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It will take a miracle to avoid catastrophic climate change and nuclear war, but it’s still possible we can create such a miracle. Daniel Ellsberg on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

It will take a miracle to avoid catastrophic climate change and nuclear war, but it’s still possible we can create such a miracle. Daniel Ellsberg on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to a very special edition of theAnalysis.news on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Daniel Ellsberg.

Ninety years ago, Daniel Ellsberg was born and he has lived a life of meaning, many of us strive to change the world, but few have the opportunity and the courage to change the course of history. Dan's release of the Pentagon Papers at great personal risk helped end the Vietnam War. His book, The Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, reveals the institutional madness of American nuclear war strategy. Dan continues to fight for truth and to awaken people to the existential danger of nuclear weapons.

I interviewed Dan's friend, historian Peter Kuznick, about the importance of Dan's life’s work. And I encourage you to watch that.

But now, in his own words, is my interview with Daniel Ellsberg on the occasion of his 90th birthday. So at 90 years old, why don't you just take it easy? What keeps you fighting? How do you summon the strength when sometimes it seems many are just not listening?

Daniel Ellsberg

Hope, hope that we can surmount the challenges that are facing us, the challenge of ceasing a moral catastrophe that we're already involved in, which is that we have allowed doomsday machines to exist in our country and elsewhere in the world and that we're on a course toward climate catastrophe as well. And the problem is to avert the physical catastrophes, not probably full extinction on either case, but catastrophic results for humanity. If we go on the way we are, if our policies continue as they are, my hope is expressed in action.

As a friend of mine, Joanna Macy says hope isn't a feeling or an expectation, it's a way of acting, and it's a way of acting as if we had a chance. And I think that's what we do have. We really do have a chance to change this and to allow a more humane future to evolve.

Paul Jay 

And to what extent is that hope, an act of faith rather than rational analysis? Because I know you've told me you're not all that optimistic when you think about it rationally.

Daniel Ellsberg

I think, by the way, to say that I don't that one has faith suggests that you're sure you feel secure in the belief that something will save us either human or external. I don't have that kind of religious faith as some do, and I don't have that faith in humanity or in my own country as much as I used to in the case of my own country. So I don't think it's a question of any sort of guarantee that we'll get through this without absolute catastrophe of a kind that has not been seen in human history or prehistory. I think that's not only not guaranteed, it's not even likely, but I don't think it's impossible.

And given that I think the way of acting that's appropriate in that possibility that we can eliminate the doomsday machines and change the course of putting fossil fuels into warming to the atmosphere of the earth, causing it's a question of either nuclear winter with the doomsday machine ice on our lakes and killing all our harvests or fire in effect with the climatic rise in temperature that will make large parts of the world uninhabitable for humans, even though it doesn't lead to extinction. So I think both of those are actually likely, but not certain.

And if we act in a way to explore as much as we should to explore, search and invent, imagine ways of changing this course,

To mark one year since Daniel Ellsberg's passing, we are sharing the interview we conducted with him in honor of his 90th birthday.

Historian Peter Kuznick looks at the significance of Daniel Ellsberg's fight against America's insane nuclear war strategy, his exposure of the lies of the Viet Nam War, and his continuing fight against the American war machine.

Historian Peter Kuznick looks at the significance of Daniel Ellsberg's fight against America's insane nuclear war strategy, his exposure of the lies of the Viet Nam War, and his continuing fight against the American war machine.

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, please don't forget the donate button and the YouTube subscribe button.

April 7th is Daniel Ellsberg's 90th birthday. Ellsberg is the original whistleblower. The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and helped end the Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger called him the most dangerous man in America, but not as we have mistakenly believed for many years because he was about to pull back the curtain on U.S. policies in Vietnam. Kissinger was terrified that Ellsberg was about to reveal an altogether different set of papers. The other Pentagon Papers, ones that would reveal the extent and sheer madness of U.S. nuclear war plans to the public.

Dan Ellsberg was born in Chicago in 1931 after graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in economics.

He studied for a year at King's College Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship between 1954. In 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps serving as a rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander. 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation and a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision making.

His book, Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, revealed what he called the institutional madness of American nuclear war planning. Edward Snowden said this long-awaited chronicle from the father of American whistleblowing is both an urgent warning and a call to arms to a public that has grown dangerously habituated to the idea that the means of our extinction will forever be on a hair-trigger alert. Ellsberg's book exposes much of the mythology that was the basis of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and was used to justify the creation of a massive military-industrial complex.

In 1967, Ellsberg worked on a top-secret study with Defense Secretary McNamara U.S. Decision Making in Vietnam 1945 to 68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1971, he gave it to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and 17 other newspapers. Ellsberg's subsequent trial on 12 felony counts, posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on the grounds of governmental misconduct against him, leading to the convictions of several White House aides and figuring in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers was an important contribution to the pressure on Nixon to end the Vietnam War. Now, joining us to talk about the extraordinary life of Daniel Ellsberg is historian Peter Kuznick. Peter is a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He's the author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activist in 1930s America. He and filmmaker Oliver Stone co-authored the 12 part Showtime documentary film series and book both titled The Untold History of the United States. Thanks very much for joining me, Peter.

Peter Kuznick

Happy to be with you, Paul.

Paul Jay

So this is Daniel's 90th birthday, and I have to say he's still active as hell and still campaigning against nuclear weapons and speaking out on so many issues. I wish I had his energy now,

Historian Peter Kuznick looks at the significance of Daniel Ellsberg's fight against America's insane nuclear war strategy, his exposure of the lies of the Viet Nam War, and his continuing fight against the American war machine.

