All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 16, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
34:55
4) Anya Parampil - “The Americas in the 21st Century”

Investigative Journalist Anya Parampil delivers a convincing talk requesting that the United States just be a normal country again...

|

Time Text
Grateful Introduction 00:02:28
I'm delighted to introduce our next speaker who's been a friend of mine for a very long time and she hasn't spoken at one of our events before.
We've worked together in journalism and I consider her one of the finest and most fearless investigative journalists.
There's not a lot of them around anymore.
Most are stenographers for the state.
And it's the first time her speaking here and it's a great reminder to all of us that the Ron Paul Institute is not a libertarian organization.
It's not a right-wing or a left-wing organization.
It's a continuation of Dr. Paul's efforts on Capitol Hill to create broad coalitions across the board and cooperate across the board on items that are of shared importance.
And those, of course, are the tyranny of the ruling class, the attacks on civil liberties, and the warfare state.
So I would like to welcome, I would like us all to welcome a great friend of mine, fearless journalist, Anya Parampil.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Hello, everyone.
How are you today?
Thank you, Daniel, for inviting me and for that introduction.
And thank you to the Ron Paul Institute for hosting this.
It's an honor for me to be included and to be among so many friends, actually.
Daniel, someone I used to interview on RT all the time.
And Dr. Paul, I don't know if he's in the room, but I learned so much from him.
People might not know this because we get put in these political boxes, but I can say with confidence that Dr. Paul and his explanation of the Fed and our monetary policy or lack thereof impacted a lot of my own work.
And so I'm grateful for that and grateful for the opportunity to speak here.
I just returned from South Africa where I covered the BRICS summit, which surprised a lot of people, I think especially in the West, with the announcement that six new countries, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, would join.
UAE Joins BRICS Summit 00:04:58
And Iran, in fact, two countries we thought were one-dimensional, long-term enemies, Iran and Saudi Arabia, coming together to join an alternative financial network, global financial network, opposed to the neoliberal IMF model that has reigned since the end of World War II.
And I've been covering events like BRICS for several years now, meeting the diplomats from U.S. designated enemy countries from all around the world who really formed this,
what they describe as a multipolar world order that is rising in opposition to the unipolar, hegemonic, U.S.-led transatlantic order that I think we kind of took for granted in the United States would continue to reign supreme.
And whenever I come back from these events, but particularly now, I feel a lot of the time that I've come back from the future because I'm hearing what the rest of the world is talking about, something that the ideologues in Washington and who run our government are so secluded from.
They're not even interested, I don't think, in realizing how these other countries operate.
But because of my exposure to this other world, I've seen the writing on the wall for years now that, for example, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and even aligning with Iran would eventually break away from the Western hegemonic unipolar order.
It was just inevitable, and I will get into why shortly.
I just can't emphasize that a lot of times when we're talking about what are they going to do in the future in terms of currency, we might be playing catch-up because these conversations have already been going on for years.
The UAE, for example, and I learned this specifically as I was covering Venezuela, which has been a focus of mine since 2019 when the U.S. recognized this parallel government.
It was the first time really that a U.S. coup declared its mission accomplished before a regime change operation had actually succeeded.
They just recognized a parallel government and then immediately froze all the assets belonging to the Venezuelan government in the United States and in Europe and transferred it under the authority of this unelected coup regime.
And it's a completely failed policy now.
You can see after the Russia sanctions were rolled out in 2023, the Biden administration had to dispatch a team to Venezuela to kind of try and restart our at least commercial relationship with their oil sector because the great irony of U.S. policy right now is that in a case like Venezuela,
for example, the greatest barrier to trade and some sort of mutually beneficial relationship is not this socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro in Caracas.
It's ideologues in the U.S. Treasury Department who have sanctioned pretty much the U.S. population and said, okay, we're not going to buy Venezuelan oil.
And then you had, that was with the Trump administration did.
Then you had the Biden administration come along and say, we're not going to buy Russian oil.
Well, what does that do?
Russia and Venezuela are going to sell their oil to somebody else.
That just means prices are going to rise and the sanctions are really targeted against people like you and me here.
And the Venezuela case was interesting, particularly because the minute we banned our sale of the purchasing of Venezuelan oil in the United States, they controlled about 7% of our import market.
Russia gained 7% overnight.
So I think they were pretty much either buying the Venezuelan oil and selling it back to us, or Russia just filled in the gap.
And so when Biden came in and put the Russian embargo down, over the course of a few years, the U.S. had pretty much cut itself off willingly from 10% of our oil imports.
