Potent News Interview with Michel Chossudovsky
[Potent News] We’re here with Michel
Chossudovsky, and we’re having a little chat. I believe we were talking
about, basically, the protests that are happening here that were
started up by the Adbusters initially. I’ve got a couple of questions.
Are you encouraged by what you see happening with the protests?
[Michel Chossudovsky]
Well, I’m encouraged by the fact that people across the United States
and Canada are rising up against an economic and political agenda. And
they are the victims of the neo-liberal agenda. I’m not encouraged by
the way this Occupy Wall Street movement is proceeding, because it was
initiated by a couple of organizations:
Adbusters, which is a magazine
in Vancouver, and the other one was Anonymous, a social media hactivist
website, which does not reveal its identity in any way.
I think the problem is
that these promoters of the Occupy Wall Street movement have been
actively planning a whole network of activities across America with
social media, websites, and so on, for several months. In fact, the
Occupy Wall Street website was launched back in, I think, in July
[2011]. We don’t know who these people are. When we go to their
websites, there’s no contact information. We don’t know who the leaders
are. These are shadow leaders. [scroll down for complete transcript of
interview]
PART I
PART II
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Transcribed from the videos by Tara Carreon, American Buddha Online Librarian
[Potent News] We’re here
with Michel Chossudovsky, and we’re having a little chat. I believe we
were talking about, basically, the protests that are happening here that
were started up by the Adbusters initially. I’ve got a couple of
questions. Are you encouraged by what you see happening with the
protests?
[Michel Chossudovsky] Well,
I’m encouraged by the fact that people across the United States and
Canada are rising up against an economic and political agenda. And they
are the victims of the neo-liberal agenda. I’m not encouraged by the way
this Occupy Wall Street movement is proceeding, because it was
initiated by a couple of organizations: Adbusters, which is a magazine
in Vancouver, and the other one was Anonymous, a social media hactivist
website, which does not reveal its identity in any way. I think the
problem is that these promoters of the Occupy Wall Street movement have
been actively planning a whole network of activities across America with
social media, websites, and so on, for several months. In fact, the
Occupy Wall Street website was launched back in, I think, in July. We
don’t know who these people are. When we go to their websites, there’s
no contact information. We don’t know who the leaders are. These are
shadow leaders.
“Leaderless Movement”: Occupy Wall Street WS Confronts “Organized Wall Street”
Now what’s coming out of
the Movement is, “We don’t need leaders; we are the leaders.” But in
effect, any organization that challenges Wall Street, and wants to yield
some form of concrete results, has to have a very solid organizational
structure. You don’t go and fight against Wall Street, because Wall
Street is organized. Wall Street is a whole structure: institutions,
banks, insurance companies, linked up to intelligence, and then linked
up to the U.S. government. So if you want to change the tide, you have
to organize, and you have to organize in a very solid way.You have to
have a program.
Unseat the Leaders Who are Supporting Wall Street
You can’t just have a
program that says, “Please Mr. Bush, or Mr. Obama, or whoever happens to
be in power, could you be more gentle, have less wars, could you tax
the rich?” You don’t demand of a system which is in crisis, and should
be replaced and reformed, you don’t ask the leaders to act on your
behalf. That’s rule no. 1.
Those leaders have to be
unseated because they are the problem. They are not the solution. And
it’s no use presenting a shopping list of demands, and then submitting
it to the U.S. government, or to Wall Street, or to Warren Buffett.
Wall Street Supports Occupy Wall Street
Now, what troubles me in
this Movement is that there is a covert element with organizations such
as Anonymous and Adbusters, as well as their main websites. Who is
behind it? Who is financing it? I recall that immediately when the
Movement got going, that several prominent personalities came to the
support of Occupy Wall Street. And these were people like Warren
Buffett, Howard Buffett, Ben Bernanke, and Al Gore. Now these people,
from my standpoint, do not constitute the solution to the crisis, they
are the cause. They are the actors behind this crisis. Warren Buffett is
the third richest man on planet earth, and his sympathy for the
Movement should be viewed with some suspicion. That’s the way I see it.
