The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 2716 - Fixing Trump's Trade War; West Bank Under Siege w/ Lori Wallach, Mohammad Hesham Huraini

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Welcome back to The Majority Report On today's program: Senator Chris Van Hollen says that despite his disagreements with the DSA that they are welcome in the Democratic party and calls out any Democrat that is afraid to debate their ideas with the DSA. Lori Wallach, director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project and founder and former director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, joins to discuss her piece published in Foreign Affairs, "The Right Way to Balance Trade: What Comes After the Neoliberal Order". Mohammad Hesham Huraini. independent journalist and human rights activist based in the West Bank, joins for a conversation about the 40 masked Israeli settlers that raided his village and burned his family's car. Huraini wrote about the attack in +972 Magazine: "What an Israeli Settler Pogrom Feels Like". For more from Huraini follow him on Instagram and X and please consider supporting/sharing this fundraiser to help his family recover from brutal settler violence. In the Fun Half: CNN's Kasie Hunt gives Florida Democratic nominee for Senate Angie Nixon a very hostile interview. Enes Kanter continues to use the right-wing trans-panic over the WNBA to get attention as he disrupts a Chicago Sky - Indiana Fever game and gets ejected. Oracle tries to accuse Mark Ruffalo of antisemitism for his remarks on Oracle's Larry Ellison backing his sons' purchase of Paramount Skydance. all that and more. To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AM Quickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: DELETEME: Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to www.joindeleteme.com/MAJORITY and use promo code MAJORITY at checkout. SUNDAYS FOR DOGS: Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com/MAJORITY and get 50% off your first order. Or, you can use code MAJORITY at checkout. SUNSET LAKE CBD: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order at SunsetLakeCBD.com. Please fill out this form to request Bryan to come to your town to do stand-up comedy @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's YouTube channel: https://ww.youtube.com/Th3Discourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here: https:/www.youtube.com/@avaraiza

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August 24th, 2026. My name is Emma Vigeland in for Sam Cedar. a five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Lori Wallach, director of the Rethink Trade Program at the American Economic Liberties Project, will be with us to talk about how to rebuild our trade policy beyond neoliberalism and Trump's trade wars. And later in the show, Muhammad Hishem Harani,

independent journalists and human rights activists, joins us from the West Bank to discuss the intensifying Israeli settler pogroms. Also on the program, Trump escalates his trade war with Canada, and Carney responds in kind. We're back doing this again. This is a problem, by the way,

for U.S. oil refiners, as Canada is the U.S.'s biggest foreign crude supplier. You might have heard oil prices in a bit of an issue with this Iran war. Canada's a little less inclined to share their already depleted reserves.

Speaking of Iran, Iran calls the Trump administration's new sanctions an act of war indicating how emboldened they've been to ask for more after Trump lost the war already. The New York Times reports that Hakeem Jeffries met privately with Jared Kushner to discuss areas of common ground. What could that be?

Yeah, searching. So weird. Really going to have to think hard about that one. Check the Middle Eastern part of your brain. Yes. From the... Wow. No, I'm not even going to attempt it.

I would have had to recall parts of my brain to make that joke. Severe storms leave tens of thousands of people in Memphis without power. And another largely black city, Gary, Indiana, still without power after two weeks. Trump tells communities opposing data centers that they're making a mistake and that they're actually going to lower your electricity bills. How's that going to work? Who cares? I want to put one in Mar-a-Lago.

Yeah, right. Trump, by the way, has made more than a thousand stock trades in June, according to disclosures. I wonder if the data center part has anything to do with that. ICE has arrested the father of one of the USS Lincoln sailors. The sailors stuck in those horrific conditions on that carrier. And another five-year-old named Liam,

taken by ice on the way to his soccer game and thrown into that camp of horrors, Dilly, down in Texas. The USPS announces new mail-in-vote restrictions despite judges blocking it. Israeli troops have been marking Palestinian prisoners with numbers. Where have we heard that before? And lastly, California's Attorney General canceled a meeting with Paramount

over their attempt to buy Warner Brothers, accusing them of acting in bad faith. All this and more on today's majority report. Welcome to the show, everybody. How are you? I am doing well. It is fun day, Monday. Sam will be out for the rest of the week, potentially Friday.

We're not sure. He's on vacation. If he's out on Friday, he'll do a pre-tape. Yes. You'll see him Friday. Yes, yes. And I will actually be out starting Thursday, but I will be doing a pre-tape, as I mentioned,

I am going to be going to a wedding. It's a destination wedding, so we've got to travel on Thursday. But we've got a great show for you today. As I mentioned, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, met with Jared Kushner, the New York Times reports, Trump's son-in-law, and somebody who isn't officially a part of the administration, and yet is, for some reason, conducting diplomacy on behalf. of the government in the Middle East, you know, Jared Kushner, the guy who is definitely taking an even hand here, who had Benjamin Netanyahu sleeping in his childhood bedroom.

That's how close Kushner is to the Netanyahu family when he was growing up. They, Hakeem Jeffries and Jared Kushner have been meeting to discuss areas of common ground, the New York Times reports.

And you got to, to wonder what that might be, obviously Israel has got to be at the top of their minds. One of the big things in the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton keeping in a private server or emails when she was Secretary of State. One thing Jared Kushner being informal advisor to the Trump administration is that he's not statutorily obligated to be under sort of FOIA requests or his documents, and that is an attack on democracy. Yes. I mean, that's insane.

Like, it's in keeping with this administration trying to conceal their actions from traditional government oversight. They've been doing this in a variety of different ways, including getting caught using signal for official government communications illicitly, and then also having outside advisors acting in a private capacity,

but with the government involved. They have been trying, apparently, to also get, there's this effort to get government officials to sign non-disclosure agreements, as if, you know, you're working at some private corporation or something. Everything should be disclosed. It is a privatization of our government. Exactly. And that is fascistic.

There we go. There we go. So when people talk about how, oh, don't be hyperbolic about the fascist piece. Just remind them of that piece of information, frankly. Yeah, but, yeah, sending a letter about quacks on social media is fascism. Apparently. This is not. You criticize me for saying the R word, and that is fascism as well, according to the worst people in our political discourse. But anyway, they've been meeting. They have a kind of friendly relationship that goes back a little while because of their work together on criminal justice reform, which is such a funny thing that also Cory Booker, who's close with the Kushners, tends to tout.

and it's like, what has happened on criminal justice reform? We're still the top jailer in the entire world. So if you guys are trying to meet to find common ground on this particular issue, I wonder what you've agreed upon except to jail more people. Nibbling around the edges. Yes, to reform it in a way that is like what Trump is doing with the renovations down in D.C. Just put a new coat of pain on it and maybe make it work a little bit more poorly. Regardless, the only thing that the top Democrat should be,

be doing in the house meeting with a criminal like Jared Kushner is to say, hey, we're working on indicting you and you better get ready. Once we get back into power, we're going to look into, say, your billions of dollars in investments with the Saudi government in this pay-to-play scheme, or perhaps your corrupt land deal in Albania. That's what we're going to be doing. And we're just going to give you a heads up as a courtesy because of our paths work together on criminal justice reform. That's the only thing that should be occurring right now. in the midst of this criminal illegal administration and what they've been doing to our country.

And yet, that is not, I'm sure, what the subject of the discussion was. I bring this up to say that there is a fight, of course, right now in the Democratic Party over leadership. And because AOC and Zora Maldane as well and DSA stood down in New York, it's likely that Hakeem Jeffries is going to hang on to his leadership in the house.

