Paul Jay is a guest on North of 48, where he discusses the Ukraine war in the context of the risk of nuclear war and climate catastrophe.

• Transcript

Welcome to North of 48. It’s February 13th, the day before Valentine’s. It’s 3 degrees Celsius in Northern Canada, and I’m happy to have you with us. We have some special guests lined up today to discuss Ukraine. First, I’m going to bring on Ann Li. Ann has a column at the Daily Kos, K-O-S, and she’s a professor. Hi, Ann. How are you?

Good, good. Thank you, Walter.

Thank you, Ann. Next, we’re going to bring up Professor Jonathan Bick. He taught poly-sci at Western Connecticut State University for nearly a decade. He now works at the University of Massachusetts. He can be seen on the David Feldman Show, commenting on current political events and occasionally gets them right. Sorry.

Once in a while, Walter. That’s true. Thank you.

Our special guest is Paul Jay of theAnalysis.news, who’s got some award-winning documentaries out there. What I like about you, Paul, is you do interviews with people whose voice should be heard in the mainstream news but is not necessarily heard, and you get different angles and different takes, and I really appreciate that. He started the Real News Network and interviewed Gore Vidal. All nice stuff.

Should we push for a compromise to support Zelenskyy’s call to push Russia out of all of Ukraine at this time? Do you have an angle on that, Ann?

Actually, I don’t. Diplomacy is incredibly complex, and the issue of pushing for any lull or ceasefire is incredibly problematic. The major powers haven’t seen fit to try and attempt to do that. Even disinformation, recall that Putin claimed that there was a ceasefire and a variety of other things and still continued combat.

That’s true. How about you, John?

Are you including in that pushing the Russians not only out of Ukraine proper but Crimea, the Crimean Peninsula?

 I think the question… yeah, I think that is what Zelenskyy said he would like to do, yes. So I would include that.

No, my position would be to reach some sort of compromise because it seems unlikely that Ukraine is going to be able to do that by itself. I think that the more that the U.S. and Western powers, NATO powers, continue to add more and more support for Ukraine, the greater danger there is that this could expand into a war that includes more than just Ukraine and Russia, and the possibility of nuclear weapons being used increases. I think these are very dangerous possibilities. I would be in favor of a compromise.

Well said. Paul, do you have some thoughts on this?

Yes. But in terms of the format, I tend to blab on. Do you want me to blab on, or do you want me to make this short?

You blab on as much as you want, my friend. We’re here to hear you.

 Poor you, but here I go.

Okay.

I think we have to start our analysis from two points, and then we look at almost anything going on in the world, but particularly now in Ukraine. That is the catastrophic existential threat of the climate crisis. It could be an even more immediate catastrophic threat of nuclear war. Then you start to look at Ukraine, Taiwan, or anything you want to look at. Let’s look at Ukraine. There will not be a Ukraine to speak of in 10 to 20 years. There’ll be no agriculture left. Much of the country will be unlivable. If you look at the IPCC report on climate, which is very conservative, but a new report just came out from James Hansen, who used to work at NASA, he doesn’t think we’re on the road to two degrees or three degrees. He thinks we are on the road to 10 degrees. Get that? Ten. This essentially means there might be a few humans left in the Arctic, and that’s about it.

Yes. I call dibs.

For Ukrainians, like for Zelenskyy to call for a no-fly zone to push the Russians and Putin’s government into a humiliating defeat and the desperation that goes with that, it accomplishes two things. One, the possibility, and the Chinese actually wrote this in an editorial in Global Times. If Putin fears for his own life, if Putin’s regime is teetering, if the Russian people believe that this war has become such a disaster that it might even lead to the breaking of the national fabric of the Russian Federation because there are many ethnicities and nationalities that are doing very bad in this Russian Federation. You could see the breakup or potential breakup. If the Russians see this as a real disaster, which some Americans want, and not only Americans but some of the real hawks are hoping for this breakup, then desperate measures may come. Those desperate measures could include the use of a tactical nuclear weapon. If Zelenskyy is serious about quote-unquote, “liberating Crimea,”– the reason I put quote-unquote on Crimea is that I think Crimea is a different story than Donbas.

