipping a coin on these days that I’m considering this specific coin, or this specific model, or weather predictions. You still have to define the experiment and what counts as an instance.

Conversely, Bayesian statistics, which had become more popular in the ’80s, although it really traces back to the 19th century, is a subjective theory of probabilities. Instead of having it be based on this long-run frequency, it’s really based on my individual knowledge of the situation. The mathematics of Bayesian statistics allows you to have your guess. I think that this is a fair coin. I think it’s a 50% chance of heads. Then as I observe more flips, there’s a mathematical formula called Bayes’ theorem that allows me to update. If I see 10 heads in a row, I might think, okay, maybe this coin is actually biased towards heads, and then you use Bayes’ theorem to update your probability. What it allows you to do is start with a subjective theory of probability. As you observe more and more instances or get more and more data, then the idea is that your probability should become more objective because it’s based less on your prior ideas of what things were and more on the data that you observed.

I’m sure we’ll talk more about this, but I think one of the important things to note is that even though it’s subjective, it’s actually much more easy to automate than frequentist probability because frequentist probability requires setting up an experiment, and you can’t assign a probability to an individual event. Let’s say you go to a website and it wants to give you an ad; there is no frequentist way that you could say, okay, I think there’s a 2% chance you’re going to click on this ad. Whereas because Bayesian statistics are subjective, you can assign a probability to an individual event when you’re going to click on an ad, and you can automate the mathematics of getting more data. It’s subjective in the sense that it’s from a specific epistemic point based on the data that’s observed, but it’s not necessarily subjective in the sense that it’s like a person. It has to be a person. The math can be done quite rigorously so that it can be automated.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, not to get too into the details of Bayesian statistical models, but I think it was founded by a priest or a theologian, Thomas Bayes. I think it is maybe halfway through your book that you’re speaking about Bayes and how he obviously believed in God. There’s this subjective element, but it still has a notion of this, I guess, objective truth, which is a deity as being the thing which determines everything. You explain how this deity can then be replaced by the market or the truth of the market. Could you explain how a lot of the models that we have: the trading of derivatives, different financialization models, and very, very fast automated ways of trading are based on this assumption that the market is the absolute truth, which is allocating things in a very specific way, in a way which is rational and objective.

Justin Joque

Sure. There are a number of components at play there, but absolutely. Bayesian statistics was invented by Reverend Thomas Bayes in the 19th century. One of the problems that you run into as soon as you accept a subjective theory of probability is that it’s really difficult to evaluate whether you’re right or wrong. If I say there’s a 60% chance of it raining tomorrow and it doesn’t rain, you can’t say, oh, no, you were wrong. You said there was a 60% chance of rain because the 40% chance that there’s no rain covers that. As long as someone doesn’t say there’s a 100% chance or a 0% chance, it’s really not an individual event. An individual probability is not falsifiable. There are different ways that you can arrive at the probability calculus and some of the rules of probability. For example, an event and not having one event should add up to one. I said there’s a 60% chance of it raining, then there should be a 40% chance of it not raining tomorrow.

Bayes’ theorem that Thomas Bayes discovered is based on this regularity and this ability to apply the probability calculus to events. For him, he says, “Look, because there’s this regularity and it follows these mathematical laws, for me, that’s actually proof that God exists because there’s this regularity to the universe.”

In the 20th century, such arguments tended not to hold as much scientific water as they did in the 19th century. There are a variety of ways that let people get to the probability calculus. One of the enduring ways that people keep coming back to is what’s called the Dutch book argument. Basically, a Dutch book is a gambling situation where you wager a certain amount of money on different bets, and no matter what happens, you lose money. There are three horses in a race, and you bet maybe on two of them or on all three of them in various proportions. If you convert your probabilities to betting contracts, if you think that a coin is two-thirds likely to land on heads and one-third on tails, then you would bet two-to-one odds on a betting contract. You can derive the entire probability calculus out of the desire not to have a Dutch book made against you. If you think that there’s a 60% chance of rain and then a 70% chance of it not raining, you can convert those to contracts and show how if it rains or doesn’t rain, you would still end up losing money.

In this deeply metaphysical way, I think you see with the Dutch book argument that the entire edifice of probability and statistics is founded on this idea of the market and on the exchange of contracts. I think there’s this internal metaphysical relationship between statistics and the market or, at least, political economy.

Also, what I argue in the book is that there’s an external one as well, that these systems are constantly making decisions in a world where they are developed by corporations and the government. They’re constantly tied back into ways to make money, which becomes the important way that truth is determined.

Two of the examples that I talk about in the book are Volkswagen’s diesel scandal, where they had cars that would detect if they were being tested by the environmental protection agency or other similar agencies, and then they would change how they function based on if they were being tested. The other one is Project Greyball, which was a project by Uber to detect if someone opening the app was a governmental regulator, and then they would try to hide the rides from them. I think you can see in these examples that these modes of producing knowledge, both internally in terms of the Dutch book, but then externally, are embedded in these systems of political economy and are optimized not for some transcendent idea of truth but for the ability to produce the most value for the owners and creators of these algorithms.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, I definitely want to speak about the epistemological foundations of these models, epistemology being the theory of knowledge and how we come to know something and what knowledge is produced. But first, it’s worthwhile to explain how your book is so deeply based on Karl Marx’s Capital and his conception of objectification.

Marx says that social relations are essentially negotiated through objects, and there’s this false consciousness which develops because you tend to treat these relations as being immutable or fixed or as something that’s natural in a sense. You use this interpretation of objectification, whereas some other people focus on objectification as being the dehumanization of the worker. I really like the way you used or deployed objectification in your book. Why don’t we speak about how you developed your analysis using Marx’s objectification?

Justin Joque

Yeah. What I find really interesting about this theory of objectification, especially as it’s developed in the first volume of Capital, is that what I read Marx talking about is essentially the way that we let objects think for us and remember us. I think he says, manage our affairs behind our backs. You think you go and you buy a cup of coffee, and you’re at the store, and the sign says it’s two dollars or three dollars or whatever for a cup of coffee; it becomes this objective fact that you have to respond to. It’s not something where you can say, “Oh, no. For me, it’s only worth $1.50,” or something like that. We have this implicit idea that the three dollars are somehow inherent in the coffee itself.

In a lot of ways, I think what Marx is talking about in terms of objectification is almost proto-algorithmic, I guess we could say. At one point in the book, I said that capitalism is the original machine learning. It’s this way, this complex social network that tracks prices, value, and labor and prevents it when we go to the stores, the price of bread, or pay rent to a landlord or something like that. I’m really interested in the ways in which probability does something similar that it becomes this objectified thing and algorithms that keep track of our affairs for us.

You can think of credit scores as a thing that does this. Even though it’s this totally made-up thing, the idea that you should get a credit card or mortgage and improve your credit score, it becomes this objective game that we get caught in. It’s metaphysical, it’s not a real thing, but we know that certain actions will improve our credit score, which increases our access to capital or to credit at least, and other things will hurt our credit score. You can say, okay, this is ridiculous. I don’t want to play this game. But if you want to get a mortgage, car loan, or something like that, you get caught in the objective condition of credit scores. I think there’s something really interesting about the ways in which these algorithms and capital think for us.

One argument that I try to make in the book that I think is really important is that the argument isn’t that Bayesian statistics are these bad bourgeois statistics and that we need to come up with a new system of doing statistics. In a lot of ways the Bayesian revolution, Bayesian discovery is an incredibly important one because it shows the ways in which all of this knowledge production is this objectifying force and one that’s tied to political economy. There’s no way we can go back to this enlightenment idea of transcendent truth or something.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you also speak about Moishe Postone, who is a historical Marxist, and he speaks about abstract domination and real abstraction. Essentially, these models take observed phenomena or certain assumptions and feed them into a model, and then you have your output. But I’m wondering, someone who’s not a statistician myself, do these models really reflect the materiality of the world? Or is there any way to make them reflect the world in a more; I don’t want to say accurate way because truth is something that’s always mediated, but is there a way to make these models more reflective of material conditions and inequalities?

Justin Joque

Yeah, that’s a really good question, and it’s a complicated one in a certain sense. I wasn’t saying that these are bad, inaccurate descriptions of the world. I think they actually are incredibly powerful tools that do describe the real material conditions, but precisely in a way that I think you can get from Postone or people like [inaudible 00:22:51], that we live in this world of these real abstractions.

Credit scores and values, are these fair? Even though they’re not material things per se. Marx says there are no advances in chemistry that will ever allow us to find the value in cloth or something like that. But that doesn’t mean that cloth, coffee, or a house doesn’t have value in a real sense. It’s not just a fiction that we can wish away or that there are some advances in either economic, bourgeois economics or Marxism that will ever figure out the real value of a cup of coffee or something like that. These are socially produced. They’re abstractions, but they are very real in a certain materialist sense.

The problem, and I think this is what you were getting at, is that they reflect a world that’s fundamentally biased, unjust, and exploitative. I think it’s a very difficult thing, and I think I would have been more concrete in the end about the path forward if I knew exactly what the path forward was. We have to address these things on both ends of the spectrum. We have to address the concrete outcomes, the injustices that these systems produce, and the ways in which they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic. But then we also have to attack and reconceptualize the very metaphysical value relations that allow these systems to produce and reproduce. It’s a question of both discussing and dealing with the outcomes of things, but then also trying to reimagine the entire system of political economy and how we distribute goods, organized labor, and the social production of these real abstractions.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, why don’t we stay on this for a bit? There’s something in your book which was very interesting. You’re saying that you’re not trying to de-objectify these statistical models. You’re not saying that we should do away with technology, whereas some people want some return to not having any technology because all technology is bad, according to their view. But I wonder to what extent that is actually possible. If these statistical models have a certain way of abstraction and potentially misrepresenting certain things in the world, how is it that we can still use them for emancipatory or equitable ends? Is it just changing what the aim is? Instead of saying, okay, we’re using this model to see what the payout is to ensure that there’s a certain amount of profit maximization, but if the aim is then some redistribution of wealth or something that’s equitable, can you plug that aim or change the aim of these models? Or are they going to have, I don’t want to say, a mind of their own because I don’t think artificial intelligence is really intelligent. It doesn’t have a psyche in them; it’s based on what we put into these models. Do you think it’s actually possible for these sorts of models, which are based on abstraction, to actually be of service to an emancipatory project?

Justin Joque

Yeah. There are two levels to which it’s important to answer that question. The first is, at some point, it’s impossible to step outside of abstractions and these forms of objectification that were always involved in the world through various abstractions. We’re never actually dealing with things, whatever, the soil under our feet. It’s always functioning as land or as something potentially productive or some form of knowledge. So that even outside of capitalism, I think that there are always forms of abstraction, forms of objectification. It’s a question not of objectification being in and of itself but precisely what it is that’s objectified and the types of abstractions, and what reality or real abstractions they end up producing.

Specifically, with that in mind, specifically the question of technology, for me, I fall in the middle. I don’t see myself as a technological determinist. I don’t think that the outcome of what these tools and systems do is fully predetermined. I’m also not on the end of the spectrum where I think, okay, it’s just a tool, and it’s totally up to you how to use it. I think it’s somewhere in between. There’s a lot of freedom in how we use these tools. They can be put to different ends, but they do smuggle with them certain metaphysical understandings of the world and ways of operating. We can’t say, oh, I’m going to take an AI and do something totally different and be completely removed from the market because I think we’re stuck in these metaphysical systems.

I think they can be put towards emancipatory projects, but we can try to use them, think of other ways for them to think about evaluating the outcomes, especially if we think about the implications in terms of climate or something like that. Those models can be used to calculate those things. It’s always difficult because both internally, they have these market-driven metaphysics, but then also, in a lot of the emancipatory projects, they exist within a world that’s predominantly capitalist, and there’s a tendency for capitalism to subsume these things and continually eat them up and reconfigure them in ways that continue to build these systems of domination and exploitation.

That’s maybe the long answer, but the short answer is yes, I think they can be used for emancipatory projects. There is no guarantee that any project, just because of our will that it should be emancipatory, is going to succeed in being emancipatory.

Talia Baroncelli

There’s, of course, always the issue of what Mark Fisher terms capitalist realism. The way that we view things is always limited by the capitalist confines in which we live. So it’s really hard to think beyond those parameters. But I also wanted to speak about something that’s been in the news recently, and this idea of the Google search engine always giving you the best results; I think that’s been problematized recently, where sometimes the search results that you get are random or not accurate. Some people argue that that’s a result of monopolization. Google has monopolized that sector of the market, so there’s no competition, and so they don’t need to optimize or improve their product. But aside from that and looking at the big picture, is it possible that some of these AI machine-learning systems are just generating nonsense? What is the knowledge that they are producing? Can we term it as knowledge, or is this something else that is clouding our intellect?

Justin Joque

Yeah. I think that there is a way in which they’re producing knowledge. They’re producing a certain gloss on what exists out there, this socially, to some extent, maybe there’s a certain analogy, and I have to think through this more, but it’s knowledge, maybe a version of socially necessary labor time. It’s like average socially-produced knowledge is being smashed together and produced. I think that the risk is that right now, it’s slurped up all this data based on a lot of things that people have written and artists have drawn and created. The problem is that it’s churning out so much tech, so many images that are then going to get sucked back up into the future versions of these.

There have been some studies recently where they trained AI, these large language models, on the output of earlier iterations of large language models, and they go completely off on their own and become increasingly incomprehensible. I think that there is a distinct risk that rather than these systems getting better, we’re going to actually see them get worse in precisely the same way that I think that Google search has gone downhill significantly. They’re losing the battle to search engine optimization and people gaining the systems. We’ll see AIs producing content and then sucking that back-up and producing weirder and weirder content and going off on their own.

There was one paper I was reading, and this was a few years ago. They had two AIs that were talking to each other, and they eventually created their own language that was completely incomprehensible to people. I think that maybe that’s the direction that this will go, rather than this fantasy of it becoming more and more accurate or anything like that.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, if it’s possible that these AI models will deteriorate, what will be the role of data pools potentially getting poisoned? I was recently reading an article about China’s AI and how they’re worried, whether this worry is warranted or not, but they’re worried about some of their systems being hacked and certain data being inputted into their data sets, which would then, I guess, skew the results or make these models not work properly. I wonder if that would be a problem that could be a long-run issue and that could impact a lot of different models. What would the outcome of that be, then?

Justin Joque

Yeah. I think that it is likely to become an increasingly bigger problem. I think it gets back to the ways in which a lot of these algorithms are designed basically to produce the most value rather than some other measure of knowledge. It becomes this arms race—you can think about it too, in terms of global competition, that it becomes easier to poison your adversary’s pool of data than to improve your own pool of data. I think there are a lot of ways in which people speak about crises of truth and crises of science. I think, at some fundamental level, they’re primarily crises of capitalism. Capitalism has become informational capitalism on the mass extraction of knowledge. I think that the ways in which knowledge production is becoming incentivized that even aside from malicious at first, there’s going to be this tendency towards these data pools becoming worse and worse and lower and lower quality to the point where these systems, these algorithmic systems of socially averaging knowledge will, as you said, just become increasingly worthless and unusable.

I think maybe there’s a risk that capitalism is maybe… maybe this is a bad analogy, and I should think through it more. Even with that said, in the same way that capitalism has destroyed the physical environment, I think that we’re entering a point where capitalism is risking and destroying the informational environment in which we live, and both poisoning it, but also what we might call data pollution or something like that, just producing these constant streams of increasingly lower-quality data.

Talia Baroncelli

So it essentially creates its own raison d’etre as well as its demise.

Justin Joque

Yes, exactly. That’s a very good way to put it.

Talia Baroncelli

I was actually wondering why you focus so heavily on Marx. I’m totally partial to his analysis, but what was it in Capital that made you think I can tie this to what’s going on with statistical models, financialization, political economy, etc?

Justin Joque

That’s a good question. I think I’ve always been drawn to a certain Marxist analysis, but I do think it’s really this idea of objectification, which is one that I find incredibly persuasive—thinking about the ways in which we let systems dictate for us because that’s really what it seems to me that we’re doing with algorithms. We’re saying, we’ll write this code, it works, and then we’ll set it aside, and we’ll let it manage our affairs. I think that’s really what drew me to this Marxist analysis. Then there’s also this, in my mind, this analogy between the ways in which value functions is this metaphysical supplement. We had these systems of producing and comprehending value that seems analogous to the way in which probability works, but it’s not really something that actually exists in the world, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool that people use to understand the world with all sorts of consequences.

Talia Baroncelli

There’s another thing you address in the book, which is this idea of the revolutionary or political subject. Marx speaks about this subject, this a-historical, trans-historical subject, which is about to bring about the revolution, essentially. You give various examples as to why this concept doesn’t always hold water. It’s largely based around a Western, potentially male subject and doesn’t account for various forms of colonization or oppression that have taken place around the world where that political subject might be different and might not be determined by the same historical forces that Marx speaks about. How do we get around that problem? Who is the subject in potentially using these models for something that’s more or less malevolent to something that’s better, essentially? Is there no such a thing? Should we do away with that concept altogether of the revolutionary subject, or is there another way of understanding it?

Justin Joque

I think, in a lot of ways, I very much appreciate Moishe Postone’s analysis when he says that the subject of capitalism is neither the capitalist nor the worker, but it’s actually capital that is the subject. It’s what makes these decisions for us. Even though we feel like we get to choose these things in a lot of ways, it is these larger structures that make decisions for us. It’s exactly like what we’re talking about. You can do whatever you want, but at the end of the day, you have to work in order to make money to pay rent, to buy bread at the market and stuff like that. I’m not entirely opposed to the idea of some revolutionary subject.

I think what interests me much more is thinking about the ways that we can actually change the objective conditions under which we find ourselves so that these changes come about objectively, not in a traditional understanding of objectivity, but in this Marxist understanding. It becomes less voluntaristic or willful; it’s a sovereign decision to change the world, but this tinkering and playing with the social rules under which we exist creates more emancipatory potential.

I think that’s probably a good description of how I think about these things. I find that sovereign subject to be a very difficult and tricky thing for all the reasons that you mentioned. I guess the hope of the book is maybe that there’s this other area that we can work on these problems that don’t involve reimagining a traditional political subject.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Justin Joque, it was really great speaking to you about your book, Revolutionary Mathematics. I thought it provided a really great overview of the history of how these statistical models have been developed and how these models are currently being used in the service of capital, and what might be done about it, even though obviously there’s no one size fits all solution to what can be done. I think you really illustrate how these models are often working against us and controlling us to a certain degree. I think just being cognizant of that fact is important in and of itself.

Justin Joque

Thanks so much, Talia. This has been a really fun conversation.

Talia Baroncelli

Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you haven’t done so already, please go to our website, theAnalysis.news, consider donating to the show by hitting the button at the top right corner of the screen. Also, like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, and subscribe to whatever podcast you’re using to watch this show. Please do visit us again, and I hope you enjoyed this content. See you next time.

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Global Upheaval Undermining Food Security – Matin Qaim

Paul Jay — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:51:46 -0400

Matin Qaim, Director of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn, examines the various aspects comprising food security, namely local and global supply chains, the generation of income for local farmers, investments in the production of nutritious foods, as well as accounting for climate externalities. Attaining food security has become even more difficult given the disruptions around the pandemic, rising inflation, and the failed Black Sea grain deal. He asserts that small-scale farming and agroecological approaches are not necessarily low-tech and that certain technologies, if applied correctly, can assist smallholder farmers.

Non-Aligned Movement +G77 (Group of Developing Countries) versus G7+NATO+OECD+World Economic Forum

Paul Jay — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:47:12 -0400

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Jomo K.S. warns U.S. policies are driving the world towards war and depression, leaving developing countries with a strong vested interest to reconvene a new non-aligned movement and strengthen democratic institutions of global governance. Lynn Fries interviews Jomo K.S. on GPEnewsdocs.

Context link & related story: Harris Gleckman OPED (Aug 2023) and interview (Dec 2022)

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Bill Black pt 2/9 – Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One Bill Black pt 1/9 – The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One Can You Destroy $20 Billion in Wealth Without Committing a Crime? – Bill Black Workers and Communities vs Amazon Polarization, Then a Crash: Michael Hudson on the Rentier Economy Democrats Stuck Between “BlackRock and a Hard Place” – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth Peoples’ Lives vs. Profits of Pharmaceutical Monopolies – GPE Newsdocs What is to be Done to Save the Planet – Robert Pollin Financialization and Deindustrialization – Michael Hudson Is Trump the Tip of a More Coherent Fascist Spear? How Deep Will the Depression Get? – Rana Foroohar and Mark Blyth Regenerative Agriculture and Massive Planting of Trees is Our Only Hope – Earl Katz Stabilizing an Unstable Economy – Jan Kregel on Hyman Minsky Will Unions Respond to the Pandemic Moment? 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LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. In this segment, guest Jomo K.S. will be sharing his views on some economic policy and development issues.

Jomo K.S. is a prominent Malaysian economist and senior adviser at the Khazanah Research Institute. He is a distinguished academic and a veteran diplomat who has held high level positions at the United Nations Rome and the UN New York headquarters. Notably as Assistant Director General for Economic and Social Development of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome and as Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development of UNDESA in New York. Among numerous other distinctions, he was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Welcome Jomo

JOMO K.S.: Thank you very much, Lynn

FRIES: At an International Development Economics Associates event, you recently spoke on the topic of US policies that as you framed it are driving the world to war and depression. What are some of the key points that you wanted to get across in that public lecture?

JOMO K.S.: I think it’s in the interest of all people, in the rich countries as well as developing countries, to recognize the really existential threats which we face in the world today. And these are threefold. We have the long term problem of sustainability. Which, you know, there’s much more attention to especially because of the growing recognition of the challenges posed by global warming.

But we have to recognize these two additional problems. That of an induced deep stagnation and depression which would set back even further the regression which has already begun. As you know from all the data which has been reported on the so called sustainable development goals, there has been minimal progress on the sustainable development goals and considerable regression. Okay.

Now, this has been variously blamed primarily on the pandemic. But I would insist on emphasizing the effects of the withdrawal from quantitative easing. I would insist on the role of the Cold War which began at least almost a decade ago. And I would also insist on recognizing how the sanctions, which are all illegal under the UN Charter, all these sanctions have basically reversed much of the more benign consequences of globalization.

I mean, basically, developing countries have been doubly short-changed.

They were forced into globalization. They were forced into trade liberalization. They were forced into financial liberalization. And precisely after doing so – this very act of opening up on the trade front, on the financial front, and so on which has resulted in de industrialization in many countries, which has resulted in lack of food security in many countries – all this has turned against them at a time precisely when those things are most needed.

So we have a very, very difficult situation, particularly for developing countries. But as we can see, things are not really all that much better in the rich countries themselves.

So there has to be an increased sense of how this system works. And how it works and affects different people differently but how this whole system is really interconnected.

FRIES: To deal then with the existential threats we face in the world today, your say we all need to be aware of how the whole system is interconnected and the effects US policies are having in this system. You have given us a picture of how the workings of this interconnected system has left developing countries in a vulnerable and very difficult situation. Expand more on your point that things are not really all that much better in the rich countries.

JOMO K.S.: Let me suggest that the various developments of the last few decades have been problematic not only for the rest of the world; they have been hugely problematic for the U. S. And we all know about the concentration of power in the U. S. And we also know that, for example, the dozen years or so of what is referred to as unconventional policies, most easily associated with something called quantitative easing or QE, largely did not enhance US productive capacities.

Did not enhance US ability to lead, to enhance its leadership in a variety of areas of technology. And so what it allowed was for others to catch up. Not only China which is the obsession of the US right now, but also other countries.

So what we have right now is that this illusion of prosperity fostered by what is called financialization has created the impression of wealth but it is not wealth based on a real economy. And so increasingly what we see is a fight to secure much more wealth through other means. So not through the real economy in the usual sense conceived but through things like intellectual property rights and so on.

Who does such income such income accrue to? It mainly accrues to those who control those rights, those intellectual property rights which are the corporations. And the corporations are extremely powerful.

So I think one has to really think about what has happened to American capitalism itself. American industrial capitalism. Look at what happened with General Electric. General Electric was once known as a consumer appliance manufacturing company, arguably the largest in the world. Today, it’s essentially a financial conglomerate with a historical background in consumer electrical products.

If we look at, for example, what happened during the last decade with QE and shareholder buybacks and so on and so forth. All this, certainly undoubtedly, enriched a great number of people. But I think it would be a stretch to suggest that the real economy and American technological leadership has been strengthened during this period. In fact, the converse has happened. And this is precisely the crisis which it faces right now.

So American capitalism is on the decline not so much because others have overtaken it or are in the process of overtaking it but because it deteriorated. And for this, I think one has to look at national leadership over recent decades. And who spoke for business, who spoke for capital has increasingly moved from the real economy to the world of finance.

FRIES: Moving from the problems of induced deep stagnation and depression and long term sustainability issues, talk now about how US policy is driving the world to war

JOMO K.S.: I think as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and many others who watch this much more closely than most of us, the threat of war is very, very real. For a whole variety of reasons, many people are increasingly familiar with. But the kind of rhetoric, the kind of behavior which passes for diplomatic behavior, it almost seems as if diplomacy has taken a back seat. There’s no more room for diplomacy.

Very often it’s not necessarily the generals who are pushing for war. It is what some people in America might refer to as the chicken hawks. But whatever the case might be we see huge possibilities, for example, for the strengthening of what President Eisenhower warned about, the military industrial complex.

So the possibility of war is very real on the Western side, on the American side. But it’s also very real on the part of Russia.

One has to remember that in the three years after the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy collapsed by half. Collapsed by half, I have to emphasize. I don’t want to finger point and say who was to blame for all this, but it collapsed by half.

And it took more than a couple of decades for the Russians to rebuild the economy. So they are now back at where they were then. Okay. And they have not been in a position to acquire a very new military arsenal appropriate for this age. They are in a situation where they have the leftovers from the late Soviet period. And that’s all they have.

And what was that? That was essentially a period of which there was a nuclear race going on towards what was called MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. That was the kind of situation.

So right now, I mean, look at what happens in Ukraine. When Russia wants to get drones, it has to turn to Iran of all countries to get drones. You know, this is the Russia we’re talking about today. The Russian economy is less than 10% of the size of the US economy. So it’s nowhere near parity.

But it did come close to parity during the Soviet period. And that’s the arsenal it has. So when you push Russia and it doesn’t have anything else to count on, it can’t even count on China as far as some of these things are concerned, what will it do? It will resort to what it has which is the nuclear arsenal. And this, I think, is a very, very grave danger.

And that’s why pushing and threatening Russia over the last three decades or so was a very, very dangerous game. And I suspect, I have no proof of this, that Putin does not believe that any successor of his will be able to deal with this issue. And he felt obliged to.

But one should also remember it wasn’t Putin who wanted to go into the eastern part of Ukraine. It was the Russian Duma, the Russian Parliament which passed the resolution demanding that Putin do so.

So, it’s a very complex situation, which we have been oversimplified into, you know, into the ogre of Vladimir Putin. But it’s a very, very complex and very dangerous situation precisely because we are dealing with caricatures rather than trying to understand how dangerous and vulnerable the present situation is.

So I’m very concerned about war. And that’s why I insist on pacifism. And developing countries in general and non-aligned countries in general know that they are not going to be a third force by any stretch of the imagination on the military front.

So they have a strong interest in finding diplomatic and other peaceful means to resolve international differences. So they have a very strong stake in this.

And the developing countries have have been in a very vulnerable situation. Especially at the end of the Cold War where there was no longer any incentive to try to entice friends in the developing countries by providing aid and so on. So aid has gone down to developing countries.

And even the new commitments, for example, relating to climate finance have not have not been met. There was a promise of a significant increase in climate finance from the year 2020. Nobody even talks about it these days in Europe.

And then what do we see? Almost two years ago, there was a promise to get rid of coal. And right after the Ukraine war begins; Germany is going back to coal. I mean, this is a world where developing countries feel that they have very little voice. Nobody’s paying much attention. And that they are

Honest Government Ad | COP31 Australia & the Pacific

Paul Jay — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:43:01 -0400

The Australien Government made an ad about its bid to host the 2026 UN Climate Summit (COP31) with the Pacific, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative. This video was originally published by The Juice Media on August 1, 2023.

Ecuador: Presidential Candidate Assassinated

Paul Jay — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 16:45:12 -0400

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Fernando Villavicencio, who was running for president of Ecuador on an anti-corruption platform, was assassinated in broad daylight on August 9th. Who stands to benefit from the assassination, and what does this mean for the upcoming August 20th presidential election? Joe Emersberger, a long-time analyst of Ecuadoran politics, discusses the situation.

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Greg Wilpert

Welcome to The World On Fire. I’m your host, Greg Wilpert. A prominent candidate for the presidency of Ecuador, Fernando Villavicencio, was assassinated on Wednesday, August 9, as he was leaving a campaign rally. The assassination shocked Ecuador, which has already been reeling from sky-high crime rates and the assassination of the mayor of the Ecuadorian town of Manta just a month ago.

On Thursday, government representatives stated that eight Colombians had been arrested for organizing the assassination and that the person who shot Villavicencio was killed in the shootout following the assassination. The government further stated that the suspects had ties with organized crime in Ecuador.

Ecuador is in the midst of a presidential campaign to complete the term of President Guillermo Lasso, who dissolved the legislature shortly before he was scheduled to be impeached on corruption charges. The move also triggered a new presidential election in which Lasso is not running for re-election.

Joining me now to discuss the latest developments in Ecuador is Joe Emersberger. Joe is a Canadian engineer with Ecuadorian roots, who has often written for FAIR and Znet, among other publications, and also has a new Substack page. Thanks, Joe, for joining me today.

Joe Emersberger

Thank you for inviting me.

Greg Wilpert

Let’s start with Fernando Villavicencio. Who was he, and whose interests in politics did he represent? What was his presidential campaign about?

Joe Emersberger

He’s a right-wing candidate. He’s a long-time enemy of [Rafael] Correa’s government, which was the left-wing government in power from 2007 to 2017. He always had a little bit of a flirtation with left-ish movements. He was a former trade union person, and he was apparently one of the founders of the political wing of CONAIE, the indigenous movement’s political wing, which is called Pachakutik. That party has always been to the Right of CONAIE. For whatever reason, there has always been a disconnect between CONAIE’s discourse and Pachakutik’s. In office, their politicians have always swung to the Right. Villavicencio was involved with that.

Recently, he got elected to Congress in 2021. He was basically allied with Guillermo Lasso, the right-wing President. Now, in fact, he made maneuvers to try to obstruct the impeachment of Lasso, which was underway shortly before the elections were called. So he’s basically a right-wing actor, although he’s flirted with leftist rhetoric and organization in the past.

His other claim to fame is that he was briefly an author of a hit piece that The Guardian put out against Julian Assange, claiming that he had met with Paul Manafort, [Donald] Trump’s campaign manager, that he had met with him in the Ecuador Embassy, which was an absolutely outrageous story. The Guardian ended up peppering it with weasel words, editing it after the fact to protect themselves from lawsuits. His name appeared on the byline of that article for a while, and then he was removed. That was before he got into politics again.

He declared himself a journalist, and he was actually convicted, under Ecuadorian law, of libel as a criminal offence. So while Correa was in office, he actually got convicted of libel because he and a few other guys, well, they made some outrageous allegations saying that Correa had ordered police to shoot at a hospital. It was outrageous, and he was convicted for that. That became another reason he got some attention internationally because people rallied and they objected to the fact that libel was part of the criminal code in Ecuador. So that gained him some notoriety.

He was polling like fourth or fifth, very low. He was not a threat to do very well in the election. The election actually, according to the average of the latest polls before this incident, who knows how this will affect things, but it looked like Luisa González, the Correa-ist candidate, was poised to, based on an average of polls, very close to winning outright in the first round. We’ll see what happens and how the vote actually takes place now.

With his assassination, Lasso immediately announced a 60-day state of exception. That’s of concern to me because although they said, yeah, there is no way the elections are going forward, then how are they going to take advantage of the state of exception to perhaps suppress the vote in certain areas where they think Correa has a large number of supporters? How could they use these extra powers to tamper with the electoral process? That’s a concern I have.

Greg Wilpert

Yeah, that’s what I want to get into next. Basically, whose interests do you think Villavicencio’s assassination serves? Surely there are those who would like to pin the assassination on the Correa movement or on Correa himself, I imagine, because of the animosity that existed between Villavicencio and Correa.

I also find it interesting, and this may be a bit of a tangent, but I just saw an article that I think might have been from The New York Times that claimed that Villavicencio was charged for insulting the president, not liable, as you point out. So that’s a huge difference. Anyway, there was a pretty big animosity in any case, and he was, as you said, in prison briefly. Who do you think might have been behind it, and whose interest does this assassination serve?

Joe Emersberger

One thing to mention is that the people in charge of Villavicencio’s security is the Lasso government. He was one of the candidates who had protection provided by the government. As a presidential candidate, it is common sense; they get official protection from the government. There was a horrendous error. His own family has been absolutely, as you can imagine, livid, denouncing Lasso’s government. These errors in the security and the handling of his security were just inexcusable and multiple: where they let him leave the building, the fact that the car wasn’t bulletproof, and all sorts of basic errors in security. The family is livid. They wouldn’t let him see the body right away. They were denouncing that. The family’s been pointing the finger directly at Lasso, and he’s responsible for the security.

Immediately as soon as this happened, you see right-wing actors, including my own family, who support the Right, immediately calling for a military government. Those reflexive forces are unleashed by something like this.

There’s no advantage to Correa. First of all, they’re not in power. They don’t have control. Nobody has control of the police, apparently. It’s just a total free for all right now. Violent crime has gone up and quadrupled since 2017 when the right wing took power with their Trojan horse, [Lenín] Moreno. It’s been a catastrophe.

Who benefits? The chaos really tends to empower those forces who want to use this as a pretext to seize power. It’s what Lasso already tried to do with his referendum. He wanted to roll back. He wanted to try to have a referendum in February that was focused on crime. The typical solutions the right wing proposed, they created this problem of violent crime, and then their solutions were to give people guns and let the government extradite people. That seems to be the direction that the Right is trying to take. Trying to blame Correa, it’s outrageous, but they’ve made outrageous allegations against him before. That discourse will be out there.

For me, honestly, it’s hard to say. My concern is that the powers that they’ve given themselves now, with the state of exception, I worry about what they could try to pull with that in terms of voter suppression or a similar maneuver. That’s my concern. As I said, Villavicencio was a minor candidate, so if anything, his votes will probably get transferred to other right-wing candidates.

Greg Wilpert

Actually, that would probably benefit the Right then. One of the main issues, as you mentioned, is the skyrocketing crime rate, specifically the homicide rate. You wrote about this last February for an article in MintPress, how the international media keeps focusing on this issue. It’s been related also, I’ve seen, to the assassination, somehow that because of the high crime rate, that has something to do with Villavicencio’s assassination.

Talk a little bit about that record you just mentioned. Crime was actually lower during Correa, and why has it become such an issue, and how serious is it at the moment?

Joe Emersberger

Yeah, it’s an absolute catastrophe. When Correa left office, Ecuador was basically about the second most safe country in Latin America. It had a homicide rate of 5.8, or something like that, homicides per 100,000 people, which is about the level of the U.S. and Canada, more or less.

Now it’s important because this also gets distorted in the media. They always say Ecuador was once safe. That’s very misleading. In the late ’70s, early ’80s, yeah, it was very safe, but then you’re talking 40 years ago. From 1980 all the way right through to 2011, to the early years of Correa’s presidency, the homicide rate is constantly on an upswing. It was maybe about 5-6 in 1980, but by 2011, it had reached 17-18. Under Correa’s 10 years in office, it had gone all the way back down to under, as I say, about 5.8, under six. There was a reduction of two-thirds, a massive reduction. That’s unprecedented. The whole trajectory over those decades was upward. It was an upward trajectory in the homicide rate.

Correa had this remarkable achievement of bringing it down by two-thirds, and he did it without all the things that the right-wing always wants to suggest, without mass incarceration, without guns proliferating, without the death penalty, all the things that the right-wing people like to propose as solutions. He achieved that. Then as soon as Moreno took over and betrayed the movement that got him elected and he became basically a right-wing government, immediately you see that the upward trend in homicide starts very, very soon. Pretty much in 2018-2019, you already see an alarming upward trend, but then under Lasso, it’s just gone through the roof.

Now, as I mentioned, if it was 17 or 18 around 2011, in the early years of Correa’s office, when it peaked after a steady climb from 1980, by 2021, 2022, and 2023, now we’re up way beyond that. Now we’re up 25-26. Now it’s the highest it’s been in decades, a quadrupling of what it was since 2017.

The corporate media tends to distort this history. The record of the right-wing in Ecuador with homicide rate for the last 40 years has always been terrible. It’s always been an upward trend when they’re in office. They lack understanding. They don’t believe in a strong state. They don’t believe in funding things properly. They believe in letting things slide and letting rich people try to pay for their own security. It doesn’t even work for rich people. It hasn’t worked for anybody. Literally, nobody is safe in Ecuador.

The Correa’s themselves have had candidates assassinated in recent months as well. It’s not something that’s just affected any particular side of the political spectrum. It’s a general free for all at the moment. You have gangs giving press conferences from jail. The jails are out of control. Prison massacres are taking place because criminals have taken over the prison system.

Luisa González, Correa’s candidate, has been hammering at this constantly. Her point is constantly that the criminal elements in Ecuador have basically taken over the state. They’ve taken over the police, the prisons, and parts of the military. Even the U.S., who was very pro-Lasso, very supportive, there was a U.S. government official who made accusations from the embassy that drug dealers had infiltrated the police and stuff like that. There are a lot of problems that are just a total catastrophe.

As I said, the history tends to get distorted because if you look at the history, the right-wing has always been terrible on crime in Ecuador for the past 40 years.

Greg Wilpert

Related to that is certainly also the issue of corruption, which was Villavicencio’s main issue. It’s also always been portrayed that corruption was particularly bad under Correa, with him being sentenced in absentia while he was living in exile in Belgium. Then also, his Vice President, Jorge Glas, was imprisoned for corruption under the previous president, Lenín Moreno.

First of all, what’s the record there? As far as we can tell, of course, corruption is always more difficult to identify than homicide. What’s your sense of what’s happening? And then, of course, Lasso himself was also charged with corruption, which is one of the reasons we’re having this presidential election coming up. What’s your assessment there in terms of the record?

Joe Emersberger

Under Correa, there was a massive increase in public works. There were all sorts of projects for the huge improvement of roads, schools built, hospitals, and infrastructure like anti-flooding infrastructure. Eight hydroelectric plants were built. There was a huge, massive, really unprecedented investment in infrastructure and public works.

With that, it’s inevitable that there will be some shenanigans and things going on. Correa has never denied that there were some instances where things happened that this guy was pilfering and this guy was doing this. It was not at a level that actually impacted the macroeconomic benefits that the public received. It was inevitable as it was going to happen on some level, and that was going to be used later. It was blown up in a big show by the media, especially under Moreno, to use that as a basis for political persecution to say, aha, well, Correa’s sentence is that he had psychic influence. One of the things he’s been accused of is he had a psychic influence on any lower-level official who took a bribe. If you took that accusation seriously, there isn’t a single president anywhere in the world who couldn’t be sent to jail because corruption takes place. There are dirty cops. There are dirty officials under any government that ever existed. You could throw anybody in jail for that. That’s the approach they’ve taken.

Correa actually has political asylum in Belgium. The cases against him are ridiculous. Interpol is not a leftist organization. They’ve rejected, on human rights grounds, Ecuador’s request to extradite him. It’s a joke. As I said, like any propaganda, there are some elements. Was there corruption? Yeah, there was some corruption because there was such a massive investment in public works, and with that comes opportunities for some people to get in there and do some things. As I said, corruption was at a low level, and it did not impact the benefits that people received from those projects.

Also, it just doesn’t track with a corrupt government that has this unprecedented reduction in homicide rate, that cleaned up the police, that purged the police, that instituted polygraph tests for police to make sure that they weren’t compromised when they were hired. Would you commit a crime? Have you ever taken a bribe? Questions that put them on the spot right at the beginning before they could even be accepted. That’s not the thing that a corrupt government does.

There could be corruption in the government, but it was not a government that tolerated it or tried it. Did they catch every single instance of corruption? No, because that doesn’t ever happen.

I think the Right took advantage of that in the early years when Correa was laid off to generate. The fact that I think that Moreno betrayed Correa generated some confusion. That gave those allegations maybe a little bit of credibility early on. With the catastrophe that they’ve created, I think, for the most part, people realized that it was all a lot of smoke and mirrors meant to justify persecution and an excuse for the right-wing to explain away their own failure. They’re still trying to blame Correa. How can he be responsible for an assassination that takes place six years after he’s in power, where they have control over the police? These are the people in power for six years now. They have control over the police and the military. It’s their military. It’s their police. If candidates are being assassinated and they’re providing security, it’s pretty ridiculous to try to point the finger at a movement that’s been out of power for six years.

Greg Wilpert

Now, let’s turn to the current presidential election. This also, of course, again, ties into the corruption issue because, as I mentioned earlier, it was one of the reasons why the election was called. How does it look so far? Who are the front runners? Who is running, so to speak? Who are the main candidates, and what are their chances?

Joe Emersberger

Luisa González’s, according to the average of polls, is very close to the 40% point where she could win outright in the first round. She needs 40% plus a 10-point margin of victory over everyone else. Sometimes the second and third-place finishers can sometimes be unclear. The polls can be off. There’s one of the former vice presidents under Moreno, I’ll probably mispronounce his name, but everyone refers to him as Otto [Sonnenholzner]. Yaku Pérez [Guartambel] is in there, a right-wing indigenous leader. There are a few others, but they’re not very consequential.

Villavicencio was one of the candidates who was not particularly consequential. A lot depends on if Luisa González can win in the first round; that would be great for Correismo. If it goes to a second round, things get more complicated for them because then people, instead of the wide dispersion of votes among all these inconsequential candidates, perhaps one candidate can emerge and become more prominent and become more of a threat to win electorally. That’s setting aside any shenanigans that they pull with the state of exception or with the electoral council that is very clearly biased against Correa.

One of the outrageous rulings that they did in 2021 that they still have is that Correa’s image cannot appear in campaign ads. His image is not allowed to appear in campaign ads. It’s funny because you remember, under Correa’s government, all the fuss that was made about freedom of expression; that’s just an outrageous ruling. They’ve enforced that, and they’re doing that for this election as well.

It looks good for Correa, but who knows what now, this chaos and the uncertainty of this assassination. We’ll have to see what impact that has.

Greg Wilpert

Well, it seems to me that, certainly, the assassination would make it less likely that Luisa González will be able to have that 10% margin because there are fewer anti-Correa candidates, basically. It makes it more difficult for her to have that 10% margin.

The other thing, though, of course, is you mentioned Yaku Pérez, who is basically running as a leftist candidate, isn’t he? Even though you say that he’s a right-wing candidate, which has caused quite a bit of confusion, I think, particularly among progressives who want to support one side or the other. What do you make of Perez’s chances? Is he a spoiler? Why do you call him a right-wing candidate instead of a progressive, as he’s often made out to be?

Joe Emersberger

In 2021, I know what you mean, he wants to portray himself as an eco-socialist, and some people in North America were taken in by that marketing. I did a thread on Twitter illustrating just how reactionary he is. He was a strong, very vocal supporter of the 2019 coup in Bolivia. He welcomed that. He applauded that and said that was a great thing that happened. He was supportive of the efforts to remove it. He said hopefully that [Nicolás] Maduro would fall as well. He wants Maduro to fall. It is really reactionary stuff. [Andrés] Arauz has had a proposal in 2021 to stimulate the economy.

Greg Wilpert

Sorry, who is Arauz?

Joe Emersberger

The vice-presidential candidate in this election. He was the presidential candidate in 2021. Now, Arauz has had a proposal to give a $1,000 bonus to all Ecuadoran citizens. I believe it was all directed to the female heads of households as a way to stimulate the economy during the pandemic. Yaku Pérez, in the debate, said that was a bad idea because the poor people had never seen that money before, and they would spend it on beer. It’s an ignorant statement that you get from a Trump supporter.

When it came to criticizing Correa for years, he basically echoed the right-wing talking points. There’s too much public spending. This is all just a waste of money. There are too many taxes. He echoes the whole right-wing talking points, but then he adds some environmental rhetoric. He claims he’s against mining. He puts an environmental spin on some of his positions. He’s ultimately a very reactionary person. He openly relished the role he played in 2021 in the indigenous movement calling for a null vote, calling for abstention. He was on Twitter openly celebrating the fact that it cost Correa’s candidacy and put Lasso in office.

In fact, in 2017, he openly endorsed Lasso, the very right-wing candidate. Over and over again, he’s shown what he’s about. Sometimes people believe his own spin or the spin that other people put on his views, and they try to project him as a left-wing candidate when he’s obviously not.

Greg Wilpert

Well, the election is coming up very soon, on August 20, and we’ll see then what happens. Hopefully, everything goes well, considering that we’ve got this state of emergency that Lasso just called. We’ll definitely check in again on the state of things, and we’ll leave it there for now.

I was speaking to Joe Emersberger, a Canadian engineer who regularly writes on Latin American issues, particularly for his new website, a new Substack page. Thanks again, Joe, for having joined me today.

Joe Emersberger

Thanks, Greg.

Greg Wilpert

Thank you, our audience, for joining The World On Fire. Until next time.

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Joe Emersberger is a writer based in Canada whose work has appeared in Telesur English, ZNet and CounterPunch. He is the co-author of Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media and 20 Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela,
published by Monthly Review.

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This is an auto-generated version of the transcript. An edited version will be arriving shortly.

Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by your other host, Paul Jay, for part two of my discussion with him on the recent arrest of Russian anti-war thinker Boris Kagarlitsky. Hopefully, you’ve already watched part one and have enjoyed that content. If so, please consider donating to the show so that we can continue making these episodes. You can go to our website, theAnalysis.com.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen and get onto our mailing list; that way, you won’t miss any future episodes. See you in a bit with Paul.

Paul Jay

So I don’t think China’s position is so socialistic, let’s put it that way. There’s a real mix of what I would say a kind of central planning rationality mixed with a nationalist, geopolitical, great nation mentality. If you compare Chinese decision-making to American decision-making, I think the Chinese are more rational when it comes to geopolitics, generally speaking. As a state-managed capitalism, it’s been brilliant in the way it’s accomplished its external commercial relationships.

In terms of Chinese national interest, China is now the major trading partner of almost every country on Earth. The U.S. talks about competing with China. In many ways, China’s already won in terms of the trading relationships. It has. China, I believe, is the number one trading partner of the United States, never mind just about everybody else. It’s the number one trading partner of most of Western Europe, certainly most of Latin America, Africa, and there’s nothing the U.S. can do about it, and that’s part of the American quandary.

That said, I don’t get why China isn’t more urgently dealing with climate. If you look at the heat maps, what the world looks like at two, three and then four degrees, China is already in record-breaking heat waves. This is just the beginning. We’re at 1.2 degrees warming. We’ll be at 1.5 within a decade, and some people think even faster. If you look at three and four degrees, there’s not much of China left. That said, there isn’t much of the U.S. left either in terms of agriculture, especially in the Midwest and the West Coast. I don’t get why China isn’t urgently screaming about this.

I think the Chinese argument that the Americans are being completely hypocritical about this is very legitimate. I think the U.S. talks a lot more than it does. The lack of phasing out of fossil fuel is the critical issue, obviously, and it’s not happening. They keep talking about carbon sequestration and such, and that’s mostly nonsense. They don’t want to do what obviously needs to be done: nationalize the fossil fuel companies, America, and phase them out quickly. As quickly as that energy can be replaced, and it can be replaced quickly with a massive investment in sustainable energy sources.

I don’t know what to say about nuclear. There are various people making the argument, even James Hansen, the climatologist that you can’t get out of this without nuclear. Others are arguing, well if that’s true, then maybe we have to reduce the size of the economy. Maybe, I don’t know if that’s politically possible. I do know we need as an absolute to phase out fossil fuel as quickly as possible and phase in forms of sustainable energy. We also have to figure out how to decarbonize. That’s going to take, I guess I said that already. There needs to be a massive, massive investment in a publicly run for the public interest, not some private sector boondoggle project to figure out what real effective decarbonization is. Not greenwashing. Not dangerous geoengineering that nobody even knows if it won’t do more damage. We do need to combine the phasing out of fossil fuel with decarbonizing the ocean and the growing of massive amount of trees, regenerative agriculture. We’re not putting much resources into any of that because it’s basically really being left up to the private sector in the marketplace with some government money to juice it. Even if we move more quickly to electric cars and such, okay, it’s something, it’s maybe better than nothing, but we’re still not transforming how electricity is produced. So that’s where our focus needs to be.

Ukrainians, as difficult as it is, when you have soldiers, Russian soldiers, slaughtering your people, you got to see the bigger picture because there won’t be a Ukraine in the future. Do not believe that the West is going to rebuild you when the West is in such a crisis. I don’t know how much the West would rebuild Ukraine even if there wasn’t such a climate crisis. Maybe they would. Maybe it’d be like a South Korea, which is they want to show how wonderful Ukraine is rebuilt as a model to try to undermine Russia and try to prove to the Russian people.

Talia Baroncelli

They’re already giving out contracts to different companies for rebuilding.

Paul Jay

One way or another it’s going to be a boondoggle.

Talia Baroncelli

It’s not going to be rebuilding in a way which is sustainable.

Paul Jay

Yeah, without getting further on the climate thing and all the rest right now to get back to it. So that’s why I think there must be a settlement of this more or less along the lines of where things are. Without this war of attrition, Russia seems dug in. Even if a Ukrainian offensive has some success and I have no idea what’s really going on in the battlefield, I don’t know who to believe.

Eric Schmidt, who used to run Google, is a scientific advisor to Biden. He was on TV the other day and his assessment was very pessimistic that the Ukrainians could breach the Russian defenses. He said maybe they could do something with hundreds of thousands of drones, which they don’t have. So it would mean the West would have to supply drones, and a ridiculous amount of drones. Who knows if the Russians wouldn’t figure out a way to fight that.

A war of attrition that goes on for years is going to be devastating for the Ukrainian people, devastating for the Russians that are thrown wave after wave into this battle and devastating to the world. Never mind what it’s doing in terms of grain exports and how much that’s going to devastate parts of Africa, maybe Asia, and so on, but what it does to global politics.

I hope China and the U.S., and I don’t know whether these recent meetings of [Antony] Blinken going and [Janet] Yellen and before them, maybe more importantly, the big tech leaders. [Bill] Gates was there, the head of Apple was there, and Larry Fink from BlackRock was there. The real power brokers of America, the leaders of the billionaire class, they went to China and they seemed to have sent the Biden administration a message to cool this thing down. This is getting nuts over Taiwan. Don’t you jeopardize this Chinese market for us. We know that Gates understands the threat of climate. We know Larry Fink gets it. They’re not doing much about it, but we know they get how serious it is. They know there’s no solution without a Chinese American collaboration.

The Chinese are saying something interesting, which is not illegitimate. They said this to John Kerry, the American climate czar or whatever he is.

Talia Baroncelli

Czar.

Paul Jay

They said, okay, fine, let’s collaborate on climate. But how do we take him seriously? Number one, when the last president of the United States didn’t believe there was a climate crisis and we don’t know who’s next. So what if we make all these agreements with you and in 2024 we’re dealing with a climate denier? Two, you’re waging chip wars against us, trying to restrain our economy, and then you want to have a collaboration on climate. Three, you’re sanctioning the technology we have to make better batteries for dealing with the climate crisis to make better solar and wind power energy. The batteries are sort of the weak link in the chain there.

The Chinese position isn’t illegitimate, and then they get caught up in the conflict over Taiwan, which is all nuts because it’s clear the Chinese don’t want to invade. But the more the Americans provoke them, the more the hawks in China. That’s the thing, we’re not dealing with some monolithic entity in China. There are a lot of splits and divisions, as there is in every country. The hawks in China are saying, okay, this has gone too far. You’re offending our national dignity. These elements of humiliation and national dignity are an important part of the narrative of how the elites in every country maintain control. So even though they’re objectively nonsensical, the issue of humiliation and national dignity have brought us to the brink of nuclear war many times. Right now we’re looking at it again.

Why won’t Putin get the hell out of Ukraine? Why doesn’t he go back to the February 23 [boarder]? There’s no strategic reason. It’s got nothing to do with NATO. It’s clear Ukraine’s not getting into NATO. Why? Because it would be humiliating. There’s no other real reason for it. It would be humiliating.

Why did [John F.] Kennedy blockade Cuba? Not because Cuba was any threat. The Soviet missiles in Cuba, they were no threat. [Robert] McNamara told Kennedy, this is a political problem for you domestically. There’s no objective strategic issue of these missiles. There’s nothing these missiles could do in Cuba that the Russian subs can’t already do. Kennedy risked nuclear war to avoid humiliation. The problem is, we live in that world, so you got to deal with it as a factor.

So what’s the conclusion of all this? And this is where Boris and I disagree. The West, with China’s help, does need to give a way for the Putin state to get out of this without looking the fool.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you were speaking about China’s reaction to the U.S.’s attempt to decouple its economy from the Chinese economy, which is incredibly difficult to do, given that they rely on each other’s markets for exports. Some analysts have said that this attempt to decouple the U.S. economy from China, if it goes too far and it antagonizes the Chinese and doesn’t have the desired effect, it could actually lead to China being emboldened to invade Taiwan.

Paul Jay

I don’t think the U.S. is serious about decoupling. They can’t. Are you giving up on a market of a billion and a half people? There’s no seriousness. What there is seriousness in is trying to strengthen American productive capacity to better compete with China in the global economy and not be so dependent on China for production. The issue of chips is a big issue because the chips that matter are made in Taiwan.

Now, the company that’s the leading chip manufacturer is itself fairly integrated into China. Much of the Taiwanese chip production actually happens in China in plants designed by and run by the Taiwanese company. The guy that owns the major manufacturing chip company is actually for less antagonistic relations with China. One must understand, Taiwan is not monolithic on this issue of relationships with China. Much of Taiwan, both elites and the population, just want the status quo. They’re not looking for independence. There are sections of the Taiwanese elites and some of the population that are pushing full fledged independence. The far right of the United States is pushing it, too. Other than some crazy ideological motives which exist in the U.S. and maybe in Taiwan, it’s an almost war that really serves the military-industrial complex of the United States, and for that matter, Taiwan.

For years, apparently, Taiwan has been buying these weapon systems, which cost Taiwan a fortune, because it’s not like some other place like Israel that gets all kinds of subsidies from the United states. Taiwan actually pays for these weapons. A lot of the weapon systems Taiwan was buying were ridiculous because they were so massive they couldn’t have been used against a Chinese invasion. It was like one paying tribute to the U.S. for protectionism. Ellsberg used to call NATO a protection racket. Well that’s to a large extent what the U.S. has going on with Taiwan. Also domestic players make a lot of money in these contracts, whether it’s through outright corruption and bribery or other ways getting local spin off contracts off the US military weapons purchases. So there’s a lot of money to be made in almost war, not actual war, an actual war most analysts think goes nuclear pretty fast or if it stays conventional, the Chinese win. So there’s a conflict of economic forces.

Like I’ve said this before, Boeing is a good example and Taiwan is an important purchaser of Boeing weapon systems and military aircraft. Maybe. I think Taiwan might be in the top 20 purchasers of Boeing military stuff. But China at least till recently and I think still because one of the things China is not as advanced in is commercial aircraft. China was and I think still is one of the biggest purchasers of Boeing commercial aircraft. So in one company, one part of the company wants less tension with China and sell more commercial aircraft. And another arm of the company wants more tension over Taiwan so they can sell more arms. The system is not rational. It’s filled with these contradictory interests and the policy reflects that. The foreign policy and especially Americans don’t know what the hell to do. But to get back to your question, the only country place in the world right now that’s really well positioned to try to bring Ukraine war to an end is China. Will they do it? I don’t know. Maybe they’re making some noises that way. When one of the senior people in the Chinese Foreign Ministry was asked, why don’t you come right out and condemn the invasion?

When you say you support the UN charter and the issue of sovereignty, his answer was, well somebody’s got to be able to be able to mediate this thing. Well if that’s the reason, they won’t come out and condemn it. And I don’t think that’s the only reason. I think right now Russia’s being turned into practically a satellite of China. So there’s know from a pure nationalist interest, there’s geopolitical interest to have let it carried on this long. But I think that interest is coming to an end. The longer this stalemate goes on, the weaker and more bled Russia becomes, the more desperate it becomes. And we were going to talk about this and we might as well now some of the voices in Russia leading foreign policy voices are calling for using tactical nuclear weapons against Poland, not against Ukraine, because they still want to act as if Ukraine are our brothers. And all this as they slaughter tens of thousands, but against Poland, because the only real threat Russia has here, the only real weapon, is the nuclear threat. And nobody, they’re saying, will really take it seriously if you don’t do a it’s part of the Russian military doctrine.