Now in 2028, when we look at a primary challenge, when the DSA left has kept its powder dry a little bit and maybe is ready to make a stronger primary challenge against him, we shall see, I hope for that. But Chuck Schumer is, I think, a dead man walking. And Chris Van Hollen is somebody who has positioned him, as a potential leader in the Senate if he chooses to throw his hat in the ring. He went on Meet the Press yesterday and was asked by Kristen Welker here about DSA and their increasing role in the party given the fact that Democratic voters in the districts that have elected these DSA candidates seem to think that their platform is more representative of their interests

than the establishment Democrats. And so here's what Van Hollen had to say about DSA's role in the party. Well, let's delve a little deeper into this debate that you referenced inside the Democratic Party. Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz fended off a DSA-backed challenger in his district. And he's taking a very different view of Democratic Socialists of America. Here's what he said about DSA members likely to join Congress next year. He writes, quote, they're anti-American at their core. People who have said anti-American things and have said things that are pro-Russia and pro-China,

should they really get a security clearance, he asked? Can you pause for a second? So would Jared Moskowitz be considered anti-American for being the biggest Zionist cheerleader in the House potentially besides maybe Josh Gottheimer, who shockingly is not opposed or is opposed to DSA candidates as well? I mean, it says a lot that they make this about other foreign policy. when it's really about Israel. And it's really about capitalism. Because like, okay, or I mean, they throw in China there.

We know that China has capitalistic parts of its economy. It's not a capitalist country. Yeah, right. But Cuba is what they're referring to. But because Israel is a bastion of capitalism, of militarism, of genocide, of Western conquering of this particular area, we're not going to say that support for that foreign nation is anti-American. just to unpack the implicit framing here.

Socialists have a place in the Democratic Party, Senator. Yes, they do as part of the debate. And in this upcoming election, candidates can be very clear about where they strongly disagree with the DSA, which is probably on most issues. But they can also talk about their own plans. So, you know, I'm not afraid to debate. I think that those in the Democratic Party who are afraid of a healthy debate, are missing the point because voters, including Democratic voters, they don't want to simply return to the pre-Trump status quo. They want Democrats who are going to stand for something,

and I can strongly disagree with one set of Democrats. But I think that debate is healthy. Well, okay, talking about the debate, let's talk about the DSA platform. It calls for in part, replacing the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress and, quote, to abolish the Senate, the chamber, of course, in which you serve. Do those ideas go too far for you? Yes, of course, they do for me. And I think a lot of the folks who are running, regardless of where they are on the Democratic spectrum, have rejected those ideas. And so I think when you look at the Democratic Party right now, you're looking at a party that, again, is incredibly united when it comes to making sure we're out there.

standing up for working people. We need to end this war in Iran, which is driving up prices. And the reason that Senator Scott didn't want to talk about this election and the issues and didn't want to talk about Trump's record is because you have a rubber-stamp Republican Senate and rubber-stamp Republican candidates who simply want to do Donald Trump's bidding. And very quickly, would you accept an endorsement by the DSA? Oh, my God. I would not, I'm not going to sort of look into all these endorsements. I'm not going to reject this.

This is not going to endorse Christmas. No, yeah. It's so ridiculous. Okay. So, yes, the DSA program has some long-term goals that include the abolition of the Senate, which in an ideal world, hey, I don't think the Senate is a very democratic body. It's not. We've already amended the Constitution to change the format of the Senate.

We should continue democratizing and undemocratic. democratic part of our constitution. Yeah, there's, of course, like, it's tough for a senator to say that, but it should be enough to say, like, yeah, there's healthy debate over there. Can we talk about stuff besides what DSA is debating? Who doesn't endorse me and who I'm not a member of? Yes, and DSA, and he's right to point out that none of the electeds have adopted those positions, because this is more about, like, a long, longer term picture view. And it's also important to point out that people aren't just joining DSA because they see something like a changing of the imperial presidency into something that more resembles a prime

ministership or neutering the Senate so the House is the more powerful body because it's more democratically responsive you know the the there's a I lost my train of thought actually amending the Constitution is a legal thing to do so you can change the Senate you know what's not legal is to break laws saying that you can arm people who you think are doing human rights abuses. Right.

That's against the law. But there are parts of the Democratic Party that do believe that you should do that. That's the real question we're not talking about. Instead of talking about, like, can we coexist? The real question is like, can we coexist with politicians who are going to take millions and millions of dollars from APEC? Can we actually coexist to those people? And what I meant to say is that the reason that people aren't resonating or seeing that

and saying, oh, that's too extreme, is one, because the candidates aren't saying it themselves. And two, because of decades of fear mongering from the Republicans about how the communists are around the corner. And the, and people I think intrinsically understand that we are not anywhere close to that happening. We can't even raise the federal minimum wage. We can't get Medicare for all. You think that we're close to abolishing the Senate and changing the presidency. And that's why the candidates who are dealing in electoralism and are more practical about it, aren't engaging on those issues. Additionally, DSA is a big. tent. And that's part of what is terrifying them is that part of why, say, Angie Nixon joined

DSA, and I would be one curious if someone would actually ask her about it instead of trying to tag her with it as a way to, I guess, smear her for some reason, even though I don't think it's going to have that effect, is because of the organizing potential and being a part of a grassroots organizing effort that has discipline and has efficacy. So it had, there's DSA, right? There's DSA left. And then there are elected officials who agree on just the general idea of people power who want to be associated with the DSA. And so I wish that Welker would ask Chris Van Hollen, hey, there are Democrats, elected Democrats who are opposed to 75 to 80 percent of their own voter base per a Washington Ipsis poll about reducing or eliminating military support for Israel. That's where the base is, right? Medicare for all. This is an issue that polls very similarly within Democratic voters. And when you look at data for progress polls, a majority of Americans depending on the framing support Medicare for all. Shouldn't the question be not about the DSA constantly over and over again? Shouldn't it be more about, hey, what about the members of your party that they're rejecting the overwhelming will of the people and what they're asking for from their elected officials in the Democratic Party in particular?

because I'm pretty sure it's not meeting with Jared Kushner about how to reform criminals, which he is one, a criminal justice reform of which Jared Kushner is one of them. Maybe that's the reform they were talking about. We're going to reform criminal justice to make sure that you and the Trump family get off okay. But in reality, I'm sure they're circling the wagons trying to say, how can we maintain this bipartisan uniparty support

for our militarism abroad, particularly the state of Israel, yeah, that's more of a scandal than the DSA, which is more representative of how Democratic voters feel. It's much more of a scandal to have Hakeem Jeffrey as the leader of the Democrats in the House going around the will of his own party and voter base to congregate with a criminal who is a part of this administration

that should be locked up. Who do you think Democratic voters in particular want to be ruled by more? The Trump stacked Supreme Court or Congress. Like the Senate, the Supreme Court thing is going to age extremely, extremely well. Yep. In a moment, we are going to be talking to Lori Wallach, but first a word from one of our sponsors. Have you ever thought, I really should be doing something to protect myself from stalkers,

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Dot FM. Quick break. And when we come back, we'll be joined by Lori Wallach. We are back and I'm thrilled to be joined by Lori Wallach. director of the Rethink Trade Program at the American Economic Liberties Project, founder and former director of Public Citizens Global Trade Watch, and her recent piece in foreign affairs is entitled The Right Way to Balance Trade, What Comes After the Neoliberal Order. Lori, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Thank you so much for inviting me. Happy to have you. Happy to talk about this, especially because it's very newsworthy given what's been happening over the past few days with Trump's escalating trade war with Canada. Maybe we can start there. Your reaction to this back and forth with Carney about tariffs. So that situation is much more politics than it is economics. So for everyone who's been hearing the breathless coverage, don't worry, unless you're

in the business of getting a new hockey stick, but not pucks. Sticks are hit, pucks are not. you are not likely to be directly impacted by the 50% tariffs, which I think, by the way, they'll negotiate again. But it's only, I mean, only $20 billion of our trade. And Canada's main, Canada mainly sends its exports to us. So just to put that perspective, that's less than 5% of the trade. Sorry about that. Is that your ringtone?

That is my ringtone. and I thought I had turned off the phone. So my apologies. No worries. So it's 5% and they export us over $400 billion a year. So if you happen to be in one of the sectors that's being hit, or you're in the job of getting a new hockey stick before this tariff goes away, you could feel it.

