theAnalysis.news

{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/theanalysis.news\/class-and-the-war-in-ukraine-paul-jay\/#arve-youtube-8h_db9xmezu6452b5b5c1b51208903290","type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8h_Db9xmEzU?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Ftheanalysis.news&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=1","name":"Class and the War in Ukraine - Paul Jay","thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/theanalysis.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Talia-Baroncelli-and-Paul-Jay-NEW.jpg","uploadDate":"2023-04-18T14:08:04+00:00","author":"theAnalysis-news","description":"Paul Jay is back to speak about the war in Ukraine, the irrevocable effects of climate change, and the ever-present but often downplayed danger of nuclear warfare. He explains how the transnational capitalist elite continue to benefit from the war at the expense of the average Ukrainian and Russian"} Paul Jay is back to speak about the war in Ukraine, the irrevocable effects of climate change, and the ever-present but often downplayed danger of nuclear warfare. He explains how the transnational capitalist elite continue to benefit from the war at the expense of the average Ukrainian and Russian worker. He also speaks about his new documentary film project on nuclear winter and his recent trip to visit political activist Daniel Ellsberg, whose insights on the Cuban Missile Crisis and potential human error leading to nuclear confrontation are heavily featured in the film. This is part one of a three-part series. Watch PART TWO Watch PART THREE .kt-post-loop_627a9e-e4 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_627a9e-e4 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_627a9e-e4 .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_627a9e-e4 .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_627a9e-e4 .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_627a9e-e4 .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_627a9e-e4 .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_627a9e-e4 .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_627a9e-e4 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_627a9e-e4 .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;} Capitalism Has Never Been This Irrational – Paul Jay (pt 3/3) Donald Trump and the (Non) Prosecution of Presidential Crimes (pt 2/3) Class and the War in Ukraine – Paul Jay (pt 1/3) Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Music Talia Baroncelli Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Paul Jay for a three-part series on the war in Ukraine, the prosecution of Donald J. Trump, as well as global oligarchy and capitalism. But first, please do go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Most importantly, get on our mailing list; that way, you’ll be emailed every time a new episode is released. You can also go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, and hit the subscribe button as well as the bell. The bell ensures that you’ll be informed every time a new episode drops. See you in a bit for part one of our three-part series with Paul Jay. Joining me now is Paul Jay, your favorite host at theAnalysis.news. It’s really good– Paul Jay Oh, not anymore. Talia Baroncelli It’s great to see you, Paul. How are you doing? Paul Jay I’m doing good, thanks. Talia Baroncelli So you’ve been really busy lately, and we haven’t seen you. What have you been up to? Paul Jay I’ve been up to my eyeballs in a documentary film I’m working on called How to Stop a Nuclear War, which is based on Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. So I was out twice in the last few months in Berkeley, where Dan is, filming more interviews with him. I’ve actually been interviewing Dan on and off for the last three years, but we’re getting much more into the thick of the production now. When I came back last time, I had COVID, and I was out of it with that. The cough is a residual of that. Talia Baroncelli Yeah, we can see that, unfortunately. Paul Jay Yeah, I apologize if I’m coughing during this interview. But the work’s going very well. Dan, a lot of people may know, is ill. He’s 92 years old and diagnosed recently with pancreatic cancer. He sent an email or a message out letting all his friends and everyone know about it. It went viral. Apparently, two or three million people have seen his note. He’s been interviewed many times now on mainstream media. Right now, he’s doing pretty well. But sadly, he probably won’t be for long, but he’s still quite energetic. Talia Baroncelli Well, in all your recent interviews with Dan, and you’ve known him for so many years, what has his core message been recently, especially with regard to climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Paul Jay Well, he’s feeling frustrated, I guess. He was hoping all the work he had been doing would have had more effect than it had. Although I think it has had more than he thinks it has. But he thinks the danger of nuclear war is as great now as it’s ever been, and perhaps even more dangerous now– and obviously, climate change. One of the things he said, if people watched his interview, which I thought was quite profound and important, was comparing the Cuban Missile Crisis to what’s going on in Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov compared the American blockade of Cuba to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United States was threatened by Soviet missiles in Cuba and had a blockade against Cuba. Russia, threatened by the expansion of NATO and even possibly nuclear weapons in Ukraine, had a right to what they’re calling the “special military operation,” which is– they use those words because to say war opens it up to a question of whether this is a legal or unjust war, illegal war. So they come up with this terminology of “special military occupation,” which is nonsense. When I asked Ellsberg about comparing the Cuban Missile Crisis to Ukraine, he said, “Well, there is a comparison, but it’s not the one Lavrov is making.” In fact, the Soviet missiles in Cuba were no additional threat to the United States, even though there were nuclear weapons in Cuba. It didn’t actually alter the geopolitical equation at all because the Soviet Union already had submarines that could fire on Washington or New York. So nothing was added to the threat. In fact, the blockade that [John F.] Kennedy put up around Cuba, while it was better than an invasion, which is what the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted, and it seems Bobby Kennedy wanted, and Jack Kennedy and maybe Adlai Stevenson were almost the only ones that really didn’t want the invasion and risk where that would lead. The blockade itself was illegal. To blockade a country is itself an act of war, an act of aggression. Kennedy had no right to put up that blockade. So to compare Cuba to Ukraine and Russia is actually not a favorable comparison for the Russians. Ellsberg argues the Ukraine situation is very similar in that even if Ukraine joined NATO, it’s not an imminent threat to Russia. I mean, Estonia is already in NATO, and there’s no threat from Estonia to Russia. In fact, Ukraine wasn’t about to get into NATO anyway. I mean, people have heard me say this a hundred times, and it’s easily verifiable. Both France, Germany and, in all likelihood, Turkey, were not going to allow Ukraine into NATO. If there isn’t consensus, they can’t do it. So there just was no imminent threat. The underlying comparison that Ellsberg makes is that Kennedy was so afraid of domestic political forces, the Republicans accusing him of being soft on communism, soft on the Soviet Union, soft on Cuba, that he had to look tough. He couldn’t be humiliated by these missiles in Cuba because [Nikita] Khrushchev had promised him there wouldn’t be any missiles in Cuba, and Khrushchev put them in any way. That’s a similar situation to Putin. If Ukraine was to be a NATO, if Ukraine was to have these kinds of weapons, it would be a humiliation for Putin. Not a real threat to Russian national security. Ukraine was not about to invade Russia. But you can’t underestimate these factors. Kennedy’s fear of humiliation and Putin’s similar, both dealing with domestic situations. In Putin’s case, rising alienation and opposition to the Russian oligarchy. We’re not the only ones that see pictures of these Russian oligarchs living on these enormous yachts in the Mediterranean or wherever. Much of Russia or the Russian people are living in poverty. Ellsberg condemns the Russian invasion. But– and this is the big but, the danger of nuclear war because of the Russian invasion and the danger of nuclear war because of the American role, perhaps provoking this with talk of NATO expansion– but like I say, they’ll see no evidence it was really going to happen. But since the invasion, the U.S. has certainly embraced this as an opportunity to try to weaken Russia, perhaps bring Putin down. They are doing everything they can to stoke and provoke this war to go on, perhaps even for years. The phrase has been used over and over again. The Americans will fight for the right of NATO to take in new members to the last Ukrainian– until every Ukrainian is dead. While he condemns the invasion quite unequivocally, he also condemns the role of the U.S. in NATO, and in particular, the Americans, in not pushing for compromise now and continuing to flood arms into Ukraine. Talia Baroncelli What do you think Ellsberg would say to the fact that, yes, of course, NATO has been expanding and has been pushing those red lines, so to speak, but what about Russia’s imperial ambitions? Maybe they would have gone ahead with the invasion, regardless, and were just using the specter of NATO expansion as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Paul Jay Well, I don’t know the answer to that question because we never got a chance to see it. Certainly, a lot of Russians I’ve talked to in Russia do think it was a pretext. The point is, even if Ukraine did join NATO, how does that really change anything from Estonia? In fact, what they’ve accomplished now is now Finland is in NATO. Now they have an even bigger NATO border, Russian-NATO border. So it certainly didn’t minimize the threat from NATO. I think, to step back a bit here, without mitigating the message that there was no imminent threat to Russia, which makes this a war of aggression, and everything I understand about the Nuremberg decisions, international law, and the UN Charter, the right to self-defense only kicks in if there’s an imminent threat. Imminent really means imminent, like you’re about to get attacked, and there’s no other way out of getting attacked but a preemptive defense. Short of that, it’s a war of aggression, period. Talia Baroncelli Right, and it has to be an imminent threat, spatially, so territorially, but also temporarily. So in terms of it being an imminent threat right then at that very moment or in that time frame and not a few months prior. Paul Jay That’s the essence of it. Imminent. Talia Baroncelli Exactly. Paul Jay Immediate. In the moment. Yeah, that’s the essence of it. At the time of the Russian invasion, there were 150,000 Russian troops on the Ukrainian border. Even if there were Ukrainian troops near the Donbas, and there’s a claim, and the numbers go all over the place. Lavrov has said 75,000. Others have said 50,000. I saw the head of the Russian Communist Party say there were 150,000 or something Ukrainian troops about to invade Donbas. Well, there’s no evidence of any of that. The OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] that does these reports, reported an increase in shelling, but that shelling was back and forth from the Donbas region into the Ukrainian government-controlled area and Ukrainian missiles going into the independent or autonomous-controlled regions, some people say Russian-controlled. There’s a lot of shelling going on, but there were very, very few deaths, if any. The number of deaths in 2021 leading up to that– the 150,000 Russian troops– in the whole of the region, according to the OSCE, there were 10 deaths as a result of the fighting, and maybe it could be attributed to the Ukrainian side. I mean, there were more people that were killed in car accidents. So there certainly was no imminent threat for Ukraine to invade Russia. I don’t see evidence that there was an imminent threat to Donbas. Even if there was, which again, I don’t know that there was, but let’s say there was, how likely is it that they’re going to do that when there are 150,000 Russian troops on their border? If there were Ukrainian troops gathering, it’s probably more likely they’re doing it because there are 150,000 Russian troops on their border. Even then, Donbas was still part of Ukraine. It was still an internal matter of Ukraine. It’d be like if Quebec was trying to declare independence from the Canadian federal government and Canadian troops were massing to go in and suppress, I don’t know, the Quebec provincial police or whatever it would be. The Americans don’t have a right to come in and get involved in that. It’s not a complete stretch of the imagination either. Some crazy neocons once talked about how the U.S. should intervene and support the Quebec independence movement. Anyway, all that said, the focus of Ellsberg is on the threat of nuclear war and the climate crisis. The Americans are playing a role now to provoke, stoke, more than provoke, to sustain this war in a way that the Ukrainians don’t feel any need to negotiate. There’s some evidence that Zelenskyy, at one point, did want to negotiate. Boris Johnson went in and trounced it. I think there were meetings going on in Turkey. So there’s no doubt that the Americans are trying to keep this war going to weaken Russia, so it cannot be a rival in Europe. On so many levels, it’s insane. Talia Baroncelli Well, you have heard different Ukrainian higher-ups in the government speaking about Crimea. I think recently some of them are saying, perhaps we can negotiate Crimea, and we won’t need to take it back for us to have some final victory. But then some other diplomats or officials were walking that back. It’s hard to really gauge what the flexibility is and how diehard they are on having complete territorial integrity, and how long they want to fight for. If you look at the recent Pentagon leaks that were showing U.S. and NATO military plans and assistance to the Ukrainian military, it does seem like there is a spring offensive underway. So do you think maybe that’s why they haven’t been investing much political capital in diplomacy? Paul Jay Yeah, sure. First of all, it’s been said over by many people, but the American military-industrial complex, arms manufacturers are having– this is heaven for them. They’re talking about how depleted American weapon stocks are now. Well, what does that mean? You got to resupply American weapon stocks. Apparently, Raytheon was saying that it’s going to take them years to catch up with what’s been depleted in Ukraine. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman love this. There’s this great economic pressure on the Biden administration. There’s no doubt that a just position, anyone that cares at all about peace in this world, and even more importantly, anyone that cares about– actually people focusing on the climate crisis and reducing the risk of nuclear war. The pressure needs to be, yes, denounce the invasion, but at this point, there have to be negotiations. Everybody knows more or less what the end game of this negotiation is. Thomas Pickering, who’s a former American Diplomat, writes in Foreign Affairs. I mean, he laid it out, but he’s not the only one. It’s pretty clear. One way he suggests is to take all the disputed territories in Luhansk and Donetsk and put them under UN supervision, then have legitimate referendums and let the people decide what status they want. Do they want to be a part of Russia? Do they want to be part of Ukraine? Do they want to be autonomous and independent? I don’t think, from what I understand, that there’s any doubt that the people of this region have a right to self-determination. The same thing goes with Crimea. The only difference with Crimea is that it’s a little more complex, given its history of being in Russia and then being in Ukraine and back in Russia. More important to me than these border histories is that quite a few of what seem like legitimate polls were taken after the referendum in 2014. The majority of people in Crimea apparently do support Crimea joining Russia. But let that be certified again. If that’s the case, then fine. People have a right to self-determination, but countries have a right to defend their sovereignty. Sometimes these are contradictory principles. Let’s take Taiwan. Does Taiwan have a right to self-determination? I think so. I’m not a lawyer, but you go into all the various ingredients of what would give a province of China, like Quebec is a province of Canada, what would give Taiwan the right to self-determination? From what I know, I think it meets those criteria. But China has a right to defend its sovereignty, and that includes Taiwan. In the same way, Canada, even if Quebec has a right to self-determination, it doesn’t mean Canada doesn’t have a right to defend its sovereignty, including Quebec. For example, if the U.S. were to try to intervene to facilitate Quebec’s independence, that would be illegal in international law. It would be a crime of aggression. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a right to self-determination. So they’re complicated, sometimes contradictory principles. But the underlying fundamental principle is the well-being of the people involved; peace as a primary principle, and the working people of each country should not slaughter each other for the sake of the oligarchs of their countries. The same thing goes for Ukraine. I’ve been saying– it’s easy for me to sit here in Toronto and say this, but I would love the Ukrainian working people to have a way to organize and say to the Russians, you want to denazify? Great. Go denazify Russia because you’re surrounded by Nazis all around Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Even the Russian Communist Party is virulently nationalist and, to a large extent, anti-semitic too. The Ukrainian workers should take all these guns they have now and point them at the Ukrainian oligarchy. Okay, that’s a nice dream. But that said, that class struggle in Ukraine, which up until the Russian invasion was there boiling, I don’t know how strong the workers’ movement was, but there were unions. It all came to nothing because of the Russian invasion. Like when you’re invaded, that national contradiction with the invader becomes far more primary. It’s very difficult. In China, when the Japanese invaded, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party were able to mobilize such a force that they could focus on the Japanese invasion and the Kuomintang, who were sometimes fighting the Japanese and more often than not fighting the Peoples’ Liberation Army and then wound up holding themselves up in Taiwan. Conditions don’t exist like that in Ukraine right now. If the problem is the Ukrainian oligarchy, then it’s the Ukrainian people that have to deal with that. Criminal, kleptocracy, yes, with Nazi influence. But the oligarchs in Russia are no better. They’re not the ones that are going to clean up and denazify Ukraine. If they had succeeded in invading Kyiv, and if they had succeeded in putting in some Ukrainian puppet, then Ukraine would have been ruled by a corrupt Russian kleptocracy. So let’s not forget Ukraine and Russia are class societies. Now, here’s the big problem here in terms of international public opinion and such. The country that’s leading the charge to denounce the Russian invasion is a rogue state. The United States is, certainly, with the invasion of Iraq and many other things, but let’s just focus on that, it is a rogue state. So what credibility have they got denouncing Russia for being an aggressor, a war of aggression, violating international law? They have zero credibility because of not just what they’ve done in Iraq, but the pressure and interference in other places, backing the Saudis in Yemen and on and on. So that’s the complication. But just because the United States is a rogue state, and just because they’re denouncing this Russian invasion, doesn’t mean we as progressives don’t have to first and foremost have solidarity with the people, not the Russian oligarchy, but the Ukrainian people who are being invaded. We must also point out what the Americans really are. Talia Baroncelli I think it’s also really important to recognize that so many people have been displaced as well. So when we’re talking about referendums, if we’re going to have referendums in certain areas of Ukraine, so many people have been forced out of those areas. So you would have to have it in a way that includes them and that maybe has them come back to the country under conditions of peace because it is a bit disingenuous to say, oh, we’ll have a referendum now after thousands of them have left and only a few of them are remaining. That’s a bit of a skewed picture of who’s there. Maybe their opinions have changed in the meantime since the invasion. I think a lot of working-class people, just by reading certain Ukrainian groups who are more working-class and have typically been opposed to the elite and have been opposed to Zelenskyy even, are now unified because they’re threatened by the Wagner group or by Russian forces who are killing them. So it’s ironic how their attention has been now forced against the other kleptocracy and not the one who is also oppressing them within their own country. Hopefully, there will be peace soon so that they can actually focus on the corruption and the problems within their own country and not just dealing with an aggressor. Paul Jay Yeah, I would expect this wouldn’t be the first time a referendum has to be organized, even by the UN, where a lot of people have been displaced. So I think you’re right. There has to be a process that people can prove they were residents at such and such time and have a right to vote. If it was under UN jurisdiction, Donbas, then people, in theory, could return to their homes. The problem here is, what’s the overriding objective for each of the players here? If you look at the Americans, the overriding objective, and is always their overriding objective is global hegemony. If you want to be the global hegemon, you got to be the hegemon in every region. So any regional power that’s a threat has to be subdued. The underlying problem here is the way global monopoly capitalism works, and there’s nothing new about it. Capitalism strives at the individual corporate level for monopoly and at the level of the country for monopoly within a region. If you’re a superpower monopoly globally, whether monopoly corporately, whether your companies can actually control certain sectors of the economy. Most importantly, and this is what exists in most of the world, American finance is the dominant financial player and is the creditor. I don’t know if it was Lenin or somebody who divided the world in various ways. One of the main ways you can divide the world is by creditors and debtors. Up until recently, the United States has been by far the number one creditor country, and more so, global capitalism depends on American management. When the Pentagon sits down with the politicians who happen to be in power and the whole foreign policy complex, all the think tanks and everybody that feeds into this U.S. foreign policy, it’s a whole class of people, really, who is driven partly by the motivation for profit making for the arms making companies, but also an internalized view of the world. America is the beacon on the hill. America’s needed, or the world goes to anarchy. Democracy versus authoritarianism. Now, of course, that means “democracy”– I’m doing quotation marks here, especially for people listening to the podcast. I got to keep remembering more than half our audience is listening, not watching. But anyway, when they talk about “democracy,” they primarily mean the freedom of capital to move freely around the world. So they can go invest where they want. They can get countries in debt to them where they want, and so on. Then a certain amount of democracy for the people– you get to vote every few years. It’s not nothing. It sure ain’t, I don’t think, a real democracy, especially in the U.S., where people barely can even vote properly. But even then, in all the Western capitalist countries, and I include Canada in that, none of the parties really represent working people. I won’t get into that in detail. But a certain amount of democracy amongst the ruling classes themselves, when they talk about democracy, I think that’s the democracy they’re most concerned about. They don’t like, and FDR articulated this really clearly in 1938 in the speech on monopoly, the Western capitalist on the whole, and there are some that don’t agree with what I’m about to say; they don’t want one section of capital to seize hold of the state and be beholden to a small group of capital. So democracy for the Americans, and for most or all of Western capitalism, is a democracy where the institutions maintain certain rules of the road. So these institutions play a moderating role between sections of capital so that they don’t go to war with each other, which they did in the United States. During the American Civil War, it was primarily a war of different sections of capital and elite power fighting over how labor was going to be exploited and which section of, whether it was North and industrial capital or the Southern agricultural slave-based capital, was going to be dominant. They don’t want to do that again. They don’t want a war. So they’ve worked out these institutions that can moderate between sections of capital without the way feudalists used to rally peasants to their side. Some peasants would fight for this aristocrat, and some for that. There were endless wars. That’s not good for business, modern capitalist business. So they want some democracy. They prefer it. They like the freedom of capital, but they hate socialism. They hate the idea of public ownership and some democratization where people actually have a say in that public ownership. When faced with that, they don’t mind, especially in other countries, dictatorship. I mean, Saudi Arabia. It has gone on and on since World War II. How many dictatorships have the Americans supported? Socialism is the greatest enemy to them. They’re balancing this. How do you have freedom of capital? A kind of democracy, not democracy for the people, but some, at least some, that looks that way. They don’t like even a [Jair] Bolsonaro situation that much in Brazil, where a group around Bolsonaro was starting to really take control of the state. But still, they had elections, and the institutions played a role. Anyway, when they look at Ukraine, what’s their primary objective? To assert their hegemony over Europe. They don’t want Russia to be a big player in Europe because it could be too competitive to American power in Europe. They hate the idea that there would ever be a Russia-German cooperation or alliance because imagine if you had a Russia-German alliance in Europe, who needs the U.S.? There’s no longer even a role for NATO at all, and it would change everything. So the Americans, that’s their primary objective. What should their primary objective be? What should we be demanding their primary objective should be? Peace? Yeah, of course. But it’s more specific. The great threat facing us is the climate crisis and then the threat of nuclear war. You can reverse it because of what’s happening right now. If there’s a nuclear war next week, no one’s going to be around to worry about the climate crisis. So you can’t even compare these two in a way. They both have to be dealt with. It’s too obvious. It can’t be dealt with without an international agreement that includes China and Russia, especially China, but also Russia. What good is global hegemony in a world of utter chaos? If they thought there were supply chain problems during the pandemic, just wait until we start crossing the 1.5 and two-degree warming levels, then three and then four. James Hansen said recently in a study that two degrees of warming is already baked into the system. We are there now. We’re not at two degrees yet, but it’s already baked into the climate. The only way to stop going past two, maybe mitigate getting to two, is a radical rupture with the use of fossil fuel now, today, and a radical moving into sustainable energy today, now. That should be everyone’s priority, including Ukrainians. What good is a Ukraine that defeats the Russians, one, isn’t a wasteland of destruction? How many times have the Americans promised to come into Eastern Europe and rebuild and this and that, and they do very little? Maybe there’ll be a way to spend money there, but do you think the American people entering a recession are going to be, oh, let’s all go spend more money in Ukraine? More importantly, what is there of Ukraine or Russia if we don’t face up to climate and if we keep risking a nuclear war? So the problem here is we got to step back from– while we need to denounce the Russian invasion without mitigation, we need to step back because the problem is the way monopoly capitalism has reached such a moment of utter irrationality that we’re on the precipice of destroying human civilization. So once you put it into that context, how on Earth can the Ukrainians keep talking about liberating Crimea? How can there not be a quick resolution under the auspices of the UN? Yes, the U.S. is very much the culprit here. Yes, the Russians invaded. Yes, I’ve said it over and over again. I’m not mitigating that. But the Americans actually do have the ability to say to the Ukrainians, yeah, you have a right to fight as long as you want to fight, including liberating Crimea. If that’s what Ukrainians want to do, okay. But we don’t have an obligation to keep arming you if it’s threatening the world. And that’s what they should say. Talia Baroncelli Not just threatening the world but also threatening the integrity of their own country. Some would argue, even certain liberal historians, I think I’ve mentioned this before, Stephen Kotkin, he’s been a diehard supporter of arming Ukraine, but he’s been saying that what good is the outcome if Ukraine can’t join the EU in the end and there’s not much left of their country. It’s going to require a huge effort to rebuild the country. We already know that. Something much greater than the Marshall Plan. What good will it be if they regain Crimea? There are no collective security agreements in place. There is no redistribution of wealth in place. There’s no solution for climate change in that region. Even if they have Crimea back, that’s not really a great final outcome, at least in his view. So it would make sense to focus on what is really realistic. Certain other experts like Trita Parsi have been saying that you can still have diplomacy and not actually have a ceasefire. The two aren’t the same thing. So many Western countries have been shying away from investing in diplomatic negotiations as if a ceasefire would be around the corner, and they don’t want to downplay their support for Ukraine. It’s ridiculous because you can still have open lines of communication and work toward diplomacy, and that won’t necessarily automatically lead to a ceasefire. So they should be talking a lot more. Paul Jay Sorry, go ahead. Talia Baroncelli We also don’t really know what’s going on. I mean, I think, again, this recent Pentagon leak just shows how U.S. intelligence is so much better at gauging what the Russians are doing than what the Ukrainian war plans are. Maybe there are some rogue elements in the Ukrainian government. So I feel like countries are just shooting from the hip, and they don’t have a real strategy in place, or else some strategies are just hidden from the West. Whether that serves a purpose, I don’t really know. But yeah, it’s really hard to say. Why don’t we talk about China’s role in mediating these conflicts? [Emmanuel] Macron was recently in China to speak to Xi Jinping, to try and put pressure on China to condemn Russia’s involvement in the war in Ukraine and to potentially discourage him from sending weapons to Ukraine. I don’t know if China is actually– sorry, sending weapons to Russia. I don’t know if China has actually sent any, but that prospect is obviously really disconcerting for people in the West if they think that this is going to become some new form of Cold War competition between the U.S. and China in the end. Paul Jay Yeah, well, it already is. It goes back to this striving for monopoly. The U.S. does not want to give up its predominant position, and it has already, to a large extent, lost it. I think China is now the major trading partner for almost everywhere, and they don’t have any foreign military bases. So they’ve accomplished this just through finance, loaning money, the aid of some kind, because of the size of their market and so on. In Latin America, almost, if not every major country in Latin America, their major trading partner now is China or it’s U.S. but China is right there next to it. In terms of Ukraine, China is the place that, in theory, should have said no to this. If they want to call themselves socialists, then one of the fundamental principles of socialism is international solidarity with workers everywhere. A fundamental principle of that is you don’t support wars where workers slaughter each other for oligarchs. That’s it. You don’t. China’s position should have been from the very beginning, trying to use the leverage they had to get a negotiated settlement. I don’t see how the Russian economy would have survived without China buying its oil and gas from Russia. Apparently, they’re getting a cut-rate deal on it, but that is not the way a socialist country operates– for the sake of better prices on fossil fuel and for the sake of weakening our geopolitical ally, the United States, I’m sorry, not ally, adversary, they like to call themselves. They like, I guess, it’s in China’s narrow interest to see the Americans tied down in Ukraine, spending tons of money there. Maybe they see it mitigates the provocations the United States creates over Taiwan. But that isn’t how a socialist country operates. They could have and should have used and still should not be so fuzzy on what they actually think about the U.S. invasion. If you read something called Global Times, which is a website that more or less speaks for the Chinese Communist Party, there have been several paragraphs in there in some of their articles where they actually do come pretty close to saying this is an unjustified invasion. They don’t quite say it all the way, but they come pretty close. But they make a point, and in some ways, it’s somewhat similar to Ellsberg’s point, which is you can’t humiliate Putin and his government, and you can’t try to bring them down without horrible consequences. You can’t hope for the disintegration of the Russian Federation, which some of the American neocons and even people in the Biden administration, many of them are essentially neocons, hope for. They’re actually seeing this as a strategic opportunity to fundamentally weaken the Russian Federation, maybe even lead to its breakup in some ways, and in that way, weaken China. They don’t like China having this massive resource of fossil fuel. Russia is not– people have called Russia just a gas station. Well, it’s pretty clear that it is not. They have a big agricultural sector. They make fertilizer. Their arms manufacturing industry is top-notch. Even if the army isn’t doing very well, apparently, their sophisticated weapons are at world-class levels. So that’s not an insignificant ally for China. For the U.S., weakening, breaking up– so China’s issued some warnings in between the lines, saying, you better be careful what you wish for here, America. A strategic defeat for Putin, the oligarchy, and the Russian armed forces can get extremely dangerous for the world. But I would just say back to the Chinese, well, the same thing for you. If you don’t really try to get this war over with and use your leverage