Now I should also mention
another organization which is OTPOR! OTPOR! was an organization involved
in Serbia in the year 2000. It was not a pro-democracy organization, it
was actually an organization which shunted the 2000 elections in which
Kostunica, who was the runner-up together with Milosevic, would have won
in any event. But they prevented the second round of elections from
occurring. And they essentially established the conditions for regime
change. That was a colored revolution.
And
OTPOR! subsequently became a consulting firm, which is called CANVAS.
It’s non-violent forms of action which were implemented in a large
number of countries. CANVAS, it’s logo is the clenched fist. And they
were involved in Georgia; they were involved in various former Soviet
republics; they were involved in Iran; they were involved in Egypt, and
in Tunisia. They’ve provided consulting to so-called revolutionary
groups. But they are also backed by Freedom House and the National
Endowment for Democracy, which are U.S. foundations closely allied both
with the State Department on the one hand, the U.S. Congress, as well as
U.S. Intelligence. So that in effect, CANVAS is really acting as a
consulting arm of the U.S. Intelligence apparatus supporting a training
program of CANVAS.
Now
we know that the Egyptian leaders of the protest movement of the
so-called Arab Spring, they were trained in Belgrade. They were trained
by OTPOR! And it should come as no surprise that the clenched fist was
used also in Egypt. And it was used in a number of countries. It’s of
interest that the name of the resistance movement in Georgia was
“Enough.” And in Egypt, the Kifaya movement, also in Arabic, means
“Enough.” So that in fact, you find the same names, the same logos, the
same catch phrases in several countries. And this is no coincidence,
because CANVAS is operating as a professional consulting arm assisting
the movements in various countries.
Now what this suggests is
that this movement, at least the grassroots of this movement, who are
committed people — we have to acknowledge that; these are people we
should support, people in the street, people who are unemployed,
students who can’t pay their tuition fees, people who are committed to
social change — we must support them. But they are being manipulated by a
framework which from the very outset is pernicious, because it’s based
on links to the seat of power. In other words, if its linked to the
National Endowment for Democracy, or to Freedom House, or to the CIA, it
cannot have an independent stance in going off to Wall Street.
And then the question is,
“Who is funding this undertaking?” You cannot challenge Wall Street, and
then ask Wall Street to pay for your travel expenses. And that is not
something that is not limited to these events in New York City and
around the United States. It’s something that has characterized
progressive movements for a long, long time.
Trade unions have been
infiltrated, their leaders invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos,
then you also have other organizations such as those that joined the
World Social Forum, or the People’s Summits. All those organizations are
funded by tax-free foundations.
The World Social Forum
I’ve been looking into the
World Social Forum, which was created some ten years ago. It started off
in Brazil. And the World Social Forum was in effect funded by the Ford
Foundation. Now we know that the Ford Foundation has links to the CIA.
And many of the organizations didn’t realize that by being funded by the
Ford Foundation, their hands were tied. The Ford Foundation would set
the outer limits of dissent. And this is what I call “manufactured
dissent.” It’s when the elites, through their tax-free foundations, will
go in, and they will support limited forms of dissent which do not
threaten their fundamental interest, which is the interest of making
money and enriching themselves and so on.
So you have an expression
of support to this Occupy Wall Street Movement which is coming from
various corners, and which is also supported by Establishment figures,
and which is receiving a fair amount of media coverage. I recall events
where you had mass rallies in Washington, D.C., and anti-war movements
against the U.S. government, and there was a total media blackout. There
was simply absolutely no coverage. And also in Egypt, there was
coverage initially of the events at Tahrir Square when people were
getting rid of Mubarak, but once they started mobilizing against the new
regime, which in effect was Mubarak without Mubarak, because the same
military establishment were calling the shots, well then the media
simply didn’t cover those events.
