Truth Jihad Radio

Meow! Surely you’re joking, Mona!

I invited Mona Shaykh, a leading “woke” comedian and self-professed “naughty Muslim,” for what I thought would be a friendly conversation. After all, we’re both American Muslims, we both have an offbeat sense of humor (check out my satire), we both sympathize with underdogs and oppressed folks, and we’re both committed to telling in-your-face truth exactly the way we see it, social niceties be *#@*ed.

My wife warned me: “What kind of Muslim is this? She’s flashing her body around, spewing her potty mouth, exploiting her background for cheap laughs, selling tasteless woke NWO crap. Don’t dignify her with an interview.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m sure Mona and I have different takes on a long list of issues. But I love interviewing people who see things differently from me. We can discuss our areas of disagreement reasonably, so the listeners can gain a better idea of what’s at stake and make up their own minds.”

I should have listened to my wife.

Six minutes in, the interview started going off the rails. Shaikh told me two of her brothers had contracted polio from expired vaccinations, and the trauma destroyed her family. I asked whether that bad vaccine experience made her wary of COVID vaccines, mentioning the previous guest, Tom Breidenbach’s, long, well-documented list of reasons not to trust the “vax everybody” party line. Her response: “I’m sorry, are you an anti-vaxer?” From what happened after that, it might as well have been Julius Streicher asking “I’m sorry, are you a Jew?” (Except that Streicher probably couldn’t keep up with Mona’s profanity.)

Unfortunately, Mona’s wish that COVID provide a final solution to the anti-vaxxer problem (starting around the 23 minute mark) might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Nobel Laureate virologist Luc Montagnier agrees with vaccine expert Geert Vanden Bossche (among many others) that mass “leaky” vaccinations in the midst of a viral pandemic are sheer madness, just as mass “leaky” antibiotics would be during a bacterial pandemic, for roughly the same reasons: they put selective pressure on the pathogen to breed more virulent variants. Though it is unclear whether the vaccinated or unvaccinated would suffer the most under a worst case scenario, the closest real-world precedent is the case of Marek’s disease in chickens. What happened, briefly, was that mass leaky vaccinations of chickens bred ever-more-virulent variants that ever-more-disproportionately targeted the unvaccinated chickens. Eventually, the selective pressure produced a virus that was mostly non-lethal in vaccinated chickens, but killed all unvaccinated chickens.

Personally, I wouldn’t wish a Marek’s disease scenario on a chicken, much less a human being, much less hundreds of millions of human beings.

But at least it would be a final solution to the anti-vaxxer problem. Right, Mona?

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

Poet, academician, and 9/11 truth advocate Tom Breidenbach recently penned “A Letter to my Family and Friends” that begins:  “I know many of you have taken the Covid-19 vaccines. I do not wish to alarm you, yet my conscience compels me to share with you concerns about the vaccines that have been voiced by prominent scientists and doctors as well as by journalists and researchers…” (Read the rest at Tom’s new Substack.)

Tom Breidenbach has analyzed 9/11 as a human sacrifice, developed that analysis in twin books of poetry, and elaborated on the insights of literary anthropologist René Girard regarding the ubiquity of scapegoating and sacrifice.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

Guest: Peter Janney, author of Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace.

Mary’s Mosaic is the best-written of all the JFK assassination books I’ve read. It provides unparalleled insights into the depths of several larger-than-life characters involved in this amazing Shakespearean drama:

John F. Kennedy: A shallow womanizer who suffered from debilitating illnesses and chronic severe pain, JFK’s character flaws stemmed from deeply troubled relationships with his parents…until he miraculously grew into his role as the greatest President America was never allowed to have, thanks in large part to the influence of the love of his life, Mary Meyer.

Mary Meyer: A brilliant and beautiful lifelong peace activist, as well as an accomplished artist, she helped convince her lover JFK to “turn towards peace” during the final summer of his life…then tried to expose the truth about his assassination – until she was herself murdered by the same people who had killed the President.

Cord Meyer: Mary’s ex-husband, a literary and conceptual genius, Cord lost an eye in World War II and spent several years with Mary campaigning for world peace…until he was recruited to the CIA and the “dark side” by Allan Dulles, created the CIA’s media-control program Operation Mockingbird, participated in the CIA’s murder of JFK, and was present at the CIA meeting that ordered the assassination of his ex-wife Mary to keep a lid on the JFK assassination.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s sometimes a better story. Mary’s Mosaic is a murder mystery, a psychological novel, and a horror novel beyond your worst nightmares. It’s one of the best and most important books I’ve ever read.

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Kevin Barrett Interviews Peter Janney 11/9/13

Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio. I'm your host, Kevin Barrett, bringing on the best guests with the most to say about the critically important issues that the mainstream media isn't going to tell you about—and that unfortunately, even the mainstream academy of which I'm sort of a half-expelled member isn't really interested in, at least in terms of going all the way and exposing what's really going on in this country and what our true history is. Well, today I have a guest I've been eagerly awaiting to interview for many months now. He's an author and he actually lived through some events related to the JFK assassination, the 50th anniversary of which is coming up in just a few weeks.

And before we jump into the interview, I want to plug the events that we're having here in Madison, Wisconsin, on Sunday, November 17th. We will have a book release party for a brand new book entitled Dynamic Duo a White Rose Blooms in Wisconsin. It's a book with a lot of JFK assassination content. It's about me and Jim Fetzer, one of our leading JFK assassination researchers. And this event will be held at the Frugle Muse Bookstore. That's the West Side Frugal Muse Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, at two p.m. on Sunday, November 17th. And then on Wednesday evening, that would be November 21st, there will be a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of America's last day as a free nation.

Kevin Barrett: That will be happening at the Red Dragon Lounge in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information about these events, you can go to the University of Wisconsin Sifting and Winnowing Club website, which is you uwsw.blogspot.com. And these events will be advertised quite prominently in the local media here in Madison, Wisconsin.

All right let's move on to the show today. Peter Janney is my guest. Peter Janney is the author of what may be the best written of all of the JFK assassination books out there. As I was just saying to Peter, it has genuine literary value. As a literary scholar, I can tell you that. It's called Mary's Mosaic: the CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer and their Vision for World Peace. It's a fascinating book with all sorts of revelations, not only about the JFK assassination and the subsequent assassination of Mary Meyer, but I think it tells you more about the folks who are really ruling this country, and the world, than the vast majority of exposé books out there. And it tells it brilliantly. So without further ado, welcome. Peter Janney. Thank you for this incredible book.

Peter Janney: Good to be with you, Kevin. Thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Barrett: I've long been interested in this topic, the murder of Mary Meyer and its relation to her affair with John F. Kennedy, especially during this last year of Kennedy's life, when he had the turn towards peace that James Douglass told us about in his book JFK and the Unspeakable. I first heard about this back in...Oh, it was quite a while ago. I think maybe the 80s, possibly even the late 70s. Timothy Leary had spoken about it, and it appeared that Mary Meyer was part of a conspiracy of eight Washington women to turn on powerful men to LSD and world peace, and that her jealous husband, her ex-husband Cord Meyer, a CIA Operation Mockingbird chieftain, had perhaps been involved in the CIA's taking revenge on her, as well as, of course, covering up the murder of JFK. It's an amazing and bizarre story. Truth is stranger than fiction. When I first heard this stuff, I was somewhat skeptical but interested. And well, your book has put the final word out there. As far as I'm concerned, this is for real. And you've been living with this stuff for a long time. So maybe we could just go back and you can tell us a little bit about how you got involved with this amazing story.

Peter Janney: Well, I grew up in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s and 1960s, and that was because my father was recruited by Allen Dulles into the CIA in 1948. And he was really right at the top echelon. Right up with Cord Meyer, James Jesus Angleton, Richard Helms. They were all socially acceptable and together with one another. So I knew all of these people and I knew their families. And my parents would socialize with them and I knew their kids. But with particularly with the family of Cord and Mary Meyer. I was best friends with Michael Meyer, their middle child who was unfortunately killed when we were nine years old. He was hit by a car right around Christmas time. So I knew the Meyer family intimately. And of course, as people will see when they read my book, I had a very unique and special relationship with Mary Meyer. She was the mother of my best friend, but she was also an extraordinary human being and an extraordinary woman, arguably one of the most beautiful women in an entire generation. And she was just so kind to me in particular, particularly around Michael's death. It was a real major life event for me as a young boy, and it really affected me profoundly. And Mary Meyer was really, I think, the only adult who really understood my grief—and, in a sense, tried to include me in that way of helping me through it, much more so than either of my parents could.

Peter Janney: So I had this relationship with her and the family. And of course, I didn't really know what was going on. (She was) taking care of me in a certain way that my parents, for whatever reason, were not able to. I mean, both my parents, in my opinion as a clinical psychologist, were alcoholic, and this had something to do with it. Mary was not a drinker. Not that she never drank once in a while, but she was not someone who used alcohol to self-medicate herself, unlike her husband, Cord Meyer. So I developed a strong relationship with her. And then, of course, when she was murdered in 1964, I was away at boarding school. And I did not find out about it until that Thanksgiving of 1964, and the murder had happened in October. So I was shocked to find this out. It really affected me. And it wasn't until 12 years later in 1976, where it came out in the National Enquirer that she had had this affair with JFK, and there was this insinuation of recreational drugs, where it really started to open my eyes. And that sort of began my journey in terms of getting to the bottom of this. So this story has taken me 35 years or so to put together.

Kevin Barrett: Your personal relationship with Mary Meyer, which was apparently a substantial relationship, and your relationship also with Cord Meyer and some of these other people—you went fishing with James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA skullduggery specialist who supposedly descended into extreme paranoia— the relationships that you've had with these people really brings depth to this book that very few other books that touch on these topics have. These characters are both deeply real, and also larger than life. Mary is larger than life in a good way, and Cord Meyer and James Jesus Angleton are larger than life in a bad way.

Peter Janney: Well, that was part of the effort in my book. Having grown up in this milieu and having known these people, having been around them, I wanted to bring that dimension into the book. I mean, because, you know, a lot of people write about Jim Angleton. And a number of others have written about Cord. But they don't really know them as people. And it's not that I had tremendous amounts of access to them. Of course, I was a child. They were adults. But I was still observant enough as a child to watch them and to understand their impact on me and other people I knew. Jim Angleton had children. I knew one of his daughters, Tracy Angleton. So I kind of had a bird's eye view, so to speak, to other dimensions of these people that most people didn't get. And that's one of the avenues in the book that I think is so important for people, because they can sit down and read this book and get engrossed in it on any number of levels. It's a detective story. It's a mystery thriller. It's all kinds of things. And I think that has to do with some of the popularity of the book and why it's done relatively well in terms of sales.

Kevin Barrett: Yes, I'm sure it has. It's a book I would recommend to anyone, including people who usually sort of turn up their noses at so-called conspiracy stuff. And the deep characterization of some of these principals is, I think, the key. It is what makes this book really stand out. And it addresses a mystery that still troubles me, and I still haven't really managed to wrap my mind around, which is: How can these people commit such unspeakable acts of evil, as James Douglass put it in his title, JFK and the Unspeakable. How? What leads them to do this? And Cord Meyer in particular is the the centerpiece of a real mystery for me. I didn't realize that he had been such a devoted peacenik before he was corrupted by the CIA and alcohol and became, according to the confession of Saint John Hunt—who I will be interviewing perhaps later today— the leader of the chain of command that killed President Kennedy? How could Cord Meyer go from being such a dedicated peace activist to participating in murdering the president of the United States because the president was working for world peace?

