The Global Shift Toward Multipolarity w/ Professor Danny Shaw - Ep 168

this is Fortress On A Hill, with Henri, Danny, Kaygan, Jo

vonni, Shiloh, Monisha , and Mike

Welcome everyone for just on the Hill Podcast about US foreign policy.

Anti imperialism skepticism in the American way of war.

I'm Jovanni your host.

Thank you for being with us today.

I'm joined by a friend of the show, Jake Tucker.

He'll be coming in soon.

So in today's episode, we're diving into the state of global affairs

in an era defined of decline of American global hegemony.

Now unraveling of late stage capitalism.

What does it, does this moment mean for the world?

And how is the American empire adapting or failing to adapt to its diminishing power?

The United States, once the unchallenged hegemon, the pol world is watching

its dominance erode its ruling elites once seen as the architect of global

empire, an admired in incompetence in fighting and growing in ability.

To manage both the domestic politics and the crumbling international order.

The cracks in American hegemony are widening.

The rights of China is steadily supplanted US economic power.

While the resurgence of Russia after 17 years of post-Soviet malas has

reemerged as the vulnerable challenger to the American led Western empire.

Today, these powers are upending the design for global supremacy

that the US has forced for decades.

After three decades of unipolar unipolarity, the world is now

hurling towards plurality.

Or as the late Venezuela revolutionary leader, UWA Chavez, once envisioned

flu polarity, a world without symbols of power for true equity

among nations become the ideal.

But as the US loses ground in Eastern Europe, central Asia, west Asia,

and on the economic front with East Asia, its shedding its veneer of.

Ability and rule of law restoring to outright strong army in the projection

of raw power to preserve its Dons, or at least delay its inevitable decline.

Nowhere is more evident than the West active support of genocide in Palestine.

The stark betrayal of the very concept of international law that

created after the Second World War.

The same powers that purported to uphold these laws and hold others

accountable have turned them upside down, dismissing them altogether

to protect the genocide of edla.

In West Asia, this hypocrisy has laid bare the moral bankruptcy

of large, late stage capitalism.

In the Western project.

In this area of decline, the US is turning its focus inward, reducing the standard of

living of its citizens, and cannibalizing its closest allies in Western Europe

while shifting its attention to its near periphery in the Americas.

The anxiety among American imperialists.

Conservatives and Neoliberals is IMP is palatable as they confront a world where

their power is no longer guaranteed.

As American power wanes, we ask what does the future hold?

Is fully polarity the goal for, are we heading towards global disorder

here to help us make sense of all?

This is Professor Danny Shaw.

Professor Shaw has taught international affairs, Latin American and Caribbean

studies at the City University of New York for two decades.

He was recently dismissed as a professor at John J College in

New York City for speaking out against the genocide in Palestine.

S Shah has been, have been in the US revolutionary movements in

1994, and is the author of Des Sp, the Poor White Trash Manifesto.

S Shah is frequent, is a frequent commentator I tell soon.

Russia today is on TV in the in, in other international channels.

He is an ethnographer and is fluent.

Haole Spanish, Portuguese, and Ian.

He has visited and organized in a hundred and he had visited and

organized in 86 different countries.

Professor Shaw, it's an honor to have you here today.

How are you doing today?

Yeah.

Good to see you, Jovanni and Jake.

An honor to be here.

Very important moment for anti-imperialist across the world.

Indeed.

Indeed.

So Professor Shaw again we're honored to have you here.

Thank you for coming and sharing your time with us and giving us your thoughts.

I wanna ask you to tell us a little bit about your work.

Way to begin.

I just finished the despised the poor white trash manifesto.

I definitely came from the bottom in Brockton, Massachusetts and

then in the Bronx, New York.

So for me, the struggle, the class struggle, the anti-imperialist

struggle was always very personal.

Seeing my own family members and the overdoses, the unemployment,

the generational trauma, the abuse, the addiction the deaths of despair.

And then of course the other side of all that, which is recovery and fighting back.

And from a very young age, I really, thanks to my mom, I saw that what was

happening to the Haitian people, what was happening to the Palestinian people?

I felt a Haitian or a Palestinian or a anti-imperialist flame within seeing

everything that was happening to myself and my nuclear family and extended family.

In 1995, the anti-imperialist movement sent me as a youth representative.

I was 16 years old to Havana, Cuba for the international youth festival.

I met young revolutionaries from around the world.

I committed myself to learning, true Spanish, not just like the freshman

year of high school when you have to take Spanish and you learn a few words.

And yeah, I've dedicated my life to internationalism enjoyed every second

of it when you stand up for the truth.

You do accumulate a number of enemies, that's for sure.

But to remember what Mao Seung said it's good to have enemies.

It shows the quality of our work.

I lived in Haiti, lived in the Dominican Republic, lived in Brazil, lived

in Western Africa, and Cape Verde.

And learning the languages of the people was key for me to be able to break

down what they were living through.

So I think for me, I just wish I had more lives to give to the

struggle to keep learning different languages and to be on the ground.

Just hearing from all of the heroic people from Puerto Rico to Bolivia,

from Chile to the Dominican Republic.

Indeed.

You have a large, extensive resume there.

You you lived you lived a lot and indeed.

So Argentine leader, Juan Peron.

One said the true politics international, the rest is administration.

How do you see the current state of American empire reflecting in the

contradictions of late stage capitalism, particularly in terms of economic

decline, domestic polarization, reduction in standard of living, and

inability of sustain global hegemony.

