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April 12, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
55:17
Does Endless Spending in Ukraine Cause Deprivations at Home?

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- Good evening, it's Tuesday, April 11th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, as the war in Ukraine grinds on into its second year, with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy now pledging his full-scale support for President Biden's proxy war, and new leaked documents warning the war will likely be fought through 2023 and beyond, We want to pull back the lens a bit on this war and examine an often overlooked component of US involvement.
Namely, what is the impact on the lives of American citizens from what appears to be an endless commitment of their resources, their money, to fuel this proxy war?
A hundred billion dollars and counting.
We've often covered the geopolitical questions of the war as well as the dangers it poses.
Little things like the warning from President Biden himself that his war policies have brought the war closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
But to hear supporters of the U.S.
role in Ukraine tell it, Americans pay no price at all for this massive flow of money from the U.S.
Treasury into the coffers of U.S.
weapons manufacturers, the intelligence community, and into the foggy precincts of Ukraine, which just so happens to be by far the most corrupt country in Europe.
Can America's commitment to militarism and endless war abroad be separated from the degradation of the lives of American citizens at home?
Or, as Martin Luther King and so many others throughout the years have insisted, is America's militarism inextricably intertwined with, indeed a key cause of, The visible decline in the quality of life for most Americans.
We'll examine all aspects of this critical question.
Then, the fallout from the leak of top secret documents, which we covered in depth on last night's show, continues.
But now, the corporate media led by the New York Times is exploiting the leak to insist that somehow this shows that we need more censorship of the internet.
We'll show you how they're doing that.
As a reminder, today is Tuesday, which means we will have our interactive live after show tonight on Locals immediately following this program, where we take your questions, respond to your critiques, and discuss your suggestions for the show.
That after show is available exclusively for members of our Locals community, which you can join by clicking the red join button underneath the video player on the Rumble page.
Doing so not only gives you access to that show and to our written journalism, but helps support this program and the journalism We do as well.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One year ago today, there was almost no issue that the media and Washington was discussing other than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Our media discourse was subsumed with debates and arguments over what the U.S.
role should be, and a consensus quickly emerged, which was that the United States was on Ukraine's side, had viewed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an immoral act, as an act of aggression.
But that the role the United States played in that role, in that war, would necessarily be limited by a whole variety of constraints, including, first and foremost, the desire to avoid any kind of direct confrontation with Russia, the world's largest nuclear stockpile, as controlled by Mosdel, but also by the geopolitical needs of the United States and the financial needs of the United States not to get sucked back into an endless war only six months or so
After we finally got out of the 20-year war in Afghanistan and all sorts of promises were made that the United States would respect a whole variety of limits.
And then the Biden administration proceeded to blow past one after the next, after the next.
And far from a limited role, a year later, the United States has already authorized $100 billion for fueling this proxy war in Ukraine with no end in sight.
The leaked documents that we discussed on last night's show warn that this war will almost certainly extend all the way through 2023 and beyond, which means there's at least another year or longer to go, and there's no suggestion that the U.S.
is going to in any way constrain what it continues to spend on this war.
Quite the contrary.
Last night, or yesterday, we showed you that Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy Who pretended before the midterms to offer Americans an alternative by saying Joe Biden believes in a blank check for Zelensky, while I, Kevin McCarthy, don't.
And if you elect me and the Republicans to control the House, we will put a stop.
to this blank check.
And he did that because he saw polling data that showed that Americans increasingly are becoming resistant and reluctant about the role the United States is playing in that war, particularly the flow of money and resources with no end to Kiev, where it's just sort of disappearing with no audit, no oversight, and most of all, no commitment as to when it might stop.
And yet McCarthy yesterday basically admitted that when he said that, he really didn't mean it.
His close friend Michael McCaul, who's the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that Kevin McCarthy always supported Joe Biden's policies in Ukraine and believes that we, meaning the United States, have to fight and win that war to the very end.
So at this point, the establishment wings of both parties, as usual, are completely united.
Which means that it's inconceivable that the United States will, at any point in the near future or the midterm future, start to rein in the amount of money it's giving to Ukraine.
And by giving to Ukraine, I mean giving to Raytheon and other arms manufacturers, giving to the CIA, and giving to President Zelensky and his band of merry men who are ruling Ukraine.
So there's no alternative.
There's nothing you can do in terms of voting.
You might have thought that if you were a Republican in the 2022 election, it meant that you were to get more constraints on the war in Ukraine.
But lo and behold, Kevin McCarthy now acknowledges that he never really meant that, and he supports Joe Biden in full.
So it's time to ask the question, because you may notice that the war in Ukraine is almost never discussed or debated anymore.
