 I am super excited for this week on China is Not Our Enemy to have our special guest and my dear friend, Bob Scheer. I was just realizing that I have known him since 1974 when I was in the Jerry Brown administration, but Bob is an American journalist who's written for ramparts, the LA Times, Truthdig, Playboy, and now his cheer post and many books. His column for Truthdig was nationally syndicated by creators syndicate in publications such as The Huffington Post and The Nation. I remember back in the day when Bob was on left right and center with Ariana Huffington and moved her left. But as soon as that was over, she fell back to her old ways. No, that's not fair. Okay. Well, you were a big influence. Between 1964 and 1969, he was Vietnam correspondent managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine that influenced so many of us that were part of the anti-war movement at that time. And from 1976 to 1993, he was the national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics, and the military. We're so happy to have you today, Bob. And I want to start with when did you first start engaging with China? Well, when I was a kid in the Bronx and I hated the food that my German father and my Russian mother prepared and I got tired of pizza. Can you hear me all right? Yeah. And so obviously, like most people, my discovery of Cantonese food was a revelation that on this very basic thing of how you eat and how you prepare food, there was wisdom elsewhere. And then I could taunt my Italian friends because their spaghetti and everything came from China. So I guess my recognition that ethnocentricism, which is the biggest disease in America after racism, but they're combined, was in play. And I never coming from immigrant parents who countries were not necessarily always so wonderful, but they were good people, you know, and then growing up as a kid, my father's family in Germany have obviously was exterminating and succeeded in exterminating my Jewish family in Lithuania. So I had to grapple with the limits of national identity and ethnic identity and that good people can become monsters and good cultures, which produce Beethoven and Einstein and other people could also be produced to death camps. So I have always been at war in my brain with chauvinism, national chauvinism, and I'm not being unserious when I say, okay, Chinese food. Well, then what else is there? Well, you know, in my journey and life, China has as great a claim as any country to being the center of civilization. It's called the middle kingdom. My serious engagement with China became when I was a graduate student in Berkeley, and I got a fellowship in the center for Chinese studies. A number of our leading sinologists these days were my fellow students, Orville Schell, who you know, the China Center, and so he's got a little more conservative, I think. But anyway, I, Franz Sherman was one of the great sinologists, was the head of the center at one point. Unfortunately, he took a sabbatical and a guy named Robert Scalapino, who was very Cold War oriented and so forth, I think helped push me out. But I was interested obviously in China, and I wanted to go there, and I wanted to see what this whole Cold War was about. So I went, first of all, first country I could go see what was called communism by our state department. Already was Cuba. I went down there as a graduate student, came back, wrote a book about it. But I really, my interest was China. And to try to get into China was not easy. I went to Japan, I went to Vietnam, I mean, I had other interests. I travel a lot in Asia, did a lot of journalism, and so forth. But I really wanted to go to China, and I didn't succeed until it was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. And in 1970, I got in. First, I went to North Korea. My big goal was to get into China. And I got into North Vietnam, and could see the ravages of the imperial posture. And, you know, I had already been in South Vietnam and elsewhere. And so I, yes, I developed an interest in China. I started writing about it a bit. And I just want to make one point about that. We've always gotten China wrong. And I don't think it's an accident. We get everything wrong, because that's what ethnocentrism is. You have to be a make America great. Here was, you know, Donald Trump said, I'm going, at least he had the sense to say it's not exactly great right now. So he was going to make it great again. And Hillary Clinton's response was, oh, no, it's always been great. Well, really, let's take the Chinese experience, for instance, was what we did to the indigenous people, what we did with slavery and black people, obviously, have a hard time saying, but what do we do to the Chinese people? We brought the Chinese people here to basically build our railroads and till our fields and work our minds. And so forth. It wasn't just Chinese restaurants and the Bronx, the Chinese labor is a large part of what made America great. And if you live in California, you have the evidence of it all over the place. You know, and yet, Chinese were denied their fundamental human rights, even while they were working on the railroad, or digging the mines, they couldn't get married, they couldn't marry a non Chinese, they may mainly brought over males, so they wouldn't reproduce. They couldn't get citizenship. And you had the, you know, exclusion act, you had all of these things. And, you know, in fact, the basic rights of even to apply for citizenship, really, in the basic right, even to get married, only got codified at World War Two. When China was our ally, we felt it was perfectly normal to put Japanese Americans into a concentration camp because they were the enemy, but we really put them in the concentration camp because they were not white, then they were what we called yellow. So you could round them up. We didn't round up the Chinese because they were our ally. That was an inconvenient truth. And I remember even as a kid, because my father was a German Protestant and, you know, but my half brother was in the Army Air Force. He bombed our home area of Germany. He was trusted to be, you know, but Japanese Americans, of course, were not. So we always had a bias against Asia and Asians and the comic books and everything that I was raised on would put them as sneaky, even when they were on our side. The Japanese, because they were not on our side, they were totally evil, much more evil than the Germans, even though the Germans were doing at least, you know, towards the people that I came from, the Jewish people, much more evil stuff. I don't want to minimize Japanese were very harsh. Obviously, I was just talking to a Korean student who's doing a paper on the need for Japanese reparations towards Koreans. So I'm not absolving them, you know, but and they certainly did terrible things in China. But my point is that even it took really World War II and Shankar Shack and the fact that we had bases and, you know, MacArthur and to recognize that China could be something of an ally and they were involved in the some of the wartime discussions and everything. And then this thing happened of the Chinese had a revolution and we only saw it in our terms of, oh, is it fit to the Cold War or not? Not even our terms of, you know, so we developed a mythology that drove the Cold War and that really is what still informs us because we want enemies. That's the whole thing that Orwell pointed out, you need enemies to actually cloak your own failings, particularly as a rapacious capitalist society. And you also need enemies to have a big war industry, which is really the engine that seems to drive a lot of our profit making and so forth. So Russia, we lost Russia as an enemy. We still keep trying to stoke it with Putin, but reality is Putin's an anti-communist. Putin, if there's going to be a change in Russia, it's probably going to be the communist party. I mean, there still is one and Putin defeated communist. Everybody forgets that they bring up he was a colonel. Well, you