time afshin rattansi welcome to another lockdown edition of going on the ground in a week of the inauguration of the 46th president of the usa joe biden hailed and heralded all around nato nation media but joining me now is the legend that is the publisher of tribune and the founding editor of jacobin buskers and caro thanks so much for coming on he joins me now from new york i'm going to start by saying what do you make of the inauguration we saw a lady gaga wearing a brooch depicting what looked to me like the piece of coin a spanish painter picasso how optimistic are you. well i should say that

certainly as a socialist i'm used to being perpetual opposition i think if you're a good socialist in the united states given the horrors perpetuated by the us economic system at home and the horrors perpetrated a broad one is used to a posture of opposition i honestly would rather be in opposition to i joe biden i ben to donald trump i think joe biden is more susceptible to pressure and saying that isn't really much of a credit to joe biden either as a human being or certainly his political history which is quite a sword one but it is a credit to the fact that due to the fact that he has a social base that is disproportionately rooted in minority communities and so on there is some room to be in opposition and to pressure from the outside but i get

that that optimism is very cautious very guarded most of all i'm just glad that the culture war of the last 4 years might possibly be over a resource a pathway to and again i think both the liberalism and conservatism in the us have been driving themselves to the brink of evan sanity and it's going to be on that he seemingly moving beyond some of that and send it while being on one's god could arguably be. justified and he will justify suspicion of maybe virtue signaling a moving of the bust of winston churchill infamous for the famines in the global south and putting in say chavez but even you presumably were impressed by these a 2nd of what is announced within hours of him taking the oath x.l. keystone pipeline paris climate change must mandate no arctic drilling and he raises in the dream i am a good program the trump wool amazing. i mean some of these things are are

progressive measures i think some of these things are steps forward to obviously the scope for what a u.s. president can do is somewhat limited it's limited by the fact the u.s. system of government is extremely dysfunctional you could do some through a series active order you could do something as to a process called budget reconciliation which allows us for the simple majority and the senate and the house of representatives to get through certain advice don't necessary measures but on the whole in the u.s. system in order to get through any gridlock you need a supermajority of 60 senators the democrats now only have 50 plus a tie breaker in the form of the vice president and the us political system is such that if you really want to win the super majority if you're a democrat you have to win a super super majority of the popular vote but you know with biden again he's a somewhat savvy politician far savvier than hillary clinton and he's someone who for all its faults and i'm one of his most vehement opponents i left of center and

in the united states but for all his faults he has spent so much time as a politician in the united states that he from the next seventy's onward he knew that he had to interact with union voters with working class people in a way that modern democrats don't because back in the seventy's and eighty's the democrats really had a much different base to their politics they were really the party of a multiracial working class and is the one you said by the way about the 2 thirds majority required in the senate to invoke progressive legislation so has said that why on earth as he was being you know he rated would deals already seemingly being made in the senate with. mitch mcconnell when he had a majority he has a majority but you're saying he doesn't need the. the united states does not have a parliamentary system or even really a regular system in fact it's basically like the ruling party is always at best the

senior partner in a coalition there are so many bottlenecks there are so many choke points or so many places when an oppositional party can just stop the process and alas there they're far weaker than they are today even obama only had a couple months with this 3 fifth's super majority that's why the obama administration had to take the health care plan from the heritage foundation and they will get a. second but you know will what surprised me was the gender sacking gave a press conference to the white house journalists very quickly afterwards and said that one priority would be to attend to the root causes of central american immigration now why flag that up given the joe biden infamously supported the death squads of central america. well i think this is one thing were an american liberalism as a whole seems to think that the world started in 2016 or at least american empire

and all the bad things the us did started with trump upon his election they seem to want to return s.s. status quo ante but of course we know that the united states resist sponsible for the destabilization of thunderous removing or helping to remove a along with domestic elites a democratically elected center last government and this is when biden was vice president this is when biden was vice president and this was at the behest of figures like hillary clinton and contributing to the destabilization of this this area this region and in general if people are living in poverty if people are living in crime infested areas with no prospects for the future wouldn't you want to get your family out of the wouldn't you want to go move to the us or canada or somewhere else if you have access to greater opportunities. the fastow that the united states has for decades prevented the emergence of last nationalist projects

in these areas or when they came to power did everything possible to authorise their efforts and then also the us is that while we're going to remove the possibility of improving things for you at home we're also going to prevent you from going somewhere somewhere else so i think that if american liberalism is serious about compassion towards migrants as they should be and i believe that there should be a radically different immigration policy in the us for more compassionate immigration policy in the us they also need to be serious about the actions of us empire abroad particularly in the americas. i mean i do want to explore some of the foreign policy internationalist issues but perhaps fundamentally and i know at jacobin you show how interlinked interconnected all these different issues are or biden was one of the people at the forefront of destroying the glass steagall act you might have to remind us about how fundamental that is how does that and of

