Pod Save the World - UK election aftermath

Episode Date: December 18, 2019

British MP David Lammy joins to talk about the UK elections and what they mean for Brexit and the future of the Labour Party. Then Ben and Tommy talk about India’s ongoing slide into Hindu nationalism, the China trade war, and a troubling investigation into problems with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process. Plus, Biden’s record on Iraq, unfair charges of antisemitism against Bernie Sanders, and a proposal from Elizabeth Warren to fight global financial corruption.

Welcome back to POT Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben. Ben, we're in studio. Yeah, I'm back. This is really fun. Glad that this stretch of travels over. Yeah. How was KAL?

How's Kuala Lumpur? It was cool. I mentioned we had like 200 young leaders from across Asia Pacific region. And, you know, I love feeling better about the world. I mean, these are like earnest kids working their butts off in civil society. And a lot of people fighting climate change. Actually, the last person I met with there was someone who, who's leading the efforts on climate change in Micronesia.

Okay. Oh, yeah. And, like, literally hearing her talk about how it's not a future scenario, like, the coast are being eroded. Part of what happens is the saltwater kind of gets into the water supply, like the fishing has to be pushed back. So people's lives are already changing. Every person who lives in her community is already dealing with the effects of climate

change. And they created none of the problem and are counting on the rest of us to, uh, prevent their habitat from literally disappearing, right? So, you know, there's a lot of mobilization happening, but a lot of challenges. Yeah. Also, all the people who used to, like, call Obama aloof or professorial or, like, not social with members of Congress, get him in a room with 200 kids who are activists, and then he's, like, the happiest you'll ever see the guy. He told me, yeah, he said, like, this is the stuff that makes him the happiest. And you go and, you know, you see people, you know, beginning to organize, beginning to mobilize. And, you know, you know,

that that's the long game. Yeah, right. But, you know, we have to make sure that there's something for them to deal with in 10 or 20 years. That's right. Well, Obama's always good at making us remember the long, long game, especially when it comes to social justice. So we have a fantastic show today. We're going to start the show with our guest today, who is David Lammy. You guys have heard him on the show before.

He's a member of parliament from Tottenham. He's been in office since 2000, a member of the Labor Party. He's going to talk us through the UK elections in the really rough. results for progressives everywhere. And then we're also going to talk about some updates out of India where there's a big series of protests over an anti-Muslim law. We're going to talk about the China trade war and how it's being covered here in the U.S. Some updates out of Turkey. I want to talk about the IG report about the FISA process that came out last week because the headline out of it was that a bunch of conspiracy theories made up by Donald Trump were in fact not true. Surprise,

surprise. But there is, I think, within that report, some troubling background about how the FISA process is working. And then we're going to do a 2020 section where we talk about Joe Biden and his history in Iraq. We're going to talk about Bernie and accusations of anti-Semitism and spoiler alert why I think they're pretty unfair, given that his family died in the Holocaust. And then some cool new proposals from Elizabeth Warren to fight global corruption. So hell of a show. But let's start. with our conversation with David Lammy. And please enjoy when in the middle of our conversation, bells literally go off signaling the ending of voting. We are thrilled to have on the line today, friend of the pod, the rightest, the most honorable, David Lammy. He's a member of parliament in the

UK since 2000, a member of the Labor Party. David, thank you again for joining. Thank you. Yeah, David, congratulations on you winning your constituency. But I guess I'll just start by asking you what happened? Well, I'm afraid. I mean, I've now been a member of parliament for 20 years, and this was shocking election for the British Labour Party, the worst election results since 1935. It has set the progressive cause back significantly in the UK.

It is going to be very, very hard for the British Labour Party to win the next general election in 2024. So we may well be out of power for a decade, and that is heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking, for my constituents in a tough inner-city environment in London, and for many working-class communities across the industrial, the former industrial belt of the UK, really, who I think now are going to be dealt a very, very hard Brexit. and by that I mean a very deregulatory Brexit that with a lowering of labor rights, lowering environmental standards, in those what are traditionally called white working class areas.

So this is devastating for labor, and we are licking our wounds. So, David, you know, we've talked to you and we've followed British public opinion, which seems to be, you know, pretty evenly split on Brexit, it may be even like a slight majority of people who have some regrets over the referendum. And yet at the same time, you see this overwhelming majority now for Boris Johnson. And I guess the questions that everybody is wrestling with and looking at these results are, you know, how much of this was about, you know, the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn or about the labor manifesto, how much of this was about Brexit and people just kind of wanting to get it over with

and feeling like labor had taken, you know, kind of straddle the line on Brexit. And how much of this is about the fact that, you know, Boris Johnson is a more talented politician than Theresa May. And maybe he really did tap into something with voters in traditional labor strongholds like, you know, the North. I mean, what's your take on why the result was what it was? Look, I think there are three issues that were coming up time and time again on the doorstep when you canvass people. and I was canvassing right across the country in Wales, in the Midlands, in the north, east, the northwest of our country, as well as in London. And what people were saying were three things. One, there were significant problems for our leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

People didn't trust Jeremy Corbyn. And the challenge there, I think, is to do with a long-serving politician who has been on the hard left of the British Labour Party. very independent-minded, who has a track record in Parliament of championing and campaigning on what many see as fringe issues, whether they're to do with human rights in Venezuela or whether they are to do with taking strident positions in relation to the IRA during the troubles in the past. All of these things are being raised. His history and record were being raised, And in an era of social media, I'm afraid it was very, very hard campaigning on behalf of Jeremy Corbyn and putting to the people that he should lead us. The second issue was obviously Brexit.

The British Labour Party had sat on the fence on the issue of Brexit for a significant period, was refusing really to take aside in what was a leave, remain election environment, back, i.e. either you stay and you remain in the European Union or lead the European Union, we didn't take a side. And we were punished for that because, again, it appeared that we were untrustworthy. It appeared in which Boris Johnson was very decisive, just like Donald Trump absolutely clear on his messaging, very strong message discipline, and the people thought he was tough and muscular, and thought that Jeremy Corbyn and Labour were weak in comparison. The third set of issues are around credibility. It was a bold manifesto.

