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{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/theanalysis.news\/vietnam-blood-bath-to-prove-america-had-balls-christian-appy-on-rai-3-5\/#arve-youtube-xxevvurjpma63c0466b758d8997915150","type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xXEvVurjpMA?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=0&autoplay=1&enablejsapi=1","name":"Vietnam Blood Bath to Prove America Had "Balls" - Christian Appy on RAI (3\/5)","thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/xXEvVurjpMA\/hqdefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2023-01-12T12:41:58+00:00","author":"Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay","description":"This interview was originally published May 29, 2015. On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Appy says that presidents Kennedy and Johnson pursued the Vietnam war largely to prove the U.S., and themselves personally, had the \u201ccourage\u201d to wage war. TranscriptListenDonateSubscribeGuestMusic PAUL JAY, SENIOR E"} This interview was originally published May 29, 2015. On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Appy says that presidents Kennedy and Johnson pursued the Vietnam war largely to prove the U.S., and themselves personally, had the “courage” to wage war. .kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .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_d936b9-f5 .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_d936b9-f5 .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_d936b9-f5 .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_d936b9-f5 .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_d936b9-f5 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_d936b9-f5 .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;} Vietnam Blood Bath to Prove America Had “Balls” – Christian Appy on RAI (3/5) “American Does Bad Things for Good Reasons” – Christian Appy on RAI (2/5) “America Does Bad Things for Good Reasons” – Christian Appy on RAI (1/5) Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. In his book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and American Identity, Christian Appy writes: the need to demonstrate presidential balls has been an under-acknowledged but enduring staple of American foreign policy. Aggressive masculinity shaped American Cold War policy and still does. Deep-seated ideas about gender and sexuality cannot be dismissed as mere talk–they have explanatory value. U.S. policy in Vietnam was driven by men who were intensely concerned about demonstrating their own and the nation’s toughness. As every other justification of the war grew threadbare, it became increasingly important to appear firm. Now joining us in the studio is Christian Appy. Thanks for joining us again.  CHRISTIAN G. APPY, AUTHOR, AMERICAN RECKONING: You’re welcome.  JAY: So one more time, his latest book is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. And Christian teaches history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. So this has always seemed to me, this need to develop, portray firmness and strength and so on, you know, it’s akin to, like, a loan shark, and it’s actually a lot akin to a loan shark, given how much of American commerce is based on lending people money–and I shouldn’t say people; lending countries money, and assuming they’re going to pay back. And for most loan sharks, you’ve got to break some knees once in a while to make sure people pay you the exorbitant interest you’re trying to collect. Talk about this need to projected toughness, and start with Kennedy in Vietnam.  APPY: Well, Kennedy early on in his presidency suffered a couple of real blows to his reputation, most obviously when he supported the–orchestrated the invasion of Cuba in an effort to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs. And it was a debacle, and it failed. Every one of the Cuban exiles that was trained to carry out the operation was either killed or captured. And Kennedy was forced to actually pay ransom to get the prisoners back. So what was to be a secret operation was quickly exposed, and it was felt that he felt it as deeply humiliating. And then later that same year he met for the first time with Khrushchev, and Khrushchev effectively kind of bullied him, and once again Kennedy felt that he had not demonstrated his presidential gravitas and was already beginning to look at foreign-policy interventions.  JAY: Can I just add one thing?  APPY: Sure. Yeah.  JAY: And internally taking tremendous flack from some sections of the military and certainly the whole conservative /pʌndərˈæpɨs/–can’t say it, but you know what I mean–about being weak.  APPY: Yes.  JAY: I mean, why didn’t he go in with a full-fledged invasion of Cuba?  APPY: Right. That, and he was already beginning to sort of move toward a neutralist solution to the communist insurgency in Laos, so he was beginning to think that maybe Vietnam would be the place to assert American credibility and power. But before that really began to develop, we had the Cuban missile crisis, and this for him was a great boost to his reputation and to his reputation for strength and steely resolve.  JAY: Again, really quickly–some of our viewers don’t know that what that is.  APPY: Yeah. Well, the United States discovered, through U-2 reconnaissance photographs, that the Soviet Union–  JAY: That was the spy plane. APPY: –the spy plane–that the Soviet Union was beginning to install medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba–in response, actually, to the U.S.-backed invasion. They were put there as a kind of deterrent, really defensive, though of course all nuclear weapons are almost by definition dangerous.  JAY: And also there were nuclear–United States had weapons in Turkey which were awfully close to Russia.  APPY: We had–exactly. And indeed you speak to the exact resolution of the missile crisis. Kennedy made clear on television that it would not be tolerated. Interestingly enough, he couldn’t tolerate it because he had made a speech a couple of months earlier saying that if offensive weapons were put on Cuba by the Soviet Union, he would not allow that. And once it happened, he asked some advisers, does this really change the balance of power in the world? And Kennedy said–McNamara said, no–this is Secretary of Defense McNamara. And Kennedy agreed. He said, I wish I had never said that. I wish I had never drawn that line.  JAY: Yeah, ’cause what could they do with them?  APPY: Yeah. So he had–but now he felt he had to do something. And what he did, thankfully, was to be a little patient and to say no to those of his advisers that immediately wanted to launch airstrikes and take a more aggressive response. They negotiated a settlement. So it really was diplomacy, not bluster or militarism, that solved the crisis. They were willing to say to the Soviets, okay, we will publicly promise never to invade Cuba, and privately we’ll agree to remove our missiles from Turkey that are threatening very close to your borders. But the narrative that they wanted to go out to the public was a tougher narrative, that we stared them eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow blinked–that was attributed to–.  JAY: Yeah, ’cause America set up all these military ships, Navy ships as a blockade around Cuba.  APPY: Yes, the sort of the–yes, the quarantine. And Kennedy even went so far as to suggest that Adlai Stevenson, who was representing us at the United Nations, had wanted to sell us out, had wanted to, quote-unquote, Munich, because he had advised that we remove our missiles from Turkey to solve the crisis. And that’s exactly what did solve the crisis. But Kennedy didn’t want anybody to know that, so he actually threw Stephenson under the bus as a weakling. Anyway, privately he told people that–Kennedy bragged in private to friends that he had cut off Khrushchev’s balls. So that really is deeply embedded in the American foreign policy of the period. And it becomes more important, as I write, as the other justifications for the war are no longer believed even by the policymakers. By 1965 or 1966, I believe, Johnson was not convinced that the war in Vietnam posed any threat to national security.  JAY: I want to get to Johnson, but I just want to stay on Kennedy for a minute.  APPY: Okay. Sure.  JAY: You know, there’s a lot of debate about the Kennedy assassination. That’s whether or not he was really going to pursue Vietnam or not. What’s your take?  APPY: Well, I waffle on this issue. As I tell students, it’s hard enough as a historian to figure out what actually happens, and nearly impossible to figure out what might’ve happened if x or y or z had been different. So really these are interesting speculations, but really impossible to nail down. The truth is there’s documentary evidence that would support both positions. I mean, those who would like to believe that Kennedy would have pulled us out of Vietnam can cite documents where they’re talking about withdrawing 1,000 troops at a time and slowly drawing down our presence. But Kennedy was pretty clear in a lot of that planning that those withdrawals had to be contingent on success. And there was some hope at the time that maybe success was coming, but it needs to be remembered that Kennedy, although he never put more than 16,000 troops into Vietnam, which seems quite a small number when you compare it to the 540,000 that finally ended up there under Johnson, those 16,000 troops had already put into place many brutal practices that would only get expanded. We were–by 1962 we were already using chemical defoliants on South Vietnam. We were using napalm. We were engaged in aerial bombing of South Vietnam, the very land we claimed to be defending. And we were already beginning the forced relocation of people from the rural countryside into what were then called strategic hamlets.  JAY: Concentration camps.  APPY: Effectively concentration camps. So all of that had begun. And even on the last day of his life, he gave a speech that morning–or maybe it was the night before; I think it was that morning–in which he reaffirmed the necessity of America’s standing against communist aggression in South Vietnam. That was to a Texas audience, but he did tick off all the ways in which we had built up the military and were–.  JAY: I interviewed Gore Vidal a few times and got to know him fairly well, and he knew Jack Kennedy, President Kennedy, fairly well. I think he was a stepbrother to Jackie Kennedy. And he was quite convinced that Jack–and this goes back to you’ve got to have balls theme–he was quite convinced that Jack wanted to pursue the war in Vietnam, and to a large extent to prove he could be a wartime president, and maybe that he had the balls to go to war in Vietnam. But as you say, this becomes a much even bigger issue for Johnson. In fact, I’m going to read a quote from your book.  APPY: Sure.  JAY: By 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton concluded that avoiding humiliation had moved from 70 percent of America’s goal in Vietnam to 100 percent. Quote, the reasons why we went into Vietnam to the present depth are varied, but they are now largely academic. Why we have not withdrawn is by all odds one reason: to preserve our reputation. We have not hung on to save a friend or to deny the communists the added acres and heads. Christian writes, to preserve an image of strength, LBJ systematically escalated the war. Perhaps the most shocking moment in Robert Dallek’s biography of Johnson comes when a group of reporters, pressed by LBJ to explain why he continued to wage war in spite of so many difficulties and so much opposition, the president, quote, unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ, and declared, quote, this is why. Other key policymakers may not have displayed their genitals, but all the men who sent America to Vietnam felt a deep connection between their own masculinity and national power. Expand a bit.  APPY: Well, it’s true. I mean, the group of policymakers did not share Johnson’s crudity, at least, or his poorer background from the hill countries of Texas–they came from, really, a different class background, many of them very privileged private schools, Ivy League colleges, elite military service, all-men’s Metropolitan Club, secret societies. That whole world inbred a kind of code of masculinity that made personal toughness inseparable from the toughness of the state. And so they really did own that idea that it was their mission, kind of a Spartan mission, to uphold American strength, and that anybody who questioned that could not really be part of that team.  JAY: It goes back a little bit, I think, to what I was talking about as the loan sharks having to prove–someone has to be the test case, the model of getting their knees broken so everyone else will pay. I mean, it’s in prison too. You know, you’re not shown–if you show weakness, then someone will take advantage of you. This mentality that if America shows any weakness, then other powers are going to take advantage of that weakness, it seems to be almost at the core of U.S. policy, because it keeps ending in debacle.  APPY: Yes. And it needn’t be that way. I mean, at this precise time that they’re digging their heels in, grounds of toughness, a whole new countercultural and antiwar movement is developing that is challenging this idea of masculinity and rejecting sort of the John Wayne image that they had grown up with, and coming to the conclusion that maybe it’s really braver and tougher to express a kind of moral courage that can say, no, this is wrong, and we really need to withdraw. And there were occasionally some people close to power who were starting to say that, and they would immediately get sort of shut out. I mean, they were saying, for example, that, you know, yes, it might be–as George Kennan, one of the great architects of the policy of containment, said when he was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify–William Fulbright was the chair at the time, and it was widely televised. So George Kennan was asked, what do you think would happen if we withdrew from Vietnam? This is 1966 again. He said, well, honestly, I think it would be a six-month sensation, but it would blow away, it wouldn’t really have any fundamental effect on our national security, and it actually, in terms of our international reputation, might improve it. So one of the ironies of this period for me is that Johnson, who was always credited as being the master politician who could read the tea leaves and count every vote, completely miscalculated the direction of the American public, because had he withdrawn early in his presidency, before the massive escalation, I think he might well have been reelected. I think he could have made the case that this really was not in our interest and not so much a sign of weakness but of really pragmatic realism. And another irony: all these guys prided themselves on being hard-headed realists who could see the world with steely eyes and unaffected by sentimentality or namby-pamby moralism, and yet in the face of the evidence that they were receiving on a daily basis, that the war was going poorly, that they had privately very little optimism that they could achieve their objectives–certainly not in any time soon, maybe five, ten, 15 years down the road–those same pragmatists were willing to continue a war they knew they weren’t winning, because they didn’t want to be seen as weak, didn’t want to be the first president to lose a war.  JAY: But then doesn’t Johnson at the end–near the end of his presidency he does come to the conclusion to try to end it and negotiate in secret a ceasefire that might lead to a final settlement that gets torpedoed by Nixon.  APPY: Yeah, he does make some small steps it that direction, though the ceasefire over the bombing in the North, first, it’s only above the 20th parallel, and then just days before he leaves office it’s all the way down to the 17th parallel, but he never stops the bombing of the South. And one thing that Americans to this day don’t quite realize is that our bombing of South Vietnam was far more intense and unconstrained than the bombing of the North. We dropped 4 million tons of bombs on the South, 1 million tons of bombs on the north. That’s a lot. But South Vietnam became by far the most bombed country in world history. We were using B-52 bombers that could hold, each one of these planes, 30 tons of bombs. They, of course, had been designed to drop nuclear weapons, but were retooled to be used in Vietnam. But, again, on the South, within 25 miles of Saigon.  JAY: But doesn’t Johnson–Johnson does negotiate a ceasefire, right, I mean, a full-scale ceasefire that never takes place ’cause Nixon talks the North Vietnamese into withdrawing.  APPY: Well, no, he continues the war. What I think maybe you’re alluding to is he does initiate peace discussions, the sort of those Paris peace talks, which do slowly begin in the last year of his presidency, though the South Vietnamese president, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, wanted nothing to do with them.  JAY: But this idea of having balls and showing American power, in spite of the war starting to unravel–but there’s also economic interest here. I mean, there’s a lot of people making a lot of money out of the war.  APPY: It’s true. Certainly defense contractors are making bushels of money. But one of the interesting things is that over time, by the late ’60s, high-level executives are beginning to believe that the war is actually hurting the economy, because it’s–.  JAY: Or hurting them.  APPY: Yeah. Well, they see [crosstalk]  JAY: Their section of the economy.  APPY: Yeah. And defense industry aside, there’s a moment in which the CEO of the Bank of America, no less, goes before Congress and makes the case that the war is bad for business, that corporate profits have actually peaked in ’65 just as the massive escalation began and had declined steadily since then and that inflation was ticking up. And so he really is calling for an end to the war.  JAY: Yeah, it was an interesting part of your book. You talk about how–’cause unemployment gets so low,–  APPY: Right.  JAY: –inflation starts to go up, corporate profits start to go down.  APPY: Right.  JAY: So you have a real division, I guess, within the American elites about those who are still making money out of the war and those who aren’t making as much money as they want to be.  APPY: Right, or people who are ideologically committed to the war, even if it doesn’t necessarily support business. So it is an interesting period. But it does suggest how broad-based opposition to the war was by 1970 and ’71.  JAY: And for some of our younger viewers or people that forget, let’s just remind people this isn’t just when someone wants to continue a war because they want to pull their organ out of their pants, they want to prove how tough they are, prove how tough America is, was. Just remind us again how many people suffered and were killed in the war.  APPY: Well, now the best estimate for the number of Vietnamese–the Vietnamese say that 3.8 million were killed during the American phase of the war. And former secretary of defense McNamara, before he died, said he has every reason to believe that they were correct. American historians tend to say that it was at least 2 million. Sort of that’s the conservative estimate. So we don’t actually know the proper figure. But when you include the fact that we were also bombing Laos very heavily and Cambodia, you can add roughly another at least a million and a half to that total. So this is a real bloodbath. And for the United States, certainly more troops were lost than at any time after World War II–more than 58,000. And, of course, hundreds of thousands wounded, and many more who suffered psychological casualties from that experience. One further cost of the war that is not always noted is that after the war ended in 1975, many Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians have died from unexploded ordnance. Roughly 2 percent of every American bomb that was dropped, or even artillery shell, doesn’t explode. So ten, 20, even 30 years later, a farmer can be plowing his field and hit one of those things and it can go off. Or a child can pick up–they had these really small baseball-size bombs that were called cluster bombs that–they would come inside a large conventional bomb, and then, when they exploded, they would send out these smaller bombs, and inside each one of these small bombs were hundreds of little steel pellets or dart-like–they were called flechettes that would go in every possible direction, designed as the classic antipersonnel weapon that would kill people but not structures and that would burrow into your body and not necessarily kill you but require other people to take care of you or lead to a slow and horrible death. And as I say, a kid could pick up one of these little baseball bombs and it could go off again. So the estimate now is that some 40,000, anyway, Vietnamese have died from that cause since the war, which is extraordinary, and many more wounded.  JAY: And when you look at American media and this narrative of American exceptionalism, the real victim of the Vietnam War was America.  APPY: Right.  JAY: And we’re going to get into the America-as-victim narrative in the next segment of our interview with the Christian Appy on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. 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) 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() ); “Christian Gerard Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is widely known as a leading expert on the Vietnam War experience. The most recent of his three books on the subject is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.” theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“.   Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay’s Documentaries

