Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (2:10)

We need your help to build the.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (2:11)

Future of independent news media and we hope to see you@breakingpoints.com joining us in our get to Know a Journalist series today is Christian Parenti, longtime reporter, academic writer, author. He's in D.C. so I wanted to get him into the studio. We've covered your work here over the years. Kind of a kind of classic thinker on the left. A fair way. Fair way to put it.

Christian Parenti (2:41)

Is that what they say? Let's go with that. So, yeah, that's nice.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (2:44)

Because you never know exactly what you're going to say, which is. Which is useful. Like oftentimes when people call themselves, like an independent thinker, 99% of those people, I can predict with 100% accuracy what their view is going to be on a particular issue, which calls into question just how independent the thinking is. So I think you gotta keep people on their toes a little bit more because things change. Like conditions change, like ideas evolve, like eras become new eras.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (3:18)

Taylor Swift.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (3:19)

Taylor Swift, yes. Her next tour will not be the ERAS tour.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (3:22)

It won't be the ERAS tour. And you may think, and if you're.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (3:25)

Still talking about the ERAS tour, like, what are you doing?

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (3:26)

You're behind. And Christian Parenti would never. But you two have known each other for a while, so people's intrigue over Christian Parenti may have been piqued during.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (3:35)

The Ryan Grim Reverse in the Lore.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (3:37)

Episode that aired a few days ago. And so why don't you both tell us how you know each other and the various misadventures you've been on?

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (3:48)

Yeah, if people want to skip this part, they can scroll ahead. Actually, do we have that element that the. The avo. The AVO thing. Yeah, Throw that up. Because this is such a. This is such a fun picture. Oh, my gosh.

American Military University Advertiser (3:59)

There we are.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (4:00)

Oh, my God.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (4:02)

That's a throwback.

Christian Parenti (4:03)

Ryan's haircut has not changed. Not changed much.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (4:07)

I mean, love that it's black and white. I know it's from, like the early aughts, but I'll just pretend it's from the same.

Christian Parenti (4:12)

Ava and Ryan had very similar haircuts.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (4:14)

We have the identical haircut.

Christian Parenti (4:15)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (4:15)

Isn't that amazing?

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (4:16)

Parenti, you're mogging, as the kids would say.

Christian Parenti (4:19)

It's over my head. I don't know what that means, but I'm hoping it's good. I don't know. Whatever.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (4:22)

You look like you're about to kill someone.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (4:25)

Trying to.

Christian Parenti (4:25)

When I was young. No, I'm whizzing middle age.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (4:29)

Yeah. So that was. That was 2005. Morales. I think we had just landed in La Paz.

Christian Parenti (4:35)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (4:36)

So Morales was flying from Cochabamba to La Paz. He was at the time, the head of the coca growers union and had declared that he's going to overthrow basically.

Christian Parenti (4:45)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (4:46)

The Bolivian government. And we just happened to be on the flight. You had interviewed him a couple weeks earlier. Yeah, we have to be on the flight with him. We were interviewing coca growers and other militants throughout the Chapari region. I was down there because. And I told this story last week. I had just gotten fired, but my boss wanted me to stay on for two months because I had a bunch of, like, projects. This is that the weed legalization place. And I had bills that were going through the state legislatures. They're like, you're fired. But these are important bills, so you need to stay for, like, two months until they've gone through the process. And I remember calling you, and you're like, or maybe it was an email because you were down in Bolivia, like, you don't owe them anything. They fired you. That's not how this works. You're like, come down here and just do some reporting on this looming uprising.

Christian Parenti (5:34)

And the window was closing because it was a very slow siege of La Paz, which is an old tradition, goes back to at least the 18th century of, you know, indigenous communities, like, just slowly gathering and, you know, building the nonviolent siege of the capital. And so that was underway. And I remember being like, yeah, you know, you got to get down here, because pretty soon the airport's going to.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (5:55)

Close because there's only, like, several ways into this city. That's, what, two miles or whatever above sea level. And they can block it. They can block it off.

Christian Parenti (6:03)

Yeah, they would have little. They made bombs, like, of, you know, dynamite and rocks and nails because a lot of people were still mining. And even. Even if they weren't mining, there was that, you know, even the coca growers had that sort of, like, mining culture with dynamite. Everybody KN how to use dynamite. Yeah. And they were, at that point, like, you know, selectively letting trucks. And it was clear that pretty soon it was, you know, nothing was getting in or out. And indeed, the mesa government at the time did fall from all that. Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (6:32)

And then Mineralis ends up becoming president.

Christian Parenti (6:35)

Yeah. Yep.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (6:36)

And so we just kind of started in media res there because of maybe that picture itself. But, Christian, could you tell us a little bit about how you ended up, you know, in 2005 in La Paz? Take us back to the beginning of how your career went in that direction.

Christian Parenti (6:54)

Okay. I was. Well, you know, my father was. He is 92 now, and he's actually quite old. He was an academic and was red baited out of academia because he was. He was a. He was a communist. And so, to some extent, I inherited the family business of being an intellectual. You know, I didn't have to do that. But that was sort of, you know, what I saw. And I knew from an early age that I wanted to write. And I'm also very dyslexic and I wasn't a very good writer. And around age 19, I was going to a very weird college that later folded under somewhat hilarious circumstances. A place called the New College of California that finally folded when.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (7:43)

Is it related to New College of Florida?

Christian Parenti (7:45)

No, it's not. When a group of Nepalese hustlers hustled the president for a fake degree and then got caught committing murder. And so they finally, like the accreditation.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (7:57)

A tail is all this time?

