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Economist Michael Hudson explains how American imperialism has created a global free lunch, where the US makes foreign countries pay for its wars, and even their own military occupation.

Economist Michael Hudson explains how American imperialism has created a global free lunch, where the US makes foreign countries pay for its wars, and even their own military occupation.Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss the economics of Washington’s empire, the role of the IMF and World Bank, attempts to create alternative financial systems like BRICS, and the new cold war on China and Russia.
PART 2 OF 2
(Interview recorded on April 13, 2020)
Part 1: “US coronavirus ‘bailout’ is $6 trillion giveaway to Wall St – Economist Michael Hudson explains”

(Teaser – 0:03)
MICHAEL HUDSON: The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture. This is built into its articles of agreement. It can only make foreign currency loans, so it will only make loans to countries for agricultural development, roads, if it is to promote exports.
So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern in history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a secretary of defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism.
Its idea is that, we’ll make Latin American, and African, and Asian countries export plantation crops , especially plantations that are foreign owned. But the primary directive of the World Bank to countries is: “You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops.”
(Intro – 1:45)
BENJAMIN NORTON: Here at Moderate Rebels we talk a lot about imperialism. I mean it’s really the kind of main point of this show. This program explores how US imperialism functions, how it works on the global stage, how neoliberal policies of austerity and privatization are forced at the barrel of a gun through the US military, through invasion and plunder.
We talk about it in Venezuela, and Iraq, and Syria, and so many countries. But we often don’t talk about the specific economic dynamics of how it works through banks, and loans, and bonds.
Well today we are continuing our discussion with the economist Michael Hudson, who is really one of the best experts in the world when it comes to understanding how US imperialism functions as an economic system, not just through a system of military force.
Of course the economics are maintained, are undergirded, by that military force. And we talk about how the military force is expressed through regime-change wars and military interventions.
But Michael Hudson also explains how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the US financial system, and banks and Wall Street, they all work together, hand in glove with the military, to maintain that financial chokehold.
He spells this all out brilliantly in a book called “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” He originally wrote that book back in 1968, and then recently updated it in 2002, published again in 2003 with the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and kind of updated and showed how, even though the system that he detailed 50 years ago hasn’t really changed, but it has shifted in some ways.
So today we’re gonna talk about how that international imperialist system dominated by the US works.
Michael Hudson, who in the first part of this talked about the scheme that is the coronavirus bailout — if you want to watch the first part you can go find that at moderaterebels.com; it’s on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, any other platform.
Michael Hudson is an economist and he’s also a longtime Wall Street financial analyst. He is also a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and you can find his work at michael-hudson.com, which I will link to in the show notes for this episode.
So without further ado, here is the second part of our interview with Michael Hudson.
(4:37)
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think it’s a good transition point to talk about another kind of scam you’ve identified. There’s a really hilarious aside in the second preface to your book “Super Imperialism,” where Herman Kahn, who is, I think he was a founder of the Hudson Institute, which you went to work for, he was also the inspiration for the Dr. Strangelove character and Stanley Kubrick’s film.
Herman Kahn is, there’s an award that the neocons give out every year named for him; Benjamin Netanyahu is a recent award winner.
But he was he was in the audience, or on a panel for one of your talks, where you laid out your theory of “Super Imperialism,” and how the United States actually gets other countries to subsidize its empire, and is able to expand and carry out this massive imperial project without having to impose austerity on its own population, as other countries have to do under IMF control.
So Herman Kahn comes up to you after the talk and says, “You actually identified the rip-off perfectly.” And your book starts selling like hotcakes in DC, I guess among people who work for the CIA, and people who work in the military-intelligence apparatus.
MICHAEL HUDSON: What he said was, “We’ve pulled off the greatest ripoff in history. We’ve gone way beyond anything that British Empire ever thought of.” He said, “That’s a success story. Most people think imperialism is bad; you’ve shown how it’s the greatest success story — we get a free lunch forever!”
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. So explain the ripoff you identified there, and how it is being perpetuated under the Trump administration in ways that I think are pretty amazing, including through the imposition of unprecedented sanctions on something like one-third of the world’s population.
(6:40)
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I wrote “Super Imperialism” in 1972, and it was published exactly one month after President Nixon took America off gold in August of 1971. And the reason he took America off gold was the entire balance of payments deficit from the Korean War to the Vietnam War was military in character.
And every time, especially in the ’60s, the more money that America would spend in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, all this money had to be spent locally. And the banks were all French banks, because it was French Indochina, all the money would be sent to Paris, to the banks’ head offices, turned over from dollars into francs, and General de Gaulle would end up with all these dollars, and he would, every month, send in the dollars and want payment in gold. And Germany would do the same thing.
And so the more America fought militarily, it was depleting its own gold stock, until finally, in August 1971, it said, “We’ve been using gold as the key to our world power ever since World War I, when we put Europe on rations. So we’re going to stop paying gold.”
They closed the gold window. And most of the economists were all saying, “Oh my heavens, now it’s going to be a depression. “But what I said was, “Wait a minute, now that other countries can no longer get gold from all this military spending” — and when you talked about the balance of payments deficit, it’s not the trade deficit, it’s not foreign investment; it’s almost entirely military in character.
So all these this money that spent abroad, how are we ever going to get it back? Well these dollars we have spent around the world, mainly for the 800 military bases and the other activities we have, these dollars would end up in foreign central banks.
And foreign central banks, what are they going to do with them? Well we wouldn’t let foreign central banks buy American industries. We would let them buy stocks, but not a majority owner.
My former boss, the man who taught me all about the oil industry, in Standard Oil, who became undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, and when Herman Kahn and I went to the White House, he said, “We’ve told the Saudi Arabians that they can charge whatever they want for their oil, but all the money they get, they have to recycle to the United States. Mostly they can buy Treasury bonds, so that we’ll have the money to keep on spending, but they can also buy stocks, or they can do with the Japanese did and buy junk real estate and lose their shirts.”
So basically, when America spends money abroad, central banks really don’t have much — they don’t speculate. They don’t buy companies; they buy Treasury bonds. So we run a monetary deficit; the dollars are spent abroad; the central banks lend them back to the Treasury; and that finances the budget deficit, but it also finances the balance of payments deficit. So we just keep giving paper
And I think President Bush, George W. Bush, said, “Well we’re never really going to repay this. They get counters, but we’re not going to repay it.” And then, as a matter of fact, you have Tom Cotton a senator from [Arkansas] saying, “Well you know China holds savings of $2 trillion or so in US Treasury bonds. Why don’t we just not pay them? They gave us the virus; let just grab it and nullify it.”
We can nullify Iranian assets, Venezuelan assets — it’s like a bank can just wipe out other deposits you have, if it wants militarily. So the United States doesn’t have any constraint on military spending.
Now Herman Kahn and I on another occasion went to the Treasury Department, and we talked about what the world would look like on a gold standard. And I said, “Well gold is a peaceful metal. If you have to pay in gold, no country with a gold standard can afford to go to war anymore. Because a war would be entail a foreign exchange payment, and you’d have to pay this foreign exchange in gold, not IOUs, and you would end up going broke pretty quickly.”
Well needless to say, I think someone from the Defense Department said, “That’s why we’re not going to do it.”
Here’s an example: Let’s suppose that you went to a grocery store. You decided, ok, you go to the grocery store and you buy — you sign an IOU for everything that you buy. You go to a liquor store, IOU. You buy a car, IOU.
You get everything you want just for an IOU, and people try to collect the IOUs, and you say, “Well you know that IOU isn’t for collecting from me. Trade it among yourselves. Trade it among yourselves and you’ll get rich in no time. But treat it as an asset, just as you treat a dollar bill.”
Well you’d get a free ride. You’d be allowed to go and write IOUs for everything, and nobody could ever collect. That’s what the United States position is, and that’s what it wants to keep.
And that’s why China, Russia, and other countries are trying to de-dollarize, trying to get rid of the dollar, and are buying gold so that they can settle payments deficits among themselves in their own currency, or currencies of friendly countries, but just avoid the dollars altogether.
(12:21)
BENJAMIN NORTON: Michael, in the first part of this interview, when we were talking about the coronavirus bailout and the $6 trillion that were just basically given to Wall Street, you mentioned that basically it is just — I mean, I also said it — that’s it’s just a con scheme. But you said, really, that a lot of people are surprised, that they don’t think the system can work this way, because it just seems so blatantly stacked against them, so blatantly unfair.
In your book — “Super Imperialism” is just so mind-blowing because, in simplistic terms to someone who is definitely a non-expert like me, it just becomes so clear that, as you put it, the US for decades, since the end of World War Two, has been really obtaining “the largest free lunch ever achieved in history,” the way you put it.
I’m gonna read just two paragraphs here really quickly from your book, and then maybe ask you to unpack exactly how this works. But right at the beginning — and this is the updated version of your book, and we’ll link to your book in the show notes for this show. So anyone, I would highly recommend anyone listening could go buy “Super Imperialism.”
I’m going to be republishing it through my own institute. It’s very hard to get the book; that’s why I’m buying the rights back. Because it’s really not marketed in this country very much. So at any rate it’s on my website, and you don’t have to buy the book; you can go to my website and get many of the chapters.
Excellent, well I’m gonna link to your website in the show notes that’s michael-hudson.com. And thank you for putting that up, because I’ve been reading the PDF, and it’s incredible.
So you write in the the introduction to the new updated version, which you wrote in 2002, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, you wrote:
“The Treasury bonds standard of international finance has enabled the United States to obtain the largest free lunch ever achieved in history. America has turned the international financial system upside down, whereas formerly it rested on gold, central bank reserves are now held in the form of US government IOUs, that can be run up without limit.
“In effect America has been buying up Europe, Asia, and other regions with paper credit, US Treasury IOUs that it has informed the world it has little intention of ever paying off.
“And there is little Europe or Asia can do about it except to abandon the dollar and create their own financial system.”
So this seems to me as an outsider to be totally insane, to be a total con scheme. Can you explain how that scheme works, and especially in light of neoliberal economics?
I took, just in college, basic introductory economics classes that were mandatory, especially microeconomics, and in those classes they teach you this neoliberal, libertarian form of economics, and they teach you the famous Winston Churchill quote, “There is no such thing in economics as a free lunch.” But you’re pointing out that actually, on the international stage, this whole thing is just all a giant free lunch for the US empire.
(15:53)
