Part 2

Nima April 22, 24

Michael’s notes from this important interview. Watch the geo-political markers.

1A. US student and voter opposition to the US-Israeli genocide.

 The breaking news here in New York City today are the mass protests at Columbia University, New York University and the New School opposing the genocide in Gaza. The protests have spread to Yale, Harvard and other universities throughout the United States. Columbia locked their gates, closing out students not only from their classes but from their dormitories and cafeterias. They are obliged to stay with friends or sleep outside. Over a hundred were arrested and their hands put in plastic tie-cuffs for many hours.

 Students are furious at how the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Columbia have knuckled under the Congressional accusations that they are permitting anti-Semitic demonstrations on campus. One sign just show on television here says just what the Republican pro-Israel congresswoman Stefanik said that If you oppose genocide in Gaza, that’s called anti-Semitism.

 These hearings in Congress feature politicians seeking AIPAC money to wave the Israeli flag. This is the biggest scandal since the McCarthy hearings back in the 1950s that led to many actors, intellectuals, professors and government staffers to be fired and have their careers reckoned.

 All three university presidents apologized for not preventing students from supporting the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. Not a single one said, “I’m proud that our students are standing up for what’s fair, and for supporting the United Nations and the rule of international law. This shows how moral and committed students are to opposing unfair one-sided bombing of a population as part of ethnic cleansing to create a Holocaust waged by Zionists themselves.”

 No university president said this. Their cowardice showed that their first concern was donors to their endowments, not to their students. The US-Israeli war on the Palestinians has caused a crisis in academic freedom. Today, Columbia University has closed down all its in-person classes to prevent further student protests against the genocide in Gaza.

 For the first time since the threat wave of student protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and soon after that, the protests against South African apartheid, students are demonstrating against the U.S. bombing of civilian populations. The Democratic Party is upset because this means that Biden probably cannot possibly win in November. I remember back in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson couldn’t speak at any hotel or other public space without having to sneak out a side door to avoid crowds changing, “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.”

 Something like that is happening with President Biden. Crowds gather and chant against his war-making from Israel to Ukraine, and chant, “Bomber Joe has got to go.”

Younger voters share a revulsion against his fighting to the last Ukrainians and his war on the Palestinians. Many Americans are refusing to vote Democratic – or Republican. Third-party candidates are gaining support, headed by Jill Stein and RFK Jr. What’s amazing is that the only anti-war candidate who’s on the ballot is Jill Stein. The Democratic Party is trying to get her and any other challengers off the ballot – just as in Ukraine, Zelensky has cancelled elections and banned other parties.

The opposition to the Democrat and Republican neocon Deep State threatens a deadlock between the two awful candidates, Biden and Trump. A likely result is that if neither of the two major party candidates has over 50% of the vote, this November’s election will end up throwing the election into the House of Representatives. The balance will then lie with the third-party electors, who can make the kind of deals that European parliamentary states negotiate.

 This election is heavily influenced by money from AIPAC – the Zionist lobbying organization. While they attack critics of Netanyahu and Israel as being anti-Semitic, he has said that the great public relations problem is created by Jewish liberals! They are against genocide. And they are demonstrating on campuses across the United States.

 Colleges are punishing supporters of Gaza as if they want to destroy Israel. The university’s president claims that Jewish students feel threatened, but the reality is Zionist violence. At Columbia, students who have served in Israeli IDF forces have sprayed pro-Palestinian demonstrators with Skunk, an indelible chemical. Columbia University did nothing to protect or help the students under attack.

 This is what Freud called projection: The Zionists are projecting onto their victims the genocide that THEY want to perform against Palestinians and other Near Easterners – Arabs, Persians and beyond.

 This claim that “To criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic” sets Zionists against the great majority of Jews who have been thoroughly assimilated over the past 75 years. Anti-Semitism has been frowned upon for over half a century. Netanyahu, Biden, and Columbia’s president are saying that if you support the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, you’re anti-Semitic. If you oppose Gaza genocide and criticize Israel, you’re ant-Semitic.” The implication is that the whole world who has criticized this violence and breaking of international law is anti-Semitic.

 At some point, many will begin to say, “All right. I guess I’m anti-Semitic.” Netanyahu, Biden and AIPAC may be creating the most anti-Semites since Hitler!

 Columbia University president Nemit Shafik has said that protests against the Gaza genocide are anti-Semitic, demanding genocide against Jews. She called out the police to break up student demonstrations, arrested over a hundred students, cancelled their IDs, prevented them from returning to their dormitories or completing their exams. All this as a sign to Columbia’s trustees that she would not hear of any support for the UN, ICJ or their criticisms of Israeli behavior.

 When the Congressional right-wingers demanded that she accuse calls to stop killing Palestinians as calls for the extermination of Israelis – by not letting them “protect themselves” – she didn’t stand up and say that she was proud that these students are defending the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. She said that she will expel the students, expel professors who oppose the genocide, and stand with opposing any anti-war stance. This is not surprising.

Columbia’s president Shafik worked for the IMF and the World Bank on behalf of the United States’ right-wing. She has fully backed Netanyahu’s claims that to criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic.

1. Your take on Gaza, and the new escalations between Iran and Israel – who’s benefiting?

Well, no matter what, Palestinians are losing. The Gaza bombing has resumed, and the killing has spread to the West Bank.

 It’s hard to say that Israel is winning. It’s doing all the killing, but it is becoming an outcast.

 So is the United States. Biden’s pretense to dissociate the United States from Israel has backfired. The world sees it as absurd when he asks Netanyahu to please “be kind and follow the rules of war” while it’s breaking international law by bombing hospitals, shooting doctors and especially journalists, using Gazan civilians for target practice, bombing Iran’s embassy in Syria. Biden’s pretense is that the US is not encouraging Israel to keep on wiping out Palestinians as Israel’s Final Solution. But that obviously is his policy and that of his neocon team, Blinken and Jake Sullivan.

They keep giving Israel a steady flow of bombs and money. If you look at the U.S. actions, they are saying: “Go right ahead. We just don’t want to be blamed for it. We want to preserve deniability so as to save our moral credibility.” But that credibility is now gone – as irreversibly as that of Israel. Their pretense of asking Netanyahu to be more gentle – while giving him more big bombs every week – seems to be saying, “We know that giving Israel arms and money is bad. But it’s all Netanyahu’s fault. We wish he could exterminate Palestinians in a nicer way.

 Likewise when Biden and Blinken make public statements telling Israel NOT to bomb Iran, this has been a common U.S.-Israeli goal for many years. The Neocons have given Netanyahu the go-ahead to make Israel something more than just a “landed aircraft carrier” and on-site manager of Isis. It is to be an outright armed attacker.

 The problem is that militarily, there seems to be no way for Israel to avoid being hurt. The neocons have seen that as the United States is losing world power and support, and even losing its military superiority. The best time for a war in the Middle East against Iran – and simultaneously against Russia and China – is now, rather than later.

Or I should say, the “least bad” time to fight Iran. This is their last big chance, with a crazy Israeli leader in Netanyahu and equally crazy rival politicians waiting to step in and follow the same policy, which seems to be that of the Israeli population as a whole.

But Russia and also China have signalled very strongly that they will protect Iran. If it is hit, Iran will be protected, and it will wipe out Israel.

I think that when the dust settles, Iran will come out ahead, Israel will self-destruct and the United States will be isolated from the rest of the world outside of its NATO partners and client states.

The violence in Gaza and the West Bank is reminiscent of the 19th century’s colonization practices wiping out indigenous populations that the Global Majority feel themselves pressed to create an alternative. They see Israel as pursuing what European colonial powers did in the 19th century.

The Europeans have apologized for what they did, and most Americans sympathize with the native “Indians” killed so that the Slave Power could use their lands for cotton and tobacco, driving them further and further West, breaking one treaty after another. That is how settler states behave.

 But until Israel, that was thought to be a bygone relic of European colonialism.

The world sees this happening again today – with an abhorrent sanctimonious self-justification that Israel is “protecting itself.” Its view is that it has behaved so brutally and Nazi-like against the Palestinians that they MUST want to fight back and kill them. Israeli aggressors thus are projecting their own behavior and hatred onto their victims.

 So to answer your question about who is the winner: This awful genocidal attack has introduced a note of urgency on the part of the Global Majority: the BRICS+ countries, the Global South and Eurasia.

 I think that this is a turning point in Western civilization, away from Western intolerance, unipolar demand for control, and the institutions of US control created in 1944-1945.

 This is an attempt to obliterate the rules of international law and leave only U.S. power in its place. This constant vetoing of UN rules and the International Court of Justice condemning Israel for genocide, for breaking all international rules by bombing foreign embassies, means that the United Nations is effectively dead.

The United States just vetoed the attempt to recognize Palestine as a nation. This veto shows that Biden wants Palestinians exterminated so as to use Israeli power to destabilize the Near East, to continue its role in mobilizing ISIS terrorism and act as the warhead in the U.S. attack on Near Eastern countries seeking independence from U.S. control.

Only a full spectrum set of international institutions can enable other countries to break free. So the ultimate loser is the dream of U.S. unipolar power.

The winners and losers thus go far beyond just Iran and Israel. This is really a conflict of civilizations. And I hope that civilization will win over barbarism.

2. Is Ukraine about to collapse since the far-right soldiers are surrendering and not willing to continue though we still see the US sending more aid?

 Ukraine already has collapsed, not only militarily but politically and socially. The Azov Battalion and other far-right soldiers are not surrendering, because they have been protected by staying behind the front. They have spent their time mainly attacking and terrorizing civilians.

 The civilian population is doing everything that it can to avoid being rounded up and thrown into the front lines without proper training. These are the Ukrainian troops who are defecting to the Russian army.

 The U.S. Congress just passed the aid package for Ukraine on Sunday. But the Christian Zionist Republican leader Mike Johnson, appointed by Trump, followed President Biden in making it clear that the aid was going to be spent in the United States, on U.S. arms production – employing U.S. labor – not on money sent to Ukraine.

 Many Congresspersons were waiving Ukrainian flags on the floor. That’s almost as serious a breach of rules as the Congressman who walked in wearing his Israeli IDF uniform –to show where his loyalty really lies.

3. Olaf Scholz visiting China trying to convince them not to help Russia. Are the EU and US able to separate China and Russia? How deep is the partnership between these two countries? 

 The US attack on China and Russia – and Iran and most of the Global Majority – has driven China and Russia together, and indeed more of the world together to protect themselves against US constant destabilization, regime change and political attacks.

 I would have thought that the Chinese would simply laugh at Scholz, but they are being as polite to him as they were to Treasury Secretary Yellen a few weeks ago when she made similar demands. They will smile and say that they understand what they are being asked to do, but they will continue to support Russia.

 There is no way that the United States can drive a wedge between China and Russia, because Biden has said again and again that America’s number one long-term existential enemy is China, and that to defeat it – perhaps by going to war as early as 2026 – is to conquer Russia so that Russia cannot provide defense to the planned US-China War.

 China is acting in a way that must surprise much of the West by still trying to hope that it can persuade the US neocons, Democrats and Republicans that there is a win-win alternative to war.

The Western art of persuasion: to hurt, bomb, injure, overthrow in regime change.

 The rest of the world, from antiquity through China: persuasion by finding a win-win solution. Leave the existing elites in place. That is what Persia did, and Genghis Khan.

4. Please take a look at the attached file of China’s rising trade. Where is China’s economy heading? 

 China is filling the economic vacuum caused by the US and NATO-Europe de-industrializing. Its official policy is socialism, but this turns out in practice to be the same basic economic practice of subsidy, infrastructure spending and rising living standards that the United States and Germany pursued in the late 19th century as the basic policy of industrial capitalism – which itself was evolving toward socialism.

 China has thus achieved the policies that the United States and Germany originally followed so successfully. But the U.S. and European capitalism is no longer industrial. It is finance capitalism.

 The US policy realizes that American and European economies are priced out of the market by deteriorating into rentier-capitalist economies. That is why the bill to support Ukraine and Israel, and to stir up Taiwan in hopes that like Ukraine, it will fight to the last Taiwanese against China, included a demand that China sell Tik-Tok.

