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In his new book titled “Titans of Capital“, Dr. Peter Phillips, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University studies the economic trends following the COVID-19 pandemic and how the wealth concentration in the world took a dramatic turn towards the already ultra-wealthy.

He joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to further analyze these trends and how dire inequality is becoming.

First aired on Scheerpost.com.

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Juan Cole, a renowned history professor at the University of Michigan and expert on the Middle East and South Asia, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to tackle inconvenient truths ignored by the media in the history of Israel and Palestine. This includes the conflation that criticizing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is somehow a form of Holocaust denial. This view of history distorts and whitewashes the deep antisemitic history of Western European culture, Scheer and Cole argue.

Cole describes the history of what came to be the current state of affairs in Israel and Palestine as a sort of Rube Goldberg machine where the European-spawned-Holocaust fueled the migration of European Jews to Palestine and the ouster of the inhabitants there who had nothing to do with the German-led barbarism against the Jewish people.

Never fully confronted, the gravest barbarism in modern history that Europe had created came to be ignored in the postwar period. In one of the most bizarre moral distortions in human history, the West shifted responsibility for the horror of the annihilation of European Jews to the Palestinian olive farmers in what is now greater Israel. That is the deeply immoral, rhetorical scam that continues to define the West’s responsibility for this continuing tragedy.

“You have this exchange of populations, this ethnic cleansing: Jews sent to Israel and Palestinian sent out of Israel. But the Palestinians that were sent out of Israel didn’t have a stable framework for their lives, they became stateless people, for a while,” Cole said.

In terms of the Palestinians as victims of colonialism, Cole said, “The Palestinians are among the great unresolved problems created by the modern era of this industrial ethnic nationalism and settler colonialism that came together in Palestine in this very unfortunate way.”

First aired on Scheer Intelligence.

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Hosted by Robert Scheer

With Juan Cole. Nov. 03, 2023.

Historian Juan Cole minces no words in offering a grave and sobering account of the conflict in Palestine and Israel on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast. In a comprehensive reflection of the history and current day situation in the Middle East, Cole uses his expertise as one of the leading historians of the region to paint a picture of the war. He asserts that in all definitions of the words, Israel is actively committing war crimes, like the United States in Iraq, a genocide and ethnic cleansing aimed at eliminating the Palestinian presence from their homeland.

Cole’s characterization of Netanyahu and his government as fascist immediately brings up the gross complicity at the hands of the U.S. and the politicians who have supported and continue to publicly stand by Israel. It’s worse when considering the high-ranking officials in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

“[H]e brought into his government, when he came back to power late last year, the most extreme, I mean, this is beyond fascism, the most extreme parties in Israel. The religious Zionists and the Jewish power. I mean, these people are terrorists and some of them actually have been on the State Department terrorism watch list, not allowed in the United States in the past. And he brought them into the cabinet. He made one of these guys the minister of national security, put the other in the finance ministry and then gave him responsibilities as a civilian for overseeing the Palestinian West Bank. And both of these ministers who are extremists were also squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank and wanted to steal the rest of it to bring in more settlers.”

It was not hard to see the irony in the Western response, as Scheer points out: “The hypocrisy of Germany, which was the author of the worst crime of modern history, the Holocaust, and the French, who certainly were anti-Semitic to a considerable degree, and others in Western Europe, [are] now saying you can’t even demonstrate for Palestinian rights.”

Pointing out the individuals with a real hand in the situation, who have the money to lobby for Israel’s interests, Cole says, “[the power] lies with the people that are most comfortable with seeing the Palestinians simply ethnically cleansed.”

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First aired on Scheer Intelligence.

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Above Photo: An excerpt from the handwritten clemency letter the military jury submitted in Khan’s trial. Screen shot / CCR Justice.

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Torture victim Majid Khan’s lawyer J. Wells Dixon joins Robert Scheer to discuss his client’s shocking testimony about the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation tactics.”

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Economist Ellen Brown sheds light on the intricacies of an economic system that is being unmasked by the government’s pandemic response.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to cause mass death and upheaval around the world, there has been an unexpected side effect: it has unmasked capitalism. In the U.S., this unmasking can be seen in both the Federal Reserve’s actions as well as Congress’ coronavirus aid legislation, the CARES Act, both of which reveal critical truths about an economic system that has been sold to working people as one thing and as quite another to banks and corporations. To shed some much needed light on the intricacies of our financial situation during the latest crisis, “Scheer Intelligence” host Robert Scheer spoke with acclaimed economist and attorney Ellen Brown.

There are plenty of parallels to be drawn between the last financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, with the clear exception being that now we’re not just dealing with a broken economy but with a deadly virus. Brown, who has written over a dozen books on economics and is the founder of the Public Banking Institute, explains how, unfortunately, the Covid-19 bailouts will once again betray Americans just as the 2008 stimulus did.

“In 2008 the bailout was basically of the banks, or we had quantitative easing that went to the banks,” the author tells Scheer. “And then the idea was that the banks were supposed to lend that into the real economy, but of course, they didn’t do it. … But now we have even more credit facilities [and] the problem is, they’re all going to help the big corporations, and the hedge funds, and virtually every sort of shady business. Things the Federal Reserve couldn’t lend to before, [but] now they have new ways of doing it.”

The nefarious uses of the CARES Act have been blasted all over the press, and now news has emerged that the Federal Reserve is planning on handing big corporations a whopping half a trillion dollars with “no strings attached” and zero interest. As Scheer points out, however, this seemingly miraculous economic response at times of crisis, when money is suddenly conjured out of thin air, is nothing new.

“The fact is, this is like what happens in wartime. You know, you had the Great Depression, [and when ] we went to war, suddenly [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt was able to really spend money,” says the “Scheer Intelligence” host, “And as a result, we got out of the Great Depression. In wartime, the government just prints money, finds it somewhere, and no questions asked.

“And that’s what happened now,” Scheer goes on. “Because of this pandemic, Congress just said, OK, we’re going to find–what, you said $4 trillion; I’m sure it’ll grow to $8 trillion. They don’t do that ever about, say, dealing with poverty or education, or any of these things; they always are very tight with the dollar. But now, because we have this warlike situation, they can suddenly find this money, and they can spend it in a totally unaccountable way.”

But just as the deadly pandemic is becoming yet another opportunity for Wall Street and corporations to swindle the public with the help of the government, it’s also finally made one thing very clear: Universal Basic Income is absolutely possible.

“As you say, if they could find the money for all that,” Brown tells Scheer in response to his summary regarding how money has always been funneled to the top, “they could clearly find the money for the people. My preferred option [is what] they call ‘helicopter money.’ Money that’s just created by the Federal Reserve and flown–theoretically, the original term came from flying helicopters over the people and just dropping the money equally on everybody. And we could still do that, and that’s called a Universal Basic Income.”

Brown goes on to explain in detail why it’s not only affordable, but won’t cause the massive inflation that critics so often write about whenever the measure is suggested.

“It’s not going to be inflationary,” she explains, “and that’s because of the way money comes into existence. We don’t really have a money system; we have a credit system. All of our money is credit; it’s created as credit on the books of banks, and it’s extinguished when the loans are paid off.”

Perhaps her most shocking calculation is that were the current stimulus money to be divvied up and sent directly to families, it would end up being $13,000 per person, not the measly $1,200 the government is sending out as a one-off. Where, you may ask, did all the rest of that money go? As Brown and Scheer continually remind us, it’s been sent to the companies that pull all the strings in our rigged system.

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Credits:

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Natasha Hakimi Zapata

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First aired via the Scheer Intelligence Podcast on KCRW.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License