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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show in Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company X, now called xAI, opened a massive data center, known as Colossus, last year that supports the chatbot Grok. The facility is next to historically Black neighborhoods and runs on 35 methane gas-powered turbine generators, which emit significant amounts of nitrogen oxide and other toxic chemicals. The Southern Environmental Law Center says the turbines are operating without a permit. Those permits are the focus of a Shelby County Health Department hearing taking place today, Friday, as Musk says he wants to continue to expand his project. In February, Elon Musk explained why he decided to build Colossus in Memphis.

ELON MUSK: Well, we needed a building. We can’t build a building, so we must use an existing building. So we looked for — basically, for factories that had been — that had been abandoned, but the factory was in good shape, like a company had gone bankrupt or something. So, we found an Electrolux factory in Memphis. That’s why it’s in Memphis, home of Elvis and also one of the oldest — I think it was the capital of ancient Egypt.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Tennessee state Representative Justin J. Pearson, a Democrat who represents Memphis.

REP. JUSTIN J. PEARSON: xAI, Elon Musk’s company, is operating 35 gas turbines in southwest Memphis, in the neighborhood where myself and my entire family lives. This is horrific news. They are increasing the amount of nitrogen dioxide, which causes smog and continues to harm people with asthma, by potentially 30 to 60%.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we are joined in Memphis, Tennessee, by state Representative Justin J. Pearson and his brother KeShaun Pearson, executive director of Memphis Community Against Pollution.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! KeShaun, let’s begin with you, as you’re quoted all over about what’s happening in your community, Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. King was assassinated April 4th, 1968; Memphis, Tennessee, where Elon Musk wants to build — is trying to expand Colossus. Explain what’s happening and the community response and what you’re planning to say today at the health department hearing.

KESHAUN PEARSON: What’s happening in Memphis is a human rights violation. Elon Musk and xAI are violating our human right to clean air and a clean, healthy environment. Today I plan to address the Shelby County Health Department in stating that this has not been a transparent process, this has been done in a clandestine way, and this is not the way that we can move forward healthily for our community. We need justice in processing. We need justice in the process. We need redress and repair. We don’t need continual pollution.

We’ve seen this story before, where polluters come to our city, whether it has been TVA in their Valero plant, sterilization services in their ethylene oxide plant. We have continued to be looked at as the path of least resistance. Today I will make and explain to our Shelby County Health Department that we are not the path of least resistance. We are a resilient community that deserves the human rights of clean air, clean water, clean soil and a healthy environment. We should not continue to bear the burden of the negative health impacts of this facility and its rapid pace and movement. A phrase and a term coined by Leah Thomas, “environmental intersectionalism” —

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you — 

KESHAUN PEARSON: — explains how Black — yeah, sure.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you, Elon Musk claims he chose the former Electrolux building in Memphis because he wanted to get his AI applications up as fast as possible, within 122 days. He decided to use the abandoned building instead of a brand-new one. Can you talk about what Electrolux was before the process it took for Musk’s company xAI to purchase the building?

KESHAUN PEARSON: Electrolux was a company that scammed the city of Memphis. Electrolux came to our city and promised jobs, promised prosperity, similar to what xAI is doing, and then they left. They left without fulfilling the promise of jobs. They left without fulfilling the tax — the tax recommendations and the taxes that they said that they would provide that would elevate our community. They made promises, and then they left and abandoned us.

This is the same process that we’ve seen Elon Musk do in Texas, as well as California. He will create a plan, and then he will leave. And so, what we’re seeing right now is that this continual process is continuing to happen with a new tenant. Electrolux provided him the facility, and he is scamming the city of Memphis while putting out pollution.

AMY GOODMAN: KeShaun, I want to introduce your brother. This is an interesting inside-outside strategy. Tennessee Democratic state Representative Justin J. Pearson of Memphis, well known to people around the country. The two Justins, the representatives who were forced out of the Legislature, then reelected back in by their communities, Justin J. Pearson representing Memphis. Justin, thank you so much for being with us, state representative. If you can talk about your opposition to Elon Musk and xAI? Very interesting that your fellow Republicans, who have a supermajority in the Tennessee state House, recently passed a resolution recognizing Musk as, quote, “a brilliant businessman who’s saving lives and helping to restore America as a valuable ally of Donald J. Trump.” Talk about your concerns about what this AI data center will mean.

REP. JUSTIN J. PEARSON: Yeah, look, my concern is that Elon Musk is buying and paying for access to pollute, harm and hurt our community. Unfortunately, our mayors and elected officials and appointed officials — Mayor Lee Harris, Mayor Paul Young, Shelby County Health Director Michelle Taylor — and the Greater Memphis Chamber all decided that the community of 38109, where I live, could be on the auction block for Elon Musk to buy.

And it is a horrible, horrendous project that is having serious ramifications for our community. The reason that in legislation that my colleagues passed praising Elon Musk I put several amendments was to tell the truth, that Elon Musk is polluting the air of Tennesseans. He is continuing and perpetuating environmental racism and environmental degradation in our community. This project is an application for 15 gas turbines, but we know today that they have 35 turbines, and yesterday a report showed 33 of those in operation, despite the fact that the mayor of Memphis said only 15 of them were being used, because that’s what xAI had told him. They are liars. They are abusing our community, and they are exploiting us, and it’s having horrible ramifications — 17.2 tons of formaldehyde being sprayed into our air because of these gas turbines, over 130 tons of nitrogen oxide, making them a larger polluter than the Memphis International Airport. It’s happening right now in our community.

And elected officials and appointed officials have a responsibility to the people who they were elected and appointed to serve, not to the billionaires and the oligarchs who are misusing and abusing their authority to hurt our community.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Memphis Mayor Paul Young, after public pressure mounted, offering to earmark a portion of the roughly $15 million in tax proceeds from xAI’s operation?

REP. JUSTIN J. PEARSON: Yeah, I mean, Mayor Young’s idea that he’s going to give us tax money in place of our health and our lives is completely asinine, and it’s an insult to the people in this community. But it isn’t just Mary Young who is problematic. It’s Mayor Lee Harris of Shelby County, who has said nothing about this project since it started, and he was all praise and all happy-go-lucky about it, and now we can’t find him. He’s entirely invisible, despite the fact that the health department is under his purview. And so, he hasn’t come out with a statement saying that we need to protect our air, we need to protect our citizens, we need to protect our community. And that is giving license to Elon Musk and to xAI that they can pollute our community, they can hurt us, without any ramification.

But the people power that is rising up, the democracy that is being shown here by people of all constituencies, people all across our district, in District 86, but all across this city and this county, is showing that we are not going to yield to the anti-democratic, anti-constitutional actions of people. We are not going to yield our lives and our lungs to Elon Musk, to Paul Young, to Lee Harris, to Michelle Taylor. We are not yielding our lives for the profits of the richest man in the world.

This is ridiculous that the Greater Memphis Chamber and so many other people have literally decided that we can be sacrificed for the benefits of a data center and a supercomputer, and we not be included in the process, our voices not be heard. That isn’t the way that economic development is supposed to go. And if that is the way that economic development needs to go in our city, we don’t want it. It’s an insult to the people in Boxtown, in Westwood, in West Junction, in Walker Homes, in Coro Lake that we are being treated this way, and that the people who have a responsibility and an obligation to do something about it are refusing to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic state Representative Justin J. Pearson, I wanted to extend my condolences on your baby brother’s death, not such a baby anymore, took his own life in December. And I understand, going back in time, when Tim was born, he needed a machine to breathe. KeShaun, when he was born, was born premature. Can you, first, talk about what you feel this all has to do with, communities that have cancer clusters and are in environmentally really fragile shape as a result of pollution?

REP. JUSTIN J. PEARSON: Absolutely. So, KeShaun and I lost my middle brother, his baby brother, younger brother, Tim Pearson, in December, and we miss him every single day, one of the reasons that it’s so important that we do something about this gun violence epidemic. And he was a proponent and a super advocate in our community and would have been at this public hearing today fighting alongside of us, as well, but he’s with us in spirit, for sure.

But he was born with asthma, my oldest brother born prematurely. My uncle sleeps with a CPAP machine. My auntie is currently fighting cancer, breast cancer, right now, and the same type of breast cancer that my grandmother died from. We know that environmental injustice is having a serious impact on the very lives and the health of the people in our communities.

And these issues are interconnected. It is no coincidence that 75% — if you are Black, African American in this country, you’re 75% more likely to live near a toxic hazardous waste facility. It’s no accident that in this district, in this community, we’re four times likelier to have cancer in our bodies. It’s no accident that in this community there are over 17 Toxics Release Inventory facilities surrounding us — now 18 with Elon Musk’s xAI plant. It is a consistent practice that is a part of the history of our country, to first redline communities, force people to live in certain areas, and if you look at those same maps and where industrial facilities are being placed, they overlap.

Our communities are being targeted. None of this is accidental or coincidental. We are being targeted, and our lives are continuously and consistently being hurt and harmed by the actions of corporations and by leaders like the Greater Memphis Chamber, Mayor Young, Mayor Harris, Director Taylor, who are not stepping up to the plate to say, “You know what? We do need to find out more information about the environmental consequences before we greenlight projects like this.”