 The US wants to become a rentier economy living on the monopoly rents by controlling internet platforms, computer-chip technology and Artificial Intelligence crapification.

 But here’s the problem for the United States. Getting technological leadership involves R&D. But this costs money – and Amazon, Google, Meta and others use their revenue to push up stock prices in the SHORT RUN by stock buybacks and dividend payouts, not for long-term R&D. So that is the big problem.

 The more immediate problem is that the US sanctions against selling critical computer-chip and information technology to China has led it to realize that it must become totally independent of U.S. suppliers. U.S. chipmakers have complained to Biden that losing the Chinese market by obeying these sanctions will deprive them of the revenue needed to make the capital investment needed to compete.

 So the US attempt to isolate and hurt China and all other countries seeking to increase their self-dependency is turning out to isolate the United States itself. That is the irony of U.S. self-destructive policy based on hurting other countries as a means of controlling them instead of trying to offer mutual gains as China and the rest of the civilized world are doing as their basic approach.

 This is why civilization is surviving over barbarism.

Photo by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash

The post Gaza – Civilization will Win over Barbarism first appeared on Michael Hudson.

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 27th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.

MICHAEL HUDSON: And I’m Michael Hudson.

RADHIKA DESAI: And working behind the scenes to bring you our show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton, our videographer, Paul Graham, and our transcriber, Zach Weiser.

And today, we not only have a guest, but a very special one. As many of you will know, Jill Stein is running for President of the United States on the Green Party ticket. Ho-hum, you will say. What’s so what? She’s not going to win. Third-party candidates never do. So what’s the point?

Well, things never change until they do. They often take longer to change than most imagine, but then, when the change comes, it happens quicker than anyone might have anticipated.

The reason why Michael and I are advising Jill on policy, why we support her candidacy so fully, and we are doing everything we can to advance her cause, is that there has never been an election in which a third-party candidate has a greater chance of winning.

Over three decades ago, when the duopoly was much more secure, Ross Perot got nearly 20% of the vote. Today, that duopoly has become a political zombie with only the appearance of life. The opening for others is yawning wide, and Jill is not only the only peace candidate in the fray of warmongers taking our world towards another war, she’s the only supporter for the national and human rights of Palestinians.

She’s also the only third-party candidate with ballot access in most states. This is what matters if you’re going to be actually elected, rather than just popular.

Even if victory remains a distant prospect, there has also never been a time when it has been more possible and more urgent to shift the discourse. When popular thirst for change has been greater, when the tenacity with which the duopoly is fighting to prevent that thirst from being quenched has been stronger. So it’s the meeting of the proverbial unstoppable force and the immovable object. So anything can happen. This is the context.

So without much ado, let us welcome Jill, who is going to kick off our conversation with a brief statement. Jill, please go ahead.

JILL STEIN: Thank you so much, Radhika, and thank you also to Michael. It’s really wonderful to be with you today discussing so many of the ideas that are really creating this perfect storm right now in this election. Exactly as you put it, Radhika, that we’re in a moment of unprecedented urgent need, and that is sort of colliding with this unprecedented opportunity for very deep and transformative change. There’s never been a moment like this. And I think we’re all familiar with the existential crises that we’re up against in our daily lives between crushing inequality, endless war, verging on nuclear on several fronts, and a climate which is collapsing before our very eyes, as well as this unraveling of our basic democratic institutions.

And this is crashing down on the heads of the American people in a very painful and ubiquitous way between some 60 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, half of renters who cannot afford to keep a roof over their heads, who meet the criteria for being severely financially stressed, spending at least 30 percent of their income just to try to keep that roof over their heads, which doesn’t leave much then to pay your student debt and your health care bills and put food on your table.

Not to mention that some 44 million young people — young and not so young — are locked into basically unpayable student debt in the terms of the current economy. The numbers in child poverty, which have effectively doubled. Homelessness is at an all-time high.

We have the climate crisis, which reaches new extremes every day. What was it last night? This sudden flooding that took place in the airport in the Middle East. I think it was Dubai. Just these unprecedented things, 70 degree elevations on the South Pole and the predictions now that we’re going to see the breakup of major ice sheets much more quickly. The flooding out of coastal areas that contain one third of the world’s populations. We are not entering a world here which is survivable on just about every count.

On one hand, you have this incredible crisis. On the other hand, you have now this resolve of the American people who really are breaking free from these very oppressive political institutions. Often we talk about breaking up with an abusive relationship. It’s hard to do. As the abused, one tends to make excuses for the abuser and say, oh, they had to do it, or I don’t have any other choices, or it’s going to get better next year.

There are so many parallels here to a very dysfunctional, abusive relationship from the political parties, in particular the Democrats, where so many people will make excuses for them now who know better. You have really a loss of this traditional mythology, this excuse, which is that the Democrats have been the lesser evil. Well, it’s really impossible to make that case anymore when the supposed lesser evil is leading the charge in a genocide and really expanding the war and leading the charge on censorship and shutting down freedom of speech and expression and the right to protest and all that.

We have really enormous ability now, and I’ll add to that, that the numbers in the polls also show that it’s over. It’s like a record high, some 63% who are now saying that our political parties are basically throwing us under the bus and that we need other options. So the American people are more positioned now to break up with this abusive relationship, with our whole political structure, than we have ever been. It’s more urgent and necessary than ever.

The political players at this moment, and we’re fairly locked in now, one cannot really launch new campaigns here for any number of reasons. Critical deadlines have passed. So this is pretty much the arrangement going forward. There are going to be, at this point, four candidates. Three of them are pro-war, pro-genocide candidates.

For many people, this is the deal breaker, that genocide is really compelling people to take new actions and new directions in their lives. We’re seeing this coming into our campaign all over the place on the campaign trail.

So we have three of these pro-genocide candidates, pro-war, and I must say, in fact, actually anti-worker and anti-climate to look at the record. So you’ve got those three who are essentially representing the forces of Wall Street and the war machine in their various ways. There are differences among them, but on the core matters, they align.

And then you have our campaign. There are several other candidates who are also people-powered and who have basically a people-powered agenda, but they do not have access to the ballot or experience getting on and are not in the process of doing that. We are actually on track right now to be on the ballot across the country. We have 75% of the work done behind us. I can elaborate on any of that as we go forward.

But the bottom line is that it’s going to be three splitting the pro-war imperial vote, essentially. And then there will be our campaign, which provides a unifying platform of solidarity for a variety of issues that are absolutely critical in our lives and which are causing truly existential crises. So we can be there for really transformative and emergency climate action, for likewise critical action for a more just and sustainable economy.

And likewise, on the war, we have the one anti-war, anti-genocide platform. And by the way, there’s so much the president could do immediately. It’s not as though one has to bring all of Congress along. There are solutions that can be implemented on day one. And in fact, even before day one, simply for building a strong force, which then begins to take on a life of its own and actually exert pressure.

So a four-way race, it depends how the numbers fall out, but it is possible in a four-way race to win the election with as little as 26% of the vote. That is the popular vote. And if the popular vote is won in various states, even a plurality that is less than a majority of the popular vote can then attain the full number of electoral votes in that state. So it’s not hard to envision how we get from here to the White House.

Less than getting to the White House is also a win because one has to begin building. And that would be the more typical course of building a party is to go from some 1.5% in our last race up to perhaps 5% or 6%, at which time very important supports become available by way of matching funds in the next race. A lot of infrastructure development goes forward and so on. And then up to perhaps 15% and so on.

There are many paths forward by which we survive and by which justice prevails and by which the planet also prevails and survives. And if we work together, we can be that unstoppable force. And this is very much what we are experiencing now on the campaign trail. And it’s a pleasure to be here today with you two in particular who have been so very important in helping articulate what the future looks like and what are the concrete plans for us to get there. Thank you so much.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What you’ve described is what’s really unique in this election. There have always been third parties before, but you’ve mentioned the polls of what people really want. And the largest poll of all in the United States is that most people are against the war in Palestine. They’re against funding not only Israel, but funding Ukraine also.

And it’s striking that given this public support for anti-war, that you’re the only anti-war candidate. And if you look at the funding, one of your candidates is the largest single recipient of AIPAC money in history, $2 million. That’s the president, Joe Biden. And what do you have to say about the funding and whether the candidates who are all pro-war are really running to represent their donor class or are they running to really represent voters? Well, to get votes, you need television, you need money, and you end up backing the donor class. What can you say about your donors, their donors?

JILL STEIN: Thank you, Michael. Yes, I mean, this is a huge issue. We have the best democracy that money can buy, which is no democracy at all. And as money has become more and more concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs, the super one percenters, this impacts our democracy and the rules of our democracy.

In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, we have a choice in this country between democracy and vast concentrations of wealth. Unfortunately, we’ve gone the route of vast concentrations of wealth. So the way that wealth and control exerts power are manifold. It happens in all kinds of ways.

And yes, one of those ways is that our political system and our elections have become such a blatant exercise of oligarchy by way of determining which candidates have the finances to run and which can break through the inordinate suppression of political opposition, particularly around the war.

And that pro-war money is funneling in through all sorts of routes. And, you know, that includes not only AIPAC, but also the war contractors and the enormous control that they exert, especially over Congress, not only through lobbying and campaign contributions, but also by way of bills that have very carefully distributed jobs so that people like Bernie Sanders feel like, oh, they can’t challenge the war industry because it employs so many people.

And that’s why our proposal for a Green New Deal, it’s not only a transition out of climate destruction, it’s also a transition away from the destruction of militarism because we need to transition many aspects of our economy to ways that are sustainable and just.

And I want to just make one more comment. Michael, you made the point about how the largest polls show that the American people agree against war. And I want to invoke also the recent very large poll that took place in New York state by way of their Democratic primary, because it’s not widely known. Not only did 12 percent oppose Biden who came out to vote, the so-called, you know, uncommitted vote. That’s a substantial block. But much bigger than that was the 83 percent who stayed home, who refused to come out relative to the last presidential primary, which was also settled. That, too, was a settled Democratic race at that point. The New York primary was very late in 2000. And, you know, the Sanders campaign had long since basically faded into the background. So it was a coronation, again, for Joe Biden, who was already well in power. So the fact that 83 percent stayed home, it was a 17 percent turnout.

The bottom has absolutely dropped out from the Democratic Party. And the fact that you don’t even hear this on mainstream media, I think, speaks volumes about what an obituary this fact amounts to for politics as usual. It’s really a very open race right now in terms of changing course.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s almost as if the race isn’t between Biden and Trump. It’s between the three anti-war candidates. And another thing that is not in the news, that I know the political managers for RFK before, Denis Kucinich and his team, they were so appalled by his support of Israel and defense of the genocide that they left his campaign and are now working on your campaign. If we could get the voters to do what his political managers did and leave the other people to go for you. This is a three-way race between the three non-Republican-Democratic candidates. I think that’s how we really should look at it.

JILL STEIN: Absolutely. Go ahead, Radhika.

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, you know, you were earlier saying, you know, before we move too far away from the point that you made about the best democracy money can buy, I just wanted to share the screen.

You know, in my classes, I show this chart, which shows that basically between 1960 and 2016, basically the winning candidate has been always the candidate that outspent his opponent. So it’s Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Obama, Obama. You can see that the winning candidate has always spent more, except with Clinton against Trump. This was the exception. So what this also shows, and this is not necessarily to praise Trump or anything, but what it shows is that already the duopoly has been breaking down for a long time.

This is the key point I want to make, which is that, you know, the incursion of Trump, although of course he was a Republican Party nominee, the fact was that in many ways he was an outsider. He came at the Republican Party from the outside, took it over, etc. So the decay of the duopoly has been going on for a while.

And the reason for the decay is also very interesting because essentially, you know, particularly over the last four or five decades, what we’ve had is essentially liberal democracy as a way of having periodic elections in which, you know, money is spent in order to allow this or that candidate to win. And both parties are essentially committed to preserving corporate power. And so the people can go whichever way they like. And I think, you know, as you say, leaving an abusive relationship is hard, sometimes even coming to the consciousness that you are in an abusive relationship is difficult.