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Lynn Fries interviews Gleckman on GPEnewsdocs. .kt-post-loop_1836c2-8c .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_1836c2-8c .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_1836c2-8c .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_1836c2-8c .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_1836c2-8c .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_1836c2-8c .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_1836c2-8c .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_1836c2-8c .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_1836c2-8c .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_1836c2-8c .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;} 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 Guest Music LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries, producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs with guest Harris Gleckman. A recent symposium marking the 50th anniversary of Salvador Allende’s speech at the UNGA in 1972 delved into the topic of “Corporate Power: Then and Now.” In this segment, I invite our guest to expand on an argument he made at that symposium. Notably, that to build a stronger democratic multilateral system accountable to the public interest and committed to a sustainable planet we not only need to think about the narrative of where we want to go but we have to think about the institutional ways of making that happen. I should note our guest speaks from first hand experience of the ways in which corporate power undermined institutions set up in response to Allende’s appeal. And how into the present, corporate power has shaped or as some would say misshaped the international economic order where among other inequalities, transnational corporations but not citizens are protected under hard law at the international level. Joining us from Massachusetts, Harris Gleckman is Senior Fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability, UMass-Boston. He’s Director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting and Board Member of the Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability. And the author of Multistakeholder Governance and Democracy: A Global Challenge. Among other distinctions and of particular relevance to today’s conversation, from the early ‘80s until it was shut down in 1992, Harris Gleckman was a staff member at the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations. He served as chief of the UNCTC environment unit (1988-1992) and in this capacity prepared the benchmark survey and recommendations on sustainable development management for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. I am delighted to welcome Harris Gleckman. Over to you. Harris. HARRIS GLECKMAN: Thank you and thank you very much, Lynn for inviting me to join your series. The panel reflecting on Allende’s crucial role in initiating global conversations about the power of multinationals was a wonderful marker in history. I want to pick up on your invitation to say what we really would like to see as a narrative for governing the international market and the institutions for doing that. I think that that at a minimum, we have a good model in theory which is what happens in the industrialized countries. And there are essentially five parts. The first part is the state is intended to be the buffer between consumers and the industry; to be a buffer between the workers and the owners of industry. And the state has this intermediary role and an institutional role in balancing those sets of powers. It sets up an administrative system to review mergers, to review technology issues, to review disclosure. It has an administrative structure. It also has a series of organizations that explicitly say: here is what a product safety standard should look like. Here is what a medical device for testing efficiency should look like. Here is how workers should be protected in their workplace. It has a separate set of institutions to make all those activities happen. It has a tax system which says this is the way in which the corporate world, in principle anyway, ought to be providing resources to meet, amongst other things, these needs. And it has a court system. When we move into the international space, we need all of those functions. And we need some additional ones because we have jurisdictional and political boundaries between countries. So those boundaries pushed by the corporate sector issue: They’ve demanded free movement of money going into the country, free movement of money going out, profits. They’ve demanded free movement of their technologies going in. But we do not have free movement of people. And we do not have clarity about how to deal with liability and responsibility and obligations across borders. All of that needs to be part of a package. The best of the national practices and a whole other collection of institutional and conceptual features to regulate a global market. But that’s not where we are. And there’s a lot of reasons why we’re not there. And amongst those that Allende flagged in his keynote address to the UNCTAD Session Three meeting in Santiago that initiated global attention to the need to figure out how to manage the international market. Let me explain to you why we’re not where we ought to be. Out of Allende’s statement, a message of which he repeated in the General Assembly [the United Nations General Assembly], the Economic and Social Council brought together a group of eminent persons to say: President Allende, are you really right? Is it really necessary to do this? And those eminent persons – a mixture of academics, labor, people from the corporate world, people from the legal profession – came with a resounding yes; we do need to do this. And they reported that to the Economic and Social Council who created two bodies. One, a standing body of governments to continue b the political aspects of this, the Commission on Transnational Corporations. And a staff called, as you referred to it, the Center on Transnational Corporations (most commonly used initials, UNCTC). The Commission at its Second Session said to the staff, we’re giving you three major assignments. First is to address the normative legal basis for how to deal with transnationals in the international market. And please help us develop a Code of Conduct [on Transnational Corporations]. Second, they said: part of the reason President Allende’s appeal for assistance occurs in many, many countries of the developing world is  because they need technical and legal and financial assistance in negotiating with multinationals and in writing their own laws. So the Center was asked to provide day in and day out technical assistance to developing countries on matters relating to transnational corporations. And the third thing they asked of us was to do research and build a data base about the nature of transnational corporations. Because while certain elements were well known, many more had to be researched. What was the response to this from the corporate world? Part of it was supporting the Center on Transnational Corporations. Part, however, went to the OECD. And the OECD produced a competing set of standards which they called guidelines. So that introduced us to the first major tension about how we did not get to what needed to be an international arrangement for dealing with the international market. The OECD explicitly said it’s guidelines. It’s voluntary: We will set some benchmarks, but it’s up to each company, each country, it’s going to be voluntary. This was the beginning of undermining an effort to build a constructive global system for managing an international market. The narrative and the wording in negotiations around the Code of Conduct remained a tension point. Because when there are references to good accounting, to consumer protection, the concern of those in the corporate world was that these ideas might permeate at the national level in developing countries into law. And that, that in their view was a bad idea. And so every section of the discussion of the Code of Conduct which might have been binding became a battle over the power of the narrative being moved into a legally binding system at least at the national level. Lynn, you were referring to in terms of developing the criteria for sustainable development as a contribution to the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development. This was an explicit request from the Economic and Social Council. And the Center convened many discussions with many advisors and produced this set of criteria for sustainable development management. The pressure on that; sorry, I need to back up and say every idea that was in the criteria had a footnote which said some company in the world was actually doing that activity at that level of environmental and sustainable behavior. That wasn’t good enough. As an example of the kind of pressure, the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris went to the Swedish government who had helped fund the work we were doing on the criteria and accounting standards. And the Chief negotiating delegate for the Swedish government in this process which was a very active country, was   explicitly told, don’t incorporate this into the material. And even more was told: don’t talk to the Center on Transnational Corporations. I can be honest with you, they basically did that. But as you understand, there was a conversation because I learned of that pressure brought through the International Chamber of Commerce through the Swedish government that constrained its contribution to the 1992 Rio Conference. In 1992, something else happened. The Center on Transnational Corporations itself was shut down. That’s also a reflection of the political power of just trying to develop some guidance, some assistance to countries; some research was seen as too much of a challenge to parts of the corporate sector. But that’s only a part of the story. Another part as I was indicating is that the idea of law and regulatory practices normally done at the national level in developed countries was moved into the area of volunteerism. Whatever standards there were, they had to be voluntary. Another way in which this battle took place was over what for many it would be a mundane issue which is accounting standards. Part of accounting standards, so far as countries are concerned and so far as people are concerned, is the taxes that can be appropriately charged to international business. That turned accounting standards into a political fight. The Center on Transnationals hosted an international standards of accounting and reporting body to give developing country accounting professionals and leaders a chance to meet and to recommend the standards they wanted. But the predominant role of setting the standards for the accounting profession worldwide is a voluntary set run through corporate organizations. Let me just indicate how different these standards could be. Our colleague at the Center on Transnationals used to work in Asia for Exxon. And he would be asked by Exxon headquarters, did we make enough? How much did we make this year? And his answer, which he repeated, says tell me, I have three different accounting standards I can use to answer your question. The US standard, the standard in the country, the internal Exxon standard, and he could have said, a fourth, the ISAR standard [International Standards of Accounting and Report]. Tell me which one you want, and then I can answer you the question, how much profits, which relates to the ability of the countries to do taxing. Another area which is missing from what is the national practice is to set product safety standards for workers, for consumers. And here the UN was asked to produce a consolidated list of the rules and regulations about risks from chemicals and medical products. A book early edition looked like this. As you can see, it was a substantial amount of work. This is a compendium of decisions made by independent countries so that it could be shared with other countries, both from a scientific point of view and an administrative point of view. Well, you won’t be surprised this also got shut down. That means that the process which would be the equivalent at the national level of environmental protection agencies, occupational health and safety agencies that doesn’t have even a starting point in the way in which the corporate sector has   that from happening, constrained the international level. Another area is in the area of courts. In the developed world, you have a largely independent court system. You have administrative of courts. All designed to have the leverage to arbitrate facts and the power to order the implementation of decisions. At the international level, there are no real courts of that nature. But what the corporate world has done is come up with a counter proposal, a counter structure, of the investor dispute settlement arbitration hearings [ISDS]. One of the key differences between that in a court is that the investor dispute settlement arena has an unusual criterion. The corporation has a platform to sue governments who enact health and safety environmental zoning rules, which might disrupt the profitability of the enterprise. Again, the power of the corporate world on the, on the international level has blocked even the analogous institutions that operate regularly in the developed world. Two other areas where that is occurring; one is in governance. In many developed countries, corporations, citizen groups, worker groups are encouraged to share their perspectives, to lobby the state, to say what the rules should be. At the international level, when Allende spoke and many years of the Center on Transnational’s and the Commission on Transnational’s life, the companies worked with their governments and the governments expressed certain views. Again, playing this moderating role but heavily influenced by corporate lobbying. Subsequently, that wasn’t seen as adequate enough and corporations wanted to become at the table in setting rules and standards. And one of the ways in which they did this is create another form of institution called a multistakeholder body. These multistakeholder bodies exist in the area of setting product standards: The Marine Stewardship Council, the Forest Stewardship Council. In effect, these are the analogs to the national bodies. But now the firms involved are on the governance of these bodies. The firms or their spokesperson organizations wanted to be in the policy debate through multistakeholder forums. And this is now a direction which is, for the last 15 years now, a push from the World Economic Forum. And unfortunately, to be candid with you, one which the current Secretary General [the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres] has largely agreed to. And has a partnership agreement with the World Economic Forum to open the door more for these multistakeholder bodies which brings the corporation into the governance process. The current Secretary General has proposed as part of going forward after the 75 years of the United Nations: Our Common Agenda is his report. That report says that six other multistakeholder bodies should be created to deal with global policy issues. And it’s also telling that the Secretary General made no recommendations for governments to negotiate new international agreements. So another way in which the pressure from the corporate world has influenced the governance of the market is that the firms now are seeking and have got a seat at the table for a number of the standard setting practices and policy making in global governance. And I want to share one other which is quite central to this discussion. And it’s quite central to the discussion in the climate discussions and in the sustainability discussions. The sustainable development goals are negotiated between governments. But those governments who have the capacity and the money for doing it didn’t put up the money, are not putting up the money. Because they’re leaving the door open for corporate philanthropies and individual firms to decide how to fund the future needs. And so corporate philanthropy power is very serious. We just had a very dramatic example of that political leverage through funding in the institution set up to deal with COVID – to fund the vaccine access for many developing countries – called COVAX. COVAX did not meet its goals. COVAX was a multistakeholder body. But, two weeks ago, one of the funders of COVAX, it’s called GAVI, the Global Alliance on Vaccine Initiative, said: It’s not working. We’re going to stop funding it. GAVI is supported largely and centrally by the Gates Foundation. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is saying very clearly, COVID is still a problem in the developing world and other parts of the world, and we need money. But the corporate funders have said that’s enough. Unfortunately, also by the current Secretary General’s advice, many countries who might have previously given their donations to the World Health Assembly to do vaccines for COVID, instead, we’re encouraged to give their money to COVAX. And now COVAX is collapsing. Now I mention [all] that as the six different ways in which what ought to be the system for governing multinationals and transnationals has been undermined in the last 30 years. So where can we pick up some of Allende’s enthusiasm and the enthusiasm and commitment of many other people around the world going forward? Let me offer five possible routes for maintaining and pushing forth further on this. First is the need to keep transnationals [transnational corporations] out of the governing process of international affairs. At the level of products, this is actually being done in the case of tobacco and infant formula. Where the treaties explicitly say that firms in that industry cannot be in the room, cannot participate, cannot contribute. Because the space is for governments to figure out how to make decisions. But that’s not what’s happening in climate. In climate, the corporations were all over the recent Conference of Parties in Egypt (COP 27). They struck an agreement with the Egyptian government, Coca-Cola, to fund part of the cost of the COP. They held sales exhibitions; oil and gas companies could put up tents to show how good they are. A new wall has to be built to reassert the space for governments to meet without the corporate world interfering in setting what should be the rules for the global market. A second area is some work under the United Nations Human Rights Council where they’re negotiating a binding treaty dealing with the issue of cross border liabilities. This is one of the areas where on the international market, there’s an enormous hole. And this gap prevents those who may cause problems from having a court room where those who have been harmed can make their case and that settlements can be enforced. So, there’s an effort for a binding treaty for the Human Rights Council. And that work is an area which would be very helpful for many people to be aware of and to join that activity in Geneva. A third area is to keep raising the attention the way multistakeholder bodies provide a frame, an institutional space for the corporations to enter public decision making. These are presented as if we now got everybody in the room. But everybody in the room has been ones which the f unders or the powerful actors have selected. And governments are treated as if they are equal to academics or to the corporate world or civil society. This forum does not have a base in any concept of democracy. And that’s an area, you know, Lynn that I’ve been writing on for a while. Another direction, a fourth, is to begin envisioning what would the next commission on transnational corporations, the next Center on Transnational Corporations, what would they look like? In terms of the narrative, their assignment, their institutional relations, planning how to build the next foothold. To begin to construct the kind of ways in which we ought to be able t o govern the international market. And my last suggestion is the toughest one, as we need to figure out what is, what we really would like to scale up democracy at a global level. And how does this fit well with regulating dominant forces in the market? And this is a tough question right now; our basic principle is enshrined in the ‘one country one vote’. It doesn’t take a lot of quick of study to realize that there are a lot of small countries in the world population wise, and there are a number of very large countries in the world population wise. But at most democracies are based on individuals. And we haven’t got that kind of system at the international level. Do we want it? That’s one of the questions about envisioning what one would want out of a whole global governance system.   A key part of that would be how to make sure that the right balance is maintained between the international firms and workers who are employed directly or indirectly by them; between international firms and the products and services that they provide; and between international firms and the natural resources that they are using. Those features of a global oversight of a market are essential. Thank you, Lynn. FRIES: With those thoughts, we are going to leave it here for now. Thank you, Harris. And from Geneva, Switzerland thank you for joining us in this segment of GPEnewsdocs with Harris Gleckman. Harris Gleckman is Senior Fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability, UMass-Boston and Director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting. He is Board Member of the Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability. He was a staff member of the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations and head of the NY office of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He is the author of Multistakeholder Governance and Democracy: A Global Challenge. 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) Donate with Credit Card Never miss another story Subscribe to theAnalysis.news - Newsletter Email(Required) Name(Required) First Last Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_4" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); “Harris Gleckman is a senior fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting. Gleckman has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brandeis University. He was a staff member of the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations, head of the NY office of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and an early member of the staff for the 2002 Monterey Conference on Financing for Development.” theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“.   Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay’s Documentaries

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Talia Baroncelli speaks to historian Pouya Alimagham. .kt-post-loop_2a3573-66 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_2a3573-66 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_2a3573-66 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_2a3573-66 .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_2a3573-66 .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_2a3573-66 .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_2a3573-66 .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_2a3573-66 .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_2a3573-66 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_2a3573-66 .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;} The Iranian Revolution: The Fall of the Shah and the Rise of Khomeini Iranian Women-Led Resistance Independent of Western Imperialism Why the Media is Now Supporting Julian Assange? – Paul Jay pt 2/2 Retired US Army Colonel on Ukraine, Iran & the State of the US Empire Anti-Regime Protests and the Devastating Effects of US Sanctions in Iran U.S. Sanctions Strengthen Iranian Theocracy – Hamid Dabashi Empire Update: Did Trump Order Iran Assassination? – Abby Martin Elliot Abrams Tries to Tie Biden’s Hands on Iran – Trita Parsi Israel Wants U.S. to Weaken and Isolate Iran – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 3/3 U.S. Attempts to Destabilize Iran Have Failed – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 2/3 U.S. Refuses to Accept Iran as a Regional Power – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 1/3 Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music A transcript will be arriving shortly. 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) 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() ); “Pouya Alimagham is a historian of the modern Middle East. He specializes on Iran, Iraq, and the Levant, focusing on such themes as revolutionary and guerrilla movements, imperialism, representation and Orientalism, “Political Islam” and post-Islamism, and the intersections therein.” 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

On this episode of The Source, Zain Raza speaks with Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Army Colonel and former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, about the latest developments in the war in Ukraine. They talk about the significance of Zelenskyy's visit to Washington and the latest military developments. This interview was produced by acTVism Munich.