know, everybody in Russia was something in the in the government. But the fact of the matter is he was a reformer in Russia and he broke, you know, actually with Gorbachev and he was in the, you know, Leningrad group and he was championed by people close to United States and the Yeltsin crowd to bring Putin in from Leningrad back to Moscow because he wasn't, he didn't drink big, big thing. He wouldn't drink and he was good administrator, solid. And he's the person that they got Yeltsin and Yeltsin put him up to run against the communists. Everybody forgets that. I only bring it up because so much of this Cold War ideological thinking still guides our relation to China, you know, and desperation Trump will bring up, oh, they're communists. Well, you know, but really we start trying starting a new Cold War with Putin, who is an anti-communist. That part of the record is clear. He's actually by American standards, kind of a Republican in the, you know, he's not a Bible belter, but he's championing the Russian Orthodox Church. He believes in cartel capitalism, you know, and he's what they would admire in the United States if they didn't need him as an enemy. But the Chinese are run by a Communist Party and it challenges the whole mythology of America in the Cold War because they invented an international communism. I remember as a kid in, in junior high school, the international communist conspiracy and its timetable for the takeover of the world was the proper answer to every single one question on every single multiple choice test. The international communist conspiracy and its time available for the takeover of the world. Well, you'd have to be an idiot. Even then, when I was in junior high school and I wasn't, I wrote letters to the New York Times challenging their rhetoric and their view, because there weren't two communist countries in the world that were on decent speaking terms. You know, the, the, the Sino-Soviet dispute started before the communists were successful. It goes back to the late 1920s. They prefer Shankar's cheque to Mao. I mean, you know, the, the, the fake news about China is so long lasting and, and you can expose it. I mean, you don't have to be particularly brilliant to know a lot. You say, wait a minute, you know, just look at what happened when Mao went to Moscow and you read Khrushchev's memoirs and you read their, they were racist to Russian stores, the Chinese. They didn't think, oh, so were communists. Big deal. You were a communist. Communism was always nationalist, always national. It wasn't for working class people, maybe in the streets of Paris, you know, or even Manhattan. They wanted some solidarity of people, working people. But once it got a whole nation state and people seizing power in a nation state, you know, the international solidarity becomes a distant concern. Okay. And I know I was in communist North Vietnam. I was in communist North Korea. I was in what we call communist Cuba. I was in communist Russia many times as a journalist. And so I saw it. You couldn't even go from one board across a border without these guys giving each other the elbow, you know, there was no love loss, you know, between North Korea, for instance, in China, even though China is their only trading partner or something, but I crossed that border, you know, and their body language just reeked of contempt. And they were all nationalists. Anybody wants to think about North Korea as anything other than some kind of fanciful nationalism, you know, and China has always been driven by nationalism, national pride, the Han majority. And, you know, so yes, I'm suspicious of nationalism. I think it can be quite dangerous and limited. But the really big error about China is to deny that communism in China is a national movement. And that's why it really has a lot of strength. Because when push comes to shove, they don't go conquering countries that they don't have a need to conquer. They're really quite conservative in the sense of their expansion. They're fighting stupidly over some islands with another communist country. Look, we fought the whole Vietnam War on the idea we were really fighting against China, right? That was the idea. Because obviously Vietnam was too small, had no military, couldn't fly. They say, if we don't stop them there, we'll have to stop Miss San Diego. Well, how would the Vietnamese... Didn't that, I mean, didn't that start with Korea? Weren't we actually... Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. You can make the point or I'll make it. But it's so obviously true. We didn't give a damn about what happened in Korea, you know, its division or what have. We didn't give a damn about what happened in Vietnam. This was all... We first went into Vietnam because it was a favor to the French imperialists who want to get back, you know, Bob. But it fit into a Cold War thing because Ho Chi Minh, who Eisenhower even recognized clearly had what he said in his book, Mandate for Change, support of 80% of the people and was the national hero because he fought the French. And he, by the way, was on the... Just like the Chinese Communist was on the American side during World War II, helped rescue pilots who were down. You know, it was our go-to guy, Ho Chi Minh, just as Mao was. We trusted him more than Shankar Shek. But the fact of the matter is we play with people's lives because we use ideology, we rewrite history, we lie with impunity when it's convenient. And it's always convenient because how otherwise can you justify your imperial presence everywhere? You have to have some human rights coding and everything for it. But in China, it wasn't a fit anymore than in Vietnam. But the irony is we sacrificed millions of Indo-Chinese people. You know, McNamara once said three million. More accurate figure by this time is probably five, six million people in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. And all in the name of stopping international communism. Because, I mean, I asked the question, you should always ask these people, what do you mean if you don't stop them there, you'll have to stop in San Diego? How did they get to San Diego? You know, Air America with the CIA is flying the plane or American airline? How did they get there? You know, let alone bring troops, let alone have air, they don't have an air force that can get to San Diego. And nobody even cared about the logic. I mean, the primitive thinking. And they say, no, because why? They're an extension of China. And everybody would admit, I remember, whether I was in Saigon or, you know, later, you know, even after the war in Hanoi, I was in Hanoi during the war, but I talked to people and said, oh, yes, it's not Vietnam, the sophisticated view from the Americans would always be, but it's China. Because they couldn't bring up Russia, because we were now doing detente with Russia. Okay. And Nixon was into that. So, no, no, it's China. China is the big mess. And China will never change. Russia can change. They're white people. They can change. They want goods. We can buy them off. And so with the Chinese, though, they're inscrutable, right? They're little ants. That was another big Henry Luce time life description, you know? They just marched to the drum beat or the queen bee or whatever. And they had all these ideas. Well, what happened? The US suffers the most ignominious defeat in its history in Vietnam. Okay. Instead of Vietnam attacking, Vietnam is now one of our closest allies in Asia. But what happened with the defeat? What happened with the defeat? And after we kill all these people, including 59,000 Americans, waste a lot of resources, destroy, you know, drop napalm. By the way, I got a very good piece on sheer post, an interview with the director of this new movie about the FBI and Martin Luther King. The FBI tried to destroy Martin Luther King, get him to commit suicide and everything, because why he didn't see why we had to be in Vietnam. And what turned him around really was the pictures of napalm children