But finally, you can see that by the 2000s anyway, and certainly the 2010s, it was becoming very clear that this was the case. And so the duopoly has been crumbling. And so this is the kind of thing that we need to emphasize because you are not a flash in the pan.

The reason why you are getting so much support, I mean, at the end of the day, you are, as you say, you are the only anti-war candidate. And the support for your position is ginormous. You can see it in the street every day, every week. You know, people are coming out and demonstrating against the war in Gaza in particular, but also the war in Ukraine has been deeply unpopular.

So in all of these ways, you know, you represent essentially an alternative, which is you are a peace candidate, but you are also a climate candidate and you are a people candidate. You want to have a set of policies that are not for big corporations, but for people.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, they don’t have to stay home anymore. Now, if they can vote for you instead of staying home, they have finally an alternative.

JILL STEIN: Yes, and if you look at the demographic of who stays home in 2016, it was about 100 million people, which is almost the size of the voting bloc for either the Democrat or the Republican candidate. So, it is a, you know, it is a determinative demographic. And it is largely, or shall we say disproportionately, of color, young and poor. So, it’s exactly the demographic that needs our agenda and that mobilizes to support our agenda, if only it can, you know, be informed.

And this is the strategy of the, you know, of the predatory parties is to silence the media and to block the, you know, the informing and empowering of the American people so that they can make decisions for themselves.

And I want to underscore what Radhika said about the long-term breakdown of our democratic system and its institutions. There’s an often cited study, the Gillens and Page study of, I think it was 2014, that basically documented in inordinate detail about how policy at the level of Congress for decades was driven by basically big campaign spenders and lobbyists, period. Virtually no policies, no major policies were passed by Congress that addressed deeply felt needs for which the public was mobilizing. There’s been a complete breakdown in our democratic institutions. And the crisis that the major parties are experiencing now is very real, and they are extremely guarded and alarmed.

And, you know, the DNC has announced that they have hired an army of attorneys in order to try to throw us off the ballot. And they have separately announced that they will also be doing their best to, I think what they call, they use this language to highlight the unsavory aspects of our character. In other words, you know, these are just blatant smear campaigns.

And in 2010, I think they really saw the writing on the wall. The results of 2010 were a real shot across the bow. And what happened? Democrats lost 1,000 seats in state legislatures across the country. We saw many legislatures flip from the Democratic to the Republican camp. We saw 64 congressional seats lost by the Democrats. I think it was 13 Senate seats and about the same number of governorships. So it was a huge kind of political swing where the Democrats had the most so-called “spoiled election” ever in their history. It was truly a spoiled election.

Now, what was spoiling that election? It was not the prominence of third party candidates all across the nation. There were hardly any in 2010 that I’m aware of. What was actually going on, obviously, was that this was the first election following the Wall Street bailouts, following the displacement of millions upon millions of families who were thrown out of their homes so that Congress could, and the White House—

It was the Democratic trifecta, which basically threw out working people and working families in order to embrace Wall Street. This was after the campaign of hope and change by Barack Obama. So this just made it so real that working people have been thrown under the bus in many ways, but in many ways really peaking and culminating in the crash of 2008, the Wall Street crash, after which the crooks on Wall Street who sabotaged the economy were richly rewarded. Young students, for example, who were dutifully following the prescription for leading a good life had taken out loans and gone to college, and they were thrown out, homeowners were thrown out.

So people are standing up. Democrats, yes, their party is being spoiled, but it’s being spoiled by none other than themselves, and they try to invoke third parties here so they don’t have to talk about what’s really going on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think to give a background to this, it wasn’t simply a Wall Street bailout that Obama did. There was a wholesale eviction, primarily of Black and Hispanic families, the victims of the real estate fraud.

And when he took power promising to write down the mortgage debts, homeownership in America was 59 percent. It’s now fallen more drastically than at any time in American history. It’s now less than 50 percent.

So by not writing down the junk mortgages to the realistic value and the affordable value, 10 percent of the American population have lost their homes to Blackstone and to other huge absentee landlords, and they’ve turned America in just 15 years from a homeownership society into an absentee-owned landlord society.

And that has all been primarily under the Democratic administration that’s represented Wall Street, but also there’s been no discussion of this in the press. That’s the media problem. How do you break through the fact that the press finds, probably to them, your worst and most culpable quality: [that] you talk about the problems that we’re having, and if they listen to you and they listen to President Biden and say the economy has never been better, he says it’s never been better for the 1 percent, and you’re talking about the 99 percent.

JILL STEIN: Yes, and this is why polls now show that the majority of the American people believe that the media, mainstream media, is purposefully misleading them and lying to them. The majority of the American people need this. People no longer believe mainstream media, the political parties. There’s been just a huge dropout in the industrial propaganda complex. It just has huge holes in it. People don’t believe it. The hype spinners are madly continuing on their way, but the system is breaking down all over the place.

Yes, of course, the antitrust laws should be brought to bear on our communications industry across the board, not only legacy press. On social media, for example, we should have the rights of free speech. This should be handled really as a public utility, not subject to the whim of whatever billionaire happens to own the platform.

It’s not rocket science how to change this. This is a matter of organizing to make it happen. There’s no doubt in my mind, starting on day one of a “green” administration, when we turn the White House into a greenhouse, which would be a good thing on many levels, there are many policies that can be brought to bear.

RADHIKA DESAI: I just wanted to add here that, Jill, the point you were making about the DNC, or essentially appointing somebody to attack third-party candidates, one of the things they’re going around saying is that these third-party candidates, like you or Cornel West or RFK, they are being funded by the Republicans. This is one of the canards that they are spreading.

Of course, they can find out about the funding, but the other thing as well is that by calling you a spoiler, they’re also missing a point that you were making. You are not a spoiler. The Democrats have already lost the game. People are essentially saying to themselves, since they can’t vote for Trump and they will not vote for Biden, they will stay at home. What you are doing is you are giving them somebody to vote for. You are there on the ballot, and that’s why it’s so critically important for us to get the word out.

And on the media, you know, again, you are so right that something has to be done about the decrepit condition of today’s media. But also, again, this is a much longer process than one imagines, because I remember very clearly some of the first alternative press websites coming out already in the late 1990s, because already there were substantial numbers of people who realized, you know, just at the dawn of the post-Cold War period, when you thought everything would be hunky-dory for the United States and so on, the United States was in sufficient trouble that the media was already engaging in so much spin that alternative news media websites came out reporting both on domestic policy as well as on international policy, both of which have been so awful. So this degeneration of the media is also very old.

And of course, today, with the proliferation of social media, what we have is the availability, the proliferation of social media and also the availability of other forms of media. You can sit in any American city today and access the news as it is being reported from around the world. You can watch media from Latin America, you can watch Telesur, you can watch RT, you can watch Press TV, you can watch Indian news media, and you see that there’s a completely different perspective. The Western and U.S. perspective is completely isolated.

Now, here, finally, a final point one should make is that, of course, antitrust may have its uses, but the real issue is that this kind of social media is actually should be a social utility. The fact that Facebook and Meta and so on are essentially trying to monetize our eyeballs on social media is what’s creating a lot of problems.

You know, in our society, in the U.S. democracy, people spend a lot of time and money fingering Russia and China as the culprits in terms of, you know, they are affecting the electoral process. No, they are only fingering Russia and China because they do not want to regulate the big privately owned corporate monopolies which are vitiating the democratic media sphere. They own it and they are essentially controlling it. And this is what has to be put a stop to.

You use the right words. We should have a substantial part of the media, both broadcast and social media and print media as a public service utility. There should be, you have PBS, but there should be a big national public service media on all— in all forms, whether it is electronic, print, etc.

MICHAEL HUDSON: But the public media, the public broadcasting is totally pro-war today. And there’s an even worse censorship that works against Jill. And that’s the censorship of colleges. You heard the Democrats browbeating the president of Harvard for letting there to be demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza. And the Harvard president apologized for letting the students oppose the war there.

And the New York Times this week had an article about New York University closing down meetings against the war. And these are your candidates, basically. So you’re suffering from the fact that there’s this total censorship of any anti-war and it goes beyond just propaganda. It goes by the deep state, CIA providing talking points to the newspapers.

I think you and I talked before about, what do you think of the idea of having every candidate report how much money they get from the AIPAC and other donors so that the whole country can know if they’re getting funds from a foreign country or lobbying for a foreign country, this should be made a public knowledge and the newspapers would have to publish this as something called basic information that everybody has the rights to know. What do you think of enforcing something like that?

JILL STEIN: To my mind, that’s an absolute no-brainer. Transparency and accountability for political support, who’s behind your campaign is supposed to be the way the system works.

It doesn’t work that way. Super PACs, for example, can bring in limitless amounts of money via so-called dark money or charitable institutions, which they can contribute. The Super PACs have to report their donors. They have no limits, however. Contributors to the Super PAC can be completely anonymous. A single billionaire can be pumping a billion dollars into a campaign and there’s no way to know about that and to know where it’s coming from.

But transparency is not enough. There are all kinds of holes in that framework. Requiring things to be transparent, it doesn’t do the job.

To my mind, number one, AIPAC should be classified as a foreign agent and not given the right to buy out our elections and our candidates from the get-go.

In addition, we should not have a privately sponsored election system, which is what this amounts to. Private dollars are able to buy out the election system and then the functioning of our representative bodies through their lobbying, as well as the follow-on to their campaign contributions, which come with strings attached. Whether they’re explicit or just implicit, they are always implicit, which is why a system that allows—

For example, Democrats and Republicans, they use a system called or a tool called victory funds. These victory funds allow a single donor to write a check for over $600,000. It changes year by year. But this is a huge amount of money that can come from a single donor. Then the money gets basically laundered in various ways through the system and comes to the candidate or to the DNC. There are huge amounts of money coming from single donors, which gives them enormous influence.

We need to move to a system that does not rely on huge amounts of private money. That should include from the candidate themselves, because there are also no limits on that money. That’s how Bloomberg bought his way forward, for example, as a billionaire. I think he spent more than $1 billion on his own campaign.

We should have a publicly funded system of elections. We should have free media coverage required for all legitimate contestants in a race. That brings the cost way down, but this should be publicly funded, not privately funded. That would begin to align the incentives with the public interest, because the way it works now, it is just corrupt to the core.

RADHIKA DESAI: Jill, what you say also reminds me, there’s a larger program that you’re running on, which is really so important also to draw attention to. Because of course, while we have these obscenely rich people, we will need to have the kind of curbs that you’re talking about.

But we also have in mind, you also have in mind, you’re proposing a type of economy, which will not have this kind of obscene wealth inequality, which will not create the sort of financialized, unproductive economy, which is unable to offer good jobs to people and so on.

So, Michael and I have been talking about this for a long time in our other shows as well. But what is needed is a root and branch reform of the US economy and also of the US financial system. Because remember, it’s not just capitalism that creates inequality. Of course, it does. But on top of that, when you put on top of that a financial system, which is essentially a system of transferring wealth from working people, from productive corporations, and from even the government into a tiny elite, you’re going to have the kind of inequality that we’re looking at.

So, part of your program is also that we need to have this completely root and branch reform of the US economy and of the US financial system. Because for the last 30 or 40 years, the financial system, through its various rules and tax breaks, and of course, the bailouts, has been doing nothing other than transferring income and wealth from ordinary working people to rich people.

And a second point that I think, which is also really central to your foreign policy. I mean, while I completely agree that AIPAC is a really big issue in the United States, it is a tail wagging the dog, etc. But you have to understand that, powerful as AIPAC is, there is a larger scheme. Even if AIPAC did not exist, the United States would support Israel. Why? Because Israel is the United States aircraft carrier in the Middle East, allowing the United States to control that absolutely critical region, thanks to its oil and energy resources, thanks to its strategic location, all of these things.

So, the United States, in a certain sense, you know, people who are, you know, I often say that people who are saying stand up for Ukraine don’t realize that they are contributing to the destruction of Ukraine.

