The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

Welcome to a new episode of our Mailbag, which is a new segment where we take questions from the members of our Locals community and answer them here live on our Rumble program.

If you want to be one of the people who can ask questions, you can do it by text or audio or video – and soon we're going to have a call-in opportunity while we're live on the air and we will have that kind of interaction. All you have to do is click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and that will take you directly to the Locals community. 

We have a lot of great questions as we often do from our Locals members. 

The first one is from @THEMILLMAN: 

Do you have any specific personal stories or stories you've heard that you can share about what Israel does to indoctrinate American Jews from a young age, and generally Americans? Maybe there are some examples from “The Holocaust Industry” [the book by Norman Finkelstein] (which I have not yet read)? 

 

I watched “Israelism: The Awakening of Young American Jews”, a documentary that examines the indoctrination techniques Israel uses on American Jews, including free trips to Israel, dehumanization of Palestinians, the equating of Judaism with Israel, etc. 

It's a great question and it's really interesting because if you grow up as an American Jew, which I did, in a largely American Jewish culture, my school was predominantly Jewish, most of my friends were Jewish who went to that school, my family is a hundred percent Jewish, so, I certainly have a lot of personal experience about that as well. 

Everyone understands exactly what happens with this kind of indoctrination and it's almost like something that everybody agrees not to talk about because it sheds so much light on why there's so much Jewish American loyalty toward Israel. It's because this is something that is drummed into people's heads from basically the moment that they're born, not just a Jewish identity which is very common – Christians have a Christian identity, Italians have an Italian identity, etc., etc. – but it's specifically about the vital role of this foreign country. 

My parents weren't very religious and that's true of a lot of American Jews who are secular – it's true of Israeli Jews as well. They're not overwhelmingly religious, a lot of them, necessarily, but it still is a central part of the identity of American Jews. My father grew up in Brooklyn, my mother grew up in the Bronx and they were both part of one hundred percent Jewish families. So, it was a central part of our family's identity. It was always, “We are a Jewish family” and even though my family wasn't religious my maternal grandmother was an immigrant from Germany. She was one of the two siblings of 11, her and her younger sister, who left Germany to come to the United States in the late 1930s to escape the persecution of Jews in Germany. She spoke with a heavy German accent her whole life and she thought it was extremely important that we have Jewish upbringing and Jewish traditions and even Jewish religion and so sent both my brother and me to a Jewish summer camp every year for I think five or six years. 

So, I spent two months during the summer in the middle of Florida somewhere, in Ocala, sometimes, in southern Georgia, in Jewish camps and there was all kinds of indoctrination, religious indoctrination where you learn Jewish prayers, but also constant talk about Israel, the history of the Jewish people and the persecution that Jews face, we know all about the Holocaust and we were indoctrinated with the idea that Israel is a place that guarantees the safety of Jews uniquely and, without Israel, American Jews around the world could never be safe. 

You're talking about the long thousands of years of persecution but obviously culminating in the Holocaust. So, from childhood, from adolescence, this is constantly reinforced in people that your identity is as a Jew, this makes you different from other people and you need to have a sense of devotion and loyalty to Israel, and it's fostered in all kinds of ways. 

I think almost every friend that I have who I grew up with who is Jewish went on birthright trips to Israel which are trips that you can go on where it will be free. The Israelis do have extremely sophisticated propaganda programs that are catered to all sorts of specific kinds of people. For example, they have an LGBT propaganda tour for gay politicians from all around the world to go to Israel. They take them to gay bars in Tel Aviv and to the gay culture around Israel, they teach them about the freedom of gay people in Israel and compare them to the treatment of gay people in the West Bank, in particular, Gaza, under Hamas. I've seen left-wing politicians who go on these trips – they're often paid by Israel – who come back and, out of nowhere, are, suddenly, fanatically pro-Israeli. They start to believe that Israel is an important project to defend. You see it with people like Richie Torres who went on those kinds of propaganda tours. There's one for American teenagers as well and you go to Israel and they indoctrinate you with love of and support for Israel and these are very like I said sophisticated programs where they play on your emotions of the most primal and visceral kind. Your fears, your identity, your place in the world. It's very, very powerful. Propaganda is a very sophisticated science. We tend to think of it as just some messaging that people do but it's actually been studied in many fields of discipline: psychology, sociology, anthropology. Techniques have become increasingly powerful in terms of how people are propagandized. 

