Israel Just Crossed Hezbollah and Iran’s Red Line: WWIII Looms
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DANNY HAIPHONG: Welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. This is your host, Danny Haiphong. As you can see, I am joined by two very special guests, both returning guests on the program, although it’s been too long for both. We have renowned economist Michael Hudson, prolific author. You can find his website in the video description.
And we have Dr. Jill Stein, the 2024 Green Party presidential candidate, longtime activist, longtime just steward for peace. You can find the campaign website in the video description as well. Michael, Jill, thank you so much for joining me today.
JILL STEIN: Great to be here. So I’ve supported Jill Stein in the past. I do encourage people to look into her campaign. She is one of the few, if not the only candidates in the 2024 electoral race who is not AIPAC bought and owned. And of course, definitely looking at Michael Hudson’s work.
But I wanted to get started right away because I think, you know, this is just a very urgent moment in the world, which has huge ramifications both for the United States and the future of humanity. And that is the flurry of events that have transpired in the last 48 or so hours.
We just had Ismail Hassania [Ismail Haniyeh]. He was a negotiator for Hamas, a top leader in their politburo, assassinated in Iran on July 31st. So the date of this stream.
And then before that, we had Israel just the day before bombing Beirut in reaction to a very suspicious strike on the Golan Heights, which killed 12 people, many of them young people.
Now we are also getting unconfirmed reports about a possible IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] commander, Iranian commander, killed in Damascus. Sound familiar? Back in April, something of this sort happened, which led to an Iranian operation to deter Israel from further attacking. It was an Israeli attack on the embassy in Damascus back in April of 2024. These are unconfirmed reports so far.
But Michael, maybe we can turn to you. You know, how do you see it based on your geopolitical and economic analysis? This kind of spiraling, it seems, of Israel broadening this war to a regional and global level, because, of course, we are also entering the one year point. You’re getting very close to that one year point of the overall genocidal campaign in Gaza.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you say Israel, but it’s actually Israel in the United States. And all this has happened right after Netanyahu came to Congress and met in Washington with the Democratic Party leaders and then with Trump. So I think it’s really the policy of the neocons. They’ve worked hand in hand. And I’ve known these people for over 50 years.
I worked with Netanyahu’s advisor, Uzi Arad, for a number of years at the Hudson Institute. We made trips around the world together, arguing. And I know what their ideas and ideology are. And it really is not only apartheid, but the feeling that if Israel doesn’t kill the Palestinians, the Palestinians will kill the Israelis in retaliation for what the Israelis are doing to them. And so once you hurt the Palestinians, that makes you think very much like what America thinks with Iran.
Well, we look at what we’ve done to Iran. They must hate us. Therefore, they’re going to do something about us. Therefore, we’re going to attack them.
So I think that the neocons in Washington believe that war is going to be inevitable. America is fighting for control of the Near East because the Near East controls the oil. And American foreign policy has been based on control of food supplies from American farms and control of the oil trade, because if you can control the oil trade, you can turn off people’s electricity, their heating, and their power. And power use for workers is the root of productivity.
And the way that the military thinks—and again, I’ve worked with them for years—is the timing, that, are we in a better position now than we will be next year or not. And I think the American military realizes that Russia and China and the other Eurasian countries are getting together. The American ability to fight militarily is going down. And to the military, that means if we don’t have war now and wait till next year in the future, we’ll be less and less and less able to win.
Well, the reality is they’re going to lose wherever they go, unless there’s atomic war and the chessboard is thrown over. And I think their feeling is the Americans are doing everything they can, from Ukraine to Israel to Iran, to try to stir up a retaliation so that they can then say, ah, we’re under attack, we’re purely defending ourselves, and once you tell your population and your voters this is a war for defense, as the Nazis know, you can always get a—as Goebbels said, you can always get a population on your side if you say it’s for defense.
So I’m very worried that the neocons are going to say there will never be a better or at least a less worse time to go to war in the Near East than right now. That seems to be what is leading the trigger, and even the military has said every way that they’ve gamed out the military sequence there, America loses. They’re not going to lose as bad now as they will in the future. And this is very dangerous, given the whole mindset that they have, and the mindset that they have to control the Near East, or else the rest of the world will not be neoliberalized.
It’s really—we’re at a civilizational split. What kind of society and what kind of economy will the world have? Will it be a neoliberalized, privatized economy, or will it be, I hesitate to say socialized, let’s just say a progressive, real kind of democracy economy?
DANNY HAIPHONG: Before I get you in here, Jill, I just want to correct myself. It’s Ismail Haniyeh. I’m probably still butchering the name, but I wanted to make sure I corrected that before I give it to you. Dr. Stein, please.
JILL STEIN: Yeah, and I would add to what Michael said. It’s not only what kind of world we’re going to have, but whether we’re going to have a world or not, because the words of Martin Luther King ring truer than ever. My country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. True back in the 60s, all the more true now.
Echoing what you said, Danny, or actually I think it was what Michael said also, that this is not just Israel. This is Israel enabled, empowered, funded, and armed by the U.S. of A. So we are deeply embroiled in this. And clearly what Netanyahu is doing is, you know, this screams as an effort to prolong and expand the war and to drag the U.S. into it.
It will be very hard for the U.S. not to be dragged into it because Israel is simultaneously attacking Yemen, just the other day, a really severe attack on one of Yemen’s key ports. I mean, they’ve been bombing Yemen for some time in retaliation to Yemen’s efforts to, you know, stop the genocide and stop the flow of weapons and materials that support the genocide. And Israel has been responding in kind and worse, basically, with bombing Yemen.
And then there’s been a big push on that bombing just last week. And then now within 24 hours, you have back-to-back assassinations that really look tailor-made to further escalate. And, you know, in particular, assassinating the head of negotiations for Hamas. How are we supposed to be, you know, and how is Israel supposed to be negotiating a peace deal when they are assassinating the spokesperson and the key figure in those negotiations?
So this is, you know, this is designed, until proven otherwise, this is designed to completely torpedo negotiations to ensure that the war goes on. And in fact, it escalates because you have not only this assassination, but it’s happening in Iran.
And, you know, there was another big offense against Iran by Israel a couple months back when Israel took on this incredible, inflammatory action, a war crime bombing Iran’s embassy in Syria, I believe.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Yes, it was Iran’s embassy.
JILL STEIN: Yeah, in Syria. And there were like 13 people killed then. And that was responded to by Iran with a retaliation of some 300 drones and missiles, which was less than it could have been. It could have been much more. And they had a relatively contained response. But that was so insane.
And what was the US response to that? You know, it was like nothing, you know, no even slap on the hands, no demand for an apology, nothing. The US has been really in full support, enabling Israel’s very offensive and escalatory actions. So you have that going on at the same time, you know, with this back-to-back assassination, bombing an intensely dense area in Beirut, where some 70 people were injured. Reportedly, there were only four deaths. But it’s hard to believe that if 70 people were injured, there were only four deaths. We’ll see, you know, what the numbers eventually turn out to be.
But you have Israel sort of simultaneously provoking all of its adversaries in the region. It’s going to war now intensively against Lebanon and Hezbollah in Lebanon, against Iran, against the Houthis in Yemen.