Similarly, I would say those who are, you know, saying that, you know, Israel, you know, think they’re being supporting Israel in the current context are actually supporting a situation in which the United States is using Israel and its Jewish population as a instrument, as a fighting force against Iran and all the other hostile forces in the Middle East. And Jill, you know, I’m sure you have a lot to say about this. So, yeah.

JILL STEIN: Yes, absolutely. And you take me back to Ronald Reagan’s remarks in the 1980s. Actually, it was the remarks of his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, who said that Israel is the unsinkable battleship for the United States in the Middle East. And in the 1980s, the U.S. very much needed those fossil fuels.

Now we are one of the major exporters of fossil fuels. However, it is our explicit policy, so-called “full-spectrum dominance”, articulated by the Pentagon, actually starting in the mid-1990s, and reiterated since then in various forms, that our military will dominate all spheres of potential conflict and competition across the world. So all areas of the world and in all potential dimensions of conflict, we will be in dominance, in full spectrum, and that we will not allow competitors to rise, even on a regional basis, not allow competitors who are friends and not allow competitors who are foes.

And this has created such an absolutely disastrous foreign policy and a series of catastrophic conflicts, you know, from Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya and Syria. It’s just been one unbelievable loss.

I’ve seen some of the, you know, back-of-the-napkin figures, well, some actually by the Cost of War Project at Brown University, to the effect it’s been $21 trillion that we have spent in this futile effort to basically dominate the world. And it only makes us more and more a pariah among nations, which certainly Israel and the U.S. are sharing that position right now.

And I should add, you know, that as someone who was raised in the Jewish tradition, following the Holocaust and following the Second World War, when, you know, in a Jewish community, going to a Reform Jewish synagogue Sunday school, so-called, every, you know, every week until I was about 15 years old, I, you know, my formative years were all about coming to terms with the Holocaust, which had everything to do with that this would not be allowed to happen again. And that Holocaust and genocide is not just the responsibility of the perpetrator. It’s also the responsibility of the witnesses to the Holocaust. This is firmly the tradition that I was raised in.

And, you know, it has everything to do with why I am doing what I am doing right now, because it just became ingrained in my DNA that to justify, you know, the sacrifice of my, you know, ancestors, the 6 million Jews who went up in flames with this, that we had to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. And for us, it was, this doesn’t happen again to anyone. And I could go into, you know, great lengths about Zionism and where it departs from basic Jewish values.

But, you know, pertinent to many of the things that we’ve been talking here about, you know, like the suppression of free speech on campuses, suppression not only of free speech, but our other First Amendment rights as well, which is the right to protest. Campuses, to divert slightly for a moment, campuses are supposed to be the bastions of free speech and debate, especially about things that are important.

What is more important than this conflict, which could go global? We basically have a World War I type, pre-World War I type complex situation right now in the Middle East, with nuclear weapons thrown into the mix. There is nothing more critical than coming to terms with this.

And we already know that the American population, by 68%, in one of the initial Reuter polls about this, opposes this conflict and wants an immediate ceasefire and a diplomatic solution. Yet young people in college are not allowed to take that position, this majoritarian position that is aligned with our key values. It’s absolutely astonishing.

And I guess the last thing I’ll say here to cap off this rant is that the, you know, the accusation that opposing genocide is anti-Semitic is astounding to me. That amounts to saying that it’s okay with Jews, that genocide is okay with Jews. And if Jews oppose genocide, they’re being anti-Semitic. What are you talking about? If anybody opposes genocide, they’re being anti-Semitic. This is so, you know, turned on its head.

And really, to my mind, this is the most anti-Semitic thing one could possibly say to imply that opposing genocide is anti-Semitic.

MICHAEL HUDSON: One of the problems here is that no matter what you or any of the other candidates do, who are elected, the whole policy is being made by the unelected deep state. I think you and I spoke before. What do you think of appointing a modern church committee to investigate what has the CIA and National Security Council been doing to interfere with American, to meddle in American political affairs?

JILL STEIN: This is absolutely essential. We know that, you know, thanks to the CIA, largely the U.S. has overturned something like 70 sovereign countries. We have basically instigated coups and, you know, internal, you know, color revolutions and all sorts of ways that we have, you know, there are many handbooks about how to do this. And the CIA has its ways. This desperately calls for a church committee.

And if I could say more generically, you know, part of the pathway forward for us in our thinking, you know, about how do you rise as an insurgent, but very principled and, you know, “small-d” democratic political force, you know, you must have a grassroots movement. And if we are so fortunate as to take power, which is democratically constituted and should happen if there is a democracy still in this country, we will rely very much on having many committees because we’re not going to be the majority. If we get into office, there will be a fight.

Hopefully we would get into office along with like-minded representatives in Congress, and there are many other green candidates and socialist candidates and so on who are running against the military industrial machine. We will need to work together, but we above all need to work with the grassroots engine for all of this.

These were the grassroots troops that Barack Obama rose to power with, with great expectations for hope and change. And he broke all kinds of barriers with the power of this grassroots movement. And then he promptly, you know, told people to basically go home and be quiet when he appointed Larry Summers as his first act really before he even took office.

But, you know, we would not take that path. We would keep, you know, continually rely on this grassroots movement. And part of the way that it would function is through holding, you know, congressional hearings and establishing congressional committees that actually hold the feet to the fire of our Congress, because our Congress is absolutely, you know, AWOL on its democratic duties.

And likewise, we would very much encourage and bring back the institution of town hall meetings where legislators have to meet with their constituents, hear them, and answer to them. If democracy prevails, we have a completely different form of government going forward. So what you’re suggesting about the church committee is absolutely essential. And we would do that and basically generalize that as a principle.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think that the reason Radhika and I have trained your campaign is even if you don’t out-poll the other candidates for president, your campaign can introduce the issues that we’ve just been talking about here.

And this is why I think the newspapers are trying not to discuss your campaign. They don’t want these issues to be open, and yet these are the issues that most voters and nonvoters are most interested in.

JILL STEIN: It is striking. You know, we are on the ballot in 21 states, have many states that will be turned in in the next couple of weeks. We basically have a ballot access battle going on in all states now, and we have the track record. Actually, in 2016, we were on in 47 states for about 95% of the population, and yet you don’t see any mention about this.

We hear a great deal about RFK being on eight states, Dr. West being, I don’t know, maybe four or five states right now without a real pathway forward. You know, intentions, but not really the wherewithal or the track record to do that, yet you have radio silence out there, not from, you know, truly principled alternative media.

And, you know, it’s wonderful that there is so much of it, including, you know, present company here. So there are many pathways to get the word out, but there are many who are being purposefully uninformed here and disempowered. And I think it does have everything to do with the fact that, you know, we are sort of an elephant in the room here in, you know, a real vehicle for truly transitioning power.

If you’re coming into this race as an independent and you don’t have a grassroots infrastructure, you know, no worries. And media outlets, even some who pretend to be progressive, can kind of do their supposed, you know, duty by covering some of the other campaigns, which are not going to be here for the long haul and really, which do not constitute a threat to power.

We have 75 percent of the signatures collected, if you add them up, totally what the burden is. And we are well on our way to getting the rest of them. And by the way, for those who would like to be a part of this uprising for democracy, go to jillstein2024.com. We badly need your support, your participation as a volunteer, and also your financial support, which is really critical to fighting this ballot access battle when the scales are so deeply stilted against the public interest. We need your help, but we are well along the way. And this has everything to do with why there is very much a mainstream media blackout on our campaign still.

RADHIKA DESAI: Well, you know, Jill, you talked about the uprising of the people, and I think this is key, because I agree with you.

MICHAEL HUDSON: A realistic outcome for this would be that even if you’re not winning the presidential vote, you will have enough votes to force the outcome into Congress, because if neither Biden nor Trump has enough votes, then it goes to Congress. That’s where you can have the voters who vote for you, you can use your voting plot to insist on certain things being done. Even without being president, you can use your decisive votes to get certain policies. Do you have any particular policies that you would want to insist upon as a condition for resolving the question of who is going to be president?

JILL STEIN: Oh, absolutely. You know, there are so many of them, from a Medicare for all system, which is really a motherhood and apple pie policy. It’s astounding that it has not been enacted already. And it’s a real, you know, statement about where our so-called leadership is coming from and who they are serving, namely the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, that we don’t have this, because it enhances health care, enhances our health, covers everyone head to toe, conception to the grave, expands so that everyone is included, all your care that’s currently excluded, like home care, like chronic care, like mental health care, like dental care, eyes, hearing aids, and so on, glasses. It’s a wonderful program. Its overhead is reduced from the 33% of the current private system down to 3%, which is the overhead in Medicare. It plugs that money back into actual dollars. So you can actually expand health care and make it total and comprehensive at the same time that we save half a trillion dollars every year. So that would be a no-brainer. That’s one critical policy.

Another one is to back off of these insane wars that are endangering us and impoverishing us as a nation, to insist that there be an end to genocide and ethnic cleansing and occupation in Israel, Gaza, and Palestine, to insist on compliance with international law in our foreign policy, to abolish student debt and make public higher education free, which is kind of among the many false promises that were made by Joe Biden in his last campaign. There are so many things that we could bargain on.

And I want to invoke another possibility for how the vote might divide up, which is that in the popular vote in any given state, one doesn’t need a majority in order to get all of the electoral votes. So if we had actually a 26% vote across the country, state by state, that is enough in a four-way race, mathematically, to actually win all of the delegates. So it’s not inconceivable where you have these three pro-war candidates splitting the conventional pro-war, pro-Wall Street vote. If they were splitting it three ways and we become the unifying platform and the unifying vehicle for the anti-war movement, the anti-genocide movement, which is huge, the movement to abolish student debt, which is also huge, to end medical debt, to make housing affordable, which is a huge need impacting so many voters.

We have the numbers to actually prevail and to potentially even win the White House. So I think it’s really important for people to think big and to envision how we can actually put our system back on course because we are all at risk. This is not an academic exercise. This is about the nature of our lives and whether we will survive to emerge from this decade, let alone what lies ahead. But the potential for these wars to spin out of control.

One single nuclear-armed submarine, and we have 14 of them, which are in undisclosed regions all around the world, and you can be sure that they are in hotspots. A single one contains the equivalent of 5,000 Hiroshima bombs, which is enough to throw us into nuclear winter, to basically take us all the way of the dinosaurs, which was also another form of nuclear winter when that meteor struck the earth and basically inserted debris into the upper atmosphere where it doesn’t weather down. The debris stays there for many, many years, even decades, so that agricultural production basically doesn’t work and there’s mass starvation. These are the risks that are being taken with our lives right now in the way that these wars are being run.

Joe Biden said to Israel, after Israel massively violated international law by bombing the Iranian consulate in Syria, this was something that is not done even in wartime. This was a huge provocative act, sort of the ultimate provocative act. Israel did that, and Biden kind of let it go, said, basically, don’t worry, Israel, we will stand by you. Do whatever you want. He’s given the green light to just unbelievably dangerous foreign policy on the part of Netanyahu.

Now, in the aftermath, when Iran asserted a very limited and targeted response, gave plenty of time to Israel and its allies to defend against that response, and then said, even before it was over, we’re done. The situation has been evened from our point of view. Don’t consider us a combatant on this issue anymore. Israel basically then said, no, we are using this as an excuse, basically, to create the war that Israel has been wanting to wage against Iran and trying to drag the U.S. into it.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, who was calling the shots in a relatively informed way, Joe Biden is doing the exact opposite. He’s effectively made Netanyahu the commander in chief for the U.S. by saying, you do what you want, however reckless and inflammatory that is, you do what you want, and we will be there to support you.

This is an absolute prescription for disaster. In my view, this underscores the imperative that we remove these warmongers from power, these criminals, these war criminals. They must be removed from power as quickly as possible because our very lives are in the crosshairs of their extremely reckless, irresponsible, and arguably insane actions.

RADHIKA DESAI: You know, I think we’re coming close. Yes, indeed. I mean, we’re coming close to our one-hour mark, so I just wanted to say a couple of things and maybe invite both of you to make a couple of concluding remarks.