for a UN broker deal, and I should mention, by the way, all these arguments about how Dombas was about to be attacked. Well, even if it was, which again, I don’t see it, but let’s say they were, well, then Russia goes to the UN Security Council and gets a resolution condemning Ukraine for its threat to Donbas, to the autonomous areas, and try to get a resolution, even a resolution supporting an intervention to defend Donbas. They didn’t do that. And that’s what China should have been saying. If you really think this is such a threat, then use the UN Charter, use the UN mechanism, because China is supposed to be a supporter of that. But you can’t make speeches about defending sovereignty and integrity and then be quiet about Russia’s invasion, which is what China is doing. So there’s this mix going on here of people. They want to call it socialism with Chinese characteristics. Well, fine. Without getting too deeply into it, at this time, although I’m happy to do it some other time, is this actually socialism or not? Well, maybe it is sort of but not the kind, certainly, that Marx and Engels imagined in the sense that where’s the democracy for the workers? But okay, let’s set aside that right now. If you say you’re a socialist, then you need to abide by the principles. In fact, the Soviet Union was very involved in some of the international laws that were written that condemned wars without an imminent threat, condemning them as wars of aggression. China has supported all that, has supported that concept. Yeah, I get the problem here and what I said earlier. The biggest criminal and the biggest purveyor of wars of aggression since World War II is the United States. Of course, the biggest criminal prior to World War II was the British Empire. Anglo-American imperialism has more blood on its hands, even than Hitler. The British actually killed more people over the 300 years of the British Empire. Anyway, you don’t need to compare who’s the worst criminal. I get why peoples of the South see the United States as the greater danger. I get why in much of the world, people see the U.S. as the greater danger. In an overall way, I guess it is because it is the power of the United States, the power of American finance, the corporate power; they are the primary obstacles, even on the climate front, in spite of all their rhetoric, pretending they care about climate. But these are not dogmatic, easy, simple rules that the Americans are to blame for everything. If you were in Pakistan and India attacked, or vice versa, or the fight over Kashmir erupted again, it wouldn’t be clear where the U.S. was where Russia and China were. Maybe China is a little more towards Pakistan. The U.S. certainly backs [Narendra] Modi, but India is keeping up its relations with Russia. It’s a complicated jigsaw puzzle there. That being said, if you’re in Pakistan, you’re worried about the Indians. If you’re in India, you’re worried about the Pakistanis. Then the world better worry about a nuclear war between India and Pakistan because that’s enough to create a nuclear winter that could kill a billion people. This is the thing; it doesn’t matter which conflict you look at. The big picture comes back to the issue of climate and the risk of nuclear war. So the fundamental thing we need to be saying to all these powers, including the Chinese, and you want to call yourself socialism with Chinese characteristics, fine. Although I’ve never heard of socialism that didn’t have some national characteristics. I mean, Cubans had Cuban characteristics and so on, so whatever. The fundamental principle of a socialist country is international solidarity amongst working people. So you do what you can to end this war. There’s probably no force in the world right now that has more possibilities for ending this Ukrainian-Russian war than China. There’s still not doing it. Talia Baroncelli Having said that, though, I think there is an argument to be made for the fact that the U.S. is the greatest obstacle to this so-called rules-based international order, with quotation marks. I mean, they use this, at least in my view, they use this as a discursive tool to pursue their own interests. So they keep saying that, we need to condemn the war in Ukraine, we need to condemn Russia because we need to safeguard this rules-based international order. But the problem is that if they actually cared about these customary norms and these international standards, then they would be the first to prosecute Bush and Cheney and to hold their own war crimes to account. But they’ve insulated themselves and ensured that the ICC would never have any jurisdiction over them or issue an arrest warrant for any American officials. I’m sure that’s why the majority of the world is just looking at the West and saying, all your talk of democracy, Trump’s autocracy is BS because you don’t hold yourself to those same standards. But I would ask you, does that then mean because they’re so hypocritical that they shouldn’t hold potential Russian war criminals to the same standards? How should we go about ensuring that there’s some form of international justice? Maybe there would be Ukrainian war criminals as well that would need to be prosecuted. I don’t know. There have been UN reports, or I think, an Amnesty report maybe, that showed that there were war crimes on both sides, but the reports show that there were probably more systematic war crimes perpetrated by Russian troops than Ukrainian. Paul Jay There is such hypocrisy in the American position and the Western position. I include China there, too. I mean, did the Chinese demand accountability for Bush-Cheney after the Iraq War? I don’t remember. Wherever I’ve looked, I can’t see anything. I don’t remember the Chinese coming to the United Nations and asking for war crime trials for Bush-Cheney. They’re far more interested in developing U.S.-China trade. Of course, that’s what should have happened. I mean, it’s a joke. The hypocrisy is so terrible that even prosecuting Trump looks hypocritical because such bigger crimes were committed by former U.S. presidents, including Obama. I’m not even talking about the drone program here, but if I understand it correctly, under international law, President Obama had an obligation to prosecute Bush-Cheney for war crimes. By not doing that, he becomes a collaborator. At the time when Obama was President, and this was a much hotter issue, I interviewed several experts on international law. It wasn’t just the need to prosecute Bush-Cheney; it’s that Obama himself could be prosecuted. But given that the only people that seem to ever get prosecuted are from small countries, it’s not like I shed a tear that these guys get prosecuted, but when the big war criminals don’t, and especially when the American war criminals don’t, then let’s get real about how do we get to a peace and how do we get to dealing with climate and the risk of nuclear war and any attempt to prosecute Putin or other Russians for war crimes. And yeah, they’re never going to go after Ukrainians anyway. And, of course, if you’re going to do it, you might as well go after all war crimes. But it’s a pointless exercise. All it’s going to do is make it impossible to come to an agreement. And if Putin thinks his life is on the line, and not just him, the people around him, they’re going to fight to the death here. So let’s get real about what should be done. Yeah, if you want to prosecute Putin, great. Let’s start with Bush-Cheney and all the other kinds of people. In fact, Larry Wilkerson, who we interview all the time, he said if there is a prosecution of Bush Cheney, he should be on the dock, too. And in fact, Ellsberg has said, and it’s going to be in the film. There’s a clip where Ellsberg says because of his role as a nuclear war planner and in Vietnam if he was charged with war crimes, he wouldn’t plead not guilty. But this idea that the Russian war criminals, sure they are, should be held accountable by Western war criminals makes no point. The fundamental problem here is we need to stop the killing of ordinary people. The slaughter of ordinary people has to stop. This accountability of the Russians, it’s a propaganda game because the truth is, I would doubt the Americans even really want Putin held accountable because that sets a precedent. If you have a war of aggression and you’re going to do now what was done to the Nazis in the Nuremberg trials, well, maybe yeah. Maybe there should be some Americans in Nuremberg-style trials. Of course, there should be. Anyway, it’s a distraction at this point. Talia Baroncelli Well, I have one final question, and that would be, how do you see things playing out in Russia? How do you think the Russian people are going to react if there are several years of war? It’s obviously hard to see into the future, but the current sanction regimes have not had a really horrible, deleterious, short-term effect on the Russian economy because Russia and the central bank they’ve learned how to isolate themselves from the effect of these sanctions, and they have China as a huge trading partner. So I think the short-term effect hasn’t been that measurable. But what do you think will happen long term if they don’t repeal sanctions and if this war continues? Do you think we’ll see hunger strikes or any antiwar movement? Paul Jay I don’t know the answer. I know there are two possibilities, maybe more, but there’s one that the Chinese describe in, like I said, in the Global Times articles I’ve seen, and that is, if it looks like the Putin government is going to be humiliated, if it looks like they may really fall, if it looks like the Russian Federation starts to even come apart, then this becomes a much bigger deal than it already is. Meaning that the Russian people, now I’m quoting the Chinese article, start to see this not as a “special military operation” that doesn’t touch most of their lives that much. They start seeing it as a great patriotic war. Amongst much of the Russian population, certainly not all, but much, as it is in the United States, there is a toxic mix of religion and nationalism that forms much of people’s identity. If people feel that identity so threatened, their whole existence– in the United States, we’re number one, we’re number one. Democracy, democracy. How many working people go off to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other wars and really truly believe they are fighting to defend the identity of their people, the freedom of their people? Well, the same thing’s going on in Russia. Many people truly believe in God, the Russian God– it’s like back in the viking days. The vikings had their gods. The British had their gods. They go to war to see which gods are going to win. Well, much of the Russian people’s identity is based on this. As we saw with the German people in the lead up to World War II, this being humiliated, as the Germans felt after the Versailles Treaty and the deliberate humiliation of Germany after the end of World War I, and they probably would have done the same thing after World War II if it hadn’t been for the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan and wanting to help Germany get back on its capitalist feet certainly had economic considerations to promoting American capital in Europe. But if there hadn’t been the Soviet Union, they would have stuck it to the Germans a lot worse than they did after World War II. Anyway, so one scenario is that the Americans keep the pressure on, keep trying to actually bring down Putin, and keep hoping for the worst for Russia and by implication China. Or one, yes, an antiwar movement develops in Russia. Boris Kagarlitsky thinks, and I’ve interviewed him a few times. He thinks the Russian military is against what’s going on, or much of the leadership is. He thinks maybe they’ll intervene at some point. I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong. Or maybe the American oligarchy and American capitalists, they get this is getting to the point of risking their own assets. I’ve been saying my joke about my film on nuclear weapons is Wall Street has said they have a responsibility to defend the assets of their investors. Well, don’t you have the responsibility to defend the asses of your investors? Maybe they get that this ain’t the best thing for money making. Maybe the Russian oligarchs get this isn’t the best way for us to be rich. Maybe. World War I and World War II, they did eventually end, but there was a craziness on the German side, a metaphysical ideology that went with German nationalism. One hopes in Russia, maybe they can be more pragmatic about it. But the Americans have to create an opening for that to happen, and maybe the Chinese can facilitate it. Otherwise, we’re into shit. Let’s be straight about it. I don’t know how long the war goes on. As long as the war goes on, I don’t expect, unless there’s a great reverse change in policy, I don’t think the Russian state as such is going to be threatened by the way it is now if it just keeps going. So I don’t think Putin is deliberately going to use a tactical nuclear weapon unless he’s really on the edge of a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. And that’s not out of the question. So is the U.S. going to push it to that point? Then the second problem is the longer this goes on, the more opportunities there are for miscalculation. So that missile that landed in Poland, at least the Americans quickly said it was not Russian. It turned out it wasn’t Russian. So the Americans aren’t looking for an excuse for a nuclear war here because they could have quickly blamed the Russians for that missile. But what happens if a Ukrainian missile of some kind, or more than one, some shit hits the fan and it’s heading towards Moscow, and they don’t actually know what it is? This is the problem. It’s one of the main points of the film. With our intercontinental ballistic missiles, there’s very little time to decide what is on your radar screen. We’ve had miscalculation after miscalculation where we’ve come very close to nuclear war. So the tenser this gets, the longer it goes, and the more chance for miscalculation there is. So maybe some rationality, at least on the nuclear issue, enters some of these ruling classes’ heads. I mean, the Chinese are concerned about this. You can see it, like I say, in Global Times. Even if the Chinese have nothing to do with it, if some nuclear weapons are used, it will lead to the end of the world. If it becomes a full-out nuclear war, there’s no China left after that. So they certainly do get the risk of all this. So one hopes that there’ll be some rationality. I’m not seeing that there’s a movement now or yet. The repression in Russia is very strong. Talia Baroncelli Yeah, you can be arrested for 15 years or something. Paul Jay It’s kind of weird what I’m being told. Some people like Kagarlitsky speak out quite openly to the foreign press, not domestically, and they don’t do anything about it. Then other people are going to jail for five or 10 years for saying it’s a war, not a special military operation. But the repression is there, no doubt. Even if antiwar sentiment is rising, it’s not breaking out in a way that’s going to change things. The other problem is if the world really goes into a deep recession, who knows whether that’s happening or not? Anyway, we’re on a knife’s edge, and the solution is simple. The Americans have to bloody well stop provoking and pushing this. Of course, the Russians need to negotiate and stop making completely unreasonable demands. The same thing goes for the Ukrainians. One hopes the Chinese, whatever you want to call them, they find it in their interest to really try to facilitate this thing to end. Talia Baroncelli Well, Paul, it was really great getting your insights on these really tricky issues. We haven’t seen you in a while, so it’s great to hear what you had to say about all of these things and about the war. So thank you. Paul Jay Thank you. Talia Baroncelli Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. Please do go to our website, theAnalysis.news and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Please do get onto our mailing list as well, so you’ll be notified every time a new episode comes out. Also, go to our YouTube channel, theAnalysis-news, hit the subscribe button, and hit the bell. That way, you’re always informed once a new episode drops. Thank you. Select one or choose any amount to donate whatever you like any amount $5 $15 $25 $50 $100 $500 $1,000 Custom Amount $ Make this donation each month (optional) User my donation to help support the upcoming documentary "How to stop a nuclear war" (optional) Donate with Credit Card Never miss another story Subscribe to theAnalysis.news - Newsletter Email(Required) Name(Required) First Last Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_5" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_10').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') >= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_10');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_10').length > 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') >= 0;var is_form = form_content.length > 0 && ! is_redirect && ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_10').val();gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [10, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [10]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_10').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_10').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [10, current_page]);} );} ); 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

Linda Campbell, Director of the Detroit People's Platform, has worked as a community organizer in Detroit for decades. She speaks about local initiatives which advocate for investment in affordable housing and oppose the public financing of big real estate projects which have historically contributed to community land dispossession. She also applauds the Michigan Democrats' recent repeal of right-to-work legislation and calls upon the political leadership to fight for higher wages, particularly for non-union workers not covered by prevailing wage protections.

