As a madman begins the first war in Europe since the end of World War II, President Biden has successfully reunited NATO, our allies, and the world. This after four years of Trump trying to destroy it and pull us apart.
The traitor Trump cemented his legacy as a toady to Putin. He did this with his recent comments reported by CNN, “It took only 24 hours for Donald Trump to hail Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dismembering of independent, democratic, sovereign Ukraine as an act of “genius.” The former president often accuses his enemies falsely of treason, but his own giddy rush to side with a foreign leader who is proving to be an enemy of the United States and the West is shocking even by Trump’s self-serving standards.” Trump went on to say, “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of Ukraine, of Ukraine, Putin declares it as an independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.” This crap must scare the hell out of our allies in Europe and anyone who believes Trump, by any stretch of the imagination, could become president again.
Threats of sanctions did not stop Putin from invading but will eventually bear fruit. The world has united against him and the Ukrainian people are standing strong. Their strength and heroism are amazing. The world can no longer view Putin as rational. He is a sick megalomaniac in the realm of Hitler and Stalin.
President Biden acted quickly in concert with nations around the world imposing harsh sanctions, including on Putin himself. As reported by Axios, “President Biden unveiled new coordinated sanctions against Russia that target Russia’s financial institutions and elite families. In doing so Biden said ‘Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences.’”
President Biden and his administration have effectively brought together long-standing allies who once again are willing to trust the United States. He has shown the world we moved beyond Trump’s disastrous ‘America First’ policies.
The president has also been honest with the American people. He told us our effort to help save Ukraine from Russia, and moves to protect our NATO allies will cause us some suffering. Gas prices will go up, inflation won’t be immediately curbed, and Russia may try to disrupt our life with cyber attacks. He is asking Americans to do what we have always done as a nation, stand up for democracy around the world, and ensure our allies in Europe and around the world we stand with them.
The president also made it very clear we will not be sending our military, men, and women, into Ukraine. We will send help, weapons, and humanitarian aid, and rally others to do the same. We will use all the sanctions at our command but President Biden has been realistic about what we can do. It is clear threats of sanctions didn’t stop Putin from invading. What we are seeing is the Ukrainian people putting up much more of a resistance than Putin expected. It is a country of 44 million people who believe in their own democracy. This is their war in the streets and the trenches and we are seeing many acts of bravery. Even if Putin manages to install a puppet government in Kyiv, he will never contain the resistance without occupying the entire country and that will not be easy.
What makes this so unreal is we didn’t believe after 70 years of relative peace in Europe this could happen again. We in the United States are watching this war live-streamed making it even more unreal. We sit drinking our morning coffee, going to work, going out to dinner, going to concerts and the theater, all while watching bombs fall on Kyiv on our cell phones and on TV.
Our hearts and minds must be with the people of Ukraine. We must give full support to our government, to President Biden, believing they are doing all America can to help the Ukrainian people in their time of greatest need. –Wahington Blade
NAS member Bruce Gilley’s article, “The Case for Colonialism,” went through double-blind peer review and was published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. It provoked enormous controversy and generated two separate petitions signed by thousands of academics demanding that it be retracted, that TWQ apologize, and that the editor or editors responsible for its publication be dismissed. Fifteen members of the journal’s thirty-four-member editorial board also resigned in protest. Publisher Taylor and Francis issued a detailed explanation of the peer review process that the article had undergone, countering accusations of “poorly executed pseudo-‘scholarship,’” in the words of one of the petitions. But serious threats of violence against the editor led the journal to withdraw the article, both in print and online. Gilley was also personally and professionally attacked and received death threats. On the good side, many rallied to his defense, including Noam Chomsky, and many supported the general argument of the article. We publish it below in its entirety, conformed to U.S. English and our style.
For the last hundred years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. Colonialism has virtually disappeared from international affairs, and there is no easier way to discredit a political idea or opponent than to raise the cry of “colonialism.” When South African opposition politician Helen Zille tweeted in 2017 that Singapore’s success was in part attributable to its ability to “build on valuable aspects of colonial heritage,” she was vilified by the press, disciplined by her party, and put under investigation by the country’s human rights commission.
It is high time to reevaluate this pejorative meaning. The notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing needs to be rethought in light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies. The case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future. It involves reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities—the civilizing mission without scare quotes --that led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples during most episodes of Western colonialism. It also involves learning how to unlock those benefits again. Western and non-Western countries should reclaim the colonial toolkit and language as part of their commitment to effective governance and international order.
There are three ways to reclaim colonialism. One is for governments and peoples in developing countries to replicate as far as possible the colonial governance of their pasts—as successful countries like Singapore, Belize, and Botswana did. The “good governance” agenda, which contains too many assumptions about the self-governing capacity of poor countries, should be replaced with the “colonial governance” agenda. A second way is to recolonize some regions. Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states. Rather than speak in euphemisms about “shared sovereignty” or “neo-trusteeship,” such actions should be called “colonialism” because it would embrace rather than evade the historical record. Thirdly, in some instances, it may be possible to build new Western colonies from scratch.
Colonialism can return (either as a governance style or as an extension of Western authority) only with the consent of the colonized. Yet now that the nationalist generation that forced sudden decolonization on hapless populations has passed away, the time may be ripe. Sèbe has documented how the founding figures of Western colonialism in Africa (such as Livingstone in Zambia, Lugard in Nigeria, and de Brazza in Congo) are enjoying a resurgence of official and social respect in those countries now that romanticized pre-colonial and disappointing post-colonial approaches to governance have lost their sheen. As one young man on the streets of Kinshasa asked Van Reybrouck in his seminal 2010 book on the Congo: “How long is this independence of ours going to last anyway? When are the Belgians coming back?”
Three Failures of Anti-Colonial Critique
The case for the past record of Western colonialism—usually referring to British, French, German, Belgian, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries—rests on overturning two distinct lines of criticism: that it was objectively harmful (rather than beneficial); and that it was subjectively illegitimate (rather than legitimate). There is, in addition, a third line of criticism that merits revision: that it offends the sensibilities of contemporary society.
The objective cost/benefit approach identifies a certain need of human flourishing—development, security, governance, rights, etc.—and asks whether colonialism improved or worsened the objective provision of that need. One main challenge of this research is to properly enumerate the things that matter and then to assign them weights, which presumably vary with time and place. In a brutally patriarchal society, for instance, access to justice for women may have been more important than the protection of indigenous land rights (which may be part of that patriarchy), as Andreski argued was the case for women in northern Nigeria under colonialism.
A second challenge is measuring the counterfactual: what would likely have happened in a given place absent colonial rule? Many research designs, for instance, control for variations in colonial rule itself and for a variety of other factors that coexisted with colonialism (such as cultural norms, geography, population, disease burden, etc.). But they do not control for the presence or absence of colonialism (for instance in a highly cited study by Acemoglu and colleagues). To construct such a counterfactual requires measuring not just global social, economic, and technological trends but also the likely course of indigenous development, of regional factors, and of an ungoverned non-colonial encounter with the West. Countries that did not have a significant colonial history—China, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Haiti, and Guatemala, for instance—provide a measure of comparison to help identify what if anything were the distinctive effects of colonialism. So too does research into pre-colonial histories that, almost by definition, reveal comparatively weak institutions, divided societies, and subsistence economies, for instance in Biber’s study of pre-colonial Namibia.
Noting some of these complexities, Abernethy summarizes the objective cost/benefit question as follows: “In times and places where colonial rule had, on balance, a positive effect on training for self-government, material well-being, labor allocation choices, individual upward mobility, cross-cultural communication, and human dignity, compared to the situation that would likely have obtained absent European rule, then the case for colonialism is strong. Conversely, in times and places where the effects of foreign rule in these respects were, on balance, negative compared to a territory’s likely alternative past, then colonialism is morally indefensible.”
Beyond these requirements, there is a list of simple epistemic virtues. Non-biased data and case selection, for instance, requires that evidence be gathered in a way that does not confirm the hypothesis at stake. Any claim about, say, the level of colonial violence, requires not just assumptions about the scale of violence that would have occurred absent colonial rule but also a careful measure of that violence relative to the population, security threat, and security resources in a given territory. One is hard-pressed, to take a prominent example, to find such care in measurement in the vast critical scholarship on the British counterinsurgency campaign against the Mau in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, especially in the scolding work of Elkins. Daniels argues that “[h]ad the British left Kenya to the Mau, there would have been anarchy and further civil war, perhaps even genocide.” Just as many Kenyans joined the Kikuyu Home Guard and the special prison service for the rebels as joined the insurgency, and the independent Kenyan government has long applauded the historic contribution of the British in suppressing the movement. At the very least, it is incumbent on scholars to show that the brutalities unleashed by the British in this campaign were not the likely result of a proportionate response given the context and scale of the threat. If this supposedly solid case is wobbly, what does it tell us about the lesser “violence” often cited as invalidating colonialism?
Perhaps the most egregious violation of epistemic virtues is internal coherence (or non-contradiction). Eminent scholars repeatedly make the logically contradictory claim that colonialism was both too disruptive and not disruptive enough, whether with regard to boundaries, governing institutions, economic systems, or social structures, as evidenced in the short space of just two pages by Young. Africanists, in particular, applaud the work both of Herbst, who argued that colonialism did too little state-making, and Young, who earlier argued that it did too much.11 New territorial boundaries are criticized for forcing social integration while old ones are criticized for reinforcing tribalism, a contradiction noted by Lefebvre. Marxist scholars found colonialism at fault when it did not invest in public health and infrastructure (showing a callous disregard for labor) and when it did (in order to exploit it). Colonialism is ascribed near-magical powers to sweep away everything good in its path (like tribal chiefs or ethnic identity) and with equally magical powers to make permanent everything bad in its path (like tribal chiefs or ethnic identity).
Finally, there is the simple epistemic virtue of falsification. This is most pointed in the treatment of what was undoubtedly a benefit of colonialism: the abolition of slave-trading. Anti-colonial critics squirm and fuss over this issue because it puts the greatest strain on their “colonialism is bad” perspective. The result is a constant stream of revisionism: it did not happen fast enough; there were mixed motives; not all colonial officials supported it; former slaves remained poor and former slave owners remained rich; it should never have existed in the first place.
Of course, not all research falls afoul of the basic prescriptions above. Research that is careful in conceptualizing and measuring controls, that establishes a feasible counterfactual, that includes multiple dimensions of costs and benefits weighted in some justified way, and that adheres to basic epistemic virtues often finds that at least some, if not many or most, episodes of Western colonialism were a net benefit, as the literature review by Juan and Pierskalla shows. Such works have found evidence for significant social, economic, and political gains under colonialism: expanded education; improved public health; the abolition of slavery; widened employment opportunities; improved administration; the creation of basic infrastructure; female rights; enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities; fair taxation; access to capital; the generation of historical and cultural knowledge; and national identity formation, to mention just a few dimensions.
This leads to the second failure of anti-colonial critique. Given that objective costs and benefits varied with time and place, another approach is simply to defer to the judgements of those affected. The subjective legitimacy approach asks whether the people subject to colonialism treated it, through their beliefs and actions, as rightful. As Hechter showed, alien rule has often been legitimate in world history because it has provided better governance than the indigenous alternative.
Yet anti-colonial critics simply assert that colonialism was, in Hopkins’s words, “a foreign imposition lacking popular legitimacy.” Until very late, European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons. Millions of people moved closer to areas of more intensive colonial rule, sent their children to colonial schools and hospitals, went beyond the call of duty in positions in colonial governments, reported crimes to colonial police, migrated from non-colonized to colonized areas, fought for colonial armies, and participated in colonial political processes—all relatively voluntary acts. Indeed, the rapid spread and persistence of Western colonialism with very little force relative to the populations and geographies concerned is prima facie evidence of its acceptance by subject populations compared to the feasible alternatives. The “preservers,” “facilitators,” and “collaborators” of colonialism, as Abernethy shows, far outnumbered the “resisters,” at least until very late: “Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull.” In Borneo, the Sultan of Brunei installed an English traveler James Brooke, as the rajah of his chaotic province of Sarawak in 1841. Order and prosperity expanded to such an extent that even once a British protectorate was established in 1888, the Sultan preferred to leave it under Brooke family control until 1946.
Sir Alan Burns, the governor of the Gold Coast during World War II, noted that “had the people of the Gold Coast wished to push us into the sea there was little to prevent them. But this was the time when the people came forward in their thousands, not with empty protestations of loyalty but with men to serve in the army . . . and with liberal gifts to war funds and war charities. This was curious conduct for people tired of British rule.” In most colonial areas, subject peoples either faced grave security threats from rival groups or they saw the benefits of being governed by a modernized and liberal state. Patrice Lumumba, who became an anti-colonial agitator only very late, praised Belgian colonial rule in his autobiography of 1962 for “restoring our human dignity and turning us into free, happy, vigorous, and civilized men.” Chinua Achebe’s many pro-colonial statements, meanwhile, have been virtually airbrushed from memory by anti-colonial ideology.23 The few scholars who take note of such evidence typically dismiss it as a form of false consciousness.
The failure of anti-colonial critique to come to terms with the objective benefits and subjective legitimacy of colonialism points to a third and deeper failure: it was never intended to be “true” in the sense of being a scientific claim justified through shared standards of inquiry that was liable to falsification. The origins of anti-colonial thought were political and ideological. The purpose was not historical accuracy but contemporaneous advocacy.
Today, activists associate “decolonization” (or “postcolonialism”) with all manner of radical social transformation, which unintentionally ties historic conclusions to present-day endeavors. Unmoored from historical fact, postcolonialism became what Williams called a metropolitan flaneur culture of attitude and performance whose recent achievements include an inquiry into the glories of sadomasochism among Third World women and a burgeoning literature on the horrors of colonialism under countries that never had colonies.
This third failure of anti-colonial critique is perhaps most damaging. It is not just an obstacle to historical truth, which itself is a grave disservice. Even as a means of contemporary advocacy, it is self-wounding. For it essentially weaponizes the colonial past, as the gradually imploding postcolonial South African state’s persecution of Helen Zille shows. “What a meta-narrative of anti-colonial sentiment can render invisible are ways in which people made claims on new possibilities without deploying either anti- or pro-colonial idioms,” Englund writes in his study of colonial-era newspapers in Zambia. “To devote all scholarly attention to the question of how different actors during this period sought to end colonial rule is to succumb to a limiting meta-narrative of anti-colonialism, one that allows no conceptual space between colonial and anti-colonial agendas, and thereby keeps other possibilities inaccessible to the scholarly and moral imagination.”