It's at best an ancillary issue.
It's what usually happens where a huge amount of public attention is devoted to a new event.
The government makes all kinds of claims when people aren't looking.
And then when they go back to their lives and start cease paying attention, the government just runs wild and makes what was supposed to be a temporary or controversial policy permanent.
And that means that the United States basically has a free hand, the CIA, the Biden White House, to spend all of your resources, as much as it wants, On generating profit for a tiny sliver of people, both in Washington and Kiev.
And so we want to ask the question, not so much, what are the geopolitical implications of this war, which is what we typically spend our time focusing on when we report on it, but instead, what is the actual cost for American citizens?
Not just the financial cost, but the cost and quality of life and standard of living.
And what prompted this question was that last night we recorded an interview with the former professor at DePaul University, Norman Finkelstein, who was denied tenure as a result of a very ugly battle in 2007 waged against him by Alan Dershowitz, primarily due to Alan Dershowitz's contempt for Norman Finkelstein's criticisms of Israel.
And he's kind of become one of these people who are not metaphorically canceled, but completely destroyed.
He's unemployable, he hasn't worked since then in academia, he barely appears on media outlets.
And so we thought about doing a series because everybody when they launch a show always says, we're going to air views and voices that aren't available elsewhere.
And it's well intentioned.
Most people mean it when they say it, but then they end up airing voices that are in full accord with the program that are available in many other places, and the people who are genuinely excluded from mainstream discourse, even though they might have a lot to say, are typically ignored.
We put Professor Finkelstein on our show about a month ago or six weeks ago when we interviewed law professor Amy Wax, who at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has her tenure threatened because of views that she defends that are quite radical about race, particularly, and about related issues.
And we put Professor Finkelstein on that show to give his views on academic freedom and what the limits might be, given that he, too, lost his job in academia due to his views almost 15 years years ago now.
And as part of that interview, we did a wide-ranging interview with Professor Finkelstein, not just about academic freedom, but about a variety of other issues.
We were interrupted by time constraints, so last night we recorded the second part of the interview, which we intend to air this week.
And I asked him about his view on Ukraine, and he said something and described it in a way that is very unusual to hear, and it's what provoked my desire to The problem is, there's no questioning at all.
in this question.
This is what he said as part of the, as of yet, unaired interview. - I don't expect everybody to agree with me with my opinions on the Ukraine.
The problem is there's no questioning at all.
Just the other day, I recently reached Medicare age.
I tried to contact Medicare.
It's impossible to contact them on the phone.
It's absolutely impossible.
I challenge anybody to dispute me on that point.
Impossible.
I finally go down to the Social Security Agency.
I'm talking to one of the agents.
She said that you call Medicare.
I said, it's impossible.
I said, could you imagine?
We're in the 21st century.
We have a dozen different forms of communication.
We have telephone.
We have email.
We have fax.
Social media.
You can't contact a basic government agency.
I said to me, it nauseates me!
A hundred billion dollars for the Ukraine!
A hundred billion dollars for the Ukraine!
And you can't provide a phone service for senior citizens?
Now, people might quibble with that anecdote, especially if you're somebody who's more well-versed on the Internet.
I think it's worth remembering that a lot of senior citizens spent the majority of their life without the Internet, even in existence, so particularly older people are not really as adept as younger people are when it comes to Performing functions online, but there's certainly no denying his central point, which is that services and quality of life in the United States has degraded and is on the decline in multiple ways over the last, let's say, decade or so.
And therefore, I do think it's a not just a valid question, but one that ordinary people would instantly ask.
Which is, why when the government can't do this for me or why when the country has deprived me of this opportunity?
For example, young people can't move out of their parents' home until they're 30 or beyond in record numbers.
Couples who are raising young children are often required Not just when they want, but even if they don't, both of them to work full time, then pay somebody to raise their children or care for their children during the day.
All things that never were part of the American way of life, certainly for the middle class, is almost disappearing.
And so, of course, it's a very reasonable and rational question to ask.
Why are we sending $100 billion To Ukraine, when we can't even clean up a chemical explosion in East Palestine because our government has no resources or can't get organized enough.
Now, I think a lot of times media elites don't ask that question because their lives are fine.
They come from wealthy families, they went to the best schools, certainly people in Washington are overwhelmingly wealthy.
Just this last week, I noted that Dianne Feinstein, the five-term senator from the state of California, just happened to have sold one of her vacation homes for $25.5 million in Aspen.
That she and her husband used to entertain foreign policy elites over the past two decades or so.
We basically are run not just by an oligarchy, but by a gerotocracy.