And, you know, this is outrageous, especially in the wake of Congress, having invited this war criminal murderer to come, having applauded him, standing ovations, practically one a minute for the entire hour of his speech. Instead of applauding Netanyahu, the US should have been arresting Netanyahu and turning him over to the Hague to be tried for war crimes.
And, you know, the US is probably next on the docket here because we are egging him on, we’re encouraging him. What Congress did was, you know, essentially to give him a complete blank check to keep going.
And it was not long ago that the US Congress and White House basically appropriated another $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets at US taxpayer expense. And this was after, you know, the explosion of Israeli aggression in the south of Gaza.
And Israel has just been on kind of a nonstop series of massacres. You know, talk about children and the deaths of children that Israel is supposedly defending. You know, Israel has been wiping out children, you know, to the tune of some 16,000 recorded deaths, but it’s likely way more than that, far more as indicated by the report from the Lancet Journal, you know, two or three weeks ago, that a total of some 40,000 deaths is probably more like approaching 200,000 deaths, actually, considering, you know, how the numbers are counted and not counted.
And among them, you know, are all these child-directed assaults, you know, on soccer fields, on schools, you know, on refugee centers. It’s just shocking and horrific what’s going on. And in the middle of that, the U.S. rewards Israel with another $18 billion worth of these F-15 fighter jets. So the U.S. has blood all over its hands, not just on its hands, but, you know, on its face, you know, from head to toe, basically. The U.S. is conducting this genocide.
And we heard recently some, you know, warm words for the suffering of the Palestinian people from Kamala Harris. But these are absolutely empty gestures, because the U.S. has the capability of stopping the genocide with a phone call or simply by curtailing the weapons, which, by the way, are illegal. It breaks three U.S. laws to be sending weapons to Israel at this point.
So it’s a simple matter to stop the flow of weapons and to even make the phone call, saying, you’re done, you know, you are basically disarmed now and going forward, barring an end to the genocide and an end to the aggressive actions that Israel is taking in order to defend its right to conduct genocide. So this is all, all of this is being enabled and empowered and intensified by the U.S.
So in my view, this is a time, you know, this is a time to, you know, to double down, to arrest Netanyahu, to send him to the Hague, to stop the flow of weapons, and to actually join our campaign, which is challenging empire.
Without, you know, without a challenge, as Frederick Douglass said, power concedes nothing without a demand. We need to be there on the ballot in every state across the country. Every time we gain access to another ballot, we’re currently on the ballot for about 60 percent of voters, but we need to be on the ballot all across the country so that every voter has a choice, which is anti-genocide, anti-war, pro-worker, and climate emergency.
We are the campaign on track to be on the ballot across the country that actually offers that choice. We are the one option to actually challenge empire now, not just in November, but by getting on the ballot now, we show Netanyahu, Israel, we also show Biden, Harris, and Congress that the anti-war movement in this country is big, it’s organized, it is the majority, it is the conscience of the nation, and we are here to stay, and we are fighting angry, and we intend to throw the bums out here.
Remember, there will be three pro-genocide, pro-war candidates on the ballot, and there will be one anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-worker campaign on the ballot across the country. So when you’re dividing the vote four ways, it’s possible, you know, and three of those are dividing the pro-war vote. They could be dividing down the pro-war vote, and we will be the unifying progressive opposition.
In that setting, where you’re dividing the vote four ways, it’s actually possible to win a race with as little as 26 percent of the popular vote. So reject the propaganda that tells you resistance is futile, that tells you that, you know, that it’s useless, that you are powerless, and you might as well be hopeless, and go crawl into a hole.
Actually, it’s exactly the opposite right now. The American people not only oppose this war, but they oppose the cost of this war to our jobs, to our health care, to our housing, to our schools, to the fact of debt that, you know, some hundred million Americans are trapped in just looking at medical debt, and student debt alone amounts to about 100 million Americans.
So, you know, they are trying, they are pulling out all the stops to silence us, to keep a choice, to keep competition out of the general election, as they did out of the Democratic primary. You know, this is the anti-democratic party. It is not the Democratic party. It is the opposite of that, and it is attempting to deny you a choice.
So I encourage people, go to JillStein2024.com and join the team here to demand democracy and an America and a world that works for all of us, because what we have right now is exactly the opposite. We are making a beeline to oblivion here right now, racing towards nuclear confrontation on at least three fronts right now, and this is not some, you know, some window dressing. This is the core of the problem.
Empire, oligarchy, and rising fascism at home and abroad, you know, are the name of the game, and we have to stand up and fight it.
Neoliberalism and the Democrats and the lesser evil are not the solution. They are the problem. Neoliberalism is the driver of neofascism. We don’t get to a solution through the lesser evil, and you don’t get to a solution through silencing yourself behind, you know, behind a lesser evil who does not have your interests at heart whatsoever. Silence is not a political strategy. This is time to stand up louder and stronger than ever.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Yeah. Yes, indeed.
MICHAEL HUDSON: We have to work on the vocabulary of doublethink. What Jill and Martin Luther King called violence, Democratic Party calls GDP. And so Jill goes, the political points that Jill just made, he’s extended into a whole economic program. If you want to stop wars, you have to stop the military budget, and if you don’t stop that, the budget balancers on both parties are going to say, well, we have to pay for the military. We’re going to cut back social spending. So what we’ve been talking about goes way beyond just military into the whole way of what kind of economy we’re going to have.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Totally. Mike, I wanted to bring you back in here to about a point that Jill Stein made around the US’s involvement here with regard to this crisis, this growing, you know, the spiraling, this growing threats of a broader war out of the genocide in Gaza.
And I wanted to ask you about the US’s, how they, there’s been a lot of activity. On the one hand, the US says, what remains of the Biden administration has said that they’re not involved in what happened in Iran, right? The assassination of the Hamas leader, that they’re trying to keep Israel from extending the war into Lebanon against Hezbollah.
But maybe you could outline a bit, like, why does the US, because at the end of the day, in the final analysis, it appears that the US actually does support all of what Israel does, either by vocally supporting it, materially supporting it, or both. Words seem to not matter very much here. It really does have to do with the action. So could you talk about why, from your standpoint, the US is supporting this conflagration, this expansion of the war, as well as the genocide?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s very simple. As Jill said at the beginning of her talk, and I agree with her, not only Netanyahu and the Israelis should be counted as war criminals, but so should the Biden administration, Lincoln and Sullivan.
So what the U.S. does, for public relation purposes, it knows just what Jill said. The majority of American people don’t want the war, either in Ukraine or in the Near East. So the pretense is to shed crocodile tears and say, oh, we told Netanyahu not to drop the bombs on Gaza and kill civilians. Oh, by the way, here’s another. Every single day, every bomb is an American bomb that continues to be sent.
And as Jill said, this could all be stopped in one telephone call so that all these are American bombs. The administration is trying to pretend, good cop and bad cop. The U.S. is the good cop trying to stop it. But the U.S. is the supporter of Israel. And I won’t simply say Israel. It’s really the Likud party. It’s not the old Labor Party of the progressive Israelis. This is the right-wing Likud party, the ultra-right party that the United States is supporting and that AIPAC is supporting with its donations to Congress, not to Jill’s campaign. So this is just all smoke and pretense.