The Costs of Anti-Colonialism
It is hard to overstate the pernicious effects of global anti-colonialism on domestic and international affairs since the end of World War II. Anti-colonialism ravaged countries as nationalist elites mobilized illiterate populations with appeals to destroy the market economies, pluralistic and constitutional polities, and rational policy processes of European colonizers. In our “age of apology” for atrocities, one of the many conspicuous silences has been an apology for the many atrocities visited upon Third World peoples by anti-colonial advocates.
Few cases better illustrate this than Guinea-Bissau and its anti-colonial “hero” Amilcar Cabral. In launching a guerrilla war against Portuguese rule in 1963 Cabral insisted that it was “necessary to totally destroy, to break, to reduce to ash all aspects of the colonial state in our country in order to make everything possible for our people.” He took aim at a successful colonial state that had quadrupled rice production and initiated sustained gains in life expectancy since bringing the territory under control in 1936.28 Cabral, in his own words, was “never able to mobilize the people on the basis of the struggle against colonialism.” Instead, he secured training and arms from Cuba, Russia, and Czechoslovakia and economic assistance from Sweden. The resulting war killed fifteen thousand people (out of a population of 600,000) and at least as many civilians, and displaced another 150,000 (a quarter of the population).
Once “liberation” was achieved in 1974, a second human tragedy unfolded, costing at least 10,000 further lives as a direct result of conflict. By 1980, rice production had fallen by more than 50 percent to eighty thousand tons (from a peak of 182,000 tons under the Portuguese). Politics became a “cantankerous din of former revolutionaries” in the words of Forrest. Cabral’s half-brother, who became president, unleashed the secret police on the tiny opposition—five hundred bodies were found in three mass graves for dissidents in 1981.32 A tenth of the remaining population pulled up stakes for Senegal.33 The Cabralian one-party state expanded to fifteen thousand employees, ten times as big as the Portuguese administration at its peak.34 Confused Marxist scholars blamed the legacies of colonialism or the weather or Israel.
Things have gotten worse. Guinea-Bissau has a more or less permanent UN peacekeeping force and continues to suck up millions in aid as the “continuadores de Cabral” squabble under what the World Bank calls “continuing political disarray.”36 Today, in per capita terms, rice production is still only one-third of what it was under the Portuguese despite forty years of international aid and technological advances. The health transition, meanwhile, slowed considerably after independence. By 2015, the average Guinea-Bissauan was living to just fifty-five, meaning gains of just 0.3 years of extra life per year since independence, less than half of the 0.73 extra years of life per year being gained in the late colonial period. What might have become a prosperous and humane Macau or Goa of Africa is today a cesspool of human suffering. Western and African anti-colonial scholars continue to extol Cabral’s “national liberation” ideas. But actually existing Guineans may be asking: when are the Portuguese coming back?
Guinea-Bissau seems like an extreme case. It is not. Of the eighty countries that threw off the colonial “yoke” after World War II, at least half experienced similar trauma while most of the rest limped on. For sixty years, Third World despots have raised the specter of recolonization to discredit democratic opposition and ruin their economies. Yet there is virtually nothing written about most of these postcolonial traumas since, as Igreja notes, it still assumed that anti-colonial movements were victims rather than victimizers.38 Scholars in full Eurocentric mode prefer to churn out books on colonial atrocities or to suggest that “colonial legacies” have something to do with the follies and body blows inflicted on these countries by their anti-colonial leaders.
To be sure, just as the colonial era was not an unalloyed good, the independence era has not been an unalloyed bad. A few postcolonial states are in reasonable health. Those whose moral imaginations were not shrouded by anti-colonial ideology had the most productive encounter with modernity, emerging as leaders of what W. Arthur Lewis called the “creative” Third World.
But most of the rest remained stuck in anti-colonial “protest” identities with dire consequences for human welfare. A sobering World Bank report of 1996 noted: “Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess.”41 This loss of state capacity was no trifle; it meant the loss of tens of millions of lives. And it is not getting better. For instance, only thirteen of 102 historically developing countries are on track to have high state capacity by the year 2100, according to Andrews and colleagues. The people of Bangladesh will have to wait another 244 years at their current rate to reach a high capacity state. Would it have taken Britain, even in some adjusted role (as discussed below), until the middle of the twenty-third century to institute good government in this former province of Eastern Bengal?
In international affairs, meanwhile, otherwise liberal and democratic states like India, Brazil, and South Africa continue to style themselves as enemies of Western colonialism. As Chatterjee Miller shows, the foreign policies of these former colonies continue to be driven by a sense of victimhood and entitlement rather than rational self-interest or global responsibility. This means that every time the world is desperate for a coordinated response to a human, political, or security catastrophe—in Sri Lanka, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe for instance—the voices of anti-colonialism intercede to prevent action. As it turned out, the most serious threat to human rights and world peace was not colonialism—as the United Nations declared in 1960—but anti-colonialism.
Chatterjee Miller argues that it is the responsibility of the West to be “sensitive” to these anti-colonial viewpoints. An alternative view is that it is the responsibility of the West to help these nations kick the habit. After all, Britain’s rise is surely inseparable from the ways that it embraced and celebrated its colonizers from the Romans through to the Normans. If anti-colonial sentiments had gone unchallenged in Britain, the country today would be a backwater of druid worshippers.
Resurrecting Colonial Governance
Even as intellectuals have continued to plough the anti-colonial furrow since the end of the Cold War, many countries have changed their domestic governance to replant the seeds of “colonial governance.” This agenda has many things in common with the “good governance” agenda: economic liberalization, political pluralism, and administrative streamlining have replaced the socialist road in most countries. But the colonial governance agenda is distinct from the good governance agenda in two respects.
First, the colonial governance agenda explicitly affirms and borrows from a country’s colonial past, searching for ideas and notions of governmentality. As Burton and Jennings note, “In the first decade or so after independence . . . East African governments often adopted or adapted both administrative structures and ideological concepts from their colonial predecessors in order to create quite successful forms of governance—certainly by regional standards.” In many cases, colonial bureaucrats and police were rehired by the newly independent governments.
Reclaiming this colonial trajectory abandoned at independence is key to the colonial governance agenda. No less an anti-colonial “hero” than Chinua Achebe ended his days with a memoir that explicitly affirmed the positive contributions of colonialism to governance in his native Nigeria: “It is important to face the fact that British colonies were, more or less, expertly run,” he wrote. What was important about Achebe’s “articulation of the unsayable,” as Msiska called it, was his rediscovery of “the colonial national formation as a habitable community.” This had concrete implications for how to organize the civil service, how to manage federalism, and how to promote education. As with democratic episodes in a country’s past, colonial episodes become an attic to ransack in search of a livable past. This also underscores the importance of reinvesting in a non-biased historiography of colonialism so that the colonial periods are seen not as objects of resistance but as fruitful sources of creativity.
Secondly, and related, the colonial governance agenda recognizes that the capacity for effective self-government is lacking and cannot be conjured out of thin air. The lack of state capacity to uphold the rule of law and deliver public services was the central tragedy of “independence” in the Third World, as a few voices like Plamenatz and Barnes warned at the time. To reclaim “colonial governance” means increasing foreign involvement in key sectors in business, civil society, and the public sector in order to bolster this capacity. In 1985, for instance, the Indonesian government fired all six thousand government inspectors at the Jakarta port of Tanjung Priok and replaced the corrupt and inefficient customs service with the Swiss firm SGS. The Swiss rebuilt the customs service, handing back partial control in 1991 and full control in 1997.48 Indonesia’s exports boomed. Civil society and successful policy reforms, meanwhile, improve faster with the presence of international civil society actors, as they did in the colonial era, as shown by studies of environmental civil society.49 Multinational corporations, moreover, can be tasked with public service provision near their facilities in direct imitation of colonial practices, as Hönke has documented.
The colonial governance agenda embraces a cosmopolitanism—a civilizing mission—often lacking in the good governance agenda. Bain, for instance, admits the “grim reality” and “ghastly consequences” of decolonization. Yet he simultaneously rejects the idea that the West has anything to offer, since this implies an imperial mission. This “uncritical critique of the liberal peace,” as Chandler calls it, consigns Third World nations to the foibles and vagaries of “authentic” or “indigenous” practices, a de facto abandonment of hope in their self-governing capacities. By contrast, the colonial governance agenda resurrects the universalism of the liberal peace and with it a shared standard of what a well-governed country looks like.
The Case for Recolonization
The second broad way to reclaim colonialism is to recolonize some regions. It may be that in some cases, only a formal share of sovereignty for Western countries can provide the mix of accountability and authority needed to build capacity in weak states. In Chesterman’s oft-quoted phrase, the problem with modern state-building is not that it “is colonial in character; rather the problem is that sometimes it is not colonial enough.”
The World Bank and USAID, for instance, experimented with “co-signatory” arrangements in Liberia and Chad in the 1990s and 2000s where major government expenditures required the signatures of both domestic and external agents. In the Australia-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) or the UN’s International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (known by its Spanish acronym CICIG), key legal and police functions were handed over to external powers because of rampant corruption and criminalization of the state.
Sèbe calls this “cosmopolitan nation-building” because it represents an explicit rejection of the parochial myth of self-governing capacity that drove most postcolonial countries into the ground. Rather than use an ever-expanding set of euphemisms that avoid the “c” word—“shared sovereignty,” “conservatorship,” “proxy governance,” “transitional administration,” “neo-trusteeship,” “cooperative intervention”—these arrangements should be called “colonialism” because it would embrace rather than evade the historical record. As Ignatieff wrote in 2002: “Imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect.”
While the conceptual abandonment of the myth of self-governing capacity is now mainstream, the challenges of making new forms of colonialism work are immense. There are three separate questions for policy-makers: how to make colonialism acceptable to the colonized; how to motivate Western countries to become colonial again; and how to make colonialism achieve lasting results.
Any colonial relationship requires a high degree of acceptance from the local population. Perhaps this explains why post-Cold War interventions have sought to emphasize their participatory and consensual nature in contrast with an alleged illegitimate and coercively imposed colonialism.56 This is another area where an accurate historiography of colonialism is sorely needed because, as noted, colonialism usually spread with a significant degree of consent from politically salient actors.
One lesson from colonial legitimation is that at least in the initial phases, legitimacy will be demonstrated not by the holding of a plebiscite or by the support of organized and broadly representative groups, but simply by the ability of the intervening state to win compliance from key actors and get the job done. Too often, critics of modern interventions have decried the lack of “accountability or representation.” Yet it is precisely the absence of conditions for meaningful accountability or representation that makes intervention necessary in the first place, much as colonialism spread in order to better manage ungoverned encounters with the West. As Chesterman wrote: “If genuine local control were possible, then a transitional administration would not be necessary.” The creation of accountable political power “may well be the end of the transitional administration,” he writes, “but by definition it is not the means.”
To push the logic further, it is the intervening state, bound to act as a trustee, that has the capacity initially to choose a legitimate path forward. As in colonial times, foreign control by a liberal state with its own robust accountability mechanisms is the closest that a people with a weak state can come to “local ownership.” The widespread support in Sierra Leone for the 1999 to 2005 British overhaul and rebuilding of the police force was explained by this externally created legitimacy with an explicit colonial vestige: “There has always been a soft spot for the British among Sierra Leoneans. That feeling has now come into full play, with public demands for the Brits to stay for as long as necessary, because of the helpless condition of the country,” one local journalist noted.[59]
The legitimacy of a new colonialism will almost always require a local leader who is both domestically popular and a strong advocate of the colonial relationship. After initial skepticism, Liberia’s energetic president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf championed the post-2005 Government and Economic Assistance Management Program (GEMAP) that gave extensive powers over spending and budgeting to external actors. As a result, Liberians generally welcomed GEMAP. “Although some Liberian politicians see the plan as thinly veiled colonialism, it is wildly popular among those living on the rubbish-strewn streets of the capital,” noted the Times. “We love GEMAP,” Henry Williams, a shopkeeper, said to nods from the crowd at the counter. “It will stop the politicians from stealing from us.”
The dynamics of colonial legitimation moving forward are tricky because as a country “earns sovereignty” the legitimacy of the colonial relationship will decline if it is not constantly recalibrated and reaffirmed. As local institutions and norms improve, the colonial relationship will become more intensive but also more contested because of this more complex polity. Again, lessons from past colonialism are germane: “The central paradox of the process of colonial exit was that it coincided in most cases with the most active phase of colonial state-building,” wrote Darwin.
Very little attention is ever paid to the second challenge although it is arguably greater: how to motivate Western countries to become colonial. Despite cries of “exploitation,” colonialism was probably a money loser for imperial powers. The Stanford economist Richard Hammond coined the term “uneconomic imperialism” to describe the ways that European powers embarked on ruinously costly and ultimately money-losing colonialism for largely non-economic reasons. That is why they gave up their colonies so easily, as Wu also showed with regard to the Dutch surrender of Taiwan. The benefits of empire were widely diffused while the costs were narrowly borne by the colonial power. As Kaplan wrote: “The real problem with imperialism is not that it is evil, but rather that it is too expensive and therefore a problematic grand strategy for a country like the United States.”
Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy, for instance, calculated that the RAMSI program cost Australian taxpayers about $2 billion over its ten-year period, roughly the annual health and education budget for the capital city of Canberra or the equivalent of a year’s economic output for every Solomon Islander. The institute described this as “a massive investment for a country where Australia’s interests are limited.” The moment there was a whiff of Solomon Islander opposition using anti-colonial tropes, the Australians headed home. A willingness to assume responsibility for the affairs of a foreign land will not come easily since Western governments are held closely to account for their spending and anti-colonial ideology can be easily mobilized. The UN, meanwhile, is not likely to step in with more “international administration” due to the enduring anti-colonialism of leading Third World states. Collier’s suggestion for expanded UN-led governance provision is impractical for this reason.