But I just particularly wanted to say that, you know, you use the word uprising and so on, and Michael earlier spoke about the deep state and appointing a new Church Committee and so on. These are all great ideas, but really what, Jill, I think your campaign represents is really a kind of a massive transformation which will change the nature of the American state, deep or otherwise.

Because what do we mean by the state? We mean by the state not this or that government, but that coterie of interests that remains in power no matter who is in government. At least that’s the way it’s been. And I think if a candidate like you, and I think you’re also really right to point out that not only is the pro-war position divided into three at the moment, but actually I’m sure you could argue that it is now a minority position. So they will be dividing into three what is already a minority of the votes, whereas you will represent the anti-war position which represents the majority of the people of the United States.

And so in that sense, I think you will bring about a very comprehensive change. It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be difficult, it’s going to involve a lot of battles and skirmishes with people in power. But remember, the people who are in power are sitting on top of a ramshackle structure. It is rotting from within. And the desire of the people in the United States to have a fairer, more just, more ecological, more peaceful system is enormous. So I think that that’s what you represent.

And I would say one other thing, which is what you will bring about. You see at the moment we have a state, a coterie of interests, which are always served by every government, which has no plan B. They want to ensure, they want to continue to promote inequality and an unproductive economy and a financialized economy at home and war abroad. This is what they’ve done for more than a century, I would say. Certainly they have been doing this over the past many decades. This is what has to come to an end. And you will represent that change, that you will essentially change the nature of the American state because you will remove, you will have to remove if you want to implement your program, the interests that hold political power in America and put the people’s power in their place. That’s what I really wanted to say.

JILL STEIN: Beautifully said. Michael, do you want to?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Nuh-uh. What can I add to that? Never had it again. You’ve said it.

JILL STEIN: Yeah, exactly. And I’ll just, you know, echo that saying, you know, this is a real moment of reckoning for the American people. I almost feel like I’m playing the role of a therapist in having a public discussion.

Now, this is about coming to terms with a very different world from what we thought we had. We are living in a world of empire and oligarchy, and it is ruinous. It’s ruinous abroad. It’s ruinous at home. Our foreign policy is impoverishing and endangering all of us. This is not survivable. We are all in the crosshairs here, and it feels like there’s a very deeply felt conversation that’s happening right now, and it’s so wonderful to be a part of it and to see just really the vision and the moral insight that is arising up out of this conversation.

And I’m continually being blown away by the insights and the moral fiber of people who are understanding what’s happening and who are really setting everything else aside to seize this moment, this perfect storm, for a major political transition.

We are not going to save ourselves here with the window dressing. We really do need a real change in our, you know, in our fundamental economic and financial and so on system, ecological system. Things are changing right now, and we need to manage that change, which brings the best of ourselves, you know, to that management.

So we are not surrogates for corporations here, which is what most of our politicians are. They are paid surrogates for their corporate masters. And this machine has no heart, it has no soul, and it really has no brain either. So it is a house of cards that is in the process of falling.

It’s like being in an airplane and the engines have stopped, you know, and the airplane is beginning to go into a tailspin here. And we’re in that moment right now when we can rescue the plane, you know, and we can start up a new motor or, you know, a new flight machine or whatever.

RADHIKA DESAI: You can at least glide it down to a safe landing.

JILL STEIN: Exactly. And people are rising to the occasion now to make this happen. So I really encourage people to be a part of that. And again, to join us at JillStein24.com and consider this the opportunity of a lifetime. And, you know, no pressure, but the future is very much in our hands now. And we are deciding not only what kind of future we will have, but whether we will have a future.

So join the team and know, in the words of Alice Walker, you know, that the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with. We have an enormous amount of power. This is about mobilizing that power for our highest vision of the world that we all deserve and that is within our reach. So let’s do it.

And I can’t thank you, Radhika and Michael, enough for your guidance here for the airplane to help us guide and glide our way forward to a very happy landing and, you know, a better world ahead.

RADHIKA DESAI: Thank you so much, Jill. Thank you all for listening. Michael and I will be back, of course, and we hope that Jill will also be back to carry on this discussion further. See you next time. Bye-bye.

The post Jill Stein: Splitting the Pro-Imperial Vote first appeared on Michael Hudson.

Kate Manne is interviewed by Céline Leboeuf.

Why Philosophy?
Kate Manne
interviewed by Celine Leboeuf

What is philosophy to you?

I’m going to take a slight liberty with this question of interpreting it not as a definitional or constitutive one, about what I take philosophy to be. (I despair of giving even a loose characterization of what counts as philosophy, let alone necessary and sufficient conditions—for both substantive and political reasons crystallized by the philosopher Kristie Dotson.) Instead, I’ll say something about what philosophy means to me, and why it has been liberating, as someone with the particular temperament I have.

Anyone vaguely familiar with my work, which has lately been mostly on misogyny and fatphobia, might be surprised to learn that I’m very much a norm-follower. That is, I like and value being able to adhere to social norms and conventions and being socially appropriate and cooperative, if it doesn’t compromise my ability to live up to other values or needs (as unfortunately it often does, in the unjust world we occupy). Yet I’m also a fairly argumentative person, who sometimes disagrees strongly with conventional wisdom, and wants the freedom to flatly deny what other people have maintained if I’m not convinced by their evidence or their argument.

Philosophy, which thrives on argumentation, is thus the perfect disciplinary home for me: it makes being disagreeable no longer normatively verboten, as it often is for women in particular, but something socially expected and even a professional obligation. And of course, you get to dispute norms that you think are harmful and impose on us pseudo-obligations, which is my main driving motivation as a moral and feminist philosopher.

How were you first introduced to philosophy?

I think I must have been about five when the philosopher Raimond Gaita, my father’s best friend, challenged me as to why I felt entitled to catch butterflies in my net. “It’s not up to you,” was my not-so-convincing rejoinder. But his question stuck with me for a long time, and I felt guilty for interfering with the life and freedom of these beautiful creatures just for my own curatorial enjoyment. I think it was my parents who explained what Rai did and what his question was an example of: philosophy, or thinking about thinking. Again, it’s hardly a complete definition (it doesn’t even clearly apply to the butterfly case). But it resonated and got me curious. Eventually, in my teenage years, I started reading some of the philosophy books in the house—Rai’s wonderful work included. I knew then that I wanted to study philosophy in college. I got hooked during my first semester, especially when we turned to the problem of determinism and free will. Philosophy struck me as harder, and more fun, than anything I’d ever set my mind to.

How do you practice philosophy today?

I think of myself as very much driven by certain questions. Lately: how should we understand misogyny? How should we understand fatphobia? I think of these questions as profoundly, but not exclusively, philosophical. They also required getting deep into certain kinds of empirical literature—on the hostility toward powerful women, and the complex relationship between weight and health, to name two obvious examples—and paying careful attention to a lot of testimonial evidence from people who occupy social positions I don’t, who can illuminate intersections of misogyny and fatphobia that are bound to escape me. So I’m inevitably reading work from thinkers and activists coming from a wide range of perspectives, both inside and outside the academy, as well as engaging with other philosophers and applying my philosophical training in ways that are hopefully fruitful given the questions that grip me.

What is a philosophical issue that is important to you?

I’m fascinated by the metaethical question of where morality comes from, or what constitutes its source. I regularly teach classes and seminars that feature the work of Hume, G.E. Moore, J.L. Mackie, Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Peter Railton, Simon Blackburn, Jamie Dreier, Steve Darwall, Christine Korsgaard, Ruth Chang, Mark Schroeder, my colleague Julia Markovits, and my dear, late colleagues, Nick Sturgeon and Dick Boyd, among many others. And I have developed what might be loosely thought of as a feminist answer to the question of morality’s source, wherein morality has its ultimate source in the bodies of vulnerable people and creatures, which issue in what I call bodily imperatives—I need help, I need sleep, I need food. For me, these imperatives literally constitute moral imperatives—albeit ones that typically compete and sometimes conflict in ways that make this all very messy in practice (and even at a slightly less abstract level of theorizing). But I’m attracted to the idea, familiar in first-order normative ethics, that trying to bring about a world where these bodily imperatives are satisfied is what morality is in large part about, somehow (though I don’t necessarily think that some form of consequentialism is the best way to cash out this insight). I’ve recently argued that these ideas impugn practices like diet culture that lead to people making and keeping themselves hungry, for example, and violating their bodily imperatives out of a false sense of moral obligation to be thin. So this is a metaethics with strong normative implications, unlike some—for better or worse.

What books, podcasts, or other media would you recommend to anyone interested in philosophy?

Oof… choosing books feels like playing favorites! But I am a big podcast person, so let me use this opportunity to recommend a few great ones (I am sure I am missing a lot of other great ones too). I love Overthink, hosted by Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán, Hi-Phi Nation, hosted by Barry Lam, Ordinary Unhappiness, hosted by Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield, Philosophy Bites, hosted by Nigel Warburton, Elucidations, hosted by Matt Teichman, The Philosopher’s Zone, hosted by David Rutledge, and In Bed with the Right, hosted by Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub. There’s nothing more fun to me than wandering around my house or neighborhood while having these folks imparting interesting ideas directly into my ears.

This interview of Kate Manne was first published at Why Philosophy?

Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT, and works in moral, social, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of three books, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, and Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, which came out earlier this year. She writes a newsletter, More to Hate, canvassing misogyny, fatphobia, their intersection, and more. Her academic papers take up questions in metaethics, moral psychology, and political philosophy.

Previous Edition

The post “Why Philosophy?” Kate Manne first appeared on Daily Nous.

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 26th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our times. I’m Radhika Desai.

MICHAEL HUDSON: And I’m Michael Hudson.

RADHIKA DESAI: And working behind the scenes to bring you our show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton, our videographer, Paul Graham, and our transcriber, Zach Weisser.

In our last two shows, we looked at China’s economy and where it was headed, busting major Western myths about it, and highlighting the differences between the Chinese and US economies that explain the dynamism of the former and the productive decline of the latter.

We spoke about how China was embarked on engineering the next industrial revolution through a major structural transformation, not only to continue its high growth, but also to improve its quality, technologically and in human terms. And in doing this, China is increasingly taking the technological lead in more and more frontier sectors, including green technology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.

In today’s show, we look at how the United States is responding to this structural transformation of China’s economy. Our short answer is: badly. It keeps military and diplomatic tensions high, continues provocative visits of high-ranking officials to Taiwan, and tries to stoke up trouble between China and its neighbors, and rings China around with new military alliances. It continues its economic provocations against China that fill the headlines these days, interrupted only, as with the recent phone call between Presidents Biden and Xi, and visits of Secretaries of Treasury and State to China by shows of attempting to cooperate with China.

The fronts of the economic attack are proliferating. The Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, Huawei, TikTok, electronic vehicles, solar panels, steel and ship building, and the matter of China’s consumption and the world market’s overcapacity. No doubt, there will be more.

The fundamental cause is pretty clear. The United States had sought to engage China in the closing decade of the last century under the delusion that such engagement would result in the complete and snug subordination of China’s economy to U.S. capital. However, by the end of that decade, the BRICS thesis already signaled problems, and halfway into the first decade of the new century, the economic war with China had begun.

President George Bush slapped 30 percent tariffs on Chinese steel. This was followed by President Obama’s pivot to Asia, President Trump’s trade and technology war, and now President Biden’s widening hybrid war on China. As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan frankly admitted in a speech last April, the U.S. has had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy has been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges.

Of course, President Bush was forced to rescind his tariffs less than a year later, and the U.S. corporate capitalist class remains highly divided on the exact policies to adopt towards China. Over the brief decade or so of engagement, substantial parts of the U.S. corporate capitalist class had become deeply reliant on China, on its workers, on its suppliers, and even on its markets. No complete break is really possible.

This is finessed in public discourse by splitting hairs, such as, for instance, shifting from talking about decoupling to talking about de-risking.

However, those for continued engagement are opposed by two powerful forces. There are the sectors of the capitalist class that are threatened by China’s technological advances, such as Google and Meta, and they are leading the anti-China charge. On the other hand, U.S. ruling circles, which continue to pursue corporate neoliberal policies designed for their benefit, need to offer the vast majority of working Americans who are suffering under these policies an explanation for their misery, and nothing is more useful than blaming China.

