 This is Jim Hogue, and this is my first interview at Orca, except for all the times I have been interviewed myself by other interviewers at Orca. And I'm excited to be able to interview today Paul Edwards, who writes for International Clearinghouse and Counterpunch and other anti-empire sites. He's the co-creator of class war films on YouTube and also films about the falsity of American exceptionalism, and one in particular, let your life be a friction to stop the machine. And I invited him on in particular because he has written the only article I'm aware of that trumps the hoax that Trump might be some kind of a tool of Mr. Putin in Russia. And he gives all the evidence you could possibly want on that idea. That idea has been promoted vigorously by the New York Times and by the DNC. So I want to get into that a little bit, but for those of you around here who are not aware, I did have a radio program for 25 years. And so I want to continue that somewhat with a YouTube channel. And what we will be doing is after Orca posts this, I will put it on my YouTube channel, which is still called House at Poo Corner. So without further ado, oh, I should also mention, for those of you who are not aware of my activism and Paul, you might want to know, I wrote the bill prohibiting electronic voting in Vermont with the help of some people like Peter Buknatsky and Ben Scotch. And that passed instantly. It was one of the quickest bills to ever get through the House and Senate in Vermont. And so I've been an activist over the years. And this is a kind of a way of continuing that. And I've been definitely a decentralist, which is why I am a secessionist. So that's part of why I'm interested in people who understand the concept of empire and why it's such a detriment to the world, to have people still on it, still making the case for empire. So again, without further ado, Paul Edwards, tell us anything else you want to tell us about yourself. And let's talk about your article. Good. I don't really want to go into any more pedigree than you've already done. That's well done. Thank you. Basically, I've been in one form or another an activist for almost all of my life, about one way or another, and pretty consistently at odds with and taking issue with the United States' exceptionalist bully boy behavior around the world from before Vietnam, going back to the atrocities in Korea when I was just a kid. Because what I found was my dad worked with the United Nations. And early on, and after World War II, he helped socialists and others escape from the Iron Curtain from when Russia took over Czechoslovakia. And in doing that, he crossed a line with the McCarthy people and was accused of being a communist and was polled. His clearance was polled. He was fired from his work and was out of work for seven years. So I watched this government operate on a man whose intentions were democratic and sound in a way that was as subversive as any kind of the stuff that's going on today. And it marked me as a kid. So from the time I was a young man, I took a pretty hard look at the United States and its behavior. And I found that it was masked by a deception inflicted on the entire American people, which was, in effect, deprived them of an ability to understand what their government was all about. It's kept America in the dark effectively, the propaganda machine, and kept them ignorant and unaware to the point where they actually behave against their own interests. And endorsing these things. So recently what I've done is to try to critique the behavior of America in its adventures ever since the business, the whole business of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East, began to accelerate this process of destructive interference in the affairs of other governments and basically the destruction of a lot of innocent humanity for reasons of commercial greed, essentially. For Counterpunch and ICH for quite a while now, they are two of the sites that tend to put out the real story on what's going on in the world, as opposed to the New York Times, the paper of record, the Washington Post, et cetera, and the entire propaganda machine. So that's my background, more or less. And I recently did a piece that you were interested in, which I call Total Eurasianality, which has to do directly with the shameful and absurd creation, concoction of the Democratic Party, that somehow Mr. Trump, who God knows enough to condemn him for so many, many good reasons, they've made it an issue as if he were a creature or a tool or a puppet of Mr. Putin, who is vilified as being next to Beelzebub, the devil incarnate, as the worst person on earth. Well, this is a fabrication which they created fundamentally to cover the fact that they got their ass kicked in the election in a way that they could not have imagined and didn't imagine by running a candidate who was a deep state lovebird and basically a woman who had advocated all kinds of the worst kind of behavior, military and otherwise, on the part of the American government. So that's kind of the one that you wanted, I think, to begin to discuss. And maybe you could give me a little cue on where you'd like to begin, or shall I just take off and run with it? Well, one thing I wanted to add is we have a very similar