To solve the incentives problem, Hechter has called for a “market in transnational governance” which we might call less euphemistically “colonialism for hire.” Colonial states would be paid for their services, an important motivator to be successful. The contractual motivation would also strengthen consent through periodic renegotiation of the terms. Properly designed, host countries would more than recoup those costs through higher foreign investment, lower external borrowing costs, and greater business confidence, benefits that were arguably more significant than improved governance in the colonial era.
That still leaves the third question of whether new forms of colonialism would work. The salient point is simply to draw attention to the relevance of the colonial past to this question since the appropriate models for state building are probably not modern liberal ones but something else. Whereas the number of post-Cold War interventions involving a share of sovereignty has been quite small, there were many episodes and types of colonialism from which to draw lessons. For instance, the largely successful resurrection of the state in Cambodia after a Chinese-imposed genocidal regime is not attributable to the UN-led reconstruction effort of 1992–1993. Liberal peacebuilding failed in Cambodia judged in terms of the intention to create a robust democracy or an independent police and army. Rather what emerged was a successful semi-authoritarian polity with deep roots in the colonial past.
One lesson from the colonial past is that the share of sovereignty needs to be substantial and thorough in most cases. If external actors are constrained to work with rotten local institutions, as Matanock has argued, then reforms will be difficult. Remaking a local police force may be possible without a share of sovereignty. But cleaning out a thoroughly corrupt national criminal justice system requires external control. Again, the reason to reclaim the word “colonialism” is that it does not sidestep this important empirical insight.
The second lesson is what Lemay-Hébert calls “the centrality of the social,” the centrality of a congruence between the values in the community and those of the state. Liberal interventions fail, he argued, because of their aversion to the social. Colonial interventions, by contrast, may stand a greater chance of success because historically this “emphasis on the social” is what colonialism was good at: the dual mandate, indirect rule, minimal expatriate staffs, and customary law went hand-in-hand with the infrastructure of modernity (schools, universal laws, “Western” medicine, etc.). “Since gaining independence, Congo has never had at its disposal an army comparable in efficiency and discipline to the former [Belgian colonial] Force Publique,” was Van Reybrouck’s sad conclusion. Maybe the Belgians should come back.
The Tale of Galinhas
Even with local legitimacy, Western will, and a good plan, the challenges of making new forms of colonialism work are immense. Leaders will need to come up with novel solutions to continued chaos and displacement caused by a century of anti-colonial policies. So here is a modest idea: build new Western colonies from scratch.
In 2009, the economist Paul Romer—who became the World Bank’s chief economist in 2016—suggested that rich nations build “charter cities” in poor countries. Under this model, largely empty land is leased to a foreign nation or group of nations so that their sovereignty allows a modern enclave to grow up, as was the case in Hong Kong. That tiny British colony, according to Romer, “did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century.”
New colonies solve the three challenges above nicely. For the local population, they are legitimate because citizens choose to move there, escaping worse situations and because their governments agree to the terms. They are potentially attractive to Western states because for conservatives they are low risk and self-financing while for liberals they are “acts of justice.” Finally, charter cities could be effective—which was Romer’s main concern in developing the idea—because they have a blank slate to transplant home institutions without having to work with rotten local ones.
Back to Guinea-Bissau. Suppose that the government of Guinea-Bissau were to lease back to Portugal the small uninhabited island of Galinhas that lies ten miles off the mainland and where the former colonial governor’s mansion lies in ruins. The annual lease would be $1 so that the Portuguese spend their money on the island and the Guinea-Bissau government is not dependent on a lease fee. Suppose, then, that the $10 to $20 million in foreign aid wasted annually on the country were redirected to this new offshore colony to create basic infrastructure. As part of the deal, the Portuguese would allow a certain number of Guinea-Bissau residents to resettle on the island each year. Portuguese institutions and sovereignty would be absolute here for the term of the lease—say ninety years as was the case with the mainland parts of Hong Kong. A small European state would grow up on the African coast.
At sixty square miles Galinhas could, over time, easily accommodate the entire population of Guinea-Bissau. If successful, it would attract talent, trade, and capital. The mainland parts of Guinea-Bissau would benefit from living next to an economic dynamo and learning to emulate its success, while symbolically escaping from the half-century anti-colonial nightmare of Amilcar Cabral. The same idea could be tried all over the coastlines of Africa and the Middle East if successful. Colonialism could be resurrected without the usual cries of oppression, occupation, and exploitation.
A preposterous idea? Perhaps. But not so preposterous as the anti-colonial ideology that for the past hundred years has been haunting the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the Third World. A hundred years of disaster is enough. It is time to make the case for colonialism again.—NAS
In 2015, the top 1 percent of families in the United States made more than 25 times what families in the bottom 99 percent did, according to a paper from the Economic Policy Institute.
This trend, which has picked up post Great Recession, is a reversal of what was seen during and after the Great Depression, where the gap between rich and poor narrowed.
“Rising inequality affects virtually every part of the country, not just large urban areas or financial centers,” said co-author Estelle Sommeiller.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, at least in the United States.
The top 1 percent of families took home an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent in 2015, according to a new paper released by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. This has increased since 2013, showing that income inequality has risen in nearly every state.
The paper looked at the income of families across the nation and assessed inequality at the state, metropolitan area and county level using data from the IRS. The incomes are averages of the IRS summaries of taxpayers in each income range.
Mind the gap
To be in the top 1 percent of earners in the United States in 2015, a family would have to have brought in $421,926 in pre-tax dollars. What qualifies as the top 1 percent varies by each state, and the states with the highest thresholds are California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.
Nationwide, the average income of the bottom 99 percent is $50,107 per family. This also varies depending on geography.
By looking at income data on the state and county level, it’s possible to get a more local picture of the trend of inequality.
When inequality came up, “often the conversation would turn to, well, that’s New York City, it’s not my state,” said Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center and co-author of the EPI paper.
“Rising inequality affects virtually every part of the country, not just large urban areas or financial centers,” said Estelle Sommeiller, a socio-economist at the Institute for Research in Economics and Social Sciences in France and co-author of the paper. “It’s a persistent problem throughout the country — in big cities and small towns, in all 50 states.”
Between the years 2009 to 2015, the incomes of those in the top 1 percent grew faster than the incomes of the bottom 99 percent in 43 states and the District of Columbia. In nine states, the income growth of the top 1 percent was half or more of all income growth in that time period.
A recent trend
This trend is a reversal of what happened in the United States in the years during and after the Great Depression. From 1928 until 1973, the share of income held by the top 1 percent declined in nearly every state.
The report from the EPI attributes that growth to a different atmosphere for workers, where the minimum wage generally was steadily rising and they were able to join unions and bargain for rights.
Today, while unemployment remains low and the economy is doing exceptionally well, wage growth has remained stagnant.
“When you look at economic expansions, it’s in that recovery that you see income growth – businesses recover, reorganize, workers find jobs,” Price said.
In those expansions since 1973, there has been less income growth for the bottom 99 percent, said Price.
Meanwhile, CEO pay has increased from about 20 times the typical worker’s pay to 271 times greater, from 1965 to 2016, according to 2017 a study by the EPI.
As the economic recovery continues, Price said that it is critically important to continue to look at growth and specifically how it is distributed.
“For some reason, the economy just doesn’t have the generation of wage growth we’d like to see,” Price said. “We like to focus a light on the way that income is distributed to share that the people who make decisions are benefiting from the economy in a way we might not all be.” -CNBC
Nearly 200 of America's top political scientists have voted Donald Trump the worst president in US history.
According to the 2018 Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey, Mr Trump ranks even lower than disgraced President Richard Nixon – even among conservatives. Abraham Lincoln, unsurprisingly, takes the top prize. Mr Nixon sits at 33.
The study, conducted every four years, surveys social science researchers from the American Political Science Association’s section on presidents and executive politics. It asks the experts to rank each president’s greatness on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being great, 50 being average, and 0 being a total failure.
Mr Trump averaged a score of 12.34, bumping James Buchanan – the president who saw the US descend into the Civil War – out of the bottom spot. The result comes just months after Trump finished his first year in office as the most unpopular president in modern history.
Mr Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, jumped 10 places since the survey was last conducted in 2014, to spot number eight. George W Bush also climbs in the rankings, making it five places up to number 30.
Bill Clinton did not fair was well as the other living presidents, dropping five places down to 14th. Only Andrew Jackson dropped more – down six places – possibly owing to increased attention on how he treated Native Americans.
The top seven presidents remained the exact same, with Abraham Lincoln on top, followed by George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.
Mr Trump was accompanied in the bottom five by Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, William Harrison, and Mr Buchanan.
Researchers Brandon Rottinghaus, of the University of Houston, and Justin Vaughn, of Boise State University, said they surveyed 170 political science experts for the study. Of those experts, 57.2 per cent identified as Democrats, 12.7 per cent as Republicans, and 27.1 per cent as independents.
While Republicans and Democrats differed on how they viewed figures like Mr Obama and Mr Bush, they were in fairly close agreement on My Trump: Conservatives voted him 40th out of 45.
The one area where Mr Trump did come out on top was in the “most polarising” section, in which the researchers asked the scientists to list the five presidents they found most divisive. Mr Trump was ranked most polarising by 90 of the 170 respondents, and second-most polarising by another 20. –Yahoo
Donald Trump is a racist and the perfect man to represent America’s racist legacy in the countries he called shitholes. This week on Intercepted: Jeremy lays out the bloody U.S. history in Haiti and El Salvador and blasts the bipartisan, selective amnesia and historical revisionism that “American exceptionalism” demands. In an exclusive interview, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard calls for direct talks with Kim Jong-un to avert a catastrophic war with North Korea. She defends her meeting with Bashar al-Assad in Syria, explains why she holds Hillary Clinton responsible for regime change in Libya, and says Bernie Sanders would have defeated Trump. Steve Bannon was ousted from Breitbart and ridiculed as “Sloppy Steve” by his hero. But Bannon is very popular in Washington — with investigators. As Robert Mueller hits Bannon with a grand jury subpoena, former CIA officer and Cipher Brief columnist John Sipher and journalist Marcy Wheeler analyze the Russia investigation, the Steele dossier, and the Trump team’s collusion … with Israel. Leading Marxist scholar David Harvey talks about alienation and debt peonage in the age of Trump, the crimes of capitalism, and why he believes the French and American revolutions would not be possible today.
Don Lemon: Are you a racist?
President Donald J. Trump: I am the least racist person that you have ever met. I am the least racist person.
DJT: They’re bringing drugs —
DJT: I don’t care if the judge is Mexican or not —
DJT: — They’re bringing crime. —
DJT: — so I don’t care about Mexican —
DJT: — They’re rapists …
Jake Tapper: He’s not from Mexico, he’s from Indiana.
DJT: In my opinion — he has Mexican heritage and he’s very proud of it …
DJT: And some, I assume are good people.
John Dickerson: If it were a Muslim judge, would you also feel like they wouldn’t be able to treat you fairly?
DJT: Uh —
DJT: Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims.
DJT: — Uh, it’s possible, yes. Yeah, that would be possible, absolutely.
DJT: It’s really very curious as to what’s going on with our president. Why doesn’t he show the birth certificate? Maybe it says he’s a Muslim.
DJT: Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him.
DJT: I have a great relationship with the blacks.
DJT: Are you the greatest? You know what I’m talking about? OK.
DJT: I have, I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.
DJT: I love these guys, look at these guys. “Blacks for Trump.” I love you.
DJT: A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white. If I was starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black.
DJT: How many of these people are even Indians to begin with, because I’ve looked at them and I have to tell you something, they don’t like Indians to me.
DJT: They don’t look like Indians to me. And they don’t look like the Indians — now, maybe we say politically correct or not politically correct, they don’t look like Indians to me and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.
DJT: Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas. But you know what? I like you.
DJT: Negotiating with China. They say, “We want deal!” He jump out of the seat!
DJT: I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?
DJT: I didn’t even know he endorsed me.
DJT: White supremacy or white supremacist?
DJT: David Duke endorsed me? OK.
DJT: You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.
DJT: Alright, I disavow. OK?
DJT: I think there is blame on both sides and I have no doubt about it and you don’t have any doubt about it either. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
DJT: Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.”
DJT: What’s going on in Chicago?
DJT: He’s fired. He’s fired!
DJT: What the hell is going on?
DJT: Of course, I hate these people, and let’s all hate these people because maybe hate is what we need, hate is what we need.
Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.
JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City, and this is episode 40 of Intercepted.
Jeremy Scahill on the Forgotten and Bloody History of the U.S. In Haiti and El Salvador
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: That we spend $322,000 for each enemy we kill in Vietnam, while we spend in the so-called “War on Poverty” in America, only about $53 for each person classified as poor.
JS: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday is an important reminder that one of the defining characteristics of the American exceptionalism that Democratic and Republican politicians constantly mention is selective amnesia combined with historical revisionism.
Dr. King, as he is celebrated in the U.S. by the majority of politicians and institutions would be unrecognizable to King himself. King was a militant opponent of U.S. wars and militarism.
MLK: What they ask, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
JS: Dr. King was a fierce advocate for the poor, the forgotten, the victims of the fabled American success story celebrated by its white beneficiaries. He repeatedly risked his life, confronting not just racist policies or segregation but the white supremacy ingrained in U.S. society to this very day.
But King the radical, the anti-imperialist, the anti-racist, is not the King that’s celebrated today.
MLK: The problem of racial and justice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.
JS: The real Martin Luther King, Jr., the King who J. Edgar Hoover tried to blackmail, wiretapped, and told King to kill himself, the King who described himself as a Democratic Socialist, who believed in redistribution of wealth, the King who was assassinated, would today undoubtedly be labeled a black identity terrorist and shunned by the Republicans and Democrats alike for being too radical and anti-American.
When King was gunned down, his popularity was at all-time low. He had been largely abandoned by his friends in the civil rights movement and was regularly denounced in the papers and on radio and TV for being too radical.
Lawrence Spivak: Dr. King, former President Truman was quoted by the AP as saying that the March from Selma, and this was his word was, “silly” and can’t accomplish “a darn thing” except to attract attention.” Now, there have been two murders, many beatings, and a federal expenditure for troops of about $300,000. Would you say that what the march accomplished was worth that cost?
JS: Perhaps it’s fitting that days before the King holiday, we learned that Donald Trump had called black nations “shitholes” or “shit houses” — it doesn’t matter which. We see you Trump.