One of these things that really struck me, and I think I talked about this before, is that I have a friend who I've been friends with almost my entire life and he's Jewish, he grew up in a typically Jewish tradition not overwhelmingly religious, but going to synagogue for Bar Mitzvah, just had the Jewish identity always reinforced. He was largely apolitical, didn't particularly feel that strongly about Israel and didn't talk about Israel much, certainly knowing that I'm a vocal critic of Israel and have been for a long time. It was never a topic of conversation between us, let alone any sort of thing that might impede our friendship. He was always pretty apolitical about it, pretty neutral about it, and yet, after October 7 – and I just didn't see this in him, I saw this in so many Jews that I had known who were similarly neutral, even a little bit critical of Israel – this very primal notion that Jews were now under attack just awakened in them and they were enraged by what had happened. October 7 deeply radicalized them and they began defending what Israel was doing and expressing contempt for those who were critical of it. This lifelong system of indoctrination which could be latent, at some points, might just be lurking. It's very present there.

I have to say more broadly that I think this is the sort of propaganda with which we're all inculcated not just about Israel, but about a whole range of topics including the United States. I can remember very vividly when I was six years old, in the first or second grade, we had civics classes, and I remember the teacher that I had she was this older woman obviously I'd lived through the Cold War, by then she was probably 60 or 70, certainly lived through that 20th century, and I remember every day her teaching us that the United States was the greatest country in the world, that we stood for freedom, that we fought against tyranny, that the Soviet Union was the opposite, it was our enemy. 

We're very tribal animals, we evolved for thousands of years as part of a tribe, we needed to be part of a tribe and we had to maintain our tribal good standing because if you're ostracized or expelled from your tribe it would mean typically, for a long time, that you would wither away and die, you couldn't survive without a tribe. So, we're very tribal and to have these tribal instincts constantly stimulated from birth – the United States is the greatest country in the world, it fights for freedom, it fights for democracy, these other countries are the bad countries – these are things that are deeply embedded in our thought process and how we understand the world subconsciously and consciously. Once you're an adult, it takes a concerted effort to say wait, I want to uproot all the things that I was indoctrinated with, maybe some of them are correct, maybe some of them aren't and I want to reevaluate the world and see what is inside me that was put there for whatever purposes and what actually is my own ideas. It's not easy to do it, for any of us, no matter how much you try. These formations that shape us for years when we don't have any defenses against them, when we're children or adolescents, these are very, very powerful and the experience of seeing, not even the full panoply of pro-Israel indoctrination as an American Jew, but certainly a lot of it, and seeing the full range of it in a lot of my friends and then see how this plays out and manifest in adulthood it is incredibly enlightening. So, you look at how many American Jews there are in media or politics and it's very difficult to find ones who position themselves as Israel critics. 

The Norman Finkelsteins of the world are known precisely because of how rare they are. Why is it that, overwhelmingly, people who grow up Jewish are taught to have Judaism or being Jewish as a part of their identity and end up on this polarizing question that divides the entire world so radically and fanatically and aggressively pro-Israel? Obviously, it's because it's a byproduct of what they've been indoctrinated with. They were taught from birth to love Israel, they become adults, and they love Israel. There's never any critical reevaluation at any point of whether that's something that they actually want to continue to believe.

I think that project of – not just with Israel, but with everything – of re-evaluating what it is that we were taught to believe, with which we were indoctrinated, and re-evaluating and uprooting it and then kind of reconstituting our belief system is one of the prerequisites to being an adult, to being an autonomous person, a free person: to make certain that the ideas and the values and the emotional reactions that shape who you are and how you think actually are coming from you and not from external sources that have been implanted in you when you had no idea that this was even being done. 

So, for sure it is a very powerful system of propaganda. It is overt, it is engineered, it's not just through absorption. The Israelis understand the importance of it, there are lots of them and there's a lot of money spent on this sort of thing. They have them for evangelicals, they have them as I said for gay people, they have them for Americans, they have very different propaganda projects for all kinds of different people in the world, they're experts at it and it succeeds in lots of ways and people who really surprised me by how radicalized they were in favor of Israel after October 7 were kind of testaments to how much that worked. 

All right, the next question is from @THEREAL_AF:

Hi Glenn! It's fascinating to watch the success of DOGE, what's being exposed with USAID, etc., and two of Trump's most controversial pics, Tulsi and RFK, being confirmed. It does seem like we're headed for some sort of renaissance or course correction, long overdue. I'm curious about your take on Chris Hedges’ recent remarks about the empire self-destructing, which is the alternate way of viewing these events.

Here is his first paragraph:

“The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of the state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.” 

I do – without all of that invective that he put there and I'm not sure why that's there, just leaving that question to the side for the moment – I do think that a lot of what's happening is through necessity. The reality is that this American empire is unsustainable. I'm not somebody who thinks the minute the United States government has a deficit or even debt that's kind of apocalyptic. It is not the same and I've never accepted the analogy that just like a family has to balance their budgets so too do governments. Governments can use debt financing for lots of different reasons but that doesn't mean there aren't limits on them. 

