Jeffrey Sachs Tears Apart US Financing Wars in Ukraine and Israel. PLUS: Top Aide Gustavo Bolívar on Colombia’s New Government, the Drug War, and More
NOTE: Our second interview was conducted in Portuguese & Spanish and is subtitled in our Rumble show. Please view it there, the recording is edited for English only. Thank you for understanding and enjoy.
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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, we present two very different, though very informative interviews that we conducted late last week.
Both shed significant light on U.S.
wars, U.S.
foreign policy, but also the political situation in multiple other countries.
First, We speak to someone who has become a regular guest on our program, one of the most popular guests we have.
He's Jeffrey Sachs, the international economist and Columbia University professor, who spent much of his life in high-end prestigious positions inside international establishment institutions advising the World Bank, Helping guide multiple countries out of debt and bankruptcy.
Being a very valued advisor to several presidential administrations.
All while being one of the loudest and most effective critics of establishment dogma.
He has lately become one of the most aggressive critics of Biden administration foreign policy.
From the U.S.
support for the bloody and futile war in Ukraine, to its financing and arming of Israel's destruction of Gaza, to the various escalations and conflicts the Biden administration is pursuing in multiple countries in the Middle East.
We speak to Sachs tonight about the current situation in the war in Ukraine, the inability of Congress to authorize $60 billion more for Ukraine and $17 billion more for Israel, Whether this difficulty reflects a change in political sentiments among Americans about financing foreign wars, we speak to them about the war in Gaza, the various wars in the Middle East, and much more.
Then we speak to one of the most important and influential figures in Colombia, where all sorts of complex and interesting and revealing political debates are unfolding.
In 2022, that country elected its first left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, after decades of right-wing leaders that were highly loyal to the United States and followed the same ideological path.
The person who is Petro's closest advisor The Spanish newspaper El País called him Petro's apostle is Gustavo Bolivar.
He is actually best known as an author of critically acclaimed and internationally well-read novels, most notably the international bestseller, quote, without tits, there is no paradise.
I think it sounds less crude in Spanish, but that's the translation.
He was elected to the Columbia Senate in 2018.
He is now a central figure in the presidency of President Petro.
We spoke about, here in the studio, the reasons why Petro was elected, why he has suffered a pretty significant drop in popularity in such a short period of time, how Columbia's strategy for dealing with drug gangs and international drug traffickers, namely by forging a peace deal with the leading drug gang FARC,
It compares with the far more violent and aggressive approach taken by the highly popular President of El Salvador, why President Petro was one of the first to denounce Israel's war in Gaza, whether it matters to Latin American countries like Colombia, which of the two political parties run Washington, and much more about the political scene in Colombia, how that affects the region and the United States.
Latin America has always been crucial to American foreign policy given its proximity to our continent.
And Colombia has long been one of the most influential countries in that region, both for other Latin American countries and for the U.S.
I found Bolivar, who's visiting Brazil here in Rio and was inside of our studio, to be a very sophisticated and illuminating analyst of the situation in Colombia, but also the broader geopolitical situation in which that country finds itself.
And I'm very confident you will view it in the same way.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Professor Socks, thank you so much for joining us.
It's always great to talk to you.
Likewise.
Thank you.
So every time we get together, we talk about war, which I guess is the nature of being an American.
When we talked to you six months ago, there was one war.
When we talked to you two months ago, there were two.
Now there are many.
It's hard to know where to begin, but why don't we just start with Ukraine, which is the oldest one, and work our way up.
There seems to be a lot of chaos in Kiev, where President Zelensky just fired his top commander.
There's certainly chaos in Washington, where they can't figure out how to get the next $60 billion to Ukraine, even though they want to.
What do you make of where we are in this war?
Well, on the battlefield, Russia is taking apart Ukraine and the death toll for the Ukrainians is terrifying.
But Washington remains steadfast on one point, which is No negotiations, no discussion of real solutions, a war only approach.
It's pathetic, absolutely pathetic.
And the idea of putting another $61 billion into more deaths for Ukraine, more destruction for Ukraine, without a word about politics and a solution to this is Biden's Complete failure.
So I find the situation shocking.
I find it shocking that a large part of the Senate and almost all of the Democratic Party mindlessly goes along with this.
We have heard since those two months even more stories about how the U.S.
stopped the negotiated settlement in 2022.
This is mind-boggling in the complete absence of any interest whatsoever in ending this war.