The Democrats express their outrage that the president would say such a thing and Trump’s defenders say it’s the truth regardless of what anyone thinks of his language.
But here’s what the Democrats and Republicans, and certainly Trump himself, will never ever talk about: The U.S. role in destabilizing and mercilessly punishing the countries whose citizens Trump wants banned from coming to the U.S. or having protective status.
DJT: We will suspend the Syrian refugee program. Have no choice. And we will keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country, believe me.
JS: Take Haiti. The first black Republic in the world. The first country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. A country consistently targeted by violent, anti-democratic U.S. policy ever since. Why don’t we ever talk about the support that Ronald Reagan offered to the brutal dictatorship of Baby Doc or how George H.W. Bush and the CIA unleashed murderous death squads in an effort to stop the democratic election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, only to facilitate his overthrow in a brutal coup after Aristide won? Why don’t we talk about how Bill Clinton would only allow Aristide to return to Haiti if he agreed not to seek reelection or the inhumane way that Clinton treated Haitians fleeing their country and warehouse them at the Guantanamo prison in appalling conditions before George Bush turned it into an illegal gulag for suspected terrorists?
President Bill Clinton: I want to thank our partners in the hemisphere. When the United States decided that, if necessary, we would use force to remove the military regime and to restore president Aristide and democracy, I was so determined that no one would think we were trying to revive any hemispheric imperialism.
JS: Why don’t we discuss the George W. Bush administration, once again supporting the overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected government in 2004, or the neoliberal economic policies pushed by the Clinton Global Fund and the Obama administration, or the story of how president Obama backed a corrupt government in Haiti as it used corruption and anti-democratic tactics in an effort to keep power.
President Barack Obama: It’s a great pleasure to welcome president Martelly of Haiti to the Oval Office. Our, you know, our two countries really brought about the trend towards independence in the Western Hemisphere.
JS: No Democrats or Republicans ever want to talk about this history. Yes, Donald Trump is a racist — a horrid, overt, shameless racist. But let’s be honest: U.S. policy toward Haiti has always been racist. Trump should be condemned for what he said but so too should all U.S. presidents, going back well over a century, who have ravaged Haiti in defense of corporate profits and the elite.
On Martin Luther King Day, MSNBC repeatedly played a clip of Ronald Reagan, denouncing the use of racial epithets in a speech that Reagan gave on King’s birthday. And they contrasted that Reagan speech to Trump’s “shithole” or “shit house” comments.
President Ronald Reagan: As recent unfortunate events have demonstrated, we cannot be complacent about racism and bigotry. And I would challenge all of you to pledge yourselves to building an America where incidents of racial hatred do not happen, because racism has been banned, not just from the law books but from the hearts of the people.
Joe Scarborough: So there you have it. Two presidents, two Republicans, two men claiming to be conservatives. And yet, a great divide between race, even among two conservative Republican presidents. But after all these decades of progress, here we find ourselves with a reactionary, and yes, some would say a racist president.
JS: The violent irony here of course is that Reagan is directly responsible for a tremendous amount of death and destruction in Haiti. And that little fact was not mentioned at all, because history doesn’t matter to these people. Only empty platitudes gain bipartisan praise.
Now I could also talk about the role the U.S. has played in destroying Somalia and other African nations whose citizens Trump believe should be banned from coming to America. And it isn’t just Haiti and African nations — tens of thousands of people in El Salvador were mercilessly murdered, tortured, raped in the 1980s as Reagan poured us weapons, training and funding to a heinous military junta. That country has never fully recovered from what the U.S. did to it over a sustained period of time.
Oh, and it wasn’t just Salvadoran civilians who paid the price. Forces backed by Washington raped and murdered four American church women. Archbishop Oscar Ramiro was shot dead as he performed mass; his killer was trained by the U.S. Six Jesuit priests were murdered in their home by paramilitaries backed by the U.S.
Newscaster: The priests were shown no mercy. During the night, gunmen invaded their dormitory, clubbed them, dragged them out to a lawn and shot them. Two women caretakers were also murdered.
JS: You see, no one wants to discuss this history when we try to understand why El Salvador faces the violence and poverty that make people want to flee. So, yes, we should all be outraged at Trump’s racist words and his racist policies. They’re dangerous and vile. But they don’t exist in a vacuum.
It’s the U.S. that’s been the “shithole” or the “shit house” in countries the world over. It’s a legacy of racism built by Democrats and Republicans, and Donald Trump is a fitting person to now represent that legacy because his overt racist rhetoric matches this racist legacy that no one ever wants to talk about. OK. Let’s go on with the show.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Calls for Direct Talks with Kim Jong-un and Critiques U.S Foreign Interventionism
JS: As I speak, the United States is engaged in multiple wars across the globe, covert and overt. Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Mali, Niger, Yemen — on and on. These wars get very little attention in the permanent Trump news cycle that we all live in. At the same time, the U.S. Congress is moving forward with a surveillance bill that’s going to have far-reaching implications on the privacy of American citizens. And it’s not even received a fraction of the attention that it deserves. But don’t ask the leaders of the Democratic Party about that. Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and other prominent Democrats, have joined with their Republican colleagues in killing an amendment that would have put in place extremely minor requirements that would have curbed warrantless spying on Americans.
And remember: This is in a bill to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act another six years. Foreign, as in foreigners outside of the United States. But Pelosi and people like Democrat Adam Schiff, who is leading the investigation into Trump-Russia in the Intelligence Committee, they joined with president Trump and the Republicans in making sure that the NSA can still collect the communications of Americans without a warrant.
Adam Schiff: Section 702 I think is among the most important of all of our surveillance programs.
JS: So, let’s get this straight: some of the most prominent Democrats who claim to be trying to end the Trump administration, who characterize Trump as a tool for Vladimir Putin they want to give that same Donald Trump sweeping surveillance authorities. Got it? And they defend this position by saying that it rises above politics. That it’s necessary to defend the country.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who has been one of the leaders of the fight against this legislation on the Senate side, said the following on Twitter, “I just want folks to know, if Donald Trump gets expanded spying powers, Jeff Sessions gets to decide when to use this collection against you.”
Ron Wyden: It allows warrantless government surveillance of foreigners thought to have foreign intelligence information. That’s practically anything that relates to the foreign affairs of the United States. Practically everything about foreign countries relates to American foreign affairs.
JS: One of the sponsors of the House amendment that tried to limit the NSA’s ability to spy on ordinary Americans, and to use what they collect without a warrant against Americans in criminal proceedings, is Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. Since her election in 2012, Gabbard has repeatedly broken ranks with the Democratic Party leadership. She has consistently blasted hawkish policies and regime change under president Obama and under president Trump. She has confronted the DNC and the Democratic primary process. She was a prominent supporter of Bernie Sanders and is routinely vilified by supporters of Hillary Clinton.
Tulsi Gabbard, who is a U.S. military combat vet, who deployed to Iraq, also made a trip to Syria last year and she met with Bashar al-Assad. When Gabbard returned to the United States, she was widely criticized by Democrats and Republicans after she said that she had not seen sufficient evidence to prove that Assad, and not other forces in Syria, had used chemical weapons.
Representative Tulsi Gabbard: If president Assad is found to be responsible after an independent investigation for these horrific chemical weapons attacks, I’ll be the first one to denounce him, to call him a war criminal and to call for his prosecution in the International Criminal Court, make sure that those consequences are there. But the key is now with president Trump’s reckless military strikes last night, it flew directly in the face of the action that the U.N. was working on at that time to launch an independent investigation, to find out exactly what the facts are, who was involved and who was responsible so the appropriate consequences could be levied.
JS: This past weekend, Tulsi Gabbard was back in the news after an alert was sent to the mobile phones of everyone in the state of Hawaii warning them of an imminent incoming missile attack. Now, that alert, of course, turned out to be totally false. It was Tulsi Gabbard who first alerted the public via Twitter that it was a false alarm and that no missile attack was happening. She tweeted that 12 minutes after the alert was sent across Hawaii and caused panic and fear. It took Hawaiian state authorities 38 minutes to officially retract the alert. Once again, Tulsi Gabbard was attacked. Some said she had no business intervening in the alert system, that it could cause problems for the U.S. military. Others criticized her for linking the fear that Hawaiians experienced after that false alert to president Trump’s belligerent policy toward North Korea.
There is a lot to talk about with Representative Tulsi Gabbard and she joins me now. Tulsi, welcome to Intercepted.
Rep. TG: Aloha, Jeremy. It’s great to talk to you.
JS: Why do you draw a connection between the Trump Administration’s posturing on North Korea and this horrible, frightening event that just took place in Hawaii?
Rep. TG: Well, first of all, let me just start with kind of painting the picture for folks who were not in Hawaii or who are not from Hawaii where you can just imagine, you know, you’re at work, you’re at school, you’re at home on a Saturday morning. And all of a sudden you get an alert that comes across your phone saying, “Ballistic missile incoming, take cover immediately. This is not a drill.”
Now, keep in mind that just a couple of months ago people in Hawaii started hearing and were briefed by state civil defense officials about a monthly nuclear attack siren test that would begin and that if they heard that on a day that it was not a test then they would have fifteen minutes to take shelter, to find shelter somewhere. So, running through my mind, running through people — over a million people all across Hawaii when they saw this alert on Saturday morning was: “I’ve got fifteen minutes to try to find some shelter, to say my last goodbyes to my loved ones before what could be the end. Before my family and my home could be completely destroyed by an attack.”
What turned out to be a false alarm because someone in the civil defense emergency operation center pushed the wrong button that sent this alert out, it really was a wake up call about this threat that exists in the first place. You know, the people of Hawaii are literally paying the price for what has been decades of failed leadership from both Democrat and Republican administrations on allowing this threat to build and grow, this capability to increase on the part of North Korea to the point where we sit here today under threat of nuclear attack. Failed negotiations, if they even occurred, unrealistic preconditions, as well as this long-held U.S. foreign policy of regime change and how that has led North Korea to develop and tighten their grip on nuclear weapons, because they see that as the only deterrent to the U.S. leading an effort to topple their regime.
We’re sitting here today, president Trump is in office, and he needs to take this threat seriously and begin direct negotiations to make it so the people of Hawaii and this country don’t have to live under this dark shadow of a potential nuclear attack and war.
JS: Well, and you also have, now, this discussion, and there’s a lot of leaks being floated by individuals within various entities of the national security apparatus and the White House, floating the idea of potentially a conventional military strike on North Korea or some kind of a surgical strike that they believe could knock out some of the nuclear capability. You’re against, as I understand, any U.S. military action in North Korea right now.
Rep. TG: Any kind of preemptive or so-called preventive strike and war will kick off a catastrophic war that doesn’t even bring into account the nuclear war that could ensue. It doesn’t bring into account, you know, all of the different layers of consequences that experts in many different fields, in the military and in foreign policy agree would have casualties and destruction that we haven’t seen before in history.
So, you know, I am opposed to those leaks and those rumors of such a preventive or preemptive attack. And, instead am, as I have been for quite some time, calling for these direct talks to explore and maximize all peaceful avenues towards finding this path to denuclearize the Korean peninsula and prevent that catastrophic war and eliminate this nuclear threat that exists.
JS: Do you believe that Donald Trump should directly speak with Kim Jong-un?
Rep. TG: I do. I do.
JS: And say what to him?
Rep. TG: I think, well, I think they should sit across the table. There are a number of things that I’m sure North Korea wants. There are a number of things that we want and actually have those negotiations that could lead us towards this path towards denuclearization. We’ve got to be willing to put things on the table as North Korea has to be willing to, you know, perhaps begin with freezing the program. But, again, build that pathway towards denuclearization.
JS: But if you’re North Korea and you’re looking at the U.S. position, why on earth would you ever engage in a negotiation aimed at you having to get rid of your nuclear weapons? It’s the only thing, from the North Korean perspective, that keeps them from having their regime changed?
Rep. TG: Well, and this is exactly what I’ve been talking about. Yet another reason why it’s so critical for us to end our long-held regime-change war policies to begin to have some credibility in these types of negotiations with North Korea that, when the United States says that they’re not going to come in and topple the North Korean regime, that there is some credibility that exists there.
There are other actions that can be taken. I think the sanctions that have been put in place have been ineffective. If we look throughout history, through different administrations that have tried to enact sanctions to be able to spur these kinds of negotiations, they haven’t worked. You know, many of them because they either haven’t been put in place long enough to have an effect or they just simply were ineffective.
For example, one of the ones that had worked in the past under George W. Bush was sanctions on hard currency. This was something that I think we began to see some immediate effect on North Korea, but then they were lifted far too quickly and were not carried out in a way that would actually be able to be used as leverage with North Korea to get them to get rid of their nuclear weapons program.
JS: Now, but before I ask this next question, I want to remind people that you, Tulsi Gabbard, are a combat veteran. That you were deployed to Iraq. And I bring that up because I have found it very interesting to watch as you have criticized American foreign policy, the pile-on against you from both Democrats and Republicans for the positions that you’ve taken in opposition to regime change.
So, I want to give you a chance to answer some of the criticism that’s been leveled at you. For instance, you were opposed to the removal of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. And, you know, when you debate that, people say: “Well, Tulsi Gabbard was pro-Gaddafi.” You’ve said that it was a mistake for the United States to remove Saddam Hussein and people say, “Well, that means that you were supportive of Saddam Hussein.”
How do you respond to the criticism that’s thrown at you when you speak out against regime change, whether it was under Obama or Bush or potentially going forward under Trump?
Rep. TG: It’s laughable, honestly, because this is coming from people who levied these attacks because they cannot debate the actual substance, and the truth, and the facts, about how these decisions — and those two examples that you have shared with Iraq and with Libya broadly — if you look at those two situations, are the Libyan people’s lives better off today because of what we did in overthrowing Gaddafi? Are the American people safer today because of going in and overthrowing Gaddafi?
The answer to both of those questions is absolutely not. In fact we are less safe today because of that action. We are less safe because we went in and overthrew the government there, spurring not only death, chaos, and destruction, but Libya became a country that became a haven for terrorism, now increasing the threat against the United States.