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the whole financial economy is a free lunch, and if you’re going to get a free lunch, then you protect yourself by saying there is no such thing as a free lunch. Obviously it does not want to make itself visible; it wants to make itself as invisible as possible.
Well most of these countries in Asia get the dollars from US military spending. They say, “What are we going to do with the dollars?” They buy US Treasury bonds, that finance the military spending on the military bases that encircle them. So they’re financing their own military encirclement!
It’s a circular flow. The United States spends dollars in these countries; the local recipients turn them over for local currency; the local currency recipients, the food sellers and the manufacturers, turn the dollars over to the banks for domestic currency, which is how they operate; and the dollars are sent back to the United States; and it’s a circular flow that is basically military in character.
And the gunboats don’t appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn’t have gun boats in them, or the crime sector, and probably they didn’t have debt in it either.
So if you have economics talking as if the whole economy is workers spending their wages on goods and services; government doesn’t play a role except to interfere, but government is 40 percent of GDP, mainly military in character, then obviously economics doesn’t really talk about what you think of the economy; it doesn’t talk about society.
It talks about a very narrow segment that it isolates, as if we’re talking about a small organ in the body, without seeing the body as a whole economic system, a whole interrelated system that is dominated and controlled by the finance and real estate sector, which has gained control of the government.
And if the finance, and the insurance, and military sector, military-industrial complex, make themselves invisible and absent from the textbook, then people are just not going to look there to say, “How did that affect our life? How does that affect the economy?” And they’re not going to see that that’s what’s making the economy poor and pushing it into depression.
(18:11)
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well I can’t give out IOUs on everything, on my own debts, because when the debt collector comes, I don’t have gunboats; I don’t have machine guns; I don’t have any gun.
I mean if I wanted to get a gun I couldn’t get one, because they’re all bought up in Virginia, across the river, because you know everyone’s panicking. And I’m sure they’re defending themselves by like having their guns accidentally go off and shoot their dogs.
But that’s kind of what’s missing as well from this theory is that, if people try to collect their debt on the US, the US can do severe damage to them, militarily or otherwise.
Let’s game this out. I mean how do you see this playing out in Venezuela, where the Venezuelan government has tried to go around US sanctions, has tried to to work with Russia and China to sell gold; it’s had something like $5 billion of assets stolen by the US through sheer piracy in the past year.
And now the US has dispatched I think more naval ships than we’ve seen in Latin America or in South America at any time in the last 30 years.
(19:27)
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well that’s the other part of the “Super Imperialism” book: debt bondage. Venezuela had a US-installed dictator, a right-winger, some years ago, and changed the law in Venezuela so that Venezuela’s foreign debt, sovereign debt, when it borrows in dollars, is backed by the collateral of its oil reserves. And it has the largest oil reserves in South America.
So the United States wants to grab the oil reserves. Just as Vice President Cheney said we’re going into Iraq and Syria to grab the oil, America would like all these oil reserves in Venezuela.
How does it get the oil reserves? Well it doesn’t have to technically invade, or at least finance is the new mode of warfare.
It tried to grab these reserves by saying, “Let’s block Venezuela from earning the money by exporting the oil and earning the money from its US investments to pay the foreign debt. So we’re just going to grab the investment, and we’re going to select a mini dictator; we’re going to give it to Mr. Guaidó, and say, “This doesn’t belong to Venezuela; we’re arbitrarily taking it away and we’re giving the oil distribution assets in North America to Guaidó.”
“We’re going to block Venezuela from paying the debt, and that means it’ll default on a foreign debt, and so the vulture funds and the bondholders can now grab Venezuelan oil, anywhere, under international law, because it is pledged as collateral for its debt, just as if you’d borrowed a mortgage debt and you’d pledged your home and the creditor could take away your home” — like Obama had so many people lose their home.
Well now they’re trying to force Venezuela into relinquishing its debt, but Venezuela still is managing to scrape by. And so they may need a military force out to invade Venezuela, like Bush invaded Panama or Grenada.
It’s an oil grab. So what finance couldn’t achieve, finally you really do need the military fist.
Finance is basically backed by military, and domestically by force, by the sheriff, by the police department. It’s the force that are going to kick you out of the house.
So the question is, is the only defense by the indebted people in America, your Virginia defense? Does there have to be an armed revolution here to cancel the debts? Do they have to eat the rich? That’s the whole question for the politics of America.
I don’t see it being solved. If it is not solved by the indebted people simply starving to death, committing suicide, getting sick, or emigrating, then there will have to be a revolution. Those are the choices in Americ.
And Venezuela said, “We’re not going to starve quietly in the dark.” And so there’s a military buildup pretending that it’s all about drugs, when Venezuela is threatening to interrupt the CIA’s drug trade. I mean that’s the irony of this! It’s the CIA that’s the drug dealer, not the Venezuelan government.
So we’re in the Orwellian world that works through the organs or the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, National Public Radio, the real right-wing of America.
(23:00)
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I’m so glad you boiled it down like that. Because so much of what we do at The Grayzone is to punch holes in the propaganda constructs that are used to basically provide liberal cover for what is sheer gangsterism.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s much more black and white than gray.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah well, we should call it The Black and White Zone.
We’re seeing it as well in Syria, where we’ve had one kind of human rights propaganda construct after another. And now at the end of the line, as the whole proxy war ends, Trump says, “We have to keep the troops there because of oil. We need them to guard the oil fields.”
So it all becomes clear. But it’s unclear to everyone who’s been confused for the past years, following the way that the war has been marketed to them through these corporate media and US government publications that you just named. It’s just, we’re there for the oil.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Michael, I mean there are so many ways we could explore this topic further, and hopefully we can have you back more often in the future, because we definitely need more economics coverage. We frequently talk about the political side of a lot of these issues of US imperialism, but of course the economic element is absolutely integral to understand what’s happening.
I’m also very interested, you mentioned before we started this interview, that your book “Super Imperialism” is very popular in China, and that even in schools there people are reading it.
And the question of China I think is the central question of this century — the rise of China, the so-called “threat” that China poses, in scare quotes, to the US. Of course China doesn’t threaten the American people, but rather the chokehold that the US has on the international financial system.
And we have seen under Trump — I mean it’s been happening for years; it really actually began under Obama with the “Pivot to Asia,” and that was really Hillary Clinton’s State Department strategy was to move toward the encirclement of China.
But now under Trump it has really become the main foreign policy bogeyman of the Trump White House. And especially now with coronavirus, every single day the corporate media is full of non-stop anti-china propaganda — “China is the evil totalitarian regime that’s going to take over the world, and we have to unite with the Republicans in order to fight against China.”
And we now even see figures openly defending the “new cold war,” as they call it. They say we’re in a new Cold War, as the right-wing historian from Harvard Niall Ferguson put it in the New York Times recently.
So I’m wondering, your book I think is even more relevant now than it was when you first wrote it, it’s so, so relevant. But what about the question of China? And what about the question of this new cold war?
Do you think that could challenge the US-dominated financial system that was created after World War II, using the weapons of the World Bank and the IMF, as you spell out? Are we heading maybe toward the creation of a new international financial system?
(26:24)
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well what makes China so threatening is that it’s following the exact, identical policies that made America rich in the 19th century. It’s a mixed economy.
Its government is providing the basic infrastructure and subsidized prices to lower the cost of living and the cost of doing business, so that its export industry can make money. And it’s subsidizing research and development, just like the United States did in the 19th century and early 20th century.
So America basically says to the rest of the world, “Do as we say, not as we do, and not as we’ve done.”
So China has a mixed economy that is working very well. You can just see the changes occurring there. And it realizes that the United States is trying to disable it, that that the United States wants to control all the sectors of production that have monopoly pricing — information technology, microchip technology, 5G communications, military spending.
And the United States wants to be able to essentially buy goods from the rest of the world with overpriced exports, American movies, anything that has a patent that yields a monopoly price. And China wants to become — it has decided that.
America, in the 1950s tried to fight China by sanctioning grain exports to China. You mentioned sanctions earlier, the first sanctions were used against China, to prevent them, trying to starve them with grain.
Canada broke that embargo for grain, and China was very friendly to Canada, until Canada turned out to be — the prime minister, now that he has moved into a small basement in the Pentagon, and has agreed to grab Chinese officials. It’s right there in Washington; Canada is right there in Washington in one of the basements. It’s not a country anymore. So China does not feel so friendly towards Canada now that it’s moved.
But it realized, we can’t depend on America for anything. It can cut us off with sanctions like it has tried to do with Iran, with Venezuela, with Cuba.
So the idea of China, Russia, and the countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has been: “We have to be independent within ourselves, and make a Eurasian trading area, and we will take off because we are successful industrial capitalism, evolving into socialism, into a mixed economy, with the government handling all of the monopoly sectors to prevent monopoly pricing here.”
“And we don’t want American banks to come in, create paper dollars, and buy out all of our industries. We’re not going to let America do that.”
(29:29)
I have gone back to China very often. And I’m a professor at Peking University; I have honorary professorships in Wuhan. I probably lecture mainly in Tianjin. There are a number of articles on my website from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on de-dollarization, essentially how China can avoid the use of the dollar by becoming independent in agriculture, and technology, and other goods.
And the threat of China is that it will not be a victim. Victimizers always look at the victims as vicious attackers of themselves. So America says China is a vicious threat because it’s not letting us exploit them and victimize them.
So again, it’s an Orwellian rhetoric of the bully. The bully always believes that the person he’s attacking is a threat. Just like in Germany, Goebbels said that their surefire way to mobilize the population behind any attack is to say, “We’re defending ourselves against foreign attack.”
So you have the American attack on China pretending to be defense against their wanting to be just as independent as the United States always has been. The United States doesn’t want any other country to have any leverage to use over the United States. The United States insists on veto power in any organization that it’ll join — the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations.
And China essentially says, ok, this is the very definition of national independence, to be independent from other countries available to choke us, offering a choke point, whether it’s a grain that we need; or technology; or the bank clearing system, the SWIFT interbank clearing system, to make our financial system operate; or the internet system.
So by essentially waging this economic warfare against China to protect America monopolies, America is integrating China and Russia. And probably the leading Chinese nationalist in the world, the leading Russian nationalist, is Donald Trump.