Peter Janney: I agree with you. It's a fascinating question. And Cord's downfall will, I think, always remain a bit mysterious. You know, certainly alcohol had a role in this, because Cord was alcoholic. There's just no way around that. And understanding alcoholism and what it does to one's character and one's being, is the subject of many, many clinical books. And it's devastating. It's more devastating than most people understand. But with Cord...you know, he was such a star in the late 40s. He really was like a rock star. He was just everywhere and speaking very eloquent for world peace. He was head of the United World Federalists, which was this organization that wanted to bring a bureaucracy into being that would do what the United Nations should be doing. So Cord really did his best to bring that into existence. But as Russia and the specter of communism came to pervade American culture in the very late 40s and early 50s, it just wasn't going to work. And I think it really depressed Cord. But then he met Allen Dulles. I believe it was his father who set up an interview with Allen Dulles. And Dulles was just a master at seducing people like Cord. And this is exactly the kind of person that Allen Dulles wanted around in the CIA: A very bright Ivy League aristocracy will continue to rule the world, but we'll do it in a way where everyone will come out a winner. He seduced a lot of people, including my father. And these people just really began to feel that they were above and beyond the law, and that they were making the world safe for democracy—and, of course, putting into place the maintenance of the American Empire. And they were damn good at it.

Kevin Barrett: Well, they they did build an empire pretty efficiently, but the ruthlessness of their efficiency certainly left some major scars on democracy, to say the least.

Peter Janney: Absolutely. It did, and we haven't recovered from it, in my opinion.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I got involved in this sort of thing in a serious way due to 9/11, which is kind of the JFK assassination for the next generation. And it seems that these people pulling off these big lie types of crimes, which repeatedly seem to be all about preventing peace from breaking out... If you look at these murders of the Kennedy brothers, of Martin Luther King, Senator Paul Wellstone, and of course, the false flag operations like 9/11, and earlier deceptions like the Gulf of Tonkin, the Kuwait Baby Incubator hoax...Over and over and over, we see that there seems to be a war party that is willing to commit murder and put out Big Lies in order to keep its war agenda going. And I guess you're leaning towards the opinion that the people behind this think that what they're doing is best for the country. They can keep the people as sort of well-meaning innocents, and they can manage their empire in the way it needs to be managed without interference from these idealistic peacenik types. I mean, is that their mentality?

Peter Janney: Well, I think that's part of it. But people talk about the CIA as capitalism's invisible army. And I think it does come down to who can maintain the biggest economic stranglehold on the rest of the world. And there is, in my opinion, a small group of individuals, whether you want to call them the Bilderberg Group or the Illuminati or whatever. But the people who are really in position to maintain economic control on this planet-they have an agenda. And I think until very recently, and possibly even as we speak, their agenda is economic control. And they are not going to give that up. They want to control the resources, they want to control governments. But what they really want to control is people's heads. Because they don't want you to know what is truly, really going on. And I think that's starting to crack, largely because we have the internet, and that has just been possibly the most important tool in terms of leveling the playing field for information and history that we have had, certainly in my generation.

Kevin Barrett: I agree completely. And that's one reason that I've moved from academia into talk radio: to be part of this new independent media of what seems to me to be almost a new kind of Gutenberg revolution that will change consciousness almost as much as the printing press did when it brought in mass literacy. Well, Peter, the powers that be that want to control people's heads, they don't want people to understand what's really going on. It seems, though, that they're willing to resort to more murder than they really need to sometimes. It appears that there were two authors that were working on books on the same topic of Mary Meyer's murder and its relationship to the murder of JFK in the 90s. And both of them may have been injured or killed by the forces of cover up. And so all that did was keep the story hot for your book, which is probably even better than those earlier books would have been. So they didn't really need to do that. And it seems to me there's surplus repression here with this violence directed at people who are trying to get out the truth.

Peter Janney: Well, I agree with you. I mean, if I think the author Jim Marrs has been very eloquent and correct in terms of putting together the list of people who have died mysteriously or who have been out and out killed in not so mysterious circumstances subsequent to the Kennedy assassination.

Kevin Barrett: And Belzer and Wayne's Hit List is another.

Peter Janney: That's right. Exactly. And they talk about Mary Meyer in that book quite a bit. And of course, Mary was was one of the the the first. She was murdered literally just under three weeks after the Warren Commission Report was released. And I believe the timing of her murder was no accident. Because when the Warren Commission came out, she was very, very upset. She was just infuriated that the country was going to be blinded by this outright lie, this outright piece of propaganda, that Lee Harvey Oswald had done it, and that would be the end of it. And she had spent most of the year of 1964 doing her own research, and she was ready to go public. She was ready to go public about her relationship with JFK and what she had discovered about what had taken place in Dallas. And of course, that was going to take her right to the doorstep of the CIA. And when Angleton and her ex-husband Cord Meyer found out about this, according to Robert Crowley, another CIA person who was at the meeting where they made the decision to take her out, Cord didn't have any ambivalence about it at all.

Kevin Barrett: That's pretty shocking. Here's this guy who seemed like such an idealistic character working for world peace all those years before he got corrupted by Dulles, the CIA and alcohol. And here he's willing to go along with the guys in the gray suits and the CIA when they say that his ex-wife, this beautiful, both physically and spiritually, person needs to be taken out to cover up the truth of the JFK assassination. That's just horrific.

Peter Janney: It is. But you know, by that time, I think Cord was really lost. He had been, you know, taken over, so to speak. And I think clearly Cord was involved in the planning and logistics of the JFK assassination, even though there's been very little written about Cord's actual role. I'm suspicious of what E. Howard Hunt says about this, because I believe E. Howard Hunt would say anything as he neared his deathbed. And he made a very salacious story about Cord being jealous because Mary had gone to JFK. I mean, I'm sure that dimension is real and on its own level.

Don't you think Hunt's not going to out-and-out lie to his son? This was a kind of a gift of truth to his son, who had been pestering him for decades. So I think that as far as Hunt's story went, it was probably largely true.

Peter Janney: Well, it could have been. It's hard to know with Howard Hunt. I just always have been very suspicious of him. He was a real rascal. And the fact that Mark Lane took him apart in court and exposed him for the liar that he was back in 1985, where Hunt was trying to sue Liberty lobby to get $600,000, saying that he had not been in Dallas that day—when in fact, not only had he been in Dallas, he was the paymaster for one group of the assassins. I mean, it's just it's incredible, frankly.

Kevin Barrett: Well, yeah, but of course Hunt is going to lie to the court! And fortunately, he got exposed. But again, I've had Saint John Hunt on my show before, and I'm hoping to have him on again very soon. And in the context here, remember, Saint John had been bugging his dad for the truth about the JFK assassination forever. He'd been put off, put off. Remember, his mom went down in a plane with a suitcase full of cash. This was related to her activities with Hunt during the Watergate scandal. And there had been a lot of emotional estrangement. And as somebody whose own father worked for the CIA, and was one of the bad guys too, I'm sure you could relate to this situation where Saint John Hunt had an estranged relationship with his father, and then his father sort of tried to mend the relationship towards the end of his life. And then this little kernel of truth, which I'm sure was far less than what he actually knew, was given to his son, kind of as a gift at the end of his life. And I find it absolutely credible as far as it goes.

Peter Janney: Well, I'm not disagreeing with you. I think there probably is some truth in it. It's just one of those things that still leaves me with a few questions. I mean, there's no question in my mind that Cord Meyer had sold his soul to the devil. Just none at all. And it's so utterly tragic because his other two sons have really just been, you know, very taken apart by what happened. His oldest son, Quentin, has largely made a career out of being a mental health patient and has been pretty much dysfunctional his entire adult life. His younger brother Mark turned into an evangelical and lives down in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, proselytizing for a certain church. This guy went to Yale and was one of Yale University's first Chinese undergraduate majors. He's a brilliant kid. But I think the family was just so traumatized, first losing their brother when he was nine years old, but then losing their mother in the way that she was murdered. And of course, all the suspicion. I mean, this is Washington D.C.'s most famous unsolved murder. And the interesting thing, Kevin, is that there hasn't been one media outlet in Washington—radio, television, literary, anything—that will touch my book, that will review it, that will talk about it. I mean, it's probably the most comprehensive account ever written or that ever will be written about what happened to Mary Meyer. And it involves a lot of former prominent people in Washington. But there's a blackout on the book in the entire Washington area.

Kevin Barrett: How does that work? You would think that D.C. is such a gossipy place. How can it be exempt from this sort of aspect of human nature that we even saw in the old Soviet Union, where even when everybody kind of believed in communism, there were still the rumors, there was still the samizdat. How could anyone in the D.C. inner circle not be interested in your book?

Peter Janney: Well, I think there are people, a lot of people, who are interested. But you won't hear, or you will not see, any of the mainstream media outlets taking it on. And that's what I find. This is the influence of Ben Bradlee that that is going on down there. It's the influence of the national security apparatus. When my book came out, the first thing that the CIA wanted to do is they got me on CNN and then just tried to lambast me. You know, I printed tha. The interview was posted on the book's website, if you ever want to watch it. But I do think the book is thorough enough that it should be examined thoroughly. I mean, look, no one gets it completely right, but I maintain that I got it more than 93 percent right. I'm sure there are details that I've missed here and there. But basically the story is there. And it's supported by nearly a thousand footnotes in the book. And just for the life of me, I can't get over the fact that in and around Washington, no one will take it on in terms of being on television programs down there, having it reviewed in The Washington Post or the Washington Observer or anything like that. No one in Congress will take it on. I just find that incredible.

Kevin Barrett: I do, too. One of the most shocking things that I went through when I discovered the 9/11 cover up, was the fact that I had been living for two years in this country after this event had taken place and I had never heard of Building Seven coming down. (It was) the CIA's number two headquarters on Earth after its Langley, Virginia, first headquarters, and the number one national security building in New York. Boom! Six and a half seconds, straight into its own footprint, for no reason whatsoever, after a countdown to demolition went over police radio. And then the Mafiosi landlord, who's a close friend of Netanyahu, confessed to having demolished it. And none of this made it into the national media. And then the more I looked at 9/11, the more I realized that there wasn't a single shred of evidence for any aspect of the official story. And in fact, it was completely contradicted, and the media had completely missed all of this. They have missed hundreds of (what should have been) the biggest stories that would have ever existed in the American media, in all of history, hundreds of these stories. And they're just completely overlooked. And that boggled my mind, because I still thought that there was a certain taste for scandal. They wanted to sell newspapers, they wanted to sell TV ads. How could they completely ignore this stuff? And maybe Cord Meyer is an interesting person to look at in terms of the history of how our media got so controlled. Because he was the head of Operation Mockingbird. And you have some really interesting observations about how successful Operation Mockingbird was.

Peter Janney: Yes, I think what it proves to us is that to this day, the CIA and the national security apparatus are embedded in the media. They are largely controlling mainstream media. And so this is why you'll never see any mainstream media outlets on television, for instance, really take on the Kennedy assassination and talk about the actual evidence. The same with 9/11. I mean, my God, when you have over 2000 licensed structural engineers and registered architects all going on record, that these buildings were brought down not by the planes that ran into them, but by controlled demolition! I mean, it just takes my breath away.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it is quite stunning. You mentioned in your book that Cord Meyer was heavily decorated for his extremely successful attempts to infiltrate, co-opt and basically take over both the U.S. media and a lot of the global media as well, through a CIA program called Operation Mockingbird.