The U.S. SEC has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and trades that led to $20 billion in losses for his firm and perhaps billions more for various banks. What kind of perverted system allows such chaos? Bill Black on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, don't forget the donate button if you haven't donated yet or you want to donate again if you're watching on YouTube. Don't forget the subscribe button and I'll be back in a second.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and the margin call trades that led to a $20 billion liquidation of his family office, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The investigation is "routine" following such a high-profile market event, and the probe may not lead to allegations of wrongdoing. Archegos Capital was hit with several margin calls last week that it was unable to meet, prompting several banks that had prime brokerage relationships with the family to liquidate its stock positions in names like ViacomCBS,  Baid,  and Tencent Music Entertainment, among others. The trades led to extreme volatility in a handful of stocks on Friday, with ViacomCBS and Discovery notching their biggest daily declines on record.

Banks like Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo managed to escape potential losses by quickly liquidating their exposure to Archegos, but others, like Nomura and Credit Suisse, are facing billions in potential losses from the trades, and of course, there's all kinds of ordinary people's money that is tied up in all of this as well. Now, joining us to make sense of more Wall Street nonsense is Bill Black. Bill's an American lawyer, academic, author and former bank regulator with expertize in white collar crime, public finance, regulation and other topics in law and economics. He is the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is To Own One, and he's associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Thanks very much for joining us again, Bill.

Bill Black

Thank you.

Paul Jay

So what is this all about? The billions of dollars of losses. Break this down for people that don't understand some of the terminology. What happened here?

Bill Black

OK, so this one is a demonstration of how completely screwed up modern finance has become, but not necessarily anything criminal in this transaction, which is  good news, bad news, that you can destroy 20 billion dollars in wealth without committing any crime is perhaps a disturbing as opposed to a non-disturbing fact, but remember that the problems were the government, right?

The government made banks make bad loans to poor people with dark skins and that's why we had the great financial crisis supposedly, right? That that series of racial tropes and myths. Here has none of those. This is supposedly in the absolute best circumstances where nothing catastrophic could possibly go wrong. So the theory that you would be taught in modern finance schools is that the key was to have skin in the game, and that's a weird phrase, and it just means you have something personally to lose.

A lot personally to lose, and Bill Hwong was investing his own family money almost exclusively. So he should have been at his absolute most careful. He should have had all the right incentives, and the banks, there were only about seven of them, they were all massive, the allegedly most sophisticated financial players in the world. So they should have never allowed themselves to be exp...

The U.S. SEC has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and trades that led to $20 billion in losses for his firm and perhaps billions more for various banks. What kind of perverted system allows such chaos? Bill Black on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

The U.S. SEC has opened an investigation into Archegos Capital's Bill Hwang and trades that led to $20 billion in losses for his firm and perhaps billions more for various banks. What kind of perverted system allows such chaos? Bill Black on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay.

In the first of a series of video comments from viewers, Ann Morrison, who lives in rural Wisconsin, talks about why her neighbors vote for Republicans and Trump and against the Democratic Party.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, and something new on theAnalysis.news. I got a letter  recently from Ann Morrison who lives in rural Wisconsin. The letter was titled “Why should rural Wisconsinites vote for a party that holds them in contempt?” I thought it was so powerful I asked her to do a video explaining why she thought so many of her neighbors voted for Donald Trump, voted for Republicans in state elections, and no longer voted for the Democratic party.

Hi, my name is Ann Morrison, I live in rural Wisconsin, which has a population of about four thousand, and it's in rural western Wisconsin, and I'm going to give my view as to why the Democrats and the left are not appealing to rural voters. I can only speak for Wisconsin so I'll just tell you how I see our area.  When I graduated from high school, 50 percent of my graduating class, which is one hundred and twenty people, lived on working dairy farms.

Ann Morrison

These were small farms, average acreage to one hundred average dairy herd, forty, and at that point in time, which is several decades ago, pre-farm crisis, the average income in this county was the national mean of the whole United States. In one generation, that average income, that median income for Vernon County, where Viroqua is the county seat, is reduced to poverty levels. So, people have gone from the national mean to poverty in one generation.

And how does this affect the Democrats? Well, let's go through what has happened to people in this area. OK, 1980, Reagan is elected. He slashes the milk subsidies and therefore farming has to work like quote a "business" and moves to corporate farming, big giant gross factory farms, this takes quite a while, 15 years to happen, but all the dairy industry goes to giant, unsustainable, polluting, disgusting, cruel to animal farms out in California, out west. 

All the small dairy farms around here, two hundred acres cows were named, wasn't organic, but it was pretty low, intensive agriculture is gone. So, when that goes the towns, it was our primary industry, the towns that support it, start losing money. OK, then we add on top of monopolies, OK, there are no small businesses anymore, anywhere. So, Wal-Mart comes and sits on the town and kills the rest of it. So, everybody's getting poorer and poorer and poorer and one option is to go to trade school or everything's credentialized so what used to be trade school is now Western Technical College.

Oh, I think they took the technical college out of it, but for example, a friend of mine who had been a union welder in Chicago previous to moving to Wisconsin and had worked as a welder in Wisconsin for decent union wages like thirty, thirty-five bucks an hour, gets laid off, goes to WTC, learns how to do graphic design on the Internet. Well, nobody tells him nobody's going to hire old people and the starting wage for that is like $14 an hour.

I mean, this is not apples to apples, and as noted in your previous podcast, the left cannot appeal to rural voters. There is no hope for the left. In the history of Wisconsin, we were pretty much a blue state for the most part. If you lookback at history and the history of the populists around the turn of the 20th century, these were farmers, of course. America was mostly rural at that time, but the farmers, and they worked together with African-American farmers, and Eugene Debs sprang out of that, and, of course, they got squashed,