Just people in their 80s and 90s who are extremely rich.
And that's who dominates media as well.
People who come from multi-families, who go to East Coast schools that are private schools, and then colleges that are very prestigious.
So they don't worry about things like this, and they don't think this way.
But I think what you heard from Norman Finkelstein is a way that a lot of people speak and when Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia Whatever you think of her is more like a kind of ordinary person in Congress than most people in Congress because she's been a politician for about six seconds.
She's done well in business.
She's not poor by any stretch of the imagination, but she's somebody who has lived in her Georgia district for many years and was not a professional politician.
And so when she stands up in Congress, she often says things that people mock.
Because it sounds like what Norman Finkelstein said.
So here was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the last time Congress was asked to vote on whether we want to play this role that we're playing in the war in Ukraine, which was last May, almost nine months ago, when the Congress took Joe Biden's request for $33 billion, arbitrarily increased it to $40 billion, And then overwhelmingly approved it, with the yes vote coming from every single Democrat in Congress, from AOC and Bernie Sanders in the squad to the House Progressive Caucus.
And the only no votes were about 60 House Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, and about 10 or 11, including Josh Hawley and Mike Lee in the Senate.
All Republicans voted no.
The only no votes came from Republicans.
But overwhelmingly, the establishment wings of both parties united as they always do to support it.
And when Marjorie Taylor Greene rose in the house to explain why she was voting no, here's what she said.
Thank you.
I rise in opposition to the Ukrainian supplemental bill.
Forty billion dollars.
But there's no baby formula for American mothers and babies.
An unknown amount of money to the CIA in the Ukraine Supplemental Bill, but there's no formula for American babies and mothers.
$54 million in COVID spending in Ukraine, but there's no formula for American babies and mothers.
$900 million for non-profits and organizations in Ukraine, but there's no formula for American babies and mothers.
$8.7 billion for economic support and funding in Ukraine, but there's no formula for American mothers.
So she chose the lack of formula for women who were facing a supply chain crisis, but also a resource crisis, and not being able to have the government help them obtain baby formula.
And she was asking, I think quite reasonably, why are we sending $100 billion to Ukraine when mothers in the United States, American women, don't have access to baby formula?
Just like Norman Finkelstein said, why, if I can't even have service, Public service for the Medicare that I earned as a senior.
Are we spending $100 billion in Ukraine?
Why are we sending $100 billion to Zelensky, the CIA, and Raytheon?
All very good questions.
And you can pick any number of metrics that show the decline of the quality of life for American citizens who could definitely use that $100 billion in all sorts of ways.
So here from KFF Health News is a report from March of last year entitled, quote, Desperate for Cash, Programs for People with Disabilities Still Not Seeing Federal Funds.
So we have a ton of disabled people in the United States.
They can't work.
They're certified as disabled.
They cannot get the minimum payments to have a minimum quality of life from the government because the government can't get money to them while it sends $100 billion to Kiev.
Hear from the CDC in August of last year.
There you see the headline from our own government.
Life expectancy in the United States dropped for the second year in a row in 2021, and they have charts here that say life expectancy at birth in the United States declined nearly a year from 2020 to 2021 according to new provisional data from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.
That decline, 77.0 to 76.1 years, took U.S.
life expectancy at birth to its lowest level since 1996.
The 0.9 year drop in life expectancy in 2021 along with a 1.8 year drop in 2020 was the biggest two year decline in life expectancy since 1921 to 1923.
since 1921 to 1923.
Life expectancy at birth for women in the United States dropped 0.8 years from 79.9 years in 2020 to 79.1 in 2021, while life expectancy for men dropped one full year from 74.9 The report shows the disparity in life expectancy between men and women grew in 2021 from 5.7 years in 2020 to 5.9 years in 2021, meaning women live longer than men by six years in the United States.
and life expectancy between men and women grew in 2021 from 5.7 years in 2020 to 5.9 years in 2021, meaning women live longer than men by six years in the United States.
From 2000 to 2010, this disparity had narrowed to 4.8 years, but gradually increased from 2010 to 2019 and is now the largest gap since 1996.
Obviously, COVID played a role in the decline of life expectancy, but not anywhere near the only role.
We're not supposed to have a declining life expectancy in a developed country.
Our life expectancy is supposed to increase.
Declining life expectancy signifies that our quality of life is degrading.
Which is why any rational person would be asking with anger why we're sending tens of billions of dollars after tens of billions of dollars to a war to determine who rules certain provinces in eastern Ukraine.
That's ostensibly what the war is about when the actual impact of the war is to enrich a tiny sliver of the American public at everyone else's expense.