If you look at the debt of the United States and what is required to be serviced, just the interest payments alone and you lay on top of that the trillions and trillions of dollars that we've spent on foreign wars all over the place, it is obvious that that needs to be reined in: even if you're morally supportive of it, even if you think it's strategically advantageous, it's simply not sustainable. 

The United States cannot sustain this level of debt and the policies that generate it. So, I think a lot of what Trump is reacting to and a lot of what Elon Musk is doing is almost an inevitable recognition that there has to be a radical course correction. 

At the same time, I think it's an important course correction. I do not think that the American empire has been good for the world. Often the argument is “Well, even if it wasn't good for the world the alternatives would be worse.” We don't have to live under a single superpower or a single empire. In fact, most of world history has not been a unipolar world. There is a benefit from balancing powers and yes that was tried in the 18th and 19th centuries and it often produced wars, this idea that we were gonna have a balance of powers and no one would be dominant. 

It just simply is the fact that – if you look at how many wars the United States has started, how many of the wars the United States has fueled, how many wars the United States has fought, how many of the proxy wars the United States fuels – much of the world's violence emanates from the United States. There have been empires in the past that would use wars to conquest, take land, take assets and for a while that can be fed but, ultimately, even those empires collapsed because they just became so sprawling and so unmanageable. So, I think that part of what is happening is this late-stage empire that Trump is reacting to and the recognition that most people in Washington have but have been unwilling or afraid to express that this cannot be sustained for much longer that this needs to all be reined in. 

I also think in the case of Trump there is a real ideological conviction that most of what the United States does in the world when it comes to interfering in foreign countries – trying to control foreign countries, trying to start wars – is very bad for the United States, very bad for American citizens. I believe there's an ideological conviction there. If you're on the left and you believe that that impulse comes from a more paleo-conservative, right-wing, or isolationist impulse, maybe you can find it disturbing even if you think a left-wing version of that would be good, I guess, if you're really intent on, not just demanding radical change, but demanding it in exactly the way that you want it, based on the exact premises that you want it – I don't really have that demand. 

I want to see the National Endowment for democracy defunded and shut down, I want to see the CIA, and the NSA, and the FBI severely limited in the role that they play in the world. I want to see U.S. foreign policy far more oriented toward getting along with other countries rather than dominating them and manipulating them and exploiting them. I want to see the military-industrial complex radically reduced so that it doesn't have an incentive as its only profit and power mechanism to constantly start and fuel wars and whether this comes from this kind of an ideological perspective or that is far less important to me than the fact that it happens. And so, when I see it happening, I'm going to be encouraged by it, I'm going to applaud it, I don't have a need to call the people doing it deviants or psychopaths or whatever. 

In fact, the first thing that we saw from Donald Trump was the imposition of a cease-fire and that ended at least for some time these single worst expression of state violence I've seen in my lifetime which is the absolutely nauseating complete destruction of the society of Gaza and the lives of 2.2 million people by Israel funded by the United States, that came to an end because of Donald Trump. You want to call people psychopaths and deviants and monsters, call it the people who funded those things which are the Democrats and the Biden administration, who certainly didn't have opposition from the Republicans, but they were still the ones who did it and who stood up every day and defended it and financed it. 

To me, the way that you judge a person is by the outcomes they produce. So far, the primary outcome that Donald Trump has produced has been a cease-fire in Gaza along with a serious attempt to end the war in Ukraine that has put the United States on a path to clearly resolving that war sooner rather than later. And then, at the same time, expressing a worldview that I think is very healthy and long overdue about the way in which the United States has tried to bully the world. Elon Musk said, “The United States has been bullying the world, has been interfering in other countries and we should start minding our own business.” 

So, whatever you think of the people who are doing it, and whatever you think of their motives or whatever you think of the impulses that are driving it, seeing these things being done and hearing these things being said are things that I regard as extremely positive. All along, from the very beginning when I was far less negative about Trump and the emergence of Trump and the Trump movement than most people who had been associated with the left, the reason for that is that I could hear and see this realignment. 

And so could neocons. Neocons left the Trump movement and were petrified and did everything to sabotage it because they understood what I understood as well which is that their project was endangered by a Trump-led Republican party. And it was for exactly that reason, the reason that neocons hated him that I found potential value in Trump and in the Trump movement and in the realignment that he could usher in, knowing that the Democratic party would never deliver any of those things, that reforming the Democratic party or trying to work within it or whatever was a fool's game. That was something I believed for a while and then saw the futility of it for so many reasons. Then, with the emergence of Trump, it got even worse because they became defenders of establishment dogma and the institutions of authority and so, all the things that made the Democratic party irrevocably rotted intensified a great deal and I think you're seeing the wisdom of that view being vindicated in just the first weeks of the Trump administration. 