It’s called escalate to de escalate. And it actually, I was just being this was explained to me yesterday by an expert in Soviet and Russian nuclear planning. It was at a time when the NATO forces were far weaker, conventional NATO forces were weaker than Russian. The NATO always had as an option, if we started losing on a conventional battleground, we would go nuke to balance things. And the threat of going nuke made up for our weakness conventionally. Well, now things are flipped around the other way. Western Europe, the NATO forces in Europe are conventionally much stronger than Russia. If it was a straight conventional fight without nukes, the west would win. I’m told by everybody knows these things we can see right now they can’t even win. Russians aren’t even winning in Ukraine, never mind against the whole of NATO, including the US. So the Russian are doing what NATO said. If we start to lose conventionally, we will have to prove we’re willing to use nukes. And the way to prove it is to do it. And there’s voices in Russia that are saying, if this thing goes on for years, it SAPS our ability.

There’s only so long we can sustain war of attrition in Ukraine. And if we start to lose, the only answer we’re going to have is give up the collapse of the Russian state, which means the resignation of whether it’s Putin or whoever’s next with Putinism after Putin. And that’s the most likely thing right now that follows Putin is another Putin or even someone more hawkish or use nukes. And they’re saying, if that’s where this ends up, we might as well do it now, right?

Talia Baroncelli

To give some context to our viewers, the expert or analyst you’re speaking of is Sergey Karaganov from the Russian equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations. And I believe at the beginning of June, he published a piece called Difficult but Necessary Decision, which sparked a huge debate among other policy thinkers in Russia. He was essentially arguing that the threshold for using nuclear weapons should be lowered because the west is no longer really scared or fearsome of Russian saber rattling, so to speak, and that some sort of preemptive attack would essentially be the way to go if the US. And Europe were to continue supporting Ukraine. And I think that did spark a debate. There were some people and other policy circles in Russia which condemned this position and said that there would never be an instance in which a preemptive strike would be justified, because that would just spell the end of Russia and Europe, obviously. And in response to that, he actually wrote another piece called there is no Choice. Russia will have to launch a nuclear strike on Europe. So he even doubled down on that position. And so I do think he represents a certain segment of Russian debates, and it’s pretty insane, but the person who actually has the nuclear codes is President Putin.

And we don’t really know what he’s thinking. In the Russian state policy documents from 2020, it does say that a nuclear or a tactical nuclear attack or the use of nuclear weapons could be justified if the existence of this state were to be put into jeopardy. And that’s a really tricky categorization, because what does that mean? If the regime is put into jeopardy? If Putin’s regime is put into jeopardy, does that then justify a strike? Or does that doctrine just refer to the Russian state? If the Russian state is put into jeopardy, so we don’t know how he’s.

Paul Jay

Yeah, what you’re referring to is very important. What’s this guy’s name again?

Talia Baroncelli

Karaganov.

Paul Jay

Karaganov is not a nobody. This equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations goes back into Soviet days. It is the assembly of the leading foreign policy thinkers of Russia. When they have their annual conferences, Putin speaks there sometimes. The most recent one, Lavrov spoke there. They are a very serious body. And this guy, Kraginoff is the chairman of the Presidium. So he’s like the leader of this thing. He’s a serious foreign policy voice. And I’ve talked to people that know him, and he’s been a hawk since Soviet days, hawk in the Soviet and then Russian terms, which means the way to deal with the west is with the most aggressive posture possible. And of course, the west has given lots of reasons to think that. So the congress that happened just after he wrote those pieces, when Lavros spoke, Lavros didn’t say what he said, but he also didn’t say anything against what he said. But what they did say at this congress and this is where the issue of what does it mean, the Russian states at threat. They define what’s happening now in Ukraine as a war with the west. This is not a war against Ukraine.

Now, the Ukrainians, of course, don’t agree with that. And when this is called a proxy war in the west by some Westerners and people of the south, that’s only partly true. You can’t discount the agency and right of the Ukrainian people to resist this. But the Vietnam War was the same. Know, the Vietnamese waged a national liberation war, and this was their war. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a form of proxy war. This was for the United States. They didn’t really care what the hell happened in Vietnam. This was all about national liberation movements moving towards socialism. And thus an alliance was what people thought was socialist Soviet Union. I mean, you can debate whether it really was or wasn’t, but that doesn’t matter. It was going to take vietnam and then other national liberation movements out of the Western sphere of capitalism. And that was the reason for the war. And that’s the reason for the Ukraine war. The Russians do not want Ukraine to be part of the Western sphere of capitalism. They want Ukraine part of the Russian sphere of capitalism. And why is there a separate Russian sphere of capitalism?

Because the west didn’t want Russia in the EU. Because they didn’t want to have to deal with the potential.

Talia Baroncelli

They didn’t want Ukraine in the EU?

Paul Jay

No. Didn’t want Russia. The west? No. The west.

Talia Baroncelli

Oh, I see. You mean?

Paul Jay

Yeah. The west wants Ukraine and the EU. They want to extend the Western sphere of capitalism, but they didn’t want Russia because they didn’t think they could control Russia. The history, the culture, the size of the country, the size of the armed forces, the fact it was a know, an equal nuclear power. They didn’t want that in the EU because the EU would have become such a rival of the United States that it may have really become its own sphere of capitalism rather than the EU being part of the American sphere. And the West European elites didn’t want it either. They didn’t know for historic reasons and more contemporary reasons, they didn’t trust how powerful Russia would get within the EU and then all the other EU and even the Germans to some extent. But imagine if there’d been a German Russian alliance in the mean leading the EU. What would that do American hegemony? So the reason Russia is fighting for a Russian sphere of capitalism, because they were excluded. The west wanted Russia to be an oil producing rump state. And that was okay with the Russian oligarchs for quite a while because they were cashing in, they had their yachts and this and that.

But as time went on, the Russian state became stronger. And now we’re at a stage where I’m quoting, more or less from this recent congress of this foreign policy group, where they’re calling Russia a state civilization, which is the Russian nation, the Russian people, the Russian language, the russian religion. The Russian values which they stress over and over again means family values between a man like, marriages between men and women, like, it’s very homophobic. The values are toxic and not very different than American Christian nationalism. In fact, it really is a form of Russian Christian nationalism. I think they’re very similar phenomena. So within that context, they’re saying there being these foreign policy, russian foreign policy elites, a long, drawn out battle in Ukraine might lead to such a weakening of the Russian economy and this government. But this government means the Russian state, which means Russian civilization. They identify the state. And Putin not like a political party in the west. Like, if Biden goes down, somebody else comes. Know which party comes to power in the United States doesn’t threaten the state. At least it never has. So far, the state is much stronger than any particular one leader or particular party.

But in Russia, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The Putin and the bureaucracy around him, the military around him, they’re too and anyway, the analysis seems to be, if I’m understanding it correctly, long drawn out war in Ukraine is a threat to the Russian state civilization. If it’s a threat to the state civilization under this doctrine, there’s justification for the use of a tactical nuclear weapon to prove to NATO and the west that we’re willing to do anything to defend this state civilization. Now, China has actually warned about know, I read this thing, Global Times all the time, which is essentially an English language website run by the Chinese party, and they have said, be careful what you wish for, west. If Putin gets desperate enough, if they think this is going to be the downfall of this Russian state, and then, to use the Russian terminology, state civilization, you don’t know what might happen. Meaning nukes are not out of the question. So we’re in a very, very dangerous moment. I just talked to Nikolai Sokov, who worked in the Soviet and for a couple of years under Putin, under Yeltsin, in the Soviet arms negotiations.

He was a top negotiator with the US. He knows Soviet thinking and Russian thinking very well. He says he has never, ever in his life, 40 years involved in this, heard public statements about using tactical nuclear weapons. He says sometimes privately, there were conversations like that that may come to this. He’s never heard about it, that such things could be declared at such senior levels. So then the argument goes, well, you can’t submit to Russian black nuclear blackmail. Why not? Somebody has a gun to your head. You don’t submit to the blackmail with getting shot. Mad I would of course, it’s up to the Ukrainians. They don’t want to submit to it, okay. That’s their right to keep fighting, but we don’t have to risk it. And more importantly, as I said, the climate issues are even more threatening than the rhetoric coming out on nuclear weapons, but it shouldn’t be taken so unseriously. So in the final analysis, what does it mean? I think, and this is where I go back to boris didn’t agree with me on this. Boris’s thinking was, if this war goes on long enough, sections of the Russian military will overthrow Putin.

There’s sections of the oligarchs that want this war over. And thus he thought Ukraine should keep fighting because it will lead to the downfall of Putin and what do they call it, the nomenclature, the bureaucracy around Putin, and will create an opening for more revolutionary politics in Russia. I can’t say he’s wrong. Obviously, he knows domestic politics way better than I do. I mean, Russian domestic politics. I only know this, I should just say, as a Russian revolutionary, which is what he is, his perspective, his frame, he looks at this in is how to advance revolutionary politics in Russia. And he thinks the victory success of Ukrainian war leads to the downfall of Putin. I don’t know, it’s a hell of a risky know, lots of people who analyze this, including Russians who are against the war, are not so sure what follows Putin isn’t worse right now. Sokov is telling me Putin’s main battle is not with the Kardalisky’s, it’s not with the left, it’s not with the liberals. His actual main battle is with the hawks who want an even more aggressive approach to the war in Ukraine. I think Putin’s calculation is that the Russian population doesn’t want more bodies coming home.

And he’s got a fine line there about how many lives he can risk. And digging in is the better strategy, which is what he seems to be doing. But the right in Russia apparently is very strong. So I think as a progressive living in North America, I advocate, for whatever it’s worth, not that that many people care what I advocate anyway, that no further arms should go to Ukraine without being late to an insistence on negotiations. Two, those negotiations need to include referendum, UN run referendums. There should be like an immediate ceasefire and immediately, as quickly as possible, organized referendums. There may be other steps that have to be taken. But let me address one thing, this issue of war crimes. And Zelensky has said no negotiations with Putin. He should be charged with war crimes and all this. Yeah, of course Putin should be charged with war crimes, but by who has the legitimacy and credibility to charge and try Putin for war crimes? The only way to do it is that the United States would arrest George Bush and Dick Cheney and put them on trial for war crimes in Iraq, for launching the Iraq war.

And you might even consider arresting Barack Obama because under international law, as I understand it, he actually had an obligation to pursue, investigate and charge Bush Cheney for war crimes, that if you don’t pursue them, you become implicated. And Obama may have other blood. We know he has other blood on his hands in terms of journal warfare and, you know, certainly not the British government who was hogged in in the Iraq war. And in terms of history, nobody has more blood on their hands than the British Empire. I mean, go on. Where exactly is it that has some credibility? Because even some of the countries that weren’t so involved in the to Canada really wasn’t much involved, but is a complete collaborator with the US and every other kinds of wars and war crimes. So any serious talk, no negotiations without charging Putin, all it’s complete nonsense. It’s only said because to avoid any negotiations or as a propaganda.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, I’ve discussed this also with Colonel Larry Wilkerson in the past too, that John Bolton was the one who. Negotiated certain deals with other countries so that they wouldn’t be held liable for war crimes or for other crimes they had committed before the International Criminal Court. So essentially, the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction anymore to try American war crimes and hostilities.

Paul Jay

Yeah, and the US never signed the agreement to be in the So, as did Israel and such. Anyway, it is beyond stupidity to have that kind of rhetoric. Maybe Zelensky has to go before these negotiations can take place. I don’t know hagiography about Zelensky. I mean, he could have taken NATO off the table and maybe this wouldn’t have happened. So to turn him into this great hero, the Ukrainian people are fighting a heroic fight, there’s no doubt, and they have a right to.

Talia Baroncelli

But the thing is, though, is Zelensky would probably be the only one with legitimacy if he actually did decide to negotiate with Russia and to say that there should be some sort of ceasefire. I feel like probably more people would follow him.

Paul Jay

But the Americans are saying, we won’t do it if the Ukrainians don’t want to. And there’s no reason why the US. Can’t say, well, fine, don’t negotiate if you don’t want to, but we don’t have to give you arms if we don’t want to. So obviously the US has enormous leverage, but so does the know. The Chinese can say, listen, you negotiate or we’re going to find our fossil fuel somewhere else.

Talia Baroncelli

And to a certain extent, Turkey as well. I mean turkey under President erdogan, for example. They were the ones who negotiated the Black Sea grain deal. And some argue that Russia pulled out of the deal because they were upset with, you know, giving back five Azov fighters who were fighting in Mariupol for giving them back to Ukraine instead of to what? I mean, initially they agreed that they would keep them in Turkey until the end of the war, and that allegedly upset the Russians. And so I don’t know who has more leverage in their relationship in Turkey and Russia’s relationship, but potentially Turkey can emerge as also negotiating some sort of ceasefire. But it seems like they’re also, for Ukraine joining NATO.

Paul Jay

Well, all things nuts, because Russia’s pissed Turkey off with canceling this grain deal because Turkey was making a lot of money out of this grain now. So in some ways, Russia’s pushing Turkey closer into NATO. Of course, Turkey’s already in NATO, but anyway, the whole thing is nuts. But to go to the very beginning of all this, I hope people do watch the Kardelitsky interviews. Actually, we’ll put them all up on one page. And let’s not forget, Boris right now is sitting in jail somewhere in Russia. They moved him to somewhere in the outskirts, and it’s very possible he’s looking at seven years and maybe more. His daughter said in the interview. That’s just the beginning, not the charges. They can come up with a lot more charges. So Morris could be looking at quite a bit of jail time here.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, thanks, Paul, for joining me to speak about Boris’s arrest and the war in Ukraine. We obviously hope that Boris will be released as soon as possible and our thoughts are with his family. If you enjoy this content and you enjoyed watching Boris Kagarlitsky’s interviews that Paul has done with him in the past, then please go to our website, theAnalysis.news. Consider donating to the show, getting on the mailing list so you’re always updated whenever there’s a new interview published. Also go to the YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. You can hit the bell so that you’re notified every time there’s a new episode and like and subscribe to the channel. See you next time.

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Russian Anti-War Activist – Boris Kagarlitsky Arrested – Paul Jay

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Subsidizing Chemical Fertilizers is Counterproductive Says Economist Jayati Ghosh

Paul Jay — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:22:53 -0400

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By reducing our reliance on chemical fertilizers, policymakers could turn the food crisis into a genuine opportunity towards shifting subsidies away from agribusiness-led to agroecological-led farming systems and a managed transition to healthy sustainable patterns of production, explains Jayati Ghosh. Lynn Fries interviews Jayati Ghosh on GPEnewsdocs.

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LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. I’m delighted to be here with guest Jayati Ghosh. We will be talking about her OPED The Fertilizer Conundrum.

A renowned development economist, Jayati Ghosh is currently Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to that she held a longstanding professorship at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She is Founding Member of IDEAs, the International Development Economists Association. She is a prolific author and high level consultant to international organizations and served as high level member of international boards and commissions. Among her numerous distinctions, Jayati Ghosh has been named the 2023 recipient of the Galbraith Award by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Welcome, Jayati.

JAYATI GHOSH: Thank you.

FRIES: A thread running through the argument you put forward in the The Fertilizer Conundrum is that governments should shift away from policy making that incentivizes chemical farming. And to instead incentivize farming without chemicals, so agro-ecological farming. The larger argument being that when it comes to the production, distribution, and consumption of food there needs to be a major paradigm shift from decade’s long practices that favor industrial food and agriculture. To give viewers a quick take on why, I will briefly cite some opening lines from your OPED :

The global food system is broken. Largely dominated by multinational corporations, it enables and encourages unsustainable and unhealthy production and consumption patterns and generates enormous waste across all stages of production and distribution. The global food system also produces massive greenhouse-gas emissions, thereby inflicting substantial ecological damage, and deprives small-scale farmers in many countries of secure and viable livelihoods. Perhaps worst of all, food access remains profoundly unequal, causing extreme hunger to increase rather than decline.

FRIES: Start by talking about corporate concentration in the food system and what has happened as a result of that.

GHOSH: Actually, what we don’t realize often is that food is one of the most concentrated industries in the world. And it’s concentrated at two different levels. It’s horizontally concentrated. That is to say every sub-sector has got a few players who dominate that industry, but it’s also vertically concentrated. That is to say literally from farm to table. It is often one company that is organizing the entire thing. And reaping benefits and profits out of every segment of that production or distribution.

So whether it is from the inputs that enable cultivation or even the farm credit that is required for cultivation onto the process of cultivation, the storage, the initial processing, the transport, the distribution and finally the supermarkets and the retail. You find that major agribusinesses dominate this industry.

Which ever part of the food system you’re talking about, you will find that there is a role somewhere for these very large agribusinesses. And particularly what I call the big four: ABCD. That is Archer Daniels Midlands, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus who dominate the industry. And they dominate all the different segments of it. So whether you are a farmer, a small cultivator in some particular part of the world or you are a final consumer in a different part of the world completely, you are somehow dependent on these corporations.

One of the things that has happened as a result of this immense concentration is a real breakdown of the way in which people used to think traditionally about food. And that’s especially in the rich countries, which is to say that we would think about food as being seasonal. Certain crops and certain fruit and vegetables would be available at particular times of the year. We would think of freshness as being a dominant concern. We would think of the availability, not just in terms of year-round access and all the different types of food, but you would think of it in terms of local varieties.

Now that’s no longer the case, especially in the advanced economies. Consumers are accustomed to strawberries year-round. They’re accustomed to fish from every part of the world. And animal products from every part of the world. And vegetables of all kinds and fruit of all kinds available whenever they want.

Now, there’s something that is unnatural about this, and the way this is done is not only through massive storage and transport facilities. Which are of course, you know, hugely carbon emitting. But also through ultimately undesirable ways of storing and encouraging particular types of consumption that often turn out to be quite unhealthy.

So we are encouraging and in fact it’s partly marketing by the major retailers as well, we are encouraging much more processed food consumption, which is much more unhealthy. We are encouraging the uses of additives, of preservatives, of different kinds of chemicals. That are required to transport food over long distances, including fish and seafood and things like that. We are encouraging a lot more meat consumption than in the past. And especially meat that requires huge amounts of land just simply to enable the grain that will feed them. And so in many, many different ways, we’re encouraging unsustainable consumption.

But then we’re also encouraging unsustainable production. Because we are trying to maximize the productivity of the land no matter what it does in terms of the chemical additives that we are using. We use chemical fertilizers, we use chemical pesticides. We use various kinds of additional inputs. We know that this has an impact on soil quality. We know that this can even have an impact on the product, on the crop, and can affect how healthy. Those are, but we keep doing more and more of that because we want to maximize the yield.

And we are increasingly getting into genetic modifications. Which are designed not only to sometimes avoid the chemicals, but more often to give you the perfect crop: the perfectly round red tomato, the perfectly shaped potato, the perfect egg and so on and so forth.

We’re looking at different types of genetic modifications. That are designed to appeal to a very standardized consumer. And to enable much greater preservation over long distances of transport.

So all of these add up to really quite an unhealthy system of production and consumption. But it’s also deeply unsustainable from the point of view of the planet. So it’s unhealthy for both people and planet. Because of course it’s massively carbon emitting, but it also erodes the soil. It also leads to lots of other kinds of concerns about the ecologies in which these plants are grown.

FRIES: To give viewers a picture worth a thousand words, I am going to put up a visual on corporate concentration in the food system. This graphic shows different sectors of the agri-food chain. And the percentage of the world market that the top firms control. From seeds, to agrochemicals, to fertilizers that we are talking about today, to farm machinery, animal pharmaceuticals, the global grain traders so the Big Four ABCD firms you just mentioned, to the food processors and last but not least retailers. In making the case the global food system is broken, in this OPED, why did you focus on fertilizers?

GHOSH: Actually, I was concerned about fertilizers, of course, because of the fact that, you know, the recent increase in prices has been largely driven by profits as in so many of the major commodities in the world over the last two years. But also because to me it represents a dilemma that is at the heart of so many of our policy decisions over the last couple of years. Which is the dilemma between what we need to do in the medium and long term, and what is the immediate short term kind of policy response.

And in the case of fertilizers, we’ve had a dramatic increase in prices over the last few years.Which is of course bad news because it affects especially small cultivators all over the world. Many of them are now finding it unaffordable to use fertilizers. And if you don’t use them, that will affect yields that will affect local food supply.

So it’s not just the livelihoods of farmers, but it’s also the ability of many developing countries to produce the food that they need. All of that is affected.

So how do you respond? And the immediate attempt is to respond by somehow reducing these prices or subsidizing fertilizers when countries can afford that. That’s in a way counterproductive.

Because as I’ve said, fertilizers are part of a chemical input dependence,which is not really healthy. And where we really do need to be thinking of alternatives and we have alternatives. It’s just that those alternatives will take time. They will be more expensive. We need to invest a lot more in them. And instead of doing that, we quickly try and somehow manage the big increase in fertilizer prices.

FRIES: Your OPED cited a study on profit driven price increases in fertilizers. Aptly titled A Corporate Cartel Fertilises Food Inflation published by GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy May 2023 as an update to an earlier report The Fertiliser Trap published in 2022.

A graph in that study shows the total profits of the big nine fertilizer companies over the past five years. So 2018 to 2022. According to this study, these profits exponentially grew from an average of around US$14 billion before the COVID-19 pandemic to US$28 billion in 2021. And then to an astounding US$49 billion last year. Give us some context on this dramatic rise in fertilizers.

GHOSH: Yes. I think, you know, the evidence is now mounting across the world that so many price increases of the last two years have been delivered by increasing profit margins. I mean, even the IMF has come up with the study now that more or less confirms this. When my colleague Isabella Weber mentioned this way back about two years ago, she was pilloried for making this argument.

But now it’s actually become accepted wisdom. That the recent period is not one where supply shortages were the dominant reason for price increases. It’s really that the news about possible supply shortages -whether because of COVID related transport constraints or because of the Ukraine war and the impact this might have on Russian and Ukrainian exports – was used by multinational corporations in energy and in grains. It was used by them to jack up their prices, basically increase their profit margins.

So Russia is a major exporter of fertilizer. And even though it wasn’t really that Russian supply was affected. It turns out now we have the evidence it wasn’t affected – but major fertilizer companies could simply use this. And say: oh look, fertilizer is bound to be affected.So clearly the price is going up. And so they increased their profit margins from about, I think, 22% to as much as 36%. Dramatic increases in profits over sales.

FRIES: Explain more about the issue of government responses to this increase in the price of chemical fertilizers.

GHOSH: I think there are two issues here. And one is the fact that, as I mentioned, there’s this contradiction between the short term response and the long term response. But the other is that, you know, also you should be seeing these rising prices as a way of shifting production and consumption away from something that is essentially not desirable.

And that is true of fossil fuels. And it is also true of fertilizers. In fact, as you know, a lot of fertilizers come out of fossil fuel. So there’s a strong interdependence between the two.

So in the immediate case, what do you do?

Well, I think there is a very strong case to do a windfall profits tax. And the windfall profits tax should be so high as to discourage attempts to just raise prices. Because you think you can get away with it. Which is what’s been happening over the past couple of years. Really for both the fossil fuel companies and fertilizer companies and a bunch of other corporations, really.

But also a strong case in certain countries for price regulation. For saying: well, no, you can’t really increase these prices because it’s not justified by your cost increases. This is something that’s been done. Not just in socialist countries but it’s been done in the United States in the wartime. I’ve been reading about Galbraith’s price controls during and after the Second World War, for example. So it’s possible to exercise price controls in sectors that are seen to be strategic, important, and essential.

But that leaves pending the larger question. Now, how do we then convert this broader problem into a possible opportunity. And you see here is where agroecology…Now there is so much scientific evidence that it is viable. It is doable. It is sustainable. It is desirable. In other words, there’s really no good reason for not subsidizing and pushing and promoting agro ecological techniques.

What are those? Well, those are really techniques that rely much more on natural farming. Not necessarily all organic, but certainly much more natural. So natural fertilizers, natural pesticides. Much more local products. Not things that are necessarily out of season or requiring special efforts to grow in particular areas. Things that can be produced seasonally and consumed as far as possible locally. And not have to rely on being transported vast distances for export.

Now these techniques are to begin with more expensive. Why? Simply because they haven’t benefited from all the massive subsidies that fossil fuels and fertilizers have got. So, you know, when people say: oh, that’s too expensive. They leave out the fact that both oil and fertilizer have benefited from decades of massive subsidies.

And when I say massive. The official estimate of subsidies in 2020 before the Ukraine War and all of that, by the IMF was about $700 billion is the total amount of subsidies. Just going into fossil fuels. But if you take the indirect subsidies as well, it was $5.8 trillion. That’s nearly $6 trillion.

Can you imagine going into subsidies for fossil fuels? And of course, those subsidies make fertilizers cheaper as well. And in addition, many countries then further subsidize fertilizer.

So we are actually making it much cheaper than it is. And then we are saying: oh, agroecology is too expensive. Whereas if we shift some of those subsidies away from fossil fuel and fertilizer to agro- ecological techniques, we will get healthier outcomes and more sustainable outcomes.

FRIES: It is not so hard to understand how decades of massive subsidies for fossil fuel and the related industrial agriculture with its chemical fertilizers has resulted in a global food system where so many of the world’s farmers and countries are dependent on chemical inputs. Comment more on the challenge for those who want to shift away from that path.

GHOSH: So the shift away from chemical agriculture cannot be abrupt. It can’t be something that you just do like that. It has to be a much more thought out, careful, sensitive transition. So, for example, in Sri Lanka in 2021, they did this massive rejection of chemical fertilizer imports. And that proved to be a complete disaster for the farmers in the country, for agricultural harvests in the country, for the economy.

You know, you can’t do this kind of thing, which will dramatically affect farmers’ ability to produce their yields and their incomes without providing some compensation. And without easing it over a longer period. So this has to be a transition which you begin now.

So the point is not to say: well, we will do this at some point in the future. And we’ll just suddenly do a big dramatic shift. No, the point is to say: we start this year. We start this year by providing farmers with special subsidies if they’re going to engage in agro-ecological practices.

FRIES: Give us a bit of a glimpse of the situation of India in all this.

GHOSH: India is a subcontinent that is full of all kinds of cultivation practices and farmers.So we have everything. We have farmers who are completely dependent on chemical agriculture and want to continue that dependence. And we have those who are interested in agroecology and doing alternative farming techniques. We have women farmers groups who are not even recognized as farmers in the official data.We have many different kinds of groups who have all remarkably come together

Now in their demands, they have a huge list of demands, some of them are in fact contradictory. Because of the nature of that very disparate movement. Some are saying continue subsidizing the chemical agriculture. Some are saying shift those subsidies to more sustainable practices and techniques.

But all of them are saying that you have to keep farmers in mind when you’re formulating policies about food. You cannot design policies for food consulting only with corporations. You have to talk to those who are actually producing the food. And I think it’s that central point which governments miss, and even international organizations miss.

FRIES: You link the need for this shift in production from chemical agriculture to a more natural agriculture to a shift in patterns of consumption. Expand on that.

GHOSH: What we have today, as I mentioned, why is our global food system broken? Because we have a pattern of consumption encouraged by this heavily concentrated agribusiness. That as I mentioned which is deeply inequalizing but it’s also ridiculous because it encourages malnutrition. And malnutrition of kinds, undernutrition and excess nutrition. That is to say over consumption, obesity, and all the illnesses that come with obesity.

And that type of food consumption is being pushed by retailers. Who are parts of the same big nexus of agribusiness that I’ve mentioned even in the developing world. So we now have crises of obesity, let’s say, in countries like South Africa. Often in the same household, you will find undernutrition and malnutrition because of obesity in the same household.

Because the poor are underfeeding themselves or they’re overfeeding on junk food and unprocessed foods which are deeply unhealthy. In some of the Pacific Islands you have diseases, heart disease, diabetes. All kinds of things coming from the consumption of processed foods. From particular types of very fatty meat products that are pushed and encouraged and advertised by these global marketing agencies.

And so you get all kinds of new illnesses coming. Because there is a push towards certain kind of food consumption that is not just unhealthy it doesn’t really help in giving you better nutrition. But at the same time, it’s very important for the profits of these major corporations.

The rich in the developed world are now very conscious of this. And they eat healthy. And they eat organic. And they eat local. And they eat slow food. And they’ve got all of that. The poor in the US on the other hand eat more and more of the processed food. And they eat excessively large portions. Which are again pushed by lobbies. And they eat much more fat and sugar-based processed foods. Which are made cheaper than natural healthier foods.

FRIES: As I noted earlier, in this OPED you say that perhaps worst of all the things wrong with our global food system is this point you just made that food access remains profoundly unequal. Comment briefly on that, so effectively, the political economy of food.

GHOSH: Food has always bees, at one level it’scentral to human existence. At another level, it is deeply indicative of all the divisions of society and economy. So access to food is not something that is necessarily universal and access to different types of food. It’s critically dependent on not just the total production or availability in any one country or globally.It’s very much determined by class, by income, by the pattern of livelihood, by the kinds of social discrimination that enable access or lack of it.

So the broader political economy of food actually reflects the broader global political economy of everything. Of all the different power relations that are determining how our economies are evolving. So the fact of extreme inequalities of income and assets… which we know have ballooned in the last decade, for example. Or extreme inequalities of health and so on.All of these are also directly reflected in inequalities in access to food. And inequalities in outcomes with respect to food.

So as I’ve mentioned, whether it is malnutrition because of undernutrition or malnutrition because of nutrition of the wrong kind, which gives you different kinds of diseases. All of these are very much reflective of the broader tendencies of inequality in our economies.

FRIES: So this kind of commentary is conspicuously absent in mainstream media.Instead agribusiness – whether chemical fertilizers and pesticides, GMO or next generation products like gene editing – is presented as the solution for feeding the world.

GHOSH: I think there’s a real problem in the way in which agribusiness and global media have worked together. To sort of make people feel that there is no alternative.

That we have to have this pattern of production and consumption of food because that’s the only way in which people will be fed. We now know that the food problem is ultimately one of distribution. And that, you know, there are surplus and excess and wastage.

Forty percent of the food in the world is wasted. While huge amounts of people, billions of people in the world, are going hungry. And they’re going hungry not just because of failure of global supply. They’re going hungry because of local supply failures. And because their livelihoods are not enough for them to be able to afford food. In the poorer countries which are affected.

You know, food importing countries which are affected by exchange rate changes and economic distress and lack of employment. So we know that the causes of hunger are different. And yet we persist in thinking it’s a problem of aggregate supply. It’s not.

Even today the attempt to reform agriculture in Africa is unfortunately going in the wrong direction. It’s led by an initiative called the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, AGRA. Which is really something driven by the major foundations and the Gates Foundation in particular but have got the support of the World Food Summit. And AGRA is really pushing this chemical agriculture that I have been talking about.

FRIES: I will just jump in here to note there is tremendoustremendous opposition to the decade’s long initiative driven by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. One such example, The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa has called upon AGRA donors to end support for green revolution programs in Africa.

This in a letter that critiqued the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa as an unequivocal failure. And AFSA is the biggest civil society movement in Africa. And unlike Western philanthropists like Bill Gates, what they want is a transition to agroecology as the dominant farming and food system in Africa.

GHOSH: In fact, AGRA’s own assessments and independent evaluations that they have commissioned all indicate that they haven’t been successful. They haven’t achieved their goals. That the so-called successes they have achieved, the minor increases in yields in a few countries and so on, are nowhere near their stated ambitions. And that in many cases they’ve actually made things worse, if not stagnant.

So to push a chemical model of agriculture at this point in humanity when we know that there are better alternatives available is not just irresponsible, I think it’s really counterproductive. And it’s going in absolutely the wrong way.

The point about chemical fertilizers is not just that they are bad from the point of view of say, CO2 emissions. Which they are. I think they contribute about 2.4% of global emissions at the moment. They are very strongly related to the fossil fuel industry. A lot of the nitrogen fertilizers come out as a by product of fossil fuel production. So again, it’s very closely related to the whole carbon emission problem.

But they also have a terrible impact in terms of farming itself. They lead to soil erosion. They lead to the degradation of the quality of the soil. They have implications for the quality of the output and the crops. And even for the health of the crops.

So chemical agriculture is bad for the ecology. That is, it’s bad for the local area, the land, the nature around it. And it’s bad for human health. And of course it’s also then bad for the planet in terms of carbon emissions.

We have to recognize this and then think of ways to ease ourselves out of this dependence on chemical agriculture. We embraced it across the world because it provided higher and higher yields. And we thought that that was essential for solving the food problem.

We now know that it’s not essential. That you can solve the food problem with sustainable yields using ecological techniques. But because we are subsidizing chemical agriculture and chemical inputs so heavily ecological techniques are not seen as profitable. Or even competitive. So we have to shift, we have to shift our subsidies away from chemical agriculture towards more natural agriculture.

FRIES: Talk more about power relations. That as you commented earlier are determining how our economies and more specifically food systems are evolving.

GHOSH:One of the tragedies of our times is the extent to which multilateral fora have been taken over. Or manipulated or dominated by private commercial interests. And particularly by large multinational corporations. Who have not just lobbying power but they have the ability to shall we say infiltrate many of these organizations.

I think it’s a tragedy in many sectors but it’s particularly a tragedy in the world food system. And the fact that even the World Food Summit relied heavily on sponsors who were private food corporations. And that so many of the big initiatives for changing agriculture rely on direct or indirect sponsorship from big corporations. I think that’s very unfortunate.

And of course it makes it much harder for, shall we say, the voice of sanity to prevail. Because the voice of sanity would say: don’t do this. Don’t make mistakes which you don’t need to make when you know that there are other options available. But the voice of profit is saying: well, go ahead and do this. And we’ll worry about the impact later. Because right now you’ll get some benefits and we will get even bigger benefits. So countering that voice of profit is a tough call.

But I do believe that there are more and more voices around this. There are many people in different food sovereignty and farmer sovereignty movements around the world. Who are trying to make themselves heard. And there are many new initiatives coming up.

But I do also believe that eventually these problems will become so severe. And so telling that humanity will have no choice but to take the sensible path.

FRIES: Do you see this as something of an inflection point? I noted that in the closing lines of your OPED, in referring to the fertilizer price inflation of the last few years, you wrote >: By reducing our reliance on chemical fertilizers, we could turn the current food crisis into a genuine opportunity.

GHOSH: The price inflation in food could also be an inflection point if governments respond in the right way. If they don’t, it will just lead to greater hunger, greater distress, and you know, terrible circumstances. But if governments, even a few significant important governments can respond in the correct way. It could be a very promising route to an alternative trajectory for all of us.

FRIES: Jayati Ghosh, thank you.

GHOSH: Thank you.

FRIES: And from Geneva, Switzerland thank you for viewing this segment of GPEnewsdocs. With guest Jayati Ghosh discussing her OPED The Fertilizer Conundrum.

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Jayati Ghosh is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was previously a Professor of Economics and Chairperson of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. She was the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates (www.networkideas.org), an international network of heterodox development economists, from 2002 to 2021. She has advised governments and served as a consultant for international organizations. She is a member of several international boards and commissions, including the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the Commission on Global Economic Transformation of INET, and the International Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT). In 2021 she was appointed to the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, chaired by Mariana Mazzucato. In March 2022, she was appointed to the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism. She received the 2023 Galbraith Award from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“. Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay’s Documentaries

Extraction, Destruction of Ecosystems, and Fires in North America – Éric Pineault

Paul Jay — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 13:53:02 -0400

Éric Pineault, professor of ecological economics at the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the University of Quebec in Montreal, explains how the fires raging in Canada are a corollary of the paradigm termed Extreme Oil. He discusses various oil and gas projects across North America, as well as the Canadian government's support for the Trans Mountain Pipeline project, and how terms such as "net zero" and "carbon neutral" are misleading and conveniently serve Big Oil's aims. His recent book A Social Ecology of Capital presents an empirical analysis of capitalist societies, which both builds on and enhances Marxist theories by accounting for the energy extraction and colonization of ecosystems, a characteristic of what he terms our "fossil-industrial" society. His conception of capitalist metabolism outlines extractivism, production, consumption, and waste dissipation, which leads to an absorption of surplus energy, capital accumulation, and profit maximization. Most importantly, how is this understanding of social ecology useful for furthering a project of emancipation?

U.S.-Iran: An Unwritten Agreement on the Horizon? – Trita Parsi

Paul Jay — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 14:21:59 -0400

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Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discusses reported negotiations between the U.S. and Iran to agree to an unwritten deal. The JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, which was a legacy of the Obama administration, seems to be a thing of the past; yet de-escalation and an agreement on a smaller range of issues would be advantageous to both the U.S. and Iranian administrations. As in the case of Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, the role of China, Oman, and Iraq in facilitating these discussions is politically noteworthy. While the U.S. and Iran are nowhere near signing a comprehensive written deal which could be legally enforced and regulated internationally, a more limited unwritten deal would unfreeze at least 7 billion US dollars’ worth of Iranian assets, which would go towards purchasing food and medicine for Iranians.

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Trita Parsi to speak about a potential unwritten deal between the U.S. and Iran. If you enjoy this content, please go to our website, theAnalysis.news, hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen, and also get onto our mailing list; that way, you’re notified every time there’s a new episode. You can also go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, and hit the bell; that way, you’ll be notified whenever a new episode is published and like and subscribe to the channel. See you in a bit with Trita Parsi.

Joining me now is Trita Parsi. He is the Executive Vice President at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Thank you so much for joining me again, Trita.

Trita Parsi

Thank you for having me. It’s great to be back with you.

Talia Baroncelli

Great to have you. So Iran and the U.S. are reportedly negotiating an unwritten deal which would unfreeze at least $7 billion worth of Iranian assets in exchange for the release of U.S. prisoners. Iran would also have to commit to stopping uranium enrichment beyond 60%. What else is at stake here?

Trita Parsi

Well, what’s at stake here is that for the last almost two years now, there’s been growing escalation on both sides. The Iranians have been enriching uranium at higher levels. They’ve gone above 60% as well. That seems to have not been necessarily deliberate but nevertheless amassed a tremendous amount of enrichment. This means that if they decide to make a bomb, they will have the material in just a few days. Whereas as long as the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was in place, it was a minimum of one year before anyone would have the material, forget about having the bomb.

To a certain extent, as long as the escalation was not too fast or too aggressive, there was some sort of a very uncomfortable, but nevertheless stable status quo. I call it the zombie state in the sense that the JCPOA was not really alive, but no one dared to declare it dead because the minute you say it’s dead, then you have a crisis. If you pretend it’s alive, then you can pretend as if you don’t have a crisis. That only works as long as the escalation is not too aggressive. We were reaching a point in which it was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain that status quo.

You saw the United States was essentially committing piracy– taking Iranian ships or ships with Iranian oil on the high sea, saying that they’re circumventing American sanctions. Well, American sanctions are American sanctions. They don’t apply to international water. It’s a different thing if there was a UN Security Council resolution behind this, but there isn’t. So the Iranians started retaliating by taking ships that were associated with the U.S. In one case, I think the ship was actually taking oil to Houston. This is getting very tense.

Then we have the tense situation in Syria in which militias aligned with Iran were attacking American bases. At one point, they killed one American contractor. It was really risking a major military confrontation. So under those circumstances, the two sides slowly and carefully started talking directly again. They can’t go for a formal agreement for political reasons.

On the American side, they want a bigger agreement. They were willing to go with the JCPOA with the amendments. The Iranians said no to that specific proposal in August. That same draft right now the Iranians wanted. The U.S. and the Europeans are saying no to their own draft because they rightfully point out that the circumstances on the ground have changed. Iran has escalated their nuclear program since August of last year.

The Americans would be okay with a smaller deal, which means that they would do some sort of a freeze, formally. The Iranians will not go for that because they see that as devaluing their leverage. It would essentially mean that they would give up a lot of their leverage, but they actually won’t get real sanctions.

There’s another aspect on the American side, which is any agreement formal or centered on the [inaudible 00:04:42] deal would kick in what is called [inaudible 00:04:45]. It’s a law in the United States that says that anything of that kind has to go to Congress. Congress doesn’t have to approve it, they just have to fail to disapprove it. That’s a huge fight in Congress that would take a lot of political capital. The White House is not really in the mood for that. Most of their allies on Capitol Hill, the Democrats, are also not in the mood. It seems like an informal agreement, one that can be smaller than the JCPOA without activating the concern the Iranians have of devaluing their leverage. At the same time avoiding a congressional battle is the most that can be achieved at this point because of a lack of political will on both sides. At the same time sufficient to make sure that this status quo that was starting to be destabilized can be stabilized again. It doesn’t resolve anything, but perhaps there can be another year and a half or whatever in which we won’t see a very dangerous escalation take place.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, since 2018, when the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA, there hasn’t been much progress on this front, especially since September 2022. I do feel like an unwritten agreement and an informal interim deal would be cause for celebration. One of my concerns would be how do you enforce such a deal? In international law, there are certain regulations and standards that need to be upheld. The U.S. did not uphold their part of the bargain when they withdrew from the deal. So how do you manage or enforce such an unwritten agreement?

Trita Parsi

It’s a great question, and that’s one of the main problems and one of the reasons why these type of informal understandings are not necessarily terribly common, because the enforcement, the ability to trust it is very limited. Again, it comes down to political will. If you want all of those things, the enforcements, guarantee, etc., then you have to go for a bigger deal. At this point, there’s no bigger deal that the two sides seem to be able to agree on, but there can be a smaller informal deal that they can agree on, potentially. It’s not done yet, but that can prevent an escalation. If any one of them violates it, well, then it does fall apart and then they’re back to where they are right now, if not a worse situation.

The difference is that with the JCPOA, the U.S. could cheat, the U.S. could betray it. the U.S. could walk out of it, and the only sides that would be paying a price for it was maybe Iran and then all of the others. The Europeans lost a lot of business when the U.S. pulled out of the agreement. The U.S. itself hardly paid a cost. So it was very asymmetric in that sense.

This informal agreement is more symmetric in the sense that if you withdraw, you pay a price, and the other side pays a price. It’s not such that, for instance, on the Iranian side, they would have given up a significant amount of leverage or the U.S. aren’t going to spend any political capital on this, they’re not going to lift any sanctions, etc. Neither side would be in the red in that sense.

You’re absolutely right. The only thing that keeps this together is the confidence that both of them actually want to avoid crisis, a direct crisis. That’s the only thing that keeps it together. There’s no other mechanism.

Talia Baroncelli

How much of this is actually influenced by this view toward the 2024 presidential elections? Is this the White House or White House diplomats setting up this deal? Is Biden in any way shape or form behind this?

Trita Parsi

I think it actually goes both ways. First of all, the elections are definitely a big part of this. I mean, there’s a reason why they want to have calm on the Iran front for the next year and a half. They’re too busy with Ukraine. Secondly, with Taiwan, they don’t have bandwidth for Iran. Anything with Iran is very domestically and politically costly. So if you actually get something, you have to go to Congress. No U.S. politicians would like to have to deal with an Iran issue in an election year. It’s the same thing on the Iranian side.

The Iranians have been told over and over again by the United States that the Biden administration cannot guarantee what the next president of the United States does. Any agreement that would cause the Iranians to give up significant leverage or sanctions relief, well, if the next president comes in, in a year and a half from now and reverses it just like Trump did, then the Iranians have made a huge loss. So it seems like the Iranians too are coming to the belief that perhaps better not to have anything right now because who knows who the president is going to be in 2024. At the same time, it is definitely better not to have a crisis either.

The Iranians need to have a degree of calm on the U.S. Iran front in order to be able to proceed with a regional [inaudible 00:10:03] that they’re having with Saudi Arabia and the regional states. There’s a limit to how far they can go with that unless tensions between the U.S. and Iran comes down. So they have an incentive to make sure that this happens. Not a full deal, but making sure that there’s no crisis.

Talia Baroncelli

The Europeans were very much involved in the JCPOA, in the negotiations of the JCPOA. I haven’t really seen them be present in negotiating this unwritten deal or even saying anything which would try to calm the waters. They’ve been a bit more adversarial towards Iran. What is going on there?

Trita Parsi

The Europeans are not playing any significant role in this; that’s absolutely clear. In fact, Europe has lost a tremendous amount of leverage vis à vis the United States. Europe is so dependent on the United States today after Ukraine and it’s in the process of making itself even more dependent on the United States. The failure of the Europeans in earlier rounds were that when Trump pulled out, the Europeans were not strong enough to be able to pursue an independent policy. They objected to Trump, but they abided by every sanction that they imposed, even though they said that those sanctions were illegitimate and illegal.

Back then, there were talks. The Germans were talking about a degree of autonomy from the United States being able to do things on their own instead of being so dependent. Now they’re actively, as ECFR put it in an article they published yesterday in the process of self vacillation, they’re turning themselves into actively a vassal of the United States.

At the same time they are losing significant influence in the middle east. Their ability to deliver the U.S. from an Iranian perspective is more or less gone. How the Europeans handled the protest in Iran is something, of course, that the Iranians are now in some ways retaliating against the Europeans on and it has further reduced their role. What you’re seeing is that it’s actually regional powers that are at the center of these mediation efforts. Qatar and Oman are playing a very important role in all of this. Then of course, China has come in and played a significant role with the Saudis and Iranians.

In many ways I think one can say ultimately this movement towards stability, resolution of conflicts are good for the Europeans as well. But it is at the same time happening within the process of Europe losing significant influence here.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, unlike the Europeans, the Chinese have been filling this diplomatic vacuum left behind by the Americans. How does the U.S. see China’s success, diplomatic success in the region? Do they view it more as being at odds with their interests in the region, or perhaps being a boon because they’ve just failed recently at trying to make any negotiations actually be successful?

Trita Parsi

So I think it’s a great question, and I think there are several layers. The initial reaction of the United States was not a particularly a cheerful one. They were first of all, taken completely by surprise, even though the Chinese, within 24 hours, came to the White House and briefed the White House on what had happened and showed complete transparency. They were not briefing the U.S. in the midst of the talks but that’s rather normal. For that to work, you need to first make sure that it’s completed.

In fact, take a look at this. The United States has been having some conversations with the Iranians through the Omanis and the Qataris. The Chinese have not been briefed on that. Now, of course, it’s not led to completion, but that’s my point. Up until the point of completion, there cannot be any real expectation of that. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the U.S. did not fully brief the Europeans either. In 2012 and 2013, when the U.S.. and Iran negotiated secretly in Oman, the Europeans knew nothing about it. Once they found out, they were actually very, very upset. One can be upset at the United States for it, but had the United States shared that information, there’s also significant likelihood that they would never have been able to be successful.

At first it was negative and because of the optics, the optics are problematic for the United States because it shows that the U.S. is no longer an indispensable power in the Middle East. It showed that the Saudis were very pleased to snub the American side and to essentially humiliate the United States a little bit.

If you take a look at it in the sense of the policy outcome, I think there’s positives and negatives. The positives are overwhelming in my view. If you have greater stability in the region, it reduces the security burden on the United States. It actually helps the United States leave the region militarily, which is what presidents have said over and over again that they want to do, and it’s certainly what the American public wants to do. It is not helpful to the U.S.’s Iran policy currently, because if the policy is to pressure Iran and tighten sanctions and isolate it, well, then having normalization between Saudi Arabia and Iran through China is a clear count against any success in isolating and containing Iran. In my view, that was not going to be successful anyways. The United States has tried to contain Iran for 40 years; it’s not worked. It’s only made matters worse. So I would still put it as an invalid negative point. It’s mostly the office.

Here I think the calculation on the American side has been highly problematic because it was constantly this fear that the Chinese were going to come in and fill the military vacuum if the United States left the region militarily. That’s not what they did. They didn’t bribe the Saudis and Iranians with arms deals and ask them to open military bases on their territory or offer security guarantees, all the stuff that the U.S. always does. Instead, they came in and they helped facilitate, and they are acting as the guarantors of this deal. They filled the diplomatic vacuum that the United States had left because of its miniaturized foreign policy. That’s where the Chinese were coming in. We weren’t even looking at that space because we felt that they had no interest in playing that role.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you say that the U.S.’s policy over the past 40 years towards Iran has been unsuccessful. I wonder if the Carter Doctrine, though Jimmy Carter was the president of the U.S. during the Iranian Revolution in ’79, and I guess it was maybe in 1980 where he proclaimed the Carter Doctrine, meaning that the U.S. would be very interested in defending their military interests in the Persian Gulf and in the region. I wonder if this unwritten deal, if it doesn’t actually contribute to deescalation and if there is some sort of military conflict with Iran, if this would reinforce that Carter Doctrine or where does that stand?

Trita Parsi

Well, first of all, it is not clear that it is a military benefit for the United States in terms of a conflict with Iran by having so many bases in the region, because that means that there would be targets that the Iranians could attack. The Iranians have the capacity through missiles, thousands of them, to rain down on all of these different bases. If the United States were to have an off the horizon, over the horizon posture in which it would have military assets out in the seas, but the ability to move them in, it would still be able to take on Iran militarily, not a full scale invasion perhaps, but without Iranians having the same ability to retaliate. So if the point actually is that Iran is a threat and there’s a build up for that, it’s not clear to me that it actually makes much sense to have all of these bases that the Iranians easily can target.

I think the Carter Doctrine and the Reagan Doctrine, the essence of it was that the United States would not allow any other power, external or internal, gain hegemony in the region or disrupt the oil flow. To a certain extent, some of that essence is still there. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the United States needs to have a constant military presence in the Middle East.

When the Carter Doctrine was put in place, the U.S. didn’t have bases in the Middle East. In fact, most of the bases that the United States have in the Middle East are coming after the mid 1990s, and even more so after 2003. We’re sometimes talking about this as if the United States has had military bases in the region throughout all of its history. It’s absolutely not the case. When these things were put in place, even when it was revised and extended by President Reagan, the U.S. still did not have anything near the military presence.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, why don’t we speak about Israel. Israel is obviously a huge player and has always been opposed to the JCPOA and to any sort of rapprochement or agreement between the U.S. and Iran.

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has been under a lot of pressure recently with all the different investigations into bribery and corruption. He hasn’t really been able to visit the U.S. on any official means or purposes. What is his stance toward the development of an unwritten deal between Iran and the U.S.?

Trita Parsi

Netanyahu is completely opposed to it. I think the key reason as to why we even know about this taking place right now is because the Israelis leaked this information, and they leaked it with the purpose of sabotaging it. The Israelis have been leaking a lot of different things about these negotiations throughout the years for the purpose of sabotaging it. In fact, there was a moment during the negotiations of the JCPOA in which the American side were briefing the Israelis even before the negotiators returned to Washington DC. Then U.S. intelligence picked up that these Israelis were actively manipulating that information and leaking it in a selective strategic way to sabotage the bonds. That’s when the U.S. side stopped those briefings.

There is a report now that Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, talked to the Israelis and were very upset that they had leaked this. So a mystery to me as to why the administration wants to share this type of information so generously with these Israelis when the pattern of leaking is so clear and so extensive.

The Israelis are opposed to this. The problem with the Israelis is that they’re opposed to the JCPOA. They’re opposed to a bigger JCPOA. They’re opposed to a smaller JCPOA. They’re opposed to an unwritten JCPOA. They’re opposed to having no deal at all. So it’s not really clear what on earth they’re in favor of except war, I guess. It’s a mystery to me why the Biden administration has not figured out quiet yet that if they want a nuclear deal with Iran, they’re going to have to have some level of managed unhappiness in Israel. There’s no way around this. If they’re trying to please Israelis and still get a JCPOA, then they’re going to be exactly in the situation they are in right now in which they have neither.

Talia Baroncelli

One of the priorities of Supreme Leader Khamenei as well as President Raisi has been sanctions relief. As part of these unwritten deal negotiations, they’ve been trying to get Iranian assets unfrozen. So $7 billion worth of Iranian assets. I was wondering if these assets could benefit the Iranian people or if they would just get siphoned off to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or potentially to other elite in the country.

Trita Parsi

So first of all, as this deal is structured, the money would actually not go back to Iran. It is Iran’s money, but it wouldn’t go back to Iran. It would stay in a couple of banks and the Iranians would be able to use that money to buy food and medicine. The argument that is being used is that oh, if you give them more money, it would be used for wrong things or bad things. There’s a certain element of truth in that, in the sense that some of the stuff that the Iranian government would buy is probably not particularly good, probably not to the benefit of the Iranian people. But if you let that be the guiding star of how you do policy, it means you actually have to starve the entire country. You have to starve all of them until you manage to get to the political elite. That’s what we’ve done in Cuba, in Venezuela, in Iraq, and it never works. You make a population absolutely miserable for the sake of not making sure that the regime makes it miserable, you’re making it miserable instead. These regimes tend to survive. They tends to become worse and the repression tends to become worse. It’s part of the problem of trying to approach these things solely from some sort of a misguided moral dimension or direction. It ends up actually backfiring tremendously.

We know that once the JCPOA took place, according to U.S. intelligence monitoring how the Iranians were using money, the vast majority of the money that the Iranians made during those short two and a half years that the JCPOA was being implemented actually went back to internal investments and the rebuilding of the country. This is what the U.S. intelligence testified to us in the U.S. Senate. But facts are not particularly exciting, drawing out all kinds of misinformation, however it tends to be far more effective.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, one last final question. Do you think that if this unwritten deal is successful and the money goes back to the Iranian people, that we’ll see more protests on the part of Iranians in the future because they’ll actually have the money to maybe even stop working and to go out on the streets, some form of general strike?

Trita Parsi

Well, $7 billion is not going to create that situation, but it’s going to take a step in that direction. If you actually had a significant improvement of the economy and a strengthening of society vis a vis the state, and a greater desire to not just be so focused on economic circumstances but also your political rights, then that is a trend that we have seen. That’s where countries are moving towards seeking greater political openness.

When you’re starving and you are fighting day to day to just make ends meet, political rights is not your priority. That pattern has been very clear in Iran as well. The economic pressure that sanctions brings about increases the likelihood of protests. It may also increase the frequency of protest, but it also dramatically reduces the likelihood of success in the protests. To be able to change things such as giving women in Iran their basic human rights on these issues, that’s not a three month fight, that’s a lengthy fight. Peak populations that are starving and that are at such short, limited margins economically cannot sustain that fight. They need to have some degree of economic well being to be able to sustain that fight. That’s one aspect.

When it comes to other things with the process, lack of leadership and things of that nature also were, of course, huge challenges that they did not manage to truly overcome. I was fascinated to see, I heard of myself from people, but fascinated to see, I think it was the Wall Street Journal that quoted one person who said, “I’m still angry, I still want to protest, but I also cannot risk being killed because my family will starve.” So again, there is a desire in some elements just to punish you. The fact that it punishes the rest of the population, they either cognitively just manage to ignore or they justify one way or another. But in reality you have almost no examples in history in which a strategy like this has been successful in a country with the specific context that Iran has.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, we can’t ignore the realities on the ground and how the brutal sanctions and U.S. policy towards Iran have shaped Iranian society and socioeconomic issues. Thank you so much Trita for joining theAnalysis.

Trita Parsi

Thank you so much. Great pleasure being with you. Talk to you soon.

Talia Baroncelli

Thank you so much Trita, for joining theAnalysis. It was great to have you.Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you’re able to donate to the show, please go to theAnalysis.news and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. You can also get onto our mailing list and subscribe and like our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. See you next time.

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Practical Radicalism: Community Wealth Building with Neil McInroy

Paul Jay — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 12:39:05 -0400

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One of the few working-class movements scoring victories, democratizing ownership, and gaining momentum is the method of economic development called Community Wealth Building (CWB). Colin Bruce Anthes interviews Neil McInroy of the Democracy Collaborative on how CWB works, what it has accomplished so far, and its potential to lead a “new common sense” movement beyond neoliberal capitalism.

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Colin Bruce Anthes

Welcome to theAnalysis.news. I’m Colin Bruce Anthes. In a minute, we’ll be discussing the growth of community wealth building and its potential moving forward with Neil McInroy from the Democracy Collaborative. Please remember to like, subscribe, ring that bell so you get notifications, and consider hitting the donate button to support our work. Back in a flash.

The last 40-plus years of neoliberalism have seen precious few victories for the working class. The most affluent countries are now regularly characterized by economic crashes, intergenerational wealth gaps, high rates of suicide and depression, stagnating and even declining life expectancies, with the threat of global climate change thrown in as a bonus. But just under the radar, there actually has been a working class movement that has scored some impressive victories and gathered a surprising amount of momentum.

Community wealth building is a highly replicable method of economic development that brings together local procurement strategies with inclusive models of ownership for land and enterprise. It was first used to pull people out of poverty in a very poor part of Cleveland, Ohio. A larger version was then taken across the pond to the city of Preston, England, and Preston went on to be named the most improved city in the United Kingdom by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Since then, it’s gone a bit viral as an international movement.

Community wealth-building initiatives now pop up around the world, from small towns to major cities like Denver, Chicago, London, and Amsterdam. National governments are starting to pay attention as well. It’s made its way onto the $68 billion strategic plan for the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. It’s influenced the way the CHIPS Act on semiconductors was rolled out, while the Scottish government created the new position of a Minister for Community Wealth Building.

So how does community wealth building work? What challenges does it face as it looks to continue its expansion? Could it finally offer a path out of neoliberalism? To discuss this, we have one of its leading practitioners, Neil McInroy. Neil is a former CEO of CLES, the Center for Local Economic Strategy. He’s been an adviser to the Scottish Government on community wealth building, and he serves as the global lead for community wealth building for the “think and do tank,” the Democracy Collaborative. Neil, welcome to theAnalysis.