There will be some disruptions, but mainly it's just, it's like guys having a hate fest, throwing tariffs around, affecting everyone else. And the places where it's most disruptive are things we won't feel immediately. So it's supply chain related stuff. So it's parts, like for instance, after all of these years of the North America Free Trade Agreement and then the U.S. Mexico Agreement, the aerospace industry between Canada and the U.S. is extremely integrated so that workers in the U.S. who are assembling Boeing planes are going to have things that they need tariffed.

And depending on what the company decides to do, they could slow down production, delay. So there could be effects, but those are not the direct consumer price effect that some people may expect. Now, a lot of the consumer price effects we've been told are caused by tariffs are really just price gouging. So having said that, make sure that if someone says, oh, I had to raise that price, it's because of the Canada tariffs. And, you know, it's going to be on something totally unrelated because there's a ton of that where prices are going up. And then a friend of mine will say, you're the trade lawyer. What's the tariff rate on this? And I'm like, uh, that's excluded. That actually is one of like Trump's brolicark buddies got an exception. So why'd your

price go up? Well, that would be price coaching. They can use the companies will use the excuse. It's actually incredible because, um, they did the same thing with Biden, under Biden after the, you know, naturally occurring inflation due to the supply chain bottlenecks that the, the, these companies, particularly in the food, grocery industry, realize, like, hey, we can just keep our prices high and take home record returns. They're doing the same thing with the tariffs right now that they've been declared illegal by the Supreme Court, many of them. So, yeah, that's a double scam. And if you go to the Economic Populist, which is the weekly publication of the Economic Liberties Project, we did a little analysis where we basically looked at with the terrorist. of refunds, because that is what you are referring to, who is going to get the benefits? And the way

it's set up, basically, small businesses don't typically directly import. They either go through a wholesaler or, you know, sometimes if it's a really super small amount, the shipper does the customs work. So UPS pays it. Well, those guys are never going to get their money back because they're not the listed importer of record, much less are consumers going to get the benefits? I mean, some of the companies have just been honest, yes, we're going to market to profits. Some of them are saying, we'll cut prices, but they'd already inflated prices. So they're still going to have a windfall, having jacked up prices on stuff that wasn't tariffed. And now they're going to get refunds and stuff that they did pay tariffs. They're just profiting off of us left and right. And unfortunately,

it's all so technical that a lot of people just think like, oh, it is what it is. And if people come away from our conversation with nothing else, this stuff is. can be democratically controlled. We have been horn swagled into thinking that there is nothing we can do about it, but we can't. So even with this silliness with Canada, where, you know, the real issue here is Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, is sort of the poster child of neoliberalism. This is a man who can't get enough of privatizing things, putting in corporate powers. He's like one of the few unrepent neoliberals on the global political scene. You've got a point where countries that had been benefiting from the old system, pretending they were neoliberals,

like in Germany, are not going, this is not working out so well. But yet Carney sticks to his position, even though he's witnessed Canada being the industrialized, et cetera, ever since NAFTA. Yet, Trump, not a guy who's like the guy who stood up and helped working people for trade as he sold us in the Midwest. Here I am in Wisconsin, but in Michigan and Pennsylvania, you can Vince voters, that's what he's going to do. No, no, no. Instead, he's had like this oligarch first trade policy where he's committed elements of tariff malpractice. I actually couldn't even have imagined when I knew they were going to screw up. There are things they have done that actually, in my most creative moments, couldn't imagine they could pull off. And so he's doing a deal where most people don't know this, but 55% of American imports the value don't have a tariff. Why? Mr. Tariff is wonderful, because he's made exceptional. for all of his broligarch buddies in the big tech sector. So like literally like Apple within days of, you know, of liberation day had had laptops, smartphones, external storage, all excluded. There's a Washington Post story about this that I bumbled into because I printed out the tariff lines.

They don't describe it. You have to look at the numbers. And I realize, hmm, there are five lines that are gone because I have a fifth page used to be this and it's only four pages now. So there's all this sneaky exceptions are putting in there. A lot of stuff isn't tariffed. The stuff that is tariffed, he's not caring about whether it's good for manufacturing or not. So the U.S. is down, 74,000 manufacturing jobs in his second term. Yes. And there we were on the, there was an increase in manufacturing jobs under Biden in the,

with the infrastructure bill, which, you know, I was insufficient, but it was at least a step in the right direction and to onshore. some of our most kind of essential goods. I love how you framed Carney and Trump, because they kind of both epitomize the two visions of trade policy that you outline in your piece, or at the very least Trump is a reaction to it. But when we're looking at neoliberalism and trade policy

and how we need to move beyond this model, it might be helpful to define what the neoliberal model of trade is for our audience. and how it has come to dominate our kind of economic infrastructure since the 80s, 90s on? So the neoliberal trade model was not free trade. That's the first place to start. So what the neoliberal model was was taking some notions about actual trade and then using the sort of smart people must be for free trade brand. to caboose onto that, all kinds of non-trade, one-size-fits-all policies that the biggest corporations and Wall Street, et cetera, wanted to implement worldwide.

And so the neoliberal model, things like the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, the World Trade Organization were the main delivery mechanisms, because that's how I would think about it. People call them trade agreements, but the dirty little secret was most of those agreements weren't about trade. putting aside the trade part, which I'll explain how that screwed up. Each of those agreements had chapters and all these agreements since that did things that would have the philosophers of free trade like Adam Smith and David Ricardo rolling in their graves. So classic rent-seeking monopoly licensing. Every country, like the epitome of textbook protectionism in the WTO and NAFTA, every country was required to guarantee 20-year monopoly patents for pharmaceuticals.

pharmaceutical companies, a way for big drug companies to raise prices. And when COVID hit, to basically be able to deny access to that stuff through compulsory licensing and generics in most of the global South. Or there are rules are literally anti-antitrust. You can't regulate a service sector that is committed to the WTO rules and the NAFTA rules according to how big it is. So literally the dominance. How many services anyone entity provides? The corporate. structure of it, like goodbye glass stagel. So they cleverly, these different interests embedded into these agreements. And so like I read fluent NAFTA-E's and GATTees. I am a recovering trade attorney. I can read these things and go, holy beans, that would totally screw up blah, blah,

law. And they did these embeds. And the most recent set of these, because Trump was no neoliberal. He's just like a griftmeister. He stuck for his friends. new rights and privileges for big tech. So if you, if you look under the, like, if you go digging through the underwear drawer and the details of the U.S.-Mexico-Can agreement, which he said was great for workers, there's a whole chapter there that's called Digital Trade, another of those stealthy brands, and all it is handcuffs on the regulation of big tech for privacy, for basically AI oversight, for monopoly abuses, and stuffed in the agreements. Now, I've one of is thinking, so what, we don't care if these rules are in the agreements. Every one of these

agreements has a clause similar to, I'll just say, the WTO one. Each country shall conform all domestic laws, regulations, and administrative procedures to the attached rules. So it's a form of international preemption where one size fits all, all of these corporate boondoggles and constraints. For instance, it's concerned in the legal trade barrier if you limit things based on labor standards. But if you don't provide big pharma, a protection, it's an illegal trade barrier. And none of that has to quit trade. And would it be fair to talk about how this is, this was a way to subvert any kind of sovereign nation from some sort of regulatory process? Like, this is a construction that elevates capital and monopolistic capital in particular over, say, the sovereignty of,

like a smaller nation that may want to regulate it? Or a bigger nation. Or a bigger one. So this was a way. Yeah, yeah. This was a way at one of my most brilliant coalition partners in this global movement against corporate globalization was an economist and he said that this is structural adjustment for the rich and powerful countries.

