my name is Matt Kennard head of Investigations at Declassified UK on May 23rd 2023 I interviewed Professor Nome chumsky the most important public intellectual in the world with a view that he could write a forward to my new book The racket a rogue reporter vs the American Empire we covered a whole range of themes to do with the book but also his work going back many many decades unfortunately a few weeks after the interview he fell very sick but his words are extremely important and speak to many themes and many issues which are exercised in
the global population right now so they need to be heard so here it is I hope you enjoy it hi gnome thanks for joining me today thank you today we're going to be mostly talking about my book The racket aoga reporter vs the American Empire which was mostly reported while I was at the financial times and has reporting from all over the world from Haiti to Tunisia to Bolivia to Turkey um all of countries and all themes that you've written about for many decades firstly I wanted to ask you um you've said previously that Financial
Times is the only major international newspaper that tells the truth why do you think that is well the financial times is a mainly a business press uh which means that rather like the Wall Street Journal does quite good reporting editorial pages are another matter though at the financial times they're I would say generally more serious than the norm so it's generally true I found over the years that the business press tends to provide less doctrinal more uh accurate reporting of a fairs that have any relation to the business world and I think that's understandable the
business Community basically runs the world they have to understand U they can't be too diluted about uh events of the world and forces at work and so on but I should say that in the Ft some of the commentators are quite a quite a the financial times sent me to Haiti the year after the earthquake to cover the so-called reconstruction there the US had near complete control over the country can you describe briefly the uh us role in Haiti over recent history well we can start I mean the whole history is so disgraceful and shameful
it's painful to talk about it since 1804 when Haiti made the mistake of uh becoming the first free country of free men in the hemisphere and overthrowing slavery the world the soall Civilized world was had Tantrums about it tried hard to destroy it the US refused even to recognize Haiti till 1862 recognized Haiti and Liberia as places where you could send freed slaves then comes an awful history which I won't recount by the 19 uh 80s 90s the US was still strongly supporting the dictatorships vicious brutal dictatorships there was an election in first free election
in the country in 1989 everyone assumed that it would be won by the us back candidate a world Bank official from the elite nobody was paying attention to the organizing that was going on in the slums and the hills which was pretty remarkable and they managed to win with a overwhelming majority they managed to elect Jean pauled populist priest with quite a strong record of courageous opposition to the dictatorship well the States was of course infuriated uh not going to tolerate this he had seven months in office and was achieving quite remarkable results he was
even impr even the international financial institutions World Bank IMF were quite impressed with the overthrowing of corruption the positive actions and so on well he was overthrown in a coup uh tedly backed by the United States not so secretly after seven months they instituted A Reign of extreme torture and oppression I actually visited in those years it was I've been in a lot of pretty awful places in around the world but I've never seen such fear and misery as right shortly after the cidras who take over people were simply they wouldn't even talk to him
the most they'd say is there are voices is everywhere I their their eyes everywhere I can't say anything and the poverty was Indescribable well that lasted through the Clinton years finally in me the there was a very interesting the Clinton Administration finally agreed to allow ared to return s the Marines restored him but on condition on that he accept very harsh economic programs which doomed the country to further disaster he had to let in with no restrictions you us AGR bus produced rice and from Clinton's home state mostly incidentally uh Haitian farmers are quite efficient
but they can't kill compete with highly subsidized us Agri business so that was going to virtually Wipe Out the basis for peasant Society but it was worse than that I happened at that time to be following the AP direct news through some system that had been worked out briefly you watch AP news it's quite interesting you're getting direct moment Moment by moment reporting without any filtering just what the reporter seeing but every day on the AP News there's one story selected featured say for it there's a break they say for editors this is the top
story for the day well the day that the Marines were going to land with a lot of hoopla about how wonderful it is we're liberating Haiti the top story that day was that the treasury Department had been permitting Texico oil company to send oil to the Hun now that's very important there were almost no restrictions on the military Hunter Rich could go to Miami and Shop buy whatever they wanted no problems there was one thing they couldn't get oil and the CIA was testifying to Congress that all oil shipments had been cut just walking around