Neil McInroy

Nice to be here.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Let’s begin with Margaret Thatcher’s most haunting phrase. “Tina, there is no alternative.” I think a lot of people feel that over the past few decades, it hasn’t much mattered who they voted for. They’ve always ended up with some form of neoliberalism on the other side. Can you begin by speaking about how community wealth building offers a viable alternative to neoliberal methods of economic development?

Neil McInroy

Great question. Look, the fundamental woes that the world faces is down simply to wealth and power. Who has wealth? Where does it go? And how that wealth controls the very nature of how many of us, where we work, what we do, and how we nurture the planet with that wealth.

In simple terms, community wealth building is a correction to wealth and power. It’s not just a concept. It actually fundamentally seeks to rewire wealth and power through practical things we can actually do. We could start now, and we are starting now, so it’s practical. It’s step-by-step. It’s got a big attack on wealth and power, but we do it in practical ways. Chipping away. And that’s, I think, its strength. Many other great concepts that are alternatives, but community wealth building is a concept, but also a practical way of chipping away at neoliberalism and the questions of power and wealth.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Can you talk about some of the component parts? You talk about how there are different ways of chipping away, and we can get started very quickly. I think one of the things that make it something that can speedily be accessed is this element of procurement and talking about how procurement can play a role in changing the game in a local community very quickly. Can you talk a little bit about some of those component parts?

Neil McInroy

Yeah. It’s worth just mentioning that from my own experience working 30 years in economic development, I also shared that consciousness with millions and billions across the world– things are getting worse. We’re not dealing with the climate crisis, poverty, and so forth. The way that community wealth building practically does things is to think about wealth, the different pillars, and the dimensions of wealth. I devised a simple way of basketing up wealth, land, a huge source of wealth, finance, capital, if you like, huge sources of wealth, wages, and workforce, a huge source of wealth. Thinking about institutions, different types of enterprises, they’re a huge source of wealth. Also, of course, procurement and public spending.

Now, that is not these five pillars: workforce, finance, inclusive and democratic enterprises, work, and procurement. Now, the interesting thing about procurement, it’s not preeminently important; it’s one of the five. Procurement, particularly public procurement, that’s our money. That’s democratic money. It’s hard to influence commercial, private individuals, or private corporations’ money, but we can influence taxation. We can influence public money. Of course, that represents roughly 30% of the economy, which comes from that public money.

So what institutions, local government, national government, universities, colleges, hospitals, public institutions, how they spend their money is a particularly important feature. It’s particularly important to how we might change how the economy works and where wealth goes. So progressive procurement looks to start using that public resource. If a local government is buying a good or service, their question is then, “Well, how do I see that as starting to turn the dial on wealth and who gets that wealth?” Looking at local procurement, looking at firms who are not just extracting the surplus into the ether of the global economy, but nurturing the place, the environment, and also in terms of having ownership forms where wealth is locked in, employee ownership and co-ops.

So procurement, because it’s a democratically overseen part of wealth, it has an important leverage position in trying to see how we can shift the local economy through progressive procurement practice.

Colin Bruce Anthes

I want to talk about some of those other structures that you were talking about. In some ways, these may seem like common sense points once they’re made, but a lot of the time, when the economy is discussed by mainstream pundits, there’s the discussion of capitalism and government. So you have these corporations with a few owners, and then there’s government over here that owns other things. There’s hardly any discussion of anything in between. There are lots of other kinds of structures than just a capitalist corporation and government ownership. That comes in, in a very important way, in this, does it not?

Neil McInroy

What we need to do is democratize our economy. That doesn’t just mean the state controlled. It means control partly by the state. In certain instances, it might be fit for purpose; this could deal with railways or whatever it may be. But it’s also that wider democratization of ownership, that plural forms of democratization.

Increasingly, certain sectors in different parts of the world, you can see it lend itself to particular forms of democratic ownership, either railways or perhaps state-owned railways. When it comes to things like childcare or some forms of everyday retail, this might lend itself to workers’ co-op or other forms of democratic ownership.

Community wealth building supports effervescence, a flourishing of those democratic forms because, by their very nature, they are not wealth extracting; they are wealth-generating in terms of the people who own those forms. So we should not see this as capitalism versus government, rather than capitalism versus democracy and democratization of the economy.

Colin Bruce Anthes

I think that there is some room here potentially to bring together different kinds of coalitions by bringing in those different options. There was a poll by the University of Chicago in, I think, 2019, and they asked 1,500 Americans what they would prefer to work for, a state-owned enterprise, an enterprise owned by outside investors, or a worker-owned enterprise. The results were pretty staggering– 72% of Americans said they would rather work for a company that was owned by its employees. But it wasn’t just that a huge number said that they would rather work for that. It was the demographics. It included 74% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, 67% of independents, and a clear majority of black, white, gay, straight male and female participants.

We live in this incredibly polarized world where we see different political camps constantly at each other’s throats. Then in comes this other form of inclusive ownership that suddenly has very, very widespread appeal across the political spectrum. That opens up some doors.

Neil McInroy

Yes, absolutely. I think what you touched upon there is that, you said before, common sense. We all know, as citizens and as workers, that when we have more of a stake in something, a genuine stake, then it’s better for us. It makes us feel better. Also, in terms of cooperatives, we know that with a genuine stake, there are no distant shareholders. We are the shareholders, and we act in the interests of both making a viable, strong, growing concern but also mindful of the wider impact of that firm, that enterprise.

This is a common sense understanding. The thing is, though, is that I think the powers that be in neoliberalism don’t want these alternatives. There’s an intentional desire to squash them because it breaks the link between these corporations, excessive profits, and excessive shareholder dividends. So there is almost a natural bubbling up, as your figure has shown, of how people think employee ownership and worker ownership are a good thing. But there is a reaction, I believe, from political forces and from power and wealth and neoliberalism, who do not actually wish to see these things grow because it threatens their own power and wealth.

There’s a political tussle in community wealth building, which I think is an important dimension. Whilst I’ve said community wealth building is practical and you can get on and do things, there is also a political dimension if we’re really going to bring this to scale.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Yeah. We’ll touch a little bit more on some of the challenges that are faced in order to keep this movement expanding. Let’s go through a little bit more of the core practices. Then we’ll go into some examples of how this has operated in hands-on practice so far.

We’ve talked about employee ownership and cooperatives. We talked about local procurement. Then there starts to become this element in which these start to play together a little bit. You get more local investment happening in companies where the profits go into the hands of lots of local people. Then we’re talking about really seriously changing some trends. Do you want to talk a little bit about how these different pieces start to build into a complex?

An E.U. Double Standard With Massive Impact on the Global Environment

Paul Jay — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 12:55:14 -0400

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The European Union is exporting more than 10,000 tons of bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides a year to megadiverse countries despite having banned these chemicals from its own farms to protect pollinators, according to research by Public Eye & Unearthed. Lynn Fries interviews Laurent Gaberell on GPEnewsdocs.

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LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries, producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. In this segment, guest Laurent Gaberell will discuss the new Public Eye investigative report that puts the crucial role of pollination and the global threat to biodiversity and food security posed by bee killing pesticides in the spotlight.

A report that for the first time reveals the full scale of the European Union export trade in bee killing pesticides. The report sheds light on the double standard that’s been at play as the EU continues to export huge quantities of this pesticide despite having banned the use of these chemicals in their own fields.

Our guest, Laurent Gaberell, joins us from Public Eye in Lausanne where he’s an agriculture and food expert on the research and policy team. Public Eye is a Swiss not-for-profit organization with a longstanding record of fighting against injustice that has a significant link to Switzerland. Welcome, Laurent.

LAURENT GABERELL: Hello.

FRIES: So Laurent, we’ll be talking about key findings of this new Public Eye report. Start briefly by first telling us something about Public Eye and also your own area of expertise on the research and policy team. And from there, the collaboration between Public Eye and Unearthed in investigating Europe’s export trade in banned pesticides. Which I understand this report is the most recent collaboration.

GABERELL: Yes, indeed. So you summarized it pretty well. Public Eye is a Swiss NGO acting as a watchdog. Looking at what Swiss multinational companies and in general Swiss politics are doing abroad mainly in poor countries of the Global South.

We look at all the sectors, the economic sectors that are key in Switzerland such as the banking sector, the trading sector, the pharmaceutical companies and pesticides because in Switzerland we have the number one in the market which is called Syngenta. This is the reason why we are interested in the topic of pesticides. It’s because in Switzerland we have the number one of the market.

I’m the food and agriculture expert at Public Eye dealing with this topic of pesticides, looking at Syngenta and its activities in developing countries. We’ve been looking now for several years at the topic of banned pesticides being sold abroad by Swiss companies or banned pesticides being exported from Switzerland or the European Union to poor countries.

This new investigation on the export of banned neonicotinoids from Europe is the latest in a series of investigations that we’ve done as a collaboration with Unearthed, which is the investigative unit of Greenpeace UK, looking at the export of banned pesticides from Europe.

FRIES: So this banned pesticide that we’re talking about, I understand, is chemically related to nicotine. And you get a clue of that from the name. Is that right?

GABERELL: Completely right. Yeah. It’s from the same family. So we’re talking about neonicotinoids derived from the same family as nicotine. But in this case developed to act as insecticides to protect crops.

FRIES: This new investigation has for the first time revealed the full scale of the European Union’s export trade in neonicotinoids or neonics for short. Start by talking about what has been called out as the double standard in the EU export trade of these neonics and from there we’ll get into key findings of your investigation

GABERELL: This case of the neonics is really the strongest example of the double standard at play when it comes to regulating dangerous pesticides in the EU.

Those insecticides were banned from all outdoor users in the Union in 2018. And then they were finally taken out of the market in 2020 because of the danger they pose to pollinators and bees. There was like huge evidence, overwhelming evidence of the impact that they can have on bees and pollinators.

So, the European Union decided to take them out of the market a few years ago already. But they keep allowing companies to produce those chemicals in Europe to export them to third countries.

It’s really the classic example of this double standard where you ban dangerous pesticides in your own country because you consider it too dangerous but you keep exporting it to other countries. That’s the double standard at play.

But, I was saying this is the strongest example of this double standard because in this specific case of the neonicotinoids, the European Commission considered them such a threat to pollinators worldwide and to food security that they even decided to act on the import of food made with those chemicals.

So in February this year, the European Commission decided to ban, to lower down to zero the residue limits for neonicotinoids in food. And what does that mean? It means basically that you’re not allowed anymore to export to the European Union foods that contain residue of neonicotinoids.

And the European Commission in its own decision to ban those residues said that there’s a big problem with the decline of pollinators worldwide. That the decline of pollinators represents a threat to food security. Because they’re pollinating crops and that there’s large evidence that neonicotinoids play a key role in the decline of bees and pollinators worldwide.

And so the European Union needs to take action and it’s not enough to ban those pesticides in the Union, the European Union. The threat is so big that the Union needs also to act on the import to make sure that no food that is consumed in the European Union was made with those bee-killing pesticides.

So that was quite a strong decision that was made by the European Commission in February this year (2023). It shows you how big a threat those neonics represent in the view of the Commission. But at the same time, what we are showing in this investigation is that the European Union keeps exporting those pesticides to third countries.

So they ban the use of those pesticides in the Union to protect bees. They even ban the import of foods made with those pesticides to protect bees and pollinators but they keep allowing their export from the European Union to other countries.

FRIES: Laurent, what kind of volume are we are talking about here? And what companies and countries have you identified as involved in this EU export of banned bee killing pesticides.

GABERELL: What we found is that in 2021, the European Union approved the export of more than 13,000 tons of ban

Haiti’s Predatory Ruling Families and Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier – Jafrikayiti part 2/2

Paul Jay — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 16:22:18 -0400

In part 2, Jafrikayiti recalls that after Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown, Canada Haiti Action Network asked officials on Parliament Hill in Ottawa as to why free and fair elections weren't being held in Haiti. The response was that Lavalas, the movement headed by Aristide, "occupied too much space," and foreign actors wanted to "level the playing field" to ensure that Lavalas wouldn't regain power. Furthermore, he delves into the myths surrounding former policeman Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier. Chérizier, whose victims have notably not been members of the predatory Haitian oligarchy, has subsequently been armed and granted impunity from arrest. Jafrikayiti calls for genuine solidarity with Haiti from people in the U.S., Canada, and France in order for there to be a paradigm shift in policy.

Paul Jay and Freddie deBoer Discuss Independent Media, Censorship, and Hate Speech Laws

Paul Jay — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 15:39:14 -0400

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A discussion about independent media and ownership, censorship, self-censorship in media and a discussion about hate speech laws.

This interview was originally published by Plebity.

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Jyotishman Mudiar

Hello and welcome. I am Jyotishman. I am the host of India and Global Left moderating

this conversation between Freddy and Paul as part of Plebity’s Free Speech and Left Conference.

We are joined today by independent journalists Paul Jay and Freddy deBoer for a conversation

on independent media censorship and hate speech laws.

Paul Jay is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is the founder, editor-in-chief, and host of theAnalysis.news, a site of political commentary and interviews. He is currently working on a documentary with Daniel Ellsberg titled How to Stop a Nuclear War, which is based on Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine.

Freddy deBoer is an independent journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of ‘The Cult of Smart How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice’ and his newest book is ‘How Elites Aid the Social Justice Movement’. Freddy is a self-styled old-school Marxist and writes regularly on his subtext about politics, Marxism, education, police reform, and other topics.

Welcome Freddy and Paul. I wanted to start with you, Freddy, on hate speech and hate speech laws. I read your article where you have argued that hate speech laws don’t work. So why don’t we start with your opening statement on that and then Paul respond to that?

Freddie deBoer

Sure. I mean, I think the first thing to say is always to point out that there is no such thing as a hate speech exemption to the First Amendment in the United States. One of my frustrations is that very often when liberals and leftists are talking about the concept of hate speech, they often talk as though there is such a thing as an already existing statute of hate speech, what it is legally in the United States. There is no such category as hate speech in the United States. You can say this is hate speech in a sense that you think is descriptively true, but there is no legal category of hate speech. And I also think that it’s almost entirely pointless to talk about the creation of one.

In order for there to be a hate speech provision for the United States, you would have to make an amendment to the Constitution to create that exception to the First Amendment. And among other things, an amendment to the Constitution requires three-quarters of the state legislatures of the United States to go along with something, which is just totally fanciful under current political conditions.

I think that Republicans would rightfully feel that any kind of a hate speech code written into the United States Constitution would be used primarily as a cudgel against them. I mean, I guess you can sort of theoretically define an idea of like a partisanly neutral, ideologically neutral hate speech code, but in practice, it would almost certainly be used more against conservatives than against liberals and the state legislatures of Republican countries, of Republican states, excuse me, we’re not going to get on board with that.

Hate speech laws don’t work because I think we have very good evidence that they don’t. The most obvious examples are countries like Germany and France. Germany and France both have aggressive anti-hate speech and anti-far-right extremism statutes on their books. They both ban explicit Nazism. Nazi parties are not allowed. Nazi iconography is banned in both of those countries. They both have a robust implementation of various laws in place to try to stop the spread of far-right parties, and they also have a huge far-right problem. Both of these countries that have really actively attempted to stamp down neo-Nazi propaganda and neo-Nazi parties have a significant neo-Nazi problem.

What you see in both cases, particularly in Germany, it happens over and over again, is that a party will rise, a far-right party will rise. It will have a lot of iconographies that are new but is in the vein that we’ve seen from fascist parties, and far-right parties in the past, and they will eventually be criminalized by the German government.

The Department of Interior, I think, is usually who’s responsible for those sorts of things. And then, once that happens, they formally disband. Maybe a few of their leaders will be arrested, but then they will simply scatter, and then they’ll reform and reconstitute new parties. You can ban the party. You can ban the particular expression of these ideas in individual parties and their specific slogans and the names of the parties. But the ideas that underlie them, right, are popular with a certain subset of the population. And so, they will continue to be expressed in some way in the political process.

In both Germany and France, we’ve seen the increasing salience of these parties in electoral politics. The sitting…

Jyotishman Mudiar

Okay. Sorry. So, can we just stay here and let Paul respond, and then we can come back to you?

Freddie deBoer

Sure.

Paul Jay

Well, this is not my preoccupation, but I don’t believe in some absolutist free speech. And there are certain forms of hate speech laws, which I think can work. I’m living in Canada right now. We have a hate speech law here. And as far as I understand it, the experience with it has not been so bad. It’s essentially aimed at overt forms of racism and fascism. I mean, overt. And I personally have no problem with that. Now, whether you could have a law like that in the United States constitutionally is a whole other matter.

But if we’re talking about, is this something I would be for, I am for it. And I am not for, for example, which I do understand might be the case in Germany, that there should be a law against any interpretation of history. I don’t think ipso facto, by saying there wasn’t a Holocaust, that’s automatically hate speech. Although maybe it is, I don’t think any court should be involved at this time in deciding how history is discussed. But hate speech, whose real intent is to mobilize people against a specific race, group, or ethnicity, I have no problem banning that.

As I say, I think the Canadian experience on that is not so bad. But either now or a little later in the conversation, I think we really have to broaden this conversation. This isn’t about a particular hate speech or censoring hate speech without looking at the context.

I’ll get into it more later, But there is a war going on throughout this world. And the one thing that’s really banned from mainstream media, is to discuss the nature of this war. And you can’t even talk about this without getting kicked off and never invited back. You can’t say the most obvious thing, which is we live in a class society. And throughout the world, there is a class war going on every single day.

Now, sometimes this breaks out into state-to-state war, the aggressive invasion by Russia and Ukraine, the Americans backing the Saudi war in Yemen, you can go on. But I lived in Baltimore for eight years, nine years. There is a class war against black workers every single day. And even the Department of Justice, under the Obama administration, investigated the Baltimore police force and concluded that every single day in Baltimore, people’s constitutional rights are being violated. Why? So that there can be a cheap labor force available for institutions and corporations in Baltimore.

In the context of this kind of war, let’s then talk about censorship, and hate speech. But on the face of it, in a very narrow interpretation, meaning very overt racism, very overt fascism that could lead to mobilizing people, sure, I don’t have a problem with that. Let’s, there’s a reason why so much money is invested in propaganda. It’s because it works.

Jyotishman Mudiar

Freddie, would you like to respond to Paul’s point that it does work? And he makes the point that in Canada, it seems to be working at this point.

Freddie deBoer

Sure. I mean, I think that Canada is distinct from the United States in all manner of ways, for, you know, a variety of historical and cultural reasons. I just don’t believe that, of course, we’re in a class war. I think the first thing I would say in response to that is one of the things that really disappoints me about the contemporary left is that the definition of who the biggest enemy is has changed within my lifetime. I understand the real enemy, the person who does the most damage, is a guy who puts on a $2,000 suit and goes up to a tall building on Wall Street, and as an investment banker, ruins the lives of ordinary Americans every day. But in my own lifetime, as someone who’s been an activist in left circles for his entire adult life, the focus has fallen farther and farther from that person; that immensely wealthy tycoon on Wall Street. It is now more and more a Proud Boy or some other, you know, part of the lumping fascist movement in the United States who shows up at a protest and throws some rocks and punches some people who have no actual power to affect anything in the world.

I mean, to me, the way to win the class war is to understand that the people who are the greatest danger to the working class, to the environment, to people of color, to LGBTQ people, et cetera, ultimately are the people who hold respectable positions of power within the established economy. It’s not the fringy John Birch society types. I think those people are despicable but I don’t think that they actually control the sort of bulk of the disruptive power in the United States.

I would also say like, look, look at an issue like acceptance of interracial marriage. Nowadays in polling, even Republicans poll north of 90% of people approve of interracial marriage. But as recently as the early 1990s, a majority of Republicans were consistently saying that interracial marriage was immoral. How did we achieve victory in moving that needle over time? We didn’t ban the idea that interracial marriage is wrong. We didn’t carve out an exception in the Constitution and say, you can’t argue this. Rather the force of the idea, the fact that we were morally correct, right? The fact that people lived lives demonstrated that these marriages were not destructive. The fact that we demonstrated our values in a lived sense, created a natural organic rejection of the idea that interracial marriage is bad.

I think that that’s just always going to be in the long term, a more permanent and durable way

to achieve change than by trying to ban things.

Paul Jay

Yeah. Well, I don’t think I disagree with a word of that. Any attempt that goes beyond what I was saying to ban overt racist and fascist language that is meant to incite people to attack in a racist and fascist way. Anything else, I’m not for, anything. And of course, you have to win by persuasion.

In fact, why is there such a Trumpist movement? Why did 75 million people vote for Donald Trump? It’s not because the majority of them are racist and fascist. The majority of them are not by any means. The majority of them are just fed up.

I interviewed a guy in the lead-up to the first Trump election where he won in a diner outside Baltimore. We asked him how he felt about Trump. And he said, “Well, he’s a liar. He’s a scumbag. I don’t trust him. I’m going to vote for him. What’s that tell you about what I think about the other guys?” The whole system is toxic. And it’s toxic for what you just said. It is how stuff is owned. It’s the concentration of ownership.

The concentration of ownership, particularly in the financial sector, which has become so parasitic that far more money is in this casino capitalism than investing in anything productive. People are suffering from that. And the corporate Democrats and the liberal face of this system have simply written off those 75 million people that voted for Trump. They don’t give a damn. And they till the soil for such crazy shit to be believed. So if you want to deal with the crazy shit, no, you don’t ban the crazy ideas. You don’t ban people that believe in this theory or crazy theory. What you do is invest in a public education system right across the country. And you actually pay teachers properly. And you train teachers to actually know history.

Look at some of the papers kids are writing in school about the Second World War. They absolutely haven’t got a clue who were the Nazis, who were the Soviets, who were the Americans. And they’re getting A’s. Why? Because the teachers don’t know any better than the kids do. If you really want to deal with the descent of so much of the population into a kind of, I don’t know what else to call it, a kind of ignorance that makes people susceptible to being recruited into a theocratic fascist movement, it’s the complete collapse of a decent public education system outside of major cities.

Freddie deBoer

Yeah, I think casino capitalism, I think, is just the right term. I think that one of the things that I think that we could all do a better job of sort of explaining to everyday people is the degree to which financialization is not just found in the financial industry anymore.

One of the things that emerged from the financial crisis in 2008-2009, a lot of people didn’t know but became apparent. For example, General Motors was making most of its money, the majority of its profit were not coming from selling cars. It had created a financial bank that was attached to it and was making bets on the economy. And the same thing was true of the major airlines, the same thing was true of General Electric.

One of the things that happen when you have this financial sector that is promising people such incredible returns, you say, well, look, you can go and you can build a factory and you might make 5% a year, or you can invest with me and you can make 20% a year. When you have that kind of a margin because you’re making these extremely risky bets like they were making with mortgages and mortgage-backed securities and derivatives and all that stuff; ordinary investment can’t compete.

If I just have an old-school factory in which I’m building widgets and I can employ people and I can send these things out, then that looks like a much less attractive investment opportunity to investors.

One of the things that happen is that financialization spreads further and further across the country because in order to compete with the interest rates that some of these banks are dangling in front of people, institutions that are not fundamentally financial have to use those shenanigans too, which of course is fine until inevitably whatever cracks are in that financial model happen to break and we have explosions as we had in 2008 and 2009.

Jyotishman Mudiar

Yeah, I just wanted to quickly add that the implication goes beyond the country and particularly its impact, the impact of finance capital on the global South has been very, very extreme.

As we speak, we are seeing country after country, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, facing the balance of payment crisis. And one of the roots of this was this liquidity was following the global financial crisis in the global North that went into these bond markets, through the bond markets into these countries of the global South. And the moment interest rates are high in the global North, capitals are switched back, leaving the country’s money into depreciation, trades falls, balance of payment goes into a sort of complete toss and then IMF goes in and imposes the austerity and eventually the burden is transferred into the working people.

Sorry for just this addition since I come from the global South, I thought there was this great moment. I want to quickly switch from this discussion, but if we can just quickly put this thing away since Paul mentioned school education and I’m taking university as part of this and maybe my question is particularly relevant to university. What are your thoughts about the rise or this conflict around free speech in university, particularly with regards to what we generally understand as cancel culture or issues of diversity, equity and inclusion? Do you see a particular threat in that or is it blown out of proportion by the right wing as a sort of weaponization?

Paul Jay

Well, I think the answer is both. I think it does get blown out of proportion by the far right and I also think it gets exaggerated by sections of the left. We are facing an existential threat. The climate crisis and the risk of nuclear war have never been more threatening, so you cannot judge an issue without starting there.

So if a particular professor or a particular thing is being said, it doesn’t mean, it doesn’t offend someone’s identity, it doesn’t restrict some rights. I’m not saying people should lay down in the face of it, but is it the primary issue? And if we need to build a unity of the people to force real policy, real action on climate and real policy to reduce the risk of nuclear war, then everything else has to be judged in the context of that.

You got to pick your battles and it serves the interests of the oligarchy, to use Bernie’s words or whatever, to keep people fighting over these other issues.

Right now the abortion issue is after years of hurting the Democrats because it pushed so many votes towards the Republicans. Now all of a sudden it’s galvanizing some vote that might help the Democrats and it’s clearly a legitimate fight for women to control their reproductive rights, but there are a lot of serious people, honest people, ordinary people who are religious and in good faith, not in bad faith, think abortion is against their principles. I don’t think women should have to give up their rights because of that.

On the other hand, there should be an enormous effort, including knocking on doors in all the areas where people vote for Trump to say, look, okay, we’re going to disagree on this, but we’re faced with an existential crisis. Human civilization could end. So how about we agree at least to reduce the risk of nuclear war? If you don’t get the climate science, let me tell you what I know about it. And, you know, we all know there’s lots of us aren’t going to agree on some of these other issues like abortion or even, you know, gay marriage. Okay. We won’t agree. But in the context of what we’re facing, the threat we’re facing, you know, if there was like a meteor about to hit the earth, you want to be arguing about abortion? Well, that’s the kind of moment we’re in.

And the problem is the corporate Democrats, which essentially are the political face or much of the financial sector, they don’t want effective policy to deal with climate. Because what is effective policy? It’s a kind of central planning. You actually have to plan a green economy. And it can’t be done by anywhere other than government. It’s clear the market can’t do it. And as much as even they know, like you listen to Larry Fink, who runs BlackRock, he’s fully aware of the facts of how dangerous the climate crisis is. But they don’t want a kind of government planning.

Now, it’s not they’re against central planning. They don’t mind when the Fed bails out banks. What is that but central planning? The bloody Pentagon is central planning. There’s lots of central planning, but essential planning done by a government and politicians very beholden to the financial sector. But they don’t want to open the door to a transformation to a green economy that will require pulling back on some of the profit centers they have in fossil fuel companies and such, even though they know human civilization is threatened by it.

Freddie deBoer

Yeah, I would also say that my response is like, it’s both at the same time. Look, I’ve written a lot about civil liberties on campus. I do fundamentally think that conservative students and conservative professors should have the right to hold and express the opinions that they do. I also think that it’s very fraught for the American university system if it really does become entirely one side of the political spectrum because that means that it’s much less defensible.

I mean, one of the things, there’s been this terrible defunding of America public education, higher education in the last 20 or so years. And one of the things that Republican state legislatures always do is they say, one of the reasons we’re cutting funding is because these are just leftist indoctrination camps anyway, et cetera, et cetera. I do think that there’s, of course, in a certain sense, these are tempests in a teapot, but I think it’s worth asking, why have young people today become so habituated to expressing their problems in a way that is very sort of parochial, so very like my campus is the world and I need to clean up my world and I appeal to the dean and he’s the highest authority there is, and my problems are all about offense and my desires are to limit people’s language.

I think you have to look at that and say that these are young people who have grown up with a sense of disenfranchisement. That, in other words, part of the reason why so many young people spend so much time with the language policing and with freaking out about who gets cast in what movie and having social media freak-outs is because they’ve grown up into a political system in which they don’t believe they have representation. In other words, they look at the political system in which they’re embedded and they don’t see themselves as having a voice, as having an opportunity to really influence things.

One of the things that I’ve found myself is there’s a really interesting combination and kind of dark combination among a lot of young people of great idealism but also nihilism, in the sense that they have very developed political instincts and they have a strong sense of right and wrong, but they don’t believe that they can actually create change. They don’t think that anything’s going to get better, and so I think that part of the reason why you see these perpetual blow-ups on college campuses is because it’s one of the only places where people of that age feel that they have any power. They don’t think that they can get a political system that actually represents their interests. They don’t think the economic deal is going to get better for them. They’re looking at a world where healthcare, education, and housing just keep getting more and more prohibitively expensive. Most of these kids don’t believe they’ll ever be able to own their own home and they’re probably right, and so they see this very pessimistic outlook on the world and they say, well, look, here at the place where I spend $30,000 a year in tuition checks and where we can raise our voice and yell at administrators who can give us what we want, here we’re going to exercise our power. It’s the expression of this is the only place I feel enfranchised, the only place I feel empowered, so I’m going to become more and more controlling of that space.

Paul Jay

Well, I’m not sure that’s so bad. Where else are they going to fight except in the school where they spend most of their time? What I’m more concerned about is the way universities suppress discussion indirectly by who they hire. For example, the Israel-Palestine question. I mean, how many professors have either lost their jobs or are scared about their jobs if they talk about what’s really going on in terms of the apartheid state in Israel against the Palestinians? The institutional power is far stronger than anything the left is capable of doing. That said, I think it’s important, don’t divide the students on secondary issues. I don’t mind closing down a member of the Nazi party if they’ve been invited to speak. Go there, scream at them, disrupt. It’s fine with me. I think suppression of overt Nazism, again, there’s a difference between conservative opinion, right-wing positions, and overt Nazism. But the main thing the left should do is promote as much open discussion and debate.

If you believe facts are on your side, you don’t fear discussion and debate. And I wish, I hope the left one gets over so much sectarianism. How much left just winds up spending its time attacking other portions of the left? And don’t divide the student body over secondary questions. There’s some polling recently, even amongst Republicans that consider themselves seriously conservative Republicans, it was something close to 20% of them thought climate is a legitimate threat, the climate crisis. 10% of those Republicans thought it was at the amongst their top three concerns, the climate crisis. So how about trying to win those people over and talk about climate and try to subdue the fights on some of the questions you know you’re going to disagree upon. Again, the meteor is about to hit the earth. You know that movie Don’t Look Up. Well, we’re in that kind of moment. We better be smart and tactical to try to build as much unity. I’m not naive.

There’s a section of the population that because of indoctrination, however, the belief system, there’s a lot of money being invested in getting people to believe that Trump is a vehicle of God. And the Christian theocracy, I think is a serious, it’s not the Proud Boys that are a problem. It’s amongst the elites that are using their money to mobilize Christian nationalism amongst the people. It’s a very serious threat.

Mikey Weinstein from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who do a lot of work on pushing back against Christian theocracy in the military, they think as much as 30% of the military have been recruited now actively into Christian theocratic forms. The real story of January 6 on Capitol Hill was not what happened on January 6. It was the lead up to January 6 where 10 former secretaries of defense, the former Supreme Commander of NATO and an editorial in the Financial Times, all on January 4th, essentially said a coup was in progress. And this is, by the way, another form of censorship because you can’t say this at all in mainstream TV. They don’t want to acknowledge there was a coup in progress on January 4th. They want to just focus on Proud Boys on January 6th, which is the more irrelevant part of what happened.

But as I said earlier, propaganda works. And there’s a lot of money invested in mainstream media, online media, social media, to recruit and persuade people. But how do we deal with it? Even if you advocated banning it, it’s nonsense. You have no power to do so. We need to talk to people and persuade people. And so as far as free speech on campus goes, if facts are on our side, are meaning the left, and I think they are, let’s rely on them.

Jyotishman Mudiar

Freddie, do you want to respond very briefly before I shift the conversation?

Freddie deBoer

No, I mean, I think that’s all said. I think that there, again, as sort of little sympathy as I have for these Republican voters that we’re talking about, again, I think that what they share with these very liberal college students, again, is a sense of disenfranchisement, which is part of, which is, I mean, in one sense is crazy, right? Because no one is more overrepresented in our political system than the average white male Republican. But at the same time, if you look at things like QAnon or the rest of these wild conspiracy theories, I think part of what unites all of them is a sense that the system is broken down, change is impossible within the system. And so QAnon is like this apocalyptic sort of conspiracy, right? Q will come back and there will be a great cleansing and there will be fire and blood in the streets, et cetera. And that sort of stuff often comes from a sense of among ordinary people that the system is rigged, which it is, and that change isn’t really possible. And so that prompts people into these extremes within their own little affinity groups, because you won’t think that you can work within the system to create change. You’re always going to sort of gravitate towards just getting more and more intense within your own little niche.

Paul Jay

And the other thing I would add to that or suggest to people on campuses and such. Daniel Ellsberg was a militant who released the Pentagon Papers. I’m doing a film with him now on his book, Doomsday Machine. He was a nuclear war planner. I interviewed Larry Wilkerson a lot, who used to be Colin Powell’s chief of staff. They were militant, militant cold warriors. They really believed the Soviet Union could try to have a first strike against the United States. They thought it was trying to take over the world. They believed all that stuff. And then they came to realize it was bullshit.

So even people that believe in the QAnon stuff, and I agree what was just said, it’s out of desperation. You pick up, you believe in this stuff. Your own life doesn’t really validate it. So if you’re going to talk to people, listen, some people are nuts. They’ve been driven mad by a culture that’s essentially irrational, and maybe you can’t talk. But most people who voted for Trump are not completely nuts and are not QAnon. And even if they are, just set that stuff aside. Just say, listen, do you think there’s a climate threat? Do you think climate crisis is real? So argue on that. Forget the rest of the stuff. Most of the ordinary people don’t have an economic interest in these crazy shit. But there’s a gang of billionaires who do have an economic interest in people believing this stuff. So what Fred said earlier, yeah, let’s get the attention back on these guys in the $2,000 suits, including the ones that are working around Trump, that are behind Trump. And let’s try to have as much unity amongst people as we can.

Jyotishman Mudiar

A lot of stuff about beliefs is due to alienation. If you read military or war histories, you very quickly realize how easily people understand the ravages of war, just by being involved, which they generally may not have understood. And thinking about this alienation, this is a good segue into my next discussion, which is the internet. This is the sort of our great moment of transformation, the new market, sort of the way Carl Polanyi would say the great transformation of the 28th century. This is our great moment, perhaps in the last 20 years. So I want to start with you, Paul, about the issue of censorship in the digital market. And there are issues about arbitrary usage of algorithm. There are issues about involvement of government. And there are issues about corporations in the digital market using our data to manipulate us, or even turn ourselves into commodities.

So can you, if you can just tell your story very briefly, but also respond to this sort of the moment we are living in, and the issue of censorship that comes with the internet space?

Paul Jay

I’ll try to do it quickly. Yeah, I run a website called theAnalysis.news. And I did this story about January 6 on YouTube, we have a YouTube channel, where I pointed out that the real issue was the events that led up to January 6, not January 6. Again, about all the various mainstream sources that were talking about an attempted coup. Essentially, Christian nationalism within the military.

And in the video, I also pointed out that the corporate America had decided they’d had enough of Trump and wanted a peaceful transition. One, they don’t so fear a Biden presidency. They know in the final analysis, there may be some legislation they don’t like, but it’s not going to challenge their essential power.

But something I pointed out in the video that was reported in mainstream media and then disappeared, the doors of Capitol Hill were breached at 2.10 in the afternoon. At 3.10 in the afternoon, the Association of American Manufacturers called for Vice President Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump. That means the preponderance of the elites had decided that this guy had gone nuts and they couldn’t trust him, and they feared this kind of coup.

Well, that video, because it targeted Christian nationalism, because it exposed how corporate America’s role in this, and I should say the Association of American Manufacturers loved Trump right up until those days. They got everything they wanted in terms of deregulation and tax cuts. YouTube took that video down and gave me a warning, official warning.

Jyotishman Mudiar

And it was selectively you, not the big media.

Paul Jay

Yeah. Well, what happened is they said, because we had a clip of Trump speaking to the crowd just before they went to Capitol Hill, we were promoting the idea that the election was stolen and promoting disinformation. Now, it was obvious in the video we were denouncing Trump and not just…

Jyotishman Mudiar

Just to be clear, the big media could run the same video.

Paul Jay

They all did. That same clip had been on every single mainstream media on YouTube. So then, as an experiment, I took out the Trump clip and I added more, because I knew more about the story of the role of Christian nationalism in the lead up to January 6th, and I published that story. I also raised the issue in the first and second story. What was Mitch McConnell’s role in this? Because nobody wants to talk about that.

The three guys that oversee the Capitol Hill Police are the Sergeant of Arms of the Senate, the Sergeant of Arms of the House, and for some reason, the congressional architect. But the guy who really runs as senior is the Sergeant of Arms of the Senate. Who does he report to? The majority leader, Mitch McConnell. And the chief of police of the Capitol Hill Police was actually quoted as saying on the morning of the 6th, he went to the Sergeant of Arms of the Senate and asked for the National Guard to be called in then. And according to the chief of police, the Sergeant of Arms said to him, well, I have to go ask my boss, Mitch McConnell. And I never heard from him again, says the chief of police.

Well, in my report, Christian nationalism, focusing on Mitch McConnell’s role and the lead up. So because I took out the Trump piece, they didn’t take the piece down. Then I tried to buy an ad to promote the piece. I got a letter from YouTube and then from Google saying, this piece spreads disinformation. You are now banned from advertising on all Google platforms forever. You, Paul Jay, me personally. So then I interview Mikey Weinstein. I do a piece about Christian nationalism. I don’t even talk about Trump’s role. It’s just about Christian nationalism in the military and the role in the lead up to the 6th. They take that piece down. I get a second strike now. I’m one strike away from the channel being closed down.

The only reason I didn’t get closed down, I know Matt Taibbi and Matt wrote a piece about this and contacted YouTube and they knew he was going to have a piece exposing all this. And so they actually did an apology. They said they made a mistake and they took away my lifetime ban and put up a couple of back the stories, but it hadn’t been for Matt. They would have closed the channel down.

So we cannot leave deciding what’s legitimate information and misinformation up to big tech. They cannot have the right. I mean, these things should be publicly owned anyway. If there’s going to be something like a YouTube, it should be publicly owned. There’s just no way a private corporation. And then even if it’s publicly owned, there has to be a process within which there needs to be real democratic public participation into what information is there. And even there, it shouldn’t be about banning stuff. It should be about properly financing independent news and investigative journalism so you can actually persuade people.

And just to add one thing, I do think this Dominion voting machine lawsuit against Fox, maybe that’s a good model. Maybe we need to create a fund for class action suits against broadcasters that publish bullshit and let it be fought out in a courtroom with evidence where you can actually prove they’re knowingly publishing lies. Because how much of this war after war is based on mainstream media promoting outright propagandistic lies to support the war? Maybe we should have an ability to have class action lawsuits against this. I mean, obviously the real solution is real democratization, real public ownership of the media, diversified media, which means we have to find ways to gain more political power. It’s not just coming up with some ideal scheme in our heads.

Jyotishman Mudiar

Freddie, go ahead.

Freddie deBoer

Yeah, I think we’re in a very weird time in terms of the balance of power between independent media and corporate media in a certain obvious sense. It’s never been easier to spread your message as an independent purveyor of the news or opinion. The technological tools have never been more accessible or more widespread.

My father was, he was an avid fan of the Village Voice, but also of these little all weeklies, printed newspapers from different cities across the country. When we were growing up, when I was growing up in Connecticut in the 1980s and 1990s, in order to get his hands on a bunch of these all weeklies, he had to just have friends in those cities, just send them in the mail every week or every month or whatever it was. In other words, there was just no distribution system. For the Village Voice, you could get it delivered, but for most of these little papers, if you wanted to get one and you didn’t live in that town, you had to have someone send one to you. Some of them had subscriptions, some of them didn’t.

Now, obviously, everything’s online. It’s incredibly cheap and easy to set something up. When I first started using the internet seriously, you had to pay money for photo hosting. You had to put down real money just to put some photos online, and now you can get unlimited whatever.

At the same time, we have this series of very real and major challenges to establishment or mainstream media. There’s not a single show on CNN that still gets more than a million viewers regularly. There’s been a terrible collapse in the number of local newspapers across the United

States in the last 10 years. The total number of people employed in newspapers was cut in half between 2008 and 2018. You’d think that the balance of power has shifted decidedly into independent media. In some ways, it has, but in a certain sense, it’s bad for everyone, I think.

A fundamental problem we face is that actual news, news gathering process, has never been a big moneymaker. When the New York Times sends a small team of journalists to Syria, and they’re there for three months, and they have to pay for their plane tickets, they have to play for their food and their lodging, they have to pay for security, they have to pay for translation, they have to pay money to grease the wheels with the local authorities, etc., that all costs a lot of money. The number of people who read the stories from Syria that come out of that is quite low compared to other things. Hard news, unless it’s about very topical stuff, hard news just doesn’t do big numbers.

What’s always kept the news making industry afloat is bundling. Your newspaper had the hard news up front, but it also had the personals, so the classifieds, the demise of which was a horrible financial blow for local newspapers, the classified ads, which you don’t need anymore because you have the internet. They had the opinion section, which is much cheaper to produce than news. Again, a news story could require you to send reporters into the field for months at high expense, whereas an opinion takes one person just thinking and writing for a few days. You had the recipes, you had the comics, Garfield, etc., you had the crossword.

One of the things that the internet has done is that it has broken the bundle up, where if you want a crossword, there’s just an unlimited number of free crosswords that you can do online. You will never run out of crosswords to do for free online. If you want comics or cartoons, there’s an unlimited number of free cartoons you can read online. If you want opinion, like the kind that I produce, you can look up a million newsletters and websites and blogs and whatever and get all that opinion.

The problem is then how does the news get subsidized? I think that this is a really deep question and a really powerful one because that old model, I am thankful for my success at creating a newsletter, but I don’t have the skills or the funding or the wherewithal to go and investigate what’s the story with the drug war in Mexico right now in the cartels, etc. You have that problem there. Then you have the problem that Paul just talked about, which is that while we have the accessibility of all of these tools, they’re ruled from the top down by a financial elite who can do whatever they want because they’re privately held tools.

We’ve seen with Twitter, recently Elon Musk was upset with the company’s substack and so he throttled the reach of substack newsletters on Twitter. He owns the company so he can do whatever he wants. YouTube can arbitrarily decide who can run a clip of Trump and who can’t. Ultimately, they’re not a public agency. They’re a private company so they can do whatever they want. That’s the other half of this, which is that yes, we have all these incredible digital tools for distribution, but at the end of all of these digital tools always, there is some corporate bureaucrat who has the ability to pull the plug, dictate standards, twist the algorithm, do whatever they want.

In a certain sense, it’s never been easier to reach an audience, but the state of actual news gathering is very, very fraught and your ability to disseminate your message to your audience is always at the whim of a corporation.

Paul Jay

Let me just add a couple of things.

Jyotishman Mudiar

I’d also like you to call to say at least two sentences about how do you look at real news, having founded you and some kind of that kind of experiment. How easy or difficult it is to do that?

Paul Jay

Well, real news, I’m now at the analysis.news. I’m not working at real news anymore for acouple of years. Well, it goes to what I was about to say, which is in spite of, what’s that joke about everybody has the right to walk in the front door of the Ritz hotel? Not everybody can afford the room. Yeah, we can all get to YouTube, but who’s actually dominating YouTube is all the mainstream media companies. What’s one of the most visited sites in the world? CNNs and New York Times is one of the main sources of online news. Anybody can start a YouTube channel, but can you actually break through to a large audience? That’s where YouTube’s algorithms can really get to choose the winners and the losers.

When Julian Assange was arrested, in his handcuffed hands, he was holding my book. It was a book based on interviews I did with Gore Vidal called The History of the National Security State. The next day, Dan Ellsberg said to my wife, he said, you be careful, you’re really on their radar now.

The same thing happened. I was in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray uprising, and we did a lot of coverage, giving a real class interpretation. In fact, our building was the headquarters for a lot of the organizing that was going on amongst the protesters. I was really on the radar then too because the local fusion center where the NSA and the FBI and the state police and probably the CIA all work out of this fusion center with the local police department. Well, they were all infiltrating, watching our building.

Then this reporting I did on January 6th, clearly an algorithm kicked in that said, okay, this guy has already been flagged. If you look at our numbers on YouTube, they greatly drop after they start taking down our stories. Matt Taibbi has been doing these stories on Twitter, some of which has shown how the FBI algorithms talk to the Twitter algorithms. That’s got to be the same case on YouTube.

Here’s a practical suggestion. The progressives that are on the hill or even at state levels,

if they can do it, have a hearing where you force YouTube to reveal the algorithms and whether or not they’re talking to the FBI and try to actually out the way the state agencies are creating agendas for social media. That would be a useful service because there’s simply no question is happening.

Anyway, just back to your point about the Real News. I’m sure there were things we could have done better and same thing what I’m doing now with the analysis.news, but it’s very hard to break through to a mass audience, almost impossible unless you’ve got enormous amounts of money to promote and buy advertising. Even then, like in terms of mainstream TV media, it doesn’t even matter how much clout you might have. Often, they’re not going to let you on anyway.

I think I’m an interesting talker. Maybe other people don’t, but a lot of people seem to. I never get invited on anything. Nothing. Occasionally, I used to get invited on RT and then I said to RT, I said, fine, but I’m not going on RT without critiquing Russia, which I did. I never got invited back on RT again. Same thing. If you talk in real terms about what’s going on in the world, you don’t get on mainstream TV. I’ll give you an example of something which is nuts.

I interviewed Senator Bob Graham, who was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, co-chair of the joint congressional investigation into 9-11. He told me on camera that Bush and Cheney deliberately disorganized the Americanintelligence agencies, and two, didn’t just do that. They actually actively facilitated the 9-11 attacks in a few ways, including that famous memo, bin Laden plans to attack America.

Graham told me that the normal protocol after a presidential briefing is called a principles briefing that goes out in the next day or two. Heads of agencies, secretaries of departments, undersecretaries. If there’s anything in the presidential briefing that requires action for national security reasons, it’s in the next principles briefing. Well, Graham tells me in the next principles briefing that memo bin Laden plans to attack America was omitted. Graham says this was part of actively facilitating.

I emailed every major news organization in the country. It makes no difference whether Graham’s right or wrong. It’s just he’s a serious guy. The fact he said this is news. I will give you this video clip for free. All you got to do is credit me with doing the interview. Not one news source, not a single one, including people I actually knew personally, not a single one followed up and asked me.

There’s certain lines you must stay within to break through, whether it’s mainstream media or on social media. It makes no difference whether you’re fact-based. You could go outside the lines of the official narrative. It’s very hard.

What is the solution? The solution is, we have to really find ways that alternative media cooperates more, creates something bigger with more clout. Bernie Sanders’ campaign shows you can raise a ton of money online. It isn’t a hopeless situation, but we have to find ways to create some clout and do get people elected. Then once they are elected, they got to use that to expose these kinds of issues.

Imagine having a guy, like I phoned a guy, I’ll end quickly. He ran World Affairs for one of the coverage for one of the major newspaper chains. I knew him. I said, Bob Graham, serious guy, right? Oh, yeah. Intelligence insider. Oh, yeah. Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Here’s what he just told me. I told him and he says, holy shit. I said, I got it on video. You can have it. Christ. I knew this guy.

I’ve got a mainstream news network background. My documentaries have been on all the major networks, A&E’s and BBC’s and you name it. My television show was a debate show for 10 years on CBC. I was the exec producer. I’m not coming from nowhere. I’ve got some mainstream credibility. Zero. They wouldn’t touch the story. Even there’s so much credibility to it

We have to build something with our own resources. If there’s plenty of money amongst us to do this, if we can break out of this, all of us competing with each other.

Jyotishman Mudiar

Freddie, I give you the final words. If you can also tell a little bit about your experience with the subscription driven sort of media, how independent you can be and do you feel like making a broader impact at all, if anything?

Freddie deBoer

Well, it’s interesting. I am frequently brought to things like this. I’m often sort of invited to be a voice of sort of independent media. On the other hand, my last book came out from McMillan. My new book is coming out from Slamid & Schuster and I’ve been in the New York Times and the LA Times and the Washington Post and the Guardian and Harper’s, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, look, I’m very lucky to be successful making the newsletter that I do. A really good post will get like 120,000 views typically. I’ve had a couple of posts that have been sort of just by luck have sort of gotten to like 200 or 250,000. I’ve been blogging for 15 years and I have long since given up on understanding the gods of what gets read and what doesn’t. I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I have labored over a piece for days and days, spent hours and hours on it, researched deeply, cared very much about it, thought that it was a piece that had a real chance to do something and it just goes nowhere. And then will dash something off in an afternoon that doesn’t mean that much to me and it will be one of my biggest pieces.

Certainly, there is a trade-off to be had between sort of the freedom of doing my own thing and the broader audiences of the other sort of doing mainstream stuff. I frequently have to sort of let young writers down and let them know how poorly mainstream places pay.

I mean, what I very often will hear from young writers is some version of, well, I’m sweating it out now, not making a lot of money blogging or working for sort of low prestige sites, but someday I’ll make it to the New York Times or I’ll make it to New York magazine or I’ll make it to Harper’s and then I’ll make real money. And I have to tell them places don’t really pay as well as you think they do. Like it’s really-

Jyotishman Mudiar

How much does the New York Times pay for a column?

Freddie deBoer

So the online only column that I put out in 2022, I think, I put out a piece about the American socialist movement for the New York Times. It was 1800 words, 2000 words. I got $750 for it. Print stuff, when I was in the print magazine, I got $4,000 for 3000 words. But that was a long, long process with a lot of sort of things like that, which is certainly not bad money, but if you’re going to do it as a freelancer, you’ve got to be churning it out all the time.

So one of the things for me right now is if I am thinking about doing, okay, I want to get a bigger audience, I’m going to write for a mainstream publication. I have to sort of do the math in my head, even if I am committed to doing that, where on a per word basis, writing for my newsletter makes me much, much more money. It makes me much more money than writing for the New York Times or for whoever.

But at the same time, my newsletter audience is largely a self-contained one. I have about 40,000 people on my mailing list. The average post gets about 40,000 or 50,000 views. Like I said, occasionally they go to 100,000 and maybe three or four in the history, in the three-year history or whatever of my newsletter, they’ve gone to 200,000, 250,000. But it’s usually the same people. So it’s sort of like a hermetic environment where I’m getting paid well to be a writer, which is the only thing I ever wanted, but I’m not really influencing the broader conversation. And then every once in a while, a post will go big. But like I said, I’ve given up on figuring out why.

Yeah. And the thing is my ability to publish in various places, mainstream places, has very little to do with the quality of my recent work. It has everything to do with who is cool with who. What person who likes me recently became an editor somewhere, who owes me a favor, who doesn’t like me, even though this piece is perfect for them. There’s just a lot of high school stuff, unfortunately, that really deeply influences the freelance market for writing.

So I certainly haven’t found the right lane. I think in a bigger picture sense, I don’t know. It’s a very real concern to me that most cities don’t seem to be able to sustain a local newspaper anymore. There were fundamental jobs being performed. It’s like the Cincinnati Inquirer, which did a pioneering story about how the Dole Corporation was committing crimes and fomenting violence in Central America. I think the Cincinnati Inquirer is down to six pages a day is the length of the paper.

Paul Jay

Can I add just one final sentence? I’ll make it really short. Yeah, I think what people watching this should do is use people like us on this panel, other sources of analysis and news to help inform you. But we’re not ever in this stage of human history. Is this media going to become influential on a mass scale? It ain’t happening.

So what needs to be done is take and get what you can from us and then get involved in organizations that are knocking on people’s doors, bypass the bloody media, go talk directly to people and persuade and discuss and listen. There’s organizations doing this all across the country. We aren’t going to break through. Let’s be realistic. It ain’t happening in this stage of capitalism. They know how to keep us in the margins, but they can’t stop people from knocking on doors and talking to each other. So use us to go do that.

Jyotishman Mudiar

Absolutely. I guess if enough of us start doing that and who knows, perhaps on the ground, there is more ground swelling and maybe capitalism, if not is toppled, it is forced to change character to at least make it somewhat of a command economy from this very sort of free range casino capitalism that you say. We’ll have to leave it there. Thanks, Freddy and Paul, for your time. It was wonderful being with you.

Freddie deBoer

Thanks for having me.

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“The Most Dangerous Man” Turns 90 – Peter Kuznick on Daniel Ellsberg

Paul Jay — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 14:21:24 -0400

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On the occasion of the death of Daniel Ellsberg, we republish our interview with historian Peter Kuznick who looks at the significance of Ellsberg’s fight against America’s insane nuclear war strategy, his exposure of the lies of the Vietnam War and his continuing fight against the American war machine.

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Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, please don’t forget the donate button and the YouTube subscribe button.

April 7th is Daniel Ellsberg’s 90th birthday. Ellsberg is the original whistleblower. The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and helped end the Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger called him the most dangerous man in America, but not as we have mistakenly believed for many years because he was about to pull back the curtain on U.S. policies in Vietnam. Kissinger was terrified that Ellsberg was about to reveal an altogether different set of papers. The other Pentagon Papers, ones that would reveal the extent and sheer madness of U.S. nuclear war plans to the public.

Dan Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931 after graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in economics.

He studied for a year at King’s College Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship between 1954. In 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps serving as a rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander. 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation and a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision making.

His book, Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, revealed what he called the institutional madness of American nuclear war planning. Edward Snowden said this long-awaited chronicle from the father of American whistleblowing is both an urgent warning and a call to arms to a public that has grown dangerously habituated to the idea that the means of our extinction will forever be on a hair-trigger alert. Ellsberg’s book exposes much of the mythology that was the basis of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and was used to justify the creation of a massive military-industrial complex.

In 1967, Ellsberg worked on a top-secret study with Defense Secretary McNamara U.S. Decision Making in Vietnam 1945 to 68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1971, he gave it to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and 17 other newspapers. Ellsberg’s subsequent trial on 12 felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on the grounds of governmental misconduct against him, leading to the convictions of several White House aides and figuring in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers was an important contribution to the pressure on Nixon to end the Vietnam War. Now, joining us to talk about the extraordinary life of Daniel Ellsberg is historian Peter Kuznick. Peter is a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He’s the author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activist in 1930s America. He and filmmaker Oliver Stone co-authored the 12 part Showtime documentary film series and book both titled The Untold History of the United States. Thanks very much for joining me, Peter.

Peter Kuznick

Happy to be with you, Paul.

Paul Jay

So this is Daniel’s 90th birthday, and I have to say he’s still active as hell and still campaigning against nuclear weapons and speaking out on so many issues. I wish I had his energy now, never mind at 90, but let’s start with the issue of Dan’s role as a nuclear war planner and what he has revealed over the years about American nuclear war strategy and the significance of it.

Well, Dan first learned about the possibility of atomic bombs when he was 13 years old from one of his middle school teachers. Before that theoretically, it is possible to make an atomic bomb. This was before Hiroshima and from that point on Dan was very, very worried about the prospect of doing so. Once the bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his fears were confirmed. At Harvard, he was actually studying economics and in his graduate studies, he studied decision theory, especially decision making, in a situation where there was a lot of ambiguity, and that’s what his Ph.D. dissertation was on.

He went to work for the RAND Corporation after his years in the Marines because he wanted to work on problems of preventing a nuclear war. You have to remember, he starts really working there in 58, I guess, permanently onboard and 59, and at that point, especially in the aftermath of the Soviets launching Sputnik in late 1957, October of 57 Americans assumed that the Soviets had an advantage in terms of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The Soviets had actually tested their first ICBM before Sputnik in the late 50s. There was a lot of discussion about the missile gap, the idea that the Soviets not only had an advantage, but they could launch a preemptive strike. You might remember the Gaither Report and the Gaither Report warned that the U.S. is in the worst peril of our existence, that the Soviets could launch a first strike on the United States that could effectively wipe the United States out.

So when Kennedy got elected in 1960, Kennedy had run in part on the basis of this missile gap, which most people believed to be true. Kennedy takes office and he quickly finds out that there is no missile gap, then he gets McNamara to continue the study, and we soon discover that there is a missile gap, but the United States has a vast advantage. The United States is ahead in most categories of at least 10 to 1, in some categories of 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union.

Dan at that point was working on McGeorge Bundy’s staff. Been with the Rand Corporation, was now working with McGeorge Bundy. He was in the Defense Department and he was assigned to do several things that were quite important. One was he wrote the speech for Roswell Gilpatric that basically lays out the reality of the missile gap, one which they admit publicly how far ahead we were, and he saw that as a way to warn the Soviets not to do anything extreme because the United States had this capability, which, of course, Khrushchev already knew, but he also, then for Bundy, McGeorge Bundy, pose certain questions to the Pentagon, which people did not know before.

The main question he posed was how many people would be killed in a U.S. nuclear attack. It was delivered by Bob Komer in the name of President Kennedy, and the Pentagon responded in two parts. The first part talked about how many Russians and Chinese would be killed. The second part talked about how many people overall would be killed, and what Dan then discovered in this response was that the Pentagon estimated that between 275 million and 325 million Russians and Chinese would be killed from America’s weapons.

Then we also found out that 100,000 West Europeans would be killed, 100,000 in the surrounding countries. Overall, the total was going to be 600 million dead from America’s attack alone, which means it’s more than 100 Holocaust’s as a result from America, because America’s plan at that point was to shoot off our entire arsenal at one time. There were no plans for gradation, no plans for a limited response, a gradual response. It was to shoot it all off at once.