Christian Parenti (7:58)

Yeah, the accreditation group came in and was like, no, we're pulling your license. But anyway, I hitchhiked out to California at age 19 from Vermont. I couldn't really write. And I met this journalist named Johann Carlisle, who had a little publication called Propaganda Review. And I was helping him out a little bit and I asked him, how do I learn to write? Well, the way I learned to write was doing community radio. And he pointed me in the direction of kpfa, which is the Pacifica station in the Bay Area, which still has a program that trains radio journalists. And a lot of people who ended up at NPR came through this much more left wing community radio station, which was always a. That bothered me that they would come there, get this free education and go on and. And, you know, sometimes just be stenographers for power. But the deal was they would train you in the evening. It was a pretty rigorous training course. And then you had to work for free one day a week for a year. And basically what happened is, you know, some people would drop out and not pay their debt, and other people would become completely committed and often become full time journalists and maybe get jobs there. And so that's what I did. I learned to write by doing radio at KPFA first. And then I worked on a radio show called Flashpoints with a guy named Dennis Bernstein that's still going on. And then I moved to New York to finish college at the New School, which is also now in crisis. And I worked at wbai, volunteering and freelancing. And I had a little paid gig for a while. WBAI is also a Pacifica station, and it was its program director at that time was a guy named Samori Marksman, who unfortunately died young of a heart attack in his late 50s. And he was really erudite, a character from a different era. He was from some very small Caribbean island like Martinique or Saint Kitts, something like that. And he was a scholar and a journalist. And I kind of liked that idea too, of being like a scholar and a journalist. And so I had a little. During the Somalia engagement, when US Troops were in Somalia, I had a little program once a week, 15 minutes, Somalia watch. So I did radio journalism. And then I finally published a piece when I was in my. Maybe I'm 24 or 25, about policing and in Z Magazine. And I wrote for Z magazine for a while. And along the way, you know, I think it is. Yeah, along the way, it was a big deal. It was a big deal. And it was. It was sort of like, you know, there had been a kind of real lull for the left. And then Z magazine came along. It was sort of like, oh, the left isn't fully dead. And one of the big stories that I did early on that affected me and sort of helped me along was I remember I was interviewing Mike Davis, the late Mike Davis, who was a historian of Los Angeles. And I asked him after the interview, I said, are there any stories you think I should be working on? And this was right after the Crips Blood gang truce and the riots. And he said, yeah, you should do a story about Duane Holmes, the guy who started the Crippsblood gang truce. I was like, okay. And he put me in touch with Duane Holmes mother. And the story of the gang truce was amazing. Everybody thought that the verdict, that Rodney King, African American motorist, is beaten by these LAPD officers. Camcorders are new. Some guy's gotten a video camera for Christmas, and he's filming randomly and he films this beating. And nowadays it's kind of hard to imagine what that was like because there's images everywhere. But in those days, we're like, whoa. To see this verite images from some person's camera catching this police brutality. This was incredible. It was really arresting. So there was a trial, and all the officers got off. And so then there were massive riots. And right after the riots, a gang truce was announced in Los Angeles. And it quickly spread throughout the country. Not all over the country, but there was then a gang truce among the Vice Lords and Disciples in Chicago. There were, like, truces all over the country. So everyone thought that the truce came out of the riots. But the real story was that actually the truce had been worked on for almost six months prior to the riots. This guy, Dwayne Holmes, who was. He came from Watts, and I mean, like, his story, you almost had to, like, if it wasn't real, you'd think it was, like, invented. It Was like there were these three housing projects in Watts and there were these, there were two Crip sets and one blood set and they had this three way fratricidal war. They had all gone to school together. There had been a paint factory. Duane Holmes father had worked in the paint factory. I believe he died eventually. The paint factory's closed, it's torn down. There used to be these 70s era, you know, social welfare programs called teen posts. And Duane said, yeah, well they closed the teen post when I was about 8 or 9. And so we would go on the freeway overpass and throw rocks at cars. Instead. The paint, you know, the teen post is shut down. The working class jobs at the paint factory disappear. Eventually the. The site of the paint factory becomes jail. Anyway, long story short, Duane Holmes is. His cousin is murdered by the lapd. They're not involved in anything. They come around the corner during a police raid in the Imperial Courts projects and Sky Tiny is shot and killed and left to bleed out. And Duane's mother had raised him and she is furious. So she starts a group called Mothers Against Police Brutality, which involves black, Latino and, and Southeast Asian mothers. And as part of that she says to Dwayne, you guys need a ceasefire. And she leans on her son and he goes and he communicates through.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (13:52)

Was he in a gang or was he just.

Christian Parenti (13:53)

He was, he was a heavy duty, I think Imperial Courts Crip. And he was a Crip. I forget which. Whether it was. It was Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts, and then the Bounty Hunter Bloods in Nickerson Gardens. And so he communicated through someone in the church to an old friend of his who was on the opposing side. He said, I'm going to come over and talk to you. And they started these meetings, just a couple OGs. And then every weekend it grew and grew and grew. And you had these like hundreds of these guys who had been shooting each other and killing each other. This was like serious gang violence. Late 80s into the early 90s. You know, the murder rate in the US peaks in the early 90s. And you know, and they're like hugging and crying and they're like, man, we used to play together as kids and we're trying to kill each other. So. And they actually, they signed a ceasefire document. That was their language. It wasn't a true ceasefire. A day before the riots, a day before the verdict and the riots. And there isand then what happens is a concerted campaign by the LAPD and I'm pretty sure the FBI to sabotage all of this. And Duane Holmes was set up On a. He was convicted from a $10 robbery that he didn't commit at some like peace oriented, you know, teen event sabotage.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (15:13)

To lock these guys up.