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In the first few days in office, Lula presented more progressive policy changes than many believed would be possible, says freelance journal"} Lula da Silva was inaugurated for a third non-consecutive term as president of Brazil, dramatically reversing the country’s trajectory of the past eight years. In the first few days in office, Lula presented more progressive policy changes than many believed would be possible, says freelance journalist Michael Fox. Here is a link to Lula’s full inauguration speech in English: https://www.brasilwire.com/lulas-inauguration-speech/ .kt-post-loop_0d88d4-79 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_0d88d4-79 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_0d88d4-79 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_0d88d4-79 .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_0d88d4-79 .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_0d88d4-79 .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_0d88d4-79 .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_0d88d4-79 .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_0d88d4-79 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_0d88d4-79 .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;} Brazil: Hope for the First Time in a Very Long Time Peru’s Systemic Political Crisis Deepens as President is Arrested Lula Wins in Brazil but “Will Have to Tread Very Carefully” After Bolsonaro’s Failures, Why was Brazil’s Election so Close? 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I’m your host, Greg Wilpert. Sunday, January 1, Brazil inaugurated the former labor union leader and Workers Party President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also known as Lula, for a third non-consecutive term as President of Brazil. Last October, Lula narrowly won a run-off election against the right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro with 50.9% of the vote. Lula had previously served two consecutive terms as president from 2003 to 2010, during Latin America’s first so-called pink tide of the early 2000s. Then his successor, Dilma Rousseff, also from the Workers Party, was removed from office in 2016 in what many have considered to be a legislative coup. Lula himself faced prosecution for corruption and was sent to prison as he was preparing to run for president in 2018. After nearly two years of imprisonment, he was exonerated and able to run for president for a third time. Sunday’s inauguration was, in many ways, a historic event, not only because of the unusual circumstances that led to it but also because Lula presented a cabinet in which one out of three members are women. Joining me now to take a look at what Lula’s third term as president might mean is Michael Fox. He’s a freelance journalist, former editor of the journal NACLA, and host and producer of the podcast Brazil on Fire. Thanks for joining me today, Mike. Michael Fox Thanks for having me, Greg. Greg Wilpert So, first of all, just how significant would you say is Lula’s inauguration for a third non-consecutive term as president of Brazil? Michael Fox I mean, it’s a complete 180. It’s a complete about-face. It’s huge. It’s a complete game-changer for Brazil. The inauguration itself was powerful, with 200,000 people in the streets. So many people are talking about hope, talking about a return to democracy. As you mentioned, there was the coup against Dilma Rousseff, and then many people saw Lula’s jailing and then Bolsonaro’s elections as all other layers of the coup. Then now, for Brazil, this is the return to democracy, the return of hope. As all of your listeners know, Bolsonaro brought in so many different things: white supremacy, fake news, and attacks against black, indigenous communities. This opens the door for a complete about-face to what we’ve had until now. The inauguration really laid the groundwork for that. Greg Wilpert So let’s take a look at the Cabinet. First of all, as I mentioned, one out of three members are women, more or less. I think it was 11 out of 30 something, which is no doubt the highest number, I think, of any Cabinet in Brazil’s history. What do we know about some of the main members of this Cabinet, and what can we expect from them? Michael Fox Well, the first thing is the Workers Party, which is obviously Lula’s party. It came into power with a very broad coalition of Left, Center, and center-right parties. Remember that his running mate, Vice President Geraldo Alkman, was his arch-nemesis back in 2006. He’s the guy who ran against Lula back in 2006. He really went across the aisle to bring in everybody within kind of the unity democracy camp, and that’s what his whole campaign was about. It was really about bringing everybody in as much as possible. So, of course, that’s what his Cabinet also looks like. A quarter of those seats have gone to Workers Party members, the nine seats. Those are really the key ministries for Lula. So that’s the makeup. You have roughly nine Workers Party ministries, and then the rest of the ministries are divided up amongst those other parties, the three ministries to each of the different parties. Now, amongst the Workers Party, you have some extremely important ministries, like the Ministry of Finance with Fernando Haddad, who is the former presidential candidate who ran for the Workers Party when, of course, Lula was taken out in 2018. Flávio Dino, who is the former Governor of Maranhão, and extremely important. He battled Bolsonaro. He is one of the most arch-nemesis of Bolsonaro during his time in power, and he is now the Minister of Justice. So that’s amongst the Workers Party. You also have– and this is really, really key, Greg. All of these new ministries, several of them, and that includes the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Women, the Ministry of Racial Justice, and actually, the woman, Marielle Franco’s sister, is now the Minister of Racial Justices or Racial Equality. This is extremely important because it brings in all these other sectors, and the Left won big in a lot of these different areas. Now, the big thing that a lot of people are talking about is, of course, the Environment Ministry. Marina Silva’s back, remember, she was Environment Minister for six or seven years under Lula. She was really key in pushing back on deforestation, cutting deforestation in half in those first two years of Lula’s first government. Then they had a falling out. She ran for president several times, and then they built their relationship again, and that’s been one of the most exciting things about Lula’s campaign and seeing her back on the stage. In fact, she was just sworn in just yesterday, and the line for her swearing-in moment or for her opening ceremony was the longest of all the different ceremonies for ministers that are happening now. Of course, the other really big key ministry that’s new is the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, led by Sonia Guajajara, who is one of the most important indigenous rights activists in Brazil. She’s the leader of APIB [Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil], which is the largest indigenous organization. Of course, she was constantly battling against the Bolsonaro government, and she is now the Minister of Indigenous Peoples. Just to put this in perspective, first off, there was never a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, and there was never an indigenous minister before. In fact, she was the very first minister to be sworn in on Sunday. She walked up, and she wore the feathered headdress. When they took a picture of the ministers there with Lula, she was standing right beside Lula. On the other side of Vice President Gerald Alkman was Anielle Franco, who is Marielle Franco’s sister. This is a very, very telling moment that Lula is pushing for diversity, he’s pushing for inclusiveness, and not just within the Ministry itself, but Lula actually went out and asked Joênia Wapichana if she would be the head of FUNAI [Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas]. Now FUNAI is kind of the Indigenous Affairs Agency. It always has been. Although the name was the Indian Affairs Agency and it’s now the National Foundation for Indigenous People. So they’ve changed the name. She’s now the head of that, and that agency is now underneath the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. Extremely important pushes. They’ve already been talking about wanting to demarcate 13 different indigenous territories just within this first month. So there are a lot of things that have happened. The Cabinet is actually really exciting. It’s way more progressive than even people thought was possible.  There is another person that I think is important, that’s Simone Tebet, who is now the Minister of Planning and Budget. Now, she was key because she got the third most number of votes in this election. She’s from the PMDB or the MDB Party, which is a centrist right party. But man, after that first-round election, she came out just battling for Lula. She came out attacking Bolsonaro for his secret budget, saying it was potentially the largest corruption scandal in the world at the time. She was really, really active in a way that a lot of people did not expect. She now has her own cabinet seat. It’s really exciting. It’s exciting for the Left to see so many different people moving into power, into Lula’s Cabinet, with really clear visions for where they want to take this, and it’s exciting for the progressive movement, just looking forward here. Greg Wilpert You mentioned, just quickly, Marielle Franco and her sister Anielle being in the Cabinet. Many people might not know who Marielle is. Can you summarize briefly who she is and what the significance of her sister being in the Cabinet is? Michael Fox That’s right. So Marielle was a black lesbian City Council member from Rio de Janeiro who was gunned down in 2018. It sent shockwaves around Brazil because it showed that there was just (A) no justice, no respect for black communities, and black politicians and leadership. So protests happened across the country. It was like a Black Lives Matter moment in Brazil and around the world, really, because of what she symbolized for Brazil, and it continues to have reverberations. Her name continues to be extremely important. Anielle, her sister, then created the Marielle Franco Institute and has been trying to lift up her name ever since and that image. The fact that she is now the Minister of Racial Equality is just so key. It’s so, so important. To put this into perspective, back in 2018, when Bolsonaro was running for power, there were Bolsonaro-allied people who actually won office, legislators who won office, who actually had picked up signs, Marielle signs. They were breaking them in this image of showing that Marielle just isn’t for Bolsonaro and for his allies. She was just worthless. The image of black communities, LGBT communities, and indigenous [inaudible 00:09:28] communities, are worth just nothing in this country. That’s why we’ve seen so much pushback over the last four years and so much resistance from social movements. Right now, that’s why people are just so ecstatic about the potential for so much hope and possibility in this new Lula government. Greg Wilpert Now, what do you think we can expect from Lula in terms of his domestic policies? What are the priorities? Also, do you think that his scope of action might be rather limited, given that he does not have a majority in Congress? That is, would he even be able to pass any significant new laws? Michael Fox So, great questions. First off, he’s been very clear about what his focus is on domestic policies and it’s poverty alleviation. That’s what it was in his first two terms. He wants to again lift people out of poverty because, of course, we’ve seen poverty numbers have risen, inequality has risen, and hunger has risen. This is one of the things. He actually broke down crying, Greg, during his inauguration speech when he talked about people asking for money on the street and people begging for food because this is not the country that he left. When he left office with an 87% approval rating back in early 2010, Brazil had eliminated poverty. Dilma did even more on that step. So this is something that’s really key. He’s talked about bringing back health and bringing back SUS [Sistema Único de Saúde], the public state healthcare system, because, of course, that was gutted under Bolsonaro. So much of his focus, particularly in these first coming months, is going to be to renew those systems and those agencies that were gutted and undone by Bolsonaro. We’ve already seen this, actually, just in his decrees within the first 24 hours. He blocked eight different privatizations of state businesses, including Petrobras, the state oil company, including Correios, the mail service. He redid Bolsonaro’s previous decree that was liberalizing and freeing up arms for people around the country. So he’s tightening those. He eliminated the 100-year [foreign language 00:11:37] or confidentiality that Bolsonaro had put into place for many things, kind of whatever Bolsonaro wanted to do. He passed seven different environmental decrees, including blocking mining on indigenous territories and opening up the Amazon fund again for people to be able to invest in Brazil from different countries. That’s just what he’s done within his first 24 hours. His domestic policy is very much going to be focused on poverty alleviation. He’s also talked about, of course, wanting to stop Amazon deforestation, but at the same time, he wants to keep the economy running. This is what he was really good at back in his first two terms. He didn’t lift people out of poverty and then do it as a detriment to Brazilian businesses, but he actually lifted Brazilian businesses, were able to get them abroad and keep them making even more money than ever before, and that’s something he wants to continue to do. He said that, of course, particularly with the Amazon, that look, “we can continue to be the breadbasket of the world and not deforest one more meter of our forest. We don’t have to cut down one more tree.” So that’s really important for him. Part of that is being able to throw money and throw resources and funds for local farmers and local smart farmers. That was key. That’s something he did a lot back in his first two terms. It’s something he’s going to want to do again. It had really helped small agricultural farming. At the same time, he’s focused on his poverty alleviation stuff. He’s already reinstituted Bolsa Família, which is, of course, his conditional cash transfer program back from the 2000s. He says that poor families are going to be receiving 600 reals a month, just over $100. So these are all really key things that aren’t actually that hard for him to do, that he’s been able to do so far. Of course, he can’t knock out the knees of important industries, agribusiness, and things like that. So that’s going to be a challenge he’s going to have, and particularly even a challenge within his own cabinet, finding the ways that he’s going to be able to push to protect the Amazon, support indigenous issues, support, say, the MST [Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra] and local small farmers at the same time as he’s not turning his back on the big agribusiness. The other thing that was really gutted under Bolsonaro, Greg, is industry. This was something that Bolsonaro basically just turned his back on, and the whole idea under Bolsonaro was to sell off Brazilian industry as much as possible and to really focus on commodities markets and selling markets for export abroad. That was his big thing. Lula comes from a completely different perspective– developmentalism. Saying, “no, we actually need Brazilian industry. We need Brazilian businesses, and we want to help to jumpstart that around the country.” With those two visions for the world of poverty alleviation and also developmentalism, of we need to build up Brazilian businesses again; they’re not a contradiction. They go hand in hand. Now, like what you just asked about how is he going to do this with obviously a conservative Congress, and this is a big question. I think it’s maybe one of the biggest questions that a lot of people are asking because, as you know, so many people came in, Bolsonaro allies, and it is a very, very conservative Congress. At the same time, the Workers Party doesn’t have its back against the wall. In fact, the PT, at this point, has as many people in Congress as it did before the whole car wash Lava Jato scandal. So it was very clear in this last election that people were more than willing to vote for the PT at the same levels that they were doing under the early Dilma years and under the Lula years. So that is one point that a lot of people have missed when they’ve been talking about the makeup of the legislature. There is going to be a conservative legislature. One other key thing that’s really important, though. Many of the allies of Bolsonaro in Congress are not used to doing opposition. They’re from centrist parties, what’s known as the Centrao, and these are the parties like the PMDB. Maybe they’ve jumped ship and joined more Bolsonaro parties, but these are individuals that are used to being in the middle and always joining whoever is in power. This is going to be a really interesting thing to see how they play opposition or don’t play opposition in the coming months and the coming years. I think a lot of this is going to depend on how strong Bolsonaro himself is. I know that we’re going to get into this, but Bolsonaro has left the country. He left the country early. Some people will say he fled. Many of his supporters and his allies are not happy with him because they feel like he’s completely turned his back on him. So the question of Bolsonaro is going to be a really important question going forward, and we don’t know how to answer that right now. In terms of the makeup of the legislature, Lula still has every possibility of pushing through things that he thinks are important. Not everything is done via the legislature. Not everything’s done in Congress and the Senate. I mean, look, what we’ve already seen just this week from his decrees. They have been extremely important. He’s going to continue to do those. In the same way that Bolsonaro, he also ruled very much by decree a lot of times. I think Lula is going to be able to do a lot more. He already has. He already has, but he’s going to be able to do a lot more than many people give him credit for. Now, is he going to be able to completely legalize abortion? No, that’s not an issue he’s going to get traction on. Why is that? Because the Evangelical movement has grown substantially. That’s not something he’s going to be able to move on at this point. He’s able to move on so many other things, and those have been his focus that he’s been very, very clear about for months. Greg Wilpert Okay, I want to turn now to Lula’s international policies, where he presumably has a little bit more leeway than he does for domestic issues. During the first pink tide, Lula, together with former President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, they were instrumental in setting up numerous regional new bodies, such as CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Nations, and UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, which both fell apart when the first pink tide ended. Now, what can we expect from Lula this time around? Michael Fox Well, this is really, really exciting. For folks internationally, it’s one of the most exciting pieces because, of course, under Bolsonaro, Brazil has had a very not just U.S.