Again, same thing with Iraq. You can look at this from a very clear perspective: Did that action help keep the American people safe or did it not? What to speak of the many American lives that were lost in that war there, the destruction, the chaos, the trillions of dollars that this kind our country has spent on rebuilding these nations that we have gone in and overthrown their governments. The cost of these wars and how counterproductive they have been purely from American interests what to speak of the, to say the destructive impact on the people of these countries is a complete understatement. So, again look at the hard facts. If you even look at this from the perspective of acting in the interests of the American people: whether it’s Iraq, whether it’s Libya, whether it’s our past and continued attempts to overthrow the government in Syria or even these rumors that are becoming louder and louder of people in Washington talking about overthrowing the government in Iran or any of these other countries where we have done so through military or nonmilitary means in the past have ended up worse off for the people of those countries and have been counterproductive to the interests of the American people.
JS: I’m wondering what your position, I know that in the past you have said that you favor a small footprint approach with strike forces and limited use of weaponized drones. Is that still your position that you think that’s the — to the extent that you believe the U.S. military should be used around the world for counterterrorism, is that still your position?
Rep. TG: Well, when we’re dealing with the unconventional threat of terrorist groups like ISIS, al Qaeda and some of these other groups that are affiliated with them, we should not be using basically what has been and continues to be the current policy of these mass mobilization of troops, these long occupations and trillions of dollars going in, really abusing the Authorization to Use Military Force and taking action that expands far beyond the legal limitations of those current AUMFs.
So, with these terrorist cells, for example, yes, I do still believe that the right approach to take is these quick strike forces, surgical strikes, in and out, very quickly, no long-term deployment, no long-term occupation to be able to get rid of the threat that exists and then get out and the very limited use of drones in those situations where our military is not able to get in without creating an unacceptable level of risk, and where you can make sure that you’re not causing, you know, a large amount of civilian casualties.
JS: Right, I mean from my experience on the ground in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, et cetera, I came to the conclusion that our policy, including under president Obama, that our — any time we got engaged militarily in these countries we ended up making more new enemies than we did kill actual terrorists who represented any kind of a feasible threat to the United States.
To what degree are you concerned that our policy is actually fueling the very terrorism that we claim to want to stop?
Rep. TG: When I talk about what the consequences of our interventionist foreign policy have been, this is one of them. Too often, as we sit here in armed services hearings and foreign affairs hearings and have briefings from people within the administration, the programs that they’re raising, the strategies that they’re talking about do not often go beyond the very specific action that they’re advocating for. They’re often not able to answer the questions of, you know, what happens next, what are the consequences, you know, down the line in the military, what we call the second, third, fourth order of effects that we can expect and should know before we decide to take a specific course of action.
JS: I want to talk to you about one trip that you took that just caused you know a massive string of attacks against you from your own party and that was your trip to Syria. I want to say that I have shared your position, I’ve been against U.S. military action in Syria, both covert and overt. I was against the idea of the Obama administration ratcheting up airstrikes.
At the same time, I do believe that Bashar al-Assad is a butcher and a war criminal and I want to know why you, as a member of Congress, went to meet with Bashar al-Assad.
Rep. TG: My mission was one of peace. And I feel strongly that if we truly care about the Syrian people, that if we truly want to do what we can to bring about an end to their suffering, then we have to be willing to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that peace could be achieved.
This is the same reason why I’ve been calling for us to have direct talks with Kim Jong-un, regardless of our opinion of these people, whether they be adversaries or dictators or others. The reality is that there is no possibility of peace unless we’re willing to talk and engage directly.
Ultimately it must be up to the Syrian people to determine their own future, to determine who is the leader of Syria, to determine what kinds of reforms, and changes, and things that they want to see in their future. We should never have gone into Syria to both directly and indirectly try to topple their regime. And we have seen the disastrous consequences of that.
JS: It seems if you look at Iraq as a model that you’re on the money with your analysis. I mean, it does seem clear at this point that there really isn’t a viable path to peace that doesn’t include some form of a negotiated solution with Assad.
At the same time, Assad is also receiving outside help from Russia, from Iran, from Hezbollah, and from a lot of other actors.
Rep. TG: Let me ask you this: Why and when did all of these outside forces come in? They came in as a reaction to the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other countries coming in and flooding Syria with weapons, providing these arms to groups that they called “moderate rebels” which we know and has widely been reported now that these groups were and are affiliated directly with, or under the command of, fighting alongside al Nusra, which is al Qaeda’s branch in Syria.
So, Russia and Hezbollah and Iran, they didn’t come in to Syria just, you know, on a whim. They came in as a consequence and a reaction to this war that we helped fuel.
JS: I acknowledge, you’re 100 percent right in terms of this, the level of military action and actually flying planes and sending in weapons, etc. But the Syrian government has had a long relationship with Russia where it’s essentially been a sort of client. And I agree with you that a lot of these other powers in the region jumped in as soon as the United States started ratcheting up its attempts to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. What do you say to reports, including from I think pretty credible journalists on the ground that don’t, you know, that aren’t sort of mouthpieces for the corporate media, that have a sense that the United States in some of its actions seems to be supporting Assad rather than trying to overthrow him and that at other times the exact opposite is true?
Rep. TG: I think your point is that our policy in Syria has been counterproductive in the sense that on the one hand we’re saying that, you know, we’re going into Syria because we want to defeat ISIS and al Qaeda and these terrorist groups who do pose a threat to United States and the American people, which I actually agree with and support this very specific action to take out those threats.
But, on the other hand, our policy made it so that we were both directly and indirectly arming militants in Syria who were fighting alongside and under the command of al Qaeda. So, in that sense, yes — in our policy we were both, so to speak, trying to put out the fire while also pouring fuel in growing the fire and worsening the problem.
JS: As I followed your political career in Congress, I’ve noticed that the most passionate denouncers of you are Hillary Clinton Democrats, rather than any other political faction, they seem to really loathe what you stand for.
Rep. TG: This points to why people in this country are so frustrated and fed up with politics, why we see lower and lower voter turnout, why we see people being less and less engaged in the process. Because whether it is within the Democratic Party, or if it’s partisanship between Democrats and Republicans, seeing these kind of cheap attacks rather than solid substantive debates on issues is something that they’re not interested in. It’s not productive and it actually undermines the very important work that we’re trying to do here.
JS: When Donna Brazile’s book came out and she clearly wrote that there was rigging going on there, that the Clinton people were in fact messing with parts of the internal process by having this sort of quid pro quo where, in return for kind of bailing out parts of the DNC, the Clinton people got to control quite a bit of the of the DNC operation even before she had secured the nomination and you were one of the more visible and well-known supporters of Bernie Sanders.
Do you believe that the process was rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton? I mean do you think Bernie Sanders was robbed there and that the Clintons played dirty or is Donna Brazile off-base?
TG: No, I mean it’s clear both from what Donna Brazile was talking about, as well as other things that were happening, that it was rigged. And the coins were in and the decision had been made about who was the preferred candidate from the DNC. And it was not Bernie Sanders.
So, you know, again this points to the problem, the lack of faith, trust and confidence that people have, not only within the DNC itself but within politics in general. So, when people think, “Oh, you know, my vote doesn’t actually matter anyway because the decision’s already been made by a few people and in a dark smoky room in Washington,” you know, what happened really only added to that, which is a threat to our democracy.
JS: Do you think Bernie Sanders would’ve beat Trump?
TG: I do, actually. I do. Because I think that, you know, Bernie Sanders — I traveled with him on the trail through quite a significant chunk of time there in 2016, and we visited, you know, big cities on the coasts, in the Midwest, we visited small towns, many different parts of America where I saw the diverse groups of people, huge crowds of people who came out to hear him and who came out to support him. And they were not people who, you know, fit into one single demographic, easy demographic. They were not people who, all of them, who are maybe are traditional Democratic voters. There’s a very diverse group of people who are actually interested in someone that they could trust, someone who would be a champion for them, who would listen to their challenges and who would fight for them. And I think that they saw that in Bernie Sanders. He was someone who was able to kind of crossover and get that appeal from people — Democrats, independents and some Republicans.
JS: If you watch MSNBC or you listen to leading Democrats or even Hillary Clinton herself, one would think that the only factor, the only real factor in the 2016 election was Russian interference in the elections. And I’m wondering how much weight you would give to what we know about Russia’s involvement in our electoral process in 2016 versus other factors like Hillary Clinton’s platform or her record or other factors.
Rep. TG: I don’t give much weight to it at all. And I think it ignores the voices of the American people who ultimately decided this election, you know. There were very real issues that people had, very real problems, very real challenges that they felt weren’t being addressed or weren’t being heard. There were a whole host of things that I think the Democratic Party would do well to pay attention to try to understand why so many people stayed at home and why too many Democrats ended up actually vacating the Democratic Party and voting for Trump.
Until the Democratic Party really takes the time to be introspective, to go out and listen to the people of this country, not just Democrats but listen to the people of this country in every part of the country, until the Democratic Party actually does that then they’re going to continue to lose the trust and the confidence of the people.
JS: You know, just because you mentioned that, the only person that I think that some of the Hillary Clinton Democrats hate more than Bernie Sanders is Jill Stein, who was the Green Party candidate. Do you believe that Jill Stein should have any sense of guilt for Trump or that that she is responsible in any way for Hillary Clinton’s loss?
Rep. TG: I don’t. You know what I do believe in? Our democracy. I believe in our democracy and strengthening that democracy by making it easier and more accessible for people to exercise their right to vote, by encouraging more engagement, by having substantive debate on the issues and by actually listening to the needs of the American people. The more strong and robust that debate and engagement is, the stronger our country will be.
JS: This amendment that you tried to get passed regarding the FISA authorization — for people that haven’t been following this it’s the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And this is the main mechanism that the NSA and other U.S. intelligence entities use to conduct surveillance on foreign targets overseas. But as you, and Justin Amash, who is a Republican by the way, pointed out in introducing your amendment, as it currently is written, Americans’ communications can be collected with no warrant and they can also be used in criminal prosecutions that have nothing to do with foreign intelligence collection. What happened to your amendment?
Rep. TG: Unfortunately, even though we received 183 votes in support, it wasn’t enough to cross the finish line and this was largely because of misinformation that was being put out by opponents of the resolution — opponents of reform of the intelligence agencies and Section 702. I think that caused some to vote against the amendment.
You know, it’s the fear tactics and misinformation campaign that we have seen far too often, especially after 9/11 that’s been used to pass things like the Patriot Act, that’s been used to allow this Section 702 reauthorization to occur without serious reform that really is a disservice to the American people and undermines the constitutional civil liberties that we were seeking to protect within our amendment, while also making sure that the Section 702 tools provided focused on foreign targets were maintained.
JS: Lest people think that it was just Paul Ryan and the Republicans that campaigned against your amendment, very prominent Democrats, including the most prominent Democrat in the House, Nancy Pelosi, spoke openly and also to members trying to crush your amendment. In fact, she was so good at trying to crush your amendment that Speaker Paul Ryan publicly thanked her for crushing your amendment.
Speaker Paul Ryan: I want to thank the minority leader for coming up and speaking against the Amash amendment and in favor of the underlying bipartisan amendment.
JS: So, this is not just Republicans. You had a bunch of powerful Democrats that also were pushing this line that it’s going to make Americans less safe if the amendment that you and Justin Amash were pushing was to pass.
Rep. TG: This was a disheartening thing to see, but something that unfortunately doesn’t surprise me that we had the establishment and we had the leadership of both parties ceding this issue even though there are very clear constitutional problems with the search and use of incidental collection of Americans’ communications by law enforcement agencies without a warrant.
It was very clear that the amendment that we offered was a compromise amendment that sought to keep the American people safe through the section 702 on foreign targets, while also making sure that those back doors and loopholes that existed were closed so that the civil liberties of Americans was protected.
JS: Last question: Have you ever considered leaving the Democratic Party or switching your affiliation to being Independent?
Rep. TG: I haven’t. You know, I’ve been focusing my efforts on reforming the Democratic Party. You know, I’ve been pretty vocal in calling for open primaries all across the country or primaries or caucuses that have, allowed for same-day registration. So, we can get rid of a lot of the barriers that people saw, especially in 2016, where many people either couldn’t vote or their votes weren’t actually counted and so on. We need to be as open and inclusive as possible.
But also getting rid of the superdelegate program. You know, this program that really is so undemocratic and that it allows a few hundred people to have the power to sway an election over the votes of the population. You know, I think there are some good reforms that the Unity for Reform Commission within the Democratic Party have suggested. In just a few days, the Rules Committee will be voting on some of those reforms. To me, they don’t go quite far enough. But it’s a start. It’s a start.
JS: Well, Tulsi Gabbard, I want to say thank you so much for what you do.
Rep. TG: Thank you. Aloha.
JS: Representative Tulsi Gabbard is a combat vet who deployed to Iraq. She now represents Hawaii in the House of Representatives.
JS: The various investigations into the Trump campaign’s alleged relationship or collusion with Russia and Russians continue to move forward. Following the release of Michael Wolff’s much-hyped book on Trump, which contained an insane amount of blabbing by Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart chief and Trump consigliore has become a popular man in Washington. Well, at least popular with investigators.
Bannon appeared before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. We also learned this week that Bannon has received a subpoena to testify in front of the grand jury hearing evidence in the Mueller investigation. It was reportedly the first subpoena that Mueller has issued to a member of Trump’s inner circle.
Bannon’s in an interesting position. He was a major player in Trump’s victory, and, at least for the time being, seemed to be one of the primary drivers of Trump’s policies and executive orders in the early stages of this administration.
But Trump has now denounced him as “Sloppy Steve,” despite Bannon’s attempts to kiss Trump’s ass after the Wolff book dropped. Bannon has also lost his major financial backers, the Mercers, and he’s out at Breitbart News. All of that could add more spice to Bannon’s conversations with investigators.
When the Wolff book came out, one of the most covered comments made by Bannon involved that now-infamous June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, Jr., among others. Bannon was quoted as saying that these senior Trump campaign officials, “Thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor with no lawyers.”
Bannon allegedly continued saying, “Even if you thought this was not treasonous or unpatriotic or bad shit, and I happen to think that it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
But there are other comments attributed to Bannon in that book that have not gotten quite the same attention, though they may prove to be of much greater importance to the Mueller investigation, and those comments deal with alleged money laundering and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
Here’s what Bannon allegedly told Wolff, “This is all about money laundering. Their path to fuck Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner.” Bannon said it was “as plain as a hair on your face.” Bannon suggested that the laundering was “sloppy” and that the FBI will find it “easily,” adding that quote, “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner stuff.”