and everything that we had run in Ramparts. But the main thing is he didn't buy the idea that somehow this is necessary to the survival of people living in, you know, Atlanta or LA or what have you. But just to make a fine point, you ask people now very sophisticated think tank people say, but wait a minute, what happened to your theory that if we don't fight this war and win in Vietnam, they will be a national security threat to us. If we don't stop in there, we lost. Okay. So you had a hypothesis. I love that. Always ask them. What was your hypothesis when we were fighting the Vietnam War? It was Vietnam is an extension of Chinese communism because they have this bond of communism, even though that bond hadn't kept Yugoslavia. It hadn't kept anybody together. And the Chinese and Russians were actually shooting at each other across the border. But you ever ask that question next time you see one of these defense intellectuals, what happened when you suffered the most significant defeat after you told us we have to win or the Vietnamese and the Chinese will come here? What happened? And the answer, the right multiple choice answer is the Chinese communists and the Vietnamese communists went to war, a shooting war over those bloody islands and over their border. Okay. A shooting war. They didn't shoot Americans. They didn't shoot the French. They didn't shoot anybody. They shooting at the Chinese and Vietnamese communists. And they are still hostile. So when people say, let's stop doing business in China, you know, they don't say, Oh, Apple should move because the Chinese don't allow unions that are aggressive or Apple should move because Chinese workers are not paid a good minimum wage or don't have a good health. There are a lot of criticisms that you can make of China. Okay. As I think Apple should be on the side of saying no, there should be independent aggressive unions in China and they should have a high minimum wage and they should not exploit young women from the villages making your little iPhone. But when people say stop doing your business in China, they say take it to Vietnam. We can find more docile workforce there. That's the whole thing. No one says we're going to have better human rights and so forth. So it's the ultimate hypocrisy. We don't care at all about the quality of the life of ordinary people. It is the factory for the world. And what we saw here, Donald Trump tries to blame China for this virus. No mention, by the way, the greatest pandemic that we've had in modern society started in Kansas, the pandemic of 1918, the other virus pandemic. No one calls it the Kansas pandemic. It starts that spread by American military troops that are Kansas Fort Riley and it's spread to the world because Wilson has to lie, fake news to the American people, deny we even have a pandemic. And then we spread it to the whole world and 50 to 100 million people die. But very few people really call them out on the chauvinism of the Chinese virus. Also, how many people do you run into now and say, oh, thank God for the Chinese communists. They are feeding us. They are all my clothes, everything I'm wearing, every mic I'm using, the screen I'm talking to, all made in China. Where the hell would I have been in this pandemic if not for the Chinese communists? Nobody wants to say that. I order it on Amazon, good American company, but where's it coming from? Amazon, of course, not paying its work, is what they should be paying. Setting allows the example for the rest of the world. But nonetheless, in this pandemic where I am teaching, paying my taxes, earning a living, trying to keep it together, supporting a large extended family, I'm doing it because I could order a great new microphone here, great new lights, great all this stuff, including everything I'm wearing from China. And there was a guy who made a very good documentary was try to have a Christmas without China. So no one has the decency to say, look, they may have their problems and I can criticize them and there's things to criticize in every society. But no one has to say that the Chinese were most successful in controlling it. Whatever they did wrong. And yes, every government in the world will lie about threats to their security and who screwed up, they all lie. I was in Chernobyl, okay, one year after that, and I saw all that lying. I know every government in the world lies with impunity to make themselves look good. So yes, the Chinese did not handle the first outbreak the way. But why is Wuhan now functioning? Why is China back to business? I might students from China, because I have them in my class at USC, we have 6200 students from China. Well, most of them have gone home, they think it's safer than being in Los Angeles where we're in the in the eye of the virus storm. Okay, so my students, they're going out to restaurants in Shanghai, you know, they're functioning, their life is back, they contained it, basically. Why doesn't anybody say, hey, maybe we can learn from them? You know, maybe they use cell phones in a way to help you monitor the cells. Maybe they were earlier to adopt masks, you know, maybe there are some positive things about their society. That would be the basis of wisdom, whatever you're talking about, okay? But you don't get any of that. It is socially acceptable in the most liberal circles to be totally biased and irrational about China. Okay? And it's a very dangerous for you to have. Wow. Thank you for all that. Who else am I going to talk to? I'm locked into my apartment here. I ran eight miles this morning, but it's pretty hard in an indoor apartment to not go crazy. I'm 84 years old. I'm of the age group that is quite vulnerable, you know? So I venture out, I think, three times and since March. So I got you. Well, so let me express my admiration for Code Pink. I really want to do that, you know, because, you know, there are very few people that have had the consistent commitment to understanding the other, which, after all, is the biggest challenge in rational thinking about this world. You're not demonized. You have to be critical. You have to have your stand as they shouldn't be imposed by your government, which happens to be the biggest military power the world has ever seen. But what I love about Code Pink is that you've kept your integrity, whatever you're evaluating, and it's driven by your base, by your activists, and so forth. I know some of these people personally, I certainly have followed your career for a long time. And whether you work for Jerry Brown in his administration, where I first met you, or now from the outside, you know the difference between trying to influence these people, what you were talking about before, and selling out and careerism and wanting to go to dinner parties, you know? I've been to a White House dinner, one, at least, with Bill Clinton. I sat at his table. I know the power of seduction and the kind of jobs they can offer and everything, but the ease with which people give up their rational thinking and all the things we say was wrong about Trump, fake news and everything, how easily my more liberal friends have embraced fake news. That's been my experience all along. I have a lot of friends in mass media. I worked for the LA Times for a long time, 19 years, I guess. No, 29 years, I'm sorry. I think, yeah, yeah, 29 years, 15 as a report, and then I had my column and everything. I loved those people. My wife was the vice president and the associate, but the ability of people even had very good news organizations to rationalize, to go along, to not question, you know? I mean, the New York Times, why have they been so wrong? Why were they so wrong? Not just about Iraq, Iraq, about Afghanistan, there's so many things. Why? Because careerism compels it. Code Pink is the anti-careerist. You want to destroy your career, go work for Code Pink. Well, we need safeguards against careerism. You know, Jody, you're it, you know? I know. I know if I write something where I, yeah, I'm starting to soften up, trying