Christian Parenti (15:14)

Yeah, and he was locked up for seven years. Jerry Brown, who, you know, was both the youngest and then the oldest governor of California and also the only governor of California who was the son of a governor, was at that time out of office and had been, you know, trying to be a presidential candidate. He spoke at Dwayne's hearing, like, I mean, all sorts of heavy duty people were like, hey, this guy is a serious community leader. Yeah. And he was, he had to do. I think it was like five of the seven years anyway. But I mean those kinds of stories again and again and again. Those that first generation of OG gangsters who put down the guns and led this ceasefire. A lot of them were put in jail, harassed, hounded, so that I followed that story and, and I was into criminal justice. Actually. Speaking of criminal justice, I was roommates around that time with Alex Vitale, who's sort of in the news these days around Mahmoud.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (16:09)

Yeah, he's the police abolitionist. Yeah, the book was called.

Christian Parenti (16:13)

And the end of the day I continued my focus was criminal justice because I lived in California and there was a lot of it around and I was, you know, I'd been an activist doing Central American solidarity, you know, getting arrested, not getting arrested, doing direct action. And us lefties had a kind of simplistic analysis of like we'd see these, you know, police actions on the street in the Mission District in San Francisco where I lived in. And we'd just sort of like try to map on some analysis from El Salvador or Guatemala. And I was like, well, this is like, doesn't quite work, like what's going on here, because these gangsters are not in rebellion against the capitalist system. I mean, they were like wreaking havoc on their own communities.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (16:56)

They're capitalists.

Christian Parenti (16:57)

And okay, the police repression is repressive, but this is not a rebellion that's being suppressed. Right. So what's going on? And then that led to my first book, Lockdown America. And I went to graduate school at the London School of Economics along the way. And I also reported from Central America, studied Spanish down there, spent some time with the FMLN because there were very few Americans who had joined up with the fmln. And there was a person from Vermont, where I was raised, who was a cinematographer, who was a videographer, who had been with the trade union movements in El Salvador and then the guerrillas, the FMLN took the capital of San Salvador, and held it for two weeks. But they couldn't get the top army leadership, the Stella Mayor, to like, board planes from Miami. If, like, if the military leadership had panicked and cracked and left, the guerrillas would have taken over the country. But. And they started bombing the working class. First. They occupied, you know, the barrios, and there were. The civilians were getting bombed. So then they occupied basically the Beverly Hills, Escalon, the Beverly Hills of San Salvador. But after two weeks of holding the capital, they had to fall back into the hills. And so a lot of people who'd been in the social movements went with them. And so this family friend was one of those people. And long story short, I managed to make contact with her and then spent some time with the FMLN and then went back after the war, after the peace agreements, when the crime wave began. Then I went off to graduate school. And so I was always doing journalism and academia. And so my first book, Lockdown America, was sort of drawn from my PhD, but the PhD was much more specific. It was about anti homeless policing in San Francisco. Why did that happen? And the answer was because of the deindustrialization and financialization of the American economy and the way that that changes the role of the cities and how cities then are faced with this problem of visible poverty that they have to manage. Because when San Francisco was a light industrial port city, it didn't really matter if there were homeless people on the street. There also weren't as many homeless people. There were a lot more working poor. But it didn't really matter because it was a different economy. But when it's conventions and tourism, then it really matters. And it's like, if there isn't like tons of money coming from the federal government for social programs and housing, and there is tons of money coming from the federal government for policing, what are you going to do as mayor when there's like hundreds and hundreds of people camped in front of City hall and you have people saying, you know, we're going to cancel the dentists of America, whatever, are not coming back. You know, if you don't get rid of these people, it's like. So that was. And then, you know, I could go on. And I wrote another book about surveillance. And then. And I always. So conflict reporting was something else I did. And then after I got my PhD, I got a series of postdoctoral fellowships and I took those to the CUNY Graduate center, and I went to graduate school at the London School of Economics. And I was there doing postdoctoral research. But that's when the war in Afghanistan jumped off and I found myself in these, there were great seminars, David Harvey and the late Neil Smith. David Harvey, for people who don't know, is a British Marxist who's been in America for like 30 years. And he's like, you know, he's like the top classical Marxist scholar. He's getting quite old, but, you know, there were some great conversations. But there was also an element of just like being in these seminars with this, like, you know, philosophy graduate students and was like, we're bombing Afghanistan. Like, what? Nobody knows anything about what's going on. I was like, I gotta get out of here. I gotta go. And, you know, David Harvey and Neil Smith were kind enough to be like, well, you know, you're supposed to be a scholar, supposed to be an academic, but yeah, sure, if you want to go, report. And they'd actually. I brought my own funding and then I actually got funding from a big grant that they'd gotten. So they were really, really quite cool about it. I mean, very few academics would have been like, you want to go to Afghanistan and write news stories? Like, and we're supposed to pay for that? They were like, okay, you know, give.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (21:13)

A shot, let's do it.

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Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (22:53)

So you've been, you know, either protesting against war or covering war, you know, most of your adult life. Yeah. You know, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan and so. So let's bring that up to today. So this week you've got the Trump administration swooping into Venezuela. Yeah. And snatching Maduro. Leaving with him.

Christian Parenti (23:18)

Yep.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (23:20)

Apparently they're going to put him on trial, which is a comical idea. I was surprised to see that, like the indictment is like, I don't know about this.

Christian Parenti (23:27)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (23:28)

Like they've got, they've got machine guns. They have a gen.

Christian Parenti (23:30)

Yes.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (23:31)

They charged, they said they were charged with felony possession of machine guns. He's a president of a country, he has a military.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (23:37)

What do you mean?

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (23:37)

Yeah, felony possession.

Christian Parenti (23:38)

He was on a military base.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (23:40)

It's like, you can't have machine guns on a military base.

Christian Parenti (23:43)

Ridiculous. Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (23:44)

So, but, you know, they've got a, they've got a general that they indicted or convicted maybe, you know, a couple months ago, who's turned state evidence, who's gonna. It won't be hard for them to find people who, for whatever they're being offered, will get up and say what maybe needs to be said to a jury to get that done. Anyway, that aside, how are you thinking now about the Trump administration and its place in the pantheon of war versus non interventionism?