Well, let me ask you about that because you've been a critic from the start of the U.S.
role in Ukraine.
I have as well.
There's no consolation to have been vindicated given how disastrous the war has been, but certainly everything you're describing now is visible.
To everybody in Washington, even if somehow it wasn't at the start of the war, that Ukraine cannot win.
There's no way to expel all Russian troops from Ukrainian soil, let alone from Crimea.
There's just no possibility of any of those objectives being fulfilled.
What, at this point, do you think is the objective?
And looking back, what has been the objective all along?
Well, I think the objective all along for the last 30 years was to put the U.S.
and NATO into Ukraine.
And at each point, Biden, Sullivan, Blinken, Newland, this has been going on for more than a decade.
And before that, it was Newland as part of the Bush administration.
They thought they could bluff their way in or frighten Putin and their way in and so forth.
It's just been one stupid, cruelly ignorant miscalculation after another.
They got to the point where every gambit failed.
The only thing that they accomplished was spending more than $100 billion of U.S.
money and about 500,000 casualties in Ukraine.
A catastrophe!
And now they have an election coming.
So to my mind, at least one part of this story is just get to November without an embarrassment.
No matter how many more deaths they cause, another $61 billion doesn't matter.
It's not their money.
They're just trying to avoid embarrassment for what has been an absolutely disgraceful foreign policy for A decade.
We're in the 10th anniversary of Biden, Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan participating in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government and this is what it's brought.
Complete disaster for Ukraine and nothing good for the United States.
I guess if there's one silver lining, it's the fact that this request for $60 billion has been pending before the Congress for several months now.
They struggled for a long time, and as of this week, they're trying everything, and so far nothing's working.
Not just to send $60 billion to Ukraine, but also another $17 billion to Israel.
Is this just something that you think is kind of an election year theater in Congress where they're kind of trading for things and eventually will send it?
Or do you think it actually reflects some change in the politics in terms of what Americans think about sending huge amounts of money to finance other countries wars when our country is in many ways falling apart?
Well, I think it is exactly the fact.
The Americans are completely against this.
Spend another $61 billion with the massive budget deficits, with the cuts in essential services.
I point out in a post today that the $61 billion exceeds our nutrition programs for women and children.
Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Labor add it all together.
But, you know, it's games for these senators.
I think what's interesting is, in fact, it's routine for the senators to routinely vote mindlessly money for the military-industrial complex.
And the fact that they're with these hiccups right now and they want to do it but they can't do it is because it's so atrocious.
What they're being asked to do.
Something that is a disaster in Ukraine, and that is complicity in genocide in the case of the war in Gaza.
And so it's completely unjustified, this money, and yet they're still trying, trying, because their normal mode is to vote money for the military.
And for this to be even a hiccup right now is something different.
It's because the American people are absolutely against it, and because the real purposes of this are so awful that there's no justification.
And interestingly, while there's debate, there's no Substantive discussion.
You don't hear Chuck Schumer who pushes this every day give a speech explaining anything or discussing the context or what's really going on.
It's mindlessness.
They just want to vote money for the military and they want to avoid any embarrassment before the November election.
But there's no substance behind it and that's why they're tripping up right now.
Moving to the second war, which is the one we're financing and arming Israel to carry out in the destruction of Gaza.
We spoke in November about a month into the war, and obviously you were making a lot of observations about how atrocious that war was at the time.
We're now four months into the war, three months later.
Things have gotten Cataclysmically and exponentially worse.
Where do we stand in this war and what now do you think Israel's actual objectives are?
They're saying this war is going to last for several more months.
They just rejected Hamas's counteroffer for a ceasefire.
Netanyahu seems intent on continuing this.
What do you see as the driving motives here?
Well, I think the key event since we last talked was the ruling of the International Court of Justice, which said that there are plausible grounds that Israel is committing genocide.
And that means, by the way, that America is complicit in a genocide, if that's what the ultimate finding is.
And I think that there are good reasons for the court to have made that ruling.
When you find genocide, it's both a matter of the incredible destruction and cruelty on the ground.
Two million people displaced, around 30,000 dead, 70% of whom are women and children.
We watch the demolition of universities, of schools, of mosques, of hospitals, of apartment buildings before our eyes with gleeful The second part of a genocide finding is intent.
And there, the intent is that the Israeli cabinet doesn't disguise what they want.
They want the Palestinians gone.