Now, of course, we would have liked to have seen some congressmen. And I think one of the congressmen said they wish they could have gone across the stage, shaken Netanyahu’s hand, and put into a subpoena to put him under arrest. But the International Court has not yet issued an arrest warrant. So you can’t arrest somebody without a warrant for other arrests. That’s what we’re waiting for. And if they can issue a warrant against the arrest of the Israeli leadership, they can do it against the U.S. leadership, which is their sponsors.
The claim is simply that, oh, Israel has bought the U.S. Congress through its campaign contributors. But there’s a circular flow. Congress will give aid to Israel. Israel will use some of the aid it gets to pay back into the lobbying effort to pay the congressmen. So everything, some portion of whatever they give Israel ends up in their own pockets. That’s the circular flow we have, thanks to Citizens United and related things. So you’re having a whole system that is so dysfunctional that I think a lot of American voters think there’s nothing we can do. The system is so corrupt.
There is something we can do. And I think that’s what Jill has been trying to explain in her campaign, which somehow does not make it into The New York Times or The Washington Post.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Definitely. And I wanted to, you know, Jill, also ask you, given what Michael said and given what you said about your campaign here, could you talk about, you know, the United States, I think one of the biggest ways that the United States maintains this plausible deniability is, on the one hand, it poses itself as some kind of diplomatic force mediator between Hamas and Israel. And it has been trying to at least play this role or play at this role, I should say, since the initial talks about a so-called ceasefire began.
But I’m wondering, you know, Hamas, considered a terrorist organization. Hezbollah, considered a terrorist organization. Iran, considered an adversary. The entire axis of resistance considered an adversary. How do you differ in terms, because, you know, we have Kamala Harris, we have Donald Trump. They don’t deviate from these positions at all. How do you differ in how you would relate to these forces, which they’re all saying that they are opposing the genocide and coming to the aid of the Palestinians? How would you relate to them if you were in that position that the U.S. claims it is now and that these two parties claim they’re in now?
JILL STEIN: So, you know, they claim that they oppose the genocide, but it’s pure talk. They have the power to stop the genocide immediately. And on day one, my administration would make that phone call and the war is over with that phone call. And, you know, this was done by Ronald Reagan, not exactly your model of a peace president, who picked up the phone and called Menachem Begin, I think it was at the time, and said, bring your troops back from Lebanon, where Israel had gone in pursuit of the, you know, terror organization du jour, you know, and Israel has its du jour, its terrorist of the day on whom, you know, resistance is blamed.
But resistance is inevitable. Resistance will happen when people are being murdered as a way of life, when you have a murderous occupation and apartheid state, when people are basically being allowed food and water out of an eyedropper. You know, everything coming into Gaza has been strictly controlled, basically to just barely maintain a survival level of calorie intake.
You know, the incredible violence that people have been subjected to routinely, and, you know, periodic massacres that have been the track record, actually, of the Zionist state since even before it declared independence, there were some four or 500 villages that had been basically destroyed.
So, you know, this was hardwired into the plan. And many people don’t know that because it was only with the revelations in the Israel’s National Historic Archives that became available to historians in the 1990s.
So there was a whole new analysis by Israeli historians, actually, of Israel’s history, and it became very clear, you know, what has been going on here from the get go.
So, you know, all well and good to blame the resistance of the day, but you’re going to have resistance as long as you have systematic ethnic cleansing, periodic massacres, and just the murderous way of life of an apartheid state.
You know, people from South Africa who fought the apartheid state in South Africa say that it was mild, it was modest compared to the violence of the Israeli apartheid.
So it doesn’t matter what you call it. You know, if you want to solve this crisis, you have to get to the underlying drivers of the crisis, which is essentially the occupation, the apartheid state, and essentially, you know, the blueprint of the Zionist plan here, which has been murderous, actually, and terrorist from its inception.
So let’s just solve the problem. And let’s also understand that this is not only a problem for Palestine, this is also a survival problem for Israel. There’s no way that Israel gets out of here alive, having basically amped up its neighbors who are stronger than Israel.
You know, when you combine Iran and Hezbollah, and then, you know, other partners, and potentially Russia, which is in a military alliance with Iran, which also has nuclear weapons. And Israel, of course, has nuclear weapons in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel also has those weapons.
You know, it raises real questions about, so what do you do? You know, how do you force a regime that has shown every indication of being, you know, psychopathic, you know? And how do you stop them?
So you basically disarm them. You disarm them by ending the flow of weapons. And further, you institute an economic boycott, which could be done right now. And, you know, the basis for that is there in the second ICJ ruling, which essentially said that occupation and apartheid is absolutely illegal. And it’s, you know, it’s necessary to take all conceivable measures to correct that. So it really does lay the groundwork and justify a national boycott.
And those boycotts actually are being quite effective right now. This is another way in which Israel does not get out of here alive, because the economic toll on Israel right now is enormous. The cost of this war is huge. Israel has lost a lot of its business, its tourist industry has completely, you know, come to a screeching halt. One of its major ports had to shut down because there’s so much, you know, commercial, you know, engagement that’s just not happening anymore.
So for the people of Israel, you know, not the apartheid state, but for the people of Israel, this is absolutely essential, too, for us to put an end to this. And yes, Israel has nuclear weapons, but you don’t need nuclear weapons to basically create an economic boycott here. And that can happen.
I don’t think that needs to happen if our leadership would simply stand up and do like Ronald Reagan did, or like Dwight Eisenhower did many decades earlier, I think in the 1950s, when Dwight Eisenhower basically made that phone call as well, and told not only Israel, but I think also France and possibly Egypt. No, they were in Egypt. Yes. And he recalled Israel and company from Egypt. And that likewise had an immediate turnaround. So the U.S. has all the power.
This is not rocket science about how to solve this. This is simply a matter of reengaging our democracy and political empowerment that demands that we have elected officials who are serving us, not serving the military industrial complex, the war contractors, the fossil fuel industry, AIPAC, etc. This is about simply doing the bidding of the American people in a way that protects us all, that ends the impoverishment and the endangerment of all of us at the way that our foreign policy is currently being conducted.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Michael, I wanted to ask, to get you back in here, about the ramifications of what we’ve seen in the last few days, and whether you feel like a broader war indeed could come out of this, because as Dr. Stein has mentioned, the last time that Israel struck inside Iranian territory, well, inside of, that struck Iran from Damascus, they struck Iran through the embassy and killed a top IRGC commander.
The last time that happened, Iran did engage in a very open, there was a lot of communication with the United States, but they did engage in a deterrence operation. Now, with this, it’s a huge figure. I mean, Ismail Haniyeh is a huge figure here. He is someone who is tasked with negotiations, and it seems like it’s sending a huge message to do it within Iran. Do you feel like Iran may respond here in kind, and we haven’t even gotten to Hezbollah. So do you feel like this war is coming, or do you feel like, how do you assess this situation going forward?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what Iran did was to show that it could bomb, precision bombs, American bases in Syria and in Iraq. It told America, the bombs are coming, try to defend yourself. It very carefully avoided hitting any American soldiers there. Just wanted to demonstrate, do you really want war? Here’s what we can do.
Hezbollah did exactly the same thing with Israel. It showed that it could penetrate the Iron Dome, it will, and that it had a complete control of the air over Israel. They are doing everything they can to stay out of the war because they realize that the United States and Israel, but really the United States, is trying to goad them into war.