Christian Parenti (24:14)

Well, obviously they're much more bellicose than they were the first time around. There is an element to all this which is still destructive of the old American empire. I mean, talking about taking Greenland, that implicitly is threatening NATO. But, yeah, no, it's horrendous, it's criminal, this attack on Venezuela. Trying to figure out what's really going on is interesting and difficult. Anya Parampal had an interview she did yesterday or day before that was very good, where she pointed out that there hasn't been regime change. It's like she just has a book.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (24:51)

She has a book out or coming out soon on Venezuela in the 2019 coup. Right, that's right.

Christian Parenti (24:55)

Yeah. She would be a good interview, too. Delsey Rodriguez, the vice president, I mean, it seems that her brother, Jorge Rodriguez was in contact with the U.S. i mean, there's questions about, I mean, there was, how did this raid go down? And the Trump administration has said they're not going to work with Machado, that she doesn't have the respect. And it seems like they're allegedly getting.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (25:21)

80% of the vote 18 months ago.

Christian Parenti (25:24)

This could go any number of ways. Right. Venezuela could explode. It could fall apart into civil war. There could be like warring factions within the Chavista government. It could hold together. And, you know, I don't think the US is going to put boots on the ground because I, I mean, I may be wrong about that, but I think that would be really insane. I mean, Caracas. I spent a bunch of time in Caracas. In fact, I went down there with another guy who was a roommate with me and Alexis Holly back in the day, guy named John Marshall, who's now a researcher for United Food and Commercial Workers Union. We did the first story on Venezuela in 99. And then I went back in 2005 and spent a bunch of time there for the nation. And, you know, there are huge parts of Caracas that are under the control of sort of quasi military, I mean, quasi revolutionary militarized gangs that many of which trace their roots back to urban guerrilla movements in the 70s. I mean, the place is pretty violent. And you hear about the colectivos, they're kind of part of that scene. So an occupation would be insane. Doesn't mean they wouldn't try it. One could also imagine possibly that there is that Rodriguez is going to sort of shift course and that there's a way in which Trump could remove. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but I could. This would probably be the most rational thing for them to do is to least likely. Yeah, it's to basically like, you know, you know, for Trump to pretend that he's like, seizing the oil. But, you know, why are, you know, why is Chevron the only firm there? It's because of US imposed sanctions, EU imposed sanctions, and UK imposed sanctions. In 2005, when I was there, you still had Halliburton and Slumberg. You know, all these oil servicing companies were down there. These companies are not there because they don't want to get in trouble with the U.S. the Venezuelan government would be totally open to having investment. The reason that ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil had their concessions taken back, that is nationalized. First of all, you know, that was 2005, wasn't it? That was 2007.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (27:36)

2007.

Christian Parenti (27:37)

And the Venezuelan, Venezuelan oil industry was nationalized in 1976 when Hugo Chavez was, whatever, a teenager, early 20s or something like that. He didn't do it right. He inherited a nationalized oil industry. But people talk about, oh, the nationalization of 2007. These were two American firms that had stopped producing and were funding the opposition. And the Venezuelan government was like, hey, the Deal was you guys develop these resources and you pay us a cut so that we can run this, like, social welfare system here. And if you're just going to sit on it, then we're taking it back from you. Right. And that was all bound up with the early onset of these sanctions.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (28:18)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the arrangement, they would have been allowed to keep their investment, but they just couldn't have a controlling share anymore so that the Venezuelan government could start production. So, like, okay, we're calling the shots. You guys can still do the work, still get paid.

Christian Parenti (28:34)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (28:35)

Still keep your ownership.

Christian Parenti (28:36)

My understanding was, like, if you go back to the original deal, like, we want you here producing oil, but if you're going to like, play games like, you don't actually own this, you know, you have a contract to exploit it.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (28:47)

Your contract is not to fund the opposition. Yeah, to get us out, to get yourself a better contract and not to.

Christian Parenti (28:52)

Hold these resources off the market. Now, you're not here to, like, you know, mess with us. So you could, you could imagine how, like, the sanctions are removed and Trump is like, we're exploiting the oil. We're like, you know, going in there and taking it, whereas the Venezuelans are like, we're getting, you know, we're renegotiating a relationship with the United States. We're getting the sanctions removed and because the sanctions are, are crushing, you know, so I don't know. Or, or there could be, you know, that, that Rodriguez could be going in that direction. There could be other elements in the military, in the Chavista government that are like, this woman's a sellout. We gotta, like, you know, put an end to this and have a coup d', etat, who knows?

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (29:30)

And Rodriguez herselfand I'm curious what you think about her and her family. You know, her dad was this socialist leader who was killed with CIA involvement, you know, well, you know, very well regarded revolutionary. So she comes from this, she and her brother come from this like family. How well regarded is she? Like, that doesn't always mean that you're going to be a revolutionary.