The Pew Research Center in September 2020 is some greater digging into these life expectancy numbers.
Oh no, this is actually about how, quote, a majority of young adults in the United States live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression.
There you see the article.
It says, Quote, the share of 18 to 29-year-olds living with their parents has become a majority since US coronavirus cases began spreading early this year.
A majority of people under 30 are living with their parents, surpassing the previous peak during the Great Depression era.
In July, 52% of young adults resided with one or both of their parents, up from 47% in February, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of monthly Census Bureau data.
The number of living with parents grew to 26.6 million An increase of 2.6 million from February.
The number and share of young adults living with their parents grew across the board for all major racial and ethnic groups, men and women, and metropolitan and rural residents, as well as in all four main census regions.
Growth was sharpest for the youngest adults ages 18 to 24 and for white young adults.
The share of young adults living with their parents is higher than in any previous measurement, based on current surveys and decennial censuses.
Before 2020, the highest measured value was in the 1940 census, at the end of the Great Depression, when 48% of young adults lived with their parents.
So again, you can look at every metric.
I just want to look at this Pew data survey from 2022, so two years later, to show that it is not dependent entirely on the COVID pandemic at all.
Quote, Americans are more likely to say it's a bad thing than a good thing that more young adults live with their parents.
In other words, Maybe young people, some want to choose to stay with their families because those kinds of family connections can be healthy and positive.
But in general, especially for young men under 30, leaving the home and making your way in the world is a rite of passage to adulthood.
And yet, for economic reasons, young American adults are impeded from doing so.
Quote, in July 2022, Half of adults ages 18 to 29 were living with one or both of their parents.
This was down from a recent peak of 52% in June 2020, but still significantly higher than the share who were living with their parents in 2010, 44% on average that year, or in 2000, 38% on average.
Here's why it's hard to clean up So that is, again, a pretty significant decline.
And if you're somebody who is stuck at home because you can't get a job that pays a livable wage to allow you even to rent an apartment, With real estate prices skyrocketing because hedge funds like BlackRock and capitalist funds are buying up enormous amounts of real estate in order to drive prices up.
And you see $100 billion going out the window to Zelensky to Ukraine, which months earlier you couldn't even place on a map.
Is there any wonder why people are going to be angry with our elite class?
Here is a report from NPR last month, March 3rd, on the train explosion in East Palestine.
Quote, here's why it's hard to clean up toxic waste from the East Palestine train derailment.
The people in that region are still living with the toxic effects of those chemicals that our government have not been able to clean up.
Quote, it's been nearly a month since a Norfolk Southern train derailed and spilled hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, soil, and water around East Palestine, Ohio.
In the weeks since, authorities have undertaken a massive operation to clean up the hazardous materials.
The effort to remove vast amounts of contaminated soil and water from the small town in eastern Ohio has involved at least seven different licensed hazardous waste disposal facilities across four states, Ohio, India, Michigan, and Texas.
The tangle became even more complicated when the EPA enacted a one-day pause on Norfolk Southern's removal operations last weekend after officials in Texas and Mexico and Michigan raised concerns about East Palestine's waste coming to disposal facilities in their states.
Afterwards, officials announced several new disposal sites for the East Palestine waste, including a landfill in Indiana, which prompted yet another objection from another state official, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb.
Quote, the materials should go to the nearest facilities, not move from the far eastern side of Ohio to the far western side of Indiana, he said.
Officials say they are searching for other disposal sites.
The controversy underscores the complexities of a cleanup process that officials are undertaking as quickly as possible.
Experts warn that it will likely take years, years to complete the cleanup of East Palestine if it can be considered truly complete ever.
Quote, they'll be living with this both environmentally and psychologically for a long time, and I don't see any real quick return to normal, said Noah Sachs, a professor of environmental law at the University of Richmond.
You could spend all night, and we probably should at some point, Highlighting and documenting and detailing the decline in the standard of living for American citizens, the complete collapse of a middle class infrastructure, and the lack of resources that the government has or society has in order to give people a minimally decent and comfortable way of life.
To allow them to leave home, to start a family, take care of their children.
All of these things Americans are economically deprived from doing.
In a way that they haven't been since at least the Great Depression.
Now, oftentimes defenders of militarism and war who know that this is their Achilles heel.
It's very difficult to convince Americans that they should rise up against war because it's killing people on the other side of the world.
Unless it's something like Vietnam, where Americans are being drafted in huge numbers the way Ukrainian men are now being drafted, and often forced to go fight in a war on the other side of the world against their will, it's very difficult to get Americans to be invested enough in wars on the other side of the world, especially if you don't show them are victims, which is usually what happens in bombing campaigns and the like.