And you realize that if someone has declared themselves as your enemy, and if they’re trying to goad you into war, they must have a plan that like in the old Western, you’ll have the gunslinger that’s a good fast draw, trying to goad some local guy into pulling his gun, and then the gunslinger shoots him first. I think that that’s what Iran and Hezbollah realized, they’re doing everything to stay out.
And as I look at it, they’re very much in the position of President Putin in Russia. They’re amazingly patient. They know that America wants to accelerate war and wants a war now. And it’s all set up for probably with really, really big weapons that are going to be more violent than anything we’ve seen since World War II.
And the other countries are not responding to the goading. What they’re doing is making alliances with each other, just as Russia and China have admitted Iran into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Eurasia’s version of NATO. Other countries are solidifying their mutual support so that they can be independent, not only of the United States, but of the United States and NATO, the whole NATO West.
So they’re saying, well, what we’re trying to do is let the West go its way. We’ll go our way. We’re going to have a different kind of economy than the West. We’re back into what this fight is really about, is for what kind of society and what kind of civilization are we going to have? Will it be neoliberal, privatized, all centered in one country, the United States? Or will it be a multilateral, win-win, non-exploitive economy of mutual gain? Because mutual gain is the only way that you can get other countries to join.
And that’s what Eurasia is doing in Africa and other Asian countries to make alliances. They’re solidifying the alliances. And in fact, the American challenge to them is driving them into a mutual alliance. So they’re looking at the long term. America’s looking at what can we do in the short term. It’s really a fight in a world view that we’re seeing right now. And I suspect that they’re going to be patient enough not to do anything as long as they can restrain themselves from the kind of provocation that the United States is doing all the way from the Near East to Ukraine.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Yes. And I’m glad you brought up Russia, Michael, because I think it’s maybe a good segue to begin talking about, you know, as the United States is completely mired in what this just catastrophic war that is being launched, of course, by Israel in West Asia. We also have an ongoing conflict, ongoing Russia’s special military operation, which was goaded by NATO.
And so, Dr. Stein, I’d like you to discuss, if you could, your position on Ukraine. And what have you made of developments now about where the situation is? Because there’s a lot more talk about peace. Don’t know how genuine it is. And it’s interesting because Russia and even China have said that there is no, the conditions aren’t there for peace. So what exactly is going on here? And what’s your take? And what’s your position?
JILL STEIN: What’s going on is extremely dangerous and could have been altogether avoided. And, you know, just to lay out at the outset here that this is a proxy war. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is a proxy war for the U.S. with its other, you know, allies, NATO against Russia, an effort to basically bleed Russia’s resources to weaken Russia. That’s been stated explicitly by the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
And, you know, this war was essentially ginned up over the course of decades as NATO began to move to the east and basically encroach on Russia’s border. And warnings were delivered. You know, first of all, it had been promised, the promise was made by NATO, by the U.S., to Gorbachev at the time that Germany reunited after the Second World War and Germany joined NATO. The promise was made NATO was not going to move to the east because Russia is understandably, you know, concerned about its border and concerned about being invaded again after having lost some 27 million people in the Second World War, you know, due to being invaded across that border with Ukraine and several times, you know, over the course of history before the Second World War as well.
So that agreement was made. NATO would not move to the east one inch. And beginning in the Clinton administration, of course, NATO began to move to the east and Russia really sounded the alarm. And, you know, NATO just kept on marching.
And then starting in 2014, really, you know, the U.S. was clearly a major driver in the coup, in the Maidan, a very violent coup that involved the fascist elements in Ukraine who were overthrowing a democratically elected government that simply wanted neutrality, that wanted neutrality in the U.S., which is what Russia was always calling for, just neutrality. Give us neutrality like, you know, like Austria, I think, after the Second World War, they just wanted neutrality for Ukraine.
And the U.S. basically put an end to that with the coup in the Maidan, at which time a war against Russian speakers across Ukraine ensued, including in Crimea and in the eastern provinces. And the eastern provinces were crying out for protection from Russia and were calling out for, you know, for Russia to basically take them in. And Russia declined that. Russia resisted until it was basically forced to do that when, you know, when it was very clear that NATO was coming to that border of Ukraine.
And Russia continued to plead, really, for a peace deal, much like the Minsk Accords. The peace deal here is not rocket science. It basically assures neutrality and that nuclear-compatible missiles would not be brought to the very long Ukrainian border. Those nuclear-compatible missiles are already there on Russia’s border, establishing really a very serious threat. But placed on the Ukrainian border, they’re really close to Moscow.
And this is extremely inflammatory. I mean, this is the danger that was addressed in years past through the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was a huge step forward in reducing the level of threat. Because when you think that you are about to be attacked and you have five minutes to make up your mind, that’s what really compels the trigger finger and really predisposes towards terrible decisions and rapidly escalating conflict. So that’s what the INF Treaty was going to control. And the INF Treaty was basically thrown away by Donald Trump and the U.S.
And then that danger has been there, but only recently with the placement of these nuclear-compatible missiles on the border. And by the way, as tensions have been escalating now recently, the U.S. has also announced that it is going to bring nuclear-compatible missiles to Germany as well, which further inflames the situation. So there’s been a real escalating ladder of conflict with Russia basically saying that it will use nuclear weapons and it has done some military exercises with nuclear weapons. And it gets crazier and more dangerous by the hour.
At the same time, it’s clear that Ukraine does not have a path forward. There is no way this war is going to be won, which is why Obama wanted to stay out of it to start with. This isn’t the U.S. border. Russia obviously has huge stakes here in the same way that the U.S. was not going to allow Russia to bring its missiles to Cuba. There’s no way that Russia is going to allow U.S. and NATO missiles to be on its border.
So basically we’ve created a Cuban missile crisis now on steroids here. So this is extremely dangerous. It begs for resolution. It’s not going to be as simple as it would have been had we allowed the peace treaty to go through to proceed in February just after, maybe it was March, but it was shortly after the war had begun.
There was a peace deal which Russia had stepped up to the plate on and it included real compromises on Russia’s part. I think it left the long-term status of Crimea uncertain. I think it allowed the eastern provinces to remain independent.
So this nonsense that Russia is on a mission to expand its empire to the west and that Russia won’t compromise, this is nonsense. It’s like the very deceptive accusations that are thrown at Hezbollah. Hezbollah has agreed to the peace deal. It’s Israel that has not. And it’s the same in this instance. Russia has long agreed. It’s U.S. and the West that has been on this relentless tear to basically attack Russia as though nuclear weapons did not exist, as though there’s no risk here.
It’s like the U.S. leadership is reckless. It is clueless. It’s brain dead. It appears not to understand the nuclear risks here and the fact that you cannot have a convenient nuclear war somewhere else. It doesn’t take many exchanges of nuclear weapons to bring on nuclear winter, which is global. Just one nuclear-armed submarine contains the equivalent of 5,000 Hiroshima bombs. It only takes some scores of them, maybe 100, something like that, to actually bring on substantial nuclear winter, which gets redistributed.
Nuclear winter basically means when you see that mushroom cloud, that mushroom cloud is a conveyor belt. What it is doing is bringing debris into the upper atmosphere where it doesn’t weather down. It doesn’t come down with the rain or the snow or the wind. It’s up there for years or decades. It dims the sky so that we humans and civilization, we go the way of the dinosaurs. That’s what led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. It wasn’t a nuclear bomb. It was a meteor.