He’s saying, “Look boys, I know that you’re influenced by American neoliberals. I’m gonna help you. I believe that you should be independent. I’m gonna help you, Chinese, and Russians, and Iranians, be independent. I’m going to keep pushing the sanctions on agriculture, to make sure that you’re able to feed yourself. I’m gonna be pushing sanctions on technology, to make sure that you can defend yourself.”
So he obviously is, I believe he’s a Chinese and Russian agent, just like MSNBC says.
(32:09)
BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah and Michael, this actually reminds me, I used to follow you regularly at The Real News, and I worked there for a bit, and unfortunately there was kind an internal coup there, and it has moved to the right a bit.
But the point is, a few years ago at The Real News, I remember you did an amazing debate between you and the Canadian economist Leo Panitch, and it was about the nature of the BRICS system.
This was when this is before the series of coups that that overthrew the left in Brazil and installed the fascist government now of Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing extremist. And at the time there was Dilma Rousseff, a progressive from the Workers’ Party.
And Brazil and Russia were helping to take the lead in the BRICS system. This is Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
And of course the coups, the series of coups in Brazil, kind of ended that project of South-South regional integration. And also the rise of the right-wing, the far-right, in India with Narendra Modi.
But there was a moment there when the BRICS community, these countries were trying to build their own bank. China of course has a series of banks. You mentioned the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
So there have been these international institutions, multilateral institutions, created to kind of challenge the hegemony of the World Bank and the IMF.
And I remember in that debate, Leo Panitch was arguing that, “Oh the BRIC system and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all of these institutions are just going to be the new form of neoliberalism, and they’re just going to replace the World Bank and implement many of the same policies.” You disagreed with that.
So maybe can you kind of relitigate that debate here a little bit and just kind of articulate your position for our viewers?
(34:08)
MICHAEL HUDSON: The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture. This is built into its articles of agreement. It can only make foreign currency loans, so it will only make loans to countries for agricultural development, roads, if it is to promote exports.
So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern in history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a secretary of defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism.
Its idea is that, we’ll make Latin American, and African, and Asian countries export plantation crops , especially plantations that are foreign owned. But the primary directive of the World Bank to countries is: “You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops that can’t be grown in temperate zones like the United States.”
So China and Russia, they’re not really agricultural economies. The buttress of America’s trade balance has been agriculture, not industry. Obviously, we de-industrialized. Agriculture, since World War II, has been the foundation of the trade balance.
And you need foreign dependency. The purpose of the World Bank is to make other countries’ economies distorted and warped into a degree that they are dependent on the United States for their trade patterns.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Well Michal, isn’t it also true though that China has massive agricultural production, and Russia produces a lot of wheat right?
(36:14)
MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure, but it does it doesn’t have to base its exports on agriculture to African countries. It can afford having African countries growing their own food supply so that they won’t have to buy American food; they can grow their own food.
Imagine, if China helps other countries grow their own food and grain, then America’s trade surplus evaporates. Because that’s the only advantage that America has, agribusiness.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah it’s like that famous quote: If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for one day; if you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life. And then I think Marx, didn’t Marx complicate that?
MICHAEL HUDSON: But if you lend them the money to buy a fish, then he ends up bankrupt and you get to grab up all his property.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah I mean we saw this play out clearly in Haiti.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, that’s the typical — what America has when it has a free a reign, that’s exactly the Haiti story. That’s absolutely terrible. It’s depressing to read.
I get cognitive dissonance, because it’s just so unfair. It’s so awful to read; I avert the page.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah I mean just observing all of this is what kind of brought me to the point where I concluded that there had to be another international financial system, when I saw how Haiti was brought to its knees.
First with the School of the Americas graduates staging a coup, and Bill Clinton reinstalls Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And so it all it takes place under the guise of goodwill by Washington.
But Aristide is forced to sign off, basically sign away Haiti’s domestic agricultural production capacity. And the next thing you know, their rice economy’s wiped out, and they’re importing rice from Louisiana.
And the only economy left, the only economic opportunity left, is to work in these free trade zones for US companies.
And that’s just the model writ large. It kind of helped lead to the next coup, that removed Aristide, and look where Haiti is today.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Right, it means, you must not protect your own economy; only America can protect its own economy. But you must not. That’s free trade.
(38:45)
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right, going back to the JFK Seeds of Peace program. It’s big agro subsidies, and then you bomb the Third World with cheap seeds and cheap goods, and then you have a migration crisis.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Seeds for Starvation is what the program is known as. Because by giving a low price of foreign aid to these countries, they they prevented domestic agricultural development, because no farmer could compete with free crops that America was giving.
The purpose of the Seeds for Starvation program was to prevent countries from feeding themselves, and to make them dependent.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, when I lived in LA I would meet families who had initially come across the border because of the program — they would point the finger directly at Seeds for Starvation. They’d say, “We came from rural Mexico, and our livelihood was wiped out.”
So this is a long-standing program. And we’ve seen in the coronavirus bailout five times more money provided to USAID for so-called stabilization programs than for hospital workers.
And that’s to do exactly what you just described: USAID is sort of the spearhead of these programs which aim to wipe out land reform programs, and replace them with US aid in the form of these cheap seeds and so on, cheap bananas to Burundi, and everywhere else.
So do you see, through your experience in China, that Belt and Road is a genuine alternative to this model?
(40:27)
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well they’re certainly trying to make it. By the way, what you’ve just described, it’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
When you have the same problem occurring after 50 years, it’s either insanity — and we know it’s not — or it’s the intent.
You have to assume at a certain point that the results of these aid programs are the intended results. And certainly if you look at the congressional testimony, Congress knows this, but the media don’t pick it up.
In China, they’re really trying to create an alternative. They want to break free from the United States. And if Trump’s policies of “America First” continue, and as he said, “We have to win every deal.” That means, any deal we make with the foreign country, that country has to lose.
So he’s integrating the whole world, and isolating the United States. And when you isolate the United States, China realizes that what will be isolated is the neoliberal philosophy that is the cover story, the junk economics that justifies all of these destructive policies.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Well Michael, this was I think one of our most interesting episodes. We want to more economics coverage, so hopefully we can talk more with you and get some more of your analysis.
I guess just concluding here, my final question would be, I mentioned that the term cold war has been thrown around a lot. And of course, the new cold war is going to be different from the old cold war in a lot of different ways.
And of course Russia is not the Soviet Union at all. Russia does not have a socialist system. China’s system as you mentioned is mixed, there are still socialist elements, but even China’s economy is not nearly as state controlled as the Soviet Union was at the peak of the cold war.
So I’m wondering, it’s pretty clear if you listen to the rhetoric coming from the Pentagon, that “great power competition” as they refer to it is now the the undergirding philosophy of US foreign policy. What is the economics of that?
Because the economics of neoliberalism, after the destruction of the Socialist Bloc, and George H. W. Bush’s declaration of a “new world order,” which is of course just neoliberalism and US hegemony — in that period, the clear economic philosophy, the kind of guiding foreign policy, was destruction of independent socialist-oriented states and forcible integration of those countries into the international neoliberal economy.
We saw that with Iraq; we saw that with former Yugoslavia; we saw that with Libya — which is really just a failed state.
So now I think we’re in a kind of new phase. The Pentagon released two years ago its national defense security strategy saying that the new goal of the Pentagon and US foreign policy is to contain China and Russia. That is the stated, professed goal.
What does that look like economically going forward?
(43:31)
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I think that’s quite right. Of course it’ll contain Russia and China, and there’s nothing that Russia and China want more than to be contained.
In other words, that they’re talking about is decoupling from the US economy. And the US will say, “Well we’re not going to let them have access to the US market, and we’re not going to have anything to do with them.” And Russia and China say, “Boy that’s wonderful, ok we’re on the same wavelength there. You can contain us; we will contain you. You go your way; we’ll go our way.”
So basically the cold war was an attempt — it’s neoliberalism and privatization. It’s Thatcherism. It’s, “How do we make China and Russia look like Margaret Thatcher’s England, or Russia in the 1990s under Yeltsin?”
“How do we prevent other countries from protecting their industry and their financial system from the United States financial system and US exports? How do we prevent other countries from doing for themselves what America does for itself? How do we make a double standard in world finance, and world trade, and world politics?”
And the result of trying to prevent other countries from doing this is simply to speed the parting guest, to accelerate their understanding that, they have to make a break; they have to be contained.
In other words, they have to create their own food supply, not rely on American food exports. They have to create their own 5G system, not let America’s 5G, with its spy portals all built in. And they have to create their own society, and go their own way.
Which is what China was like before the 16th century. It was always the “Central Kingdom”; it always looked at itself as being central and independent from the rest of the world. And it’s going back to that. Except it realizes that it needs raw materials from Africa and other countries.
And the question is, what is Europe going to do? Is Europe going to just follow the Thatcher right deflationary Eurozone policies and end up looking like Greece? Or is it going to join with Eurasia, with Russia and China, and make a whole Asiatic continent?
The cold war really is about what is going to happen to Europe. Because we have already isolated China and Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
The question is what will happen to Europe, and what will happen to Africa.
(Outro – 46:04)
BENJAMIN NORTON: Great, well I think that’s the perfect note to end on. We were speaking with the economist Michael Hudson. He is a Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri – Kansas City.
He’s also the author of many books, and we were talking about “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” He has two versions of that, and we will link to that book in the show notes of this episode.
We will also link to his website, where you can find a lot of great interviews with transcripts, his articles — and that’s michael-hudson.com.
Michael, thanks a lot. That was a really great, two-part interview. I learned a lot, and I think our viewers will benefit a lot.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah thanks a lot Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you. I hope we can fill out all the details in subsequent broadcasts.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Absolutely.


