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Oct. 11, 2022 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
57:48
Stay Free with Russell Brand #010 - The REAL Reason Why Trump Didn’t Pardon Assange & Snowden
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I'm going to go ahead and get my phone out of the way.
In this video, you're going to see the T-34.
You're watching Stay Free with Russell Brand.
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You know what time it is where you are.
We've got a fantastic show for you today.
In our item, here's the news now.
Here's the effing news.
We're going to be talking about Trump not pardoning Julian Assange due to the threat of impeachment.
Was it a deep state ploy?
Is it possible that politics takes place beyond the reach of ordinary democracy?
Let me know in the comments, let me know in the chat what you think.
Also I'll be talking to Yanis Varoufakis about the cost of living crisis.
How is it affecting you?
Is it Putin's price hikes, or is it energy conglomerates and powerful globalist interests that prevent us from being able to have access to the most simple resources, let alone the deep power within us all?
It's always worth remembering, isn't it, that reality passes through human psyche.
Every single social system ever designed at some point has to pass through human consciousness.
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Okay, you know, as well as our streams every single day, which you're watching today, by the way, it's a slightly different show.
Gareth's not with us.
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Aren't you, Subhi?
Who's our head of social media.
It's so lovely to have you.
Often when you read comments, what kind of comments do you go for?
Because there's often ones that say things like, I'm a truth pervert, stuff like that.
What goes through your mind?
I'm trying to read really quickly.
You're just reading me.
It's purely a practical issue that we're dealing with.
Listen, you know, every single week we make a podcast for guided meditation.
Do you meditate yet?
If you don't meditate yet, you've got to learn to meditate.
You are simply not accessing a power deep within you that will bring you much serenity and peace, that will help you to get a different perspective on your life, that will help to free you from the constant intransigent nagging in your belly.
Meditate once a week.
With my new podcast, Stay Awake, I provide a guided meditation.
What could be more relaxing than me nattering on in your earhole while you try to access... I'd use a different voice.
I'm much more like this.
Have a look at it.
♪♪ Last week, I did a meditation that seemed to have a lot of
impact on people's pets.
Carolyn Joy, you got in touch saying, thanks for all you bring to us, it's very much appreciated.
Here's some pictures of Ivy and Ruby, who prove canines and felines can be besties.
How can we not achieve peace between Ukraine and Russia when that dog and cat...
Against all odds, they're getting on so well.
Mazza1, I used to listen to Above the Noise, so pleased you're still guiding us.
My beautiful chocolate Burmese, Coco, often joins me for meditation.
When I heard beautiful chocolate Burmese, all sorts of images went through my mind, but that's the one that I want you to focus on, that one, of a sort of Siamese-looking cat, but it's actual Burmese.
AmandaGrace777, you don't know how much I needed this today, speaking about my meditation.
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Okay then, so, um...
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Now, Tucker Carlson called on Trump to pardon Julian Assange, stating he was in jail for telling the truth.
That's amazing, isn't it?
Fox News.
Who would have thought that we would have allies on Fox News when I used to be regularly goaded and ridiculed on that very channel?
But, some people say that Trump was intimidated by deep state agents into not going forward with that pardoning.
If you want to learn a little bit more about that story, and why wouldn't you, I want you to watch Here's the News.
Wait for it, because I want to make sure what people are saying on locals.
They're talking about growing their own food.
Amazing what people are talking about over there.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Here's the news.
No, here's the fucking news!
Did the deep state establishment bully Trump into not pardoning Assange and Snowden?
They'd never do a thing like that, would they?
Now, let's get into this story.
One of the great guests we've had live on Rumble has been Stella Assange, wife of Julian Assange, currently in Belmarsh Prison, put there because of his revelations that damaged US reputation.
He told the truth about US foreign policies and some of the unnecessary deaths that were caused.
The CIA threatened to have him killed.
This is a matter of public record.
I asked Stella, did you ever think that Trump would pardon Assange?
The reason I asked it is because I know a lot of you like Donald Trump and think that Donald Trump was a genuine maverick and a genuine opponent of the establishment and, you know, they want you but they need to get me to get to you.
All of that stuff.
I read your comments.
I read the chat.
So I asked Stella, how come if Trump was a genuine outsider and a genuine maverick, how come he didn't pardon Assange and Snowden as part of his presidential pardoning campaign?
Here's what she said.
Did you ever think that Donald Trump might pardon Julian?
Well, I was certainly trying to convince him to pardon Julian.
I think, you know, he's... Donald Trump is such a...
uh...
um...
I don't know.
Unpredictable.
A lot of people will be filling that silence in for you.
Unpredictable person.
He is unpredictable.