Peter Janney: Radio Free Europe was another one of his little projects. Cord was a brilliant guy. He could have been successful at anything he took on. He was also a beautiful writer. This guy won the Henry Award for the best new short story, right when he came out of World War Two. It's an incredible story that was published in The Atlantic. And his book Peace or Anarchy did very well when it first came out in the late 1940s. His second book, Facing Reality, I thought, was just a complete whitewash, and it didn't do well at all. But by that time there was really no one home in Cord Meyer. This beautiful, young, pacifist soul had been co-opted by evil. I think that's the only way to say it. And he was gone.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it'd be really interesting to be a fly on the wall, watching Cord in his first interactions with Allen Dulles, who recruited him for the CIA and apparently turned him away from his path of seeking world peace. Somebody should maybe try to make a movie out of it or write fiction about it. He's such a larger than life character. Your book is by far the best thing that's yet been done about this.

Peter Janney: Well, it's interesting that you say that. Because I shared that one chapter on Cord with a couple of CIA people who who knew him. And both of them independently came back to me and said it was by far the best thing they had ever read about Cord, that it really captured something about him that no one else had been able to capture. And I considered that a real feather in my cap, because it was a very hard chapter to write. It took me a long time. And I had to spend quite a bit of time in the Library of Congress reading his diaries and things like that. But it was gratifying finally to get it done in the way that I did, because I really felt in the end that I had largelly portrayed Cord in terms of who he was and what he turned into.

Kevin Barrett: And you also succeeded in a kind of a deep characterization of Mary Meyer and JFK and their relationship, which apparently had a lot to do with turning JFK towards world peace during the last year of his life. And that's another amazing and quite impressive story. JFK's trajectory kind of mirrored Cord Meyer's. It was sort of a mirror image of it. Of course, Meyer went from a peace activist to hard line sort of Cold Warrior willing to employ evil methods. And JFK was sort of following the opposite trajectory. He was a Cold Warrior and spoke out against Eisenhower being too much of an appeaser. And then in once in office, he had his turn towards peace, apparently stimulated by a number of things, including the CIA deceiving him about the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which all of his advisers wanted him to attack Cuba, which we now know would have set off a nuclear exchange. And then there's his relationship with Mary Meyer. And so he comes across also as a three dimensional, larger than life in-depth human being in your account in a way that he doesn't in most other accounts. We see that kind of change in him, and we see these weird paradoxes of his capacity for idealism and purity of heart, as well as his sort of other less benign characteristics, especially in the the earlier periods of his life.

Peter Janney: Yes, I think that's a very good point, and I think that's particularly important for your listeners to understand that JFK did go through a transformation, which I think largely took place during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. That was really a huge turning point for him. And it was at that time, Kevin, that his relationship with Mary Meyer was really primary. He was seeing a lot of her, and I think she was having a real impact on him. This was a relationship with a woman that he had never had before. And I think she was the first woman to really stand up to him emotionally, and basically say, "Look, I'm not going to put up with any of your crap. I'm going to give it to you straight. And if you don't want to be with me, that's fine. Believe me, I'm not going to be devastated. But you know, if you do want to be with me, you're going to have to show up in a way that you don't really know much about." And I think that really intrigued him, because this became a relationship of redemption for JFK. I do maintain in the book that there is credible evidence that they took a mild LSD or psilocybin trip several weeks before he made his legendary American University commencement address in June of 63. I think the combination of things really had an impact on him, where this was the moment when he was turning away from the Cold War toward world peace. And Mary was part of that process for him.

Kevin Barrett: And it's such a fascinating and kind of heroic story in a way, JFK having this character of— he was always in pain from his physical ailments, living with a tremendous degree of pain that he had to medicate for with a lot of drugs, including some bad ones like amphetamines. It's kind of amazing that this guy was even functional at all. But he kind of got through life, repressing that pain and turning on this amazing charisma that he had. And then he was kind of using women, seducing them, throwing away women who were almost like playthings for him. For such a long time, he was in that marriage with Jackie. His father had forced him into it. It was never much of a real marriage. And then this guy, this amazing character who's not entirely sympathetic by any means, meets Mary Meyer. And it seems that the sparks that flew between those two sort of turned him into a real person.

Peter Janney: Well, those sparks began, I think, the moment they met back in February of 1936. He was really taken with her. She could have cared less. She saw him at that point for what he was. She was interested already, at age 15 and 16, in someone more serious. And, you know, they knew each other in college. They didn't date as far as I know. But Mary really falls for Cord Meyer because Cord comes back from the war and he's been wounded. And he said, This is terrible. We're doing the absolute wrong thing. I should never have gone into this war. I gave up my most cherished beliefs in terms of non-violence and pacifism. And I've got to turn this around. And so Mary and Cord were the sort of post-World War Two glamour couple, and really made an impact to one degree or another. That was the kind of relationship that Mary wanted to have with a man, who JFK was not at that point. He wasn't evolved enough to have that kind of relationship with a woman. He had tremendous hostility and mistrust toward women, largely because he had such a terrible relationship with his mother, which I try to point out. But that changed, because I think Mary's influence was strong enough where JFK knew he had some really severe emotional problems. But as I said earlier, there was the possibility of redemption with Mary, and that was really worth fighting for.

Kevin Barrett: And there's something about this story that seems to mirror the larger trajectory of the U.S. in the post-World War Two era. The country faced a choice of how it was going to react to its World War Two experience. It could have turned towards peace and towards leading the world towards peace, by being a role model and trying to behave with a certain amount of ethical probity on the world stage. And that was the kind of trajectory that Cord Meyer the peace activist would have advocated, and the same trajectory that JFK was leading us toward during the last year of his life. But unfortunately, I think we made the wrong choice, which was to take the horrific slaughter and pain of World War Two, which left so many scars on so many people, and rather than healing those scars and trying to emerge healthy and ethical, our country became cynical and repressed the pain and then moved in this Machiavellian direction of using whatever it takes to make sure that whatever suffering there is in the world, we're the ones inflicting it, rather than the ones on the receiving end of it.

Peter Janney: Well, I largely agree with you. At the end of World War Two, we have the rise of the American Empire and the invention of the national security state with the advent of the Central Intelligence Agency. And the CIA basically changed the historical and cultural landscape of the United States post-World War Two. I still maintain that we don't know the half of it in terms of some of the things that they did. It's only beginning to come out in dribs and drabs in terms of what the CIA has been up to since its inception, particularly in the 1950s and 60s. And this is where the The Cold War historian and former intelligence person Fletcher Prouty, who was the character that Oliver Stone based Mr. X on in his film JFK, has been really eloquent about, with the two books that he wrote about the impact of what the CIA did during that time. And I credit Prouty with being one of the first people who was willing to stick his neck out. He resigned his commission after Kennedy was assassinated because he knew what had gone on, and he could not stomach the role that he had taken beforehand. And he turned his life into becoming a real historian and wrote two great books. One is called The Secret Team, and the other is JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. You know what George Kennan said at the end of his life about the CIA: that giving the CIA the kind of power that it had was the biggest mistake of his life. He told that to Congress, and he told that to a Yale historian, John Lucas. I just think that we still have really not dealt with the full impact of the influence of our own national security apparatus.

Kevin Barrett: Indeed. And Truman actually published an op-ed in The Washington Post after the JFK assassination, and it was printed in the morning edition, and then it was killed and taken out of the subsequent edition of the same day's newspaper, which amounted to Truman all but coming out and saying "The CIA just killed the president. I really wish I hadn't created this agency."

Peter Janney: Well, right. "I wish I had not allowed it to have these paramilitary dimension where it can go off and do anything that it damn well pleases and then claim plausible deniability," that kind of thing. But Truman could have done more to stand up to what had taken place. So could have Eisenhower. This is what Eisenhower says at the end of his administration to Dulles: "You've left me a legacy of ashes." That was a book title that someone won the Pulitzer Prize for about the history of the CIA. I think there's so much, Kevin, that we still don't know about what took place. I mean, Richard Helms destroyed all the MK Ultra files. And I think that's really where we would have seen what the CIA was really up to.

Kevin Barrett: And let's remind the listeners that MK Ultra was the secret CIA mind control program. It defined success as creating a mind controlled assassin who would kill someone and not have the slightest idea why he did it, or perhaps believe a false narrative about why he did it. And that, of course, may have given us real life so-called assassins like—of course Sirhan Sirhan is the obvious one, the guy who tests out at ninety nine point nine percent on the scale of how hypnotizable you are. But this this mind control work wasn't just the stuff that's been revealed about MK Ultra. As you say, there was so much more, including many, many dozens, minimum, cases of CIA people torturing people to death in mind control experiments. I was very shocked when I encountered that, because I guess I still had the idea that even if these guys are professional assassins and so on, that's just too much, torturing dozens or even hundreds of people to death in mind control experiments, that sounds like Dr. Mengele. That's not something that our tax dollars should be paying for, but apparently they did.

Peter Janney: The whole concept of The Manchurian Candidate: I think it's increasingly clear that Sirhan Sirhan was programmed to show up in the way that he did for the RFK assassination. There's legal work going on now by the attorney William Pepper that completely blows this case out of the water in proving that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill RFK, but that someone else did. His shots came from the front. The shots that killed RFK came from behind. There's just such a wealth of conspiracy that we really do not know about. And of course, "conspiracy theorists" have gotten a very bad rap in our culture only because the CIA infused into the media, during Jim Garrison's investigation of Clay Shaw in 1967, that the CIA sent out a memo asking all of its stations to really start to push this idea that anything that diverges from the Warren Report should be labeled as a conspiracy theory, and that people who talk about these things are conspiracy theorists. And this was all set up to malign and defame people. They were just alternative assassination theories, but the concept of conspiracy theory was generated by the CIA itself.

Kevin Barrett: That's right. Lance DeHaven-Smith's book Conspiracy Theory in America goes into this quite brilliantly. And it's it's pretty ironic because if you try to simply tell the truth about these things, you look quite paranoid. If you speculate a little more about what the big picture is, you sound even more paranoid. And then when you find out what really was going on, it turns out that it was worse than your most paranoid nightmares could ever have come up with.

Peter Janney: Exactly, exactly. Ironically, most of history, or a great deal of history, is made or changed by conspiracies that (actually) took place.

Kevin Barrett: It's the most commonly charged federal crime. And the term conspiracy theorist has become so mindless that it can even be used in the case of 9/11, which obviously was a conspiracy. The term "conspiracy theorist" was invented by the CIA to be applied against JFK researchers because this was a crime that had been attributed to a lone gunman, Oswald. So anybody who thought that there was more than one person involved, which is what a conspiracy is, was maligned with this term. But today you're called a conspiracy theorist if you have an alternative theory of 9/11. And yet everyone admits that obviously more than one person was involved with the events of 9/11. Therefore, everyone is a conspiracy theorist. The term makes no sense whatsoever, and yet it's still being applied mindlessly and robotically, almost like the bleating of sheep, in a case which it doesn't fit.

Peter Janney: Yes. I could not agree with you more. I really think that this has gone way farther than it should have. But fortunately, again, I think largely because of the internet, people are waking up. And I see it as a very hopeful sign that there is a gradual awakening on the part of the citizens of our country to what our government is doing and has been doing. And I'm particularly encouraged, as we come into the 50th anniversary in another couple of weeks on the 22nd of November, I think there really is a larger population of our country that is awakening to the fact that what our government tried to do was essentially lie to American citizens and cover this up completely.