And if I can say this, look, when you look at —

AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 20 seconds.

REP. JUSTIN J. PEARSON: Oh, go ahead. Look, we have to fight. That is our responsibility. Fight, because clean air is a human right.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Tennessee Democratic state Representative Justin J. Pearson, who’s holding a news conference today at 4:30 in Memphis. And I want to thank KeShaun Pearson, executive director of Memphis Community [Against] Pollution. We will continue to follow this story.

Democracy Now! currently accepting applications for an individual giving manager to support our fundraising team. Check it out at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show looking at what ProPublica calls “The Trump Administration’s War on Children.” Their new report looks at how the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is putting children at risk by cutting funds for investigating child abuse, enforcing child support payments, providing child care, and more.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by ProPublica reporter Eli Hager.

So, Eli, lay out your findings.

ELI HAGER: Well, it’s probably been a little bit hard for people to follow all of these cuts across all of these different federal agencies. But one throughline that we’ve tracked at ProPublica is cuts to programs serving children, so across a lot of little-known federal agencies with names like the Children’s Bureau and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. There have been cuts to both funding and services and staffing for Child Protective Services, for enforcing child support orders, for child care and all sorts of programs. And the throughline has been that those programs serve children.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Eli, could say — we’ll get into each of the programs that you list in the piece. But why do you think this hasn’t been given so much publicity, people aren’t aware of how much poor children are being made to suffer by these cuts, or will be?

ELI HAGER: Right, yeah. I mean, that’s definitely true. I think one is just the chaos and the onslaught of cuts at so many different agencies. I think a number of these agencies are relatively anonymous, agencies that people haven’t heard of. And they’re also housed within very large departments, like Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, and these are smaller children’s offices within those large departments. And I also just don’t think people realize how much the federal government does for children’s services and for administering things like CPS and adoption across the country and things like that.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s start with Head Start. I mean, this is astounding, goes to 1 million low-income parents. What this means, eliminating the Lyndon Johnson program from the War on Poverty?

ELI HAGER: Right. There’s Head Start in every community across the country. This would especially affect rural areas, where often the Head Start program is the only child care facility or location in a whole town. And so, 1 million working parents across the country wouldn’t have anywhere to send their children during the day if Head Start were to be ended, which the president’s budget calls for. Also, these Head Start program directors have been having trouble accessing their congressionally appropriated funds. They’re being directed to a DOGE “Defend the Spend” website, which seems to be new.

AMY GOODMAN: This as Elon Musk calls for people to have more children, and they’re talking about actually spending money, giving $5,000 apiece to women who give birth to children.

ELI HAGER: Right, yes, that is an irony that we noticed.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you also talk about in the piece the other areas that have been impacted, including cuts to institutions that investigate child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children, responding to reports of missing children and preventing youth violence. If you could elaborate on some of those? Like, where — under what organization or department do those fall?

ELI HAGER: Right. So, what we noticed was that it wasn’t just cuts to kind of these more liberal-coded programs like support for child care and direct assistance to lower-income families with children, but also these programs that have much more support across the political spectrum, like funds and staffing for investigating child abuse and Child Protective Services. A lot of that is funded by the Social Services Block Grant, and the entire staff that delivers that block grant was laid off by Robert F. Kennedy at HHS. And then you also, at the Department of Justice, have cuts to or delayed or blocked funding for local law enforcement to investigate internet crimes against children, for programs that respond to cases of missing children, for amber alerts, for all of these things that just respond to very serious cases of violence against children.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the cutting off of healthcare for, what, some 800,000 children, and then, of course, with the threats to Medicaid, the number, the millions of children covered by Medicaid.

ELI HAGER: Yeah, I think one thing that people don’t realize is that children are actually the — they receive Medicaid in greater numbers than any other age group. Nearly 40% of the people who rely on Medicaid are children, whether that’s in school-based healthcare or in foster care residential facilities, whether it’s for their disabilities or for cancer treatment. The potential cuts to Medicaid would be devastating to children across the country.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And is there any recourse that these agencies have? I mean, are these cuts inevitable and going into effect?

ELI HAGER: So, it depends on — it depends on which one. The cuts to Head Start, and both to staffing and potentially to its funding, seem imminent, and Head Start programs are already closing in several parts of the country. That’s probably one of the more imminent ones. The cuts at DOJ for local law enforcement seem like they may happen, but there’s a chance that some of that funding gets reinstated. The department said that they’re still considering some of the grants. So, there’s a spectrum. Obviously, we know that with Medicaid, that’s still up in the air, but it looks like the Republicans in Congress are going to be cutting Medicaid [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: And you got a response from Robert Kennedy’s office, of course, in charge of health in America, saying they’re going to put money into establishing MAHA — right? — the Administration for a Healthy America.

ELI HAGER: Right, they’re going to consolidate all these children’s programs at the Administration for Children and Families, that had run child care and Head Start and the child support system. That’s another big one that the federal government does, that it makes sure that child support payments get to families. All of those are going to be reduced and consolidated into this other area.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Eli Hager, we’re going to have to leave it to folks reading your piece. Eli Hager is a ProPublica reporter. We’ll link to his new piece, “The Trump Administration’s War on Children.” That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, for another edition of Democracy Now!

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Maria, we also want to ask you about the death of Pope Francis. Thousands of mourners are lining up again today as Pope Francis’s body lies in state in St. Peter’s Basilica. His funeral will be on Saturday. You met with the pope, Pope Francis, several times at the Vatican, including most recently in January at the World Communications Jubilee, where you delivered the opening speech. We’re just going to play a clip.

MARIA RESSA: Because we are at the Vatican, I want to point out three things. First, technology rewards, rewards lies. Think about that. The first time I met Pope Francis, I said, “Pope Francis, it’s against the Ten Commandments.” Two, the men who control this transformative technology wield godlike power, but they’re far from God.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Maria Ressa, the Nobel laureate, speaking at the Vatican with Pope Francis in the audience. It was what? January 27th. Talk about what Pope Francis means to you — Philippines is a Catholic country — and why he was also so concerned about the media.

MARIA RESSA: Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I would be what you’d call a wayward Catholic. I mean, you know, I believed in God, but I didn’t like the way governance in the five major world religions happen. Right? The manipulation, the lack of rights for women — I mean, whatever. But Pope Francis called us, about 20 to 30 Nobel Peace Prize winners. And around 2023, we met with him and came out. He thought the world was going crazy. Right? War. He stood up against the — he asked for peace in Ukraine, in Gaza, in all the different —

AMY GOODMAN: He called for a ceasefire in Gaza Sunday, Easter, right before he died.

MARIA RESSA: Right before, exactly. And beyond that, this is a pope that understood the role of artificial intelligence. I mean, it was interesting sitting around a table where, you know, you could see all of the world’s problems that were existential, from landmines to climate change to nuclear proliferation to — oh my gosh, what would be the next one? I mean, I was at the last, in terms of technology and media. Right? He understood this. He stood up for the principles that were there, and even for the marginalized. This was a progressive pope. He was inclusive in a way the church had not been. And I think even small things, like we quibbled over the word “fraternity” — right? — because it’s sexist in nature. But it’s very hard to change an entire Catholic Church.

So, look, I think what he did with us, I was sitting next to Shirin Ebadi from Iran, Tawakkol Karman. It was multi — 

AMY GOODMAN: From Yemen.

MARIA RESSA: From Yemen, the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for the Arab — in the Arab Spring, right? And we all came together to demand peace, unity, and press freedom was also something Pope Francis — look, it was a choice. The jubilee happens once every 25 years for the Catholic Church. And the first speaker he chose, despite the relentless coverage of sexual abuse both of minors and of women in the Catholic Church — right? — despite all of that — 

AMY GOODMAN: And men.

MARIA RESSA: And men — he chose journalists to kick off the jubilee. He cared about what was happening around the world. And now this is yet — this conservative ally of progressive values, now we’re going to see what will happen at the conclave. Who will replace Pope Francis? The church is a powerful force. I guess this is what he taught me, is that faith is incredibly important when you’re fighting for your rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Two Filipinos are being considered to be the next pope.

MARIA RESSA: Oh my god! So, I knew one. Who’s the second?

AMY GOODMAN: I don’t know which one you know, and I probably don’t know the name of the second.

MARIA RESSA: OK, OK, OK. I know that three Filipinos for the first time — this is huge for the Philippines — are joining the conclave. And that was the other thing Pope Francis did, right? He changed the church by changing the people. He moved it away from a Eurocentric kind of Global North view, and he brought in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Right? So, the one that has been tipped — and, of course, I’ve been to the Vatican now like four times in less than two years, because when Pope Francis calls, you go. Right? And the whisper, of course, is — and he may be as high as number two — is that Cardinal Tagle — he became — he moved to Rome because the pope, Pope Francis, gave him a special — like, he changed the rules. He gave him a special appointment to come to Rome. And Cardinal Tagle, I believe, is just behind —

AMY GOODMAN: We’re showing his picture with you.