PTO prance you could see that that's not true but you could see the mevs family the rich family building oil facilities so obviously it was coming in well it turned out that secretly the Clinton Administration was was providing oil to the hunter the one thing they couldn't get U I was writing an article about it but I barely even mentioned this I know my article wouldn't come out for six weeks I thought by then it would be a big story well nothing it simply wasn't reported uh had to be the story is US liberating Haiti
not us destroyed Haiti by supporting the military Hunter I was able to leak this material to my friend Alex Coburn who was writing I think for the nation at that time and he did do a story about it but that's the only thing that appeared this is particularly interesting to me because of a childhood experience in the uh around 19 late 30s early 40s I was pretty closely following the Spanish Civil War uh the official position of the United States and other liberal democracies was neutrality wouldn't participate that's a gift to the AIS and to
Franco of course because Germany and Italy were arming them anding and for the liberal democracies to say neutrality is to say okay we'll let them be destroyed there was one thing that Germany and Italy could Supply oil the in the leftwing press that I was reading at the time they reported that the treasure Department had allowed the Texico oil company to break its contracts with the Republic and to ship oil to Franco the government of course denied this later it turned out that they were they conceded quietly that it was true same Oil Company then
history replayed in a unbelievably ugly way well then come the following years I won't go through the details it was impossible for Haiti to reconstruct under the harsh conditions that Clinton imposed Clinton in fact later apologized for them finally there was another election our St was elected again US Canada and France basically invaded ha kidnapped him sent him off to the Central African Republic uh shut him up uh restored the government to brutal thugs his party lavalas man party wasn't even allow to participate well that's the way it continues until now by now the country
is such a hideous wreck it's hard to know if it can even be reconstructed maybe it's best would be to have China invest in it that's not a joke incidentally uh it's it's it's a history of centuries of vicious murderous torture and violence mainly not for secret reasons black men overthrew slavery became a free country of black men not women uh that was just intolerable especially to the slave Society next door France is and even worse France imp which had Haiti had been a French Colony the richest colony in the French Empire large part of
France's wealth derives from they imposed a severe Indemnity on Haiti to punish them for daring to overthrow uh slavery Haiti had no choice had to pay under this conditions of Imperial attack it wasn't until I don't I think the 1940s that Haiti actually managed to pay off the France ared when he was president politely requested the French to uh consider remunerating Haiti for this immense burden that had strangled the country after horrible French colonialism and slavery French France did establish a commission to look into it headed by RIS de leftist li de they decided that
France had no obligation I mean all of this it gets so unspeakable you can't you can't even say what can't even talk about it everywhere you look it's beyond description the postc world war economic and political settlement was said by many to have had an idealistic thread originally that was later subverted do you agree with this there was an idealistic thread in the 40s it shows up most strikingly in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was actually initiated by the United States Elanor Roosevelt was the leading figure pushing it but it had very broad
participation uh direct participation through in many parts of the world so it was a joint Declaration of me all the pretty much the whole world this could be brought together and it's a pretty forthcoming document especially if you look at the socioeconomic Rights Article 25 I mean it calls for things that we ought to take for granted but that don't exist every person should have the right to a decent job to Health Care uh to whatever makes life feasible there is special provision for for women for mothers after birth must be have they must be
cared for uh their children must be cared for U well that was an idea that was still the effect of the New Deal Spirit which had some effects but overall there was almost nothing idealistic starting in they heard the end of the war in the late late 40 44 or 45 uh there was a wave of radical democracy that was spreading over the world the Depression was over maybe the war was coming to an end Russia was defeating the Nazis Japanese imperialism had been turned back there was a a lot of hope that maybe we
can move to a new world which will be really just and honorable the US wasn't having that when the the US troops first entered Italy that's where they entered the continent first in 1944 us and British troops Italy had been pretty much liberated by the resistance the partisans they had begun to establish a u worker based worker on economy especially in Northern Italy the US dism and Britain dismantled it restored the old regime including the the king who had supported the Nazis Victor monel imposed the what's his name it's Scapes me the bolia the field
Marshall who had been responsible for the Ethiopian Invasion he was put in fascist collab liberators restored the old order was restored same in Greece there was an uprising in Greece British weren't strong enough to control it Americans moved in maybe 150,000 people or so were killed finally Stalin wasn't supporting the gorillas he was living up to the Ulta agreement which put this in the British American Zone and they were decimated and Greece was restored to a quasi fascist order that's uh pretty much the same happened in Western Europe the old order was reconstituted plenty of