All right. Next question from @IFTRUTHBETOLD:

Hi Glenn. I am a longtime fan of your show. I have a question about your segment on the OAS visiting Brazil to “audit” Alexandre de Moraes and the STF. [That's the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who has become notorious for censoring; the STF is the Brazilian Supreme Court.] 

It was an interesting juxtaposition with your segment on USAID, which highlighted the damage caused by foreign interference in other countries by groups like AID. The OAS has traditionally been a tool of US influence, intervention and “democracy spreading” in Latin America (and incidentally receives USAID funding). 

Why do you think viewing OAS interfering in internal Brazilian matters is laudatory in this case (however awful I agree de Moraes’ actions are) but other instances of U.S. and other foreign influences are bad? How do you make this distinction? Wouldn't it be better if resistance to censorship in Brazil surged organically from domestic elements? Also, I strongly suspect the OAS visit to Brazil is not motivated by a dedication to free speech, but an effort by the Bolsonaristas (who are close to the Trump administration) to weaken Lula and tilt Brazilian politics back in their favor, but I welcome your views on this and your broader thoughts on how to make normative judgments on when intervention by either foreign governments or international orgs are good or bad.

Excellent question, absolutely a very smart question. Not easy to answer, I think; it does point to some tensions that are important to try to navigate and resolve. So, I will begin by saying this: the Organization of American States is a member organization that only has jurisdiction in countries where the countries voluntarily join that organization. Brazil is a member state of the OAS because Brazil joined it at its founding and therefore submitted as, say, a member state of the U.N.  do to its charter, to its processes, to its rules, to its values, to its investigations. 

Brazil has requested OAS investigations of other member states before endorsing the idea that this is a legitimate role of the OAS, including Lula's government, the first two terms, have done that. They've requested it with Venezuela, and they've requested it with right-wing countries, with allegations of human rights repression, but it is true the OAS has largely been dominated by the United States unsurprising that an organization of American states would be dominated by the richest and most powerful country on the planet. So, I agree that OAS has been an imperialist tool and you have to be very careful about cheering the interference of or the use of international organizations in a foreign country even if the outcome is one that you applaud or hope is brought about. So, I take that critique. As I said, I do distinguish OAS from say USAID. USAID just intervenes in any other country regardless of whether they've submitted to the jurisdiction or not, whereas at least there's some voluntary submission on the part of Brazil to the OAS given how Brazil joined it and could leave it at any time. So, there is that aspect. 

It is true and I'm not comfortable – and I want to make this clear as well – I think the premise might have overstated the extent to which I'm happy about the fact that the OAS is in Brazil and investigating and I also share your concerns about the motive, the politicization of it. I don't think there's any pure concern about free speech. I do think that the Trump administration allied with the Bolsonaristas to influence the OAS to do this. So, it's not some pure concern for free expression and I am not necessarily thrilled that the OAS is there to conduct a politicized investigation, even if I do think Alexandre de Moraes and the censorship regime in Brazil are extremely dangerous and oppressive for reasons I've said before. 

So, by highlighting this, I'm really attempting to simply bring the censorship regime in Brazil to light and I do want Brazilians to feel as though there is some international cost in their standing if they completely abandon free speech. Sometimes, the only way rights can be protected is with international attention.  

I do agree there is tension between acknowledging that and then at the same time wanting the U.S. to stop interfering in other countries or other organizations like the EU to do. I absolutely prefer that opposition to the censorship regime emerged domestically. But the nature of repression domestically is oftentimes that it's very difficult to challenge precisely because any challenge to it becomes criminalized, they imprison those who challenge it, they censor those who challenge it, they silence those who challenge it. And so, perhaps I'm a little more comfortable with the OAS doing what it's doing simply because Brazil is a member of the organization and chose to be and can choose not to be at any time but that is not my preferred way for censorship in Brazil to end. 

I have talked a lot before about how the OAS has been a tool of American interference, I will say interestingly that, although throughout the Cold War, the U.S. Security State the CIA, etc. were almost always supportive of right-wing governments especially in Latin America and opposed to left-wing governments, over the past decade the U.S. Security State has adopted the position that the most dangerous movement is right-wing populism. They're way more afraid at this point of right-wing populism than of left-wing governments, especially moderate left-wing governments like Lula, Lula is not Fidel Castro, he's not Nicolas Maduro, he never has been. Brazil is a capitalist country, corporations thrive, the market thrives and there's economic growth under Lula, especially in his first two terms. The United States can live with Lula. What they really fear is right-wing populism and, under Biden, the CIA visited Brazil several times, so did Anthony Blinken, so did Jake Sullivan, and aggressively told Bolsonaro that there will be severe consequences if he tried to challenge the integrity or the accuracy of the 2022 election. They were hoping that Lula would win, and Europeans were hoping that Lula would win. It is a big change from the U.S. posture, but the reality is that the U.S. Security State works mostly against right-wing populist movements no longer against left-wing governments. I'm sure they prefer some nice center-right, pro-capitalist government. Between those two choices, especially a moderate left-wing government that has long done business with the United States of the kind Brazil has under Lula and a populist right movement of the kind that Brazil had with Bolsonaro, you see their preference. That's why the U.S. Security State sabotaged Trump. They prefer the Democrats, the neoliberals and the militarists of the Democratic Party to right-wing populism. 