Several Western polling firms polled Crimea after the Russian-organized referendum because not many people trusted the results of that referendum. I think it was three different Western polling firms that found that, in fact, the results of that referendum, whether the process was legitimate or not, it actually did reflect the majority of public opinion in Crimea. The Russian naval bases there, Russia does see Crimea as a part of Russia, of the Russian Federation. If Zelenskyy is serious about trying to throw the Russians out of Crimea, I think that is beyond a red line. Maybe it’s even beyond a red line that even the U.S. would accept, but I don’t know.

The war of hysteria in the United States right now, whether it’s about Ukraine or whether it’s about China, the pressure of domestic politics is you can’t look weak on Russia. You can’t look weak on China and expect to win the next election. Whether that’s even true or not is another story. I don’t know that Americans actually care that much. But certainly, it’s something the political elite believe to be true and is driving and has driven over the decades, much of U.S. foreign policy– the fear of looking weak, the fear of being humiliated.

When I’ve had this conversation with Ukrainians, I’ve had it with Lefty progressive Ukrainians. I’ve said to them– because even they are saying, some of the socialist left-wing Ukrainians, they want to liberate Crimea, not just Donbas. They just discount. They say you can’t succumb to the nuclear blackmail of Putin. But why not? Why can’t we succumb to nuclear blackmail if there’s some legitimacy to it? And there might be. Over Crimea, there might be. Especially in Crimea, where as I said, it seems at least prior to the invasion, I don’t know what it is now, the mood might have changed; if most of the people want to be part of the Russian Federation, then why shouldn’t they be? In fact, that goes for Luhansk, and that goes for Donetsk. There need to be legitimate referendums to see where and how these people want to live. They have a right, I think, to self-determination. For quite a while, what the people of Luhansk, Donetsk, and such wanted was actually to be in Ukraine but within a federated system.

In 2014, when they declared autonomy from Kyiv, it wasn’t a demand to join Russia. It was a demand to have a federated system. I believe something… we’re in Canada, you and I, and we have a federated system. The civil code in Quebec is not the same as in the rest of Canada. They have language laws protecting French that don’t exist in the rest of Canada. A federated system might have worked. So why wasn’t a fairly reasonable proposal from the people in those regions acknowledged, respected, and adopted by the Ukrainian state?

This is where the whole thing gets complicated, which is the Ukrainian oligarchy is not the villain of the piece. Clearly, it’s the Russian oligarchy, and the Russian state, if you want, within this time frame, and this region is the villain of the piece. I say it that way because this only takes place within the context of global monopoly capitalism, a vicious, horrendous system that’s given us World War I, World War II, and endless wars afterward, including the use of nuclear weapons. It takes place within that system, a system since World War II, managed by the United States. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, no power within this monopoly capitalist system has more blood on its hands than the United States. That doesn’t mean, in terms of the Ukraine War, the specificity of it. It doesn’t mean the Russians did not launch a war of aggression. It is illegal. It continues to be a war of aggression and continues to be illegal, and it continues to be catastrophic for Ukraine. Who knows, it may turn out to be catastrophic for Russia. It could turn out to be catastrophic for all of us.

The Ukrainian government is not a good guy in this story. The Ukrainian government, before the invasion, could have said something that was obvious to anyone that knew anything about it. They should have just taken NATO off the table and said, “look, they’re not going to let us in any way, so we might as well just say, withdraw our application.” There were many Ukrainian voices saying that before the invasion. Just acknowledge the truth here. Ukraine is not getting into NATO, so stop making it an issue.

Now, whether that would have stopped the invasion or not, I don’t know. I think there are a lot of domestic reasons why Putin launched this, but he would have lost his principal argument. That argument does matter in terms of Russian public opinion. This public opinion matters. It mattered in the U.S. and the Vietnam War, and it matters now. Putin does not want to lose Russian public opinion, and it seems he is to some extent.