Egypt and The Arab Spring
And
what I also noticed in the case of Egypt was that at no time were the
main organizations, which consisted of Kifaya, the April 6th movement,
and the Muslim Brotherhood, at no time did they actually challenge the
macro-economic reforms of the IMF and the World Bank, the neo-liberal
agenda, which were imposed on Egypt starting in 1991 at the height of
the Gulf War. And I so happened to be in Egypt at that very moment. I
was in the Minister of Finance’s office. And that was imposed. And you
had that whole period, over a period of 20 years, when the country was
subject to these deadly macro-economic reforms, leading to the
destruction of agriculture, and the massive unemployment in the public
sector.
And that framework remains
today. It hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s gotten worse, because in effect,
in the wake of Tahrir Square, the Egyptian economy ran into certain
difficulties, particularly with increased levels of external debt. And
so the clenched fist of the IMF and the World Bank is still there. And
the protest movement did not, from my standpoint, change the fundamental
relationship which exists within Egyptian society, which is the whole
state apparatus that is controlled by external creditors, as well as by
the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Military. That we know.
So Tahrir Square cannot be
presented as a model of pro-democracy protest, because essentially they
have achieved virtually nothing. And they have achieved nothing
precisely because the main groups — Kifaya, April 6 and Muslim
Brotherhood — are controlled precisely by the U.S. Government. U.S. and
British Intelligence in relation to the Muslim Brotherhood — that
relationship is well established — and the links between the April 6th
Youth Movement and the U.S. Embassy are well-documented. So you cannot
run a revolution against the Empire — which is Washington — and then ask
the Empire to give you money through its various foundations to fund
your resistance against the Empire. It doesn’t make sense.
And Occupy Wall Street is in a very
similar situation. First of all, it is using Egypt and Tunisia as a
model. They are not a model. They are failures. They are colored
revolutions which have manipulated the grass roots, and which have led
these countries into coup de sac, into a status quo. So the end game of
the protest movement is the status quo. It’s a semblance of
democratization, but in effect, what happens is that the people in power
who are in positions of government are replaced by other people who are
in effect playing the same role on behalf of the U.S. and the external
creditors of those countries.
Now there was one thing
which disturbed me in a statement by Occupy Wall Street. I recall that
there was a statement by a number of personalities, including Naomi
Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Vandana Shiva among others. And part of the
statement was alright. But then they said they had to fight against “a
global al-Assad, a global Gaddafi”, and that these dictators personified
the IMF and the World Bank. They said the IMF and the World Bank are
behind this agenda, and they are treating us in the same way Gaddafi and
al-Assad are treating their people. Now that kind of comparison is
totally misleading because it is demonizing the IMF and the World Bank
through the image of a political personalities, rather than focusing on
the IMF and the World Bank as economic demons in their own right. [In
fact the objective of this misleading comparison is to demonize Assad
and Gadaffi, M.Ch.]
[Potent News] A two-part
question here. First, how can we keep this movement as pure as possible
as opposed to a media spectacle that is coopted? And what would you
advise for people whose hearts are in the right place, and want to make a
difference?
Organized Protest. Confronting Wall Street requires a strong organizational structure
[Michel Chossudovsky] Well, I think a
movement which is confronting the World Economic Order, the New Economic
Order, has to be organized across the land not solely in terms of
street events, it has to have an organizational structure in towns, and
cities, and villages, and workplaces, and parishes, in universities and
colleges. In other words, all the various entities of civil society. It
also has to permeate mainstream organizations such as trade unions and
human rights organizations. It has to have a very strong organizational
structure which can confront the corporate agenda. Corporations are very
well organized, but they still constitute a minority. Now if the 99%
want to ultimately reverse the tide, they have to organize. They have to
have strong leadership. They have to have a program. And they are not
there to make demands. They are there to question the legitimacy of the
corporate agenda. They are there to unseat these powerful actors whose
legitimacy actually is sustained by a very crooked and fraudulent
apparatus. So that’s what you have to tackle.