And so who is that going to impact?
Again, us.
And as a result of this weaponization of the dollar, which Jeff discussed, and the financial system in general, bank accounts and SWIFT, the financial service messaging system, countries like Venezuela, China, India, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil have been working together for years to build an alternative financial order.
International Economic War Shifts 00:08:03
And earlier this year, Daniel, Dr. Paul, Max, my husband, who is not here, he's coming soon.
He had to drop off our child at his parents' house in the other direction.
But he also is excited to be here.
And we were all participating.
My point was, we were all participating in this rage against the war machine rally where we were trying to come across political barriers and make a point about opposing not only this war with Russia, but this international economic war that we're waging on the world.
And we caught a lot of controversy for trying to break down political and ideological barriers.
But the rest of the world has already moved on from that kind of discussion.
They've already moved on from a one-dimensional or even three-dimensional view of international relations.
They're not saying, oh, Erdogan and Turkey is an Islamist, Maduro is a socialist.
They even in The Economist, they'll brand someone like AMLO in Mexico an authoritarian.
But what all these leaders actually have in common is that they believe in their own national sovereignty, and they actually authentically represent a picture of what their democratic or national sovereign population looks like.
And it's the U.S. elite that would like to keep them divided one-dimensionally, for example, so that Saudi Arabia and Iran could never partner together, that also wants to keep us divided as U.S. citizens, because there's, as I believe it was Gary said, there are more of us than there are of these elites, this transatlantic nexus that is really not only exploiting us at home, but waging war on the world.
So the rest of the world, they've really broken out of this one-dimensional grand chessboard view of the world, or even, as I said, three-dimensional.
It's multi-dimensional.
Countries have multiple interests.
They can't just be boiled down to one ideology or one economic system.
And the case of Venezuela for me, I keep bringing this up because I'm actually publishing a book in January called Corporate Coup that used Venezuela as a case study in U.S. regime change policy, hybrid warfare.
So the media tactics, covert destabilization tactics through USAID and mercenaries, economic weaponization of the dollar and financial system, and then the diplomatic tactics and just crazy lawfare campaign that they use to target countries for regime change.
It's not just, even though I go into detail in Venezuela, this is not something that's only been seen in Venezuela.
It can be applied to Ukraine, Iran, many places around the world.
But I also learned about how Venezuela is working with these other countries to build the multipolar world order that we're seeing emerge before our very eyes right now.
And I think a lot of people want to project ideology onto BRICS and say, oh, this is an anti-Western organization, or oh, this is an anti-American organization.
And I can tell you, based on my experience speaking to the officials working on BRICS, who are responsible for expanding BRICS most recently, that it is not.
They simply would like to establish a model for international development that is based on multilateral exchange and the principles of territorial sovereignty, political independence, and the basis of what was supposed to be the UN Charter, but that the West has weaponized and we know that real modern development hasn't been a two-way street.
That the West thought for so long that they could dictate the policies of African, Latin American, and Asian countries in order to extract their wealth.
That's pretty much just how the current model worked.
What they would like is for the United States to just break away from that and deal with the world like a normal country.
And I actually think the United States would be better off if we broke from this transatlantic obsession, this desire for zero-sum hegemonic rule, and focused on our home front and then just dealt with the world the way any normal country would.
What do you have that I need?
What can I give you?
And how can we avoid conflict and make peace?
During my reporting, I had the chance to, covering this corporate coup in Venezuela, I attended the non-aligned movement, a summit of the non-aligned movement in Caracas in 2019, which included 120 countries from all over the world, basically just excluding the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe.
And the conversation about dropping the U.S. dollar and building alternatives to the Western-dominated financial network was the center of discussion.
In a room just like this, I watched the foreign minister of Iran hold his cell phone in the air and implore his fellow dignitaries to just Google the word terrorism.
And he read out the definition.
He said, using force to terrorize a population into submitting to a political will.
And he said, this is what they're doing to us.
This is what the West is doing to many of the countries in the room.
About 30% of the world population, 70 countries over the last several decades have been subject to unilateral U.S. sanctions over the last several years.
And so he said, this is what they're doing to us.
Don't call these measures sanctions.
Call it what it is, financial terrorism.
Then I heard the Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia tell the room, let's turn this war against us into a chance to unify.
Let's turn independence into dependence and work together.
And so the stage was really set because I saw even the Saudi, high-ranking Saudi officials were there in Caracas standing there right next to their Iranian counterparts and showing a face of unity.
I saw the Indians and the Pakistanis coming together and saying it is both in our interests.