If you compare the amount of media coverage given to the victims in Ukraine caused by the Russian military to the amount of media coverage given to the victims of the American military in our bombing campaigns and invasions, you will see this huge gap because our media and our Washington know that as long as you hide the victims, Americans won't really mind.
The time they will start to mind is when they realize the huge amount of resources being poured in to these endless wars that don't impact their life in any positive way, but actually deprive them of the thing they want their government to do, which is facilitate a society that allows them to maintain a decent material level of life.
And so the argument will be from war defenders that when you say this, they kind of panic.
There's no real answer, which is, oh, there's no real connection between our spending tens of billions or hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars on foreign adventures and regime change wars and militarism, because it doesn't really impact The domestic budget.
It's two completely separate things.
If we stop spending $100 billion on the war in Ukraine, that wouldn't mean we would use those resources to help the people of East Palestine, or improve Medicare services, or create a society that allows people to return to a middle-class standard of living.
Why not?
There's no answer for why that's true.
Why wouldn't that freed up money be available to be used, not as handouts, but to renew infrastructure and to do the things the government expected to do to facilitate a decent standard of living?
And what's particularly remarkable about hearing that argument from Democrats, and I made this point today online when I referenced Professor Finkelstein's grievance about how much money we're sending to Kiev when he can't even get basic services.
And I referenced Congresswoman Taylor Greene's argument that women can't get baby formula while we're devoting unlimited resources to Kiev.
And the response I got was, oh, these two things have nothing to do with each other.
This is sophistry.
And what is really amazing about that is it has long been recognized for decades as a staple, not just of left liberal politics, but our politics in general, that of course we sacrifice and suffer as American citizens when we allow our government to spend endless sums of money on foreign wars.
Of course those are inextricably linked.
And there's a lot of people who have made this point over the years, and I think the most compelling case was made by Martin Luther King in a speech he delivered in Riverside Church in New York on April 4th, 1967, one year to the date before he was assassinated in 1968.
The purpose of this speech, well, it was called Beyond Vietnam, a Time to Break Silence.
Beyond Vietnam, a Time to Break Silence.
And the purpose of this speech was for Martin Luther King to come forward and explain why he had recently begun spending so much time opposing the war in Vietnam, whereas prior to that, he had basically abstained from any foreign policy or war debates on the grounds that he only wanted to focus on his domestic agenda, on his domestic goals.
Which were not just about racial equality, but eliminating deprivation and poverty across a multi-racial coalition.
That was always his stated goal.
Not just racial, but economic and class.
And so he came to give this speech as a way of essentially apologizing for the fact that he neglected the war in Vietnam and other issues of war and militarism for so long Because it came to understand that the two cannot be separated.
That the reason so many Americans in American cities are in decay and neglect and people are suffering in the working class, not nearly as much as they are now, but certainly then they were as well, is because of how much resources we allow our government to devote to Hundreds of military bases to endless wars all over the world that never improves the lives of American citizens.
So let's just take a moment to look at what he said because as I say it is, I think, the most compelling case for why these two debates, the issue of militarism over here and the lives of American citizens over here, are actually completely interconnected.
And you can't separate them that way by saying, oh yeah, I support the war in Ukraine and I want to keep sending in unlimited resources because that has nothing to do with the lives of American citizens.
It's the resources of our government and how we use them.
That's what the debate is about.
This is what he said, quote.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me with no choice.
I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together.
Kurji and Lehman concerned about Vietnam.
That was the group that asked him to speak.
The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines.
Quote, a time comes when silence is betrayal.
That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path.
At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud, quote, why are you speaking about war, Dr. King?
Why are you joining the voices of dissent?
Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say.
Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask?
And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened.
For such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.
Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam.
Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue.
Nor do I overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem.
While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi or the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
And here's his argument as to why he believes it's not just consistent with his domestic agenda and his causes, but necessary to them.
Quote, since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America.
Now listen to how he defines his cause.
A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle.
It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program.
There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.
Then came the buildup in Vietnam, the military buildup, and I watched the program be broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.
And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continue to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.
So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Meaning, of course, if we're spending enormous sums of money on wars abroad, it's going to have a gigantic impact on the lives of American citizens, particularly the ones whose lives have not been elevated to being very wealthy or to the upper class, namely the poor and working classes of all races.
That was his argument.
Now, here we just want to play you an audio of one segment of the speech where he gives a very emphatic critique of the United States' posture in the world, something that, if you were to say now, would prompt accusations that you are some sort of Kremlin agent or America hater.
And of course, that was said about him as well.