You're going to be forced to do this stuff that the IMF and World Bank forced us to do by conditioning our loans on it because we're going to hit you with trade. sanctions. So just, I mean, a handful of these with the U.S., you know, we wiped out a part of the Clean Air Act for gasoline cleanliness. We wiped out endangered species rules. We wiped out mandatory food labeling because these are all enforceable rules and trade sanctions under this system can be imposed on countries that don't conform their laws. So you have all this non-trade, one-size-fits-all, corporate garbage. And then they attach that to the trade rules that don't actually learn any of the lessons of trade. So, you know, we had a very hard lesson going into

World War I and through World War I and World War II about what not to do on trade. And so you had a lot of very smart guys like Keynes, who sort of start out as a free trader, saw the enormous global imbalances that got created in part because, you know, then the pound sterling, the British currency, was the reserve currency, the trade currency like the dollars now. saw in the interwar period how basically the concentration of production and then enormous trade deficits, deindustrialization and unemployment was extremely stabilizing. Because your analysis of using this as a way to undermine sovereignty's right, but it's even bigger. It's undermining democracy. The people are going to live with the results have taken away from them by this overarching,

like, you must do this or else trade. So what ended up happening is Keynes went into the Bretton Woods conference after World War II, where they were going to come up with new rules for the global economy. And he basically said, hey, recovering free trader, we have to have some basic rules. We need to have trade balance or we're going to have concentration of production and vulnerabilities and very bad moments of leverage, which we're seeing right now. The U.S. is doing it to everyone else. China is doing it to everyone and the U.S. because so much of trade, we are the big consumer. They are the big maker. Either one is leverage. You either have to sell it to someone. someone of or you have to buy it from someone, them. When it's that concentrated, then a lot of

other crazy demands get thrown in. Kane said, we're going to have a lot of countries deindustrialized. We need for resilience to have countries feeling secure and able to produce some core things or trade with their neighbors. We can't have everyone reliant on one or two countries, bad politics, bad vulnerabilities. And number three, he said, you have to have a floor. So believe it or not, way back when they were writing in the international laborer, organization's nascent labor standards as a condition, and they had anti-monopoly rules. And they have this whole construct called the International Trade Organization, which the U.S. Senate blew up. And we got left with just the tariff code, the general agreement on tariffs and

trade, the GATT. And we had that for 40 plus years because the U.S. Senate wouldn't take what was a reasonable set of trade rules. And that going forward, because we're now back to that situation of extremely unbalanced, deindustrialized, politically destabilizing trade. And you talk about the U.S. as the big consumer and China as the big producer in this architecture of

global trade. You'd probably rather be the producer than the consumer that has deindustrialized over this long period of time because the consumer is one that's going to be more vulnerable, I'd imagine. And we're seeing that now with China's trade surplus, if you could talk about their increasing power in this global trade order? Here's the thing I just want to say before I answer that question,

which is being a civilian, being a normal person in either a major surplus country or a major deficit country is problematic. Because the way you get to be a major surplus country and footnote on the footnote, I'm not talking about countries that have big surpluses, Norway, because of oil and gas, or Botswana because of diamonds. I'm talking about countries that have industrial manufacturing, huge surpluses. To get to that state, you have to have employed certain policies, which at the time of Keynes and Breton Woods were called Beggar Thy Neighbor. We sometimes now call them mercantilism. There's sort of a smorgasbord of policies that you can use to prioritize production for export. And to do that, you end up hurting your workers. So,

you know, and by the way, it's China, but there are about two dozen other countries in the world who have employed all or some of these. China employs all of them. So, and this is why it's not great for workers. You suppress your wages. So, you know, you either don't allow independent unions or if you have a command and control government, you say, this is what we're going to pay workers. You suppress consumption. Both things suck. if you're the repressed party, which is you can't have good things and you can't have a decent wage. And so you repress consumption, China doesn't have a social safety net. So they basically force people to save a ridiculous amount of the amount they earn

because they're going to be responsible for health care, for their elderly, etc. You manipulate the value of your currency. You bring it down so that when you get on the market, you have effectively like a subsidy without having to put the cash out. Germany has the second largest trade surplus. China is over a trillion. Germany is about $340 billion last year. And that is because, in part, they're trading on the euro, which they didn't do this intentionally, but it acts like an enormous currency devaluation compared to what the value it would be if they were trading on a Deutsche mark, which would be a much stronger currency, representing their industrial might not the mix. And is that why also there's some, there's all this

like racism in Germany about nations that are in the European Union that don't necessarily have the surplus that Germany does? I mean, I'm thinking about how they talk about Greek people and Spanish people, for example. I, I, as a first generation American whose family barely escaped from Germany, I will not speculate as to why there is that level of, okay. I could have to especially in German, because my dad didn't even speak English until he was five. But the question there is, I think, more one of there's an older generation of, I think there's an older generation of policymakers in Germany who are way too long, we're thinking about being that same very export-oriented country that had dominated all of Europe also

and was not really thinking about a country like China being able to do to them, because they're being severely deindustrialized. Why is the policy opportunity shifting? Because Germany is losing 10,000 jobs a month in their industrial sector. Their politics are shifting way right. And some of the things that you're describing are happening on steroids because basically they're having the China shock too, that the U.S. had the China shock,

one of severe deindustrialization and then you have you know a working class that has expectations that are not wrong of economic security that suddenly is finding themselves having their lives ripped out from under them all across germany's manufacturing heartland and they're a huge manufacturer apologies i threw you off but but go ahead yeah but yeah so you do currency you also have subsidies huge subsidies and um in in you know And with currency, some of the other countries that are the major surplus countries, Taiwan, Korea, Japan. Currency is a big part of it, but all the countries also have done subsidies.

And in this way, if you're a person who's a worker there, your wages are suppressed. You don't have the proper social safety net because they're trying to make you save and transfer the savings from the consumer through taxes into subsidies to boost exports. And your quality of life as a civilian in a country that's a big surplus country, ain't so great either necessarily. And then if you're in the deficit country, obviously, we know, we live this. We saw what's happened. We've seen the polarization politically. We've seen communities across the country, because it is wrong that's just the Rust Belt. The number one impacted per capita off-storing district, congressional district is in Texas. It's a NAFTA victim. And it's El Paso.

And it was Latina women who lost all the jobs making blue jeans and what you. used to be the denim capital of the world. That was a NAFTA thing. So the impact in California and New York, not just the middle of the country, has been dire because when you lose one of these facilities, the tax base goes, the hospital therefore goes, your schools don't have any money. People can't find a decent job any place nearby. They may be employed, but the quality of their life, they're doing two or three jobs and they have enormous insecurity. And you get things like Trump in response when he's smart enough to sell that he's going to fix it, when in fact, it's not just we're down 74,000 manufacturing jobs,

but on your point, when Biden had a mix of using strategic tariffs, because we need them. I'm not your anti-tariff gal. That's one of the tools we should use. But you mix it with other elements of industrial policy. To put in perspective, our highest manufacturing employment peak was in the very beginning of 2020. 23, and we had, since then, we have fallen almost 300,000 manufacturing jobs. So the peak of, like,

kicking in, sorry, 2024, the peak of kicking in all those industrial policies and having tariffs that were strategic, we also had the highest rate of investment in New American factories in 30 years. Yep. That is now plummeted. So we can do it right. There is a way to do it right. We have to get the domestic rules right and the international rules right. Yes. I mean, it is maddening how as soon as Trump got into office, he undid all of this. And the tariffs and the on and off nature of it, the fact that there, it was about, as you say, appealing to the demagogues that he wanted to and maybe getting currying favor with major U.S. corporations here for some goody down the line. The corrupt nature of it created this instability that froze any kind of investment. Because if you don't know what the rules are, you don't know. know how much capital to allocate. You don't know where your resources are supposed to be going. And so I want to end with, you know, talking about what a sane trade policy looks like going forward

in the future. But I did just want to touch a little bit more on China because you write about how our trade policies have made that Chinese surplus possible. I know you talked about it a bit in your response there. But we've talked extensively on this show about how China has this very centralized state planning apparatus where it can direct investment. And yes, workers aren't treated the same. And you touched on that and there are issues there. But like in the United States, we have these monopolies that are and capital that are

running our trade policy for their own benefit. But in China, at the very least, they're directing resources. to a point where they can grow at this rapid pace while still having this surplus. How did that come to be? And how are our greedy U.S.-based kind of Western capitalists to blame? So the rules that were set up in the WTO, which is what took over from the GAT.