So, I think we have to be very careful about those premises but, of course, the OAS visit is politicized and I did try to be careful about not cheering it too much. I was just kind of rubbing it in the face of de Moraes and his supporters that Brazil is now perceived and increasingly being perceived as a state that relies on online censorship and political repression because I think that they do. But I absolutely want the end of that to come from internal Brazilian politics, from domestic sentiment, and not from outside organizations that are obviously controlled by the United States. 

All right, so those are all the questions for this episode.

I hope you'll continue to submit them using our Locals platform for next Friday!

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

We focus a lot on this show on international relations and foreign policy from the perspective of what often shapes them – things like wars and militarism, conflicts and perception of external threats – but at least as important is the world economic order: which countries are rich, which ones are poor, which ones are developing and aren't and how that system is maintained as well as the truth about rising economic powers like China and its potential to undermine American dominance and the dollar as the reserve currency. 

Ha-Joon Chang is a leading economist known for his sharp critiques of international economic institutions and their defense of neoliberalism. No matter how often it fails, as well as for his advocacy for economic pluralism, he has become quite a growing sensation online with his lectures. 

He's a professor at the SOAS University of London and a former Cambridge lecturer. He's probably best known for his 2002 book, “Kicking Away the Ladder,” which examines how wealthy nations traditionally have blocked economic progress in developing countries. His recent book, “Edible Economics,” from 2022, uses food to explain economic ideas. 

In addition to these topics, we sat down with him last night and he helped us understand the likely implication of Donald Trump's proposed tariffs and protectionism as a basis for his economic policy, as well as the reason basic economic literacy is so important in democracy and how often it is deliberately made inaccessible through things like jargon and excessive statistics and a reliance on all sorts of terms that are designed to keep people away. He has made it a life work to elevate economic literacy. I found the conversation with him very interesting. I think you will as well. 

The Interview: Ha-Joon Chang

G. Greenwald: Professor Chang, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk. One of the reasons we were so interested in having you is we have a lot of conversations now about geopolitics and international relations. So often it focuses on things people can easily understand, things as wars and various types of conflicts. A huge part of geopolitics in the international order is the scheme of wealth – that various countries have or don't have – and has always been. 

A lot of your work has become quite popular. I think “Kicking Away the Ladder,” the 2002 book, is among your best known and, for me, that provides one of the best explanations to understand why some countries are rich and why some are poor and kind of how there's a system to ensure that stays the same. Can you talk about that for people who haven't read that book or are familiar with your work? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yes, the book was published in 2002, so it's quite a bit old now. But there I was pointing out that this was the high noon of neoliberalism when rich countries were lecturing developing countries “Oh, don't use that stupid things like protectionism, don't use that state-owned enterprises that don't have a government meddle with business.” But then I tried to show that these are actually exactly the policies that the rich countries themselves use in order to get where they are today. Telling the developing countries not to use these policies is like someone using a ladder to climb to the top and kicking the ladder away so that other people cannot follow. 

The most famous and most robust argument for using protectionism is known as the infant industry argument. That argument says the government of a developing nation needs to protect and nurture its young industries until they grow up and compete in the global market. Exactly in the same way that we protect and nurture our children until they grow up and can compete in the adult labor market. Of course, in poor countries, a lot of children work from the age of five or six, but you know, this means that they cannot get educated, they cannot acquire high skills and so on. So, if you can do it, it pays to send these kids to school rather than sending them to work. 

Very interestingly, this logic of infant industry protection was invented by an American and not just any American. He was called Alexander Hamilton, the very first Treasury Secretary of the United States of America. He invented the term “infant industry protection.” Initially, a lot of Americans were not convinced by this, especially people like Thomas Jefferson who said this guy is insane. We can export our cotton and tobacco, of course – I never mentioned the slaves – and import manufactured goods that are cheaper and better – even considering the considerable transportation costs – than what these Yankees can produce. So why should we subsidize these inefficient Yankee manufacturers? 