background in our interest in fake news. I wrote a very long piece for Vermont Independent on fake news, and I went back even to the War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, to give examples of fake news that would achieve a certain purpose. In other words, propaganda that would achieve a certain purpose. But my main focus was on the Spanish-American War, then I talked about the First World War, Second World War, and those bits of fake news that the media, particularly the New York Times, put out there in order to help the deep state, if you will, achieve its goals. And so going back to the Gulf of Tonkin, going back to weapons of mass destruction, the uranium, the whole, the girl who reported that the incubators were being disturbed. So that kind of history is something that we have both followed. And I think it's terribly important, as you just said, for Americans to pick up on the fact that the news they are getting, particularly from the New York Times, is generally a way to get the military industrial complex moving into a war, whether the military industrial complex wants to get into that war or not, which it usually does. That's where the motivation seems to come. And the New York Times, at all, are the avenue by which this news comes out. So with that said, tell us specifically about the fake news having to do with Putin leading Trump by the nose. Yeah, this is a piece of mythology that is a shameful concoction based on very little fact and a lot of innuendo and assertion. And of course, the New York Times and all of the media in America, which is basically the PR arm of the corporate tyranny that owns the game, that's exactly what they are. And there's no wonder in that. I mean, that is who they belong to. That's who they report to. That's where their loyalty is. But this business that's been created about Putin and Russia being in some way the controlling entity, the nefarious, devious force that has subverted American elections is entire nonsense. It's entire nonsense. In the first place, it's well-established that the DNC was never hacked at all. And this is a technological fact that's been established and has been suppressed by the press, by the phony press. And the phony press, by the way, what's odd is that Trump been talking about the press as being phony is in one of those rare instances in which he's actually telling the truth, because the American press is simply the megaphone for the corporate tyranny that owns the country, the deep state, and the governing power that runs America. So this business, the hacking never happened. It was actually, it was downloaded onto a thumb drive. And it was given by thumb drive, directly handed to a gentleman who, at one point, was an important diplomat in England who then got it to WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks got it out. So the whole thing crumbles at its base. But it's the only horse that they seem to think they have to ride. And they have relentlessly hammered on this thing, making themselves into fools and attempting to sell this idea, which on its merits would fall flat. The thing is, though, that it's reinforced by the entire media megaphone of the United States. There isn't, I don't know, of a single major outlet or a single major influence in broadcasting. There may be exceptions, but I don't know of them, where someone who has really clout and importance and position has said, hey guys, this is, bullshit is what this is, basically. And here's why. Anyway, the point of it is that I wrote a kind of a semi-saturated whole thing, which I don't think is, it wasn't intended to be funny, but it had to do with the fact of, if Putin and Russia, and particularly Putin, because they have to diabolize it, a face, and that's what they do, they make a devil out of someone. And how many references have you heard to Hitler in the last 10 years by idiots who don't know a thing about it? I mean, you and I were kids. These people who were talking about Hitler know nothing about Hitler, or about what Hitler represented. It's a figure of speech. It's a way of tarring someone with a nasty image that sticks. So the business of Putin's so-called influence and subverting the election, and the fact that Trump is supposed to be his puppet, I took a look at that, and what I found was, okay, let's suppose, for the moment, that he is Putin's puppet. Let's suppose Putin has a purpose and wants to have a puppet elected in America in order to subvert America. How does he manage his puppet? How does he make his puppet behave? Well, the first thing he would do if he were serious about truly undermining America's might would be he would have that puppet act with presidential power to diminish and cut and restrict the military budget, all right? So the military budget somehow passed at $700 billion this year, which is the greatest military budget in our history, including war times. Trump evidently did not perform in that regard for him, all right? So that's maybe that was a slip-up. So then what about the climate change deal? Putin was involved in that with many other heads of state. The first thing that he would probably insist on having his puppet do would be to be a part of that and sign on to that and support it because obviously climate change