So that's an opportunity which I thought, you know, it could work for Julian and, you know, he's my husband, he's the person I love the most, so I will try anything I can to get him free.
Let me know in the comments.
Let me know in the chat.
Did you think that Trump might pardon Snowden and Assange, genuine enemies of the establishment, patriots in their way?
I would say righteous people in their way.
Edward Snowden, I think, was motivated purely by a love of America and American values.
Julian Assange, I think, is a person that believes In telling the truth.
These people are human beings, I'm not suggesting they're anything other than flawed human beings, but why are they in the position that they're currently in?
Why is Snowden exiled in Russia, having sought solace in other nations first?
Why is Assange currently in a British prison?
What's going on?
Now I know there's a counter-argument that usually predicates on putting the lives of military personnel in danger and I think that would be unforgivable.
I'm very supportive of the military and I think the people that have the biggest obligation to look after American military personnel are the Pentagon or the British military.
Those are the people that should be looking after them by paying them properly, taking care of them when they're in service and certainly taking care of veterans and I think there's a lot of questions to be asked there.
Have a look at Glenn Greenwald on Breaking Points when asked about the same story.
He suggests that Trump was on the precipice of pardoning both Snowden and Assange, but was persuaded to do otherwise.
Who has the power to persuade Trump to do other things?
What does that suggest about democratic power?
If people are more powerful than the president, particularly if that president's like a crazy, ego-led person like Trump, rather than a sort of near-cadaver like the current White House occupant, who has sufficient power to manipulate these apparently potent marionettes?
There was real movement inside the Trump administration to give particularly Snowden a pardon.
It came much closer to Snowden than they did to Assange.
And if you think about it, why would they have initiated an impeachment proceeding against a president who within a couple of weeks was on his way out?
And the reason, Crystal, was that they were very afraid that on his way out, Trump was going to do a bunch of stuff Including not just giving pardons to Snowden and Assange, but also declassify all kinds of documents he had been threatening to declassify about the CIA, about the Kennedy assassination.
And the only leverage they had against Trump doing what they considered crazy stuff on his way out was the second impeachment trial.
And they explicitly communicated to Trump, multiple Republican kind of hawkish senators did,
that if you do what we know you're thinking about doing, what Rand Paul and Matt Gaetz and others were encouraging
him to do, which was pardon Snowden,
that will severely jeopardize your chances of getting out of this impeachment trial with an acquittal.
We're talking about the power that continues to exist regardless of which president or political party occupies
the White House.
We talk about this continually and Julian Assange is a great example of the consistency.
Obama's in power, Snowden and Assange are charged with the Espionage Act.
Trump's in power, he doesn't do anything about it.
In a sense, as Noam Chomsky says, in the subjects in which both parties agree, you have no choice at all.
Assange is an example of where both parties agree.
What information did he have?
What is the documentation that Trump was considering releasing?
What do you really believe about the Kennedy assassination?
Do you think we're told the truth right now when something like the Nord Stream 2 pipeline suddenly springs a leak?
Do you really think it's not possible, impossible, beyond the bounds of possibility that Navy SEALs were involved in that?
Do you think it's something that shouldn't even be discussed?
Shouldn't even be considered?
Does that not feel like an impingement not only on your free speech, but your free thought?
Whilst I'm not an advocate of Donald Trump, I can see that Trump was a figure That was a berserker, a disruptor.
Even though Trump gave tax breaks to the rich and did things that I recognize are not going to help ordinary Americans and therefore don't address the fundamental issues that democracy must address, I can see that he agitated establishment figures like the Clintons and evidently he had an impact on the figures that are more deeply buried whose names we don't even know.
Does that relate to the documents that he then takes to Mar-a-Lago?
Because there's some reporting that the documents that he took there were, you know, related to Russiagate.
What I know for sure is that Trump was threatening to declassify all of those documents relating to Russiagate because Trump believes, I think, with a lot of validity, That there were crimes committed or at least ethical transgressions committed during the 2016 election to create and manufacture Russiagate.
It came out of the CIA.
And I don't know exactly which documents he took.
Nobody really knows exactly which documents he took.
But it certainly seems to align with everything I knew at the time, which was that Trump wanted those documents public.
Had the power to declassify them and now his defense is that he did.
It's amazing to consider that a figure like Donald Trump rose to power.
Perhaps it's even more amazing to consider a figure like Joe Biden could occupy office.
Yet more significant to note the amount of censorship that took place on social media platforms to enable Biden's unimpeded ascendancy.
We are living at a time when we need to question power.
The invisible power that's evidently present While the artifice of power in the form of the Republican Party and the Democrat Party shift and interchange without, I would say, ever making a real impact on issues that are symbolically significant and meaningful also, like the imprisonment of Assange and the exiling of Edward Snowden.
