 US Empire usually functions via plausible deniability, even denying the overthrow of a democratic government is in fact a coup by, for example, painting military rulers just temporary transition period to restore constitutional order, or if a coup can't be nadeid, if you can't say no, that was a legitimate, just say it wasn't anything to do with us, we just happened to be in close contact with the people who did it, and we just happened to be, you know, funding them and potentially providing military expertise. But ultimately what they say is, the United States doesn't stand up and say, yep, we backed that coup. It was a coup, we backed it and we're proud of the role we played. That's not what they do. But whilst government press releases are careful with their words, pot smoking billionaires aren't necessarily so, especially not on Twitter. This was the case with Elon Musk on the weekend. So on Saturday in response for calls for more government support for business and citizens during coronavirus, the Tesla owner tweeted, another government stimulus package is not in the best interest of the people IMO. A Twitter user replies, you know what wasn't in the best interest of people, the US government organizing a coup against ever Morales in Bolivia, so you could obtain the lithium there. We'll fill you in on the context there. What does Elon Musk reply? We will coup whoever we want, deal with it. That's not the kind of thing you'll ever hear a press secretary from the US State Department say. It's not what you'll hear when a CIA director stands in front of Congress and has to justify what they have been doing over the past five years. This is the kind of stuff that you won't hear from official channels. But you know that Elon Musk is actually having regular conversations with the president. So when he says we will coup whoever we want, deal with it, you maybe should take it seriously, right? Now, Musk fans have obviously claimed this was a joke. It's just his sense of humor. I can't read Elon Musk's mind. Maybe he did mean it as a joke. But what we do know is that there was a coup in Bolivia and it will benefit Elon Musk. Why is that the case? We'll go into the details again about the coup in a moment, but why is the case is because Bolivia is a leading supplier of lithium, which is necessary for the production of batteries. Those batteries are used in Tesla cars. Tesla now the most valuable car production company in the world, surprising. And the democratically elected president of Bolivia, well, ex-president, although the last democratically elected one, Evo Morales was a social democrat unwilling to let U.S. corporations exploit the South American nation's natural resources. Let's take a look now. As I said, we're going into the details of the coup, why it was a coup, who supported the coup when they shouldn't have done. But first of all, because we're directly talking about Elon Musk now, I want to go to a clip of Evo Morales speaking to the Intercepts Glenn Greenwald a month after his removal from power. So that's Evo Morales speaking in December, so that was a month after he was forced out of power and forced into exile. In fact, so he's talking about that. So that's Evo Morales speaking in December, so that was a month after he was forced out of power and forced into exile. In fact, so he's talking about that how, you know, at the point when he was kicked out of power, Bolivia were expanding their lithium industry. And he was saying they would have had a role not just setting the price of lithium coming out of Bolivia, but the global price, because they were such a, or they would have been such a powerful producer, you could have seen something like OPEC, for example, where you've got different oil producing states who set a price. Now, that's exactly the kind of thing that the Western powers hate, because what they want to do is, I suppose, privatize it straight away, sell it for, you know, as cheap as possible to their corporations or take the profit themselves. They hate this kind of economic nationalism where a leader of a developing country or third world country, they found that unacceptable. And Evo Morales says he's convinced this was a lithium coup. Then seven months later, you've got Elon Musk, who runs Tesla. What do they require lithium for their batteries? He says, yeah, well, coup, whoever we want, deal with it. That tweet didn't, or wasn't ignored or was noticed, I suppose, by Evo Morales. Let's take a look at this. At Elon Musk, owner of the largest electric car factory says about the coup in Bolivia, we will hit whoever we want. Another proof that the coup was due to Bolivian lithium and two massacres as a result, we will always defend our resources. The massacres referred to their civilians who were shot in the protests, which followed Morales, or Morales is pushing from power, followed the coup. Aaron, I know you've been following this story. What do you make of this? How seriously should we take what Elon Musk said? Does it matter if he was joking or not considering that it seems, you know, that a coup did happen and it probably will benefit him? It was very reminiscent of 1950s Cold War, over Cold War rhetoric. You've got the old adage, the United States doesn't have friends, it merely has interests. Elon Musk was basically saying that. You know, who sang in a sort of very, you know, Gen X, ridiculing social media ties way, but he was effectively saying the same thing. You know, it's been