Instruction: Write an article about: US Congress candidate Geoff Young: Abolish CIA, stop arming Nazis, end drug war. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: CIA, Congress, Geoff Young, Kentucky, Nazis, podcast, Ukraine, war on drugs

Output:
US Congress candidate Geoff Young, who is running in Kentucky on an anti-war platform, explains why he wants to abolish the CIA, dismantle AFRICOM, end the war on drugs, and stop arming Nazis in Ukraine.

Multipolarista host Benjamin Norton interviewed US Congress candidate Geoff Young, who is running in Kentucky’s 6th district on an anti-war platform calling for abolishing the CIA.
We discussed Young’s 12-point program, which also seeks to “End the failed ‘War on Drugs,'” prevent nuclear war, establish a Medicare-for-All system of universal healthcare, dismantle the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), increase taxes on billionaires and millionaires, and “Get Big Money out of politics.”

Young won Kentucky’s Democratic primary election on May 17. But he explained that the state’s Democratic Party branch has refused to support him against incumbent Republican Congressman Andy Barr.
Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, has in fact publicly criticized Young over his opposition to the proxy war in Ukraine.
Young said he is “probably the only anti-war Democrat” running for Congress.
Preventing nuclear war “is my main concern. That’s been my main concern for 40, 45 years,” he explained.
And “it’s most likely to happen, looking at today’s situation, when there is a tense, perhaps a war going on, such as Ukraine. And that’s where the chances of an accidental nuclear war are the highest,” he warned.
Young criticized the US government for sending weapons to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Avoz Regiment, which has officially been part of the country’s National Guard since a 2014 Washington-sponsored coup.
At the top of his campaign website, young4ky.com, Young has a promise: “Unlike Andy Barr, I will never vote to send weapons to Nazis.”
In the interview with Multipolarista, Young stressed that Nazis “are enemies of humanity.”
“I thought Americans were against Nazis in general, you know, since World War II,” he added.
Young noted that sitting congressmen like Barr “can’t acknowledge the fact that the federal government, both parties, have been sending weapons to Nazis since 2014, in Ukraine.”
“One of my objectives during the next five months is to inform every voter in the sixth district, regardless of what party they are registered as, that Andy Barr knew about it since 2014 or 2015, and he never objected, and now he wants President Biden to do it even more,” Young explained.
When asked why he wants to abolish the CIA, Young said, “Since it was founded in 1947, right after World War II, the CIA has been the worst, most well-funded, most powerful, most dangerous, most deadly terrorist organization in the world. It still is today.”
“We’ve got 16 other intelligence agencies. Let’s get rid of the worst one and save some money,” he added.
Young also condemned the US government’s so-called war on drugs, arguing “it has never been effective at fighting addiction. It has always been a bonanza for drug smuggling, you know, organized crime. The CIA has made a whole lot, billions of dollars on the Afghan opium and heroin trade, for example.”
“The war on drugs is just wrong-headed from the start,” he continued. “It should be treated as a public health issue, as an addiction treatment issue, and not as a criminal issue, where people get thrown in prison.”
Young stressed that the drug war has hurt his state in particular. “The overdose problem in Kentucky has been horrible for years. We’ve been losing thousands of people a year, because they get poisoned by the stuff they buy on the street.”
“And the harm reduction approach, the public health approach, would reduce all of that,” he argued.


Instruction: Write an article about: US kidnapped and imprisoned Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab for buying food. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Alex Saab, Camilla Fabri Saab, CLAP, Iran, sanctions, Venezuela