So the Ukrainian government could have taken that off the table. Of course, the U.S. government could have taken it off the table, and they didn’t. Quite the contrary, they made it such a big issue that it became another point of humiliation for Putin.

So just to step back a bit, we are dealing, as I said, with a system of global monopoly capitalism and global imperialism. I see that basic system you could look at as a cancer. It’s not new. This cancer has been around. You could say even from the early 20th century; it brought us the First World War, the Great Depression, and so on. This cancer has been getting worse, and it’s like a parasite if you want it, and that parasitism is based in finance because finance has become so parasitical. People call it a global casino, and so on. It’s getting worse, and that normal cancer is managed by our democratic institutions.

So the normal Democratic Party, the normal Republican Party, meaning more like Bush-Cheney than Trump and the Christian nationalists, they manage this cancer in different ways. The Democrats want slightly less intense exploitation of American workers. The Republicans, if they had their way, would probably go back. This is certainly this version of Republicans. They want to certainly go back to America before the New Deal, and some of them wouldn’t mind going back to slave society or some variation of it. They fight over that. How intense should the exploitation be? The Democrats’ argument, and I’m talking about the elites here, not ordinary people who are part of the party or vote for the party, even the majority of candidates, certainly people in the House, but the elite of the Democratic Party, they’re worried about the radicalization of the working class. So they say, “let’s mitigate the intensity of the exploitation in the United States,” but they don’t mind plundering the rest of the world, which is why, on the whole, with some exceptions, the corporate Dems and the corporate Republicans have been pretty much on the same page of foreign policy, more or less since World War II.

Anyway, let me cut to the chase to the answer because you can go on with this. Let’s be clear about who we are. Nobody much gives a shit what we say anyway. Let’s acknowledge that. We’re not in power. We don’t get to decide U.S. foreign policy. What we can do is speak out as progressives of what is what we think is the most rational course of action for people to demand of their elites and to get organized to take as much power as possible, even at the level of unions and communities, and then electorally. Hopefully, sooner than later, because we don’t have much time, really build a mass movement both in the streets and electorally that can get some rationality back into this discourse.

Within the next 10 years or five years, I don’t know; in terms of climate, the predictions get worse and worse. The time frame of the window of opportunity to do something is getting… every time you hear a prediction, it’s less years. We need to urgently get back– in 1969, there was a massive protest against the Vietnam War. They called it the moratorium. I’m working on this film with Daniel Ellsberg now. That massive protest in 1969 helped curb Nixon’s plan to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Vietnam. Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon papers was another blow to preventing Nixon from using it.

In 1972, there was a conversation between Nixon and Kissinger. There’s actually a recording. People may have heard this. He asked Kissinger… no, Kissinger said to Nixon, “maybe we should blow up the dams.” Nixon says, “how many people will it kill?” Kissinger says, “probably around 200,000.” Nixon says, “well, then why don’t we just use a nuclear weapon?” Kissinger says, “well, isn’t that going too far?” Nixon said, “why? Are you afraid of that?” Something like that. I’m actually going to use the actual… we have the tapes. The tapes have been released to that conversation.

The Pentagon Papers are coming out, and the trial of Ellsberg, which led to the Watergate investigation, which led to the downfall of Nixon, all of these things, mass movement, whistle-blowing, it actually stopped Nixon from a real plan. Ellsberg says, “Nixon had already commissioned the targeting of where the tactical nuclear bomb or maybe bombs would hit North Vietnam.” It had gotten so far that they actually knew where they were going to drop them. They were prevented from doing it by American public opinion. We need that again now because as much as we need it and hope that it also rises in Russia, an antiwar movement rises, and there is some indication it is. There are stories of the amount of people leaving Russia because of this. Over a million or maybe more.