Not necessarily for this reason, though.
So listen to this passage in the speech where he connects war policy and what he has come to regard as the U.S. role in the world.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness.
For it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers.
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that mulletop cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems.
I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.
But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam?
They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problem, to bring about the changes it wanted.
My questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed and the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, So there's a couple notable aspects of that passage.
One is he, again, is saying throughout this entire speech that if you spend resources on endless war, of course that's going to affect the society in all sorts of negative ways, namely the ability of American citizens at home of all races to live a decent quality of life.
He also, interestingly, connects The fact that if you're a country at endless war, constantly sending guns and arms and bombs and using them around the world, it's going to degrade your national character as well in the sense that it's very difficult to tell people that violence isn't the answer to their problems if they constantly see their own government, as he called the greatest purveyor it's going to degrade your national character as well in the sense that it's very difficult to tell people that violence isn't the answer to their problems if they constantly see
But his key argument was this emphasis on resources and the fact that there was no way he could ever succeed in building a country with better lives for all Americans.
So I'm not sure where we had that little technical glitch, but what I was saying was that Martin Luther King is the closest thing we have to a secular saint and nobody can criticize him.
Without being immediately attacked.
And that is accomplished by completely revising and limiting what he actually advocated.
And the response to this speech was extremely negative, particularly from liberal institutions of authority in media and politics who were enraged that he had denounced the posture of America's endless wars.
They're basically saying, as long as you stick to your preaching about race and racism, we're on board with you.
But when you start questioning American imperialism and militarism abroad, we're going to malign you.
And in fact, we're going to tell you that it is counterproductive to your cause because you will alienate us and the liberal establishment if you do that.
So here is Let's see if we can bring this up, which is the next article from Stanford University.
And it's the history of that speech.
It's entitled, quote, Beyond Vietnam.
It's from the Stanford University Martin Luther King Research and Education Initiative.
And it recounts their reaction to that speech that we just covered.
Quote.
The immediate response to King's speech was largely negative.
Both the Washington Post and the New York Times published editorials criticizing the speech, with the Post noting that King's speech had, quote, diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people, through a simplistic and flawed view of the situation.
Similarly, both the NAACP and Ralph Bunche accused King of linking two disparate causes, Vietnam and civil rights.
Despite public criticism, King continued to attack the Vietnam War on both moral and economic grounds.
It was an incredibly harsh editorial from the Washington Post, and an even more vitriolic one from the New York Times.
Here you see, April 7th, 1967, so three days after he delivered that speech, the New York Times published an editorial, the headline of which was, Dr. King's Error.
And they noted in this first line that the purpose of the speech was to link his personal opposition to the war in Vietnam with the cause of Negro equality in the United States.
They both, and all these other liberal institutions tried to say, You have no standing to talk about that word.
That's a completely different issue from What you're supposed to stick to, which is how Americans are living at home, and his whole point was, you can't separate the two.
And this is what the New York Times said, quote, Dr. King can only antagonize opinion in this country instead of winning recruits to the peace movement by recklessly comparing American military methods to those of Nazis testing, quote, new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.
The facts are harsh, but they do not justify such slander.
Furthermore, it is possible to disagree with many aspects of United States policy in Vietnam without whitewashing Hanoi.
So, do you see how these tactics are ageless and timeless in American political discourse?
If you criticize the war in Vietnam, it meant that you were on Hanoi's side, that you were whitewashing Hanoi.
This is what they accused Martin Luther King of because this is how Longstanding, the corporate media's commitment and devotion is to the agenda of the U.S.
security state and the Pentagon of endless war.
They concluded.
As an individual, Dr. King has the right and even the moral obligation to explore the ethical implications of the war in Vietnam.
But as one of the most respected leaders of the civil rights movement, he has an equally weighty obligation to direct that movement's efforts in the most constructive and relevant way.
There are no simple, easier answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country.
Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions, but to deeper confusions.
But ultimately, his argument won out.
Throughout the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, even into the War on Terror, the argument was widely accepted that the more we spend on foreign wars, the more harm comes to the lives of American citizens at home.
That's an obvious trade-off.
Only now are we back to this claim that one has nothing to do with the other.
Now, it's not just the United States where this conflict can be seen.
In France, there are widespread protests going on to their second month that have become sometimes violent, highly disruptive, in anger among the French citizens for the plan by President Emmanuel Macron to raise the retirement age by two years.
So French people have to work two years longer in their lives before they can finally take off.
These are not people who have comfortable jobs often, who write articles in digital outlets or who are professionals.
They often do real hardcore physical and manual labor.
And when they get to the end of their lives, they want to have some years to have leisure time.