is danger to the world including Russia and its possessions. But Trump instead opted out of the climate change, the sole large country to do so. So that evidently, the hold wasn't very strong in that regard with Putin either. Another fact would have been the Iran deal, Russia's signatory along with other major nations of the Iran nuclear deal, which was thought to be a considerable achievement which took a lot of work to put together. Putin presumably as a signatory would have wanted Trump to endorse it and to throw his weight behind it. Instead it seems Trump wrapped it and opted out on that one. So there's, you begin to wonder a little bit about how strong is this hold that Mr. Putin, the diabolical Mr. Putin has over Trump but then there's a business of Syria. And Russia supported the right of Vashar Assad to maintain himself as the elected head of the country. They went in basically to defend that right against ISIS and other entities that were jihadis, some many of whom by the way we financed and supported. So first thing he would have done in that case that had been to ask Trump to listen, but out of this, leave it alone here, we need to keep Vashar Assad solidly. Well, Trump refused to do that. And in fact, he stayed until he was thrown out of Syria, basically thrown out. Putin had to confront him militarily and kick his ass out of Syria in effect. So the question arises really strongly at this point. If this is how the diabolical Putin controls Trump, then it's not working very well. It's really not, it doesn't seem to, it doesn't appear to hold up. So then you go into the business of, well, let's suppose, let's think about Putin in human terms and in political terms and think what would motivate a man to want himself to subvert a country entirely and presumably to find a way to wreck it through control of its chief executive. Well, the only real motive for that, of course, would be that he really wants to eliminate America from position of influence, to wipe it out as a world power and to take over basically NATO, which is an American tool, and take over the world so that he can be the dominant, imperial figure. At that point, if you're not insane, you realize this is a creation. This is a foolishness. This is not something that adds up in terms of human behavior. This man is not attempting to become the dictator of the universe. And this thing is a fantasy. This thing is a creation. What would he do with China, for example, if he's going to subvert the United States? Is he gonna ask China to just hang on while he takes over the United States and then perhaps turns onto, I mean, it becomes nonsense, Jeff. It becomes nonsense. There's no way to sort through it and make any sense of it unless you choose to view Vladimir Putin as some kind of mechanistic, automatistic, irrational case. There's no way to, there's no way that it adds up. Trump has very definitely not followed the direction or even the intranation of Vladimir Putin and Russia. He has done quite the opposite, which makes the whole story bogus and silly. And there are two interesting aspects of that. One is that the success of the propaganda machine in making Americans think that Putin is an evil dictator is pretty thorough. I know intelligent people who will spout that. Yeah, but Putin is a horrible dictator and blah. And I think back to all the horrible dictators that the US has murdered in their way to achieve what they wanna do achieve. And I don't have any evidence that any of these people were horrible dictators, particularly Saddam Hussein and particularly Gaddafi. Gaddafi had rebuilt Libya and they all, by the way, had their own monetary system. That's the one thing that all of them had in common was an independent monetary system. It was the gold didn't pull through the switch. That's when he had to go. He was engineering a gold-based denier to get off Petra dollars and to get off the IMF. And that's when he had to be assassinated. And sure enough, as Hillary sang so delightfully that murderous witch that he was eliminated and destroyed. Yeah. And everyone that you can think of going back as far as you wanna go had an independent currency. Even Hitler was working on an independent currency for Germany and Churchill, I've read the letter by Churchill in which he explains that, well, that's it. That's the one thing we cannot tolerate is the industrial success of Germany, which was growing in leaps and bounds because of its independent currency, which is exactly what happened in the American colonies, by the way, in the 1700s, the late 1700s, an American currency, though it was kind of a potpourri, was causing the American colonies to grow and succeed to such an extent that the English passed the Currency Act, which is one of my things in fake news. It was the Currency Act, anyway, my point being that the reason behind these wars is never told to us by the press. And one of them is surely the intolerance that the central banks have. And they're European central banks too. I don't think this is an American thing at all. I think it's a combination of all those central bankers who can't tolerate independent currencies. So they went after all these people for fake reasons, hence the fake news, and either assassinated them or invaded their countries, and