This is an opportunity for us to observe how entrenched these power systems really are.
When you see the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, when you see the significant comparisons that can be made between the policies of both parties, When you can see successive administrations entering and leaving office without real change for American people on the issues that matter, you have to bring this question to the forefront of your mind.
How are we going to change our lives?
How are we ever going to alter these systems without dismantling the institutions that maintain systemic corruption?
Without learning to operate outside of the confines of big media, big state, big business?
I'm not saying that those are the only documents he took.
He probably took a bunch, being Trump.
Just kind of did it all recklessly.
I'm taking these boxes.
I'm taking these boxes.
I'm having that box.
Keep that box.
I don't care.
But I would think there's certainly a relationship between his belief that documents were being hidden that should be seen and his decision to remove a lot of documents out of the White House tomorrow.
Can you imagine how you would have felt if Trump on leaving office had pardoned Julian Assange, pardoned Edward Snowden?
How that would change the political landscape.
Imagine if he had released files pertaining to the assassination of JFK and other issues that are the center of conspiracy.
Is it possible that Donald Trump was a genuine outsider?
that genuinely wanted to make revelations about the machinations of American power, but was stopped by a deep state system?
Let me know what you think about that.
Let me know in the comment.
Let me know in the chat if you think that Trump was on the brink of revealing things that would shake the state and the state system to their very foundations.
One thing I will offer you.
This is a further confirmation that there is classified information that exists, that if you knew about it, if I knew about it, if we knew about it, we would no longer be able to give our trust over to the state.
We would realise that there are levels of corruption, hypocrisy, assassinations, murders, Plots and lies that would mean, well how can we trust these people?
How can we trust them to run schools, hospitals, build roads, conduct international diplomacy, when evidently on the basis of this secrecy alone, we can see that ultimately they are self-interested politicians.
Self-interested power players.
Of course, the argument that's usually offered is, we're keeping this information to protect you from the baddies, from our enemies.
But who among us can legitimately believe now that there's a single enemy out there that's more powerful than these deep state interests?
Maybe I'm being naive.
Maybe the argument that I'd much rather live within American hegemony than Chinese hegemony or Russian hegemony holds true.
And I should thank my lucky stars for those lucky stars and stripes.
For me, if we're told that we live in a transparent democracy, if we're told it's us that elect our leaders, if we're told that America is the greatest and freest country in the world, why didn't Trump pardon Snowden?
Why didn't Trump pardon Assange?
And why shouldn't we know the truth about some of the greatest stories never told in American political history?
That's the question I'd like to leave you with.
Let me know your answers in the comments.
Let me know what you think in the chat.
See you in a minute.
Thank you for using Fox News.
The dude.
No.
He's the fucking loser.
Many of you will have seen our interview with Stella Assange.
You can watch that in full now.
If you are a Stay Free AF member, you can also watch it just on Rumble.
It's up there.
Give it a rumble.
Press that rumble button on this.
Go on, rumble right now.
Go on, rumble like you mean it, for God's sake.
And go over and watch that Stella Assange interview in full.
To give yourself a little more insight on that peculiar case.
Remember, any donations you give to us go to treatment centres where drug addicts and people with mental health issues are regularly helped.
I want to welcome our new Stay Free AF members, Liberty Veritas and Amanda Grace.
Now, there's a cost of living crisis devouring our planet.
Wherever you are in the world, it's likely that you are being impeded, that you're experiencing an energy crisis.
In our country, the UK, our energy bills are doubling in size.
Perhaps this is because we are seeing the neoliberal experiment Reaching its crescendo.
Julian Assange was of course famous for saying that the function of modern government was to extract public money and to place it in private hands.
Think simply of the example of the funding for the recent vaccines.
Do you know how those vaccines were funded in the experimental phase?
You funded them.
Taxpayer money funded that experimentation.
Do you know what happened when it came to paying for them?
You paid for them!
It was your tax money that paid for them.
Today, in our conversation with Yanis Varoufakis, we talk about how a financial elite has reached a state of total domination around the world.
How there isn't just one planet, there are several.
There are invisible barriers that prevent you accessing power and prevent these elites ever being made accountable.
We're going to talk about how the financial system has been managed by the US from a surplus of dollars in high exports to the financial crash of 2008.
This is going to make you a lot smarter.
Please now enjoy this 30-minute extract from Subcutaneous.
That's our deep conversation.
So deep it gets under the skin.
I wanted to call it something like cut to the bone, but people said that sounds disgusting.
Have a look at me and Yanis Varoufakis and let me know in the comments, let me know in the chat, what you think about it.
And remember, keep rumbling, bud.