Col. Larry Wilkerson speaks about how the media's portrayal of the U.S. invasion of Iraq barely encapsulates the damage wrought by the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing.” He also addresses recent developments in the Middle East, including Israel's increasingly belligerent policy on Iran, how the Saudi-Iran deal might end the Saudi blockade of Yemen, and the military significance of Israel being moved from U.S. European Command to U.S. Central Command.

{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/theanalysis.news\/honest-government-ad-visit-new-south-wales\/#arve-youtube-pywfylqqnhg6425e0c82d52b660431761","type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PYwfylqqNhg?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=1&enablejsapi=1","name":"Honest Government Ad | Visit New South Wales! - @thejuicemedia","thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/theanalysis.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/honest-gov-wales.jpg","uploadDate":"2023-03-30T11:43:39+00:00","author":"theAnalysis-news","description":"The NSW Government has made a tourism ad ahead of the coming election, and it\u2019s surprisingly honest and informative. This video was originally published by The Juice Media on March 16, 2023. ListenDonateSubscribeMusic"} The NSW Government has made a tourism ad ahead of the coming election, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative. This video was originally published by The Juice Media on March 16, 2023. .kt-post-loop_9edcbd-b4 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_9edcbd-b4 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_9edcbd-b4 .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_9edcbd-b4 .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_9edcbd-b4 .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_9edcbd-b4 .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_9edcbd-b4 .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_9edcbd-b4 .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_9edcbd-b4 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_9edcbd-b4 .kb-filter-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:2px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:5px;padding-right:8px;padding-bottom:5px;padding-left:8px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;} Honest Government Ad | Visit New South Wales! Honest Government Ad | the Safeguard Mechanism Honest Government Ad | AUKUS Honest Government Ad | Julian Assange Honest Government Ad | Visit Western Australia Juice Media Satire: Australian “Values” News Corp Bargaining Code – Biting Satire From Juice Media Juice Media Nails Australien Government Climate “Policy” Juice Media Take Down of QAnon – we wish it was just satire Listen Donate Subscribe Music Select one or choose any amount to donate whatever you like any amount $5 $15 $25 $50 $100 $500 $1,000 Custom Amount $ Make this donation each month (optional) User my donation to help support the upcoming documentary "How to stop a nuclear war" (optional) Donate with Credit Card Never miss another story Subscribe to theAnalysis.news - Newsletter Email(Required) Name(Required) First Last Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_10').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') >= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_10');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_10').length > 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') >= 0;var is_form = form_content.length > 0 && ! is_redirect && ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_10').val();gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [10, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [10]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_10').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_10').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [10, current_page]);} );} );

Noam Chomsky und Daniel Ellsberg diskutieren über die Absichten der USA im Ukraine-Krieg und die Vorbereitungen für einen Krieg mit China.

{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/theanalysis.news\/fossil-fuel-industry-phaseout-three-critical-worker-guarantees-for-a-just-transition\/#arve-youtube-qc4nswnwhka6427932078c4e766320712","type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qC4nSWNWhKA?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=1&enablejsapi=1","name":"Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out: Three Critical Worker Guarantees for a Just Transition","thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/theanalysis.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/gpe2023Q1Pollin.jpg","uploadDate":"2023-03-27T13:53:12+00:00","author":"theAnalysis-news","description":"Robert Pollin says PERI research findings published in Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out and Just Transition demonstrate Just Transition policies are easily affordable in all high-income countries & imperative for any serious prospect of success in climate stabilization plans. Lynn Fries interviews"} Robert Pollin says PERI research findings published in Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out and Just Transition demonstrate Just Transition policies are easily affordable in all high-income countries & imperative for any serious prospect of success in climate stabilization plans. Lynn Fries interviews Pollin on GPEnewsdocs. .kt-post-loop_7c9518-97 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_7c9518-97 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_7c9518-97 .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_7c9518-97 .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_7c9518-97 .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_7c9518-97 .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_7c9518-97 .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_7c9518-97 .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_7c9518-97 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_7c9518-97 .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;} Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out: Three Critical Worker Guarantees for a Just Transition Net Zero Commitments Dangerously Misleading – Peter Carter The False Promise of Carbon Capture and Storage Exposing Apocalyptic Economics with Steve Keen Navy Puts Climate Change at Top of Threat List – Larry Wilkerson State of Big Tech 2022: Dismantling National & Global Digital Enclosures Real Climate Solutions are No Mystery – Pollin How to Fight Inflation Without Attacking Workers – Pollin Debunking Net Zero, Carbon Offsets, Nature-Based Solutions, Climate Smart Agriculture, Bioeconomy… A Warning From Chomsky and Ellsberg Biden’s Bill has Significant Funding for Climate but 10% of What’s Needed – Bob Pollin Progressive Running Against a Corp Dem in Boeing Country The Capitalist Solution to ‘Save’ the Planet: Make it an Asset Class & Sell it Daniel Ellsberg on Nuclear War and Ukraine A Dire Warning About the End of Human Civilization Nationalize Fossil Fuel to Fight Climate Change and Inflation – Bob Pollin Fossil Fuel and Private Equity Love Trump – Thomas Ferguson Pt 3/4 Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change Humanity will not be saved by promises COP 26: End the Cynicism and Denial – pt 2/2 COP 26: End the Cynicism and Denial – pt 1/2 House Committee Chairwoman Maloney Nails Oil Executives Stop Subsidizing Wall St., Start Subsidizing Workers for High Energy Costs – Bob Pollin Biden Heads to COP 26 Throttled by Manchin and Trumpists – with Bob Pollin A Conversation With Paul Jay – Pt 4 Current Climate Extremes Double at 2 Degrees Warming and Quadruple at 3 – Lead IPCC Author A Just Transition Now or Climate Disaster is Inevitable Not Much Climate Plan in Biden Jobs Plan – Robert Pollin Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. Today I am joined by PERI’s Robert Pollin. As part of PERI’s global project to fight climate change, Pollin will be talking about just transition policies. PERI has long researched how robust Just Transition policies are imperative to advance a comprehensive global climate stabilization program that offers any serious prospect of success. Today we will look into evidence that these just transition policies should also be understood as an entirely realistic prospect for all high-income countries. This based on new PERI research findings released this February in the paper titled Fossil Fuel Industry Phase-Out and Just Transition. This is a preliminary working paper that extends PERI’s published studies on Just Transition programs in the U.S. into other major high income economies notably Germany, the UK, the European Union and more briefly Japan and Canada. Joining us from Massachusetts, Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of PERI, the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Welcome, Bob. ROBERT POLLIN: Thank you for having me Lynn. Happy to be on. FRIES: Bob we will be talking about PERI research findings on what is needed for fossil fuel industry dependent workers and communities to make a just transition from one kind of an economy to another. Let’s start on why this is imperative for a successful climate stabilization plan. POLLIN: Yeah. So, we face this situation where and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change/IPCC, just put out another study Monday which has summarized what they’ve been saying at least since 2018. That we have to basically be at zero fossil fuel emissions by 2050. We have to be at a 50% reduction relative to 2005 by 2030 which is only six and a half years from now. Now that means we have to dramatically consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas to produce energy and by 2050 phase it out basically entirely. So that is an imperative with respect to the climate crisis. Now, it obviously impacts a lot of different entities, organizations, governments, people, communities. So one of the big factors here is that there are people, not just rich shareholders of the fossil fuel companies or oil sheiks, there are ordinary people whose lives and communities are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry. And so what do we do about that? What do we say about? Well, as a basic, simple matter of ethics, we have to be able to offer something like a fair transition, a just transition for all the workers and communities. That’s an ethical imperative. But even if you have no ethics, even if you don’t care at all about the people that are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry and the communities, there’s no way politically we can advance a robust and adequate fossil fuel phase out, in other words, a adequate climate stabilization program, unless we do something to address the needs of this community and these people, because justifiably, they’re going put up political resistance. Now we’ve seen in the United States just how far that resistance can go. Because I mean, there are several factors that are behind the Trump phenomenon. But a big one was him saying: you know, the environmentalists don’t care about you workers in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania. They want to destroy your communities. And whether that’s true or not, it had a lot of resonance. And so it is absolutely as just a mere political reality. We have to show that if we’re going to phase out fossil fuels to save the planet, which we have to, we also have to mount a vigorous, robust just transition for the workers and communities whose jobs are going to get phased out. FRIES: So in discussing what is needed for as just transition, you say in the paper that the first questions we need to ask are what should be the overall goal of just transition policies. And then the next questions should be what specific measures need to be implemented to accomplish that. Briefly comment on that. POLLIN: So just transition policies have been around in various forms for a long time. This particular paper focuses on high income countries. I’ve done work in developing countries as well. But this one is focused on high income countries. So we have had phase out programs, maybe the, the most advanced have been in Germany for decades because of the phase out of the coal industry in Germany. The United Kingdom has phased out its coal industry without doing a whole lot for the workers. In the United States we’ve had just transition or transition, let’s say, policies around the workers who are impacted by changes in trade policy opening of free trade. And for the most part, those policies have been minimal. They have not provided any significant support. In fact, in the US what are called transition policies officially, unofficially by union members are called burial insurance. In other words here, go off and die. Here’s a few thousand dollars. And that is generally what has been provided to date including in Germany, though somewhat better. So those policies have really focused on providing retraining for other jobs. They’ve provided some minimal level of job placement support to find a new job; some modest level of relocation support if people have to move to get another job. And that’s basically it. Even the European Union with their Green Deal has at least in rhetoric made very strong statements as to the significance, the centrality of just transition policies. Uh, Franz Timmermans, the Vice Chair of the European Commission, he himself says, you know: just transitions are central. We need everybody’s support for this movement out of fossil fuels. Yet the policies that they are implementing to date are, they are better than others, but they’re basically focused only on job search, retraining, and relocation. What I’ve been advocating now as you mentioned, thank you, for several years, is the development of just transition policies that are much more robust. It includes simple things, not just job retraining but a job guarantee. Not just any old job, but the jobs that will pay at least for a few years the difference between any salary loss that a worker will have faced. And then finally, critically, is guarantees for worker’s pensions. Because if we’re phasing out this industry, obviously, these companies are facing financial challenges. And we cannot assume that the first thing that they’re going to do is guarantee their workers’ pensions. And so the policy has to guarantee the pensions. I should just say as a personal anecdote, I’ve had several interesting stories are around this issue, but the most interesting, the most valuable…I had done a study in 2014, a big study on Green Transition for the United States. And in doing that study we were looking for endorsements from respective people. And one of them was somebody named Bill Spriggs, who’s the chief economist of the AFL CIO. He was at the time, and he still is. And he’s also a friend mine. We asked many people for endorsements. They all wrote nice things except for Bill Spriggs. And he said: I can’t endorse this because your transition policy is just fluff. It’s just like nice words, platitudes and it doesn’t address the real needs of workers. And he was right. He was right. And at that time, I said: okay, you’re right, Bill. And from now on I’m going take this issue much more seriously. So that’s really how I got into the issue. Recognizing that the kinds of things that I was saying, the kinds of things that were out there in the policy world are not serious. FRIES: We’re talking about fossil fuel industry phase out and just transition in high income economies. The working paper released this February covers PERI’s study of Germany, the UK, the European Union, Japan, and Canada. It also connects the dots between all the above high income economies and that of the US. Talk more about read-throughs in your findings across all high income countries. POLLIN: Yeah, so basically in the US as well, I mean, the just transition policies that are in place right now are slim to nothing. In the case of Canada, they had a big commission, study. They interviewed workers; they interviewed people in the community. It was an official government commission. And again, they say nice things but there is no commitment of anything to date. At least as far as I know and I was looking at it pretty carefully. That’s also true in Japan. Nice phrases not much. UK, Germany, better. Germany as I said has had some significant commitment for a long time with respect to the phase out of the coal industry in the Ruhr Valley. It’s often held up as a really valuable example and it is relative to the alternatives. But even there in Germany, the level of financial commitment and the types of commitments: there is no job guarantee; there is no pension guarantee; there’s no wage guarantee. And those are the three critical things I think that are central. So the work that I’ve been doing on this question subsequent to my