So the technological and hybrid war continues, and today we want to discuss some of the key elements. And Michael and I thought we would begin by talking about Huawei. Michael, why don’t you take that away?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the beginning really is what America means by a non-market economy. It means an economy that is better at competing internationally than the United States. It’s not a market economy if the United States can’t gain control of it and do something better.

And that’s the problem that the United States had with Huawei ever since the U.S. began to move its industry under the Clinton administration to China. The United States can’t compete in industrial products, and it only has a few raw materials—oil, gas, and agricultural exports—to support the balance of payments. That leaves only one way that the United States can balance its payments enough so that it can afford all of the 800-plus military bases that it has all over the world and can afford to fight in Ukraine, in Palestine, and in the China Sea.

So the solution is it needs economic rent. It needs to monopolize some high growth area of the economy that other countries are not allowed to compete in. Well, one of the great growth areas is, of course, the move towards 5G communications technology. And Huawei is way ahead of the United States there. That’s why it was being adopted everywhere.

What could the United States do? It couldn’t really compete. So it asked Canada to place under arrest the daughter of the head of Huawei and said, well, we’re essentially going to keep you under home arrest until you agree to let us have this technology. We don’t want anyone else to have a technology that is growing that we can’t control because that’s a threat to our national security. And Huawei was a threat to national security because if the United States can’t get its market, how is it ever going to have a market enough to support the balance of payments and be the unique country?

And Huawei was sort of the first symptom of all of this. And in fact, it’s just posted its largest and fastest growth on record. And from the U.S. point of view, the U.S. investors don’t control it. And U.S. bankers are not making the loans to it. So there’s no way that the United States can benefit from Huawei. The problem is that the beneficiary is Chinese. And that is not what America had in mind under Clinton when it thought of the grand opening to China. China was supposed to let American companies come in and to rely on American banks to expand. And that’s not what Huawei has done.

So the umbrella legal and political excuse for trying to exclude Huawei and to bring pressure on the European countries and America’s NATO allies not to use Huawei is national security. And the Energy and Commerce Committee of the United States issued a report a little while ago. And it said, quote, foreign adversaries have used access to data to disrupt America’s daily lives, to conduct espionage activities, and to push disinformation and propaganda campaigns in an attempt to undermine our democracy and gain global influence and control.

Well, the problem is that control is the key. Huawei did not let the National Security Agency and the CIA have a backdoor into its products. And if the United States cannot listen to what people say over Huawei, it gets very insecure. We don’t know what other people are saying. It’s sort of like silk-making. The West tried a long time to get silkworms from China so that you could bring it to Europe. And finally, some priests brought some silkworms. And Italy’s silk industry started all that. Well, the United States would like to do the same thing with Huawei, to turn technology into a rent-extracting monopoly, intellectual property privilege. And it wants to steal China’s platform, to make a long story short.

RADHIKA DESAI: No, this is so true, Michael. And I just thought I would make a couple of few points, really, to reinforce what you’re saying. Because as you say, the United States is insistent on keeping its monopolies. And this insistence arises from the fact that increasingly the leading sectors of the U.S. economy rely on the sort of political imposition of monopoly. It is not a natural monopoly in the sense that it’s arrived at through out-competing, you’re successfully out-competing rivals. So if you think about what are the leading sectors of the U.S. economy, there’s the military-industrial complex, there’s the finance, insurance, and real estate sector, there’s big pharma, and there’s information and communication technology.

And if you think about it, the military-industrial complex requires essentially the creation of an artificial U.S. monopoly by the expansion of NATO and the imposition of its interoperability requirements, which keeps expanding the market for the U.S. defense producers, no matter how bad they may be, how bad the quality of their products may be. Similarly, the FIRE sector relies on the international dominance of the dollar, which is, of course, threatened. But nevertheless, the United States keeps trying to do everything in its power to continue it. Big pharma and ICT rely on patents and copyrights and, you know, basically intellectual property rights.

And those scholars who study intellectual property rights have pointed out that the United States is actually pursuing the wrong policy. If you want to keep and maintain a technological lead, you don’t do it by trying to consolidate your existing technology or trying to back your existing technology with intellectual property rights. You do it by continuously innovating. And this is, in fact, doing the first is actually counterproductive to doing the second, because you’re trying to retain an existing advantage rather than constantly developing new technological advantages. So in that sense, this is the wrong strategy. The United States is pursuing that strategy rather, and I would say that China is pursuing the other.

And the other thing is that, you know, when the United States securitizes everything, so, you know, in the name of national security, the United States wants to give subsidies to all sorts of corporations to develop their products and R&D and what have you. And the fact of the matter is that this strategy, which really sort of confuses the issue, is far less effective. And therefore, the United States is losing the technological lead than the strategy that China adopts, which is really to focus on developing the technologies, whether security or civilian or whatever.

And that’s why, as you rightly pointed out, Michael, Huawei has not spent much time worrying about the ways in which the United States wants to restrict it by restricting the export of various types of chips and so on. Huawei has continued to innovate, and I have no doubt that even with the recent bad, the chip wars and so on, the Chinese are actually going to not take very long before they will out-compete technologically, the US technological lead on chips.

So, and finally, you’re so right, you know, when you pointed out that the United States wants to spy on everyone, which is why it does not want China, Chinese companies, which will not allow them to spy on the rest of the world, to have any share of the world market in technologies where you can collect big data, et cetera, because the United States government and all the major US ICT corporations are already cooperating with one another. The United States has access to our data and the US just does not want anybody else to have the same access. So, this is what we are looking at.

And of course, associated with this is the whole issue of TikTok. TikTok has also been named as a security threat, et cetera. So, Michael, why don’t we talk a little bit about TikTok?

MICHAEL HUDSON: TikTok exemplifies the distinction between what you call the wrong strategy and the right strategy. Your idea of the right strategy is long-term research and development, but for the financial sector in the United States, that’s the wrong strategy, because if you spend money on research and development, you cannot use it to pay dividends and to buy stock buybacks. The financial sector lives in the short term. So, you’re really saying that the US follows a short-term financial strategy and China follows a long-term strategy of research and development. Well, that’s what led to TikTok, which China says has a much more sophisticated platform strategy than the United States platforms have. And that’s why TikTok threatens Silicon Valley’s monopoly on its platforms, and it also steals the hopes to monopolize the social media.

The United States hoped that Facebook and X and the other platforms would be monopolized. And what you call intellectual property rights are really monopoly rights. And they just don’t like to call it because monopoly is a bad word, but that’s what America wants. And America cannot have a monopoly right if people are having the free choice to choose TikTok because it’s created a better overall system. And it’s in 150 countries, it has a billion people and 170 million Americans, and the United States can’t control it, just like with Huawei. That’s what upsets Washington.

So, the question is, how do you make these 170 million Americans when your technology can’t be used to use a backdoor? What they did was a number of things. They’ve accused China and TikTok of somehow being a threat to national security, because that’s an umbrella that can cover absolutely anything that you want. Well, TikTok has spent a billion and a half dollars with an American firm to ascertain that there’s no way in which China can have access to this. The United States simply ignores this because the facts don’t matter. It’s a danger to the dollar and hegemony.

And so, the platform disturbs Washington for a number of reasons, and that’s because of what can be said on it. The government of Israel has especially complained to the United States that there’s much more opposition to the war in Palestine on TikTok than there is on Facebook and on X. And in fact, Facebook has censored any defense of the Palestinians. And for every three posts of support for Palestine on TikTok, there’s only one on Instagram or the others. So, Israel has told Biden that this is a national security threat to the duopoly between Biden and Netanyahu for the war to drive out the Palestinians who control the Near Eastern oil. And if you accuse Israel of genocide, then that’s a threat to U.S. national security. And where are these accusations? They’re on TikTok because they’re all censored on the other platforms, and the United States doesn’t have censorship powers over TikTok. So, that’s why it says you’ve got to sell to the United States or go out of business.

Well, China has said we’d rather go out of business and lose the money that we are making in the United States and give you the billions and billions of dollars that we’ve developed for the programming for TikTok so that you can use it and take away our markets. You know, this is not going to be another case of the silkworms being lost to the West.

And a number of far-right Republicans are saying that TikTok’s a spying operation, and it doesn’t matter what the reality is. They’re just accusing them. And of course, you have Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary under Trump, saying that he’s putting together a group of buyers to try to buy TikTok. He thinks he’ll be able to make it a killing. And obviously, that’s not going to happen.

And what’s certainly not going to happen is the United States is sending Yellen to China now to say, why don’t you send ByteDance, the overall worldwide operations? That’s what we want. Well, the United States has nothing to offer in exchange. It’s just making the demand. And all that it can really do in the end is to close TikTok. And we’ll see what the political effects of all that are, because obviously, many of the younger people who already are disapproving of the Biden administration say, well, we want free speech. As long as the United States is leading the world fight against free speech, then—

I’ll let you finish. What the hell does that mean?

RADHIKA DESAI: No, no, exactly. I mean, I think that what the United States would really like, as you say, is to totally monopolize social media, because then the ability of the United States to essentially dominate the information space would be vastly enhanced, because all the social media companies would essentially be parroting what the United States says. So it wants to eliminate any possibility that there will be any other type of information that will be available.

But of course, this is not going to happen that easily, because in addition to the social media, as we know, China, Russia, and many other countries, too, have increasingly been creating their own information space, and creating their own media companies, and so on, which put forward a different point of view. And today, along with all sorts of alternative news websites, these websites are part of the information space for those who realize that the mainstream media does not give you the correct view, and would like to try and see what other views there are. So, you know, whether it is Global Times, or CGTN, or RT, or various Indian news media websites, they do provide a different perspective.

There are a couple of other points one should make about this. It was, you know, remember that Trump originally proposed a ban on TikTok, and in the course of discussions about that, many people said that, oh, well, TikTok is very addictive, and harmful, and so on. Well, in China, the social media is actually controlled a lot more. In the US, because the social media are essentially vast, you know, essentially belong to big corporations whose right to make profits are never to be challenged, the United States refuses to regulate social media, whereas China regulates it. China has rules and regulations to protect children from harm, etc. And China will not say anything if the United States wishes to protect its children, not only from any adverse effects of TikTok, but also any other social media, but the United States refuses to do that.

Second point is that, you know, not only is it true that TikTok is one of the few social media websites where you can voice criticism of what Israel is doing in Palestine, etc., but it is also true that because of this freedom, younger people are basically users of TikTok disproportionately, and their importance in the coming election is going to be huge. They have become very critical of the Biden administration, and in recognition of this, President Biden himself, on the one hand, says that he will sign into law any law against TikTok, which is passed by the Senate now that it’s already been passed by the House. But why, on the one hand, he says that, on the other hand, he has himself acquired a TikTok account.

Another point that one should make as well is that, you know, TikTok is often regarded as a Chinese company. It’s not a Chinese company. Its CEO is based in Singapore. What’s more, a number of US investors would stand to lose from TikTok, which is why I don’t think it’s very clear that the Senate is going to pass this legislation.

Among the US investors that have a fair bit invested in TikTok are the following companies that I’ve just made this list from reading several different sources. They include BlackRock, Fidelity, General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, Susquehanna, KOTU Management, and T. Rowe Price.

So, you know, we know that in the House, the legislation got passed chiefly because of the concern over criticism of Israel, but it remains to be seen exactly what happens. And I completely agree with you, Michael. I think that if it comes to it and the Senate does pass this law and President Biden signs it into law, I don’t think the Chinese are going to sell TikTok. I think they would rather just shut down TikTok.

So, we’ve talked about Huawei. We’ve talked about TikTok. And by the way, I should remind you that, you know, there are also disagreements between different so-called US allies. You know, I’m reminded that some years ago, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, when it was first floated, the British government actually joined the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, even though President Obama very loudly asked them not to. So, there are, you know, not only is the US capitalist class divided, but US and its allies are also divided on many fronts.