both. So there's that. The joke about the hacking is that as an election activist, as a voting integrity, election integrity activist, I was screaming from the church towers about how vulnerable our election systems were. And there was this wonderful army of people screaming it with me, but you couldn't get anybody in power to acknowledge that. Even though people got caught and sent to jail. Oh no, we can't possibly have any funny business with our elections, and the BBC said the same thing, and oh, get over it. They don't have a problem. But then suddenly, lo and behold, overnight, Russia can hack our elections. And I found that so ludicrous that I thought that they would be laughed off the planet. But no, all these suckers seemed to believe suddenly these very people who didn't think that our elections could be hacked suddenly believe that another country, never mind the Sequoia and Debald and ESNS, all these companies that owned them, they could easily hack them unquestionably. No, no, they would never do that. But Russia would. So I found that to be the thing that I thought would get them laughed off the planet, but silly me, I was wrong. I don't think there's ever been in the history of the world a country as propagandized, a country who has as little perspective and as little knowledge about what is real about their government as the United States. The propaganda machine that Mr. Bernice talked about so long ago, that Mr. Orwell has simply closed down the American mind. And Americans have a great desire. They've been told they're the best people on earth. Their desire is to believe it and to believe that their government acts in their interest when in fact their government is their enemy across the board in every possible way. So I did have a question for you about other actors that influence, shall I say influence the American elections and influence American policy. And that's perfectly okay for other countries to influence American behavior and dictate and come and speak before Congress. That's perfectly okay. But it's not okay for a president to go and talk to another president. And so I wanted to throw in the Netanyahu factor when it comes to Syria and when it comes to the other behavior that I have found reprehensible on the part of the US not to mention slaughtering people in Gaza. But that influence seems to be another one of those unmentionable topics. Again, which is why I got kicked off the radio for pledging to boycott Israel for slaughtering Palestinians. How do you, how influential say do you think Israel has been in keeping the US trying to keep the US in Syria? And I know this is off topic and it might not be an area of your expertise. But what do you think Israel was up to other than Golan Heights keeping the US in Syria? I wanna start off by saying that if you wanna talk about interference in American elections the place that you begin is with Netanyahu and the Zionist-Israeli combine. I mean, this is another thing that America can depress and the entire Israel lobby fights day and night to keep this out of the public view. But you have a country where in the last administration, for example, Netanyahu was invited not by the president but by the Congress to address the Congress. He had something like 26 standing ovations. He owns the Congress through the Zionist money machine through Sheldon Adelson and the rest of them basically have bought the American Congress in terms of converting it into a dynamic power to substantiate and sustain Zionist-Israel. And Zionist-Israel is a criminal regime. There is just no question about it. The Gaza business is a horror beyond belief. It's direct parallel with what the Union of South Africa operated with in terms of apartheid. It is a reprehensible and criminal state. It has interfered deeply in American elections. It does it every single time. It does it in the midterms. It does it locally. It does it regionally. It does it state to state. It's a terrifically powerful entity and it is arguably destroying any kind of basis for reasonable democratic politics in America. And it has been a horrendous influence in the Middle East along bringing America along with its muscle to sustain it because without America it would fail and fail quickly. And the whole business of keeping America and Syria has to do with Netanyahu and Zionists almost maniacal obsession with Iran as having as being another power center which can offset their own power in the Middle East. And this is relentless and unending and it will not end. It's being pushed as we speak the effort to create a basis for attack on Iran is being pushed by Israel and by the Saudis who are by the way they talk about criminal dictators. I mean the United States has funded them from my entire lifetime. We funded a series of horrific criminal dictators around the world and Salman is just the latest that we have to be in bed. In any case, Israel is a terribly pernicious force in the Middle East and one which is because of its influence on American politics is determining America's position. Okay, have you seen the specific influence that Israel may have had in Syria? And I ask because I've heard a lot of very good contradictory, contradicting opinions as to the benefit of Israel in keeping in wanting to keep