Kevin Barrett: And this critical mass of people that's slowly gathering is understanding some of these hidden truths about our history, which are really shocking. In many cases, it seems to me to be contributing to a crisis that the national security state is facing and will be facing in the future as people are awakening to these things thanks to the internet among other things. It seems that this is happening at exactly the moment that the U.S. petrodollar empire is being threatened by a lot of other forces as well, including the rise of China, which will have a much larger economy than that of the U.S. in just a few years. The rise of these other countries, the BRIC countries, means the US is no longer going to be able to dominate the world economically the way it has. And soon the West will not be dominating the world militarily, either. And so it seems that this empire is seeing its power slipping away, both on the domestic front with the spread of the truth and on the international front with a change in global relative economic power. And I'm concerned about how they're going to react to this. Their past record would indicate that they're capable of the most immense crimes. Many folks are worried about Halliburton detention camps and things like that, or preemptive wars designed to rally the public and make them forget about what's really going on. And then, on the other hand, maybe they'll go gently into that good night and make up for their past crimes by allowing the Empire to sort of slowly make way for a multi-polar world. So how do you think that they'll react?

Peter Janney: Well, I think that's a quintessential question, because the credibility of our government right now is really headed into the toilet, in my opinion. What is really going to, in a sense, upset this in the most dramatic way possible will be, I believe, in the next five to 10 years, maybe even sooner, the revelation that we are being visited by extraterrestrials. I think the evidence is overwhelming. I've studied it for years. I've talked to people in the know about this. I mean, this is happening. And yet our government has done everything that it could to cover this up. And when this finally. breaks, and it will, it will, of course, be biblical. But the fact of the matter is what will come out is the amount of just complete sheer criminality that took place in terms of our government obfuscating the truth about this certainly back until the mid-1940s. And you know, if we look at history, I think this has been going on for possibly a couple of thousand of years. Of course, we won't know until we know. But I am utterly convinced that this is going to be the next big event on our planet.

Kevin Barrett: Very interesting. I think you may be right. I've looked at this too. I have a PhD minor in folklore, and I did work on Moroccan stories of amazing and supernatural events, miracle stories of various kinds. So I read up on the UFO lore. UFO stories in many parts of the world have parallels to traditional stories of kidnappings by so-called jinn (genies), things like that. And yeah, there's something going on. There's so much smoke around the UFO issue that there's obviously some kind of fire, but I've never been able to figure out exactly what in the world that fire is. I can't get a coherent narrative out of the information in that field. I can with JFK, with 9/11, et cetera. It's pretty simple. Well, not that simple, it's a little work. You can come up with a coherent narrative that probably roughly covers the material just like your book does with the JFK and Mary Meyer issue. But with a UFO issue, oh my goodness, you have so many different approaches. None of them are really very satisfying in terms of a comprehensive explanation or a narrative that can help us make sense of this issue. So if you have any suggestions about where I should be looking to get a better sense of what in the world is going on with this UFO issue, please let me know.

Peter Janney: One of the best books I've seen is by Richard Dolan, who was actually a Rhodes Scholar finalist, went to Oxford, studied history. He's a very knowledgeable guy. He wrote UFOs and the National Security State. He's just come out with a new book called A D, After Disclosure (when the government finally reveals the truth about alien contact). I respect Richard quite a bit because he brings a real scholarly approach to the subject matter, and he's done his research. He knows what he's talking about. So I think he's certainly one person (worth reading). There's another man, journalist Timothy Good, who I whose some of his work I've read and I liked a lot. His new book is called Earth: An Alien Enterprise. Philip Corso also wrote a good book about this subject matter. There is some good work out there. There's also a lot of junk. But you see that with the Kennedy assassination as well. You just have to look for (the good work) and I do believe it's there. And as I said, I think this is going to have a biblical-proportional effect on on the entire planet when it breaks, and it is going to break sooner rather than later.

Kevin Barrett: Richard Dolan, as I recall, finds credible the story that Eisenhower...the simple version of the story, which is a brilliant story, a perfect metaphor, whether or not it's true. But the story goes that Eisenhower was approached by representatives of these spiritual aliens who are supposedly tall, Nordic looking characters. And what did they offer him? If we enter into a relationship with these spiritual aliens, we can pursue spiritual development more effectively. And then along come these little grey aliens and they come up to Eisenhower and say, "If you cut a deal with us, we can get you all kinds of really great technology to help you dominate Earth." And guess what? Eisenhower cut a deal with a bad aliens, and the rest is history. Well, I don't know if this is true or not. It's certainly, as I said, a very good metaphor that explains a lot. But Dolan seems to take that seriously. Do you think that story might actually be true?

Peter Janney: I actually interviewed one of Eisenhower's attachés, a man by the name of Brigadier Steve Lovekin, and we talked about this at length. And he's convinced of it because he knew Eisenhower and what he was up to. I've also talked to a couple of other people (who said) that clearly Eisenhower was very into this subject matter. It was a phenomenon that was near and dear to him. As to the actual events that took place, I can't say. I wasn't there. But I do think that, uh, Eisenhower was approached. In Timothy Good's new book, he says there's an account where JFK was approached. It's not like I can agree with this wholeheartedly, because it presents all kinds of research problems in terms of verifying stories like this. But the point is, I really don't think it's extraordinary to think that way. And I am just utterly convinced through a number of different things that I have seen and read, and people I've talked to, that the phenomenon is, by and large, very, very real. I mean, we are being visited.There's great concern about this planet, about what's going on on this planet in terms of the ecological damage that we are doing to it, the nuclear fallout from this planet, both from the nuclear industry and the atmospheric testing back in the late 40s and 50s. So, I just think that it's something that very few people, and of course no one in the mainstream media, wants to talk about. Yet. But they will. That's my prediction. They will. And it will be sooner rather than later.

Kevin Barrett: OK. Despite my having a skeptical bent in general, I think you're probably right about that. And sorry, if I have any listeners that I've offended with that opinion, just go on and read some of these books that we've just recommended. Well, thank you so much, Peter Janney. It's been a fascinating conversation. Your book Mary's Mosaic, The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Meyer and Their Vision for World Peace is a minor masterpiece, maybe even more than minor. Keep up the terrific work, and I hope to have you back sometime because there's always more than enough to talk about.

Peter Janney: Thank you, Kevin. It was great to be with you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire takes up where Economic Hit Man John Perkins leaves off. Hudson’s book offers a historical overview of how the US empire covertly exacts tribute from the world. But the era of Super Imperialism may be coming to an end, as the subjugated and exploited nations, led by China, band together to escape dollar hegemony. Will Main Street Americans, crushed beneath the collapsing dollar, turn against their bankster overlords? Will the Empire lash out in its death spasms, potentially inciting World War 3? We have certainly been cursed to live in interesting times; and Michael Hudson may be our best guide to understanding the economic dimension of the storm we are living through.

Michael Hudson Interviewed on Kevin Barrett's Truth Jihad Radio, 11/15/21: Full transcript

Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio, the radio show that wages the all-out struggle for truth by covering all sorts of interesting facts and perspectives that are normally banned, covered up, obscured, spun or otherwise messed with in the corporate controlled mainstream. Today we're going to the rather complex subject of international economics, but by way of an analysis of empire. John Perkins and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man showed us the debt dimension of empire. Our US empire is the first empire ever that runs on debt more than anything else. And if you want to learn how that works, the place to go is Super Imperialism by Michael Hudson. It's been recently reissued with a new concluding chapter, and it pretty much breaks it down: It's a fantastic book, and kind of disturbing, too, that makes you realize how shaky the foundations of our whole world right now are. So let's talk about it. Hey, welcome Michael Hudson, how are you?

Michael Hudson: Well, I'm pretty good, and it's good to be here.

Kevin Barrett: Good to finally have you. I've been reading your stuff for years, and I just read Super Imperialism actually for the first time, I hate to admit, and it's quite a masterpiece. I would think anyone teaching a university course on these matters would have to assign it. But I'm not sure that it's mainstream acceptable enough to get that assignment. What's been the response?

Michael Hudson: To this book? The problem is not acceptability. The problem is getting it into the curriculum.

I was a professor of economics since the 1960s, and there's no way to fit either international finance or even money and credit, or the balance of payments, into the curriculum. I don't think the balance of payments, which is the key to the world's debt problem today, is taught anywhere. I was told that in 1969 and 70, my course was the only course in balance of payments accounting in the United States. Most economists actually look at economies as if they're done on barter. And money doesn't really appear because economists say, "Well, we owe the debt to ourselves, so it doesn't really matter." But the "we" who owe the debt or the 99 percent, and the "ourselves" or the one percent that things are owed to in America and internationally (are not the same). Right now, you're seeing crises erupt throughout the world. Argentina, again, is about to default or repudiate the debt that it owes to the International Monetary Fund that essentially serves as an arm of American foreign policy. And that's what I discuss in Super Imperialism: how the International Monetary Fund lends money to support governments that are friendly to the United States.

Michael Hudson: And when the U.S. policy, neoliberalism usually, gets these economies in trouble, the IMF will lend money to a country like Argentina to support flight capital. It will enable all of the U.S. corporations in Argentina, and the rich families, to move their their domestic money in pesos or escudo, or whatever they're dealing with, out of the country into dollars. And then the IMF lets the currency collapse—and in fact, insists that the currency collapses. Because it says when if you can't pay your debt, the way to repay it is to impose austerity and lower your wages and stop investing in public infrastructure, stop government spending. And so the result of this policy of the IMF with the World Bank right behind it, is to make countries less and less able to pay their debts. And so they fall deeper and deeper into debt and more and more dependent on U.S. official credit. Imf credit and essentially debt is used internationally to impoverish other countries, just as it's now impoverishing the U.S. economy.

Kevin Barrett: And this all raises the question of why you were the only one teaching this in the universities, given its central importance for history, geopolitics, and the way things really work in the world. And that's where I wonder whether there must not be some kind of political resistance in the form of a kind of a propagandistic way of pushing particular views of politics and economics coming down from the top. Before I read John Perkins' book years and years ago, I had no idea that that was actually how it worked. It seems like somebody must not want us to know that this is how it works.

Michael Hudson: Not really. Certainly, the government wants to know how it works. The reason that I taught balance of payments was I'd been working for many years for Chase Manhattan as their balance of payments analyst, and then for Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that was later closed down for fraud, as its balance of payments analyst. And the topic just wasn't taught in economics. The economic theory in the universities pretty much ignores money and credit. That's what Steve Kean and myself and the MMT people at University of Missouri at Kansas City, who have now all been dispersed—Stephanie Kelton, Randy Ray—we're all trying to say, "wait a minute, you're looking at the economy as if it's purely technological, purely physical, and you look at technology and GDP growth, but actually, what grows most rapidly is debt, and the debt is what is slowing the economy down and preventing the economy from growing. There's an attempt not to look at money and credit created by banks or what they're creating it for, which is essentially for real estate, for economic rent.

Way back in the 1890s, economics stopped. There was an anti-classical reaction against Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Marx, Henry George, all the people who were talking about economic rent. Most of the fortunes in America were made by economic rent. So the wealthy fortune gatherers and rent extractors promoted a kind of barter theory of the economy. But in terms of what the government wanted, when my Super Imperialism came out, I had thought that probably a lot of left wingers would buy the book. And indeed it was quickly translated into Spanish and Russian and other languages. But immediately, Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute, a National Security Institute, hired me and said the Defense Department wanted to give me an $85,000 grant for me to come to Washington...

Kevin Barrett: So they could understand how they're ruling the world.