This is absolutely deadly for our leadership to be toying with nuclear threats. We should be eliminating all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. We should be signing the nuclear ban treaty, which the majority of the world’s nations have signed. We are actually in violation of that U.N. treaty right now ourselves by continuing to possess nuclear weapons.
There is a simple path forward here. We should just sit down and negotiate. Let’s hammer out a deal because Ukraine has no future. Ukraine is being utterly destroyed. It has lost a generation. Now it’s losing generations on either side of that. The deaths have been absolutely off the charts to some extent for Russia as well. Russia has a much larger population, so it’s not so devastating.
The loss of human life here is outrageous. It’s completely unnecessary. This has really been instigated by the U.S. with its apologists in NATO. This can be stopped. This is, again, this is the bidding of the weapons industry to create yet another war, yet another market for selling weapons. This serves absolutely no one except the war profiteers, and it endangers all of us. It needs to be stopped now.
MICHAEL HUDSON: You use the word mired as if it’s a failure of U.S. policy as it was in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
That was the intention from the beginning. The U.S. strategy was to get mired because they said, if we can just mire down Russia in Ukraine, we will bleed its resources because the Russian economy, being post-communist, is basically inefficient.
All of the U.S. plans made by the CIA and national security analyzed that somehow Russia had so little ability to create an economic surplus and military technology that it would run out of it.
So what is a failure is the whole plan of the U.S. was thinking that, well, we can mire Ukraine down, and then in two years, Russia will be on its knees and the population will change for Russia.
Now, in the month after the Americans prompted the Russian counterattack in February 2022, Ukraine had $50 billion of foreign debt falling due to foreign investors. They postponed the foreign debt until Ukraine would win the war on August 1st— today! or tomorrow, actually. This was the date in which the $50 billion was to come through.
And obviously, Ukraine couldn’t pay. And I had hoped that the international investors would say, well, we’re not going to take a loss. Yes, we’re going to declare you in default.
And had they done what investors do, that would have blocked the IMF from making more loans to Ukraine in order to fund the war because you can’t make [loans to] the countries in default. But instead, the investor did something that they’ve not, the bondholders did something they’ve not done with any global South country. They took a 39% breakdown and postponed the interest rates for another three or four years when Ukraine wins the war, ostensibly, which of course means it’ll never be paid.
And obviously, there was a lot of pressure on them. And we’re talking about BlackRock and PIMCO, the two largest financial firms in the world, not known for taking losses voluntarily. So I’m trying to figure out, this reflects something in the US strategy. What’s the strategy?
Well, it says that, yes, we’re going to make a deal for peace with Russia, but we’ve already been, we’ve grabbed all of Russia’s foreign exchange holdings in Europe, $300 billion. We’ve just given Ukraine all of the interest payments on this. Part of the peace deal, I think, that the United States is pressing for will say, okay, you have to spend the whole $300 billion that we’ve taken, give it to Ukraine as reparations.
Well, what I’m urging Russia to do is say, okay, we’re willing to give that $300 billion to Ukraine as reparations to Donetsk, Luhansk, and the Russian-speaking territories. Yes, we’ll spend that whole $300 billion in rebuilding the civilian infrastructure, civilian buildings, homes and apartment buildings that Ukrainian neo-Nazis have bombed. And we will rebuild the east of Ukraine. And there’ll probably be a demilitarized zone in the middle.
Obviously, none of this is going to be done before the November elections, because the Biden administration, Biden-Harris, the Democratic Party, believes that somehow if they would have peace in Ukraine now, the voters would all vote against it, not realizing that that was the one way to get the voters.
I think that’s why Donald Trump, not known for his pacifism, has been opposing the war in Ukraine.
So it’s amazing that the other both political parties imagine that the voters want America to win in Ukraine, to win in Palestine and Israel. And yet, Jill is the only candidate that actually is promoting what the voters want. And that, well, you can see that something is asymmetrical here.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Yeah. And maybe we can talk further too about the economic impact, because it feels like all of these wars, this endless war regime that the United States is leading and all of these, we haven’t even gotten to the Asia Pacific with China. But if we just look at Ukraine, there’s not only been massive sums of money sent to Ukraine, so-called aid, a lot of it going to the military industrial complex, of course.
But there’s also been the sanctions regime, which I know Michael, you’ve talked a lot about. The sanctions regime, which was supposed to cripple Russia, was supposed to destroy Russia, was supposed to do what it has done, at least in the economic sense, make people suffer. And then hopefully the governments will be overthrown.
It hasn’t really worked in other places. I mean, Nicolas Maduro is still the president of Venezuela. You know, we can go on and on and on of countries. Syria, Bashar al-Assad is still the president of Syria, despite crippling sanctions. Iran still has the same political leadership.
But nonetheless, that was the idea. So maybe you could talk about the, Dr. Stein, you can begin. The economic impact of sanctions and what you believe needs to be done about them, because across the political aisle, the two parties, but they are, there is no talk, zero about stopping sanctions. Sometimes Donald Trump says, oh, well, they’re not really working on Russia, but there’s no real talk about, well, maybe they need to be eliminated. Maybe they’re not useful. Maybe they are inhumane. Maybe they’re a war crime. But Jill Stein, your take.
JILL STEIN: So sanctions are, you know, I think they are a violation of international law. They are a form of unconventional warfare. It’s economic warfare. We know that tens of thousands of people were documented to have died in Venezuela from sanctions, you know, sanctions cause real shortages of food and medication and, they’re really a deadly weapon.
We not only need to, and the U.S. has something like one third, maybe more than that of the entire world’s population under sanctions right now, which reflects what a kind of misguided, you know, foreign policy the U.S. has. We’re kind of at war with the world.
We have a foreign policy described as a full spectrum dominance. We must dominate all spheres of competition and interaction. We will dominate all areas of the world, cyberspace, outer space, surface of the sea, land, under the sea, etc. We must dominate it all. And, you know, economies are part of that, that we, you know, presume to dominate.
And so that’s a problem too. It’s not only the sanctions. It’s like, it’s the sense of, you know, imperial power that underlies those sanctions, that those sanctions are intending to enforce. So we not only need to put away this very harmful enforcement mechanism, but we need to move from a unipolar world where we are basically the bully in the schoolyard to a, you know, we need to be an adult member of the global community and be part of a multipolar world, which is the reality.
I think, as Michael was saying earlier, that the U.S. is no longer the dominant economic power and the BRICS alliance has more of a share of GDP than we do. You know, China and BRICS actually are growing at far greater rate than we are. So it’s a very misguided policy all around and it’s a losing proposition.
So we need to both end the sanctions, but we also have to end the policy behind those sanctions that’s trying to dominate the world and, you know, move forward in a way that is, you know, based on a, we can have competition, but we don’t need a vicious, violent competition and the effort to dominate.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, to paraphrase a famous French saying, the sanctions are even worse than the violation of international law. They’re a blunder.
When you sanction a country, you force it to protect itself. Sanctioned Russian imports of agricultural food. What did Russia do? It produced its own cheese instead of importing cheese and dairy products from the Baltic States that now have lost that market.
When you sanction a country in essentials, the country very quickly produces essentials for itself because if it didn’t, it would go under. So every time you impose sanctions, you lose the market.