MARIA RESSA: We were just — we were doing a — this is at the Vatican. And this man is very liberal, progressive. He speaks — he speaks normally. Again, I know him quite well, because when I first took over as head of the largest network in the Philippines, Cardinal Tagle had a program on ABS–CBN. Sorry. Back to ABS–CBN, the largest broadcaster in the Philippines lost its franchise to operate under Duterte. Franchise is like a license to operate. It never regained it, even after Duterte was gone. I’m just saying, you can cut the deals, corporate media, but once you empower a dictator, you lose these rights.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us. Certainly, an important warning you once again share with us here in the United States. Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of the Philippine independent news site Rappler, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work defending free expression in the Philippines, as the president at the time, Duterte, went after, attempted to arrest her over and over and over again. We also want to thank Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect.

Coming up, the Trump administration’s war on children. Back in 30 seconds.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re continuing our conversation with Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect to talk about another of his recent articles, this one headlined “Is the Press Next?” Kuttner writes, quote, “As Trump tries to destroy one free institution after another — universities, law firms, independent public agencies, trade unions — sooner or later he will come for the press,” Kuttner writes.

And Trump’s attacks on the press have already begun. In December, ABC News settled a defamation suit filed by President-elect Trump instead of taking the case to court. As part of the deal, ABC will donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library. The White House has also banned the Associated Press from covering some presidential events over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. After suffering a court setback, the White House moved to restrict access to all of the wire services.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has also repeatedly attacked 60 Minutes, CBS’s flagship investigative news program. Trump has urged the Federal Communications Commission to pull CBS’s license. And in his personal capacity, Trump has filed a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over how 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris last year. This all comes as CBS’s parent company Paramount Global is seeking FCC approval for its proposed $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Earlier this week, there was a major shakeup at 60 Minutes. The show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, resigned, saying, quote, “Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience,” he said. Semafor has reported Paramount’s Shari Redstone had begun personally keeping tabs on 60 Minutes segments about Trump.

Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect is still with us, along with Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of the Philippine independent news site Rappler, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work defending free expression in the Philippines.

Robert Kuttner, we’re going to start with you laying out what is taking place here, when you have 60 Minutes’ head leaving, saying he can no longer ensure its independence, and you have this merger that Shari Redstone is trying to accomplish with Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, and his son David Ellison, known Trump allies. Talk about all of this.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, my worry is that this is just the beginning. If they want it to become really systematic, in this article, “Is the Press Next?,” I ticked off all the things they might do.

So, the first thing they might do is they might go after the nonprofit tax-exempt status of much of the progressive media, so-called 501(c)(3) status, that allows you to get foundation grants. And to be a 501(c)(3), you’re not supposed to be political. And, you know, just between us and your audience, a lot of the left press is pretty tough on Trump, as it ought to be. So, Trump could go to the — now, it’s illegal for the president to, you know, abruptly pull the tax exemption of any organization. But you could get the IRS to launch an investigation, and you could find that — shock, shock — several progressive media are actually pretty critical of Trump, and maybe they don’t deserve a 501(c)(3) status. That, in turn, would spook their foundations, because they’re also 501(c)(3)s, they’re tax-exempt, and you could threaten their tax exemptions. So, that’s just one thing he could do.

You already have a kind of anticipatory capitulation, appeasement, on the part of big corporate owners of The Washington Post and the L.A. Times, and sometimes The New York Times feels like it’s pulling its punches, because when a billionaire owns a media property — I hate the word — they have their other business interests to look out for, Shari Redstone being a classical example. So you’ve got self-censorship. That’s a second evil.

You’ve also got the fact that, you know, public broadcasting broadcasts on frequencies that are allocated by the FCC. The FCC could say, “Hey, actually, we need those frequencies for national security purposes. And public radio stations, you don’t get to broadcast over the air anymore.” So —

AMY GOODMAN: And Congress has already started an investigation into PBS and NPR.

ROBERT KUTTNER: That’s correct. So, Trump could play harder hardball. Now, the good news here is this is protected by the First Amendment. And in the last segment, we talked about briefly the Supreme Court discovering the fact that its primary job is to uphold the rule of law. And it doesn’t get any more fundamental than the First Amendment. So that might slow down Trump.

The other interesting thing is that more and more and more Americans get their news, regardless of what the original news source is, from the internet. They don’t read newspapers anymore. And a lot of listeners to public radio listen on the internet. It’s hard to censor the internet. And you could imagine media gravitating to the internet. Even the Chinese Communist Party had trouble creating what was called the Great Firewall of China to keep Chinese citizens from accessing the internet. So, I don’t think he’s going to put the free press out of business, but I think we need to be vigilant.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to get Maria Ressa to comment on what’s happening in the U.S., as well. Of course, you have devoted your life to fighting for free expression in the Philippines, for which you were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. So, if you could talk first about your site Rappler, the repeated attempts by the Duterte government to have you imprisoned, several — 10, I believe — arrest warrants issued against you, and how, despite all of that, you kept Rappler running throughout?

MARIA RESSA: Yeah, no. First, thank you for having me.

But, you know, let me just be a little bit more dire than Robert. I just came from Perugia, from the International Journalism Festival, where V-Dem, which does kind of a rating of all democracies globally — right? — their latest report now says that 72% of the world is under autocratic rule. Like, we have elected illiberal leaders in 72% — in these democracies around the world, right? But —

AMY GOODMAN: How do they classify the U.S.?

MARIA RESSA: The U.S. is — so, here’s what he said. The head of V-Dem publicly said that if the trends in America continue, that he expects democracy to die by the summer. Like, not just to wake you up, right? Like, literally. And actually, if we stop normalizing the death by a thousand cuts of rule of law, you can see this happening, right? For the Turkish grad student picked up from the streets from Tufts University, from all of the little things — we’ve talked here about the press. The press was attacked in the first Trump administration, right? Duterte echoed President Trump. President Trump echoed Duterte. “Enemies of the people,” that’s what they both called us.

But the point here is, it’s — we normalize new depths. Like, we should not be where we are, and yet that’s where we are. And what are you seeing being created? At the early days, in the first month, I called at the Filipinization of American politics. But I think it’s even worse, because what you’re seeing, not many mainstream covered the government pausing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — right? — saying, essentially telling Americans that it’s OK to be corrupt, because you need to be competitive. These are the ideals that are being broken down. So, what are we seeing? We’re seeing the creation of a kleptocracy.

The last part here is, Robert talked about the internet. But these Big Tech companies, the “broligarchy,” who were there in the front row, right?

AMY GOODMAN: At his inauguration.

MARIA RESSA: At his inauguration. The design of social media — and this was a clip you ran in the tease at the beginning — it literally turns the incentive structure upside down, is on the side of a populist — a dictator-to-be, right? Because why? In 2018, MIT said that lies spread six times faster. That was before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it to X and turned it into a human cesspool, even worse than it was in 2018. So, if lies spread six times faster, and fear, anger and hate — this is across the world — if you use fear, anger and hate, it spreads — and I hate to — I put rabbit ears on “information” — the post spreads virally, right? So, there are more ways. Online violence is real-world violence. The reason why 72% of the world today is now under authoritarian rule is partly because our public information ecosystem is corrupted. Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: I remember you being on the show here years ago, when Duterte was really going after you, when he was the leader of the Philippines, now — and we’ll talk about this in a moment — 

MARIA RESSA: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — he’s in prison at The Hague. But when you walked out, you said, “Don’t take this as just an example of, you know, this sort of story of the Philippines.” You said, “This could be happening to you in just a few years. I see us as a warning for you.” So, talk about — I mean, Nermeen mentioned how many times they attempted to arrest you.

MARIA RESSA: Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how you dealt with this and how you fought back, because I think law firms are seeing — 

MARIA RESSA: Law firms, academe —

AMY GOODMAN: — universities are seeing —

MARIA RESSA: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — all of these institutions, when they fight back, yes, Trump blinks.

MARIA RESSA: So, first, I think the biggest lesson we learned is that you are at your most powerful at the beginning of the attacks. Every day you do not fight back, you lose just a little bit more of your rights. We normalize just a little bit more of this kind of pseudo-democracy, right?

So, we need to — I think the first is that — what are the steps? Right? Social media was used to attack us. And it’s like fertilizer. Saying you’re the enemy of the press then lets people believe. That’s astroturfing. For me, hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa was trended by pro-government, by pro-Duterte information operations two years before I was actually arrested. And that sets the stage. It’s like fertilizer. So, social media, then media capture. And Robert talked about the chilling effect. Forget the chilling — it’s Siberia. And business interests. I talked about the three Cs: corrupt, coerce, coopt. For every single institution that is broken down — media, academe, NGO capture, state capture. And each step of the way as you go down, rule of law breaks down, and you lose — it’s death by a thousand cuts of your rights.