friend Bill Spriggs fairly criticizing me, fairly criticizing me, was to figure out, well, what actually would constitute robust just transition policy that you could present to workers in their communities and keep a straight face in saying that this actually is a just transition. So, we’ve done it for several states. West Virginia is one of them. And so for the case of West Virginia, we go through this exercise. How many workers in the state are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry? And the number in West Virginia is about 40,000. And not just coal miners but people in the coal industry; everyone in the fossil fuel, in the oil and gas industry; plus everyone in ancillary sectors  anything to do that are feeding into coal and oil and gas production. So that’s 40,000 people. So then we say, well, okay, 40,000 people. Then what does a realistic phase out look like for those 40,000 people if we assume by 2050 all their jobs are going to be gone? But it’s critical that not all of their jobs are going be gone tomorrow. They’re going to be gone over a generation basically by 2050. So, when we calculate the rate of annual job loss and incorporate the demographics of the age levels of the workers so we are able to take account of voluntary retirements. What we’re really looking at is about 1400 workers per year who are going to lose their jobs and want another. So the focus of the study then is okay, we’re going to give these people: guarantee them a new job; guarantee them a wage equivalent to what they’re making now; and guarantee their pensions in addition to the other things. I’m not against helping people with job search retraining or relocation. It’s just those should be seen as supplemental to: Yes, you will have a job; yes, you will not face a significant income loss; and yes, you will not lose your pension. That’s the critical thing. So, we do all that and we take account of these workers and how much they’re making now. We also do this as part of a green transition in West Virginia. And we say, well yes West Virginia is going to be getting investments to build a clean energy economy that’s going to create jobs. And we estimate that that will create 25,000 jobs in the state. Meanwhile, we’re losing about 1400 jobs in the state. So one simple way to think about a transition is, well, as many as possible, move people from the fossil industry into the emerging nascent green energy industry. And so then we did all that and we said, okay, you know what? It’s going to cost about $40,000 per year per worker to do everything. And that ends up being when we added up for the 1400 workers per year, it ends up being equal to about 0.2% of the GDP of West Virginia. And this is the most fossil fuel dependent region in the country. So it’s 0.2%. When I’ve done the same exercise for the whole United States, the cost as a share of the overall economy as a share of GDP is one 10th that of West Virginia, 0.002%; yeah, two 100ths  of 1%. So this is eminently affordable even in West Virginia. West Virginia is the test case because the costs proportionally will be higher. Anyway, so those are the main results. And so the point that we conclude with is this a robust just transition is viable and it is the ethical right thing to do. FRIES: I should note for viewers that the US findings you refer to are based on studies of Just Transition programs PERI has published for the US states of California, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maine, Colorado, Washington State and New York State. So the West Virginia study is one of a series that PERI has published on eight states and the US economy overall. In the paper released this February, the West Virginia just transition program features prominently as a case study drawn from Peril’s research findings. Why so much focus on West Virginia? POLLIN: It’s like if you can tell a story that’s reasonable for West Virginia, you can tell a story basically for any place.As I said thinking about say Trump. Trump got 70% of the votes in West Virginia in 2016 and again in 2020, 67%. And a lot of his appeal is, you know, he’s against all these environmentalists that want to take away our jobs. So how can we tell a story that is convincing, that is really credible for the workers and the communities in West Virginia? That really was our aim. And I think, who knows in the end, but we did have success in the sense that we did present this in accordance with the the mine workers Union. And the overall leadership of the union movement, AFL CIO, in the state. We were commissioned by a wonderful organization called Reimagine Appalachia. So it is really trying to think about not just West Virginia, but the four states Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia all transitioning out of their dependence on fossil fuels and into a new clean energy economy. They certainly can do it. And if we can do it there, again, we can do it anywhere. FRIES: Bob as we sum up, round off on some key implications and conclusions of your findings on Just Transition programs in high income economies. POLLIN: So again West Virginia has a very high concentration of fossil fuel workers. Ten times the level relative to the overall country, the US economy. And so again, the implication is actually analytically financially it is easy to do a robust, fair transition that is not, quote, burial insurance. That it is treating people with respect, understanding that their livelihoods are dependent. This is not the same as if you are a shareholder of a fossil fuel company. If you’re a shareholder of a fossil fuel company and you know the company is going to be phased out, well sell your shares, and buy something else. The fossil fuel companies last year made $200 billion, the six biggest. So it’s a fine time to sell and recognize that this is going to be a phase out. And it’s not going to affect your home. It is not going affect your pension. It’s not going to affect anything about your life if you’re a shareholder of one of these companies. On the other hand, if you are a worker and this is your full-time job or you’re a member of the community, let’s say you’re a school teacher in a community whose tax revenue is dependent on fossil fuels, you know, this is massive. Your livelihood, your community is facing a threatening of ending all the things that you’re used to. And that this has to be seen as a front and center critical feature of any overall climate program. Yes, we obviously have to think about how we get off of fossil fuels. We have to think about how we stop destroying the Amazon Rain Forest. Those are good starters but an equally important starter is to think about the workers and communities who are going to face major negative impacts unless there is a just transition program. FRIES: This then brings us back to the point at the open of our conversation on why just transition programs are so imperative not only on ethical grounds but for achieving the level of political support needed to move onto a viable global climate stabilization path. In other words, for achieving the political support to phase out the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy and to replace the global fossil fuel energy infrastructure with a zero emission, renewables dominant infrastructure. POLLIN: It is a major, major challenge. I mean, we’ve seen what happened even with the Biden administration, which overall in my opinion, has been better on these issues than I would’ve thought they were going to be. But they did a major backsliding just this past week or last week when They agreed to allow the development of oil exploration in Alaska on public land. Which they, you know, Biden had said: no way I’m never going to do this. Well, somehow now he’s doing it. So, obviously he was intensively lobbied. We have to be able to fight back. And one of the tools for fighting back is to say to the workers and their communities this is a program, a just transition program for you. And that you do not face this loss of income, employment, pensions that would be devastating for people’s livelihoods. FRIES: Among other corporate tactics to block the phasing out of the fossil fuel industry, we see the financing card get played. The argument being in the case of a just transition that: oh we can’t afford it. So for high income countries, this study tables evidence that effectively shows that argument does not hold water. Is that a key takeaway? POLLIN: That is the key takeaway. I mean, again, I think a lot of people say: yes definitely just transition we’re all for it. As I said Frans Timmermans made that quite explicit in the documents of the European Green Deal. It’s all in there now. That is a new development but it’s in there. But the point is what does it really mean? And if we’re really going do it in a way that protects people’s livelihoods and communities is the cost just outrageous, unaffordable? And the answer is clearly no. Again, if you can do it in West Virginia, you can do it in Canada, you can do it in the UK. And if we’re talking about in the US overall, two 100ths of 1% of GDP, you don’t even notice it. In West Virginia it’s 10 times more as a share of GDP. That means it’s two tenths of 1%. These are funds that are available. I mean, just in the last year the subsidies for fossil fuel companies when the price of oil went up due to the COVID shortages and the war in Ukraine fossil fuel subsidies doubled from about $500 billion to $1 trillion. So $500 billion for subsidizing fossil fuel companies when we’re supposed to be phasing them out. That was found immediately. There was no question. FRIES: You’ve been informing policy makers at the state level, at the federal level and holding town hall meetings across the United States. Do you find you are getting much traction? POLLIN: Well, actually, I’ve been in discussions even with people in the White House. So yeah, I think so. Yeah it’s not easy because obviously this isn’t simply a matter of: oh, that sounds good. That’s logical. There are huge interests involved. And I’m sure the fossil fuel industry itself recognizes that if there is a robust set of just transition policies, well then that undermines their own lobbying in behalf of themselves. Because they’re saying: Hey, we’re the ones that are keeping this economy alive. You know, there was a piece in the Financial Times a couple weeks ago with respect to this doubling the 200 billion in profits and the CEO of Chevron, whose name I can’t remember now, he just says: fossil fuels run the world and we’re going to keep running the world. We’re running the world now. We’re going to run the world in 10 years. We’re going to run the world in 20 years. He just out and out says it. And if he’s right, then you know what, then we’re facing a climate disaster. There’s no question about it. FRIES: And at the town hall level do you see resistance building? POLLIN: One of the tests is I’ve, you know, I’ve presented this to working people, union meetings and so forth. And there has been serious criticism and I understand it. The most honest telling criticism I’ve gotten is: gee, professor, these are great numbers, look really good, and you’re going to keep writing your papers and you’ve got a job and you’ve got a pension and you’ve written these numbers and that’s fine. But, you know, nobody’s going to pay attention and we’re not going to get this policy and we’re going to lose our jobs. And what am I supposed to say to that? The best thing we can say is, you know, people are fighting on your side, including you on this show by having me on, thank you. What we have seen, let’s say the most dramatic, I would say, traction has been in California where our study, our equivalent study was commissioned by the union movement in California, by the actual union movement. And about 20 unions explicitly endorsed the program that we had laid out. Including the oil refinery workers, the oil refinery workers union endorsed our study. And the leader wrote a brilliant article in the Los Angeles Times saying: we know just transition policies are usually a bunch of just rhetoric that mean nothing and people forget. We know that. But if we’re going to be serious, this program laid out by the PER researchers is real and we endorse it. And if this is the kind of thing that our policy makers are willing to put in place, then we’re for a just transition. And we know we have to get our fossil fuels. FRIES: This California study and of course all PERI’s studies on Just Transition programs are available online at peri.umass.edu including the new paper on high income economies featured in today’s conversation. For now, we are going to have to leave it there. Robert Pollin, thank you. And thank you for joining us in this segment on Fossil Fuel Phase Out and Just Transition with Robert Pollin. Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also the founder and President of PEAR (Pollin Energy and Retrofits), an Amherst, MA-based green energy company operating throughout the United States. Select one or choose any amount to donate whatever you like any amount $5 $15 $25 $50 $100 $500 $1,000 Custom Amount $ Make this donation each month (optional) User my donation to help support the upcoming documentary "How to stop a nuclear war" (optional) Donate with Credit Card var gform;gform||(document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",function(){gform.scriptsLoaded=!0}),window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){gform.domLoaded=!0}),gform={domLoaded:!1,scriptsLoaded:!1,initializeOnLoaded:function(o){gform.domLoaded&&gform.scriptsLoaded?o():!gform.domLoaded&&gform.scriptsLoaded?window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",o):document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",o)},hooks:{action:{},filter:{}},addAction:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("action",o,n,r,t)},addFilter:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("filter",o,n,r,t)},doAction:function(o){gform.doHook("action",o,arguments)},applyFilters:function(o){return gform.doHook("filter",o,arguments)},removeAction:function(o,n){gform.removeHook("action",o,n)},removeFilter:function(o,n,r){gform.removeHook("filter",o,n,r)},addHook:function(o,n,r,t,i){null==gform.hooks[o][n]&&(gform.hooks[o][n]=[]);var e=gform.hooks[o][n];null==i&&(i=n+"_"+e.length),gform.hooks[o][n].push({tag:i,callable:r,priority:t=null==t?10:t})},doHook:function(n,o,r){var t;if(r=Array.prototype.slice.call(r,1),null!=gform.hooks[n][o]&&((o=gform.hooks[n][o]).sort(function(o,n){return o.priority-n.priority}),o.forEach(function(o){"function"!=typeof(t=o.callable)&&(t=window[t]),"action"==n?t.apply(null,r):r[0]=t.apply(null,r)})),"filter"==n)return r[0]},removeHook:function(o,n,t,i){var r;null!=gform.hooks[o][n]&&(r=(r=gform.hooks[o][n]).filter(function(o,n,r){return!!(null!=i&&i!=o.tag||null!=t&&t!=o.priority)}),gform.hooks[o][n]=r)}}); Never miss another story Subscribe to theAnalysis.news - Newsletter Email(Required) Name(Required) First Last Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_10').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') >= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_10');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_10').length > 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') >= 0;var is_form = form_content.length > 0 && ! is_redirect && ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_10').val();gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [10, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [10]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_10').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_10').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [10, current_page]);} );} ); “Robert Pollin is an American economist and self-described socialist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and founding co-director of its Political Economy Research Institute. He has been described as a leftist economist and is a supporter of egalitarianism.” 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

In this episode of The Source, Zain Raza speaks with independent journalist, author, and economist Dr. Shir Hever about how and why his lecture on child labor in Palestine was abruptly censored by the GEW (Education and Science Workers' Union) in Germany. They also talk about a recent Forbidden Stories article detailing how Israeli companies played a key role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and continue to provide hacking services that influence countries' elections. They examine the China-brokered peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the international significance it has for Israel. To conclude the interview, they take a look at recent developments between Israel and Palestine, focusing on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial reform in Israel.