So we had the GAT up until 1995. And then basically, if you had put into a mirror of evil, the International Trade Organization, with its floor of decency, with its competition policies, with its balanced trade requirements, with its no currency manipulation rules, instead of that, the opposite in every instance, became the World Trade Organization, which replaced the GAT in 1995. And it was sort of the epitome of neoliberalism being delivered, one-size-fits-all worldwide. So among the things that were the obligations you had to take on were things like those new monopoly protections for big pharma. But there were constraints on all kinds of key policies.

And that included basically rules forbidding any kind of capital controls. Now, there are some exceptions to that, but largely it was no capital controls, no managing the flow of capital. There were rules about anti-anti-monopoly. So in a bunch of these service sectors, but notably financial services, there was a whole deregulation agreement. We once FOIAed a bunch of the documents from the negotiations and literally have a note where Summers is writing to Geithner, Geithner's writing to Summers, you know, way back when, basically saying, yeah, we got all the stuff the Wall Street guys want, you should start calling them, here are their phone numbers, and they're talking about the WTO's Financial Services Agreement, which basically, literally,

in the FOIA, we also found a note that basically is like, yes, we're going to have to write the annex making clear we're getting rid of Glass Stegel, Siegel, because it's not a lot. anymore under these rules. So you have rules put in place that basically promote financialization, but then in addition, you have none of the trade rules that could help sustain balance. Because one thing a lot of people don't understand is the connection between trade imbalance and financialization. So when we buy all of these imports, the U.S. has a trillion dollar, slightly less now, but it has had a trillion dollar trade deficit. it. When we buy all of these imports, we're sending out dollars to pay for them. Those dollars

have to go someplace. They have to come back for investment someplace. And so when we are sending them to, you know, oligarchs in other countries who are themselves, the controlled owners of concentrated production, or it could be U.S. multinationals and oligarchs who have offshore the production and you're paying a facility there, but it's really coming back. Or it is some sovereign wealth fund in a country. They're all looking for high returns. So they bring the money back to the U.S. market. And this is the financialization formula.

And they're looking for the highest, quickest return. So you have investment in all of this risky stuff, derivatives, cryptocurrency, and financial speculation in real estate, not constructing it, but a buy and hold, all those buy and hold scams that have apartments empty injecting up prices. And that's because that's our quickest return. Now, obviously, some of it goes into some other things, but the quickest fastest and highest return is being drawn by all this money that slashed out for us buying all those imports slashes back in. And that means a lot less capital available for the productive economy.

So we can have really high growth rates in a really high stock market. And yet, what we're basically doing with these trade rules and with the imbalance is incentivizing a very vulnerable, very centralized, monopolized, financialized economy. So when I wrote about what we should do, I'm thinking about that problem too, because Trump has kind of toxified the idea of balanced trade. But people who are populists need to take that back. And people who are populists in the left really need to take it back because it was our damn idea originally. Well, and it's also about But she's doing it. Yes, yes.

And that's why I do appreciate figures like Bernie Sanders not rejecting tariffs outright. And part of the trade policy that was having great effect from Biden at the end of 2024 employed tariffs because you need to be able to, but you need to build the capacity to manufacture certain goods first before you slap tariffs on them. But for ones that you do that in a tailored way, as the capacity is built domestically, that's where tariffs have a role. So I'm so glad you clarified that last question for you because I know I've kept you very over. And I want to make sure I read this.

I am from Punch Drunk Pulpit saying, please let Lori know that the Twitch chat thinks she's really cool and we all want to take her class and be her friend. So the audience is loving this interview. That's why I'm keeping you a little late. But lastly, if you could just summarize what a way, what a path forward looks like for a balance free trade and for an economy and a trade policy that works for the world and for everyday Americans. So folks should look at this article.

It was a long process to boil it down. I have a longer version of it, but it's again a sort of it lays out both the critique and the solution. And if you go, I still have an ex account. If you go to Wallach Laurie, which is my Twitter handle, there's a link to a free copy of it behind the paywall. So you can actually read it. We'll link down below as well to your article. It stays up for like seven or eight more days. So the bottom line of it is this.

And this is a very high level way of thinking about it. But there is what are the rules and then there is to how do we get there? So the what are the rules, I think, are more or less those guys who were thinking about the global economy after World War II had it largely right. So we need a construct where you have a floor of rules, just like we do as a floor of federal law, you have some labor standards, some environmental standards, the competition rules that set a floor of decency of how you want an economy that can work for small businesses for independent farmers, that is fair for workers, that provides the competition you need for consumers to have access to lots of potential choices at decent prices. You need those kind of rules controlling global

capital and you have the condition of accessing markets based on meeting those basic rules. So how do you do this practically related to trade and how do you get there? So the only upside of the United States having this ginormous honking trade deficit is the whole world has an enormous interest in how we shift, if we're going to shift, from just being the importer of last resort for everyone and having all these imports dumped on us into being more mixed, where I'm not autarky gal. I don't think we should make everything ourselves. I believe we should be producing more domestically, including for resilience in the face of climate crisis, et cetera, some key sectors of stuff where also after COVID, like we know, the whole damn world knows. We can't have

one or two supply chains for medicine, communications equipment. Like we need structurally four or five supply chains, because invariably, someone's going to have a climate weather disaster. There's going to be an epidemic of something. We need for each other to have resilience. So different parts of the world need to make some of their own. We're a continental-sized country. We and or we with Mexico and Canada could be making a chunk more of a lot of key things that we need for our safety, our security, our health. Then we need to diversify our trade. Because even if you're making 50% of something, if the other whole 50% is reliant on just one country, you're still setting yourself up. So how do we do this. We use the access to our market that so many countries are addicted to to negotiate terms,

well, kind of negotiate. Just say you want the access to our market. Everyone, here is the floor. We all are in these international labor organization treaties. We're not telling you to do exactly U.S. law. We all are signatories to these multilateral environmental agreements that have various standards. We would have to negotiate the anti-monopoly rules, but we have served a pretty good basis of that and that we know a lot of countries have the right rules, they're just not enforcing them. And so we would have a rule that is, hey, everyone who wants to follow these standards, you're in a club where we're going to trade at a relatively lower tariff. We're going to negotiate what this is a thing called the trade weighted average,

the actual rate that you would have on the volume of trade. And we're going to set a ceiling, but within that you can decide how you want to distribute it. So room for industrial policy, as you've pointed out, you need that. So if you want to have zero tariffs on all of these things, because you want to have a 20% tariff on these three things you think you really have to make or however you're going to do it, but there's a trade weighted cap within that, which is lower than you have to pair that with external tariffs. And the external tariffs are on the trade of everyone who's not willing to follow the rules. And the way you do that, basically, is you set up amongst your partners a common external tariff. So let's say in between all of us, the trade weighted average would be whatever it would be 10%, whatever it is. Outside tariff would have to be 70%, something high. Now, some things you would have to still pay a tariff, and those would be things that you'd incentivize in the market, some country inside the club starting to make that stuff because it would become a market to have stuff under the fair trade rules being produced because the stuff from China,

whoever else wouldn't want to come into that set of rules would start to get too expensive. And so you would phase into it. Like you said, you have to have the capacity and the partners before you just slam the door shut. But eventually you would have these higher external tariffs. You would have this floor of decency. And then within, it sounds a little bit like what's called a common market, except common markets then amongst themselves have zero tariffs. But you would have the room for your industrial policy. And then just like, you know, with subsidies, because you'll need some subsidies and some stimulation of demand to support your domestic industrial capacity, which is what Biden used all three parts of the mix, to be able to do that if the subsidies

actually influence effect to undermine another country's production, they can do what's called a countervail. So if they can show your subsidy is hurting their production, they can put up a tariff as you are phasing that in to balance it. So you'd have a system of basically fair trade with a floor. And then the other countries would have to decide the ones that are not China, but that have been surplus countries using these mercantilist policies. So, you know, countries like the European Union's members of Germany and the Netherlands, it's really hard to know what's on with the Netherlands, because the way they keep the trade data, it's unclear if we have a, if the Netherlands has a trade surplus or the Port of Rotterdam has a trade surplus. But as you dig through that,