Keep rumbling for God's sake.
Thanks for joining us today, Yanis.
Well, thank you very much, Aston.
Hello, everyone.
Because some people are watching us live and then later people will be listening to this as a podcast, Yanis, and watching it on a variety of platforms.
We will be disseminating this message in as many places as we possibly can.
That's good to know.
We have to put it out there, don't we?
Because we are losing at every other front, aren't we?
We leftists.
We libertarian leftists.
It's interesting that you open with that phrase, because a lot of people that consume our content are American, and they, I think, have a completely different perception of the left, and I imagine they envisage, based on my sort of casual observations and research, that the left is defined by identity politics, which, you know, any regular viewers of this channel will know I'm supportive of, but that I think a component of a political ideology that is about the empowerment of all people.
And I feel, Yanis, that there's a lot that you can teach us.
And I want to start, first of all, by talking about political and financial corruption in the United States of America.
For example, the New Stock Act has been introduced that has a loophole in it that means that one way or another, People in Congress in the United States will continue to be able to trade in stocks and shares that they regulate.
It's been recently revealed that 20% of American Congress people own stocks and shares in companies that they literally sit on boards to regulate.
We know that Barack Obama, who was the great hope of the center-left ...introduced a stock act and then nullified it and neutered it sort of a year after it had been much trumpeted.
So, in a sense, I would, first of all, I guess, could we talk a little about the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street and how it seems like that, for example, Trump's rhetoric around the swamp and draining the swamp was to a degree legitimate, although neither you or I would imagine that Donald Trump would be, or his sort of ideas would be the
solution to that particular problem.
So can we talk a little about financial corruption in Washington to get started, please?
What you described is the ubiquity of insider trading.
But when I'm talking about insider trading, I'm not simply talking about financial sector insiders,
but all inside.
Insiders are the people who, the way that it was described to me once by Larry Summers, the great of the greatest insiders in the United States, academic, political, financial, Establishment.
He said to me once, when we had just met, I was finance minister of Greece at the time, and he was actually helping me, because he was quite peeved with the way that the German government was throttling the people of Greece.
Not because he was a philanthropist and a humanitarian, and he gave a damn about the people of Greece, but because he thought that what Germany was doing to Greece was creating repercussions that were negative for American financial capital.
So it was a kind of wolves friendship for a very short period of time, during which we met in a Washington DC hotel.
And after a long discussion, when we agreed on a couple of things that we had in common regarding our common objectives, he turned around and said to me, Yanis, let me ask you, what kind of politician are you?
Are you an insider or an outsider?
I looked at him and said, define your terms.
He said, listen, inside this are people who enter the system and they accept the rules of the system in return they get information which is vital crucial information that the system shares with them and they can make minor marginal changes to the system and then there are outsiders people who prefer to speak their minds and
You know, who will be jettisoned by the system very, very, very soon.
And the key difference is that the insider never turns on other insiders.
It doesn't matter whether they're Republicans, Democrats, left-wing, right-wing, center-left, whatever.
And so you say, what are you?
So this is what I mean by insider.
Insider trading.
So you've got the revolving doors scheme.
So you have, typically, under George W. Bush, Under Bill Clinton before him.
Under Obama after George W. Bush.
Under Trump.
The only difference between Trump and the rest was that Trump was a better liar than the others.
When he was saying, I'm going to drain the swamp.
And I'm going to stop the revolving doors.
And I'm going to stop the revolving doors.
What revolving doors was he referring to?
He was referring to situations where, I remember, during 2008, the great financial collapse, you had Hunt Paulson, who was the Minister of Finance of the United States, the US Treasury Secretary, What was his job for decades before he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the vilest and most apoplectically disgusting financial firm on Wall Street.
So he was He was there as Goldman Sachs' representative in the US government.
And when Lehman Brothers went under, the only reason why he let Lehman Brothers go under, with all the repercussions that you know, is because he didn't actually like the head of Lehman Brothers, because they used to be competing CEOs.
So this is the idea.
You know, you are the CEO of Goldman Sachs, then you become the finance minister, and then after you become the finance minister, you return to JP Morgan.
These are the revolving doors.
What did Trump do?
This is to people who may have been taken in by Trump's lies.
He did exactly the same.
He took the next CEO of Goldman Sachs and made him finance minister in the United States.
So, you know, this is insider trading.
The government has been absolutely utterly co-opted by the nexus of the military industrial
complex, the Wall Street financial sector and big tech.
The consequences of that crash are perhaps being felt still, exacerbated by the pandemic.
Now, with this war in Ukraine, there is a genuine cost-of-living crisis, much of which is being blamed on the war between Russia and Ukraine.
