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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.

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Lynn Fr"} 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 Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music 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 <

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Welcome to the"} 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 Justifying Genocide – Shir Hever pt 2 Demand a Cease-Fire in Gaza – Shir Hever pt 1 A Brutal Occupation Begets a Brutal War Between Israel and Hamas – Trita Parsi Censorship in Germany, Israeli Hacking & Saudi-Iran Peace Deal – Dr. Shir Hever Why David Clennon Refused Audition for Hit & Run, a Netflix Israeli Co-pro Is BDS Effective Strategy? – Shir Hever Pt 3/3 Fighting for Peace and Equality in Israel – Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green Who Rules Israel – Shir Hever pt2 Why Did 72% of Israelis Want Attack on Gaza to Continue? Is Israel a Strategic Asset or Liability? – Wilkerson Abby Martin’s “Gaza Fights for Freedom” Israel’s War on Palestine – Ali Abunimah Does Israel Have the Right to Exist as a Jewish State? – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (3/5) Gaza Under Siege – Eva Bartlett on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/2 Gaza Under Siege – Eva Bartlett on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 1/2 Class Struggle in Palestine – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (4/5) Palestinians can Learn From the African America Struggle – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (2/5) Awakened by the Palestinian Intifada – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5) Justice Requires an End to Israeli Jewish Supremacy Over Palestinians – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (5/5) From a Zionist Youth to Outspoken Critic of a Jewish State – Michael Ratner on RAI Pt 2/7 One State or Two, Solution Must be Based on Palestinian Rights Phyllis Bennis on RAI Pt 4/4 Fmr. Israeli Intel. Chief Says Palestinian Israeli Conflict Greater Risk than Nuclear Iran Pt 2/4 Vietnam War Created Middle East Activist – Phyllis Bennis on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 1/4 Syria’s Six Wars and Humanitarian Catastrophe – Phyllis Bennis on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 3/4 Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music 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 Thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Please don’t forget, that without your donations, we don’t get to do this. So go over to our webpage at theAnalysis.news, click donate and get on the email list. Thanks again. 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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). 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

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TranscriptListenDonateSubscribeGuestMusic Paul"} 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. Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music 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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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)

In part 2, Patrick Bond broadens out his analysis of the BRICS countries engaging in what he terms "talk left, walk right." He explains the economic theories of "accumulation by dispossession" and refers back to the aims of the Non-Aligned Movement of 1961 and the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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. .kt-post-loop_15d859-bf .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_15d859-bf .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_15d859-bf .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_15d859-bf .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_15d859-bf .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_15d859-bf .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_15d859-bf .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_15d859-bf .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_15d859-bf .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_15d859-bf .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;} Paul Jay on 9/11 9/11 Lies and the National Security State – Thomas Drake Intelligence on Bin Laden, 9/11 Targets Withheld from Congress’ Probe 9/11 Not an “Intelligence Failure” From 9/11 to Mass Surveillance, The Man Who Knew Too Much – Thomas Drake on RAI Pt 6/6 From 9/11 to Mass Surveillance, The Man Who Knew Too Much – Thomas Drake on RAI Pt 5/6 From 9/11 to Mass Surveillance, The Man Who Knew Too Much – Thomas Drake on RAI Pt 4/6 From 9/11 to Mass Surveillance, The Man Who Knew Too Much – Thomas Drake on RAI Pt 3/6 From 9/11 to Mass Surveillance, The Man Who Knew Too Much – Thomas Drake on RAI Pt 2/6 Sen. Graham: Bush/Cheney Misdirected Intel Prior to 9/11, Aggressively Deceived After – Pt 2/7 Sen. Bob Graham: FBI Deliberately Covered Up the Role of Saudis in 9/11 Attack – (pt 1/7) Sen. Graham: President Must Side with Openness About C.I.A. and 9/11 – Pt 3/7 Did Bush Cheney Create a Culture of Not Wanting to Know – Sen. Bob Graham on RAI Pt 7/7 Revealing 9/11 Conspiracy Would Undo U.S. Saudi Alliance – Sen. Bob Graham on RAI Pt 5/7 Saudi Government’s 9/11 Connection and the Path to Disillusionment – Sen. Bob Graham on RAI Pt 4/7 9/11 Redux – Pt 3/3 9/11 Redux – Pt 2/3 9/11 Redux – Pt 1/3 Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Music 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. 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