Now, all this is being debated right now regarding China because the Democratic Party says, well, let’s put sanctions on information technology against China so they can’t get computer chips and the chips they need. And the result is that the major American providers of computer chips have said, wait a minute, China’s our major market. If we lose the Chinese market, we don’t have the profits anymore. How are we going to make, to get the money to invest in research and development?
Losing the Chinese market means they will produce the chips themselves. They will use the sales proceeds of the chips to fund their own research and development, which we can’t produce because of the sanctions. And it’s all economically, it’s backfiring.
So when Jill says this is the mentality of a bully in a schoolyard, that’s exactly what it is. It’s the mentality. The mentality doesn’t work. And so this is what the election really should be all about. What kind of a mentality are you going to have? How are you going to treat the world and other people?
Are you just going to say, if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to hurt you? Or are you going to do what Chinese policy is very careful to say, how can we both gain? The idea is that you can’t both gain because as Donald Trump says, America has to gain from any contract we have. There you have two different philosophies. That’s what’s splitting the whole world apart right now.
JILL STEIN: And if I can just add to that, it’s like the difference between being a kind of an insecure adolescent, you know, who needs to dominate their personal relationships, in which case, they’re not going to have healthy or, you know, mutual or long-lasting relationships. They’re going to have, you know, really toxic relationships. And you can just sort of amplify that at a national level.
And that’s the choice here. Are we going to have, you know, human interactions? Or are we going to have these kind of domineering sort of corporate dehumanized rules of the game? That’s really the choice we want. And we see in our own lives what it means to have a corporate-dominated economy and communities and to have lost our public spaces and our commons.
And, you know, health care is now, you know, very much, you know, intensively a matter of, everything is commodified, you know. Our housing does not meet human needs. It’s, you know, it’s a crisis.
I mean, whatever dimension of our lives you look at right now, people are in serious, serious crisis, really existential crisis, when half of all Americans are paying 30 to 50 percent of their income just to keep a roof over their heads, because, you know, housing policy has basically been hijacked by big profitable developers. And so you have the, you know, the private equity buying up homes massively and reducing the supply, so the rents are skyrocketing. People cannot afford their rent.
And this is true, really, actually, you know, really across the board with population. You have homelessness skyrocketing. Then, meanwhile, you have homelessness is criminalized. And so, you know, you have, like, the governor of California, who’s now doubling down and telling communities they have to get rid of their homeless populations. Where are they going to go, you know?
And meanwhile, Americans are one to two paychecks away from evictions. So this is not a world that’s working. You know, the crisis is in our foreign policy, and the crisis is very much, you know, in our lives, the fabric of our lives. And people are saddled with debt.
When you’re paying half of your income to keep a roof over your head, you know, how do you pay your student debt or your medical debt? Eight million Americans were driven into poverty just from medical debt last year.
You have, if you develop cancer, which rates are skyrocketing, by the way, especially in young people right now, if you develop cancer, the odds are within two years, you are, the odds are like 40%, at least, that you’re going to exhaust your savings within two years just trying to survive and cope with your cancer diagnosis.
So, you know, the walls are closing in on us. This, you know, this predatory economy and a predatory foreign policy, which in turn is robbing us of the resources we need to have a humanized economy. All of this is unsurvivable. It’s intolerable. And people are ready to rise up.
And, you know, again, I encourage people to go to JillStein2024.com. We have the numbers here to be a very powerful force.
In fact, this election is a perfect storm for a number of reasons, including that there are three pro-war, anti-worker campaigns that will be on the ballot dividing that vote. If we can get on the ballot across the country, you know, all bets are off about what will happen. That will also force the media to start covering us.
Right now, they can pretend that we are not a factor in the election because they’re just ignoring us. But once we are on the ballot for most voters across the country, then they really cannot lock us out of coverage.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Yes, indeed.
Well, maybe we can close on bringing this all together because, Michael, earlier you mentioned sanctions being a blunder. They do force countries like Russia to become far more self-sufficient. And we’ve seen a lot of success in that realm. And this has also been a huge boost to the multipolar world, to this alternative way of doing not just business, but also development in all spheres, the diplomatic, political, military.
And we’ve seen this with China getting increasingly involved around the Palestine question, hosting. All of this may be for naught now, given the intensity of the situation with what Israel and the U.S. has just conducted inside of Iran. But nonetheless, Palestinian leaders and groups did sign a declaration calling for unity under the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
And then we’ve also seen Russia get involved in this way.
We’ve also seen major diplomatic achievements from the multipolar world. And also this drive, BRICS is holding their summit in Kazan in October. We’ve seen all BRICS countries, especially at the bilateral level, move more toward their respective currencies and away from the dollar and settling trade.
So Michael, maybe you could talk about just, how have these wars, whether we’re talking about what’s happening in West Asia with Gaza, the broader conflagration that’s emerging there, Ukraine, how have they really cascaded or accelerated this process toward a more multipolar world? You have framed it as almost like a split in civilizations.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, way back in 1955, you had the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations meeting in Indonesia. They realized that the way in which the American post-war order of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and trade was working against them, but they couldn’t do it alone. And America was able to divide and conquer countries.
Well, what has changed all that was really beginning around 25 years ago, China was able to be independent and was able to rise very rapidly by getting rich in the same way that America got rich in the 19th century, by promoting industrialization, by preventing monopolies from taking over, and most of all, by keeping money and finance as a public utility in its own domain instead of letting the banks take over.
And so for 20 years now, just before the last few years’ war, you had countries realizing that we need a new economic order, let’s talk about it. You had a lot of academic work on it.
What has actually triggered this sense of urgency and making it pressing is precisely what you’re seeing not only in Ukraine, but above all in Israel. You’re having a fight against the principle of civilization itself. And Netanyahu, he said it quite efficiently. He said, this is a fight between civilization and barbarism. And it is.
He gets it confused as to who’s the civilization and who are the barbarians. That phrase comes from Rosa Luxemburg a century ago, who was killed by Nazis in Germany, along with Karl Liebknecht. And now you’re having, all of a sudden, when the rest of the nations see what’s happening in Ukraine, the fight for the last Ukrainian can be us. Japan is saying, well, if we join America, are we going to fight for the last Japanese? The Taiwanese are saying, well, if we really take American arms and fight China, are we going to die for the last Taiwanese?
And they’re looking at the anti-human behavior against Gaza, against the West Bank, against Lebanon. And they’re saying, this could be our future. This makes it urgent that we join together and create an alternative economy to the kind of world that the United States and the neoliberals are controlling, saying, if we can’t control you, we’ll wreck you.
Well, there has to be an alternative to being wrecked. And it’s not that there is a conflict. There’s no such thing as a Thucydian conflict. China, Russia, Iran, Eurasia, they don’t want to be like the West. They want to avoid being like the West. They want to say, you go your way, we’ll go ours. The West has failed as it’s being sucked into the US-sponsored unipolar neoliberalism.
They’re creating, sort of trying to reinvent the wheel politically and economically. They’re not looking at the past. They’re trying just very pragmatically to figure out how to go it alone. All they want to do is to go it alone.
And the United States is saying, we don’t want you to go alone. We want you to be financially colonized. We want to get your wealth, to siphon it off to the IMF, the World Bank, our foreign trade and investment. We want you to let us buy your commanding heights, to us buy your public utilities and make monopoly rents off them.