But it seems to me, with energy companies continuing to profit in the way that they are, that this cannot be the only factor.
There are a few questions in this.
One is, what do you see as being the solidarity between all people of the world, not that I'm suggesting any kind of centralised government at any point, I believe in autonomy, I believe in localised authority, I believe in true democracy, that's one area of it, but a degree of global solidarity of ordinary working people, of all descriptions, persuasions and views.
Two, This exacerbating cost of living crisis that's been continuing, lurching from catastrophe to catastrophe in the last, you know, sort of 12, 13 years.
What can we do to arrest it?
And three, what about the role of the media in the way that these stories are presented in ways that keep people fractured, separate, disparate and unable to unify?
What do you have to say on this, dear Yanis?
I'll give you an example from little pipsqueak Greece here.
Because it's actually, it tells a story which is much broader in terms of its application.
Here in Greece we have six oligarchs and one hedge fund stationed in London called CVC.
They own the electricity producers and the electricity providers.
They also own the media.
Every single television channel and newspaper is owned by the same people.
During this tremendous cost of living and energy catastrophe, their profit rates have skyrocketed because they have managed to amplify their price-cost differentials during the electricity disaster and the oil crisis.
And they're using these funds in order to ensure that they are buying out every journalist that appears on their channels.
Channels that they own.
I'm a parliamentary leader in Greece now for three years.
My party is in parliament.
Do you know how many times I've appeared on standard television channels like the equivalent of the BBC and ITV and Channel 4?
It's a rhetorical question.
Because it's a radical number.
So, you know, this is a very small example of what's going on worldwide.
But Russell, allow me, because, you know, your question is so... I mean, it contains almost everything that happened after the Second World War.
So, if you allow me, I'll try in very broad, in the broadest brushstrokes, to tell a story that follows through your line of thinking and questioning.
After the Second World War, we had two decades, the so-called Bretton Woods system, if you remember, or if you ever read about it, I'm talking to our viewers now, it was a remarkable system because it was designed by the Americans, the American New Dealers, by the FDR administration, to reflect the American New Deal.
So for 20 years, The West had the common currency, the dollar.
We had fixed exchange rates.
The exchange rate between the pound and the dollar and the yen and so on didn't shift for 20 years, right?
It was a managed system.
And it was actually the only time when capitalism seemed to be working.
It was a time, you remember, between the 50s and 60s of the baby boomers, a period of high growth, very low inflation, Very low unemployment and shrinking inequality in the 50s and the 60s.
Now, why did that happen?
Because you had boring finance.
There were capital controls.
Rich people could not take billions from one country and speculate in another.
There were restrictions in the movement of money.
No restrictions in the movement of trade, which is not a bad thing.
And the most important thing was that the whole thing was predicated on America having surpluses.
America was selling more to the world than it was buying from the world, because after the Second World War the rest of the world was in smithereens, right?
So we were buying American cars, American washing machines, and so on and so forth.
And so America had a dollar surplus as a result of the net exports to Europe and Japan, and that net surplus was being recycled to Europe and to Japan in the form of investment, public and private, the Marshall 8 plan and so on.
It was very, it was always rational, the system.
But that system blew up in the late 60s for a very simple reason.
America stopped to be a surplus country.
It went into a deep deficit because of the Vietnam War, because of the Civil Liberties Rebellion, which caused the LBJ, while at the same time sending young men to be killed in Vietnam, to increase social security payments and so on.
And so that was the first period.
That collapses in 1971 under Richard Nixon.
And then we have the reversal of this.
What happens is this.
The United States goes deeply into the red.
It starts importing from the rest of the world almost everything.
From Germany, from Italy, from Japan, and of course later from China.
It was operating like a huge vacuum cleaner that was sucking into American territory the goods produced by these exporting countries.
Now the question is, who was paying for that?
Any other country doing that would have gone bust.
But because of the exorbitant value of the dollar, and the American military and all that, and Wall Street, 70% of the profits of non-American capitalists, German capitalists, Italian capitalists, Japanese capitalists, and then later in the 1990s and 2000s, Chinese capitalists, 70% of the profits they made, they sent back to the United States to be invested in Wall Street.
So that was a recycling.
It was not ecological recycling, but it was financial capitalist recycling.
And that was the period during which we had financialization, you had Thatcher, you had Reagan.
To do this they had to unshackle finance, to let the city of London, Wall Street, go haywire, do anything they wanted.
And that came to a crashing end in 2008, when this tsunami of financial capital, under the weight of its own hubris, collapsed.
And then we have the period between 2008 and the pandemic.
Which was, briefly put, socialism for the bankers and austerity for everybody else.
By that what I mean is this.
All the banks, every single bank in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union went bust.
Every single bank.