-focused but Trump-focused foreign policy. It’s whatever is good for Trump is good for us. Of course, that left Brazil in the air over the last two years, not knowing exactly what to do once Trump was out of office two years ago. The foreign policy now is going to be completely about-face. Lula has already said that, and so has his incoming Foreign Minister, Mauro Vieira, who was actually Foreign Minister under Dilma Rousseff. He’s been very clear that he was instructed to focus on three key elements, to begin with, by Lula, and that’s first South American ties, then Latin American ties, and then African ties. Those, of course, were really important for Lula back in the 2000s. His whole thing was south-south relations, regional integration, and building those relationships with Africa for the first time. He opened up 35 new embassies during his two administrations during those years, and he traveled to more than 50 countries in eight years. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. He is a great diplomat. We saw that at COP-27 when he was there. It was only two weeks after his election. He still wasn’t even president yet, and he was received like a rock star in Egypt. That’s going to be really key for Brazil. It is kind of lifting Brazil back up onto the international sphere, being able to dialogue with the world’s richest countries, but not bowing down to those richest countries and really being able to keep Brazil on this international level and have a relationship with everybody. We saw that at the inauguration. I think this is really interesting, Greg. Sixty-five different foreign delegations came to Lula’s inauguration, including nineteen different heads of state. We’ve never seen anything like this before. During that, while we were watching the passing of the different foreign delegations, first you saw Ukraine; the Ukrainian delegation came and shake hands with Lula, and right behind them was Russia. So it shows how Lula is willing to dialogue with everybody in the world, and he’s going to have solid relationships with everybody. He is the great negotiator in that sense. Now, regional integration and south-south ties are one of the most exciting things about this whole question because this is pink tide 2.0, really, except for the fact we don’t have the revolutionary socialism of the 21st century. It’s not the revolutionary pink tide. Many of those governments maybe came to power kind of eking it out, just like Lula. He won by 2 million votes, 2%. right. But still, most of the countries in Latin America at this point are Left or left-leaning, and that’s going to be really important. Lula has already said he wants to go full speed ahead with UNASUR. Most likely, his first international meeting is going to be in Argentina at the CELAC Conference, where he’s going to reannounce Brazil’s reentry into the international meeting. Many people are talking about the importance of a new UNASUR and the possibility of reinvigorating UNASUR or kickstarting it again like we haven’t seen in a very long time. So this is really, really key. In fact, what Lula’s Foreign Minister said, and Lula has said as well, “it is not just building these bodies, but going even further,” is what they want to see. What does regional integration look like going beyond what we saw back in the 2000s? So it’s really exciting. We’re going to see what these next couple of months mean and what they look like as the different countries are dialoguing. But just to give you a little bit of sense of what we’re looking at, six different heads of state leaders met with Lula just the day after his inauguration, talking about how do we go forward, what are we doing, what does trade look like, what are our relations look like? So that’s what we’re going to be seeing in the coming months. Greg Wilpert I just want to turn briefly to the point that you made earlier about the narrow victory that Lula had and the fact, of course, that Lula and Bolsonaro camps were so far apart in terms of politically speaking. Does that mean that Brazilian society is this deeply divided? How do you make sense of that? There’s such a big divide, so to speak, and such a narrow divide, too, in the sense of the population’s support for each side. Michael Fox So there are several different things to unpack here. First off, absolutely, it’s deeply divided, and it’s divided like it hasn’t been before. It’s divided almost like what we saw in Venezuela back in the 2000s or like what we see in the United States right now with Trump. I mean, that’s the legacy of the Trump image and the Trump style of politics that Bolsonaroo inherited and took on completely: pushing fake news and pushing this nationalist agenda, attacking, attacking, attacking the other side and the Left and whatnot. It is extremely concerning. One of the things and part of the reason for this division is obviously the fake news, the misrepresentation of things we saw even just around the polls, the whole electoral system and everything under the elections. This was one of those moments, this election was one of those moments that was the most twisted and contorted in terms of fake news and just new misrepresentation and misinformation being pushed just on the daily by Bolsonaro’s campaign. So that’s extremely concerning. Look, the thing is, though, Greg, a lot of people I talked to during the elections when I was there, and I was there reporting from around the country, a lot of them are completely on board with Bolsonaro. What they told me even ahead of the second round vote was, “look, if Bolsonaro, first off, we know that we’re in the majority,” Bolsonaro’s people were the majority, “so if Bolsonaro doesn’t win, well, then we know something was wrong with the electoral system, so he should have won.” That’s why we saw his people out in the streets later on because the idea there is about faith. It’s almost like a religious conviction. It’s not about actually having a democratic play and trying to figure out how we work together in a democratic system. No, it’s about destroying your opponent. That’s what we’ve seen just in the last little bit. That’s why we had, around the country, people rallying, Bolsonaro supporters rallying in front of military barracks, calling on the military to turn out to block Lula’s election and to keep Bolsonaro in power. People actually believe that. We’re talking about thousands of Bolsonaro supporters who believed that if they protested in front of the military barracks, the military was going to support them. The fact that they actually believe that, and they continue to do it for months and months, and they actually thought that Bolsonaro was going to find a way to enact some sort of a coup at some point is really concerning for what it means for Brazilian democracy, for what it means going forward, and for what it means for Lula. I think most likely what we’re going to be seeing in the coming weeks and in the coming months; although right now, there’s kind of this unclear phase about how Bolsonaro’s people are going to organize. There’s almost no doubt that they are going to organize as an opposition and as a very clear opposition, particularly in the streets, particularly with fake news that’s going to come against Lula, and people are going to be out in the streets just like Trump supporters have been out there. We’ve even seen this in the news right now, Greg. Since Lula’s inauguration, you’ve seen over Twitter and social media people are saying, “look, Lula never he never walked up the presidential palace. He never was inaugurated. He never swore with his hand up in Congress. It didn’t happen. At any point, Bolsonaro is going to fly back from Florida, and he’s going to be taking power.” People actually believe this, and it’s on social media. This is what’s passing over What’s App in the social networks amongst Bolsonaro supporters. So it’s really concerning that this is a real reality. It shows the polarization, but it also shows the very clear intent by a certain group of people to attack Brazilian democracy, to gut the potential for Lula to be successful. This is one of the things that the Supreme Court, Brazilian Supreme Court has been very clear on and they’ve been investigating for several years, are the attacks against Brazilian democracy. This is why many people have been talking about potential accusations and crimes against Bolsonaro and potentially that he might actually stand trial for some of these things. This is why, from what we heard from reports, was that when he left two days early, that’s because his lawyers, from what we understand, advised him, “hey, it might be a good idea for you to skip town for a little bit and get out of the country because they might be coming after you.” The very first day after Lula’s inauguration, PSOL [Partido Socialismo e Liberdade], the small Left party that had split from the Workers Party back in 2005 but is now back in the coalition, they actually requested from the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court ask for preventative prison from Bolsonaro for crimes, for the crimes against humanity, for lying during the elections, for attacks on democracy and pushing coups. There are several different potential crimes and accusations against Bolsonaro going back to, of course, the Senate inquiry into COVID-19, which lasted for almost eight or nine months. When they came out, they said that Bolsonaro was responsible for as many as nine different crimes, including crimes against humanity. So all this is kind of putting this into– that’s how come, most likely, Bolsonaro is right out of the country right now, but we’re going to see what happens going forward. Greg Wilpert Now, just turning to what Lula can do to counter these dangers, what about his own party, the Workers Party, the PT? Lula is said to enjoy a massive amount of popularity, often far beyond his own party. First of all, is that still true? Some people even say that he has lost touch with the grassroots. Is there anything to that story? If so, what is or has the PT done to connect with the grassroots? Michael Fox Well, I think the first thing, Greg, is just to understand that this electoral campaign that brought Lula to power, like I said, was a very broad coalition. It wasn’t just with other parties. It was social movements and grassroots movements. It was broader than anything we’ve ever seen before. In fact, the MST, working together with other social movements, actually created five to 7,000 different popular committees in urban communities and cities all up and down Brazil with the idea of exactly that– being able to organize for Lula’s election, but then be able to continue to organize in those communities long beyond that. Some people have had that criticism around the PT that they lost touch with the grassroots, but that criticism is actually pretty old. That’s like, from a decade ago at a time when their local grassroots committees had failed, when the PT had been in power for a very long time. What we’ve seen since the coup against Dilma Rousseff, and particularly since Lula’s jailing, is this overwhelming organization from below, from the grass, from grassroots organizations, from movements, unions, and political parties behind Lula, behind Lula to (A), to get him out of jail, and to (B), to get him into power. I mean, this is like the ultimate rags-to-riches story, a political prisoner comeback. Here he is, and he’s just come to office. This is huge. People in Brazil realize this. I mean, Lula represents the working class and the poor. I’ll tell you what, Greg. When I was in Reciefe, which is northeastern Brazil, State of Pernambuco, which of course is where Lula’s from, this is the capital of that. There was a big rally there for Lula where was where he arrived. Every single person I talked to, everybody said, “Lula is our guy. Lula helped me go to school. He built universities where I was able to study. Lula is the hero of the working class.” Particularly in the northeast, Lula won this election because of the northeast, Greg. He won roughly 70% in northeastern Brazil, whereas in the rest of the country, he either lost or he was very close. So, I mean, a lot of people were talking right after the election about how northeastern Brazil saved Brazil. It’s very true. Even in São Paulo, remember, Lula’s trajectory is super interesting because he was born poor in northeastern Brazil. He comes young to São Paulo with his family in search of work. Many people I met on the streets of São Paulo on the night that Lula won, on that night, almost everybody I talked to said, “I’m proud. I’m from Pernambuco. I’m from this state. I’m from northeastern Brazil. I’m here because Lula represents me.” So absolutely, he still is extremely important, extremely, extremely popular. Now, some people, obviously, he lost some support because they still believe that he was corrupt or they still don’t understand what went down. All of the convictions, every one of the accusations against Lula, have all been tossed out in one court or another in Brazil. So it’s just ridiculous to believe that those convictions were real. Of course, they were done by biased judge Sergio Moro with the idea of tanking him and blocking his ability to return to power. In 2018, Sergio Moro, by the way, who then became Justice Minister under Bolsonaro and who is now a Senator who just won Senate in this last election. He will, I’m sure, be very loud, as loud as he possibly can be. But no, Lula is extremely important for the grassroots. The grassroots is now organized and more kind of on fire and excited than ever before. That’s why this election was so important. That’s why Lula was so important. So it’ll be interesting to see how they continue to keep the grassroots mobilized. This is something that João Stedile talked about just before the first-round vote in a press conference I attended in São Paulo. He’s one of the longtime founders of the MST, the landless workers’ movement, of course, one of the largest social movements in the Americas. He said, “what we need is a popular grassroots movement from below like we haven’t seen in decades. They just need to push Lula all they can.” Of course, there will be other interests, there’ll be other parties, and there’ll be other people trying to push Lula in different directions. Obviously, the grassroots needs to keep organized. Right now, at this point, there is so much unity from beyond pushing, beyond Bolsonaro everybody’s had their back against the wall. Right now, I was talking to somebody yesterday who is involved in the indigenous movement, and he said, “right now, we’re feeling three things. We’re feeling alleviation relief, we’re feeling excitement, like celebration, commemoratory, and we’re feeling hope.” And that’s the feeling on the ground right now. Now we’re going to see what the coming months– this is the honeymoon period, of course. In the coming months, things will get more complicated in one way or the other, and when different factions are trying to vie for this or that. Right now, Lula’s connection with the grassroots and those grassroots organizing is like never before. Just an example to really define that, Greg. Traditionally, in inauguration ceremonies, it’s always the previous president who passes the presidential sash onto the incoming president. They walk together up the presidential ramp to Planalto Palace, which, of course, is the presidential palace, and then the old president passes the sash on to Lula. Of course, Bolsonaro left two days early, so he was not passing the sash. Many people were asking, I mean, this was the big question for days. What is going to happen? Who’s going to pass the sash on to Lula? Is it going to be Dilma? Is it going to be Bolsonaro’s vice president? What’s going to happen? And the way they did it was so perfect, Greg. They brought together this group of people that just symbolized the pure diversity of Brazil and who are Brazilians. You had a cook. You had a black trash collector who comes from a family of [foreign language 00:33:17] and recyclers in the streets. You had a disabled activist. Someone from the LGBT community. You had a young child, a ten-year-old child, black child, and they all came together. Oh, and of course, Chief Raoni, who’s the most important indigenous leader in the history of Brazil. He’s the guy who did all the tours back in the ’80s with Sting and who was actually pretty critical of the Dilma Rousseff administration back in the early 2010s. They all walked up the presidential ramp together, arm in arm, and they put the presidential sash onto Lula. That just signified just so clearly that this is going to be a government, or Lula wants this to be a government by the people and for the people, in which the people are giving Lula the power to be in charge. He’s going to try and hold on to that to be sure that he’s able to push, continue to push his policies. One of the things we heard in Sonia Guajajara, for instance, she is now the Minister of Indigenous Peoples. She said in her very first talk with supporters, she said that she had been just in conversation all the time during the campaign with Lula. Always talking, “hey, what’s going on?” They’d see them in different places. They kept talking about what they wanted. Then she was the one who said, “let’s do a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, let’s do it.” Within days later, Lula is talking about that up and down the country. He did it. He made good on his promise. There she is. She’s in power. So indigenous peoples are more excited than ever. People up and down the country are more excited than ever. There is hope for the first time in a very long time. Greg Wilpert Okay, well, on that note, we’re going to leave it there for now. I was speaking to Michael Fox, freelance journalist, host, and producer of the podcast Brazil on Fire. Thanks again, Mike, for having joined me today. Michael Fox Thanks so much, Greg. A pleasure to be here. Greg Wilpert Thank you to our audience for having joined The World on Fire. The title’s similarity to Mike’s podcast is just a coincidence. Thanks again. 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) 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() ); “Michael Fox is a multimedia journalist, radio reporter, and documentary filmmaker. For the last 15 years, he has had one foot in the U.S. and the other in Latin America, covering political developments and diverse movements across the region. He has lived in more than half a dozen countries, has written hundreds of articles, and shot countless hours of footage. He is freelancing again after seven years of overseeing editorial and multimedia production for a magazine, a human rights organization, and an international news agency. During this time, he coordinated dozens of writers, videographers, correspondents, and editors. He has launched several new media projects and has taught radio, shooting, and video editing to students, organizers, and low-wage workers.” 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

A Bank for International Settlements study says 60+ trillion dollars of off-the-books currency swaps could be a profound, systematic risk. Robert Johnson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news.