But now let’s come to the next point, you know, that we want to discuss, which is the whole matter of US steel and US shipbuilding. You know that the United Steelworkers has made a petition to the US Trade Representative Katherine Tai. And Katherine Tai has agreed to look at this and take it very seriously because, and let me just share here a brief statement by her. You see here a Katherine Tai statement where, in response to the United Steelworkers petition, she pointed out that we have seen the People’s Republic of China create dependencies and vulnerabilities in multiple sectors like steel, aluminum, solar, batteries and critical minerals, harming American workers and businesses and creating real risks for our supply chains. I look forward to reviewing this petition in detail.

So, once again, here we have another instance of blaming China for the misery of US workers, which is actually created by neoliberal policies. Wouldn’t you agree, Michael?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, so the United States policy is that it has to control all key areas on national security grounds. And I think the reason is, we’ve talked before, the US plan is to go to war with China in 10 years. And you want to prepare for that. If all of a sudden you went to war and you were still depending on China for goods, that would disrupt the United States economy. So the United States wants to prepare for this war, presumably war with China, by separating as much as you can right now. And that begins with steel.

And it’s not only independent from China, but from Japan too. What’s been most in the news here is that Japanese companies want to buy US Steel, which used to be the major steel industry in the country. And again, the United States is claiming that even though Japan is our satellite, our ally, it doesn’t want it. So Nippon Steel offers $15 billion to acquire US Steel, and the Biden administration opposes this. And Donald Trump already has threatened to block the Nippon deal. And the present administration wants to do the same thing.

And the labor unions are involved, because US steel is a unionized shop. And the labor unions have come out against saying, no, we want a US controller that we can pressure. But it’s not only China, it’s Japan, it’s everyone. So the US limiting its imports from China is against the entire world. And the only reason China is mentioned is it’s the main country that’s able to produce these imports. And the United States is essentially, if it cuts itself off from China in its attempt to be self-sufficient, it’s going to essentially cut itself off from the whole rest of the world that is trading with China. And this will not help the United States compete, because the steel workers in America, in order to get enough money to pay for their medical care, for their housing, for what it costs to live in America, simply cannot compete with almost any other country, whether it’s Japan or the United States. So it’s good to look at steel as just an example of how far the United States can stretch the national security umbrella.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. And you know, the fact of the matter is that US steel has been one of the earliest victims of the de-industrialization of the United States that set in. Once Ronald Reagan came to power and began to impose his neoliberal policies, his monetarist policies, you know, beginning with imposing the infamous W-shaped recession of the early 1980s. So the de-industrialization of the US began then.

Today, if you look at the shipbuilding industry, the major producers of steel are not in the United States, they are in China, they are in Japan, they are in Korea and elsewhere. And by the way, the US steel workers petition refers specifically to shipbuilding. And here also, we see an astonishing decline of the United States. I just wanted to share a few slides that show this.

So let’s look at this one to begin with. So if you look at this slide, what you see is that the US is not a significant player in the global shipbuilding industry. This is from the Financial Times:

Screenshot

And you see here that China accounts for nearly 50% of the world’s shipbuilding, followed by South Korea, which accounts for another 30% and more, and [Japan], which accounts for another 20% and more. So you can see that the rest of the industrialized world, so to speak, or shall we say post-industrial world, accounts for tiny fractions of that. And among these, the United States is down here at the very bottom with hardly anything.

And let me also show you another really interesting point here, which is that Forbes magazine reported that US shipbuilding is at its lowest ebb ever. This was the name of the story, how did the US fall so far? And in this story, among other things, Forbes notes that a nation that was among the world’s leaders in commercial shipbuilding at key junctures in its history, today builds less than 10 vessels, actual number of vessels, for ocean-going commerce in a typical year. China, by contrast, builds over 1,000 vessels every year. So you can see 10 versus 1,000. China’s shipbuilding is 100 times bigger than the United States. The entire US registered fleet of ocean-going commercial ship numbers fewer than 200 vehicles out of a global total of 44,000. And this is despite trade flows to and from America exceeding a trillion dollars annually. So the United States is among the biggest trading nations in the world. It should own the ships that bring the goods that it buys and sells and take away the goods that it sells, but it does not do so. US registered ship carry barely 1% of the traffic that comes to the US.

And then we have this graph, the decline of US shipbuilding, which accelerated under Reagan, as we were just saying:

US commercial shipbuilding saw a massive decline during the Reagan presidency and is now smaller than the Norwegian industryhttps://t.co/DNLPtkldGS pic.twitter.com/IB3LZiCSih

— Jonas Algers (@JonasAlgers) March 12, 2024

So here you have two lines. The blue line is commercial shipbuilding and the red line is naval shipbuilding. So this is related to defense. And you can see that beginning in the Reagan presidency, there has been a sharp decline in both with some improvement here, but these are just ordinary numbers of vessels. And you can see that the decline is really quite massive because even if these numbers show some recovery here, they are minuscule compared to the world totals.

So this is the sorry state of US industry of which shipbuilding is just the tip of the iceberg.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, I can’t add anything to that, except the Forbes article went on to say, or follow up article on saying that navies are obsolete. If China is able to send a million drones against any kind of US naval vessel, no US naval vessel is safe, given the modern technology where it’s so easy to build a drone or a rocket. To wipe out an aircraft carrier or a battleship or even a submarine. So I think the United States is smart enough to give up on the idea of naval warfare. And we’ll see what happens in the China Sea.

RADHIKA DESAI: I mean, I think that that point I think is a quite an interesting one, because of course, today, destructive capacity is very widely spread, you know, so you have Turkey and Iran building very, very high technology drones. And this just shows that actually, since the ability to inflict harm is now so widely spread around the world, it makes very little sense to make enemies around the world the way the United States is going around doing. I think to me, that’s the main lesson.

That does not, however, mean that control over transportation routes and so on is not an important part of securing your country’s interests and so on. There has been historically very few powers that have not controlled transport logistics. And China has certainly not only increased its shipbuilding capacities, but also increased its carrying capacity, the number of ships that China has. And increasingly, China also controls more and more ports around the world. And to whom, again, it is sort of distributing its logistics software, which is now being increasingly adopted by more and more ports around the world. So in that sense, I think that China certainly represents a challenge to the United States. And if China wishes, sorry, if the United States wishes to antagonize China, China has a lot of power with which to inflict harm.

And I just want to add one final point, you know, the United States has long been talking about having industrial policy. And obviously, with the United Steelworkers Petition around shipbuilding, the matter comes down to, you know, can the United States pursue successful industrial policy, for example, to revive its shipbuilding? And there again, we see that there are a number of obstacles the U.S. faces. After 40 years of neoliberalism, the United States has reduced itself to a position where even if it were to try to seriously engage in having an industrial policy to revive its industry, it would suffer from a number of obstacles.

Number one, there is a lack of skills. You know, the number of graduates that are graduating in STEM subjects, the science, technology, mathematics, et cetera, science, engineering, technology and mathematics are actually relatively few compared to other powers who are more serious about their industry, including China.

There is also a lack of suppliers. The tendency to have just-in-time production is simply not conducive to having a reasonable industrial policy and building resilience.

And finally, you have an entire capitalist class that requires high profits in the short term, whereas industrial policy requires being patient, accepting low profits for a long time before your investment finally occurs. Your investment finally comes into stream and matures in order to deliver high profits. And none of these elements or aspects of successful industrial policy actually exist today in the United States.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that’s why Yellen, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, is in China now. Shall we go in to discuss—

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Go ahead, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: She’s essentially there to make a number of demands. She’s accusing China of monopolizing clean energy goods, the battery technology, all the things that you mentioned before. She says this is driving down the prices of global energy, of batteries, of everything China produces. There’s no way that American industry can compete with that. So you’ve got to stop exporting these things. Why don’t you just support things for your own consumers? And why don’t you stop exporting? This is almost hilarious.

And she’s used, and the media in America uses, a kind of vocabulary. I think we should get used to a new word. It’s not a new word, but it is in the dictionary. And it’s called cacophemism. It’s the opposite of a euphemism. A euphemism paints lipstick on a pig. It makes something pretty bad look good. Well, Yellen has gone through the entire vocabulary of cacophemism, making everything that China is doing good looking bad. For instance, she says “to export” is “overproduction”. Well, any country that exports produces something more than it produces at home. The only way to avoid overproduction by producing more than you do at home is not to export anything. That’s what she’s asking China to do. Don’t overproduce, consume everything at home, stop making exports. Well, that’s a pretty crazy thing.

And according to Reuters, U.S. Treasury officials said that Yellen was going to, quote, make clear the global economic consequences of Chinese industrial overcapacity, undercutting manufacturers in the U.S. and firms around the world. I couldn’t have made that up for a description of why the United States is so upset with China or any country that is following an industrial policy instead of a post-industrial policy. So the U.S. is approaching with its own agenda.

Congress is using the word that Yellen is going to use, too, of “dumping” its products. Well, dumping means selling below cost. And Yellen’s definition of selling below cost is anything that’s not done by a market economy, meaning anything that’s done with government support. Well, every economy that’s successful is a mixed economy with government support. And in fact, China has opened a complaint with the World Trade Organization challenging Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is a huge subsidy of hundreds of billions of dollars to try to support U.S. information technology and chipmaking technology.

And China has protested the trade barriers that America is doing, that America is leading the fight against the free trade that it was supporting as long as the United States, after World War II, could undersell Europe and other countries because there was a war that destroyed their economies. But now that the United States can’t undersell them, it says, well, you’re dumping if your government helps you. Our government can help our agriculture with all of our huge government parity support for agriculture, for all the special support we’re giving for the war industry, for all of these. But if other countries’ government can subsidize, China produces public transportation at a much lower price than America. That’s called cheating and dumping. Well, you can just see how the vocabulary is being twisted and taken away.

And China, Yellen has even accused China of currency manipulation because when it gets these dollars for its exports, it puts them in the central bank and holds U.S. treasury bonds, just like other central banks are dollarized. Well, there’s no question China’s trying to de-dollarize as quick as it can. But of course, if it didn’t hold the U.S. treasury bonds, its currency would go way up. So by manipulating currency, that means not letting its currency appreciate so much as to price China exports out of the market, just like the Swiss currency for flight capital rose so much that Switzerland couldn’t manufacture industrial goods anymore.

You’re having a whole twisted vocabulary of American diplomacy.

And you’re having a Reagan official, Robert Lichtauer, attributing part of the whole blame on China’s mercantile practices, which are simply the way that America, Germany, and every other country got rich.

Intel, especially the firm that is a foundry for making chips and also designs, has asked for, I think, $280 billion of support in the chips bill.

I would imagine some Chinese official, if they actually sit down for lunch with Ms. Yellen, and they can get in a word when she stops making demands, can point out the double standard that’s been used. But she doesn’t care about the double standard. She’ll just go, you know, plow right ahead and say that, well, the fact is, of course, they both use government subsidies. Every country has a government sector. And the American government sector is, I think, 40% of the economy. So there’s no such thing as a market economy without government, because that’s part of the government.

So I think that the warning, Yellen is really there to make threats and just say that, well, Biden originally attacked Trump in the 2020 election. He attacked Trump saying, Trump raised exports in China’s goods. Looks how awful that is. Well, he came in in 2020, and he kept Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods. And now he’s trying to raise the tariffs on Chinese goods, the exact opposite of what he said to do.

Well, this is making the U.S. companies, especially the information technology companies, scream because they said, wait a minute, if we can’t import goods from China, then we’re going to have to raise our prices, and we don’t have the capacity to produce these goods at home. There’s going to be a huge interruption. And instead of— we’re going to have the effect now that it’s as if you’re gone to war already with China, not preparing for 10 years to try to pry everything away. So Biden and Yellen have nothing to offer China.

I look forward to what the press will say about her trip there, because there’s really nothing that can be said except demands that China can just laugh at. China can say, well, if it really matters to you, instead of you raising tariffs by 30%, I think they might say, why don’t we just raise our export tariff by 30% instead of the U.S. government, Treasury, getting the tariff proceeds, why doesn’t the Chinese government get the tariff proceeds? And for every 10% that America imposes illegal tariffs on China’s goods, China should impose a matching 10% export charge on goods to the United States. Say, hey, you want to be independent? This is independent. Well, it’s not exactly the kind of sanctions that NATO put against Russia, but that’s the kind of war that we’re going to get into.