So, in the Philippines, you know, it was a rallying cry for us, because I’m a traditional journalist in the old sense of the word, right? And I didn’t want to be an activist, but when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism. So, in our case, I said, “We hold the line. This is the line where the Constitution gives us our rights.” The Philippines, like the United States, has three branches, coequal branches of government. And the United States is following the Philippines, what happened under Duterte, a very powerful executive, a coopted legislature. And it took Duterte six months to crush the checks and balances of the Philippines, to get rid of institutional checks on his power.

The judiciary, what happens with the judiciary is not only — you talked about the 10 arrest warrants I have. Eight years later, we’ve won eight of the 10 cases, but I still have to ask for the Philippines — for approval to travel from the Philippines Supreme Court. What rights you lose today, you will not get back. Right?

Like, this is part of the reason why, if you value your rights, you stand up for them. You hold the line. Because silence is complicity. Silence gives approval for it, and we create a new normal. Even reporting has to slightly change. You have to call a lie a lie. You have to put the context to it. And anyway, sorry, I could talk about this forever. I feel like I have PTSD and déjà vu all combined. You know, it’s shocking America is where it is today.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But tell us. So, what happened with Rappler? There were constant attempts to shut it down, but somehow you moved the servers abroad or you did something to make sure that, despite the crackdown on the media, you were able to continue running.

MARIA RESSA: We prepared. Right? You embrace your fear. And once I figured out what were the worst-case scenarios we could have, we work flowed. I mean, Rappler is small. It’s 100, 120 people. And we told our people very early on, when the government first tried to shut us down in January 2018, “You may not want to be here. This is going to be a different thing.” Everyone has a different risk appetite, right? So we gave our reporters the option to leave Rappler, because I said, “We’ll help place you in another news organization.” Not one reporter took that. Right?

And the other part is, once you know who you are and what you stand for and you’re ready for the worst case, then you stand up for your rights. I think that’s the challenge today. In How to Stand Up to a Dictator, the question I asked Filipinos, and I now ask — the reason why I thought it was coming for every democracy around the world is this tech is global. You know, what it proved is that we could all be manipulated in the exact same way, regardless of country or culture. It was like looking at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Oh my god! And we’re allowing this to happen. They’re doing it with impunity for profit. So, hold the line, don’t give up your rights, because you only get weaker over time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you win the Nobel Peace Prize. You travel the world talking about freedom of the press. And Duterte is in jail. Let’s talk about this. Former President Rodrigo Duterte was flown to The Hague after being arrested in Manila for crimes against humanity on an International Criminal Court warrant. The ICC has been investigating Duterte since 2018 — as you have, even further back — over his extrajudicial so-called war on drugs that the U.N. estimates killed over 8,600 people. Human rights groups in the Philippines say the death toll is more like 30,000.

MARIA RESSA: More.

AMY GOODMAN: Many children were among those killed. Last year, the former president admitted under oath he oversaw a death squad of gangsters while he served as mayor of the southern city of Davao. Can you talk about what this means for the Philippines?

MARIA RESSA: Well, it doesn’t end — right? — the fight. So, what is it? How did he get arrested? It was the work of so many families, so many victims who refuse to be victims. And over time, it took that long. And part of it was also Gaza, right? We were told — we’ve been looking for this since August of 20 — my gosh, when was that? 2022. Right? Soon after the pandemic. So it took a long time, a lot of work, a focus on justice.

And I think the interesting thing here is that what’s at stake for the world today is whether or not an international rules-based order still exists, whether it’s Ukraine or Gaza or tech, right? And then, what the Philippines proved is that — and people will say, “Well, it’s power politics.” Everything is power politics. What the Philippines proved is that little Philippines actually honored an ICC — the very first time a Filipino president has been charged with crimes against humanity, when he was arrested. I was in the Philippines when that happened. We broke the story in Rappler for the arrest warrant. And when that happened, we didn’t know it was going to happen.

And I think that’s the part I really want to tell Americans, that you take step by step towards the goal of your values, towards the rights you have. And you don’t know what will happen. It’s incredibly uncertain. There were times I thought I would go to jail. There were times I had to wear a bulletproof vest in the car. Right? But you hold tight. And I think that’s what — I lost my right to travel. Five times, I couldn’t travel. Then the Nobel Prize happened, and I could travel. But I’ve still lost some rights. Sorry. The Philippines proved that an international human rights-based order can exist. But we have elections. It’s two weeks, May 12th, our elections, midterm elections. It’s a battle between Marcos and Duterte, the president and his vice president. And —

AMY GOODMAN: Duterte’s daughter.

MARIA RESSA: Duterte’s daughter. And Duterte, now in prison at The Hague, has been given a boost. The massive disinformation that has come to the Philippines, Rappler has done three or four stories to track this disinformation, that even though Filipinos know we’re being manipulated online, we continue to get manipulated, because it’s our emotions, right? If Duterte’s allies win at the Senate, his daughter is facing impeachment charges, corruption. Again, kleptocracy. It is power in money, right? This is where the world is headed. Hello. And then, what happens is, if his allies win, Sara Duterte may actually then survive the impeachment, may not be — may not lose her post. And that means that’s a setup again for another Duterte for our presidential elections. It doesn’t end, but the fights for your rights continues. Are you going to be silent?

And here’s the last part. Fear is real. I mean, in the Philippines, there were an average of eight dead bodies dumped on the sidewalk every night. We had one reporter going out every night, right? So, fear is real. And there were times I was angry at Filipinos for not doing more. But we kept going. And I think the Philippines shows you that it could take a while, but justice does happen. But it depends on what happens in America now — right? — where the world goes. It’s still true: What happens to America will — America catches a cold, so does the entire world. Right? So, look at the markets, as you’ve done. Anyway, hold on to your rights. And I’m worried about 2025 and where the world will take us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: President Trump is facing increasing criticism from corporate America over his decision to launch a global trade war. On Monday, the CEOs of Walmart, Target and Home Depot met with Trump at the White House to warn about the impact of Trump’s trade policies. A day later, Trump signaled he’s open to substantially lowering tariffs on China. Trump is also toning down his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who he had threatened to fire. This all comes as global stock markets remain in turmoil over Trump’s trade policies. The Wall Street Journal reports the Dow Jones Industrial Average is headed for its worst April performance since the Great Depression.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. His most recent piece is headlined “Trump Blinks.” Kuttner’s latest book is Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy. Robert Kuttner is also a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School.

Robert, welcome back to Democracy Now! So, let’s begin with this U-turn, with this reversal of Trump’s. When he started talking about 145% tariffs on China, it was like someone else had proposed them, and he wanted to turn that around. So, you’ve got from China to the possible firing of Jerome Powell and the turnaround on that. Can you talk about the significance of this and what it means that the Dow Jones is plummeting to the point of being compared to the Great Depression?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, Amy, I’ve been obsessively concerned with one question: Where are the firewalls? Where are the speed bumps? How might we slow Trump down? And there may be three or four ways that we can do this. One is by activism. One is by the Supreme Court remembering that its job is to protect the rule of law — and that seems to be happening. And one is financial markets.

Now, as someone who’s spent my entire career criticizing the power of Wall Street, it doesn’t give me great pleasure that financial markets can be a source of restraint on Trump. On the other hand, in World War II, you know, we had an alliance with Stalin to beat Hitler. So you take the allies you can take.

And what’s happened in the past few days — and Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, is the interesting figure here — markets crashed, first of all, when Trump declared “Liberation Day” and tried to impose tariffs on the whole world. They crashed again when he made noises about firing Jerome Powell. They crashed again when he did this lunacy with China. And what Bessent has done — he’s sort of the most conventional Wall Street guy of all of Trump’s advisers, so he kind of speaks for financial markets. And he basically said to Trump, “You really don’t want to do this.” And so Trump walked it back. And if you look at markets, financial markets, the Dow Jones, the S&P 500, in the past few days, you know, they bounced around like a yo-yo. And they bounced around primarily in response to whether Trump is doubling down on this craziness or whether he’s backing off.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you’ve said, Robert, that Scott Bessent is the — plays the role of the, quote, “sole grown-up in the room” in the Trump administration.

ROBERT KUTTNER: That’s right.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could say a little bit about his background and what kind of influence you think he has on Trump?

ROBERT KUTTNER: It’s very interesting. I mean, he is the most atypical of all of the close Trump advisers. He used to be a Democrat. He worked for George Soros for a long time. He’s the guy who came up with the bet that crashed the pound in the mid-’90s. And then he set up his own hedge fund. He’s gay. He’s married to a man. He’s about as unlike most of MAGA as he could be.

And Trump picked him because he wanted one traditional Wall Street guy to reassure financial markets. And Bessent has not been shy about using this influence to kind of talk Trump off the ledge and get him to back off some of the crazier stuff. Now, we’ll see whether Bessent’s days are numbered — right? — because Trump is paranoid about loyalty. He’s petulant. He could turn on Bessent. But I think, for the moment, he’s following Bessent’s advice.