There's so much focus within the empire on scapegoating immigrants.

I spent a lot of the last year actually applying all the ethnography to Ohio

and Indiana and southern Illinois.

I was out there in Trump country and in the Midwest just trying to understand

how Fox News and the xenophobic oligarchs were miseducating and indoctrinating

everyday working class people.

And I heard so many on so many different occasions, just very

dehumanizing things from everyday Americans, respectful Americans, working

class Americans, humble Americans.

But when it came to questions of immigration and questions of

race, you could hear in their voices the scapegoating and the

anti-immigrant racist hysteria.

But what every American has to understand is that.

If your homeland, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, these are some of the

richest areas of the entire world.

Venezuela has more oil deposits than anywhere else.

And every economist estimates, they don't know if it'll be in 2060, 2065,

but the oil resources are gonna run out.

So the empire is desperate for the oil.

And the number one producer that produces that has more oil, even

not the number one producer, but the number one holder of the most oil and

natural energy reserves in the world is Venezuela, even more than Saudi Arabia.

So right now, the ruling class, and there's different debates within

the foreign policy establishment Biden, it's not a Biden Trump debate.

It beef, it's, they're just mouthpieces of the different oligarchs of the.

Whether it's the energy sector or the military industrial complex, the

pharmaceutical lobby the Zionism, these are the big powers disputing what's most

favorable for the different oligarchs.

So certainly Biden represented one strategy, and now Trump is on the scene.

I think a big part of the foreign policy establishment is very afraid of Trump.

The fact that Trump so quickly went after us.

A ID is wrong to say US aid very sinister, very cunning name because

it has nothing to do with aid and everything to do with exploitation.

But these imperialists never underestimate the enemy.

But for Trump to gut US aid in his first two weeks in office, we're talking

about a 44 billion dollars budget.

For example, roaming the countryside of Haiti, or being in the bean views, the

ghettos of Port-au-Prince, you would see little US aid projects all over.

It would always masquerade as, the benevolent Americans giving food to

the poor Haitians and the poor Latin Americans and the poor Africans.

But only 10% of US a's budget actually ever reached anybody

in Bangladesh or in the Ukraine.

U-S-A-I-D is a central part of the Imperial State, for example, in Ukraine.

And this all came out publicly.

The New York Times ran a story on it yesterday, and they were panicked because

90% of all media in Ukraine is funded by the empire, funded by us taxpayers.

They're afraid of losing this proxy war against Russia with the Ukrainian people

trapped in the US nato meat grinder.

So if Trump's going to dismantle the Imperial state,

what exactly does that mean?

Is it a, in fact, a dismantling of the imperial state?

Will that $44 billion now go to the Midwest to create manufacturing jobs

that left in the seventies and eighties?

We don't trust Trump for a second.

Trump is pure blah, blah, blah rhetoric.

Where's that $44 billion gonna go?

Is it gonna go to the Pentagon and the State Department so that they

can more directly because us, A ID and Biden Obama, they represented

more of a soft imperialism.

A more sophisticated neocolonialism, what France Fanon would've called

indirect colonialism, which is camouflaged humanitarian rhetoric.

We had to go into Libya.

What they did in Syria was so necessary to save lives.

And there's even evidence that the Israelis in the us experimented

with a nuclear bomb in Syria.

But all of the headlines which are controlled by the military industrial

complex general Electric, for example, owned, m-S-N-B-C and Unovision, which

was like the Spanish equivalent.

So these are mouthpieces of militarism.

And they have this high sounding rhetoric.

Here comes Trump.

Trump says, forget all the rhetoric.

We want the oil of Venezuela.

And we're gonna Marco Rubio, we're gonna crush the enemies of humanity.

We're gonna crush Nicarag, we're gonna crush Cuba.

We're gonna crush Venezuela.

So I don't know that we have had someone speak so directly about their intentions.

Trump immediately re-implemented.

Biden never stopped the blockade on Cuba, but he did a few symbolic

measures to appear to be more conciliatory or diplomatic.

It was complete bs, but here comes Trump and ratchets up the blockade against Cuba.

The function of the blockade against Cuba and the blockade against

Venezuela is to stoke hunger and descent and migration to make these

different socialist projects look bad.

These are very dire moments, specifically for the Cuban people.

I just published a study at the Gray Zone about the hunger

inflicted by the US blockade.

So I'll leave it there just as just to keep the conversation going.

Yeah.

I understand the US idea.

It's been a long time, a long tour of us, imperial soft power, driving

in the coal revolution around the world, the stabilizing government,

pretty much trying to peel.

By these these little NGOs or that sets up, try to peel people away from their

governments and whatnot, to create shift, rift among them intentions,

why would you chop this, it seems to be an effective tool of imperial

power, why would you chop it, if it's been disaffected all these decades?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I think it's too early to completely understand, but we know that a

billionaire like Trump and the world's richest billionaire, Elon

Musk, their intentions are not to reinvest that money out in San Antonio,

Houston, and in the Bronx, New York.

We know that's not true.

So I think they're just trying to get rid of the middlemen,

historically, capitalism by definition.

Politicians, the government is nothing more than the executive committee of

the bourgeoisie of the ruling class.

Here comes Trump with all of his nepotism, narcissism, sadism, and

Trump says, forget the middlemen.

We don't need politicians.