Nazi Collaborators U some interesting same thing was happening in Japan that's um that's in 19 45 February 1945 the US was basically taking over World governance from Britain Britain had been the former Global hen and the US was pushing the mide and taking over first place to be concerned with was Latin America that's our territory so the in February 45 the United States called a hemisphere conference in Latin America where it imposed an economic Charter for the Americas which was opposed to economic nationalism in all its forms there's a background the state department was deeply
concerned with what they called the I'm virtually quoting now the philosophy of the New Nationalism which calls for an equitable distribution of resources for the population and insists that the first beneficiaries of a country's resources should be the people of that country none of that the first beneficiaries are foreign investors that was the economic Charter for the Americas so Brazil was allowed to produce steel but lowlevel steel that didn't compete with with the high quality us steel and so on that's the back that's 45 the Britain Woods institutions in U 44 right before that had
were kind of a mixture they did establish a system in which the US would be able to basically have free economic penetration and essentially substantial political control over most of the world but on the other hand they did establish a an order economic order which did Lay the basis for uh 20 25 years of quite substantial growth in France it's called the con or is the 30 glorious years in the United States economists call it the golden age of the American economy fastest growth rate egalitarian growth rate uh New Deal Provisions were still in force
there was a business offensive already building up to try to break it down but the business offensive didn't really succeed until the late 70s and the onset of the neoliberal period during the which just totally revers at all was basically bitter class war you know go into the details but by International standards which are not very elevated the Britain would system was moderately decent but the things like I just talk about the ud Universal declaration again through the subsequent period it was at least honored in words by the time you get to neoliberal years then
I pretend so Jean Kirkpatrick Reagan's un Ambassador dismissed the universal declaration as what she called a letter to Santa Claus she was talking about the socioeconomic Provisions that's just a letter to Santa Claus nobody can pay attention to this nonsense the um human rights director for the Reagan and Bush Administration Paula do briansky said these things are a myth we have to destroy the myth that people have socio and economic rights none of this Universal declaration business um moris Abram who was the delegate to the UN Commission on human rights vetoed he was the Soul
veto of the UN resolution on right to development basically article 25 said this is pernicious destructive it's a dangerous perversion we have to stop all of this so by the time you get to neoliberalism which was basically class war even in a pretense of verbal pretense of honoring these Provisions was gone U there and that's part of the history of the post-war period during the early years there was some remnant of the Social Democratic new deal policies the aspirations for more Justice and freedom but they were under sharp attack which finally succeeded and you get
into the neoliberal period the Brittain Woods institutions were pretty much undermined by Nixon when he took the country off the gold standard my book The racket looks at many of the myths that the US uses to project its power around the world one of the main ones is that it practices and promotes free trade is this true of course not take a look at the World Trade Organization it's called that's the centerpiece of what's called free trade it's one of the most highly protectionist trade agreements in history what are called intellectual property rights are exorbitant
patent restrictions of a Kind which had never existed before if they had existed in the 19th century the United States would still be exporting fur and and agricultural products no country could possibly develop under those restrictions which gave enormous patent rights uh long 20year rights not just process patents but even product not just product but also process patents meaning others can't figure out better ways to make the same uh same product that's why pharmaceutical prices are astronomical Way Beyond the cost of production even though a lot of the production is based on government uh government
research and government funded and government develop research in fact they're just investor rights agreements and could go through the details there and in fact it's kind of interesting to see how the US treats the World Trade Organization so um as you know the world is strongly opposed to us sanctions almost all of them the during the Clinton years the sanctions on Cuba which are utterly outrageous and the whole world literally the whole world is opposed to them you look at the votes at the United Nations it's 184 to2 against the sanctions us and Israel uh
World 1996 Clinton sharply stepped up the sanctions the Helms buron act Europe which is very much opposed to the sanctions brought the question to the World Trade Organization ask the World Trade Organization remember that us sanctions are third party sanctions everybody has to obey them or else you're punished severely so everybody hates them but everyone obeys them uh Europe brought it to the World Trade Organization to ask for a judgment on the legality of the uh sanctions Clinton administration was outraged they condemned the World Trade Organization pulled out of the negotiations steuart Eisen who was