The Tobin Tax: Taming the Speculators
I recall many years ago when the World
Social Forum started up, there was another movement which was called
ATTAC, which was one of implanting attacks on speculative transactions.
It was called the TOBIN tax. And everybody joined the bandwagon of the
TOBIN tax. saying we have to put a tax on speculative activities, and
use the proceeds of this tax to help the poor. I was opposed to that for
various reasons, but more fundamentally, if you want to get rid of
highway robbery, you don’t put a tax on highway robbery. If you want to
get rid of speculation, which is ultimately the instrument for
transferring wealth, you do not provide legitimacy to the speculators by
taxing him 1%, or whatever, of his transactions. You freeze those
transactions. And that is something that can be achieved. In other
words, their whole series of speculative instruments on Wall Street
which affect, let’s say the price of food, the price of oil and which
are impoverishing people worldwide.
Putting a Freeze on Derivative Trade
Now, how do you reverse the
tide? You put a freeze on derivative trade. You don’t tax the
speculator. The speculators were the first people to endorse the TOBIN
tax. Why? Because they’re stealing from the 99% by using very complex
financial instruments. And if a tax is imposed, the legitimacy of their
undertakings is not questioned. They pay the 1% tax that is used to
compensate the people who have been expropriated and impoverished as a
result of their actions, and it provides a human face to the speculative
onslaught. That is what is behind this complicity of people like Warren
Buffett and Ben Bernanke in this Occupy Wall Street movement. You do
not reverse the tide by taxing the rich. You have to tax the rich, but
ultimately you have to address the broader question of how do these
people enrich themselves at the expense of the 99%.
NATO Atrocities in Libya
[Potent News] So one last
question. Apparently, yesterday at the conference at the university [St
Mary's University, Halifax] there, apparently was someone doing the
video that was actually shedding light on what’s actually happening in
Libya. I heard that one of the people there cried and walked out. How
important do you think it is to be able to gain the strength to face
what is being done in our world and often in our name?
[Michel Chossudovsky] Well,
I think in Libya, atrocities have been committed by NATO. Thousands of
people have been killed. The media is not reporting those atrocities. It
has a responsibility as media, as journalists, to report the facts on
the ground. But that is not happening. In fact, it’s the reverse: they
are obfuscating. They are acting as a camouflage, as a cover-up. And
they are providing a human face to the rebels, which are in large part
are made up of al-Qaeda militia. This is not a pro-democracy movement.
And what has happened is that the media has supported this war.
NATO: “We are running out of bombs”
Without the media, they
could not have run this war, because they would not have been able to
camouflage the impacts of those bombings. Anyone who has a minimal
understanding of fighter aircraft knows that if you have 10,000 strike
sorties, with a dozen missiles on each of these fighter planes, you’re
going to kill a lot of people. You’re talking above 50,000 bombs. And
it’s certainly worth noting that already in the month of April [20111],
after one month of bombing, NATO has said, “We’re running out of bombs.”
They’re running out of bombs?! That’s an incredible observation against
a country of 6 million people. And then they would make the same
statement, “We haven’t killed anybody.”
So people don’t analyze
necessarily that data which comes out from NATO. Every week they will
publish the number of strike sorties. But the military analysts working
for the mainstream media, who know the planes, who have an understanding
of war, and of the impacts of advanced weapon systems, they have a
responsibility to report those, to analyze them. They are not doing it.
Killing Gaddafi. Destroying an Entire Country
And yes, atrocities are
being committed. But what I find disturbs me is that when you go to
Occupy Wall Street, they say we must implement pro-democracy following
the example of our brothers and sisters in Libya. And they are referring
to the transitional counsel which is made up of a bunch of criminals,
and which does not represent the Libyan population.And then they present
Gaddafi as the enemy of democracy.