We’re in an urgent moment for climate and nuclear threats, and we need to get organized at every level of society wherever we can. In terms of Ukraine, I know a lot of the Ukrainians don’t like what I’m going to say, and I’m saying the same thing Chomsky has been saying and Ellsberg. Chomsky has been getting denounced by a lot of Ukrainian leftists for this. There’s got to be a compromise– to get to your question– because of the climate crisis, because of the threat of nuclear war, and because, and maybe in the most immediate sense, how many more tens of thousands of people need to die? How many more children need to die? How many more people, including Russian soldiers? And dying for what? Let’s say they liberate Crimea. Let’s say they’re successful in Donbas. Then what? Hand it all back to the Ukrainian oligarchy? So the same corrupt, rotten oligarchs that helped create the conditions for this war, and I’m not putting the primary onus on them. Without a doubt, the primary onus is on the Russian oligarchs, then the Americans, the whole context, then the pushing of NATO, sure. The Ukrainian oligarchy has a lot of responsibility for creating these conditions. And they’re going to hand all this right back to the Ukrainian oligarchs because right now, there doesn’t seem to be any independent movement in Ukraine.

What I would love to see is the Ukrainian workers take all these guns and all these weapons and tell the Russians, “you want Ukraine denazified? Great. Get the hell out of Ukraine, and you go denazify Russia. We’ll denazify Ukraine, including using all these weapons to overthrow the Ukrainian oligarchy. We’ll build a real independent progressive Ukraine.” That’s what I’d like to see, but I don’t know that that force is there. So if it’s not there, what are they going to get if they liberate these places except the Ukrainian oligarchy in alliance with NATO and Western European and American capital? They just go back to where they were. So, yes, of course, there must be a compromise. We, as progressives here, need to demand a compromise that’s for the good of the Ukrainian people. But we need more than that.

What I’m about to say is, sure, I’m looking through rosy glasses, but I see no way out for humanity other than what I’m about to say. I don’t see how we get there, but we need to demand it anyway. We need this grand global– like they used to have the Geneva convention. We need a massive conference of the UN or certainly of the major powers. There needs to be one, a compromise in Ukraine, which includes legitimate referendums for Luhansk, for Donbas, and for Crimea. There needs to be a Marshall Plan of some sort. I hate using the word because there are a lot of negative sides to that, but at any rate. China and the United States need to offer Russia a way out of a fossil fuel economy, and not just Russia. There needs to be an international urgent agreement. Do you know the movie Don’t Look Up? A meteor is coming, or an alien invasion. Well, we’re there.

We’re at a point where if the major powers don’t come together and have this grand bargain of a transition off fossil fuels, at least some kind of nuclear weapons limitation treaties. We essentially have no nuclear weapons treaties now. The last one is going to expire in 2024, but the inspections have already stopped. The Russian-American inspections are not even happening. So the treaty is effectively not in force. We don’t have any nuclear weapon agreements right now. So we’re headed for an all-out, unrestricted, new nuclear arms race, and we’re in it. We’re not headed for it—wrong language. We’re in it. The United States already has a plan to spend at least one and a half trillion dollars. The Russians are going to do what they can to match it. Because of that, now the Chinese are trying to match it. The Chinese, up until now, was very modest. I think they only had about 200 ICBMs, and they were keeping it at the level of a deterrent. But because of this craziness going on in the United States, which is also pushing the Russians, the Chinese are now starting to build up their nuclear weaponry. We are headed towards existential goodbye humans, so we better get organized.

Well, it’s a lot to unpack there, Paul. You weren’t kidding. Let me just ask a couple of questions, and we’ll throw it to John and Ann. I think Ukrainians inherited a Soviet system of oligarchy, and I think the Ukraine oligarchs were beholden to the Russian ones. As the war was going on, there was still helicopter motor plants producing motors in Ukraine and sending them to Russia to kill Ukrainians. With what Zelenskyy has done– in a war setting, you can do this. You can be, I don’t know if it’s ultra cruel, or you can… he’s taken the Ukrainian oligarchy out of the system, according to what I read. Now, do you not think that’s a step forward for Ukraine?