And when you raise the retirement age by two years, you're taking away two years and forcing them to be useful workers for the society.
And they're unhappy about that.
So here you see from CNN just a few days ago, France wracked by more protests among rising violence on the streets, protesters on the tracks at a Paris rail station.
There you see smoke bombs.
And the article reads, quote, protesters on the tracks at a Paris rail station, smoke bombs let off at Barrette's airport, anger at French President Emmanuel Macron's pension reforms showed no signs of letting up on Tuesday as the nation saw its 10th day of nationwide demonstrations.
Sweeping protests have paralyzed major services across the country in recent weeks over Macron's proposal to raise the retirement age for most workers from 62 to 64 in a move that has riled opposition lawmakers and trade unions.
Some 740,000 protesters joined 240 rallies held throughout France on Tuesday with more than 93,000 demonstrations filling the streets of the capital alone according to the French Interior Ministry.
One of the country's major trade unions, the General Confederation of Labor, estimated a total nearly five times the ministry figure, 450,000 protesters according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.
The number of demonstrators is short of the record breaking protests of March 7th, which started nearly 1.3 million people take to the streets according to police figures, the highest turnout for protests against the proposed pension reforms.
Now, maybe you think 64 is a good retirement age and it's better than 62.
Maybe you think austerity measures are needed.
But this is something that has happened after years, decades, of neoliberal reforms, neoliberal austerity measures, where the French people pay far more attention to EU institutions of finance and the World Bank and the IMF.
Then they do to the citizens at home.
And while professionals and the professional managerial class in France, like in the United States, are perfectly fine with this because it doesn't affect them, the angry people are working class people who feel left behind and neglected and forgotten.
The same people who voted for Donald Trump in the United States, who voted for Brexit in the UK, and who throughout Western Europe are causing political evolutions which were previously unthinkable in that part of the world.
And this is why.
It's not just that they're being told by the government they no longer have money to support their standard of living or to enable their standard of living.
It's that they see at the same time this.
Here from January 2023, so just two months before these protests, quote, France increases military aid to Ukraine with more tanks.
The article says France will be sending tanks to Ukraine in an effort to expand its military aid, French President Emmanuel Macron told his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, on Wednesday.
On December 20th, France announced it had delivered rocket launchers and Crotale missile batteries to Ukraine.
Quote, this is the first time that tanks of Western design have been supplied to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the presidency said.
According to the Defense Ministry, France had 247 of these tanks in 2019.
Paris and Kiev will soon exchange to define the number and delivery modalities.
On Wednesday, the French president told his counterpart of France's, quote, unwavering support until victory.
So, at some point, you can tell a population that belts need to be tightened, they need to sacrifice, because of all sorts of things that you can point to, the war on terror, or COVID, or whatever you tell them, they need to support and sacrifice for, for their own good.
But when they start to see huge amounts of money being sent, and not so much in the other side of the world, in France's case, but still to a country in Ukraine to which the French never felt any connection, All in order to fight over who governs various provinces in Ukraine, of course people are going to start to draw the same connections that Martin Luther King 40 years ago urged people to draw, which is that when you spend resources on endless war abroad,
You're going to demand that it's a citizenry sacrifice continuously at home and it's not the wealthy or the powerful who will end up enduring those sacrifices, but the vast majority of the population who are poor and who are working class, the same kind of people throughout Western Europe and in the United States who are driving populist movements.
in contempt toward the elite classes and who are increasingly angry at the recognition that none of these policies serve their interest in any way but instead radically undermine the lives of themselves and their children.
So on last night's show we spent the show covering this very strange leak of classified documents that the closest media outlets to the US intelligence community keep saying is some incredibly dangerous leak, the most dangerous leak.
Since the Snowden reporting in 2013 or the WikiLeaks reporting a couple of years prior to that.
Yet we reviewed what these documents actually reveal and there's almost nothing of any real significance in terms of things that would actually cause a problem for the United States government.
We showed a couple of the documents that theoretically or possibly could be said to be embarrassing revelations such as the United States has deployed special forces to Ukraine along with three or four other NATO countries.
But even that is something that Was widely assumed to be true and as I got done demonstrating has the support of the bipartisan establishment class in Washington and really isn't going to cause any kind of scandal at all.
So it continues to be interesting to watch the aftermath of this leak that the media suddenly has a huge interest in drawing your attention to and telling you is authentic and claiming is incredibly scary and threatening to the U.S. government.
And there are, as I said, people in the region in Ukraine and Russia and elsewhere who believe this is a disinformation campaign designed to demoralize Russia or deceive the public in other ways, including by preparing the American public to fight this war throughout 2023 and beyond.