I’m not particularly a fan
of Gaddafi, but Gaddafi is not the enemy of democracy, it’s the United
States of America, which in the course of the last 100 years has
supported dictatorships all over the world. And now they say we’re
pro-democracy. The fact is, if they don’t like a particular head of
state, or head of government in the case of Gaddafi, they go in and they
kill him, and they kill the members of his family, and his
grandchildren. And that is not the way you implement democracy. You
implement democracy by respecting the sovereignty of countries, and the
rights of people in those countries to decide on how they want to run
their own affairs.
Libya Had the Highest Standard of Living in Africa
And I think it’s important for the
record that Libya was one of very few countries in the world that did
not obey the diktats of Washington and the IMF. And as a consequence of
that, whether we like Gaddafi or not, the figures published by the
United Nations, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization, confirm that
the standard of living in Libya is the highest in Africa. There’s full
employment, there’s almost 100% literacy, 50% of students who graduate
from high school go to university, and it is by African standards an
advanced welfare state. Whether we like the political regime or not, we
have to acknowledge that.
And what has happened with
the bombings over a period of several months since March [2011], is the
destruction of a country, of its water system, of its food supplies, of
its schools, its hospitals, its universities. Because these are being
bombed, and we have evidence that they are being bombed. And if the
Occupy Wall Street movement is a significant pro-democracy movement in
the USA, Canada, and the Western world, it should take a stance against
those NATO bombings. It should not present NATO as the role model, and
all the rebels as the role model.
And that is precisely what
was implied in some of those statements made by Occupy Wall Street that
ultimately we should support our brothers and sisters in Libya who are
fighting against Gaddafi. Those brothers and sisters are essentially
al-Qaeda. They don’t represent the majority of the population, which
ironically was supportive of the government. I mean, there’s opposition
within all of those societies, but broadly speaking that society, that
country had a project, had a high standard of living, had an educated
population, and the result of this seven months of bombing has been to
destroy a country. And it’s certainly not a role model for Occupy Wall
Street.
Occupy Wall Street Must Take a Stance against War
And so Occupy Wall Street
has to take a stance not only against Wall Street, but against all the
wars which are led by Wall Street, by the oil companies, by Washington,
in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine, in Libya, and in other parts of
the world where they come in, in the Congo, in Rwanda, in Somalia, which
is characterized by The Agenda. It’s the Agenda of going off the
terrorists, going off to al-Qaeda. But then we discover that al Qaeda is
a creation of the CIA, and that al-Qaeda in effect are the
foot-soldiers of NATO in Libya. It’s the Libya Islamic Fighting Group
which constitutes the main paramilitary force.
And then we discover that
in Syria, the gunmen involved in the confrontation with the government
forces are paid mercenaries who are Selafists, al-Qaeda-affiliated, and
they are also supported by Western Intelligence. And this is an
insurgency which purports to destabilize a sovereign country. Whether we
like al-Assad or not, I respect the right of the Syrian people to
decide on their own future without the intrusion of armed gunmen paid by
foreign powers. And that is what is happening.
And the media also has the
responsibility of reporting what’s going on in Syria. And when they have
protesters armed with heavy machine guns, they have the responsibility
to acknowledge that; because that’s not a protest movement, that’s an
insurgency.
[Potent News] Thank you for joining us and donating your time Professor Michel Chossudovsky. Thank you very much.
[Michel Chossudovsky] Thank you very much. Delighted.
What happens to the SYSTEM OF LIEYERS? There is a serious problem in the United States and IT is spelled: NO DUE PROCESS RULE OF LAW. Now how did so many go to school and paid a handsome sum to learn this, BUT here we are and there is NO LAW TO STOP NAZI U$A!
ReplyDeleteWhen the SYSTEM OF "CHECKS AND BALANCES" [US CONSTITUTIONAL GOV COURTS] has been an abortion of due process rule of law, then the obvious RETIREES of WALL STREET'S FRAUD, need to get clean hands FAST!
ReplyDelete