Meanwhile, Senator Diane Feinstein last week leaked the transcript of the testimony of Glenn Simpson, the head of GPS Fusion. That’s the firm initially hired by a Republican opponent of Trump to do opposition research, before it was hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Interestingly, Clinton’s people tried to suggest that they had not paid for the work that was done by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, which of course was not true. They did pay for it. Anyway, Steele was the guy who wrote up the series of reports that came to be known as the Steele dossier.
They’re essentially raw intelligence reports of the type spies file all the time to their agencies. Except in this case, they were produced for Hillary Clinton. The dossier contains a number of explosive allegations about Trump and it’s often referenced by Democrats to bolster their case that Trump is essentially a Russian Manchurian Candidate. And Republicans and Trump supporters, they use the dossier to suggest that the Russian investigation was all a plot cooked up by Hillary Clinton and that fake dossier.
To break all of this down, I’m joined now by two people: John Sipher is a former CIA officer. He spent 28 years at the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and has extensive experience in Russia, and also in counter-espionage against spies for Russia, like former FBI agent Robert Hanssen.
And, I’m joined by my friend Marcy Wheeler who is perhaps the most dogged investigative researcher I know. Her excellent news site is emptywheel.net.
John, Marcy, welcome to Intercepted.
John Sipher: Thank you, glad to be here.
Marcy Wheeler: Always good to be on.
Jeremy Scahill: Marcy, you and John both have said that in general you think that there’s quite a bit of credence that should be paid to the Steele dossier. What is it, Marcy, that convinces you that, in the bigger picture, the thrust of what Steele is reporting is true?
MW: The thrust of what Steele reported is that the Russians basically had developed compromising information on Trump, also on Hillary Clinton, and that they were manipulating that to support Trump in the election. And I think that is true, but as I read the dossier, there’s been actually nothing in the dossier that has matched known reality. And on the hack and leak, the dossier particularly weak.
There was a meeting on June 9, 2016 where:
Suzanne Malveaux: Donald Trump, Jr. was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton, before agreeing to meet with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin at Trump Tower on June 9, two weeks before his father became the Republican nominee.
MW: And Don Jr., and Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner thought that they were going to get dirt, and we now know that they had been offered dirt in the form of e-mails in exchange for a meeting with Putin, in exchange for some policy considerations.
So, I think that maps out clearly that the Russians offered the Trump camp dirt in the form of e-mails before it happened, and then it happened, and we’ve seen Trump try and make moves towards policy considerations that are the kinds of things we know the Russians wanted on the front side.
So, I have no doubt that, that happened, that there was some conversation back and forth. Will it rise to the level that Mueller will, you know, indict Jared Kushner? I think it probably will, but I don’t — I haven’t seen all the evidence he has.
But that’s a separate question from the Steele dossier, and one of it one of the most interesting things about the Steele dossier, in my opinion, is that the company that did it, Fusion GPS, also was working with two of the attendees at that June 9th meeting. And so, the Republicans are trying to discredit the entire Mueller investigation by saying, you know, “This dossier was just some Russian junk, and look Fusion was doing work with those who were trying to get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions.”
And so that’s where we’re at now, is that the dossier has become the means that the Republicans are using to discredit what is otherwise an obviously meritorious investigation.
JS: John, you’ve certainly been around espionage. I mean, let’s say that every single thing that is alleged in the in the Steele dossier is true. Is this completely out of sync with what the U.S. and other countries, Israel, around the world do on a regular basis or is this something uniquely bad that Russia has done?
John Sipher: Russian active measures — the one thing that is different about Russia than a lot of intelligence services is this idea of subversion and of political guerrilla warfare, psychological warfare, is central to what they do. Throughout the Cold War, this was very important, they would set propaganda, they would do it oftentimes by going to India and putting articles in newspapers and then using agents around the world to try to move that story up through the media food chain until it got into the West and hopefully into U.S. papers. And there were stories about the United States, about the Pentagon creating the AIDS virus, about, supposed assassination attempts against leaders in Africa and Asia. In 1979, an early sort of al Qaeda group took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca and it was very troubling obviously to the Islamic world, and the Russians put out a story that the U.S. military was behind that which led to riots around the world to include an attack on our embassy in Pakistan, in Islamabad, which they burned to the ground and killed a bunch of Americans.
And so, there’s no shortage of information about the Russians doing this type of thing to include, in the lead-up to 2016, in almost every European country they were doing the same thing with propaganda and using intelligence assets to try to, you know, change the situation on the ground.
So, what’s different is not that other countries might be interested or might do some things, It’s that Russia’s primary foreign policy goal is to do damage to the United States, to hurt the United States’ image abroad and its connection between the U.S. and its allies. And so, you had a hostile power attacking our system and so I think it needs to be taken seriously. The question is: Do others do it?
Maybe. But what happened here is something we need to take seriously because we have the evidence to show what they did against us.
JS: Well, I agree on that last part, I, 100 percent agree with you that we need to take this very seriously, and I think we all have a right to know the extent to which Russia did seek to interfere and potentially influence the course of our election.
I mean look, John, the agency that you worked for: ’53, the overthrow of Mosaddegh, ’54 the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz —
John Sipher: Yeah, that’s true.
JS: The financing of the contras in Nicaragua. I mean Trump called, reportedly called Haiti a shithole country.
PAIPH, the movement for the advancement of the Haitian people, was essentially a CIA front in Haiti that was trying to stop the election of, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And don’t want to go down this list, but sort of — the point I’m making on one side is the point you’re making about Russia. I’m saying I could make that same historical case about the United States. So, what I’m trying to get to is —
John Sipher: The United States is not an innocent party over our history: We made a lot of mistakes, don’t get me wrong. However, what happened this time was different in the sense that those efforts to push propaganda in the past had an effect, but this time there’s a few things I think that made it different.
One is the internet and social media allowed them to weaponize information in a way that was much more successful than the past. Algorithms allowed them to target audiences and then, you know, we often did the rest. You know, the U.S. is still considered the main enemy of Russia. He [Putin] obviously hated Mrs. Clinton for her activities in 2012. He took the Panama Papers information, I think, personally and thought that that was an attack on him. So, his level of willing to take risk and to attack us was higher than it might have been in the past.
I think our dysfunction was probably one of the main things that made this successful. You know, we were dry tender for the match that the Russians threw into our system.
MW: I don’t think we Russia is unique for doing this. Israel obviously has done very similar things, both dumping a ton of money overtly into our politics, but also with the social media side. And also the Saudis, and the Saudis are very good at propagating disinformation, as are the Russians. The difference there is that they’re our friends.
But I think it’s actually really interesting, because if you look at where Jared Kushner has been going from a foreign policy perspective, it is a plan, I joke about his “peace plan,” it’s a plan that really is implementing Israeli, Saudi, and to some extent, Russian interests — not the U.S. interests. And I think too little attention has been paid to the degree to which the Saudis and the Israelis have been using the same tactics against the Trump people.
But the other thing to go back to the tinder comment, John’s comment. I think one of the things we have paid far too little attention to is the degree to which on the electoral front what the Russians did or are alleged to have done really was just, you know, throwing a match on top of the bonfire that is the far-right disinformation campaign that has gone back at least to the 90s.
So, this disinformation is not qualitatively different than what came out of 4chan and what came out of Breitbart. And what came out of 4chan and Breitbart already had much more take up than anything the Russians did.
In my opinion, the single most important fake news story of the election had nothing to do with Russian disinformation, but had to do with Brett Baier saying on November 2nd that Hillary Clinton was going to be indicted for something.
CNN’s Brian Stelter on Brett Baier: This lit up the Internet. The I-word: Indictment. Countless conservative blogs and websites ran with this. Some started fantasizing about Clinton behind bars about serious legal peril for Clinton and for the Foundation.
MW: False news, he retracted it. But that didn’t take it out of the news stream and we know from the studies that have been done after the election that what really resonated with people was still old media, cable news or Breitbart, more so than anything that came off of Facebook. And there was plenty of disinformation that came out of Fox News and still is coming out of Fox News — and that is what I think has poisoned our politics.
And yeah, Russia came in and took advantage of that. But until we fix that poison, until we fixed the Fox/4chan poison, it doesn’t matter what we do against the Russians because that poison is really what’s creating the toxins in this country.
JS: One of the most flagrant documented cases of attempting to change an Obama-era policy while he was still in power by the Trump transition team, according to Michael Flynn’s statement of offense when he pleaded guilty, that a senior member of the presidential transition team directed Flynn to contact officials from foreign governments including Russia to learn where each government stood on a resolution that the Obama administration had planned to abstain from at the U.N. Security Council that would have either delayed or defeated a resolution condemning Israeli position in Palestine. And there’s been attention, they say, “Oh well, Flynn was talking to the Russian ambassador.” But it really is seldom mentioned: what were they talking about? They were talking about advocating a policy on behalf of the government of Israel.
Why, John, do you think there hasn’t been more attention paid to what seems to be pretty clear attempt to subvert the current President of the United States on behalf of Israel, not Russia in this case?
John Sipher: What’s interesting here is the fact that they thought the Russians were the right people to be going to. So that to me fits into that sort of narrative of collusion, of working with the Russians. How would they develop a relationship, such with the Russians, that they thought before they were even in power, they could go to them on such tactical issues like this to get their help?
For a lot of this stuff we get caught up in the weeds of what’s happening here and we don’t go back and ask sort of some of the fundamental questions. Like, why did a campaign running for president in 2015 and 2016 think that they needed to engage with Russia?
I don’t know that any other campaign of any other person was dealing with Russia. When they were asked, they just say, “Oh it’s perfectly natural.” And then people sort of let them get away with it.
I don’t think it’s perfectly natural. I don’t understand why they would do it and then when they’re asked about it, they’ve lied about it.
JS: Well, that’s the thing. Even if there’s some level on which this is either legally defensible or they make an argument that there is precedent and they start picking out examples from, you know, various incoming administrations.
My favorite would be actually the Reagan administration undermining Jimmy Carter prior to Reagan’s defeat of Carter. But it’s the lying about it — I mean that to me is what’s incredible. If they really truly believe that there was nothing wrong with this, why on earth are they just systematically lying about every single communication they had with Russia?
John Sipher: Yeah, what is the narrative of innocence. If it’s normal, just explain to us why it’s normal and conceivably we’ll understand.
JS: The point I’m getting at here is: Yes, we should examine what these guys were doing with Kislyak, and all of these other Russians, and Manafort, and Carter Page, and all of the stuff that we’re all talking about regularly. But I am surprised that the focus is that Flynn was talking to the Russian government rather than who he was doing it apparently on behalf of, which is the Israeli government.
MW: I mean one of Trump’s most remarkable foreign policy decisions was naming Jerusalem the capital, right?
DJT: I’ve judged this course of action to be in the best interests of the United States of America and the pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
MW: That’s stunning. Shocking. And yet that hasn’t been traced back to the agreements that Kushner has been making with the Saudis, with the Israelis, and add the Emirates in there, because we know that there were some funny meetings with them.
I absolutely agree there is a lot of smoke and a good deal of fire with regards to the Russian discussions. But I also think that one way to understand what is going on is to take a look at, again, what I call Jared’s peace plan. And he thinks, this 30-some-year-old kid who can’t even fill out a form adequately, he thinks he’s going to remap the Middle East. And the mapping that he is doing is fairly breathtaking and involves far more players than Russia. Russia, you need to get involved to isolate Iran and again we know that Trump is trying to reverse Obama’s policy on Iran. But that to me I think is an important way to at least consider this issue. Because I do think that Trump was making deals. And Kushner has said so. He was like, “I had meetings with people from all these other countries.” I think to understand what Trump is up to we need to not focus exclusively on the Russian thing.
John Sipher: I think that’s correct.
JS: You know, John, in reading the various reports from Christopher Steele, one of the things that kind of pops up a number of times is this idea that that Trump’s people were not so concerned about the increasing reporting on the campaign’s connections and communications with Russia because they viewed it as kind of a convenient bogeyman to distract investigators or the media from much more nefarious relationships like with China, where there were large kickbacks and bribes. So, unlike in the case of Russia.
What’s your assessment of that, John?
John Sipher: I don’t want to oversell the dossier, because it’s just a series of, sort of, intel reports, and we don’t know who the sources are, and we don’t know a lot of information around it. But it does provide sort of a narrative of collusion around the 2016 elections and it gives us a narrative around it.
You know, we focus so much on the sort of Russia part here that we haven’t paid attention to those other things. The point that I want to make as I look at this dossier is not so much of those of us in the outside in the private world now looking at it, and trying to look at each one of these pieces of information and see if we can run it to ground; it’s that it gives professional investigators, for the first time, a series of things to grab onto to test, to use the tools that only they have in terms of travel records and telephone collection and working with foreign partners to pull down information. So that’s the kind of thing, exactly, that people like the Mueller investigation may be looking at that we’re not paying attention to.
JS: I mean Marcy, could it be the case that it when Mueller comes back, there is just like some bombshell involving evidence of Chinese collusion with Trump’s campaign?
MW: Or Israeli or Saudi? You know, I don’t know whether that —
JS: I’ll put money on it that neither Saudi nor Israel is included in any kind of condemnation of Trump or indictment of Trump.
MW: Right. I mean a. at this point we know there are far more important threads to check: the June 9th meeting. And I would bet a lot of money that the public story about the June 9th meeting we have currently is actually a limited hangout, that what happened is far more damaging than what we know publicly so far. So, we don’t need the Steele dossier any more.
JS: I want to read part of the op-ed that Glenn Simpson published in The New York Times. Now, of course, Dianne Feinstein did release the transcript of his congressional testimony much to, you know, the outrage of Senator Chuck Grassley and other Republicans saying that in doing this the Democratic senator had undermined the investigation. But Simpson, in his own op-ed in the New York Times wrote the following: “We suggested that investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip. Reportedly ours are the only bank records that the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed” — meaning Fusion GPS’ bank records.
What about this issue of why Congress hasn’t seemingly looked into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others funding Trump’s businesses?