Michael Hudson: Yes. They didn't realize that going off gold for the United States left other countries' central banks with nothing to keep their foreign exchange reserves in except U.S. dollars, which meant U.S. Treasury bonds—loans to the U.S. Treasury, essentially. And so they looked at my Super Imperialism as how to do it book! And for the next four years, I was going back and forth to the White House and other government agencies sort of explaining this, and there was no attempt at all to to prevent this from being discussed. In fact, I worked for a lot of brokerage houses who wanted me to explain to them what the foreign exchange effects of American dollarization and the Treasury bill standard were, and America's free lunch. And Herman Kahn and others said, "Well, look, this is great. American imperialism is giving us a free lunch, and we're able to get foreign countries not only to finance our debt, but our balance of payments deficit, which is mainly military." So in effect, foreign central banks paid the foreign exchange costs of America's military expansion all through the the Korean War, the Vietnam War and throughout the 1960s and 70s into the 80s, all over the world. And again, economics as a discipline doesn't deal with politics, and political theory doesn't deal with economics. And so there really was nowhere for me to fit this into the curriculum at all. But the book's been translated into many foreign languages. There have been at least two editions in Chinese where it sold more copies than anywhere else.

Kevin Barrett: I can see why China would be interested in this.

Michael Hudson: Yes, because if you understand how America gets a free lunch through the dollar standard, if you understand how the IMF and The World Bank are impoverishing countries, then you realize why other countries are trying to de-dollarize, getting rid of the dollar, and why this is causing desperation in the United States, which now has to finance its own military expenses throughout the world with its own dollars. And that's causing the dollar to go down. It's causing inflation here. It's causing other countries to break away from the U.S. orbit and leave the United States isolated. So the United States, when it went off gold in 1971, created a system that gave it an enormous amount of free lunch and foreign money for 50 years. But now that's ending. It became so predatory and so abusive and so destructive of the Third World, destructive of other economies through the bad economics of the IMF, the bad economics of the World Bank, and essentially the destructive economics of neoliberalism from Reagan and Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher in England, and Social Democratic parties in Europe, that other countries are now changing and the whole world is splitting up and fracturing geographically, largely as a result of financial factors, monetary factors, and balance of payments issues. And all of a sudden, the whole emptiness of the way in which economics is taught in the United States is changing.

Kevin Barrett: Well, I guess that's a good sign. But the good fortune for your book may not necessarily be good fortune, certainly not for the U.S. Empire, or maybe not even for the world. So the first question that arises after reading your book is: If at this point this new block of Russia and China—and Iran is on their side—and various other countries are interested—if this new bloc is going to try to break out of the dollar scam that you describe in the book, the biggest question is, why hasn't anything like this happened before? Because as you describe, before World War Two, it was just kind of taken for granted that the the country that runs a huge deficit and gets into debt, ends up at the mercy of its creditors. And somehow the U.S. has flipped that around, especially after Nixon went off the gold standard. And rather than the world responding the way that all countries did prior to World War Two by pursuing their own national interests, it seems that most of the world has spent many decades accepting a grossly unfair system in an unprecedented way. So why has the reaction been so bizarre after World War Two, when before that it would have been unthinkable?

Michael Hudson: Well, all along, other countries realized that the system was unfair. General de Gaulle explained how it was unfair already in the 60s. The problem is, in order to have an alternative, there had to be a critical mass. And that meant a critical economic mess. The United States had one way of convincing other countries to go along, saying, "Well, we'll wreck your economy if you don't follow our rules and we'll wreck your economy by doing what they're trying to do to Russia and China and other countries today." By imposing economic sanctions and by sanctions, they meant: "You need our exports and you need our market. Where are you going to sell your goods except to wealthy Americans? Where are you going to get your food except from American farms?" Other countries weren't able to feed themselves, and they weren't able to find a market because all of the markets were plugged in to U.S. consumption and U.S. foreign investment, and other countries weren't willing to take the step towards public infrastructure investment themselves. There was somehow an idea that if you privatize infrastructure, it'll become cheaper. And of course, that's not the case. It's loaded down with debt and becomes a monopoly and becomes more expensive.

Michael Hudson: Well, it took 50 years for other countries to develop to the point where two years ago, when the United States imposed agricultural sanctions on Russia, Russia said, "Okay, we'll make our own cheese, we'll grow our own grain." And now two years later, Russia is the largest agricultural exporter in the world. Well, that wasn't the case during the Cold War years as a result of the awful collective farm system that was over there. Same thing with China. Thirty years ago, China had not developed an ability to produce high technology, goods, cars, aircraft, electricity. It took a long time for other countries to develop. And fortunately (for China and Russia) you had Bill Clinton and George Bush and Obama essentially promote the offshoring of American industry. They pushed American companies to say, "Why hire American high wage labor when you can hire foreign labor?" And the foreign countries have all had their currencies decline, largely because whenever a country has to pay debt, it throws its currency onto the foreign exchange market, and the currency goes down. And what's really devalued when a country lowers its exchange rate is the price of labor. So all of a sudden, the result of this dollar standard and IMF pro-creditor policy was to make labor outside the United States much less expensive than labor in the United States.

Michael Hudson: So American industry began to move to Asia, not only China, but also other countries in Asia. European industry did the same. And all of a sudden China said, "Well, you know, we're quite happy to have you come in and build factories here and use our low wage labor. But you have to show us how to build the factory. You have to share your technology with us." And so the American companies were glad to share their technology since the 1990s and (especially) since it joined the World Trade Organization around 2000. And now other countries say, "Okay, thank you for the technology. We really don't need you anymore. We've we've got rich enough exporting to your market. We've got (to the point that) we can rely on each other for our own market. We can create our own currency. We don't need dollars. We have our own printing presses in our countries. We spend our own currencies, yen or or whatever." And so you can see how all of this is unfolded. And basically, that's what my book Super Imperialism is about, how this process unfolded and left America all of a sudden without industry and as a debtor country.

Kevin Barrett: And what were they thinking when Clinton and subsequent presidents and the people behind them decided to go ahead and basically export the U.S. productive capacity and move the factories abroad? Did they really believe that was sustainable? Or—there's a conspiracy theory out there that there are these evil globalists who are out to destroy the United States? Many Trump supporters believe in that. Of course, the Trump supporters also believe that the system you described is actually working against the United States, that the U.S. has been totally generous and throwing away all its money to these ungrateful other countries and so on and so forth. So but getting back to the issue of exporting U.S. productive capacity, why did they do that?

Michael Hudson: Well, you asked whether they didn't see where it was leading? That's the wrong question to ask. They didn't care! The time frame of corporate investors is usually three months to one year. All they care about is the next year. That's what their salaries are based on. So they knew exactly where it was leading. They didn't care, because they said "we'll be retired by then. We want to make as much money as we can as quickly as we can. Our salaries as CEOs are based on how high we can push the stock price. Let's push the stock price high. We'll get our bonuses, we'll get our high salaries, and even if it collapses later, by that time we'll be retired as multimillionaires."

Michael Hudson: And there was also something else: They wanted to hurt labor. The Democratic Party has always looked at labor as what Hillary Clinton said: White Labor is deplorable. Employers don't like Labor. There's a class war and Clinton —like Tony Blair in England—Clinton revived the class war against Labor. He threw all of his weight behind corporate industry. And the Democratic Party, ever since Clinton and Obama, essentially became the party of Wall Street and large corporate America and the oil industry and foreign investors. And their business plan is to make money as quick as they can, and take their money and run.

Michael Hudson: And so it was perfectly logical to them. Of course, they knew what was happening. But to them, the fact that they were getting rich and labor was getting further and further in debt was actually a bonus. Because they're really very nasty people. Their ideology is nasty. They want to get rich by making other people poorer. That's their strategy. The whole business plan of the United States economy for the last 20 years is for the wealthy one percent to get the 99 percent in debt, and for American investors and banks to get Third World countries in debt, and then say, "you have to lower your wage rates, you have to stop unionization, you have to essentially just provide low priced labor."

Michael Hudson: Clinton and all the subsequent presidents, especially Obama, essentially forced other countries to go it alone, which was the opposite of creating an empire. You can't have a unipolar single global economy if you force other countries to remain in your empire only by impoverishing their own labor force. At some point they're going to push back and they're going to say "we don't want to be impoverished." And that's exactly what's happening, week after week and month after month, in today's news."

Kevin Barrett: And in today's news, we see claims that this new Democratic administration wanted to change things and push these big infrastructure projects and engage in a certain amount of Bernie Sanders style redistribution and so on—you know, claims that the Democrats were sort of revitalizing the American Left such as it is. You write in a new article about the demise of the Democrats that today's U.S. political duopoly features the Democrats as having the key role of protecting the Republicans from attacks from the left. And that's basically all they do. So I imagine you weren't particularly surprised when these ambitious Bernie Sanders style proposals have pretty much all fallen by the wayside.

Michael Hudson: There was never a chance of them taking place, because the philosophy of the Democratic National Committee that really runs the party is: Well, if we do have infrastructure, it has to be as a giveaway to monopolies that are going to get rich off government grants.

Michael Hudson: There are two kinds of infrastructure spending. The United States in the late 19th century developed the whole philosophy of infrastructure spending. And Simon Patton, who was the first economics professor in the United States at a business school—he was a business school professor at Wharton School—said: "Infrastructure is a force factor of production alongside labor, land and capital. But the purpose of infrastructure isn't to make a profit, it's for the government to invest and provide low cost essential needs education, transportation, communication and to provide low cost infrastructure so that the American industrialists can employ labor that doesn't have to pay a high cost for education, doesn't have to pay a high cost for health care, doesn't have to pay a high cost for communications or cable TV or telephones or anything else." Well, all this changed after the 1980s with the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Michael Hudson: They said: "We want to privatize infrastructure instead of having the government provide low cost infrastructure. Our political campaigns are paid for by the big monopolies, and we're going to give a Comcast and Spectrum the right to charge huge economic rents from cable TV. We're going to turn our free public roads into toll roads like the Indiana Toll Road. We're going to turn over the streets and parking meters, we're going to privatize them, as Chicago did by privatizing its meters. We're going to make America the highest priced economy in the world. And all (the wealth of) this high priced economy is going to go to infrastructure monopolies. And so the the original of the Biden plan, essentially the Democratic Party's plan, is to give its campaign contributors monopoly rights to infrastructure. It'll be like pharmaceuticals, where the American government will pay the cost of developing a pharmaceutical and then it'll give it to a drug company, whoever is its biggest campaign contributor, for $1, and let the drug company make half a trillion.

Kevin Barrett: That's pretty much what they've done with the COVID vaccines.

Michael Hudson: Yes, that's exactly right. The government paid for developing the vaccine, told its campaign contributors "You can make all you want here, and this is wonderful. Now we can make the Third World countries pay so much money for the vaccine that their currencies will go down and we can employ their labor even more cheaply and get their raw materials even more cheaply."

Michael Hudson: So that's part of the system. Infrastructure as the Democratic Party sees it is a travesty of what American infrastructure was a century ago. And they don't realize that the way infrastructure is financed, and what it's priced for, is the key. Of course, Bernie Sanders said, "look, American companies won't have to pay their employees so much money if the government pays for all of their medical costs." Right now, eight percent of America's GDP goes for health insurance and health care. That's higher than any other country, and the health care is much worse because it's all done for profit and done as cheaply as possible, and it's been financialized.

Kevin Barrett: So the angry reaction to this that we would expect has to some extent developed, as abroad this new bloc with Russia and China is pushing to de-dollarize, which could take down the empire by preventing the U.S. from running these massive deficits to support its military occupation of so much of the globe. But here in the United States, the angry reaction to it has come through the Republicans and the Trump movement. And those people, of course, are even less interested in keeping public infrastructure cheap and pushing through Bernie Sanders style proposals. They're even more interested in giving their contributors monopoly rents to make fabulous fortunes by ripping people off. So where will the well-informed, angry reaction to this come in the U.S. political system? Do we need a third party? Or could the Trump movement morph into a more enlightened angry populist movement?

