Was it a deliberate plan to allow the rampage or just incompetence? Was it a plot by Mitch McConnell to discredit and destroy Trump or just the welcomed result? Wilkerson and Jay on the events of Jan 6th on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Was it a deliberate plan to allow the rampage or just incompetence? Was it a plot by Mitch McConnell to discredit and destroy Trump or just the welcomed result? Wilkerson and Jay on the events of Jan 6th on theAnalysis.news podcast.

The Indian government is pushing austerity rather than stimulus and using the pandemic as an opportunity to introduce policies they thought would go through without much opposition - but that's not what happened. Jayati Ghosh joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Rush Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don't forget we have a matching grant campaign on now. We only survive because people like you donate. And so if you haven't donated already or if you want to up your donation, it will be matched.

And if you want more information on the matching grant campaign, just head to theAnalysis.news website and we'll be back in a second.

On the 26 of November 2020, a general strike was held across India. The strike was organized by 10 trade unions across the country and were supported by the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India, Marxist, the Communist Party of India, Marxist, Leninist Liberation and other left wing parties.

Trade unions estimate two hundred and fifty million people took part in the strike. Strike was followed by a farmers march to New Delhi, which arrived there on the 30th of November with tens of thousands of farmers surrounding Delhi, increasing the hundreds of thousands by December 3rd as coveted savages India, which is amongst the worst affected countries in the world. The farmers of India continue their protest. By some estimates, the numbers have now grown to two million people. Now joining us to discuss the massive protests in India is Jayati Ghosh, she taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi  for nearly 35 years.

She's now joined the  PERI institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She's authored or edited 19 books including Never Done and Poorly Paid Women's Work and Globalizing India, and she's authored more than 200 scholarly articles. Thanks for joining us.

Jayati Ghosh

It's a pleasure. 

So, Jayati, tell us exactly the story and how the strike began and how it evolved into the farmers protest.

Jayati Ghosh

Well, the workers strike really came about because the government has used this period of covid not to do anything for the welfare of the people, but to push through all kinds of laws that really they would have had faced a lot of protest against otherwise. So they introduced four new labor codes, which are supposedly designed to modernize the labor laws. But of course, they basically end up disempowering labor and destroying the capacity of bargaining and reducing their ability to demand minimum wages, basic working conditions, easing the possibility of extending working hours and all kinds of things.

Now, as you know, in India, ninety five percent of our workers are informal and really do not have rights to speak already. So the argument that you need to further deregulate to actually make investment more interesting is ridiculous. And it's just one of the many ways in which this government has tried to actually impose various things which are deeply undemocratic, using the pandemic as an excuse.

The farmers movement is slightly different, it didn't quite arise out of that worker strike, it emerged separately because along with those labor codes that they have brought in,

The Indian government is pushing austerity rather than stimulus and using the pandemic as an opportunity to introduce policies they thought would go through without much opposition - but that's not what happened. Jayati Ghosh joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

The Indian government is pushing austerity rather than stimulus and using the pandemic as an opportunity to introduce policies they thought would go through without much opposition - but that's not what happened. Jayati Ghosh joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

The Indian government is pushing austerity rather than stimulus and using the pandemic as an opportunity to introduce policies they thought would go through without much opposition - but that's not what happened. Jayati Ghosh joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

While corporate media is drumming up anti-Russia hysteria about an alleged hack that “threatens national security”, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says so far it looks like the phony claims about WMD in Iraq. On theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay, welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don’t forget we’re near the end of the year and there’s a matching grant campaign going on. Every dollar you donate gets matched, if you get a monthly that gets matched times 12, if you raise your existing monthly that gets matched, just go to the website theAnalysis.news and you’ll get all the details.

President Trump seems to be in his death throes, flailing around, searching for a last-minute reprieve from returning to his far from normal life and a possible legal quagmire in the midst of raging COVID.

We’re also told now that a hack of massive proportions threatens America’s national security. Pompeo blames Russia, Trump blames China, but one presumes they’re looking at the same intelligence.

That doesn’t stop the media from jumping on the anti-Russia hysteria train without, from what I can find, at least any evidence in the public domain, about who is responsible.

NBC News has a screeching headline, “Why the Russian Hack is So Significant and why it’s close to a worst-case scenario, “. “Experts say it’s potentially the largest spying operation against the U.S. in history and it ran without being noticed for nine months,”. Of course, all this plays into the Democratic and Republican Party’s neocons playbook who are licking their lips at setting the new Cold War with Russia on fire, again. I’m not saying it wasn’t the Russians, I don’t know, but are we going to trust all this without any real evidence, again?

In the midst of all this, the Republican Party seems caught between Trump and some semblance of rationality, I think the rationality is losing, but their push towards austerity and a weak stimulus is actually the real threat, as it will not only exacerbate the COVIDcrisis, it will push the U.S. into a much deeper and painful recession.

So far, there’s very little to suggest that Biden is building an administration that will stand up to either Wall Street or the Republicans. Now, joining us to talk about all this and more is Larry Wilkerson.

Thanks for joining us, Larry.

Larry Wilkerson

Good to be with you, Paul.

Paul Jay

So where should we start? Well, why don’t we start with the hacking thing? Let me ask you, I mean, you may have access to some information we don’t have, but have you seen anything in the public domain that

actually says they have evidence that Russia did all this hacking or as Trump says China did? Or I mean, it could be some third party hacking collective, anonymous or whoever. But the degree of certainty the media is portraying here seems completely out of whack with what we know about this.

Larry Wilkerson

Paul, it sort of reminds me of when we said we knew that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or for that matter, when we said there was a missile gap between the U.S. and the Soviet Union as [John F. Kennedy] Kennedy was running to beat Nixon for the first time as president…and we found out that there was a missile gap, it just worked the other way. We were so far ahead of the Soviets that they had to try a very dangerous gamble of getting missiles into Cuba to kind of give them a little strategic balance.

While corporate media is drumming up anti-Russia hysteria about an alleged hack that “threatens national security”, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says so far it looks like the phony claims about WMD in Iraq. On theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

While corporate media is drumming up anti-Russia hysteria about an alleged hack that “threatens national security”, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says so far it looks like the phony claims about WMD in Iraq. On theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

While corporate media is drumming up anti-Russia hysteria about an alleged hack that “threatens national security”, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says so far it looks like the phony claims about WMD in Iraq. On theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.