It was a gigantic implosion of financialized capitalism.
And the states, central banks primarily, but also governments, saved them.
They bailed them out.
Something that never happened in 1929, which was the other equivalent financial crash.
That's socialism for the bankers.
You have the state, Providing the dough that keeps the bankers alive.
Constant socialism, right?
Lavish socialism for the bankers.
And austerity for everybody else.
Remember George Osborne in your country, the Troika in my country.
Even Obama, who did a supposed stimulus in the United States.
If you look at the overall fiscal situation in the United States, it was austerity.
Because the states were retrenching.
Much, much faster than the federal government was stimulating.
So you have austerity for the many, globally, at least in the North Atlantic economies, Europe and America, and socialism for the bankers.
Now, what happens is this.
When you have austerity for the many, and you print money and you give it to the rich, to the financiers, the financiers then lend it to big business, big business gets all these trillions from the central banks.
They look out there, out of the window, and what they see is that multitudes, the masses, were impecunious because of austerity.
And they say, yeah, damn that.
I'm not going to invest.
I'm not going to create, you know, a Tesla competitor if you're in Germany.
I'm not going to create new, fancy, high-value products because, you know, the hoi polloi out there cannot afford it.
So what do you do with the dough that comes your way if you're a big business person and money that has been freshly minted by the Fed comes your way?
You go to the stock exchange and you buy back your own shares.
Because that pushes your share price up.
Your bonuses are connected and your dividends are connected to your share price.
And you're doing really very well.
Then you buy real estate.
Real estate prices go up.
But there's no investment.
There is no investment, not even in capital goods, in manufacturing, in green technologies, in energy.
That explains why Germany has been sitting on surpluses now for 20 years and they're still struggling to produce electricity after all those years.
No investment.
Profits?
Rents?
No investment.
That was the situation between 2008 and 2020 when we had the pandemic.
Then the pandemic hits.
So what do they do?
More of the same.
They bring more money to give to the big financiers, to give it to the big businessmen.
Okay?
During the lockdown, however, they had to do also something else.
They had to give some of the money, some of the money they were making, for the first time since 2008, give it to the poor people.
Because otherwise it would be a revolution.
You lock down people, you give them some fairly low wages in order to keep them fed and quiet.
So at the time when the lockdown was crushing supply, supply chains, the availability of goods was gone because of lockdowns, and 13 years of underinvestment.
At that time, the hoi polloi get a little bit of money printed by the central bank.
So you have an increase in demand because the many now have a little bit more money.
Reduction in supply, prices go up.
And that's why the inflation genie came back.
Right?
And now we're in a situation where central banks are completely... Am I allowed to say the word fact on your program?
They're completely fucked.
Because they're damned if they do, they're damned if they don't.
If they increase interest rates, then all the zombie corporations, financiers, banks, states that have been addicted to the free money over the last 13 years will go bust.
If they don't increase interest rates, inflation will go back to 1970s standards.
So this is the situation.
The media, in the meantime, I gave the little Greek example, is owned by the same people who've been practicing socialism for the very few, for the bankers and the big finance, and austerity for everybody else.
And, meanwhile, you've got working classes that have been completely divided.
Completely divided between people who still have a decent job, the precariat, who don't give a damn about the rest of the working class because they think the rest of the working class does not have their interests in mind at all if you are peddling around London for Deliveroo.
You don't feel that the trade union movement is on your side.
You don't feel that the rest of the working class gives a damn about you.
So, what Thatcher began in the 1970s and 80s, which is to divide and rule over the working class in Britain, has now become a worldwide phenomenon.
Working classes are being turned against working classes.
This is what the fascists, neo-fascists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Meloni in Italy, Orban, this is what they do.
They invest in, you know, my country is greater than your country.
My working class, I'm going to look after my working class against your working class with tariffs and all that.
So you've got effectively a postmodern version of the 1920s and 30s of the mid-war period during which the only serious Resistance against the liberal, so-called liberal, illiberal establishment comes from neo-fascists, who are stoking up the fires of nationalism, of racism, of dividing one working class from another working class.
Sorry, that was too long an answer, but your question was very packed, mate.
I liked that answer, and we will release that answer in its complete form to as many people as possible.
The only points that I would like to pick up on is to the final flourish, almost the denouement of your 20-minute beautiful response.
Was that it's the ethno-nationalism and retro-fascism and this sort of post-modern nationalism that you cited is enhancing and increasing social tensions through their policies, their ideals and their rhetoric.
I also feel that the centre-left, which I regard now as a subset of neoliberalism, distinct in ways that are only A superficial, an artificial, they do their part too in stoking those divisions.