We, the billionaires can rule directly.

And that's why the liberal class is so disgruntled.

They're not disgruntled for the same reason that class conscious,

anti-imperialist like we are, they're disgruntled because USAID

had 17,000 employees, some of whom I went to graduate school with.

And in our graduate schools, whether it was at Princeton or Harvard or

wherever the CIA came to recruit and U-S-A-I-D came to recruit.

So you have these 17,000 bureaucrats and here comes arrogant Trump.

And this could be Trump's downfall.

You can only step on so many ruling class toes, like those assassination attempts

against Trump did not come out of nowhere.

And there is big reason to believe that if he continues to meddle right now,

it's not clear 'cause he said he was gonna end the Russia, Ukraine conflict,

which is not a Russia Ukraine conflict.

It's a US NATO offensive against Russian geopolitical, geo military,

and geo-economic interest.

But that's not what they sell us, particularly the Russia phobic Russiagate.

Liberal media, and I think liberal media really had hegemony.

And here came Trump and the Trump phenomenon and Trump country,

and they threw a giant monkey wrench into neoliberalism.

So it, it appears that with Trump's arrogance.

It remains to be seen.

He just had an emissary in Venezuela meeting with Nikola Roh.

What we know is that the Exxon Mobil and these massive corporations want

to tap into, and they are tapping into the Venezuelan resources.

Venezuela is surrounded by US military base.

Gustavo Petro, the president, who's been in power now in Columbia for

roughly about two years, a very valiant historical record, but he can't dismantle

the nine US military bases in Columbia unless he wants to be assassinated.

Yesterday in Panama, they already have 11 US military bases.

So Venezuela is surrounded the US military in the Caribbean Sea.

They control 14% of all Puerto Rican land is in the US military's hands.

Now they've used Guyana.

Under the Biden administration, there were all these Lara Richardson,

the General five Star General.

Four, four star, five star top CIA asset agent meeting with the

Guyanese, with President Ali.

It was really just puppet Ali to try to use this whole region as

an excuse to go into Venezuela.

So maybe they're getting rid of USAID so they can more directly just use what

the former president of the Dominican Republic, who was overthrown in 1965,

Juan Bosch, he called it smu Pentagon.

So Trump could be a more direct representative of the military industrial

complex, or he could try to get along with the Venezuelan bolivar leadership.

For right now, I think a lot remains to be seen.

Tomorrow will be three weeks.

The Trump's been back in power, but it's been a whirlwind three weeks.

Who knows what he's gonna do next?

Yeah, power.

Power, right?

That's what they're that's what they're going for.

It seems like non Chomsky talked about that the United States empire has

been in decline since the Vietnam War.

I would say that since the Iraq invasion in the, since nine 11 Iraq

invasion and invasion of Afghanistan the, this decline has just been

rapidly going faster and faster.

We've been going from one leadership, the leadership in this country goes from bad

to worse, to incompetent, to buffoonery.

And and yeah, and I feel that the ruling class, the ruling power the

managers of empire are, have anxieties, have anxieties as they see that their,

the power is waning around the world.

Pepe Escobar writes this book called like Empire Chaos, and it seems like.

Just by creating chaos around different parts of the globe is they

intend to prolong American power, American hegemony around the world.

What's your take on that?

Yeah.

So many analysts say that we're witnessing the decay of empire, and I

don't doubt it, but at the same time.

We can't be overly cavalier.

The everyday hunger that the Cuban people face because of US foreign policy 7.8

million Venezuelans have been forced to leave their homeland since the 2014

Obama era economic war against Venezuela.

If we listen to Trump and Netanyahu's genocidal press conference last

week, now they're talking about 1.7 million Gazans or Palestinians.

What happened to the 2.4 million Palestinians?

As the Lancet Medical Journal explain to us, they have been obliterated.

They have been genocided.

That's the definition of a genocide.

The entire world has witnessed it.

The Zionists, the Israelis openly brag about it.

The decay of this empire could not come soon enough for

us both at home and abroad.

The Pentagon's budget continues to approach or be in excess if

you include the un vouchered that is unaccounted for a CIA budget.

The CIA is an agency and Trump's meddling there as well.

Let's not forget the CIA had public, as did the FBI, they've had public

letters against Trump in the New York Times published as centrif fold.

So the deep state, the state.

In general is in disarray.

This is part of the crumbling of empire.

But how can we really say the empire is crumbling to the Palestinian people?

Let's talk about Haiti for a second.

The Palestine of the Caribbean.

I've been traveling to Haiti speak Haitian Creole fluently since 1998.

And for them to just get rid of usaid, I will, it will impact many Haitian

families who've been forced to depend on the crumbs of empire as they steal the

minerals and the gold and the incredible natural resources in agriculture of Haiti

and exploit these sweatshop workers.

They then come in with these, little crumbs.

And it conjures up the Malcolm X quote.

We don't want your crumbs.

We want to make we want a bakery in which to make our own bread.

So this is really a question of sovereignty.

We saw the elections yesterday, the first round of elections in Ecuador.

I. It's a showdown between Bolivarian forces, and that's why

they're so afraid of Venezuela.

Venezuela has been the spearhead of Bolivarianism what is Bolivarianism

what was the vision of Simon Bolivar?

Simon Bolivar at the end of his life?

'cause Simon Bolivar was born into a lot of privilege and aristocratic family.