Now, here’s the complication. It’s sort of easy to say, “OK, I’m not going to fire Jerome Powell.” It’s much harder to do a deal with China. China plays a long game much better than we do, as I wrote. China’s time horizon is measured in centuries, if not millennia. And Trump’s attention span is measured in hours, if not days. And you don’t just do a deal with China. China has an entire economic system based on mercantilism, so-called, industrial policy, using state subsidies to build the world’s second most powerful economy, soon to be the world’s most powerful economy. You don’t just have a staged meeting with Xi Jinping and say, “OK, we’ll cut the tariffs, and you change your whole economic and political system.” That’s not how it works. So, it’s not clear what kind of deal is in the offing. And Trump has basically weakened his own hand by doing this ridiculous 145% tariffs and then, humiliatingly, having to walk it back. So, Xi’s hand is stronger than it was before Trump did this.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could explain, actually, what do you think happened? Because, I mean, just to clarify, the tariffs that Trump had imposed on China were at 145%. China retaliated by imposing 125% on American goods to China. Then he says earlier this week to reporters in the Oval Office that tariffs on China will, quote, “come down substantially,” saying, he said, “We’re going to be very nice, and they’re going to be very nice, and we’ll see what happens.”

ROBERT KUTTNER: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And then, China today came out and said, actually, there are no negotiations going on between the U.S. and China on that, and much less has there been any agreement.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, exactly. So, a lot of what Trump is saying is in the realm of wishful thinking. And the reason he backed off is that so many American consumer goods, American producer goods, like auto parts, are intimately bound up with sources of supply that come from China. Now, think about what 145% tariffs mean. That means that if something costs $100, it suddenly costs $100 plus 145% of $100, so it now costs $245. That’s tantamount to a boycott. It’s like a complete boycott of Chinese exports. And after all these years of neoliberalism, where so much stuff gets outsourced to China, we’re very dependent on China.

The flip side — and this has to do with China’s retaliatory tariffs — our biggest export is, guess what? It’s soybeans. It’s 9% of all of American exports — not farm exports, all exports. And the biggest customer for American soybeans is China. Well, if China’s tariffs are over 100% on American soybeans, China is going to start getting its soybeans from Brazil or from Argentina. So you’ve got farmers very upset, as well. And you’ve got all of industry and all of agriculture telling Trump, “Back off. Don’t do this to us.” So, of course, he has to back off.

And China is in the catbird seat, and China can very well say, “Well, we don’t have any deals pending. We didn’t do this. He did this.” And he’s weaker than it was before — he was before. And this is classic Trump. You create a crisis. Then you say, “Well, actually, I’m going to back off,” and the crisis is over. And you end up with yourself and the country worse than before you started.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, of course, the question is how much he and his friends make when he suddenly does a turnaround and the stock market goes up. Robert Kuttner, 10 seconds to respond to that.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, he’s totally corrupt. He doesn’t make any bones about the fact that he’s totally corrupt. You’ve had the item about cryptocurrencies. I mean, he’s the ultimate grifter.

AMY GOODMAN: As in “grifter,” not to be confused with “drifter.” Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. We’re going to link to your piece, “Trump Blinks.” But stay with us, because we want to talk about your other piece, “Is the Press Next?” We’ll speak with Robert Kuttner and the Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa. She knows something about corruption and pressure on the press, coming from the Philippines. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with Greg Grandin, history professor at Yale University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, whose major new book is out this week, America, América: A New History of the New World. He describes it as a, quote, “history of the modern world, an inquiry into how centuries of American bloodshed and diplomacy didn’t just shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also gave rise to global governance — the liberal international order that today, many believe, is in terminal crisis,” unquote.

The book spans five centuries, from the Spanish conquest to the first Latin American pope, Francis, who was the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and just happened to die at the age of 88 the day before the book was released. The Nation has published an excerpt from America, América in a piece headlined “Pope Francis Upheld the Spirit of Liberation Theology.” Greg Grandin also has new piece for The Intercept that draws on the book, headlined “The Long History of Lawlessness in U.S. Policy Toward Latin America.” He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

Professor Grandin, welcome back to Democracy Now! Congratulations on the release of your book. I want to begin with that incredible moment in the White House, in the Oval Office. There is President Trump sitting next to the Salvadoran president, who calls himself a dictator, Nayib Bukele.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And the moment of the United States and El Salvador, what this represented in the culmination of U.S.-Salvadoran relations, even going back — and I’m sure you’re going to go back further — to the ’80s, when the U.S. supported the paramilitaries and the military in killing so many tens of thousands of Salvadorans, and now the relationship is around this notorious mega-prison, where President Trump says he no longer has control over people he sends there.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah. Well, what struck — a number of things struck me about that encounter in the White House. One was, as you mentioned, Latin America is famous for the kind of form of political violence called political disappearance, in which people were literally just kidnapped off the street and disappeared by security forces. And back then, an element of that kind of crime was the government would deny any knowledge of it. And obviously, that wasn’t true. The government and the security forces were deeply involved in carrying out and executing the disappearances. But that deniability created another element of terror, the uncertainty where their loved ones have gone, among the relatives, among the survivors and the people who were taken. You know, government officials — people would waste their time going through labyrinth bureaucracies, asking questions, and the government officials would say, “Who knows? Maybe they went to Cuba. We don’t know.”

And what struck me was Bukele is like — there was no deniability this time, right? Trump and — Bukele was like, “We got them. We know where they are. And yeah, and we’re not going to give them back.” That kind of “f— you” impunity is a different kind of terror, a different scale — right? — that if the uncertainty of that first wave of disappearances created a kind of horror and suffering among people, this kind of performance of omnipotence: “We have them, and you can’t do anything about it.” I also was struck by the glee in which they talked about it, just the joking about it, like as if they were just talking about, you know, not even human beings. The dehumanization, that was another thing.

Let me just also say, this is a little bit — this is a little bit of a tangent, but Bukele does like to joke around with a little bit of irony — although it’s not ironic at all, because it’s true — that he’s a dictator. And, you know, when FDR visited — Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited Vargas, the president in Brazil, who was a dictator but was also building a kind of social state. He was a backer of social rights and expanding kind of social welfare to the working class. When Vargas and FDR met, there was a little protest against Vargas. Vargas whispers to Roosevelt, “They call me a dictator.” And Roosevelt whispered back, “Me, too.” And so, they were joking about being dictators, but in a completely different circumstance, in the sense that they’re building social rights, they’re building a social state, they’re expanding economic, you know, welfare states, the social rights to people, where here we have two people who are talking about themselves as dictators and acting as dictators as they dismantle what’s left of the New Deal.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Greg, of course, you’re familiar, you’ve written in the past about this history of lawlessness from the United States with regard to Latin America. And it seems to me that just the same cavalier attitude that was evinced in this discussion in the White House has been pretty much part and parcel of U.S. policy. We’re facing now, for instance, Trump talking about taking back Panama. And, in fact, there are actually more U.S. troops now in Panama — quietly, the Panamanian government has allowed some of the old military bases to open up again — as a result of the pressure from the Trump administration.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, and they’ll soon be in Ecuador also. Ecuador is vying to be a second El Salvador in the sense of a kind of security outpost. This is all in the context of — in a way, of losing Colombia. I don’t know if they’ve lost Colombia permanently, but a left-wing Gustavo Petro was elected president, and he was an old insurgent, and Colombia kind of no longer serving as a kind of forecastle of U.S. power in the region, and the United States now constituting El Salvador and Ecuador as these kind of places in which they’re projecting military power.

I mean, the bigger question here is, if the United States really has given up its role as superintending a global liberal order and the world is reverting back to these kind of spheres of power competitions, then Latin America becomes, essentially, much more important to the United States as a source of resources, as a security perimeter, in which being able to use certain countries as military bases becomes that much more important, as the world kind of fragments up into — fragments into these spheres of influence, Russia and China and whatnot. And so, we’ll see a lot more of that, I think, in Latin America in the coming years.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering — I wanted to ask you specifically about the role of Guantánamo, because most Americans don’t really grasp the fact that the United States is holding a military base in Cuba really against the wishes of the Cuban government still after all of these years. What allows this to continue to occur?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, what allows it to continue to occur is just absolute raw power, the power of the United States. The United States, when it took Cuba and it took Puerto Rico and the Philippines and Guam in 1898 in this war, Spanish — war against Spain, it carved out Guantánamo as a military base, as a coaling station, you know. And it had an end date, and I think that end date passed, for the least. But once the Cuban Revolution happened in 1959, the U.S. ignored it and just kept Guantánamo as its own kind of enclave within the revolutionary island.

And, of course, you know, Latin America has long been a place in which the United States, as a growing empire, has used as a receptacle to cast off its unwanted or the people that it considered kind of outside the pale of belonging to the nation. Prior to the Civil War, many people thought that the United States could avert a war over slavery by basically sending all its free people of color to Latin America, to Central America, to Mexico, to Panama, to Haiti, as a way of lessening racial tensions. That, of course, didn’t happen. In the 1990s, Guantánamo became the place where the U.S. held refugee Haitians, following that country’s coup against Aristide, in inhuman conditions. And then, of course, during the “war on terror,” Guantánamo became synonymous with a war that legal categories could no longer — could no longer kind of organize, right? So there was no term for these prisoners who didn’t belong to any — or we weren’t fighting their nations; we were fighting them. So it came up with enemy combatants, and Guantánamo became the place in which they were housed. So, there’s a long history of this, of course. And yes, it’s on the island of Cuba, and the irony of that, since Cuba is one of the few countries that have long resisted U.S. militarism.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to, first of all, congratulate you on your new book, America, América, and also ask you why you felt that it was necessary to write this new history of the Western Hemisphere, especially at this time.