For example, in Clinton's, Hillary Clinton's, condemnation of Trump supporters as, you know, invert commas, Nazis, because of like they did that America first, one finger salute, while simultaneously praising Georgia Maloney for being, you know, like a woman, glass ceiling, but also maybe a fascist as well, you know.
Also, because when someone like Maloney is able to say, I will stand as a woman, as a Catholic, as a supporter of families, those ideas taken at face value, I believe are valuable ideas and ideas that have been neglected.
Whether or not I'm setting you up for long, long answers here.
you're not a part of this group then fuck you. You know that's like yeah that's a longer conversation
and a relevant conversation but a conversation that wouldn't be necessary if there was a
meaningful party representing ordinary working people at the national and international level.
A few other things I just want to pick up on is like I'm setting you up for long long answers
here I recognize this Yanis and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to listen. In this country of
course like Liz Truss has just sort of exploded it seems like a not even an economic time bomb
an economic bomb because it sort of went off immediately.
I'd love you to explain that for me and our audience, like in sort of simple terms, what she did and why it's been so negative so immediately.
I'm curious as to why banker bonuses caps were simultaneously removed as part of this package.
And I wonder if you would like to comment too on the broad but helpful proposition from Julian Assange
that the function of modern government, I think he's talking in particular about America but I feel like it
applies elsewhere, is to extract, and it sort of seems like a post-Thatcherite
notion, extract public money and place it into private hands.
So I wonder if you could elaborate on that Assange maxim a little more.
But start with, if you don't mind sir, a little breakdown of trusts' budget.
I hope I'll be more succinct than that.
the role of neoliberalism from the left and their culpability in creating the conditions
that you just described and sort of attributed more it seemed to me to be a problem of the
right rather than the left and I just want to present the alternative view as well and
that's my question. See you in 20 minutes.
I hope I'll be more succinct than that. Rasta let me begin with Trash, with Lizzie.
Okay, apart from the fact that she's clearly incompetent, because she made such a spectacular mess of it within seconds of getting her hands on the steering wheel.
What we have here is a clear case of what Marx once said, that when history repeats itself, it is as farce.
And the history I'm referring here to is her attempt to distance herself from Rishi Sunak.
Her great opponent within the Tory party, whom she defeated in order to become Prime Minister, and Boris Johnson, whom she replaced.
She decided that she's going to, I don't know whether she believes in it or not, but at least this is the strategy, it's a clear strategy, to present herself as a revivalist Thatcherite.
A new Thatcherite.
A new Iron Lady, with all the tropes that Margaret Thatcher so successfully, from her perspective, introduced in 1979.
Except that she's no Thatcher.
She doesn't have the noose, she doesn't have the intelligence, and she doesn't have the levers and the means that Thatcher had.
Now, What do I mean by this?
Now, Thatcher, I lived through this, I remember, I was in England during every one of Thatcher's years, unfortunately.
absolutely a master strategist when it came to combining an intensified class war against the working class with brilliant communication.
So her line was, for instance, on the one hand, that the state has to wither, which by the way is an expression first used by Karl Marx, the state has to wither to make space for people to actually be creative and do stuff.
No?
Who doesn't like this idea?
And by that she meant reduce tax rates, reduce regulation, get the state out of people's way.
But secondly, the tax cuts that she introduced were always the kind of tax cuts which simultaneously keep the lid on The government budget deficit.
And how did she do this?
There were not real tax cuts.
There was a tax redistribution against the working class.
So, remember, she doubled VAT, I remember that, it was 7.5% VAT, and she made it 15%, while at the same time giving tax cuts to the rich.
So, she shifted the tax burden onto the shoulders of the working class, while keeping the lid on the deficit.
Trust didn't do that.
She just got rid of the 45p tax rate, that is the highest tax rate, the one that applied to people making more than 200,000 quid, right?
And nothing else.
So that extended the budget deficit.
Markets didn't like it.
So she got her comeuppance, not from the working class, but from capitalists.
That's point number one.
Point number two is, Thatcher understood that by reducing tax rates for the rich, there is not going to be a growth spurt in the economy.
Capitalism does not respond by growing when you give more money to the rich, because the rich are never going to invest more money.
They already have plenty of money to invest and they're not investing it.
Why would they invest more money when they don't invest the existing money that they have?
So Thatcher understood that.
She understood that in order to create the appearance of growth, short-term growth that she capitalized on politically, electorally.
She won every election, you know, I mean to the extent I had to leave Britain at some point and migrate to Australia because she was winning everything.
The way to do it was by Just as Julian Assange said.
I wrote an article in the Guardian a few days ago saying the same thing.
What she did was to liquidate public property and throw it into the cauldron of financial capital in the city.
To be precise.
You were probably too young to remember.
