Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: The War Parties and the November Election

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: The War Parties and the November ElectionSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, May 6, 2024. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Apologies for the late start. These things happen and gratitude for Professor Sachs and for all of you for waiting for us to get everything back together again. Professor, I have a lot to ask you about, but I want to start with a bizarre incident. Was a Columbia University professor, and you're a member of the faculty, arrested outside of his apartment building in New York City because of words he uttered or expressions he made on the Columbia campus? Well, a little bit worse than that. Yes, a Columbia professor was arrested right outside his home

because he lives across from the campus and he stepped outside to observe the police raiding the campus, called by the university administrators. I think he took out his camera to record the events and he was promptly arrested. Not only was he arrested, the university, apparently from what I hear, did not reach out to him. And when the media made inquiries, was one of your professors arrested? The university's response was talk to the NYPD. And the NYPD had no comment. I found all of this absolutely startling, that a university would show no interest, apparently not reaching out personally to this professor, much less responding to a media inquiry about what has happened to a professor arrested on the street. Why do you think authorities, the governor of Texas, the mayor of Los Angeles, the mayor of New York City, the president of Princeton, whom you and I know was a constitutional scholar, which is everybody's afraid of the Israel lobby.

Everybody is afraid of Congress, which is afraid of the Israel lobby. Everybody is afraid of stepping out of line. No one wants to talk. administrators are absolutely groveling in front of demagogic congresspeople and donors to the campaigns of these congresspeople and to the universities. So we're just seeing a rather brute exercise of power at play, but it's shocking. It's as if there are no norms. Nobody behaves as one is supposed to behave in a free society. Nobody right now. This is not the way a democracy, which is not just majority rule, but individual rights, and foremost among those rights is the freedom of expression.

This is not the way a democracy is supposed to work. Israel is not a democracy. And now it's authoritarian impulses are showing that the United States is not a democracy either. We're seeing thousands of students being arrested across the United States, many faculty being arrested, campuses being raided, demands for worse coming down on people who are peacefully protesting, students getting roughed up. It's very, very distressing.

By the way, it's not only the U.S. right now in Europe. Absolutely normal. One could say academic or whatever, political seminars, workshops on Gaza or on Palestine are being closed by the police in Germany. There was a recent high profile case because many internationally known individuals were stopped at the border, stopped at the airports, told you cannot enter the country. And as this proceeding was taking place in Berlin, the police raided the premises. It was an evening event about Palestine, which is being slaughtered right now. And the police just raided it, shut it down. This is happening all over Europe. It's happening over the United States. These are the supposed Western values.

It's ugly. Why is it, and I realize I use the word democracy loosely, we're basically a constitutional republic theoretically, but the whole purpose of the Bill of Rights is to restrain the government from interfering with the rights that we have as human beings, and foremost among those rights is the freedom of speech. But the government seems to revel in interference with the freedom of speech. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, so proud of the violence caused by the New York City police on the Columbia campus. One of the aspects of this that I think is important is the police went out of their way to, and the university, to prevent anyone from seeing what was actually happening. And then we know from student reports that the

students were roughed up as they were being rounded up. Some pushed and kicked down the stairs, we're told. We know now because the NYPD acknowledged it, one of the policemen fired his weapon accidentally, we're told. All of this was deliberately kept out of sight. This is why this particular professor was arrested. He was filming just on the street in front of his house. You're not allowed to do this. This is how America works right now. I don't know the law in New York State, but in New Jersey, where I was at one point a life-tenured judge, the Supreme Court in New Jersey ruled seven to nothing. You have an absolute right to film the police.

Yeah, and obviously- It should be a universal right. It certainly should be a right everywhere in the United States. They're public officials. You have the right to film what they're doing. What's amazing about this is how quickly each of the universities has turned to force. This is what surprises me. These are not last resort episodes. Columbia University administrators say, well, the students raided the building. That was after multiple escalations, threats, suspensions of students for peaceful demonstrations. That was the end of the story,

not the beginning of the story. Remember the great Ed Levy, the president of the University of Chicago, eventually became attorney general of the United States, absolutely refused to call in the Chicago police after he knew what happened in the summer of 1968, was one of the few college or university presidents to refuse to involve the police and was lauded for it. We'll switch gears. How is it that we have one party in the Congress of the United States of America, and it's the war party, Professor Sachs? This is a very important question, question and not so easy to understand. I feel perhaps that historians will look back and explain to us that sometime in the second half of the 20th century, what was the formal structure of a republic became a militarized security state. Of course, the most famous transformation of this sort was the change from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, which took place basically from the time

of Julius Caesar to his successor Augustus and the Civil War in between, and what was a republic with republican institutions became an empire. And I wonder whether this is essentially what has happened to the United States. We've become a security state. Most of the relevant documents of government are confidential. The government works overtime to keep facts away from the public. The mass media has rolled over and is playing dead. The New York Times has no relevant information for us day after day because all they do is repeat unnamed official sources. So I wonder whether this is not actually what transpired and that what we're seeing is the realization of this. But both parties get briefed by the CIA and they fall into line. You watch the pictures of presidential decision-making. More often than not, it's the CIA director talking and the president listening. Our government operates by secrecy. It operates by overthrowing other governments in deniable operations. I won't say covertly because they're out on the street, but they're denied. So everything is a bit

