Banking and finance are essential to a modern economy, but they don't have to be privately owned to do it. The Federal Reserve must be transformed to create a system of publicly-owned banks. Gerald Epstein joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Three presidents in one week as massive youth-led protests shake Peru's political system. Patricia Oliart, head of Latin American Studies at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Produced in collaboration with Other News.

Three presidents in one week as massive youth-led protests shake Peru's political system. Patricia Oliart, head of Latin American Studies at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Produced in collaboration with Other News.

Three presidents in one week as massive youth-led protests shake Peru's political system. Patricia Oliart, head of Latin American Studies at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Produced in collaboration with Other News.

Trump installed civilian leadership at Defense that will do his bidding; Biden's national security and foreign policy transition team has the patina of warlike Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Trump installed civilian leadership at Defense that will do his bidding; Biden's national security and foreign policy transition team has the patina of warlike Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. And please don't forget, we've got a fundraising campaign on. One of our members has generously contributed a $10,000 matching grant. So, if you donate now, you get matched. If you do a monthly subscription, that will be matched times twelve. So, hang on; we'll be right back.

Heads have rolled that the Department of Defense as President Trump fired Secretary Mark Esper and install his loyal sycophants. OK, perhaps "loyal sycophant" is redundant. Now joining us to discuss the significance of these appointments and Trump's reported plans to withdraw most U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Elliott Abrams' trip to the Middle East at a time when it's been reported Trump is asking about bombing Iran is Larry Wilkerson. Larry is a retired United States Army colonel and former chief of staff to the United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. He's a distinguished adjunct professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary and a member of the National Election Task Force for Election Crises.

Thanks for joining us, Larry.

Larry Wilkerson

Good to be on in such tumultuous times.

Paul Jay

So, connect the dots here. First of all, I guess of all the things I just listed, Trump asking about bombing Iran is the most dangerous. Now, there's been some talk. He was "walked back from that," and then there was talk he may have been only walked back from that temporarily. How serious is this threat against Iran? Is it connected to the issue of the changes at the Defense Department? Let's start there.

Larry Wilkerson

I'll give you the rumors first. And the rumors come from my contacts in the Pentagon and around the building. The rumors are the Pompeo was behind it. I know he's been trying to tell people that he wasn't behind it, that he was "aginnit" [i.e., against it], as it were. And, as you might imagine, Pompeo's people like Elliott Abrams. And I've been told also that Doug Macgregor, who went in as an adviser to this young man, Chris Hughes, the new acting secretary of defense, -- and I know Doug pretty well -- was dead set against it. And that's Doug. I imagine he would have been. So, I think the uniformed military and Doug's advice prevailed. That's my rumor story anyway. And so, there wasn't very much support for it.

Now, my analysis of what's going on there, though, tells me that he [i.e., Trump] is probably trying to set up the Pentagon so he can deal with it, if he wants to deal with it, in a way that is unopposed to him. If that's the case, though, why did he put Doug there? Because Doug is dead set against these endless stupid wars and he's dead set against any kind of conflict in the Middle East or North Africa. Anywhere in the world, it'd have to be really seriously in our vital interests before Doug would be for it. So, Doug must be there, I think, to fulfill Trump's real wishes, which are no war.

But Trump wants to get the troops out. I think he really wants to get the troops out, particularly in Afghanistan.

Trump installed civilian leadership at Defense that will do his bidding; Biden's national security and foreign policy transition team has the patina of warlike Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Trump installed civilian leadership at Defense that will do his bidding; Biden's national security and foreign policy transition team has the patina of warlike Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Journalist Kevin Gosztola runs down Biden's transition team and possible Cabinet picks and it doesn't look good for progressives, on theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Journalist Kevin Gosztola runs down Biden's transition team and possible Cabinet picks and it doesn't look good for progressives, on theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don't forget the donate button at the top of our web page at theAnalysis.News: a very generous supporters offered $10,000 as a matching grant. So, if you donate or if you up your monthly donation, he'll match that. And that's how we survive. So, thanks for listening and I'll be right back.

After Joe Biden won the Democratic Party primary, in order to win over supporters of Bernie Sanders, Biden joined with Bernie to create working groups on various issues to develop a joint platform. Interestingly enough, foreign policy was not on the table. I don't know if that's because the two sides were too far apart on the issue. But Biden's appointments to his transition team now working on foreign policy and rumors of who he's considering for secretary of state and other key posts are not suggesting any recognition of progressives' concerns about his policy direction. Domestic appointments, so far, are not all that much more encouraging for Sanders supporters.

Now joining us to keep track of what we know so far about the direction of the incoming administration is Kevin Gosztola. He's a managing editor of Shadowproof. He publishes The Dissenter newsletter at Substack and is co-host of the weekly Unauthorized Disclosure podcast.

Thanks for joining us, Kevin.

Kevin Gosztola

Yes, thank you.

Paul Jay

So, start off with: what do we know? Kind of go through the list. Let's start with foreign policy. Who are the key people on the transition team? What seems like the direction he might go for on important appointments?

Kevin Gosztola

So, we've got a list of people who we know in the last week have been providing national security briefings and then we also have these agency review teams. These are people who are going to plot the way forward for the first hundred days and after. So, we have people who are on State Department teams, a Defense Department team, and then there's an intelligence community team. These people are going to be most consequential for the way forward on foreign policy and how he interacts with his national security apparatus, the officials and the intelligence agencies.

To me, people that stand out are individuals like General Stanley McChrystal, who we know as someone who commanded JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, under President Barack Obama's administration, but was also brought on board while Bush was president. He was involved in running these operations in Iraq, oversaw Camp Nama, an acronym [NB: a "backronym" taking advantage of the pre-existing Arabic name for the camp from the Saddam Hussein government, which built the camp] that spells out "nasty-ass military area," actually. And there was just horrific torture going on there. It's heavily documented in Jeremy Scahill's book Dirty Wars. He's someone who is a pioneer of this "world as a battlefield" paradigm that we've been living under in a post-9/11 era.

He systematized mass killings and the capturing of suspected insurgents in Iraq. And at this camp Nama, we know from Jeremy's book that a CIA general counsel visited and found that there were torture techniques being employed that were far worse than some of the te...