It was a left manifesto. It was an anti-auster. Challenging an equality manifesto, bringing things into public ownership. There was a lot in it that was radical on the economy. And actually, it was very exciting. But there was way too much. And in the end, it challenged people's belief and their belief in credibility. Fiscal credibility, this is, and the Labour Party's ability to deliver.

it. So for all those three issues collided and they punished us. Just one last thing I would say. These issues did not just sort of arrive in the UK in the last few years. Many of them are long-standing issues to do with the de-industrialization of northern communities similar to what you've seen in the US with the Rust Belt. And in a sense, politics has failed to deliver for those people. And it's the of the spectrum that seemed to provide the answers. We know what those answers were, scapegoating immigrants, scapegoating the EU. But I'm afraid that the general public chose to believe them and trust them over the progressive left. Just a couple relevant stats for our listeners. So the Conservative Party won 365 seats. Jeremy Corbyn's Labor Party or your Labor Party won 203

seats. The Liberal Democrats won 11 seats. The Scottish National Party won 48 seats. And to your point about Corbyn's personal approval rating. I saw a stat that said in September 2019, he had 16% approval, 76% disapproval, which is a net 60 point rating, which is staggeringly bad. I imagine impossible for almost any party to overcome. But just one question for you to sort of catch folks up at home who aren't as familiar with British elections. So our listeners probably hear the word manifesto and think of the last words of troubled individuals. Can you explain what it means in a, political context in the UK? Well, our manifesto is what we present to the British people as a political party. We are going to deliver when we get to power and when we are elected. So it's a document

that has subject headings like education, like health, and we say to the public what we're going to do. On this occasion, the manifesto ran to 106 pages. It was the longest in the Labor Party's history. It was too long. I'm afraid there are bells ringing in the house to indicate that the chamber is coming to an end. This is exciting. Honestly, I like the bells. This feels like some breaking news. Yeah. I just hope that nobody kicks down your door. Yeah, leave it all in. So that's why it's ringing. But if you're happy for me to continue through that, so that is what the manifesto is. It's a presentation to the public. And I'm afraid,

the perception was there was a lack of credibility about our program. And I know that in the Democratic race, where candidates have put their programs and their platforms on their website so that the electorate can see what it is that they want to do when they win the presidency. And I know there's quite a lot of debate about the detail or lack of detail about some candidates' platform or indeed about whether some platforms are two left-wing or two-centric, and in a sense, that debate was very much had in relation to the British Labour Party's program. So when you look ahead, obviously, as you suggested, with this mandate, it's likely that Boris Johnson takes the UK out of the European Union and that that Brexit will be harder than it would have

been in terms of the break from the EU, had there been, you know, a closer result. But before we get to the Brexit piece, I'm just wondering about the next steps for the Labor Party and the British left. A lot of the same debates there that you see here about whether or not the problem was the manifesto and whether it was too radical or whether it's just a matter of political tactics. But what do you think is next for the Labor Party? And how would you like that? How would you like, like to see the Labor Party evolved to have a better shot in the next election? Well, we've got one of the biggest decisions in our political history, which would determine when we next come to power and the fate of working people up and down this country.

My view is the first thing is we must elect a leader that looks like he or she is capable of being prime minister on day one. and that is absolutely mandatory, and that means that not just a leader that makes the Labour fold, and those on the centre-left and left feel good about themselves, but someone who the country can look at and instantly say, yes, I can put my face in that man or woman. The second thing, I think, is actually there were aspects of our program, our manifesto, that were exciting, that were radical, and we should retain that radical energy,

particularly economically in an age of huge inequality and indeed hardship for so many people. But we have to have an offer that speaks to people where they're at in their lives now. We have to have a program that is articulate and clear in those communities that have traditionally always voted Labor and have left us behind. And those are, in America, those would be sort of Rust Belt, Middle America kind of communities where we have to hear what they're saying to us, listen to what they're saying to us,

and unite that message with those that we're attempting to represent out of the cities. The Labor Party in this election won the cities. We were piling on votes in our big cities. I'm afraid we were losing towns and villages up and down the country. And we have to understand that, recognize that it's an immense challenge for social democrats, center and left parties all over the developed world, but seek to unite that messaging and be very careful. But you can only do that with a credible leader that the country can look at

particularly those that move in electoral cycles and say, yes, I can put my fate and the fate of my family in that particular individual. If we disappear into ideology, if we disappear into our own tribe, I'm afraid we're going to make the wrong call. Very well said. Advice we could probably take over here as well. Last question for you. So, you know, Nicholas Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party was on this show. previously she was talking about Scottish independence, given that Brexit's going forward, given how well Scottish nationalist did in this past election, do you think that a Scottish independence

movement is on the horizon? Well, let me answer that, and then I want to answer something else, if I may. Please. Please understand in the United States of America that the deal that Boris Thompson has struck, the way in which he plans to leave the European Union, is. more than likely, I would say, to lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom, because the culture and temperament of Scotland has now swung entirely behind SMP. And if you think about it, from their point of view, they want to remain within the European Union. They have a history

in the path of an independent country. They are very likely to get that independence vote, and they are likely to vote for independence. And of course, there are issues in the island of Ireland and Northern Ireland as well, with many predicting that over time we may well be heading towards a United Island as well because of this border now that Boris Johnson is perceiving down the Irish Sea. But there's a second issue that I want you to understand in the United States. Boris Johnson is set for a trade deal with Donald Trump. is the only way actually that Britain successfully survives outside the European Union by hitching close

to the United States. But we have stronger labor rights here in the UK, which he's likely to ditch in order to get that trade deal. We have a particular range of our agriculture, much of which will be ditched, because America always puts its agricultural interests first in any trade deal. You've heard the debates about our national health service and the fact that we want to protect our national health service. The only way Britain survives is by heavily deregulating sitting off the coast of the European Union and in fact competing with the European Union. That's how we survive. I'm afraid that will be fine for people who are super rich. It will be fine for the wealthy and some in the middle class will do well out of that.