U.S. forces in Syria. I mean the one that's obvious that it achieved already was when it stole the Golan Heights it wanted to solidify that theft as a legitimate theft. I mean as a legitimate piece of Israel. And so that's recently happened, hasn't it? Israel operates on the basis of the idea that they need to be the controlling power in the entire region. And I think it's that sort of joined hands that has convinced the United States that it needs to keep Israel in that position and therefore anything that threatens that is poison. It's from the point of view of the United States. I mean Iran is another country where it's described in similar terms to Russia and Putin's Russia. It's described as something diabolical and entirely theocratic and intolerant. My brother-in-law is a Persian who is a professor at Northwestern University. We've been there, he's been there, he has family there. It simply isn't the case. Iran is not looking, Iran is not imperial. They're not looking to expand. They haven't attacked anybody in 2000 years since the Greeks. This is fantasy, this is more of the fantasy engine of the war machine. And that couldn't function without the New York Times. No, it's the entire media cohort that goes with it. It's not as though the New York Times is awful, which it is, and the LA Times is not. It's the whole spectrum that's just answered. I use the New York Times as a synecdoche in that it leads, it tends to lead. Now the Washington Post led with a humongous hysterical lie that was so idiotic, but they led with it anyway. And the idiot Vermont representatives went along with it, which is that Putin was trying to hack into the Vermont electric grid. I mean, my friends and I that have some kind of perspective, we just laughed and shook our heads and said, how long is that gonna fly? Well, these idiots, Leahy and Welles in particular, Sanders came in a little later, because he's slow. But they said, oh, this is terrible. What are we gonna do? Russia's hacking into our electric grid. Well, the whole thing was fiction. But it's, I mentioned that again, because of the absurdity of the entire hoax, occasionally something surfaces that's so absurd that you really got them, but you don't because people don't get it. What happens is that if they're caught, really caught way out, a story has dropped, then it doesn't happen anymore. And therefore, on the side, out of mind. The propaganda machine is interested in perpetrating the big lie on a constant basis. That's how liberals saw it, and they realized that it was, that was the way to do it, and that's how they do it. Our media are probably used to Americans, to confuse them and to keep them supporting the disastrous war machine that is basically eating their own resources. So the whole debacle that has occurred in the Middle East, I think we agree that there is a major monetary factor in that. And when I use the word monetary, I'm very careful that people understand that it means the creation of money. I'm not talking financial, I'm talking about the creation of money is what is forbidden by the deep state. Absolutely, absolutely. The American currency, the dollar is, regardless of any reasonable basis for it, is the default currency of the world. Everybody can tells you that. But interestingly, both Russia and China now are talking about another system, not only of basket of currencies as opposed to the dollar, but their own issued, Russia's bought 2,000 tons of gold in the last 10 years. And they're gonna do the book there. They will be initiating a gold-backed ruble before law. America is not in position to do to them what they did to Gaddafi. The Russians have weaponry that is two and three generations beyond anything the Americans have. This to me is a mindblower in itself because how the generals who are pretty much idiots, in fact, coutowing to system and procedure, how they can be so ill-informed as to think that you would want to provoke the country that has hypersonic weaponry, that has weaponry that is not cybernetic, that defies tracking, that is eight and 10 times the speed of sound. And the weaponry that they've developed is phenomenal. I don't want to get into that here, but people may not be interested, but it is phenomenal. It is far beyond what the U.S. has and the U.S. simply can't afford an open conflict with Russia. We would have our ass handed to us if it was a disaster. And Russia doesn't want it either. They really didn't. Putin said it during a news conference, he said, you know, we tried to do agreements with it. We tried and they wouldn't listen to us. Perhaps they'll listen now. The idea that Congress can keep on poking Russia, I think they don't know what else to do. They're told to do that, so they do it. And they haven't got any phase two proposition. So they keep doing the same thing over and over again. And I think Putin is well aware of the bankruptcy of the whole idea. So, well, let me thank, I should have said your name many, many times, Paul Edwards for being my guest on this program. And there may be other events and other times when you can come back in and let us know what you think's going on. I'd love to do that, Jeff. It's been a pleasure talking to you. All right, you too. And thank you very much everyone for listening. Bye-bye.