course the billionaire donations link into all the rest of it if he doesn't introduce. something like the gusty elect is the rest of it all bluster and progressive fakery while the democrats are pushed financial deregulation that among other things were your furniture it. it prevented the the linking of the retail functions the banks and the consumer oriented functions of bands giving loans to businesses mortgages to individuals and so on with its investment function and so you have banks engaging in more more wild financial speculation and of course this economy built on fictitious wealth with a big part of the boom of that the ninety's and early 2000 leading straight up to the crash of 2008 there were attempts in the u.s. senate to reregulate it through dodd frank and other legislation but this has

always been treated quite tepidly by the democratic party or the segments of it biden especially so the new democrat base includes a lot of financial interests and real estate interests and other. interests i mean 54000000 americans is it consciously tonight without being hungry yeah i mean i i think there's so many the scale of the problems is far beyond his program but if you look at the biden program it is far more expensive and what it promises only compared to the program that clinton and obama ran on and the best way for me to complexion why this would say that when biden 1st came into politics the national level in 1972 he ran as quite a center left figure for opposing the expansion of the welfare state this is the 970 s. then in the eighty's and ninety's when you've been much more cemented and the washington establishment he started advocating for tough on crime policies and for the

politics of austerity and now he's coming into power in a different moment and he's back to advocating more expansionary fiscal policies and some expansions of the welfare state so you could follow that trajectory to even the u.k. labor party and to other you know european the center left parties in other words some of these figures are bellwethers they shift with the top. i'm sick and i think the interesting thing about this moment is that this might be a moment when the center of laughter all around the world has the opportunity to use the power of the state to improve people's lives because right now with the pandemic and with the recession people all around the world are looking for help and they're not afraid about that that they're not afraid about government overreach they're asking for government help and the real thing is well by then take advantage of this opportunity you see i mean you know some might say that despite all the had you lation in the western european nato nations about biden becoming president actually given his violent opposition to universal health care

he would be considered an extreme right wing politician here in in britain by the conservative party i mean we have we could never have a conservative prime minister who is opposed to universal health care let alone one that. his foreign policy record i know britain is you know criticize well i would say this the tories are by and large i'm far more reactionary party and force than the democratic party i've any even joe biden is a figure but what it tells us is that once you win a big popular universal program is very hard for people to. to go against it publicly that national health service is so popular that even the reactionaries have had to reconcile themselves to the reality that the national health service is staying in the same way in the united states once we find a way in medicare for all i suspect you'll find some republicans who will defend it

just like republicans the united states well defend programs like social security and medicare are national health program for older americans people over 65 you know these are socialized app programs that you would not expect right of center people to support but they have to support it for political reasons i think that. and that's that's an important bit of bit of context i didn't use a slippery centrist figure i think you'd be comfortable with and maybe the liberal party of the u.k.'s maybe a stream right wing of labor maybe some of the the more flexible and malleable parts of a conservative party it really just depends on the year of the decade the moment that's why i keep referring to him has a as a bellwether. now ok in defense of the tory party i don't think they would ever countenance the kind of mass incarceration of biden champion to in his career let alone some of the policies on whole manner of things that we know about given

a given his past let alone let alone the liberal party in the cause of the labor party that was in charge when the iraq war stop you there more from the publisher of tribune and the founding editor of jacobin after this short break. i think this is a 3rd of ministration we've been down the shaft for going on 12 years anyway you know a big steaming $222016.00 boys dollars station the globalization now it's all coming to.

welcome back i'm still with buckets of daraa the publisher of tribune and the founding editor of jacobin let's just go through then some of his picks so the 1st one i actually before we get to tony blinken the secretary of state is this woman avril haynes who apparently hacked into the senate computers and. trying to sabotage investigations into torture why would avril haynes be appointed director of national intelligence if you look at the histories of these people you'll find that they're just drawn from the very small coterie they all go into the same couple schools in d.c. schools for foreign policy they all have the same experience at places like langley and elsewhere it's become a very common thing for democratic candidates. even for the house of representatives to trumpet their past positions as cia analysts and what you're also seeing in the by the ministration is military appointments at

a very alarming. level so obviously these are people who have recently retired from the u.s. military but are now shuffled into government posts and traditionally that was frowned upon it's not it's not illegal in any way because there are retired figures but what it does is it erode the civilian basis of the defense department in the same way that putting figures from the intelligence community to so-called that since euphemistically called in the u.s. media. into government post right after undermines the point that we want civilian watchdogs of these for oppressive institutions obviously some of these institutions like the cia i think should be abolished overnight and do far more harm than good and make americans and the world less safe not more safe but that's kind of outside the point but even within the now or confines of how the u.s.