So, it was initially rejected, but over time the Americans figured out that actually this was what they needed and yeah, from about the 1830s until the Second World War, most of the time over that 120-year period, the United States was the most protectionist country in the world. So, I was revealing this history. It wasn't just the U.S. I mean, Hamilton got his ideas from British practices, Germans later developed Hamilton's theory and used protectionism quite heavily in the late 19th century. The Swedes and later the French and the Japanese and more recently Koreans and Taiwanese and so on. 

So, I was basically pointing out this hypocrisy in which these countries are actually telling developing countries not to use the exact same policies that they used in order to climb to the top. It wasn't just protectionism. It wasn't just tariffs, there were a lot of other policies like the use of state-owned enterprises, strict regulations on foreign investments and other things. So yeah, I mean, that caused a bit of a wave in the international policy debate because developing countries could tell the rich countries, “Look, why are you telling us not to use these policies when these are exactly the policies that you guys used in order to get where you are today?” 

G. Greenwald: You know, it's interesting when you kind of take those principles that you just described, these historical and economic principles, and apply them to specifics, I think sometimes people can see them better in a kind of more modern sense. And one of the things I find so interesting is that you have now a lot of billionaires who became that wealthy because they developed companies in the wake of the internet that became public companies, became very large and successful, who are now essentially insisting that the only way for innovation to happen is to have massive cuts in government spending, even though the internet itself was the byproduct of massive government investment, some of whom will acknowledge that. So, is that the kind of dynamic that you're describing where there's kind of this propaganda that government spending impedes economic growth, whereas so often it's what spurs it? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, I mean, it's in a way the most obvious in the United States. You know, it wasn't just the internet, but the computer itself, microchips. I mean, these are all financed by the U.S. government, especially the U.S. military: the internet, the GPS system, what makes our modern information economy possible, these were all invented with government money. And there's a reason why Silicon Valley is where it is because this is where a lot of U.S. defense research, specially built around the jet propulsion laboratory, was conducted. And yeah, this is like, once again, people rewriting history in the most convenient way. I mean, they lived on government support in the beginning, and then now that they are bigger and don't need the government as much, although they still need government, the U.S. government is still pouring huge amounts of money into military research, which spills into the civilian industries. I mean, it gives a huge protection in the form of the patent system and copyright system, without which these companies wouldn't have the monopoly they have. So, actually, they still need the government, but of course, they only want protection and not the obligations. So, now they say the government is bad. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, in fact, most of those companies, not only exploited the technology developed by the government, but continue to rely on massive government contracts, particularly with the military, but with the intelligence, you know, you have Palantir and all these adjacent companies that are on this kind of austerity kick. Everyone needs to lose their benefits, every government agency needs to be cut, except for our massive contracts with the CIA and the Pentagon that are worth many, many billions of dollars. 

The enforcement scheme – you were describing earlier, how rich countries sort of dictate this economic dogma to poor countries, that they know themselves the rich countries aren't what produces growth. The mechanisms by which they do that have been these kinds of international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Oftentimes the message is, well, we've fostered this dependency, you're relying on a bunch of our loans and bailouts and, as a condition, we kind of demand that you just cut all services for your citizens and investments in your society. We want to see massive austerity and no more government spending. 

Is that done, do you think, with the intention to maintain these countries in a sort of dependence state, or is it just a misguided but well-intentioned way of trying to help these countries grow? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, it's a mixture of things, you know, because there is a lot of misguided goodwill. There are people who truly believe that the United States and other rich countries are developed on the basis of free trade and free market; there are economists who believe that government is bad and so on. So yeah, some of it is misguided goodwill. But you have to ask the question, if it's so misguided and has produced terrible results – because the World Bank and IMF programs have basically wiped out economic growth, increased inequalities, and created all sorts of problems in almost all the developing countries where they were involved – then, at that point, you will have to ask: okay, I mean, misguided goodwill or not, if these programs are not working, why do they keep repeating the same thing again and again and again? I mean, maybe you could say that these people are mad. As Einstein said, the definition of madness is repeating the same thing again and again and expecting different results. But it's not madness that they are doing this. They are allowed to repeat these policies that are not working only because they are basically backed by the rich countries, which benefit from this kind of thing. 

G. Greenwald: One of the more interesting disputes that arose in the last decade, it was about a decade ago now, maybe a little more. I don't focus primarily on economic policy or macroeconomics or anything, but I follow the story quite closely when the Greek economy was sort of on the verge of collapse. The Greeks elected a fairly populist, aggressive government that tried to stand up to primarily France and Germany insisting that the Greeks impose a sort of rigid austerity like we were just talking about. The Greeks tried to be very confrontational and resisted and didn't really work out well for Greece in the end. Are there ways that underdeveloped countries that are put into these positions have to defy these institutions or are they pretty much captive to what they're told to do? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Well, yeah, Greece was really crushed by the European Commission, basically France and Germany. I mean, people say that in that episode the IMF was telling the Germans and the French that they were going too far but what happened there was this mistaken belief that the way to revive the economy is to cut government debt, which means cutting spending. The trouble is that when you cut spending, the economy shrinks and the tax revenue falls and, as a result, even while the spending was cut brutally, public debt, as a proportion of GDP, was still rising because GDP itself was shrinking very rapidly. And there was a huge unemployment –especially youth unemployment reached over 40%. So, it was a total disaster.