but working people, people in constituencies like mine, inner city seats in London, and of course those areas of the north that voted, put their face in Boris Johnson, because a lot of it to do with the xenophobic rhetoric, I might say, I'm afraid they're going to be badly, badly let down, as they've found often in the United States of America. And it's that that I worry about. What happens when the empirical truth hits them, And there is no improvement in their life because Boris Johnson has struck a bargain bucket deal with Donald Trump,

where most of the, most of the chips are in the hands of our friends in America. Very, very worrying times indeed. And very worrying times in Europe, I think, because this signals conflict in Europe, and that is usually glad globally. Yeah, there's not a good history of that. No. I mean, so you're basically sketching, you know, a hard Brexit along the lines of the deal he has, a potential for some disintegration of the United Kingdom, potential for economic shocks from Brexit itself,

while the Labor Party also has to regroup. I mean, you know, it may be that essentially part of what ultimately discredits the likes of Boris and Trump is when the consequences come due for their decision. but part of what we learn from this election, and we have to keep on our minds in the U.S. election, is that the worst of those consequences of yet to come. So we're living in this period where people can yet see necessarily negative consequences of decisions like Brexit, and the center of left is going to have to figure out better answers to respond to it. My friends, it's very worrying that our countries have leaders.

have leaders who are stoking populist nationalism. Populist nationalism does not end well. It usually ends very, very badly indeed because the people that were seduced in order to vote for it end up, let down. It's an attempt to take their eyes away from the real solutions to their problems. But it also means that those of us who are progressive, we have to work harder. And this is the time when I really hope that Democrat friends work, think very hard, outsmart. We had very poor message discipline in this election in the British Labour Party. We have to work harder. We have to recognize that they're well-resourced. We have to recognize the huge challenges actually presented by social media in an age of

mass misinformation and lies. And we saw a lot of that in this, in this UK campaign. And of course, we all know the worries about international interference by countries with their own agendas. This is a very, very challenging age for progressives. And I'm afraid what has happened here in the UK is a serious wake-up call. Yeah, that's a good warning. Well, listen, thank you so much for making the time. Hopefully we can at least find some solidarity in the enormous frustration. progressives feel on both sides of the Atlantic, but we will keep fighting hard over here, and we know you will too. One last thing, there's always hope.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good reminder. In 2008, Barack Obama was able to unite Ohio, Wisconsin, California, and New York. There is no reason why the British Labour Party in the economic problems that are likely to flow from Boris Jackson deal can't do it. But we have to fight on the banner of hope and not be too gloomy, if you like, or too gloomy. You know, you have to give people something to believe in in order to bridge the fear that our right wing of opponents are pushing. Amen. Well, thank you, David. Really appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you. Well, I always feel better after talking to David Lemmy. Yeah. Yeah, it's something about that guy. You know, that results sucks. We should all worry about the state of democracies in liberalism, especially in country.

with Murdoch owned news outlets, as we discussed. Well, yeah, and the thing I'd say about Lammy, right, is, you know, you heard him express concern about Corby and about whether their manifesto was radical. People should know, David Lammy is not some milkto-centrist. He's a pretty serious progressive. So this is a guy who does believe in very progressive policies. I think the warning note he's sounding is that how you present those policies, who your leaders are, how you make arguments to a broader public, obviously, matter here.

And, you know, I know that this stirs controversy, and you glance at Twitter after the British election, could tell you that. But Lamia is a voice, I think, worth listening to. Yeah. Tone matters. Okay, let's turn to India. So over the last month or two, we've talked a lot about Indian Prime Minister Neander Modi's authoritarian political roots, these anti-Muslim laws and rhetoric that he's been spewing. And that includes, you know, annexing the majority Muslim Kashmary region. And it also includes a new law that would create a religious test for individuals who want to become citizens of India.

So this law says basically every religion, but Islam would have a clear path to citizenship. But if you're a Muslim, you will not. It comes on top of an effort to force citizens in northeastern India to prove their citizenship or they get basically sent to a concentration camp or deported. So if you combine those two efforts, right, you could strip a bunch of people from northeastern India of their citizenship and provide the non-Muslims a way to. regain that citizenship, but you basically are exiling all these Muslims. So it's super fucked up. So these laws set off a wave of protests and the government cracked down hard. I don't know if you've looked on Twitter, but there are tons of videos of protesters being beaten. The reports of protesters being killed. I mean, you can see police shooting tear gas and flashbang grenades into a college library.

And it reminded me a lot, Ben, of the footage of the students in Hong Kong. So, you know, Modi's out there appealing for calm. He says this law isn't designed to target Muslims, but let's be honest, that's bullshit. So again, this feels like a serious growing problem of nationalism in India. It's existed forever, but it's clearly exacerbated by Modi in this last election. And now the response is not surprisingly turning violent, especially when police are beating people with sticks and clubs and, you know, worse. So it just is disconcerting. Yeah. And, you know, he's tapping into, and we should, you know, underscore Modi is quite popular, right? So this isn't the case of some guy using kind of minority rule to impose this

agenda. You know, I think what he's tapping into, though, are these kind of Hindu nationalist sentiments in the country, some of which have been harnessed by Modi and his party of the years, some which have kind of been under the surface. And now this is all. at the forefront. And I think the reason it does, you know, kind of remind you of Hong Kong or impart the tactics, but also, you know, the sense, like we've talked with Hong Kong, that for Indian Muslims, this must feel fairly existential, you know. It must feel like the country you're living in is about to pass some point of no return where you feel like a second-class citizen, if that. And so people, despite the risks, are protesting and being met with this kind of force.

And I think what this does show is in a lot of these societies around the world, Brexit, Hong Kong, India. And frankly, this will happen here in our election next year. People have a sense of the stakes involved. And that can lead to some serious tensions within societies. Yeah, agreed. Speaking of tensions, we've talked all. lot about the escalating trade war with China. Yeah. It's been going on for what, a year, a half a year. I mean, every day feels like an eternity. But last week, the White House announced a so-called deal

that put off tariffs on $160 billion a year and Chinese made goods. It would also cut U.S. tariffs on another tranche of $100 billion a year of different products from China. In response, the Chinese said they would buy some, you know, they didn't specify some large quantity of agricultural products from the U.S. So I guess that's good for American farmers who have been hurt by this trade war. But, I mean, it's also worth noting that Trump has given these farmers for mostly big agribusiness companies 28 billion in subsidies and corporate welfare, basically, to help them, you know, deal with the trade war.