Christian Parenti (29:58)

Well, I, you know, I don't know. I haven't been to Venezuela for a long time, so I don't know. But I mean, I think that the government still has a lot of support. There've been big protests in, you know, Caracas and other cities demanding the return of Maduro. So, I mean, there's been conflict. I think, you know, probably on the streets, people regard the government well, but withinyou, know, at the higher Levels, there's factions and I don't, I cannot speak with any authority on that level of machinations. But yeah, it's awful. And then threatening, you know, the President of Colombia and talking about taking Greenland. I mean, this is allit's all insane. Now, of course, in the background is China. And I mean, there's a way in which this seems to be a struggle over what model of development will be going forward. And the Belt and Road Initiative, this is China's response to basically the overproduction of capital, the over accumulation of capital. China is running into the problem that Marks and Engels laid out in the manifesto when they were kids in 1848, that like, part of the problem with capitalism is that it's really, really good at producing wealth. And then you have too much money, too much wealth and not enough demand. And you get this crash, these economic crashes, these booms. And it's like, so China has all this excess capital and they're deploying it through the Belt and Road of just like building infrastructure and thereby also trying to build markets and connect the world. And the US clearly seems to be about trying to block that. I mean, there's a way in which the Ukraine war is like, you know, centerpiece of Belt and Road initiative is that Eurasian landmass. And so the US through its proxy in the Ukrainian government, is like, well, we're going to light a fire at this end of it. We're not going to let you like, integrate with Europe geographically. No, we're going to like block you. And there's an element of that here too, which is like, you know, oh, you're like making huge investments all over Latin America. You're buying more and more soybeans, more and more oil. I mean, the Chinese, they get like between 8 and 13% of their oil from Venezuela. Not a lot, but not insignificant. It's like 80% of what Venezuela sells typically goes to China. But there's that which is like, okay, we're going to sabotage your investment plan. You're going to try and incorporate everybody and we're going to smash up your investment patterns. But there's another aspect of it which is that, you know, the US just doesn't have the ability, short of atomic war, to fight a conventional war against China in the western Pacific. You know, the level of investment would have to be so much higher in terms of the Navy. I mean, we don't have enough ships to move the fuel for the planes out there. And so there's a realization like, okay, we are rolling back we are stepping back from the Western Pacific, and that is a Chinese sphere of influence. And so there's an element of this which is like Trump, like, with a squid spraying ink. You know, it's like creating this Jackson Pollard drama of like, oh, my God, this horrendous imperialist bully. And it's like, that's all true, but it's also like a horrendous imperialist bully operating at a much smaller scale than it used to be able to. You know, that global hegemony, that's over.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (33:25)

But that's. See, that's very interesting because I was going to ask you about how the Cold War dynamic between the Soviet Union and the United States is. In some ways, we're seeing the rhymes of that in what you just laid out with belt and road in the United States and China in the United States. And part of the reason, I think the right misunderstands this, part of the reason that you were still dealing with pink tides in Latin America is because there's a lot of anti American sentiment throughout south and Central America that still exists. I mean, there are a lot of people who, like America, have favorable views towards America, but there's also a lot of fuel for some of these leftist politicians and movements that comes from doing things like regime change in Venezuela. There's a Sandinista in charge of Nicaragua right now. And it's not guaranteed that because you took control of Panama and felt like it was stable for 20 years that you now have hemispheric dominion. These things don't necessarily go together.

Christian Parenti (34:23)

Yeah. And there's also a lot of poverty and a lot of inequality. Right. You know, you go like places like in Rio or Sao Paulo, it's like people living in shacks with dirt floors, seeing in the sky above them private helicopters going to elite penthouses. And it's like, you know, you live under those conditions, you're like, really? There's really not enough money to get proper plumbing in this neighborhood. I don't believe it. You know, and so that never goes away. I mean, you can decapitate and crush and discredit, but then it's like, you know, another 10 years, another generation, people being like, what? Why do we. We have oil. We sell enormous amounts of soybeans. Why don't we have plumbing here? Why don't we have jobs?

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (35:03)

You know, and China can exploit that.

Christian Parenti (35:06)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (35:06)

And what. So what does the US get out of blocking China? I hate to put things in black and white and good and bad, but one empire is building stuff. And the other empire is destroying stuff and trying to block the other one from building stuff. It's like, why? What are we doing?

Christian Parenti (35:29)

I mean, I think that there is a fear in the policy elite of loss of control, that it's, you know, if China gets more and more control, who knows what kind of rules could be imposed on the U.S. and so there's, and there's, I mean, there's a, at the bottom of this, and this is something that a certain kind of conservative, like the people at American affairs have been pretty good on. Like, I mean, at the bottom of this is a realization that was like, wow, what we on the left would call like the neoliberal turn. This was a disaster. This was insane. To export our industrial base abroad, which usually means eventually to China, Mexico, Honduras first, but then to China, was in retrospect, totally nuts, you know, and be like, oh, we've got all this money, you know, and the economics profession, I mean, I'm in an economics department, professor of economics, even though my degree is sociology and geography, but I teach political economy. But I mean, mainstream economics has a lot to answer for this because they.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (36:32)

Have been saying, this is a great idea.

Christian Parenti (36:34)

All that matters are prices. All that matters is money and prices. And as long as you have a lot of money, then you can just buy what you need. And it's like, yeah, but what if you have an adversary who has a different philosophy and doesn't care about prices and says, well, you know what, we're going to not sell you rare earths regardless of the price because of geostrategic concerns about our sovereignty and our sense of our society as being ancient and venerable and having been pushed around. And we're in this long term project of rebuilding our power. And so, yeah, yeah, you're right, we could make more money selling you rare earth elements, but instead we're going to embargo them and bring you to your heel, bring you to the table.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (37:15)

Tomahawk missiles.

Christian Parenti (37:16)

Yeah. So there's a realization like, oh, actually it's not just prices that matter. Places, things, skills, all this, like, process knowledge. You can't, it's turning out, oh, you can't actually send manufacturing 6,000 miles away and have the designers and engineers in California, you know, be as good. And we don't even quite know why, but it's like, you know, the people who make the stuff and the people who design stuff have to be in contact. They have to see it. It's like, we don't even quite know why. But innovation breaks down with this Kind of globalization of supply chains. There's a lot of ways in which.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (37:52)

The financial executives, like here in the US have no idea how the product is made and so therefore can't, like, come up with ideas to make it better. Yeah, but the people that would have those ideas are the ones that are, like, making it.