MW: Well, remember, one of the things the Simpson transcript made clear is that there was the Republican project first, that was funded by Peter Singer and that actually focused on Trump’s mob ties, and we haven’t gotten that report. And I would very much love to see that report.
And then as his, according to his description, there was a bunch of the work that he and his researchers did and I think they got into more of those financial ties. That Simpson’s expertise as well — follow the money guy, right? So, I think to some degree he’s saying that even he did research that got into a lot more of Trump’s corruption. Deutsche Bank clearly gets you right to Kushner and also to Trump. And some of what we know happened with Deutsche Bank happened literally right before the election, so it wouldn’t be in the dossier in any case.
I think that Richard Burr is conducting at least a competent investigation, but remember, he was an adviser to Trump during the period when — I mean the only state that Russian tampering may have affected is North Carolina. The only state that we know that the actual tampering with vote tallying may have affected is North Carolina, where Richard Burr was re-elected last year. He was on the advisory committee to Trump in that period, Devin Nunes’s transition official. So, both of these intelligence investigations are being run by people who, at one point or another, were part of the Trump camp.
I have been told that there are a bunch of SARs, suspicious activity reports at Treasury that would implicate some of these questions and that they’re not getting to Congress. You know, the Democrats in, on the House Intelligence Committee are saying, “Let’s ask for these financial related records and Nunes refuses to bring them in.”
So, I think both of those investigations are scoped specifically to avoid any financial questions. And that’s what Trump has sort of said is his line in the sand: You can’t go after my businesses.
The Manafort prosecution is interesting because it makes a very clear he is a pretty expansive money launderer. You know, it just sort of seems like Mueller’s playing with him until such case as he dumps the June 9th meeting and other things on him.
But the money laundering necessarily gets you to why the Russians have Trump by the nuts. Right? Because his entire brand and Kushner’s family brand, in fact, both collapse if you take out their ability to money launder not just for the Russians but for the Chinese and for everyone else.
JS: John, isn’t the case though, I mean based on what we’ve seen from not just the past year but also Trump’s history, even if the congressional investigations do find clear evidence that the Russians had compromising information on Trump, maybe they had this you know video of the golden showers that everyone keeps talking about, that Trump just says, “fake news” or “that’s a doctored video” or “that’s not really me.”
I mean reality doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
John Sipher: As an American I’m appalled by it and it does seem that way. You know, we’ve seen a pattern of behavior here and financial crimes and money laundering, potential collusion and conspiracy around the dossier we’re talking about. You know, sexual assault and patterns of lying and attacking all of those people who could hold you accountable to make us worried on a number of fronts.
However it’s the Mueller investigation that could come up with, you know, specific criminal charges. And in the past he’s been able to get away politically because he has a strong base and he has Republicans supporting him. And in the past, when he was charged in his previous businesses, those were civil cases and he often could do deals to get out of them. I don’t know, but my hope is that, serious investigators in a serious investigation that come up with criminal charges are not the same kind of thing that he can just sort of slide out of. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m being too optimistic there.
But, you know, that if he can slide from serious criminal charges then we’re in a world of hurt.
JS: That is one of the possible outcomes and it’s not so wild of a potential outcome. There is a lot of information that has been revealed to the American public that shows dubious activity and activity that people don’t believe that their leaders should be engaging in, but it doesn’t rise to the level of criminal activity, particularly by Trump himself.
John Sipher: You know, I worked with the FBI very closely in a number of espionage investigations, including the Hanssen arrest, very closely. And in that, it was fascinating to me because we collected information that we could have given to any, you know, breathing human being and showed it to them and they would have said, “Oh my God, this is espionage, this man’s a spy.”
But when we went to the Justice Department they were like, “well you know this might be tough in court, a lawyer could do this and the rules of evidence.” And they didn’t want to take the case.
Now in the case of Hanssen, we were able to then, you know, step back and catch him in the act and arrest him.
What I worry about what’s happening here is, you know, as an intelligence professional, some of the stuff I see around that June 9th meeting and over the summer could very well be espionage or conspiracy related. But making the case to a jury or to a trial in counterintelligence is really difficult. If you don’t have the smoking gun and you can’t produce it given the rules of evidence, I think I think it’s very hard to make a case like that.
So, I agree with you. What’s going to probably happen is we’re going to get a mass of really ugly things that you should pay a serious political price for, but it’s going to not rise to the level of a specific crime and then we’re in the same place where we are now.
MW: I want attention. I mean, I’ve talked about what I think the intelligence committees are doing. On Monday, I wrote a piece where I pointed out that Nunes not only is not letting the Democrats investigate stuff that that should be investigated, and Nunes — he’s the leading edge of what I call the law fare against the dossier, to turn the investigation into the dossier, and then politicize it as a way to discredit the investigation.
But it appears that in the last couple of weeks he has forced the FBI to share, at least their interviews, not their grand jury materials. The letter that Nunes wrote appears to mean he wants anything that would impact the Russian tampering with the election. If that’s the case, then Nunes basically has seen half of what’s in Mueller’s hand and has done it in such a way that anybody who might go in and cooperate with Mueller is then going to be subject to whatever the Republicans want to do against this person.
So that I think isn’t getting enough attention, the degree to which Nunes is going way overboard at trying to undercut this investigation. That said, I think, you have two cooperators. You have Papadopoulos who was on the front end of getting the e-mail offer. You’ve got Flynn who I think was on the back end of the quid pro quo. We will see whether Mueller has other things in his pocket that will surprise people.
Even from what has been publicly reported about the June 9 meeting, again I say that it’s pretty clear what we know is a limited hangout. If I know that, then I assume Mueller’s people know that and have more reasons to believe that to be true.
JS: Just to define the terms Marcy’s using, when you talk about a limited hangout, you’re saying like you admit to one thing that appears to be bad for you, but you’re doing it in the service of covering up a much greater malicious act or bad act on your part?
MW: I think that’s why there’s so much focus right now on whether Trump is going to sit for an interview with Mueller. And there’s a lot of historic — I mean it will actually impose a significant political cost if Mueller does that, if Nunes hasn’t already undermined the investigation. Because, you know, George Bush sat for an interview in the CIA leak case. Dick Cheney had what counted as a grand jury appearance for it, and that was, the last similar case like this. For a president refuse is pretty significant.
JS: We’re going to leave it there. John Sipher, thank you very much for joining us on Intercepted.
John Sipher: My pleasure.
JS: Marcy Wheeler, thank you again for being with us on Intercepted.
MW: Thanks as always, Jeremy.
JS: Marcy Wheeler runs the news site emptywheel.net. John Sipher spent 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.
Marxist Scholar Professor David Harvey Talks about the Crimes of Capitalism, Alienation, and Debt Peonage in the Age of Trump
JS: For the past year, we’ve all experienced an intense sort of political or news vertigo. And I believe it’s making us dumber by the day. Of course, part of this is due to the fact that Donald Trump is president and he constantly scoops the story of the latest outrage about himself by performing yet another outrage just as we start discussing the previous one. It’s exhausting and brain melting.
But this is also because major media organizations have all chosen to constantly chase the rabbit. In a way, all of us in media are complicit. When we’re constantly on the run, it’s very difficult to take stock of where we are and where we’ve been. To take a good look at the big picture becomes a luxury that none of us seem able to afford.
And this is going to have serious consequences. Our brains are actually being altered. The way we process news and information, our ideas about what constitutes resistance and what constitutes tyranny. In general, we live in a society that doesn’t study its own history — I mean its unvarnished history. And often current events are analyzed in a vacuum that almost never includes the context or history necessary to understand what’s new, what’s old, and how we got to where we are. We’ve become detached from our own reality and our own work.
Having said all of this, I thought it would be fascinating to talk to David Harvey about the Trump moment. He is one of the leading Marxist thinkers in the world and an authority on Marx’s “Das Kapital,” which turned 150 years old late last year. Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the City University of New York and he was one of the pioneers of the discipline of modern geography.
David Harvey has a new book out. It’s called “Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic reason.”
JS: David Harvey, welcome to Intercepted.
David Harvey: Thank you.
JS: First, I’m curious having now read your book: How did we get Trump?
DH: If I had to simplify it would be one would be one word: alienation. That you have a population that’s increasingly alienated. It’s alienated from its work process, because there are not very meaningful jobs around. It’s been promised kind of a cornucopia of consumerism and they find a lot of products that don’t really work, they find themselves having to renew their phone every two years. You find them having to live a lifestyle which is, you know, they’re disillusioned. And of course they’re disillusioned with the political process; they realize that it’s big money that buys it. They’re disillusioned in lots of ways. And it’s not only in this country. Alienated populations don’t necessarily behave in kind of a way that would probably make sense to somebody like me. They don’t go to the left, for example, they just kind of say: Give me something that looks different. And I think when Trump came along and said, “I’m going to be your voice,” he actually, completely trumped — if I can use that term — Hillary Clinton. And I think the same thing you will see over the Brexit vote in Britain, where the metropolitan areas which are doing OK, but you’ll find alienated populations in those small towns where the economic basis of life has just disappeared. So, you get this kind of real rash of neo-fascist, populist, right-wing kind of people who are coming along and saying, “Listen to me, listen to me, I have a different answer to all of these kinds of questions.” And I think that that sort of thing is going on, not only in this country, but elsewhere.
JS: Do you do you believe that Trump has any ideology based on the actions that he’s taken officially as president or the ideas that he floats when he speaks or tweets?
DH: I think he has some ideas, whether it adds up to an ideology or not. For instance, one of his ideas is to dismantle everything that Obama did. That’s almost instinctual on his part. So, he has ideas.
An ideology? I don’t think he has a clear ideology. But he certainly has a persona who is — it’s about me, me, me, and the narcissism is obvious. But I think this is a classic sort of situation of populist leaders.
JS: I mean, Trump’s brand of what, you know, a lot of observers call his populism. But Trump has multiple mantras that he sort of repeats and his favorite when he talks about his successes is the stock market keeps breaking records, people’s 401ks are just going through the roof. He never mentions that the vast majority of workers in this country actually have no pension and are not participating in 401k plans.
DJT: The stock market is hitting an all-time, high record, for another, and think of this, 86 times since Election Day. And then you look at all of the money that you folks are making. Oh, I wish I could take 10 or 15 percent. But I think you’re not going to do that right, you’re not going to do that? But it’s getting better and better, your pensions are getting bigger and bigger —
JS: What’s going on right now on Wall Street and with the stock market? I mean clearly it is breaking records. Trump is totally right. The Dow is above 25,000. I mean, it’s nuts if you think about it. What’s happening on Wall Street?
DH: I think it’s just a matter of that, since the problems of 2007 and 2008, what we’ve seen is essentially central banks adding to the money supply. And the money has to go somewhere. And it mainly goes into the stock market and, of course, that money goes into the pockets of the top one percent. So actually if you look at the indices of inequality since 2007, 2008, they’ve increased markedly, not only in the United States but worldwide.
And so, in a sense, what you’ve done is you’ve run into a difficulty in 2007, 2008, and you answered it by throwing money at it, which has been great for the stock market and all rest of it. But as we know, the incomes of ordinary people have not improved at all, peoples’ situation hasn’t, and hardly any of the benefits of the small recoveries been since 2007, 2008 have gone to anybody other than the top one percent. That’s the bondholders solution to the economic problem. And the last tax cut was really bondholders’ charter.
So this has been the case in the United States that in fact the bondholders are creating an economy, which is good for the bondholders.
JS: If someone were to arrive here from a different universe and you were asked the question, “What is the wages that workers are paid or the money that exists in the stock market or the money that changes hands from ‘we the people’ to companies like Amazon, what’s it based on?”
DH: Well, the dollar should be worth whatever it will buy which is the commodities and so on that people want. And we want useful commodities. And the trouble with that is that capitalism is very good at making commodities that don’t work, or break down, or only last two years. I mean, I often use this example: I’m using my grandmother’s knives and forks. If capital made things that lasted 100 years, what would it do? Instead it makes computers that actually don’t function if they’re more than about three or four years old.
One would like to think that capital was a rational system, but it’s not. It’s irrational, it introduces these irrationalities because that’s the only way it can reproduce itself. And I think, again, people are beginning to see that this is not exactly the good life that they thought they might have at some point down the line, particularly for the mass of the population now, who are indebted, and who have to pay off that debt — whether it be credit card debt, or mortgage debt, or consumer debt, or — this is this is the world we’re living in. We’re living in a world of debt peonage, in which must of the population is actually — their future is foreclosed by the way in which the capital is wrapped around them. This kind of thing about the good life is: Borrow money and then everything will be OK.
JS: What about the role of Amazon, Google, Facebook in our lives? I mean is this something new in the evolution or devolution of capitalism?
DH: I don’t think it’s new. I just — look at this historically: We went through this from the 1970s onwards, with what we call deindustrialization, the loss of industrial jobs and the loss of manufacturing jobs. And the result was the unions which were very strong — everything gets lost.
So, the deindustrialization of the manufacturing sector was one big thing. Now we’re seeing the same thing happening in retail and marketing. We’re seeing it through Wal-Mart, we’re seeing it through Amazon, we’re seeing it through online purchasing. And we’re going to see happening in the retail sector the same thing that happened in the manufacturing sector.
And so, then, the question is what kind of jobs are going to be anywhere? And those places that do have the jobs are going to do what Amazon does, which is to say, “Well, you’re not really doing anything significant. You’re just doing manual work, just packaging things and sending it out. This is a rather meaningless kind of work, this is what I mean about alienating kind of work.
I mean so here we have a real transformation in labor processes which I think is going to have a real big impact upon the American economy. The example of deindustrialization and what happened to industrial communities is now going to hit big consumer centers which rely upon the retail business.
JS: What is your critique or problem with the idea that competition is going to give not only consumers, but nation states, the highest quality product.
DH: First off, I’d like to say: What competition? We’ve got a tremendous amount of monopoly. I look at it in energy, look at pharmaceuticals, look at it everywhere and actually there’s a lot of monopoly around. So, the competition is kind of fake competition in lots of ways.
And, internationally, of course, there is some sort of level of competition going on between different nation states in terms of — but notice what it does. Basically what you’re supposed to do is to create a good business environment. That’s what the state is supposed to do. And the better the business environment, the more capital will go to it. So that means lower taxes — again, the last tax bill was very much about trying to improve the United States as a business environment — so you’ve got to give, actually, money to corporations. And that’s the astonishing thing that corporate capital doesn’t seem to be able to survive these days without subsidies from the public sector.