But by the end of his life, his vision was a United continental project

against the encroaching US empire, which was on the rise back then, and

of course, the dying European Empire.

So Hugo Chavez won the election in 1998.

I was living in the Dominican Republic, working with the Marxist

Linearness, the leftist forces down.

Then I remember when Chavez won, it was a lightning rod for a across

the continent for all leftists, for all Anine Imperialists and

Nikola Mato and Jorge Riaa.

And so many different leaders have continued that legacy, but they're

up against this $1 trillion Pentagon.

Budget.

So in Ecuador right now, really it's Luisa Gonzalez representing the re, Rafael

Correa, the anti-imperialist forces.

The Bolivar forces, though probably not quite as radical as the

Venezuelans or the Cubans, each country has its own national context.

We can't over simplify, but certainly if Luisa Gonzalez wins on April 16th

when the presidential elections will be.

Held, and she's up against who?

Danielle Noboa, the son of the richest Ecuadorian billionaire.

So the right wing forces in Ecuador, and this is a microcosm for the

forces that are in the showdown across the entire continent.

If Danielle Nobo wins, he'll continue to invite the US military and

Trump into the Galapagos Islands.

Rafael Corre, when he won the presidency in 2006 his first order of business

was he closed the US military base in Monte and he had the famous quote

where he said if the US can occupy our country, then surely we can send.

Thousands of Ecuadorian troops to occupy Miami, which of course no one would

ever allow because that is the hypocrisy in the double standard of imperialism.

It's important to say that $1 trillion military budget, which

we ourselves fund is taxpayers.

I think most people in the US are very ignorant to it.

Whether willfully or not, we could debate.

But the United States continues to have 72 US military bases in Hondura s just

in the Americas, just in South America and the Caribbean with the biggest one

being the Soto Air Force Base in Honduras.

They had the coup against Pedro Castillo in December of 2000 22.

It was just the second anniversary of that coup where they have one

of their other biggest naval bases.

So it's battle for hegemony.

We no longer live in that uni polo world like we did post-Soviet

Union and Warsaw packed countries like East Germany and Poland.

Now you have the rise of China, you have the rise of Russia, you

have the Bolivarian countries.

You have Iran, though I think of course with, the recolonization of

Syria what they've done to Lebanon.

One third of all Lebanese people displaced.

Iran is more isolated, so that's why Iran has more military and

economic deals with the Russians.

With the Chinese, you have the Shanghai organization.

And that's the legacy of the bolivars.

They started ud.

What's ud?

Why can't the South Americans, why can't the Caribbeans have their own CNN?

Why do they have to watch the United States'?

CNN just in Spanish.

Then you have ABA and you have lac.

These are all these different continental projects of unity and integration.

So we'll be looking very closely what happens in Ecuador.

There's gonna be elections in Bolivia coming up.

We can talk about the whole spat between Evel Morales and

lucia Ossey in, in, in Bolivia, Argentina's a bastion of reaction.

Right now.

Argentina has massive resources but China, the Chinese economically are

really winning the trade war in South America, which is a huge difference

from the early two thousands.

Yeah, indeed.

That's one of the reasons Mark Rug did his his trip in Latin America recently.

He is trying and trying to bully Panama for example, to try to get Panama

to cut any economic ties with China.

You mentioned the ak and Alba, there's also other organizations that are

forming like, the Bricks, the cac, the San, the Shanghai cooperation

organization, which you mentioned, the Economic Cooperation Organization the

Alliance of Sahil states, with all these.

And also you got the Project of China, which is the Belt Road Initiative

debris with all these movement going on around the globe that's happening

outside the control of the West.

Which is something that, that Chas was big on with, regional

integration and south relations.

With all this going on, do you feel that this is contributing to

the the anxiety of Western powers?

And if this is this shifting the balance of power in the

post-colonial and post Cold War world?

Oh, no question.

No question.

At the same time, if the world was truly multipolar or ppl

polar to quote Hugo Chavez as you did, would there be a genocide?

Would there be a holocaust of another native people?

What's the difference between 2025 and 1492?

What's the real difference?

The bombs are much more sophisticated and but at the end of the day, the

control of information what is Twitter nowadays, but the futile kingdom of

the world's richest billionaire, it's pathetic and it's not gonna stop.

They're gonna continue to consolidate power which will continue to bring

up not just economic confrontations with China, but this is why they've

had this whole proxy war on China.

By using historically a historical province of China, Taiwan, in Hong Kong,

in Tibet and the Uyghur people as if the United States cared about democracy

when they, you go around the US and you see these bumper stickers, not as much

as you used to 20 years ago, but free Tibet and all this attention on Hong

Kong and how horrible the Chinese are.

And it's open your eyes and look at US foreign policy.

But of course, they're meddling there because how many.

At this point, it's something like Pepe Escobar gives all the numbers.

It's 140 different countries who've joined the Silk Road initiative.

That was one of the true legacies of Lula in GMA Hue in Brazil.

Both of who were coud by US proxy forces.

These were judicial coups of what we should study as law fair.

But one of the true legacies of the of the Workers' party in Brazil

China replaced the United States is the leading trade partner of Brazil.

So no longer do the South American countries have to

submit to the Monroe Doctrine.

Which has been active for 201 years.

Barack Obama actually apologized for it, which is pathetic as they

continue to treat the Caribbean and South America as their backyard.