Michael Hudson: You've stated the problem very clearly. What you just said is exactly what's occurring. It's almost impossible to start a third party in the United States. Bernie Sanders looked into that years ago. And the way that the state laws are written really blocks any third party from getting onto the ballot. The Democrats and Republicans have small print in the laws such that it essentially blocks anyone from doing anything. So when you have someone like Bernie coming in as an independent, he has to caucus with either the Republicans or the Democrats. I certainly don't see the Trump Republicans being any better, because they're just like the Democrats. I think of them as the same party. There's really no difference. But they have different constituencies, and they both are financed by the same campaign contributors—by Wall Street, the large corporations, oil and gas, the pharmaceuticals industry. And it really doesn't matter... For instance, if you look at last month's elections for mayor in Buffalo, New York, you had the Democratic Party candidate being a left winger. And so the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic National Party backed the Republican, saying, "We'll back the Republicans against any follower of Bernie or any progressive." So you have the duopoly firmly in control, very much like the Roman Senate was in control at the end of the Republic and was able to block any kind of progressive movement. And you have the big media, the New York Times, the Wall Street, New York Times, The Washington Post and the major TV networks just not talking about the kind of things that we've been talking about for the last half hour, certainly not.

Kevin Barrett: Well, the progressive movement used to be quite different from what it is now. In the late 19th century, in the early 20th century, it was much more interested in these kinds of issues that you raise. Today, it seems like the so-called progressives are mostly interested in gender pronouns and racial hysteria. Do you think that could be a deliberate strategy by people with a lot of money who have the money to hire Edward Bernays style PR experts in order to hoodwink the average people and get them paying attention to the wrong things?

Michael Hudson: I think that's exactly what's happened. The question is, if you were to have a third party or a progressive movement, what are they going to talk about? They're going to talk about economics, about wages, about economic issues, about debt. And how do you how do you prevent any movement from coming and talking about economics? Well, the Democrats from already in the 1960s, but especially from the 1980s, said, "Okay, let's divide the electorate into hyphenated Americans." So in the 1960s, you had Italian-Americans, Greek Americans, Irish-Americans. Now, if you just say it's divided by gender, by ethnicity, by race... what all these different hyphenated identity groups have in common is they're all wage earners. But the one thing you don't talk about is wage earners. If you can get people to think of themselves in terms of ethnic or racial or gender groups, then they won't think of themselves as having the common denominator of being wage earners, debtors and taxpayers and consumers. And if they think of themselves as consumers and debtors, then they're going to want debt relief, they're going to want an end of monopoly pricing for consumers. They're going to want progressive taxation and to shift the tax burden on to the billionaires, not onto themselves. And both the Democrats and Republicans want to make sure that doesn't happen. So the Republicans have become the party of white working class labor, while the Democrats say, "well, they're deplorables, we'll take all the rest and we'll play them off against each other." I don't know how long that can last before people wake up and say, "Wait a minute, we all have a common problem and the common problem is debt. We're all in debt. We're struggling to make a living, our wages aren't going up while profits are going way up. We're having to pay more and more to the monopolists, and we're afraid to quit our jobs and complain about working conditions because then we'd lose our health care and we'd fall behind in our rents and be evicted or we'd lose our homes. This is not the situation we were promised in 1945 after World War Two." And they'd all say "there is an alternative." Well, the Democrats and Republicans have have adopted Margaret Thatcher's slogan "There is no alternative": TINA. And as long as people believe there is no alternative, they'll just somehow blame themselves and they'll think, Well, gee, we're a failure. We haven't succeeded. And they don't realize that the deck is stacked against them, and they have to change how the economy works systemically. And now that there is an alternative in China and other countries, they can say, wait a minute, it doesn't have to be this way. Our wages can go up. What China does that makes it so unique is it hasn't left the financial system and money creation in the hands of banks. The government creates the money and the government can write down debts. So when you have big companies going into debt to essentially expand the economy, the Chinese government can just write it down.

Michael Hudson: The U.S. government can't have Chase Manhattan or Citibank or Bank of America write down the debts because they'd lose all the political campaign contributions and the banks would create a crisis. So essentially, what's blocking the United States recovery is financialization. And as long as you have this financialization, which is also occurring throughout the world and is causing a whole crisis in the Third World today—as long as you have financialization, you're going to have a slow crash. You'll be getting more and more austerity until you end up looking like Argentina.

Kevin Barrett: Well, "financialization" is a kind of a fancy word that seems to describe the transfer of the economy from Main Street to Wall Street. And it occurs to me reading your work—and one of the great things about your work, of course, is the sweep of history where you can touch on these historical examples from the Roman Empire and even back to biblical times—it occurs to me that the two basic underlying scams at the heart of these processes that you describe are, on the one hand, compound interest, which of course, is mathematically unsustainable, money growing faster than the physical things it can represent; and rent extraction, unearned rent extraction: Somebody has a piece of paper that says, "I own this land or whatever, I own this money, I own this infrastructure, and so you have to just pay me for sitting here on my butt doing nothing because I have this piece of paper I can wave in your face." And these two kinds of unearned wealth seem to be at the root of so many of these problems.

Kevin Barrett: I'm Muslim, and we're quite fervently opposed to usury, although most Muslims don't have the faintest concept of what's really going on, what's really at stake. But that core principle of usury being a horrendous sin and something that just needs to be stomped out, and that God and his prophet and by extension the community of his prophet, has to be at absolute all out war with usury, meaning all forms of lending and interest, for all of eternity—that principle is still there. So I'm wondering if you think that enlightening people to this (can help), just like people, when they understand a Ponzi scheme, can avoid being taken in by it. At some point, will humanity awaken and recognize that unearned rents and compound interest need to be abolished?

Michael Hudson: Well, this is what classical economics was all about in the 19th century. Everything from Adam Smith to David Ricardo to John Stuart Mill to Marx, to Alfred Marshall to Thorstein Veblen—the whole 19th century tried to get rid of land rent and economic rent by the landlord class. John Stuart Mill said economic rent is what landlords make in their sleep. It's unearned income. A classical idea of a free market was to free markets from economic rent and from monopoly rent, from land rent and from natural resource rent. And the idea was that taxes should essentially siphon off all the rise in land values and natural resource values and economic rent. And that was where the world was moving towards until World War One. Everybody expected the governments to play a rising role. And it was in the United States and Germany where government was playing the most active role in promoting industrialization and preventing economic rent, by the U.S. antitrust laws and other countries' similar laws. These became the leading industrial nations.

Kevin Barrett: Today, economic rent is being opposed primarily in China and the socialist countries. And now it's called socialism. But it used to be called a free market by Adam Smith. And so this is one reason why in the last 30 years, they don't teach a history of economic thought in the economics curriculum anymore. They've replaced it with mathematics. And so people are not even aware that the whole idea of a free market has turned away from a market that's free from rent extractors, free from private banking and credit, towards a market free for landlords to get as much as they can and not pay taxes on it, free for the banks to make financial interest and not have to pay income tax on it.

Michael Hudson: One of the big fights over the Biden so-called social infrastructure plan was to say: The most unfair economic giveaway of all is the giveaway to the financial sector in the form of what's called carried interest, which means trading speculative gains by large banking firms that are manipulating the market. And of all of the proposals that Biden had to tax financial gains, this was the first to go, because the financiers said, "If you want us to continue giving money to your candidates to beat the Republicans, then you'd better drop anything that's going to attack Wall Street. Remember Democrats, you were the party of Wall Street." And so they did that.

Michael Hudson: The next most popular proposal that Biden had originally made in his plan was to forgive student debt. Well, again, the corporations said, "Wait a minute, you've got to have student debt being paid because the students have to pay the student debt. They're going to have to go to work and go into the labor force and take whatever we are willing to pay them in order to not fall behind in their student debt." So essentially, what is holding down wage rates and holding down working conditions in the United States is finance and economic debt.

Kevin Barrett: And the rent extraction seems to be also happening on the other end with the current inflation, which is not just the result of all of this COVID money that's been blasted out into the world, mostly through through the big corporations and banks, but also the monopolization of the various goods and services that we all buy. That's happened at the same time that the small businesses have been driven out of business by COVID. And now Wal-Mart and Amazon are the only options. And since they have de facto monopolies, they can charge whatever they want. And hence prices are rising very quickly. Do you think that that's a big factor behind inflation, this consolidation by the big retail outlets?

Michael Hudson: Sure. The last year and a half since COVID have been a bonanza for the one percent. The stock market and bond market have gone way up. Corporate profits have gone way up. And for the 99 percent, for the workers, what's gone up is their debt. They're talking about eight million families about to be evicted from their homes, who were unable to pay rent while there was the COVID crisis and they lost their jobs, especially low income jobs. And the moratorium on back rents and back debt is supposed to expire in February, and it's already in fact expiring in some states. And you're going to have millions of people thrown out of their homes. And that's why you've had the private capital funds use this money that they've cleaned up in the stock and bond market in the year and a half of COVID to buy property. And now I think over a quarter of all of the homes that are being bid up in price are being bought by private capital companies. The idea is they want to turn America from a country of homeowners into a country of renters. That's their business plan, and they've vastly succeeded. Obama started the process by not by bailing out the banks and breaking his campaign promise to roll back the junk mortgages to realistic mortgages. Instead, he met with his campaign contributors. He invited the Wall Street bankers to the White House and said, "I'm the only guy standing between you and the mob with pitchforks. But don't worry, I'm on your side. My job is to deliver my voters to you." And that's just what he did. He immediately evicted two and a half million homeowners. He did not write down the debts, and he did not throw a single Wall Street bank crook in jail, despite their massive rip offs and financial fraud. He did not even take over the insolvent banks like Citibank, like Sheila Bair, who was head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, had urged him to. The problems we're having now in a way can be traced back to the Obama administration. The Federal Reserve has been single handedly financing the stock market and the bond market. The government has been giving away monopoly privileges to increase profits, to help support stock and bond prices, and that's been a disaster for the economy at large. But again, I'm not sure where one can fit this into the academic curriculum, which is why most of the students I had decided that economics really wasn't very interesting to get a degree in and went into other subjects like anthropology or sociology or whatever. And that's why you're talking about these problems on radio and the internet, but it's not being talked about in the New York Times or The Washington Post.

Kevin Barrett: Well, here's a question for for you, since you're an economist. This is something that I wouldn't be able to figure out myself. My dad was a professor of finance as his final job, his last job, and we used to discuss these matters. He was a pretty conservative, common sense guy who thought differently because he'd actually run a business and then retired and became a professor of finance. And he thought that a lot of the profession was overly theoretical. He believed in the regression to the mean: that is, if the price earnings ratio is out of whack, it's going to have to return back to the norm and so on. And so one of those ratios that I believe is a little out of whack right now would be the percentage of people's incomes they're paying for their housing compared to their overall income, right? Supposedly it always has to return to some—I don't remember precisely what the numbers are here, maybe you do. But the question would be: If these rent seeking oligarchs succeed in buying up enough of the U.S. housing stock, are they going to be able to permanently change that ratio so that it'll never regress down to the mean? Maybe you have the right numbers. But let's just say normally people spend 25 to 30 percent of their income on housing, and let's say it's up to 35 to 40 percent now. Can they permanently change that and force people to continue to pay 35 to 40 percent of their income for housing if they buy up enough of the housing stock? Or do you think it'll inevitably bounce back to the historical levels?