You'd figure out what you would do with the EU, because I'd have to choose. I bet they'd come in. You'd have to figure out if you're in Taiwan, in Korea, in Japan. Obviously, they're geopolitics. Like, do you want to be in the group that has the human floor of decency, or do you want to be out there in the race to the bottom club? And then the final piece of it is you have to remove all this neoliberal baggage that got pasted onto trade agreements. So you would have within the group the ability to set your own. domestic destiny and policies. So you would have room for experimentation. You would have the people going to live with the results able to say, we want this policy for small business. And you wouldn't

have this. No, you're not allowed to do this. The WTO says so. And you would basically go back to the core rule of trade, which is called non-discrimination. Because there are lots of benefits you can get from trade if the rules are right. And to get those benefits, you can't just treat the other country worse in regulatory stuff. The concept of comparative advantage, there's something to it. You have to have it in the right conditions. So if you could just discriminate like, I'm not going to

allow any pesticides and imports, but I'll allow the garbage on my domestic farmers. No, no, no. You have to have non-discrimination as the rule. So you, as the eater, get to decide what is my meat safety standard, my labeling rule, my pesticide standard, and then you have to

treat domestic and foreign producers the same. If you have that as the basic principle. And same thing with the service sector regulations, not like a cap of you can't regulate based on size, but rather, if this is the standard, it applies domestically into it. And you would basically have the benefits of trade operating globally and a flow of decency. You distribute production. It would almost mechanically break up production that way. And that has all the democracy and defunationalization benefits. Because, you know, when you're asking me about Germany, the reality is, why are things they're getting more and more ugly politically?

And it's the same phenomenon. Sadly, we all live through in the U.S. There are a lot of working class people who are feeling totally abandoned. And it's very easy for the elite who are benefiting from this and the sort of economic outworkedarks to say, like, it's that person, it's that immigrant, it's that brown person, it's that Greek person, it's them, it's not us, look the other way. And that is a lot of what was done here, basically. And, you know, the Democrats set themselves up for it.

You have had generation after generation Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, pushing the neoliberal lunacy. And so for a lot of the people where I grew up up here in northern Wisconsin, they just feel totally abandoned by all of politics and by Democrats and Republicans alike. And to some degree, they're the most mad at the Democrats because they think, like, the Democrats nafted us. And so they were very open and willing to hear some message from Trump. They wanted to believe. Now, interestingly, as I'm up here again, there are a lot of people like, what the hell is going on? Like, why are we not seeing any of the promised gains yet again? And so it's shifting.

But you know something? The Democrats could totally screw up because a bunch of the people who think they want to run in 2028 are kind of some of those leftover neoliberals from our party. Yes. And so you have people like basically just bashing the hell out of tariffs as if, you know, tariff is not the same as cancer. Tariff is the same as hammer because a hammer is a tool. Cancer, always bad. Tara, tool.

So you can use it to smash the crap out of something. Well, you can use it to build a house. And so you've got a bunch of neoliberal sort of leftover Democrats, maybe secret lovers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Who knows how bad they are. And those guys are, you know, thinking, oh, we can use this Trump abusive tariff to swing back to the old thing. But then you have some candidates or maybe candidates. You know, there's a list of them who are like, uh-uh, not going to step in that landmine. Democrats need to be for working people for real.

I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. And thank you so much for that thoughtful summary. I think part of what we saw was good under Biden was a shift from that. And also someone like Bernie Sanders really having influence on that, on that, that, that administration in crafting a much better policy that, of course, Trump scrapped. Lori, thank you so much for your time. I can't tell you how many IMs we're getting about how informative this segment was for our audience. We have to have you back another time. Lori Wallach, you can read her piece, the right way to balance trade, what comes after the neoliberal order in foreign affairs.

We'll link to it down below. And then, of course, check her out on social media if you want to follow her. And we'll link to that as well. Thank you so much, Lori, for your time today. Really appreciate it. This has been a joy, and I look forward to doing it again. Absolutely. We've got to have you back.

Thanks so much. With that, folks, we're going to head to our second interview. I recorded it this morning. This is another phenomenal interview in my humble opinion with Muhammad. Hisham Harani, independent journalists, human rights activists based in the West Bank. We spoke to him this morning about the increasing Israeli settler pogroms and basically how the Israeli government right now is Benjamin Netanyahu has elections coming up. The settler coalition needs to be satiated and so we're on the fast track to West Bank annexation potentially. I spoke to Muhammad about his firsthand experience with Israeli settlers,

and you'll hear that interview in just a second. Be right back. We are back, and we are joined now by Muhammad Hesham Harani, independent journalist and human rights activists based in the West Bank. You can read his recent piece in 972 magazine entitled What an Israeli Settler Program feels like. Mohamed, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thanks for hosting me, actually. Thank you for taking the time. I know that right now in the West Bank, it's just very dangerous. I wanted to actually talk a little bit about your story before we get into some of the updates out of Kusra and the other Israeli settler pogroms that have been happening across the West Bank. You wrote a piece, as I mentioned, for 972 magazine, talking about your individual experience with an Israeli settler program on July 18th. Talk about what happened on that day. So, yeah, what was happening actually, that was in the 18th of July last month, a program took a place in my community, in my Saperiata community in my village, 20. Over them 40 settlers, they raided my village. They were all masked, and they were all with sticks, guns, and stones, also with gasoline.

They raided my village at the midnight, while all the community and all the village were asleep. and you can imagine from the timing of the raid what could be the purpose of this attack, what could be the goal of this pogrom, which is they wanted to kill us inside our homes and inside our houses while we are sleeping. So the pogrom began,

and I was actually that night out of the house, out of my house, in another house in the village with my friends, with my cousins, just chilling and talking. Until I heard a voice of screaming and people were shouting, I realized that at the moment of the screaming, that this voice is not really different and it's not a strange voice for me. It's like a voice that I know. So I took my phone, I took my cousins, my friends, like we went out from the house, like looking for the side of the screaming. I realized at that moment this screaming is going out from my house. And this screaming was my sisters.

They were screamed from the stones that the settler were throwing at my house, at my car. on them while they were all sleeping. I started to try to get close to my house, to help my family, but I realized at that moment it was only me and another two of my friends, but they were 40 of them. They were even more than 40, but you cannot really recognize and give like a specific number because it was at the middle. night and it was a little bit dark. But when I saw them and I heard like my sisters and my family,

they were screaming inside the house. I really, that moment, I felt really speechless and I felt really useless, what I can do, what I have to do. Like they were throwing stones at the windows of my house. They were throwing gasoline inside my house and sitting my house on fire. Like the fire was going out from my house everywhere. So I thought at that moment, like, my entire family will be on fire and they will be all killed by such a pogrom and by such a rampage like this by the Israeli extremist settlers. I keep really try to push, to push more and more, try to shout,

try to do like the minimum that I, and the maximum, actually, what I can do against 40 masked settlers with guns, with stones and with gasoline. In just a while, just like a few minutes after the pogrom began, like my house was all in fire. My car was totally destroyed and sat on fire and burned totally. The settlers, they were like making like from the big number of this group,

like making it to a difference group moving from a, from a house to another, from my house to the mosque, to the dairy factory, to my neighbor's house, to another house. And they were doing the same to every house, to every place in the village. They were destroying the windows. They were throwing gasoline. They were sitting the houses on fire. And as I told you, it was clear what they want to do. They want to burn the families all alive while they were all sleeping inside our safe homes,

which is not safe anymore after these attacks and after these pogroms in the community. The mosque was burned, the dairy factory that served the whole community with milk, with yogurt, with the stuff like yogurt and milk. And also, my neighbor's house, when they throw gasoline inside it and set it on fire, The mother and the mother that lived in that house, she was pregnant. And from that terrifying scenes and from that crazy scenes that she saw that night, she had to go to the hospital, but this was after the pogrom.