They want ethnic cleansing.
If it means death because the Palestinians won't leave, so be it.
And they don't hide this.
What is amazing, actually, is that since this ICJ ruling, Israel hasn't changed an iota, not a bit.
It continues the killing, it continues the slaughter, it continues the murder in cold blood, and now it says it's going to assault the south of Gaza, where it told the Palestinians to leave for safety.
And the statements by the cabinet have remained absolutely as vile and genocidal as before.
So they don't even take note.
Well, maybe we should be a little bit careful.
Not anything like that.
Quite the contrary.
They had a big event in Tel Aviv, you know, where the settlers are saying, we're going to resettle Gaza.
They have to leave.
This is greater Israel.
And there it is before our eyes.
Now, today, it's incredible to watch Secretary Blinken.
He wrings his hands.
He says, oh, yes, it would be better with a two-state solution.
That's what the Saudis are telling us and what we know.
But this is up to the Israelis.
It's saying, as clear as can be, Israel runs American policy.
Okay, that's it?
Even though we finance them?
Even though we finance them?
It's the most bizarre dynamic.
I know we provide the munitions, we provide the financing, we're asking for emergency aid, and Blinken's saying there's nothing we can do.
It's all up to the Israelis.
Well, let me ask you, the one thing that has changed since the ruling
is that there was one group doing actual work in delivering basic humanitarian assistance nowhere near sufficient but still some to the Gazan population that has been on the brink of starvation and now suffers the genuine prospect of mass famine which was the UN Rescue Aid Agency and Israel just decided to accuse it of having 12 members who participated in October 7th and being linked to Hamas and now the United States and multiple other European countries that have been funding
The destruction of Gaza are now saying we're going to cut off funding to the only aid agency that's actually doing something on a substantive level to keep the people in Gaza from just dying in mass numbers from treatable infections and starvation.
What do you make of those accusations?
Complicity in genocide.
You know, even if the accusations were true on their face, and we have not the slightest idea whether they are, and people that have seen the dossier supposedly say that it's absolutely absurd, but even if it were true on the face, the reaction to cut off an aid agency at this moment with hundreds of thousands on the brink of starvation is absolutely complicity in a genocide.
So, you know, I don't know what they think they're getting away with.
The whole world's eyes are on this.
There will be a report by South Africa shortly again to the court.
There's nothing hidden in any of this.
Of course, having being held accountable for genocide doesn't stop the genocide by itself.
But the American leaders are absolutely complicit in this.
And the senators like Schumer, who just give him the money, doesn't matter, are complicit in this too.
Doesn't anybody speak a word of honesty anymore?
This is really the question.
Who is the spokesman every day, the one that said that the accusations were completely meritless when South Africa first made the application and then dismissed the court's ruling, brushed it aside in one moment, does not say a word of truth on any day.
And this is how we are right now.
Of course, the world's extremely dangerous.
when it is so miserably governed and when the United States, which is a big military power, is absolutely without decency and limits.
Last question because I know you have to leave.
But speaking of being miserably governed and dangerous, the United States, the Biden administration said at the start that their primary objective was to avoid an escalation in the Middle East.
Obviously that's failed.
We are now repeatedly bombing Yemen with no congressional debate or authorization, continuously bombing targets both in Iraq and Syria that we say are linked to Iran.
We've had three of our own troops killed in a military base in Jordan that very few people knew existed.
What do you see as the risk of regional escalation though?
Look, Israel's policy is not even about Hamas.
Israel's policy, explicitly, it's the policy of the cabinet ministers, it's their stated intentions every day, it is the core of the policy platforms of the parties in power, is control over all of Palestine.
This is not a secret.
And they want the Palestinians to leave, or they'll die, or something else.
With that approach, there can be no peace.
There can be no avoidance of escalation.
And the United States says, well, it's up to Israel.
We're just going to keep going along with it.
You can't even understand how pathetic this is.
The United States, We have some choices, but this administration apparently just says, no, they're not our choices, they're Israel's choices.
Well, the choices that Israel makes are absolutely leading to wider and wider war, and we know that it's no secret that these religious national extremists in Israel want the United States to go to war with Iran.
So, if that's what Israel wants, is that what we're going to do?
That's what we're going to find out.
Professor Sachs, it's always very illuminating to talk to you.
It's also so refreshing to hear someone speak with so much bluntness and without obfuscation about these crucial issues.