state has functioned before i think there's an alarming turn from people who go from these intelligence organizations or from the military go toward the private sector where they get rich really quickly in the span of 4 or 5 years sitting on boards of companies i break down and other defense companies then go into government office when their guys get in power and so it's it's almost cynical i don't think any of these people or most people have real political beliefs. well tony blinken his return to the public sector he's the secretary of state if they in the senate. really value civil service i'm sure tell me about his record and whether he is appointment does signal the return of your intelligence agencies backing de facto al qaeda isis diane in syria because i'm hearing reports going on the ground hearing reports of troop deployments being made into syria already so i

can't confirm anything about about troop deployments i've certainly heard those those rumors as well we have to see what the what the future holds for for syria i would say this the american people not our intelligence leads not our officers and our military not our kind of foreign policy or whizzes in washington are strongly against interventions abroad the member of the iraq catastrophe is still very fresh i think there's no public appetite for this expansion i think even trump space held intact count and forced a drawdown of u.s. troops and afghanistan obama was from his base obviously forced to do the same and iraq and i think this should give us hope so what i asked for people is to obviously have no hope are assurances that the us empire will be in better hands because joe biden is in power but i have some hope in

a growing bipartisan consensus among the american people that intervention and more and meddling needs to stop and i think this is a new and refreshing phenomenon and it's the only thing that gives me hope and that every part. well what are they going to do then when the 3 quarters of a trillion dollars that have just been mandated for the for the pentagon i mean is it is a presumably nickel ahmed doro doesn't have to worry about all of that money being used by the by did ministration to attack the country with the largest known oil reserves venezuela because i understand biden wants to recognize one white oh well i think there will be continued attempts to after size both u.s. soft power and also that comes with a very ugly side. sanctions and other destabilization after its efforts to fund proxies and spur asymmetrical warfare and so on which

call comes with a tremendous human cost and often doesn't get the same public scrutiny i think if the american people knew what their tax dollars is funding these are these i've got states and places like yemen they would be at abt horrified at it i think if the american people knew what was happening in libya and their their their names and these interventions if they think they knew the the extent of u.s. involvement and i bet a sailor and elsewhere they would be horrified but that is at least a far cry from the direct military ventures that you saw in past and ministrations in past year but we're in and we're in the middle of a coronavirus global pandemic you expect by going to use sanctions even more than trump already was easing sanctions on the a bomb administrations because obviously sanctions so the countries sanction claim

mean that they can't had to quickly respond to coronavirus which of course given that we're only as strong as i was vulnerable means coronavirus will go on yeah i think it'll be a mixed bag on the whole so i think you might see continued sanctions and pressure probably ratchet up on venezuela i think you might actually see. may be a softer approach on cuba that obama ministration one of its few positive foreign policy achievements was the slight opening towards towards cuba on iran you might see a. weakening of sanctions and the attempt to pursue diplomacy which i think would be very positive we it's yet to see what's going to happen and. regards to russia policy but the democrats have been extremely hawkish when it comes to russia and and you know the real shame is this this growing tension between russia and the united states was completely unavoidable a lot of this happened in the clinton administration when the u.s.

had the opportunity to create a completely new geo political dynamic one based more on cooperation in the various less overt tension but instead decided to very aggressively expand nato for very unclear reasons it's not even clear what what should change advantage the us i mean we drew drew from it. so i think it's going to be a mixed bag but one thing i do want to push against and i'm not saying you're saying this is the idea that trump. lessened any part of us empire i think he like biden is represents more of a continuation of it without the same overt adventurism that you saw in the bush administration to some extent in the obama administration. ok i mean what's disturbing there is when you talk about russia because on the one hand we could talk about the foreign policy think tanks and advise them great gaming things by you know having reproached war with iran and them but al-qaeda are in power in

syria and doing things in venezuela being friends of cuba what's worrying about russia or is of course that really does risk the entire planet who knows whether rising inequality in russia under putin will make russia more more outwit in its responses to what they see is a perceived aggression from the united states i mean so world war 3 is more likely under by. i think that we're not going to see in our lifetime any sort of large scale conventional war thank thank god for that but we will see these continued proxy battles and asymmetrical warfare which will claim a lot of lives of people in the global south and it's our responsibility in the united states to say no to this kind of intervention and this kind of empire and this stone to figure out how to build a new order based on multilateralism based on respect for institutions i do united