Secretary of Commerce wrote that uh the World Trade Organization has no B interfering in internal US policy which has been been designed for 30 years to overthrow the government of Cuba and they have no right to interfere with this that's how the US of course the case was drop us pulls out it's drop so the treats the World Trade Organization so it's not a free that's the main I mean if you look at NAFTA it's about the same you know similar things the racket has a chapter on the key role played by the US in
turkey's war on the Kurds and Israel's war on the Palestinians can you describe what the US role is in both those conflicts yes I've been in both places I visited jarak here shortly after the worst just at the period when the worst Terror of the 1990s under the Clinton Administration was subsiding so you could at least travel around a little the 90s I mean turkey the curds of a awful history of Oppression I won't run through the whole story the largest kurd part of the Kurdish population in Turkey where they've been bitterly oppressed the oppression
picked up strongly in the 1990s Clinton years uh Clinton provided the arms for it as the terror mounted against first of all the the terror against the Kurdish population was very serious tens of thousands of people were killed thousands of villages were in towns were just wiped out hundreds of thousands of people were driven into the slums and miserable living conditions in Istanbul maybe you did I visited the places where they live it's in describable uh as the atrocities mounted us Aid mounted by 1997 998 when the unities peaked the United States the Clinton Administration
was providing about 80% of the Aid Clinton spent provided I think in one year 1998 he provided more Aid to the Turkish military than the entire Coast War Cold War period combined up to the onset of the Insurgency press refused to report it New York Times had a bureau in Anchor of course check and see almost not a word it was certainly possible to find out no secret about it was real murderous Terror it declined a little in the early years of the this Century then picked up again in around 2005 when uh aan took
over began to increase the repression now it's pretty bad again not like the 90s but bad and now it's extending to the Syrian areas where the Kurds had established a pretty free Society in the midst of the Calamity of the Syrian War but turkey is attacking it us is looking the other way uh as for Palestine I've been there pretty often I don't I think it I mean Israel's for 50 years has been carrying out a illegal brutal occupation totally in violation of international law and Security Council resolutions uh the US has been providing the
arms uh if you read the isra the Israeli press or it's the main newspaper every day there's another crime in the West Bank Gaza of course which I've also visited is just a miserable prison and a punching bag for his roof and they feel like it they do what they call mowing the lawn just let's bomb and kill a lot of civilians and hit the hospitals and so on and so forth about there's a million children two million population about a million children in Gaza they can't get portable water the even that power station destroyed
sewage station was destroyed fishermen can't aren't allowed to go out more than a couple of kilometers which means they can't fish because of the pollution it's just a horror story but the West Bank too it's just daily crimes what they call the settlers Hilltop youth the IDF the armies watching them Palestinians try to protect themselves the Palestinians or it's um about the only place that resembles it right now I think is Kashmir also occupied by India uh illegally imposed and sending Indian set lers and so on very much on the Israeli model so could Israel
get away with it without the US not at all in the 1970s Israel made a fateful decision it had to choose between expansion and security it's in the early' 70s the Arab states uh Egypt Syria Jordan the three neighboring Arab states were looking for a way in the conf there were resolutions introduced in the security Council supported by these three confrontation states which called for establishment of two states Israel Palestine on the internationally recognized border maybe with some modifications with I'm now quoting it guarantees for the right of each state to exist in peace and
security within secure and recognized borders that would have given some kind of settlement not beautiful but better than anything else you can think of Israel was infuriated refused to attend the sessions Yak Robin who un representative bitterly condemned the United Nations for daring to move in this direction us vetoed the resolution uh well goes on from there won't go to the details Israel basically decided at this point it's going to expand even at the expense of security Now that has a corollary relying on the United United States you can't do that unless the most powerful
state in the world is going to support you and that's what's happened ever since the US has been backing it all the way provides the uh Military Support economic support U diplomatic support huge flow of vetos in the security Council votes at the general assembly you know 150 to2 that sort of thing that when Trump came along he just abandon any pretense Israel had annexed the Golan Heights in violation of Security Council orders and next what's called Jerusalem which is in fact five times as big as Jerusalem ever was including Palestinian Villages also against security