But there are instances where the countries defied these international institutions [audio failed] …the Asian financial crisis and yeah, instead of signing these austerity agreements with the IMF, Malaysia suspended capital outflow for like a year. And yeah, there was a huge uproar. You know, they said, “Oh, when this ban is lifted, you know, 70, 80 billion dollars will flow out of the country.” But what happened was that because of this ban, because the money couldn't flow out, they stayed and then started doing something, so the economy got revived. When the government lifted the ban one year later, only six or seven billion dollars flowed out, which is a kind of normal amount. 

So, you know, there are these instances. And also, you know, look at the successful economies in East Asia: Japan first and then Korea, Taiwan, now China. I mean, these countries never really followed the advice of the World Bank and the IMF. (laughs) So, the proof is that they're steering you right into your face but apparently, you know, the people refuse to understand it. Was it the Canadian American economist John Kenneth Galbraith who said that if someone's salary depends on not understanding something, you can never make that person understand anything? It might have been often unclear but, basically, these institutions, these governments, they are refusing to accept this reality because it means that they have done wrong, it means that they have to do something that benefits them less. 

G. Greenwald: That is interesting, this emergence of this kind of new economic power based in Asia, obviously led by China. As you might know, our program is based in Brazil. Brazil had for a long time been kind of under the thumb of the United States. It's in what the United States considers its backyard, which is all of South America. But then Brazil became a founding member of the BRICS alliance and the Brazilian president Lula da Silva has said several times now that he wakes up every day dreaming of de-dollarization. Is the emergence of things like BRICS or the attempt to move away from the dollar as the dominant reserve currency potential paths to undermining this system that you're describing? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yes. Of course, if you zoom out, the history of Capitalism has been a history of domination and resistance and military invasion and colonization, gunboat diplomacy that led to unequal treaties. And so, it's been a constant struggle between different countries and societies that are located in different parts of the global economic hierarchy. 

So, yeah, I mean, in the '60s and '70s, with decolonization, a lot of developing countries that wanted to be kind of independent of the U.S. and European domination, they wanted to be allowed to change their positions in the global economic hierarchy and, yeah, they called for the new international economic order, they organized a non-aligned movement. Unfortunately, all of this was crushed in the '80s and '90s with the third world debt crisis starting with the Mexican [  ] of 1982 and, yeah, especially countries in Latin America and Africa basically kind of being forced to implement these World Bank-IMF policies, which basically created decades of stagnation and social unrest. 

Now, with the recovery from that phase and with the rise of China, with the kind of revival of some of the developing economies in the 21st century, these countries have started demanding a different arrangement. So, there's BRICS, also G20, which was created when rich countries were in big trouble, after the 2008 financial crisis. There has been the creation of new developing country-focused financial institutions, very often led by China, the Asian Infrastructure Bank and the New Development Bank. Yeah, so things are quite different. 

In the '80s and '90s, if you didn't agree with the World Bank, you didn't get money because there was only one bank in town, and it was called the World Bank. Now, there are different banks. Now, there are different countries with slightly different views about development, like, say, South Korea giving foreign aid and China is rising, Brazil is becoming quite assertive and South Africa, in its own way, is trying. So yeah, I mean I think this is a time of great global geopolitical shift. 

But when it comes to dollar dominance, I'm afraid that it's going to be a while before it can be changed because once you become the dominant currency, it gives you so much kind of extra power even without you trying. So, it's very difficult to change that. It has been changed only once with the rise of the U.S., you know, Britain had to see the position of the home of the dominant currency. But even that took decades. And this time around, even with the creation of the euro and the rise of China and so on, it will still take some time before the currency domination can be changed. But in other respects, the World Bank is now almost irrelevant, the IMF is kind of less domineering, [  ] credits changed its practices a little bit, not massively. So yes, I think the world is in a very interesting place. Unfortunately, it means that it can be a very dangerous place because now the Americans and Europeans are desperate to stop China's rise and they are doing a lot of things that could create quite a lot of collateral damage for weaker countries in the process.

G. Greenwald: Your work has become quite popular in various sectors online, as I'm sure you know and one of the viral clips that I saw circulating several times was one where you were talking about how modern-day economic thinking and language are sort of comparable to Catholic theology in the Middle Ages. 