about eight months now since the coup, the interim president, interim president is still there. Her party at that election got 4% of the vote. She's still there, 4%. Evo Morales, you know, the OAS, the Organization of American States said, well, you know, he kind of won by the margin that he did because if you win by more than a certain amount in the first round, I believe it's 10%, then there is no second round effectively. Because it was so close for so long, he was always in the lead and the OAS, nobody's ever said he didn't come first, because he was the only margin in the lead and then he sort of gets the necessary difference, sort of in the final hurdle, the final furlong rather towards the end. They said, well, that can't be correct. So nobody's disputed that Evo Morales came first. And yet, he has to leave the country, his family and friends and political allies are threatened with political violence. And you have a panoply of publications, the Economist and the New York Times, the Guardian, the Observer, saying that he, you know, he should have left. He was wrong to try and hold on to power. This is a country which for centuries has been ruled over by effectively a European political class. He was an indigenous leader. And the reason why he won a democratic election, by the way, in 2019 as well, is because Bolivia is a majority indigenous country. They make up the majority of the population. And so this story at any moment would be distasteful and savoury. But coming in the context of, like you say, this coup, eight months later, the interim European leader still being in charge and very little, very little contrition actually from the people that kind of cheered it on at the time. Effectively, nobody, very few, I mean, the only exception here is the New York Times and a little bit sunny hand out, has basically, oh, maybe I was wrong. But apart from that, nobody else has really done that. Hmm. I mean, let's go through some of these evidence, right? So, so as I mean, that was a very good explanation of what happened. So ultimately, yeah, you had the organized in American states, they say, although we're irregularities here, the election gets canceled, Morales gets overthrown, replaced by someone as you say, who got 4% of the vote. The whole international media is saying, oh, yeah, this is fine because it's an interim government. The interim government are going to make way for proper democratic elections, which aren't, you know, controlled and disrupted by this demagogue. You've heard all of the language about Latin American leaders before that that was the narrative, including in the MIT and the observers we're going to go to in a moment. But then an independent study six months later finds that, oh, actually, it turns out the election was fine in the first place. And this isn't something that we just read on, you know, like a left wing blog, this very reputable study, which has been, yes, reported in the New York Times. We can go to this now. A bitter election, accusations of frauds, and now second thoughts, a closer look at the living election data suggests an analysis by the OAS, the Organization of American States, that raised questions of vote rigging and help force out a president was flawed. You can go look up that article tells you in great detail how that was just a completely normal election. There should not have been concerns. It was just the fact that many of the... It seemed basically like there was a sudden surge in Morales votes when it came to the count. But that was just because he's more popular in more remote districts because the rural poor back Morales. So there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. No reason to void the election whatsoever. And as you say, and the MIT have now published this, they're not, you know, they're not suppressing this information. But at the time, you know, all the mainstream leader writers were backing it. And it's all very well to say six months after, oh, yeah, maybe they shouldn't have done the coup. But it's a bit late now because the interim president is still in power and they're probably not going to give that up particularly easily, especially as if polls are correct. They'll lose. The only way to keep Morales and his party mass out of power is to retain a dictatorship with military repression fundamentally. That's the only way you can rule if you don't have popular backing. But yeah, Aaron, you mentioned the sort of people who backed it at the time. I just want to get up some evidence of this and especially, you know, UK evidence. So this is the observer, our liberal paper of choice. Let's look at their leader at the time. There is also the fraught possibility that Morales and his supporters will boycott new polls, dispute the winners legitimacy and set up a rival administration as happened in Venezuela. Morales's claim that he was ousted by an old-style military coup is not justified by the facts. Democracy is still working in Bolivia just now. He has a responsibility to ensure that remains the case and issue any coup making of his own. If you read the whole article, they're like, oh, even Rales, yeah, he did do some economic policies, but ultimately he's got too powerful and he can only be blamed for his own downfall. And yeah, basically, this is just people restoring democracy. The responsibility is on him to now retain the peace and to make sure there is no constitutional disruption. Now, why have the observer there put, you