So at least 600 million, partly depending on certain wind effects. So that was terrifying to them, and that does not even include the effects of Soviet weapons in their targets in Europe and the United States. Dan at that point did not know about nuclear winter, because he would have realized that almost everybody on Earth would have been killed from that kind of mass detonation, but Dan soon starts to discover other things because he becomes the leading expert on command and control of nuclear weapons.

What he discovers over this period is, first of all, there is no longer just one finger on the nuclear button as people have believed that Eisenhower had delegated authority to the theater commanders to use nuclear weapons if Eisenhower if the president were incapacitated or if they thought it was necessary and they were out of communication, but then had discovered in some of his other studies during this time was that these commanders were out of communication with the White House, the Pentagon often hours a day, partly because of weather conditions, partly because cables got cut.

So this idea that the president was the only one who could authorize the use of nuclear weapons was a falsehood that Dan understood. Then he also understood that Eisenhower gave them the authority to subdelegate this same authority. So if the heads of the numbered armies and air forces, for example, there are others in the field, were out of touch with their commanders and they thought it was necessary to launch, then they had the authority to launch also under certain circumstances.

So what Dan realized is that there was not one finger on the nuclear button. There were probably at least dozens, maybe scores of fingers on the nuclear button. Beyond that it kept on getting worse. Beyond that, he understood that America’s policy at this point, especially in NATO, was to not only threaten to launch, but actually if European countries were being threatened, the United States could launch a preemptive attack against the Soviet Union and later against China.

Paul Jay

Which wipe out much of Europe.

Peter Kuznick

Which would be suicidal and Dan understood the insanity of this. That’s why when he talks about the doomsday machine, he means it quite literally. He means that there are the rational, thinking people behind our nuclear strategy, which was the heart of our defense policy that we built up into this vast machine, because you know, and I put a lot of this in Untold History, much of which I learned from Dan, and that when Eisenhower took office, we had approximately a thousand nuclear weapons and they were in the hands of the civilians, but Eisenhower quickly starts transferring them to the military control, and when Eisenhower was budgeting cycle is finished now, not even his budget cycle, his presidency is finished in January of 1961.

We now have no longer a thousand. We now have close to 23,000 nuclear weapons. When Eisenhower was budgeting cycle just finished, the U.S. has 30,000 nuclear weapons. So Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex was not a metaphor and it’s not an abstraction. Eisenhower knew this because he created the military-industrial complex for the crazy reason that he was afraid that by unbalancing the budget that we would run this huge deficit and that would wreck the American economy.

He thought that nuclear weapons were cheaper than conventional weapons, and so he downplayed the army try to control the defense budget and to do so with the cheaper means of defending the United States with nuclear weapons, but it’s the beginning of this total insanity, which consists to this day and that’s what Dan’s dedicated his life to, combating. The reality is that we’ve created this insane doomsday machine. It’s not only irrational and indefensible, it is suicidal.

Paul Jay

And so much of this nuclear war mythology, which the missile gap is one of the big pieces of, is a foundation of the whole rationale, justification for the military-industrial complex and so much of it is just bullshit. And apparently Kennedy was told this while he was campaigning for president. Is that true? He was told there really wasn’t a missile gap, but he keeps saying it as part of his election campaign. Is that right?

Peter Kuznick

I don’t think so. Allsopp was the one who was advising Kennedy on this, and the numbers he was giving him were totally insane, but also the same thing with the demands from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you know, and the strategic command, they wanted 3000 more ICBM’s, McNamara said the lowest number he could convince them to accept was the increase of a 1,000 ICBMs. How did that look to the Soviets? How did that look to the Kremlin?

They knew that the United States had a vast superiority ready and its saw the United States was going to add a thousand more intercontinental ballistic missiles to the arsenal. In the Kremlin, they were convinced that the United States was preparing for a first strike, that there’d be no other reason if they had such a vast superiority already to massively increase the number of ICBMs unless they’re preparing for strikes.

Paul Jay

And they were.

Peter Kuznick

Well, they had plans to do so. Kennedy thought it was absolutely insane when Kennedy was briefed upon this, he commented to Dean Rusk “and we call ourselves a human race”.

You know, Kennedy hated this as did Khrushchev, and we’re very lucky. Kennedy once said, I’d rather my children be red than dead, the opposite of Eisenhower, who said I’d rather be atomized than communized, and if Eisenhower had been in office during the Cuban missile crisis instead of Kennedy, we wouldn’t be here today having this discussion. Had Barack Obama been in office instead of Kennedy, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We are lucky that probably the only president who would have resisted during the Cuban missile crisis, any president we’ve had since Roosevelt was Kennedy.

Paul Jay

All right. Let’s hold the Obama peace, because that’s rather interesting and we’ll get to that. My understanding is in this period, which I guess is around 1960 or just after Kennedy gets elected, that the Army and Navy were saying that the Soviet Union might have had 100 to 200 ICBMs. But the Strat, the Air Force Strategic Air Command, led by Curtis LeMay, who’s the guy who firebombed and nuclear bombed, Japan, he was telling the White House and others that the Soviet Union might have a thousand ICBMs, and then Ellsberg finds out that the actual number is four and that that changes his whole head. He describes himself as quite a militant cold warrior up until that point.

He was a cold warrior from the beginning, as was his father, who was a lifelong Republican and Dan did think that the Soviet Union was the enemy and they had to be resisted. He initially thought that the threat of nuclear war did not come from the United States. The danger of nuclear war came from the Soviets, and so his initial strategy was, what do we have to do to preempt a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States?

So the missile gap is relevant in that context, and he discovers, as you say, that the United States has 40 ICBMs. The Soviets only have four, initially, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the gap was even much faster than that. So Dan discovers that early and that’s starting to change his thinking and that original psyop that he studied where the United States is going to launch everything and lead to about 600 million deaths, lrther reinforced his thinking on this.

That was Dan’s initial interest, as a nuclear war planner when he went to work for McNamara in the Pentagon in 64 and he started to work on Vietnam, but his real concern was with nuclear war and how to prevent nuclear war, and a lot of this concerns about Vietnam are, again, in the context of preventing nuclear war.

Paul Jay

Well, elaborate that.

Peter Kuznick

Well, it was interesting. The more studying I did on this period, the scientists especially, the Chinese test their nuclear bomb in 1964, and so the American strategy in Vietnam is even back in 54 when the French were being defeated at Dien Bien Phu. According to Operation Vulture, Nixon and John Foster Dulles offered the French three atomic bombs to use against the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu.

Paul Jay

OK, hold on. The Americans offer the French nuclear weapons and in other words, suggesting they should.

Peter Kuznick

Well, yes, the United States and Nixon thought so. Eisenhower thought so and others thought so, but they wanted to get the agreement of Britain and France before they would do this. And the British and the French, fortunately, were much more rational than was Eisenhower and Nixon at that point. You have to remember that Eisenhower, his goal was to erase the line between nuclear weapons and conventional weapons. He said this taboo is limiting what we can do.

But American policy by 54, the New Look defense policy was to rely on nuclear weapons in our first line of defense. This is one of the insanities of Eisenhower. Eisenhower was not a warmonger. He’s not bloodthirsty, but his policy was suicidal or as Dan likes to say, a homicidal policy, and we knew that from the mid-50s. That’s why in 1955 that Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issue their famous Einstein Russell Manifesto. The last thing that Einstein ever signed was the letter to Bertrand Russell signing on to this manifesto.

And what it says basically is that if there was a nuclear war and London and New York and Moscow were wiped out, that within a few hundred years the human species would recover, but the real danger in a nuclear war with hydrogen bombs is that all of humanity would be wiped out, and so that’s their warning. They and I think it was nine other leading physicists and philosophers around the world signed off on this and Dan was aware of this, but thought that the real threat at that point was coming not from the United States, from the Soviets, which he learns later is not the case.

But Einstein’s nuclear policies. It was back in 1947 that Lewis Mumford wrote that editorial, that statement, gentlemen, you are mad. That these look like normal human beings going to the office with families and children and dressed in suits and ties with the name of president and secretary of defense and general. He says they go to the office and they carry out these plans for annihilation, for human extinction. They’re madmen, you know, but it’s been rational people with rational plans who seem like normal human beings who are bent upon this compulsion for mass extinction, and that’s the craziness that Dan has been campaigning against his entire life ever since. This makes him, you know, why we love him so much.

Paul Jay

And when he releases the Pentagon Papers, his plan is to reveal all this insanity about nuclear strategy, and then the documentation gets wiped out in a hurricane because it was buried somewhere.

Peter Kuznick

Dan had not only copied the Pentagon Papers, he had copied everything else that was top secret in his desk at Rand, and so he had thousands and thousands of pages on all of America’s insane secret war plans. Our nuclear war plans. Dan thought that after the Pentagon Papers crisis was over, he was going to then release all of the nuclear papers, and that was what he thought was even more important than the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War.

But he knew that the FBI was going to come and arrest him because of the Pentagon Papers leak, so he gave these other papers to his brother, his brother Harry, an older brother, and his brother also realized that when Dan got arrested, he was going to come and search his place. And so he put them in a cardboard box inside of a green plastic garbage bag, then decided to bury them in the local dump and he buried them under a stove so it could be identified where they were and can get them again when he was ready to.

But then there was a tropical storm that summer and all of the things in that dump got misplaced. The stove was 100 yards away from where it was originally, and they couldn’t find all the nuclear papers, and they searched for a year and a half and they got all kinds of digging machines and everything and got thousands of bags, but not the right ones, and so they never found it and never found all these. Since then fortunately, a lot of them, or some of them at least have been released and declassified. One of the things about them, he might not remember when you and he talked about yesterday. He has a photographic memory of every document that he ever saw 60 years ago.

So in Dan’s brilliance, you know, came in number three in his class at Harvard, and Kissinger, who describes him, as you said, for being the most dangerous man in America, had publicly given him credit for having taught me more about Vietnam than any other living person, and that everybody recognizes Dan’s brilliance.

And going along with that is this precise photographic memory when it comes to all the things that happen and the documents. He was able to recreate a lot of this over the years.

Paul Jay

And this ends up in his book Doomsday Machine. And I should, for all transparency’s sake, explain that I’m working with Dan on a documentary series on exactly that book on Doomsday Machine.

So. How does a man who’s a Marine? Who’s a cold warrior. Who’s life up until this point is devoted to the military-industrial complex. How does he get to a point where he releases the Pentagon Papers, is ready to release the nuclear secrets, and willing to go to jail for it?

Peter Kuznick

Well, Dan had a deep sense of morality, fortunately for the world. And he also had an abhorrence for lies, mendacity, and deception. He’s really a democrat a small d democrat and believes that people and policymakers need to have access to information. Dan believes in transparency, believes in honesty, believes in decency, and has an abhorrence for war and killing. And so when he saw that firsthand, when he talked about Vietnam, he went to work in 1960 for his first day at work for MacNaughton in the Pentagon was August 4th, 1964.

And that was the day the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and he saw what was happening and he saw that initially, they thought there was an attack, but as more and more intelligence came in, they realized that it was very dubious that there was any attack.

Paul Jay

Peter, for younger viewers that don’t know what we’re talking about, just a quick 20 seconds on what the Gulf of Tonkin incident was.

Peter Kuznick

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was U.S. ships, two U.S. ships in these waters off the coast of Vietnam had allegedly come under attack, and the belief from the North Vietnamese and the belief was this was aggression on the part of North Vietnam in response to which the United States launched attacks on North Vietnam. This was August 4th, 1964, but it very quickly became clear that from the commander on board the USS ships there, that there were all kinds of interference, that things that they thought were an incoming attack were not an incoming attack.

But we decided to launch this anyway, and McNamara and Johnson issued a series of statements that were baldfaced lies about what had occurred that night and the intelligence was coming and Dan realized beforehand that it was very, very dubious and that they were using this as a pretext for escalating and expanding the war in Vietnam. To give it a little more context, Dan and McNaughton, his boss, were asked to come up with a series of statements that were basically a series of lies that could be used in defense of American policy of aggression there.

That was Dan’s first day and first night. He stayed up all night in the Pentagon working on this, following the incoming intelligence reports. So Dan effectively shifted when he went for MacNaughton in August of 64 from the nuclear issues to Vietnam, and so he started to get all the intelligence reports. He asked for everything, and every day they would bring in a stack of reports taller than he was. So eight feet of reports, mostly top-secret reports about what was going on in Vietnam.

So Dan had a front-row seat to the lying, the mendacity. You have to remember that during the Johnson administration they developed the term called the credibility gap because Johnson would. You know, we talk about Trump and Trump’s seven-plus thousand lies about everything. Johnson might not have been quite the pathological liar that Donald Trump was about everything. When it came to Vietnam Johnson lied constantly. And among these things. That Dan was discovering during these years, because he goes to Vietnam first in 1961, goes back to Vietnam in 1965, and there he is working for the infamous Ed Landsdale, the master counterinsurgent, there.

And he becomes friendly with John Paul Vann, who is a very honest critic of the war, and then Dan is in charge of doing assessments of the pacification programs in the countryside. He stays in Vietnam as a civilian until 1967. Then he gets hepatitis and has to return to the United States. So between the documents he was reading and his on-the-ground experience, Dan was learning firsthand, was that what we were saying about the war and the reality of the war were two different things.

Then in 67, Dan is asked to work on the Pentagon Papers, which was a secret study of the war from 1954, even earlier up through 1968. That was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Dan had worked through Rand on the first volume, but he actually got access to the entirety of this top-secret document that he stored in his safe at Rand. So what Dan was learning over these years was that we were saying that not only could we win the war, which was not true, but that we were winning the war.

And for example, when Dan was in Vietnam, he met with McNamara in 66 and he briefed McNamara. McNamara wanted to know what Dan was finding on the ground and Dan told him that we were not only not winning, that we were losing ground. That is the best we could say. It was a stalemate, a quagmire. The worst was we were putting more and more troops in and getting nowhere, and McNamara agreed with him and he said that the situation is worse.

It’s much worse than it was a year ago, and then McNamara gets off the plane, gets in front of the microphones, tells the press and the others who were there, we’re winning the war. Things are improving. Conditions are getting better. Dan saw first hand that kind of lying, repeatedly, as did others. There were at least a thousand people Dan said who knew the reality was the opposite of what was being said. And what was being said? We were winning. In reality we were not. So when Johnson talks about putting in another twenty-five or fifty thousand troops and he says, and that’s all we have planned, the generals and Dan and others knew that they had plans to put in one hundred and fifty thousand more troops, but they were lying to the American people. They were lying to the Congress and that this is not the way a democracy is supposed to work. So Dan understanding the horrors of what we were doing, the futility of what we were doing, the immorality, and the mendacity, Dan knew he had to do something.

So his thinking was changing, and he met Patricia, who he is madly in love with and Patricia was covering the war as a journalist and also helped influence Dan. They went to anti-war marches together and Dan knew that he had to act and figure out ways to act. So he told everybody he spoke to that this is wrong, it’s immoral, it’s a lie, that we’re actually not going to win and we should get out immediately. He was opposed to the bombing.

He hated the thought of the bombing. He hated the troop escalation and knew that this was a losing policy and we were lying to the American people. So then he works on the Pentagon Papers and by 1969, he’s at his wits end about what to do to try to help end the war. So Dan decides to copy the Pentagon Papers. This is two years before they were released, and then Dan tries to get them to congressmen, to senators.

He tries to get to friendly people, to Robert Kennedy. He wants Charles Mathias, Fulbright, other senators, to get them to release this publicly, put it the congressional record, go before the public and say that we’ve been lying and lying and lying, but everybody’s got their reasons for not doing it. So finally Dan decides that the best way to do it is to go to The New York Times. He contacts Neil Sheehan because he knew Neil from Vietnam.

He knew that Neil was strongly opposed to the war and so he trusted Neil Sheehan and gave him access to these records, the Pentagon Paper because what the Pentagon Papers showed is that administration after administration after administration had been lying about the war and that the public didn’t know this and much of Congress didn’t know this. Dan thought that leaking the Pentagon Papers would probably not end the war, but it might help nudge the country in that direction.

And so finally, even though Neal was playing dirty and dishonest with Dan about what The Times was planning, The Times, finally, I think it was June 13th, 1971, finally starts publishing the Pentagon Papers. They didn’t even give Dan any warning that they were going to do so, which was very, very immoral. It was not hard to figure out that Dan was the likely source for this. The FBI was already onto him for this.

Dan and Patricia, go underground. Part of the story that’s not very well known is that the papers were for a time stored in Howard Zinn’s living room in Boston and working with Dan to distribute them to the newspapers was my friend Gar Alperovitz, who wrote the book Atomic Diplomacy, which really was one of the great books about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And Gar is still very, very active through Democracy Collaborative and other things on nuclear issues and on economic transformation.

Gar is still out there doing great work, but his role in all this didn’t come out until a couple of years ago. So they get it to The New York Times. The Times starts publishing it. The Nixon administration freaks out and they get the Supreme Court to issue an injunction on The New York Times to halt publication. And so Gar then brings them to The Washington Post and then The Washington Post starts to publish and then The Boston Globe.

So then The Post is shut down and the Boston Globe and then The Globe is shut down and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and they’re shut down.

Paul Jay

Shut down by injunction from the government

Peter Kuznick

Yes to stop the publication. They finally get it to 19 different newspapers that are publishing parts of this and the Supreme Court lifts the injunction and says that they do not have a right to stop the publication.

Paul Jay

Now, what’s the historic significance of the release of the Pentagon Papers and how much did it have an affect on eventually ending the war?

Peter Kuznick

Well, it’s interesting because Nixon and Kissinger freak out and if you watch Oliver’s movie, Nixon’s got a lot of this and they decide that they’re going to destroy Dan Ellsberg, right? Nixon says, we’re going to show him going to the bathroom in front of the American people and we’re going to destroy him, and in those meetings there, Kissinger apparently mouthing Colson, talks about different things about Dan, all these lies, but then he says that Dan Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America as you said in the introduction.

Dan had known Kissinger at Harvard. He had lectured in Kissinger’s classes a couple of times. Kissinger had tremendous respect for Dan, but Kissinger was such a slimy and duplicitous, two faced lying, kind of power hungry creep in all of this. So then they create the plumbers unit. The plumbers unit was set up to stop the leaks and the leaks were coming from Dan initially, but it was the things that they did to Dan that ultimately bring down the Nixon administration.

So the plumbers unit, they also wiretapped Dan’s phones illegally. They broke into his psychiatrist, Dr. Fielding’s office to get more compromising material. They put a hit on Dan of 12 Cubans from the CIA who go back to the Bay of Pigs, who are told to compromise Dan totally, to incapacitate him totally, is what their objective was. Fortunately, they didn’t get to him that day, but it was those things that ultimately brought down the Nixon administration.

A lot of the other things in Watergate, Nixon could have probably defended himself against on national security grounds, but they found all of these other things. It was based on that. So when the trial finally comes in 1973, Dan and Tony Russo faced one hundred and fifteen years in prison for what they had done under the Sedition Act or the Espionage Act of 1917. They prosecuted Dan and he was facing 115 years. A life sentence for trying to stop the Vietnam War.

But it ultimately happens is this is what brings down the Nixon administration, which is fortunate because Nixon intended to restart the bombing, but because of the Watergate investigation and scandal, he wasn’t able to do so, and we were finally able to end that war. The American part of it, in 1973, the overall war in 1975. The war, as you know, was horrific. Robert McNamara came into my class. He said he accepts that 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war.

As I say, and I think you and I have discussed that, I ask my students, what they know and they don’t know that much about it, but they have almost all been to the Vietnam Memorial walls and those black granite walls, marble, two big walls, 492 feet long have the names of fifty-eight thousand two hundred eighty Americans who died in the war. The message of the Vietnam Memorial is that the tragedy of Vietnam is that fifty-eight thousand two hundred eighty Americans died 492 feet long.

If those walls contain the names of all the Americans, all the 3.8 million Vietnamese, the more than a million Cambodians, Laotians, the Thais, the Brits, the Aussies, everybody who died in that war, it would be more than eight miles long, and that’s what should be the memorial to the Vietnam War. And that would be an anti-war memorial like the Okinawa Memorial that has the names of everybody on all sides who died in the fighting in Okinawa, but the Americans are not quite there yet, but Dan was there. He saw the tragedy and was willing to risk his life in order to stop that war.

Paul Jay

Now, Dan is, as I said early on, is still as active as ever campaigning against the threat of nuclear war, and he says he thinks the threat is as dangerous now as ever. This idea that because the Cold War with the Soviet Union’s over somehow nuclear weapons aren’t a threat anymore is a complete illusion that it’s still very dangerous.

So let’s talk about the current situation, but start with the comment you made about Obama, that if Obama had been president during the Cuban missile crisis, we might not be talking today.

Peter Kuznick

Well, the thing about Kennedy was that from the Bay of Pigs on. Kennedy had been sort of a war hero in World War Two in the Navy, and after the Bay of Pigs, he refused to send reinforcements to back up the bomb in Cuba and he had told them beforehand he wouldn’t, but he got berated by top officials in the Pentagon, Lemnitzer and the CIA, who thought that under that pressure, Kennedy would have to cave in and send in the military support for the invading Cuban exiles and CIA exiles in the Bay of Pigs, and he refused to do so.

After that, he developed this deep mistrust and he talks about later those CIA bastards, those Joint Chiefs, sons of bitches. He said the first advice I’m going to give my successor is don’t trust the generals. Even on military matters, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and he says at one point, if somebody comes in here and they want to talk to me about economic policy or an insurance issues, he said, I have no trouble contradicting them, but you assume that the military and the intelligence people have the superior knowledge and insight. They don’t. You can’t trust them even on these things. So Kennedy had a deep mistrust, and during the Cuban missile crisis, he was often the only one in the room who resisted bombing and invading Cuba, and that’s why I’m saying that Obama, I’m not saying Obama is a bad guy or was bloodthirsty.

It is bizarre that he won the Nobel Peace Prize while fighting two wars and bombing multiple other countries, but Obama just never stood up to the generals that way. Obama just did not have the backbone. Obama gave in time and time again, even though he knew, I’m sure that this was a mistake. But then, and I know, perhaps more than anybody, have been making an issue of the fact that we’ve known since 1983, but the reality is since 1950, 52 probably we’ve been living with the threat of a nuclear winter and that Sagan and the other scientists publicized this in 1983 and they talked about what would happen in the event of nuclear war in which the cities would burn and the cities would burn, and that would send up millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere.

If it was in the troposphere they would get washed away, but in the stratosphere they wouldn’t, and within weeks it would circle the entire globe, and soon block seventy percent of the sun’s rays from hitting the earth, the temperatures on the earth would plummet, agriculture would be destroyed. We have about a 60-day stockpile of food around the world. And after that, the starvation and disease would begin and that perhaps not everybody on earth would be killed, but over a period of years, probably 90 to 99 percent of people on earth would perish as a result of what we call nuclear winter.

And I’ve been working with people to expand these studies now, and what we realize now is that, if anything, the threshold for nuclear went that Sagan and others were talking about back in the 1980s was too low, that even though there were scientists paid by the defense contractors and others who tried to deprecate and deny the theory of nuclear winter at that point say, well, maybe it’s only nuclear autumn and it’s exaggerated and that not everybody would die.

The same kind of attacks by, quote-unquote, scientists against carcinogenic effects of nicotine. The effects on the ozone layer that we see now about climate change, the same kind of lying refutations happened in the 1980s against nuclear winter, but scientists have begun doing those studies again. What the recent studies show is that the risk is even greater than we realize. The recent studies show that a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, in which 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons were used, that that limited nuclear war, which would kill up to two billion people all over the planet because of partial nuclear winter.

And we know the reality is not that there are 100 nuclear weapons, there are close to 14,000 nuclear weapons left, and they’re not Hiroshima size. They’re between 7 and 70 times the power of the Hiroshima bombs. So we know that we’re lucky, and this what Dan has been warning about more eloquently than anybody. This idea that we’re still living with insanity, with the threat of annihilation, with the doomsday machine that we’ve created, and that if we created it, we can dismantle it.

We’ve gotten rid of 80 percent of nuclear weapons, maybe more than that, but the United States and Russia have more than 90 percent of the existing arsenal and that many of them, a couple of thousand of them are pointed at each other on hair-trigger alert, and that’s the first step of the insanity. Get rid of those intercontinental ballistic missiles, stop planning for a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles to replace the Minuteman 3. Dan wants to do that.

He wants to get rid of the first use policy and replace it with no first use. Obama was supporting no first use back in 2013 and did want to eliminate America’s first use policy, but he got pushback and he got pushback from our NATO allies. He got pushback from countries like Poland. And he said, well, if we get rid of our first use, then Japan is going to develop its own nuclear weapons and Poland is going to develop their own nuclear weapons.

And so we can’t do it, and again, Obama didn’t stand up and fight for that. So, you know, Obama was a decent guy in a lot of ways and knew better. He just did not have the backbone of a Kennedy when push came to shove at that kind of crunch time, and now Biden, you know, as much as I admire much of what Biden is doing when it comes to domestic policy and his pro-labor stand and some of his economic policies, his new infrastructure plan might not be as big as I would like or his pandemic plan, but he’s on the right track on these things. When it comes to foreign policy he’s sadly, I think on a very, very dangerous track right now.

Paul Jay

And there’s a new nuclear arms race, the Americans, the Russians and now the Chinese, apparently a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, at least a trillion dollars being spent by the U.S. and Russia, and one expects that China, which has been a bit more moderate on these issues, may not continue to be so, and we’re back into the crazy nuclear weapons race with all the promise or possibility of accidents, never mind deliberate use.

Peter Kuznick

And that was Obama’s plan. That was the corrupt bargain that Obama made, and he authorized a trillion-dollar modernization program over 30 years.

Paul Jay

It’s been reported that Biden was opposed to but there’s not a pipsqueak out of the Biden administration now of undoing it.

Peter Kuznick

And then during Obama’s time, they estimated it was at least $1.2 trillion. Now, the estimate is that it’s going to cost at least $1.7 trillion, and the craziness is that it’s not just the U.S., that every single nuclear power. All nine are modernizing their nuclear arsenals to make them more efficient and more deadly.

By more efficient means single weapons can kill more people. I don’t know why I’m laughing.

Oh, it’s not laughing out of it being funny, it’s laughing out of desperation. When we feel helpless, sometimes we laugh, but look at what’s happening. March 1st, 2018, Vladimir Putin announces in his State of the Nation address, he announces that Russia now has five new nuclear weapons, all of which can circumvent the American missile defense. After the US abroga

To His Last Breath, Daniel Ellsberg Fought to Save the World

Paul Jay — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:51:27 -0400

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Daniel Ellsberg, an extraordinary hero, passed away on Friday, June 16, 2023. Dan fearlessly risked everything in his unwavering quest for social justice and opposition to war. He was not only a cherished friend but also a guiding light for me and countless others. I feel honored to have had the opportunity to engage in extensive interviews with Dan while working on our film, “How to Stop a Nuclear War.” I will miss his wisdom and radiant smile, but his warning to the world will be delivered. Please click to watch our interview on the occasion of Dan’s 90th birthday and a collection of our interviews. – Paul Jay

To view more interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, click here.

This interview was originally published on April 7, 2021.

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Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay, and welcome to a very special edition of theAnalysis.news
on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Daniel Ellsberg.

Ninety years ago, Daniel Ellsberg was born, and he has lived a life of
meaning. Many of us strive to change the world, but few have the opportunity
and the courage to change the course of history. Dan’s release of the Pentagon
Papers at great personal risk helped end the Vietnam War. His book, The
Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, reveals the
institutional madness of American nuclear war strategy. Dan continues to fight
for truth and to awaken people to the existential danger of nuclear weapons.

I interviewed Dan’s friend, historian Peter Kuznick, about the importance of
Dan’s life’s work. I encourage you to watch that.

But now, in his own words, is my interview with Daniel Ellsberg on the
occasion of his 90th birthday. So at 90 years old, why don’t you take it easy?
What keeps you fighting? How do you summon the strength when sometimes it seems
many are just not listening?

Daniel Ellsberg

Hope. Hope that we can surmount the challenges that are facing us, the
challenge of ceasing a moral catastrophe that we’re already involved in, which
is that we have allowed doomsday machines to exist in our country and elsewhere
in the world and that we’re on a course toward climate catastrophe as well. The
problem is to avert the physical catastrophes, not full extinction in either
case, but catastrophic results for humanity. If we go on the way we are, if our
policies continue as they are, my hope is expressed in action.

As a friend of mine, Joanna Macy, says, “Hope isn’t a feeling or an
expectation, it’s a way of acting, and it’s a way of acting as if we had a
chance.” I think that’s what we do have. We really do have a chance to change
this and to allow a more humane future to evolve.

Paul Jay

To what extent is that hope an act of faith rather than rational analysis? I
know you’ve told me you’re not all that optimistic when you think about it
rationally.

Daniel Ellsberg

I think, by the way, to say one has faith suggests that you’re sure you feel
secure in the belief that something will save us, either human or external. I
don’t have that kind of religious faith as some do, and I don’t have that faith
in humanity or in my own country as much as I used to in the case of my own
country. So I don’t think it’s a question of any guarantee that we’ll get
through this without an absolute catastrophe that has not been seen in human
history or prehistory. I think that’s not only not guaranteed, it’s not even
likely, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

And given that, I think the way of acting that’s appropriate in that
possibility that we can eliminate the doomsday machines and change the course
of putting fossil fuels into warming the atmosphere of the Earth, causing it’s
a question of either nuclear winter with the doomsday machine ice on our lakes
and killing all our harvests or fire in effect with the climatic rise in
temperature that will make large parts of the world uninhabitable for humans,
even though it doesn’t lead to full extinction. So I think both of those are
actually likely, but not certain. And if we act in a way to explore as much as
we should to explore, search and invent, imagine ways of changing this course,
it is possible to do it.

Let me go on that. The notion of faith is often always associated with
religious terms, especially with miracles. Well, I’m old enough to have seen
some miracles, secular miracles in the world. I was 60 when one of those
occurred. Now, I’m 90. In 1981-83, about forty years ago, if anyone had asked
what is the chance that the Berlin Wall would be down in ’89 (in eight years),
or if they dared say in ‘83 or ‘85, the answer would not have been that it was
unlikely; it was impossible. It’s not really thinkable, so the question wasn’t
asked, but it did happen.

A few years later, Nelson Mandela, who had been in isolation for 27-29 years,
became the president of South Africa without a violent revolution. I remember
my friend Tony Lewis of the New York Times reading a column saying in
words that were very unusual for a columnist, it’s impossible that there will
be political change in South Africa without a violent revolution, and that’s
what was regarded, but it did happen. So that’s the good news. Miracles of that
sort, and I could name others that I’ve experienced in my own life, in the life
of this country; they are possible. The bad news is it will take a miracle like
that for us to escape the consequences of what we’re actually doing and programming
right now: in nuclear weapons, in the possibility of wars between nuclear
states like the U.S. and Russia, for that matter, India and Pakistan, and in
reducing to zero by 2050, less than 30 years from now, fossil fuel emissions
into the atmosphere. That’s the goal, to keep this as habitable a planet as it
is now. That’s not happening. The emissions are going up. They show every sign
of going up now. So, it will be a very great transformation of our country. I’m
working on the assumption at 90 that I perhaps wouldn’t have had at 50 that it
is possible to see change like that.

Paul Jay

I’ve got an eight-week-old grandson. What can you say to kids that are
coming into this world now? What might the world look like when he’s 90?

Daniel Ellsberg

When you ask that question, it makes me feel almost like the wicked
stepmother or the fairy godmother—something in the fairy tales who comes and
curses the newborn child in some way. I certainly don’t mean to curse them—quite
the opposite. I think you as a grandparent, and I know you are following the
advice I’m about to give, but I think what I have to say to the grandparents is
that this child will grow up in a world much, much less hospitable to human
life than exists right now or has existed for millennia.

If humanity exists at all in numbers greater than a hundredth of something
of the current population, the result of nuclear winter, these are very bad
prognostications, and I think that you won’t change that future unless you, as
you are, Paul, but not everyone, not every grandparent, unless you are willing
and able to face the difficulty of this and which are the forces and the
interests that are invested in keeping things on the course that they are, in
other words, toward disaster. Because I don’t think unless we name those forces
to some extent and recognize them and find ways to organize and enlighten
people and to challenge them, they will have their way and will stay on our
course as it is.

Which let me sum up, I’m saying I think your grandchild is born on the
Titanic and we haven’t yet hit the iceberg, but we all of us at this time are,
of course, on that same ship or what Nikita Khrushchev called our arc during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, aptly, and we’re heading into ice, and
indeed, the captain of the ship has been warned of the ice ahead, as was true
on the Titanic historically and so far has chosen to go full speed ahead on a
dark night into that warned ice instead of as other ships in the same vicinity
did with the same warning, stopping dead in the water for the night so as to
have daylight when moving or to move ahead very slowly.

So it would be sure to see any obstacle in the way or simply to go south and
extend the voyage, which was acceptable for virtually every ship except the
Titanic, which wanted to set a speed record and couldn’t afford to go south if
it were to do that or to stop in the water. And so full speed ahead.

What was needed then was a kind of mutiny by the captain against the wishes
of the head of the White Star Line, who was on that ship and wanted a speed
record, or against the captain who wanted to be on the board of White Star and
made these foolish, reckless choice of moving ahead, the first mate did have
theoretically actually a power to say that’s not acceptable we can’t have that.
A kind of mutiny, saving the lives of the people, knowing, by the way, that
they did not have lifeboats enough for even more than a third of the
passengers, because for many reasons, the first-class passengers needed patios
outside their cabins from which lifeboats had to be removed in the design.

Exxon, Chevron, Aramco are inducing our politicians who they pay with
campaign donations and other ways and their influence on the president in terms
of jobs and again, campaign donations and whatever to allow them to continue
exploring for oil that should remain in the ground if our current civilization
is to continue and to get it up, and without a mutiny in Congress and pressure
on Congress and the president to change that policy, the basis for hope would
disappear. I’m assuming that there is a possibility of doing that difficult as
it is. On the nuclear aspect, Northrop Grumman, which has just won a contract
to develop a ground based strategic deterrent, new intercontinental ballistic
missiles, which should not exist and have been a danger to humanity for at
least the last half century, an inexcusable, unconscionable danger of bringing
about the nuclear winter if used.

And it’s not only Northrop Grumman. They beat out Boeing for that contract.
They are subcontracting, of course, to Lockheed, and we have General Dynamics
and Raytheon, Big Five, actually, who were pushing the idea of a $1.7 trillion
modernization, revitalization, as they say, of a doomsday machine that can destroy
not all life on Earth, not even all human life, probably, almost surely, but 90
percent of it, seven billion people, if we exercised our current war plans in a
war against Russia.

Now, as I say, it’s a moral catastrophe that this country built such a
machine and it was a moral catastrophe for the world and for Russia when they
imitated it about a decade later, two of them poised on hair triggers, the hair
trigger being the ICBMs on both sides that are vulnerable to being attacked by
the other and subject to warning, tactical warning that each side has invested
billions and billions to achieve that has often proved false, that they are
about to be attacked, and therefore, the president [of the United States] and
president of the Soviet Union, Russia now, has to decide in minutes whether to
use them or lose them. Use them to do what? To hit the other side’s ICBM. The
warning is telling us they are already on the way not to quit. Or to do it
earlier. If we had a war in the Ukraine where it’s likely to escalate, nuclear
war is coming. Do we use our ICBMs now before they’re destroyed or later? That
is a question that is wrong for any human to be asked, you know, to have the
circumstances.

Abraham Lincoln said if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. If the
existence of a doomsday machine, I again, I’m talking about an elaborate system
developed by major corporations that profit from it and politicians that profit
from it in jobs and a general ideology that endorses this, including media, if
that’s not wrong, then nothing is wrong. It is wrong. It is wrong for us to
maintain that, and that is what we’re doing, Democrat and Republican alike on
this issue, there’s no major difference between the parties.

It’s a bipartisan policy to be prepared, ready, totally ready to the order
of a president or someone else who has succeeded, a president who’s just been
killed somewhere or put out of action. Many fingers could launch this. It’s
impossible to paralyze by human attack, to paralyze the system, and it’s a
system, as I say, which we’ve known for 30 years now, will have the effect, if
launched, of destroying about 90 percent, perhaps 99 percent, probably not 100
within a year from starvation because the harvests have been killed for years,
perhaps a decade, and the river system dies and the lakes and whatever else.

And yet there’s hardly any discussion of this. I’m reminded really with the
fire on the one hand which will be the cause of the smoke that will cause the
nuclear winter. For up to this time, the amazing fact has been revealed that
the Joint Chiefs of Staff never calculate the effects of fire from their
attacks, that they’re planned and readied because it’s too hard to calculate.
Supposedly not really true, but it depends on wind. It depends on the load of
the cities that will be set on fire, that particular target.

So, it’s too hard to calculate compared to fallout or blast or prompt
radiation, but actually another thing, they then failed to calculate for 40
years into the nuclear era was smoke, the effect on smoke, where there’s fire,
there’s smoke, And in the case of nuclear weapons causing fire, they will cause
firestorms of of a kind we tried to produce very widely in firebombing by the
British and the Americans in Germany and then the Americans in Japan.

We only achieved it three times. Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, a firestorm
that would cause intense temperatures on the surface, and kill everyone within
a given area, 100,000 people in one night in Japan, in Tokyo, March 9th and
10th. They tried to create firestorms in 60 other cities after that, but didn’t
get it, killing about 900,000 Japanese civilians before Hiroshima, but
Hiroshima caused the firestorm that you can do every time.

The firestorm has the unanticipated effect, they didn’t calculate it, of
causing the smoke to rise into the stratosphere, to launch it upwards into the
stratosphere where it won’t rain out. Do it to one city, effect of that, like
Tokyo or even Hamburg and Dresden, the effect is not really perceptible on the
earth. Do it to 100 cities.

When I started working on war plans fifty years ago, 60 years, 1961, the
Joint Chiefs intended to hit every city in Russia and China, over 100,000 and
many less than that, hundreds of cities. The effect of that would be to put
enough smoke and soot into the stratosphere where it would go around the globe
very quickly. Within days, or a week or so, it would cut out 70 percent of the
sunlight and cause Ice Age conditions on the earth.

So fire followed by ice. So Frost. I actually saw Frost recite his poem in
1961 at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the wind blew the leaves, the
leaves of his speech, away, and I remember this is a little embarrassing
because he was old, but of course, he had already written the poem Fire and
Ice. I don’t think that’s the title of it, but it goes.

Some say the earth will end in fire, some in ice, from what I’ve tasted of
desire. I tend to favor fire, but from what I know of heat, ice is also great
and will suffice. For destruction. Ice is also great and will suffice.

Anyway, that’s what we’re building toward, and that existed in 1961, and
really it’s existed as a U.S. capability for about 10 years before that. So I
say again, there’s no excuse for the continued existence of this. For one man
or one nation to have the capability to do that, and the climate issue is very
much the same. So at 90 and finally the answer to your question, I’ve learned a
good deal of disillusion about my country and about my species, as well as
learning how wonderful it is to live here, to be alive, and I’m still never
less conscious of that than I ever have been. Wonderful here with my wife of 50
years and our children. My son lives in the house and look at this in California,
and yet in a world where most people do not have the privileges and the luxury
that we have.

Or the security, I could think, although actually what I’ve described it’s
not a whole lot of security looking toward the future, but from day to day, no
comparison with most people in the world, and yet with all that harm and
oppression and inequality going on, I do choose to want to keep it going, to
keep it going, to postpone at least until we evolve in some cultural way in a
way that will make it possible for us to make the world less insecure, less
inhumane for everyone.

Paul Jay

Denial of the threat of nuclear war is very comforting. Facing up to it.
It’s very disturbing. You are the least in denial of anyone I know. Yet you
maintain a sense of joy. You always have a twinkle in your eye. You laugh and
you smile easily. Most people when I start talking about this, they say ah this
is too depressing. How do you keep your sense of joy throughout all of this?

Daniel Elllsberg

Well, here my wife of 50 years here now being married and being with her,
lying with her at night is heaven on earth. So, I know what heaven is, and the
other side of that is that. Hell, it’s possible on this earth, as a matter of
fact, all the people doing these things, I think hardly any of them do not
convince themselves that they are making things less bad than they otherwise
would be if other people were running it, that they have good intentions, but
they are the kind of intentions that pave the road to hell.

And that’s the road we’re on. Well, how do you smile on that road? You know,
and curse me? One of my favorite books. Very much so. When I was a kid was a
book called Scaramouche by Rafael Sabattini.

And I always remember the first line of that about a Frenchman in the 18^th.
He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Well,
what we’ve been talking about here is he was not wrong.

The epigraph from my book recently chosen from Nietzsche, one of them two
epigraphs. Madness in individuals is something exceptional, but in groups,
parties, nations and epochs, it’s the rule, and again, I think that’s what
we’re seeing, the sort of availability of humans to madness in any way.

It’s capable we’re all capable of it, I think all humans are capable not
only of participating in something mad out of a sense of group teamwork going
on, delusional beliefs generally and being obedient, being loyal, being
patriotic, being courageous, all things that we generally regard as virtues,
but they all have a dark side in that they can be put to work serving very bad
interests in general, and that’s where we are. So for many of us, obviously,
life is simply, as I said earlier, very privileged.

My life, has always been a life of privilege compared not only to most
people in the world, but most people in America, and it’s a privilege and my
family to have my wife with us together, to have friends who are also joining
me in this effort is joyous, and there’s a lot of things to laugh about. At the
same time, I can’t let go of this feeling, the belief I have, that it’s not
impossible to avert these catastrophes that we’re facing and that it’s possible
even to challenge the hoax that entraps so many people.

The Ro Khanna and Markey effort to stop the ground based deterrence, the
continuance of which I think would mean that we were doomed to have a hair
trigger on the Doomsday Machine indefinitely, and I don’t think we would
survive that indefinitely. The programs of the new administration need
improving actually in terms of climate, but they are an immense change and
really offer hope, an actual visible basis for hope that the emissions will go
down. My hero Greta Thunberg, who enlarged a vigil at the Swedish parliament
with Patricia and I actually participated in one very snowy, very cold morning
once in Sweden with about 50 or 60 people had encouraged millions, actually a
million or so in a couple of weeks later, a couple of months later and a year
later, several million, many million people protesting in a strike on a school
day, going from school, basically and striking.

But she could not be clearer in saying success is not measured in these
numbers of people or even in her ability to speak to parliaments and to the
U.N. and to Davos and so forth. She said the emissions are going up and that is
that what we’re looking at, and that’s failure so far, a willingness in words.
She’s shown this amazing moral courage and willingness to face not only the
possibility of failure, but the existence of failure of very many times and yet
to keep at it, as she does with the others.

And that’s what that’s what I’m privileged to be able to do. To keep at it.
It’s possible and if it’s possible, it’s worth devoting one’s life to trying to
bring that about.

Paul Jay

Thanks for joining us, Dan, and happy 90th birthday and thank you for
joining us on theAnalysis.news.

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“Daniel Ellsberg (April 7, 1931 – June 16, 2023) was an American political activist and former United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers.”

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U.S. and Canada Continue Meddling in Haitian Affairs – Jafrikayiti part 1/2

Paul Jay — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:05:07 -0400

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Jafrikayiti is an artist, author, activist, and radio show host, and works for Solidarité Québec-Haiti. Part 1 of his analysis of foreign intervention in Haiti presents a scathing critique of French, U.S., and Canadian powers who have dismantled Haitian democracy, as well as looted the country for countless decades. He argues that political leaders who are appointed by western powers, such as the current interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry, are illegitimate figures who continue to do a disservice to Haiti’s political institutions. Furthermore, Jafrikayiti explains how the exploitation of Haiti cannot be understood without examining the racial underpinnings of imperialism and capitalism.

Part 2: Haiti’s Predatory Ruling Families and Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Jafrikayiti for an in-depth conversation on the current situation in Haiti. But first, please go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and consider donating to the show. You can also get onto our mailing list; that way, you’ll be notified every time there’s a new episode. Also, go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. Hit like on all the videos you want to watch, subscribe, and hit the bell; that way, you’re notified every time a new episode is published. I’ll be back in a bit with Jafrikayiti.

Almost two years ago, the autocrat Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a conglomeration of Colombian mercenaries and other Haitians opposed to his regime. Most recently, Rodolphe Jaar, a Haitian-Chilean businessman, as well as a convicted drug trafficker and U.S. informant, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit murder before a U.S. court. Since then, the country has not been in a position to hold independent elections, and Haitians continue to be deprived of access to clean water or to enjoy a dignified standard of living.

Why is this impoverished country experiencing this instability in the first place? Haiti’s woes can be traced to a long history of foreign intervention in the country. Up until the end of the 18th century, Haiti was a slave society under the control of colonial France. The Haitian Revolution was an incredible moment in modern history where black slaves overthrew their colonial masters. The Haitian Constitution extended social and political rights to all black people on the island but also to indentured Polish and German workers who supported the cause.

Beginning in 1791, Haitian slaves revolted under the leadership of General Toussaint Louverture. In response to this uprising, France abolished slavery throughout its colonies in 1794. In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France. Yet independence came at a devastatingly high price.

In 1825, Haitians were forced to begin paying 150 million francs to the French government to secure their independence, purportedly for the damages caused to the French economy after losing its lucrative plantations in Haiti. Haiti ended up paying the equivalent of $21 billion U.S.D. for its independence. The country couldn’t afford to pay France all at once, so it was forced to take out loans from French banks and later from American Citibank at high-interest rates. It was only in 1947 that it finished paying back these loans to Citibank.

The French economist Thomas Piketty has estimated that France owes Haiti approximately $28 billion U.S.D. for its so-called independence debt.

The indebtedness of Haiti to American banks, as well as the prospect of confiscating Haitian resources, led Wall Street to push the U.S. to invade Haiti in 1915. Of the countless atrocities committed under the occupation, U.S. Marines stole Haiti’s entire gold reserve from its banks and left 15,000 people dead. The occupation of Haiti only came to an end in 1934. Indebtedness and corruption in Haiti were exacerbated by President François Duvalier, who set up the militia Tonton Macoute in 1959.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Haiti’s political future was finally looking brighter. It held its first democratic elections in 1991, electing the liberation theologist Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide’s focus on social justice and autonomy provoked the powers in Washington. Aristide faced not one but two coup d’états supported by the U.S. and its allies, the last one ousting him from office permanently in 2004.

Since then, a UN mission which brought cholera to the country, as well as a devastating earthquake in 2010, have depleted the country’s public coffers while its political elite profit from control of the country’s resources.

Joining me now is Jafrikayiti. He is an activist, author, radio show host, and artist, and he works for Solidarité Québec-Haiti. Thanks so much for joining me, Jafrik.

Jafrikayiti

Thank you for inviting me, Talia.

Talia Baroncelli

Since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021, which was almost two years ago, Ariel Henry has been the acting President of Haiti, but he was never elected. What do Haitians need now in order to return to some semblance of democracy?

Jafrikayiti

Well, I think, first of all, there is no point in referring to Ariel Henry as prime minister or president. In Haiti, a president is someone who is elected. The prime minister, which is his actual title, is appointed by the elected president but is not to come into office until they present their credentials to a Parliament, which we do not have.

In reality, what needs to happen in Haiti is that the governance of the country needs to return to Haitians. That means this ‘faire semblants (make-believe)’ that there is a Haitian government needs to cease. The United States, which is running the show, as well as Canada, the European Union, OAS, and the UN, who intervened and overthrew the last real Haitian government that Haitians chose back in 2004, need to acknowledge that this mess is theirs.

Haiti had 7,000 elected officials in 2004. They had their meetings here in Gatineau. They decided that the Haitian government had to be overthrown. They replaced them with thugs who embezzled billions of dollars. The country is in a mess. There is no government. Now they’re spending all of this effort trying to protect a semblance of governance. They are also pretending to be foreign to the mess that was created. They’re getting away with it in large part because the media does not ask those questions of Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and others. When they’re having these senseless conferences about how to fix Haiti, no one is asking them what happened to the real government of Haiti. I thought you guys overthrew that government in order to make Haiti better. That was the plan. That’s what they announced to the world.

After the earthquake, Bill Clinton got involved, and they collected billions of dollars in the name of Haitians. But at the same time, they imposed a set of criminals, such as Michel Martelly and Laurent Lamothe, on Haiti. Now, it would be comical if it wasn’t tragic that those same countries that rigged the elections, such as the 2010-2011 elections when Hillary Clinton went to Haiti and ordered the Director of the Electoral Council to change the results and take someone who was fifth on the list and put him in the second round to become president. These are the same people and the same government who rigged the elections in Haiti: Canada, the United States, and Europe; as part of this thing called the Core Group; they’re sanctioning the people they put in power.

Now, of course, those sanctions are invisible to us. They claim that they are taking sanctions against those people. I would say that for people who have been found to be in collusion with kidnapping gangs, the sanction for them is not to put their name on the list; it’s to arrest them. That’s what the Haitian people have been asking for. Give some help to arrest the criminals, the [inaudible 00:09:05] criminals linked to the Clintons’ who were put in power fraudulently, violently by foreign interference by the United States, Canada, and France. Arrest these people. Collect the money that they have embezzled out of Haiti. Some of it may be hidden in Haiti still, but some of it has found its way to the United States, Canada, and Latin America. We need to find those resources and bring them back to the Haitian treasury so the people can have a real government on the basis of processes decided upon by Haitians. Not by Joe Biden, not by Justin Trudeau, but by Haitians.

Talia Baroncelli

Would you say that these gang members who were supported by Hillary Clinton at the time and the American political elite, would you say that they’re also supported by Haiti’s own ruling elite, or how are they able to sustain themselves?

Jafrikayiti

Well, of course, there’s always been collusion between the folks that they are calling elites in Haiti and corrupt elites in North America. To be precise, people need to search for a term, BAM BAM. B-A-M, B-A-M. It’s the first name, the first letter in the names of six of the richest families in Haiti: Bigio, Apaid, Mevs, Brandt, Acra, and Madsen. Now, all of these folks have their roots in what they are calling today the Middle East.

Bigio was the richest man in Haiti and was actually the former representative of Israel in Haiti. He is reportedly the richest man in the Caribbean. We are talking about a billionaire who lives in Florida most of the time. Now, this guy owns almost everything that has to do with the Haitian economy, whether it is with banks or oil. Everything! This is not hearsay. In fact, the United States sanctioned him back after the 1991 coup. Again, whenever we say the word sanction, we need to realize these things are smoke screens for the general public. It just means that the United States government issued a statement saying that these individuals were involved, or there was suspicion that they were involved in the coup in Haiti, and then you don’t hear anything anymore. When these sanctions are lifted, we don’t even know about that. In reality, it’s a way for the United States to pretend that there is a distance between itself and those corrupt individuals in Haiti.

We refrain from using the term elite when we’re referring to these individuals because, for instance, some of them bought sugar refineries. They closed them up to import sugar from the United States to sell in Haiti. So they’re not really industrialists. These are people who have monopolies because whenever there is a real government in Haiti, they spend a few million dollars to overthrow that government. Then the criminals they put in power allow them to have contracts in the import and export business. So yes, they are among the richest, but they are not elite in the sense of people who are richer in a country who are investing in important sectors of the economy and giving back to society. Yes, they are directly linked to the gangs. That’s why Canada and the United States have put the names of Abdalah, Bigio, and Boulos on those lists.

Again, I’m saying that the kidnapping gangs that we’re talking about here, instead of kidnapping middle-class and poor Haitians who have family members in the diaspora who, when these people are kidnapped, are sending their meagre resources to get their families released. Sometimes they take the money, and they kill the people anyways.

Now, imagine if, for a number of months and even years, you had gangs in Montreal who were kidnapping blue-eyed, blonde-haired Canadians for months and years. Do you think the response of authorities in Montreal, in the province of Quebec, in Canada, would be to draw a list of people who are associated with those guys? And to say that, well, they cannot travel to country X, Y, and Z, or that they’re going to sanction some of their products, no. They would get arrested, and they would be punished. That’s what we’re calling for.

Gilbert Bigio can be a billionaire. We’ve heard that they finance elections. They contribute to elections in the United States, but that’s not a reason for them to be untouchable. These people need to be arrested, tried, and put in jail. All of the resources that they have taken away from the Haitian people, such as taxes that they’re supposed to be paying that citizens are paying, should go to the Haitian national budget.

What is evident to anybody who’s been to Haiti is that Haiti is a country that did not benefit from the Industrial Revolution. You can travel from east to west, north to south of Haiti, but you will not find a single tunnel. If you try to go from the little town where my father was born, Léogâne, to go to Port-de-Paix, where my mother was born, it will take you 6-8 hours sometimes. Not because it’s 800 or whatever kilometers away; it’s not. It’s barely 200 kilometers away. That’s because there are no roads. You keep on turning around and around a mountain, going up and down, etc. There is no infrastructure built. Of course, that’s because there were dictatorships in Haiti.

It’s not just that because we have not had only dictatorships, we’ve also had enlightened leadership, whether it is under our founder, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, or leaders like Louis Étienne Félicité Lysius Salomon, who was a genius in terms of finance and organizing, taking the Haitian currency from being one-thousandth of a U.S. dollar and bringing it at par with U.S. dollars in a span of about 20 years or so.

What happened when Louis Félicité Salomon was President? Well, you had gunboat diplomacy where countries came together, countries of Europe, including Sweden. Countries that people don’t think about when they refer to Haiti, but the ambassadors in Haiti came together. Britain, Sweden, and the United States all threatened President Louis Félicité Salomon of sending their warships and bombarding the National Palace with him in it if he didn’t pay reparations to some of the merchants who claimed that they were a victim of social unrest in the country. When you go and investigate, the social unrest in question was instigated by them.

In other words, Haiti is a country that has been at war. The war is not an internal war. The war that Haiti is facing has to do with global white supremacy. I know these terms are not familiar. People are not at ease with analyzing it, but they must because you will not fix the problem in Haiti with a band-aid. Haiti needs reparations. There’s no other way about it.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, the social unrest that you speak about, I’m assuming we can tie it to the money that Haiti had to pay back to France in 1825, this 150 million francs or whatever it was at the time. Some of it was reduced, but essentially they paid an equivalent of 90 million francs, which is a lot of money, like $21 billion U.S.D.

Jafrikayiti

Yeah. President Aristide estimated $21 billion back in 2004. More recently, the New York Times in 2021 estimated it to be $115 billion U.S.D.

Talia Baroncelli

That’s a lot of money. So perhaps some of these issues with debt and infrastructure can be tied back to that. We can speak about the issue of race, racial domination, and suppression, but without even needing to speak about white supremacy, we can speak about that moment in which Haiti was completely indebted to a country which had basically had to pay for its independence. As a result of that continued indebtedness, it was not able to then build up its own infrastructure.

Jafrikayiti

What is more important is the timing of this. This is the Industrial Revolution. That’s when everybody was building the infrastructures of their cities. If you look at the universities in the United States, in Europe, and in Canada, these were established around that time. It was during that time that, coming out of 300 years of enslavement, the people of Haiti were feeding the French economy. That’s ransom. It wasn’t just the French economy because by 1915, the United States had invaded Haiti, and it was the United States that was managing that so-called debt, collecting the money from Haiti and sharing it among French, German, and American banks.

The problem when you’re dealing with the history of Haiti, even if you were to do the analysis only based on economics, whether you want to or not, you are going to face the racial dimension. What happens is that nowhere can I see these examples of countries that are supposed to be in conflict with each other, such as the United States, France, and Britain, but they come together when it comes to Haiti.

We saw it in 1805. The French Foreign Minister of the time, Maurice de Talleyrand, wrote to James Madison and said to him, “The existence of a Negro people in arms is a terrible threat for all white nations.” He said it. That’s his words. In response, they started the embargo against Haiti. You can say, well, that’s in the past, but that’s what happened in 2004.

Does it make sense for a Canadian Minister like Jean Chrétien to organize a meeting right here in Gatineau, where I live, with foreign ministers of the United States, of France, and a few other people, but no Haitians, to discuss the fate of Haiti. These white men and women found nothing weird about their discussion to overthrow the President of Haiti, to put Haiti under UN tutelage, over two days of eating and drinking, and to do that, the very year of the bicentennial of the end of racial slavery in the Americas.

If you don’t understand the racial dimension of this, you will not understand why today it is Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, who is going to the Bahamas to get the so-called leaders of CARICOM to have a pre-meeting in a prelude to the CARICOM meeting that is supposed to take place later on this week in Jamaica, where they’re going to decide the fate of Haiti. You need to understand that.

To understand that, you need to go back to the beginning of the 20th century when the United States wanted to steal [inaudible 00:23:40] as a military base, which is in the northwest of Haiti. They found that the Haitians were being picky. They didn’t want to cooperate. So they recruited Frederick Douglass. Yes, the famous Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist. They knew how much Frederick Douglass had, just like most early African Americans, a lot of respect and empathy toward Haiti. They recruited Frederick Douglass and sent him to Haiti as the consul so that he could help the Americans, the Yankees [eankkes], to convince the Haitians. Even Frederick Douglass, when he was confronted with what the Americans were asking the Haitians, his conscience told him that he couldn’t do this. After two years, he quit.