I can speculate. I don’t know enough. I would just say that in wartime, as it happened in the United States and in World War II, FDR was essentially an Emperor during World War II, even leading up to it, some say. Sure. But maybe what emerges out of this, maybe, is a little more of the current Russian-style state. I wouldn’t compare it to the Soviets, where you have state capitalism in partnership with an oligarchy. Right now, the state seems to be more powerful than the oligarchs. The state itself, Putin, and others are oligarchs. So it’s a section, you could say, of the oligarchy that has direct control over the state. The individual oligarchs are not part of that inner circles. If they play ball, they keep their wealth. Now, maybe Ukraine will emerge with that.

Now, my understanding from talking to Ukrainian is that prior to the invasion, there was a basic contradiction within the Ukrainian oligarchy. The Eastern Donbas-based oligarchs relied on cheap natural gas from Russia. They didn’t want to have such an antagonistic relationship with Russia. The Western oligarchs, Western Ukraine, were the ones far more pushing for the E.U. relationship. But it wasn’t simplistic because a lot of them also wanted the E.U. relationship. There are some basic contradictions in the oligarchy which gravitate towards the Russian sphere of capitalism and which gravitate towards the Western sphere of capitalism. And that is, in fact, what the war really is about. It wasn’t actually about any NATO threat to Russia. I think that’s a crock. It’s an important piece of the nationalist narrative in Russia, and that can’t be underestimated. The nationalist narratives in the United States are critical to holding that society together. If it wasn’t for Americanism, why wouldn’t Americans rise up and get rid of their own bloody oligarchs? It’s a very important piece. How do poor people from all these Southern states go march off to war and die for Americanism? I mean, for a total…

I almost think it’s a class struggle because the Russians going to die are coming from the least economically advantaged. There are commercials running in Russia right now. Do you want to buy your daughter an iPhone? Join the army. Do you need a new car? Join the army. To me, it sounds like more of a class war.

Of course, it is. The American Army is very similar. Most of the people who join supposedly volunteer, but they’re doing it out of economic necessity. The relationship between the Ukrainian state to the Ukrainian oligarchy, assuming this ends with this state still intact, and right now it looks like it will, then I don’t see why I wouldn’t go back. The pro-Western oligarchs will be dominant, but I don’t know if Zelenskyy has the power that Putin has. So if he loses that wartime clout and popularity, the Ukrainian oligarchs, I think, will wind up more powerful in relation to the state than is in Russia, but I’m speculating, and I’m not sure it matters right now that much.

Well, it’s true. But I’m hoping what’s going to happen is all these soldiers on the Ukrainian front line won’t take the crap any more from the oligarchs. They’ll be highly trained, much the same as what happened in Canada and the United States when the Second World War veterans came in. Unions started expanding, and there was more stuff for the people. John, you look like you have a question. Am I wrong?

Well, I want to say, first of all, I think that Paul’s analysis is dead on. Just starting with the climate crisis, if there were an increase in the average global temperature of 10 C, civilization is gone, and humanity would be lucky to still have any survivors, I think, over the intermediate term. That’s just catastrophe if that were to happen. Even half of that increase would pose an extinction threat to humans. We’d be living under conditions that are totally foreign to us today.

So yes, I agree completely that climate is and should be the number one issue that the world is dealing with. In the very short future, it’s going to cause global catastrophes that are going to kill millions of people. As this happens, and as food supplies become disrupted and transportation networks become disrupted, the opportunity for conflict increases dramatically, and that includes using things like nuclear weapons.

I understand the horrific situation that is transpiring in Ukraine and in other places around the world with other conflicts, but if we’re serious about surviving as a species, I think we need to come to the realization that we have to prioritize addressing climate change as a species.