Right now they're sending whoever whatever immigrants they can to

Guantanamo Bay, which is what they did under Clinton in the early 1990s

putting the the Haitian migrants and others into into Guantanamo Bay.

What do they have to have a base station parked in the middle of the Cuban people

who had this incredible 1959 revolution.

And that's the, this is the essence of the Sahel countries, Mali,

Burkina Faso, in the spirit of Thomas Ada, Africas Ernesto Cada.

And in in, in Guine.

And these, these countries that are standing up, they've kicked out

the French ruling class, economic interests and military interests.

They're inspiring the entire world.

Yeah.

Panama.

Imagine Marco Rubio going back to Panama and threatening them and saying that

they're gonna take back the canal.

Panama was ripped out of the Grand Colombia.

It was just a province that Theodore Roosevelt back in 1902.

It was made in the United States.

They created a country just like they created this whole thing about Taiwan and

Hong Kong and Tibet and the Uyghur people.

Why can't the Chinese.

Why can't that area of the world celebrate their own diversity?

So that is imperialism that comes with this humanitarian

camouflage American people.

Human beings want to see justice and if they're told every day that the Chinese

are doing this and the Russians are doing this, and the poor Ukrainians

and the poor Taiwanese and the poor Cubans, our electorate, our people.

And that's why our people sign up for the US military.

That's a piece of it, right?

They've been brainwashed to think the United States is the greatest country

in the world and wanna go do this.

And people join the military 'cause they think they're gonna be

digging canals and they're gonna be doing these humanitarian projects.

They don't know that they're gonna be participating in the recolonization of

Afghanistan, of Iraq, of Libya, of Syria.

Nowadays really, the US military is contracting out a lot of their projects.

What we just saw, what Trump is interrupting is one

of the great experiments.

Great.

Is in massive.

Not grade is in good, but the what Empire was doing in Haiti now, they were

contracting proxy forces from Kenya, from The Bahamas, from Jamaica, from Guyana.

They were paying mercenaries no different than how during World War I and two the

French Empire and the British Empire would pay Indian soldiers and Senegalese

soldiers to do their dirty work.

But because these wars of expansion are so unpopular the US has now been

using foreign mercenaries instead of mercenaries right here at home

because these wars are so unpopular.

But

Nigerian soldiers too,

huh?

Nigerian soldiers, yeah,

because of the dire situation.

So many of our young people have to join the the military because what's out here?

So the economic trend, despite, Trump's a pathological liar, Trump's

gonna bring back manufacturing jobs from 1977 to Cleveland, Ohio.

And South Chicago and Gary, Indiana.

He will, may maybe indirectly they'll bring back a few through,

through these tariffs and stuff.

But the American people are gonna wake up because within the next

six months to a year, to two years, nevermind in four years when Trump's

supposed to, relinquish power they're gonna wake up that the future is

automation and artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is outta control, but it displaces everyday workers, right?

Long gone of the manufacturing days when they can pay.

Indonesian workers and Vietnamese workers and Honduran workers a few dollars a day.

Why are they gonna employ us here in Hunts Point or Williamsburg for $20 an hour?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I appreciate this.

So many thread to, to pull on here, but I wanted to go back to looking at Latin

America, the focus on Latin America, and also with Rubio as Secretary of State.

I really appreciated your article on Cuba because I was really

thinking many of the same thoughts at the time that you published it.

I went to Cuba in 2019 and then returned in 2023 and just saw

the drastic differences just in that short four year timeframe.

Some of the people that I had met there in 2019 were noticeably thinner,

some of the buildings noticeably in a more deteriorated state.

Then with the naming of Rubio as secretary of State, I'm just wondering what with

hi, with his just Doggett obsession with Cuba, what would be his plans, and maybe

trying to figure like finally bring home the destruction of Cuba which is

long shot, which the US is long shot.

Do you think that military intervention or anything on that is

on the table with regard to Cuba?

And then also I was just curious.

With the pausing and funding of U-S-A-I-D restoring the renewing

the contracts with Venezuela.

Also, I'm maybe seeing that Rubio's been sidelined a little

bit by the Trump administration.

So I was just kinda curious what you think about Rubio's role within the

White House is and what you think that kind of portends for Cuba and then

other other countries in Latin America.

Yeah.

Rubio's a recalcitrant cold warrior.

He's a dedicated anticommunist.

The very force is responsible to make sure that the Cubans can't

access technology and internet.

I. Claim to be the ones who wanna, liberate Cubans the

worst type of hypocrisy.

How many Cubans how many children have to go to sleep at night hungry?

You know how many Cubans have had to flee the main migration route

is actually through Nicaragua now.

'cause they can get to Nicaragua easy enough because of Cuban,

Nicaragua and solidarity cooperation.

And then they try to make the trek up to the Mexican border.

Cuba is hemorrhaging human lives to migration because of this blockade.

It would be another color revolution.

It follows a basic blueprint.

If they can starve enough people, if they can stoke the flames of

descent, because the special period that was what they called 19 90,

91, when I first went to Cuba in 95.

It was called the special period because overnight Cuban's

caloric intake was halved from.

I think it's what, 2,800 calories were supposed to have a, a day.

And suddenly they were getting about half of that because the Soviet

Union and all their socialist trading partners had imploded and collapsed.

So if the forces of imperialism can cause enough despair if enough Cubans

come into the street beating pots and pans, we're hungry, they can't protest

Washington dc they can't protest the the sellout Cuban Americans in Miami.