In the news, they were accusing him of betraying the Americans. Frederick Douglas replied and said, “Listen, I’m not a criminal. The Haitian people deserve to have a nation.” So whether you look at it from the past or present, the conflict in Haiti is all about black nationhood. These people are not regarded as individuals who are worthy of having their nation. That’s why today, they’re trying to put the black face to imperialism by recruiting CARICOM. Some countries in the African Union to put in front, and of course, people like Kamala Harris, Brian Nichols, or Karine Jean-Pierre, who is the spokesman for Biden with her Haitian heritage, have that responsibility to make stupidities sound intelligent about the United States foreign policy towards Haiti.

Talia Baroncelli

So essentially, you’re saying that the U.S. officials, as well as Canadian officials and other European powers, don’t want to entrust Haiti, a primarily black country, with the right to organize its own elections and to deal with its affairs in the way that it sees fit. What are the other interests there? What do these countries stand to benefit economically from Haiti? Besides subjugating the country based on racial oppression, what are the other motives there?

Jafrikayiti

The motivation is not only racial. Those things are not divided. Imperialism, for the past few thousand years, has been tied at the hip with white supremacy. No one else has had the ability to subjugate other peoples and steal their land on this planet as European people have. That’s why it’s always tied. But Haiti is what, in scientific experiments, you would call the control. If you cannot impose your will on Haiti, a country that has no army, that doesn’t even have a government; you impose your profits on Haiti, then where can you impose yourselves in Latin America?

You can see the situation with Venezuela. For the past decades, these folks wanted to steal petroleum from Venezuela, and they tried. Today, there’s still speculation as to how Hugo Chávez died. We remember him going to the United Nations, claiming to have smelled the presence of the devil at the podium. Well, Hugo Chávez might have been a colorful personality who made jokes and stuff, but Hugo was very serious about the need to put our world on a different path of genuine human brotherhood. That was why he created the Petrocaribe program. Many countries in the region benefited from that program in order to build minimal infrastructure.

What you have happening in Haiti is equivalent to what’s happening on a bigger scale in Africa. What is the current crisis everywhere? The Europeans and the Americans are screaming bloody murder because the Chinese are displacing them in Africa. The Chinese are building ports. They are building highways. They are building all kinds of infrastructure that the Africans have been saying for the longest time that they need. Of course, these Europeans, without tongue in cheek, have the audacity to pretend that they are there to protect the interests of the Africans, so they are warning them about the ‘bad’ Chinese as if 500 years of oppression cannot inform those stupid Africans of their own interests like Europeans have to tell them.

Talia Baroncelli

Right. A lot of people justify European colonialism, saying that, oh, it built the roads. So I’m not sure that the Chinese going in and actually creating infrastructure is a justification for another form of domination.

Jafrikayiti

I’ve recently been to Tanzania and Rwanda, and I’ve been to other parts of Africa. I can tell you the infrastructure that is currently being built is not what was there before. Clearly, some African countries have realized that we don’t need to have that relationship with France, with Britain. That’s not a relationship. That’s abuse. France doesn’t have all kinds of resources that it’s stealing from Ivory Coast, Mali, and all kinds of places. Now, they’re revolting.

Now, in the case of Haiti, it’s the same situation. Now, when Hugo Chávez came with the Petrocaribe program, it had the potential to show the world what could happen if, for a brief period of time, genuine Haitian leadership had access to capital. Because that’s what the Petrocaribe program was allowing the Haitian government to have: to have a budget that is not tied to the IMF and the World Bank, or in short, the dictates of the United States. When this money comes, these guys, they say, you cannot invest in education, you cannot invest in health care, and you cannot invest in basic infrastructure. You have to spend that money on what they call job creation for sweatshops and stuff like that. Basically, you tie your population to exploitation so that the companies, the multinationals coming from the United States, can continue to benefit from what they call comparative advantage. These were the terms used by Apaid, Boulos, those families that the United States subcontracted, the control of the neo-colonies.

If the Petrocaribe program was not sabotaged, we would have seen a level of development in Haiti that would have challenged the American system. So they crushed it. Often times people are asking, “Well, what’s in there that the United States needs or wants?” It’s not that they need. They don’t need anything. Christopher Columbus did not need what he was stealing when he came in 1492. He wanted it, and he murdered billions of people to get it. It’s not about need; it’s about greed. It’s also because they can.

Right now, the people of Haiti are in a state of vulnerability that even when they see the enemy show up at their door, they cannot stop them from showing up. Haitians are not stupid. When we hear, for instance, at the United Nations, Canada and the United States show up, and they call themselves the group of friends of Haiti. Of course, the so-called Haitian politicians are guilty of never standing up and telling these people to shut up and stop bringing this childish language to the table. I mean, I’ve never heard of the friends of the United States, the friends of friends, the friends of Canada, but they use that terminology for countries like Haiti, the Congo, and stuff like that. This needs to stop.

We need to have a space where people in Haiti can manage to develop enough real solidarity among the populations, whether in the Caribbean, in the Americas or among the populations of Europe, so that the populations can challenge their governments to abandon that paradigm. It’s the same thing that’s happening with the relationship with Africa.

Africa is a different situation because here, we’re talking about a continent that is rich in resources, whether it is gold, culture, or everything else. They need those resources. There’s been speculation about Haiti having rare minerals as well, like uranium and iridium and all of that. The thing is, even if this exists in Haiti, currently, there is not enough military might in Haiti under the control of Haitians to protect that. If the United States wants to steal that, it’s going to steal it, just like they do everywhere else in the world.

Whereas in the case of Africa, it’s getting more complicated. You have countries like Mali that are showing that they’re willing to get the weapons that they require in order to fight whoever shows up and tries to dispossess them of their resources.

Perhaps as a global community, we need to push the reflection to a different model. Why can’t Belgium buy the cocoa from Ivory Coast at a fair price? At the same time, the Ivory Coast is also producing chocolate. Why must we buy chocolate that is only made in Europe? Can we not make chocolate in Africa? It’s the same thing with regard to Haiti.

Yes, in a population that is impoverished, there is going to be cheap labor, but that’s not our ambition. Our ambition is not to be cheap labor to the planet forever. Our ancestors spent over 400 years feeding those Europeans. It has to end. We have Haitians who are doctors, lawyers, and engineers all over the planet. Why are we not living in Haiti? When you watch the flights, we are leaving Haiti by the thousands, and you watch the planes going inside of Haiti, white people.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, I wanted to pick up on a point you made earlier about imperialism and racism being so interwoven and linked because abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about capitalism being racial from the get-go and racial capitalism being an institutionalized hierarchy which was based on the labor of marginalized people. Not just people who looked visibly darker, but also Irish or Roma people in Europe, for example. So this racialized element wasn’t always tied to skin color. Tying that idea to Petrocaribe, we could maybe see that this would have been another way to fund Haiti without having to rely on institutions which have been the proponents of economic and racial capitalism, such as the IMF or the World Bank, which would implement structural adjustment programs or other conditions on Haiti for them to benefit from certain loans so that they would have to privatize their industries or open up their country to other imports.

Maybe we could speak a bit more about what the aims of Petrocaribe were and whether something similar is actually possible if other foreign powers were to stop being involved in Haiti.

Jafrikayiti

Absolutely. Petrocaribe allowed Haiti to buy petroleum from Venezuela at a cheap price, with a very low-interest rate. The condition was that Haiti, instead of having to pay right away, would have 25 years to pay. Therefore, the money saved can be used for investment that is productive, including in agriculture. When Haiti pays back Venezuela, it can also pay back cash or agricultural products. In a way, that was perfect.

When you talk about the Caribbean, Haiti is the country besides Cuba that has a sizable population. We’re talking about 12 million people. The other countries of the Caribbean, some of them, are way better off economically. When you’re talking about, for instance, Barbados, that’s a very small community in terms of population and size of the island. Haiti, being part of CARICOM, would have benefited a lot. I still believe that this model is what is needed.

I was fortunate enough to go to countries like Belize or Guatemala and saw how– they also have corruption, but they still manage to do a little bit of progress using Petrocaribe funds. The problem was what happened with the timing of Petrocaribe in Haiti, which was signed around 2006 when Hugo Chávez started to have discussions with President Préval. The money really started flowing around 2010, just before the earthquake. When the earthquake happened, of course, that was devastation. The physical devastation was nowhere as damaging as the arrival of the Michel Martelly regime. These guys, basically, jumped at that money, which came at the same time as all of these billions of dollars were being collected by Bill Clinton for the rebuilding of Haiti.

During that whole period of 2010-2012, Haiti was a Mecca for all kinds of crazy criminals who created fake companies. They’re going to build this. Companies that are created out of thin air. In Canada, I saw some of them. When they go to Haiti, the criteria for them to get a contract or not is how close they are to the Clintons. A lot of money was embezzled and wasted, but very little of it by the corrupt Haitians in terms of the rebuilding or the reconstruction money because all of that reconstruction money was under Bill Clinton’s control and the companies that are linked to him. It’s the Petrocaribe money that Martelly, the corrupt Haitian group that Hillary Clinton put in power, that’s the money that they stole.

When you hear this week that the United States government announces that they are taking sanctions against Laurent Lamothe, who was Martelly’s very close childhood friend who became his Prime Minister because he would have– there’s evidence that he might have taken $60 million. People who are really following this realize that we’re being taken for a ride. Laurent Lamothe, first of all, was an illegal Prime Minister because he doesn’t qualify as someone who had lived in the United States without having spent five consecutive years in Haiti before he became Prime Minister, which is illegal, but they imposed him. Laurent Lamothe, if you check the archives during the time that he was a so-called Prime Minister, the ambassador to Haiti at the time, the lady’s name is Pamela White, she was always seen with Laurent Lamothe and Michel Martelly. There’s just no way that the United States is now discovering the corruption of Laurent Lamothe. The corruption of Laurent Lamothe means that all of this money, and of course, $60 million is not the amount. Haitians say there needs to be at least another zero put in that number. But that money cannot have been stolen out of Haiti without U.S. complicity.

So the question is, who are the American accomplices of Laurent Lamothe? Of course, you cannot speak of Laurent Lamothe’s corruption without speaking of Michel Martelly, who was his partner in crime.

Talia Baroncelli

You’ve just been watching part one of my conversation with Jafrikayiti. If you enjoy this content, please consider sharing this episode and going to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, subscribing to the channel, and hitting the bell; that way, you’re notified every time there’s a new episode. Also, please go to our website and consider donating to the show and signing up to our newsletter. See you for part two next time.

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“Jafrikayiti is the co-founder of two self-help organizations AKASAN (Ayisyen ki ap soutni Ayisyen nètalkole) and Jaku Konbit which follow the principles popularized by Marcus Garvey. He is also an artist-activist immersed in the Global Peace and Social Justice movement.”

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Political Resistance in Senegal Through Food Sovereignty

Paul Jay — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 16:08:46 -0400

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Famara Diédhiou is the West Africa Program Officer at the Alliance for Food Security in Africa (AFSA). He is also one of the producers of a documentary feature film called The Last Seed, which was produced by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in cooperation with AFSA, Biowatch South Africa, and PELUM Tanzania. In this interview, Famara discusses why food security is not enough in a country such as Senegal, whose farming practices and dietary consumption have been negatively affected by agrochemical companies. He makes the case for food sovereignty, as well as the establishment of an agroecological approach to farming and rural planning which not only benefits local populations but also facilitates climate adaption strategies. What sort of socio-economic system would create the conditions necessary for this agroecological approach?

You can watch the trailer for The Last Seed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dForPtgxFXY

You can learn more about the documentary film The Last Seed here: https://www.thelastseed.org/

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. Today I’ll be joined by Famara Diédhiou to speak about food sovereignty in Senegal, as well as different agroecological methods in farming. If you enjoy this content, please do go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. You can also get on our mailing list so that you’re informed every time a new episode is released. Also, go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. Like all the videos you want to watch, hit the subscribe button, and hit the bell; that way, you’re notified every time a new episode is published. See you in a bit with Famara.

Joining me now is Famara Diédhiou, he is the Program Officer for West Africa at the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. He is the producer of a recent documentary feature film called The Last Seed, which was also produced by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, together with the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. So thank you so much for joining me, Famara.

Famara Diédhiou

Thank you, Talia. How are you?

Talia Baroncelli

You’ve had so much experience working in rural planning and in small-scale farming in Senegal. I know you’ve had over 12 years of experience working on these projects. I was wondering what your own personal view is on how important food sovereignty is in African countries, particularly given the context of European colonialism, which has plundered Africa’s resources for so many centuries on end.

Famara Diédhiou

Yeah, strong, great question, and a very large question as well. On the issue of food, one side of it is what is said in the media, by policymakers, and so on. On the other side of it, which is, for me, more relevant, what communities, people, and citizens are living day to day. I will take it from not only my childhood, but where I’m coming from, for instance, my village, and the same could apply to many other communities in Africa, not only Senegal.

There was a time where I would say at least 75% of what you eat, you were able to produce it by your own. If you were not able to produce it by your own, it was very nearby that you could have access to it. Those types of products, there was a way to cook it. There was a way, if I can even say, to eat them, depending on your, if I can call it, diet. Not everything you are going to eat can you eat at any time. There are things you will eat at a certain part of the day. There are things you will eat at a certain part of the year, and so on, and so on. But more and more, we are about to have a standardized way of eating, which is completely disconnecting us from our, if I can call it, our reference of how food, how agriculture, and how a community should be.

Now, this issue, of course, it’s happening in most of the places I know. Here is a small example. Look at the early years of the 2000s; there are places, if you go there, you wouldn’t see packages. If I say packages, the packaging of food, meaning bags, big bags, or boxes that were coming to package the food people were eating. People were just eating what they produced around them. Now, if you go to those places, all the trash, where they throw wrong material, what is not good, is full of plastic, is full of empty packaging. This is real proof and evidence of what people are eating, which is no longer coming from their own community.

The issue of food sovereignty is crucial. It’s real. It’s threatening our communities. Where it’s harmful is that more and more, you can easily hear some populations saying, “No, you don’t need to cultivate now. You can go and buy it in the shop.” It means I’m not going to work for my food. I will work for a car. Then my food, where it’s coming from? How is it produced? I don’t care. This is for us, solving this way or this new trend of relationship with food is something that is what we call regaining our food sovereignty. I don’t know whether you get what I mean by that.

Talia Baroncelli

Yes.

Famara Diédhiou

We are more and more losing control of our food: the soil, the seed, the work we have to do ourselves, and what we should eat. All of this is slowly, slowly, slowly, and slowly disappearing, and we need to regain it. By regaining it, it means we are recovering our food sovereignty.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, based on what you’ve said, we can assume that because of industrialization, people are more separated or alienated from the land. They’re alienated from the food that they’re consuming, from the seeds even. So I wonder, these other approaches like agroecological approaches, which your organization would support, they’re more focused on smaller scale farming. But is this small-scale farming enough to actually meet the food needs of people, like the demand? Can it be scaled up, or is it something that has to be kept at such a small level?

Famara Diédhiou

In Africa, at the minimum, 50% of the population depends on agriculture. If I say agriculture, it’s not only farming crops; it’s both pastoralism, fisher folks, and crop production. A minimum of 50% of the population is relying on that. In that population, most of them are small-scale producers. Statistics have shown that more than 70%, around that, of the food that is consumed or produced in Africa is produced by those people: small-scale fisheries, pastoralism, and small-scale farmers.

What does it mean? It means that there is a potential there. Unfortunately, most of our policies don’t support that, it doesn’t recognize the strength. They rather go for the narrative that’s saying that we need to scale it up. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that in agroecological practices, you can’t scale up the level of production. There are a lot of examples, including in export products, where big companies were able to follow the requirement of agroecological production, and they met it.

What is needed is first to recognize that the majority of African producers or African farmers, those working in the primary sector, most of them are small-scale. That’s where we need to add value and support. If we support them, then it can take the level of production to another level. Small-scale production doesn’t mean that the level of production is small.

Here are two examples. Those who want to sell cacahuètes, for instance, or peanuts for export, most of them rely on small-scale producers. Hence, they are able to produce enough until exported. In a country like Senegal, Mali, and so on, rice and millets are part of the most consumed cereals. Most of those products are produced by small-scale producers or small-scale farmers. There is a potential there. We just don’t need to give it a negative connotation when we are talking about small-scale farmers. I was impressed, not impressed, I was strongly surprised when in a meeting in Germany, I remember the country, we were talking with some organic farmers, and one of them was saying, “I’m a small-scale producer with 250 hectares.” I could not believe it. I said, “What?” When he realized that I was surprised, he said, “No, I’m small. This guy has over 400 [hectares],” and they call themselves small-scale farmers.

In Africa is not the case. In a country like Senegal, the average for a small-scale farmer is around two hectares or three hectares on average, and there is a potential. They can’t feed the world. What you should ask is whether those big companies, agrochemicals, and agro-industries, for years, for decades, they were saying, “We need to feed the world. We need to come up with a food security approach.” Hence, up to date, the number of those who are hungry is getting more and more, higher and higher. So it means what they wanted to give us as a solution is indeed a false solution.

Talia Baroncelli

What has been the role of agrochemical companies and pesticide companies in African countries such as Senegal? I think the film, The Last Seed, focuses on this and shows the nefarious presence of these companies. What are they actually doing, and how are they affecting the actual, maybe, genetic composition of these seeds?

Famara Diédhiou

If you talk about the genetic composition of the seeds, this will call upon the issue of GMOs. In Senegal, I don’t have facts and evidence saying that GMOs are around. I just heard some things about that. What I am sure of is that the agrochemical companies, seed agro-dealers are very present on the continent.

If you go to the northern part of the country, Senegal, where there is rice production with irrigation from the Senegal River; there is a big quantity of tomato production alongside the Senegal River with irrigation. Most of the seeds they are using, if not all of the seeds they are using, are coming from the agro-dealers. Very few people, very few farmers are in touch with the Senegalese Association of Peasant Seed Producers. It’s very small inside the seed. What I mean by that is that all the farmers who use those seeds are 100% dependent on agro-input. A 100% dependent! When I say agro-input, I mean both fertilizer and pesticides, including the seeds they are using every year.

What is the most dangerous about that is that we don’t have enough choice when it comes to rice eating. More or less, there are two or three varieties turning around what we call NERICA. NERICA stands for New Rice for Africa. Where is it coming from? It’s a breed between African rice (O. glaberrima) and Asian rice (O. sativa). African rice used to fall very quickly, and that sativa, something like that, and they mix it up. The fact that African rice is very tolerant to a lot of diseases was completely ignored.

The fact that we had various types of rice, including red rice, black rice, brown rice, black and white rice, and so on, was completely ignored. The fact that the diversity of rice enabled us to be able to grow rice in various areas. Not all rice needs a big quantity of water. There is rice that can sustain itself where there is enough water. So all that diversity which lived in some of our cultural way of doing things, I’m very serious about that, is slowly disappearing. In the northern part, it’s industrial agriculture. In the southern part and in the middle of the country, it’s not industrial agriculture, but it’s family farming. It’s for saving the family first before we go to the market. In those parts, NERICA is getting slowly, slowly in, and it’s dangerous.

One last example I’m going to give, in 2007, I go to a village and say, “Okay, we are working on this farmer’s innovation, but please keep your seeds because of this.” One of them, a very wise man, said, “You don’t understand what this boy is saying, but what he’s saying is very important.” This was 2007.

In 2020, during COVID, the same village called me and said, “Famara, we don’t have seeds.” I said, “Which kind of seeds?” “Rice.” I said, “I believe your community is culturally linked to seeds, to rice. It’s not normal that you don’t have seeds.” They said, “We now realize what you were saying in 2007.” I said, “I was in a program and we were reproducing traditional varieties. The only seeds I have are traditional varieties. If you are happy, I can give it to you.” They said, “Those are the ones we want because the new varieties, NERICA, we are lost on it.” This is a fact. They are trying to rebuild their seed system.

The agro-dealers are, I’m sorry to say, but slowly, in some parts, they are winning the game. They are achieving their goals.

Talia Baroncelli

Sorry if I can interrupt you. Is the issue that some of these seeds, because they’re hybrid or they’ve been changed in some way, that they’re not able to reproduce another batch of seeds past, say, one harvest, and that’s why farmers are then forced to perhaps buy more seeds, and they can’t rely on getting seeds from the harvest that they’ve been sowing?

Famara Diédhiou

Yes. Definitely. We need to recognize one thing. When they come with their hybrid seeds, it’s true, the criteria of those seeds is productivity. Yes, we need to recognize it. It is highly productive, but not forever. During the first two to three years, with all the requirements, you put this type of fertilizer; you need to use pesticides at certain times. If you collect the seeds and replant them after two or three seasons, the yield will decrease drastically.

What is worse is most of the farmers are saying, “We cannot do anything with our land now. The land is dead. We need to recover it.” If it’s only production that was linking the farmers to the agro-dealers, this is where the issue is. But there are some other social aspects behind it. Standardization. You can only have one type of rice. The variation is very small. Either it’s a long grain or short grain, but the test generally is only one. It doesn’t mean they culturally value the traditional diets and so on.

Talia Baroncelli

How are these small scale farming methods that you’re speaking about? You said that just because they’re on a small scale doesn’t mean that they’re small. They can encompass large swaths of land and they can be sustainable. But how can they work toward or help implement strategies to prevent climate change? So climate adaptation strategies?

Famara Diédhiou

Yeah. If you look at the theory of change for the transition to agroecology.

Talia Baroncelli

It’s right behind you, actually. It’s on the picture behind you. The theory of change.

Famara Diédhiou

Maybe this one is for us, but in general, the one we worked on with other stakeholders. When we came and we went to the farming system, we say the change in terms of agroecology practice we will start with the farm level. After the farm level, we have a community level. Before the community level, we talk about the landscape: where all the farmers in a village or in a community say this area is where we are going to farm the rice, to grow the rice. There, they have approaches that will fight against water; when the water is depleting the soil, they have techniques to fight against that. When they say how to do so that there won’t be fire coming into that place, there should be techniques for that. Then it goes to the municipality. The municipality will come together with several landscapes and develop a strategy for that. This is just in terms of climate hazards: the force of the wind, the force of the water, and so on.

Famara Diédhiou

Now, when it comes to what to grow in order to face climate change, usually people will talk about short-term variety. The one that arrived very quickly and another one that needs time. There is a type of maize, for instance, that within 45 days you can harvest it. There are others that will need two months, three months, and so on.

So the farmers, from what I know, in one single family, you will find that if they are growing rice, they can grow five different varieties. What is the rationale behind that? First, and usually, they don’t have just a single plot. If a farmer tells you that they have five hectares, it doesn’t mean that you will go to one place and see the five hectares. No. One will be here, two here, three over there until you have five. The fact that they have diverse places is so that when something happens here, it is what you say in English; I won’t put all my eggs in one basket. That’s how they do it. This is in terms of space.

Now, in terms of varieties, they have varieties that are salt tolerant. They can have varieties that can be flat tolerant. They can have varieties that need a very small quantity of water, and so on. This is their strategy to fight any type of hazard. So whatever happens, there will be a place where they can harvest the minimum. These are the strategies.

Now, let’s say that in the case where are no hazards and everywhere it works; yes, they have workforces at home. All the crops won’t mature at the same time. So they will take their force where it matures first, and slowly they will cover all the spaces without losing everywhere. But if they have only one type and one variety, it will ripen at once. Before they finish the harvest, one-third of all what they have cultivated, the rest will be destroyed either by the wind, either by the birds, or whatever else, or it will fall. So they have a strategy. We just need to recognize it and scale it somewhere.

Talia Baroncelli

What are the policy demands that you think are essential in order to effectuate small-scale farming and to have food sovereignty?

Famara Diédhiou

Yeah. One of our policy demands, including here in Senegal, there is a saying for those who want to change the land, land policy. They say, “Land for those who can exploit it. We say land for those who want to exploit it.” If you want, you should have access. They should not say if you can, because for them, I can, means I have a big tractor, I have a lot of money, I can build a bridge or a dam, but this doesn’t apply to us. Whoever wants should have access to the land and food rights.

Then we come to agroecology practices. When we say agroecology practices, there are a lot of cases where the land is completely depleted and there are public programs that are trying to recover the land health. The method they are using to recover the land, they are not agrochemical. They use agroecological practices. They never use chemical fertilizers. They use agroecological practices to recover the land that is depleted. So instead of depleting the land because of a type of farming method, yes, use the agroecological method. You don’t have to recover, but you will maintain or improve the soil as you go. We have a program called ‘Healthy Soil, Healthy Food.’

Talia Baroncelli

Well, this policy demand which you speak about, how everyone who wants access to the land should have access to the land, reminds me of a different conception of rights. So a socio economic prioritization of rights as opposed to other rights frameworks, which, for example, prioritize political voting, access to voting, to elections, to those sorts of political rights, to property and that sort of thing. What you’re talking about seems to shift the framework to other forms of economic rights, which are just as important as owning property or being able to participate in an election. So do you think a whole new system of rights and maybe a new economic framework is necessary to see this agro ecological perspective and mechanisms manifest? Is it possible under the current capitalist neoliberal framework?

Famara Diédhiou

No, not at all. I think there is a need for a shift. We’ve been living or experiencing capitalism, one economic vision, for almost a century. When the concept of agroecology came on board, it was not because of farming practices. Agroecology came for, of course, our practices to be changed, not productivity, productivity, productivity without knowing what we are doing. But also as policy. It’s a social movement; it’s politics. Under those politics, it’s against capitalism.

When we say capitalism, for instance, if you want to farm, to do a farming project, if you go to a bank for them to lend you money, to have credit, the business model that you have to fill-in so that they can believe or rely on your project, it’s not done for agro inclusion. It’s done in a capitalistic way of thinking. This one needs to change. What type of finance? What type of investment? What type of vision for an agroecology approach?

We’ve done some research. We are not yet done. What has appeared in a lot of countries, including the [inaudible 00:29:25], is that the finance structure within the bank doesn’t match with agroecological practices or agroecological vision. What should we do next? What should be the solution? Yes, we are still looking. In Burkina Faso, I’ve learned of an experience which could be fine, but we need to dig more and see if it’s the best. Then we scale it up everywhere for the world to come and learn from Burkina Faso.

Talia Baroncelli

I have one last question for you, and that relates to the impact of the war in Ukraine on African countries and on food sovereignty in a country like Senegal. How do you think a country like Senegal should insulate or protect itself from supply chain issues, from inflation, or from other global crises?

Famara Diédhiou

Those who know me will laugh when they are watching us. I spent time believing that the world in Ukraine has impacted us in Senegal. Until now, even when I’m talking about it, I’m not 100% convinced that this has really impacted us. This was the real cause of what we are suffering here in Senegal. The very first one, they said that there is no chemical fertilizer for our farmers. I said, “What?” Here in Senegal, we have at least two-three mining industries which have the material to produce fertilizers. How can it be that we depend on Ukraine, a country how many kilometers away? Just one country. Then after, they talk about the fuel. The fuel is more or less $2 a liter. I could not believe it. Then after, everywhere, any single food, commodity, whoever is saying, yes, it’s because of the war in Ukraine. Now, I accept it as it is.

How should a country like Senegal protect itself or prevent such type of situations, which is not nice but bad situations? We call ourselves the Alliance for Food Sovereignity in Africa. This word sovereignty, the concept of sovereignty, when I started to work in the early 2000s, I remember policymakers don’t want the concept of sovereignty. They were talking about security. Fortunately, during the issue of Ukraine, we heard the French President, President of France, Macron, saying, “We need to recover our sovereignty.” We said, “Oh,” coming from the head of state. A few months later, our President said, “We need to recover our food sovereignty.” I said, “What? The policymakers are talking about food sovereignty and talking about local consumption, supporting our local industry, and so on.”

What should be done is what we used to call for since we started to talk about food sovereignty. First is the land to the local people first. We are not against industrialization, but when it comes to industrialization, we support local companies. Food or products that are needed by the country should be the priority. There are some crops which are just for the external market. I won’t say just for the external market, but I would say maybe the primary target of those crops is the external market. We need the land for local people first.

Second, any company, any industry that is going to work at a local level, owned by the local population, should have first priority and local consumption. Then we build the infrastructure we might need. Finally, then there should be a push-pull strategy. For instance, the government could say, “If Talia or someone wants to build or start initiatives if it has taken into account the five principles or element of agroecology agreed at the worldwide level, they will be tax exempt, tax-free. If they use 90% of them, they will be tax-free up to 10%. This we should create.

I don’t know what you call it in English; where there is a public demand, public push.

Talia Baroncelli

A referendum?

Famara Diédhiou

No. When the country wants, for instance, to buy food or rice for a school feeding program, for instance, they could say, “Our priority is for the product that is agro-ecologically made.” Then people will go there, and they say, “If someone has done an innovation towards agroecology, there will be something like a price.” Now, for innovation in agriculture, in terms of packaging, in terms of feeding and so on. So a push-pull, intensive buys, and so on. This needs to be done for the people to recover its full sovereignty. Otherwise, wherever there is a no one, usually, if you dig behind it, there is the food industry behind it, and this doesn’t support us.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you make a very interesting distinction between food security and food sovereignty because the term security always begs the question, security for whom? Is it for the state? Is it for the people, for the local populations? Or is it, in fact, security for other foreign powers who are so interested in getting certain exports from a country or acquiring resources? So I think the way you explain sovereignty really shifts the focus to control over local resources in such a way that benefits the local populations.

Famara Diédhiou

Yeah, local population first. Not only the food but including the economy. I’ll just give one example. I like facts. In Ghana, around 2013-2015, around that, in the middle part of Ghana, it’s called the Middle Belt, similiar to the US. In the Northern part, I forget the name. That year, the northern part, maize production was a catastrophe and not good. At the same time, the production of maize in the Middle Belt was at its top. They never had this level of production. As the world is, black, white, that clear, and so on, so it was easy to solve. Just take what is in the Middle Belt and take it to the north of the country. But there was a strong propaganda, very, very, very strong propaganda, saying that the maize in the Middle Belt is infected by aflatoxin. I can’t believe it. To see the people in northern Ghana saying that they were facing hunger, they went to the U.S. and brought maize from this U.S. aid to feed the north of Ghana. The Middle Belt remained there with their maize.

I really wanted to do some research aboutaflatoxin, where aflatoxin is appearing. I had a lot of discussions with some scientists and academics about aflatoxin. Yes, it can be there, but I have a hypothesis in my head. It’s saying that this aflatoxin can appear at a big rate where it’s the hybrid seeds. So the traditional seeds or peasants seeds, I’m not sure if the aflatoxin could have occurred this often. We’ve grown in rural areas. We’ve been farmers for part of our lives. All that we are talking about, the cause or the impact or the consequence of the aflatoxin, we did not face it. At that time, we were not eating all of those hybrid seeds; that depends on inputs here. So if I have money, if I have time, I will put some research on that to see where aflatoxin is, we see more aflatoxin here or there, which practices and so on. I need some more proof from people to see.

To come back to your question about food security, yes, our people first. The local consumption first. Local diet first. Then we go for other things. We know that we are globalization, yes. We are traveling here and there. Our food is traveling here and there. There are some things like if I go to the airport with my passport, the nationals should have a specific treatment. When it comes to food, the nationals also should have a specific treatment before we go to the others.

Talia Baroncelli

Famara Diédhiou, it was really fascinating speaking to you. I’m very happy that you were able to make time to speak about food sovereignty and the work that the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa has been supporting. Thank you very much.

Famara Diédhiou

Thank you, Talia. My pleasure.

Talia Baroncelli

Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you enjoyed this content, please go to the website, theAnalysis.news, and get on the mailing list; that way, you’re informed every time a new episode is released. You can also donate to the show and go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. Hit like and subscribe to all the videos. See you next time.

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“Famara Diédhiou has over 15 years of professional experience working mostly in rural development in African countries, particularly in the establishment of community seed and cereal banks, organizing women’s groups for urban-rural partners. As a West Africa-based program officer under the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), Famara Diédhiou is active in various networks to advance the food sovereignty struggle and African-driven solutions.”

theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“. Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay’s Documentaries

Honest Government Ad | Anti Protest Laws (SA)

Paul Jay — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 14:03:21 -0400

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The South Australien Government has made an ad about its new anti-protest legislation, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative. This video was originally published by The Juice Media on May 28, 2023.

.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .kt-blocks-post-grid-item .kt-blocks-post-grid-item-inner{padding-top:10px;padding-right:25px;padding-bottom:25px;padding-left:9px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .kt-blocks-post-grid-item header{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .kt-blocks-post-grid-item .entry-title{padding-top:5px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:10px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font-size:16px;line-height:17px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .entry-content{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .kt-blocks-post-footer{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_5c6343-3a .kb-filter-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:2px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:5px;padding-right:8px;padding-bottom:5px;padding-left:8px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;} Honest Government Ad | Anti Protest Laws (SA) Honest Government Ad | Reserve Bank of Australia Honest Government Ad | Visit New South Wales! Honest Government Ad | the Safeguard Mechanism Honest Government Ad | AUKUS Honest Government Ad | Julian Assange Honest Government Ad | Visit Western Australia Juice Media Satire: Australian “Values” News Corp Bargaining Code – Biting Satire From Juice Media Juice Media Nails Australien Government Climate “Policy” Juice Media Take Down of QAnon – we wish it was just satire

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Russian Invasion a War of Aggression – Offer of Ukraine in NATO a Provocation – Paul Jay

Paul Jay — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 17:05:20 -0400

Paul Jay and Jyotishman Mudiar, host of India & Global Left, discuss and debate the war against Ukraine and the role of NATO and the US. Jay states, "NATO doesn't exist to invade Russia. NATO exists to assert American hegemony in Europe."

Debt Ceiling Theater and the Trump Parallel Universe

Paul Jay — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 16:17:47 -0400

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Paul Jay interviews Tom Ferguson about the debt ceiling crisis in the United States. Ferguson explains that the debate over the debt ceiling is largely theater, with both Democrats and Republicans working together to cut spending while maintaining the appearance of opposition. He criticizes the Democrats for not raising the debt ceiling earlier when they had the opportunity and suggests that their reluctance is due to their desire to secure more campaign funding for future elections. Ferguson argues that the spending cuts rolled back are not significant enough to impact inflation and proposes alternative measures, such as taxing the wealthy and reducing defense spending, to address the issue. He also discusses the influence of money in politics and the Democratic Party’s efforts to weaken the progressive wing.

Libyans Caught Between Warring Elites and Foreign Powers

Paul Jay — Thu, 25 May 2023 15:31:01 -0400

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Anas El Gomati is the founder and director of the Libyan think tank, the Sadeq Institute. He discusses how so much of Libya’s history has been shaped by European colonial powers and other foreign states meddling in its affairs. On the flip side, E.U. developments and the rise of right-wing populism and racist anti-migrant sentiment cannot be disentangled from what transpires in Libya. In light of the ongoing fighting between rival government structures, how can the control of oil resources and state assets shift from elite strongmen to civilian bodies?

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Libyan analyst, Anas El Gomati, to speak about the situation in Libya as well as Libya’s role in the conflict in neighboring Sudan. If you enjoy this content, please consider donating to the show by going to theAnalysis.news and hitting the donate button at the top-right corner of the screen. You can also get on the mailing list so that you’re informed every time a new episode is published. Also, go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news. Hit like on all the videos you want to watch and hit subscribe so that you’re notified every time a new episode drops. See you in a bit with Anas.

Joining me now is Anas El Gomati. He’s the founder and director of the Libyan think tank, the Sadeq Institute. Thank you so much for joining me, Anas.

Anas El Gomati

Thanks, Talia. I appreciate it.

Talia Baroncelli

There’s so much I want to speak to you about today, but I think we should start off with what happened after the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, where Muammar Gaddafi was ousted from power. He was killed, and fighting continued afterwards. There was a UN-led process which tried to establish elections and a functioning government. I think it’s safe to say that the process has unfortunately failed and that there are two rival governments now; one in the West and one in the East. What’s going on right now in Libya?

Anas El Gomati

Well, it’s a really complicated story, and it’s always good to start from where you picked things up. It’s difficult to look back in retrospect and try to condense those ten years together. But I would say for the first three years, things were not as bad as they are now. There was an episode of violence that was fairly limited in comparison to the last two conflicts that Libya has endured—one in 2011, one in 2014, and one in 2019. But I don’t know whether or not Libyans would always consider what happened in 2011 to be a civil war. Of course, as you alluded to, NATO’s intervention was heavy on that. I think it also limited a lot of the potential violence that could have occurred, as we saw in Syria. I think that’s one thing that has to be said about the 2011 intervention.

In comparison, the 2014 and 2019 interventions contained the very same players and contained more players. I think that’s where the UN remitted and turned a blind eye to the maligned influence of a lot of regional players and world players that have continued to destabilize Libya. That’s been forgotten.

From 2011 to 2014, Libya was fairly stable, and its progress was actually quite positive in comparison to right now. So there were elections in 2012, with an 80% turnout, very high numbers for Libya’s first elections. There was so much pluralism in that first Parliament that Libya elected that it was a hung Parliament. There were so many different groups there because 60% of the seats were given to independent candidates not running on a party list. Forty percent were given to a party list.

I think, in retrospect, some of those things might now look like a mistake. Maybe what Libya needed at the time was strong party affiliations so that a block could come to dominate and say, “This is the direction that we’re going to take after the elections.” Many argued at the time that we didn’t really know what the Libyans wanted. We don’t know who the Libyans are, so let them elect as many Libyans as possible and let them move forward.

So in retrospect, the first couple of years were okay. Yes, there were militias that were on the ground at the time, but they were not conducting the violence that we’ve seen them conduct since 2014 and since 2019.

So for the first three years, up until Libya’s second elections in 2014, the situation was fairly stable on the ground, and there was one single government. It was elected by the Libyan people en masse. I think, in that sense, there was much to be celebrated. I think Libya’s economic outlook, its political outlook, and its stability in the region were good.

In 2014, we had a civil war, and it came down from the rise of this actor who many may know of and many may not know of, but his name is Khalifa Haftar. I think your viewer should know who he is. He has the longest-standing political career of anybody in the entire Middle East and North Africa. It spans 54 years. He emerged in 1969 with Muammar Gaddafi in a coup against King Idris. He has gone on to launch seven power grabs over a career now that spans, as I said, 54 years. Those power grabs are not just coups. They are defections from the very partners that he launched those coups with.

If we start looking at today’s recent news, the last 24 hours of what has happened in Libya, which we may get into in a little while, you’ll see Khalifa Haftar’s fingerprints and his political DNA all over that.

To set the scene, the first three years were not so bad. I think NATO’s biggest mistake was most likely abandoning Libya’s political future and the role of regional actors and not immunizing Libya from those two things. There was the creation of militias that needed to be integrated into a unified military and a subservient military, which Libya had never experienced. The reason why Libyans overwhelmingly overthrew the Gaddafi regime was that they wanted to live in a society, in a state that was not controlled by a family or by personal militias but by a neutral state security service that respects human rights and allows you to have the same level of freedom no matter where you’re from, what your surname is, what your tribe is, or what part of the country you’re from.

Since 2014, that has been quite the opposite. Khalifa Haftar emerged and declared himself the leader of the self-styled Libyan National Army, or the Libyan Arab Armed Forces. With that, he launched this coup and a war on terror that split the country in two. He split the country between two rival parliaments, the first Parliament that was elected in 2012, a second Parliament that was elected in 2014, and then two rival administrations that were unified temporarily after Libya’s last war in 2019 that Khalifa Haftar launched, but has since, as you’ve mentioned, slipped back to another partition after he failed to have elections in late 2021.

So it is a bit of Groundhog Day in Libya because there have been lots of changes in the middle of the last 12 years. At the same time, for so much change, it’s almost like old wine and new bottles. The same actors are still there from 2011, and they’re still here in 2023. Despite the unification process, the UN process that was supposed to unify all these different parts and put Humpty Dumpty back together again, you still have two different governments under different acronyms. You still have two rival military formations. You still have two rival parliaments.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, I would argue that the NATO intervention is what pushed Humpty Dumpty to fall off the wall, so to speak. Of course, Gaddafi was not liked by his people, or by some of them at least. Maybe some of them supported him, but a lot of people would argue that they were uprising against Gaddafi and they didn’t want him to be in power anymore. But the NATO intervention was not conducted in a way that would ensure that there would be something left of the country afterwards.

In 2011, you had so many people fleeing the country and refugees trying to escape Libya and get to Europe. A lot of people, unfortunately, died in the Mediterranean trying to make those crossings. So the intervention wasn’t benign. I’m sure the mandate was not conducted or not designed in such a way to ensure that there would be functioning institutions. We’re still seeing that there is a power vacuum. Now you have, as you said, Haftar, who has his own interests, and you have these rival governments.

Bringing it back to right now, you have a government in the West, the GNA [Government of National Accord], which is supported by the UN, but I think a lot of other European powers and by Turkey. Then in the East, you have a House of Representatives which has just suspended Fathi Bashagha. So what’s going on there? Why was he suspended? What was his vision, at least, of trying to unify Libya, or was he just trying to grab power and resources?

Anas El Gomati

Can I just touch on your point? I actually agree with you. But just on your initial point about NATO.

Talia Baroncelli

Sure.

Anas El Gomati

I think the question about NATO’s intervention, lack of planning, and the fact that members of NATO have since gone on to undermine Libya’s stability tells you a lot about the way that that organization functions. The reality is that why are these states, what we consider to be strong states, or thought were strong states, why are they so brittle? That’s really the reality. A lot of these states, the authoritarian states, the myth of the strong man, it comes down to Fathi Bashagha’s own personal story because that’s really the crux of this story with this parallel administration that was created. They’re brittle states. They look like they’re very strong, but the moment that you poke them, they start to disintegrate because there are no institutions. There is no plan for a day after, and they’re designed to be coup-proof. I think this is where a lot of these states, whether it be Saddam’s [Hussein] Iraq, whether it be Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, or whether it be Gaddafis Libya, or tomorrow, even Egypt’s [Abdel Fattah El-]Sisi, and as we’re looking at the fall of Saddam and its disintegration into a civil war, the rise of [Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo] Hemedti, these places, their institutions are so personalized. They’re so brittle that once there is any intervention from the outside or there is an uprising, they start to fall apart.

But let me come to this question about Fathi Bashagha because it’s a really interesting point that you’ve raised about what are his motivations. His own personal story is fascinating. What you have with the story of Fathi Bashagha is an individual who joined the revolution in 2011. He was a former Air Force pilot and led a revolutionary armed group, a militia from the city of Misrata, which became famous during the revolution for being a real kingmaker and power broker in Western Libya, where the capital is in Tripolitania. He went on to then join, over several years, the political class. He was elected as a member of Parliament in 2014; that second Parliament that we spoke about, the House of Representatives. Then he was appointed as the Minister of Interior to the Government of National Accord that was established in 2015 during the UN process to unify this first division after Libya’s first civil war in 2014. Four months into the job, Khalifa Haftar attacks the capital.

Now, we should remember that the GNA didn’t have a Ministry of Defense. It didn’t have a Chief of Staff. It didn’t have a Chief of Intelligence. So he was literally the last man standing in terms of Libya’s or Tripoli’s security. He goes on to defend the capital from Khalifa Haftar’s onslaught. What begins as just a normal war escalates into a nasty, brutal, personal war of words between Khalifa Haftar and Fathi Bashagha. Khalifa Haftar calls the GNA, the units, and the forces fighting underneath him that Bashagha was leading– he calls them terrorists; and says, “I will never enter into a dialogue with them.”

On the other hand, Fathi Bashagha calls Haftar a putschist, a coup plotter, a war criminal, someone whom he will never meet with. In fact, on the record, he says, “There will be no peace in Libya whilst Haftar enjoys a political role.”

Now, that was in 2019 and 2020. The civil war culminated in a stalemate around the summer of 2020. Within six months, there is a UN political process that says, “Well, there is a rival government here in the East. There’s a rival government here in the West. Let’s again unify these two separate halves.” They create a political dialogue forum where they bring in members of the status quo, Libya’s two rival parliaments, to appoint two figures, one president and one prime minister.

Fathi Bashagha enters into that race with the head of the Parliament in the East, who is considered to be Khalifa Haftar’s staunchest political ally. So people start scratching their heads, and they start wondering, what happened to all this anonymity?

Before the end of that year, before the end of 2021, Fathi Bashagha stood in Benghazi, the eastern city that has become infamous for the events in 2012, over the last ten years, and is the center of power of Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army. He shares a handshake with the man that he said there would be no political future for in the country and that there would be no peace with. Khalifa Haftar, the man who said that he emerged in Libya not for his own personal political gain or financial gain but to fight the scourge of terrorism, which he has said he will never enter into a dialogue with and shakes his hand. So the terrorists are shaking the putschist’s hand.

It’s an unusual place in Libya, but it’s a place where there are friends with benefits, but there are also enemies with benefits. That’s what happened with this creation of the Government of National Stability. These two figures emerged, and they have this narrative that surrounds them. Everyone has called Khalifa Haftar, or many people have called him ‘the strong man of the East.’ Fathi Bashagha, after his role in the 2019 civil war, became labelled ‘the strong man of the West.’

What happens is that these two strong men come together and forge an agreement, but they’re not strong enough to take the capital. They tried to overthrow the Government of National Unity that was appointed in 2021 under Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, the current sitting internationally recognized Prime Minister, and they failed to overthrow him. What happened beyond failing to overthrow him, it actually dispels a lot of the myths around the “Arab strongman.” They’re only as strong as their rhetoric suggests. In a place like Libya, where there are no angels on either side of these civil wars, I’ll be very clear about that, but there are militias that have emerged that fight for greed. There are certainly militias and armed groups out there that fight for grievance. There are those that are going to end up supporting the revolution, and there are going to be those that oppose it and support Gaddafi. The question is not who is right and who is wrong. The question is, what are they fighting for, and how do you get them to stop fighting? And so that deal that was cut between the two rival strongmen of the last civil war, the two political polls of the last civil war, failed. It failed because these two strongmen assumed that they could buy their way out of a civil war.

Civil wars are there. There’s a lot of political rhetoric that is there. There’s always going to be financial gain. There are going to be geopolitical and economic interests that are there. In a place like Libya which has some of the highest levels of gold deposits and the highest levels of cash deposits in the world, of course, there’s going to be greed, but there’s also going to be grievances. Trying to meddle and mould both together and mesh both together has been one of the reasons why we’re struggling to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. You can’t buy out everyone. You can’t buy out people that may have supported Gaddafi’s regime. They’re principled, and they believe in what they fought for.

In contrast, you might not be able to buy out those that fought against him and have now fought against Khalifa Haftar and have now fought against Fathi Bashagha. But as you can see, over a decade, one of the things that no one really looks at is how we turn away from these places for a decade, and we look back, and we say, “Oh, yeah, it’s Groundhog Day. It’s just two governments. It’s just two rivals. They’ll fix it eventually.” You forget that on a dusty Tuesday in a place like Libya, there are war crimes that are taking place on either side or any of the sides that we’ve just mentioned that have been there over the last decade. The build-up of those grievances makes those states even more brittle. It makes it even harder to then address the number of grievances that have been there for the last decade. So when you look at the rise and the fall and demise of a player like Fathi Bashagha, it tells you a couple of things– strong men beware, and those that are buying, beware of what you’re buying because, to be honest, that is a myth that has now come down crashing on the plate of analysts, diplomats, and commentators across the country and further afield. But also that the serious work that needs to go in, as you mentioned, the serious work and planning that needs to take place after the fact of an intervention like what happened in 2011 or two serious civil wars that have erupted in the aftermath, you can’t put them to bed through a handshake in Benghazi and assume there’s nothing else to see here, and everything will be rosy.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, yeah, why don’t we talk about that planning? Because you have this unlikely alliance, as you might call it, between Haftar and Bashagha. Are they in control of some of the oil reserves?

Anas El Gomati

Mhm.

Talia Baroncelli

Or is it the UN-led or the UN-supported government in the West in Tripoli that’s controlling those reserves? Because the Libyan Coast Guard, for example, receives an incredible amount of money from the E.U. and especially from Italy to ensure that people on the move, that asylum seekers don’t leave Libya and that they don’t arrive in Italy or in other parts of the peripheral area of Southern Europe. So they’ve been systematically pushed back. This is, of course, against international standards and against international norms. It’s [inaudible 00:18:00]. It’s pushing them back to Libya. The Libyan Coast Guard has been fully complicit in these crimes, and they’re receiving money from the E.U. to basically do the E.U.’s dirty work and ensure that people don’t leave the country.

Anas El Gomati

Mhm.

Talia Baroncelli

Who do these people represent? Are they from the West, so to speak, and are they also in control of some resources? The most important question would be, are the Libyans themselves, the Libyan population, are they benefiting from any of these resources and oil profits whatsoever, or are they just completely impoverished?

Anas El Gomati

It’s a number of questions you asked, and all of them are pertinent and straight to the point. So I’ll try and be as quick as I can to go through them.

Number one, I think when it comes to the oil reserves and how they’re controlled, that is a really unusual game that reflects the ways in which wars are fought now in the 21st century and how different they were fought in the 20th century. Libya is littered with mercenaries and foreign mercenaries. There is Russias Wagner Group that operates in Libya. There are other sides and factions that have delivered their own mercenaries. Libya is littered with militias and tribes.

If you ask Khalifa Haftar when he blockaded that oil, he said, “It wasn’t me that blockaded it. It was the Libyan tribes.” But then he’ll put out an order through the Libyan National Army to say that nobody can work from the Libyan military in any of those facilities.

In late 2021, I believe, in September 2021, after Libya’s oil was blockaded at the end of the civil war in 2019 and 2020, that oil blockade was lifted through negotiations in Moscow. So there was an element there that was hinting at foreign control. It was blockaded again after Khalifa Haftar and Fathi Bashagha established their own GNS, the Government of National Stability, that parallel government we spoke about a few moments earlier. After they blockaded the oil, Khalifa Haftar negotiated with Dbeibeh, the Prime Minister in Tripoli, and again stabbed in the back his own political ally, Fathi Bashagha, and lifted the blockade through negotiations in the UAE between, as I said, Dbeibeh and Haftar. Now, Dbeibeh and Haftar each control portions of the oil wealth. None of the oil wealth goes to the Libyan people. They’re yet to see any of it.

Basically, look at the pictures across the country. There is nothing that has been built in that country arguably since the late ’70s. That’s one of the things that Libya is desperately in need of. If you go to Libyan government estimates, Libyan is in the region of $100 billion of investment in its infrastructure alone, and that’s telling. What it’s telling is that the $100 billion is there. It’s in the Libyan coffers. They could spend that money if they wanted to. So much of that money goes into the hands and pockets of Libya’s unelected and expired political elite.

When it comes to the Coast Guard, it’s a very different question. I think it’s really important. It is one of the things that the European Union is certainly guilty of. If you look at the UN panel of expert reports, not only are they training and equipping the Libyan Coast Guard in means that are deeply contrary to international humanitarian law, Libya’s own law, and Europe’s own responsibilities and maritime responsibilities, but more peculiar than that is that many of the individuals that are responsible for the smuggling of humans and human trafficking, they’re the ones that are now part of the Libyan Coast Guard.

In the West of Libya, you have individuals known as [inaudible 00:21:45] and other people like that. The town of Az-Zāwiyah is a critical departure point for refugees and migrants fleeing to Europe. By the UN’s own admission and its own panel of expert reports, there are individuals that were smugglers that attended training courses under the E.U. and were received by the E.U. themselves. They’ve either taken material support or support of some kind from the E.U.

What is getting worse now is that for the first time in the modern history of Libya, departures are exceeding in the East of the country where there has been a smuggling empire under Khalifa Haftar. Sixty percent of departures today, the 57,000 that landed on the shores of Italy over the last year, have come from Libya, at least 60% from Eastern Libya. Khalifa Haftar today has moved from being the commander of the Libyan National Army to being the commander of a smuggling network. You would think that this would also irk the European Union or member states. He was received by the Meloni administration two weeks ago and given red-carpet treatment in Rome.

It’s one of those places where when you look at the political landscape, you look at the political fingerprints on the crimes that have taken place; Libya is like living in the upside down. Nothing makes sense. The more crimes that you pursue, the more spoiling that you pursue, the more reward you get. It also tells you a number of other things. The harder you push, the more you can get. For every Khalifa Haftar, you have a plastic one sitting behind him thinking, “I could be next,” and that’s damaging. That’s why what you were talking about, international norms, they’re not just words and abstract terms that people use to describe phenomena in textbooks. They matter on the ground because if you keep breaking these rules over and over again, then everyone thinks, “If he can do it, so can I.”

Talia Baroncelli

Unfortunately, it is a lot of the western actors, such as the E.U., are involved indirectly or directly with their money, perpetrating these crimes against humanity. There was a UN report saying that the crimes against a lot of the migrants and asylum seekers who are detained in Libya amount to crimes against humanity– rape and all sorts of inhumane conditions in which they’re detained. Yet the E.U. policymakers, as well as the U.S. policymakers, keep talking about this rules-based order, which they stand behind in European values. They’re just complete hypocrites when it comes to actually trying to implement policies that would foster those values.

Another area that we could speak about is how the E.U. has welcomed so many refugees from Ukraine who have been forced to leave their country. They should accept these people and treat them with respect and give them asylum. At the same time, there have been no legal channels for people to leave Libya or other countries in Africa that have been stricken by conflict and other calamities and crises.

Anas El Gomati

Yep.

Talia Baroncelli

It’s just unfortunate to see that because the E.U. has been so present in those regions and in contributing to those crises. Yet there’s a racist element to it because when these people want to come to Europe and seek protection, then it’s, “Oh, these people are just economic migrants, so they’re not really deserving of any protection.”

Anas El Gomati

I couldn’t agree more, honestly. I think the dilemma that I have in my mind, there are two things. The first is that racial discrepancy; it’s certainly not lost on an Arab audience because they started scratching their heads and saying, number one, “How come we’re not received in that way?” Number two, they don’t want to be received in the first place. They want to stay at home. There’s no refugee on Earth that ever wants to leave their home and take a boat, most likely die, be ignored and forgotten about and be described as cockroaches by other European heads of state and otherwise.

There’s something that is to be said about the fact that the best way and best policy for reducing a refugee crisis is to prevent violence from taking place in the first place. That’s where you find, unfortunately, the role of regional Arab states, the role of other European states, the role of the U.S., and Russia in Libya. They have their fingerprints all over that. I think some countries don’t care because they’re not on the receiving end. Libya is considered to be NATO’s southern flank and Europe’s soft underbelly. In many ways, the only thing that is of importance for a lot of policymakers today about Libya is to just stabilize it, and give it to someone to stop those boats from coming in. I think that’s really when you start to interrogate what their policies could have been over the last several years; why don’t you stop the malignant influence of regional actors? Why don’t you stop your own malignant influence of working with smugglers and calling them coastguards? I mean, there’s a lot more. I know this sounds strange saying this as a political analyst, but in a philosophical sense, there’s a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done when it comes to not only the policy-making on Libya but also the rhetoric. The rhetoric is deeply dehumanizing when it comes to places like Libya and places like Syria. If they’re called a human, that’s the best possible outcome. More often than not, they’re either, as it is, like a wink and nod or whatever, the idea that they’re either terrorists, terrorist sympathizers, or parts of criminal networks. It’s the most deeply dehumanizing thing to say about those that are fleeing from conflict and fleeing from terror, fleeing from criminal networks and fleeing from violence. Violence [inaudible 00:27:21] perpetuate.

Talia Baroncelli

It reminds me of Josep Borrell, the High Representative of Europe. He gave a speech; I think this was eight months ago or so, in which he characterized Europe as a garden which needed to be protected from the jungle. Just that metaphor; it’s so colonial. When he was called out as opposed to apologizing, he double downed on it and said that he didn’t mean it in a racist way but that Europe represents these lofty values that need to be protected from places like Libya, alluding to the warfare and the deaths and the horrible bloodshed that’s going on there. He missed out on the important part, and that’s how Europe has contributed to the perpetuation of these crimes in the region.

I think the Arab regional actors also play a role. The Emirates, the United Arab Emirates have played a huge role. I think initially they did not support Haftar, and now they do support Haftar. If you look at–

Anas El Gomati

No, they were the first.

Talia Baroncelli

Oh, they were the first.

Anas El Gomati

Yep.

Talia Baroncelli

Okay. They’re also involved in a neighboring conflict in Sudan. So in Sudan, there’s a war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which are led by General Hemedti. Haftar and Hemedti are also buddy-buddy.

Anas El Gomati

They are fellows.

Talia Baronce

Modern Iran: National Identity as a Tool of Resistance or Coercion?

Paul Jay — Fri, 19 May 2023 14:09:50 -0400

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This is an unedited version of the transcript. An edited version will be arriving shortly.

Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. Assal Rad, a historian as well as the author of a recent book State of Resistance, will be joining me today to speak about national identity formations in Iran.

Assal Rad

But then, in a lot of cases, as I said, I didn’t say I was doing an interview. I would just go to a store, I wanted to buy a CD. If there was a dance party and you wanted to give somebody a CD of all the best songs right now, what is that? Chat up the person who’s going to sell you what is, by the way, not an official CD. It’s like an underground CD because it’s officially allowed to be sold.