GREG GRANDIN: Well, I thought — there’s a lot of books that look at the influence of Latin America and the United States, you know, and El Norte, and how the Americas are really all one. But what I was really trying to do is go a little bit further and think about how the tension between, first, the British and Spanish colonial system, and, then, between Spanish Republicans and the United States, gives rise to a set of political principles that become the foundation of the global order. You know, when people think of the founding of the United Nations or the founding of the League of Nations or what — you know, what they talk about, the rules-based order, they often look to Europe. They look to Europe’s relationship with its former colonies. And that’s the histories that get written. But, you know, in many ways, the ideas that become foundational to the world after the end of World War II were created in Latin America.

When you think about it, Juan, Latin America — the United States becomes a nation, a single nation, on what they imagined to be an empty continent. Obviously, it wasn’t an empty continent. Obviously, the Spanish Empire diddled there. There was Indigenous sovereignties across the Plains and across the Rockies. And the United States revives the doctrine of conquest in order to justify moving west as fast as it can.

Latin America comes into the world, six republics already a League of Nations. They come into the world already a United Nations. They have to learn — there was nothing like that in history. Europe wasn’t like that. Europe was a collection of empires, you know, and monarchies, that were then expanding their colonial reach, sending their gunboats into the Indian Ocean and flitting around China. Latin America was a true assemblage of bounded nations, and they had to learn how to get along. They both threatened each other and they legitimated each other, and legitimated each other because if one republic can throw off Spanish Catholicism and declare itself independent, then another one could. But they threatened each other, because under the old rules of law, what was to stop Argentina from doing what the United States was doing and say, “We want the Pacific. Let’s just send our settlers over across the mountains and start taking land from the Chileans or the Mapuche or whatever”? But, of course, they weren’t going to do that. They had to figure out a new theory of sovereignty, a new way of thinking about how nations live together.

And one of the first things they came up with is the premise that nations aren’t necessarily inherently competitive. They critiqued both the United States’s doctrine of conquest, and they critiqued the Old World’s balance of power, the presumption that the way you will achieve stability and stasis is by each nation or empire pressing their interests, and that creates a kind of countervailing force. They thought that was inherently unstable and would always lead to war. What they came up with was a vision of internationalism in which the first principle was that nations shared a kind of common purpose, a shared set of interests, and that they can work together cooperatively through diplomacy.

They also came up with the idea that the boundaries of the old colonial system were the boundaries that they were going to accept. They may not be perfect. They may have been imposed by the colonial system. But that’s what we have. There’s no frontiers. We’re not going to be pushing. And now, in many ways, this was a kind of an ideal type of vision. There was plenty of wars in Latin America, particularly in the 19th century, and skirmishes. You know, Brazil wanted rubber, and that was in Peru. And there was lots of, you know, water skirmishes. But all of those skirmishes were negotiated under the premise that the boundaries were real, that the wars of conquest and wars of aggression were illegal. And all of these ideas are what eventually makes it into the United Nations Charter.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Grandin, I wanted to ask you, follow up on you mentioning Argentina and also follow up on the pope. And it goes to a major theme in your book. Democracy Now! broadcast from Buenos Aires for several days. We followed the Mothers of the Disappeared in the Plaza de Mayo in the — the women who lost their children and grandchildren, demanding to know where they were. And you follow the position of the Catholic Church throughout Latin America, an extremely conservative force, but also the liberation theology, that was so important, and they were counter to each other, whether we’re talking about the church allying with the U.S.-backed regimes in Guatemala, in El Salvador. In El Salvador, of course, Archbishop Romero was gunned down March 24th, 1980. Argentina, that is where Pope Francis was from, the first Latin American pope. He was there during the Dirty War, from ’76 to ’83. And I know there’s controversy around — it’s quite murky what happened then. And what his role was and his relation to liberation theology at the time, could you go into this?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, yeah. I mean, Pope Francis, in many ways, was a quintessential Latin American. He was born during an era in which social movements, labor unions and peasant leagues were entering the public sphere, demanding social rights. In his case, he grew up under Peronism. I don’t know whether — I don’t know his position on Perón. I don’t know whether his family was Peronist. I have no idea. But he certainly was immersed in that kind of — you know, the bursting into the public sphere of the plebeian. And he was a priest through the Dirty War, as you said, and through all the turmoil of the 1970s. And there is a murky period, and there’s accusations and counter-accusations. And it seems as if most of the forces of the left have — you know, the question was whether he did enough to protect other Jesuits as the head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, against the dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: Particularly the story of two priests?

GREG GRANDIN: And particularly, yeah, two Jesuit priests. And one, to his dying day, believed that Saint Francis — Saint Francis — that Pope Francis gave him up and —

AMY GOODMAN: Named for Saint Francis of Assisi.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, named for Saint Francis. And the other priest forgave and said, “No, I believe he did all he could to protect us as much as he could.”

He wasn’t a liberation theologian. In fact, many thought he was conservative. And there was some talk when he was voted pope that he was picked because he would serve as a counterforce to the political left, which at that time, if you remember, was Chávez and Kirchner in Argentina, and, you know, it was a very strong movement in Latin America in the middle of the — in the first decade of the 2000s.

But, you know, history has this way of, you know, doing the unexpected. And he turned out to be quite a humanist, progressive pope, particularly when placed within the larger perspective of the religious schism between conservative Christianity, which was on the rise, in which there’s alliances between conservative Catholics and dominionist evangelicals that want to basically take over the political sphere — and seem to be doing a pretty good job of it in this country and elsewhere — and that wing of the Catholic Church that still imagines itself as emancipationist, as liberationist, as egalitarian. And he obviously sided with that wing, with the liberationist wing, in his pronouncements, in his very being, his just — one of his last acts was calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, which The New York Times didn’t bother to mention in its obituary, which is interesting, and which itself —

AMY GOODMAN: Sunday, on Easter Day.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, which was amazing. So, you know, I mean, it was the same thing with Óscar Romero. When Óscar Romero was picked to be bishop of El Salvador, he was picked because they thought he was conservative. They thought he would defend the status quo. You know, the landed class was very happy with Óscar Romero. And the experience of living in history has the tendency to radicalize people sometimes. And sometimes it radicalizes them in the right direction, in the more humanist direction. And that happened with Óscar Romero, and it happened, I think, with Francis.

AMY GOODMAN: And he dies, right before, giving that speech, which is broadcast throughout El Salvador, Archbishop Romero, directly addressing the Salvadoran military — sadly, the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military — saying, “I urge you, I” — 

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — “beseech you, I demand you put down your arms.”

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, I mean, it’s quite a heresy — right? — to order your military not to obey their officers.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Greg, I wanted to ask you — this debate between the humanist and elitist and conservative wings of the Catholic Church, as you note in your book, has a long history. And you’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about the 16th-century debates between two Dominican priests, Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria. What was the substance of that debate, and what’s its importance historically, especially in terms of the impact that the Native presence on America had on European thought?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, well, the book does start with the conquest, and it starts with the conquest in all of its horror and all of its suffering. I mean, we’re talking — some demographers call it the greatest human mortality event in history. They estimate that there were probably about 90 million people living in the Americas, and within a century, 90% of them were gone. And, you know, Spanish Catholicism, when the Spanish Empire arrived and claimed dominion, claimed sovereignty, they knew they were presiding over a populated land. And it sparked a debate among the theologians about how to justify dominion. You know, the reconquest of Iberia, the driving Muslims and Islam off of Iberia, was justifiable because —

AMY GOODMAN: Spain.

GREG GRANDIN: What’s that?

AMY GOODMAN: Spain.

GREG GRANDIN: Spain. Spain, yes. Iberia, Spain — was justified because they claimed that Spain was Christian before Muslim or Islam arrived, and therefore, what they were doing was just taking back land that had been taken from them. But they couldn’t make that argument in the conquest — right? — because Native Americans hadn’t known Christ, and therefore, they couldn’t deny Christ. And so, they had to come up with a new justification for why Spain had the right to presume sovereignty over the Americas.

And there was a small group of critics, including de las Casas, including Francisco de Vitoria — most of them were Dominicans, also Franciscans — that began to argue that you couldn’t find any basis of legitimacy. You certainly had no legitimacy to enslave them. And there emerged — in the face of the horror of the conquest and all its unimaginable suffering, there emerged a critique, a quite cohesive critique, against conquest, against slavery, almost — a critique that almost went to the point of pacifism, and a critique that insisted that all humanity was one. Bartolomé de las Casas is famous for a line, “All humanity is one.” The actual correct English translation was something similar, “The whole human lineage is one,” meaning lineage from Adam and Eve. But he insisted on the equality of people. There was no difference between Native Americans and Europeans, in his mind. And this is the foundation, I argue, of modern political thought, and particularly his rejection of the doctrine of conquest.