to look the other way, too good to check out, you call me out in 10 minutes. You have. You have done it, you know? If we weren't in a quarantine, you come out and just shout at me, you know? And I think we need that, you know? Because the seductions, that's what Orwell and Huxley were really writing about. The seductions of a modern capitalist society are awesome. The rewards. I mean, you have it right here in the pandemic. You've got at least 60% of our population really, really hurting. Then it's going to take them 10 years, if ever, to get back to, this happened with the Great Recession, you know? But you have, and then you have your top, you know what, one or two percent baking out like the worst bandits in human history, okay? No kings could ever do it that well. But then you've got that other group of people that we often hang out with, you know? That, you know what, they are from the top three down to maybe even the top 20%, I don't know what, 25%. And there are enough goodies, enough crumbs falling off the table. So you're still getting your paycheck, you know, and you're still getting some subsidies. That's what this whole subsidy thing is about, you know? It wasn't anything about helping the people, cleaning those other people's houses, you know, or working in these grocery stores or anything else. You know, it was all about how do we keep, you know, our people from going crazy, our people. And our people at most is 30% of the population, you know? The real winners are obviously the two, one, two, one half, one a percent, you know? But that is what the whole response to this if you listen to Reverend Barber, he says that you, you know, there's 150 million people in the United States that are living in, you know, close to poverty. And so that level of people are the ones really suffering right now from, from COVID. But I want to ask you, let me just tell you, by the way, okay, go ahead. No, I mean, I want to tell you this, because I know this personally, it happens through into marriage and everything that I'm connected with our Latinx population here. And it is really tragic, because these are the people who still have to make some money. They're cut off from the normal supply chain, and it is really frightening what happened, what's happening to these people is almost not commented on. And I'm not talking just about a question of citizenship. I mean, I'm talking about people who, and in those states, you know, all right, there was a $600 bonus everybody. Lawrence Summers says, by the way, Lawrence Summers who created the Great Recession, more than any other human being, Lawrence Summers who lied to Congress, fake news told you this is wonderful, these hedge funds know what they're doing, these collateralized debt, oh, they understand them, you have to be really smart, then they all testified they didn't understand them. But Lawrence Summers said a $2,000 bonus too much, you know, what's the justification for that? Can you imagine this guy got six and a half million dollars from the D Shaw hedge fund, you know, while he was supposed to be advising politicians, you know, and oh, they'll get spoiled on 2000, they won't want to go back to work. So that's why we lost the 600. And now we're coming back with 300 to supplement unemployment. Meanwhile, we find our state agency here in California gave away what 25 billion or something to people who were not deserving, but we knew how to scam the system. I mean, that's really okay, enough. Now I've dominated the conversation, I'll be accused of being a credible sexist pig, but I'll sit here as long as you want and I'll shut up. Well, I wanted to ask you, you talked about the span for which you've been looking at China and all these things that have happened. What have you seen change? Because both on China and also, you know, with this campaign, China is not our enemy, what we're finding is that people are so clueless about China still. And that, you know, we, you know, we have a campaign where PBS just censored a show about how China took everyone out of poverty. And it's a factual show. Has it always been this frightening? Has China always been this censored? What has created so much disinformation? And as you spoke about earlier, the ugly racism. Greed. Greed. Look, come on. These people know better. They just know better. They know it's never gonna, the world is never gonna be good guys, bad guys, good people, bad people. Yeah, there'll be systems that are terrible and there'll be systems that maybe are not as terrible or have some potential. But this kind of fantasy about history and the capacity of people, that's really at the issue here, the capacity of people to make their own history. What I have witnessed as a journalist and I've traveled all of the world, I've been in war zones, I've seen a lot of stuff, you know, the basic conceit is that we Americans somehow know what would be best for the Vietnamese, we know what would be best for the Chinese, you know, we always deny that this is done out of our own self-interest, right? We deny that our interest in China is really getting cheap clothing and cheap, you know, look, why is Jeff Bezos now either the first or second richest man in the world? All the people listening to this, why? Why, what is it about Tesla that has allowed, because after all, Tesla has not really made a lot of profit, you know, in the United States, by the way, I have a boat, I have a Chevy boat and I use, I've been using an electric car now for five years. But in the United States, electric cars are not taking or have not taken route and it's not a great big market now. There's some snob appeal to Tesla. So why how did Jeff Bezos suddenly, you know, why is the stock market so big on Tesla? Why is he now competing, you know, I mean, I mean, Musk, not Bezos, he's competing with Bezos to be the richest man. Why is it on Musk so wealthy? Is this a space idea or what? No, it's the Tesla stock. I'm sorry, I apologize. But why, you know, indeed, why are both of them competing for the richest? But let's just take Tesla. I already explained about Amazon, without the China supply line, Amazon hardly would have made the profit that is done there. So that's Bezos. But let's take Elon Musk. Any answer? Anybody out there, they allowed to ask questions? They can ask questions. Okay, well, let me tell you just in case they don't wait. Somebody said we do coups, get over it, because we love our cheap shit. Yeah. Okay, anything else? Well, because people listen in the market in China, Apple and Tesla and many other companies couldn't do without the market in China. No, let me ask you listeners, listen, is there a specific what has happened with Tesla just in the last few months in relation to China? Does anybody know who's listening? You know, I'm not blaming you. I don't blame my students when they don't know stuff. It's because the media is out to lunch or something, I don't know, they're tone deaf. The reason Tesla is important now in booming in the market is the first X car came off the dam assembly line, okay, made in China. The biggest market for electric cars by far is the Chinese, but why? Because you can't breathe in Beijing for four or five months of the year. Okay. And the fact of the matter is, you know, they're at least come to their senses. I think, by the way, the point you made earlier, China does have a big victory. Everybody wanted to map the future. When I was in graduate school in the sense of a Chinese studies, they had between four and 500 million people, probably more closer to 400 million people. And the conventional wisdom is China could never develop. The land is exhausted. They don't have any petroleum overpopulated, overpopulated and so forth. China now has a billion more people. Okay. And they lifted for 500 million people out of abysmal poverty. If you want to talk about human rights, there is no 800. I know I'm giving you conservative figures, Jody, because, you know, I that's what I do. Okay. But you could, I'm talking about