By the way, that number has doubled the auto bailout. So I just want to talk about how this has been covered because the more sophisticated coverage of these negotiations has made clear that none of the underlying problems between the U.S. China have been addressed, right? Yeah. But the people heard of then U.S. consumers were paying more thanks to these tariffs. Some U.S. businesses are hurt. Meanwhile, the Chinese have just waited Trump out and they've watched them negotiate

with themselves. I mean, how many times have we heard that there was a deal that got walked back? Yeah. The truth is that most of those times, a deal is struck by a more moderate faction in the Chinese government and then they walked away from it and they just waited for Trump to relent and and give them a better deal. So, you know, China has seen some impact, like they've had a decreased economic growth, but she knows, he doesn't have an election, you know, he's not waiting out the politics like Trump is, so his time horizon and incentives are quite different. So I guess

what I'm getting at is people should know that the major issues, right, like China has all these state-owned companies that are heavily subsidized and they make things like semiconductors, airplanes, solar panels, and they just have unlimited access to cash and sometimes help from the government when they steal intellectual property from other businesses. Trump wanted them to either stop subsidizing those companies or face tariffs. We basically dropped the demand that they stopped subsidizing these companies, and we've cut the tariffs in half. So we have walked back all our negotiating positions, yet you still see places calling this a win.

And I don't get why. Yeah, no, I think you put your finger on it in the sense that you have these structural problems. The way in which China has organized its economy gives enormous, advantages to Chinese companies relative to American or other companies. Because there are these enormous state subsidies that help finance Chinese companies because they just steal trade secrets. There are structural imbalances in the trading relationship. None of those are addressed in this deal. None. So the thing that would lead you into a trade war with China, those structural components of how China operates, are put to the side here. Yes, there's. Yes, there's

There are some obviously also trade imbalances between the U.S. and China. The reality is that what Trump did in terms of imposing these tariffs and the economic consequences that that had, you know, that led to some estimates are, you know, a couple hundred thousand jobs lost the United States, lost revenues in a lot of different sectors. China just buying some more stuff doesn't even really make us whole for what we've already lost. So the way to think about this on the scorecard is Trump did not deal with the structural issues and whatever he got. in terms of additional Chinese purchases of soybeans and other agricultural goods does not even compensate for the damage that this trade war has left. And you're exactly right. The way in which Trump frames it is, you know, I created a problem. I created a mess. Now I have kind of a half measure where China's going to buy some stuff, even though it doesn't solve the problems. And yet the narrative is, oh, Trump scores a win, you know, because Trump reached some kind of agreement here

and there's going to be a number attached to the stuff China's going to buy. People should keep in mind, you know, if China says, you know, we're going to buy $50 billion worth of agricultural products, it sounds huge. And Trump will go around and saying, well, I got $50 billion out of them. Well, keep in mind, you know, number one, there's a lot of goods that China hasn't been buying because of the trade war. Number two, China would be buying some of this stuff anyway. Right. So they're just tallying this up and making it seem like this is an outcome of this trade dispute. And frankly, number three, in the past when China's put out big numbers like this,

they've rarely actually made it all the way up to that number. So Trump's going to be going around the country talking about all this stuff he squeezed out of the Chinese. The reality is going to look very different. But too often, you're right, our press just kind of goes along with this. And it's like, oh, and another big win for Trump, X happens. And that's not really what happens when you look under the hood. And even if it's a win for someone in the U.S., it's probably a win only for U.S. businesses. It's not going to help workers.

It's not going to bring back manufacturing jobs. It's not going to unwind some of the bad effects that free trade agreements have had over the past decade. And just that blatantly obvious point is just never part of this analysis. Well, that's right, because like Trump was good in the last campaign at going around to these parts of the industrial Midwest that have suffered under trade agreements. And frankly, because of automation too, which is not something you can deal with in a trade agreement and talked about how people got screwed and how he's going to stand up for them in the way that past presidents haven't. And if you don't deal with these structural issues in the trading relationship, though, like you said, you're not going to fix the things that have led to Chinese companies having unfair advantage. All you're doing is having the Chinese buy some stuff, again, some which they would have bought anyway. That doesn't fix the problems that have depressed communities in the United States.

But Trump will do his best to convince people that it does, that basically this is all about just getting other countries to buy a certain amount of goods. when in fact, no, it's about structural problems with how China operates relative to the United States. Yeah. Okay. Another big headline from last week was the Department of Justice Inspector General released a port about the FBI's Russia investigation. It's Russian interference. And the political headline out of that report and certainly what we talked about on Ponce of America was the IG report knocked down a whole bunch of crazy Trump conspiracy theories that like Barack Obama spied on him personally or that they were targeted by the Obama administration. It was all nonsense. But, When you dug into the guts of this report is about 400 pages, it showed a shocking to me, at least, and troubling series of mistakes by the FBI in how it got permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA court to wiretap Carter Page, who was this bumbling Trump advisor. So the reason it was shocking to me is because this was such a high profile case. You knew there was going to be scrutiny, but that didn't stop the FBI from cherry-picking information to make its case for this warrant. and here's one example. So the application talked about how Carter Page had a history of meeting with Russian intelligence officials,

but it didn't report to the court that page had been reporting back on those conversations to the CIA, which is a pretty important data point if you're like saying he's colluding with this, you know, or conducting espionage. You know, that doesn't mean the investigation was biased against Trump. It doesn't mean the investigation shouldn't have happened. Like from where I said, I'm not second guessing the FBI for looking into this rush interference in our election. clearly it happened. But it does make you worry about a process where errors like this could be created in a high profile case. If they're happening in a systematic way across all the FISA applications, that's really bad. And like, I don't know, you know, I imagine you feel the same way, Ben. Like when we were in government, we had access to like top secret SCI information, the highest