And as a result of this attack, as a result of this pogrom on her house, she lost her unborn child. Actually, for me, I felt the same. I felt like the first thing I saw when my house was on fire, the same scenes that I already watched and saw in Doma near Nablos when a group of settlers sit fire in the Wabshah family and burned the entire family alive and killing everyone in the house except a little child that was half burned, but not. killed. I saw the same scenes, actually. I felt the same feelings that, okay, today just because of such a

people like this, they are thirsty for the Palestinian blood, I'm going to lose my entire family. And it's really not enough and it's really hard to explain and to describe the scenes that I

was watching and that I was seeing that night. But we keep really trying to push these settlers away, and we succeeded for a while to push them away to the outpost, the outpost of Havat Maun, which is the closest outpost to my village. It's just 200 meters, 150 meters away from my house, and it's one of the most extremest illegal outposts in the South Hebrew Hills.

And most of the pogroms, most of the attacks, that it's taking a place in my community in general, not just in my village, it's starting from these settlers that they live in this illegal outpost. So that was a night and that was an attack, that was a pogrom from like tens and hundreds of pogroms and attacks that taking places in my community and in the West Bank in general,

because today we are seeing like these settlers, they are taking the advantage of every. Everything. Everything, they are taking the advantage of it. Like, first of all, they took the advantage of the genocide that was happening on Gaza. After being fear gave the settlers, like these weapons to kill Palestinians, and they were using this under something called authority and self-protection, which is like self-protections from who? From us, like, and from us Palestinians, and while we are, like, here, our only guns is, our cameras.

So, like, comparing two things, like, they have, like, guns, they shoot at us, they kill us, and the only thing that we can do is just to film and to document what is happening. Just also three weeks ago, there was also another attack, the same scenes, the same settlers from the same illegal outpost on one of the villages called Tuba, close to my village as well. There was the same pogrom that is taking a place. They did the same scenes, actually. They destroyed the houses, they burned the houses, they beat the women's and little children inside the houses, and then setting houses on fire.

No, no settler, no one of these attackers, they were like detained or questioned or arrested by the Israeli occupation forces or by the Israeli occupation police, because it's clear that it's a coordinated campaign between the government, between the police, the army, the army, and settlers, leading it to the same goal, which is to displace and to force Palestinian to leave their lands and to leave their homes to build their new outpost and to build their settlements instead of the Palestinian community and Palestinian villages. And your car was completely burned. Your family is physically okay, though? Yeah, the car was completely burned, but at the moment of the Bougarum really, you don't really think about what will happen to the car

as much as what will happen to the family and what will happen to my sisters, to my little brother inside the house when I saw the house on fire. For sure, also, my family still feel scared that they will come back, that there will be another pogrom because, as I told you,

there is no serious actions was taking against these settlers to stop these crimes. So we still feel that they will come back because, okay, they didn't come back, to my village, the village of 20, but after like just the three weeks of the attack on my village, on my house, there was another attack in another village. And also last week, there was another attack in the village of Wadarachim, which is in Masafriata, close to Susia village. So we really don't know if they will come back or not, but we still take like the worst

like part, which is they will come back and maybe they will be like more dangerous. They will be like more settlers. And maybe my family at the second attack, at the next attack, they will be like all killed. So that's why really we are like asking for serious actions, takes against these settlers. Like these settlers must be sanctioned. Israel itself and this government itself must be sanctions against all the crimes that they are committing. We saw the genocide in Gaza, but no serious actions was taking a place about Gaza. Also, right now, they are talking about a fake ceasefire, but the genocide is still taking a place in Gaza Strip. And same same is happening here in my community.

If really nothing serious will be against these crimes, these buggrooms, these attacks, like until when? Until, like, for example, I lose my family, then the world will really wake up and say a Palestinian family, we're sit on fire alive and they were killed after a settler boughroom in the village of Tuan. then the world will really take an action or it will be like just like a normal a normal life for the and a normal like scenes in news which is will be published in social media and the world will just liking it and sharing it and that's it this is what not really what we want like what we want is really to stop these crimes to stop these pogromes to stop these attacks they the settlers they commit like pogromes they like they beat us They burn us. They do whatever they want to do. And in the next day, the army came to, like, commit another crime to demolish the houses, the same houses that was attacked.

Yes. And you mentioned in your article in 972 magazine that this is in Masafariata, which was central in the No Other Land documentary that won an Oscar. And I wonder if you think that that is also why Masafariata is being targeted. even more as a penalty? You know, it was really important and amazing to see a Palestinian director to won the Oscar

and to have our community being known for the award after the Academy Award, but meanwhile, like even before the program that was taking a place, the directors themselves, they were like a main target for the Israeli Saffner's attack

and for the Israeli army. Like Hamdan Ballel, one of the directors of No Other Land documentary. He was just attacked two days after he came back from the U.S., after he came back from the academy after he won the Oscar. And Basil Lauder as well, he was attacked multiple times and Sattler still harassing him wherever they saw him. So it could be a part, but we won an Oscar. We have an Oscar.

And in my village, actually, we have this Oscar. But does it mean, is it enough just to have an Oscar? Because we're really Palestinian. We really here in my community, we need more than an Oscar. We need protection. We need to live a life like indignity. We need a life, a better life than what we are seeing. But yes, it could be a part where it's a punishment or I don't know how

They think about it, these settlers because we have an Oscar, so they wanted to target my community and to target the village itself. It would be in keeping with past Israeli tactics to retaliate and to target anybody that gets international attention as a message. And right now, I want to turn to what's happening south of where you live in Kusra, because we're entering the third. week of Israeli settlers blockading three Palestinian families in their home in Kusra, they've been cutting off power, water, preventing them

from access to food, all under the protection of the IDF. What are you hearing as a journalist about what's happening in the Southern West Bank? And what can you tell us about those settler sieges in Kusra?

Yeah, you know, this sieges, today it's everywhere. It's like Kusra, it's like the, it's a big example. And it's like one of the most dangerous like sieges that it's happening today and at these moments in the West Bank. But also, we are talking about like tens and hundreds of new outposts, illegal outposts that was established after, 7th of October

2023. Like, as I told you, settlers, they took the advantage of the genocide and they began to continue with the stealing and with their occupation vision. And they built these outposts and they felt like

moving freely. And today, like in Kusra, they are like surrounding like three Palestinian houses and not allowing like the medical aid, like food, and like the important and the minimum rights for for any human in the world to have it they are

also like cutting it for these families so also I told you and it's really clear that it's a coordinated campaign between the soldiers and the the settlers to lead these families leaving their houses and they to build these outposts and to build their settlements and to build their settlements instead of these Palestinian houses. But what we saw, actually, is when something serious will be taking on the ground, there will be a big difference that it's happening. Like just one of the relatives of the families just came back from the U.S., putting the American flag on the house.

There was something serious, actually, after what is happening. Settlers violence started. like to go a little bit less on the families, but doesn't mean it's stopped. So just a flag and an American citizen came back to his house sitting with his brother inside the house. They start like, let's say, at least counting to 10 before committing a pogrom before attacking one of the houses. So which is mean there will be if like if the world will move as how this Palestinian,

American guy moved, the siege will be broken and the families will can go move freely and can feel like how they were and maybe better than how it was before even. Because it's like a group of settlers where they want just, they are really want to steal these houses, they are just want to keep attacking these families, to stop like the important sources for these families, but meanwhile, just a flag on a house, on one of these houses, it's like taking it a bit less, but doesn't mean it's to stop the sage or it's a break the stage. So if the American government goes out in like a statement or like to sanction these settlers or to take serious actions against these settlers and this army and these fascist government,

I feel there will be like something happening on the ground to break the siege on Kusra. So we really need a very urgent move from the world, from like the government's whole around the world, not just the U.S., but especially the U.S., because we saw that. Just the American flag did that. So how it could be if there will be serious action from the government itself? I am with you. I wish with every fiber of my being that our government could take an action here. And we've seen, though, it's much of a continuation from Biden to Trump. And the settler violence is escalating, as you say, the Israeli government has approved over 12,000 settlement units in the occupied West Bank this year, claiming that it is their right to the land because they seized it. in 1967 and has been illegally occupying it and East Jerusalem since that period. I also wanted to ask you about this horrible incident on Friday where Israeli settlers killed

a 17-year-old boy, one of the dozens of Palestinians killed in the West Bank this year by Israeli forces. Tell us about that story. Yeah, so we all saw the news and we all saw what was happening. But always there is like a way for the army, a way for the police to publish their lies, which is Palestinians we are trying to attack outpost, blah, blah, blah. But for me personally, I went to one of the places in Seir where I saw the security cameras. But the families, they were a bit scared from sharing these videos and to share it on social media because they said, if we publish this, maybe people will start to be afraid to come and visit us. But I saw one of these videos when even before the boy was shot.