{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/theanalysis.news\/bill-black-on-svb-a-bipartisan-clown-car-crash\/#arve-youtube-6ydosph7tp4641b52e4c4280656772948","type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6yDoSPH7tp4?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=1&enablejsapi=1","name":"Bill Black on SVB: A Bipartisan Clown Car Crash","thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/6yDoSPH7tp4\/hqdefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2023-03-22T15:10:48+00:00","author":"theAnalysis-news","description":"The legendary regulator and white-collar criminologist William K. Black explains why, contrary to corporate media coverage, the bank failures set off by the Silicon Valley Bank crash were absolutely not sudden, unexpected, or unforeseeable, and why none of the regulations Democrats or Republicans ar"} The legendary regulator and white-collar criminologist William K. Black explains why, contrary to corporate media coverage, the bank failures set off by the Silicon Valley Bank crash were absolutely not sudden, unexpected, or unforeseeable, and why none of the regulations Democrats or Republicans are talking about would have stopped them. .kt-post-loop_1d07a2-95 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_1d07a2-95 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_1d07a2-95 .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_1d07a2-95 .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_1d07a2-95 .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_1d07a2-95 .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_1d07a2-95 .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_1d07a2-95 .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_1d07a2-95 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_1d07a2-95 .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;} Bill Black on SVB: A Bipartisan Clown Car Crash 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  Capitalism’s Structural Crisis and the Global Revolt The Story Behind “The Con” Why the Media Doesn’t Understand Control Fraud Michael Hudson: Biden Between BlackRock and a Hard Place Bill Black pt 9/9 — The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One 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 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 Polarization, Then a Crash: Michael Hudson on the Rentier Economy Peoples’ Lives vs. Profits of Pharmaceutical Monopolies – GPE Newsdocs FED’s $10 Trillion Defends Assets of the Rich – Michael Hudson Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Music Colin Bruce Anthes Welcome to The Analysis. I’m Colin Bruce Anthes. In a minute, I’ll be speaking with Dr. Bill Black on bank failures and what is to be done. Please remember to like, subscribe, ring the bell, and consider hitting the donate button to support our work. Stay tuned. Only 15 years after the last global financial crisis, three American banks failed in one week, and now Credit Suisse, after 166 years of independence, has been purchased by a rival bank with state intervention from the Swiss National Government due to a crisis in confidence. To discuss how and why this has taken place and what should be done next, we’re privileged to be joined by one of the major voices on the subject. Dr. William K. Black is a lawyer, an academic, an expert in white collar crime. He has personally served as one of the major bank regulators in the United States. He helped develop the concept of control fraud. He testified to Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, during which time he accused Timothy Geitner of engaging in a massive cover up of fraud. And he’s the author of the seminal book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Bill Black, welcome back to the analysis. Bill Black Thank you. It’s great to be back. Colin Bruce Anthes Before we jump on into all of the things that are going wrong in corporate finance right now, I wanted to ask you a big systemic question that I don’t see being asked very often, which is about why corporate finance has the scale over our lives that it does. There are other ways of doing banking and finance. I live in Canada, where the province of Alberta. It’s a very large scale public bank. That’s in one of our most conservative provinces. I’ve done a lot of my banking at a credit union, which is a cooperative financial institution. I get democratic voting rights on the Board of Directors. I ask this not in a let’s burn all the banks down sense, but genuinely, if everything was regulated perfectly, if everything was running tickety boo, what benefits should I, as a working class person, expect to be able to get from these corporate banks under those ideal circumstances that I could not get at a public institution or a cooperative institution? Bill Black Well, if I put on my took and lean back in my Chesterfield while paying my hydro bill and channel my semi Canadian from growing up in Detroit, Michigan, they’re basically three big things as to why finance is so critically important. First, finance blows up the world, and that’s really important. Second, finance affects everything. You want to know why there’s not enough spending on the environment? Well, that’s largely thanks to finance on how it allocates. Third, particularly in the US context, there’s enormous predation, typically on the basis of race and ethnicity, sometimes on the basis of age, and sometimes the basis of gender, and sometimes, of course, those things interact and such. So the combination of those three things means that lots of people lose money or are in crushing levels of debt, particularly, again, in a place like the United States, from their university debt and from payday lending. And so people are often caught in debt traps that crush their life choices. Those are the big three reasons why finance is such a big deal. By the way, I’m sorry, the fourth one is supposed to be that it’s supposed to be the motor that drives innovation and growth. Not so much, but that’s the theory. Colin Bruce Anthes When we look at this, let’s go specifically into Silicon Valley Bank, which is the spark that has ignited a pretty big fire now. And it was really a run that happened in the span of one day. And this is a bank that was highly engaged in tech startups. The Silicon Valley Bank failure was immediately portrayed as something that came out of the blue that happened very suddenly. Since then, we have had the Democratic Party accuse the Republicans of having caused it through the rollbacks of some regulations that happened under the Trump administration, which did happen. From your perspective, part A of this question is from your perspective as someone who has been a bank regulator, was this out of the blue? Was this sudden? Bill Black It wasn’t remotely out of the blue. And the fact that it’s being treated as if it were out of the blue is enormous tell in the poker sense of that word as to the utter collapse of regulation, not, of course, just under the Trump administration, but under the last five administration’s. Colin Bruce Anthes So that takes us back to, would you say, when Glass Steagall was repealed? Bill Black Yes. So Glass Steele’s removal was incredibly stupid. It was one of those things where there’s a conservative maxim that makes a lot of sense, and it’s called, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, if things are working, and Glass Steagall worked brilliantly. And the only thing that it wasn’t working for was bankers. It was working great for all those other things that I talked about that finance is supposed to do, and in preventing those nasty things that finance actually does. So they had to get rid of it, and both the Republican and Democrats worked together like chums to achieve that. And it was done in a particularly cynical fashion where they did a deliberately unlawful merger. But under Glass Steele, you would have a year to unwind it. But it would have meant unwinding what was at that time the biggest financial merger, not just in the United States, but in the world in history. And so, of course, the bankers knew that would never happen. They held the government hostage, and the government let itself be held hostage. So that actually occurred during the Clinton administration, but that wasn’t done over their opposition. They were all for it. But repealing Glass Steadle was terrible. It played a role, all completely negative in the great financial crisis. It’s got a peripheral role in the current crisis. It would have been bigger in Switzerland, except of course Switzerland never had a glass steel, which is one of the reasons its banking has been so corrupt, not for 10 years, but for over a century. Let me go to the stuff about the Trump legislation. Was the Trump legislation terrible? Yes. Was it sold on the basis of lies? Yes. Were Democrats heavily involved in making that happen? Yes. Not all Democrats, but a significant portion. And the lie was, we’re doing this for community banks. This is the little bank in the rural village that doesn’t much exist anymore in the United States. And it is true that government regulation tends to be more costly per unit in those smaller banks. But you got to admire the chute spot. They solve this as we need to therefore remove restrictions on banks up to $250 billion in assets. Now, a $250 billion bank is ballpark one of the 10 biggest banks in the United States and one of the 20 biggest banks in the world. It is not only not small, it is in that proverbial category of being systemically dangerous, that when it fails, it can bring down others. And of course, Silicon Valley Bank was a leadership that was specifically lobbying for this insane loophole to apply to it, even though it was ballparked $200 billion in assets and, of course, had no problems complying with the law. Now, the Democrats have their own falsehood about this, and that is, Oh, if Dodd Frank had not been amended, this wouldn’t have happened at Silicon Valley Bank. And we know that that’s 100 % wrong. And we know that’s 100 % wrong because the same problems happened at places where it wasn’t rolled back. They just haven’t come home to roost at this point because they dare not act on banks that side. Colin Bruce Anthes Can you. Bill Black Go into that for me? The fundamental thing that the amendment did under the Trump administration that the Democrats are focused on is it got rid of the mandatory stress test. But it is in critical to know why that’s nonsensical as a cause of this crisis. And the answer is stress tests are useless. They’re designed to be useless. They do not stress the institution. They’re an oxymoron created by regular morons. What they don’t do specifically is look at runs. If you remove runs, then banks seem a whole lot safer and they die in years, not in hours, which was your point about Silicon Valley Bank, which is why they don’t put that into the stress test, because then you would say hundreds of banks are insolvent and are at enormous risk. If there’s a run, they will fail and a run is in some sense rational in that they’re insolvent on a market value basis, which Silicon Valley Bank was into that category. So even if the Trump amendment had never occurred and they had done the stress test, the stress test would have said, no problem here. And we know that because this is what the following list of institutions have in common. Bear Stearns, Leeman Brothers, Fannie, Freddy, the big three Icelandic banks. All of them passed stress tests with flying colors, like sometimes days before they failed because stress tests don’t actually look at the things that kill you. As a metaphor, liquidity, which is what a run is, is a bit like pneumonia. So you’re put into the hospital by some chronic disease that is actually going to kill you eventually. But pneumonia is an opportunistic infection, right? And it’s often fairly common in hospitals, unfortunately. And it puts enormous stress on your breathing, which puts enormous stress on your cardio system. And it tends to be the thing that kills people the quickest. So runs on the bank, kill you quick. But what was the underlying problem? Why did they have a run on the bank? And the answer is mostly it appears at this point in the US context, interest rate risk. And in the Swiss context, interest rate risk plus probably some more exotic derivatives. But Switzerland is super opaque, even more opaque than US. Well, much more opaque than the United States. So it may be months or years before we get the details on the derivatives. All we’re being told is that financial derivative positions were a significant part of the problem and causing very large losses. Colin Bruce Anthes I want to just hammer home this point that it’s highly likely what we’re going to see next is the Democrats start talking about putting some things back in place that looked like they were before the Trump administration. From your point of view, that would be a cosmetic solution. It would not actually be preventing these kinds of things from happening further down the road. Bill Black Correct. They’ve got to T he response to the Great Financial Crisis in the United States, which becomes the Dodd Frank Bill, has many good ideas but no coherence. So it’s here’s an idea, here’s an idea, here’s an idea, here’s an idea, and they all threw them into the bill. So it’s an utter monstrosity of a bill. And then the secret I can tell you as a regulator, regulators don’t like enormously detailed regulation. It’s a pain in the ass from our perspective. You have to learn and it’s incredibly boring to read it. It’s incredibly boring to read. It’s incredibly boring to draft it and it’s easy to get it wrong, and you’re getting all kinds of abuse left, right, and center. Why do we have these super detailed regulations? Well, part because this bill was a monster with literally hundreds of ideas thrown into it, but mostly because the big banks. Because the big banks always come in and say, Oh, in our precise circumstance, this possible thing could happen. And if it did, it would be unfair. So this is the ignoring the adage, of course, never let the search for the perfect become the enemy of the good. And that’s what exactly happens in these circumstances. So at the staff level, I led the deregulation of the savings and loan industry. That was desperately needed. I think it saved hundreds of billions of dollars, actually probably trillions. But I got rid of more regulations than I created. Of course, there are stupid regulations. And the other secret thing I’ll tell you about competent regulators is we hate bureaucracy. You have to deal with bureaucracy once every three weeks, typically, as a regular Canadian or American. We have to deal with it every day. T here are bureaucrats and they’re anal and it just makes your life miserable. So when you see competent regulators, we are completely non bureaucratic in our approach. So what do we need for this particular crisis? Remembering crises change. Generals that only get ready to fight the last war are disasters. This one, we can put a really fine point on it because one of the disastrous things… Disaster is going to be too strong, but one of the things that showed that they hadn’t learned the fundamentals is in doing Dodd and Frank, they overwhelmingly created the supposed answer to future problems in economists, conventional economists. Now, conventional economists create the problem and they don’t solve the problems in finance. So this is significantly insane. Let me give the specific example that ties in so well to the Silicon Valley Bank. I may call it SVB collapse. As far as we know now, to interest rate risk leading to liquidity risk, a run, and the place fails essentially within a day. But it’s been, because of interest rate risk, insolvent for the better part of the year. F inally, people go, Oh, it’s insolvent. Colin Bruce Anthes It was a. Bill Black Sitting duck. My deposits are way, way in excess of the insurance limit because that’s what was special at Silicon Valley Bank. Now it’s that old joke about the bear, which Canadians and Americans both tell. The