level, we didn't have no idea how DOJ was getting FISA warrants. Like, this is the guts of the stuff that happens in the vows of bureaucracy that, like, frankly, the very few political hires have oversight over. Yeah. No, and look, I do think it's worth underscoring that the reason there were investigations into Trump and Russia is because Russia was interfering in our election and because Trump associates were talking to Russians, that's clear, right? I do think, though, this spotlight something, which is that, you know, since 9-11 and the Patriot Act,

you know, there's been an aggressive use of FISA, which is essentially, you know, how do you you get the capacity to conduct surveillance on Americans. And it's a court process that plays out in secret. So, you know, the FBI or the Justice Department goes to the FISA court to seek a warrant so they can then conduct some surveillance against America. I think what you see in this, which is not unlike what you've seen in other times that the FISA court has been put under the microscope, is there's an overwhelming just kind of momentum towards, yeah, sure, you know, here's the warrant, you know. And in fact, that may explain why the FBI is somewhat casual in how they pursue these types of ones, because it feels like the default is to grant this access. And so

I think, you know, this, you know, combined with some of the things we've learned over the years, but if it validates, I think, some of the concerns from the left or from civil libertarians that there's not a lot of accountability in this court. You know, there's not transparency, obviously, and that there's probably not enough oversight to prevent kind of shoddy use of it or, you know, again, this kind of institutional bias towards just giving the government these powers. So to me, yeah, if there's a constructive thing that can come out of this, it is, again, making sure that we're rethinking how easy it is for the U.S. government to conduct surveillance. Yeah. And so just a little more background for people. So like FISA dates back to a 1978 law that regulated domestic surveillance for now. national security investigation. So that is distinct from, you know, like a wiretap to get some

mob guy. We're talking about spies, terrorists, not ordinary criminals. So according to New York Times, in 2018, they were 1,833 targets of such orders, including 232 Americans. Like you were just saying, what you would always hear is like one would get turned down a year. And when pressed on how that's possible, the Bureau or DOJ would say, well, the cases are so strong. We take such care. We take such care in conducting how we put them together that the judges end up granting them. Clearly, that didn't happen in this instance. There were like multiple errors. Yeah. Well, and again, I think this is what happens when you set up whole structures and systems in secret, you know, and again, the use of this has, you know, ballooned since 9-11. You know, the system just takes on

a momentum of its own, right? And, you know, I do think that it suggests that, you know, one thing that, is worth doing, frankly. We talk about ending the permanent overseas wars, but we may need to go back and take a look at that post-9-11 architecture. We did some of this in the Obama administration to reform certain types of intelligence collection, particularly after the Snowden disclosures. But, you know, that vast apparatus of laws and procedures that changed in the Patriot Act in particular, you know, I think does bear some scrutiny if and when we get a president that once to reprioritize civil liberties. The irony is that Donald Trump is not that president. No, not at all. So, I mean, he can, you know, rant and wave about the origins of investigations in him,

but that's not, it's like him fighting corruption in Ukraine. You know, this is not something that he actually wants to do. It's just a talking point that he uses to try to discredit valid scrutiny of his actions. Yeah, that's right. One more thing I want to revisit that we talked about recently, which was a bill in Congress to recognize the mass killing of Armenians in 1915 by the Ottoman Turks is a genocide. So the Turks were not happy about this bill. It came on the heels of the U.S. being very mad at them for invading northeastern Syria. But in response recently this week, President Erdogan of Turkey said he would reciprocate by saying that the death of thousands of, if not millions of Native Americans by European and U.S. settlers in America was also a genocide,

to which we say to Erdogan, yeah. Yeah, he can say whatever the fuck he wants. It's a democracy. You're probably right. Yeah. And we should be able to say, you know, the same thing about his, you know, this is about recognizing historical truth, you know, and, and Trump, you know, the Trump administration has, you know, now I think formally said that they don't agree with, um, they did, yeah, the congressional expression that this is a genocide, which, again, does beg the question of, like, why it is that Donald Trump is so sensitive around type, Erdogan, you know, this is not a guy who's been shy about offending people or breaking taboos. And yet, you know, this is part of a pattern, you know, obviously him green lighting Erdogan coming into Syria, him welcoming Erdogan with the red carpet in the fall, even after these Kurds were killed, and now him kind of running interference on this question of Armenian genocide.

You know, if you're scrutinizing corruption and the potential for corruption of Trump and you look at his history of business interest in Turkey, it's hard not to start to think, like, why is it that this guy is so deferential to like this problematic authoritarian leader in Erdogan? Yeah, it's very weird. All right, let's talk about some of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates for a minute. So let's start with Joe Biden and Iraq. The Daily Beast did this long piece looking at Biden's record on Iraq. They went back basically to the war vote until today. Here's a summary of what the author Spencer Ackerman concludes, quote, Biden got the Iraq war wrong before throughout the invasion, occupation, and withdrawal. Convenient as it is to blame Bush, who, to be clear, base primary and eternal responsibility for the disaster. Biden and the Iraq war for what he portrayed as the result of his foreign policy principles and persisted most often in error for the same reasons. So some of his proof points that Ackerman points to include the fact that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Biden shared at the time, held hearings that were mostly focused on whether Iraq a WMD, not whether the invasion was smart policy or morally right. He talks about Biden's plan in 2006 to basically divide Iraq into three autonomous pieces. He talks about in the Obama years, he feels like,

like Biden didn't do enough to push Prime Minister Maliki's government to be more inclusive and stop marginalizing Sunnis. And the piece does give Biden credit for fighting hard to get funding for MRAPs, which, you know, were these up-armored vehicles that protected thousands of service members from roadside bombs and ambushes. So our friend Tony Blinken, who's Biden's top foreign policy aid, pushback in the piece. Some of what he said was, first of all, the vote to authorize Iraq War wasn't a vote in favor of war. It was an effort. to give our diplomatic efforts some teeth and backing to compel Saddam Hussein to come clean at the UN or give, you know, give Bush some credibility at the UN to push him, I guess. And he also says