They can only protest there.

So they come into the streets.

The authorities have to, the authorities do.

What can they do?

This is David versus a Goliath, a genocidal.

Goliath.

And just for saying that word, we've already ruined our algorithms and

trying to reach the American people because of all of the censorship.

But then they point the finger that Cuba has censorship.

What about the censorship right here at home, what they do to the Cubans,

to the Nicaragua's, to the Venezuelans, the Zim, the Zimbabweans, the

Chinese, the Vietnamese the Iranians.

They fully encircle these countries.

They have an all-out war on Cuban all-out war on Venezuela.

It's a diplomatic war.

It's a military war.

It's a paramilitary war.

It's an informational media war.

It's a diplomatic war.

It's first and foremost, it's an economic war that creates

the contradictions from within.

The Venezuelans aren't gonna relinquish power.

They're not gonna roll over and say, okay, us imperialism, come

take our, massive resources.

They're gonna defend themselves.

The bowl of Arians, they have sovereignty.

So when they defend themselves, then CNN and Fox News.

And, they always say that the liberals and the conservatives are fighting.

But when it comes to applauding Juan Gudo, when it comes to overthrowing

Cuba, they're always firmly united in the foreign policy objectives to

call out their hypocrisy once again.

And at that moment that the Cubans come into the streets and the Cuban state

has to defend their interests and their revolution, that's when the forces in

Guantanamo, the forces, the from whatever Fort Bragg and Fort Hood and wherever

in the south of the US can then use this to justify whatever invasion of Cuba.

It's been floated to, they've tried to invade Venezuela.

They've used paramilitary forces, they've used intelligence forces.

We've seen recently the Venezuelan government has let some of those

agents of Empire, CIA agents free.

You had the Alex Saab prisoner swap as well.

But yeah, I predicted in the Gray Zone article that it would be one of

trump's in Marco Rubio's opening svo.

So I would not be surprised if, this year they try something that sinister.

The new rhetoric is that those three countries are enemies of humanity.

Now Bolivia is not under the same exact pressure, but we should mention Bolivia.

Boron, Argentinian sociologist and political scientist.

Definitely worth studying and translating his work to the English language.

And I'm just gonna quote him directly because I don't, I

haven't been in Bolivia recently.

I did have the opportunity to meet Il Morales and some of that leadership

in South America before, but these assassination attempts against Il Morales,

it appears that, of course, IL Morales was was the architect of the Bolivian

ppl, national Republic and Revolution.

He's a bolivarian tried and true, and it appears that

Lucho Odyssey has this leftist.

Camouflage, but represents the agenda of the world bank, of the IMF, of

the encroaching imperialist forces.

So this divide and conquer mentality is straight outta the CIA playbook.

And there's elections coming up in November, in Bolivia.

Some of us will be traveling down there.

But certainly the empire does not wanna see Abel Morales this super

committed bolivar win again, because.

How many different countries have turned their back on Venezuela?

Like this fake Chilean president, Bordi.

First thing he does is attack Cuba and attack Venezuela.

Doesn't attack empire, doesn't attack the neo colonizers.

He attacks the country's most in the cross heads of imperialism.

You see that liberal left hypocrisy.

So they're trying to use a type of bodies over there.

With Odyssey, it appears.

And we should listen to Bolivian experts.

I just submit this based on different things that I've studied, but I don't

say it as conclusively as some of the other conclusions that I've drawn.

We should remain open-minded and and critical, but that's my sense

of why things are so divided within the movement towards socialism.

The MAS in Bolivia.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

That was John Bolton called it the the Detroit Car of Tyranny.

That's, so he called it yeah,

my boy Libre, and Khalil in Miami.

One was Nicaragua, one was Cuban, one was Venezuelan.

Then there was some Puerto Ricans in the mix, and they formed the Trica Collective

based on that John anti-imperialist, TRICA Collective based on that quote.

So I had to sneak that in there, Jovanni.

Yeah.

That's cool.

That's cool.

Now you mentioned the the migrant, the the sending migrant to Guantanamo, right?

Like the back, I remember back in 94, I was in the military and they were sending

a lot of the the Haitian migrants and they're being intercepted, and they were

taken back to Guantanamo and they would be putting tents there and also Cubans.

And they were using Guantanamo Bay for that, for the housing of migrants

before as they were coming in.

But given the the Syrian experience, the recent Syrian experience in iib,

do you think that that something similar could happen in Cuba?

For example, marshaling mercenaries in Guantanamo to unleash 'em

when the time is right, just like what happened in Syria recently.

I.

It's not off the table.

They could try to invade from anywhere.

I don't think Americans even have a sense of what an incredibly humiliating act to

insist upon continuing to have US troops based upon the plat amendment back in 1902

occupying Cuba the glorious Cuban people.

1959 was not just a watershed moment, an inspiring moment for socialism

in Cuba, in the Caribbean, in the Americas, but around the world.

The Cuban Revolution not as big as the Chinese Revolution or the Russian

Revolution, but how symbolic that.

The cominos, the peasants, the poor the most exploited could stand up and

take state power because of course, capitalism tells us each and every

day, ah, you can dream and have noble ideas, but it's pie in the sky.

There'll never be socialism.

There'll never be egalitarianism.

And they want to crush the baby in the womb so that we can't even dare to dream.

As Thomas Sanada said, you have to dare to struggle and dare to win.