know, the assumption, the assumption is, oh, if Morales had been over front, oh, it must be his fault. The left wing leader, oh, what an idiot. Then you find out six months later, oh, actually the election was completely fair. He was overthrown in a coup by a leader who has remained in power, a right-winger without any public support and what was a vibrant democracy with basically a healthy social democracy has now become a dictatorship. Right. You mentioned Sonny Hundor. Let's go to that as well. And actually, this is a good point because this is showing that not only do the mainstream press just toe the line. I just don't think, I don't believe the observer leader, right, has did any research into this. I think they looked at like the economists and they thought, oh, we've got to take a balance take, which is like, oh, we've got nothing against progressive economic policies. And we do think poor people should be able to have some food vouchers. But if someone's been overthrown, we'll probably side with the Americans because, you know, it's just a, anyway, it's ridiculous. Anyway, this is Sonny Hundor calling out people who are calling out the observer. So you've got Ash Sarkar again. I said her tweets come up a lot on this show. So she's saying what's happening is a fascist coup. It's de facto a war on women, the working class and the indigenous people who voted for Morales solidarity with socialist under attack in Bolivia. Now, as we've seen, the observer said this was legitimate. It wasn't a coup. Ash saying it was a coup. Who was history proven correct? Ash, what was Sonny Hundor saying at the time? The difference between Democrats and communists is the latter will ignore the trashing of democracy when it suits them. Now, who trashed democracy? It was not Morales. Do some independent research. Okay. As you say, he has admitted he was wrong. But again, six months later, it's a bit too late. But I want to go back actually to another exchange he had at the time because it brings up another person who always talks about conspiracy theories. This is Sonny Hundor. It's reassuring most of those calling events in Bolivia a coup are usually the people to ignore on foreign policy anyway. And then David Ivanovich says, you mean like the leader of the Labour Party and prospective Prime Minister. He always puts himself forward as this expert on conspiracy theories. What he's an expert on is dismissing people who've looked at some evidence and decided that actually maybe the narrative, which was pumped out of the American State Department, isn't necessarily true. You know, these people have all been proved absolutely wrong. The costs, the outcomes are huge. You've got a country which was a healthy democracy with egalitarian policies, which is now a dictatorship. And these people at the time are stupid left wing people who don't believe the State Department conspiracy theorists. It's astounding, isn't it? Well, yeah, going back to the observer editorial, you know, it's still a democracy. Just no, it's literally no longer a democracy. This kind of Orwellian double speak. I mean, they've got in that passage, it's incredible. They've got absolutely every every clause and every sub clause completely wrong. I mean, they couldn't have got the wording more wrong. You know, Morales is a dictator authoritarian would know he wants to do a coup. No, he's literally trying to resist a coup. It's still a democracy. No, this is literally an act which subverts its status as a democracy. And like you say, all they've done is they've got they've got the economists, they say, OK, let's basically say what the economist says, but we want corporation tax 2% higher. Let's say what the economist says, but you know, we want to rally a little bit more against global tax avoidance. That's it. They haven't got an original contribution to make. They don't really have a political poll of attraction. They haven't for 20, 30 years. The Observer, by the way, the Observer in the Sunday Times used to do stunning investigative journalism. The Observer, it was the Observer which found in the early 1980s that vetting of BBC staffers on political grounds was still going on on an industrial scale. That was the kind of story the Observer did 30 years ago. Now we have, you know, the Observer just from yesterday on Sunday, non-encity story. And it's editorials from late last year, just absurd, you know, obscene or well in doublespeak. And it tells you a great deal actually about that political tradition. And none of the Ronovitch and Sonny Handau in a way, Michael, they can afford to be wrong. They can afford to be wrong about everything because there's no overhead for them. They don't lose any respect amongst their fellow professionals. They don't lose the sort of the pundit gigs. David Ronovitch will still be on BBC Radio 4, you know, waxing lyrical about how China is a threat to the Pax Americana. You know, I was listening to Radio 4 the other day and I hear David Aronovich. And literally the first three words were Russia, China, you know, coups. I was like, oh my, this is like pure, this is like, I feel like I'm watching a Clockwork Orange and people are about to sort of start syringing things into my eyes. Well, I listened to David Aronovich talk about Russia and China on repeat. You know, the last people that should be taken seriously on foreign policy. I'm going to kind of, I'm going to capsize the statement from Sonny Handau. People like Sonny Handau and David