that, you know, Biden pushed Maliki to be more inclusive and less sectarian, but basically Maliki was terrible. His instincts were sectarian in nature and there was no viable alternative to Maliki, so we dealt with the leader we had. So Ben, I'll just pause there. I'm curious, you know, what you made of the piece in what you think, you know, reflecting on Biden's Iraq record? Well, it's a useful piece. It's a tough one. But, you know, I think what it does well is to kind of establish that, you know, Biden is the guy who's kind of consistently been in kind of the mainstream of where the Democratic Party was on foreign policy. The reality is that part of the reason that George Bush got that authorization to go to war is because a lot of the mainstream folks in the Democratic Party did vote to authorize

war. And look, I love Tony. He will know, you know, we made the same argument against Hillary, essentially, because Hillary made the same argument that her vote was not a vote for war as a vote to authorize inspections and to support diplomacy. I do think that's a tough argument to make. I mean, the reality is people knew when that vote happened. I'm old enough to remember it. That was a vote for war. That's certainly how it was kind of presented. That's how it felt. It's how it felt, you know. And it could very well have been. that Biden's preference would have been that that vote gives some teeth to the diplomacy and then you get inspections in it. In fact, I have no doubt that that was probably Biden's preference.

But you can't escape the fact that that vote did give Blankcheck authorization to George Bush to go to war. And, you know, he seemed very much to want to go to war. So I think this is a tough one for the Biden people to finesse. The other two points I make, though, is that Biden does have a good argument to make about intervention generally. And Spencer, in the the peace, you know, does kind of drive by this, but in the Obama administration, Joe Biden was the consistent voice against military interventions. When we had the debate about the Afghan surge in 2009, he was the only kind of cabinet-ranking person who was stridently against sending more troops to Afghanistan. He was against the intervention in Libya that ultimately moved Gaddafi.

You know, frankly, he was even against the bin Laden raid, but that's, you know, probably not when they want to hold up. Right. But I make those points to say, in, in fact, fairness to Biden, if I were them, I wouldn't necessarily go back and try to relitigate the 2002 vote. I think what you can say is like, look, Joe Biden has a track record of being different from, say, Hillary Clinton on these questions of military intervention in Afghanistan and Libya. And that, you know, frankly, he may have learned the lessons of Iraq that you have to ask these questions before you go in, you know. So in a way, I think Biden has a different case he can make to present himself as someone who has internalized the lessons of Iraq. There's one thing about the Maliki piece. It is interesting.

I've often looked back on this. And again, I think this is hard to put all on to Biden. I'll put it on to us collectively in the Obama administration, which is there was an election in Iraq in 2010. And there was a very kind of muddled result. And everybody knew there were problems with Maliki. But it took like, I think, nine months to form a government. Yep. And Maliki ultimately emerged as the only guy at the end of that process who could kind of

cobble together a coalition. And then, of course, ends up being after he gets that second term as prime minister, very problematic, very sectarian in ways he, a Shia, Maliki was a Shia, alienated a lot of the Sunni population. And of course, ISIS preyed on that sense of alienation in the Sunni population to help reassert itself. You know, I do look back and think, like, could we have done more in that period when they're forming a government to try to put pressure for a diplomatic solution that led to a different kind of prime minister? I think those are fair questions to ask. At the end of the day,

when you're talking about other countries' politics, you know, you're limited in your ability to force an outcome. So I think the piece in general, you know, does look at this history that Biden's had, and frankly, history that America's had in Iraq is a very problematic one. unfilled with failures. And if I were the Biden people, I think you have an argument to make about the lessons you've learned from that and how you apply them going forward. Going back and relitigating these things is always going to end up being pretty tough, especially if you voted for the war in the first place. Yeah. I mean, look, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, a lot of people tried to contextualize that vote. It's just, it's not going to fly. So to your point about Biden's evolution

on the use of force. So Spencer links to this piece that Biden wrote in June 27th, 2004 in the new republic, where Biden says this. Much has been said about the potential consequences of failure in Iraq, how it would provide a new haven for terrorists deal a blow to reformers and modernizers throughout the region and encourage radicals in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. But perhaps failure's most pernicious legacy will be a further hardening of the Vietnam syndrome that afflicts some in the Democratic Party, a distrust of the use of American power. Now, that is super hawkish.

I super disagree. And kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It's like, that is, whoa, unnerving. But it is interesting that that rhetorical passage in no way reflects the actual policy choices he made in the White House, right, that you just listed through opposing the surge in Afghanistan, et cetera, et cetera. I think, you know, this, the most important debate in American foreign policy in the last 20 years, I think, has basically been, what was the mistake? Was the mistake to go into Iraq in the first place? or, you know, should we have sent more troops in or should we have stuck with the surge? And to me, it's an obvious answer. The mistake was to invade Iraq. I frankly don't believe that much of

anything that we did after we invaded an occupied country would have made much of a difference. You know, could we have done things tactically at different moments? Sure. And so, you know, how you come down on that matters a lot because I think the decision to invade and occupy Iraq is part of what ended up hurting reformers, part of what ended up discrediting the the idea of promoting democracy in other countries. Certainly part of what led to a diminution in America's standing in the world and China and Russia and others kind of filling this vacuum of global confidence in the United States, right? So the big question that was gotten wrong was to invade Iraq in the first place. I think this, so this idea of a Vietnam syndrome, I've never quite understood this because it's like in the foreign policy community, it's seen as like a diagnosis of cancer.

You know, the Vietnam syndrome, why not? Why wouldn't we want to learn from the Vietnam War? You know, the way they describe the Vietnam syndrome is like Americans are reticent to go to war in other countries because of Vietnam. Well, good, you know, there should be in Iraq syndrome. We should be reticent to invade other countries. It's certainly in wars of regime change like the Iraq war. So I actually saw the Joe Biden that I served under as someone who had the Vietnam syndrome. He didn't want to go and he said when we debated the Libyan war, why would on earth would we go in another Muslim majority country and overthrow its leader? So he was acting in that basis and I think, you know, was better forward if you look across all those debates. I think what is endemic in that 2004 piece you quoted is you and I have talked before about these euphemisms in the foreign policy community and the language that you speak. And I think that's exactly what's happening here, which is that to be taken seriously in foreign policy, you have to talk about how the Vietnam syndrome is bad.