Before the boy was shooting, there was five settlers coming up. out from the outpost throwing stones on the houses, throwing stones on the shops, throwing stones like at the nearby houses to the closest houses to the illegal outpost. But after that, the settler just invaded the village and invaded the houses, started also throwing stones again and again and again. Until we like me as any person around, I just like, here that there was someone shooted in Sa'eer village, which is, today it's happening everywhere. It's really happening everywhere. Settlers with their guns that was, I told you, given by being feared to these settlers,

which is we know, like, what kind of self-protection they want to do. Like, they came in the middle of the village. Yeah. And you have, they came with their guns. What do you want to do with a gun in the middle of a Palestinian village? For sure, you will not come to throw flowers. came really to shoot someone. They came really to kill someone. And it was in Syir last Friday, but we don't know, I told you, tomorrow we don't know who will be shooting. We don't know who will

be arrested, which house will be burned, which house will be demolished. It's really, today, especially because Bingvir Smotrich and Benjamin Netanyahu, they are looking for the votes of these settlers. So they are really aware of from arresting and aware, from saying or doing anything against these settlers. So these settlers are taking the advantage of these elections to commit more crimes, more pogroms, because they know if they will be arrested or if they will be, like, touched by the government. But I'm not saying that, like, to defend the government.

No, this fascist government, they are committing crimes since the beginning of their leading inside the inside Israel but today it's getting increased because of the elections. Police are not doing anything because Bingvir want these votes of these settlers. Yes. Mottrich is the same.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the same because there are lots of settlers in the West Bank. They want to commit crimes as much as they commit crimes. This is the great propaganda for Bingvir to won the elections again. Yes. We covered a few weeks ago

how some of the settlers in the West Bank traveled to the Gaza border and they were trying to pressure Benjamin Netanyahu to allow them to settle Gaza just to give people a sense of how captured this government is by the extremist settlers and how much they are a part of the fascist government. If you have some final thoughts, Muhammad, I just want to make sure that people know

or have a good sense of how they can help you and how they can shed light on what's happening in the West Bank. What would be your request to our audience if they want to make sure that they can help in the best way they can? Yeah. So I really just want to keep an eye on Palestine, to share what is happening, to keep like our our our our our our, our, our, our, our voices loud to push on your governments, to take serious actions, to stop these crimes, to stop the genocide that it's happening in Gaza, to stop these pogroms and attacks and the stealings of the land of the Palestinians in the West Bank, because it's really enough. We are watching like our houses, our friends, our people, they are getting killed.

They are a target for the Israeli settler and the army, and nothing is happening on the ground. And I have, like, a way to say it, it's in Arabic, but I will say it in English. With two hands, you will never make the sound of, like, with one hand, you will never make the sound of the clap. But with two hands, you can make the sound of the club. So we are Palestinian one of these hands,

and we want this word, the humans on this war, to be our second hand to make the sound of the club, which is to make serious actions on the ground to change this hard reality that we are living and passing through. Absolutely. Well, we're doing everything we can to spread the message here. It's not enough, but I'm thinking of you and your family and your neighbors and everybody in the West Bank who has to deal with this horrific terror right now.

Thank you. Thank you. Mohamed Hashem Harani, thank you so much. for your time today you can read his recent piece in 972 magazine entitled what an Israeli settler program feels like but you're also an independent journalist where can people follow your work yeah thank you thank you so much I really appreciate that of course we will put a link to your Twitter are you on Instagram as well Muhammad yeah okay we will put a link to your Twitter and your

Instagram down below wherever people are listening to or watching this thanks so much for your time today Thank you. Thank you so much. We are back. Thanks so much for checking out that interview, folks. I thought it was really excellent. And Muhammad, as he mentioned, his home was was torched. His car was also completely torched.

So if you would like to support him, we have a link down below to a PayPal that can help support his journalism and also help support his, you know, just continued ability to live in the West Bank. We have that link, right, guys, down below? I have it in the blogs. I'm adding it to YouTube right now. Okay, so it's a PayPal link, and it's Mohammed, his fundraiser, Mohammed Hisham fundraiser, is how it will come up.

So if you'd like to support him since they destroyed his, family's car, these Israeli settlers, that link is down below, but you can also follow him on Instagram and on Twitter to continue to support independent journalism in the West Bank. We're going to wrap up the first part of this program and head into the fun half where we will have some fun today. If you would, if you have the ability, well, I'm going to forego a membership request today. If you were considering joining the majority, Report, maybe do so on another day today. Muhammad's

fundraisers, where I would like to direct you. But in the future, if you'd like to become a member of the majority report, you can. You can get access to the fun half. You can IM the show. It helps us survive and thrive, stay resilient in these times. Join the Majority Report.com

for another day. Muhammad's fundraiser is the primary place I'd like to direct you today. Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning? And the Jacobin. We had a Sunday show for folks. Patreon.coms is Left reckoning. Tomorrow, afternoon, after a majority report, left reckoning with Beto O'Rourke, where we ask him,

among other things, can a big tent survive when it includes APEC? Check that out, patreon.com, just left reckoning that's come up tomorrow at 3. Beto O'Rourke, I said this to you. One of the nicest politicians I've ever interviewed, good guy has his heart in the right place, I would say. Yeah, I think he's a very genuine guy. Yep. Kowalski from Nebraska, Emma, your interview is really know how to get my blood pressure up.

We do not hate the state of Israel enough. Here, here, exactly right. And a lot of people have nice things to say about the Lori interview as well. So I'm glad you guys appreciated it. All right. See you in the fun half. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking in the majority report.

Wait, what? Look, Sam is unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show. It is Thursday. Yeah, I think you need to take over for Sam. Yes, please. Sir, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pause you right there.

Wait, what? You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it's offered a tour, sushi, and poker with the boys. Tour? Suci and poker with the boys. Who's offered to tour boys? What?

Tour? Sushi and poker. Tim's upset? Twirp. Sushi and poker with the boys. It's offered a twirp, sushi and... That's what we call it, bids. Dwerp, sushi and poker.

I just think that what you did to Tim Poole was mean. Free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about him because I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here. Dwerp. Ugh.

Sushi and poker with the... boys. Oh my god. Twir? Wow. Sushi. I'm sorry. I'm losing my fucking mind. Someone's offered a twir?

Yeah. Sushi and poker with the boys. Logic. Twerp. Sushi and poker with the boys. Boy, boy, boy. Twerp. I think I'm like a little kid.

A little kid. Twer? I think I'm like a little kid. Add this debate 7,000 times. A little kid. I think I'm like a little kid. Some people just don't understand. So I'm not trying to be a dick right now, but like, I absolutely think the U.S. should be providing

me with a life and kids. that's not what we're talking about here. It's not a fun job. Dwerp. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing.

That's a real thing. He's done it again. Sam has like the way to the world on the shoulders. Sam doesn't want to do this show anymore. It was so much easier. When the majority report was just you, you were happy. Let's change the subject. Rangers and Nick's going right.

Now, shut up. I don't want people saying reckless things on your program. That's one of the most difficult parts of this show. This is a pro-killing podcast. I'm thinking maybe it's kind of buried the hatchet. Left is best. Violet twer. Emma is cooked.

My honor's thesis. The main mic to you now. You want to go right on the outside policy. We already fund Israel. Incredible theme song. I bumbler. Emma Viglin. Absolutely one of my favorite people.

Actually, not just in the game. Like, period.