Nationalism is almost entirely poisonous. Paul, I don’t understand how it is that people sign up for these wars when their own elites in their own nations are having a war against them in terms of their quality of life, in terms of their ability even to have a life. It’s fundamental that we have to address these things and recognize that, essentially, the war in Ukraine is a distraction from the most important priority, which has to be climate change and also addressing nuclear threats. Those two issues are magnitudes greater a threat than what’s going on in Ukraine. That’s not to say what’s going on in Ukraine is not important, but compared to those two issues, it doesn’t even compare.

I would just say that they’re all tied up with each other because the reality is there needs to be a deal in Ukraine to be able to have the conversation. China, the ridiculousness of the hawkishness towards China. If you want a dystopian future, listen to this one. Think about that conversation with Kissinger and Nixon. If it hadn’t been for maybe the Pentagon papers and then Watergate, Nixon seriously considered using a tactical nuclear weapon. Kissinger was seriously thinking about blowing up dams that could kill 200,000 people. This is a state with Truman that dropped nuclear weapons on Japan, and fire bombed city after city. These people do not care about killing hundreds of thousands and even millions of people. They can live with that.

So listen to this future. What happens at three or four degrees when millions and tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people from Latin America have to move north? What are they going to do to stop them? There’s no wall. There’s one way to stop them, and there’s only one way that I know. Two ways. There’s a rational way, which is right now a real proper Marshall plan for Latin America to transition off fossil fuel and help build a sustainable economy in Latin America. You could even start with Central America. Or, and I hate even to say these words, but you cannot rule this out; tactical nuclear weapons are used in Mexico, so people can’t come north. Do you really think this is beyond these fucking people? What’s the alternative to stopping tens of millions of people coming north? What, machine guns at the border? Even that wouldn’t do it.

Elon’s spaceship.

Yeah, that’s nonsense, too. If anything, they may well be doing something under the Earth. They may have some secret ways to live down there, but that’s all ridiculous, too. I mean, if there’s a nuclear winter, they better plan to stay down there for about 25-30 years or something. Maybe some rich people will survive. The end of Don’t Look Up is great. Is that the one where the dinosaurs eat them all at the end?

Yes.

Ann, you look like you have a question.

Well, I think it is very compelling. The climate issues are still and will remain as far as we can see the kind of backsliding that has become normal for a lot of neoliberal approaches to solving the crisis at a standard, peaceful level. I actually tend to agree with you that the initiation of a tactical nuclear strike somewhere, somehow, will punctuate, I think, some important move. Whether it winds up in peace or not is another question. I do want to ask you why– it seems that Ukraine is making a serious attempt to de-oligarch or at least purge one portion of its oligarchy. I think that they’re doing this on the prompting, of course, of the E.U. and of the United States. This is incremental. I think you’ll wind up still with a smaller, perhaps, or wider group of oligarchs in Ukraine. These kinds of solutions are still predicated, I think, on trying to find a ceasefire solution. That ceasefire solution is going to be not impossible. I think that’s the message that the Ukrainians are sending, that they only want to go back to the 2014 borders, which includes Crimea. Crimea is probably the linchpin for some, or at least the negotiating point for a ceasefire that will probably return Crimea to the Russians and keep, as you say, a federated system. But it’s going to take a long slog of ceasefires, demilitarized zones, a lot of diplomacies, and probably some serious military victory on both sides to get us to that point.

Do you see that as a reasonable case, but can it be done quickly before some nuclear solution occurs? It seems pretty clear that the fighting around Zaporizhzhia, the reactor there, was symptomatic of a testing of our will to either have another Chornobyl or not and whether that’s going to be a key element in the negotiations that move forward. I don’t disagree with you about the possibility of 10 degrees. We are at a technological point where we can achieve that. But your suggestion that we’re going to get to a global solution for these kinds of things with all due respect to the Marshall Plan is, well, unfortunately, there are more people on the side of a neoliberal solution to that than there are to a UN solution. I wonder how you see that scenario working out. It seems as though we’re going to need a change in consciousness that will proceed further beyond any mass movement.