I don't endorse that at all, but it is an odd way this leak has developed.
But one of the ways it's now starting to be used is that leading media outlets like the New York Times are pointing to the way this leak happened To somehow argue that it shows the need, like everything does these days, for greater censorship over the internet.
The way this leak happened is very unusual.
It is not a case where you had a source like Daniel Alsberg or Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning coming to media outlets like the New York Times or myself at The Guardian or WikiLeaks and then having those news outlets publish those materials after curating them.
These are documents that just materialized on the internet in very obscure internet form, including Discord.
And so now the New York Times is saying that it's time to shed a light on what Discord is, because it's one of the few places on the internet that isn't subject to centralized control, and they're essentially framing this leak as evidence That Discord is insufficiently monitored and controlled.
As always, the number one leading argument of media institutions and the factions of government that they serve is that there's nothing more dangerous than a free internet.
They use every event, they exploit every development to argue that we need greater control and censorship and centralized manipulation of the flow of information online.
So here you see the New York Times article today.
They just kind of benignly ask, what is Discord?
The social app where late Pentagon documents were found.
This is where the documents were first found, which is Discord.
It's a platform that's often used for video games.
Here in the New York Times says, Discord gained popularity among gamers, but as it has become mainstream, it has run into controversy.
Over the past few years.
So what is the problem with Discord, according to the New York Times?
You'll never guess.
Discord, the eight-year-old social media and messaging platform popular among young people and video game players that has increasingly become a mainstream part of the internet, has once again run into controversy.
Leaked Pentagon documents were said to have been circulating on the platform as early as March before appearing on other sites.
The leaks are the latest incident in recent years in which Discord has played a key role.
What are Discord's content moderation policies?
Discord has faced several controversies over the last years regarding harmful content on its platform, including white nationalists organizing the quote, Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 on Discord servers, and the shooter who killed 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store posting his plans and racist messages on the platform before his attacks last year.
The company has said that it has become more serious about content moderation.
That, of course, is the euphemism that media corporations and the government uses for censorship.
So, Discord has a problem with insufficient content moderation.
As a result, they're now promising they've become more serious about content moderation and that 15% of its more than 900 employees work on its trust and safety teams.
Discord's community guidelines prohibit hate speech, harassment, threats, violent extremism, child sexual abuse, material, and misinformation.
It was unclear whether the leaked documents violated the company's guidelines.
Enforcing its policies has been a tricky issue for Discord, particularly because of the small and private nature of many of its servers.
The company has strengthened its automated tools for detecting, harassing, or offensive messages.
It is also reliant on members of Discord servers to report violations to the company.
Many Discord servers function as their own miniature governments, with the creator of the server deputizing other members to enforce the rules and giving them the power to prohibit miscreants from sending off messages or kick them out of the server entirely.
Now, some of you may recall that for about three months, there was a very popular app called Clubhouse, where people could go on and speak in rooms using their voice, and whoever wanted to could enter those rooms, and if they were selected by the moderators, could participate in the conversation.
And the New York Times, when Teller runs there, famously complained that Clubhouse was allowing what they called, quote, unfettered communications, unfettered conversations.
And here now you have them targeting Discord, one of the very few places on the internet not subject to their control, and so now it's time to malign them, to blame them for this leak, and to say they need more centralized censorship.
The same exact thing is happening here at Rumble over the last couple of weeks.
Rumble has announced very high profile signings of younger cultural voices, commentators on hip hop and rap music who have a huge audience.
And it interferes with the narrative that Rumble is some sort of site that's designed only for right wing voices or to promote right wing ideology.
And yet the corporate media has continuously attacked Rumble because it too refuses to censor on command.
They demand that Rumble cease platforming RT Rumble refuses.
As a result, they're not available in France.
And the media hates Rumble because it's one of the few places on the internet they can't control.
Any place, any platform that the New York Times can't pressure to censor on command Or that's immune to the censorship pressures of the US government, the corporate media will attack this way.
They exploit every incident, every event, because their central message is the one thing we cannot afford is to allow people to freely communicate on the internet outside of our rules and without our centralized control.
And to watch them exploit this leak So brazenly and so quickly for this cause is just yet another reason why I think lots of skepticism is warranted about these documents and the claims being made about the implications of this leak and even arguably where this leak came from.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As always, we are very appreciative for those of you who continue to watch.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
For those of you who are members of our Locals community, tonight is Tuesday.
On Tuesday and Thursday, we conduct our interactive after show on our Locals platform.
We will start that in just a few minutes, where we take your questions, respond to your feedback, interact.
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