Output:
Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab was essentially kidnapped by the United States because he was buying food for the government’s CLAP food program, to feed the people of Venezuela.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
“It’s not a crime to fulfill a diplomatic mission. It’s not a crime to evade sanctions that are harming an entire country. It can’t be illegal to help a people.” Camilla Fabri Saab made these impassioned remarks when explaining the situation behind the illegal arrest and extradition – the kidnapping, in essence – of her husband, Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.
Saab is virtually unknown in the United States, where he is currently languishing in a Miami prison, but he has been vital to Venezuela’s ability to survive the brutal economic war being waged by the U.S.
He is a political prisoner whose case has parallels to that of Julian Assange. Both have been subjected to extraterritorial reach by U.S. authorities, as neither are U.S. citizens, and their alleged crimes took place outside of the country. Assange is in jail for telling the truth. Saab is in jail for helping feed Venezuelans.
Saab faces a charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering for his involvement in Venezuela’s housing program, and was sanctioned by the Trump administration in 2019 for his work with Venezuela’s CLAP, a program that sends food and other necessities to Venezuelan families.
Routinely referred to in the media as a Colombian businessman, Saab has dual Venezuela-Colombian citizenship and is a diplomat. He was appointed as a Venezuelan special envoy in April 2018, more than two years before his arrest.
Under the Vienna Convention and the U.S. Diplomatic Relations Act, a diplomat cannot be arrested by a foreign power. This includes diplomats who are in transit between the sending and receiving countries, Venezuela and Iran, in Saab’s case.
Alex Saab was flying from Venezuela to Iran when his plane stopped to refuel in Cabo Verde, an island country off the western coast of Africa. He was arrested without a warrant and held in Cabo Verde for nearly 500 days, as a protracted battle over his extradition to the U.S. played out in the courts.
He was beaten, denied medical care, and held in isolation. Cabo Verde ignored a ruling from a regional court ordering his release, as well as a decision by the United Nations Human Rights Committee suspending his extradition. Neither his family nor his lawyers were informed of his extradition until after it occurred.
In short, Saab was kidnapped twice: once when his plane was refueling and again when he was spirited to the U.S.
The U.S. government argues that the extradition was legal and that any violation of the Vienna Convention was committed by Cabo Verde. David Rivkin, one of Saab’s attorneys, says the fact that “Cabo Verde absolutely violated its legal obligation does not provide any excuse for the United States.”
Rivkin describes the case against Saab as “unprecedented,” given the broad and protective view the U.S. has typically held on diplomatic immunity. Saab has an April appearance in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on this very issue.
“The U.S. cannot have a world in which third countries can molest U.S. diplomats and if you establish a rule that says third country diplomats can be molested by the United States, it is inevitable that the same would happen to U.S. diplomats. This prosecution is not based on the law and is not in the long-term interests of the United States itself,” Rivkin explains.
Beyond the crucial issue of diplomatic immunity, the charges and case against Saab are clearly political. For years, the U.S. has gone after key figures in Venezuela, including putting bounties on President Nicolás Maduro and others, as part of its attempts to overthrow the government.
These attempts, which include waging a barbaric and illegal economic war that has decimated Venezuela’s economy, led to increased migration and caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans. Camila Saab rightfully calls U.S. sanctions an “act of war against the entire Venezuelan population.”
Her husband played a key role in mitigating the disastrous consequences of the sanctions. He first became involved with Venezuela by winning contracts for the Great Housing Mission, a government social program that has built 3.9 million homes for working-class Venezuelans since 2011, the majority of those with the country under sanctions.
Saab later won contracts for Venezuela’s CLAP program, through which 7 million Venezuelan families receive boxes of food and essential goods each month.
The sanctions not only make life difficult for Venezuelans; they make it a challenge to do business with Venezuela. Banks refuse to carry out transactions, even when they’re perfectly legal. Insurance companies raise prices or back out altogether. Shipping companies raise rates. Vendors demand cash and won’t operate on credit.
Instead of pulling out from Venezuela, as many businesspeople did, Saab decided to stick with the Venezuelan people and went from the private sector into the public one, becoming a diplomat tasked with finding “practical solutions” to the “economic and financial blockade” imposed on Venezuela since 2015, which included brokering trade deals with Iran.
The economic relationship with Iran has been critical in helping with the recuperation of Venezuela’s oil industry, and by extension, its economy.
Saab played a critical role in trade agreements between Iran and Venezuela for everything from gasoline and spare parts to food and medicine. According to Forbes, Saab was a target of the U.S. because he had “the means and know-how to help discreetly keep an entire economy moving under the eyes of a watching world.”
Saab has denied the allegations against him, and points to a Swiss investigation that was dropped after three years due to a lack of evidence.
“The merits of the charges are weak on their face. They involve activities that did not take place in the United States and their connection to the U.S. is very tenuous,” says attorney David Rivkin.
Saab’s arrest in Cabo Verde, at the behest of the U.S. government, came just months after Trump announced a “maximum pressure” campaign on Venezuela. His extradition to the U.S. derailed the dialogue between the Venezuelan government and opposition.
The U.S. now plans to “pressure” Saab “to shed light on Venezuela’s post-sanction economic network,” according to Forbes. After enduring torture in Cabo Verde, the word pressure is an understatement.
“Since the day he flew to Iran, they have persecuted all of us. We have been harassed in the media, they have demonized us, they have not let us see him,” Camilla Saab said, describing what her family has been through.
A cancer survivor, Alex Saab hasn’t been able to take his daily medicines since his arrest. He has lost 65 pounds. His parents died of Covid-19 while he was imprisoned in Cabo Verde.
Saab’s family has been targeted too. His adult children were sanctioned by the Trump administration. His youngest daughter has never met him. Yet in all of his communications, Saab maintains his allegiance to the Venezuelan people.
In persecuting him, Camila Saab believes the U.S. is sending a message: “They’re trying to intimidate but the Venezuelan people resist and continue in their fight for sovereignty. The U.S. is not the world’s police force. Free Alex Saab!”


Instruction: Write an article about: US kills 4th UN call for peace in Gaza, helping Israel violate Hague’s genocide ruling. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Canada, Gaza, Hague, ICJ, International Court of Justice, Israel, Joe Biden, Josep Borrell, Mélanie Joly, Palestine, Rafah, Security Council, UN Security Council, United Nations

Output:
The US used its veto power to block a fourth UN Security Council resolution that called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The Biden administration keeps sending weapons to Israel, helping it violate an ICJ ruling that says Netanyahu must respect the Genocide Convention and stop killing Palestinians.

The United States has since October voted against four United Nations Security Council resolutions that called for peace in Gaza.
Top UN officials have called for a ceasefire, but the US government has stood in their way, facilitating further violence.
In January, the highest UN judicial authority, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruled that Israel must abide by the Genocide Convention and stop killing Palestinians. But Tel Aviv ignored the Hague’s decision and killed thousands more Palestinian civilians.
By vetoing a fourth Gaza-related Security Council resolution on February 20, and by continuing to provide weapons to Israel, the US government has helped Israel violate an ICJ order.

The resolution that Washington vetoed on February 20 had been introduced by Algeria, and called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
In the session, 13 of the 15 members of the Security Council voted in support of the resolution. The UK abstained, and the US was the only country that voted against it.
#BREAKING
US vetoes Algerian-led draft resolution that would have, inter alia, demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire that must be respected by all parties
IN FAVOR: 13AGAINST: 1 (US)ABSTAIN: 1 (UK)
Live coveragehttps://t.co/fLIqiQv9A4 pic.twitter.com/5lqhlix7RV
— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) February 20, 2024

The 13 nations that voted in support of the resolution were permanent members China, France, and Russia, plus Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and Switzerland.
United States vetoes latest draft resolution on the ongoing crisis in #Gaza
The text was put forward by Algeria on behalf of Arab States. It demanded, among other issues, “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire that must be respected by all parties”
More: https://t.co/fLIqiQv9A4 pic.twitter.com/Nd1sCDQMEf
— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) February 20, 2024

The US designed the United Nations after World War II by concentrating power in the Security Council and giving permanent seats to the war’s five victors: the US, UK, France, Russia (the former Soviet Union), and China.
The Security Council’s permanent members have veto power, which Washington has abused to advance its foreign-policy interests.
On December 9, the US vetoed another resolution in the Security Council, which had been introduced by the United Arab Emirates and called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
That vote was the same: 13 countries in support, an abstention from the UK, and the US veto.
#BREAKING United States vetoes Security Council draft resolution that would have demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, and immediate and unconditional release of all hostages
VOTEIn Favour: 13Against: 1 (US)Abstain: 1 (UK) pic.twitter.com/hY0YcJ1JKF
— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) December 8, 2023

Back on October 18, the US vetoed a resolution that had been introduced by Brazil, which the UN News Agency noted “would have called for ‘humanitarian pauses’ to deliver lifesaving aid to millions in Gaza”.
In this case, 12 countries voted in favor. The US voted against it, and two countries abstained: the UK and Russia.
US vetoes Security Council resolution that would have called for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver lifesaving aid to millions in Gaza
Favor: 12 (Albania, Brazil, China, Ecuador, France, Gabon, Ghana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Switzerland,UAE)Against: 1 (US)Abstain: 2 Russia, UK pic.twitter.com/y4tiAbRMUQ
— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) October 18, 2023

Why did Russia abstain on this resolution that had been introduced by Brazil?
This was because two days before, on October 16, there was a vote on a stronger competing resolution that Russia had introduced, which called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
This had been the first resolution concerning Gaza to be introduced in the Security Council since the war began on October 7.
In this first resolution, five countries voted in support of the ceasefire: China, Gabon, Mozambique, Russia, and the UAE.
Four countries voted against it – the major imperial powers that had colonized much of the world: France, Japan, the UK, and the US.
Six countries abstained: Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Malta and Switzerland. (Brazil only abstained because it had introduced its own competing resolution, which was voted on two days later, and vetoed by the United States.)
The Western powers killed a UN Security Council resolution that proposed a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza
The resolution was proposed by Russia
5 countries voted for the ceasefire:???????? China???????? Gabon???????? Mozambique???????? Russia???????? UAE
4 voted against:???????? France???????? Japan???????? UK???????? US… pic.twitter.com/6UMfoRRqQH
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 17, 2023

The US veto of the Algerian resolution on February 20 is particularly scandalous, because Washington did it after the top legal authority on Earth, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), located at the Hague, ruled in January that Israel had to stop killing Palestinians.
The Hague stated that there is sufficient evidence to investigate Israel on charges of genocide.
The ICJ was very clear in its ruling. It ordered (emphasis added):
Israel must, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of … (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Since this ruling, Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and injured tens of thousands more.
ICJ’s Israel genocide decision: Historic victory for Palestinians and Global South