of a lie about what we actually do. We don't know almost anything that we need to know to be responsible citizens. Are there American soldiers operating in Ukraine right now? Probably yes. Do we know? No. What kind of military operations, intelligence operations, other operations are they engaged in? We do not know. We don't know about NATO troops in Ukraine right now. We are not told. All of this is highly confidential. If something leaks, someone goes to jail. But we're supposed to be citizens. We're supposed to be making judgments about these things. Of course, both parties vote overwhelmingly for war. Both parties vote overwhelmingly to support the security state. Both parties vote

overwhelmingly for formulations for the government to spy on us. And both parties, and it is both parties, are calling on the university administrators to crack down, and I mean that physically, crack down on the heads of these protesters. This is coming from letters from Democratic members of Congress. It's coming from Republican members of Congress. It is one war party. It's a sorry state of affairs, and it is, as you said at the outset of your comments, the transformation of the American Republic into the American empire. You've been warning about this your entire professional career, the number of

coups perpetrated in secret, the number of governments overthrown, the number of wars started, the number of military bases around the world. I'm sure Lloyd Austin, I'm sure no one in the State, in the Defense Department could name all 1,000 military installations that the United States owns or operates or occupies around the planet. You know, Judge, we cannot get the most basic information right now. And I've seen close-up things that,, I've seen them for a long time. Once a president of Haiti, President Aristide, said to me, Jeff, they're going to take me out. I'm a little naive. I said, no, no, we're going to work on this. And sure enough, one day the CIA essentially marched him out to an unmarked plane, stuck him in the plane, and flew him, I think it was 23 hours, to Central Africa. It was a coup in broad daylight.

I knew the beat reporter of the New York Times. I called her. I said, where's the story? She said to me, Jeff, the editor is not interested. A coup in broad daylight, the editor is not interested. A coup perpetrated by the government of the United States of America in broad daylight, and the editor of the New York Times was not interested. That is correct. And we have had a pandemic which has claimed about 20 million lives. There is reasonable cause, let's say, to believe that this emerged out of research funded by the National Institutes of Health. You cannot get this information. The government is closed down. I was speaking to one of the top experts in the world on this. Because nothing has to be explained to the people at all.

We are on a path to World War III right now. Nothing is explained. Nothing is told us, and we have no choices. We're not offered any choices. The CIA comes in, does the briefings, and off we go to military escalation. And the public is profoundly unhappy and the students are getting beaten up. Faculty are getting arrested because you're not supposed to speak about this. And then this concoction that this is about anti-Semitism, give me a break. I'm a Jewish professor at Columbia University. This is

not about anti-Semitism. This is about a slaughter that is taking place in Gaza right now. And the American people don't like it. They don't like our complicity in it, and they are protesting it. That's what this is about. But we don't behave in any reasonable way right now, even to discuss these things honestly, to know the facts, to have hearings where our executive is called to account by Congress. This was one of the fundamental roles that Congress was supposed to play. It's laughable to think that this is how anything works right now. It doesn't. I know it doesn't.

There is no accountability whatsoever. There are closed-door briefings. And then if you approach a congressman or senator, as I often do, they say, well, Jeff, I'm just not supposed to talk about such matters. I'm sure you understand. In the meantime, we have our NATO allies talking about moving troops to Ukraine and Russia, entering tactical nuclear drills right now. This is crazy. This is what you read about on the path to World War I, when a few people decided the fate of the world.

And we had made a claim that because we are a republic, oh, it couldn't happen here. But starting in 1947, it has been happening here repeatedly. That's the year of the National Security Act. That's the year when we went secret. And now we cannot hold our government accountable because everything is confidential. The International Criminal Court sent investigators to Gaza to interview physicians, the health personnel, and victims of the Israeli slaughter, and they brought that data back to the court in Brussels, and the court is considering indictments of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, his defense minister, and the chief of the military.

Twelve Republican members of Congress, sounding like they were mafia dons, except the mafia would know not to put this in writing, said, target Israel, we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated, we will move to end all American support for the courts. Sanction your employees and associates, bar you and your families from the United States. You have been warned. An attack on Israel is an attack on, you ready for this, Jeff? The sovereignty of the United States. One of these senators is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a clerk for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. I'm appalled that they would say this. I'm appalled that they would think it. I'm appalled that they would attempt to use their legislative authority to interfere in an international court,