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Mainly it is a new age. Franklin D. Roosevelt The bad news and the good news. The defeats and the victories. The changing fortunes of war. Harry S. Truman We’re going to maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace. Dwight D. Eisenhower  We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. John F. Kennedy Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to uphold aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. George W. Bush By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. Gore Vidal Hollywood and Washington had always seemed to me, since I’ve spent a good deal of time in both politics and movies, there’s a symbiotic relationship. They both deal with illusions, and reality doesn’t often play much of a part in fictional narratives, which is, after all, what we do in a movie on the screen and what we do with a candidate in politics. They belong together. The first person to realize that was Woodrow Wilson. He was trying to get us into World War I. You had to get Hollywood aboard to get them to make movies demonizing the Germans. And Hollywood never looked back or forward. And every President since has known that the movies, if you could harness them, were the way to get your program across, particularly if you wanted to go to war. That was the way to get people excited. Roosevelt first had radio because he had a great speaking voice and everyone liked to hear the President. I’ll never forget this one. You’ll never hear this again from a President, but Singapore had just fallen to the Japanese. Tonight the news is all bad. Franklin D. Roosevelt So far, the news has been all bad. Gore Vidal Well, at that moment, the entire country, “we’ll help you, Mr. President. We want the news to be good for America again.” Oh, God. How he played the people, it’s superb. Then newsreels came along. He proved to be just as good at newsreels as he was as a voice. And he used to call them his Garbos. And you’ll see him sitting at his desk. Franklin D. Roosevelt Through the news shown on the screen. I want to thank the many thousands who have telegraphed and written to me since the election. Gore Vidal Well, my little dog Fala has joined me here. You can see him sitting in the corner. He’ll join us in a minute, and they play. They had the little dog. He had his grandchildren. He had Eleanor [Roosevelt]. I mean, it was just glorious stuff. Franklin D. Roosevelt To all of you, I say we can now march forward, all of us together. Gore Vidal And he got the New Deal through and built up the fleets and the air force that defeated the Germans and the Japanese. He’s our first Emperor, and he did it through radio, and he did it through newsreels in those days, which would be like television now. He would have been just as good on TV. Except they wouldn’t let him on because he said substantive things. We’re sorry, Mr. President, but this is not the message that Westinghouse wants to put out. The difference between Roosevelt and [Harry S.] Truman, his successor, is enormous. Roosevelt, in his first inauguration, says we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Franklin D. Roosevelt The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Gore Vidal Then comes Harry Truman. Harry S. Truman There is a power, a monolithic power, in the world today. That power is communism forever on the march. Gore Vidal And he’s frightening us about this terrible enemy called Russia and communism. Just saw the difference; it’s night and day, night and day. Roosevelt hit the affirmative side and swept the nation. Truman got us deeper and deeper into great trouble and stirred the pot. And out of the pot comes [Joseph] McCarthy. Out of it comes the House on American Activities Committee. Out of it comes you’re not a good American. You are seen reading a book without moving your lips, that is a sure sign of a communist, and I speak as a U.S. Senator. That was the game. Narrator This our country and all its people could be in danger of nuclear attack. In minutes by enemy missiles. In hours, by enemy aircraft. Our cities, our farms, our factories. Gore Vidal Well, I think I saw through the myths of the Cold War almost from the beginning. I was a Washington political kid from a political family. The joker in the deck was Roosevelt’s death. Everyone who knew him knew he was dying. He was elected President four times. In the last race, it was clear that he was a dying man, but he had all his marbles. He had all of his marbles at Yalta. He got more out of [Joseph] Stalin than Stalin got out of him. Narrator Hoping to solve intricate problems of war and peace, President Roosevelt reaches the Yalta meeting. Gore Vidal Roosevelt, the master politician, had made an alliance with Stalin. Stalin, contrary to the propaganda, wanted to be a normal country with other normal countries. He got on with Roosevelt. He understood Roosevelt, and Roosevelt understood him. They were both emperors, and they were both continental powers. So they had hit it off, and they had a number of agreements that would have made Russia a much more civilized, modern, less tyrannous place. Then he drops dead, and the most incompetent little man you could dream of succeeds him. Harry S. Truman I have done as you do in the field when the commander falls. My duties and responsibilities are clear. I have assumed them. These duties will be carried on in keeping with our American tradition. Gore Vidal Suddenly, Harry Truman who understands nothing about international politics– he was a last-minute choice for Vice President by Roosevelt, who was trying to soothe the right-wing of the Democratic Party, particularly the South, which was racist and Democratic, as it is now racist and Republican. Roosevelt felt he had to hold on to that to hold on to Congress. So he said, “I’ll get rid of Henry Wallace.” Henry Wallace had been his Liberal Vice President, an intelligent and worldly man, and replaced him with Harry Truman, who had many virtues and many demerits. One being he just didn’t know what he was doing in the big league. Truman proceeded to break every arrangement that Roosevelt had set up for peaceful coexistence with Stalin. And Truman thought, why not just stay armed all the time, thinking about all the money that would be for the military budget each year and how good that would be for General Electric and General Motors. We have remained armed ever since. Narrator Production board meetings that we have here in the United States are winning the battle of production. Gore Vidal Well, you can’t justify all this money being thrown away. Well, nothing is going to education, nothing to health care. You can’t justify it unless you find an enemy. Well, there are plenty of enemies if you look around for them, and we found them. Truman was backed by a clever international lawyer called Dean Acheson, who was very empire-minded. He got Truman overexcited by Stalin and communism and how evil it was. Narrator Russia had occupied many new territories bringing additional millions of people under communist control and serving notice that Soviet Russia was now a world power to be reckoned with. Gore Vidal Truman fell for all of it, or he pretended to. They said, well, Russia’s on the march. They’ve lost 20 million people, and where are they going to march, too? They could barely get out of Middle Europa. They didn’t have enough gas or enough tanks to take their cannons, their artillery back to Russia. They had to have horses drag them back. They were just about finished, and yet we start this thing; the Russians are coming. Narrator Mr. Truman delivers his message on the state of the Union. Harry S. Truman This is an age when an unforeseen attack could come with unprecedented speed. We must be strong enough to defeat and thus forestall any such attack. For these reasons, we need well-equipped, well-trained armed forces for our own defence should the need arrive. Gore Vidal And then he devised the National Security State. Now the National Security State had about seven points to it. One was never negotiate honestly with the Russians. Two was total rearmament and constant rearmament, and develop the hydrogen bomb because they were going to get the atomic bomb one day. In other words, you created a totally militarized economy, which we are to this day. When Truman announced the National Security State and this huge military build-up in peacetime, Senator [Arthur H.] Vandenberg said, well, while I agree with you about the menace of communism, but if you’re going to get after this long and expensive war, the money you want for a build-up, you’re going to have to scare the hell out of the American people. Narrator This boy will grow up acutely aware that there are forces at large alien to his way of life, and he has seen the face and forces of evil. Communism is a word he is learning to understand. Gore Vidal Truman said, don’t worry. First thing he did, loyalty oaths. All throughout the government, everybody had to swear a loyalty oath. Throughout the universities, throughout high schools, teachers, you got to go up and swear allegiance to the United States or else you’re a commie. I mean, we had imported fascism. And the only person to stand up against him was the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt, and that was former Vice President Wallace. Truman was using a threat that the Russians were going to interfere in the Yugoslav affairs and Greek affairs. And Wallace said this is not a Greek crisis, as the administration likes to tell us; it’s not a Yugoslav crisis. This is an American crisis. We have a government that is now pledging itself and us to fight on the side of any government, no matter how terrible if it says it’s anti-communist or anti-Russian, we’re on their side. And we’re now demanding of every janitor and every schoolhouse in the United States to swear loyalty to the Union. We’ve never done this before. The fact that half the country had been involved in the military should have been quite enough to demonstrate the loyalty of the people of the United States. Harry Truman is acting like a European dictator and getting away with it. Why? Because the rulers of the country, just the same as now, corporate America that makes its money out of armaments, and graft, and media, thought it was a good idea to frighten the people. The more scared they are, the more they’ll appropriate. More tanks you can sell. Narrator Here in Russia, you see the reason why we are spending billions of dollars in defense production. Why your family is paying the highest taxes in our history. The leaders of Russia tell us their only concern is the defense of their own nation. Is this so? Or are they ambitious for world conquest? Gore Vidal Everything was militarized to fight communism. Monolithic, atheistic, and godless; it’s much worse than atheistic. Communism forever on the march. So that changed the United States forever. We have never ceased to be a National Security State. We’ve kept on more and more armaments year after year, greater and greater appropriations for the military. So we are in the midst of an arms race which goes on even as you and I sit here and chat. We have been forever at war. Meanwhile, the empire is chugging along. Harry Truman eventually goes away, and we get Dwight Eisenhower, and he said, thank god we have a President, me. Who understands the military, and they’ll steal everything in sight. These civilians don’t know anything about it, and everything they ask for they’re getting and will be bankrupt by the time they finish. So Eisenhower at least held back the Pentagon. Dwight D. Eisenhower  Good evening, my fellow Americans. We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involve our own country. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportion. Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Gore Vidal And he said this is going to change everything, and the way our country is governed it’s going to change us politically. It will change us spiritually. And then part of the speech, which I’ve always loved, nobody ever quotes it. After all, he’d been President of Columbia University. He said the effect of all of this money coming to our universities, even though it’s for the Physics Department, the Nuclear Departments is going to affect all education. And if the universities are not the home of free investigation, suddenly our knowledge of the world is curtailed by this huge amount of money which will control the responses of everybody, including the History Department. He didn’t say that, but that was his meaning. So that’s how that started. Did anybody pay attention? No, they didn’t. Narrator In the greatest story of a momentous year, John F. Kennedy defeated GOP standard-bearer Richard Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections on record. The youngest man ever elected President takes the burden from the oldest ever to hold the office as America enters the critical and challenging ’60s. Gore Vidal Along comes Jack Kennedy. And Jack was very bright about many things, but he was brought up in the house of a very right-wing family, without much imagination, about the rest of the world and without much knowledge of the rest of the world. But Jack was a quick learner. But he arrived with all these right-wing views. Well, where Eisenhower and Truman were two old, tough politicians, neither Truman nor Eisenhower believed in the threat of world communism, but they knew it played for the dumb, dumbs like nobody’s business. Russians are coming. [Gasp] Communists. Godless, atheists? Godless, atheists. Oh, no. Does this mean that we’ll have to get up at five o clock every morning and commit abortions all day long, under the red flag? Yes, that’s what it means. The dumbest things were pumped into our poor people’s heads, and the Russians weren’t going anywhere this time. We’re still talking about, well, Jack came to power in 1960. [Nikita] Khrushchev is trying to make changes. Khrushchev has already made his famous speech denouncing Stalin. He’s trying to start a new chapter. Jack, I’m afraid, believed in what the two old presidents knew was cynical nonsense with which they could get elected and get appropriations for the military and just have the country on a platter. Jack was genuinely high-minded. He wanted to free the world, just like [George H. W.] Bush, who loves freedom and liberty and so forth, and so on. John F. Kennedy Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans born in this century. Tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the small undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed and to which we are committed today, at home, and around the world. Gore Vidal National Security State under Kennedy blossomed, of course. He ordered after the Berlin Wall the biggest build-up in our history until then. It was larger than the one Roosevelt had ordered in 1940. His inaugural address gives it away; we’ll bear any burden to see that liberty, or whatever it was, triumphs around the world. He saw himself in heroic terms. He wanted to make his mark. Believed in the Cold War, or he believed in a white knight versus the wicked knight. So I think he was more tolerant of the idea of war. He said once, where would [Abraham] Lincoln have been without the Civil War? Just another railroad lawyer? Well, that’s about it. I mean, he figured out wartime presidents just as the silly little thing we have now as President. They know that’s how you make it in the history books. I remember talking to him when he came back from the Vienna Conference with Khrushchev, and I was full of the usual Liberal complaints. I said, but you know, there seems to be so really little an issue between our side and their side. I said it’s pretty clear Khrushchev isn’t marching anywhere. And Jack quite agreed to that, even though we had to pretend how dangerous the Soviet Union was and they were getting ahead of us. But he said, in this kind of politics, it is the appearance of things that matters.  So the National Security State was doing very well. So, in the long run, we go back to my notion that the only art form the United States has ever created is the TV commercial. That is our art form, And that’s how we control people. And it’s a world of illusions. And it’s a world of false claims. George W. Bush We’re fighting and winning the war on terror. Thank you all. Gore Vidal Now the National Security State still exists. Only it isn’t communism anymore; it’s terrorism. George W. Bush I signed the largest increase in defence spending in a generation. Gore Vidal If we had decent media, which we do not have or anything close, these people wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this stuff. They’d just be stopped. George W. Bush Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world. Gore Vidal What we’re told about ourselves and our great strengths and how much loved we are, forget it. Our strengths are there, but it’s the kind of strength that blows off your hand while you hold up the grenade. It’s a suicidal strength as well as a murderous one. Remember that practically everything that you’re told about other countries is untrue. Colin L. Powell Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. Condoleezza Rice Iraq provided some training to Al-Qaeda. Tony Blair That threat is real. Dick Cheney  There’s more there than we know. Donald H. Rumsfeld There isn’t any debate about it. George W. Bush I don’t know what more evidence we need. Gore Vidal Well, today, we’re in a peculiar limbo. Nine-Eleven proved to be a pretext for getting rid of the old republic, which has not been in very good shape for a long, long time. Now we’re in a strange, strange situation. There is nothing in our history to guide us. The world is running out of fossil fuels. We’ve got our eye on Iran. We have fields in Iraq. We have our eye on the pipelines that run through Afghanistan, and we have a dictatorial system as best personified by the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which just removes us of our Bill of Rights. Do we just go further and further along the road toward total war? We’re sort of like somebody going along a minefield dropping matches, waiting to hear the bang. The bang might take us all out. I think everybody should take a sober look at the world about us. This is the most serious thing that has happened in the history of the United States. Knowledge is power. We need an honest new system. 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) 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() ); “Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, erudition, and patrician manner. Vidal was bisexual, and in his novels and essays, interrogated the social and cultural sexual norms he perceived as driving American life.” theAnalysis.news theme music written by Slim Williams for Paul Jay’s documentary film “Never-Endum-Referendum“.   Never-Endum-Referendum Artist Website Paul Jay’s Documentaries