The United States has also continued to send weapons to Israel, to help it kill Palestinians – and violate the Hague’s ruling.
Meanwhile, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) reported on February 5 that roughly 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza had either been killed or wounded by Israel, or were missing – trapped under the rubble of the buildings that Israel had destroyed with US weapons.
Furthermore, the WHO estimated that “60% of the 27,019 fatalities reported by the enclave’s health authorities have been women and children… with more than 66,000 now injured and requiring medical care that remains difficult to access”.
As of February 21, Israel had killed more than 29,000 Palestinians, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
The Gaza health ministry’s data has proven to be consistently accurate. Israeli intelligence agencies have used its casualty figures for their own analysis.
Moreover, despite US President Joe Biden’s misleading claims to the contrary, multiple medical experts published peer-reviewed scientific articles in the leading medical journal The Lancet, scrutinizing the data from the Palestinian health ministry and concluding that it is accurate. If anything, the death toll is conservative, and actually understates the number of Palestinians who have been killed by Israel.
In fact, the most mainstream of media outlets in the US, the Associated Press, or AP, published a report in January titled “Israel’s military campaign in Gaza seen as among the most destructive in recent history, experts say”. It wrote (emphasis added):
The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history.
In just over two months, researchers say the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.
The Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza. But from blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.-made. They say the weapons include 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) “bunker-busters” that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas.

The Wall Street Journal reported in December that the US has sent Israel these 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs during the war.
The newspaper noted that, between October 7 and December 1, the US had delivered to Israel 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.
In fact, the Biden administration has repeatedly bypassed Congress, using extraordinary measures to ship more weapons to Israel.
While US officials claim that they supposedly want a ceasefire in Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported on February 17 that the US plans to continue shipping Israel tens of millions of dollars worth of additional weapons.
Even the European Union, which strongly supports Israel, has publicly criticized its atrocities in Gaza.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell admitted in a press conference on February 13 that Israel is carrying out a “slaughter” in Gaza.
Borrell highlighted the “illogical” hypocrisy of the US, arguing, “If you believe that too many people are being killed, maybe you should provide less arms in order to prevent so many people being killed”.
The top European diplomat stated:
I don’t pretend to be in charge of the foreign policy of the US. I have enough with the foreign policy of European Union. But let’s be logical.
How many times have you heard the most prominent leaders and foreign ministers around the world saying too many people are being killed? President Biden said this is too much on the top; it is not proportional.
Well, if you believe that too many people are being killed, maybe you should provide less arms in order to prevent so many people being killed. It’s not logical.
…
They [Palestinians] are going to evacuate. Where? To the moon? Where are they [Israel] going to evacuate these people?
So if the international community believes that this is a slaughter, that too many people are being killed, maybe they have to think about the provision of arms.
And by the way, today [February 13], a court in the Netherlands has said, has ordered the government to stop exporting the spare parts of the F-35 fighters to Israel, in order to be sure that the International Court of Justice ruling is being implemented.
So I don’t know; every member state is an owner of its foreign policy. But this is a little bit contradictory to continue saying that there are too many people being killed, too many people being killed; please take care of people; please don’t kill so many.
Stop saying please, and do something.
The Canadian government has been equally hypocritical. Canada’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly tweeted on February 10, “We are deeply concerned by reports of an Israeli military operation in Rafah. It would have devastating impact, putting the lives of Palestinians and foreign nationals, including [Canadians], seeking refuge in grave danger and making the vital delivery of humanitarian aid dangerous”.
However, local news outlet The Maple reported that the Canadian government has approved $28.5 million worth of new permits for military equipment exports to Israel during its brutal war on Gaza.


Instruction: Write an article about: To celebrate Obama Day, here are Barack’s worst crimes: wars, coups, slavery, sanctions, al-Qaeda, colonialism. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: ATF, Barack Obama, Brazil, deportations, Flint, Gaza, Honduras, immigration, Israel, Libya, Mexico, migrants, Operation Fast and Furious, Palestine, Project Gunrunner, Puerto Rico, Syria, TPP, Venezuela, Yemen

Output:
Obama’s had no real scandals, aside from the tan suit, wars on Libya, Syria, and Yemen, coups in Honduras, Ukraine, and Brazil, Wall Street bailouts, and drone assassinations

In the United States, June 14 is considered “Barack Obama Day.” On social media, the hashtag #ObamaDayJune14th went viral.
To commemorate this day, Multipolarista has compiled a list of the former Democratic president’s many accomplishments.
As his supporters are so keen to point out, Obama had no major scandals, except for:
Here are some more unforgettable classics from Obama:
And be sure not to forget these other timeless hits from Obama:
This last act in Flint is especially symbolic, and instructive. Watch video of it below, and you can see how the beloved 44th president cared just as little about his own population as he did the imperial subjects he bombed across the planet.

Obama did this repeatedly, just to rub it in.

But Obama is not alone; you can’t be commander in chief of the US empire without being willing to commit horrific crimes like these. It is the most important job requirement.
Obama certainly isn’t alone when it comes to being a war criminal; every modern US president is. Barry just managed to pull it off with style.


Instruction: Write an article about: Polls show almost no one trusts US media, after decades of war propaganda and lies. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Bolivia, CIA, corporate media, Jeff Bezos, Libya, media, Nicaragua, propaganda, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, Washington Post

Output:
The CIA has long manipulated the media, spreading disinformation to justify US wars. Today just 11% of North Americans trust television news.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
Very few people in the United States trust the mainstream corporate media. This is confirmed by a July survey from the major polling firm Gallup, which found that just 11% of North Americans trust television news, and a mere 16% have confidence in newspapers.
It’s quite easy to understand why. The US media apparatus has repeatedly shown itself over decades to be completely unreliable and highly politicized.
The corporate media’s treachery has been especially clear in the demonstrably false stories it disseminated to try to justify the US wars on Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.
This disgraceful legacy continues today, in the proxy war that Washington is waging on Russia via Ukraine. Fake news echoed by the press has served as a powerful form of US information warfare.

A co-founding officer of the CIA, Frank Wisner, famously referred to the media as a “mighty wurlitzer,” a type of musical instrument. He boasted that the US spy agency had so many assets in news rooms across the world that Washington could play the press like a musician, in order to manipulate public opinion.
Revolutionary Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, who was assassinated in an operation backed by US police agencies, recognized the power of the US media in the 1960s, warning, “The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
US media outlets have a kind of symbiotic relationship with the government, and especially with intelligence agencies like the CIA, which act on behalf of Wall Street and powerful corporations. US spies selectively leak stories to journalists, controlling media narratives to serve elite economic interests.
Mainstream news publications frequently promote stories based on flimsy accusations made by anonymous US government officials, without any concrete evidence. In this way, the US national security state can spread propaganda and fake news to demonize and destabilize Washington’s adversaries.
This is not journalism; it’s information warfare. But large media corporations willingly go along with it, because they profit from it.
Many mainstream news outlets have a revolving door with the US government, and are owned by billionaire oligarchs who also have large contracts with US government agencies.
Top newspaper the Washington Post, for instance, is the personal property of Jeff Bezos, the richest man on Earth. Bezos is the founder of mega-corporation Amazon, which has billions of dollars worth of contracts with the CIA, Pentagon, and National Security Agency (NSA).
Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, meets with US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at the Pentagon in 2016
The North American public has lost confidence in the media in no small part because of its long history of spreading blatant propaganda and fake news in an attempt to justify US wars of aggression.
The media’s history of lying in defense of US wars can be traced back to the very beginning of the country. Newspapers rationalized genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples by European settler-colonialists by claiming the Natives were “barbarians” and “uncivilized.”
In the 1898 war between the Spanish empire and the newly emerging US empire, North American media outlets promoted false stories to justify Washington’s colonization of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. This propaganda came to be known as “yellow journalism.”
When the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, major media outlets scrambled to defend the crime against humanity.
Top newspapers falsely claimed that the atomic bombing was necessary to end the war – despite the fact that the US government’s own Strategic Bombing Survey admitted that this was false, and that the Japanese empire would have surrendered even without the nuclear attack.
The New York Times published a patently ridiculous article titled “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.” The respected media outlet obediently echoed a US general who “denied categorically that [the nuclear attack] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”