abject poverty. They've never been done in human history. Never. It's not all I want because I'm one of these lefties who wants the workers to be paid the same as bankers, you know, that's my view. But, you know, I believe in, you know, guaranteed free healthcare and everything for people. You know, I'm not driven to the morality of the market. But even if you are driven to the morality of the market, it's something England wasn't able to do in their industrial revolution. It was something the U.S. was not able to do. In fact, still doesn't do. We still have the dependent upon the exploitation and division of minorities. I don't have to tell you, in California here, you know, if the Mexicans would all go home, boy, you'd really have a depression not to be believed, you know. But the fact of the matter is, China has done that. Okay. But they've done it at a great price. So to talk about global warming and not recognize, and this is true of India as well, it's true of other countries, Brazil, we have imposed on these countries that they have to use. In China's case, they had to be dependent on coal. They didn't have much oil. They had to use much more primitive technology, hurt their workers and so forth, go through a harsh industrial revolution. And why? Because they, oh, yeah, they're great. They're feeding us. They're doing all this stuff for us. Okay. Well, the prices, their environment is seriously degraded. Okay. Now we tell them, hey, you can't do it that way. But when they go to higher tech, like, right, you know, the new internet connection 5G and everything, oh, they're using it for subversion. Oh, when you know, we have a couple of billionaires, right? We have three or four of the richest companies or most successful companies on the internet are in China. Oh, we find out a threat. We don't want to use their products. No, it's a threat because they might get into the higher end production. You know, why does Apple make so much damn money? They claim, well, we have the special capacity for design in Cupertino. Why? Are the people who end up in Cupertino, particularly smart, creative, first of all, quite a few of them are Chinese or from India or some other place, you know? And, you know, Zoom, we're talking on a guy who was originally educated in China, who developed Zoom. I don't know if you're using Zoom, I assume you are. Okay. So we have this conceit that somehow we in Cupertino and the people who come here, this we have the special source here to be creative and design and map. And therefore, we can justify having these young Chinese women, some of them commit suicide and so forth under oppressive but somehow we can justify it because we can make it all work. So some very small percentage of the money made off my iPhone stays in China. People always forget that, you know, most of it comes West and it goes to the suppliers and everything you should ask Apple. And so the rewards there are not great, but we have this idea somehow they now they've proved this wrong. The Chinese turn out to be able to do good. Oh, they can do, they not only had great recipes for cooking, they actually have good recipes and design and eye for products. They can do that. So can people from India and so can people from Brazil. And you're keeping your power by developing this fantasy somehow you are indispensable. Well, you're also indispensable because you control the dollar, you control the banks, you control the world trade organizations, you write the rules. Okay, so the Chinese now are on the right side of I think of the danger of climate change because they can't breathe in their major cities and they had this tremendous, these tremendous problems. Okay, so they have embraced the electric vehicle, not perfect solution, but at least with electricity you can produce it somewhere away from the cities where it's killing everyone. Here I'm in LA, we're grateful for only main reason, we're grateful for the pandemic, we're miserable over all sorts, every other reason, but at least I can see mountains today. I saw snow, you know, when's the last time I saw I've been living downtown for about 20 years. You know, I saw snow, my goodness, you know, and also tells us maybe the drought won't be as bad. But the fact of the matter is in China, they at least recognize as a matter of necessity that just as they did with wearing masks, you got to wear masks, you don't have a big argument about it, you know, and you got to monitor behavior on the phone and who's been in contact. Well, they know you need at least electric vehicles, you know, you need more mass transit, they've been pretty damn good about mass transit. I'm looking here, we're trying to build an underground train system in LA. I've been looking at it for 20 years now. It's a joke. When is it going to happen? It's probably going to happen when we don't have people want to live in downtown LA anymore, you know, because of their fear of illness that we mismanaged. By the way, we have the greatest, the worst record in managing this pandemic and you can't blame it all on Trump. It's our medical system. It's our way we treat science and profit and everything else. Nobody talks about that. Why has the United States, every single social system in the world, whether it's Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Brazil, India, everyone in the world, obviously in Germany and France, maybe England, not so good, you know, but you know, the fact of the matter is, we have the worst record in the world that reproduces no humility whatsoever. No, it's the Chinese virus or they mismanaged. Well, they also dealt with it. They smashed it, you know, so there's no humility understanding. So I just want to get back to Elon Musk. I'm going to make that point. Okay, because it's an important point. And I'm not going to, I see some of the chat people want to demonize. It's fine. Go ahead and demonize. But the real reason that Tesla is over is not the US market and not US production. He moved out of Fremont because the public officials in Fremont dare to say that you, Elon Musk and your factory have to observe some rules about the pandemic. He said, screw you, I'm going to Texas. Okay. And that's what he's doing. But he ain't going to make the cars in Texas. He's making them in China. Okay. And other places like about mostly China. And he's making it for the Chinese market. And that's why he's now either the first or second richest person in the world. Okay. And then we'll blame some Chinese entrepreneurs for trying to play the same game. Oh, they stay secrets. And let me say something about that. We say you can't use a product with 5G or something of China because they have some part of the system and you're going to jail one of these women who works in a high level, you know, at Walway, the company and so forth. All right. But they should trust us. Now after Snowden for God's sake, why anybody in the world should trust a product that had anyway made in the United States or designed in the United States? When Apple has admitted that our intelligence agencies, you know, forced the back door and trapped their data and cut into the cables of Google, for example, under the ocean and did everything to destroy the authority and respect for the capitalist system. Because if capitalism should mean anything, if we evoke somebody like Adam Smith, who hated monopoly capitalism, that was what he was writing about. But nonetheless, if it has any virtue, it should be that the private sector has autonomy and that government has some limit. Okay. Well, we have set an example. How dare we talk about, you know, and attack Julian Assange attacks Snowden for revealing this truth that the major invaders of privacy in the world, the major connecting of this invasion of privacy to surveillance, the major authority for a surveillance society is in the United States. And it certainly precedes Trump, hardly a Trump phenomena alone. Okay. So we have said, really, you shouldn't trust any American product. We don't say that. But