Talia Baroncelli

If you enjoy this content and would like to contribute to the show, please go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and make a donation by hitting the button at the top right corner of the screen. You can also get on our mailing list; that way, you’re notified whenever a new episode drops. You can also like and subscribe to all of the videos on our YouTube channel at theAnalysis-news. See you in a bit with Assal.

Joining me now to speak about Iranian national identity is Assal Rad. She’s a historian and author of the new book State of Resistance. Thanks so much for coming back onto the show, Assal. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Well, your book is a really fascinating excursion into Iranian national identity, and it juxtaposes different identity formations, such as top-down formations led by the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Islamic Republic. It sets that up against different bottom-up formations and ways in which Iranians contest these limited notions of identity. Before we get into the details, I wanted to ask you why you wrote this book in the first place.

Assal Rad

Well, it was a very personal project, if I’m being honest. As an Iranian American, as someone who was born and raised in the United States but to parents of Iranian immigrants, my own navigating that hyphenated identity made me really interested in the notion of belonging and identity. When you grow up, especially within that generation where there’s a lot of anti-Iran sentiment in the United States that creates a sense of alienation, you want to always have this idea of belonging.

I travelled to Iran as an adult, thinking in my mind, I’m like, oh, I’m going to go to this place where I’m going to get that sense of belonging for sure, because this is really where my core identity comes from. I travelled there, and I realized that that’s just not the case. It’s not that it wasn’t wonderful for many reasons, visiting your family, being with people who understand certain aspects of your culture that might not be understood in the state that you live in. My idea of Iranianness was so distinct from theirs. It was so far removed. What I had expected when I visited there because I had grown up in this bubble of not only my own Iranian household but the community that we had built here, that’s really what I expected. It was a very different situation. So I became very interested in understanding that more and understanding Iran more. It also made me realize if I, as someone of Iranian heritage in the United States, didn’t really understand the complexity of the population, the culture, and the politics of that country, then how can I expect an American of non-Iranian heritage to understand? I became really fascinated with trying to understand those things.

As someone who decided to study history, there is that ubiquitous phrase, “History is written by the victors.” You understand the importance and the power of narrative, how important the story is, and people believing that story. It’s almost the story, and whether or not people believe it is more important than the reality on the ground. People in religious studies and historians of religion do this all the time, they’re like, “Oh, such and such story that’s in this religious text is disproven by this information.” It doesn’t matter oftentimes to the believers. So all of that I found really fascinating. I wanted to, as much as possible, try and understand how those narratives played into contemporary Iran.

I tried to trace that back to how having a national narrative and condition of nationalism was tied to the idea of the modern nation-state. In order to have a modern nation-state, you had to have the trappings of a modern nation-state in terms of modern infrastructure, an organized military, a bureaucratic state, all of those types of things. The story was so important, too, that people understood how they belonged to this, as [Political Scientist and Histortian] Benedict Anderson has put it, “imagined community.” That was such an integral part of that project. You could see that unfolding under both the Pahlavi dynasty and then continuing under the Islamic Republic.

Talia Baroncelli

These historians, like Benedict Anderson, and [Historian] Eric Hobsbawm, play a really important role in how you make sense of identity making and identity formation. I think the Haitian anthropologist [Michel-Rolph] Trouillot also plays a big theoretical role in terms of looking at how certain narratives are silenced over time and which contested narratives actually have supremacy or are more recognized as being valid or authentic over other ones. I think in your book, by reading it, it seemed like you weren’t trying to argue that any one identity is actually more authentic than the other. If you have all these different identities, which one do you then choose? Or is it all relative?

Assal Rad

I think there’s definitely the idea of it being relative. Yeah, I would never want to. I think anybody who tries to choose a definitive or authentic identity is doing a disservice to understanding the whole point. The point of it is, in scholarship, at least, there’s this idea that the nation-state is a construct, race is a construct, and gender is a construct. Sometimes to the nonacademic, that’s a meaningless statement. It’s like, what do you mean that there are social constructs? What it means is basically that they can change their dynamic—someone who’s wielding power at the top. A state can try and wield that narrative, and people can do the same thing. There’s a negotiation that goes back and forth. Nobody has the power to control that narrative because it’s so dynamic and fluid, and it can change over time.

But then what happens is if you take that argument to an extreme, the idea that it’s a construct, you see sometimes in scholarship the idea that then it’s inauthentic, that it’s not real, it’s fake, or it’s made up. I think that also does a disservice because the reality of it is once you as an individual psychologically attach yourself to an identity, it’s very real. It’s a very real experience, and it has very real consequences. You can say that borders are made up, and they are. If you look at a picture of the Earth, there are no borders on it. We’ve created those borders. But the experience of existing in those borders is very real. The inability to move across those borders is very real.

I wanted to be on that fence of understanding both sides of the argument, that it’s constructed in the case of, say, Iran, where I’m looking at national identity. Those national identities are constructed both from above and from below, but it’s still a certain set of characteristics and symbols that they can choose from. An Iranian identity is not… it’s going to take different symbols that are part of its very long and rich historical and cultural history. That was really what I wanted to get at. Yes, it is imagined, and yes, it is constructed, but it’s still very real, and it has very real consequences for those who are experiencing it.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, and you were looking at the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and how he would use certain cultural or historic symbols from Iran’s pre-Islamic age, so to speak. He kept referring to the 3,000-year history of Iran and how it was this Aryan civilization—trying to sanitize Iranian history from Islam, basically. Whereas I guess after the revolution, there was resistance to that. An opposite identity formation was taking place but in the same manner.

Assal Rad

Yeah, so one thing to be clear about with the Shah is that the cultural pillar that he tried to use in terms of the national narrative was tied to monarchy. Remember that when he’s asked, “What ties the nation together?” He literally responds with himself, the monarchy, the monarch, the king is like the father of the nation. So in seeing that identity for himself, he tied the identity of the nation-state to this history of the monarchy; that predates Islam. He was also very much a Muslim himself. Especially with the recent protests, the anti-compulsory hijab protests that we saw in Iran, although those protests obviously went beyond the concept of the hijab, but the idea that there is this compulsory hijab in Iran, a lot of people brought up the fact that, “Oh, the former Shah outlawed the veil.” The reality of it is that it was his father. Reza Shah outlawed the chador in the 1930s when he tried to enforce this idea of westernization. But his son, who would become the last Shah, didn’t enforce those restrictions on whether or not women could wear the veil. You could say culturally, those groups may have felt more alienated because westernization and westerners were set higher in terms of something to aspire to. He wasn’t anti-Islam; that’s not the point of it. It’s more that that’s the cultural factor that he tried to bring into his national narrative.

I bring up two other elements to these three elements that make up his nationalism. It’s the concept of revolution, ironically, and the concept of independence. You see those same threads go into the revolution itself by 1979. Revolutionaries are using the idea that Iran is not an independent state, not a fully independent state. Going back to the coup of 1953, going back to the idea that they see some of these tendencies, the appetite towards westernization that the Shah had as being alien to a lot of the indigenous cultures within Iran. Obviously, they are revolutionaries. But he’s using this discourse in a historical context where you have a lot of anti-colonial national independence movements around the world. So you see that rhetoric everywhere around, and he’s trying to tap into that.

You see that in the White Revolution of the 1960s. He has an entire book called The White Revolution. So he’s using revolutionary discourse, he’s using the discourse of independence, and he’s infusing cultural symbols that predate Islam and go back to the Iranian monarchy as far back as the Achaemenid monarchy, that of Cyrus the Great, and really directly tying his own dynasty to that era.

Iranian revolutionaries then use Islam as a counterpoint in a certain way. It’s someone like [Iranian Revolutionary and Sociologist] Ali Shariati, whose discourse becomes very popular, especially in the 1970s, when he is saying we need to go back to our indigenous roots. Now, who is he getting influenced by? It’s a figure like [Psychiatrist and Political Philosopher, Frantz] Fanon. This is quintessential anti-colonial resistance. But whereas Fanon is saying we have to leave history behind and forge new identities; Shariati is saying, “No, we have to reclaim our indigenous identities and take pride in those identities rather than trying to emulate the West.” And that’s a sentiment that you see in other thinkers at the time. Someone like [Author and Anthropologist, Jalal] Al-e Ahmad, who writes the classic Westoxification—the idea that this obsession with the West, wanting to emulate the West, is almost like a malady that exists within Iran and within maybe the greater region arguably. So that’s the historical context in which the Shah is creating this narrative.

Talia Baroncelli

I mean, you do see the Shah’s obsession with the West, and that’s probably what was one of the factors in leading to his downfall and leading to the Iranian Revolution; his constant reference to the West being more modern and that Iran is, because of its history, also a modern civilization, they just needed to emulate the West to drag themselves out of the impoverishment that had been brought on them by imperialists. Not that Iran was ever colonized, but its resources were colonized. I think in the ’70s, he had more of an anti-imperialist rhetoric when speaking about the oil crisis, for example.

Assal Rad

Right. I mean, he did. There are interviews with the British. Up until 1953, Iranians tend to have a very positive view of the United States. Their negative view, vis-à-vis colonial powers or foreign powers trying to exert control over Iran, is really against Imperial Russia and the British Empire. In the ‘Great Game,’ these are the powers that are trying to influence and really control resources and even land in Iran. It was after 1953 that Iranians start to have a negative view of Americans because that’s when Americans start to impose their will as well. He has these interviews in the 1970s where he is very much talking about a confrontation with the attempt of British control over Iranian resources.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you mentioned Ali Shariati, and he was an Islamic Iranian thinker. I’m wondering how you think he would have influenced modern Iranian identity because he did say that Islam was the greatest victim of colonialism. I wonder if that idea of being a victim plays into the Islamic Republic’s idea of itself as being the underdog, as having to stand up for revolutionary struggles around the world, stand up for Palestine, whether they actually do so or not is, of course, a different story. I’m not trying to equate Shariati with the Islamic Republic or with [Former Supreme Leader of Iran, Ruhollah] Khomeini, but do you think some of his views imbued the identity of the state which came after the revolution?

Assal Rad

Well, what I think the state does, the Islamic Republic does, is it really appropriates that language from revolutionaries. Shariati is someone who’s influencing that discourse very much so. You point to something that’s really important, and it’s actually [Professor and Author] Hamid Dabashi and his book on Shi’ism where he writes about this. He says, and I thought this was so fascinating, it’s basically this idea that Imam Husayn in the Battle of Karbala in the seventh century when he’s martyred with his 72 companions, he is victorious in his defeat. It’s the fact that he’s fighting against tyranny and dies fighting for justice that makes him this heroic figure.

What happens with the Islamic Republic, especially, is when you become the person in power, when you become the power, you’re now the flip side of that. You become the symbol of injustice. You very much see that with the Islamic Republic. The reason it appropriates that language is that it tries to maintain this image that it is a continuously revolutionary state. As such, it is supporting resistance movements worldwide. You mentioned the Palestinian cause is one cause.

You see Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei talking about figures like Malcolm X or mentions of things like BLM. Why? Because they’re trying to take this facade of the… They’re like the modern day among Hussain’s. They are fighting injustice all while trying to divert from the fact that they are carrying out their own injustices and they’re actually the ones in power. That language is very much, I think, taken up by the Islamic Republic. And there’s this attempt to pretend like they’re the guardians of among Hussein. But why tap into that imagery? I mean, arguably, one of the reasons is because it’s so powerful. It’s really powerful imagery. Shia motifs and symbols lend themselves very easily to resistance, whether it’s through stories that were told to galvanize Iranian troops after Iran was invaded in 1980 by Saddam Husain, or whether it was the revolutionary cause itself because that’s the story that that’s the story of the Martyrdom of Cahir Bala. And this isn’t unique to Shia. It’s this story, this l ower, is ubiquitous in other cultures. It’s the David and Goliath story. It’s the Battle of Thermopoli in 300 Spartans against, in this case, thousands of Persians.

So you see this a story because the images are so powerful. So they really tap into that. Revolutionaries tap into that imagery. And then later, the Islamic Republic appropriates that and tries to use it as one of the ways to get that rally around the flag effect in order to fight back against the Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980. Of course, that’s also infused with a lot of nationalist rhetoric. It’s not just these symbols, it’s not just Shiaism, but it’s Iranian Shiaism. You’re not just defending the religion, you’re defending the land. And that’s very much the sentiment that so many of the people who fought in that war had. It was a very, very nationalist cause because it was defined by these two nation states that were fighting each other. So even though Iraq had a large Shia population and Iran, although did not have a large but still had, especially in the Southwest where Iraq originally invaded, an ethnic Arab population. But neither fought for the other side. Shia didn’t fight for Iran and Arab Iranians didn’t fight for Iraq because they were very much defined within these national borders. It’s fascinating. Sharia, of course, dies in ’77, so it’s before the revolution even happens.

You would imagine that all of the revolutionaries who died before or soon after the revolution would take issue with the way that the Islamic Republic has manifested because it really flies in its actual actions, not its rhetoric, but its actual actions fly in the face of A, why Iranians had a revolution. They had a revolution to dismantle tyranny, not to replace it with another one. And also that it was based on this idea of justice. And so many injustices are carried out in its name right now.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Iran is an incredibly diverse place. Farsi isn’t the only language that is spoken there. I think many different languages are spoken. And the Shah did embark on this nation building project in which he made Farsi the official language of the country. And you could argue that that erased a lot of the cultural diversity. Would you say that the Islamic Republic’s equating Iranianness with Islamicism, essentially, another way of trying to potentially erase some of the cultural and religious diversity? And I’m also asking this question, given that my mom’s out of the family is Baha’i, so they’re a religious minority from Iran. They had to escape Iran and go to Canada during the revolution, unfortunately. And so I’m asking this question from that position of knowing that there was and there continues to be large scale persecution against certain minorities in Iran.

Assal Rad

Absolutely. And I mean, you bring up one of the most important examples of that silencing. And that’s one of the things that Shriyo is talking about, right? By inherently, when you elevate one narrative, you’re silencing others. And both states, both the monarchy and the Azan Republic participate in that erasure. It was actually the father, Ratha Shah, who establishes Farsi as the official language. And it’s not unique, right? That’s part of a nation state project. In order to bring people under this umbrella of the nation when you have so much ethnic language, religious diversity, there has to be something that formalizes that. It’s formalized through, for instance, secondary education. The United States is a country that has lots of different ethnicities and languages and minorities, but we tend to have a formalized system where everybody learns, where everybody is educated at least.

Now we see a lot more dual language programs, but still English is the dominant language in which everybody is educated in. So something that’s interesting about that on the language front, by the way, just to understand how new this actually was is, for instance, for me, my maternal grandparents are Azati Turksks. And so my maternal grandparents, this is not so many generations ago, this is two generations before me, spoke Pr asian with an accent. They spoke it with an Azati accent, right? It was their second language. Their first language was Turkish. For my mother, Pr asian became her first language, and she spoke Turkish with an accent, so it reversed. But in terms of the minorities that you’re speaking of, yeah, I mean, the Islamic world tries to present itself as a country that is tolerant of or actually has religious freedom. If you are Christian, there’s a large Iranian population in Iran. If you are Sunni, if you are Jewish, Iran is home to the second largest Jewish population in the Middle East is actually in Iran.

Zoroastrians, these are all supposed to be protected religions. Well, let’s start with them. First of all, they’re not really. They’re treated differently. Anytime you have a country that identifies itself as a particular religion, I mean, it’s the Islamic Republic. You’re automatically second class if you’re anything else because you’re not part of the identifying feature of the state. But Baha’i specifically are persecuted. This isn’t just you don’t get the same treatment. This is you are basically not recognized. It is difficult to get an education. It’s difficult to own property, which is to the point that you just made why many Baha’is have left Iran. Iran is the home of Baha’ism. It’s a religion that emerges in Iran in the 19th century. That group, unfortunately, has been persecuted from the very beginning, from the 19th century, in part because they’re seen as heretics because obviously, anything that comes before Islam is different. But when you have the seal of the Prophet, anything that comes after Islam is considered heresy because Islam is the last religion, and Muhammad is the last Prophet. Anything that comes afterwards is considered in theory heresy. That’s one of the reasons why Baha’is are targeted the way that they are.

Also, of course, it threatens when you have a new religion emerge and you have a clergy, a Shia clergy in Iran, that even in the 19th century have already become an autonomous body, already wield a certain amount of power, maybe not political power at the time, but they have their large landowners, they have mosques, they have religious taxes that they collect, they have a significant following. Anything that might compete with that also creates challenges to the power of the clergy. These are the reasons why Baha’is are persecuted, unfortunately, from the very beginning, and it continues. In a much harsher fashion under the Islamic Republic.

Talia Baroncelli

There’s a part of your book where you’re talking about different symbols and military symbols. You’re speaking about the Iran Iraq War and the Basj Siege. The Basj Siege being a paramilitary group which formed during the Iran Iraq War. Then you were also speaking about the Museum in Tehran, the war museum. There’s a photo of different people who represented… Sorry, different religious symbols and how they are representative of the different Iranians who engaged in this struggle. So again, emphasizing their Iranianness, even though they had or they came from different religions and how they were all fighting together to face Saddam represented as Yezid in a way. But of course, Baha’is were not included in that, so that was significant. But I guess there was a time when it maybe wasn’t as bad as today, and I think that might have been under President Khahtami in the early 2000s, where I think he was even talking about extending certain social rights to Baha’is at the time, whether that was implemented.

Assal Rad

I’m actually not sure about that. I’m not specifically privy to Khahtami wanting to expand rights for Baha’is. But I will say I find it believable. I don’t know personally and so I don’t want to speak to it in that sense. But it would fit with the general change that occurs with at least the rhetoric of someone like a figure like Khahtami. He gets a lot of criticism for his failure to fundamentally change the system or to change the system, really, in any significant way.

But I think that also misses the fact that he was very different than previous leaders in the country, and his vision of the country was quite different. And things did change under him in terms of at least newspapers opening, artistic expression, a lowering of repression. And so there’s this ebb and flow in Iran since the 1979 revolution, depending on who is the President and which political faction has more power.

It’s always a repressive state. It’s always an authoritarian state. I’m not saying that any of those things change, but the atmosphere on the ground does change to a certain extent. And so what we’ve seen in the last five years or so is this consistent trend towards more repression. That’s why I’m saying this fits in, I think, with that logic. You’ve seen that with the Baha’i community as well, that increased repression on the further persecution of the Baha’i community. We’ve seen it in terms of arrests and punishments of human rights activists. You had someone like Nasim Suthurda, who I believe had been arrested under the Ahmedinejad presidency, was released in 2013. And then again, I think it was in 2008, if I’m not mistaken, somewhere in the last five year span that she was rearrested again. So in the last five years, you see crackdowns on labor movements, crackdowns on protests, crackdown on any voice of really dissent, and then further repression, I think, of groups like the haze as well, unfortunately. So I think that all fits into that trend. And it’s just gotten worse under the RACI administration who took over in 2021. One of the things that they tried to implement more strictly was the hijab.

And this is in part, of course, course not. Again, the hijab law has always existed and women have always been stopped in order to have it enforced. The morality police.

I should say, the so called morality police predate, of course, the RACI administration. But it is under this stricter enforcement that we see young woman, Gina Massa Amini, killed by the so called morality police. And that’s the spark of the most recent iteration of protests that we’ve seen in Iran. So that further repression is. Not forcing Iranians to stay quiet. They continue to come to the streets, they continue to protest, and they continue to show different forms of resistance to whether it’s the state as a whole or particular policies within the state?

Talia Baroncelli

Well, we will come back to the current iteration of Iranian identity or iterations. But I did want to ask you about the method you used in writing this book because you’re a historian, so typically historians will spend countless hours sitting in archives and just pouring through different documents. But you actually went to Iran multiple times and interviewed people. So your work almost comes across as being a bridge between a historical endeavor as well as being very sociological and looking at culture. So maybe you can talk about your first experiences going to Iran. When that was, I don’t know if it was actually under President Khatun, MD, or if it was already in the Ahmedina J arred period. And also explain how you decided to interview certain people. Like, how did you pick those people?

Assal Rad

So one of the things is when I was doing my graduate research, I had an anthropologist on my committee, very intentionally, because I wanted to do field work. And to your point, yeah, I wanted it to be a history text, but I also wanted to have very contemporary elements to it. And so that’s where I think the interdisciplinary approach comes across. And that’s why I wanted to do interviews and use really contemporary art. My archive is not the same dusty archive that we think of. I’m listening to contemporary music, films, television, and specifically in terms of interviews. So there’s a couple of things that went into it. The most important part was accessibility, right? The ability to access people. And one of the things I tried to avoid when possible was the formal interview process because I came to notice that once you’re discussing these topics, especially like identity and things like that in a very formal setting, the tone and the responses become much more politicized. Whereas in a lot of cases, I’m like, I’m not asking for your political identity. I’m just asking, how do you identify? What does it being Iranian mean to you?

In some cases, they were very formal. I went in with the idea of I want to interview people, for instance, families of. People who were either involved, who were soldiers in the Iranian Rock War, or families of people who were murdered in the war. Those were much more formal because I didn’t have that access myself. And then in other cases, I really started with a small network. And I think it’s called the snowball method. I tried to expand from that network, and it started with people that I knew. And then from there, I tried to get. As many different perspectives as I could, but that’s why in the book I also give a basic description of the person I’m talking to. And a lot of the reasons why I don’t use their names is because of the nature of the research, the fact that it’s very contemporary and it could be very contentious. And in an authoritarian state like Iran, that’s the other layer of it, right? Accessibility in terms of people you can get to and in terms of people who are willing to talk to you. There becomes an unwillingness for a lot of people to speak because you’re in an environment that might feel like it’s dangerous. Assuring that anonymity is very important. But then also in a lot of cases, like I said, I didn’t say I was doing an interview. I would just go to a store. I wanted to buy a CD that would have… There was a dance party and you wanted to give somebody a CD of all the best songs right now. What is that? Chat up the person who’s going to sell you… Was, by the way, not an official CD. It’s like an underground CD because it’s officially allowed to be sold.

Chatting with someone who’s a taxi driver. Finding other situations where you could interact with people. And talk as much as you can, but get a much more organic conversation that way. So the central limitation, though, is accessibility because I didn’t want it to be… I wanted it to be as under the radar as possible, both for myself and for anybody who would be willing to speak to me. Well, one of.

Talia Baroncelli

My favorite parts of the book is where you’re talking about popular culture and pop music. And there’s this one section where you’re speaking about Black cats and Andy. These are very famous Iranian pop singers or pop bands from the 90s, early 2000s. And there’s this one part that just really struck me because you’re speaking about Andy’s song, Dohtar Iranit, like the Iranian girl, and you’re explaining how the lyrics paint this picture of Iranian women in general, like the figure of the Iranian girl and how that ties and plays into certain stereotypes or notions of national identity. And in the next breath, you then bring up the Frankfurt School theorist Theodore Adorno and his manuscript on popular music from 1941 in which he’s talking about how pop music really standardizes the idea of individual identity and national identity. So I just thought that was so brilliant how you took this pop culture example and then analyzed it through the cultural lens or theory of the Frankfurt School. But my question would be, looking at these really popular artists, Andy, Black cats, when you were in Iran, did young Iranians think of these artists as being Iranian, or were they considered to be artists who were then traders or from the diaspora because they had left Iran and gone to the US?

Assal Rad

Well, I never got a…First of all, thank you. That’s a great anecdote about somebody who read the book. I never got the sense that they were seen in a negative light in that sense, like a traitor or anything like that. But they were also distinct. So there’s a period in which obviously soon after the revolution, music is outlawed at the beginning, and then it’s very limited. There’s very limited space.

For any musical both production and consumption. Of course, it’s still limited to this day. For instance, women cannot be vocalists. Women can still not be vocalists. I talk about a band, Arianne Band, that emerged in the late 90s, early 2000s that used women and men, but the women vocalists were just background vocalists. They couldn’t sing lead. But that was a big deal at the time because it was like, oh, look, women are back in the scene. And this is a country before the revolution that had, maybe you can’t necessarily say the most popular artists, but at least some of its most popular artists were women. You have a singer like Bubush or Haideh, just pop staples of pre revolutionary Iran. And they still tend to be popular figures because they’re these famed female vocalists of that era. So in the 80s and 90s, especially when you don’t really have a burgeoning musical scene in Iran.

They relied a lot on these diaspora artists. And they were very popular in the consumption of that music. I don’t remember the theorist right now, or I don’t remember the author that wrote this, but it’s not my… I want to just clarify, this is another author who wrote about this. And the author is cited in the book at least, who basically talks about how this consumption of this music in and of itself was a form of, I don’t know if she calls it resistance, or it’s more like it’s a way of pushing the limitations that they have because you’re listening to this pop music that’s not even allowed to be consumed in the country. But this has evolved over time. Like I said, when you have a period like K otame in the late 90s and early 2000s, you see the beginnings of the Iranian musical scene inside of Iran really start to flourish. And you get all sorts of genres, which was much less popular. The diaspora had its own just pop music genre. Whereas inside of Iran, when the musical scene starts to evolve, you have rock, heavy metal. In the early 2000s, you have a lot of rap music that becomes very popular.

Of course, you still have the pop ballads and melodies and things like that as well. Later, you see a lot of infusion of traditional vocalists, people like Shahjarian, who then his son, Homaun Shahjarian, uses those traditional styles but then meshes them with more contemporary styles. And so you get this very diverse musical scene in Iran. And when that happens, I think they start to shift away from the diaspora musicians a little bit more. But what I saw when I was there just in the field work and when you would ask if it was a DJ or if it was somebody who was selling music and it was for parties that they were having at the time, just things that you consume in passing. This is not a political statement at all. It’s just what do you listen to when you’re at a party? Then you’d see these songs like, like, would be playing, or they would have a song if it was at the time popular by Black cats or something like that. So the diaspora music was still, and I assumed to today that would be the case. I haven’t been. My field research ended in 2015, so it’s now been several years, so I don’t want to speak to that.

But you would assume, like, if you look at a site like Radio Javan, which is basically like an iTunes type site for… It’s like a music… No, it’s Spotify. Maybe that’s a better equivalent. It’s like a musical streaming site for Iranian and Brazilian music. They have artists inside of Iran as well as diaspora artists. And they have a lot of views and listens and all of that from both sides of the spectrum. But I think inside of the country, they’re more heavily.

Listened to artists inside of Iran because the musical tastes in the country have evolved probably distinctly than that within the diaspora, which would make sense. I mean, the cultural center is the country itself, and so it has a lot more diversity within it.

Talia Baroncelli

And you spoke to so many young people when you were there, I wonder how they think of their own history. And now I’m generalizing, but young people are generation Zed as a group. How would they see the revolution? And do they think of their history in terms of this historical rupture of pre, post revolution?

Assal Rad

The people that I interviewed, I didn’t make it to Gen Z because most of Gen Z was born. After the 2000s. When I was there, they were far too young to be part of the group that I… And I would be fascinated to actually go back to Iran if it was possible to do that field research because I do think that… And it’s not unique to Iran, but that this new generation Gen Z is changing things everywhere. That’s just the nature of generational change and transition. Whereas I think previous generations, the post revolutionary generation, which is a lot of the subjects that I spoke with, I spoke with post revolution generation who are probably now in their 30s and early 40s, and folks who were there before the revolution, a slightly older generation, people, 50s and 60s. Gen Z, as opposed, I think, to the previous generation in Iran, which was more open or more, I think, strategically thought more in terms of reform, less in terms of revolution, like having another revolution. And if they had grievances and discontent with the system, they thought more in the idea of reform, which is why we saw so much engagement with the political system for so many years after the revolution. This generation, and we can’t paint everybody with one brush and draw this conclusion or generalize, but there’s at least a significant portion, and we saw this in the protests in 2022 into 2023, that believes that reform is not possible and as such have gone a step further.

And the way that they protest and the way that they air their grievances. So I’d be very interested in really looking at that group distinctly. What you mentioned, though, the abla Zengelob badla Zengelob, before and after the revolution, that’s very much of the people that I interviewed, that’s very much of the people that I interviewed. That’s very much a language that they would talk about. There was two periods that they would always, if you wanted to have this conversation.

That would be talked about in very unique ways. And one was that puritization before and after the revolution, and also the war. The war was such a huge thing. I knew people were born in 1986. This is the tail end, the last two years of the war. You would think they have no recollection of the war. You were toddler when the war ended, and they were very much like, No, I remember this. The war was also very much, I think, a part of that generation’s experience. It affected, especially for those who were children during it, it affected their childhoods and they have these childhood memories from it. It literally changed the landscape. So many of the murals, if you go anywhere in Iran, this is not just Tehran, this is anywhere in Iran if you go, you will see street signs, street named after Martyrs of the War.

Murals everywhere, either about the revolution or especially the war. That’s changed as well over time. The amount that you can really allow that, the more history is removed from it, the further away we get from that history, the less it resonates with people. But you still see something like that Museum in the middle of Tehran. It’s like a giant piece of land that’s been dedicated to the war, to the revolution and the war. But I’ll tell you, somebody who visited it wasn’t a lot of people there. How popular was this was in 2015. I would not describe it as it’s certainly not like the Louve, where you go and you have a lot of people. So the state can still try to use those stories, but how Iranians themselves consume more stories.

Talia Baroncelli

Is also very different. And you can see that in the cinema of it. Yeah, I think the state probably exaggerates the importance of some of those symbols. It’s like they play a role in this cultural sense making, as you call it. But they’re not the only symbols that matter, and pop culture does matter. My other question would be, your book really looks at identity as a construct. But of course, you mentioned that people who identify in certain ways or live these identities have a very visceral, a very real experience of it. So I wonder what your prescription would be because identity, it seems to me, can have disadvantages and advantages in terms of how you strategize in a political struggle. Would you say that national identity in the current context of the protests could maybe serve a political ideal of liberation, or would other forms of identity, maybe across.

Assal Rad

Class lines or other shared universal experiences, would that be more important? It’s a great question. And it’s hard for me to answer because on the front of nationalism, let’s say this about nationalism, using nationalist rhetoric can be liberating or extremely dangerous, really depending on who is wielding it and how they’re doing it. That’s very.

Important to say because, yes, in terms of resistance movements when you are the state of India in the 1940s and you’re trying to liberate it from British colonialism, then Indian Nationalism can become a force for resistance. When Partition happens, it can become something that’s not as good. It can create that Indian Nationalism, can then create violence against other groups. So it depends on the situation. It’s really dependent on how it’s used. And it’s funny because when you talk about Nationalism, I think it’s like any other ideology. This happens a lot with religion. I think when you talk about religion, you’ll often get… And I’m not talking about in academia, I’m saying across the board, when people talk about religion, there’s a sentiment that religion is a wildly dangerous thing. Look at how many people have been killed in the name of religion. The counter argument to that is that people have been killed in the name of everything. Nonreligious Nationalism is not religion, but in the name of certain nationalisms, we’ve carried out genocide, many atrocities. These are tools in our repertoire that can be used for liberation, but can then also be used for oppression. When you use it as a way to silence minority voices, in the case of Iran, if you use it as a way to silence Baha’is, that’s a danger of of nationalism.

In some circles, the nationalism you see about Iranian identity can elevate the idea of Iranianness is being tied to Arianism and Whiteness. That carries some dangers within it. When it becomes exclusionary of other groups, whatever those groups are, whether they’re religious minorities, racial minorities, ethnic minorities. I would tend towards in a revolutionary movement or in a social movement, especially one that uses discourse like liberation or democracy, inclusiveness, human rights, all this very powerful and just ubiquitous discourse. Everybody uses discourse now, right? That’s what everybody is claiming to be. But if you’re going to use it, then you have to actually execute that in reality. And that I think, for instance, class struggle, I think is very important for that. It’s one umbrella in which people can really be united across. And that also carries its own dangers. As soon as you say class struggle and then you bring in words like socialism and then it goes communism and then people… What I’m saying, what I’m trying to get at, essentially is any of these identifiers, any of these ideological tools, any one of them can be used in a way that’s potentially good, but also potentially bad.

So it’s really the people who are wielding that identity and how inclusive they want to be. What I’ll say about these protests that we saw in Iran, inside of the country, inside of Iran, is some of the images that I saw that were heartening, at least, where I thought, Well, this is hopeful, right? Was images of women with their backs turned and you would see very different variations of how they were dressed. And that was actually very intentional and very symbolic. A woman in chador, a woman in hijab, a woman in nothing, dressed how she wants to, a T shirt and pants, holding hands. And that solidarity to me is much more positive because it’s creating that larger umbrella. And that’s not about national ism necessarily, it’s just about choice. It’s about freedom. That’s what they’re really trying to talk about. These aren’t protests that are anti Islam. They’re not anti hijab. They’re anti compulsory hijab. They’re anti repression. They’re anti authoritarianism. And so I think that positive messaging resonates more because it’s more inclusive. And if you want to be inclusive, I definitely think you have to take class into consideration. I mean, if you.

Want a successful movement, you probably want to involve the workers of a country because they’re the backbone of that country, whatever country it might be. And Iranian workers. Have been organized politically since before the revolution and after the revolution. And in recent months, it’s a continuity. When we saw some attempts at labor strikes, these aren’t unique. This didn’t happen starting in September 2022. This has been happening for years. And remember that five yearish period where I said you’ve seen more repression? You see more repression of the labor movement as well.

I don’t know if that answers the question fully because I feel like I’m evading the question just a little bit because it’s hard to articulate whether something is good or bad. It’s really the way that it’s used. But I would urge more, the more inclusive we can be, the more I think that reflects the ethos of the discourse that we hear people use. And if anything.

Talia Baroncelli

Even though the movement can be described as a feminist movement, it’s very inclusive because they’re not talking about women’s rights in terms of it being a zero sum game. It’s not women’s rights at the expense of the right of men or anyone else. It’s women’s rights so that everyone else can have more freedom as well. And it’s anti repression. So it’s repression of all groups and not just specifically Iranians or minorities such as curves.

Assal Rad

I also want to say, since you brought up women’s rights, these are conversations that transcend Iran’s borders. This isn’t just happening in Iran. That’s the solidarity that you can see. When it becomes nationalist, that’s one of the limitations of it. When it’s about your borders, then it limits the discourse to your borders. But when you look at it as women’s rights, there’s no border that it doesn’t transcend. Women’s rights is an issue everywhere in the world. Women’s rights is an issue right now in the United States. It’s a very important issue actually right now in the United States. Despite all of the freedoms that we have, this is a huge issue in the United States because we’re seeing those freedoms be stripped away. We’re seeing a regression of those things. And so when you can trans… Workers rights transcends borders. When you can look at these movements, these social movements and see parallels in other places in the world and build that solidarity, I think those also become in a very different way more inclusive and I think more effective. Well, I do have one.

Talia Baroncelli

Last question if you have time, if you have a few more minutes. And it’s just a very, maybe, I don’t know if this will elicit a short or a long answer, but what would you change if you had to or add to your book in light of the current protests? Because your book does such a good job in giving the historical context to understand the protests, but I wonder if there’s anything that you would maybe add now.

Assal Rad

Oh, yeah. Okay. And I think I touched on this earlier. There’s a whole generation that it’s now missing, right? And that generation emerged on the political scene in a very potent.

Way starting in the protests in September 2022. And it’s not to say that they were never on the scene, but not in this fashion, right? And the saddest thing, the saddest evidence of that is in the people who were killed. When you look at the age of the people who were killed, right? Those are the people protesting. Something else you saw is you saw a lot more women killed because they were the ones out there again, right? So you f I wanted to add a chapter, and I would love to, it would be to look at this generation as another watershed moment, right? Not these protests even necessarily, but what these protests represent about a generational shift. And that’s where I think the field work in Iran would be invaluable because then you could actually be on the ground to see what the distinction is between this generation and previous generations.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Assal, it was really great to speak to you. I hope everyone reads your book because even though you write it in a somewhat academic context, it’s not an incredibly dense, unreadable academic book. It is very easy to understand and it’s incredibly interesting. You also bring in these amazing historians, and you weave that in. I really loved reading it. I hope that everyone reads it. I don’t have a physical copy of it to show here, but I really hope that everyone reads it.

Assal Rad

Thank you.

Talia Baroncelli

Thank you for watching theAnalysis. If you’re able to donate to the show and contribute, you can go to theAnalysis.news. Hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen and also get on the mailing list so that you’re notified every time a new show drops. Also, please go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, and hit like and subscribe. Hopefully, we’ll have Assal on again soon to speak about Iran.

Assal Rad

I would love to. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and for the very generous review of the book.

Talia Baroncelli

You’re welcome. You really deserve it.

Assal Rad

Thank you.

Talia Baroncelli

Take care.

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Honest Government Ad | Reserve Bank of Australia

Paul Jay — Fri, 19 May 2023 14:02:46 -0400

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The Reserve Bank of Australia has made an ad, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative. This video was originally published by The Juice Media on May 6, 2023.

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Massive French Protests Continue – Renaud Lambert

Paul Jay — Tue, 16 May 2023 12:43:24 -0400

Renaud Lambert, journalist at Le Monde diplomatique, discusses the nationwide anti-pension reform protests in France, which have consisted of over a million people taking to the streets on more than one occasion. He underscores how French President Emmanuel Macron's tax cuts for the wealthy have increased the current deficit, exposing how workers will now need to work longer to make up for the decreases in government revenue.

Yemen: Biden’s Hypocrisy and Possible Peace?

Paul Jay — Fri, 12 May 2023 12:55:12 -0400

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Shireen Al-Adeimi, Professor of Language and Literacy at Michigan State University, lays out the U.S., U.K., and Canada’s role in perpetuating the brutal Saudi-led blockade of Yemen. She exposes Biden’s continued military support of Saudi Arabia, despite the administration’s pledge to only send defensive support, and calls into question the misleading dichotomy of “offensive” vs. “defensive” military support. Is a peace deal more likely now that the Houthi and Saudi representatives have met in Sana’a?

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Professor Shireen Al-Adeimi to speak about the war in Yemen and the role of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Canada in fueling this conflict. We’ll also speak about the history which led up to this conflict and potential ways to put pressure to ensure that it is brought to an end.

Shireen Al-Adeimi

The only reason Yemenis needed humanitarian aid was because they were blockaded and prevented from trading. It’s because their water facilities were being bombed. It’s because their hospitals were being bombed. It’s because, heck, even their schools, their homes, and cars were being bombed.

Talia Baroncelli

But first, please consider donating to the show by going to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hitting the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Most importantly, get on our mailing list. That way, you’ll be emailed every time a new episode drops. You can also go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell; that way, you’ll get notifications if you have your notifications enabled every time a new show is published. See you in a bit.

Joining me now to speak about the war in Yemen is Shireen Al-Adeimi. She’s a Professor of Language and Literacy at Michigan State University and is a non-resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. So thank you so much for joining me, Shireen.

Shireen Al-Adeimi

Thanks for having me, Talia.

Talia Baroncelli

A few weeks ago, on April 9, we saw a positive image. We saw a handshake between the Houthi political leader, [Mahdi] al-Mashat and Saudi Ambassador to Yemen, Al-Jaber. Did you think we’ve reached a sort of breakthrough in this war right now?

Shireen Al-Adeimi

I think the peace talks have been very encouraging. Of course, we know that a ceasefire was reached back in April of 2022. For about a year, or more than a year now, there have not been Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen, and that’s a positive development. That’s what we’ve been asking for, one of the things that we’ve been asking for so many years. It represents a change, at least in the war. The war is still ongoing, but it represents a significant change in the war.

I think the handshake and the meeting are certainly positive. I think it surprised a lot of people because it represents a Saudi recognition of the de facto rule of the Houthis. For the Saudi representative to go right into the heart of Houthi control, which is in Sana’a, and to meet with them, recognizes, I think, or shows that the Saudis finally understand who they’re dealing with. They’re not dealing with rebels, as they’ve been calling them for the last several years, even though, of course, the title still fits in many ways. They have organized themselves into a government over the last several years. They have been the de facto rulers. They control an area of Yemen where over 70% of the population, close to 80% of the population resides. I do think it’s positive. There’s still a long way to go before peace can be achieved. I think anytime people are talking to one another instead of dropping bombs, that certainly is a development that we should be looking at positively.

Talia Baroncelli

Do you think this potential peace deal would have legs if it doesn’t really incorporate some of the other political actors who have been involved in this conflict, actors besides the Saudis and the Houthis?

Shireen Al-Adeimi

I think for lasting peace, it absolutely has to include everybody. There is no getting rid of the Islah Party or members of the GPC Party, which is the party of President Hadi or former President Hadi, or the Southern Transitional Council, which is the separatist group, or the Houthis. There is no getting rid of any of these elements, no matter what people or how people feel about them. I do think that a lasting peace settlement needs to include all of these parties.

Now, the other thing we have to realize, too, is that the Houthis have been fighting all of these factions alongside those who are in the same camp as the Saudi-led coalition. So the STC is only powerful because they are backed by the United Arab Emirates. The Islah Party and President Hadi– President Hadi is not powerful, but members of his party and the Islah Party are only powerful because the Saudis have been funding them over the last several years. They’ve been based in Riyadh for the most part. I think we have to understand that when the Saudis are speaking to the Houthis directly, they’re not just representing themselves. In a way, they’re representing these other groups that they have been training, backing, funding, and hosting in their countries over the last several years.

Now, after a Houthi-Saudi settlement is reached, and if these foreign entities stop funding these groups and other groups, then I think there’s hope for Yemenis to actually sit around the table with one another and discuss a settlement and reach an agreement that works for all of them. As I said, nobody’s leaving the country. Nobody’s going to give up arms. Nobody’s going to give up their claims. Yemenis have to live with one another. They have to reach some agreement among themselves.

Talia Baroncelli

What do you think led to this particular moment right now where we’re seeing more dialogue, we’re seeing different leaders and representatives meeting in Sana’a? What led to this particular moment?

Shireen Al-Adeimi

So, if you remember, in early 2022, there were strikes in Sana’a that disabled Yemen’s internet for four days. No country has ever done this to another country and outright shut down its communication with the rest of the world. In that same week, there were attacks that killed 70 people at a detention center. There was this escalation of attacks, and it followed the UN not renewing this expert group which was supposed to hold the Saudi-led coalition accountable for some of what they were doing in Yemen. There were escalations on the part of the Saudi-led coalition, but at the same time, the Houthis escalated their strikes against both Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.

For the very first time in the last several eight years, they were able to successfully, I would say, target some areas. There was an oil refinery in Jeddah that was hit. There was also a facility in the U.A.E. that was hit and it was not rebuffed by the U.A.E. or Saudi in time. So I think everybody had a reason to talk to one another. The Houthis were not able to rest Marib, which is a gas and oil-rich province, out of the hands of the Saudis and their coalition. At the same time, the Saudis were not able to move forward. There’s been a stalemate for several, several years, and now they saw that the Houthis were actually going to be able to cause some economic disruptions in their countries. I think everybody was incentivized to actually sit down and come up with an agreement that’s negotiated and mediated by Oman and come up with some kind of agreement that would work for all sides.

The Saudis, I think, have been exhausted by this. They have spent, by some accounts, $200 million a month on this war over the last several years. To spend that amount of money and not see your goals achieved in any way. They weren’t able to reinstate President Hadi’s power. Eventually, they ended up setting him aside. They weren’t able to recapture territories from the Houthis. What is it all for? I think there’s a recognition that, well, there’s all this pressure from U.S. Congress not wanting to support the Saudi-led coalition anymore. The Saudis are seeing that this was actually a war that they could not win. The Emiratis have a big question mark about their interests because they remain entangled in Yemen. I don’t think anybody’s really focused on their role or focused as much on their role. I think, at the very least, on the Saudi side, there’s an interest in extracting themselves from this war.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, the Emiratis are occupying an island just south of Yemen, and I know that they have played a role in this conflict. What has the role of China been given the recent rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which was in large part negotiated by China, but also by Oman? You also referenced Oman’s role in these negotiations. What is China’s role?

Shireen Al-Adeimi

I think it would be interesting to see what their role could be. China did not sell weapons to the Saudis or the U.A.E. They didn’t get involved in any way in the war. I think Oman is one of those other countries, and uniquely Oman, because every other Gulf country and many other Arab countries and African countries joined the Saudi-led coalition in one way, shape, or the other. Oman stayed neutral and has been hosting these talks for several years. This is not the first time they’ve hosted talks.

China worked with Iran and Saudi Arabia directly and reached some kind of agreement to reinstate diplomatic relations and whatnot. I think that’s a positive role. As for what they’ve done in Yemen, I would say, sure, any kind of peace talk or recognition of the resumption of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a positive move and does relieve some of those tensions. Iran’s role in Yemen has been overstated over the last several years, so it doesn’t directly affect the peace talks that have been happening between the Saudis and the Yemenis themselves. Although, of course, it does help that a major ally of the Houthis, Iran, is now not in conflict with Saudi Arabia.

Talia Baroncelli

Do you think Iran’s, I would say, economic isolation, as well as the backlash against Iran, given the protests a few months ago, does this play into negotiations at all? Are the stakes higher for them to see peace in Yemen now, more so than before?

Shireen Al-Adeimi

I’m not sure what the Iranian intentions are. Again, I think that Iran’s role has been overstated in Yemen. When the war began, this was just a few months after the Iran deal was negotiated with the Obama administration. So for Iran to risk the Iran deal, I think, would have been foolish. There have been allegations by the U.S. that Iran has been involved. The Houthis have always said that they are not acting on behalf of Iran. There have been key moments where, for example, when the Houthis took over Sana’a in late 2014, the Iranians were very vocal about their stance against that takeover. The Houthis were like, well, who are you to tell us what to do? That was a pivotal moment. That is what set the spark that eventually led to this war in Yemen. So, of course, they’ve been supporting them in some ways, but not to the extent that they would be considered a proxy war or not to the extent that they were supporting, let’s say, the war in Syria. There are no Iranian Generals on the ground.

The country has been under blockade– air, land and sea blockade for the past several years. Journalists have to smuggle themselves in to report from inside Yemen. People are starving to death. There’s no medicine that’s allowed to enter the country that has been approved. Pharmaceutical companies have been trying to send medicine, for example. Aid has been rotting in ships because they’re not allowed to enter the ports of Yemen. Fuel that has been rerouted to Jeddah. Yet these allegations that Iranians are somehow getting through all of these blockades and supporting the Houthis have just been preposterous. They’re supporting them in other ways, just not in that way. Whatever support they’ve shown for the Houthis has been minimal compared to the ways in which the international community has supported the Saudi-led coalition. I think Iran wouldn’t want to risk it. I think it looks good for Iran to show that they are interested in peace in Yemen, even though the conflict itself has very little to do with Iran. It’s an internal conflict. It’s a conflict between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. It is a culmination of decades of intervention by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and decades of intervention by the United States in Yemen. This is not an Iran-Saudi conflict that’s happening at the borders of Yemen. This is a Yemeni-Saudi conflict that, unfortunately, is not even a war. It has been an asymmetrical attack on the country.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, before we speak about the humanitarian crisis in the country, you did touch on the history a bit. To give our viewers a bit more context, it would be good to speak about how this conflict came about. In 2011, there was an uprising in Yemen which ousted Ali Abdullah Saleh, if I got that correct. He was an authoritarian president, and he was forced to give power to his deputy, Hadi. So maybe you can explain what led to that and what people were protesting or uprising against, and how the Houthis came in to essentially take power from there.

Shireen Al-Adeimi

Yeah. Arab Spring, early 2011, Yemenis were watching what was happening in Tunisia and then Egypt. It seems like the protests were leading to positive change in these countries. I think for the first time, Yemenis, for the first time in a long time, not for the first time ever, because we have a history of uprisings and revolutions, but for the first time in a while, in, like, three decades, they found that maybe we could bring about change through these peaceful protests.

In January 2011, Yemenis started protesting. Now, they weren’t necessarily protesting Ali Abdullah Saleh himself, and only Ali Abdullah Saleh. They were protesting the entire system, which Saleh used to keep himself in power and to enrich himself at the expense of the Yemeni people. Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East, has been for many, many years, and is now among the poorest in the world. Yet Saleh was, by UN estimates, one of the richest men in the world. Where is this man getting his resources from? Obviously, there was a lot of corruption. There was a lot of wealth that he, his party, and the Islah Party, which he essentially created as a controlled opposition in the early ’90s; this is like the Islamist Party in Yemen; they were all part of that system that people were uprising against.

Now, the movement was peaceful until members of the Islah Party saw this as an opportunity for them to co-opt the revolution from the people. Even though they were part of that system and they were long-time Saleh allies, they took the opposition. They went in opposition to Saleh himself and turned the conflict into a bloody mess. There was an assassination attempt. There was armed conflict. When he survived that assassination attempt, that’s when he agreed to transfer power to his Vice President, Hadi. Nobody wanted Hadi. They say he was elected if he ran in a one-man election, but that’s not an election; that’s an appointment. It was supposed to be a two-year term. It was extended by one more year. He resigned at some point and then unresigned. He was flailing around over the next few years, not knowing how to bring all of these different factions together.

Now, one of these factions was the Southern Secessionists, who didn’t even want to be part of the Union, and they didn’t want to be part of the Union since 1994 when there was a civil war between the North and South. They eventually reorganized themselves into the current STC, which is, as I said, funded and trained by the U.A.E. They had legitimate concerns that weren’t addressed.

The Houthis are a group from northern Yemen who initially started off in the late ’90s as a vocal opposition to Saleh’s corruption and Saleh’s rule, but also Saleh’s very close relationship to Saudi Arabia, which was becoming detrimental to Yemeni society. Here enters the sectarian conversation. This is not a sectarian war. The Houthis follow a version of Islam called Zaidi Islam, but they’re not a minority. Forty percent of Yemenis are Zaidi Muslims, and we don’t have a history of fighting along sectarian lines. What was happening in the late ’90s, early 2000s, and early ’90s as well is that Saudi Arabia was exporting their version of Islam, Salafi Islam and Wahhabi Islam, to all of these other countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. I remember when the textbooks changed in school, and they came printed from Saudi Arabia. Now, what that was doing was an attempt to erase Yemen’s rich history of both Shafi’i-Sunni Islam and Zaidi-Shi’a Islam.

The Houthis were a family of scholars, and they had a representative in parliament. They were among the only people who were vocally outwardly speaking out against this, even though many people within Yemeni society did not like these changes that were happening. So that put them in opposition to Saleh, who, by the way, himself was a Zaidi, so this was not a sectarian issue. He didn’t handle critique very well, so he fought six different wars against the Houthis and was not able to get rid of them. In some of these wars, he enlisted the Saudis for help because he made the argument that these people are at your border, and they’re your problem as much as they’re mine.

So that’s the history with the Houthis. They became one of the groups, in post-2011, who were trying to have their voices heard. You know, they come from a province that was severely underdeveloped. We’re talking about no running water or electricity in many parts of the province. They had economic concerns as well. All of these different groups had their own concerns. Hadi was just not bringing together people in any meaningful way, and that’s what led to a lot of tensions leading to 2014, when the Houthis up and took over the capital, Sana’a, in an attempt to force Hadi into doing something about it.

I know I’ve spoken a lot, but I also want to highlight a key moment that happened between the Houthi takeover of Sana’a in late 2014 and the Saudi-led bombing in March 2015. During that time, there were still talks that were happening. The UN envoy to Yemen at the time, Jamal Benomar, writes about this in Newsweek. He writes about an agreement that was essentially reached between all of these different factions. He says it was ten painful weeks. He says the different parties agreed on the legislative and executive agreements. It was a power-sharing deal that was supposed to work for people. They were ready to sign the peace deal, and only two days later did Saudi Arabia start bombing. So that was the context. It wasn’t an all-out civil war. There was a lot of tension in the country. There was a Houthi takeover. There was a lot of resentment. There were a lot of parties who were left unheard, but they were still able to negotiate something. Now, we don’t know what would have happened with that, but they were able to negotiate a deal that was essentially derailed by Saudi Arabia intervening in 2015.

Talia Baroncelli

I have read about that. I was wondering, what was it that actually made Saudi Arabia intervene at that moment, what you say was two days after this potential peace deal had been negotiated? Did they already have U.S. support at that time, or did they think that they would be militarily supported and they were overly confident that they could push through their own agenda?

Shireen Al-Adeimi

I mean, they had U.S. support on day one. The day they announced their war, which was, by the way, in English from D.C., not in Arabic from Riyadh. They made the announcement that they were leading this war in Yemen called a ‘Decisive Storm,’ and that announcement was made in D.C. That very same day, the White House released a statement of support saying that they already created a Joint Planning Cell that they were supporting and that they were not at war because that was illegal. The Obama administration was very careful to say that they were not at war, but essentially everything they were doing signified that they were a party to the war and that they might as well have been part of that coalition because they were setting up Generals in the command room and supporting them with targets. Of course, most of the weapons that Saudi Arabia has comes from the U.S. So from the very, very first day of the war, they knew that they had full support from the United States, and the United States was very vocal about that.

Now, why did they intervene? They intervened in Yemen in the past. They intervened in the civil war in the ’70s. They intervened when northern Yemenis were trying to oust the imamites: the father, son, and grandson monarchy that was taking shape and turned Yemen into a republic. Saudi Arabia supported the monarch for the next eight years, even though he was a Zaidi, so religion here didn’t matter. They just needed another monarch or another ally. So when the monarchy failed in Yemen, and we turned into a republic, we’re the only republic in that part of the region and part of that world. All of our neighbors are monarchies. They made sure that they had an ally in Yemen, a very close ally in Saleh.

When Saleh was gone, they knew that Hadi was a very close ally. Now, they knew that the Islah Party would be allies as well. I don’t think they were too worried about the STC. The one group they certainly did not want in that agreement, in that power-sharing deal, was the Houthis because they had just spent the last several years fighting alongside Saleh to get rid of the Houthis and were really embarrassed by the fact that they weren’t able to control this group who has not backed away from speaking outwardly against Saudi interventions in Yemen or Saudi interference in Yemen. They didn’t want the Houthis in power, which is why they wanted to– what they said is intervene on behalf of the UN-recognized, legitimate president of Yemen, which years later, they had no problem setting aside, literally told him and woke him up in the middle of the night, said, hey, why don’t you resign and transfer power to these eight guys that we support? So that was the plan.

Now, the miscalculation happened when they thought this was going to be a quick two-week war, and they didn’t realize that when you attack people, they fight back. That’s the calculation that they did not make very well.

Talia Baroncelli

What was the extent of the support of the Houthis in 2014? What would you say characterizes their group? Allah is also the other name of the Houthis. What characterizes them? Do they have a specific long-term goal or political ideology that you think engenders broader support, or are they just filling in this sort of power vacuum, so to speak, and just fighting against the Saudi-led invasion, and that’s what’s perhaps giving them some more popularity?

Shireen Al-Adeimi

I think it’s a bit of both. When they took over the capital Sana’a, they were still some small group from northern Yemen. Yes, they had been gaining a lot of sympathy from their general population because, frankly, they were the only group that was able to stand up to Saleh and who seemed to not back down. I lived in the South when the South declared secession from the North, and Saleh responded by bombing us for the next three months until all of the leaders in the South fled, and the South was forced back into unity. Southerners and secessionists are looking at this, saying, oh, wow, we weren’t able to succeed. When we spoke about Saleh, your average Yemeni could not speak about Saleh without getting disappeared or being assassinated or something. This was a country that was under political repression.

The Houthis were seen as this group that raised armed conflict in response to Saleh’s attack on them because initially, they were speaking, and he attacked, and they fought back. They still weren’t anything significant. They weren’t a significant political party or anything like that. I think once they took over the capital in late 2014, people realized that they must have had support.

Now, who did that support come from? It turns out it came from Saleh, which is very ironic here. They had been enemies for many years, but Saleh, even though he resigned, he wasn’t your average Arab Spring president. He wasn’t assassinated. He wasn’t kicked out. He wasn’t jailed. He, in fact, remained in Yemen. He negotiated a deal under the GCC that would prevent him from being persecuted for any crimes that people were accusing him of and remained in control over large parts of the Yemeni army.

When the Houthis were able to very simply take over, march over from the North and take over with very little resistance, people felt like, well, Saleh’s telling the army not to act. That’s likely what happened because when the Saudis started bombing in 2015, very quickly, Saleh and the Houthis joined forces. He was able to mobilize parts of the Yemeni army that he still controlled, and they formed a unified resistance to the intervention. It didn’t last. It lasted for a good two and a half years. At the end of 2017, Saleh decided to switch sides. He saw that this was not going anywhere, and he thought maybe this was his second coming. He decided to switch sides, and within days, he was killed by the Houthis.

The Houthis then found themselves in Sana’a, now forced to rule. They did form a political group, an alliance with people from Saleh’s party. Initially, I don’t think they had any ambitions to govern, but that’s the role they found themselves in. Over the years, there has been no security situation in northern Yemen where they rule.