When she sold British Gas, right?
There was this amazing Saatchi and Saatchi advertising campaign.
Tell Sid.
Bus stops everywhere, tell seeds, television advertisements everywhere.
Tell seed, tell seed.
And what was this tell seed?
What was she actually telling Sid or, you know, Jill and Jack and Harriet?
What she was telling them was, you know what?
I've underpriced British gas.
I've chopped up the ownership of British gas to shares and every share I'm selling it at half price.
So buy, and then if you buy, borrow, borrow, go to the banker, to your banker and borrow money, you know, 1500 quid.
She also put a limit on, you couldn't buy more than, I think it was about 1500 quid worth of shares.
But you know, if you buy it, then within five seconds, you sell it for 3000.
So you've doubled your money.
So what she did was she cut down all the Bits and pieces of public properties.
Gas, electricity, everything.
People actually went and borrowed money to buy their council homes.
And she did the same thing with council homes.
She threw the value that decades of working class effort had Put into council houses, took this value and threw it into the City of London.
Because this is what happens when you go to the Barclays Bank or Royals Bank to borrow, you know, get a mortgage in order to buy a council house, you are financialising the house.
This house that the working class built over years for itself.
Now it's become part of the City of London.
Same thing with pensions.
Financialised pensions.
Turning them into private insurance contracts that are traded in the City of London.
Okay, now that's what Thatcher did.
Liz Truss did none of that.
She thought she could, you know, play the role of the new Thatcher simply by announcing tax cuts here and more expenditure there and, you know, adopting the language of Thatcher.
And the markets got her.
Okay, so that's Truss out of the way.
Let's go to the question of what I call the post-fascist, neo-fascist on the one hand, and the center-left.
Let me be abundantly clear.
If the neo-fascist, post-fascist, authoritarian right is rising all over the world, we must blame ourselves, the left.
Not just the centre-left, all of us.
I like the fact, for instance, that you are adopting the mantra of liberty, that you're saying, you know, stay free, that you're talking about freedom.
Because, Russell, you and I have talked about this before, the left, you know, when the left began in the 19th century, you know, trade unions, the Communist Manifesto, the whole paraphernalia of the left ideology, It was not about justice.
It was not about equality.
It was about freedom.
It was an emancipatory movement, the left.
The feminists.
The feminists, they were women's lib.
Women's liberation.
It was not about identity.
It was about bloody liberty.
The liberty of women to do stuff.
And not to be confined to their home.
Not to be confined within the conventions of male-induced patriarchy.
I like that.
And I'm mentioning this because we, the left, during the 20th century, all sorts of left, the communists, the socialists, the social democrats, the labour rights, we ended up Presenting ourselves as lovers of a state that will come from, you know, a cradle to our coffin to look after us once we give up some of our liberties.
This is precisely the opposite.
I mean, Karl Marx would have, you know, would be rotating at 10,000 revs a minute in his coffin if he had heard that.
Why am I saying that?
The reason why Trump succeeded was one word, Obama.
It was Obama's failure, not failure, design to use a left-wing language in order to reinstate Larry Summers, the gentleman I mentioned at the beginning of our program, to the Treasury Minister.
To take Tim Geithner, all those people who had unshackled Wall Street in the 1990s under Clinton, and who had caused the massive pain of blue-collar workers in the United States.
Obama, who was voted by those blue-collar workers to give them a chance at having life prospects again.
took the architects of Wall Street's emancipation, put them back through the revolving doors that you mentioned, in power, to bail out the bankers and create socialism for the very, very few.
Well, Yanis Varoufakis, remember, that dude was running Greece during the time of the 2008 crash.
So he's got real experience of the EU, real experience of government.
If you want to listen to the rest of that conversation, it's available to our Stay Free AF members.
At the moment we're doing an offer of $33 for a year of membership.
Later in the year, my stand-up special, $33, will be dropping and you'll get that additionally.
That's all we've got time for today.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Tomorrow we're doing a fantastic story on billionaire bunkers.
Are they already preparing for Armageddon?
Was the first crisis financial?
Was the second crisis the pandemic?
Is the third crisis nuclear Armageddon?
Are they already preparing for it?
We're going to be joined by philosopher Brad Evans, who can always give us unique insights on complex issues.
Please sign up to Stay Free AF for exclusive live sessions.
Coming up, we've got Eckhart Tolle and Jordan Peterson.
Let me know as well in the chat, let me know in the comments who you want to see as guests and we will respond to you.
You can also listen to this show as a podcast every day, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
See you tomorrow for another episode of Stay Free.
We're not doing a Stay Free AF session today because today's the day where I don't do that.
But I'll see you tomorrow for another show.
See you in the chat.
I love you.
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