And now, why that’s important — and I kind of trace that out through the book, and this — by no means does it ameliorate any of the brutality of the conquistadores and what they did and the enslavement of Native Americans and that greatest human mortality event in human history that I mentioned earlier. But it did create and consolidate a pole within the Catholic Church that continued, an emancipationist, abolitionist pole that continued. And why it’s important, it’s important for a couple of reasons. One is, it was important for the nature of the Spanish American — Spanish Empire within the Americas, which I can come back to, but later on, when Spanish American Republicans begin to break from Spain and set up their own independent nations, and then have to start contending with the United States, which is reviving the doctrine of conquest to justify its expansion west, these Latin American intellectuals and political leaders had already at their disposal a fairly coherent critique of conquest, a fairly coherent critique of slavery, that they then — that what have been applied to Spain, they then applied to the United States. And it’s that tension, and it’s that kind of persistence of this ethic, that becomes the foundation of the international order.

Now, I’ll also say, the other thing that’s specific about the Spanish Empire is that the Spanish Empire made no — the Spanish Empire knew it was an empire over people. Native Americans were the main thing. They were the people who extracted the wealth out of the Americas and created the world’s first universal currency. But they were also the center of Spanish moralism. You know, what the Native Americans were, as they were defined by theology, is what justified the Spanish Empire.

Now, when you jump ahead a couple of centuries and you get to British colonialism, there’s no discussion about Native Americans. There’s no discussion about, you know, the justification of how to justify colonialism. In fact, the London Company in 1607, when they were sitting around, they had a meeting, and they said, “Well, maybe we should — maybe we should issue a document that justifies Jamestown and justifies what we want to do in New England.” And, you know, they have this debate, and they’re fully aware that for a century the Spanish have been debating this for a year — for a century. And they basically come to the conclusion, “You know, the Spanish priests, the Dominicans and the theologians have been debating this for a century, and they still can’t come up with a workable justification for Spanish conquest, so maybe it’s better we don’t say anything at all. We just keep our mouths quiet and just do it.” So, that evasion of responsibility is a major strut in the book.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. I want to talk about the role of Latin America in fighting fascism, from the ’30s until now. And also, I want to ask you about the radical journalist Ernest Gruening. Greg Grandin is our guest, history professor at Yale University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, whose new book is America, América: A New History of the New World. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Las Tumbas” by Puerto Rico’s Ismael Rivera. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We’re spending the hour with history professor from Yale University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, whose book is out this week, America, América: A New History of the New World — professor Greg Grandin is our guest.

So, let’s talk. We talk about Orbán in Hungary. We talk about Holocaust. We talk about those who fought fascism. But it isn’t as much talked about, those who fought fascism in Latin America, and its key role, and what the United States, and especially those who are fighting the authoritarian tendency, can learn from our southern neighbor.

GREG GRANDIN: Well, Latin America had the good fortune of getting to fight fascism just as the New Deal was consolidating in the United States, and a shift in the way — away from intervention and a shift away from Washington defending U.S. capitalists and U.S. investment at all costs. So, FDR had a much more eclectic approach to Latin America, and basically he gave the left room to maneuver in Latin America.

I mean, Spain, in many ways, a lot of grand strategists were afraid that, basically, the Spanish — the kind of conflict that you saw in Spain between Franco, representing a Spanish nationalism, Catholic nationalism, allied with Mussolini, allied with Hitler, and fighting kind of more liberal currents within — liberal and radical currents within Spain, was basically just a preview of a conflict that would eventually drift across the Atlantic and take over all of Latin America, because the sociology was very similar — servile peasants, large landed landowners, you know, militarism, a kind of conservative Catholic hierarchy. Many people saw in the Mexican Revolution a kind of mirror of the Spanish Civil War. And many theorists felt Latin America could go either way. And this isn’t even — this isn’t even talking about the influence of Germany and Japan and Italy within Latin America. So, Latin America was really on the knife’s edge in the 1930s.

And the New Deal, basically — and it’s particularly the left-wing members of the New Deal who were very much interested in Latin America, worked very hard to give space to social democrats and create a kind of really bulked liberalism to a robust conception of social rights and material improvement in people’s lives as a way of countering fascism. Like, they didn’t beat fascists by just calling them fascists; they beat fascism by offering an alternative. And that alternative was some form of socialism or some form of social democracy or some form of social liberalism. And in one country after another, this kind of, you know, variations on social democracy come to power and ally with the United States. And by the time the war starts, Latin America is pretty much — with the kind of exception of Argentina, is pretty much allied with the United States behind Washington.

So, when FDR went to war in 1941, he rallied not just his nation, he rallied the whole hemisphere. The United States really — and Latin America was indispensable to the United States. The United States didn’t have to fight one battle for resources, because it had Latin America. And then, Brazil, with that bulge that goes into the Atlantic, was a major transport route, that Roosevelt called it the “Atlantic trampoline,” because the planes would land in Natal and then go straight off — then go bounce over to North Africa. And an amazing amount of war material made it to Europe through that route. So, Latin America, in many ways, both materially and ideologically, was key to fighting fascism, both as part of the war, but then internally fighting the fascists within their own countries.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Greg, there were, as you mentioned — you mentioned Argentina. Clearly, Juan Perón’s era was one that was at least sympathetic to the Nazis. And also, the Trujillo dictatorship was — had a lot of sympathies for — certainly for Franco and for fascism. Trujillo at one point had the assassination of a Spanish Republican, Galíndez, the infamous Galíndez case. He was assassinated at Trujillo’s orders in the United States. So there was a current, a fascist current, that eventually led to many Nazis settling in places like Argentina and Brazil after the war.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what I mentioned, that in many ways, people — the fear was that all of Latin America would become Spain, that there would be a Spanish Civil War throughout the whole of Latin America between the forces of progress and the forces of fascism. And that didn’t happen. And, you know, in most places — in many places, it’s because democrats and social democrats came to power. In other places, like the Dominican Republic, with Trujillo, it’s because they saw which way the winds were blowing, and they got on board with the Allies.

And then, after the war, as you said, it does become a kind of — in some ways, a continuation of World War II. Many socialists thought that the fight against fascism didn’t end with the dropping of the atomic bomb or European victory over Germany, that now that fascists were defeated in Europe, the fascists at home had to be defeated — the Trujillos, the Somozas, the Batistas. You know, in the Caribbean, they created the Caribbean Legion, which they saw in — you know, they didn’t see it as like looking ahead towards the Cold War. They saw it as a continuation of World War II, that we’re going to build a Caribbean Legion, and we’re going to take out Trujillo, we’re going to take out Somoza, we’re going to take out Batista and all the little Hitlers that are still kind of, you know, populating Latin America. And, of course, that didn’t happen.

What happened was that the Cold War shifted the terms of debate, and the United States shifted its support away from social democrats and the idea that democracy and development went hand in hand, towards an idea that order and stability and development went hand in hand, and began shifting all of its surveillance activities away from fascists and towards communists and towards the left. And, of course, the irony is that during World War II, the United States invested all of these countries with enormous capacity, military capacity. There was a lend-lease program in Latin America, where Chile got military equipment, and Brazil got military equipment. And after the war, those weapons were turned on the left.

There’s no better example of this than in Chile in 1948. Chile, a Popular Front government was elected in 1947, but then there was a militant strike in 1948, a miner strike in 1948. And the government turned from the kind of ethos of the Popular Front to putting down the miners’ strike and basically mobilizing airplanes and military warships to destroy and occupy large portions of northern Chile. And involved in that was a young military officer named Augusto Pinochet, who began rounding up strikers and putting them in a prison camp in northern Chile. So you see how all this military weaponry that was — so, the line between fighting and facilitating fascism in Latin America was always very fungible.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Greg, we have only a minute or two left, but I wanted to ask you about the Latinization of the United States. There’s over 62 million people of Latin American descent living in the United States today. How much is this presence a part of the history that you write about?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, I don’t go in — well, the book was long enough, so I couldn’t go too far into the migration question. But certainly, and they bring with them the same kind of polarization, same kind of conflicts. I mean, you know, they revitalized union movements in Nevada, in Los Angeles. You know, when Latin Americans, they come to the United States, they don’t think that democracy means just individual rights. They believe in things like healthcare. They believe in things like public education.

But then, on the other hand, there’s also a group of immigrants that come fleeing countries that they consider have gone too far to the left. And they’ve created their headquarters in Florida, right? Like, you know, what we thought was the waning influence of older generations of right-wing Cubans has been reinvigorated by waves of Hondurans and Venezuelans that imagine themselves fleeing left-wing tyrants, Nicaraguans, and so it’s contributed to the turning of Florida into this laboratory of Trumpism and headquarters of a — and Mar-a-Lago as a kind of headquarters of a pan-American Trumpism, pan-hemisphere Trumpism.