You know, we might have differences between us, but we know that none of us can have sovereignty, none of us, if we remain submitted to the modern international financial order.
And afterwards, I spoke with the Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergei Ryabkov, to just ask about Russia's perspective or what was actually going on in the world, because I don't think anybody else, not many people in Washington are really engaging and asking, well, what can we do to work together?
And he told me that it took particularly long, this is a quote from him, for the U.S. to realize there's no such thing as everyone agreeing to all of its asks or demands after the fall of the Soviet Union.
You know, Francis Fukuyama came forward with the end of history, and then we have the project for a new American century.
We thought that our hegemonic rule was set in stone and it was nothing could ever change.
But what Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov stressed was that because the countries that were gathered in that room, again, 120 countries, were not bound by ideology.
They were just bound by their own interest in preserving their national sovereignty, that they could work together.
Venezuela's Future Oil Power 00:15:29
They could, they don't even necessarily, they haven't needed to come up with the currency because they're just trading in basket currencies with their own with their own commodities.
For example, this is why I saw the writing on the wall with the United Arab Emirates for years, years ago.
They were doing gold swaps with the Venezuelan government to get oil.
The Chinese also have been trading in oil-backed loans.
And since 2015, Iran hasn't used the U.S. dollar because of U.S. sanctions cutting off Iran from the global market or the Western-dominated market and financial system.
Iran and Venezuela, two major oil producers, haven't been able to access dollars, and so they've been trading in the Euro already for years.
And I'm not sure if we've actually grasped that in the United States.
And for so many years, because of U.S. sanctions, we kind of forgot that Venezuela, a close neighbor to us, for most of the last century, was the premier, a premier, if not the top oil producer and exporter in the world.
They have the largest oil reserves in the world and the largest untapped gold deposits in the world.
And so when Chavez came in around the turn of the century, you probably have heard in the media since then that Venezuela's just been under the thumb of this crazy communist regime or socialist dictator.
But something that I point out in my book is that actually 60% or more of the Venezuelan economy throughout this whole time is still controlled by the private sector.
And what Venezuela socialized was actually the wealth that it kept under its shelf, a continental shelf under the waters and under its territory.
So that, when we to hear socialism and about socialism in Venezuela, it's not some Soviet top-down system where everybody's just living under the boot of the state.
No, you go to a grocery store, you go to hotels, it's private business, just like anywhere else.
The state just happens to own the oil and the gold.
So you can imagine that is why London and Washington are very preoccupied with Venezuela, especially considering some people might not know this either, the Allied fight in World War II was pretty much dependent on Venezuelan oil to fuel its military.
London was completely dependent on foreign imports to fuel its military.
And by the time U.S. troops landed in the British Isles in 1942, Venezuela was supplying 80% of UK oil imports.
So this relationship with Venezuela is key.
And actually, you might be, it might be funny for me to say this, but as someone who spent a lot of time there, I actually would say that we have a lot more in common with Venezuelans, and I think throughout the people throughout the entire American continent, than we do with Europeans.
For example, Venezuelan officials love to bring up the fact that Francisco Miranda, one of their liberators, who led the fight against the Spanish imperial crown in South America, actually fought in our American Revolutionary War.
He participated and held siege, actually, to King George's troops in Pensacola, Florida, decades before he went on to lead the South American fight against European colonialism.
So they saw that fight against Europe as shared.
They saw it shared then, and they see it shared now.
That's why I think if the United States were actually going to accept its place in the multipolar world, that if we turned to the Americas for our friends, for our special friendships, we would actually be much better off.
We have infrastructure built with Venezuela to start importing their oil.
We could do it the next tomorrow if we wanted to.
But otherwise, and this is something that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obridou has actually spoken about, if the U.S. continues this hostile stance toward our immediate neighborhood, that is what has created space for China and other powerful foreign nations to come in and gain a sphere of influence.
Something I detail in my book is how a policy personally crafted by John Bolton and Elliot Abrams in the Trump White House, the combined maximum pressure campaign against Russia, against Iran and Venezuela, actually led Iran to create or to gain a leg of influence on the American continent that would have never been imaginable.
When I was in Caracas in 2020, I went to an Iranian supermarket called Megasis.
It's like Walmart, but it sells Iranian products, even Persian carpets, pickles shipped from Iran.
80% of the products were from Iran right there in Caracas.
They're coming to build electricity grids or revive electricity grids in Venezuela as well, working on reviving their sanctioned, ravaged oil industry.