Christian Parenti (38:05)

Yeah. Or it might come from the engineers, but the engineers have to, like, be around the people who are making it and then have to have conversations with the people making it. Have to be like, yeah, well, if you did this a little different, it's like, oh, okay. And it can't all be done through documents and zoom calls and this kind of stuff. Right. And then finance. So it's like deindustrialization, financialization, realizing, oh, that is a path towards sacrificing national sovereignty. Right. And so there is left, right and center concerns about sovereignty. And I think people are waking up. And there's this reactionary, I think, horrible element in the Trump administration which is responding in terms of your question, like, why fear China to something very real, which is like, wow, like, what did we just do? That was totally insane. And it's like. And reindustrialization, you know, that's never really been done. That would take a long time. There are very, very serious problems that the United States faces. Sort of regardless of your politics, regardless of your image of what you want the distribution of wealth and rights and prosperity to be in a country, it's like sort of like, oh, we have sabotaged our own development model here.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (39:13)

This is actually another interesting dynamic in the Trump administration, because I love your writing on Surveillance State and your work on FBI, CIA, the Trump administration, and you've written about this Trump world more broadly. People like Roger Stone have recently been really critical and skeptical of the FBI and CIA, which sort of engendered this deep skepticism of the, quote, deep state, the surveillance state and the intelligence community and Trump world. They come in now and CIA is operating in Venezuela on the ground. Trump authorizes that they are now using the FBI to infiltrate antifa groups, which is exactly what people were arguing against in principle, not even just in action, but in principle that it was dangerous. I mean, the right sounded like the left when it was talking about Feds and the proud boys and all of that. And now they're repeating exactly what they were taking issue with in, like, the Whitmer kidnapping plot. So I guess that's also something from the Cold War. That's also something that came from the paranoia of the Cold War in a lot of different respects. And I wonder what it' swhat you're making of this weird moment where you have a Trump administration doing a Venezuela regime change, but not installing Maria Karina Machado. And then you have them, you know, saying we're done with the deep state, but then also infiltrating antifa. It's just very weird.

Christian Parenti (40:32)

It is weird, and I don't fully understand it, but there's definitely not a confrontation with the deep state. It seems like there is. I mean, there's a confrontation with the elements of the deep state. Like Comey, who went after Trump. Right. I mean, it almost seems. I have no proof of this, but it almost seems like some sort of deal has been cut, implicitly or explicitly, which is like you can get rich with your crypto schemes, basically pay to play right out in the open. You got this cryptocurrency. People want to cut deals with your government or with your private businesses, they buy your crypto. There's nothing illegal about that. And then never have a conversation of quid pro quo. But it's like, oh, hey, Saudis or whoever bought billion dollars worth of crypto, let's sell them F35s or whatever. I mean, so it's like the Trump family can do that and they're going to go after the people who went after them, but there's clearly not going to be any new church committee hearing. There's nothing. They're not dumping documents. MK ULTRA files. There are still redacted MK ULTRA files. I was just visiting a friend of mine who's a scholar down at University of Virginia, and we know there were 149 projects in which the CIA and academics, usually in universities, hospitals, jails, experimented with psychedelics, particularly lsd. But, you know, we don't know the people who were involved. If we had the name of all the scholars who collaborated with the CIA and that, then there'd be a whole other type of historiography that could happen. Right. You know, I mean, there's no even discussion about releasing that, but that stuff should happen.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (42:08)

Even though there's theories that that's what happened in the Charlie Kirk case and potentially in the Butler case, like there are people on the right that believe there's mk.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (42:15)

That's where they're going.

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Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (42:16)

But to Christian's point, like, where is the momentum to actually do something about that? Structurally, there isn't any.

Christian Parenti (42:23)

There isn't. So that's all, you know, I suppose not. Not surprising. But yeah, there isn't. There isn't momentum. And there also isn't there isn't much demand for it, you know. You know, like, I mean, you know, Matt Taibbi was when Trump first came in saying, was saying like, there has to be massive disclosure. And then he dropped that. And there's no one, there's no one really on the right who's calling for this. I mean, there was a moment where people say, oh, now give us, you know what, you have to trust the public and you have to just disclose the stuff. And it's like, that hasn't happened. And there's also, there's no movement. People say, hey, where are the documents? There's the Epstein thing, right? But that's only one of the dark spots in the history of the American intelligence agencies which have not only been abusing people in the third world, they have been mucking around in the US and this is the thing, like, you know, a lot of good lefties don't like to say that because you, you don't want to suggest that elites consider their interests and coordinate. That'll be conspiracy. Other people in other classes do that all the time. But like elites just, you know, they don't do that. And that's about respectability. You know, the professional class lives in fear of losing their jobs. I get it, you know, but that's what it's about. And people, a lot of people know better. But it's like, if you say that, you sound a little weird. It's like, I'm sorry, it's the facts that are insane, you know, and if you're really, really, really concerned about not sounding at all weird and untoward, then you can't talk about certain subjects because they are so weird and untoward.

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Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (46:04)

It almost feels like by design, some of the stuff they do gets so crazy that you sound crazy just talking about.

Christian Parenti (46:10)

Absolutely.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (46:11)

Or even knowing about it.

Christian Parenti (46:12)

Oh, yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (46:13)

Marks you as. That's kind of a weirdo over there.

Christian Parenti (46:16)

You kind of know. You know a lot about this subject.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (46:18)

That's right. Ryan, you know a lot about Jeffrey Epstein.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (46:21)

A lot about Jeffrey Epstein, A lot about Wuhan.

Christian Parenti (46:23)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's ridiculous.

Greenlight Advertiser (46:28)

So.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (46:31)

They can find your work at Compact. Where else?