the reality is, how could anybody using an iPhone anywhere in the world not think that the NSA has entrée to it? And when Apple, which by the way has a damn good record at trying to because they know it would destroy their business model, trying to protect privacy, having a big fight with Facebook right now over privacy. But the fact of the matter is, our government has said, no, we're going to break into any phone and do anything. Fortunately, by the way, let me do a shout out for Chief Justice Roberts. He actually is on the right side of this privacy issue. And his decision in that case involving California and the police seizing a cell phone wrote a very important decision. But in the main, we set a very poor example. So again, one last China thing, the idea that you will not use chips or something from China, when you have set the model of sneaking your spyware and into everything made or controlled by an American company is obscene. And the fact that people go, the fact that we even have to have this discussion shows how brainwashed are intellectual classes. And you know, and I don't even know brainwash is too flattering to them. It's more that they, they go along with it. You don't even have to be brainwashed. Right. That is one of the questions we have. First of all, Chino Shea asked, you know, what is the basis of the confrontation between China and United States? And I think you said that so eloquently that it is greed and, and the greed of the capitalist leaders. But then Stephen Rode asks, how do we get average people to stop blaming China for their economic woes? What does it take to overcome this propaganda from all sides? And you were just talking about, it's why does, what is the benefit for everyone? And I'm going to pull in one other question on this, which was TADS, which is a little misinformed. But he's what he's asking is, is like, you know, we all we hear these really bad things that China does. And, and, but we hold them as really bad things instead of like comparing them to some of the bad things that happen in the United States. I don't know. Yeah. You know, they're all out there. It's like, we only digest anything that's horrible. Instead of looking at things that in relationship to, you know, what is happening in China about human rights, we're driving them to war. What is the first casualty of war human rights? Do you actually care about these people? Do you actually care about human rights? You wouldn't be driving us to war. Yeah. What's your first question of the same person who has been very active in supporting the ACLU and LA? Stephen Rode? Yes. I think that's a different Stephen. Okay. But I'm glad I wanted to just bring up the ACLU. I am a fanatic for individual freedom. I believe the ACLU was right when it said you should defend the rights of people called Nazis to march in Skokie. I believe, I believe that the right wingers now, we actually read a story this morning that members of Congress, Republic and members are being called out because they have been connected with some group or so. We have a witch hunt now of anybody who thought maybe the election was rigged after all the Democrats said the election that Trump won was rigged and they went after him for four years to say it was rigged. But anybody who dares to say something like that, wow, they should be arrested. They're responsible for the... Well, I've been in demonstrations. I wouldn't like to be held responsible for what some people did later. You discover some of those people were government agents. They were there to hurt the whole cause. This was true saving people's park in Berkeley. Dan Siegel, a great lawyer, said take the park. He didn't mean take it violently, but then they tried to prevent them from being a lawyer because somehow he gave a speech. So I think we're on a very dangerous course when we treat human rights as a luxury. And I applaud Code Pink. I applaud the ACLU. I applaud organizations that are consistent about human rights. As individuals, non-government actors, not bought off of control by government, we have a clean hands. When I was in China, North Korea, I trust you, I'm a little worried when I was in North Korea, but less worried when I was in Vietnam. I confronted Castro. I interviewed Castro for the LA Times. Actually, I was down there and I challenged him on the UMAP camp where Cuba was arresting people for being homosexual back in the 60s even. I brought that up later when I interviewed him. Well, that was before I was at the LA Times then. I was at ramparts at that point when I interviewed him about that. So it was like 68 or something. It was anyway the night the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. I challenged him on what is your position on, are you going to condemn Russia? That night he did, by the way, but he changed his position a few days later. But I believe as a journalist, as a citizen, as a human being, you should always challenge what you think is wrongdoing. That doesn't mean you can order the bombing of people who don't agree with you or you should invade their country or you use it as an excuse to avoid anybody questioning your values. I mean, when we were attacking Russia, they would respond and say, what about segregation in the American South? And the fact is we know one excuse that J.A. Gohova, this goes back to the podcast I have on KCRW today and I have a sharepost. Let me give a promotion about this very good documentary about the FBI's destruction of Martin. Try to destroy Martin Luther King. Well, they used anti-communism against him at first because he had some people who were called communists or were communists working with him. Well, the communists in America were very strong and supportive of civil rights. Why deny history? They were the first group that talked about the Scottsboro case, talked in the 30s and 40s about it. We had a segregated armed forces that fought World War II. Communists were among the few groups that occasionally talked about that, so why not be honest about it? But you can't use the argument that would then justify what's going on in Russia or Stalin. So as long as honest individuals and writers and intellectuals and activists and labor leaders speak honestly about human rights, they should condemn anything in the world they think violates human rights. They're not bringing state authority, state propaganda, state self-interest, and hypocrisy to the discussion. Jody Evans, Code Pink, you have shown you'll take your lumps, you'll be arrested, you'll fight for what you think is right. So wherever you are, I assume you'll do that. It's in your nature. But even if you make wrong statements, you're an individual. You're willing to pay the price for it. That's different when our State Department or their State Department or anyone or any government buys off organizations, sends up front things, lies, and so forth. It's a whole different world. So I have no hesitation. I think China needs vigorous independent labor unions. I think they need First Amendment protection. I think everybody in the world should be aware of any government power, understand the needs to limit it. I have no hesitation about this. Power corrupts. It will corrupt every society in the world. I don't care whether it's the Vatican or it's Communist China or Democratic US. That was the lesson of our, yes, admittedly racist, male, white founders. They had one bit of business that they knew real well was the need to limit power of themselves. After all, the checks and balances in the US Constitution and in the amendments was aimed at themselves. They knew their fellow founders could be monsters. They knew power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It reeks. All of their letters, all of their correspondence, everything has that one basic idea. That's different than the President of the United States saying, I got to kill millions of people in Vietnam to protect freedom. No, you're lying and you're using state power and you're doing what Orwell warned