bear appears and there are two hikers and one of them starts getting out of his hiking boots and putting on his running shoes. The other one turns to him and says, What the hell are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear. Of course, the answer is I only have to outrun you. That’s basically it. If you were less bad than the other folks, you may survive even though you’ve been an idiot and gone into bear country and done everything wrong. You’ve got honey smear all over your arms and such. Everybody knew each other. When I teach public finance, the first risk I start with is interest rate risk. It’s in some ways the most basic and the one that comes from economics the most clearly. And everybody that does this is an economist. So this should be their wheelhouse. They should be great at this stuff. And FSOC, the Financial Stability Oversight Committee, which is this creation and which is almost exclusively economists, did a report, circa 2015, on interest rate risk. Great. And you know what it says? And this is almost a direct quotation. The banks should continue to address interest rate risk. Colin Bruce Anthes Well, that’s informative. Bill Black And the regulators should continue to address interest rate risk. And you’re going, you got a PhD in economics to do this crap? I mean, this is utterly useless, but it gets better. They put together this presentation. It ain’t all that long, but it has 75 PowerPoint slides with the guts of the number because they’re economists, chart after chart after chart. And it doesn’t have the two charts you would absolutely want on interest rate risk. And the two charts would be how big is the un recognized for accounting purpose loss in market value due to interest rate changes? And two, if interest rates continue to rise by, say, 200, 400,000 basis points, 100 basis points makes 1 % of interest. How big will that loss grow to? Those are the two charts you’d want. Those two charts ain’t in it and there’s nothing like it. There’s nothing from which you could infer, even if you had a PhD, what the numbers were. And have you seen either of those two charts? No. In the news coverage? No. No? Colin Bruce Anthes How was that possible? Bill Black Okay, so again, if you take interest rate risk seriously, then you know it can spark a run. And you know if it sparks a run, your stress tests are useless. And you based everything on your stress test. Tim Geitner, who Bally Hoot stress test, even made his book, Stress Tests type of stuff. So this was largely created as a propaganda exercise to make people feel, Oh, it’s not business as usual. The regulators turned over a new leaf, they got tough, and they put them through rigorous. Fannie and Freddy, since they were very good at publicity, they called their stress test nuclear winter scenarios. It was the equivalent of the Holocaust of all Holocaust on multi dimensions, a continuing for 20 years, and they’d just be fine. Whereas in the real world, they were dead and they were dead at the time they were saying this nonsense. But the regulators wanted, after the Great Financial Crisis, to say, Oh, we’ve looked, and it’s actually not a big problem. Look, virtually all of them passed their stress test, and it was typically maybe two didn’t. And by the next iteration, they all did, or they did with an asterisk type of thing. And it worked. Go back and look at the press coverage of the stress test. It got enormous play. All was well and such. Okay, but it isn’t. So they don’t take interest rate risk seriously. Any time in the press coverage you see these things, you know that either they don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re lying deliberately. It’s only a paper loss is one phrase. Or, oh, and this is the Democrats are doing this one. Oh, these are good assets. I know that. Colin Bruce Anthes One drives you crazy. Bill Black They’re good assets. You just have to hold them to maturity. And you’re going, Yes, they are assets that are not going to default because of credit risk. But if I got a bond that’s only earning, which is these bonds are earning roughly according to the press reports, 1.8 %, and inflation and market interest rates are more like 5 %, then if your bond only makes less than half of market value return, your bond isn’t worth $10,000. Your bond might be worth anywhere between three and six. Remember, the asymmetry of this, they’re betting the bank’s survival. And if they win, they get 1.8 %. But if they lose, they lose catastrophically, except that now we have to interrogate the pronouns. That’s right. Colin Bruce Anthes So it. Bill Black Goes back to the way that loses is the bank, not the bankers. And it’s us that ends up bailing them out. And then we have the number of the Democrats saying this isn’t a bailout. Of course, it’s a bailout. Colin Bruce Anthes That was the next question I was going to ask you because everybody is bending over backwards to say that none of this activity is a bailout. Bill Black The Swiss just said that it wasn’t a bailout because the Swiss passed a law after the Great Financial Crisis that said Switzerland renoundses and will never again do a bailout unless, of course, we actually have a large institution fail at which point we will rush on a Sunday night to execute a bailout. So yes, of course it’s a bailout. And this next one is a particularly pernicious lie. Oh, no taxpayer dollars. Well, the FISLIC, the FDIC Fund. No, when you use FDIC Fund dollars, that’s a bailout in these circumstances. So I don’t understand it. You could make a perfect criticism of the banks. You could say clearly regulation is a catastrophe. Financial regulation is clearly a catastrophe in the United States. Because, again, some things in finance are really complex. This aspect that we’ve been going through is an absolute no brainer. It is super, super simple. Undergraduates in my class understand this just fine type of thing when they’ve never taken much of any economic class in their entire experience. And again, because of the asymmetry, there’s no advantage to the federal government of allowing this interest rate gamble. So why are they doing it? I haven’t seen a reporter ask that question. And they’re not just doing it at SVB. The things in the press suggest that the unrealized losses, remember that chart that should exist and should be famously there at the top of every news report is in the 400 to 600 billion dollar range. So we’re talking about very, very large numbers. Also, the Fed is the Fed. You know tautology? The Fed is a regulator and the Fed is the one that boosts interest rates and knows that it’s going to boost interest rates. So the Fed, when it’s regulating, knows with certainty, we’re going to pound. Because they act like there’s only one tool to deal with inflation, and that’s causing a recession. And if that 60 pound mall doesn’t work, then they get a 120 pound mall and swing it. So the Fed has examiners too. It’s a regulator of two different types of banks, bank holding companies and state chartered nonmember banks is their call. So those people know with absolute certainty what’s going to happen. I know. They don’t know exactly, but they don’t need to. They know interest rates are going to go like this, up, and they know that the value of fixed rate bonds and mortgage backed securities is going to go like this when that happens. So nobody at the Fed can claim to be surprised. So again, not only have we not seen the two charts, right? One, how big is the hole? Two, how big will it become if interest rates continue to increase? And then there would be a third chart for bonus points, and that is the following. Here’s the scam that goes on. Generally accepted accounting principles don’t require you to recognize currently, that means put on your actual books, the loss from interest rate changes. Colin Bruce Anthes So they don’t even tell you the true story. Bill Black Unless you are holding the assets for sale. And in the older days, which is to say last year, they were holding hundreds of billions for sale. And if they continued in that categorisation, they’d have to recognize hundreds of billions of losses. So they reccharacterized them. Oh, no, we’re not holding the use for sale. We’re holding them for investment. So that should be the third thing. Who’s deliberately hiding their losses through this process? That should be the third level of chart. How big in total is that mischaracterization of the accounting? And which institutions are the big players in that? All of that should be publicly available. But again, in addition to this FISOC report, remember, this is The Economist, The Economist specifically to look for the forthcoming risk, to make sure we’re not fighting the last war. Look ahead, economists, and saying interest rate risk, but then not actually saying anything about what our exposure was. And with this unbelievable, you should continue to monitor interest rate risk. Yes, you should continue playing the piano in the whorehouse. What? No, you should shut it down. There’s no upside to allowing banks to deliberately take substantial interest rate risk. None. There’s a massive downside to them doing it, which is we get stuck with those huge losses. So the next test of regulation, right? Have you seen the head of the Office of the Control of the currency, the head of the FDIC, the head of the Federal Reserve issuing guidance saying, Stop, don’t do this? I haven’t. Oh, and that’s the next part. I use the word guidance. They used a similar word at FISOC. It’s an advisory. That means it’s deliberately unenforceable. I was an enforcement head, among other things, as a regular legater. I can’t enforce it if you’ve chosen to just make it an advisory. An advisory is telling your 16 year old daughter, That dress seems a little provocative. You can say it. It is utterly useless. Every parent knows it’s utterly useless. Every regulator knows the guidance. So if this is absolutely useless, it’s designed to cover your ass. Have you heard any proposed rule? Colin Bruce Anthes No. The fact that this… It sounds very obvious when you say it, but the fact that this is… There’s so much that’s missed. There’s this huge gap that’s missing here in basically the accountability of the institutions that control our economic life. We saw Bernie Frank, who was one of the people who at the heart of Dodd Frank, then became a lobbyist for deregulation afterwards. Bill Black Not just deregulation, for crypto. Colin Bruce Anthes For crypto. Bill Black And then he claimed that his bank was closed, not because it was a crappy bank, which it was. I mean, SVB was a clown car. It’s not even close. If you can’t get SVB right as a regulator, you really need to leave the job to somebody who can actually do things. But we do not pick regulatory leaders, and we have not picked regulatory leaders for. Colin Bruce Anthes Decades. Bill Black On the basis of they’re going to fix problems and prevent problems. Because if you do, you piss off the bankers. Bill Clinton gave an address to banking regulators, and this is how we started it out. I never heard as many complaints as I did about you when I was on the campaign trail. And he didn’t then say, Thank you. That’s exactly what we need. For him, it was self evident that you had to get out. I got out when, and I witnessed this personally, when they came and they trained us on the new reinventing government of the Clinton Gore. Colin Bruce Anthes Administration. Bill Black And their big di ctot was, You must treat the banks and the bankers as your client, your customer, in fact, was the exact word. And in my own quiet way, I got up and said, Surely you meant the people of the United States of America. And they said, No, we thought about that, but rejected it. Well, if you wanted to give an instruction that over the process of the next 30 years would destroy regulation, that would be exactly the mindset that would destroy effective regulation. We are not there. They are not our customer. We are not there to make bankers happy. Now, we do make good bankers happy when we get rid of crappy competitors who are going to blow up the system. But have you heard the bankers putting out a list of the worst institutions or saying interest rate risk is a disaster and it is critical for the banking regulatory agencies to adopt regulation? No, what they’re doing is the opposite. That we have columnists and not industry columnists, regular columnists for Reuters who have their beat. Finance is part of their beat saying, Oh, the problem is we have deposit insurance. And you go, Wait a minute, we had the run because they weren’t insured. How much of it? Benny and Freddy were not insured. Bear Stearns was not insured. Leem and Brothers was not insured. The money market mutual funds with a $400 billion run were not insured. Colin Bruce Anthes There’s. Bill Black Junk. We get nonsense, utter nonsense in the alleged specialty press for finance. Reuter’s thinks of itself as being particularly skilled in finance. The guy writing it, he has an undergraduate degree in English, which is a perfectly great degree. But it means that it didn’t come from him. Somebody in the industry told him this thing and it sounded cool. His title is something like, Deposit insurance is not the cure, it’s the problem, or something along those lines. And it is exactly the opposite of what we’ve observed in life. What did we have to do to stop the largest run in world history? How many people know what the largest run was in world history? It was $400 billion on the money market mutual funds, which are not insured after Leem and Brothers failed. And the only way to break that run is that we temporarily extended for over a year federal deposit insurance to break that run. Colin Bruce Anthes And yet these are the lines that are getting released through the media at this time. So it’s just bogus going around. Bill Black Right. And as I said, neither party has it right. And these are people that ordinarily, I mean, ex profs that are very good but are saying things that are nonsensical because they don’t understand finance. Colin Bruce Anthes Well, how much of this is caused by incompetence and how much of it is incompetence that gets promoted through the revolving door? Bill Black They don’t need the revolving door anymore. For now, over a full generation, they don’t appoint people to run regulatory agencies if they believe in regulating. Tom Frank, I don’t know if that’s a familiar person, what’s the matter with Kansas, asked me early on after the Great Financial Crisis, because I had appeared in this Obama campaign thing about the savings and loan debacle because John McCain was one of the Keating Five, and I met with him and he tried to intervene on behalf of Keating and such. Tom Frank asked me early after the Great Financial Crisis, when are you going to get a senior position? And about five minutes later, after I could stop laughing, I had to explain that at that time, about 350 million Americans would have to die before they would ever… I would be the literal last person they would ever allow to have authority again because we didn’t just put them in receivership properly, we put them in prison. They’re not about to recreate that danger. You saw both Republican and Democratic administration s now they don’t. Credit Suisse. In the Great Financial Crisis, we did a justice department deal with them, a sweetheart deal with them, in which one of the findings of the justice department was that Credit Suisse had been defrauding the United States of America with the same basic fraud scheme for over a century. I didn’t say a decade, I said a century. So you’re talking about tens of millions of frauds, and they gave him a sweetheart deal. And then they did four more scams just since the Great Financial Crisis and then blew up the second biggest bank in Switzerland. So now the largest is going to acquire it. So now we’re going to have the do big, do fail problem, absolutely controlling. That bank, UBS, is going to have more assets than the GDP. Colin Bruce Anthes Of Switzerland. Right. Ubs, their statement actually said