Michael Hudson: I don't see it bouncing back unless there is a change in the tax system. And if there was was a change in the tax system, the whole financial system would collapse, because 80 percent of bank loans in the United States are mortgage loans, and these mortgage loans to homeowners are guaranteed by the government up to the point where they absorb 43 percent of your income. And this is the legal maximum in the United States. Well, imagine that Fannie Mae, the government mortgage insurance agency, says we will guarantee the loan so that you will not make money, but you can't take more than 43 percent of the income because otherwise it would be unstable. When I came to New York in 1960, there was a rule for banks. Banks would not make a mortgage loan for a home that absorbed more than 25 percent of the borrower's income. So already we've had the income cap go from 25 percent to 43 percent. Well, just imagine the status of workers now if 43 percent of their income goes for housing. In New York City, it's often 50 percent of their income.

Kevin Barrett: In San Francisco, it's 200 percent. (laughter)

Michael Hudson: This is why the United States cannot industrialize as long as the house prices absorb this high a rate of income, and as long as the banking sector is supporting this, and as long as the political parties say we will not tax real estate so that all of the rising land value will be able to be pledged to banks to pay interest instead of to pay taxes. Essentially, it's the (lack of) taxing of real estate in the United States that has subsidized the increase in housing prices, because housing prices are worth whatever a bank will lend to buy a house. If you have to go to a bank, and if they lend more and more and this money isn't taxed away, the price is going to go up. So you have the government policy, the bank policy, all trying to promote this high diversion of income into paying land rent. Again, this is the exact opposite of what Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and clasical economics and the whole 19th century had advocated. This has priced American labor and industry out of world markets. If you have to pay 43 percent of your income for rent, then even if the government were to give you all of your goods and services for nothing, all of your food, all of your clothing, all of your transportation for nothing, you'd still have to pay so much money for rent and for health care that you couldn't compete with labor in Asia or the Third World or even Europe. And so this is what has essentially excluded the United States from having a successful empire. It's the greed of the financial sector, basically, and the takeover of the government by the financial sector here as happened under Margaret Thatcher in England and then Tony Blair. You've had both countries essentially enter permanent austerity programs, and the only way to cure this is for housing prices to go down. But if the housing prices go down, then the banks will go broke. That's why Obama said he had to support the banks: because if he'd actually lowered the housing prices to realistic levels, that would enable America to survive, but the banks would go under. Until you're willing to restructure the banking system, you're not going to be able to industrialise the American economy.

Kevin Barrett: Ellen Brown has been on the show many times, talking about the need to make banking a public utility. And I recently read Stephanie Shelton's The Deficit Myth. She argues that we can fix all kinds of problems and bring back full employment and have all sorts of goodies simply by having the government spend more money. This is the modern monetary theory position. And maybe that is true to a certain extent in the U.S. due to these privileges that you describe in Super Imperialism. I doubt if it's nearly as true anywhere else, for all these reasons that you've been describing. Do you think that if the U.S. ever does opt for more of a Bernie Sanders style modern monetary theory approach, would they quickly run into the limits of spending money due to these international factors?

Michael Hudson: No, there's no limit to how much domestic money you can create to spend domestically. Right now, the banks are creating all the credit. And Stephanie says you don't have to rely on banks to create credit. The government can simply create the credit instead of the banks, and it doesn't have to charge interest. It doesn't have to go into debt. Stephanie was my department chairman at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and we've gone around the world together giving speeches and lectures on this. Her logic is quite correct. The problem is that modern monetary theory has been taken over by somebody in a much stronger position than Stephanie—by Donald Trump. And Donald Trump said, "We can just create all the money we want." And he cut taxes and went on spending and he was willing to do it. Stephanie was the economist for the Congressional Budget Committee and was an adviser to Bernie Sanders. But the Democratic Party gimmick the election to make sure that Sanders and people who were advising him would not have a chance of getting into government. And they chose the Donald Trump version of modern monetary theory, where the government creates money and gives it to the banks. This quantitative easing has created trillions and trillions of dollars, but it's all been used to buy stocks and bonds and package mortgages. It hasn't been used to spend into the economy, which is what Stephanie wants. So the question is: if the government's going to create money, is it going to be spending into the economy, which is what the MMT group that I'm a member of is advocating? Or is it going to be given to Wall Street just to support stock and bond prices and promote financialization? That's really the the great issue financially in economic policy today.

Kevin Barrett: Ok. And I think that's a good place to end it. So thank you so much, Michael Hudson. I appreciate your fantastic landmark book, Super Imperialism, as well as your ongoing columns, which people can find at the Unz Review, that's U.N.Z., where I'm also a columnist and probably where many of you are listening to this radio show. I appreciate your great work, and I hope that down the line you can come back on the show and we can talk about some promising solutions, or at least some more positive political developments than we've seen so far.

Michael Hudson: Well, you've asked all the right questions, and our discussion shows that there are a lot of powerful interests preventing a solution. So I'm not sure when we're going to have a realistic discussion about that, but it is important for people to know that there is an alternative.

Kevin Barrett: Ok, well, thank you. Michael Hudson, great conversation. I look forward to talking again sometime. Take care.

Michael Hudson: Thank you for inviting me.

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Biological warfare scholar Meryl Nass, M.D. returns to update us on her research on COVID-19 related issues, including vaccine efficacy and side effects, alternative treatments, and much more. What does Dr. Nass think about Aaron Rodgers’ claim that it’s his body, his choice? Why are the majority of COVID deaths in Vermont vaccinated people, while in Texas it’s the opposite? Is the “WARP speed” vaccinate-kids program medically justified?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

First half hour: Dave Lindorff discusses “The US is Set to Make Nuclear War More Likely“:

“The US is about to move towards a far more likely first use of nuclear weapons, with word that the Air Force has ‘completed flight testing’ of the cost-and-performance-plagued F35A Lightning fighter, all units of which are being ‘upgraded’ to carry thermonuclear weapons.

“What this means, as explained in a new article in Popular Mechanics, is that the world’s most costly weapons program (at $1.7 trillion), a fifth-generation fighter, supposedly ‘invisible’  to radar (that actually cannot fight and is not invisible to advanced radars), now has a new mission to justify its existence and continued production:  dropping dial-able ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons that can be as small as 0.3 kilotons or up to 50 kilotons in explosive power…”

We also discuss Dave’s forthcoming documentary on nuclear spy Ted Hall, tentatively titled “Joan and Ted: The Teenager Who Saved the World.”

Second half hour: Jim Fetzer remembers patriot radio pioneer John Stadtmiller, the subject of my eulogy “RIP John Stadtmiller: He Sparked 9/11 Truth Movement—and Gave Me My Start in Radio.” We’ll also get an update on Jim’s website, JamesFetzer.org, which has been down for several days, allegedly due to a copyright claim by Jim’s nemesis, Lenny Pozner.

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Two guests discuss issues raised in my new article “COVID-19 Fascism: State Power Plus Corporate Power Equals Goose-Stepping Groupthink.”

First half hour: Jimmy Walter returns to Truth Jihad Radio!

In his recent article Out-Thought Out-Bought Out-Fought: Why the "9/11 Truth" Movement Failed, Alan Sabrosky erroneously stated that “the Truthers were never able to garner the support of even one major individual, non-profit or corporate donor.” Actually the truth movement peaked circa 2005-2008 thanks in significant part to one major individual donor who was very active in 2005: Jimmy Walter.

In our new interview, Jimmy Walter addresses Alan Sabrosky’s claims, then discusses articles including: “Austria to BAN unvaccinated from long list of public spaces,” “57 young athletes suddenly die from cardiac arrest after vaccinations,” and Spike Protein Goes to Nucleus and Impairs DNA Repair (In-Vitro Study) - YouTube .

Second half-hour: Civil libertarian lawyer John Whitehead wonders about “COVID-19 Detention Camps: Are Government Round-Ups of Resistors in Our Future?” He answers his own question: “It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

“This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

“It’s just a matter of time…”

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Tom Compton of We Hold These Truths joins me for some interfaith dialogue after sending the following email:

“I’m a big fan of your interviews. In this interview with Ellen Brown, you reminded me of an incident over 10 years ago when I received an email from a fellow Christian sharing a hateful and untrue email about Muslims. I wrote a response: “Why Do Some Christians Love to Hate Muslims.”

“About five years after this incident, I received the same email from a Jewish Zionists urging me to pass it along before Sharia overtakes the US. Our group, We Hold These Truths has been challenging Christian Zionists for over 20 years. Our documentary, “Christian Zionism: The Tragedy & The Turning, Part I”  won an award at the 2014 Ammar Popular Film Festival in Teheran, Iran. We have had more luck speaking to Muslims than to our fellow Christians. Here’s a presentation I made at a mosque in Tempe, AZ on Al Quds day about Christian Zionism.

“We have conducted over 200 vigils in front of Christian Zionists churches. Here’s an example: https://whtt.podbean.com/e/challenging-a-war-willing-church/  I appreciated your interview with a former Christian Zionist. If you want to do another interview on the subject from a different perspective, please let me know. Blessings, Tom Compton”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

NASA whistleblower Richard Cook is the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age. After the much-ballyhooed “teacher-in-space” Challenger space shuttle blew up, killing all crew members, in January, 1986, Cook spearheaded the partial unraveling of the coverup by feeding inside information and documents to journalists. Giving the lie to NASA propaganda, Cook showed that the lethal problem with the O-rings was common knowledge at NASA, including at its highest echelons. The Challenger obviously never should have flown in such cold conditions, not only due to the O-ring problem but also because of potential damage from ice. But political pressure from the top of the Reagan Administration—and “customer” pressure from the Star-Wars-addled military—overrode common sense and standard operating procedure. The result was a shocking national tragedy, followed by a coverup featuring widespread perjury and obstruction of justice. The truth (“Reagan murdered those astronauts by insisting on an unsafe launch so he could talk to the ‘teacher-in-space’ during his State of the Union speech”) was so toxic that just about everyone eventually fell in line with the coverup.

I sent Richard some questions in advance of the interview, and he offered tentative answers:Here are some questions (sorry about all the “conspiracy” stuff, but that’s my bailiwick).

In what ways was the Challenger disaster emblematic of the creeping corruption of the 1980s? Or should we describe it as a coup d’etat, since Reagan seems to have been installed by hyper-militaristic Deep State players who cut a deal with Iranians to keep the US hostages imprisoned, throwing the election to Reagan-Bush?

I worked in the Jimmy Carter White House at the time of the Reagan takeover. It was definitely a Deep State coup–no question about that at all. But it was also part of a continuity that began with the takeover of U.S. foreign policy by the CIA and military in the 1950s, continued with their assassination of the Kennedys in the 1960s, then on through the Reagan Revolution, the first Iraq war, 9/11, and all that has happened since then. Obama was obviously a CIA asset, as was Trump. It’s a joke to call the US a democracy with two parties that hate each other being egged on by a controlled media while the military prepares for the next phase of endless war.

You mention Barbara Honegger in connection with the October Surprise coup against Carter. Have you followed her career as a 9/11-anthrax investigator, and if so, what do you think of her work?

I don’t know anything about Barbara Honegger except what is in my book.

How was the Challenger explosion both a result of plans for the weaponization of space, and then a roadblock in those plans?

Challenger can’t be understood at all without focusing on the weaponization of space. We’ll need to cover that in detail.

Are you familiar with David Ray Griffin’s view that 9/11 was among other things a pretext to ramp up the weaponization of space, and if so, do you agree?

Not familiar with David Ray Griffin’s argument about a connection between 9/11 and weaponization of space. However, one purpose of 9/11 was certainly a false flag event to advance the Deep State agenda. Weaponization of space is a key part of that agenda. The military still favors a first strike on Russia and now China. Weaponization of space has always been a search for how to do that.