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I'll shortly be joined by Pouya Alimagham to discuss th"} Talia Baroncelli interviews historian Pouya Alimagham about the historical context of the current Iranian uprising.  .kt-post-loop_c9d5dc-21 .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_c9d5dc-21 .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_c9d5dc-21 .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_c9d5dc-21 .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_c9d5dc-21 .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_c9d5dc-21 .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_c9d5dc-21 .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_c9d5dc-21 .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_c9d5dc-21 .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_c9d5dc-21 .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;} U.S. Refuses to Accept Iran as a Regional Power – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 1/3 U.S. Attempts to Destabilize Iran Have Failed – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 2/3 Israel Wants U.S. to Weaken and Isolate Iran – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 3/3 Elliot Abrams Tries to Tie Biden’s Hands on Iran – Trita Parsi Empire Update: Did Trump Order Iran Assassination? – Abby Martin U.S. Sanctions Strengthen Iranian Theocracy – Hamid Dabashi Anti-Regime Protests and the Devastating Effects of US Sanctions in Iran Retired US Army Colonel on Ukraine, Iran & the State of the US Empire Why the Media is Now Supporting Julian Assange? – Paul Jay pt 2/2 Iranian Women-Led Resistance Independent of Western Imperialism Transcript Listen Donate Subscribe Guest Music Talia Baroncelli Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Pouya Alimagham to discuss the protests in Iran, as well as the history which led up to them. But first, please don’t forget to go to our website, theAnalysis.news, hit the donate button, and subscribe to our newsletter. I’ll be back in a bit. I’m very excited to be joined by Pouya Alimagham. He’s a historian and a lecturer on the modern Middle East at MIT, and he’s also the author of the book Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprisings. Thanks so much for joining me, Pouya. Pouya Alimagham It’s good to be here. Thank you. Talia Baroncelli So I wanted to ask you about the current protests. Right now, we’re about three months into the protest. It’s been three months since Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police. Over 100s, or actually almost 500 people, have been killed now during the protests, and we’ve seen two people being executed. So I was wondering if you think the protests will continue to have momentum or if they’ll be driven underground. Pouya Alimagham It’s a good question. Momentum doesn’t necessarily have to be every day. We’ve seen the uprising. We’re actually in the 96th day of it. It has a lot of ebbs and flows. Every Friday is a big spike, especially in places like Zahedan, where they gather for Friday prayers, and then right afterward, they protest, especially the Baluchis, they protest. The repression is real, though. When you have a disorganized movement, and when I say disorganized, I’m not trying to knock it. I’m not trying to say that it’s ineffective or there’s no organization, but organizations are really important to revolutions. They get people going, they set dates and times, and they present an alternative ideology to get everybody else on board with it. There are people setting dates and times and locations, but there are so many, it’s a bit disorganized. The real issue is that it’s really easy to say what you’re against, but they haven’t really presented, systematically, an alternative. For that reason, the great majority of the population, however sympathetic they may be, many Iranians are a little bit weary of what could come about after the regime falls. So they may be sympathetic, and there may be a fence sitter. They’re sitting on the fence, looking out, looking in from the outside, thinking about getting involved, but they don’t know what’s going to happen. So they haven’t really crossed that threshold yet. So having an organization that could present a viable, realistic, practical alternative is part of getting a big country like Iran, which is about 85 million people, getting them all on board. Then the flip side of this is really important because while the movement is disorganized, the state is very organized. The state is very organized and very repressive. It has an entire repressive apparatus, not just in security forces, but in political prisons, in the judiciary, oftentimes rudimentary kangaroo court trials, torture, and rape. These are part of its repressive capacity, that’s actually very organized. Then there are the multi-layered security forces. So you see the ebbs and flows, and we’re at the point where it seems like the protests are evolving. There are more strikes than were happening initially, but the number of street gatherings has decreased, and the number of protests at universities is decreasing, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to increase all of a sudden. So the uprising or the Iranian revolution itself was about 14-15 months long, with lots of ebbs and flows, and then basically a year into it is really when the majority of the population became mobilized. The Shah fled the country January 16, 1979. December 10, 1978, towards the end of the revolution, was when the revolution was brought to a crescendo. So it’s kind of hard to predict what’s going to happen, but you see the state really employing maybe a fraction of its repressive capacity. Five hundred people are dead, probably more. We don’t know the exact number; it’s probably more. The state is able to repress much more than that. It is repressing. I don’t mean to downplay it or downsize it, but it’s just capable of much more than that. So that’s why I don’t really know what’s going to happen. Another trend that I’m noticing is that the demonstrators are actually getting a little bit more organized than they were initially. Talia Baroncelli Right. Do you see a leader emerging at some point? You’ve spoken about how the protests currently are leaderless, and maybe that’s why some Iranians are a bit reticent to join onto this movement, or perhaps they are sympathetic towards the regime. Pouya Alimagham You’re going to get me killed because if I tell you that. As of now, there’s no viable leader, all the supporters of different leaders will probably come after me. There are plenty of leaders. The most well-known to Western audiences live in the West. There are many leaders in the country. A lot of them are in prison, and that’s kind of the issue. It’s difficult to have a viable leader spring from the country because of the repression. History is our guide. [Ruhollah] Khomeini himself was the leader of the Iranian revolution. He was arrested and exiled, first to Turkey, then to Iraq. Fourteen years later, he returned from exile abroad and led a revolution. Fourteen years is a long time, but relatively speaking, it’s short. The problem I see is that a lot of the leaders that are presenting themselves as leaders in the West, they’ve been in the West for a lot longer than 14 years. There’s a big disconnect. Some of these leaders who have been in the West for this long are very closely tied to foreign governments, and that kind of hurts their political standing within the country. The one constant in modern Iranian history is the desire to be independent. If you look at all the moments of revolutionary upheaval in the country, from the tobacco revolts to the 1890s, when the Qajar Shahs were just handing over the economy for short-term concessions or short-term gains. The economy was just being gifted away to foreigners, the British, and the Russians. Then there was this movement against the monarch to cancel the concessions that eventually led to a constitutional revolution to rein in the powers of these monarchs, so they don’t just give away the economy to foreigners, to imperial powers. Then we go from the tobacco revolt to the constitutional revolution and then the nationalist movement of Mosaddegh, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who nationalized the Iranian oil company against British interests, and the British and Americans together ended up overthrowing him. So the constant is, and that brings us all the way to the Iranian revolution in ’78 and ’79, is to rest Iran’s independence, its sovereignty from foreign powers. So this is the constant that continues to this day. Can we have a leader, an alternative leader to this Islamic Republic, or to Khomeini coming in from abroad who is not tainted with its proximity to foreign governments? That’s really the issue, in my opinion, of a lot of leadership in exile that’s presenting itself as alternatives, is that they don’t command that fealty that comes with being independent. Most of the leadership that came to power after the revolution actually ended up refusing a lot of foreign help. The first president was Abolhassan Banisadr, and the Iraqis came to him. Saddam Hussein had a regional rivalry with the Shah. Saddam Hussein came, and his government approached Banisadr in exile and said, “Hey, we came to power through a military coup. How about we help you guys? Help you guys overthrow the Shah through a military coup?” Banisadr says, “Iran is different from Iraq, but also we can’t accept foreign help.” For that reason, he wasn’t tainted with being part of a foreign conspiracy or being an agent of a foreign government and was able to become the first president of the country. He was ultimately driven out by the conservative clergy in ’81. But he was the country’s first-ever president. Talia Baroncelli Right, and that’s obviously, or arguably a long-lasting gain and accomplishment of the revolution, is that it was able to accomplish this independence from Western imperialism. I wonder if the current regime actually feels threatened because Iranian propaganda is basically saying, “we’re being threatened by a Western-staged coup or uprising and we need to crack down on these protesters. We need to execute people so that we instill fear in the population so that they won’t protest.” Do you think that they actually are feeling really desperate at this point and are scared as to what is coming next? Pouya Alimagham I want to say this. First of all, every time there’s been an uprising against the Iranian government, the Iranian government presents it as being part of the Western conspiracy. Every single one of them. Part of that is because there have been conspiracies concocted against Iran. The most obvious example is when the U.S. and British overthrew the Iranian government in 1953, the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. That doesn’t mean that protesters today are part of this Western conspiracy. They have legitimate grievances, 100%, and they do their own cost-benefit analysis. They have their own agents, they have agency, and they’re protesting. The Iranian government likes to paint– it has to paint these people as part of a Western conspiracy to justify cracking down on them. To be honest with you, the United States kind of makes it a little bit easy, not because it’s behind the protests, because in my opinion, it isn’t, but because of all the intervention at the hands of the United States in the region. Iran is essentially encircled by the United States. Before the Taliban came back to power, the United States had military forces in Afghanistan. It has military forces in Iraq, Syria, and the Persian Gulf. It is sanctioning Iran. The sanctions in Iran predate this uprising. It has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the nuclear program, which Iran was abiding by. So there are all these really malicious policies that the United States is pursuing that give the Iranian government the justification to present or cast the demonstrators as being part of this Western conspiracy when they’re not. The protesters have nothing to do with– they’re not getting orders from the United States to rise up. They’re not these people who are doing the bidding of the U.S. government. They have their own beef with the Iranian government. They have every single incentive, personal reasons, or incentive to process the state. The state is very repressive, and it has been repressive and it’s only growing more repressive as it continuously loses its legitimacy. Its legitimacy has been chipped away at for years now. In my book, I focused on the 2009 uprising because that was, and to this day still is, the biggest challenge to the Iranian government. People look at that as a failure because it was ultimately put down, but it had so many important victories, and its most important and lasting victory was that it shattered the state’s sources of legitimacy. It sees itself as having a monopoly on Islamic truth, on this history of the revolution. The uprising in 2009 robbed the state of all of these sources of legitimation and then, most importantly, kind of transitioned from “where is my vote” in June 2009 to December, “this month is a month of blood. Khomeini will be overthrown or toppled.” That was really the first public moment where demonstrators began to target the entire system– the core. Every protest since 2009 has picked up where the Green Movement was put down. Every protest has been targeting the core ever since then. So one slogan you hear now in this uprising is ‘this year is the year of blood. Khomeini will be overthrown.’ So that’s why, as a historian, I like to talk about continuity. These things cascade, and they build on their predecessors. Even the green movement itself built on the symbolism and repertoire as a political action of the Iranian Revolution. Talia Baroncelli Right, so you see the current protesters coming out of that same trajectory in which the protesters of the green uprising were basically co-opting the symbols of the revolution to undercut the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. Pouya Alimagham So they’re not doing that right now. My point in connecting these is that the Green Movement co-opted those symbols to attack the legitimacy of the Iranian government. Ever since 2009, it’s been operating without the same legitimacy it had before 2009. So every protest that’s happened since then has continued to chip away at that legitimacy. So today, they’re not really using a lot of the symbolism of the Iranian revolution because the whole thing with the Iranian government is that it has sources of legitimation. Its sources of legitimization come from Islam and the Iranian or Islamic Revolution. Then it institutionalized these symbols and the political, aesthetic, and educational landscape of the country. It shut down the schools, Islamized the curriculum, changed the books, and now the books talk about Khomeini as this great leader and Palestine. The Muslim cause of Palestine needing to be liberated. The political calendar changes. Now we have days like the seizure of the U.S. Embassy as a day of protest against U.S. imperialism. These are all days that came about through the revolution, that became institutionalized as part of the discourse or common sense, logic of the state post-revolution. All of that was challenged in 2009. All of it was challenged. The one example I really like to give– there are two examples I really like to give, but I’ll focus on one so I don’t bore you. The Iranian government– that big demonstration I talked about earlier in our discussion, December 10, 1978, where literally millions of Iranians came out, that was Ashura. The anniversary of the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn [ibn Ali]. The whole idea was that this day of commemoration had typically been a day of mourning. You see, in the late ’60s and ’70s, across Shiite communities in the Muslim world, Husayn’s martyrdom became reinterpreted. If before you just mourned him as somebody that was oppressed and was killed in the 7th century, and if he died fighting tyranny, and if God let him die, the Prophet’s grandson died fighting tyranny, then our fate will be the same. There’s no point in resisting. That was like a very defeatist attitude. What you end up seeing happening in the late ’60s and ’70s is saying “no.” The proper commemoration of Husayn’s martyrdom is to rise up against injustice; your life is not more important than his. If he was willing to fight and die, then who are you to say that you don’t want to do that? If you believe in him, then you should rise up against the tyranny and injustice of today because if Husayn was alive today, he’d be shoulder to shoulder with us. So you see that reinterpretation of Husayn’s legacy, and that’s why Ashura, December 7, 1978, was the biggest protest event in the history of the Iranian revolution. Anywhere between 10 to 15-17 million people, at a time when Iran’s population was about 34-35 million people, so almost half. That was the largest protest event in world history, at a time when the Shah had martial law imposed and a military government in power in Tehran. Since the revolution, the Iranian government basically has co-opted Ashura now, saying that “we, as the Iranian government, support the David and Goliath struggle. We are the flag bearers of Husayn as we face down the United States in the region.” This is part of the history now of not just Islam but of the Iranian revolution. They drilled this lesson into the next generation that was raised under the authority of the Iranian government. The Ashura of 2009 blows up in the face of the Iranian government because on Ashura, December 27, 2009, protesters are saying, “this month is a month of blood. Sayyid Ali Khamenei will be overthrown. This month is a month of blood. Yazid will be overthrown.” So now they’re acquitting the Iranian government with the murderers of Husayn on Ashura of all days. In doing so, they’re using the language of Islam and the Iranian Revolution against the so-called leader of the Iranian revolution. Khamenei, even though he was not the leader of the revolution, he embodies the continuity of the revolution. So one of his many titles is he is the leader of the revolution. This is when the government really considered the protesters as blasphemous. They are sacrilegious. They’re violating our sanctities. A lot of those death sentences that we see being handed down now, you really see them climax in the six-month uprising in the Green Movement. Six or seven-month uprising in the green movement, a lot of those death sentences were handed down in late December or early January because of those Ashura protests. One last point. One of the really interesting things about 2009 is that by protesting the Iranian government on Ashura of all days, they brought to the fore a paradox that exists in Iran. Husayn, in the 7th century, died fighting power. He never achieved power. In the international arena, the United States is the world’s superpower, the sole superpower. For Iran, the Iranian government to be leading the charge against the United States in the Middle East could play on that Husayn-like-flag-bearing mantra of the David and Goliath struggle. The United States is the powerholder in the world, and here’s this resistant state fighting that David and Goliath struggle. On Ashura 2009, the paradox comes to the fore because within the borders of Iran, domestically, the Iranian government claims Husayn’s mantle is the ultimate arbiter of power. The protesters were unarmed, facing down the state, and they were invoking Husayn’s legacy and facing down the state. That’s what I mean when I say they robbed the state of all these sources of legitimacy. The running government since 2009 has been a shell of its former self in terms of its sources of legitimation, and it has doubled down on repression. So it’s evolving and hardening its repressive capacity because it doesn’t have the legitimacy it once had before 2009. In the eyes of many, it never had legitimacy. If we’re speaking objectively, it was far more legitimate in 2009 than it is today because of everything that’s happened since. Talia Baroncelli Right, well, the regime must have been incredibly infuriated if it had been compared to Yazid. I mean, it’s like the ultimate sort of bad guy. Pouya Alimagham Absolutely. Talia Baroncelli So that’s probably why they didn’t take so well to that comparison. I think the green uprisings were also a slightly different context because the context of the uprisings was protesting the result of the [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad election. How important was [Mir-Hossein] Mousavi, the other opposition candidate, in sort of fomenting protests and supporting the protests back then? Pouya Alimagham So he actually wasn’t that important. I often talk about the Green Movement when I talk about the protests today, and people don’t understand why I do that. As a historian of revolutionary movements, it’s actually really important to be able to compare and contrast. The protests in 2009 started about the election results, and then it evolved to be an anti-state, anti-Islamic Republic movement. As I said, they went from “where’s my vote” to “Khamenei’s rule is null and void, and he should be overthrown.” These are the slogans. The protest today started with the issue of the hijab and the death of one person, and it has evolved into something much bigger, has it not? And it evolved very quickly. So that’s why it’s important to see the continuity. Mousavi’s people see him as a leader. He wasn’t. Of course, he was a candidate. He was a reformist candidate. What people ended up really doing was, before the elections, there were calls for boycotts. There were boycotts in 2005, which is why Ahmadinejad won resoundingly in 2005. There were calls for boycotts again in 2009. A lot of people didn’t want to boycott for two reasons. One is because the idea is that voting in the Islamic Republic is a fool’s errand because everything is kind of controlled. All the candidates are screened, and there’s a lot of truth to that, for sure. But for people who lived under four years of Ahmadinejad’s regime, they understood that when you vote, you don’t vote, and you get stuck with an IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] former commander who then appoints cabinet members, all or majority of his cabinet appointees were from the IRGC who had no experience in government. They were IRGC commanders and led to the securitization of the country more than ever before. So when there were calls for boycotts in 2009, people were not excited about boycotting. They didn’t know what to do. They were kind of giving it a chance, and then they saw the television debates. So we had presidential debates in the country before, but this is the first time they were one-on-one. When they were one-on-one, Mousavi versus Ahmadinejad, even though there were four total candidates, the debates between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad were really intense. Mousavi was accusing Ahmadinejad of everything that a lot of Iranians have been saying amongst themselves, and now all of a sudden, they’re seeing it on national TV– about the corruption, the securitization of the state. Mousavi was like, “when you go on TV, and you talk about the Holocaust and stuff like that, you’re embarrassing us. You’re an embarrassment to us around the world. You’ve ruined the name of Iran across the globe.” What Mousavi