And the first victim, as usual, will be the customers of China, America, and presumably the NATO countries of Europe, if America can convince them to import less from China, which NATO is already telling China, why don’t you buy more from us and balance the trade? And I think China said, oh, why don’t you sell us the chipmaking equipment and all the good capital goods that Holland and other countries make? And NATO says, oh, we’re not allowed to send you anything that involves national security. So China, I think, will say, well, then I guess we have nothing to talk about.

RADHIKA DESAI: Right, Michael. And I just wanted to also speak about Janet Yellen’s visit and her claims about Chinese dumping and so on, and raise a couple of slightly different points from the ones that you had raised.

So let’s look at this. So this is from CNBC, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday warned that China is treating the global economy as a dumping ground for its cheaper clean energy products, depressing market prices, and squeezing green manufacturing in the US. I’m concerned about global spillovers from the excess capacity that we are seeing in China. During a speech at a Georgia solar company called Suniva, China’s overcapacity distorts global prices and production patterns and hurts American firms, workers, as well as firms and workers around the world.

Now, there are a couple of things really worth looking at. Number one is that, according to Yellen herself, she points out that China produces clean energy products more cheaply. Well, isn’t it supposed to be a law of the market that those who are able to produce more cheaply should be triumphant in the market? No, on the one hand, the US administration and officials like Ms. Yellen want to talk about the virtues of the market. On the other hand, they want to complain about the effects of the market. So that’s the first thing.

And of course, it’s the fact that China is able to produce these goods more cheaply only means that China has advanced the productive capacities sufficiently far that these products are available really very cheaply. And in the United States, it’s not just that it’s because of higher wages in the US that are not available cheaply. It’s also because the companies are unwilling to invest in the most efficient methods of production. So that’s the first thing I wanted to say.

The second thing I wanted to say is that what Ms. Yellen is calling overcapacity is really very important. Now, if you think about it in one way, overcapacity has been a problem allegedly plaguing the world economy for about 50 years. One could say that the crisis of the 1970s emerged precisely because there was overcapacity and overproduction, particularly in relation to existing demand.

Now, in itself, industrial capacity is a good thing. And to complain about overcapacity is to say that somebody else should shut down their productive capacity and allow our productive capacity to flourish. Well, instead of playing this kind of zero-sum game, there’s actually another way of dealing with it, which is why not expand global demand? Because if a global demand increases, then there would not be overcapacity. Indeed, if you think about it, considering that so much of the world lives in poverty, needs the roads, the green technology, the hospitals, the buildings, the food, the clothing, all sorts of manufactured goods, the world needs more of it, of course, produced in a green way. So the problem is not overcapacity. And to frame it as a problem of overcapacity is to refuse to resolve the fundamental problem that has been plaguing the world economy for 50 years and more now, which is that there is deficient demand. And there is deficient demand because too much of the world is poor. So why not develop the productive capacities of the world and therefore the ability to demand goods? So that’s the first couple of points I wanted to make.

And there is also another point I want to make, which is that, sorry, so what Ms. Yellen is complaining about is that in China, there has been a rapid growth in three industries in particular, which Ms. Yellen is complaining about. First is battery production. The second is new vehicle production, new energy vehicle production. That’s the red line. And finally, wind and solar power generation capacity. And you can see that in certainly in two of the three cases, and also in the third case, there have been remarkable increases in China’s productive capacity since about 2020. So, and this is what Ms. Yellen is complaining about.

But the fact is that China is making these products available to the rest of the world more cheaply. And this will only mean that the world can get on with the business of dealing with climate change more effectively. So that’s also really quite important.

And a third point I wanted to make is that this discourse about how China should not be exporting so much and is also aligned with something else we discussed last time in considerable detail, which is that the Western officials are essentially saying that China is investing too much and consuming too little. So here’s the IMF director, Kristalina Georgieva. She recently made a number of pronouncements on China’s growth. And among other things, she said China is poised to face a fork in the road, rely on policies that have worked in the past or update its policies for a new era of high quality growth. So basically, she’s saying China should abandon the old policies which have worked and given it amazing growth.

Then she says China could grow considerably faster than a status quo scenario. The additional growth would amount to 20 percent expansion of the real economy over the next 15 years, adding 3.5 trillion US dollars to the Chinese economy. So she’s kind of dangling a statistical carrot saying, if you follow what I’m saying, you will benefit in these ways.

But what is she actually asking China to do? She’s asking China to increase domestic consumption and, of course, in doing so, increase income growth, which in turn, according to her, relies on increasing the productivity of capital and labor. And here’s the key. Reforms such as strengthening the business environment and ensuring a level playing field between private and state-owned enterprises will improve the allocation of capital. And the fact of the matter is that this advice is precisely the opposite of what has given China its amazing capacity to grow in the past.

So really, as Michael said, not only are Western leaders distorting the truth of China’s growth and making the good in China look bad, they’re actually giving bad advice to China.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there’s a reason that China, the consumption has not taken the form of goods and services so much. And that’s because the first Chinese demand is the same demand that middle classes have all over the world. They want to buy the house. So basically, the problem of increasing the domestic market is China has to solve the real estate problem. And that means the real estate pricing problem, the idea of the mortgage credit problem. This is exactly what China is debating and trying to go through now.

I think in some future program we should go over that. It’s a problem all in itself. But there’s no recognition in the IMF that— the one thing the IMF will never talk about and that economists don’t talk about is the FIRE sector: finance, insurance, and real estate. To them, all income is spent on goods and services. They’re not talking about the attempt to spend goods, income on, as they do in America, on debt service, on buying a house or renting a house. We’ve said before, just this week, there was a new census of New York City. The average rent in New York City is $5,500 a month now. Well, how can America and other cities actually compete when they have such a high kind of rent?

As long as economists, IMF and the regular professions don’t realize that apart from goods and services and employers and wage earners, there’s also the financial sector, the insurance sector, and the real estate sector, they’re not going to have a realistic view of the economy.

And in the U.S., as you pointed out at the beginning, it’s the financial sector that says, use your income to support the stock price, pay it out as dividends to raise the price, and use stock buybacks. S&P 500 companies spend 91% of their profits on pushing up the stock price, not R&D. That’s happened for decades. That’s why China and any other country that’s following the Chinese model is going to increase its output. And why, if you follow the American model, you’re de-industrializing. That’s really what the whole fight is about.

And I don’t know how Miss Yellen can bring this up with Biden without other people at the table just breaking out in laughter.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. And, you know, I mean, the fact of the matter is that there was a report just, I think, this morning in the Financial Times, I couldn’t find it just now, but it basically said that the amount of buybacks is reaching such absurd proportions that there’s actually a dearth of equities to buy in the U.S. market because basically they’ve been buying them back at such a rate of knots.

But to come back to our main topic, I just want to share this picture with you as well:

You know, the fact of the matter is that China, precisely because it is pursuing policies that are opposed to the United States, today, the bulk of the countries of the world have China as its main trading partner. So all the countries you see here, which are colored in red, their main trading partner is China. All the countries you see that are colored in blue, their main trading partner is the United States. And all the countries you see here colored in orange, their main trading partner is Germany.

So the efficiency of Chinese production, the beneficence of the links it offers to the rest of the world is very clear from this little statement alone.

And probably, Michael, we should be winding down our conversation, but I didn’t want to wind it down without showing one other thing, which is this, because, you know, you earlier talked about China’s holdings of treasuries, etc. And I just wanted to show this chart, which goes back to 2000 and up to 2024.

So you see here, from the moment China entered the WTO, because China was essentially such a successful exporter and began to really dominate the world export markets, the flip side of that was its accumulation of US treasuries, which reached a peak in the early 2010s, about 2011, 2012, was when China held the most US treasuries, amounting to about $1.3 trillion.

But since then, what we’ve seen is a relative decline of China’s holdings of US treasuries, so that today they are just a little over $750 billion. And here’s the most recent figures that I could find from Reuters. And Reuters says the latest figures show that China held $782 billion of treasuries in November, a large amount, but also around its smallest in 15 years, and down significantly from the peaks of $1.3 trillion in 2011 and 2013.

More importantly, they say, China’s footprint in the US bond market is a fraction of what it once was. China owns less than 3% of all outstanding treasuries, the smallest share in 22 years, and again, substantially down from a record of 14% in 2011. So this shows on the one hand that, you know, we saw in the previous chart here, China has certainly decreased it, but this is an absolute number.

But as a proportion of the total outstanding treasuries, it is as small as 3%, because remember what has also been happening at the same time. The Federal Reserve has essentially been expanding its balance sheet, including by buying US treasuries, which nobody else will buy. So in my humble opinion, I have no doubt that one of the reasons why Madam Yellen has gone to Beijing to meet her various high-ranking Chinese officials and politicians is because she wants China to step back into the treasury market, because as we’ve pointed out earlier, the treasury market is not in good shape, and it needs other buyers.

At the moment, essentially, bulk of the US treasuries are owned by American entities, of which the Federal Reserve is a major part.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s currency manipulation. That’s what you’re saying. I would have liked to see the chart on China’s gold holdings, because yesterday, gold hit an all-time record. And obviously, countries are seeing what the United States is doing to Russia and what it’s doing in Palestine and the Near East. They’re all moving out of treasuries because the United States is going to do to other countries what it did to Russia. So of course, no country wants to put its money at risk by holding dollars. That’s what all the shows we’ve done on de-dollarization. So you can see it all coming to a head right now.

RADHIKA DESAI: Well, Michael, you wanted to see China’s gold reserves. I wouldn’t say gold holdings. And I’ll show you, you wanted to see a chart, so I have summoned up a chart for you. Here we go:

So this is just from Trading Economics. This is the 2021 figure. And you can see that China’s gold reserves, these are official holdings. Of course, China also has a large private market in gold. This is just China’s gold reserves. And you can see that, yes, exactly, at the same rate at which China is dumping dollars or treasuries and not participating as much in the treasury market as it once did, it is also increasing its gold reserves.

So, Michael, shall we wrap up? Do you want to say any last few things?

MICHAEL HUDSON: You’ve done it. We didn’t even rehearse this. It’s just natural flow of talk.

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah. Well, I just wanted to say a couple of things. You know, one of the things that comes out in all of this, or to me anyway, the takeaways is that the United States is essentially, not only is its economy failing productively, but it seems unable even to undertake the industrial policy that will be necessary to make its industry more competitive, make its industry stronger, make its industry more technologically competent. So, its capabilities are low.

And what’s more, I would add one final point, which is that I would say that given its present political structure, it doesn’t seem as though the United States is even going to generate the political will to have industrial policy. Because, you see, if you look at the history of industrial policy, we see that industrial policy and developmental states have been successful only in instances where there are non-capitalist ruling classes, such as, for example, in late 19th century Germany, or in the Soviet Union, or today in China, which are able to impose a certain level of discipline on the capitalist classes. Or where there is, you know, a socialist economy which is capable of doing that.

Whereas today in the United States, you have a political structure which is completely dominated by politicians who will slavishly do what the corporate capitalist class will want. They have not got the capacity to control the capitalist classes for the greater good of the American economy and of the American people. This is the problem that they have.

So, if Michael, you don’t want to add anything, we will bring the show to a close.

I wanted to say that we hope you enjoyed this. We hope you will like it and please share it widely. And I also wanted to announce that in our next show, Michael and I, who’ve been advising the candidate for the Green Party, the presumptive Green Party candidate for US President Jill Stein, will be having a show in which she will be our guest. And we hope this will be a show in which we will discuss the broad outlines of her policy and what are the obstacles that she faces as a third party candidate in the US elections.

So, we hope you will join us. This should be coming up in less than two weeks. So, we look forward to doing that with you. Thank you and goodbye.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

The post Free Speech and Platform Media first appeared on Michael Hudson.