about, whether he was talking about the Soviet Union or talking about the United States and Huxley even more profoundly saying, sure, in the West, you'll do it with seduction, with consumerism, with distraction, but you're basically lying to people. So there's a world of difference with saying what a journalist, a writer, a citizen, a physician, you know, physicians for social responsibility won the Nobel Prize. Why? Because they were consistent in their messages. They were against nuclear weapons, whether they were held by communists or Democrats, liberals or conservatives. They said these weapons are barbaric and they will end life. Okay. And that's why they deserved the Nobel Prize. People come along and say, I'm for peace, like an organization like PEN now, which has been captured by people who gave us a lot of war talk and everything in the Clinton and Obama administration. You know, okay, as long as we have the drones, it's okay to destroy people in a wedding or something. And they, they, they're very big on the rights of people in the Ukraine or, you know, the Uyghurs and, you know, I'm all for their rights. I'm from the right of Muslims to pray everywhere in the world and to organize and have their own life and believe in their own God. I'm for that right in the West Bank and I'm for that right in a province in China. Okay. Now, if you don't feel the same way, fine. You're another individual. Okay. That's the difference between what I do and what a government does. And for the United States government to use human rights as a defense for being what Martin Luther King said, remember, you know, the year before Martin Luther King was assassinated, he gave that speech at Riverside Church and my hats off to the memory or to if she's still alive, Cora Weiss, you know, who was there helped organize that. But he said, how do I tell a young person to get over the United States to be nonviolent, even though they're being cracked over the head or abused by people? How do I tell anyone I'm a champion of nonviolent world? How do I do that when my government is the major purveyor of violence in the world today? It's the most important statement that Martin Luther King made because in the sense that it took the most courage because at that time he knew the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover were after him. They were blackmailing him with all their tails first of being a communist, then his sex life or what have you. They wanted them to destroy him. They wrote a letter to him that, you know, you have to commit suicide and everything. And he knew that Lyndon Johnson, even though Hoover probably had stuff on Johnson, just as he had on Kennedy. Well, I don't want to anger the president. I'm sure there were plenty of people said, Martin, you know, forget about peace and everything. Just concentrate on civil rights. Well, that is a big test. And Martin Luther King was so offended by what the US was doing in Vietnam. He said, I can't shut up about this. And, you know, there's a real question. What happened to Martin Luther King? Because he, as we now know, was under 24, 7 surveillance of the FBI. They knew what he was doing at 9 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon, you know, and he was organizing a march there in support of janitors, but it was all about raising poverty as an issue in the United States. It's a very courageous thing, which we now know we really need because I'm surrounded by homeless people and their little tents around here and big prosperous international city LA. That's all the only people I see out of my window and on my few little walks are homeless people by the thousands in the rain today out here. You know, that was the issue Martin Luther King was raising. It's not just about, you know, yes, black people are the most oppressed people, but, you know, we have to deal with a larger group. He said, and the question is, you know, in this great free society, why, how was he assassinated? What do we really know about it? And we do know that J. Edgar Hoover actually thought the guy she had the right to court, try to force the guy to blackmail him to commit suicide. You know, so we talk a lot about freedom and the proper use of power. We have the most power any society has had in the world. And then you have to ask, what is the freedom you're talking about? Is it the freedom of someone like myself in a privileged position to be able to hire a lawyer and maybe defend myself if the government doesn't get too angry and to have enough income, you know, until you get blacklisted or fired somewhere and pushed out? Is that what we're really talking about? Or is it the power to redress grievances, to challenge authority, to demand justice, to demand change? And I make a prediction by the way, what's being done to the right wing in America and some of those people do scare me is going to be done to black lives matter because they've now got license. Oh, yeah. Wait a minute. There was a riot. There was a mob action. There was this. We can go after all of you now. Were you there? If you were just there at that demonstration and somebody broke the windows of that department store, you're culpable. That's what's going on now. And we have the right to investigate you on every level, destroy your privacy, get your family out there. So happy when kids say, oh yeah, my dad was involved with that. He must be a bad guy. Turn in your parents. You know, we're having that now. I see these news stories. Oh, he was revealed to be interested in that because his nephew or his son talked about it. And we think that's great. Well, we didn't think it was great when it's done in other places like the Soviet Union, you know, or Germany or something. So we got to be really careful what's happening now. And what's happening is taking American self-righteousness once again to the extreme. We are the city on the hill. We are wonderful. And anybody who's angry with us, including our own citizens, there's something, what did Hillary Clinton call them, the deplorables. Anybody who supported Trump must be a deplorable, must be a racist, must be sick in the head. Well, what were there? 74 or 75, six, I forgot, let's track. They're boated from, despite everything, you know, are they all deplorables? Are they all sick in the head? You know, and so there's a conceit in this country that is quite dangerous, that goes to the heart of the issue about China. You know, despite China, you know, Middle Kingdom, actually making a, could make a better claim than just about anybody else, to be at the center of human civilization and human history, whatever that means. They certainly have had a storied and, you know, come on, you know, Cambodia, which we thought we could bomb back to the Middle Ages. Everybody forgets that Cambodia had developed dyke system and system of agriculture and everything, engineering, when we were living in the most primitive, I'm not putting down indigenous people, but their skill set was not at the level of the Cambodian peasants in hundreds of years before. So, you know, that arrogance that drives our current China, that how dare we, yes, as individuals, even as a society, we want to be consistent and blast people, other governments for their violation of human rights. Yes. But if you're going to blast them for how the Chinese, if our government is going to blast the Chinese for how they treat Muslims, how the hell do we treat Muslims? What do we do after 9-11? We made every Muslim in this country have a sign on them like I'm an enemy. You know, we rounded people. What do we do? What do we care about Muslims if they happen to live in the West Bank? We've killed over a million of them in the Middle East. Yeah. No, I mean, this is the point. If you want to claim, I mean, there's a time, you know, maybe Sweden at some point or India at a certain point where they say, you know, we're going to try, you know, I forget we had the Five Continents Alliance and, you know, Olive Palme and so forth. There have