You know, you have to talk about in a language of a certain kind of American primacy that is tied to intervention in other countries, right? And I think Biden's challenges, he often has good instincts, but he's so saturated in these euphemisms and in this way of talking and thinking about American power. And what Spencer points out readily in the piece is anybody who's elected president in 2020 is going to be confronting a world that is nothing like the world of the 1990s, when the U.S. could really throw its weight around in the world. We've got a China that has emerged. We've got a Russia that is on the offense. We've got a discrediting of the American model that's happened over a long period of time.

And we have to adjust our language and our policies to that new reality. And it doesn't mean you don't think the American foreign policy should be robust or that the United States. States isn't the most influential nation in the world. It means, though, you have to internalize these lessons and pursue objectives with a bit more humility. That point is actually a great segue to the next thing I want to talk about, which is these charges of anti-Semitism against Bernie Sanders. I think the D.C. conventional wisdom on foreign policy is that leftist positions or those who support leftists globally are just reflexively not taking seriously. They're discredited. They're discredited themselves. And so, okay, so this starts this Bernie anti-Semitism thing.

It's been around for a while, but recently this conservative writer, it's not worth naming, tweeted something where he demanded that campaign reporters asked Bernie Sanders about his, quote, tolerance for anti-Semitic indulgences from surrogates and staff. So just again, a quick reminder that Bernie Sanders is Jewish and he lost family in the Holocaust. But the newspeg for this, you know, tweet and then an opinion piece was a tweet from Bernie's national organizing director that said, as vote labor in the UK elections. So what they're referring to is that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor Party have really struggled to deal with anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic acts by its members.

There is a hour-long BBC documentary on just this subject that includes testimony from a number of individuals who heard anti-Semitic commentary at Labor Party meetings or who were investigators who saw evidence that the Labor Party failed to adequately investigate anti-Semitic commentary. And it's really worth watching in full because it's incredibly troubled. and there does seem to be a deep problem there. Britain's chief rabbi criticized the party for its handling of anti-Semitism. And so they need to address this.

And I'm sure it really hurt them in the election. But this piece argues that Bernie's endorsement of Corbyn stems from some genuine affection in conspicuously Corbin-esque instincts. Those are both quotes. And then he goes on to dredge up, you know, Ilan Omar's past comments because she endorsed Bernie. And he tries to smear two Bernie staffers,

Shakir and Matt Duss, because they once worked at the Center for American Progress, which, you know, wrote a bunch of articles that were critical of Israel and the occupation. But the only thing that was ever anti-Semitic was a tweet from a blogger that was fired and condemned and whatever else. But he's just trying to smear all the Bernie staffers in this campaign because of this one moment. So look, stipulating that some of Ilan Omar's comments. comments were wrong and she herself is hurtful and she herself apologizes right and in stipulating that labor needs to do a much better job of addressing anti-semitism within its ranks we should just extend this guy's logic out for a minute which is the republican party has serious problems with members making anti-semitic remarks starting with Donald Trump but they're not writing op heads about that and I don't want to do what aboutism because like serious challenges deserve to be like examined but we need to be clear like what this bad faith attack is designed to do right they're trying to do to smear Bernie as an anti-Semite to constrain the policy discussion on a whole series of issues, mostly U.S. policy towards Israel. Yeah. That's clearly the objective. Yeah. And to kind of weaponize charges of anti-Semitism in the context of our election to try to peel off votes.

And, I mean, this is complete, under bullshit. I mean, Bernie Sanders is not an anti-Semite. We talked to him at J Street. I mean, he spoke passionately about these issues, but he spoke about them informed in part by his Jewish heritage and Jewish faith, you know. And if you look at the problem of anti-Semitism in the United States today, it is not something that is by and large tied to criticisms of Israeli government policy. The thing that seems to have motivated people to conduct, say, acts of violence is more the kind of corrosive and traditional anti-Semitism just that just hates Jews, right? And frankly, he's even about other pieces of Jewish practice. So, for instance, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, like that guy that

carried out that shooting said he was motivated by the fact that this synagogue worked with refugees, right? Not its position on Israel. Yeah, it's a great replacement theory, like white supremacist stuff. So exactly. So when we're living through a period that is very dangerous in terms of the reaffirmation of anti-Semitism in this country, we're having the wrong debate and discussion because the virulent strain that is leading to violence or threats of violence is overwhelmingly from the white nationalist set of ideologies in this country, right? That Bernie has nothing to do with, you know, and instead, these types of things try to make it all about if you're a critic of Israel or a critic of the Israeli government,

then you're in this pool of anti-Semites. We have to be able to separate out these. things and say there is a white nationalist anti-Semitic strain in this country that is the same strain, by the way, that goes right back to Nazi Germany, right, that seeks to delegitimize Jews and treat them as something that is other and something that has to be targeted. That is a huge fucking problem, right? Whether or not Bernie Sanders, look, there are a lot of people who voted labor who aren't any semites. You know, does Jeremy Corbyn have some problematic things in history?