nations these are imperfect bodies but this is the best shot we have at a different sort of world and especially with climate change and their rights and i think this is a real powder keg if you saw the east able as an f.x. of amount of refugees and they came out of syria and other places in recent years into into europe and you saw the response from governments which is often quite quite harsh and punitive and it fostered the rise of some right poppy those parties in these countries you could imagine what's going to happen when many more millions of people from sub-saharan africa from parts of south asia british are forced to flee because of the effects of climate change that they had no part in creating havoc he expected by them for all the acts so he's done by blind you expect him to stop fracking whole across the united states i mean i think like tension i think biden's climate policy is in fact even including something like like like fracking

is on the whole reasonable if it's a transition to something his whole fracking his whole fracking and he's absolutely for fracking he's for fracking because i think of the political ramifications of that it's a provider of you have jobs in places like pennsylvania and elsewhere and also because it's used as part of that transition that the idea that gas production even factoring in methane. emissions. might be a better bet than oil production that's a logic biden i reject that that logic you know i think there's a need for an immediate more aggressive leap to renewable energy but i think on the whole program matic lee biden is committed to the more far reaching climate policy than we've seen in recent administrations now will he follow through that's the question so i think we should be very cynical about the possibility of biden following through but in order for us to be effective and pushing him we need to

hold the methods word we need there at every for propaganda supply way when you say when you say we how you're going to be stronger than the billionaire don't is that gave disproportionately more to buy an intro. well i think on the whole there is now least on the left pole of opposition and the united states there's a handful of prominent laugh when congresspeople there's organizations like the democratic socialism america there's staring this within the labor movement which is a small portion of the u.s. but it's still 89 percent of our workforce that has a lot of structural power and it's now flexing its power in certain sectors and industries so does that mean we're probably going to run against the forces are raised are a bit gensis i would say probably not but it means that we have more of a fighting chance that we did in 2012 or 2008 while it certainly doesn't get as much prez's the nationalist working class movements that have got his back trumpets

and to 74000000 earlier on you were talking about how you wished the american people would understand some of the issues that you've been talking about how do you expect to buy to clamp down on media freedom you know when i saw the celebration in so-called progressive circles of the banning of trump's twitter account i don't know how jacobin and your other publications faring in the algorithmic censorship that goes on thanks to silicon valley silicon valley backed by you expect massive censorship renewal an expansion of the patriot act and clamp down of those men rights i think our standpoint needs to be a defense or free speech anything other than direct incitement i think should be permitted i do not believe that there will be more state censorship but an error when so much public communication happens through private mediums like twitter and

facebook that naturally calls for some sort of public oversight to ensure activity that we're not held hostage to rather arbitrary terms and conditions i don't want president what president would trying to tell that if he wanted to. to be able to communicate through those. avenues of information anyway well i think there is a push within the congress including a bipartisan push from segments of both the republican party and the left wing of the democratic party calling for more regulation of the social media companies that's one reason or use arguably that they tried to take action in this misguided series a bad thing in censorship they're trying to say we can self censor and self regulate but i think if anything they're proving the point they can't be trusted it's quite quite arbitrary. so we'll see what what happens i don't believe there will be a push towards more direct state censorship i believe though that the mainstream

the democratic party is very happy to have their pals in silicon valley continue to to limit speech and i think the most shocking thing was the banning and freezing of the new york post twitter account when it reported accurately in many ways on the biden 100 biden leak. this worries me the new york post i'm from new york i have been here it's a right wing venue has been attacking jakob and myself whatever for a very long time but. there are journalists there are people producing things for public consumption i'm more than willing to have the battle of ideas with the new york post we don't need some account balance on our side to regulate that. because a guy thank you enough of the show will be back on monday when we go to gaza until then keep in touch via you tube twitter facebook instagram and to.

join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm showbusiness i'll see you then. right now there are. people who are overweight or obese it's profitable to sell through the frenzy and sugary and solti and addicted it's not at the individual level it's not individual willpower and if we go on believing that will never change this obesity epidemic that industry has been influencing very deeply the medical and scientific establishment. so what's driving the obesity epidemic it's called for both as.

a towering figure in broadcasting for more than 6 decades legendary interviewer larry king has died at the age of $87.00. also major muslim federations in france reject a manual micron's anti extremism charter designed to combat. radical islam the president of the paris islamic confederation tells us why. groups anyway asking muslim 6 to clarify their position on subjects subjects that they have respected for years and years. protests.