The Republican establishment, the mainstream corporate financial wealth, is getting to a point where it can't control the base it's mobilized.
I've occasionally been asked to talk on Israel-Palestine. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it elicits hysteria in the community.
In the United States, and to a certain extent in Canada, there's very little interest in what happens outside their borders.
The United States is a very insular society. Most people know very little about the outside world and don't care that much. They're concerned with their own affairs.
People don't have knowledge and understanding about the outside world, or about history [in the USA].
Syria is bad enough, it's a pretty terrible atrocity. But there are much worse ones in the world. So for example, the worst atrocities in the past decade have been in the Congo, the Eastern Congo, where maybe 5 million people have been killed.
The main mineral in your cellphone, coltan [a black metallic ore], comes from the Eastern Congo. Multinational corporations are there exploiting the very rich mineral resources of the region. A lot of them are backing militias which are fighting one other to gain control of the resources or a piece of the resources.
The government of Rwanda, which is a US client, is intervening massively, and Uganda to an extent. It's almost an international war in Africa. Well, how many people know about this?
It is the worst atrocity underway [in Rwanda]. But it's barely in the media, and people just don't know about it. And that's quite generally true.
What happened in Syria was, President [Barack] Obama had made a statement announcing what he called his "red line": You can't use chemical weapons, you can do anything else but [use] chemical weapons.
Credible reports came through that Syria had used chemical weapons. Whether it's true actually is still open to question, but it's very probably true. At that point, what was at stake was what is called credibility. So if you read the political actors, political leadership, foreign policy commentary, they constantly point out accurately that US credibility was at stake, and we have to maintain US credibility. So therefore something had to be done to show you can't violate our orders.
A bombing was planned [in Syria], which would probably make the situation worse, but would at least establish US credibility.
What is "credibility"? It's a very familiar notion. It's basically the notion that is central to the Mafia. So suppose say the Godfather produces some kind of edict and says you're going to have to pay protection money.
The United States is the Godfather when it establishes edicts. Others had better live up to them, or else. We have to demonstrate that. So that's what the bombing of Syria was to have demonstrated.
There was very little international support, even England wouldn't support [bombing of Syria], which is amazing.
[Barack] Obama was reaching a point [with Syria bombing] where he might not have been able to carry it off.He was losing support internally, and was compelled to send the vote to Congress, and it looked as if he was going to be defeated, which would have been a very serious blow to his presidency, to his authority.
Israel produces and stores chemical weapons. So therefore the US will prevent the Chemical Weapons Convention from being imposed on the Middle East. But it's necessary to evade this by misrepresenting the convention, and I think maybe 100 percent of the media, or close to it, go along. But that's a critical issue. Actually, Syria's chemical weapons were developed largely as a deterrent to Israeli nuclear weapons. Also, not mentioned.
For the past century or so that's [ Monroe Doctrine] actually been true, but it's declining very significantly.
South America has virtually broken away in the last decade. That's an event of historic significance. South America just doesn't follow US orders. In fact there isn't a single US military base left there.
South America goes its own way dramatically in international affairs.
There was a hemispheric conference in Colombia. It couldn't reach a consensus, so there was no declaration that came out, [but] on the crucial issues, Canada and the US were totally isolated. The rest of the hemisphere voted one way, and the US and Canada rejected it. So there couldn't be a consensus.
The US and Canada are now increasingly isolated in the hemisphere, and sooner or later, I think we're going to find that the US and Canada are simply excluded from hemispheric affairs. That's a sharp reversal of what was the case not long ago.
Part of the uprising of Latin America, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, has been a reaction to [neoliberal regime], and they have thrown out a lot of these measures and moved in a different direction. In earlier years, the US would have overthrown the governments or, one way or another, curtailed them. Now, it can't do that.
Very urgent measures need to be taken, and without much delay, in dealing with the ongoing destruction of the environment.
Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle.