Christian Parenti (46:34)

I have a piece of it. American affairs, kind of academic. Gets into questions of deindustrialization, industrialization. It's a review essay. It's about the role of government in the, you know, in the moments of robust development within American capitalism.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (46:51)

But I didn't mean to cut you off if you've got anything else.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (46:53)

Well, no, I was just going to ask a quick question about the media. Like, as a journalist who's chronicled a lot of this stuff, new media is. This is a weird, almost revolutionary time. Like we're here talking on this set and no corporate backing, nothing like that. But is that changing populism? Is that changing? And are there any ways you're optimistic about that? I mean, we were talking about zines earlier. There's something happening.

Christian Parenti (47:16)

Yeah, I think that all this new media stuff, this podcast, this kind of stuff you guys are doing here, I think it's very good. It does make me optimistic. And the legacy media, I'm not glad to see it decline, but but, you know, it's full of flaws and outrageous distortions. You know, one. For example, I was just reading the New York Times the other day, and it's like, they described Aaron Seri, who is. You know, I am a Covid skeptic. And, you know, I was not in favor of the lockdowns. I was not in favor of forcing this vaccine on people. And so that constituted sort of like a break with the majority of the left for me and them, you know. And there's an article about Aaron Seri, who's an attorney who's worked with RFK Jr. He sued on behalf of a family that had a child that they thought was injured by one of seven varieties of polio vaccine. And this polio vaccine had not gone through the proper safety trials that the other six had. And what they wanted was for this vaccine to be subject to. To those safety trials. And the way the New York Times put it was like, he's opposed to the polio vaccine. Yeah. And it's like, first of all, there's no such thing as the polio vaccine. There's, like, two sort of basic categories. And then, like, you know, six or seven other varieties, and it was the one most recent, most experimental that they were saying, don't take it off the market. They're just saying, like, make it pass the safety test that the other polio vaccines have passed or take it off the market. You know, it's just like the New York Times just lying like that. So.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (48:54)

Yeah, but it's one of those things that you sound crazy for talking about.

Christian Parenti (48:58)

Yeah. Yeah. Which is why I brought it up, because I wanted to normalize it for people, because I also don't really care if people think I sound crazy.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (49:07)

And before we let you go as a New Yorker, did want to get your take on Mamdani for a little bit. Yeah. Because he's in the arc of kind of Bernie Sanders AOC Mamdani, like, literally kind of emerges out of their movement.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (49:24)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (49:25)

But also seems to have reinvented it a little bit to move, you know, to focus on New York. I think Andrew Epstein is one of his aides, called the campaign a love letter to New York. And you could tell, like, he really loves New York, but leading with the material concerns of New Yorkers.

Christian Parenti (49:47)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (49:48)

Making. Making the city the place that it should be. Yeah.

Breaking Points Host (Krystal Ball) (49:52)

Great again.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (49:53)

And. And while he got attacked for all of his identity concerns and he would speak in every language he could think of to try to reach voters where they were, he did not lead with the kind of language that became popular in the early 2000s among the left. So what do you think are his. Like, what do you make of him so far? Like, what's he got going for and what are the. What does he need to look out for?

Christian Parenti (50:18)

Well, I'm very hopeful. I think he's good. I voted for him. I hope that he can get stuff done. I mean, it's a huge job. There's limits to what the mayor can do. I worry about some of his early steps. Like, there's actually a bike lane in. In my neighborhood in Greenpoint. There is. You know, there were these Uber funded. There's a group called Transportation Alternatives and these other kind of, you know, and Transportation Alternatives was. Got Uber funding to basically, you know, make war on cars, which is fine. I mean, I'm in favor of bike lanes. I mean, I voted for Mike Bloomberg when he was a Republican because the Democrat was saying, I'm going to close bike lanes. And I was like, my life depends on these bike lanes. I'm not, you know, so I'm for bike lanes. But they have really kind of gone overboard to the point where, like, you know, on this main thoroughfare, McGinnis, like, an ambulance can't get around stuck traffic. And so, you know, he immediately went there and kind of wants to revive this. And it's like some of that stuff, just because it's coated green, it needs a critical second look. I'm worried about the idea of the Department of Public Safety because it's not at all clear cut that, like, this is a mental health crisis and this is a criminal justice situation. You know, and there's a long history of the. What criminologists call net widening and mesh thinning. You know, I mean, this is presented as an alternative to the police could very easily become an additional form of police power that doesn't even incorporate some of the crucial protections like your Fourth Amendment rights. You know, I mean, you know, social workers show up and they're like, we're here to help you. Tell us what's going on. And you say, I just assaulted somebody. You know, if it was the cops, they'd be like, hey, you know, you're acting crazy and we're taking you in. You have the right to make signs. You know, I mean, that's pretty important. You know, and once you come to your senses, maybe you'll be glad that you didn't, like, emote, like, I just attacked these people randomly. It's like, get some meds. Like, you know, I mean, and it's also like the. I mean, the problems are so deep. I'm not sure how this, like changing the thin end of the wedge can do that much. But I'm not saying I'm totally against it, but I would like to just introduce a note of skepticism because I feel that on the left, it's just, it's assumed the cops are problem. This is a solution. Fact of the matter is the NYPD has become much less violent than it used to be in the 90s. And interestingly, you know, I mean, I think it has a lot to do with the diversification, the diversity of the force. And you know, I've written critically about, you know, woke politics and the obsession with that, but I just think the reality, I'm always for actual diversity, but the reality is that the force is less male and white than it used to be. When I was in my twenties in New York City, it was like all these Irish and Italian kids.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (53:11)

It's a bunch of guys named Ryan Grimm.

American Military University Advertiser (53:13)

Yeah.