Now, if these were a very small group with no political power, every Yemeni would be armed to the teeth. You would see a lot of resistance against the Houthis. We don’t see a lot of that going on. In fact, we see the Houthis working with many northern tribes to gain their support and their trust. I think they’ve been able to do alliance-building work over the last several years and have been able to fold into their group many swaths of the Yemeni population who previously would not have been identifying with them at all. So they were seen as the people who stayed to defend the country, and that’s why I think a lot of people support them in northern Yemen. If the Saudis, U.A.E., and Americans were worried about the support that the Houthis had, well, now they really have something to worry about because now they have a lot of support from the population, whereas before, they didn’t.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, we can’t speak about this conflict without addressing the United States’ role in providing weapons to Saudi Arabia. If I recall correctly, the U.S. even sent in Green Berets at some stage in the conflict, and they’ve sent over $50 billion worth of military funds, weapons, and that sort of thing. Can you speak more about the role of the U.S. as well as the War Powers Resolution of 2019, which was vetoed by the Trump administration and which was recently rediscussed? I think Bernie Sanders was a bit reluctant and said that he wanted to speak to the Biden administration once more before putting it to a vote.

Shireen Al-Adeimi

Yeah, almost $60 billion have been sent from the U.S. alone to Saudi and the U.A.E. between fiscal years 2015 and 2021. So this doesn’t count (2022-2023). That adds up to about $22 million a day. We have that much in weapon sales just to those two countries. Then, of course, the Saudis and Emirates purchase weapons from Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Britain, and all of these countries. The other way that the U.S. supports the Saudi-led coalition and has throughout the years is through, as I said, the Joint Planning Cell. They actually have U.S. and U.K. commanders in the command room helping them with targeting. Up until late 2018, they were refuelling Saudi jets in midair. They weren’t only training their pilots and helping them with maintenance, spare parts and weapons, and helping them choose the targets, but these jets were flying midair over Yemeni airspace, and the U.S. was helping them refuel. That ended with the Trump administration in late 2018. So in every way, shape or form, logistics, intelligence sharing, choosing targets, weapons, every single way that a war operates, the U.S. had a hand in operating.

Now that essentially amounted to a violation of the Constitution. There’s a 1973 bill that was passed called the War Powers Act, and it became federal law in 1973 when journalists found out that the Nixon administration was secretly bombing Laos. They found out that and said, well, actually, we should not allow this to happen. We need to make sure that war-making is something that only Congress can authorize and not a president. Now, of course, we know every president has violated that since 1973: maybe not every president, but most presidents. Congress never really stood up to any sitting president until 2019. This was years of effort by activists in the making. Finally, in 2019, War Powers was passed in a bipartisan way, you could say by both chambers of Congress. It was largely seen by Democrats as Trump’s war in Yemen. There was no recognition of Obama’s role when we tried during the Obama years to end this war and hold the Obama administration accountable for what they were doing in Yemen. It was easier for Democrats, at least, to see this as Trump’s war, and they had the willingness to stand up against it. Trump vetoed it, and we didn’t have the two-thirds majority needed to undo the veto, so that fell apart. That was an effort to end U.S. participation in the war. It wasn’t going to end up in sales because, apparently, those are separate transactions. It was going to end all of these other logistical ways that the U.S. was supporting the Saudi-led coalition.

Now, Biden’s administration, here we go, 2021. In the very first policy speech that Biden gave, he made a promise to end what he called ‘offensive operations’ in Yemen. So this random dichotomy showed up in the vocabulary here,

Capitalism Has Never Been This Irrational – Paul Jay (pt 3/3)

Paul Jay — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:14:16 -0400

Talia Baroncelli interviews Paul Jay; “The financial elites know how dangerous the climate crisis is, but they won't acknowledge the only solution is central planning, government regulation, and intervention. They know market mechanisms won't work within a time frame that matters, if at all. They're not against central planning. What is the Pentagon if not central planning? What is the Fed and bank bailouts if not central planning? Central planning in their interests and under their control is okay. But government planning that transforms the economy and phases out fossil fuel, is unacceptable. They hate any form of socialism more than they hate risking the end of civilization.”

Part 2: Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Michael Hudson

Paul Jay — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 14:29:24 -0400

In part two, Michael Hudson discusses his new book "The Collapse of Antiquity." Hudson challenges the traditional beliefs about the fall of the Roman Empire, arguing that it was caused by a financial crisis brought on by excessive debt, wealth inequality, and the concentration of economic power. Hudson draws parallels to modern-day economies and highlights the dangers of financialization and wealth concentration.

Donald Trump and the (Non) Prosecution of Presidential Crimes (pt 2/3)

Paul Jay — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 11:40:04 -0400

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In part two of this three-part series, Paul Jay speaks about the grave war crimes committed by numerous U.S. presidents, which have gone largely unpunished. The current corporate political class is hyper-focused on President Donald J. Trump’s unlawful behaviour as if it constitutes an anomaly in the historical trajectory of presidential crimes. Despite this double standard, Trump should not be exempt from judicial scrutiny and prosecution.

Paul Jay is back to speak about the war in Ukraine, the irrevocable effects of climate change, and the ever-present but often downplayed danger of nuclear warfare. He explains how the transnational capitalist elite continue to benefit from the war at the expense of the average Ukrainian and Russian worker. He also speaks about his new documentary film project on nuclear winter and his recent trip to visit political activist Daniel Ellsberg, whose insights on the Cuban Missile Crisis and potential human error leading to nuclear confrontation are heavily featured in the film. This is part one of a three-part series.

Watch PART TWO
Watch PART THREE

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Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Paul Jay for a three-part series on the war in Ukraine, the prosecution of Donald J. Trump, as well as global oligarchy and capitalism. But first, please do go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Most importantly, get on our mailing list; that way, you’ll be emailed every time a new episode is released. You can also go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, and hit the subscribe button as well as the bell. The bell ensures that you’ll be informed every time a new episode drops. See you in a bit for part one of our three-part series with Paul Jay.

Joining me now is Paul Jay, your favorite host at theAnalysis.news. It’s really good–

Paul Jay

Oh, not anymore.

Talia Baroncelli

It’s great to see you, Paul. How are you doing?

Paul Jay

I’m doing good, thanks.

Talia Baroncelli

So you’ve been really busy lately, and we haven’t seen you. What have you been up to?

Paul Jay

I’ve been up to my eyeballs in a documentary film I’m working on called How to Stop a Nuclear War, which is based on Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. So I was out twice in the last few months in Berkeley, where Dan is, filming more interviews with him. I’ve actually been interviewing Dan on and off for the last three years, but we’re getting much more into the thick of the production now. When I came back last time, I had COVID, and I was out of it with that. The cough is a residual of that.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, we can see that, unfortunately.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I apologize if I’m coughing during this interview. But the work’s going very well. Dan, a lot of people may know, is ill. He’s 92 years old and diagnosed recently with pancreatic cancer. He sent an email or a message out letting all his friends and everyone know about it. It went viral. Apparently, two or three million people have seen his note. He’s been interviewed many times now on mainstream media. Right now, he’s doing pretty well. But sadly, he probably won’t be for long, but he’s still quite energetic.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, in all your recent interviews with Dan, and you’ve known him for so many years, what has his core message been recently, especially with regard to climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

Paul Jay

Well, he’s feeling frustrated, I guess. He was hoping all the work he had been doing would have had more effect than it had. Although I think it has had more than he thinks it has. But he thinks the danger of nuclear war is as great now as it’s ever been, and perhaps even more dangerous now– and obviously, climate change.

One of the things he said, if people watched his interview, which I thought was quite profound and important, was comparing the Cuban Missile Crisis to what’s going on in Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov compared the American blockade of Cuba to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United States was threatened by Soviet missiles in Cuba and had a blockade against Cuba. Russia, threatened by the expansion of NATO and even possibly nuclear weapons in Ukraine, had a right to what they’re calling the “special military operation,” which is– they use those words because to say war opens it up to a question of whether this is a legal or unjust war, illegal war. So they come up with this terminology of “special military occupation,” which is nonsense.

When I asked Ellsberg about comparing the Cuban Missile Crisis to Ukraine, he said, “Well, there is a comparison, but it’s not the one Lavrov is making.” In fact, the Soviet missiles in Cuba were no additional threat to the United States, even though there were nuclear weapons in Cuba. It didn’t actually alter the geopolitical equation at all because the Soviet Union already had submarines that could fire on Washington or New York. So nothing was added to the threat. In fact, the blockade that [John F.] Kennedy put up around Cuba, while it was better than an invasion, which is what the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted, and it seems Bobby Kennedy wanted, and Jack Kennedy and maybe Adlai Stevenson were almost the only ones that really didn’t want the invasion and risk where that would lead. The blockade itself was illegal. To blockade a country is itself an act of war, an act of aggression. Kennedy had no right to put up that blockade. So to compare Cuba to Ukraine and Russia is actually not a favorable comparison for the Russians.

Ellsberg argues the Ukraine situation is very similar in that even if Ukraine joined NATO, it’s not an imminent threat to Russia. I mean, Estonia is already in NATO, and there’s no threat from Estonia to Russia. In fact, Ukraine wasn’t about to get into NATO anyway. I mean, people have heard me say this a hundred times, and it’s easily verifiable. Both France, Germany and, in all likelihood, Turkey, were not going to allow Ukraine into NATO. If there isn’t consensus, they can’t do it. So there just was no imminent threat. The underlying comparison that Ellsberg makes is that Kennedy was so afraid of domestic political forces, the Republicans accusing him of being soft on communism, soft on the Soviet Union, soft on Cuba, that he had to look tough. He couldn’t be humiliated by these missiles in Cuba because [Nikita] Khrushchev had promised him there wouldn’t be any missiles in Cuba, and Khrushchev put them in any way. That’s a similar situation to Putin.

If Ukraine was to be a NATO, if Ukraine was to have these kinds of weapons, it would be a humiliation for Putin. Not a real threat to Russian national security. Ukraine was not about to invade Russia. But you can’t underestimate these factors. Kennedy’s fear of humiliation and Putin’s similar, both dealing with domestic situations. In Putin’s case, rising alienation and opposition to the Russian oligarchy. We’re not the only ones that see pictures of these Russian oligarchs living on these enormous yachts in the Mediterranean or wherever. Much of Russia or the Russian people are living in poverty.

Ellsberg condemns the Russian invasion. But– and this is the big but, the danger of nuclear war because of the Russian invasion and the danger of nuclear war because of the American role, perhaps provoking this with talk of NATO expansion– but like I say, they’ll see no evidence it was really going to happen. But since the invasion, the U.S. has certainly embraced this as an opportunity to try to weaken Russia, perhaps bring Putin down. They are doing everything they can to stoke and provoke this war to go on, perhaps even for years. The phrase has been used over and over again. The Americans will fight for the right of NATO to take in new members to the last Ukrainian– until every Ukrainian is dead. While he condemns the invasion quite unequivocally, he also condemns the role of the U.S. in NATO, and in particular, the Americans, in not pushing for compromise now and continuing to flood arms into Ukraine.

Talia Baroncelli

What do you think Ellsberg would say to the fact that, yes, of course, NATO has been expanding and has been pushing those red lines, so to speak, but what about Russia’s imperial ambitions? Maybe they would have gone ahead with the invasion, regardless, and were just using the specter of NATO expansion as a pretext to invade Ukraine.

Paul Jay

Well, I don’t know the answer to that question because we never got a chance to see it. Certainly, a lot of Russians I’ve talked to in Russia do think it was a pretext. The point is, even if Ukraine did join NATO, how does that really change anything from Estonia? In fact, what they’ve accomplished now is now Finland is in NATO. Now they have an even bigger NATO border, Russian-NATO border. So it certainly didn’t minimize the threat from NATO.

I think, to step back a bit here, without mitigating the message that there was no imminent threat to Russia, which makes this a war of aggression, and everything I understand about the Nuremberg decisions, international law, and the UN Charter, the right to self-defense only kicks in if there’s an imminent threat. Imminent really means imminent, like you’re about to get attacked, and there’s no other way out of getting attacked but a preemptive defense. Short of that, it’s a war of aggression, period.

Talia Baroncelli

Right, and it has to be an imminent threat, spatially, so territorially, but also temporarily. So in terms of it being an imminent threat right then at that very moment or in that time frame and not a few months prior.

Paul Jay

That’s the essence of it. Imminent.

Talia Baroncelli

Exactly.

Paul Jay

Immediate. In the moment. Yeah, that’s the essence of it. At the time of the Russian invasion, there were 150,000 Russian troops on the Ukrainian border. Even if there were Ukrainian troops near the Donbas, and there’s a claim, and the numbers go all over the place. Lavrov has said 75,000. Others have said 50,000. I saw the head of the Russian Communist Party say there were 150,000 or something Ukrainian troops about to invade Donbas. Well, there’s no evidence of any of that. The OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] that does these reports, reported an increase in shelling, but that shelling was back and forth from the Donbas region into the Ukrainian government-controlled area and Ukrainian missiles going into the independent or autonomous-controlled regions, some people say Russian-controlled. There’s a lot of shelling going on, but there were very, very few deaths, if any. The number of deaths in 2021 leading up to that– the 150,000 Russian troops– in the whole of the region, according to the OSCE, there were 10 deaths as a result of the fighting, and maybe it could be attributed to the Ukrainian side. I mean, there were more people that were killed in car accidents.

So there certainly was no imminent threat for Ukraine to invade Russia. I don’t see evidence that there was an imminent threat to Donbas. Even if there was, which again, I don’t know that there was, but let’s say there was, how likely is it that they’re going to do that when there are 150,000 Russian troops on their border? If there were Ukrainian troops gathering, it’s probably more likely they’re doing it because there are 150,000 Russian troops on their border. Even then, Donbas was still part of Ukraine. It was still an internal matter of Ukraine. It’d be like if Quebec was trying to declare independence from the Canadian federal government and Canadian troops were massing to go in and suppress, I don’t know, the Quebec provincial police or whatever it would be. The Americans don’t have a right to come in and get involved in that. It’s not a complete stretch of the imagination either. Some crazy neocons once talked about how the U.S. should intervene and support the Quebec independence movement.

Anyway, all that said, the focus of Ellsberg is on the threat of nuclear war and the climate crisis. The Americans are playing a role now to provoke, stoke, more than provoke, to sustain this war in a way that the Ukrainians don’t feel any need to negotiate. There’s some evidence that Zelenskyy, at one point, did want to negotiate. Boris Johnson went in and trounced it. I think there were meetings going on in Turkey. So there’s no doubt that the Americans are trying to keep this war going to weaken Russia, so it cannot be a rival in Europe. On so many levels, it’s insane.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, you have heard different Ukrainian higher-ups in the government speaking about Crimea. I think recently some of them are saying, perhaps we can negotiate Crimea, and we won’t need to take it back for us to have some final victory. But then some other diplomats or officials were walking that back. It’s hard to really gauge what the flexibility is and how diehard they are on having complete territorial integrity, and how long they want to fight for. If you look at the recent Pentagon leaks that were showing U.S. and NATO military plans and assistance to the Ukrainian military, it does seem like there is a spring offensive underway. So do you think maybe that’s why they haven’t been investing much political capital in diplomacy?

Paul Jay

Yeah, sure. First of all, it’s been said over by many people, but the American military-industrial complex, arms manufacturers are having– this is heaven for them. They’re talking about how depleted American weapon stocks are now. Well, what does that mean? You got to resupply American weapon stocks. Apparently, Raytheon was saying that it’s going to take them years to catch up with what’s been depleted in Ukraine. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman love this. There’s this great economic pressure on the Biden administration. There’s no doubt that a just position, anyone that cares at all about peace in this world, and even more importantly, anyone that cares about– actually people focusing on the climate crisis and reducing the risk of nuclear war. The pressure needs to be, yes, denounce the invasion, but at this point, there have to be negotiations. Everybody knows more or less what the end game of this negotiation is.

Thomas Pickering, who’s a former American Diplomat, writes in Foreign Affairs. I mean, he laid it out, but he’s not the only one. It’s pretty clear. One way he suggests is to take all the disputed territories in Luhansk and Donetsk and put them under UN supervision, then have legitimate referendums and let the people decide what status they want. Do they want to be a part of Russia? Do they want to be part of Ukraine? Do they want to be autonomous and independent? I don’t think, from what I understand, that there’s any doubt that the people of this region have a right to self-determination. The same thing goes with Crimea. The only difference with Crimea is that it’s a little more complex, given its history of being in Russia and then being in Ukraine and back in Russia. More important to me than these border histories is that quite a few of what seem like legitimate polls were taken after the referendum in 2014. The majority of people in Crimea apparently do support Crimea joining Russia. But let that be certified again. If that’s the case, then fine. People have a right to self-determination, but countries have a right to defend their sovereignty.

Sometimes these are contradictory principles. Let’s take Taiwan. Does Taiwan have a right to self-determination? I think so. I’m not a lawyer, but you go into all the various ingredients of what would give a province of China, like Quebec is a province of Canada, what would give Taiwan the right to self-determination? From what I know, I think it meets those criteria. But China has a right to defend its sovereignty, and that includes Taiwan. In the same way, Canada, even if Quebec has a right to self-determination, it doesn’t mean Canada doesn’t have a right to defend its sovereignty, including Quebec. For example, if the U.S. were to try to intervene to facilitate Quebec’s independence, that would be illegal in international law. It would be a crime of aggression. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a right to self-determination. So they’re complicated, sometimes contradictory principles. But the underlying fundamental principle is the well-being of the people involved; peace as a primary principle, and the working people of each country should not slaughter each other for the sake of the oligarchs of their countries. The same thing goes for Ukraine.

I’ve been saying– it’s easy for me to sit here in Toronto and say this, but I would love the Ukrainian working people to have a way to organize and say to the Russians, you want to denazify? Great. Go denazify Russia because you’re surrounded by Nazis all around Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Even the Russian Communist Party is virulently nationalist and, to a large extent, anti-semitic too. The Ukrainian workers should take all these guns they have now and point them at the Ukrainian oligarchy. Okay, that’s a nice dream. But that said, that class struggle in Ukraine, which up until the Russian invasion was there boiling, I don’t know how strong the workers’ movement was, but there were unions. It all came to nothing because of the Russian invasion. Like when you’re invaded, that national contradiction with the invader becomes far more primary. It’s very difficult.

In China, when the Japanese invaded, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party were able to mobilize such a force that they could focus on the Japanese invasion and the Kuomintang, who were sometimes fighting the Japanese and more often than not fighting the Peoples’ Liberation Army and then wound up holding themselves up in Taiwan.

Conditions don’t exist like that in Ukraine right now. If the problem is the Ukrainian oligarchy, then it’s the Ukrainian people that have to deal with that. Criminal, kleptocracy, yes, with Nazi influence. But the oligarchs in Russia are no better. They’re not the ones that are going to clean up and denazify Ukraine. If they had succeeded in invading Kyiv, and if they had succeeded in putting in some Ukrainian puppet, then Ukraine would have been ruled by a corrupt Russian kleptocracy. So let’s not forget Ukraine and Russia are class societies.

Now, here’s the big problem here in terms of international public opinion and such. The country that’s leading the charge to denounce the Russian invasion is a rogue state. The United States is, certainly, with the invasion of Iraq and many other things, but let’s just focus on that, it is a rogue state. So what credibility have they got denouncing Russia for being an aggressor, a war of aggression, violating international law? They have zero credibility because of not just what they’ve done in Iraq, but the pressure and interference in other places, backing the Saudis in Yemen and on and on. So that’s the complication. But just because the United States is a rogue state, and just because they’re denouncing this Russian invasion, doesn’t mean we as progressives don’t have to first and foremost have solidarity with the people, not the Russian oligarchy, but the Ukrainian people who are being invaded. We must also point out what the Americans really are.

Talia Baroncelli

I think it’s also really important to recognize that so many people have been displaced as well. So when we’re talking about referendums, if we’re going to have referendums in certain areas of Ukraine, so many people have been forced out of those areas. So you would have to have it in a way that includes them and that maybe has them come back to the country under conditions of peace because it is a bit disingenuous to say, oh, we’ll have a referendum now after thousands of them have left and only a few of them are remaining. That’s a bit of a skewed picture of who’s there. Maybe their opinions have changed in the meantime since the invasion. I think a lot of working-class people, just by reading certain Ukrainian groups who are more working-class and have typically been opposed to the elite and have been opposed to Zelenskyy even, are now unified because they’re threatened by the Wagner group or by Russian forces who are killing them. So it’s ironic how their attention has been now forced against the other kleptocracy and not the one who is also oppressing them within their own country. Hopefully, there will be peace soon so that they can actually focus on the corruption and the problems within their own country and not just dealing with an aggressor.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I would expect this wouldn’t be the first time a referendum has to be organized, even by the UN, where a lot of people have been displaced. So I think you’re right. There has to be a process that people can prove they were residents at such and such time and have a right to vote. If it was under UN jurisdiction, Donbas, then people, in theory, could return to their homes.

The problem here is, what’s the overriding objective for each of the players here? If you look at the Americans, the overriding objective, and is always their overriding objective is global hegemony. If you want to be the global hegemon, you got to be the hegemon in every region. So any regional power that’s a threat has to be subdued. The underlying problem here is the way global monopoly capitalism works, and there’s nothing new about it. Capitalism strives at the individual corporate level for monopoly and at the level of the country for monopoly within a region. If you’re a superpower monopoly globally, whether monopoly corporately, whether your companies can actually control certain sectors of the economy. Most importantly, and this is what exists in most of the world, American finance is the dominant financial player and is the creditor. I don’t know if it was Lenin or somebody who divided the world in various ways. One of the main ways you can divide the world is by creditors and debtors. Up until recently, the United States has been by far the number one creditor country, and more so, global capitalism depends on American management.

When the Pentagon sits down with the politicians who happen to be in power and the whole foreign policy complex, all the think tanks and everybody that feeds into this U.S. foreign policy, it’s a whole class of people, really, who is driven partly by the motivation for profit making for the arms making companies, but also an internalized view of the world. America is the beacon on the hill. America’s needed, or the world goes to anarchy. Democracy versus authoritarianism. Now, of course, that means “democracy”– I’m doing quotation marks here, especially for people listening to the podcast. I got to keep remembering more than half our audience is listening, not watching. But anyway, when they talk about “democracy,” they primarily mean the freedom of capital to move freely around the world. So they can go invest where they want. They can get countries in debt to them where they want, and so on. Then a certain amount of democracy for the people– you get to vote every few years. It’s not nothing. It sure ain’t, I don’t think, a real democracy, especially in the U.S., where people barely can even vote properly. But even then, in all the Western capitalist countries, and I include Canada in that, none of the parties really represent working people. I won’t get into that in detail. But a certain amount of democracy amongst the ruling classes themselves, when they talk about democracy, I think that’s the democracy they’re most concerned about.

They don’t like, and FDR articulated this really clearly in 1938 in the speech on monopoly, the Western capitalist on the whole, and there are some that don’t agree with what I’m about to say; they don’t want one section of capital to seize hold of the state and be beholden to a small group of capital. So democracy for the Americans, and for most or all of Western capitalism, is a democracy where the institutions maintain certain rules of the road. So these institutions play a moderating role between sections of capital so that they don’t go to war with each other, which they did in the United States.

During the American Civil War, it was primarily a war of different sections of capital and elite power fighting over how labor was going to be exploited and which section of, whether it was North and industrial capital or the Southern agricultural slave-based capital, was going to be dominant. They don’t want to do that again. They don’t want a war. So they’ve worked out these institutions that can moderate between sections of capital without the way feudalists used to rally peasants to their side. Some peasants would fight for this aristocrat, and some for that. There were endless wars. That’s not good for business, modern capitalist business. So they want some democracy. They prefer it. They like the freedom of capital, but they hate socialism. They hate the idea of public ownership and some democratization where people actually have a say in that public ownership. When faced with that, they don’t mind, especially in other countries, dictatorship. I mean, Saudi Arabia. It has gone on and on since World War II. How many dictatorships have the Americans supported? Socialism is the greatest enemy to them.

They’re balancing this. How do you have freedom of capital? A kind of democracy, not democracy for the people, but some, at least some, that looks that way. They don’t like even a [Jair] Bolsonaro situation that much in Brazil, where a group around Bolsonaro was starting to really take control of the state. But still, they had elections, and the institutions played a role.

Anyway, when they look at Ukraine, what’s their primary objective? To assert their hegemony over Europe. They don’t want Russia to be a big player in Europe because it could be too competitive to American power in Europe. They hate the idea that there would ever be a Russia-German cooperation or alliance because imagine if you had a Russia-German alliance in Europe, who needs the U.S.? There’s no longer even a role for NATO at all, and it would change everything. So the Americans, that’s their primary objective.

What should their primary objective be? What should we be demanding their primary objective should be? Peace? Yeah, of course. But it’s more specific. The great threat facing us is the climate crisis and then the threat of nuclear war. You can reverse it because of what’s happening right now. If there’s a nuclear war next week, no one’s going to be around to worry about the climate crisis. So you can’t even compare these two in a way. They both have to be dealt with. It’s too obvious. It can’t be dealt with without an international agreement that includes China and Russia, especially China, but also Russia.

What good is global hegemony in a world of utter chaos? If they thought there were supply chain problems during the pandemic, just wait until we start crossing the 1.5 and two-degree warming levels, then three and then four. James Hansen said recently in a study that two degrees of warming is already baked into the system. We are there now. We’re not at two degrees yet, but it’s already baked into the climate. The only way to stop going past two, maybe mitigate getting to two, is a radical rupture with the use of fossil fuel now, today, and a radical moving into sustainable energy today, now. That should be everyone’s priority, including Ukrainians. What good is a Ukraine that defeats the Russians, one, isn’t a wasteland of destruction? How many times have the Americans promised to come into Eastern Europe and rebuild and this and that, and they do very little? Maybe there’ll be a way to spend money there, but do you think the American people entering a recession are going to be, oh, let’s all go spend more money in Ukraine?

More importantly, what is there of Ukraine or Russia if we don’t face up to climate and if we keep risking a nuclear war? So the problem here is we got to step back from– while we need to denounce the Russian invasion without mitigation, we need to step back because the problem is the way monopoly capitalism has reached such a moment of utter irrationality that we’re on the precipice of destroying human civilization. So once you put it into that context, how on Earth can the Ukrainians keep talking about liberating Crimea? How can there not be a quick resolution under the auspices of the UN? Yes, the U.S. is very much the culprit here. Yes, the Russians invaded. Yes, I’ve said it over and over again. I’m not mitigating that. But the Americans actually do have the ability to say to the Ukrainians, yeah, you have a right to fight as long as you want to fight, including liberating Crimea. If that’s what Ukrainians want to do, okay. But we don’t have an obligation to keep arming you if it’s threatening the world. And that’s what they should say.

Talia Baroncelli

Not just threatening the world but also threatening the integrity of their own country. Some would argue, even certain liberal historians, I think I’ve mentioned this before, Stephen Kotkin, he’s been a diehard supporter of arming Ukraine, but he’s been saying that what good is the outcome if Ukraine can’t join the EU in the end and there’s not much left of their country. It’s going to require a huge effort to rebuild the country. We already know that. Something much greater than the Marshall Plan. What good will it be if they regain Crimea? There are no collective security agreements in place. There is no redistribution of wealth in place. There’s no solution for climate change in that region. Even if they have Crimea back, that’s not really a great final outcome, at least in his view. So it would make sense to focus on what is really realistic.

Certain other experts like Trita Parsi have been saying that you can still have diplomacy and not actually have a ceasefire. The two aren’t the same thing. So many Western countries have been shying away from investing in diplomatic negotiations as if a ceasefire would be around the corner, and they don’t want to downplay their support for Ukraine. It’s ridiculous because you can still have open lines of communication and work toward diplomacy, and that won’t necessarily automatically lead to a ceasefire. So they should be talking a lot more.

Paul Jay

Sorry, go ahead.

Talia Baroncelli

We also don’t really know what’s going on. I mean, I think, again, this recent Pentagon leak just shows how U.S. intelligence is so much better at gauging what the Russians are doing than what the Ukrainian war plans are. Maybe there are some rogue elements in the Ukrainian government. So I feel like countries are just shooting from the hip, and they don’t have a real strategy in place, or else some strategies are just hidden from the West. Whether that serves a purpose, I don’t really know. But yeah, it’s really hard to say.

Why don’t we talk about China’s role in mediating these conflicts? [Emmanuel] Macron was recently in China to speak to Xi Jinping, to try and put pressure on China to condemn Russia’s involvement in the war in Ukraine and to potentially discourage him from sending weapons to Ukraine. I don’t know if China is actually– sorry, sending weapons to Russia. I don’t know if China has actually sent any, but that prospect is obviously really disconcerting for people in the West if they think that this is going to become some new form of Cold War competition between the U.S. and China in the end.

Paul Jay

Yeah, well, it already is. It goes back to this striving for monopoly. The U.S. does not want to give up its predominant position, and it has already, to a large extent, lost it. I think China is now the major trading partner for almost everywhere, and they don’t have any foreign military bases. So they’ve accomplished this just through finance, loaning money, the aid of some kind, because of the size of their market and so on. In Latin America, almost, if not every major country in Latin America, their major trading partner now is China or it’s U.S. but China is right there next to it.

In terms of Ukraine, China is the place that, in theory, should have said no to this. If they want to call themselves socialists, then one of the fundamental principles of socialism is international solidarity with workers everywhere. A fundamental principle of that is you don’t support wars where workers slaughter each other for oligarchs. That’s it. You don’t. China’s position should have been from the very beginning, trying to use the leverage they had to get a negotiated settlement. I don’t see how the Russian economy would have survived without China buying its oil and gas from Russia. Apparently, they’re getting a cut-rate deal on it, but that is not the way a socialist country operates– for the sake of better prices on fossil fuel and for the sake of weakening our geopolitical ally, the United States, I’m sorry, not ally, adversary, they like to call themselves. They like, I guess, it’s in China’s narrow interest to see the Americans tied down in Ukraine, spending tons of money there. Maybe they see it mitigates the provocations the United States creates over Taiwan. But that isn’t how a socialist country operates.

They could have and should have used and still should not be so fuzzy on what they actually think about the U.S. invasion. If you read something called Global Times, which is a website that more or less speaks for the Chinese Communist Party, there have been several paragraphs in there in some of their articles where they actually do come pretty close to saying this is an unjustified invasion. They don’t quite say it all the way, but they come pretty close. But they make a point, and in some ways, it’s somewhat similar to Ellsberg’s point, which is you can’t humiliate Putin and his government, and you can’t try to bring them down without horrible consequences. You can’t hope for the disintegration of the Russian Federation, which some of the American neocons and even people in the Biden administration, many of them are essentially neocons, hope for. They’re actually seeing this as a strategic opportunity to fundamentally weaken the Russian Federation, maybe even lead to its breakup in some ways, and in that way, weaken China. They don’t like China having this massive resource of fossil fuel.

Russia is not– people have called Russia just a gas station. Well, it’s pretty clear that it is not. They have a big agricultural sector. They make fertilizer. Their arms manufacturing industry is top-notch. Even if the army isn’t doing very well, apparently, their sophisticated weapons are at world-class levels. So that’s not an insignificant ally for China. For the U.S., weakening, breaking up– so China’s issued some warnings in between the lines, saying, you better be careful what you wish for here, America. A strategic defeat for Putin, the oligarchy, and the Russian armed forces can get extremely dangerous for the world. But I would just say back to the Chinese, well, the same thing for you. If you don’t really try to get this war over with and use your leverage for a UN broker deal, and I should mention, by the way, all these arguments about how Dombas was about to be attacked. Well, even if it was, which again, I don’t see it, but let’s say they were, well, then Russia goes to the UN Security Council and gets a resolution condemning Ukraine for its threat to Donbas, to the autonomous areas, and try to get a resolution, even a resolution supporting an intervention to defend Donbas. They didn’t do that. And that’s what China should have been saying. If you really think this is such a threat, then use the UN Charter, use the UN mechanism, because China is supposed to be a supporter of that. But you can’t make speeches about defending sovereignty and integrity and then be quiet about Russia’s invasion, which is what China is doing.

So there’s this mix going on here of people. They want to call it socialism with Chinese characteristics. Well, fine. Without getting too deeply into it, at this time, although I’m happy to do it some other time, is this actually socialism or not? Well, maybe it is sort of but not the kind, certainly, that Marx and Engels imagined in the sense that where’s the democracy for the workers? But okay, let’s set aside that right now. If you say you’re a socialist, then you need to abide by the principles. In fact, the Soviet Union was very involved in some of the international laws that were written that condemned wars without an imminent threat, condemning them as wars of aggression. China has supported all that, has supported that concept.

Yeah, I get the problem here and what I said earlier. The biggest criminal and the biggest purveyor of wars of aggression since World War II is the United States. Of course, the biggest criminal prior to World War II was the British Empire. Anglo-American imperialism has more blood on its hands, even than Hitler. The British actually killed more people over the 300 years of the British Empire. Anyway, you don’t need to compare who’s the worst criminal. I get why peoples of the South see the United States as the greater danger. I get why in much of the world, people see the U.S. as the greater danger. In an overall way, I guess it is because it is the power of the United States, the power of American finance, the corporate power; they are the primary obstacles, even on the climate front, in spite of all their rhetoric, pretending they care about climate. But these are not dogmatic, easy, simple rules that the Americans are to blame for everything.

If you were in Pakistan and India attacked, or vice versa, or the fight over Kashmir erupted again, it wouldn’t be clear where the U.S. was where Russia and China were. Maybe China is a little more towards Pakistan. The U.S. certainly backs [Narendra] Modi, but India is keeping up its relations with Russia. It’s a complicated jigsaw puzzle there. That being said, if you’re in Pakistan, you’re worried about the Indians. If you’re in India, you’re worried about the Pakistanis. Then the world better worry about a nuclear war between India and Pakistan because that’s enough to create a nuclear winter that could kill a billion people. This is the thing; it doesn’t matter which conflict you look at. The big picture comes back to the issue of climate and the risk of nuclear war. So the fundamental thing we need to be saying to all these powers, including the Chinese, and you want to call yourself socialism with Chinese characteristics, fine. Although I’ve never heard of socialism that didn’t have some national characteristics. I mean, Cubans had Cuban characteristics and so on, so whatever. The fundamental principle of a socialist country is international solidarity amongst working people. So you do what you can to end this war. There’s probably no force in the world right now that has more possibilities for ending this Ukrainian-Russian war than China. There’s still not doing it.

Talia Baroncelli

Having said that, though, I think there is an argument to be made for the fact that the U.S. is the greatest obstacle to this so-called rules-based international order, with quotation marks. I mean, they use this, at least in my view, they use this as a discursive tool to pursue their own interests. So they keep saying that, we need to condemn the war in Ukraine, we need to condemn Russia because we need to safeguard this rules-based international order. But the problem is that if they actually cared about these customary norms and these international standards, then they would be the first to prosecute Bush and Cheney and to hold their own war crimes to account. But they’ve insulated themselves and ensured that the ICC would never have any jurisdiction over them or issue an arrest warrant for any American officials. I’m sure that’s why the majority of the world is just looking at the West and saying, all your talk of democracy, Trump’s autocracy is BS because you don’t hold yourself to those same standards. But I would ask you, does that then mean because they’re so hypocritical that they shouldn’t hold potential Russian war criminals to the same standards? How should we go about ensuring that there’s some form of international justice? Maybe there would be Ukrainian war criminals as well that would need to be prosecuted. I don’t know. There have been UN reports, or I think, an Amnesty report maybe, that showed that there were war crimes on both sides, but the reports show that there were probably more systematic war crimes perpetrated by Russian troops than Ukrainian.

Paul Jay

There is such hypocrisy in the American position and the Western position. I include China there, too. I mean, did the Chinese demand accountability for Bush-Cheney after the Iraq War? I don’t remember. Wherever I’ve looked, I can’t see anything. I don’t remember the Chinese coming to the United Nations and asking for war crime trials for Bush-Cheney. They’re far more interested in developing U.S.-China trade. Of course, that’s what should have happened. I mean, it’s a joke. The hypocrisy is so terrible that even prosecuting Trump looks hypocritical because such bigger crimes were committed by former U.S. presidents, including Obama.

I’m not even talking about the drone program here, but if I understand it correctly, under international law, President Obama had an obligation to prosecute Bush-Cheney for war crimes. By not doing that, he becomes a collaborator. At the time when Obama was President, and this was a much hotter issue, I interviewed several experts on international law. It wasn’t just the need to prosecute Bush-Cheney; it’s that Obama himself could be prosecuted. But given that the only people that seem to ever get prosecuted are from small countries, it’s not like I shed a tear that these guys get prosecuted, but when the big war criminals don’t, and especially when the American war criminals don’t, then let’s get real about how do we get to a peace and how do we get to dealing with climate and the risk of nuclear war and any attempt to prosecute Putin or other Russians for war crimes. And yeah, they’re never going to go after Ukrainians anyway. And, of course, if you’re going to do it, you might as well go after all war crimes. But it’s a pointless exercise. All it’s going to do is make it impossible to come to an agreement. And if Putin thinks his life is on the line, and not just him, the people around him, they’re going to fight to the death here. So let’s get real about what should be done. Yeah, if you want to prosecute Putin, great. Let’s start with Bush-Cheney and all the other kinds of people. In fact, Larry Wilkerson, who we interview all the time, he said if there is a prosecution of Bush Cheney, he should be on the dock, too. And in fact, Ellsberg has said, and it’s going to be in the film. There’s a clip where Ellsberg says because of his role as a nuclear war planner and in Vietnam if he was charged with war crimes, he wouldn’t plead not guilty.

But this idea that the Russian war criminals, sure they are, should be held accountable by Western war criminals makes no point. The fundamental problem here is we need to stop the killing of ordinary people. The slaughter of ordinary people has to stop. This accountability of the Russians, it’s a propaganda game because the truth is, I would doubt the Americans even really want Putin held accountable because that sets a precedent. If you have a war of aggression and you’re going to do now what was done to the Nazis in the Nuremberg trials, well, maybe yeah. Maybe there should be some Americans in Nuremberg-style trials. Of course, there should be. Anyway, it’s a distraction at this point.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, I have one final question, and that would be, how do you see things playing out in Russia? How do you think the Russian people are going to react if there are several years of war? It’s obviously hard to see into the future, but the current sanction regimes have not had a really horrible, deleterious, short-term effect on the Russian economy because Russia and the central bank they’ve learned how to isolate themselves from the effect of these sanctions, and they have China as a huge trading partner. So I think the short-term effect hasn’t been that measurable. But what do you think will happen long term if they don’t repeal sanctions and if this war continues? Do you think we’ll see hunger strikes or any antiwar movement?

Paul Jay

I don’t know the answer. I know there are two possibilities, maybe more, but there’s one that the Chinese describe in, like I said, in the Global Times articles I’ve seen, and that is, if it looks like the Putin government is going to be humiliated, if it looks like they may really fall, if it looks like the Russian Federation starts to even come apart, then this becomes a much bigger deal than it already is. Meaning that the Russian people, now I’m quoting the Chinese article, start to see this not as a “special military operation” that doesn’t touch most of their lives that much. They start seeing it as a great patriotic war. Amongst much of the Russian population, certainly not all, but much, as it is in the United States, there is a toxic mix of religion and nationalism that forms much of people’s identity. If people feel that identity so threatened, their whole existence– in the United States, we’re number one, we’re number one. Democracy, democracy. How many working people go off to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other wars and really truly believe they are fighting to defend the identity of their people, the freedom of their people? Well, the same thing’s going on in Russia.

Many people truly believe in God, the Russian God– it’s like back in the viking days. The vikings had their gods. The British had their gods. They go to war to see which gods are going to win. Well, much of the Russian people’s identity is based on this. As we saw with the German people in the lead up to World War II, this being humiliated, as the Germans felt after the Versailles Treaty and the deliberate humiliation of Germany after the end of World War I, and they probably would have done the same thing after World War II if it hadn’t been for the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan and wanting to help Germany get back on its capitalist feet certainly had economic considerations to promoting American capital in Europe. But if there hadn’t been the Soviet Union, they would have stuck it to the Germans a lot worse than they did after World War II.

Anyway, so one scenario is that the Americans keep the pressure on, keep trying to actually bring down Putin, and keep hoping for the worst for Russia and by implication China. Or one, yes, an antiwar movement develops in Russia.

Boris Kagarlitsky thinks, and I’ve interviewed him a few times. He thinks the Russian military is against what’s going on, or much of the leadership is. He thinks maybe they’ll intervene at some point. I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong. Or maybe the American oligarchy and American capitalists, they get this is getting to the point of risking their own assets. I’ve been saying my joke about my film on nuclear weapons is Wall Street has said they have a responsibility to defend the assets of their investors. Well, don’t you have the responsibility to defend the asses of your investors? Maybe they get that this ain’t the best thing for money making. Maybe the Russian oligarchs get this isn’t the best way for us to be rich. Maybe. World War I and World War II, they did eventually end, but there was a craziness on the German side, a metaphysical ideology that went with German nationalism. One hopes in Russia, maybe they can be more pragmatic about it. But the Americans have to create an opening for that to happen, and maybe the Chinese can facilitate it. Otherwise, we’re into shit. Let’s be straight about it. I don’t know how long the war goes on. As long as the war goes on, I don’t expect, unless there’s a great reverse change in policy, I don’t think the Russian state as such is going to be threatened by the way it is now if it just keeps going. So I don’t think Putin is deliberately going to use a tactical nuclear weapon unless he’s really on the edge of a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. And that’s not out of the question.

So is the U.S. going to push it to that point? Then the second problem is the longer this goes on, the more opportunities there are for miscalculation. So that missile that landed in Poland, at least the Americans quickly said it was not Russian. It turned out it wasn’t Russian. So the Americans aren’t looking for an excuse for a nuclear war here because they could have quickly blamed the Russians for that missile. But what happens if a Ukrainian missile of some kind, or more than one, some shit hits the fan and it’s heading towards Moscow, and they don’t actually know what it is? This is the problem. It’s one of the main points of the film.

With our intercontinental ballistic missiles, there’s very little time to decide what is on your radar screen. We’ve had miscalculation after miscalculation where we’ve come very close to nuclear war. So the tenser this gets, the longer it goes, and the more chance for miscalculation there is. So maybe some rationality, at least on the nuclear issue, enters some of these ruling classes’ heads. I mean, the Chinese are concerned about this. You can see it, like I say, in Global Times. Even if the Chinese have nothing to do with it, if some nuclear weapons are used, it will lead to the end of the world. If it becomes a full-out nuclear war, there’s no China left after that. So they certainly do get the risk of all this. So one hopes that there’ll be some rationality. I’m not seeing that there’s a movement now or yet. The repression in Russia is very strong.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, you can be arrested for 15 years or something.

Paul Jay

It’s kind of weird what I’m being told. Some people like Kagarlitsky speak out quite openly to the foreign press, not domestically, and they don’t do anything about it. Then other people are going to jail for five or 10 years for saying it’s a war, not a special military operation. But the repression is there, no doubt. Even if antiwar sentiment is rising, it’s not breaking out in a way that’s going to change things.

The other problem is if the world really goes into a deep recession, who knows whether that’s happening or not? Anyway, we’re on a knife’s edge, and the solution is simple. The Americans have to bloody well stop provoking and pushing this. Of course, the Russians need to negotiate and stop making completely unreasonable demands. The same thing goes for the Ukrainians. One hopes the Chinese, whatever you want to call them, they find it in their interest to really try to facilitate this thing to end.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Paul, it was really great getting your insights on these really tricky issues. We haven’t seen you in a while, so it’s great to hear what you had to say about all of these things and about the war. So thank you.

Paul Jay

Thank you.

Talia Baroncelli

Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. Please do go to our website, theAnalysis.news and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Please do get onto our mailing list as well, so you’ll be notified every time a new episode comes out. Also, go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, hit the subscribe button, and hit the bell. That way, you’re always informed once a new episode drops. Thank you.

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Detroiters Fight to Reclaim Their City From Real Estate Vultures – Linda Campbell

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Linda Campbell, Director of the Detroit People's Platform, has worked as a community organizer in Detroit for decades. She speaks about local initiatives which advocate for investment in affordable housing and oppose the public financing of big real estate projects which have historically contributed to community land dispossession. She also applauds the Michigan Democrats' recent repeal of right-to-work legislation and calls upon the political leadership to fight for higher wages, particularly for non-union workers not covered by prevailing wage protections.

U.S. Interference in the Middle East – 20 Years Since the U.S. Invasion of Iraq – Col. Larry Wilkerson

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Col. Larry Wilkerson speaks about how the media's portrayal of the U.S. invasion of Iraq barely encapsulates the damage wrought by the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing.” He also addresses recent developments in the Middle East, including Israel's increasingly belligerent policy on Iran, how the Saudi-Iran deal might end the Saudi blockade of Yemen, and the military significance of Israel being moved from U.S. European Command to U.S. Central Command.

Honest Government Ad | Visit New South Wales!

Paul Jay — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 11:43:39 -0400

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The NSW Government has made a tourism ad ahead of the coming election, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative. This video was originally published by The Juice Media on March 16, 2023.

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Chomsky und Ellsberg über die derzeitige Bedrohung (Ukraine & Taiwan)

Paul Jay — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 13:39:43 -0400

Noam Chomsky und Daniel Ellsberg diskutieren über die Absichten der USA im Ukraine-Krieg und die Vorbereitungen für einen Krieg mit China.

Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out: Three Critical Worker Guarantees for a Just Transition

Paul Jay — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 13:53:12 -0400

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Robert Pollin says PERI research findings published in Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out and Just Transition demonstrate Just Transition policies are easily affordable in all high-income countries & imperative for any serious prospect of success in climate stabilization plans. Lynn Fries interviews Pollin on GPEnewsdocs.

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LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. Today I am joined by PERI’s Robert Pollin.

As part of PERI’s global project to fight climate change, Pollin will be talking about just transition policies. PERI has long researched how robust Just Transition policies are imperative to advance a comprehensive global climate stabilization program that offers any serious prospect of success.

Today we will look into evidence that these just transition policies should also be understood as an entirely realistic prospect for all high-income countries. This based on new PERI research findings released this February in the paper titled Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out and Just Transition. This is a preliminary working paper that extends PERI’s published studies on Just Transition programs in the U.S. into other major high income economies notably Germany, the UK, the European Union and more briefly Japan and Canada.

Joining us from Massachusetts, Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of PERI, the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Welcome, Bob.

ROBERT POLLIN: Thank you for having me Lynn. Happy to be on.

FRIES: Bob we will be talking about PERI research findings on what is needed for fossil fuel industry dependent workers and communities to make a just transition from one kind of an economy to another. Let’s start on why this is imperative for a successful climate stabilization plan.

POLLIN: Yeah. So, we face this situation where and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change/IPCC, just put out another study Monday which has summarized what they’ve been saying at least since 2018. That we have to basically be at zero fossil fuel emissions by 2050. We have to be at a 50% reduction relative to 2005 by 2030 which is only six and a half years from now. Now that means we have to dramatically consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas to produce energy and by 2050 phase it out basically entirely.

So that is an imperative with respect to the climate crisis. Now, it obviously impacts a lot of different entities, organizations, governments, people, communities. So one of the big factors here is that there are people, not just rich shareholders of the fossil fuel companies or oil sheiks, there are ordinary people whose lives and communities are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry.

And so what do we do about that? What do we say about?

Well, as a basic, simple matter of ethics, we have to be able to offer something like a fair transition, a just transition for all the workers and communities. That’s an ethical imperative. But even if you have no ethics, even if you don’t care at all about the people that are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry and the communities, there’s no way politically we can advance a robust and adequate fossil fuel phase out, in other words, a adequate climate stabilization program, unless we do something to address the needs of this community and these people, because justifiably, they’re going put up political resistance.

Now we’ve seen in the United States just how far that resistance can go. Because I mean, there are several factors that are behind the Trump phenomenon. But a big one was him saying: you know, the environmentalists don’t care about you workers in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania. They want to destroy your communities. And whether that’s true or not, it had a lot of resonance.

And so it is absolutely as just a mere political reality. We have to show that if we’re going to phase out fossil fuels to save the planet, which we have to, we also have to mount a vigorous, robust just transition for the workers and communities whose jobs are going to get phased out.

FRIES: So in discussing what is needed for as just transition, you say in the paper that the first questions we need to ask are what should be the overall goal of just transition policies. And then the next questions should be what specific measures need to be implemented to accomplish that. Briefly comment on that.

POLLIN: So just transition policies have been around in various forms for a long time. This particular paper focuses on high income countries. I’ve done work in developing countries as well. But this one is focused on high income countries.

So we have had phase out programs, maybe the, the most advanced have been in Germany for decades because of the phase out of the coal industry in Germany. The United Kingdom has phased out its coal industry without doing a whole lot for the workers. In the United States we’ve had just transition or transition, let’s say, policies around the workers who are impacted by changes in trade policy opening of free trade.

And for the most part, those policies have been minimal. They have not provided any significant support. In fact, in the US what are called transition policies officially, unofficially by union members are called burial insurance. In other words here, go off and die. Here’s a few thousand dollars. And that is generally what has been provided to date including in Germany, though somewhat better.

So those policies have really focused on providing retraining for other jobs. They’ve provided some minimal level of job placement support to find a new job; some modest level of relocation support if people have to move to get another job. And that’s basically it.

Even the European Union with their Green Deal has at least in rhetoric made very strong statements as to the significance, the centrality of just transition policies. Uh, Franz Timmermans, the Vice Chair of the European Commission, he himself says, you know: just transitions are central. We need everybody’s support for this movement out of fossil fuels.

Yet the policies that they are implementing to date are, they are better than others, but they’re basically focused only on job search, retraining, and relocation. What I’ve been advocating now as you mentioned, thank you, for several years, is the development of just transition policies that are much more robust. It includes simple things, not just job retraining but a job guarantee. Not just any old job, but the jobs that will pay at least for a few years the difference between any salary loss that a worker will have faced. And then finally, critically, is guarantees for worker’s pensions.

Because if we’re phasing out this industry, obviously, these companies are facing financial challenges. And we cannot assume that the first thing that they’re going to do is guarantee their workers’ pensions. And so the policy has to guarantee the pensions.

I should just say as a personal anecdote, I’ve had several interesting stories are around this issue, but the most interesting, the most valuable…I had done a study in 2014, a big study on Green Transition for the United States. And in doing that study we were looking for endorsements from respective people. And one of them was somebody named Bill Spriggs, who’s the chief economist of the AFL CIO. He was at the time, and he still is. And he’s also a friend mine.

We asked many people for endorsements. They all wrote nice things except for Bill Spriggs. And he said: I can’t endorse this because your transition policy is just fluff. It’s just like nice words, platitudes and it doesn’t address the real needs of workers. And he was right. He was right. And at that time, I said: okay, you’re right, Bill. And from now on I’m going take this issue much more seriously. So that’s really how I got into the issue. Recognizing that the kinds of things that I was saying, the kinds of things that were out there in the policy world are not serious.

FRIES: We’re talking about fossil fuel industry phase out and just transition in high income economies. The working paper released this February covers PERI’s study of Germany, the UK, the European Union, Japan, and Canada. It also connects the dots between all the above high income economies and that of the US. Talk more about read-throughs in your findings across all high income countries.

POLLIN: Yeah, so basically in the US as well, I mean, the just transition policies that are in place right now are slim to nothing. In the case of Canada, they had a big commission, study. They interviewed workers; they interviewed people in the community. It was an official government commission.

And again, they say nice things but there is no commitment of anything to date. At least as far as I know and I was looking at it pretty carefully. That’s also true in Japan. Nice phrases not much. UK, Germany, better. Germany as I said has had some significant commitment for a long time with respect to the phase out of the coal industry in the Ruhr Valley. It’s often held up as a really valuable example and it is relative to the alternatives. But even there in Germany, the level of financial commitment and the types of commitments: there is no job guarantee; there is no pension guarantee; there’s no wage guarantee. And those are the three critical things I think that are central.

So the work that I’ve been doing on this question subsequent to my friend Bill Spriggs fairly criticizing me, fairly criticizing me, was to figure out, well, what actually would constitute robust just transition policy that you could present to workers in their communities and keep a straight face in saying that this actually is a just transition.

So, we’ve done it for several states. West Virginia is one of them. And so for the case of West Virginia, we go through this exercise. How many workers in the state are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry? And the number in West Virginia is about 40,000. And not just coal miners but people in the coal industry; everyone in the fossil fuel, in the oil and gas industry; plus everyone in ancillary sectors anything to do that are feeding into coal and oil and gas production.

So that’s 40,000 people. So then we say, well, okay, 40,000 people. Then what does a realistic phase out look like for those 40,000 people if we assume by 2050 all their jobs are going to be gone? But it’s critical that not all of their jobs are going be gone tomorrow. They’re going to be gone over a generation basically by 2050.

So, when we calculate the rate of annual job loss and incorporate the demographics of the age levels of the workers so we are able to take account of voluntary retirements. What we’re really looking at is about 1400 workers per year who are going to lose their jobs and want another. So the focus of the study then is okay, we’re going to give these people: guarantee them a new job; guarantee them a wage equivalent to what they’re making now; and guarantee their pensions in addition to the other things. I’m not against helping people with job search retraining or relocation. It’s just those should be seen as supplemental to: Yes, you will have a job; yes, you will not face a significant income loss; and yes, you will not lose your pension. That’s the critical thing.

So, we do all that and we take account of these workers and how much they’re making now. We also do this as part of a green transition in West Virginia. And we say, well yes West Virginia is going to be getting investments to build a clean energy economy that’s going to create jobs. And we estimate that that will create 25,000 jobs in the state. Meanwhile, we’re losing about 1400 jobs in the state.

So one simple way to think about a transition is, well, as many as possible, move people from the fossil industry into the emerging nascent green energy industry.

And so then we did all that and we said, okay, you know what? It’s going to cost about $40,000 per year per worker to do everything. And that ends up being when we added up for the 1400 workers per year, it ends up being equal to about 0.2% of the GDP of West Virginia. And this is the most fossil fuel dependent region in the country. So it’s 0.2%. When I’ve done the same exercise for the whole United States, the cost as a share of the overall economy as a share of GDP is one 10th that of West Virginia, 0.002%; yeah, two 100ths of 1%.

So this is eminently affordable even in West Virginia. West Virginia is the test case because the costs proportionally will be higher. Anyway, so those are the main results. And so the point that we conclude with is this a robust just transition is viable and it is the ethical right thing to do.

FRIES: I should note for viewers that the US findings you refer to are based on studies of Just Transition programs PERI has published for the US states of California, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maine, Colorado, Washington State and New York State. So the West Virginia study is one of a series that PERI has published on eight states and the US economy overall. In the paper released this February, the West Virginia just transition program features prominently as a case study drawn from Peril’s research findings. Why so much focus on West Virginia?

POLLIN: It’s like if you can tell a story that’s reasonable for West Virginia, you can tell a story basically for any place.As I said thinking about say Trump. Trump got 70% of the votes in West Virginia in 2016 and again in 2020, 67%. And a lot of his appeal is, you know, he’s against all these environmentalists that want to take away our jobs. So how can we tell a story that is convincing, that is really credible for the workers and the communities in West Virginia?

That really was our aim. And I think, who knows in the end, but we did have success in the sense that we did present this in accordance with the the mine workers Union. And the overall leadership of the union movement, AFL CIO, in the state.

We were commissioned by a wonderful organization called Reimagine Appalachia. So it is really trying to think about not just West Virginia, but the four states Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia all transitioning out of their dependence on fossil fuels and into a new clean energy economy. They certainly can do it. And if we can do it there, again, we can do it anywhere.

FRIES: Bob as we sum up, round off on some key implications and conclusions of your findings on Just Transition programs in high income economies.

POLLIN: So again West Virginia has a very high concentration of fossil fuel workers. Ten times the level relative to the overall country, the US economy. And so again, the implication is actually analytically financially it is easy to do a robust, fair transition that is not, quote, burial insurance. That it is treating people with respect, understanding that their livelihoods are dependent.

This is not the same as if you are a shareholder of a fossil fuel company. If you’re a shareholder of a fossil fuel company and you know the company is going to be phased out, well sell your shares, and buy something else. The fossil fuel companies last year made $200 billion, the six biggest. So it’s a fine time to sell and recognize that this is going to be a phase out. And it’s not going to affect your home. It is not going affect your pension. It’s not going to affect anything about your life if you’re a shareholder of one of these companies.

On the other hand, if you are a worker and this is your full-time job or you’re a member of the community, let’s say you’re a school teacher in a community whose tax revenue is dependent on fossil fuels, you know, this is massive. Your livelihood, your community is facing a threatening of ending all the things that you’re used to. And that this has to be seen as a front and center critical feature of any overall climate program.

Yes, we obviously have to think about how we get off of fossil fuels. We have to think about how we stop destroying the Amazon Rain Forest. Those are good starters but an equally important starter is to think about the workers and communities who are going to face major negative impacts unless there is a just transition program.

FRIES: This then brings us back to the point at the open of our conversation on why just transition programs are so imperative not only on ethical grounds but for achieving the level of political support needed to move onto a viable global climate stabilization path. In other words, for achieving the political support to phase out the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy and to replace the global fossil fuel energy infrastructure with a zero emission, renewables dominant infrastructure.

POLLIN: It is a major, major challenge. I mean, we’ve seen what happened even with the Biden administration, which overall in my opinion, has been better on these issues than I would’ve thought they were going to be. But they did a major backsliding just this past week or last week when

They agreed to allow the development of oil exploration in Alaska on public land. Which they, you know, Biden had said: no way I’m never going to do this. Well, somehow now he’s doing it.

So, obviously he was intensively lobbied. We have to be able to fight back. And one of the tools for fighting back is to say to the workers and their communities this is a program, a just transition program for you. And that you do not face this loss of income, employment, pensions that would be devastating for people’s livelihoods.