So, in effect, the public is perpetually supporting large corporations and they’re not really competing. They’re simply using their monopoly power to assemble a great deal of wealth in few hands.
JS: When it comes to electoral politics in the United States, what do you make of the argument that — I mean, first of all, there was a pretty ferocious debate on the left in the United States about the 2016 elections. And I think very significant chunk, even of leftists, ultimately held their noses and voted for Hillary Clinton as a way of sort of voting against Donald Trump. Where do you come down on these questions when it comes to electoral politics?
DH: Well, I think where I come down is to say, “well we’ve got to organize something which is very different and alternative on the left, instead of having, what I call, in a sense, the party of Wall Street governing in both parties.”
The sorts of things that worry me about Trump is what he’s doing with the environment, what he might do with nuclear war —
DJT: North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.
DH: He’s totally irrational about some of those kinds of things. So, yes, I would rather have Hillary in, but I don’t want to be in a situation in which I say the only answer to somebody like Trump is Hillary, because that seems to me is going back into exactly all those problems that we hit with the first Clinton administration which was the beginning of this process of the selling out of the U.S. government to the bondholders and Wall Street. So, we’ve got to find something which is a non-Wall Street kind of party. And we’ve got to have a real, solid, good left movement, which you began to see elements of that crystallizing around Bernie Sanders and the like. But we need to go further than that, I think.
JS: Bernie Sanders identifies himself as a Democratic Socialist and yet his voting record indicates that he supported regime change in Iraq, he said he would continue the drone assassination program as it existed under Obama.
Senator Bernie Sanders: Drone is a weapon. When it works badly, it is terrible and it its counterproductive. When you blow a facility or a building which kills women and children, you know what, not only doesn’t do — it’s terrible.
Chuck Todd: But you’re comfortable with the idea of using drones if you think you’ve isolated an important terrorist.
BS: Yes.
JS: What form of socialist would you describe Bernie Sanders as? I mean, is he a Marxist in your view?
DH: No, no, he’s not a Marxist at all. He’s, as you say, kind of a Social Democrat. But Social Democrats have a rather long history of being rather warlike about all kinds of things and believing in things like military humanism and those sorts of issues. The history of social democracy is rather a bit tainted by all of that. And so, I think that there has to be a genuinely left socialist movement.
And I think that Sanders, the more he got into sort of talking to the millennials, I think his rhetoric began to shift well away from social democracy to a more socialist line. So, talking about a single-payer system and talking about free access to higher education.
JS: What’s your assessment of the current state of the Democratic Party?
DH: I mean, somebody like Chuck Schumer, for example. He’s raised more money off Wall Street than almost anybody else in Congress. So, I mean, while rhetorically he can say some certain things, I think that he’s very much part of that. Nancy Pelosi also.
Representative Nancy Pelosi: Well, I thank you for your question. But I have to say, we’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is.
DH: I think the leadership in the power structure within the Democratic Party is antagonistic somewhat to a kind of real socialist push. And my nervousness is that they will simply have to say,
“Well, they are the alternative to the crazy man Trump.” And they will get into power. But that’s not going to make any real difference. It’s going to actually exacerbate the problems as I see it.
And I don’t see them taking on the kind of question of, say, student debt and I don’t see them taking on single-payer and those kind of questions at all.
JS: The term neoliberal is thrown around so much these days by people that I think have literally no clue what neoliberal economic policy is or neoliberalism. Give people a definition: What does neoliberalism mean?
DH: I took it to be a political project, which originated in the 1970s with the Business Roundtable, and The Rockefellers, and everybody else, which is to reorganize the economy in such a way as to restore power to an ailing capitalist class. The capitalist class was in difficulties in the late 1960s, early 1970s, because the worker movement was rather strong, there were lot of community activists, the environmental, there were all of these reform things coming through, the formation of the EPA and all those kinds of things. So they decided, through the Business Roundtable, that they were going to really try to recuperate and accumulate as much economic power as they could amongst themselves.
And that had a number of elements to it. For example, if you were faced with a situation of bailing out the people or bailing out the banks, you would bail out the banks and let the people struggle. You would always, say if there’s a conflict between capital and the well-being of the people, you choose capital. That was the simple form of the project.
Now some people say it’s just an idea about the free market. Well, yeah, a free market to some, personal responsibility, yeah. A redefinition of citizenship such that a good citizen is not a needy citizen. So, any citizen who’s needy is a bad person. Social services get set up to punish people as opposed to really assist them and help them.
JS: And what I often think of as one of the most visible aspects of neoliberal economic policy is the notion of austerity measures that are imposed on economies in the global South, but also in the case of Greece, for instance. You see this demand from the creditors that the first thing that has to go, if we were to give you this debt, is your social programs, and the money that you would normally spend on those is going to go toward paying off either the principle or the interest on the money that is being generously lent to you.
DH: Well, it’s the debt peonage again. You organize debt peonage in such a way as to lock people in, and then they have to pay. But, you don’t take the money away from the bondholders. I mean, in the case of Greece, for example, it wasn’t as if anybody went after the French and the German banks who lent all that money to Greece. They kind of basically socialized their debt, turned it into the IMF, and the European Stability Fund, and all the rest of it, and then made the Greeks pay.
Well, actually, if the banks made a bad judgment they should pay. But they didn’t and this is this neoliberal principle at work. And I tend not to like the term austerity, because austerity is used for policies which are administered to the population. Austerity is not for capital.
JS: Right. Right.
DH: Absolutely not for the financial institutions, and it’s not for the top one percent. So austerity is about social programs. And, in fact, the state has been heavily, heavily involved in subsidizing capital. So, the banks never get hurt. This is what the neoliberal order is about.
JS: When you have politicians campaigning in part on this idea that they’re going to reduce the debt or eliminate the debt of the U.S. federal government, what are they really talking about?
DH: Well, this is a sort of a baseball bat which is taken to politics periodically. Remember Dick Cheney saying that “Ronald Reagan taught us that debt doesn’t matter.” Because Reagan went into debt like crazy, mainly on the military side, Bush also, was going into debt.
Then the Republicans turn around when Obama comes in and says, “We got to something about the debt.” And that becomes the excuse to stop any kind of programs going through. So, the question of the debt — and we see now the Republicans are back into power, what do they do? They increase the debt by a half trillion dollars or something like that.
I don’t think there’s a real issue here, what is simply a political excuse to raise the rhetoric about indebtedness and we’ve got to deal with the debt on our children, but then, of course, it’s turned around. And like this last tax bill, nobody cares about it when, in fact they’ve been bleating on about the debt for ages, and ages, before that. But it’s a political tool which you use in this particular way, in a particular historical moment.
JS: Who owns the U.S. debt?
DH: China owns a great deal of it, and actually Russia owns quite a bit. Japan owns quite a bit. And, in fact, there’s a very interesting story about that if you want to know, when in the middle of the crisis when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and AIG were all kind of going dim, the Russians went to the Chinese and said to the Chinese, “Let’s sell all our debt in those institutions and that will crash the U.S. economy.” And it would have done, because, actually, the holders of the debt of those institutions were primarily China and Russia. China refused, for a very simple reason: They didn’t want the U.S. economy to crash because it’s a main consumer market. But if Russia and China decided at that moment to sell all of their holdings in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and AIG, the U.S. economy would have gone down.
JS: What would it look like if we were to radically reorganize U.S. society under a philosophy or an ideology rooted in Marxism? Or that the social good was actually a priority in this country rather than, sort of everyone fend for themselves? What would that mean in a country as big and as populated as the United States?
DH: If I put it sort of crudely: I think the future of the U.S. in so far that it has a radical future, lies more with some sort of what I would call almost non-ideological anarchism. I don’t think that it’s ready for the kind of collective endeavor that would really be required to confront the power of the Federal Reserve and find an alternative. I don’t think it’s ready for thinking about a mass movement of some kind that will actually start to redefine how the economy works.
I think if there’s going to be any real kind of left, it’s going to be a kind of a socialist-anarchist kind of left politics that will remerge, which has, many redeeming features. Coming out of a Marxist history was supposed to be very hostile to anarchism, but I have a great deal of appreciation for the anarchist tradition. And I think there’s an ideological area of overlap that has something which will be distinctive to U.S. history and culture, and I think we have to recognize the significance and importance of that history.
JS: There’s no there’s no plausible path to that short of a complete collapse of the capitalist state in the United States. Am I wrong?
DH: Well, no, I think that one of the things that is going on to some degree on the left is the attempt to redefine forms of governmental power, if you want to call it that, which are alternative to the existing state structures. And, to some degree I see the activism that’s going on at the municipal level as an interesting kind of way to start to explore what those alternative structures might, might look like. Can we create democratic forms of municipal governance for example?
If, so, what kind of institutional structures would work, so that people become involved, become un-alienated, as opposed to alienated entirely from the rather corrupt structures of government that we now have. So, I think there would need to be already in place the capacity of people to organize themselves into alternative structures of collective governance, which are outside of the conventional forms of the state apparatus.
JS: The technology that exists right now in the world is such that the world could easily be destroyed many times over, by single actors in some cases: United States, Russia, China could instantaneously destroy the world.
DH: Right. Right.
JS: The guns and the caliber of weapons that people have in this country are much more fierce than ever before in history. And I’m not even sure that Marx or anyone from that era would have been able to imagine the level of destruction that could be caused by one individual person with these weapons. Does that factor into how you think about the future and the possibilities of rebellion or transformation in society, just the sheer level of destruction that could be wrought by a very small groups of people?
DH: Yeah, I mean —
JS: Do you understand what I’m saying? Because people are obsessed with dystopic novels and everything, but it’s like: This guy who killed all these people in Las Vegas? I mean the amount of firepower that that individual had, not just in his hotel room but also in other properties, I mean, 200 years ago, it would be unthinkable that one person could hold that kind of power in their hand.
DH: I agree, and I think that politics really has to take account of that. I mean there’s no such thing, I mean what happened in the American Revolution couldn’t happen today. What happened in the French Revolution couldn’t happen today.
JS: Right.
DH: I mean the thing that struck me about Ferguson was the sight of those militarized police — I mean, there’s no way, it seems to me, that a political movement could imagine taking to the streets and storming the barricades and getting anywhere. They would simply be mowed down. And so therefore politics has to start to think about a kind of progressive transformation which does not involve confrontation and violence of that sort. Because, quite simply, I think any movement of that sort would lose. And therefore, we have to think of something that is an alternative kind of movement.
The difficulty is that movements which are, say, attempting to construct some kind of alternative will get criminalized. And so, we see the criminalization of environmentalists. We see the criminalization, as we saw in the Dakota [Access] Pipeline, kind of thing, you criminalized people who are engaged in protest. And then of course you have the right to go in and kill them.
This is, if you like, the problem on the left. The left has to think of an alternative strategy and not have dreams of the Russian Revolution or the American Revolution or anything of that kind. Because right now it’s not so much that there’s one person that’s got a finger on a button. I mean if Trump pushes the button, then, we’re not going to be here to talk about anything.
JS: It’s a very big button. Much bigger than your button, let me tell you.
DH: Right. So that’s not what worries me so much. But what worries me is the militarization of social control. And the intense militarization and the super-militarization of it. So that even something like Occupy, which was a fairly innocent kind of affair in some ways, got treated as a criminal organization which had to be smashed. Even something as elemental as that, it seems to me, is that it’s not going to be able to do very much. The closer we get to actually doing something about the real centers of political and economic power in society, I think that we will be treated as criminals.
JS: Something that I’ve said when I’ve had debates with people who say, “Oh, you know, there’s going to be a coup in the United States that the military ultimately is going to take over. Or that they’re going to build these FEMA camps, etc.” And I’ve often argued with people, including from my own world on the left, and said, “The state doesn’t need to do any of that. They don’t need to build the camp to put you in. They’re already winning.”
That’s capitalism in this country: The idea that people think that it requires a finite group of fat, white men, smoking cigars, coming up with a way to lock up all of the dissenters because of their thoughts — that’s not how that kind of a force operates. It’s much more ingrained in every aspect of our life.
DH: Yes, and that’s why I come back to notions of debt peonage. One of the ways in which social control is exercised is to get people so deeply in debt they cannot imagine anything in the future other than simply living in such a way as to pay off their debt.
And if you kind of say what is one of the biggest checks on the radicalism of, say, the millennial generation, it’s the huge student debt that hangs around them. And, I think that cognizant of that, they’re not going to rock the boat. Debt peonage is the order of the day.
JS: For young people listening to this right now, what advice would you give them about how to be better contributors to society and making the world more just. Like what, what should young people read and what ideas should they explore as they kind of go further and further out into the world to make it better?
DH: Two things. First, while being on Snapchat and all the rest of it, try and cultivate a circle of very close friends that you can have real communication with, because there has to be some ground-truthing, as they sometimes say in these words, of what all these abstractions, which you’re getting through the internet, are about.
And I think that by having a group, sitting around a table with none of the devices on, and talking and drinking or whatever, you know. I mean just so that you have a real human closeness and you can talk about a lot of the issues that you’re encountering.
And I would be very much in favor, and I think this has been going on a lot, of forming reading groups: eight, ten people sort of get together and once a week they get together and they talk about: I’m not saying everybody should do “Kapital.” But you have reading groups of that kind so that you can discuss ideas and alternatives.
But I also recognize that when I talk to people who form those reading groups and that they’re doing something significantly different from what goes on in terms of — I’m not against all of the new stuff, I mean, I tend to have a slightly Luddite view of some of this, I’m more in favor of a lot of it — but there has to be something else going on as well. And that’s something else, it’s something which has to be actively constructed. Not in opposition to, but as a companion to what is going on around them in the internet.
JS: What a great note to end on. Professor David Harvey, thank you very much for joining us on Intercepted.
DH: Well, thank you for this opportunity. It’s been great. Thank you.
JS: David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the City University of New York and author of many books. His latest is “Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason.”
JS: And that does it for this week’s show. If you’re not yet a sustaining member of Intercepted, log onto theintercept.com/join. Sam Sabzehzar is our honorary producer, and we thank you very much for your generous support.—The Intercept