There was an interesting meme back in 1994 back when memes weren't called memes,

but they existed in some form or another.

And the meme had the Statue of Liberty.

And the Statue of Liberty was telling the Cuban immigrants, come.

So we can showcase you on CNN as immigrants fleeing communism, and

then to the Haitian immigrants and the Dominican immigrants and immigrants from.

The US neo colonies.

Of course, the Statue of Liberty said, no, stop right there.

We don't want you here.

But if the immigrants were from Nicaragua or any other revolutionary country,

it was always all specifically Cuba.

The immigration crisis is not a crisis of the immigrants.

It's a crisis of imperialism.

It's an inevitable crisis of neoliberalism, of neocolonialism.

I don't care how many walls Trump builds, I don't care how many soldiers

you put there when you starve people.

In Mexico, there was a statistic, few years back, 60% of all Mexicans

were surviving on less than $4 a day.

It's, it's a little higher now, but you get the general point like.

Now we should talk about Mexico.

What Lopez ob the Lord, what Claudia Scheinbaum have done.

Cla Claudia Scheinbaum is a continuation of the people centered projects

of Lopez ob the Lord to break that pre dictatorship over, over power.

And of course, Lopez over the law probably wasn't as radical as some of

us would like those who are fi and I get it, but hey, we take what we can get.

Just the fact that the Mexican leadership.

Has invited the Cuban leadership and the Venezuelan leadership.

And, it was just a few years back that they had a group of Lima, this

reactionary group based out of Lima, Peru, and then Lopez OBOR came in

and set up the group of the Puebla, which was an anti-imperialist group.

You have the Sao Paulo forum, so you have all these different expressions

of this unity and integration.

In Cuba, though it's a small country of only 11 million people has certainly

been at the leadership at the epicenter of this bolivar revolutionary momentum.

So the economic sabotage, the military sabotage, the diplomatic

sabotage is still there.

Lula we should break down Brazil a little bit.

Lula really turned his back.

Forget, turned his back, stabbed the Boulevard in the back

in Russia a few months back.

Final nine different representatives in the room.

And they all voted for Venezuela to be a part of bricks.

Cuba just joined bricks as well, right?

And that's what I article Cuba's only chance to survive is if the Bris na Bris

nations truly go in there and invest.

And I really wrote that article for the leadership of the of the multipolar

world, how they don't get, how dire things are in, in La Havana and across Cuba.

I'm not sure what was the final point I was gonna make?

I lost my train of thought.

You were addressing Lula stabbing, especially Venezuela.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it was last minute.

The Brazilians had vowed to vote for Venezuela to come

in and like the last day.

So some jockeying in the backgrounds with Lula's ambassadors and in, in the

uni, the representatives of the world or what they want to be uni world, they must

have somehow gut to them or offered them.

But Lula does play this kind of fake in between, like how do you be in

between the the predator and the prey?

How do you be in between the class enemy and the, in the, and the people?

I do this thing every December 31st, the sellout of the

year and last year with the.

With the genocide, it was Bernie Sanders and dj Khalid.

And this year it was Lula.

How do you turn your back on the country's most under attack from imperialism?

And then you talk about you're a diplomat and your man of the people.

And Lula's story is amazing coming from these poor families

in the northeast of Brazil into Sao Paulo became a union leader.

So really shameful.

Now that's not to take away from all of Lula's internal enemies in Brazil.

He was already couped once put into jail as a political prisoner.

We have to see things dialectically, but this contradiction for Lula will be

tough for us to ever forget or forgive.

Yeah, I really did want you to finish that point because as Joe Jovanni

and I discussed just at the time, I was pretty puzzled by it and.

Quite frankly, this ne it, it never works out.

It never works out for these sellouts like that anyways do appreciate that.

And I, I wasn't familiar with your despise series in until this discussion,

so I want to discuss that a little bit because my own background is basically

coming from Nebraska, growing up in the eighties during the the farm crisis.

And basically that was where, my, my formation, right?

And my, my own father, like basically lost a lumberyard business when because

of the recession that had hit in the plain states and across the Midwest.

And then saw the takeover of industrial agriculture and then mass, mass

immigration influx and basically a right, a real right wing turn.

It's not like it was a. Super liberal and definitely not a left wing place to

begin with, but it was very much a right wing turn, anti-immigration and so on.

I remember hearing comments from Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz at one

point about the foreign crisis.

There were farmers going to the capitals to protest and to

ba basically make demands on, on, on their state governments.

They like Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and her comrades had come and

to intervene and speak with the farm workers or the farmers.

And she basically said the KKK and other white supremacists had

already beat them to the punch.

There.

So I just want to ask, because that upbringing basically led to my

participation in the military and so on to seek college funding and things like that.

What kind of lessons does despite get at in order how we approach, organize

and basically change the narrative or however put it with regard to the

situation in rural America and so on.

Yeah.

Shout out to Omaha.

Shout out to Nebraska, Malcolm X and grew up in Nebraska and

Malcolm X's father was murdered.

A garveyite murdered by the KKK on train tracks in Omaha.

Yeah, despised the Paul White trash manifesto.

Woo.

That, that really merits its own hour of conversation, but

I'll just, it's tantalizing.

I gotta teach in I think four minutes, or I'd love to.

We get together.

I think we could talk all night.

You making me want to head head, head west, head to the Midwest?

I think it would be very beautiful to do a type of tour with the Paul

White Trash Manifesto because, I wrote that because with identity

politics, like on paper, right?