This is a whole fight for what kind of world we can have. And the urgency is about just how we started this whole discussion with the inhuman wars that we’re seeing in the Near East and Ukraine.
JILL STEIN: And if I can add to that, you know, about the urgency, we also have this genocide that’s going on, you know, right in front of our noses. And it’s not only that the housing has been totally destroyed, people have been completely displaced. They’re basically living on the street in tents if they’re lucky, but they’re out of tents as well. And they’re denied food and water. And now they have infectious diseases that are beginning to really escalate. And that’s cholera. It’s also polio, you know, which becomes really widespread in a population before you even begin to see it. And it looks like that has happened.
This is also a threat to Israel, by the way. These infectious diseases don’t stay, you know, contained. So this is a monstrous world.
And speaking to the urgency, you know, there’s the urgency of Americans who are just barely holding on to a roof over their heads, who don’t have the health care that they need, who 18 million people can’t afford their pharmaceuticals. You know, this is the false promises of the Democrats that they would pass a $15 minimum wage. They wouldn’t even bring it to a vote. You know, and $15 is no longer enough to support yourself or your family or keep a roof over your heads.
So it’s really the complete abandonment of working people in this country that is really in a state of emergency right now.
You have some, you know, 600,000 people or more on a given night that are out on the streets, and now they’re not allowed to sleep on the streets. So exactly where are they going to go?
We have a world which is crashing and burning. Speaking of which, you know, look at the, you know, the wildfires that are burning out of control right now. And, you know, and the heat waves and the drought of the Colorado River, for example, which supplies the agricultural system of California, which in turn provides half the fruits and vegetables for the nation, Colorado River is going down.
So this is, this is an all out emergency here on so many fronts.
And specifically, you have the genocide. And there are some half million people who are at risk for dying this month, according to the UN World Food Program. So, you know, if you don’t like genocide, if you don’t like that blood on your hands, if you don’t like seeing these emaciated skeletons of children, and, you know, starvation is not like a quick death or a merciful death. This is torture. You know, these are families and children who are being tortured on an industrial scale. And this torture has gone on really for nine months.
This is, you know, this is like the opposite of civilization. This is unbelievable, really brutality, inhumanity, barbarism on an unprecedented scale that we’re watching now.
And Israel completely denies, is in all-out denial of, and the neocons here that support them, and the neoliberals that support them are completely, you know, in sync. It is a characteristic of genocide, according to some of the experts that, I’ve just done only the least little bit of reading on. But apparently, this is common. Populations that are committing genocide, people are committing genocide, feel like they are under threat themselves. And that is the mindset right now.
We need some adults in the room to stand up here, because they are dragging us all into this quagmire right now. And that goes nuclear. You know, I mean, that’s where we’re going. And we’re moving from a genocide right now to potentially a genocide on a civilizational scale here. That’s what nuclear war is. And we have leadership, which has lost their minds, not only Israel’s leadership, but the leadership in this country, who are collaborating with these monsters, these complete moral monsters, who don’t have a clue what they’re doing. They need to be removed from power as quickly as possible.
And I just really want to encourage people to have the courage of your convictions, you know, and don’t let your humanity be denied. And don’t be intimidated out of your vote. We have absolutely nothing to lose here by standing up and voting for what it is that we need. Don’t be talked into the lesser evil. Fascism is here. You only have to look at the heads being bashed in on campuses, the denial of our rights of free speech, the denial of our right to protest, the viciousness.
You know, it’s the Israeli occupation forces, which are training the police forces. We have 70 cop cities being built in this country. In just about every state now, you have cop cities that are being built.
You have the draft, which has been reactivated. It is now on automatic pilot. And your names and your children’s names are all going into that database. There is nowhere to run. Fascism is here. We have to stand up and we have to fight it. Do not be intimidated.
You know, a lot of the cop cities, a lot of the violence that’s taking place in defense of genocide here in this country is being committed by Democrats, whether it’s Mayor Adams in New York, whether it’s, you know, the cop cities in Atlanta, Georgia, for example. That’s all under Democrats. And people are trying to bring it to a referendum to shut it down. And they are trying to block that referendum.
Look at the whole process of this election within the Democratic Party. There was basically, you know, a primary was really not allowed to be held. And then there was this switcheroo that was orchestrated from on high, dictated from basically political elites inside the Democratic Party, decided that Joe Biden was out and Kamala Harris was in. There’s not been a single vote cast on behalf of Kamala Harris, but she is now the anointed candidate. There will not be an open convention.
You know, democracy is on life support in this country, if at all. So do not be intimidated into voting for genocide, voting for fascism. It’s here. It’s in both parties. The minor differences between them, you know, are not enough to save your job, to save your life, or to save the planet. The ship is going down here rather quickly.
And the one, you know, tool that we have, and I should say there is more than one tool, certainly action in the streets is a very powerful tool, but we cannot let them talk us out of our power to vote. We have to vote and we have to stand up and demand our right to vote and to vote for a candidate of our choice who actually represents us, not AIPAC, not the war machine, not the big pharma and the health insurance companies.
So I just really want to encourage people to stand up. Do not let yourself be, you know, drummed and propagandized into powerlessness. We do have the power.
In the words of Alice Walker, the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with. Whether you look at 68% of Americans who vehemently object to this genocide, whether you look at 44 million young people locked into student debt, you know, 100 million in medical debt, things that we can fix right here and now, we have the numbers.
And, you know, this is a, you know, a once in a lifetime opportunity in this election to stand up and fight back while we still can. And however far we get, we become a force to contend with, whether we take the White House or we simply win the day by establishing a strong force, which will continue to organize and to contest for power.
Look at what just happened in France. How did France beat back the right wing? By standing up, by the forces on the left joining together.
It was the same thing [with] Allende in Chile. When Allende prevailed, that was thanks to Pablo Neruda, who joined forces with him. And so you had the two progressive campaigns coming together so that they could prevail. Unfortunately, the CIA then, you know, overturned that revolution. But, you know, we have to take it and then we have to stay on it.
And, you know, the world is in rebellion right now. The US and Israel are alone together in this genocide. And that is not a, you know, that’s not an alliance that can prevail against the rest of the world. So we need to stand up. We need to protect and preserve international law, because when you’re no longer the bully in the schoolyard, you need international law. So we have to stop setting it aside and destroying it. We need to be a team player. The adults in the room need to come forward here, including in this country. And we need to stand up and take our democracy back. And that starts right now.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Indeed. And, Michael, do you have any final comments?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, nobody can be more eloquent than what Jill just said. I wanted to sum up the voting issue. Many people accuse her campaign as being a wrecker for the Democratic Party. And they say, you know, if you’re going to get votes, it’s going to be just like Ralph Nader in 2000. You’re going to make the Democrats lose.
Well, that’s the objective. The Democrats are what have become the neoliberal party, the war party. When even Donald Trump moves to the left of the Democrats and is a peace candidate in Ukraine, you see how crazy it is.
Yes, a vote for Jill is a vote away from Democrats. That’s why I want you to vote for her.
JILL STEIN: And it’s the only way to shut down Republicans, I must say, because neoliberalism is the cause of, of, of neofascism. It is not the solution to it. The Democrats have been funding the most extremist wing of the Republican party in the same way that the Pied Piper campaign, you know, revealed through the WikiLeaks in the Podesta emails, the Pied Piper campaign was all about elevating the most radical fringe element of the Republicans. And that was Donald Trump, whom they promoted in the news and with their media contacts and all that. They were all about running against Trump.