been countries that have actually tried to identify with an objective, neutral, open, honest position on human rights, but no major country. They're all hypocrites, you know, and then it's dangerous when you happen to live in the most powerful country the human race has ever seen. Rhetoric matters, because you all will then go from the point that you are virtuous and they are evil to killing them. And we have a really depressing record of killing people we have called monsters. So we want to let you go. Thank you so much for your time. You have one more minute with so much great information. And you don't have one last minute. I have one last minute. I just want to tell you something I discussed on sharepost. Yeah, okay. Sharepost. Yeah. Okay. No, I'm all for it. But I'm not selling it. You want to go there? Go there. We don't take as people do contribute money through Patreon, but I'm not begging anybody. I like to say I can also support it out of my social security check. I'm still gainfully employed. But I always been raised to admire Aristotle. And my students challenged me in my ethics class at USC a couple of weeks ago. They said, well, you don't bring up traditional, you know, Aristotle and, you know, ethics. So I said, but extra promise every time I read Aristotle, I fall asleep. But I do begin with, I do begin with Aristotle. And before that, I begin with Confucius, you know, after all, Confucius gave us the golden rule. And there's a lot of wisdom in all of these philosophers. But I came across a quote, I'll admit, I actually read it in Wikipedia, about advice that Aristotle had given Alexander, you know, the first he had been his teacher, and then he was his advisor. It's very brief and I'll read it. He said to Alexander, he said, quote, be a leader to the Greeks, and a despot to the barbarians. Look after the former, the Greeks as after friends and relatives and treat the latter, which is the barbarians, as if they're beasts or plants. And then I told my students, I once went to Karl Marx's hometown in Trier, Germany as part of my mission to understand my German relatives and how could they have, you know, my uncle was in the German army fighting at Stalingrad against the communists. So he did into it voluntarily. He was drafted and he would have been shot if he was a farmer. Okay. But I sat in Trier, where Marx had developed his whole idea of the dialectic and internationalism and so forth. And I sat on the furthest extension of the Roman Empire on some stones that he had played on as a child. And there's a little museum there that the social democrats maintain. And it occurred to me at that point, the Romans defined the Germans as barbarians. And that's what the Greeks were doing to the Persians and to everyone else, the barbarians. That's what we've done with China. They're the barbarians. And we even did it when Chiang Kai-shek was there. We've done it with different, you know, come on, we wanted them to be high on drugs and exploit them on their cotics and rape their women. I mean, the whole thing, you know, and you know, this whole imperial attitude is so contemptuous of the other. And if they happen to be white and happen to speak, have a common shared root of language or religion, we tend to be different. But that man is profound as Aristotle would tell this emperor, this very thing, treat the other or some people we treat as family and relatives. The other we treat as barbarians or plants, basically inhuman. That's what's gone on with China. We have always defined the Chinese and the Vietnamese and, you know, go down the list, the Arabs in the right of the list, you know. And even by the way, Jewish people who we turned away at Ellis Island when they're trying to get away from Germany, you know, when we didn't quite swing in yet with it. And Jews who were discriminated in the United States when I was growing up or here in Los Angeles, you're leading clubs wouldn't let Jews be members. And Richard Nixon had couldn't sell his house to a Jewish sign, not only a racist covenant but an anti-Semitic one. Okay, so, you know, the demonization of the other has been very important part of Anglo-Saxon history, including our own. And I just do think there's something insulting to the Chinese people that we should even be having this discussion. What right do we have to ask a question like, you know, can we trust the Chinese or, you know, do we have to intrude on their history? We, the people who have dropped more bombs on a country, little country like Vietnam than we did on Europe in World War II, are we not barbarians? I mean, we get the right to just challenge anyone in the world or whether they're incapable of taking care of their own people. We do as individuals, yes, we do as individuals to have the right to assert our own sense of morality in terms of speech, write a poem, write a song, condemn what you want to condemn. But as a government, as a culture, that's what we're really talking about. We're talking about using state power. We're talking about Americans voting for a government as we did and we've done in the Rock War, lied to fake news. We vote for government to save freedom. That's different than saying, hey Joe, no, you shouldn't say that. You can say anything you want and you have the right on the basis of your religion, your ethics, whatever, to assert any notion of your values. But we're talking about the use of state power through trade agreements, through war, through intimidation, through international banking to tell people how to live. And we claim we're always doing it in their own interests. You show me the last example where we did it in their own interests and where we remain consistent. Was it World War II? It's a long time ago. Which war has the United States fought? You mentioned Korea, really, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, where we helped create this monstrosity, where we backed the Mujahideen before the Russians even invaded. Well documents, Big New Brzezinski, our great national security advisor under Bill Clinton, admitted it to an interviewer, a Nobel observer. So when was the last time we intervened anywhere in the world really concerned about human rights? We've backed dictators, we've sell dangerous war equipment and everything to the worst dictators in the world. And by the way, as Nixon proved with China, hey, when it's in our interest, we'll get along even what somebody's called a communist. After all, you know, after I went to China, Nixon went. I don't think he went because I showed his promise there. But the next thing I knew, I had my passport yank for going to communist China. Okay, my passport yank. I was threatened with jail for going. I was not allowed to go to communist China, let alone Korea, let alone Vietnam. Nixon goes and he has a traditional Mike I drink with now guy described as the bloodiest, you know, leader, China's had communist, you know, and he's there. No, we're going to do business with them. And the same people that were willing to kill Americans to go fight against China by sending them to a place like Vietnam suddenly wait a minute. Oh, communism not so bad. You know, which is what Elon Musk is saying right now. Communists Oh, I can do business in there that I can't do in Fremont, California. Because in Fremont, California, they're actually labor unions, maybe an environmentalist, and maybe even some elected officials that will tell me I know you can't keep operating in the middle of a pandemic. But in China, hey, not a problem. Okay, that's it. Thank you, Bob. Thank you so much. Deep gratitude for everything you do and write and say fierceness. We need it so much right now. So adding some wisdom to everyone's day, reminding everyone China is not our enemy. And you can engage with us every week at the different action at could pink.org. This week we have an amazing letter to Biden on how he needs to back down on his China hate written by one of our team members, D roadie. So chow everyone until next week. Thank you. Peace.