And by the way, they're coming to Nicaragua and Cuba as well, the troika of tyranny that John Bolton so famously demonized while he was national security advisor.
Iran is operating there too.
And I'm not saying that Iran's building terrorist cells, and I think it's those countries' right to have relations with whoever they want, but it wouldn't have happened if the United States were just behaving like a normal country and not applying this zero-sum, we have to control every aspect of your country and society and we're going to cut you out of the market.
I mean, it's just insane hubris.
So it's backfired.
Really, Elliot Abrams and John Bolton gave Iran space on this continent that I don't think they even realized it was going on.
And Russia is another example.
In the memoirs of Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Esper being Secretary of Defense, they both complained, oh, Russia and China, they have their advisors in Venezuela and Russia sells arms to Venezuela and has their military advisors deeply ingrained with the Venezuelan armed forces.
Well, why?
Because in 2006, the Bush administration canceled U.S. arms sales to Venezuela, thinking that that would help overthrow the Chavez government.
So the Venezuelan foreign minister told me frankly, he said, we had to defend our country.
The U.S. blocked us from buying weapons, so we had to go to Russia.
But our alliance with Russia is not against anyone.
It is just a necessary relationship for survival.
And he described these countries coming together that are now, I think, going to be emerging in BRICS as really coming together as the natural flow of a river.
He said the U.S. waged, and the West waged this insane hybrid war against all of us, and we are just trying to survive.
So it's not as though they woke up one day and said, we don't want the U.S. dollar.
They were actually cut off from it in Venezuela's case.
And so as China, Russia, and Iran work to redevelop Venezuela's oil capacity, which they are doing, eventually Venezuela is going to be producing just like it did in the last century, and it's not going to be selling its oil in dollars.
Just like Iran is not selling its oil in dollars, just like because of our sanctions, Russia is not selling its oil in dollars.
So what is that?
Where does that leave other oil producers?
Where does it leave Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?
And by the way, they're looking at all this happening to Venezuela and Iran and Russia, and they say, what's going to stop the United States 10 years from now if they don't like Prince Mohammed bin Salman?
We know that they don't from the media coverage.
Finally, CNN talks about abuses in Saudi Arabia because they don't like this one crown prince for some reason.
Saudi knows that the dollar and this Western financial market can be weaponized against them.
And no one trusts the West.
They know that the U.S. and Europe will turn on you on a dime.
So they're putting, why have all of your eggs in the transatlantic basket?
Why not go to BRICS?
Because not only are all of the other oil producers and exporters forced out of our dollar-based market, but the largest oil consumers, the United States, we're still up there, but China and India can compete.
They're buying oil.
And if they're buying oil from Venezuela and Russia and Iran, not in dollars, then again, Saudi Arabia can see where all of this is going.
They can't just rely on a market in the United States indefinitely.
So it's that multi-dimensional picture of the world that I think U.S. officials would benefit from beginning to accept.
Because I don't think that the United Kingdom would necessarily fare well in a multipolar world, but the United States will.
If we are actually producing things again, if we had a non-industrial farming sector and actually, you know, Ned, you laughed when we were talking about buying U.S. exports.
What exports?
What are we exporting?
I mean, imagine if we actually had a functioning economy.
Imagine if we, I don't know, actually were allowed to tap into our own natural resource base and just dealt with the world normally.
I think we would actually be way better off.
Maybe we wouldn't be spending billions of dollars in Ukraine or on Israel or on other satellite states because we could just get by as a very powerful country.
I mean, look at a map of the world.
The United States is always going to be powerful.
And as I said, no one from these BRICS nations really thinks that they're casting the United States aside.
They would just, you know, it's kind of like we need to be in timeout and grow up a little bit before we can go back and face the rest of the world.
And I brought up AMLO in Mexico because if you listen to his speeches, and I think he's worth listening to, he really is proposing a future, what he describes as an America for the Americas.
He's frustrated with growing Chinese influence on the continent, not because he sees them as some big scary communists that are coming to take over everybody's, but culturally and just in terms of national sovereignty and interest, I think he sees kinship with the Americans as anyone, I mean it just makes sense, right, as we should with him.
And he gave a speech in July of 2021 on the 238th birthday of Simone Bolivar, who is the South American equivalent of Washington.
But I will say those, they were all inspired by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and our anti-colonial heroes.
That is what inspired the South American anti-colonial fight and also Chavez.
They all cite this idea that the Americans should stand alone and strong as an American continent as the inspiration for their political movement.
And AMLO recited a quote from Thomas Jefferson during this speech that I think is worth recalling.
He said, our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe.