had said resonated with people. Then what ended up happening was a lot of activists used his campaign to mobilize against the government. So you hear, before election day, you were already hearing slogans in Tehran saying, “Marg bar Taliban. Che dar Kabul, che dar Tehran.” Death to the Taliban, whether in Kabul or in Tehran. Essentially equating clerical rule in Iran with one of its arch nemesis, the Taliban in Afghanistan. So you see that, and then when the election fraud happened, or Ahmadinejad’s supposed election win, you start seeing a massive protest movement that really had nothing to do with Mousavi. Mousavi wasn’t calling for it. A lot of times, when protests happened, he would jump on board with them after. He did show up in one important protest, but it was Monday, the Monday after. It was June 15. He shows up amongst the crowds, but whether he shows up or not, it was going to happen. Then when the protest was driven underground after a week, it started resurfacing on specific days of action where the government was relaxing repression to get its supporters to come out, like the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy. On those days, the Iranian government wanted people to come out, but to come out to protest with the government, not against it, with the government against the United States. On those days when repression was relaxed, green movement protesters re-emerged and reignited the protest movement. That had nothing to do with Mousavi in them. That strategy, that tactic, took Mousavi and them by surprise. They’re doing stuff like that today. They’re calling for these days of action. That’s something that’s kind of part of Iranian culture. As I said, the Ashura of 1978 was the day of political action. When protesters died in the Iranian Revolution, their 40th day of mourning became not just a day where you go to the grave, but it became a day of protest. You saw that when Mahsa Amini’s 40th day came, people activated that culture, that ritual, for political reasons. That’s something that is kind of embedded in Iranian culture. In Iranian and Islamic cultures, there are these days, there are these cultural things that can or cannot be political. It depends on what you want to do with them. It’s kind of like this cultural reservoir where politically, you could activate them for political goals. That has nothing to do with Mousavi’s leadership or anything; that kind of is just part of Iranian history and culture. Talia Baroncelli So I wanted to speak about the political structure of the Islamic Republic because I think something that came out of the revolution was this sort of sprawling, interwoven, interlinked, massive government structure that relies– well, you have the Supreme Leader, and then the functioning of Khomeini and then followed by Khamenei was really dependent on the Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC, and then the paramilitary Basij. So I was wondering, do you think that you would need defections in all of these sort of institutions, all of these Iranian institutions, or if you have more defections in one, would that sort of be enough to overthrow the regime from within? Pouya Alimagham So, again, these are hard things to predict. I’ll say this: the Iranian government, for all of its failings, has created a system that’s almost coup-proof. It’s coup-proof to a certain extent. The Guardian Council vets presidential and parliamentary candidates, and it abuses that power, but it also just means that no U.S.-backed candidate or foreign-backed candidate could ever run for office. So it’s just one of those things where, as historians, when we look at the Shah’s government, we say that it’s a one-man show, a one-bullet solution. Whereas this is a system, the Iranian government has a very deep-rooted system of governance and repression. Whereas the Shah in 1978-79 had its secret police, its Imperial Guard, to protect the royal family and the army. It didn’t really have the means to put down demonstrators or demonstrations, so it dispatched the army to do it. That’s when we saw mass defections because these were soldiers, conscripts, who were conscripted into the army and trained in conventional warfare to defend the territorial integrity of the country from foreign invasions, specifically. Before the revolution, before the war, and before Saddam, Iraq was Iran’s regional rival. So because it wasn’t prepared for the revolution, it used the soldiers to shoot demonstrators. A lot of them didn’t want to shoot not just their own countrymen and women but also maybe friends, neighbors, and family members because they were conscripts. So that’s why we saw so many defections. The Iranian government has learned this history, so it has created so many parallel security forces to prevent that. The most obvious one, as you mentioned, is the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the IRGC. This is also why organization is really important. The order to create the IRGC came about before the Shah’s regime’s final collapse, and they had a discussion. Khomeini and Ayatollah Montazeri had a conversation about what we should do next. Montazeri, I think Montazeri and a couple of others suggested to Khomeini that “we can’t trust the Iranian military because the Iranian military has been built by the Shah and the United States. It’s loyal to the Shah. It has contacts with the United States. The same United States that overthrew Mosaddegh through a faction of the military. We can’t trust it. We need to not only purge the military, which includes my grandfather, who was a two-star General who had to flee the country, but the idea was that we have to not only purge the military, but we have to create an entirely parallel military force whose main purpose is to guard the revolution.” That’s why it’s called the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and by that, he means to protect the state and its leaders. Khomeini gave that order to create the IRGC when the Shah’s military was in power. This is why organization is so important. The state has been preparing for this, for all of its failings. I remember, I think, weeks into COVID, the IRGC had this really silly show in the country somewhere in Iran, and it proclaimed that it had found the vaccine to COVID way before there was a vaccine anywhere else, and that turned out to be BS. For all the failings like that, it’s so prepared to put down demonstrators and also fight wars abroad. That’s the one thing it has mastered. So, historians, we call Iran a guerrilla state, and then the flip side to that is we call Israel a garrison state. These are two regional rivals now. Israel has walls everywhere, checkpoints everywhere, and barbed wire everywhere. Iran has tunnels and multiple layers of security forces and military forces. It has allied armed groups that it created or co-founded across the region, from Hezbollah in Lebanon, through the Al-Hashd al-Sha’bi forces in Iraq and elsewhere. To answer your question, it’s very hard for me to imagine a scenario. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where there will be a military coup or defections. I think a civil war is more likely in comparison to that scenario, but I still don’t know if civil war is likely. Talia Baroncelli You speak about the Islamic Republic as stylizing itself, as being a resistant state, as helping resistance abroad, so in Palestine, for example. What is the role of the IRGC in trying to enact that support for resistance as well as the role of Basij? So I guess the Basij was probably formed in the Iran-Iraq War. Pouya Alimagham Yes. I think the most important case study for the IRGC as it relates to its military efforts, vis-à-vis Israel and the Palestinians, is Hezbollah and Lebanon. People often call it a proxy of the Iranian government. I don’t like to use that language because people have agency. So Hezbollah, its ultimate leader, is Khomeini for certain. So if you look at this brochure or this pamphlet that came out in 1985, it’s in Arabic; when they proclaimed the existence of the organization in 1985, it was formed in ’82, but they came out of the shadows in ’85 with the publishing of this leaflet. They have the picture of it– Hezbollah martyrs. Then on the back of it is a picture of Khomeini. They say in the leaflet that “as Muslims, what fate befalls Muslims in Afghanistan or the Philippines, barely affects the body of the Islamic nation of which we are an integral part per the leadership of our guardian jurist Ayatollah Khomeini.” The interesting thing about Hezbollah’s creation is that it has a lot of factors that kind of aggregated together to spark its creation. It all happens in ’82. In 1982, after two years of war with Iraq, Iran liberated Khorramshahr and basically was really emboldened. After two years of being on the defensive, it is now on the march. Right after Khorramshahr is liberated, Israel invaded Lebanon. So Iran is feeling so emboldened that now it’s also not only looking at Iraq and preparing a counter-invasion of Iraq for the first time, but it’s looking beyond Iraq, beyond the border war, and looking across the region. When Israel invades Lebanon to fight the PLO, a lot of Lebanese Shiites get caught in the crossfire, and ruptures exist within the existing Shiite organizations. Amal, at the time, was an organization that predates the Iranian Revolution and predates the Islamic Republic. Because some Shiites were critical of the Palestinian armed presence in their areas, especially in south Lebanon, some Shiites welcomed the Israeli invasion. The fact that some Shiites welcomed the Israeli invasion angered those other Shiites. Those other Shiites met with Khomeini in ’82, right when Khorramshahr was liberated, and then Israel invaded Lebanon. Iran has this conference, a conference of the world’s dispossessed Mostaz’afan. Khomeini meets in private with a delegation of radical Lebanese Shiite clergymen and basically says, “go back and turn your mosques into centers of jihad and we will be there and with you every step of the way to help you push back this invasion.” And then Khomeini dispatches 1,500 guardsmen, IRGC guardsmen, to go through Syria into the Beqaa Valley and basically start training Hezbollah fighters. So people often say that it’s Iran’s proxy, but Iran was obviously huge in the creation of Hezbollah. There were also Lebanese clergymen who, because of the Israeli invasion, basically issued a call to arms and many people signed up to fight the Israeli invaders. Another example is when the uprising happened in Syria in 2011, and onwards, Hezbollah got involved with that. People say this is evidence of Hezbollah being Iran’s proxy because Iran is so close to the Syrian government and didn’t want to see the Syrian government fall. It ordered Hezbollah to get involved and basically do Iran’s bidding in Syria. That’s an oversimplification because the opposition to the Syrian government declared that as soon as they win the war and come to power, they’re going to shut off Iranian support to Hezbollah. As soon as Hezbollah heard that, they’re like, “well, then we got to make sure you don’t come to power so that we keep the arms flowing to us.” So they had their own incentive, especially since so much of the rebellion in Syria was fiercely anti-Shiite Takfiri groups. They didn’t want a much bigger country like Syria that essentially enveloped Lebanon to have Takfiri rebels in power. So Hezbollah helped turn the tide. Hezbollah, the Iranian government, and the Russians helped turn the tide in favour of the Syrian government. That’s really part of Iran’s regional influence, its relationship with Hezbollah. I would not call it a proxy, but Iran was very important to its founding, and it is very important to Hezbollah’s strength and sustainment, for sure. Talia Baroncelli Right, well, you’ve spoken about the regional ecosystem in the Middle East; what about the dual functionality of the Basij that came about out of the Iran-Iraq War? The Basij as being a paramilitary group that could crack down on peaceful protests within the country but also presented itself as being capable of fighting imperialism. Pouya Alimagham Yeah, so if we’re going to talk about the Iran-Iraq War and the emergence of the Basij, and what they’re doing now in terms of fighting imperialism, but then also cracking heads in the country, we got to first mention the war. I think it was this famous sociologist, Charles Tilly, that said, “war builds states,” and the Iran-Iraq War became the impetus to create the state and, more importantly, its narrative. This is the era of the IRGC and the Basij. The Basij was created as this fierce Shiite force that was fighting the Yazid of the time, which was Saddam Hussein and its backers, the Soviet Union, West Germans, the French, the British, the Americans, and a lot of Arab heads of state. When you go to Iran today, you see all these murals dedicated to the martyrs of the war. So that memory is part of the aesthetic landscape of the country. A lot of Basij fighters, a lot of Basij paramilitary force members today, they see themselves as carrying on that legacy. Now, the interesting thing is that there is a big difference between the younger Basij people, Basij members, and then the older ones. The older ones who fought in that war were very zealous, a lot of them are like fathers now, and they have daughters. They may not be excited about some of these anti-women ordinances from the state that they helped protect, helped establish, and defend. The younger Basij forces– and I’m generalizing, not all the younger Basij forces are like this, but a lot of the younger Basij forces looked to the older ones both with respect and admiration for having fought in the Iran-Iraq War. Also, some of them say that the generation has gotten soft and they got old. So there is this new generation of young zealots, and they see themselves as carrying forth the banner of that resistance to the Iraqi invaders now resisting to the United States. Many of them see going up against these protesters as part of the anti-imperialist struggle because they have bought into the government narrative that the protesters are part of that Western conspiracy. There’s a really good book on part of what we’re talking about right now, about the differences in the older and younger Basij generations. It’s a book by Narges Bajoghli. It’s called Iran Reframed. I couldn’t put it down. I read it in one day. It’s short, but it’s a great book. I loved it. It’s very illuminating, for certain. We tend to look at these things as monoliths and this narrative. Her book complicates that narrative and shows you that there’s a generational divide within not just the state but its security forces. Talia Baroncelli Well, the Iran-Iraq War clearly played a really important role in post-revolutionary Iranian identity. Now that we’re talking about history, what about before the revolution? So under the Shah, Iran is basically a one-man monarchy. What were the social structures, class formation, and different political structures which enabled the revolution? In particular, how the Shah emboldened the clerics rather to sort of maybe tame down or dampen down the threat of communists in the country, and in doing so, actually brought about the revolution. Pouya Alimagham So I’m smiling because I love the question. This is essentially– what were the causes of the Iranian revolution? That’s essentially what you’re asking. There’s an entire literature on this. I can’t give you an example. I can only try to give you the contours of the debate and probably what I think as well. The Shah, for certain, was part of the American camp in the Cold War. He was fiercely anti-communist and was dispatching Iranian soldiers to places like Oman to help put down Marxist rebellions in places like Dhofar Oman. He was the guardian of the Persian Gulf, the guardian of Western interests in the Persian Gulf. He dispatched this guy named Imam Musa Al-Sadr to Lebanon because Shiites, typically when they were minorities before the Iranian revolution, they’re typically the poorest and the most marginalized. So for that reason, in the Cold War, Marxism appealed to them probably the most because it spoke to their economic plight. The Shah sees a lot of the Shiites in places like Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, the shrine cities, and the Shi’i shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. He sees Shiites in places like Lebanon gravitating towards Marxism, and he sees that as a domino effect in the largest Shiite-majority country in the world being Iran, and he was worried that might impact Iran. So he sends someone like Imam Musa Al-Sadr to preach religion and to basically guide Lebanese Shiites away from Marxism and towards religion. Domestically, the Shah was cultivating Shiism, but not the way you think. People mostly blame the Shah for the revolution in the sense that he cultivated the clergy, and then they rose up against him. That’s not the entire picture. By that, I mean most of the clergy that came to power or many of the clergy that came to power after the revolution were either at one point in prison, tortured, or exiled. So the clergy was not given a total free hand to preach religion and then mobilize against the state. Khomeini was arrested, and he was exiled for 14 years. Khomeini’s one-time successor, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, was imprisoned for many years, he was tortured, and then he was made to listen to the torture of his son, Mohammad Montazeri. Ayatollah Taleghani, the first Friday prayer leader after the revolution, was tortured extensively in the ’70s to the point that when he died soon after the revolution. Some believed he died because the more militant clergy that wanted an Islamic Republic poisoned him. That’s one of the conspiracy theories because Taleghani was a clergyman, but he was not down with the clerical-led government. He was not supportive of it whatsoever. Some believe he was poisoned by those who wanted to create a clerical-led government. Some people argued that the torture he sustained took a toll on him, and essentially, he took his life when he got a little bit older. Then there’s Ayatollah Ghaffari, who was a clergyman who died in prison through torture. So it’s not one of those things where he cultivated Islam. It’s not the whole story. It’s part of the story that the Shah built mosques to get people to be more religious, not because he wanted religion. He was personally pretty– he had moments of piety. He survived an assassination attempt when he was young, and he thought God intervened to save his life. He had that kind of worldview, but he had a secular policy. His politics were secular. When you talk about the social forces, it was a militant faction of the clergy that essentially forced the entire nationwide mosque network to go into format revolution. It was partially them and then an alliance with the bazaar class, the merchant class, because Iran in the mid-70s underwent a severe recession. When inflation occurred, the state blamed the merchant class and began to fine them. When they protested those fines, they were arrested. Talia Baroncelli Sorry. I have a question. When you’re talking about inflation, are you talking about inflation following the 1973 oil prices? Pouya Alimagham No. Yeah, actually, I thought you were going to say following the revolution. Talia Baroncelli No. Following the oil prices when the Shah basically increased the price of oil by 14%. Pouya Alimagham Yeah. So what ends up happening is the Shah goes on a spending spree. His regime was awash with billions in oil wealth because of the Arab embargo following the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Then he went on this spending spree, but the country’s infrastructure was not ready. You can’t import all these things when your ports are not built, when you don’t have the roads and the transportation systems to bring in all those. So there was a bottleneck in Iran’s ports that caused recession and inflation. The merchant class was blamed for it. When the prices skyrocketed, they were fined. When they protested those fines, they were arrested. So the merchant class became incentivized to side with the enemies of the regime, and that’s essentially the militant fashion of the clergy. The merchant class also has been historically close with the clergy– a lot of intermarrying, the tobacco revolts, the constitutional revolution, a lot of it has to do with them joining forces against the monarchies, against the monarchs. The student class was very supportive of the Iranian revolution. A lot of them were Marxists or leftists. They saw the Shah as the imperialist outpost in the country, and they saw Iran as being part of the capitalist West, but in a way that was benefiting the metropoles of the colonial powers. They had the incentive to help bring him down. There’s one other thing I wanted to say. We’re talking about the political situation, so the Shah situation. The Shah was growing. Because of the oil wealth, he thought– and this is kind of what we call in academia the oil curse. He felt that because he wasn’t taxing the population, he didn’t have to give them representation. So in 