Yes. But I don't think that every single person who voted labor in the U.K. election is an anti-Semite. Frankly, if I lived in the United Kingdom, I probably would have voted labor. And there's nothing to do with Israel or Israeli policy. And so this will be a constant refrain throughout this election where there'll be an effort to paint anybody who disagrees with this Israeli government's policies is an anti-Semite. That is complete bullshit, right? That doesn't mean that some criticism of Israel isn't anti-Semitic. Some of it is, right? But a lot of it is just people who have concerns about Palestinian rights or about where Israel is going. And we have to be

able to separate these things. And just the other thing that really just bugs me is like people write pieces like this purporting to be sincerely word about, you know, anti-Semitism. But bad faith charges like this that smear people like FAS or Matt Dust or Bernie about issues this important. actually take away from a real conversation about anti-Semitism. Like, we're not, Bernie has put out a plan to combat anti-Semitism. It devalues the real strains of anti-Semitism. If you're just throwing that charge at anybody and everyone, and I've had that charge thrown to me a bunch over the years

because of like my support for the Iran nuclear agreement, right? Right. I mean, if everybody's anti-Semite, you're devaluing the seriousness of calling somebody an anti-Semite, right? That's a serious charge when you look at it in the context of history and you look in the context of the Holocaust, right? And if we're just going to be throwing this around to get political advantage, it actually lessens the impact. And a good example, right, during the Iran deal debate, Obama said something about how there

was like a well-funded anti-Iran deal campaign. And that was spun as somehow suggesting that, you know, Jewish— The trope of Jewish money. Exactly. And that absolutely was not what he's at. But it was just designed to harm him. Yeah. No, basically any Democrat, anybody who's a Democratic nominee, will be charged with any

Semitism. And the irony is that Donald Trump is a president who's giving motivation and energy to these white nationals who are the real anti-Semites. Yeah. Yeah. We've talked about problematic comments from Democrats on the show many times call me when you are leading an effort to primary Donald Trump and get his disgusting ass out of your party and I'll take you seriously. Okay. Last thing. So Elizabeth Warren put out a new plan to fight global financial corruption that is pretty interesting. So in this post she wrote on the issue, she notes that in total laundered money represents two to five percent of global GDP or as much as $2 trillion annually. That is staggering.

Ben, I know you've actually talked to Warren's folks about the problem and about their proposal a bit. Can you explain why these shell companies and global bribery efforts are actually a foreign policy problem? Yeah, so they're a foreign policy problem in part because if you look at, at people like Putin, right, or people like Victor Orban of Hungary we've talked about on this podcast. There's a very clear nexus between authoritarianism and corruption because the way in which a lot of these leaders get power, like a guy like Putin, is, you know, you create through corrupt means

a bunch of wealthy oligarchs, billionaire types, who then are kind of funding your politics, buying up the media. And there's kind of an unholy circle where the politician is rewarding them and then they're funding the politics. And a lot of these corrupt authoritarian systems rely on places to hide dark money because they're making money through corrupt gains or sometimes they're just seeking to avoid taxes, right? And so if you can shine a spotlight on where money is, you can do two things at the same time. One is hopefully you can recover enormous amounts of tax revenue that is just being stashed overseas or in different places. places. But the other is you can kind of paint the picture for somebody in all these countries as to how these leaders are actually accumulating vast reservoirs of wealth and where they're

stashing it. And there's some pretty simple things in her plan that I think would be important. You know, for instance, there's a rule in the United States that basically anybody can establish a shell company here and hide their money. And we don't know who owns that shell company. So if you look at the amount of Chinese or Russian or Gulf money that's stashed. in say New York real estate, like those huge buildings that are going up in New York City. Empty buildings in Maytown. Nobody lives in them. Well, there's like an LLC, a small business established to basically stash this wealth.

And we don't even know where this wealth is coming from. And so Warren's talking about changing the rules to put more transparency on this so that you can follow the flows of money and understand where it's coming from. Transparency is a starting point. She's also talking about working with other governments to try to crack down on tax avoidance. So people who are evading the tax laws of the countries they live in by stashing money overseas. And again, this would have the benefit of both spotlight and corruption, which hopefully could have a political impact on some of these corrupt leaders, but also beyond even just corrupt politicians, just if you can begin to recover some of that $2 trillion of revenue,

that's money that could be funding schools and health care and infrastructure, right? And so it's also a revenue generator over time if you can if you can find a way to crack down on that kind of tax avoidance. That's a good idea. Yeah, that'd be good. It's just a smart. I mean, it should be no-brainer, but I think, you know, you can also consider other things like, do you reveal how wealthy these people are? Like, because the voters in a lot of these countries, the people in these countries don't necessarily know that their politicians are worth billions of dollars. Yeah. Putin hated the Panama papers for a reason because it showed all his, you know, kleptocratic buddies. Yeah. Who's the celloist worth a couple billion dollars? It was just a childhood friend or something. Yeah, exactly, right? And these are people who are not earning billions of dollars, right? So these are ill-gotten gains that they don't want people to find that they have. And so I think blowing the whistle on the spotlighting it could be part of the toolbox that we use to push back

against kind of global authoritarianism. That is directly, you know, it's the other side of the coin of corruption. Yeah, good idea. That's all I got for the show today. Anything else? No, I mean, you know, it's a, I will say this stuff comes together, you know, in the British election, there's so many threads that intersect there, right? There's a Brexit issue. There's the kind of Russian interference in their politics, the kind of, you know, fake news phenomenon of just a lying Canada. A lot of lying candidate. But then also this question of like how do progressists fight back against this? And you fight back obviously by, you know, having a manifesto that is, you know, a purely socialist manifesto.

or how do you build coalitions? And I do think, as Lammy said, there's a lot to reflect on how do progressives not abandon the policies that they care about? Because in many cases, as the Warren thing illuminates, those policies are remedies to inequality and are remedies to authoritarianism. But you've got to find the language and the capacity to build coalitions that can reach people who aren't necessarily seeing things in the same way. And that's going to be hard.

And it's easier ultimately for right-wing populace to get up and just blame immigrants or talk about a form of identity politics than it's for progressives to connect all these dots around inequality and corruption and government. Yeah, agreed. So we're going to take a week off. We're not going to drop a show on Christmas. And have a great holiday. Yeah, thanks. This will be like one year of sitting in the co-pilot secret. We're saying Merry Christmas again.

So thank you to all the worldos for checking in here every week. All right. And we're saying Merry Christmas this year. because this is my first year. Oh, it's my first year. Well, I guess my second year. My wife is Jewish. So you can say Happy Hanukkah, too. So I can say it all. You can say happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas. My God. Yeah. Happy holidays. Freedom. Yeah. Happy holidays. Happy freedom. Yeah. Positive of the World is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez.

Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.