FRIES: Among other corporate tactics to block the phasing out of the fossil fuel industry, we see the financing card get played. The argument being in the case of a just transition that: oh we can’t afford it. So for high income countries, this study tables evidence that effectively shows that argument does not hold water. Is that a key takeaway?

POLLIN: That is the key takeaway. I mean, again, I think a lot of people say: yes definitely just transition we’re all for it. As I said Frans Timmermans made that quite explicit in the documents of the European Green Deal. It’s all in there now. That is a new development but it’s in there.

But the point is what does it really mean? And if we’re really going do it in a way that protects people’s livelihoods and communities is the cost just outrageous, unaffordable? And the answer is clearly no.

Again, if you can do it in West Virginia, you can do it in Canada, you can do it in the UK. And if we’re talking about in the US overall, two 100ths of 1% of GDP, you don’t even notice it. In West Virginia it’s 10 times more as a share of GDP. That means it’s two tenths of 1%. These are funds that are available. I mean, just in the last year the subsidies for fossil fuel companies when the price of oil went up due to the COVID shortages and the war in Ukraine fossil fuel subsidies doubled from about $500 billion to $1 trillion. So $500 billion for subsidizing fossil fuel companies when we’re supposed to be phasing them out. That was found immediately. There was no question.

FRIES: You’ve been informing policy makers at the state level, at the federal level and holding town hall meetings across the United States. Do you find you are getting much traction?

POLLIN: Well, actually, I’ve been in discussions even with people in the White House. So yeah, I think so. Yeah it’s not easy because obviously this isn’t simply a matter of: oh, that sounds good. That’s logical. There are huge interests involved. And I’m sure the fossil fuel industry itself recognizes that if there is a robust set of just transition policies, well then that undermines their own lobbying in behalf of themselves. Because they’re saying: Hey, we’re the ones that are keeping this economy alive.

You know, there was a piece in the Financial Times a couple weeks ago with respect to this doubling the 200 billion in profits and the CEO of Chevron, whose name I can’t remember now, he just says: fossil fuels run the world and we’re going to keep running the world. We’re running the world now. We’re going to run the world in 10 years. We’re going to run the world in 20 years. He just out and out says it. And if he’s right, then you know what, then we’re facing a climate disaster. There’s no question about it.

FRIES: And at the town hall level do you see resistance building?

POLLIN: One of the tests is I’ve, you know, I’ve presented this to working people, union meetings and so forth. And there has been serious criticism and I understand it. The most honest telling criticism I’ve gotten is: gee, professor, these are great numbers, look really good, and you’re going to keep writing your papers and you’ve got a job and you’ve got a pension and you’ve written these numbers and that’s fine. But, you know, nobody’s going to pay attention and we’re not going to get this policy and we’re going to lose our jobs. And what am I supposed to say to that? The best thing we can say is, you know, people are fighting on your side, including you on this show by having me on, thank you.

What we have seen, let’s say the most dramatic, I would say, traction has been in California where our study, our equivalent study was commissioned by the union movement in California, by the actual union movement. And about 20 unions explicitly endorsed the program that we had laid out. Including the oil refinery workers, the oil refinery workers union endorsed our study.

And the leader wrote a brilliant article in the Los Angeles Times saying: we know just transition policies are usually a bunch of just rhetoric that mean nothing and people forget. We know that. But if we’re going to be serious, this program laid out by the PER researchers is real and we endorse it. And if this is the kind of thing that our policy makers are willing to put in place, then we’re for a just transition. And we know we have to get our fossil fuels.

FRIES: This California study and of course all PERI’s studies on Just Transition programs are available online at peri.umass.edu including the new paper on high income economies featured in today’s conversation. For now, we are going to have to leave it there. Robert Pollin, thank you.

And thank you for joining us in this segment on Fossil Fuel Phase Out and Just Transition with Robert Pollin.

Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also the founder and President of PEAR (Pollin Energy and Retrofits), an Amherst, MA-based green energy company operating throughout the United States.

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Censorship in Germany, Israeli Hacking & Saudi-Iran Peace Deal – Dr. Shir Hever

Paul Jay — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 11:23:09 -0400

In this episode of The Source, Zain Raza speaks with independent journalist, author, and economist Dr. Shir Hever about how and why his lecture on child labor in Palestine was abruptly censored by the GEW (Education and Science Workers' Union) in Germany. They also talk about a recent Forbidden Stories article detailing how Israeli companies played a key role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and continue to provide hacking services that influence countries' elections. They examine the China-brokered peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the international significance it has for Israel. To conclude the interview, they take a look at recent developments between Israel and Palestine, focusing on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial reform in Israel.

Bill Black on SVB: A Bipartisan Clown Car Crash

Paul Jay — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 15:10:48 -0400

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The legendary regulator and white-collar criminologist William K. Black explains why, contrary to corporate media coverage, the bank failures set off by the Silicon Valley Bank crash were absolutely not sudden, unexpected, or unforeseeable, and why none of the regulations Democrats or Republicans are talking about would have stopped them.

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Colin Bruce Anthes

Welcome to The Analysis. I’m Colin Bruce Anthes. In a minute, I’ll be speaking with Dr. Bill Black on bank failures and what is to be done. Please remember to like, subscribe, ring the bell, and consider hitting the donate button to support our work. Stay tuned. Only 15 years after the last global financial crisis, three American banks failed in one week, and now Credit Suisse, after 166 years of independence, has been purchased by a rival bank with state intervention from the Swiss National Government due to a crisis in confidence. To discuss how and why this has taken place and what should be done next, we’re privileged to be joined by one of the major voices on the subject. Dr. William K. Black is a lawyer, an academic, an expert in white collar crime. He has personally served as one of the major bank regulators in the United States. He helped develop the concept of control fraud. He testified to Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, during which time he accused Timothy Geitner of engaging in a massive cover up of fraud. And he’s the author of the seminal book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.

Bill Black, welcome back to the analysis.

Bill Black

Thank you. It’s great to be back.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Before we jump on into all of the things that are going wrong in corporate finance right now, I wanted to ask you a big systemic question that I don’t see being asked very often, which is about why corporate finance has the scale over our lives that it does. There are other ways of doing banking and finance. I live in Canada, where the province of Alberta. It’s a very large scale public bank. That’s in one of our most conservative provinces. I’ve done a lot of my banking at a credit union, which is a cooperative financial institution. I get democratic voting rights on the Board of Directors. I ask this not in a let’s burn all the banks down sense, but genuinely, if everything was regulated perfectly, if everything was running tickety boo, what benefits should I, as a working class person, expect to be able to get from these corporate banks under those ideal circumstances that I could not get at a public institution or a cooperative institution?

Bill Black

Well, if I put on my took and lean back in my Chesterfield while paying my hydro bill and channel my semi Canadian from growing up in Detroit, Michigan, they’re basically three big things as to why finance is so critically important. First, finance blows up the world, and that’s really important. Second, finance affects everything. You want to know why there’s not enough spending on the environment? Well, that’s largely thanks to finance on how it allocates. Third, particularly in the US context, there’s enormous predation, typically on the basis of race and ethnicity, sometimes on the basis of age, and sometimes the basis of gender, and sometimes, of course, those things interact and such. So the combination of those three things means that lots of people lose money or are in crushing levels of debt, particularly, again, in a place like the United States, from their university debt and from payday lending. And so people are often caught in debt traps that crush their life choices. Those are the big three reasons why finance is such a big deal. By the way, I’m sorry, the fourth one is supposed to be that it’s supposed to be the motor that drives innovation and growth. Not so much, but that’s the theory.

Colin Bruce Anthes

When we look at this, let’s go specifically into Silicon Valley Bank, which is the spark that has ignited a pretty big fire now. And it was really a run that happened in the span of one day. And this is a bank that was highly engaged in tech startups. The Silicon Valley Bank failure was immediately portrayed as something that came out of the blue that happened very suddenly. Since then, we have had the Democratic Party accuse the Republicans of having caused it through the rollbacks of some regulations that happened under the Trump administration, which did happen. From your perspective, part A of this question is from your perspective as someone who has been a bank regulator, was this out of the blue? Was this sudden?

Bill Black

It wasn’t remotely out of the blue. And the fact that it’s being treated as if it were out of the blue is enormous tell in the poker sense of that word as to the utter collapse of regulation, not, of course, just under the Trump administration, but under the last five administration’s.

Colin Bruce Anthes

So that takes us back to, would you say, when Glass Steagall was repealed?

Bill Black

Yes. So Glass Steele’s removal was incredibly stupid. It was one of those things where there’s a conservative maxim that makes a lot of sense, and it’s called, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, if things are working, and Glass Steagall worked brilliantly. And the only thing that it wasn’t working for was bankers. It was working great for all those other things that I talked about that finance is supposed to do, and in preventing those nasty things that finance actually does. So they had to get rid of it, and both the Republican and Democrats worked together like chums to achieve that. And it was done in a particularly cynical fashion where they did a deliberately unlawful merger. But under Glass Steele, you would have a year to unwind it. But it would have meant unwinding what was at that time the biggest financial merger, not just in the United States, but in the world in history. And so, of course, the bankers knew that would never happen. They held the government hostage, and the government let itself be held hostage. So that actually occurred during the Clinton administration, but that wasn’t done over their opposition. They were all for it.

But repealing Glass Steadle was terrible. It played a role, all completely negative in the great financial crisis. It’s got a peripheral role in the current crisis. It would have been bigger in Switzerland, except of course Switzerland never had a glass steel, which is one of the reasons its banking has been so corrupt, not for 10 years, but for over a century. Let me go to the stuff about the Trump legislation. Was the Trump legislation terrible? Yes. Was it sold on the basis of lies? Yes. Were Democrats heavily involved in making that happen? Yes. Not all Democrats, but a significant portion. And the lie was, we’re doing this for community banks. This is the little bank in the rural village that doesn’t much exist anymore in the United States. And it is true that government regulation tends to be more costly per unit in those smaller banks. But you got to admire the chute spot. They solve this as we need to therefore remove restrictions on banks up to $250 billion in assets. Now, a $250 billion bank is ballpark one of the 10 biggest banks in the United States and one of the 20 biggest banks in the world.

It is not only not small, it is in that proverbial category of being systemically dangerous, that when it fails, it can bring down others. And of course, Silicon Valley Bank was a leadership that was specifically lobbying for this insane loophole to apply to it, even though it was ballparked $200 billion in assets and, of course, had no problems complying with the law. Now, the Democrats have their own falsehood about this, and that is, Oh, if Dodd Frank had not been amended, this wouldn’t have happened at Silicon Valley Bank. And we know that that’s 100 % wrong. And we know that’s 100 % wrong because the same problems happened at places where it wasn’t rolled back. They just haven’t come home to roost at this point because they dare not act on banks that side.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Can you.

Bill Black

Go into that for me? The fundamental thing that the amendment did under the Trump administration that the Democrats are focused on is it got rid of the mandatory stress test. But it is in critical to know why that’s nonsensical as a cause of this crisis. And the answer is stress tests are useless. They’re designed to be useless. They do not stress the institution. They’re an oxymoron created by regular morons. What they don’t do specifically is look at runs. If you remove runs, then banks seem a whole lot safer and they die in years, not in hours, which was your point about Silicon Valley Bank, which is why they don’t put that into the stress test, because then you would say hundreds of banks are insolvent and are at enormous risk. If there’s a run, they will fail and a run is in some sense rational in that they’re insolvent on a market value basis, which Silicon Valley Bank was into that category. So even if the Trump amendment had never occurred and they had done the stress test, the stress test would have said, no problem here. And we know that because this is what the following list of institutions have in common.

Bear Stearns, Leeman Brothers, Fannie, Freddy, the big three Icelandic banks. All of them passed stress tests with flying colors, like sometimes days before they failed because stress tests don’t actually look at the things that kill you. As a metaphor, liquidity, which is what a run is, is a bit like pneumonia. So you’re put into the hospital by some chronic disease that is actually going to kill you eventually. But pneumonia is an opportunistic infection, right? And it’s often fairly common in hospitals, unfortunately. And it puts enormous stress on your breathing, which puts enormous stress on your cardio system. And it tends to be the thing that kills people the quickest. So runs on the bank, kill you quick. But what was the underlying problem? Why did they have a run on the bank? And the answer is mostly it appears at this point in the US context, interest rate risk. And in the Swiss context, interest rate risk plus probably some more exotic derivatives. But Switzerland is super opaque, even more opaque than US. Well, much more opaque than the United States. So it may be months or years before we get the details on the derivatives.

All we’re being told is that financial derivative positions were a significant part of the problem and causing very large losses.

Colin Bruce Anthes

I want to just hammer home this point that it’s highly likely what we’re going to see next is the Democrats start talking about putting some things back in place that looked like they were before the Trump administration. From your point of view, that would be a cosmetic solution. It would not actually be preventing these kinds of things from happening further down the road.

Bill Black

Correct. They’ve got to T he response to the Great Financial Crisis in the United States, which becomes the Dodd Frank Bill, has many good ideas but no coherence. So it’s here’s an idea, here’s an idea, here’s an idea, here’s an idea, and they all threw them into the bill. So it’s an utter monstrosity of a bill. And then the secret I can tell you as a regulator, regulators don’t like enormously detailed regulation. It’s a pain in the ass from our perspective. You have to learn and it’s incredibly boring to read it. It’s incredibly boring to read. It’s incredibly boring to draft it and it’s easy to get it wrong, and you’re getting all kinds of abuse left, right, and center. Why do we have these super detailed regulations? Well, part because this bill was a monster with literally hundreds of ideas thrown into it, but mostly because the big banks. Because the big banks always come in and say, Oh, in our precise circumstance, this possible thing could happen. And if it did, it would be unfair. So this is the ignoring the adage, of course, never let the search for the perfect become the enemy of the good.

And that’s what exactly happens in these circumstances. So at the staff level, I led the deregulation of the savings and loan industry. That was desperately needed. I think it saved hundreds of billions of dollars, actually probably trillions. But I got rid of more regulations than I created. Of course, there are stupid regulations. And the other secret thing I’ll tell you about competent regulators is we hate bureaucracy. You have to deal with bureaucracy once every three weeks, typically, as a regular Canadian or American. We have to deal with it every day. T here are bureaucrats and they’re anal and it just makes your life miserable. So when you see competent regulators, we are completely non bureaucratic in our approach. So what do we need for this particular crisis? Remembering crises change. Generals that only get ready to fight the last war are disasters. This one, we can put a really fine point on it because one of the disastrous things… Disaster is going to be too strong, but one of the things that showed that they hadn’t learned the fundamentals is in doing Dodd and Frank, they overwhelmingly created the supposed answer to future problems in economists, conventional economists.

Now, conventional economists create the problem and they don’t solve the problems in finance. So this is significantly insane. Let me give the specific example that ties in so well to the Silicon Valley Bank. I may call it SVB collapse. As far as we know now, to interest rate risk leading to liquidity risk, a run, and the place fails essentially within a day. But it’s been, because of interest rate risk, insolvent for the better part of the year. F inally, people go, Oh, it’s insolvent.

Colin Bruce Anthes

It was a.

Bill Black

Sitting duck. My deposits are way, way in excess of the insurance limit because that’s what was special at Silicon Valley Bank. Now it’s that old joke about the bear, which Canadians and Americans both tell. The bear appears and there are two hikers and one of them starts getting out of his hiking boots and putting on his running shoes. The other one turns to him and says, What the hell are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear. Of course, the answer is I only have to outrun you. That’s basically it. If you were less bad than the other folks, you may survive even though you’ve been an idiot and gone into bear country and done everything wrong. You’ve got honey smear all over your arms and such. Everybody knew each other. When I teach public finance, the first risk I start with is interest rate risk. It’s in some ways the most basic and the one that comes from economics the most clearly. And everybody that does this is an economist. So this should be their wheelhouse. They should be great at this stuff. And FSOC, the Financial Stability Oversight Committee, which is this creation and which is almost exclusively economists, did a report, circa 2015, on interest rate risk.

Great. And you know what it says? And this is almost a direct quotation. The banks should continue to address interest rate risk.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Well, that’s informative.

Bill Black

And the regulators should continue to address interest rate risk. And you’re going, you got a PhD in economics to do this crap? I mean, this is utterly useless, but it gets better. They put together this presentation. It ain’t all that long, but it has 75 PowerPoint slides with the guts of the number because they’re economists, chart after chart after chart. And it doesn’t have the two charts you would absolutely want on interest rate risk. And the two charts would be how big is the un recognized for accounting purpose loss in market value due to interest rate changes? And two, if interest rates continue to rise by, say, 200, 400,000 basis points, 100 basis points makes 1 % of interest. How big will that loss grow to? Those are the two charts you’d want. Those two charts ain’t in it and there’s nothing like it. There’s nothing from which you could infer, even if you had a PhD, what the numbers were. And have you seen either of those two charts? No. In the news coverage? No. No?

Colin Bruce Anthes

How was that possible?

Bill Black

Okay, so again, if you take interest rate risk seriously, then you know it can spark a run. And you know if it sparks a run, your stress tests are useless. And you based everything on your stress test. Tim Geitner, who Bally Hoot stress test, even made his book, Stress Tests type of stuff. So this was largely created as a propaganda exercise to make people feel, Oh, it’s not business as usual. The regulators turned over a new leaf, they got tough, and they put them through rigorous. Fannie and Freddy, since they were very good at publicity, they called their stress test nuclear winter scenarios. It was the equivalent of the Holocaust of all Holocaust on multi dimensions, a continuing for 20 years, and they’d just be fine. Whereas in the real world, they were dead and they were dead at the time they were saying this nonsense. But the regulators wanted, after the Great Financial Crisis, to say, Oh, we’ve looked, and it’s actually not a big problem. Look, virtually all of them passed their stress test, and it was typically maybe two didn’t. And by the next iteration, they all did, or they did with an asterisk type of thing.

And it worked. Go back and look at the press coverage of the stress test. It got enormous play. All was well and such. Okay, but it isn’t. So they don’t take interest rate risk seriously. Any time in the press coverage you see these things, you know that either they don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re lying deliberately. It’s only a paper loss is one phrase. Or, oh, and this is the Democrats are doing this one. Oh, these are good assets. I know that.

Colin Bruce Anthes

One drives you crazy.

Bill Black

They’re good assets. You just have to hold them to maturity. And you’re going, Yes, they are assets that are not going to default because of credit risk. But if I got a bond that’s only earning, which is these bonds are earning roughly according to the press reports, 1.8 %, and inflation and market interest rates are more like 5 %, then if your bond only makes less than half of market value return, your bond isn’t worth $10,000.

Your bond might be worth anywhere between three and six. Remember, the asymmetry of this, they’re betting the bank’s survival. And if they win, they get 1.8 %. But if they lose, they lose catastrophically, except that now we have to interrogate the pronouns. That’s right.

Colin Bruce Anthes

So it.

Bill Black

Goes back to the way that loses is the bank, not the bankers. And it’s us that ends up bailing them out. And then we have the number of the Democrats saying this isn’t a bailout. Of course, it’s a bailout.

Colin Bruce Anthes

That was the next question I was going to ask you because everybody is bending over backwards to say that none of this activity is a bailout.

Bill Black

The Swiss just said that it wasn’t a bailout because the Swiss passed a law after the Great Financial Crisis that said Switzerland renoundses and will never again do a bailout unless, of course, we actually have a large institution fail at which point we will rush on a Sunday night to execute a bailout. So yes, of course it’s a bailout.

And this next one is a particularly pernicious lie. Oh, no taxpayer dollars. Well, the FISLIC, the FDIC Fund. No, when you use FDIC Fund dollars, that’s a bailout in these circumstances. So I don’t understand it. You could make a perfect criticism of the banks. You could say clearly regulation is a catastrophe. Financial regulation is clearly a catastrophe in the United States. Because, again, some things in finance are really complex. This aspect that we’ve been going through is an absolute no brainer. It is super, super simple. Undergraduates in my class understand this just fine type of thing when they’ve never taken much of any economic class in their entire experience. And again, because of the asymmetry, there’s no advantage to the federal government of allowing this interest rate gamble.

So why are they doing it? I haven’t seen a reporter ask that question. And they’re not just doing it at SVB. The things in the press suggest that the unrealized losses, remember that chart that should exist and should be famously there at the top of every news report is in the 400 to 600 billion dollar range. So we’re talking about very, very large numbers. Also, the Fed is the Fed. You know tautology? The Fed is a regulator and the Fed is the one that boosts interest rates and knows that it’s going to boost interest rates. So the Fed, when it’s regulating, knows with certainty, we’re going to pound. Because they act like there’s only one tool to deal with inflation, and that’s causing a recession. And if that 60 pound mall doesn’t work, then they get a 120 pound mall and swing it. So the Fed has examiners too. It’s a regulator of two different types of banks, bank holding companies and state chartered nonmember banks is their call. So those people know with absolute certainty what’s going to happen. I know. They don’t know exactly, but they don’t need to. They know interest rates are going to go like this, up, and they know that the value of fixed rate bonds and mortgage backed securities is going to go like this when that happens.

So nobody at the Fed can claim to be surprised. So again, not only have we not seen the two charts, right? One, how big is the hole? Two, how big will it become if interest rates continue to increase? And then there would be a third chart for bonus points, and that is the following. Here’s the scam that goes on. Generally accepted accounting principles don’t require you to recognize currently, that means put on your actual books, the loss from interest rate changes.

Colin Bruce Anthes

So they don’t even tell you the true story.

Bill Black

Unless you are holding the assets for sale. And in the older days, which is to say last year, they were holding hundreds of billions for sale. And if they continued in that categorisation, they’d have to recognize hundreds of billions of losses. So they reccharacterized them. Oh, no, we’re not holding the use for sale. We’re holding them for investment. So that should be the third thing. Who’s deliberately hiding their losses through this process? That should be the third level of chart. How big in total is that mischaracterization of the accounting? And which institutions are the big players in that? All of that should be publicly available. But again, in addition to this FISOC report, remember, this is The Economist, The Economist specifically to look for the forthcoming risk, to make sure we’re not fighting the last war. Look ahead, economists, and saying interest rate risk, but then not actually saying anything about what our exposure was. And with this unbelievable, you should continue to monitor interest rate risk. Yes, you should continue playing the piano in the whorehouse. What? No, you should shut it down. There’s no upside to allowing banks to deliberately take substantial interest rate risk.

None. There’s a massive downside to them doing it, which is we get stuck with those huge losses. So the next test of regulation, right? Have you seen the head of the Office of the Control of the currency, the head of the FDIC, the head of the Federal Reserve issuing guidance saying, Stop, don’t do this? I haven’t. Oh, and that’s the next part. I use the word guidance. They used a similar word at FISOC. It’s an advisory. That means it’s deliberately unenforceable. I was an enforcement head, among other things, as a regular legater. I can’t enforce it if you’ve chosen to just make it an advisory. An advisory is telling your 16 year old daughter, That dress seems a little provocative. You can say it. It is utterly useless. Every parent knows it’s utterly useless. Every regulator knows the guidance. So if this is absolutely useless, it’s designed to cover your ass. Have you heard any proposed rule?

Colin Bruce Anthes

No. The fact that this… It sounds very obvious when you say it, but the fact that this is… There’s so much that’s missed. There’s this huge gap that’s missing here in basically the accountability of the institutions that control our economic life. We saw Bernie Frank, who was one of the people who at the heart of Dodd Frank, then became a lobbyist for deregulation afterwards.

Bill Black

Not just deregulation, for crypto.

Colin Bruce Anthes

For crypto.

Bill Black

And then he claimed that his bank was closed, not because it was a crappy bank, which it was. I mean, SVB was a clown car. It’s not even close. If you can’t get SVB right as a regulator, you really need to leave the job to somebody who can actually do things. But we do not pick regulatory leaders, and we have not picked regulatory leaders for.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Decades.

Bill Black

On the basis of they’re going to fix problems and prevent problems. Because if you do, you piss off the bankers. Bill Clinton gave an address to banking regulators, and this is how we started it out. I never heard as many complaints as I did about you when I was on the campaign trail. And he didn’t then say, Thank you. That’s exactly what we need. For him, it was self evident that you had to get out. I got out when, and I witnessed this personally, when they came and they trained us on the new reinventing government of the Clinton Gore.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Administration.

Bill Black

And their big di ctot was, You must treat the banks and the bankers as your client, your customer, in fact, was the exact word. And in my own quiet way, I got up and said, Surely you meant the people of the United States of America. And they said, No, we thought about that, but rejected it. Well, if you wanted to give an instruction that over the process of the next 30 years would destroy regulation, that would be exactly the mindset that would destroy effective regulation. We are not there. They are not our customer. We are not there to make bankers happy.

Now, we do make good bankers happy when we get rid of crappy competitors who are going to blow up the system. But have you heard the bankers putting out a list of the worst institutions or saying interest rate risk is a disaster and it is critical for the banking regulatory agencies to adopt regulation? No, what they’re doing is the opposite. That we have columnists and not industry columnists, regular columnists for Reuters who have their beat. Finance is part of their beat saying, Oh, the problem is we have deposit insurance. And you go, Wait a minute, we had the run because they weren’t insured.

How much of it? Benny and Freddy were not insured. Bear Stearns was not insured. Leem and Brothers was not insured. The money market mutual funds with a $400 billion run were not insured.

Colin Bruce Anthes

There’s.

Bill Black

Junk. We get nonsense, utter nonsense in the alleged specialty press for finance. Reuter’s thinks of itself as being particularly skilled in finance. The guy writing it, he has an undergraduate degree in English, which is a perfectly great degree. But it means that it didn’t come from him. Somebody in the industry told him this thing and it sounded cool. His title is something like, Deposit insurance is not the cure, it’s the problem, or something along those lines. And it is exactly the opposite of what we’ve observed in life. What did we have to do to stop the largest run in world history? How many people know what the largest run was in world history? It was $400 billion on the money market mutual funds, which are not insured after Leem and Brothers failed. And the only way to break that run is that we temporarily extended for over a year federal deposit insurance to break that run.

Colin Bruce Anthes

And yet these are the lines that are getting released through the media at this time. So it’s just bogus going around.

Bill Black

Right. And as I said, neither party has it right. And these are people that ordinarily, I mean, ex profs that are very good but are saying things that are nonsensical because they don’t understand finance.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Well, how much of this is caused by incompetence and how much of it is incompetence that gets promoted through the revolving door?

Bill Black

They don’t need the revolving door anymore. For now, over a full generation, they don’t appoint people to run regulatory agencies if they believe in regulating. Tom Frank, I don’t know if that’s a familiar person, what’s the matter with Kansas, asked me early on after the Great Financial Crisis, because I had appeared in this Obama campaign thing about the savings and loan debacle because John McCain was one of the Keating Five, and I met with him and he tried to intervene on behalf of Keating and such. Tom Frank asked me early after the Great Financial Crisis, when are you going to get a senior position? And about five minutes later, after I could stop laughing, I had to explain that at that time, about 350 million Americans would have to die before they would ever… I would be the literal last person they would ever allow to have authority again because we didn’t just put them in receivership properly, we put them in prison. They’re not about to recreate that danger. You saw both Republican and Democratic administration s now they don’t. Credit Suisse. In the Great Financial Crisis, we did a justice department deal with them, a sweetheart deal with them, in which one of the findings of the justice department was that Credit Suisse had been defrauding the United States of America with the same basic fraud scheme for over a century.

I didn’t say a decade, I said a century. So you’re talking about tens of millions of frauds, and they gave him a sweetheart deal. And then they did four more scams just since the Great Financial Crisis and then blew up the second biggest bank in Switzerland. So now the largest is going to acquire it. So now we’re going to have the do big, do fail problem, absolutely controlling. That bank, UBS, is going to have more assets than the GDP.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Of Switzerland. Right. Ubs, their statement actually said that they did not want to make this deal. Do you want to speak.

Bill Black

To that? Yeah. P art of that’s true. Now, obviously, they love being a monopolist and they love being too big to fail. And especially, as I said, because Switzerland, after the Great Financial Crisis, put in statute, we cannot, we hereby promise and remove any ability to bail out. So they’re saying there’s no bail out. There’s no bail out. There’s no bailout. There’s a $160 billion bailout through various credit lines and other such things. But on top of that, so little in the weeds, bankruptcy priority. You pay off secured creditors first and unsecured creditors. Then there’s this category that’s actually what junk bonds are, which are called subordinated debt, because you subordinate your priority in bankruptcy to regular creditors. Then below that, the last folks are the shareholders. Each group has to be paid in full for the group below it to get anything, each higher group priority. Except that subordinated debt has a higher priority than equity, and they directed that the equity would receive three billion and the subordinated debt would receive zero.

Colin Bruce Anthes

I saw just before I logged on to this interview that there’s an expected lawsuit coming from those people.

Bill Black

Oh, yeah, I bet you. But beyond that, conservative economists love subordinated debt. To them, the FDIC is the great Satan. Federal deposit insurance is the great Satan, and subordinated debt is the most wonderful thing. These people will be the ideal folks to exert private market discipline, which is to be stage a run, except you can’t run on subordinated debt. So it’s a really odd thing to deliberately screw the sub debt holders when they should be paid in full and they’re not only not going to be paid in full, they’ll get zero cents on the dollar. So again, as soon as governments get into a too big to fail institution, failing, all the rules depart. The bank holds hostage the entire national economy and sometimes global economy. To which my point is, then why do we allow them to be that big?

Colin Bruce Anthes

Yeah. So that’s the next question I have. But if they’re already this big, what steps would need to be taken to get us into something that was sustainable? And is there anybody out there who is talking about taking those kinds of steps?

Bill Black

No, other than fringey progressive types. As to the second question, as to the first, the way you would do it is say, we’re not going to tell you what to sell, but you have five years, roughly, to get down below a level of systemically dangerous. And in the modern era, at the time of 2008, that was probably around 50 billion in assets. These days, maybe it’s 70 billion. But we have three trillion dollar institutions. And as your point is, we’re going the wrong direction. Concentration is increasing. And back to your very first question. If you don’t ask about finance, but if you ask about the 20 largest banks in the world, they do ballpark 99 % of all financial derivatives. So in many areas, it’s hyper concentrated beyond the concentration numbers. And as big as finance is, financial derivatives… Now there’s some technical stuff about how you number it, but they are much bigger than what they call the real economy. So this is completely out of control. There is no democratic control. There is no meaningful democratic process when it comes to finance. So if you want to take back… This could be you would think transcend right, left lines.

If you want to take back democratic control, you would be really well advised to start with finance because A, finance blows up the world periodically. B, when it’s not blowing it up, it is systematically misallocating assets. It’s creating hyperinflated bubbles that are absolutely nonsensical. It’s creating palaces. It’s doing things that the opposite of economic theory. The economic theory is providing finance is what drives economic growth. But since we’ve made finance all powerful, roughly 35 years ago, growth sucks. And the places where they really made finance, absolutely in control, Japan. Well, it ain’t a single lost decade at this point, folks. It’s really three lost decades in terms of Japan. So we’re not getting what the conservative economist promised us, which was things were going to be super great. What are we getting? What do we really observe when we see the really big financial institutions… Not financial institutions, really big commercial institutions, but where the whippie hand is held by finance? We see stock buybacks, and not little stock buybacks, stock buybacks that are staggering in their amount. And all of that says we have no productive use for our capital to invest and make good products and hire workers and things like that.

We’re out of ideas, useful ideas. So we’re just going to And of course, what’s really going on is stock buybacks, raise stock prices and make the CEO’s bonus.

Colin Bruce Anthes

That gets back.

Bill Black

To the other thing. Much more valuable. So that’s why it’s going on. The bank, SVB, Silicon Valley Bank, did not gain by buying a ton of 1.8 % yield treasuries and mortgage backed securities. That was something that doomed the bank. And again, the asymmetry of risk and return, they did this gamble knowing that the Fed was going to massively raise interest rates and that they would lose. But that comes back to pronouns again. Who’s the they? The bankers were going to win. The bankers had paper, I don’t know, but maybe eight tenths of one % because rates were so incredibly low. And now they do 1.8 %. Oh, well, then my nominal income, not my real income, but my stated income goes up and it was all due to my brilliance in investment. And so I get bigger bonuses and the stock appreciates. And the stock capitalization of SVB shortly before disaster was $15 billion. Again, markets are not efficient. The markets that are most likely to be efficient, according to economist, are financial markets. They ain’t. They’re not a little bit off. In Yiddish, they’re far blankein. each other. This is literally lost, but far blonde is I’m trying to drive from Detroit to Toronto, and 18 hours later, I noticed that the signs, the highway signs are all in Spanish, not.

I didn’t just take a little bit wrong turn and ended up in Montreal instead of Toronto. I ended up in Mexico. That’s far blunted. So that’s how crazy. A gain, it’s so obviously crazy. And it has failed so spectacularly and that neither party has actually seriously sought to fix it. I think the Democrats thought they did, and I’m sure some of them did, but it was absolutely incoherent. They didn’t actually ask people who had succeeded, what works? That was the last thing in the world. And so if they can’t fix the… And indeed now, they don’t even try to fix it. Now it’s just you did it type of thing. And the explanations are nuts. Wokeness or, Oh, my God, if we’d only had stress tests, all would have been well.

Colin Bruce Anthes

So the bipartisan ignorance is not something that you’re seeing dissipate in the slightest way after this crash, after this crisis has.

Bill Black

Taken place. It’s worse than just ignorance. It’s just not serious.

Colin Bruce Anthes

It’s.

Bill Black

An unwillingness. Again, lots of folks are contributing to this. I know everybody picks on mainstream media, but it’s true in this case. You just don’t see serious analytics. You get descriptions, but not serious analytics.

Colin Bruce Anthes

I wondered, as we get towards the end of this interview, if you could speak to something that the economist Michael Hudson, who cites your book all the time, recently said, which is that in some ways he sees this crisis as worse than what he saw in 2008, because 2008 was really a scam. Whereas in this case, what we’re seeing are some practices that have been standard among many banks for a long time being exposed by rising interest rates. So this is more of a problem at the heart of the practices that have been building in recent years across the financial sector. What do you make of that?

Bill Black

I won’t get into the definitional stuff about how you rate what’s actually worse, but I agree with this fundamental point on the difference. And again, this is what I’ve been trying to express. Fraud people are unwilling to admit, right? And so you can’t simply look at reports that the institutions provide and have a particularly good understanding of the fraud. That’s not true with interest rate risk. You just have to look at the numbers. Again, the point is, it’s just so easy. It was so easy for the bankers to avoid it. It was so easy for the regulators to avoid it. And not only did they not avoid it, but even now, where they see all these terrible things happening. This is the second and third largest bank failures in US history. And it was easy to prevent because, again, in the last one, there was all this hoopla around, We’re helping, in particular, poor minorities by lending to them. That was the whole shtick in the defense in the run up to the Great Financial Crisis. There’s no such thing. This isn’t lending at all. This is how I invest my funds as a bank.

Completely different function. And as I said, undergraduates can figure this out. And again, just to ask you, have you even heard anybody else go, What reports would I want? Right. Well, I.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Guess.

Bill Black

The truth is… When I say that the reports that we wanted, and again, the reports were how big are the unrecognized losses due to interest rate changes? And how much bigger will they get if interest rates continue to increase? Those are not hypothetical things. Those are charts that I and my counterparts used to look at in 1984. And we didn’t invent them. So probably they were there before in 1984. I joined the federal agency in 1984. That is quickly approaching 40 years ago. I have a feeling technology has gotten better in the last 39 years, not worse. We never claimed to.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Be geniuses.

Bill Black

I’m going f we could get it right, and now they have the benefit of our experience because remember, the first act of the savings and loan debacle was interest.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Rate risk. Right. I want to close with a a two part question. If you were speaking to a member of Congress right now about one thing that they should stand up and champion right off the bat, get up and make a speech about, and if you were speaking to someone in a major media outlet about the first way they should start reporting this, what would your advice to both of those figures be?

Bill Black

I would say I want those two charts.

Colin Bruce Anthes

Two charts.

Bill Black

And I want every regulator to provide them. And then my second thing would be, here’s the asymmetry between Democrats and Republicans. The following Democrats, as President, have reappointed Republican appointees as chairman of the Fed. That would be the last three Democratic presidents. All of them reappointed Republican appointees as chairman of the Fed, even though they knew they were hard right. And we’re talking about Alan Greenspan of Ayn Rand.

Colin Bruce Anthes

A literal disciple of.

Bill Black

Ayn Rand. Literal disciple of Ayn Rand type of thing. And Democrats reappointed him. Do you know the last time a Republican reappointed a Democratic nominee?

Colin Bruce Anthes

Has it happened?

Bill Black

I am not personally aware of it ever happening. It certainly never happened when I was an adult. So it has not happened in the last 50 years, roughly. Again, Democrats play slow pitch softball and not the industrial League thing where you arc it 30 feet in the air. No, the kind when you want your kid to hit it. And Republicans play hardball. It doesn’t work well for the nation. I don’t care whether it works for the Democrats. It doesn’t work well for.

Colin Bruce Anthes

The nation. Well said. I want to thank you so much for providing some much needed clarity at a time when there isn’t much clarity going on. And I hope some people out there are listening to the things that you’ve been saying because there’s clearly a lot of room for improvement from what we’re doing right now. So, Bill Black, thank you so much for taking the time and for providing some invaluable insight at this crucial juncture.

Bill Black

Thank you. Thank you for the channel’s efforts.

Colin Bruce Anthes

And we’ll continue to do our best to cover these events as they unfold with figures like Bill Black. Please remember to like, subscribe, ring that bell for notifications. If you’re able to hit that donate button, we would certainly appreciate your support. Thank you so much.

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Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg discuss American objectives in the Ukraine war and the preparations for war with China.

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Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. It is a special interview session today with Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. Be back in just a few seconds. Please don’t forget the donate button. We can’t do this without you and be right back.

Once again, joining me are Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us.

Daniel Ellsberg

Good to be here. Thank you.

Paul Jay

I’ve asked Noam and Dan if they would actually kind of interview each other, and I’ll jump in if I need to. But at any rate, Noam is going to go first and ask Dan a question. So go ahead, Noam.

Noam Chomsky

Actually, I can ask quite a lot of questions. There are lots of things I’d like to hear your take on, which I have a limited grasp of. One of them is kind of in the forefront now, I think, or should be. There’s a good deal of increasingly open talk in Washington– British analysts and others– about the fact that the United States is getting kind of a bargain out of the Ukraine war. Quite a part from the military industry, the fossil fuel industry, and Europe falling into Washington’s pocket. The United States, as a number of military figures and others have pointed out, is able to significantly degrade the military capacity of its main military enemy at a very small cost to itself and can therefore husband its resources for the major war that it’s planning with China. I’m just wondering what your take is on all of this.

Daniel Ellsberg

Noam, with my knowledge from the inside, it is very profitable to prepare for war, to plan for war, and above all produce for war. For instance, arms manufacturers would like very much to break through the limits on war material that we provide to Taiwan. That has been in place since about ’79 when [Jimmy] Carter actually recognized Beijing as the capital and there being ‘One China’. Congress forced on that agreement a separate agreement that Congress would continue to budget for, and we would continue to sell military arms to Taiwan– you’re talking about China now– despite the fact that Carter had just recognized Taiwan as a province of China, as virtually all Chinese regarded. Until this century, nearly all Taiwanese regarded it as a province of China. Now, there is an independence movement that has grown since the end of the last century, the end of the year, and since then.

Generally, they are regarded as part of China. So we have this kind of paradox of sending weapons to a province of China. We don’t send them to any other province of China, Zhejiang, for example, and we don’t do that. But this move towards seeing Taiwan as a separate part, which of course, is by about 100 miles. But actually, it contradicts the idea of ‘One China’. However, Congress insisted we’re able to send, but with a limit, defensive arms, and not excessive amounts.

I can’t help but believe that there are a lot of people who would like to break through that. They have been increasing the amount over the years and even more in the last year. Of course, we’ve been taking a lot of moves like Nancy Pelosi and even progressives like Ro Khanna to make visits to Taiwan of a kind that didn’t occur before and which are in the line of recognizing Taiwan as a separate, independent and sovereign country.

Now, why? What’s the pressure for that? I certainly am not an expert in that area. I think one contributor, just one, but not an insignificant one, is the desire to enormously increase the sales of arms that we make to Taiwan. No ceiling on that. If it is recognized as an independent country, which we’re moving toward with these open statements of commitment to defend them from China, of course, an independent country can make alliances; that’s sovereignty. In fact, all of Latin America is a sphere of influence in which countries have limited sovereignty. They cannot make alliances with, quote, “foreign powers.” We’re not a foreign power, of course, in the Western Hemisphere. They can’t have bases, for example. If they were totally sovereign, they could. We were preparing to invade Cuba even before Russia in response to those plans.

After the Bay of Pigs in ’61 and ’62, they were providing arms, but not yet nuclear arms. There were great calls, pressing calls, for [John F.] Kennedy to announce an invasion of Cuba going right up to the moment when they turned up with nuclear weapons from Russia.

Now, I’ll come back. Since they have no legal status, as they don’t, clearly, the position we take is, “no, no. Sovereign countries, independence, have [inaudible 00:06:04].” What Kennedy was preparing for and accelerated when the build-up appeared– totally aggression was illegal. We regard it as criminal and illegal for China to claim that it has a right to determine the nature of the government and to claim Taiwan as its own. But we come back to the question, which I don’t fully answer– no, I’ll come back to Noam. Aside from the desire to have, I think, Taiwan not only as a purchaser of our weapons and a great profit to our arms sales but as a base again, as it used to be before ’79– they used to have nuclear weapons, U.S. nuclear weapons in Taiwan. I visited bases with nuclear weapons in Taiwan in 1960 and thereafter. I don’t think the Navy has ever fully reconciled itself to losing Taiwan as a base. With all this talk about containing China with a circle of friendly powers, a NATO-like encirclement of China, as we did with Russia, I think Taiwan would be a marvelous part of that circle of containment. It would be just wonderful to contain China from these various things, including parts of China that they read as Chinese. I’ll turn the question back to you.

Noam Chomsky

I’m wondering what this conception that’s now spreading in high circles is that we can degrade Russia on the cheap by losing Ukrainian lives to degrade the Russian forces. We can kind of control it enough so that it doesn’t lead to a strong Russian response. We’ll just keep it under control while at the same time preparing for a massive assault on China. I’m just wondering, for example, recently, there were reports about the Marines shifting their tactics from heavy armaments to island hopping, go back to Iwo Jima, and so on. I mean, can they really seriously be thinking that we can be preparing for a war with China where the Marines will be attacking islands as in the Second World War, and it’s not going to blow up into total catastrophe?

Daniel Ellsberg

I don’t believe they’re preparing to invade Taiwan. I think it would have to be with the request, or politicians who indeed may have been induced in various ways to make that request, bribed, or impelled in some ways. I cannot believe they have in mind an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. They do intend [crosstalk 00:09:14]– like the puppets.

Do you really believe that? I think the idea would be that like our puppet government in Saigon [Ho Chi Minh City] asking us– they asked us sometime after the Marines had arrived. Phan Huy Quát, I know very well the Prime Minister. I know very well a fact that Phan Huy Quát, whom I did meet but didn’t know well, was not informed that Marines were about to land at Da Nang in 1964. But of course, he endorsed it once it happened. The rest of the involvement there did have the appearance of asking a request of a government that we described as sovereign. Although we had created South Vietnam, the U.S. created South Korea, South Vietnam had not existed before we drew [inaudible 00:10:11]. Taiwan, as I say, went back and forth and so forth, but for many years we treated it as an American base, and we didn’t do that by invading it. We had people there who relied on it and profited from it, in fact, wanted us to support Chiang Kai-shek’s pretensions that his claim to being the ruler of all of China was based on his firm intention to reinvade China. We supported operations against China from Taiwan and from the offshore islands, some of them a mile and a half from China. When China was opposing those, they were opposing bases that we were using for covert operations.

How to keep them in the U.S.; that is Chiang Kai-shek’s hands? The answer was there’s only one way to do that. They’re a mile and a half, some of them, a few more within sight of mainland China. Only nuclear weapons can keep them away. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower was prepared to initiate nuclear war to maintain islands that are just within sight of the mainland as part of the defense of Taiwan, which we regarded, in effect, as a subordinate.

So 65 years ago, it was still top secret that Eisenhower had been ready, if necessary, to hold those islands to initiate nuclear war, with the understanding in his eyes that although China didn’t have nuclear weapons, read Ukraine, its allies and a supplier of Russia did have nuclear weapons. Eisenhower expected a response from the U.S. against Taiwan, Shanghai, and possibly bases in Japan and Guam that were supporting this effort. In other words, to which our response would be an all-out war, which, as I found in ’61, the Joint Chiefs expected to kill 600 million people. They didn’t know then in 1958 or ’61, and they didn’t know until 1983 when nuclear winter became conceptualized and predicted by many scientists and confirmed today that it wouldn’t be just 600 million that would be killed. We expected to attack. We planned to attack. We targeted every city in Russia, over 100,000, and 80% of the cities over 25,000, and the same in China. That’s where you get up to 600 million and fall out from those attacks. What we didn’t figure out then was that the smoke from the burning cities would be lofted by nuclear attacks. Hard to do this with non-nuclear attacks, but possible. We did it in Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, creating firestorms that lofted the smoke into the stratosphere where it wouldn’t burn out. But that was only three cities. With 100 to 200 cities with that smoke in the atmosphere, and you get that firestorm every time with nuclear weapons, it blocks 70% of the sunlight for up to a decade. It kills all of us, and it starves nearly everyone to death. Not everyone– Argentina.

Allen Rose is having dinner with us tonight, leading environmental scientists– 90% to 98% starve to death in a year. He has a big peer-reviewed study that says it will be over 5 billion. He was telling me it’ll be a lot more than that. I’m bringing this up to today. That’s what we’re facing now with the prospect of continuing this war, including moving toward the invasion of Crimea and the full expulsion of all Russians from Donbas, where Russian troops have been for eight years now. They’ve all got to go. Putin has said he is prepared to use nuclear weapons to prevent that. That Crimea, for example, is a trigger if he’s really facing expulsion, which he wouldn’t be, in my opinion, from Ukrainians alone. But if some people, including many major factors in Ukraine, including Zelenskyy, and so on, want and get direct U.S. involvement on this and not just a matter of arms sales and provisions, but troops and pilots, not just F-16s, then Putin would be seeing a real challenge and may as well, in Donbas. I don’t think he is bluffing. He could be. People have bluffed in the past and have not bluffed in the past. I don’t think he’s bluffing now.

I am getting away from your point that there are people who don’t want to press it to that point because they want war with China, which is a nuclear power, of course. Actually, China doesn’t have the number of weapons that Russians do. China doesn’t need a first-use threat like Putin in its own region. Twenty years since [Bill] Clinton sent carriers to the Taiwan Straits as a challenge to them when they were sending test missiles in the area of Taiwan, we sent two carriers; the Chinese have been building up their conventional capabilities, including anti-aircraft carrier cruise missiles, and a lot of airfields among other things. The U.S. can’t do that again. They will control it. It’s pretty well recognized that they have at least conventional parity there, if not superiority. That’s the difference from Europe. That used to be the way it was in Europe. We thought there was an overwhelming conventional superiority of Russians, Soviet troops against West Europe. Now, that was always a hyped-up hoax. There was a basis for that supposedly rationalized, the idea that we would initiate more the basis of NATO planning. We don’t have to do that anymore in Europe.

Why is Putin doing it? Because he’s in the position we used to be. He’s imitating our old policy. He has a conventional inferiority in Europe. So he’s doing what we did for 70 years, threatening initiation of nuclear war and blowing the world up. It has no more justification than we had for 70 years, and we’re still making it.

Here’s the point I was leading up with regard to your question. President Biden could easily, actually, said in 2016, when he was just leaving office as vice president, he couldn’t think of any circumstances in which it would be to the benefit to initiate nuclear war or to threaten it. That was Vice President Biden in 2016. He ran on that in 2020—no first use. We will not initiate nuclear war, which seems, you know, sort of a bedrock of sanity, except for the fact that we have been saying the opposite for 70 years. But here we had a presidential candidate who was, at last, recognizing that it will be immoral and insane to initiate nuclear war in any way.

Well, he’s been in office for two years. He hasn’t said that. He’s not going to say it. He could very well afford to say that. He could say cold threats are now tarn-justified, totally immoral, as they are, and with no longer saying, and we’re saying the same. Hard for us to say that now because that is NATO policy right now, what he’s threatening. He won’t say that, I think, because many Americans feel he will need that threat in Taiwan. To hold on to Taiwan as an independent state, in effect, which we haven’t openly recognized, but saying that we will defend them goes pretty far. We can’t assure a conventional defense. We could actually defend it with non-nuclear weapons. If Biden says, “no nuclear weapons or first use threat for Taiwan,” he will be accused by political factors and authoritative people saying, “you are now inviting a Chinese invasion into Taiwan.” And that goes along with our ideology and our commitments of the last 50 years, you know, very openly till ’79. After ’79, as we move toward treating Taiwan as an independent to which we are, in effect, abide, we’re back to threatening it.

So, in short, we need Putin’s threat for Taiwan, even not in Europe. And that is what makes me a little pessimistic that without pressure, Biden will not do what he would be, I think, quite willing to do in Europe.

Noam Chomsky

Well, based on your incomparable experience with these guys, is it conceivable, in your view, that they are now thinking the gang around Biden, that they can calibrate the war in Ukraine carefully enough so as to keep degrading Russia, sacrificing Ukrainians, not lead to Putin’s escalation of the war, and at the same time prepare the Marines, your old friends, to start island hopping in a planned war against China, which they will somehow be able to calibrate as well to keep it short of Chinese nuclear weapons and gain the goal of degrading China as well? Can it be that they’re really thinking of that?

Daniel Ellsberg

The Marines, as I understand it, moved to training in recent years for amphibious operations, which were the essence of my three years in the Marines as a platoon leader and then incumbent in commander, but as a battalion planning officer, assistant battalion planning officer. It’s all for amphibious operations. But now, you know, gradually, much more helicopters instead of landing crafts. I probably went down the nets from the ship. A rather challenging project, actually, when you have a big pack on your back and weapons– more than 100 times. I practiced it all the time. Of course, based on the island hopping of World War II, yes, they’ve been rehearsing now for helicopters for a long time, but they do, as you say, seem to be moving back. I don’t know the details of this, but they are moving back toward more operations like that in their training.

Now, something that occurs to me, which my memory isn’t too precise on, but hasn’t China been very much warming their relationships with the Solomon Islands? Guadalcanal? My first brother-in-law died in 1942 during the Battle of the Guadalcanal. Well, before they can go back to that, we have the islands that the Chinese have built up in the South China Sea to some extent for airstrips and so forth. Yeah, you could take over those.

Coming back to the first part of your question, initially and now the attitudes on Europe, what do they plan there? It’s true. They are– especially Republicans. They seem to be sounding almost sane direction on Ukraine in the sense of not an indefinite amount of escalation here. Not forever. You even have– what to say. How shall I describe Marjorie Taylor Greene? A maniac saying it would be insane to invade Crimea. Well, that’s true. You have Democrats who are denying that and going along with Zelenskyy and pronouncing that we’re going to invade Crimea. Taylor Green thinks– I have used it, but I’m afraid it is not good even for a joke, but I have used it. I said I do have a principle you can’t count on. You might think you could use, as a compass point, somebody who is always wrong. Lindsey Graham offers himself for that, for instance. One would think Marjorie Taylor Green. I’ve often said you can’t count on anyone to be wrong on everything all the time. As I mentioned that somebody said to me, “even Lindsey Graham had a good resolution on immigration the other day.” Maybe I’ve been misjudging him. That means you just can’t set your compass court opposite to these people or reliably, pretty reliably, though.

So in Europe, I think that the democratic leaders like [Antony] Blinken, [Lloyd] Austin, [Jake] Sullivan, and Biden have shown a willingness and even a desire for the war in Ukraine to continue indefinitely at this level and somewhat higher. I don’t think they want– I’m pretty sure they don’t want nuclear war, but it’s like Condoleezza Rice said, “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Well, how do you know if you’ve gone enough in pressing the Russians or too much? You know it when this comes up [inaudible 00:25:32] and Crimea offers itself as an abyss. I don’t think they want a two-sided nuclear war or even a one-sided one in Europe. They are threatening a one-sided war in Taiwan, and I think they’ll continue to do that. Putin is threatening what he hopes, I believe, is a one-sided war to hold on to Crimea, where virtually all Russians, I understand, do regard that as part of Russia. It would be an existential threat to lose it, and so forth. He has a lot of support for that. Donbas is a more complicated issue. Will he really blow up the world to keep all of his troops in Donbas as opposed to going back to pre-2023 and pre-2022, February 24? We don’t know.

Noam, as you keep pointing out in other channels, it’s outrageous that there is no negotiation going on on this point and there to be no communication. The fact that Blinken and [Sergey] Lavrov’s Foreign Minister’s first discussion since the war began was ten minutes a day at a conference which Blinken used to say, “get all your troops and withdraw, in effect, withdraw from Crimea,” that’s not going to happen. A nuclear war, I think he knows that. We can just say no communication. Well, that’s outrageous in terms of the interests of the world, but I think to keep it going, there’s nothing but a benefit for the ruling circles in this country. The profit to the military-industrial complex, the share profits of Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing have gone up, as have the profits of the oil companies. I would say they’re not going down. But even more important, as you said, for the arms sales aspects, is the fact that NATO is back having appeared to have no purpose, no rationale since about 1992, with the end of the USSR, the end of the Warsaw Pact, the Warsaw Pact moving and not existing as a Russian set of satellites, it seemed to have no purpose of NATO. Now Putin is back as an enemy is a [inaudible 00:28:21] factor for NATO with the U.S. as its head.

I have to say we’ve taken on, and with a lot of consensus, the role of a military protector in Europe. A protectorate, first in West Europe, now in East Europe. Now it’s hard to get the benefits of being a protector, a protection racket unless you’re protecting them against somebody. I think that [George F.] Kennan’s and [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s desire for a peaceful, democratic Russia to be part of a peaceful, democratic Europe community, from Lisbon to Vladivostok, but anyway, from Lisbon, a very wide European community, that was not desired. Kennan said, “you won’t get this if you go into Ukraine.” [Jack] Matlock, [William] Burns, and many others said, “you can’t have a peaceful, democratic Russia if you talk about going into Ukraine. If you get Ukraine into NATO, you will have very bad relations with Russia.” I think that was heard by other people. Aha, that gives us our roadmap. We’ll do everything we can to get Putin, in a sense, to look like an enemy and to do things that make him appear; that’s a trap he fell into.

We have Putin back– that’s full. We have all the benefits now of being a protector of Europe, and it is indeed committing aggression, massacring people, and in every way encouraging people [to purchase] F-35s. He’s the greatest salesman for this dog of a plane, F-35S, which is in the shop all the time and cannot fly near a thunderstorm because it doesn’t have good lightning protection. All of the other competitors for fighter bombers and Saab Gripen, and Dassault Rafalel, they’re all out. It’s F-35s all over. Well, that’s okay with Lockheed. They’ve been lobbying for that since the ’90s. Anyway, it’s a perfect little war, as they used to say– the Spanish-American War. In this case, it can’t go on too long without the constant risk of inciting Putin to carry out threats of a kind we have often made but haven’t yet been carried out.

Noam Chomsky

Well, actually, Lindsey Graham, who you mentioned, is one of those who’s been celebrating the fact that the U.S. is degrading the Russian military with very little expense to ourselves, a great deal of expense to Ukraine and the rest of the world. But notice what’s happening. NATO is now at its last summit, an Indo-Pacific power. We have now been able to enlist Europe in our planned confrontation with China, which is pretty much a bipartisan agreement in the main conflict. We’ll sort of somehow calibrate things so that it doesn’t get out of hand, and Europe will fight to the last Ukrainian, as some are putting it. Meanwhile, we’ll prepare for China. The U.S. has now sent– it’s not only the shift in the Marine strategy, which I mentioned, the U.S. now has for the first time established permanent bases for B-52s in Darwin, Australia, in Guam, maybe pretty soon in the Philippines. They’re now building up the military connections with the Philippines that had declined. It looks as though they seriously think that they can somehow continue to provoke China. Also, the commercial war, which is trying to prevent China from any technological and economic development, maybe bring them to their knees. Can they really? I mean, judging by what you’ve seen on the inside, can anybody be crazy enough to really be thinking this?

Daniel Ellsberg

I haven’t been on the inside since about the time I got to know you, read your books, and be influenced by you. So I’m not on the inside. In fact, I want to ask you what your opinion is here. By the way, your book was about American power and the Mandarins. I’m just looking at it. I’ll tell you why in a minute. But of course, that looked at the Pacific war in World War II in a way that totally changed my understanding of it as somebody who had grown up slightly from 10 to 14 during World War II; it certainly changed my attitude. So why do they seem to be acting that way? Not all of them, but not every politician, but most of them, actually, and more Democrats than Republicans. It’s certainly in Europe, only Europe, but also on the Pacific. Why? I don’t know. I’ll tell you right away, as an outsider, I don’t know why they are acting as if they want war with China. You tell me.

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“Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) is an American political activist and former United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.”

“Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics,” Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.”

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