Council orders Trump simply said fine take them it's yours uh Trump decided to punish the Palestinians by removing the small amount of Aid that the US was giving humanitarian Aid because the Palestinians weren't grateful enough to him for selling him totally down the river that's the Trump Administration Biden's essentially P continued pretty much with it soften some of the edges uh that's uh that's been the what Israel is doing is perfectly plain it's been obvious for 50 years constructing a kind of Greater Israel which uh keeps Gaza in its current state it uh um takes
everything that's of value in the West Bank and integrates them into Israel so take over the Jordan Valley pick out the population on one or another pretext it's about a third of the Arab land imprisons the rest uh vastly expanded Jerusalem taking in Palestinian Villages towns to the east like M each of them basically bisects the livable part of what remains um integrate all of this in subsidized housing and nice suburbs in malim you can live in a subsidized Villa there and get to your job and Tel aiv and K Jerusalem on a super highway
in which you never even see a Palestinian because they're not allow uh the Palestinian population concentrations are excluded Israel doesn't want them it wants to maintain a large Jewish majority in what it can call a Democratic state so Nablus is encircled but it's not incorporated into what Israel is taking over that's basically greater Israel Palestinians who remain in the territories that Israel is occupying and taking over are cut off into about 160 small enclaves surrounded by Israeli soldiers which prevent people even from going to their Olive Groves or pasture their flock occasionally they'll let them
through but basically imprisoned constant attacks by what are called Hilltop youth right-wing mostly religious settlers many from the United States U that's life in the West Bank G is almost unlivable in fact the international institutions conclude that Gaza will literally will be unlivable in a few years Golan Heights everybody's forgotten about Syrian Goan Heights and of course it couldn't be done without strong us support there's a whole section in the racket on us poverty and inequality at home do you think there's a link between the Empire abroad and the war on the poor at home
in America I don't think there's a direct connection with imperialism abroad uh these are basically separate matters the neoliberal programs were designed as I said they're basically class War I mean officially if you look up the definition it talks about markets and small government and so on that's all nonsense we've talked about markets U same internal to the United States when Reagan it started to build up during the late Carter years but when took over and Thatcher in England it just shot through the roof and spread to the rest of the world u u as
far as free markets are concerned Reagan opened the door to financial speculation the financial Industries grew enormously make a lot of profit of course there's crashes they rean the first the first couple of years of the Reagan Administration I think 1984 they came the largest bank bail out in American history rean bailed out the Continental Illinois Bank uh bran Administration ended with the Savings and Loan crash had to bail out the perpetrators then one crash after another each time the friendly taxpayer moves in and bails them out and it's not just bailouts the it's understood
there's a phrase too big to fail which means no matter what you do no matter what crimes you commit taxpayer bill you out that means they get cheap credit High credit ratings make risky Investments a lot of money safe because you'll be bailed down that's the market uh internally externally we've already discussed uh what about small government government's grown grew on but it's grown to support the rich and the corporate sector they need protection and support it was a ren Corporation Quai governmental Corporation did a study of transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of
the population working people middle class transfer of wealth from them to the top 1% during the neoliberal years about 50 trillion that's pretty effective class war you take a look at the Reagan Administration prly doubled the debt huge increase in the federal debt because of tax cuts for the rich and enormous military spending Trump also blew a huge hole in the deficit with his one legislative achievement 2017 tax cut for Sharp tax cut for the rich and the corporate sector the Republicans don't care when they blow up the deficit and the it's when the Democrats
do it that you get what you're seeing right now but uh that's real wages have pretty much stagnated male real wages for nonsupervisory workers or about what they were in 1979 of course productivity's increased wealth is increased but going into different Pockets actually the Biden years have seen a Improvement in the situation of working people contrary to what you read in the headlines for working people it's been a comparatively good economy even for the lower paid who doing better doesn't make up for the 40 45 years of destruction of Labor but um slight Improvement uh
Republicans are going to try to break any any anything that contributes to that they're opposed to strongly they've stopped being a parliamentary party a long time ago they're just in abject service to wealth and corporate power and but the um I think the Imperial uh atrocities and the internal domestic repression are not really closely connected they're just parallel developments there's something that lies behind them of course making sure that the world and the domestic economy are operating to the benefit of the very rich and the corporate sector that's a commonality I went to Honduras a