1975, I believe, he scrapped the two-party system in favour of the one-party system. In a way, it was kind of like a fascist system. The two-party system itself was what we call in history the yes and the yes sir parties. They were like rubber stamps of the Shah anyways. And even that rubber stamp was consolidated into one-party system. So you had Iranians going to universities. The universities, a lot of them, that the Pahlavi dynasty had established. So they’re learning these new ideas about democratic government, anti-imperialism, nationalism, independence, all these things that they’ve been learning about for 100 years, but now the masses are learning it in education systems in the country. Then they see that the economy is modernizing. So you see the emergence of a modern middle class. Typically the modern middle class are the ones that can be activists. Typically, if you’re super poor, people think revolutions happen by the lower class. In 1978-79, that was not the case. The poor are too busy, typically struggling to survive for their daily bread. They don’t have refrigerators, let alone food in the refrigerator. They don’t have any of that. So if they go on strike or if they’re protesting, that means they’re not getting their wage for that day to be able to put food on the sofre; if you want to call it a table, sure. The rich typically don’t want to see changes because the status quo benefits them. So really, the emergence of a modern middle class in the country and modern ideas, you see them wanting to agitate for political openness and participation and inclusion, and then the state was going in the opposite direction by narrowing the avenues for political participation, by scrapping a two-party system. So you see the whole generation saying, “if we can’t participate within the system, then the entire system has to go. But participate by casting a referendum against the state, by voting with our feet in mass protest,” which is essentially what happened. Talia Baroncelli At that point, it was quite apparent that the monarchy was extremely repressive. I mean, SAVAK, the secret services, was torturing political prisoners. I think something like a thousand political prisoners was killed towards the end of the ’70s, before the start of the revolution, which is maybe something a lot of Iranians in the diaspora don’t always want to recognize when they speak about the Shah and when they still continue to support their nostalgic idea of what the monarchy was. Pouya Alimagham Yeah, and I grew up in the diaspora, so I’m very well attuned to these arguments that I hear, and I’ve been hearing all my life. When you talk about the abuses of the Shah, there are two typical responses. One, they say, is that “the Shah didn’t know about it. His secret police were doing it, and they kept it from him,” which is complete BS. Another one is that “okay, fine, he was repressive, but he’s nothing compared to today’s government,” and that’s actually true, but that is not an excuse. That does not justify anything. The Iranian government today is far more repressive than the Shah ever was, but that does not give the Shah a get-out-of-jail-free card. Like, there’s a reason why the revolution happened. There are structural, ideological, and repressive reasons for why it happened. Again, it’s because people want to participate in the political system. The repression and the consolidation of the two-party system into one made people realize that they couldn’t participate. The only real way to participate is by their feet and overthrowing the entire system. The Iranians are reaching that point today, too, by the way. Talia Baroncelli Speaking about today, let’s bring this full circle. What do you think– I mean, this is a really difficult question to answer, but what should countries be doing and not be doing to support the protesters? Pouya Alimagham These are all sensitive questions. So I’ll tell you what people are saying, and I’ll tell you what I think. Some people are saying that “this is the moment. The time has come. Everyone should be doing everything they can to isolate the Iranian government and help facilitate its demise at the hands of the people and those demonstrating.” So I understand that point. My issue then is, as a historian of the whole region and U.S. foreign policy as well, I live in the United States. What we’re really talking about, for me at least, is what should the U.S. government do? When I know the history of the United States’ involvement in the Middle East, when I know the history of the United States’ involvement in Iran and subverting democratic movements around the world and democratic governments, I think that it’s a matter of legitimacy. The United States does not have legitimacy, even though it sees itself as the oldest and the greatest democracy in the world. I understand how Americans like to see themselves. It does not correspond with the reality of Europe’s foreign policy everywhere else outside of Eastern Europe post-Cold War. I think if the U.S. government wants to preach and pontificate, I would hope that it would do so consistently because that’s when U.S. rhetoric about freedom carries weight, is when it’s doing it consistently. It’s difficult to support the freedom of Iranian protesters while you’re enabling the occupation of the Palestinians or when you’re sustaining one of the most retrograde governments in the world, the Saudi government. Like Trump himself said it. “The moment we withdraw our security guarantee from these countries in the Persian Gulf region, they’ll fall within a week.” There’s a bit of truth to that. Trump admitted that the U.S. arms sustain dictatorships in the Persian Gulf region. So I think that if the United States wants to do something in support of the Iranian government, it needs to be consistent about advocating for freedom and living up to its own ideals, so that when it does say something, it doesn’t end up being to the detriment of the movement where the Iranian government says, “look, the United States is saying this. It must be behind the protest movement.” That’s the historian’s answer or a historian’s answer. Talia Baroncelli Then according to that, they should also roll back certain sanctions which continue to immiserate the population. I mean, you’ve already said that the protests are not a result of the sanctions. I mean, Mahsa Amini was not killed because of the sanctions, but they still played a role in creating these very specific socioeconomic conditions and fleecing the Iranian– Pouya Alimagham Yeah, it’s crazy because the discourse is narrowed. It’s very difficult to talk about the sanctions. The sanctions before this uprising, and to this day, don’t have credibility. The sanctions were about the nuclear program. Iran more or less surrendered its nuclear program. It had been abiding by the JCPOA. The U.S. arbitrarily subverted the JCPOA and sanctioned the country. For a full year, Iran continued to abide by the JCPOA until they basically stopped. To this day, it’s clambering to return to the JCPOA. The strategy really is this, and they’ll tell it to you themselves; the very hawkish Iranians in the diaspora will tell you this themselves. They’re like, “we don’t want…” First of all, they’ll tell you two things, “that the sanctions target the government only,” and that is just not true. The sanctions are on the financial sector. That financial sector is for the whole country. So there are charts– you can look at the charts– the moment the sanctions were snapped back by the Trump administration, inflation that was up here, spiraled out of control. That inflation affects the whole country. So if you’re 65 years old or 60 years old, you’re preparing to retire and now your savings is not worth the paper it’s on, that has to do with the sanctions. People don’t want to talk about it. Let’s be honest about it. Now, why are the sanctions happening? They will tell it to you themselves. The Iranians in the diaspora, the Saudi government, the Emirati government, and the Israeli government don’t want an economic solution to Iranian suffering. They want a political solution. The Iranian government does not want a political solution. It wants an economic solution. It wants to be able to invest and trade and then improve the standards of living for the population in hopes that they’ll just acquiesce to the status quo, essentially like the Saudis and the Chinese citizens. All these people that are against sanctions want to keep the Iranians at a certain below-sustenance level, so they could be even more angry about the politics of the day, so they could seek a political solution. The interesting thing is that the Israelis want a political solution for Iran and not an economic solution; when it comes to Palestinians, they want an economic solution and not a political one. So they don’t want a two states negotiated settlement with the Palestinians or any kind of settlement with the Palestinians. They’re just like, “look, we want to continue the occupation, we want to continue building in Palestinian lands, but let’s bring in some investment, let’s improve their lives, so they just shut up. Maybe their quality of life will be better, and then they don’t want to jeopardize that.” So it’s a little bit dishonest to talk about Iranian suffering and not talk about sanctions. Sanctions are a big part of the story. But again, just like you said, the sanctions don’t explain the fact that we have a supreme leader for life in the country. It doesn’t explain the fact that we have a morality police. It doesn’t explain the fact that we have torture and rape in prisons for both men and women. It doesn’t explain the fact that somebody was ruled by dumb laws like the Hijab law, and then she died under custody. The sanctions don’t excuse any of that. But we have to understand the sanctions are part of the story. Talia Baroncelli Definitely, well, Pouya, thank you so much for that deep historical dive and for your analysis of the current protests. It would be great to have you on another time. Pouya Alimagham It was my pleasure. Thank you for the wonderful questions. Talia Baroncelli Thanks for joining me, Pouya. Take care. Bye. Select one or choose any amount to donate whatever you like any amount $5

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To view the English version – https://theanalysis.news/debate-on-the-war-in-ukraine-with-an-award-winning-journalist-pt-1-2/ .kt-post-loop_6e9946-2c .kadence-post-image{padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;}.kt-post-loop_6e9946-2c .kt-post-grid-wrap{gap:30px 6px;}.kt-post-loop_6e9946-2c .kt-blocks-post-grid-item{border-top-width:0px;border-right-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;border-top-left-radius:0px;}.kt-post-loop_6e9946-2c .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_6e9946-2c .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_6e9946-2c .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_6e9946-2c .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_6e9946-2c .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_6e9946-2c .entry-content:after{height:0px;}.kt-post-loop_6e9946-2c .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;} 9/11 Redux – Pt 1/3 9/11 Redux – Pt 2/3 9/11 Redux – Pt 3/3 Urban Poverty in America Made Me Question Everything – Chris Hedges on RAI (1/7) Journalism Should be About Truth, Not Career – Chris Hedges on RAI (2/7) We Must Grasp Reality to Build Effective Resistance – Chris Hedges on RAI (3/7) “America is a Tinderbox” – Chris Hedges on RAI (4/7) The Liberal Elite has Betrayed the People they Claim they Defend – Chris Hedges on RAI (5/7) As a Socialist, I have No Voice in the Mainstream – Chris Hedges on RAI (6/7) Chris Hedges Answers Viewers Questions – RAI (7/7) Marx and Tolstoy Helped Me See the Limits of Liberalism – Vijay Prashad Pt 1/4 Questioning the Underlying Structures of Property and Power is Off the Table – Vijay Prashad Pt 2/4 Bradley Manning, the Nuremberg Charter and Refusing to Collaborate with War Crimes – Prashad Pt 3/4 International Law and The Responsibility to Protect – Vijay Prashad Pt 4/4 Saudi Government’s 9/11 Connection and the Path to Disillusionment – Sen. Bob Graham on RAI Pt 4/7 Revealing 9/11 Conspiracy Would Undo U.S. Saudi Alliance – Sen. Bob Graham on RAI Pt 5/7 Did Bush Cheney Create a Culture of Not Wanting to Know – Sen. Bob Graham on RAI Pt 7/7 Ex CIA Analyst on Snowden and Calling Journalists Terrorists – Ray McGovern Pt 1/2 Hegemony Abroad Requires a Security State at Home – Ray McGovern Pt 2/2 “Liberty and Justice for Some People” – James Early on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 1/3 Will Cuban Reforms Create More Inequality – James Early on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 3/3 Obama and the Post Racial Society – James Early on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/3 The Kennedy Brothers Thought the Civil Rights Movement Was a Nuisance at Best – Glen Ford Pt 4/5 The Pathology of the Rich – Chris Hedges on RAI (1/2) Credibility of the Ruling Elite is Being Shredded – RAI with Chris Hedges Syria’s Six Wars and Humanitarian Catastrophe – Phyllis Bennis on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 3/4 Vietnam War Created Middle East Activist – Phyllis Bennis on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 1/4 Fmr. Israeli Intel. Chief Says Palestinian Israeli Conflict Greater Risk than Nuclear Iran Pt 2/4 One State or Two, Solution Must be Based on Palestinian Rights Phyllis Bennis on RAI Pt 4/4 Lies and War – David Swanson on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 1/3 What Drives War – David Swanson on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/3 Are There Just Wars – David Swanson on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 3/3 Kennedy Was A Cold War Warrior to the Core – Glen Ford on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 5/5 Giving Grassroots Leaders a Voice – Glen Ford on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/5 Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report Tells Life Story – Reality Asserts Itself Pt 1/5 Black Nationalism and the Peoples’ Movement – Glen Ford on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 3/5 Al Qaeda and the Saudi Agenda – Toby Jones on Reality Asserts Itself (1/2) Are the Saudis Fueling a Sunni-Shia War? – Toby Jones on Reality Asserts Itself (2/2) The Vietnam War was a Seminal Event for Me – Michael Ratner on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 1/7 From a Zionist Youth to Outspoken Critic of a Jewish State – Michael Ratner on RAI Pt 2/7 MLK and a Radicalizing Moment in American History – Michael Ratner on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 3/7 The Butcher of Attica – Michael Ratner on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 4/7 Puerto Rican Independence Movement and Cuba Further Radicalized Me -Michael Ratner on RAI Pt 5/7 Fighting Reagan’s Secret, Illegal Wars – Michael Ratner on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 6/7 Moving Towards a Police State – Michael Ratner on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 7/7 Sen. Graham: President Must Side with Openness About C.I.A. and 9/11 – Pt 3/7 Justice Requires an End to Israeli Jewish Supremacy Over Palestinians – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (5/5) Being the “Other” in America – Andy Shallal on Reality Asserts Itself (1/4) An American Should be One that Questions Their Government – Andy Shallal on Reality Asserts Itself (2/4) DC Test Scores Up, but Poor Black Kids are Doing Worse- Andy Shallal on Reality Asserts Itself (3/4) We Need to Harness People’s Power – Andy Shallal on Reality Asserts Itself (4/4) Global Warming Theory Based on Evidence, Not a Belief – Alan Robock (1/5) No CO2 Eureka Moment, Just Years of Statistical Analysis – Alan Robock on RAI (2/5) Answering Counter Climate Claims – Alan Robock RAI (3/5) Nuclear Winter – Alan Robock on RAI (4/5) What to Do Next About Global Warming – Alan Robock on RAI (5/5) Awakened by the Palestinian Intifada – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5) Palestinians can Learn From the African America Struggle – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (2/5) Class Struggle in Palestine – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (4/5) Civil Rights Leader Bob Moses Dies at 86 – Pt 1/9 Patriotism and Lynching – Bob Moses on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/9 The Respectable Face of Terror – Robert Moses on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 3/9 Founding SNCC and Taking on Mississippi – Bob Moses on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 4/9 An Earned Insurgency – Bob Moses on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 7/9 The Constitutional People and Slavery by Another Name – Bob Moses on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 8/9 ‘We the People’ Force Confronts Democratic Party Leadership in ’64 – Bob Moses on RAI Pt 9/9 Reaganism and Thatcherism were Intellectually Dishonest – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 1/5 Racing to a Dead End – Heiner Flassbeck on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/5 The U.S. Dollar and the Search for a Reasonable Capitalist – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 3/5 The Necessity for Higher Wages – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 4/5 Capitalism Will Hit the Wall Again, Hard – Heiner Flassbeck on RAI Pt 5/5 Gaza Under Siege – Eva Bartlett on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 1/2 Gaza Under Siege – Eva Bartlett on Reality Asserts Itself Pt 2/2 Corporate Media Perpetuates Climate Science Denial – Gabriel Byrne on RAI Pt 4/4 Towards a Green Economy: How Urgent is It? – Robert Pollin on Reality Asserts Itself (1/8) Towards a Green Economy: Proposal for a Sustainable Plan – Robert Pollin on RAI (2/8) Towards a Green Economy: Models That are Working – Robert Pollin on RAI (3/8) Towards a Green Economy: Is Clean Coal and Carbon Capture an Option? – Robert Pollin on RAI (4/8) Towards a Green Economy: Green Growth or no Growth? – Robert Pollin on RAI (5/8) Towards a Green Economy: Fighting at the Local Level – Robert Pollin on RAI (6/8) Towards a Green Economy: Tax, Trade, Cap, Deny? – Robert Pollin on RAI (7/8) Towards a Green Economy: Private or Public? – Robert Pollin on RAI (8/8) Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs – Johann Hari on RAI (1/2) Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs – Johann Hari on RAI (2/2) Does Israel Have the Right to Exist as a Jewish State? – Ali Abunimah on Reality Asserts Itself (3/5) Sen. Bob Graham: FBI Deliberately Covered Up the Role of Saudis in 9/11 Attack – (pt 1/7) Sen. Graham: Bush/Cheney Misdirected Intel Prior to 9/11, Aggressively Deceived After – Pt 2/7 RAI With Former Weatherman Bill Ayers Pt 1/3 RAI with Former Weatherman Bill Ayers Pt 2/3 RAI with Former Weatherman Bill Ayers – Pt 3/3 U.S. Refuses to Accept Iran as a Regional Power – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 1/3 U.S. Attempts to Destabilize Iran Have Failed – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 2/3 Israel Wants U.S. to Weaken and Isolate Iran – RAI with Trita Parsi Pt 3/3 Corporate Democrats Have a Vested Interest in Not Listening to Workers – RAI with Thomas Frank (1/9) Clinton Attacks Sanders in New Book – RAI with Thomas Frank (2/9) Liberal Elite Doesn’t Care Much About Inequality – RAI with Thomas Frank (3/9) Clinton Democrats Hate the Left – RAI with Thomas Frank (4/9) From Ronald Reagan to Bernie Sanders – RAI with Thomas Frank (5/9) Prisoners of Hope – RAI with Thomas Frank (6/9) From Priesthood to Actor to Activist – Gabriel Byrne on RAI Pt 1/4 The Miners Strike Taught Me to Think Critically – Gabriel Byrne on RAI Pt 2/4 Clinton, Blair, and Obama Destroyed the Idealism of Politics – Gabriel Byrne on RAI Pt 3/4 Clinton and Obama Helped Make the Democrats a Wall Street Party – Thomas Frank on RAI (7/9) Obama Chose Wall St. Over Main St. – Thomas Frank on RAI (8/9) Harvey Weinstein, the Democratic Party and the Power of the ‘Creative Class’ – Thomas Frank on RAI (9/9) The Radical Ferment of Winnipeg’s Jewish Socialist Politics – Leo Panitch on RAI Pt 1/4 The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 1/6 Apple, Market Manipulation and the Cult of Personal Finance – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 2/6 Clinton’s ‘Committee to Save the World’ Unleashes Wall Street – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 3/6 Sociopaths Rise to the Top RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 4/6 The Rich Have an Escape Plan – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 5/6 Artificial Intelligence in Whose Interests? – RAI with Rana Foroohar Pt 6/6 The Rise of Jeremy Corbyn and Class Struggle in the UK Labour Party – RAI with Leo Panitch Pt 3/4 Is Another World Possible – Leo Panitch on RAI Pt 4/4 I Think I’m a Marxist – Leo Panitch on RAI Pt 2/4

Are antitrust laws effective as a mechanism to break up monopolies and Big Tech? How monopolies enable price-gouging and drive inflation. Talia Baroncelli speaks to Matt Stoller, Research Director at the American Economic Liberties Project.