Too bad.
He then said, second, we should never allow for Europe to meddle in our affairs on this side of the Atlantic.
And now, AMLO is reciting this to his own ministers and foreign dignitaries from the surrounding region.
And he actually said that he believed it was time to not cast, again, he said, we are too, some, you know, the reactionary movements against the United States and U.S. Empire in the region is anti-American.
He said, that's not going to get us anywhere.
We should actually approach the Americans and try to convince them that there is a new way of dealing with the American continent, and the region, and that we could actually convince them to start treating us as equal partners.
This is what he's telling the region.
And I mean, imagine this.
The people in Washington aren't thinking this way.
He said that now is the time for a new existence among the countries of the Americas because the order that was imposed more than 200 years ago is exhausted.
It has no future and it's no longer benefiting anyone.
And Americans know that too.
For a while, we could say we were benefiting from it.
But now it's just an increasingly tiny, increasingly borderless elite, this transatlantic network, they're the only ones benefiting from it.
The people that Victoria Newland represents when she marches around the world and hands down orders to foreign dignitaries as if she's a colonial figurehead.
When I was in South Africa, I spoke with a South African diplomat who had just met with her while she was in South Africa.
She was there about two weeks before BRICS began.
And this source told me that he had never seen the Americans so desperate because she arrived one day following the coup in Niger that had followed a series of coups in the Sahel that had overturned pro-Western, mostly pro-French governments.
And he said she was panicked.
She was completely caught off guard.
And she immediately started stressing out about how many U.S. troops, over a thousand U.S. troops were in Niger and all of our financial and billions of dollars of financial investments as well.
And she was asking for South Africa's help and responding to this.
It's not happening.
We have to break out of that mentality.
And we would be better off for it.
America for the Americas.
I think in the multipolar world in the 21st century, it is time for the U.S. to not, and this Vivek Ramaswamy guy, he comes out and he says all of these hot takes when it comes to Ukraine.
And then he says, oh, by the way, not only am I going to defend Taiwan militarily, which, I mean, that's crazier than even our current Ukraine policy, in my opinion.
Modern Monroe Doctrine Debate 00:03:54
He then says that he's going to do a modern Monroe doctrine for the 21st century.
I mean, the same way that I think Putin would laugh in his face the minute he sat down and said, okay, we're going to end the war in Ukraine if you break off your partnership with China, which is his plan, by the way.
Putin would laugh in his face the same way Putin would respond to that is how Latin American leaders would respond to hearing that he's going to come and give them a modern Monroe doctrine.
Because the great tragedy of the Monroe Doctrine is while it was initially articulated in a way that was supposed to represent a U.S. perspective of rejecting all foreign interference on the American continent, it was mostly just a precursor to the policy that has arranged ever since where we saw that we had inherited the right, the European imperial right to dominate the Americas.
And so it wasn't their right to be sovereign.
Now we were the empire and Latin America was our backyard.
That's the basis of the modern Monroe doctrine.
And so I would like to instead argue that we should approach Latin America as our immediate neighborhood for once.
And I don't know about you, but personally, in my neighborhood, I think the best way to go about business is I don't care what's going on in their household, as long as it doesn't spill over into mine, and as long as I can get along with them, and maybe even we can have a good block party and exchange some things that we all like.
And that should be our approach to the Americas.
Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, they're all going to be turning to bricks because the neoliberal model of development has not served anyone.
I don't think that focusing on the question of currency even really is necessary at this point because as I said, they're already exchanging in their own currencies.
They've already been dropping U.S. dollar treasury debt holdings and increasing their stockpiles of gold in their own central banks.
This is something that I detail in my book.
So the one point of history that I think the people who are currently running our government fail to acknowledge is just the fundamental laws of physics.
That every action has an opposite and equal reaction.
And for decades, we thought we could just get away with an aggressive financial policy and an oppressive hegemonic order.
And it's collapsing before our eyes.
So the sooner we accept that there is a reaction to our policy and that the rest of the world is already there and that they would actually be very happy if I was speaking to a friend who was part of the Iranian delegation who said, I would just love for the United States to be a normal country.
I said, me too.
If we could just do that, the future is bright.
And the future is here in the Americas.
Because I don't know about Canada, but at least from the United States down to Patagonia, we all have this fighting American spirit.
I've seen it because of all the time that I've spent there.
And I've met leaders from all different countries.
I know we could work out something hopeful and represent what it means to be Americas.
Americas, they don't have to fall to another foreign power.
We can just be one beautiful continent.
Thank you.
Export Selection