NASA as described in your book does not seem competent enough to have pulled off the Apollo moon landings and gotten all the astronauts back alive. Many of my listeners, including one former NASA engineer, tend to agree with the perspective expressed in this article: https://www.unz.com/article/the-moon-landing-a-giant-hoax-for-mankind/  Your thoughts?

NASA as described in my book was a far cry from the organization that put men on the moon. The key player in this was Dr. Werner von Braun along with his team of German engineers. NASA got rid of Von Braun because he opposed the technology of the space shuttle. I give no credence at all to theories that the moon landing was faked. As a professional analyst I want to see the evidence, and there isn’t any. Nor, as a career government employee, do I believe thateverything the government says and does is a lie.

Another “conspiracy” school of thought holds that a nefarious earthling elite is clashing with a relatively benign federation of extraterrestrials, and that the ETs oppose earthling efforts to weaponize space—hence reports of ETs disabling nuclear weapons, etc. This seems to be the view of a former Canadian Defense Minister:  https://noliesradio.org/archives/93985  Any thoughts or inisghts?

The question of extraterrestrials is a fascinating one. I have studied this in detail and tend to dismiss the claims about UFOs, etc., as no one has ever been able to prove their existence in a rigorous scientific way. Also, everything that has been claimed via channeling, trance states, etc., can easily be dismissed as hoax, hallucinations, or possibly possession. At the same time, it stands to reason that in the infinity of space many other planets host human-like beings. However, I do believe that what has been overlooked is the real possibility of beings or influences acting on human beings from other spiritual dimensions. Yes, I do believe there are celestial beings who oppose the nefarious designs of earthly elites. I also give credence to the idea that earth is a battleground between good and evil, possibly reflecting the religious idea of good vs. fallen angels battling it out. There is no question in my mind that the human proponents of war, injustice, etc., are “possessed” by demonic forces, possibly of different kinds. It thereby becomes the sacred duty of the rest of us to resist those influences, at least by not going along with them in our own lives. This is definitely something we can talk about. Also, Bo Yin Ra has a lot to say about these matters, especially in his essay “War and Peace” in The Book on the Living God.

Dr. Bob Bowman, who played a major role in your Challenger investigation, later became a leading member of the 9/11 truth movement. What do you think motivated him to pursue these difficult truths instead of going along with the program like most of his peers?

I don’t know what motivated Bowman, except that he was an honest, competent professional with backbone.

Richard Feynman (I used to teach some of his stuff in a humanities class on creativity) threw a couple of monkey wrenches into the Challenger coverup, but didn’t take it down. Why didn’t he make a bigger stink, such as resigning from the Commission and loudly stating what he thought really happened?

On Richard Feynman, I think he knew much more than he said, but he was, after all, a big name with a reputation to protect. I think he was afraid to rock the boat more than he did. I am sure that if he did resign from the Commission to speak out that the government and press would have let him have it with both barrels. Also, he may have been subject to threats and blackmail based on his personal life. I am sure that someone of his status had a CIA dossier.

Your book documents crimes by high government officials including reckless endangerment if not manslaughter or worse, (conspiracy to commit) perjury, and obstruction of justice. Yet you say “I ultimately realized that every person involved in the tragedy and subsequent events only did what seemed right to them at the time.” How can we understand this apparent paradox? Might it also apply to such crimes as political assassinations, false flag mass murders, biological warfare attacks that (potentially or actually) kill millions or billions, ritual satanic abuse by pedophile blackmail rings…at what point does elite deviance stop being well-intentioned? Is there a distinction between well-intentioned elite criminals and the other kind, and how do we draw that distinction?

I do believe that most people, including those who do evil, make some excuse for themselves at the moment when they cave in to internal or external weaknesses. I would put Reagan in this category. Of course, the caving-in easily becomes habitual or a way of life. Beyond this there are no doubt a few who do evil for the enjoyment of it. I think of my previous comment about fallen angels. I am presently reading about Hitler, and find that even he was making excuses for himself and rationalizing his actions based on assumptions he believed to have some truth behind them. I’m not too sure about Lenin and Stalin, however.\

And finally…Why the *&% didn’t Ron and Nancy Reagan listen to their astrologer?! (Who advised against the Challenger launch.)

I think that what Reagan’s astrologer told him probably was a surprise to him. By the time he got that advice, too many plans were already in motion.

I agree that what you have written about spiritual renewal as the only way out of our dilemmas is absolutely true. For myself, Bo Yin Ra is my guide in that direction. He says that as long as there is hate there will be war. So we have to find and uproot the hatred in ourselves as the first step.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com

NASA whistleblower Richard Cook is the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age. After the much-ballyhooed “teacher-in-space” Challenger space shuttle blew up, killing all crew members, in January, 1986, Cook spearheaded the partial unraveling of the coverup by feeding inside information and documents to journalists. Giving the lie to NASA propaganda, Cook showed that the lethal problem with the O-rings was common knowledge at NASA, including at its highest echelons. The Challenger obviously never should have flown in such cold conditions, not only due to the O-ring problem but also because of potential damage from ice. But political pressure from the top of the Reagan Administration—and “customer” pressure from the Star-Wars-addled military—overrode common sense and standard operating procedure. The result was a shocking national tragedy, followed by a coverup featuring widespread perjury and obstruction of justice. The truth (“Reagan murdered those astronauts by insisting on an unsafe launch so he could talk to the ‘teacher-in-space’ during his State of the Union speech”) was so toxic that just about everyone eventually fell in line with the coverup.

I sent Richard some questions in advance of the interview, and he offered tentative answers:Here are some questions (sorry about all the “conspiracy” stuff, but that’s my bailiwick).

In what ways was the Challenger disaster emblematic of the creeping corruption of the 1980s? Or should we describe it as a coup d’etat, since Reagan seems to have been installed by hyper-militaristic Deep State players who cut a deal with Iranians to keep the US hostages imprisoned, throwing the election to Reagan-Bush?

I worked in the Jimmy Carter White House at the time of the Reagan takeover. It was definitely a Deep State coup–no question about that at all. But it was also part of a continuity that began with the takeover of U.S. foreign policy by the CIA and military in the 1950s, continued with their assassination of the Kennedys in the 1960s, then on through the Reagan Revolution, the first Iraq war, 9/11, and all that has happened since then. Obama was obviously a CIA asset, as was Trump. It’s a joke to call the US a democracy with two parties that hate each other being egged on by a controlled media while the military prepares for the next phase of endless war.

You mention Barbara Honegger in connection with the October Surprise coup against Carter. Have you followed her career as a 9/11-anthrax investigator, and if so, what do you think of her work?

I don’t know anything about Barbara Honegger except what is in my book.

How was the Challenger explosion both a result of plans for the weaponization of space, and then a roadblock in those plans?

Challenger can’t be understood at all without focusing on the weaponization of space. We’ll need to cover that in detail.

Are you familiar with David Ray Griffin’s view that 9/11 was among other things a pretext to ramp up the weaponization of space, and if so, do you agree?

Not familiar with David Ray Griffin’s argument about a connection between 9/11 and weaponization of space. However, one purpose of 9/11 was certainly a false flag event to advance the Deep State agenda. Weaponization of space is a key part of that agenda. The military still favors a first strike on Russia and now China. Weaponization of space has always been a search for how to do that.

NASA as described in your book does not seem competent enough to have pulled off the Apollo moon landings and gotten all the astronauts back alive. Many of my listeners, including one former NASA engineer, tend to agree with the perspective expressed in this article: https://www.unz.com/article/the-moon-landing-a-giant-hoax-for-mankind/  Your thoughts?

NASA as described in my book was a far cry from the organization that put men on the moon. The key player in this was Dr. Werner von Braun along with his team of German engineers. NASA got rid of Von Braun because he opposed the technology of the space shuttle. I give no credence at all to theories that the moon landing was faked. As a professional analyst I want to see the evidence, and there isn’t any. Nor, as a career government employee, do I believe thateverything the government says and does is a lie.

Another “conspiracy” school of thought holds that a nefarious earthling elite is clashing with a relatively benign federation of extraterrestrials, and that the ETs oppose earthling efforts to weaponize space—hence reports of ETs disabling nuclear weapons, etc. This seems to be the view of a former Canadian Defense Minister:  https://noliesradio.org/archives/93985  Any thoughts or inisghts?

The question of extraterrestrials is a fascinating one. I have studied this in detail and tend to dismiss the claims about UFOs, etc., as no one has ever been able to prove their existence in a rigorous scientific way. Also, everything that has been claimed via channeling, trance states, etc., can easily be dismissed as hoax, hallucinations, or possibly possession. At the same time, it stands to reason that in the infinity of space many other planets host human-like beings. However, I do believe that what has been overlooked is the real possibility of beings or influences acting on human beings from other spiritual dimensions. Yes, I do believe there are celestial beings who oppose the nefarious designs of earthly elites. I also give credence to the idea that earth is a battleground between good and evil, possibly reflecting the religious idea of good vs. fallen angels battling it out. There is no question in my mind that the human proponents of war, injustice, etc., are “possessed” by demonic forces, possibly of different kinds. It thereby becomes the sacred duty of the rest of us to resist those influences, at least by not going along with them in our own lives. This is definitely something we can talk about. Also, Bo Yin Ra has a lot to say about these matters, especially in his essay “War and Peace” in The Book on the Living God.

Dr. Bob Bowman, who played a major role in your Challenger investigation, later became a leading member of the 9/11 truth movement. What do you think motivated him to pursue these difficult truths instead of going along with the program like most of his peers?

I don’t know what motivated Bowman, except that he was an honest, competent professional with backbone.

Richard Feynman (I used to teach some of his stuff in a humanities class on creativity) threw a couple of monkey wrenches into the Challenger coverup, but didn’t take it down. Why didn’t he make a bigger stink, such as resigning from the Commission and loudly stating what he thought really happened?

On Richard Feynman, I think he knew much more than he said, but he was, after all, a big name with a reputation to protect. I think he was afraid to rock the boat more than he did. I am sure that if he did resign from the Commission to speak out that the government and press would have let him have it with both barrels. Also, he may have been subject to threats and blackmail based on his personal life. I am sure that someone of his status had a CIA dossier.

Your book documents crimes by high government officials including reckless endangerment if not manslaughter or worse, (conspiracy to commit) perjury, and obstruction of justice. Yet you say “I ultimately realized that every person involved in the tragedy and subsequent events only did what seemed right to them at the time.” How can we understand this apparent paradox? Might it also apply to such crimes as political assassinations, false flag mass murders, biological warfare attacks that (potentially or actually) kill millions or billions, ritual satanic abuse by pedophile blackmail rings…at what point does elite deviance stop being well-intentioned? Is there a distinction between well-intentioned elite criminals and the other kind, and how do we draw that distinction?

I do believe that most people, including those who do evil, make some excuse for themselves at the moment when they cave in to internal or external weaknesses. I would put Reagan in this category. Of course, the caving-in easily becomes habitual or a way of life. Beyond this there are no doubt a few who do evil for the enjoyment of it. I think of my previous comment about fallen angels. I am presently reading about Hitler, and find that even he was making excuses for himself and rationalizing his actions based on assumptions he believed to have some truth behind them. I’m not too sure about Lenin and Stalin, however.\

And finally…Why the *&% didn’t Ron and Nancy Reagan listen to their astrologer?! (Who advised against the Challenger launch.)

I think that what Reagan’s astrologer told him probably was a surprise to him. By the time he got that advice, too many plans were already in motion.

I agree that what you have written about spiritual renewal as the only way out of our dilemmas is absolutely true. For myself, Bo Yin Ra is my guide in that direction. He says that as long as there is hate there will be war. So we have to find and uproot the hatred in ourselves as the first step.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com