On pa and a Comrad said to me yesterday I was going back some stuff

that popped off 10 years ago, and he is I'm gonna tell you the truth.

Can I tell you the truth?

I said, what else would I want from you?

But the truth.

He's I really didn't care what your perspective was.

You white, we black.

Oh, you white w And I was like, all I appreciate you keeping it real.

So on paper, right?

White.

Male, that word cis and heterosexual, and six, six.

I'm a retired boxer.

I got Ivy League degrees because I was a scholarship

student and fellowship student.

So on paper, shoot I'm as bad as Elon Musk.

I'm worse than Donald Trump, right?

According to identity politics.

But we don't subscribe to identity politics.

We subscribe to Marxist politics.

What is Marxism?

It's sensuous, it's materialism.

When you use your five sentence, five senses now, like on Twitter, with all

the rumors and BS and the post apo and the apocalyptic post reality, post

truth world, when you actually break down what me and my family have gone

through and the fatherlessness and the unemployment and the abuse, and.

The generational trauma, everything that we had to survive.

That's I can't tell, Jake or Jovanni's entire story, but I'm sure you all

have similar stories of how you became politicized and radicalized.

Like we weren't in kindergarten when we learned about enzyme imperialism.

It wasn't in high school unless you had one of the, Howard Zinn type people's

history of the us type of teacher.

We had to be autodidactic like Malcolm and like George Jackson.

We had to be self-taught.

So the Paul White Trash Manifesto despised is me saying that most poor whites or poor

whites, we haven't had a voice either.

And Trump pretend.

How can a billionaire, how can I read one study that through all these court

battles and all the attacks on him, Trump's wealth has multiplied and

actually doubled in the past eight years.

So I, everyone should do their own independent research on that.

'cause different liberal media, conservative media says this or that.

But how the heck could Trump and Elon Musk speak for us?

And the conclusion of this 50 page manifesto it's fucked Trump all day.

But it's never fucked Nebraska.

It's never fucked Ohio.

It's never fucked Trump country, which is not Trump country, it's our country.

And, shout out to the Midwestern Marks Institute, everything that I learned

with them, because you know me with all my training and I'll end with this I

burned many US flags because that's what the people were doing in Port-au-Prince.

That's what the Nicaragua people were doing in Managua.

That's what the Dominican people were doing in front of the US Embassy in Santo

Domingo and in Caracas, in, in Venezuela.

But I came with a whole new appreciation that the American

flag doesn't belong to Jeff Bezos.

It doesn't belong to Bill Gates.

It doesn't belong to Clinton.

And Trump and Tweedle D and Tweedle Dumb and Kamala and Biden.

That American flag belongs to the people of Nebraska, the people of the Midwest who

haven't had a voice in the flyover states.

And I felt, learning from all my people out there in Carbondale Southern

Illinois and in, in Cleveland, Ohio, I felt like I had a Midwest within.

So I'll be eternally grateful to the Midwest for that.

Right on.

Thanks for that.

Indeed.

I know that you have to depart in a few minutes.

And I feel that this conversation has been very rich and I feel that we could

have talked for like hours and hours.

Before we depart though I, Jake mentioned his background.

I'm, my background's from Dominican Republic.

You write a lot about Haiti which is the next door neighbor.

And Haiti, Haitian is a very so I

gotta teach.

I'm gonna be It's six, nine.

Yeah.

I'm gonna cut it real quick.

And and we don't, and we don't have to get into it now.

In the future, if we ever talk again.

But I do appreciate what you write about Haiti, because that's a topic

that that I want, like I explore.

But it's difficult to talk about in my community, my Dominican

community when it comes to Haiti because of so much despised.

That's the word that a lot of people in the Dominican

Republic as to Haitians, right?

But I appreciate in Haiti as being the first Black Republic, as being the first

true state of free state of the Americas.

Giving weapons to Simon b Boulevard to Free South America, and, and

sending generals to Ethiopia, to repel Italian invaders, et cetera.

Hazy has a very rich history, which I like to explore with you in the

future, but I know you gotta go.

Dr. Professor Shah again, thank you thank you for joining us.

I think we can wrap up here.

Do you have any last comments before we depart?

Before we

yeah.

Shout out.

Shout out to all my Dominicans.

I'm over here in the South Bronx and in Washington

Heights, so I'm in little Sanlu.

Ernesto, do yeah.

I, at this point I'm part Dominican too.

I've been adopted all them years and struggle.

I put out a book, the Saints of Santo Domingo, Dominican Resistance

in the Age of Neocolonialism.

So it's been a pleasure building with y'all.

I'm a minute late for teaching, but holler at me.

Let's get on a zoom off.

When we ain't doing all the podcasting and everything.

Gotcha.

Hey, what's up to y'all?

All y'all comrades, all the veterans out there.

I know it's not easy.

Holding it down, being far away from your family station, wherever you

are, keep building with the Jakes and the Jovannis and the, and the

Danny's and, we deserve a better world.

And only we, only us can usher in that and build and fight for that other world.

Ain't no tweedle deed tweedle dumb Trump Biden politician gonna deliver that.

That's up to us.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Thank you again.

Thank again Professor for for joining us and been an honor to have you here.

Very has been a very rich conversation, and hope to talk to you soon again.

Take care.

Take care, Phil.

Appreciate peace.

Peace.

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