that they did not want to make this deal. Do you want to speak. Bill Black To that? Yeah. P art of that’s true. Now, obviously, they love being a monopolist and they love being too big to fail. And especially, as I said, because Switzerland, after the Great Financial Crisis, put in statute, we cannot, we hereby promise and remove any ability to bail out. So they’re saying there’s no bail out. There’s no bail out. There’s no bailout. There’s a $160 billion bailout through various credit lines and other such things. But on top of that, so little in the weeds, bankruptcy priority. You pay off secured creditors first and unsecured creditors. Then there’s this category that’s actually what junk bonds are, which are called subordinated debt, because you subordinate your priority in bankruptcy to regular creditors. Then below that, the last folks are the shareholders. Each group has to be paid in full for the group below it to get anything, each higher group priority. Except that subordinated debt has a higher priority than equity, and they directed that the equity would receive three billion and the subordinated debt would receive zero. Colin Bruce Anthes I saw just before I logged on to this interview that there’s an expected lawsuit coming from those people. Bill Black Oh, yeah, I bet you. But beyond that, conservative economists love subordinated debt. To them, the FDIC is the great Satan. Federal deposit insurance is the great Satan, and subordinated debt is the most wonderful thing. These people will be the ideal folks to exert private market discipline, which is to be stage a run, except you can’t run on subordinated debt. So it’s a really odd thing to deliberately screw the sub debt holders when they should be paid in full and they’re not only not going to be paid in full, they’ll get zero cents on the dollar. So again, as soon as governments get into a too big to fail institution, failing, all the rules depart. The bank holds hostage the entire national economy and sometimes global economy. To which my point is, then why do we allow them to be that big? Colin Bruce Anthes Yeah. So that’s the next question I have. But if they’re already this big, what steps would need to be taken to get us into something that was sustainable? And is there anybody out there who is talking about taking those kinds of steps? Bill Black No, other than fringey progressive types. As to the second question, as to the first, the way you would do it is say, we’re not going to tell you what to sell, but you have five years, roughly, to get down below a level of systemically dangerous. And in the modern era, at the time of 2008, that was probably around 50 billion in assets. These days, maybe it’s 70 billion. But we have three trillion dollar institutions. And as your point is, we’re going the wrong direction. Concentration is increasing. And back to your very first question. If you don’t ask about finance, but if you ask about the 20 largest banks in the world, they do ballpark 99 % of all financial derivatives. So in many areas, it’s hyper concentrated beyond the concentration numbers. And as big as finance is, financial derivatives… Now there’s some technical stuff about how you number it, but they are much bigger than what they call the real economy. So this is completely out of control. There is no democratic control. There is no meaningful democratic process when it comes to finance. So if you want to take back… This could be you would think transcend right, left lines. If you want to take back democratic control, you would be really well advised to start with finance because A, finance blows up the world periodically. B, when it’s not blowing it up, it is systematically misallocating assets. It’s creating hyperinflated bubbles that are absolutely nonsensical. It’s creating palaces. It’s doing things that the opposite of economic theory. The economic theory is providing finance is what drives economic growth. But since we’ve made finance all powerful, roughly 35 years ago, growth sucks. And the places where they really made finance, absolutely in control, Japan. Well, it ain’t a single lost decade at this point, folks. It’s really three lost decades in terms of Japan. So we’re not getting what the conservative economist promised us, which was things were going to be super great. What are we getting? What do we really observe when we see the really big financial institutions… Not financial institutions, really big commercial institutions, but where the whippie hand is held by finance? We see stock buybacks, and not little stock buybacks, stock buybacks that are staggering in their amount. And all of that says we have no productive use for our capital to invest and make good products and hire workers and things like that. We’re out of ideas, useful ideas. So we’re just going to And of course, what’s really going on is stock buybacks, raise stock prices and make the CEO’s bonus. Colin Bruce Anthes That gets back. Bill Black To the other thing. Much more valuable. So that’s why it’s going on. The bank, SVB, Silicon Valley Bank, did not gain by buying a ton of 1.8 % yield treasuries and mortgage backed securities. That was something that doomed the bank. And again, the asymmetry of risk and return, they did this gamble knowing that the Fed was going to massively raise interest rates and that they would lose. But that comes back to pronouns again. Who’s the they? The bankers were going to win. The bankers had paper, I don’t know, but maybe eight tenths of one % because rates were so incredibly low. And now they do 1.8 %. Oh, well, then my nominal income, not my real income, but my stated income goes up and it was all due to my brilliance in investment. And so I get bigger bonuses and the stock appreciates. And the stock capitalization of SVB shortly before disaster was $15 billion. Again, markets are not efficient. The markets that are most likely to be efficient, according to economist, are financial markets. They ain’t. They’re not a little bit off. In Yiddish, they’re far blankein. each other. This is literally lost, but far blonde is I’m trying to drive from Detroit to Toronto, and 18 hours later, I noticed that the signs, the highway signs are all in Spanish, not. I didn’t just take a little bit wrong turn and ended up in Montreal instead of Toronto. I ended up in Mexico. That’s far blunted. So that’s how crazy. A gain, it’s so obviously crazy. And it has failed so spectacularly and that neither party has actually seriously sought to fix it. I think the Democrats thought they did, and I’m sure some of them did, but it was absolutely incoherent. They didn’t actually ask people who had succeeded, what works? That was the last thing in the world. And so if they can’t fix the… And indeed now, they don’t even try to fix it. Now it’s just you did it type of thing. And the explanations are nuts. Wokeness or, Oh, my God, if we’d only had stress tests, all would have been well. Colin Bruce Anthes So the bipartisan ignorance is not something that you’re seeing dissipate in the slightest way after this crash, after this crisis has. Bill Black Taken place. It’s worse than just ignorance. It’s just not serious. Colin Bruce Anthes It’s. Bill Black An unwillingness. Again, lots of folks are contributing to this. I know everybody picks on mainstream media, but it’s true in this case. You just don’t see serious analytics. You get descriptions, but not serious analytics. Colin Bruce Anthes I wondered, as we get towards the end of this interview, if you could speak to something that the economist Michael Hudson, who cites your book all the time, recently said, which is that in some ways he sees this crisis as worse than what he saw in 2008, because 2008 was really a scam. Whereas in this case, what we’re seeing are some practices that have been standard among many banks for a long time being exposed by rising interest rates. So this is more of a problem at the heart of the practices that have been building in recent years across the financial sector. What do you make of that? Bill Black I won’t get into the definitional stuff about how you rate what’s actually worse, but I agree with this fundamental point on the difference. And again, this is what I’ve been trying to express. Fraud people are unwilling to admit, right? And so you can’t simply look at reports that the institutions provide and have a particularly good understanding of the fraud. That’s not true with interest rate risk. You just have to look at the numbers. Again, the point is, it’s just so easy. It was so easy for the bankers to avoid it. It was so easy for the regulators to avoid it. And not only did they not avoid it, but even now, where they see all these terrible things happening. This is the second and third largest bank failures in US history. And it was easy to prevent because, again, in the last one, there was all this hoopla around, We’re helping, in particular, poor minorities by lending to them. That was the whole shtick in the defense in the run up to the Great Financial Crisis. There’s no such thing. This isn’t lending at all. This is how I invest my funds as a bank. Completely different function. And as I said, undergraduates can figure this out. And again, just to ask you, have you even heard anybody else go, What reports would I want? Right. Well, I. Colin Bruce Anthes Guess. Bill Black The truth is… When I say that the reports that we wanted, and again, the reports were how big are the unrecognized losses due to interest rate changes? And how much bigger will they get if interest rates continue to increase? Those are not hypothetical things. Those are charts that I and my counterparts used to look at in 1984. And we didn’t invent them. So probably they were there before in 1984. I joined the federal agency in 1984. That is quickly approaching 40 years ago. I have a feeling technology has gotten better in the last 39 years, not worse. We never claimed to. Colin Bruce Anthes Be geniuses. Bill Black I’m going f we could get it right, and now they have the benefit of our experience because remember, the first act of the savings and loan debacle was interest. Colin Bruce Anthes Rate risk. Right. I want to close with a a two part question. If you were speaking to a member of Congress right now about one thing that they should stand up and champion right off the bat, get up and make a speech about, and if you were speaking to someone in a major media outlet about the first way they should start reporting this, what would your advice to both of those figures be? Bill Black I would say I want those two charts. Colin Bruce Anthes Two charts. Bill Black And I want every regulator to provide them. And then my second thing would be, here’s the asymmetry between Democrats and Republicans. The following Democrats, as President, have reappointed Republican appointees as chairman of the Fed. That would be the last three Democratic presidents. All of them reappointed Republican appointees as chairman of the Fed, even though they knew they were hard right. And we’re talking about Alan Greenspan of Ayn Rand. Colin Bruce Anthes A literal disciple of. Bill Black Ayn Rand. Literal disciple of Ayn Rand type of thing. And Democrats reappointed him. Do you know the last time a Republican reappointed a Democratic nominee? Colin Bruce Anthes Has it happened? Bill Black I am not personally aware of it ever happening. It certainly never happened when I was an adult. So it has not happened in the last 50 years, roughly. Again, Democrats play slow pitch softball and not the industrial League thing where you arc it 30 feet in the air. No, the kind when you want your kid to hit it. And Republicans play hardball. It doesn’t work well for the nation. I don’t care whether it works for the Democrats. It doesn’t work well for. Colin Bruce Anthes The nation. Well said. I want to thank you so much for providing some much needed clarity at a time when there isn’t much clarity going on. And I hope some people out there are listening to the things that you’ve been saying because there’s clearly a lot of room for improvement from what we’re doing right now. So, Bill Black, thank you so much for taking the time and for providing some invaluable insight at this crucial juncture. Bill Black Thank you. Thank you for the channel’s efforts. Colin Bruce Anthes And we’ll continue to do our best to cover these events as they unfold with figures like Bill Black. Please remember to like, subscribe, ring that bell for notifications. If you’re able to hit that donate button, we would certainly appreciate your support. Thank you so much. Select one or choose any amount to donate whatever you like any amount $5 $15 $25 $50 $100 $500 $1,000 Custom Amount $ Make this donation each month (optional) User my donation to help support the upcoming documentary "How to stop a nuclear war" (optional) Donate with Credit Card var gform;gform||(document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",function(){gform.scriptsLoaded=!0}),window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){gform.domLoaded=!0}),gform={domLoaded:!1,scriptsLoaded:!1,initializeOnLoaded:function(o){gform.domLoaded&&gform.scriptsLoaded?o():!gform.domLoaded&&gform.scriptsLoaded?window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",o):document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",o)},hooks:{action:{},filter:{}},addAction:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("action",o,n,r,t)},addFilter:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("filter",o,n,r,t)},doAction:function(o){gform.doHook("action",o,arguments)},applyFilters:function(o){return gform.doHook("filter",o,arguments)},removeAction:function(o,n){gform.removeHook("action",o,n)},removeFilter:function(o,n,r){gform.removeHook("filter",o,n,r)},addHook:function(o,n,r,t,i){null==gform.hooks[o][n]&&(gform.hooks[o][n]=[]);var e=gform.hooks[o][n];null==i&&(i=n+"_"+e.length),gform.hooks[o][n].push({tag:i,callable:r,priority:t=null==t?10:t})},doHook:function(n,o,r){var t;if(r=Array.prototype.slice.call(r,1),null!=gform.hooks[n][o]&&((o=gform.hooks[n][o]).sort(function(o,n){return o.priority-n.priority}),o.forEach(function(o){"function"!=typeof(t=o.callable)&&(t=window[t]),"action"==n?t.apply(null,r):r[0]=t.apply(null,r)})),"filter"==n)return r[0]},removeHook:function(o,n,t,i){var r;null!=gform.hooks[o][n]&&(r=(r=gform.hooks[o][n]).filter(function(o,n,r){return!!(null!=i&&i!=o.tag||null!=t&&t!=o.priority)}),gform.hooks[o][n]=r)}}); Never miss another story Subscribe to theAnalysis.news - Newsletter Email(Required) Name(Required) First Last Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_10').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') >= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_10');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_10').length > 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') >= 0;var is_form = form_content.length > 0 && ! is_redirect && ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_10').val();gformInitSpinner( 10, 'https://theanalysis.news/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [10, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_10').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [10]);window['gf_submitting_10'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_10').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_10').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [10, current_page]);} );} ); theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“.   Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website

Over a year has passed since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, with both sides suffering enormous casualties. Talia Baroncelli speaks to retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson about the credibility of various reports on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, noticeable tensions between Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as possible steps towards achieving a negotiated settlement.

Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg continue their discussion about how to avoid nuclear war.