Then, as the US empire sought to justify its scorched-earth wars in Southeast Asia in 1960s, media outlets echoed fake claims by Washington that Vietnamese communists had supposedly attacked US forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was soon proven to be false; it was actually a US act of provocation.
In the 1980s, US media outlets absurdly blamed Nicaragua’s Sandinista government for atrocities carried out by the right-wing CIA-sponsored Contra gangs waging war on the Sandinista Front. Former Contra leader Edgar Chamorro later admitted that the Contras were “a proxy army controlled by the U.S. Government,” describing them as a “Central Intelligence Agency puppet” that massacred and tortured civilians in a “premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the Government.”
While US media outlets falsely accused the Sandinistas of harming civilians, Edgar Chamorro wrote that the CIA-backed “‘contras’ burn down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas build them.”
This US strategy of laundering information warfare through the press continued in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. US media outlets promptly spread fake news claiming that Iraqi soldiers had removed Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them on the ground to die.
This was a complete lie, but was used to justify the US war on Iraq in 1990 and 1991. The fabrication originated with the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador, who spread the false claim in testimony before the US Congress, which identified her simply as Nayirah, without disclosing her familial ties.
The daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador, referred to simply as Nayirah, spreads lies in the US Congress in 1990
Just over a decade later, Washington waged another war on Iraq. In the lead-up to the illegal US-led invasion in 2003, the media spread fake stories about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein supposedly harboring “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs).
This WMD conspiracy theory was also proven to be totally false. But almost no journalists who spread the US government’s fake claims were punished or faced professional consequences. This is because they were obediently serving the interests of Washington’s war machine – and that is the true role of the media.
During the NATO war on Libya in 2011, the press once again repeated fake stories, claiming that leader Muammar Gaddafi gave his soldiers Viagra and ordered them to assault women. This was an utter lie.
Likewise, in the Western proxy war on Syria that began on 2011, media outlets spread false reports blaming the government in Damascus for atrocities that were actually carried out by CIA-backed Salafi-jihadist extremist insurgents.
Some of these falsehoods in the Syria war were exposed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. Yet despite his impressive credentials, Hersh has been basically blacklisted by the corporate media, because he damaged the reputation of the US empire. Mainstream outlets now refuse to publish the renowned and accomplished reporter.
More recently, US media outlets were exposed for publishing blatantly fake stories about so-called Havana Syndrome, a vague medical condition allegedly affecting US spies and diplomats. Media networks claimed, without any evidence, that Russia, China, and/or Cuba were attacking US officials with futuristic “directed energy” weapons. The CIA later admitted that this was false.
The media spread another ridiculous conspiracy theory during the administration of US President Donald Trump. The press ludicrously claimed for years that Trump was a puppet of Moscow, and that the Kremlin had supposedly helped him win the 2016 presidential election. No concrete evidence was ever presented, because it was false.
This scandal came to be known popularly as “Russiagate.” The fake story was endlessly debunked. But it had a massive effect on US politics, and still today many media figures repeat the nonsensical myth that Trump was a Russian asset.
Russia is one of the US media’s favorite bogeymen. In 2020, the press targeted Moscow with another fake news campaign. Dozens of major media outlets published false reports, based on unsubstantiated claims by anonymous CIA officials, that Russia was paying Taliban militants to kill the US soldiers who had been occupying their country for two decades.
This story was, once again, shown to be a falsehood, but only after it had the intended impact of temporarily blocking the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
Today, in the ongoing US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Western media outlets have ramped up their dissemination of fake news to demonize Moscow.
Top publications spread the false claim that Russia killed Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island. Many media networks echoed the myth of a virtuosic Ukrainian pilot known as the “Ghost of Kiev,” celebrating him as a hero, when in reality he didn’t exist. Some major outlets even published video game footage and claimed it showed Russia attacking Ukraine.
NBC News admits that Ukraine’s “Ghost of Kyiv” myth, which was amplified by the media, was false
Any independent journalists in the United States who challenge the lies of the mainstream media are demonized and vilified.
The New York Times attacked me personally because I reported on the objective historical fact that the United States sponsored a violent coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014. A leaked recording of a phone call between top State Department official Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, proves they were planning the putsch against Ukraine’s democratically elected government.
But despite this undeniable fact, the New York Times smeared me in an irresponsible and defamatory article, claiming I was spreading “conspiracy theories” and implying that I am supposedly collaborating with China and Russia.
Whenever the United States carries out a coup d’etat, mainstream media outlets act as Washington’s loyal lapdog, spreading false claims to justify its aggression.
When the CIA overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973, the press published fake stories to justify it and falsely portray the putsch as a popular uprising.
The media used the same tactics of deception and information warfare to justify the 1953 CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, because he tried to nationalize his country’s oil, challenging the interests of British and US capitalists.
Still today, we see the same propaganda and fake news. When the US government and right-wing extremists that it sponsored in Nicaragua tried to violently topple the democratically elected government in 2018, media outlets in both English and Spanish insisted that the violent putsch was actually “peaceful protests.”
The press falsely blamed the Nicaraguan government for all deaths during the coup attempt, ignoring the fact that a huge number of the victims were people who supported the Sandinista Front or members of state security services who were killed by the fanatical coup-plotters.
In a similar vein, the media played a key role in the US-backed far-right coup in Bolivia in November 2019. The press tried to justify the violent overthrow of democratically elected socialist President Evo Morales by falsely claiming that he rigged the election.
This myth originated with the Washington-dominated Organization of American States (OAS), which helped sponsor the anti-democratic Bolivia putsch. The OAS’ false accusations were obediently spread by the media. But these lies were later thoroughly debunked by prominent academics.
An academic expert debunks the lies spread by the OAS, US government, and media to try to justify the 2019 coup in Bolivia
The reason that mainstream media outlets continue to spread these fake reports, based on evidence-free claims of anonymous US government officials, is precisely because they help to advance Washington’s foreign-policy interests. For US elites, the fact that the stories are false is irrelevant.
The professional reputation of corporate journalists is not hurt because they are fulfilling their political role as agents of information warfare, serving the US empire and the billionaire capitalist oligarchs who own the media companies and dictate US government policy.
But for the North American public, it has become clearer and clearer by the year that the media is lying to us.
The United States claims to be a model of “democracy” and “freedom,” defending a so-called “rules-based order” – in which Washington makes the rules and orders everyone around. But the reality is that many scientific studies prove that that US regime is deeply undemocratic and unpopular.
The general mistrust that North Americans have in the media is a symptom of an overall lack of faith in the authoritarian US political system.
A June poll by Gallup found staggeringly low levels of confidence in the US government. A mere 2% of North Americans believe their government does what is right “just about always,” and only 19% think it does what’s right “most of the time.”

Many of these results fall on partisan lines. Liberals have confidence in the Democratic Party and are skeptical of Republicans, whereas conservatives have faith in the Republican Party and don’t believe Democrats.
This extreme partisanism in the United States is partly a result of media conditioning. US news outlets compliantly follow the lines of one of the two corporate parties, the Democrats or Republicans.
Although these two parties are nearly identical in their warmongering foreign policy and their neoliberal economic policy, they are at each other’s throats. These ruling corporate parties constantly squabble over cultural issues in order to distract the US public from the more important problems that directly affect their lives.
North Americans likewise have very little faith in the other institutions that make up our deeply undemocratic society.
Just 7% of North Americans have confidence in Congress, 14% in the justice system, 14% in big business, 23% in the presidency, 25% in the Supreme Court, 26% in large technology companies, and 45% in the police, according to another study by Gallup.
One of the only US institutions that remains trusted is ironically the military, which constantly wages illegal wars around the world, with some 800 foreign bases.
This widespread lack of confidence in institutions in the United States is a product of its ultra-capitalist model.
The USA is a deeply individualistic, consumerist society in which the free market and capitalist profits are valued above everything else. This has led to an atomized culture in which many North Americans feel hopeless, depressed, and lonely. There is very little solidarity and empathy for the many people who suffer from poverty and homelessness.
Corruption is rampant and systemic in the United States. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations are legally considered people. This means there is no limit to how much money large companies and billionaire capitalist oligarchs can spend on politics.
In other words, bribery is essentially legal in the US political system. And candidates who have more money nearly always win the elections.
In the 2016 election cycle, 95.41% of candidates running for the US House of Representatives who spent more money won, while 85.29% of candidates running for Senate with more funding won.

According to any consistent definition of the term, this system cannot be considered a democracy. It is the textbook example of an undemocratic oligarchy and a plutocracy – a government ruled by the rich.
While the United States portrays itself as the paradigm of democracy and freedom, actual scientific studies by academic experts show that the opposite is true: The USA is an authoritarian oligarchy run by a small handful of rich capitalists, plagued by brutal systematic violence, mass repression, and rampant racism.
Yet the US empire seeks to impose its undemocratic model on countries around the world. Washington spends billions of dollars propping up corrupt right-wing dictatorships and bankrolling neoliberal opposition groups that use violence and other extremist tactics to destabilize independent foreign governments – especially socialist or nationalist states that use their natural resources to benefit their populations instead of Western corporations.
Washington does this because the US oligarchy, the wealthy capitalists that truly control the government, want to exploit the resources and labor of the Global South to keep their authoritarian system going.
These are the same plutocrats who own the press. And they use large media companies to spread propaganda and fake news to deceive the public and advance their economic interests.
Polls show that most people in the United States can clearly see through this scam. But because the US system is so undemocratic and repressive, average working people have no real means of changing it.