something over which they have no lawful jurisdiction whatsoever. Yeah, Christopher von Halen, another senator, said specifically, this is the language of the mafia. It is completely disgusting coming from the U.S. Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the world. It is a shame, but there are no standards right now. We're in a thuggish time. We are at war because we do not entertain diplomacy at all. There is no talk of peace anywhere. There is only talk of military escalation. We have nuclear drills by the country together with the United States that has the most nuclear weapons in the world. We're crazy the way we're going right now. This is a disgrace of the Biden administration and the people in that administration who do not have any language of negotiation whatsoever. But I'm afraid that this is both parties and we're in a spiral and

the American people are simply being left out of this story. What kind of sense does it make for Secretary of State Blinken and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to call Russia, China, and Iran an axis of evil? What does that do? What damage does that do to efforts to try and keep a lid on things? The United States has sent armaments to Taiwan, which is part of China, by U.S. agreement and diplomacy. The United States has stationed troops on Kinmen Island, part of Taiwan, which is part of China as per U.S. diplomacy. Blinken went to China a few days ago, and every single day since, the U.S. has put on sanctions, threats, warnings, calls with our so-called military allies in East Asia. We are on a war path. What are we possibly thinking? They do not know how to keep diplomacy one day to the next. And there's an editorial and one of the leading Chinese government outlets saying, we don't understand your secretary of state came.

I think it was probably about 10 days ago, if I have the count right. And then this editorial outlined every single day since then, it has been nothing but unrelenting hostility from the United States towards China. And of course, everyone's cheering in the Congress over this as well. This is again, bipartisan. What are we thinking? We want to destroy the world. We don't honestly want to have discussions. No other countries have interests. Only the United States gets to decide who does what to whom and when. And only the United States can put on sanctions. And only the United States can decide who the ICC does or doesn't indict. This is a kind of madness right now that is leading us closer to doom than we can recall in our modern times.

What kind of sense did it make for Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury, this is crazy, for chastising China for over-manufacturing. What is she talking about? I communicated with her because she's a friend and my teacher. And I said in public that this whole concept, if the United States wanted to say, you know, we're 20 years behind you, China, while we were having wars in Iraq and Libya and Syria and Ukraine and trying to overthrow governments and doing all the things we're doing and running up a massive debt. You, China, were building the biggest industrial capacity in the entire world. You were lowering the costs of electric vehicles. You were building a global battery supply chain.

You were developing 5G and implementing it at low cost, faster than anyone else. You developed the lowest cost photovoltaics. You developed the lowest cost photovoltaics. You develop the lowest cost wind turbines. You develop the world's lowest cost fourth generation modular nuclear power plants. That's peaceful nuclear energy, just to be clear with everybody. In other words, China, you've really done something amazing. You've built the whole infrastructure for a clean, green, efficient manufacturing system that produces products that the world wants. You produce the Teslas and the iPhones and so forth, while we were in useless wars and

driving up our debt to more than 100% of our national income. Now, if Secretary Yellen had said, you know, we really messed up and we need a little bit of a breather to build back our industry, okay, there would have been some honesty to that. But to go and attack China, an unrelenting language of bad-mouthing and terrible antagonism, to say all those things you've been doing, that's terrible. You have to make amends. We demand it. This approach is actually, it doesn't work. It's extremely dangerous. It has left the United States in isolation diplomatically, economically in the world. Other countries are building financial defenses. Part of the problem

is these 12 senators are still part of this delusional world that the U.S. can run everything. That is where the arrogance comes in. It's a kind of mix of neurosis, anxiety, and overbearing arrogance, but it's completely destructive for American daily life, by the way. Where does that inflation come from? From disrupting every supply chain in the world. Where does it come from? And then we attack. The only mode we know is to attack and complain and say, you're an axis of evil and you have to do what we say and we get to write the sanctions, we get to write the rules. One of the things I've been looking at, the U.S. claims that we lead the rules-based order. It's a fascinating term because- Well, that is a farce to suggest that we lead the rules-based order. But what's very interesting is the U.S. says it really nonstop and it writes it,

but it never defines what the rules are. But if you actually look at the rules as in the treaties and obligations and the U. UN Charter and so forth, it turns out the U.S. is systematically the least compliant country in the entire world with following the rules that the world thinks are the rules, the ones that are embodied in what the world has agreed. So this is where we are right now. And since it doesn't work, the answer is the hard fist when people say, hey, this isn't working. This is just violence. This isn't making peace.

This is crushing other people. This is killing Ukrainians, 500,000 of them, because the U.S. and Biden got it in his mind a decade ago that we were going to force NATO into Ukraine. Like it or not, Ukrainians like it or not, we're going to overthrow a government. We're going to get our military bases in there like we have in 75 other countries. Russia, no, no red lines. 500,000 deaths later, it doesn't work. The public doesn't want this, but who's asking the public? Professor Sachs, thank you, my dear friend. Thank you for everything you said and for your analysis. We are both off to Italy, but to different places.

It would be nice to get together there, but I'll see you back in New York one day soon. And I hope you'll be back next week. We will. Excellent. Thanks a lot. Have safe travels. Thank you. All the best.

Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday at noon Eastern, Colonel Douglas McGregor. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Altyazı M.K.