I’m not sure of the last sentence.

Well, I think you’re urging a change in consciousness that would be a mass movement. I don’t disagree with you about the issue of mass movements in the ’60s and ’70s. I grew up in a generation that hoped that we would be able to have such a movement. There are some on the ground who believe that a mass student strike, for example, would have compelled that. As we see, we do a lot of memorials, but we still haven’t moved to the next step of controlling the military in the United States. It seems somewhat futile to assume that a mass movement can achieve those kinds of ends.

Yeah. I would say there are two possible objective factors that could play in favor of this. We’ll see. First of all, capitalist elites since the 19th century, since modern industrialization, have been split on this question of how intensely to exploit workers. I’ll give it quickly. I don’t know if I told this story last time, but there’s a mine in Wales. Did I tell you the mine in Wales story last time? No? All right. So I was in this mine in Wales, an iron ore mine, and it has been continuously mined since the Romans. So like 2,500 years of iron ore mining. But in the mid-1800s, there was no air filtration system. So you weren’t allowed to pee when you were working down there. If you didn’t keep your job, you’d get fired, and your family would probably starve. The choice was to have at least somebody in the family working in the mine, hopefully, a man, a woman, and a child or children, or you would starve. You couldn’t pee. So they couldn’t use donkeys to haul the ore up to the surface, so they used women.

By the mid-1800s or so, so many women’s pelvises had been twisted and distorted by the weight of hauling iron ore to the surface that they couldn’t have babies anymore. The children were dying and being forced to go up into these little crevices in the ceiling of the mine, and they put sharp stones down the back of their shirts so they couldn’t sleep. They were destroying the working class to the extent that they wouldn’t be able to have new workers to go mine. So there was a split.

This wasn’t just happening in the mines. It was happening throughout British industry where the level of exploitation of especially women and children was so intense that there was a question, would there be enough workers? So the capitalist class splits on this. A section says, “for the sake of capitalism, we got to pull back on this intense level of exploitation.” The other section says, “well, screw you because I make more money doing it this way.” The ones that were more understanding of the needs systemically won, and they did ban child labor in the mines, and they did ban women from working in mines. Eventually, there was an eight-hour working day, which also came from a mass movement. It was both. There was a rise of workers getting organized and sections of the elite that saw it as a systemic interest to have some level of reform.

Can we see that again now? And you still need both. There is no foreseeable mass movement strong enough, whether it’s in the streets or electorally, to make the change we need just at that level of mass movement. You need some sections of the elite to see their own interest is jeopardized both by the threat of nuclear war and catastrophic climate change.

Now, on climate, you can see an acknowledgment of that. It’s finally penetrated. Even Larry Fink from BlackRock talks about the need for companies to be more accountable. It starts to get through their heads that this really is an existential threat, although there’s no conversation on nuclear, but nothing in terms of really effective policy other than Biden’s plan, the supposed anti-inflation thing, or whatever he called it. But that thing, at least it was something compared to nothing, but it’s nowhere near to what’s needed. So the problem is the system itself works against these solutions.

Let’s say BlackRock wants to get out of coal, which they said they did. They claim they wanted to pull back on their coal investment. Well, when they do, Vanguard just steps in or somebody else steps in and picks up the coal investment. Without government intervention in a phasing out of coal, the market can’t do it, even if an asset management fund is as powerful as BlackRock, which has something like eight trillion dollars under management now. Between BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the three largest asset management companies, they have more money under management than the GDP of China. That’s insane, right? Three companies. But they’re very competitive.

The craziest thing happened recently. Mark Carney, who used to be the Governor of the Bank of Canada and then went on to be the Governor of the Bank of England, and now is a special climate consultant for Guterres at the UN, created an organization from the financial sector to big banks, asset management companies all over the world. He recruited them to start making green investments and start trying to make the companies they invested in more accountable. It was more greenwashing than real, but anyway, at least they acknowledged the problem, at least. So some Republican governors threatened that if any bank starts going down the road of this green, like Mark Carney’s group, that state would no longer do business with that bank. Vanguard pulled out because of it—the second largest asset management company. So the market can’t do it.