key part of the US so-called War on Drugs for the book can you describe what the reality of the US War on Drugs is well Honduras has been a it was the almost paradigmatic banana state owned by the United Fruit Company working people miserably repressed huge profits for the company small Rich Elite called sometimes the 14 families very rich they cooperate with foreign imperialist powers and enrich themselves that standard uh during the 1980s Honduras was turned into a an armed Camp basically it was the base for the US attack against Nicaragua uh which in incidentally
the US was condemned for at the world court and told them to get lost just like it tells the World Trade Organization to get lost uh it continued that way until a couple of years ago 2008 when a moderately reformist president mils Alia started to begin to reverse the process he was overthrown in a military coup kicked out of the country uh C was harshly condemned by almost the entire world one exception the Obama Administration Obama and Clinton refused to call it a military coup because if they had by law they would have had to
stop military aid to the hunter so therefore they said it's not a military coup it's just an internal um change of some kind the military Hunter ranana totally fraudulent election also condemned by Latin America and the world except for Obama and Clinton Hillary Clinton who said it's a wonderful step towards democracy and so on I mean all of this is so familiar in the history of Latin America hesitate even to report it the hunda was introduced be introduced a regime of torture Terror Honduras became maybe the homicide capital of the world people started fleeing from
hondura Honduras the Caravans the famous Caravans were based in Honduras us of course kicked him out got Mexico to kick him out drive him back home uh the drug war is part of it we might ask what the drug war is the drug war is in the United States demand is in the United States the arms too that the military uses say in Mexico to attack the cartels um or that the cartels themselves use the arms that the cartel uses to kill tens of thousands of people they come from where I live in Arizona I
mean I don't know which end of a gun to hold but I could walk into a gun store pick up a rifle um hand it over to the local representative of the cartel he go down to Mexico with it and start killing people it's not everything but it's a lot of it uh the Colombia which is maybe Mexico is Horst or Colombia has been one of the worst cases paramilitaries connected the government uh carry out major atrocities is all closely connected to the drug cartels I've I visited Southern Columbia peasant areas um you go to
a remote Village pass a place on the side of the road where there's white crosses people killed by the paramilitaries when they were trying to drive in a in a bus you know uh the there's the program of what's called fumigate us fumigation essentially chemical warfare it's supposed to destroy opium destroys everything U doesn't discriminate uh you see kids with horrible boils and many die and so on it's a and there's a background to this if you go back to the 1970s before the neoliberal period take a look at incarceration rates in the United States
they were fairly high but within the spectrum of Western societies now they're five to 10 times as high a lot of that is the effect of the drug war why has there been more crime and why is it happening the drug war took off with Nixon but Nixon by contemporary standards was quite liberal and human believe it or not so if you look at Nixon's drug war it had a substantial component for prevention and treatment now there have been studies ran Corporation others of just cost benefit analysis of modes of dealing with drugs by far
the most effective and least costly is prevention and treatment next most expensive is police action more expensive less less effective more expensive than that and still less effective is border control worst of all most expensive least effective is what are called outof country operations like supporting paramilitaries in Colombia and chemical warfare you look at policies virtually the opposite of the recommendations by now almost nothing for prevention and treatment which is the only effective way and it's a way to control the population here and it's devastating for Latin America uh but the drug war is centered
here let's see now you find right-wing Congressman saying we have to invade Mexico to stop fentel production ction how about treating the source of the problem here not invading Mexico not sending them guns not not fumigating their Colombian territory it's it's just another major crime I also went to Egypt and Tunisia soon after the revolutions there in 2011 do you find Hope in what happened there there was hope in Tunisia and Egypt the Arab Spring socalled pretty much started in Tunisia Egypt's the most important country of course and it picked up in Egypt and for
the first couple of months there was real hope that something would change they could overthrow the dictatorships the dictator of Tunisia had to flee the country uh the United States supported the Egyptian dictator Mubarak about as long as it was possible to do so some point the Army and the business World turned against him so the US did too Army took over instituted the harshest murderous dictatorship in Egypt's history U Trump's said that Ali he described the dictator as his favorite dictator strong WR us support all the way um it's U I'm I'm sorry to
be so gloomy and harsh but you want to ask those questions I don't see any alternative Tunisia unfortunately it did have a moderately Progressive democratic government it's collapsing in this case on internal grounds the elected leaders turn themselves into a autocrat is breaking down Democratic structures restoring a kind of dictatorship freedom I notice I have another talk in five minutes I'm gonna have to switch over okay thanks so much for joining me Professor n chumsky