Christian Parenti (53:15)

And they were afraid of people and they looked down on them with contempt. There's tons of women. And in New York, the diversity, the growing diversity of the force has coincided with a declining use of force. Now, there's been an uptick over the last year. The NYPD needs to get much better about transparency. But the idea that this is an out of control police force, I mean it's, it's not the same force it was in the 90s. And so there's problems with that. And then it's like, I mean, if you have this Department of Community Safety, I mean, do we also have the funding for. I mean, there needs to be like massive back of the house funding for the mentally ill and drug addicted people who are unhoused in New York. So, you know, I worry that this could be a billion dollar jobs program for, you know, DSA type social workers and that in the end people are like, you know what? This is a racket. This is a ripoff. What is this? You know, so you got the social workers to take them in and then the same thing happens as with the cops. They're back out in a week. Like, what's going on here? So I don't have a solution, but.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (54:23)

My cousin, but I think he's like.

Christian Parenti (54:25)

Deep cleaning the subway.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (54:26)

Yeah.

Christian Parenti (54:26)

You know, he's got energy, he's smart. The idea of building, the idea of, you know, trimming the regulations, I mean, there are some pretty excessive regulations around building and housing codes in New York City. I mean, it could stand now of.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (54:45)

Course like that are often carve outs for corporations.

Christian Parenti (54:48)

Yep, yep, that's true.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (54:49)

And speaking of things that the left doesn't want to touch, my cousin in New York has worked in and works in the mental health departments of hospitals and currently at Harlem Hospital, and she worked at Rikers for a while. And the point that she's made is that she's like, there's a population of deeply and chronically mentally ill people in New York City that when whatever they call it, the institutions, the asylums, the institutionalization. The institutionalization were shut down because of abuses within them, they no longer had a place to go. And what they'll do now is they're like, well, sometimes you have access to an apartment or like a room.

Christian Parenti (55:32)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (55:32)

But they don't. They don't want to really stay in that room and. Or they sleep in that room. But then they're basically unhoused during the day around the city and self medicating with whatever they're. With whatever they're on. Her argument is like, this is a finite number of people. Like, but they are 90% of these calls that the police are getting. They need a place to go.

Christian Parenti (55:58)

Yeah.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (55:58)

And it has to be. Has to be serious, has to be well funded. It has to be, you know, it's not locked in treatment. But then she's like, it should be like in upstate New York or somewhere.

Christian Parenti (56:10)

I mean. Yeah, the whole. The history of deinstitutionalization is beginning to get a second look. I mean, that coincides, of course, with the beginning of austerity, the budget crises, and, you know, like, it starts before Reagan comes in, but it's part of that whole, like, you know, gutting the social welfare system, you know, and the left was correctly pointing out, like, these places are horrible, though sometimes even that was a little nuts. I rewatched Titty Cut Follies, this famous documentary about Bridgewater State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts. And I remember, you know, you're supposed to be like, this place is horrible. And I watched it, I was like, I don't know. It doesn't. Doesn't actually seem that bad.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (56:47)

Probably easy to make them look bad.

Christian Parenti (56:49)

Yeah. I mean, but just sort of like, you know, so there's. I mean, it's not. Those places were without problems. They had problems. But there was a way in which the critique of the left was harnessed by the tax cutting. Austerity. Right. It was like, yeah, that's great. You're right, they're horrible. We're gonna close them and give that money to Rich people. It's a tax break, you know. Yeah, yeah. You know, speaking of austerity, I mean, one thing I would be like throw into the mix here for the left to think about is, you know, we oppose austerity because it's usually aimed at workers and vulnerable people. But I think there could be a place for left austerity. Speaking as a university professor, the number of administrators in American universities has gone from an average of one administrator per three faculty in 1980 to one to one. And in many universities they are now. More than 50% of the employees of universities are administrators and many of them are paid a lot of money. Their job. Speaking from the front lines of the email receiving teaching profession, it's like their job seems to be to harass people. And it's very clear. Like I remember the great scholar Fran Fox Piven said this to me. She is retired now, but she was at the graduate center. She said, yes, I'm there on 34th Street, 35th Street. I've been to the fifth floor. And it's true, Christian, they have nothing to do. They literally don't. So, you know, no one ever talks about that. It's like, no, they don't. I think we could do some like, very, very deep cuts to the administration of what is a great university system, the cuny, City University of New York, where I work. I mean, so the administrators won't like that. But you know what? I don't like all the pointless emails.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (58:35)

So you try to unsubscribe and it doesn't work.

Christian Parenti (58:38)

Actually it does block sender, a lot of it. You can just sort of ignore.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (58:43)

Filter straight into the spam. Yeah, yeah.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (58:46)

Amazing.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (58:46)

Well, they'll enjoy this interview.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (58:48)

Yes, yes, everyone will.

Christian Parenti (58:50)

Great.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (58:50)

Well, thanks for coming by here.

Christian Parenti (58:52)

Thank you very much, very much. Appreciate it for inviting me. Appreciate it.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (58:56)

It was worth it for that picture alone.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (58:57)

Yes.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (58:57)

That was great stuff, guys.

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Christian Parenti (59:32)

Live. CBS Tonight, Hollywood's biggest party is now bigger than ever.

Breaking Points Host (Ryan Grim) (59:38)

Perfect.

Greenlight Advertiser (59:39)

No notes.

Christian Parenti (59:40)

The Golden Globes. With more stars, more glamour, more chaos.

Interviewer (Ryan Grim) (59:46)

And more host Nikki Glaser we're gonna.

Christian Parenti (59:48)

Laugh at the celebrities that can take.

Greenlight Advertiser (59:50)

It and completely ignore the ones who can't. I'm just kidding. They're not safe either.

Christian Parenti (59:55)

The Golden Globes, live, CBS tonight at 8 Eastern, 5 Pacific, and streaming on Paramount.

Breaking Points Host (Krystal Ball) (60:00)

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Podcast Host (60:31)

This is an iHeart podcast.

Prolon Advertiser (60:34)

Guaranteed Human.