AMY GOODMAN: What shocked you most in researching this, oh, 700-page epic work?

GREG GRANDIN: Oh, well, I guess what shocked me most — well, didn’t — well, what I was so surprised with was how the Good Neighbor — we know “the Good Neighbor policy” as a phrase, associated with Franklin Roosevelt as his treatment of Latin America. But it was also the phrase that they used to get out the vote in his 1936 reelection. And it became a kind — the Good Neighbor Leagues were set up as a counter to the Liberty Leagues, explicitly anti-fascist. They were meant to embody a certain kind of cultural pluralism and acceptance of the diversity of the nation. And they were understood explicitly as an alternative to the white supremacist Liberty Leagues. And they basically delivered the vote to Roosevelt. He won 20 million votes. He won more votes — 

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.

GREG GRANDIN: — than any other human being in history up until that point. And he did so running on a policy of social democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Grandin, our guest for the hour, history professor at Yale University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author. His new book, America, América: A New History of the New World. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

As President Trump moves to upend the global trade system, we look back at a critical moment 70 years ago, when 29 nations from Asia and Africa gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, for a historic anti-colonial conference. The 1955 Bandung Conference marked a critical moment that the peoples of colonial nations of the Global South made their collective presence felt on the world stage. It marked the birth of what would later become the Non-Aligned Movement in the midst of the Cold War. Key nations participating included India, China, Indonesia, Egypt, Burma, Pakistan, Vietnam and Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka. This is the Indonesian president at the time, Sukarno, speaking at Bandung.

PRESIDENT SUKARNO: This is the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples, so-called colored peoples, in the history of mankind. I am proud that my country is your host. It is a new departure in the history of the world that leaders of Asian and African peoples can meet together in their own countries to discuss and deliberate upon matters of common concern.

AMY GOODMAN: Malcolm X would later talk about the historic importance of the Bandung Conference.

MALCOLM X: At Bandung, all the nations came together. There were dark nations from Africa and Asia. Some of them were Buddhists. Some of them were Muslim. Some of them were Christian. Some of them were Confucian — Confucianists. Some were atheists. Despite their religious differences, they came together. Some were communists. Some were socialists. Some were capitalists. Despite their economic and political differences, they came together. All of them were Black, Brown, red or yellow. The number one thing that was not allowed to attend the Bandung Conference was the white man. He couldn’t come. Once they excluded the white man, they found that they could get together. Once they kept him out, everybody else fell right in and fell in line. This is the thing that you and I have to understand. And these people who came together didn’t have nuclear weapons. They didn’t have jet planes. They didn’t have all of the heavy armaments that the white man has. But they had unity.

AMY GOODMAN: Malcolm X. The hundredth anniversary of his birth will be in May.

We’re joined now by Vijay Prashad, the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His latest newsletter is titled Waiting for a New Bandung Spirit. Vijay Prashad has written more than 40 books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, which was just published in Indonesia this week. His latest piece for Globetrotter is on ”BRICS & Industrial Development.” He’s joining us from Santiago, Chile.

Vijay, welcome back to Democracy Now! Let’s go back 70 years. Talk about the significance of the Bandung Conference, how it came together, and what this meant for the world today.

VIJAY PRASHAD: You know, it’s very interesting, Amy, that right after World War II, there was an enormous upsurge of political unrest in the former colonies in Asia and Africa. This unrest, led by anti-colonial movements, was taking place not only for freedom in their countries, but for freedom in each other’s countries. So, in India, even before India won its independence in August of 1947, they convened a conference called the Asian Relations Conference, which was for solidarity with the people of Indonesia fighting against the Dutch. That was the spirit of the age, hundreds of millions of people across Africa, across Asia, fighting against colonialism, fighting brutal colonial wars in Malaya, in Kenya, the so-called Mau Mau rebellion.

At this moment, they gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, a beautiful city in Indonesia, under the leadership of President Sukarno, who had won a really courageous fight, first against Japanese imperialism and then the Dutch. They came together. And what’s really remarkable is, as Malcolm X says, they came — communists like Zhou Enlai came, few years after the Chinese Revolution, but also Sir John Kotelawala of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, a absolute anti-communist. I mean, they all gathered together, because they understood that their unity was very important, not only to create a new trade and development order — that was not the only part — but also to fight for peace, because they understood what it meant to live on the other side of a rifle. They understood that if the Cold War was allowed to metastasize, it would just not allow them to develop. So, the watchwords from Bandung were “peace” and “development.”

And these people who came there — Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Zhou Enlai — they represented vast movements from around the world. They were not afraid of the people. They walked from their hotel to the conference venue. There were no armed guards. They met the people. They were greeted with cheers. And they gave powerful speeches, not only of unity, as Malcolm X points out, but also to say that, “Look, we don’t have nuclear weapons, but we have the moral force of the anti-colonial movement, and that’s what we’re putting before the world. We want to change the world, make it a better place. We don’t want the force of guns to rule over us any longer.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Vijay, I wanted to ask you — you mentioned some of the leaders who were there, but, interestingly, many of those leaders, within a few years, were either overthrown — for instance, Sukarno in 1965, Nkrumah and Nasser — and even on the way to the conference, there was an assassination attempt against Zhou Enlai. The plane that he was scheduled to take to the conference was bombed and out of the air. And luckily, Zhou Enlai supposedly had had to postpone taking that plane because of an illness. But could you talk about how much the Western powers were in fear of what was developing as a result of Bandung?

VIJAY PRASHAD: It’s very important to know that when you read the U.S. government documents, John Foster Dulles and others were quite furious with what was happening at Bandung. They refused to call this a non-aligned process. They insisted on calling them neutralists, saying that these people are in fact pro-communist — completely mischaracterizing the difference of political opinion at Bandung.

And this attack at Bandung, you know, really takes on a vicious form when it comes to the coups in the early to mid-1960s. It’s important for people to remember that there was a trinity of coups d’états in the 1960s against progressive governments in the largest countries in Africa, South America and in Asia. First, the coup against Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was, in a very real sense, you know, the descendant of Nkrumahism, of the belief in pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah, comes to power in the largest country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is overthrown in a brutal coup led by the United States, the Belgians, the British intelligence services and so on. That’s in 1961. It destabilizes the national liberation movement in Africa, followed three years later by a coup d’état against the liberal president, elected president of Brazil, João Goulart, in 1964, a coup that lasts 21 years, where the military in Brazil is then authorized, through Operation Condor, to effectively utilize military services across Latin America to cut down the impact of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. And that’s a process that leads to the coup in Chile in ’73, in Argentina in ’76, and so on. Again, the largest country in Latin America, a coup pushed by the United States. And finally, 10 years after Bandung, as you rightly said, the coup d’état against Sukarno, a million communists killed, often with faxes, telexes sent by the Australian intelligence services, British and United States, names of people that they wanted the military in Indonesia to execute, a million people killed, the progressive government of Sukarno overthrown. This has a huge impact in Asia.

Bandung represented hope for the hundreds of millions of people around the planet in 1955. It was to crush that hope that the United States and its allies conducted these coups against Lumumba, Goulart and then Sukarno.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what is your sense? You’ve written now in terms of the spirit of Bandung and what the situation is for the countries of the Global South. Now you’ve talked also about BRICS quite a bit in the last few years.

VIJAY PRASHAD: I mean, you know, it’s interesting, Juan, because at the time of Bandung, the subjective or the consciousness of the need for a new change, for unity, for this moral force called the Third World, this was extremely high. But this sense, this consciousness of the need for change was far greater than the ability of these states. You know, these states were outclassed when it came to military power. These states simply didn’t have the kind of wealth, technological capacity. In fact, they couldn’t produce most things by themselves. You know, Walter Rodney will write later in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that most African countries at the time of their independence were not able to produce toothpaste, because they had to import it from Lever Brothers, from a British multinational corporation. These countries were at an objective disadvantage.

Well, you know, the debt crisis of the 1980s really collapsed the political unities, the hope from the Third World. But something new has emerged, particularly since the world financial crisis of 2007, 2008. The large countries of the South, particularly in Asia, led by China, have developed their manufacturing. They’ve developed their technological capacity. In terms of the objective changes taking place, we can see that before our eyes. The center of gravity of the world economy is no longer the Atlantic Ocean. It’s definitely now in Asia, somewhere between China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia. These countries are growing at a very fast clip.

But the sense of political unity is still not fully visible, despite the BRICS. The BRICS is a trade body. It’s not really a political body. It shouldn’t be exaggerated. So, that sense of Bandung, which was there in 1955, is not there now. We are sort of waiting on the revival of the Bandung spirit. We’ve got the structures for a new world relatively in place, but we don’t really have the consciousness, the confidence that a new world can be built. And by the way —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds, Vijay.

VIJAY PRASHAD: — the consciousness in the North is not there, either.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

VIJAY PRASHAD: Yeah, I’m just saying the consciousness in the North, Northern countries, not there, either, as of yet. Trump’s tariffs trying to reverse this trend, not going to work. [inaudible]

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, Vijay Prashad, director of Tricontinental. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.