Instruction: Write an article about: US gov’t body plots to break up Russia in name of ‘decolonization’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Casey Michel, colonialism, Congress, imperialism, Russia, Steve Cohen, Ukraine

Output:
The US government’s Helsinki Commission held a Congressional briefing plotting ways to break up Russia as a country, in the name of supposed “decolonization.”

(Se puede leer este informe en español aquí.)
A US government body held a Congressional briefing plotting ways to break up Russia as a country, in the name of supposed “decolonization.”
The participants urged the United States to give more support to separatist movements inside Russia and in the diaspora.
They proposed the independence of numerous republics in the Russian Federation, including Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Dagestan, as well as historic areas that existed centuries ago such as Circassia.
This is far from the first time that hawks in Washington have fantasized about carving up foreign countries. During the first cold war, the US sponsored secessionist groups inside the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the US-led NATO military cartel successfully dismantled Yugoslavia. And Washington has long backed separatists in the Chinese regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
After the overthrow of the USSR, neoconservative operative and future Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to slice up Russia into several smaller countries. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski even published an article in elite Foreign Affairs magazine in 1997 proposing to create a “loosely confederated Russia — composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic.”
Yet this Congressional hearing was one of the most high-profile and provocative calls for balkanization yet, held in broad daylight.
Titled “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative,” the June 23 briefing was organized by the US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), known more commonly as the Helsinki Commission.
This commission claims to be “independent,” but it is a US government agency created and overseen by Congress.

The event was introduced by Congressman Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee who co-chairs the commission.
Representative Cohen claimed Russians “have in essence colonized their own country,” and argued that Russia is “not a strict nation, in the sense that we’ve known in the past.”
US Congressman Steve Cohen speaks at the “decolonizing Russia” briefing
At the virtual hearing, which was livestreamed on YouTube, the congressman was joined by veteran regime-change activists who have worked for an array of US government agencies.
The event was moderated by Bakhti Nishanov, a senior policy advisor to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
He excitedly noted, “We have many, many participants. I think this is pretty much a record for a House commission briefing.”
Nishanov argued that Western condemnation of Moscow’s war in Ukraine should expand to opposition to “Russia’s interior empire.”
He added that the panelists hoped to “come up with ideas that will actually contain Russia.”
The most active speaker in the hearing was Casey Michel, a millennial neoconservative activist who has made a career out of advocating for regime change against the US government’s adversaries.
Michel got his start professionally working for the US Peace Corps on the Russia-Kazakhstan border, and later capitalized on the new cold war hysteria in Washington.
He is an adjunct fellow at the ironically named Kleptocracy Initiative of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing DC think tank that has been handsomely funded by the Koch oligarchs, WalMart’s Walton family, massive corporations like ExxonMobil, and the Pentagon.
In May, Michel published an article in Washington’s establishment magazine The Atlantic, titled “Decolonize Russia,” which appears to have been an inspiration for the Congressional briefing.
Neoconservative activist Casey Michel
“Russia continues to oversee what is in many ways a traditional European empire, only that instead of colonizing nations and peoples overseas, it instead colonized nations and peoples over land,” Michel declared in the hearing.
The neoconservative activist lamented that the United States did not use the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to break up Russia itself. He complained that Western support for secessionist movements in Russia did not go far enough.
“These are colonized nations that we consider to be part of Russia proper, even though, again, these are non-Russian nations themselves that remain colonized by, as we’ve seen yet again, another dictatorship in the Kremlin,” Michel said.
He insisted that the event was not simply about advocating for the “dismemberment and partition” of Russia, but was rather motivated by genuine opposition to colonialism and imperialism.
This was deeply ironic, because Michel has spent years viciously smearing the anti-imperialist left in the United States, while frequently caricaturing the term to demonize the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia.
When it comes to supporting separatist movements inside Russia, however, Michel curiously fashions himself one of the world’s most vocal advocates of a unique form of “anti-imperialism” that just so happens to advance US foreign policy interests.
.@cjcmichel: choosing to ignore the kinds of anti-colonial, pro-sovereignty, and anti-imperial movements that will emerge in Russia is a luxury we no longer have. https://t.co/RQA2bR4pd9
— Helsinki Commission (@HelsinkiComm) June 23, 2022

Joining Michel at the Congressional briefing was Erica Marat, a professor at the College of International Security Affairs at the Pentagon’s National Defense University.
Marat accused Russia of committing “genocide.” She condemned so-called “imperial collaborators” in Russia, singling out Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. She did not acknowledge the incongruity that she herself works for the US Department of Defense.
Marat also complained that the “Global South continues to consider Russia as an anti-Western, anti-colonial power and denies the dignity of non-Russian people and especially people of color from the former Soviet states.”
Similar comments were made by fellow panelist Botakoz Kassymbekova, a lecturer at Switzerland’s University of Basel.
Kassymbekova lamented that the Soviet Union’s anti-imperialist “narrative was very attractive, especially in the Global South.”
She rejected “the Marxian idea, that was popular all around the world, that capitalism produces colonialism,” and the “very successful anti-Western narrative of the Soviet Union that colonialism is a Western problem.”
Kassymbekova insisted that the USSR was colonialist, although her argument was contradictory because she simultaneously admitted that, after the Bolshevik Revolution, the former Russian czarist empire “partially underwent decolonization.”
Ironically, she also repeatedly mentioned “Stalinism” and the need for thorough “de-Stalinization,” without ever acknowledging that Joseph Stalin was himself Georgian, not Russian.
Kassymbekova used the briefing to call for the US government to provide more resources for secessionist movements by “supporting civic initiatives and civil societies of its neighbors and within Russia.”
.@BotakozKassymb1: Today Russia attempts to restore the Soviet empire based on the idea of Russian cultural superiority and genocidal suppression of peoples. https://t.co/RQA2bR4pd9
— Helsinki Commission (@HelsinkiComm) June 23, 2022

Another panelist was Fatima Tlis, a Circassian separatist activist from Russia who was given a fellowship by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA cutout used to finance US regime-change operations around the globe.
Tlis has worked extensively with US government propaganda outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. According to her publicly available LinkedIn profile, Tlis has also worked with the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative DC think tank closely linked to the CIA.
Tlis claimed in the hearing that her “homeland” Circassia is “occupied” by Russia. She also spoke of “white slavery.”
In the Q&A session, a guest asked how the panelists could discuss “decolonization” in Russia while they are in the United States and work for the US government, which was founded on genocide of Indigenous peoples. Tlis dismissively shot back, “As for your question, everybody who has ever dealt with the Russian disinformation and propaganda would immediately recognize it for what it is. It’s called – there’s actually a professional term for this disinformation: whataboutism.”
Kassymbekova responded similarly, arguing “this is kind of a very typical way of blaming the West rather than looking inwards.”
The final participant in the briefing was Hanna Hopko, a former of member of Ukraine’s parliament, who previously chaired its Foreign Affairs Committee, and a significant figure in the 2014 US-sponsored coup in Ukraine, marketed as Euromaidan.
Hopko insisted that Washington must think “how to change not just the regime, but how to change the imperialistic nature of Russian statehood.”
But because she was traveling, Hopko’s call signal was very weak, and she was not able to speak much in the briefing.
The panelists concluded the hearing condemning Russia’s military intervention in Syria, while making no mention of the billions of dollars the United States, its European allies, Gulf monarchies, Israel, and NATO member Turkey spent arming and training sectarian Islamist rebels in order to wage a proxy war in the country.
They likewise failed to acknowledge that Russia only entered Syria at the request of the country’s internationally recognized government. Tlis referred to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as an illegitimate Russian “asset,” and depicted Moscow’s defense of Syria’s territorial integrity against Western attempts at state collapse as a form of aggression.
This “Decolonizing Russia” briefing is one of a growing number of examples of the US government co-opting left-wing rhetoric in order to advance its imperial interests.
Numerous Biden administration officials have exploited rhetoric about “intersectionality,” the principle that various forms of oppression like racism and sexism intersect.
The White House claimed to follow an “intersectional approach.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted the State Department supports “diversity and intersectionality.”
The CIA published a recruitment ad featuring a Latina agent who proudly called herself a feminist. The spy agency – which is notorious for organizing right-wing coups d’etat and torturing detainees – has likewise portrayed itself as a supporter of the trans community.
The US government funds a podcast co-created and hosted by a CIA veteran that claims to speak on behalf of the “Uyghur diaspora” and employs intersectional feminist rhetoric to demonize China.
This strategy of intersectional imperialism shows how Washington has modified its propaganda tactics, employing progressive-sounding talking points to appeal to left-leaning youth.
DC’s call to “decolonize” Russia is reminiscent of an award-winning paper by academic Cara Daggett, titled “Drone Disorientations: How ‘Unmanned’ Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War.” This article whitewashed the US assassination program by arguing it is subversive and anti-heteronormative, because “killing with drones produces queer moments of disorientation.”