And they’ve continued that, you know, very successful policy, you know, that absolutely outrageous strategy. They’re still following it.
And in the 2022 midterms, they spent some $50 million elevating the most extremist candidates within the Republican party, sponsoring them, contributing to them so that they would win their primaries and make it easier to win in the general. But unfortunately then, they take on a life of their own within the Republican party.
So both of these parties are absolutely corrupt. They are up to their eyeballs in the swamp in very big money. You can now contribute a hundred, $1 million at a pop. That’s even not even using super PACs where you can contribute billions if you want, you know, it’s absolutely limitless, but even within the non-super PAC contributions, the limit is now 1 million. The system only gets more corrupt by the day. We need a system of public financing.
And by the way, the department of treasury, the Democratic department of treasury is withholding our matching funds. We are supposed to have $300,000 approximately in matching funds that we would be using to complete our ballot drives now to ensure that all voters have an anti-genocide, anti-war, pro-worker, climate emergency choice on the ballot.
They’re withholding the money. They are pulling out all the stops. They’ve hired an army of lawyers and they have publicly advertised for spies and infiltrators and people to manage them in our campaigns. In order, that’s how scared they are. They know their days are numbered.
Greens and independents don’t need to steal their thunder because they already lost their thunder. Democrats did this to themselves. They started losing their base in 2010 after the Wall Street bailouts, after you know, after the Democratic party trifecta in both houses and in the white house, um, uh, bailed out wall street and threw out seven or 8 million homeowners, you know, add to that NAFTA and essentially the loss of 30 million jobs, uh, over the last couple of decades.
So working people have been devastated, particularly by the Democratic party. And that’s when votes really began to shift. That was the biggest spoiled election that the Democrats have ever had. They lost 1000 seats in the state legislatures. They lost 64 seats in Congress and 13 or 14 in the Senate and the same number of governorships. So they have done this to themselves.
They try to blame it on us. They just need a scapegoat. Like they’re trying to blame, you know, everything on immigrants right now. The Republican party is all about demonizing immigrants and the democratic party is all about demonizing Republicans. And that’s about as far as we will get with those two parties. So we have to stand up and fight back. Democrats are not how we fight back.
We’ve got to do that. We have an agenda for that, which is up on our website and it’s what we’ve been talking about here today. So I’d say join the revolution and, uh, let’s make it happen again. Go to Jill Stein2024.com and, uh, really appreciate you.
Thank you so much, Michael, for all you do. I learn every, I learn a lot every time I, uh, every time I have a conversation with you and Danny, thank you so much for making this possible and all your fabulous work.
We need a free press, and support, support this channel here for making that possible. Of course.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Well, one thing, uh, for our purposes, uh, the reason why Jill Stein is here, the reason why Michael Hudson, I bring on people like Michael Hudson here is because a campaign like Jill Stein’s is really, as you said, Jill, the Democrats, Republicans, there’s no chance for the purposes of this channel. We talk a lot about geopolitics. We would talk a lot about peace. We talk a lot about, uh, war.
There’s no candidate. Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Democrat, Republican, those two parties, they will not address these questions, no matter what they say, they are not going to change the political calculus worldwide. They will not bring us closer to peace, which means all these other things that Dr. Stein has brought up and that Michael has brought up, they will not be addressed either. So that’s why we are here today.
But do you guys have time for a couple of quick questions from the audience just to close it out?
JILL STEIN: Um, yeah. Uh, quick ones, but I, I sure, sure. So I won’t go over everyone. Uh, sorry. We have time constraints. Um, so I’m going to not go over all the super chats, but we do have one, a super chat question and one Patriot member question. I’m gonna start with the Patriot member question. Cause it’s a good one. It’s from Jeff.
He said, how will the Greens, if elected, pragmatically defend themselves from efforts to sabotage their campaign? So you talked a little bit about that because they’re interested in, and you even brought it up, Jill, with with Salvador Allende, right? Like we’re not even at that stage yet, but nonetheless, the repression is there. So, so how, how pragmatically, how do you address that kind of thing?
JILL STEIN: Yes. So there’s no silver bullet here and, and that’s going to be a big issue, but there are many things we need to do and can do to re-engage democracy. And let me say that we will not get elected into the White House without there being a strong grassroots movement. And above all that grassroots movement will not be put on the shelf, which is what Barack Obama did once he broke a whole lot of barriers, you know, and then he appointed Larry Summers and it was clear where he was going with his campaign, it was about Wall Street. It wasn’t about grassroots power.
So let me just say to everyone who supports this campaign, it’s not over. You know, if, if we, however much we prevail, we have to keep going, whether we win the White House or we don’t win the White House, we have to keep going. But especially if we win the White House we will need to have a concerted ongoing grassroots movement.
And among the things that we will re-engage to make democracy possible are town hall meetings so that we are holding our elected, our electeds accountable. We used to do that. Right now, our electeds are too busy talking to their big donors to be held, you know, to have their feet held to the fire by their constituents. So we will bring back town hall meetings and, using the bully pulpit, which they cannot deny us. We will blame and shame those who are not meeting with their constituents and who are not representing them.
We’ll also bring back congressional hearings and we will also undertake an antitrust lawsuit against consolidated media so that we will break up media. You know, all this is day one stuff that we can start aside from, you know, ending the flow of weapons to Israel declaring a climate emergency as well, because the minute you declare the emergency, you unleash over half a trillion dollars in funding to actually begin the Green New Deal.
So, you know, we will not come into this blind and naive. We won’t come into this after decades of, you know, of harassment, smears, smear campaigns and fear campaigns.
You know, we will also fight to make social media a public utility so that it’s not in the business of being controlled and censored by, you know, by Elon Musk and the likes.
You know, we need a strong democracy. We also need to tear down oligarchy because when money and power is highly concentrated in a few hands, it has all kinds of ways to destroy democracy. So, you know, we need multiple initiatives on multiple fronts.
And I will also say that there are many people running for Congress right now who are Greens or Socialists or DSA who are running on a similar agenda. And so we will have allies. There’s no way that we will get into the White House without there being a wave of, you know, people-powered representatives also coming into power.
So we basically, you know, fight by staying organized and staying vigilant and knowing what’s coming.
And by the way, among the congressional hearings that we intend to hold are hearings on actually the history of the CIA and the role of the deep state in undermining our democracy and our foreign policy. The record needs to be set straight.
MICHAEL HUDSON: So what Jill’s saying is this is just the beginning.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Well, actually, let’s cut it here, everyone. I am so appreciative of your Super Chats. I want to say thank you to Ken, Nadia. I know you had a question, but thank you so much. We’ll have to get to another time. J.D., Heinz, Josh, Lucky, duly noted, Barbara, you all left Super Chats. Thank you so much for that. But we will wrap it up here. Thank you so much, Dr. Stein. Thank you so much, Professor Hudson, for joining me today. Thanks to all the people in the audience. You can find the links both to Jill Stein’s campaign as well as Michael Hudson’s website where you can find all of his books and works in the video description.
You can support this channel and the links in the video description as well from Patreon, Substack, YouTube membership, PayPal and more. We will be heading out of here right now. Take care, everyone. And I’ll be back soon. Bye bye. Thanks so much.
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