Aronovich, but the point is there's no overhead for them. You know, the more wrong they are, the better, the more that BBC Radio 4 will elevate them. The World Service will elevate them because the point is all their job, their job is literally nothing more than to be utterly credulous with the State Department. Be utterly credulous with the British security services and poo poo people like you, me and Ash. That's their job. And if they just do that, they'll keep on getting the radio gigs. They'll keep on getting the kind of the pundit legitimacy. It doesn't matter if they're wrong. It doesn't matter if there's been an undemocratic coup, there's been the subversion of an entirely legitimate election result in Bolivia. It doesn't matter if a hugely valuable mineral resource has been stolen effectively from the Bolivian people in the name of, you know, sort of American multinational business. That doesn't matter. And it's a huge, huge problem. It's a huge problem in political journalism, particularly pertaining to foreign policy, which is why, you know, you need to go to navarameedia.com. Because, you know, there's actually some really good work on this, you know, you've got declassified in the UK, you've got Navarra Media. I think the intercept is the outstanding sort of new media presence in the United States over the last five years on original investigative journalism. There's clearly a number of great outlets, you know, in the UK, we've also got Tribune and the US, you've got Jacobin. They're doing fantastic work. And if they weren't doing that work, if we weren't doing that work, we're not the intercept yet. If we weren't doing that work, if Jacobin tribute, if you don't, if we don't do that work, nobody is. You know, Aronovic and Sonny Handler are unchallenged. And so, you know, we need to, we need to build that counter-mediacology because 30 years ago, papers like the Observer weren't doing this. Papers like the Observer were breaking the story that, oh, wow, the OAS is actually a bit of an American front. The OAS basically says what the State Department, you know, wants it to say. They're not doing that anymore. Sort of centrist, progressive mainstream journalism is failing and what historically has been quite good at. And so that's the space we now need to fill. I agree. There's one thing I want to finish on, which is, I suppose to highlight to you, I mean, you might know more about Bolivia than me. I don't know. I'm presumptuous here, but if you don't, it wasn't a particularly radical government. I mean, it was radical historically in terms of what has been permitted in Latin America, but it was fundamentally a social democracy, right? The kind of thing I back here. And to sort of show this, I want to get an article from the Washington Post. And as we've said before, Washington Post did not have any critical coverage of the coup. You know, they took the State Department line. But before the election earlier in the year, they were writing quite positively about Eva Morales's record in government. So this is a quote from early last year in the Washington Post by one of their Latin American correspondents. 13 years after his movement for socialism one at the ballot box is indisputable that Bolivians are healthier, wealthier, better educated, living longer and more equal than at any time in this South American nation's history. As Morales seeks a fourth term in election Sunday, his Bolivia is serving as a counterpoint to Venezuela in the hemispheric debate over socialism and our loaded word that has become a flashpoint in the US presidential race. The state will not be able to solve all problems Morales told the Washington Post. The state as the head of investment, accompanied by the private sector, that is the model of socialism we have. And the reason I wanted to point this out is because, you know, often what you hear in liberal circles in this country is, you know, like, oh, Cuba, they've, you know, terrible, they don't respect human rights. Why would anyone on the left value what they've done? Why can't all countries in the global South just be a bit like Sweden? You know, obviously, social democracy is which respect your liberal rights and have some sort of egalitarian redistribution. That's, you know, the best place to live. That's where rights are respected. I think that the Swedish model is probably the best model that's existed in modern history. But social democracy, where liberal rights are respected, and you have some egalitarian redistribution and international corporations are not allowed to just completely pillage your country. That's not allowed. That's what Morales was trying to do. What everyone says about, well, not Chávez anymore, Maduro, is that, oh, yeah, the redistribution policies were okay. But why didn't he respect liberal institutions? Now, next door in Bolivia, you had Eva Morales, who was doing the redistribution. He was respecting the liberal institutions, and he still got overthrown. And still, when he got overthrown, you backed it because you couldn't be bothered to check the State Department's press release, right? So if you were going to castigate countries like Cuba for not having a vibrant liberal democracy, and I would prefer Cuba to have a vibrant liberal democracy, what you have got to do is take seriously the fact that where people have tried to have a vibrant liberal democracy and egalitarian social policies, it hasn't been allowed. They've been overthrown. Thank you.