We have to get way louder because even Bernie doesn’t talk about this, and not nearly enough and hardly at all. We need public ownership. We have to start with this question of fossil fuel phasing out and regulations. It’s clear the marketplace can’t do it. I think anybody who’s not brain-dead in the elites has to know this is true. So maybe with the rise of a movement and some sections of capital, like those who saw you better ban child labor and female labor, maybe some will start to say, “we’re jeopardizing our own wealth. Okay, maybe the fossil fuel people have to get sacrificed here.”

Even if you take the manufacturers of nuclear weapons, it’s a big deal to Lockheed Martin. The amount of money they make on this new generation of ICBMs, it may be close to… what is it? I think it’s $100-200 billion. I don’t know. There are a trillion dollars more of contracts out there for this whole renewal of nuclear weapons. If you actually look at who owns Lockheed Martin, it’s the banks. It’s these asset management companies and other banks. If you look up who owns Lockheed Martin, CNN has a good breakdown of this. The majority investor, I think, in every single one of the 12 companies that make nuclear weapons, you’ll see, is under the category of institutional investors. Well, those are the big banks and especially asset management funds. Well, if you look at the size of that eight trillion dollars that, say, BlackRock has under management, how much does that Lockheed Martin nuclear weapons contracts mean to them? Not that much. It’s a very small amount of money when you’re looking at the size of a BlackRock.

So in this film, if I get it, I want to go try to get an interview with Larry Fink. I’m going to say, “listen, you said you have a responsibility to defend the assets of your investors, but that doesn’t mean you also have a responsibility to defend the asses of your investors because these assets won’t be worth hell. They’ll be nothing. They’ll be worthless in maybe as little as 10-15 years. We’re not talking end of the century.” If we’re crossing two degrees by 2050, do you think there was a disruption in global supply chains during the pandemic? There won’t be global supply chains at three degrees, two to three degrees. It’s a joke. So they’re very short-sighted, but maybe this combination of elites starting to get the danger, starting to understand the need for government intervention. They did deal with acid rain, so it’s not out of the question. This kind of thing can happen.

One of the things we have to do is be better at finding ways to communicate with ordinary people whose identities are so wrapped up in Americanism, a certain religion, because I’m in no way condemning all people who are religious, but there are certain forms of religion which are interwoven with Americanism and apocalyptic thinking. Maybe there’s a certain section of people you can’t get to, but I think most people could listen to this if there’s some way to get to them. So I’m hoping this movie of the nuclear thing… yeah, it’s been announced publicly; I can say this now. Emma Thompson is going to be the narrator for it. So it’s going to give us a mainstream possibility to get it out there.

Well, I really want to talk about that. Let’s just say this is the end of part one, and we’ll come back for the start of part two.

Walter Kiriaki 

Bienvenido a North of 48. Es el 13 de febrero, el día antes de San Valentín. Tenemos 3 grados centígrados en el norte de Canadá. 

Gracias por acompañarnos. Tenemos algunos invitados especiales para hablar sobre Ucrania. 

Primero, daré la palabra a Ann Li. Ann tiene una columna en el Daily Kos y es profesora. Hola, Ann. ¿Cómo estás? 

Ann Li 

Bien, bien. Gracias, Walter. 

Walter Kiriaki 

Gracias, Ann. 

A continuación, presentaré al profesor Jonathan Bick. Enseñó Policiencia en la Universidad Estatal de Western Connecticut durante casi una década. Ahora trabaja en la Universidad de Massachusetts. Aparece en el David Feldman Show, en el que analiza acontecimientos políticos actuales, y a veces acierta. Lo siento. 

Jonathan Bick 

De vez en cuando, Walter. 

Walter Kiriaki 

Eso es cierto. 

Jonathan Bick 

Gracias.