And the thing that I thought of when I heard that was the very first U.S. presidential election that I really paid close attention to – it was in my young adulthood – was the 1992 presidential election where you had the Democrat Bill Clinton and the Republican George H. W. Bush who were in full agreement on the virtues and the sanctity of free trade. And then this was the time of NAFTA and the like. And then you had this third-party candidate who was kind of treated as a crazy person, Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, who was saying NAFTA will gut out industrial jobs and factories and good paying middle-class lives for Americans. And then, you know, 20 years later, everyone agrees that the major problem is that we have massive deindustrialization, all these towns are shuttered, the middle class has kind of withered. Very prescient. 

At the time I didn't know who was right, but it seems very clear that the NAFTA opponents were. And yet any attempt still, even after all of that, to question the tenets of free trade and the necessity of having full-scale free trade drives people insane like it's some kind of an outrage.

Is that the sort of thing you were talking about with this “Middle Age theology”? And can you kind of expand on what more you mean by that? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, well, yeah, Ross Perot's giant sucking sound from the South. Yeah, no, no, absolutely. 

Well, it's not just in relation to free trade that economics has become the modern equivalent of Catholic theology in Medieval Europe. I mean, it is basically now a doctrine that justifies the existing social economic order. So, it's basically telling us the world is what it is because it has to be. However, unjust, irrational, or wasteful, you think that it might be the “science of economics” is saying – or in the old days, “the words of God,” especially as interpreted by the Vatican – it is something that you have to accept. 

So that now, you know, I mean, of course, that, you know, in the capitalist economy, economic considerations have always been dominant, but especially in the neoliberal age, when, you know, economic considerations are the ultimate and very often the only logic that you have to accept. I mean, economics has become basically the language of power. 

Of course, when I say economics, I must qualify that. There are different types of economics, you know, not all economists believe in the free market; not all economists think nothing else matters other than the market. But, you know, economics as it is practiced today is like that. Therefore, it has become a very important kind of obstacle to changing the world because it says that this is the best of all possible worlds and that anyone who tries to challenge it is either misguided or has a hidden agenda to enrich himself, empower himself, but really don't care about the rest of the world. 

So, yeah, I'm afraid that it's become like that and to extend the analogy a bit further, you know, economics as it is practiced has become basically impenetrable to ordinary citizens because it uses a huge amount of jargon, lots of mathematics, you know, lots of statistics. And yeah, I mean, ordinary people find it difficult to understand. So, it's become the Latin of the Middle Ages. I mean, it's the language of the ruling class. And if you don't know Latin, you are not even allowed to debate anything and the Vatican made sure that no one other than the priesthood and sons of some very rich people understand the Bible, by preventing the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. So, later during the Reformation, it became a big deal that the Bible was translated into English, German, French, and so on. Because now it meant that a lot of people could read it. So, yes, I'm afraid that this analogy is not as frivolous as it might seem. 

G. Greenwald: Well, it's interesting, though, because although that's clearly accurate in terms of how economic theory and economic thinking has gone, especially in the West and in these institutions we've been describing, probably even globally, you now have a new American president who ran on a campaign very hostile toward free trade and very favorable to protectionism and tariffs and explained it in a way that enough people could understand it. They voted for him, believing that tariffs would protect American industry, would enable its reemergence, the return of jobs and you have these establishment economic outlets like The Wall Street Journal and those types – the neoliberals and sort of, you know, classic conservative economic dogmatists – who are horrified and outraged by what is coming out of the Trump White House with regard to protectionism and free trade and tariffs. What do you make of his administration's approach to these questions? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, well, first of all, most of his tariffs are used to get concessions on other things than straightforward economic things, so, the use of the threat of tariffs to Canada and Mexico to kind of intensify their border controls. But insofar as it is used for economic purposes, I think it's very poorly conceived and will backfire most immediately, it is going to increase inflation. Especially if you impose a tariff on Chinese imports, which account for a big proportion of U.S. consumer products, then it will have an immediate inflationary effect. 

I mean, this is why initially he talked about a 100% tariff on Chinese goods, but now it's only 10% because even he and his people know that could spark inflation. But, you know, in the long run, this importation of cheap, good-quality consumer products from China has been one of the most important factors in the modern neoliberal American political economy, because wages have been suppressed for the last 50 years. The U.S. median wage fell from the mid-70s till the mid-90s, and then it started rising again but it recovered to the ‘70s level only a few years ago. And in that story, of course, another important role was played by the ballooning of credit cards and other consumer debts, but the availability of these cheap Chinese goods was very important. 

Now, if you impose a tariff on Chinese goods, you'll have to pay your workers more. How are you going to cope with that? So, it actually could undermine the whole neoliberal economic system. 

Now, he says that this will rebuild the U.S. industry, but I'm afraid it's not going to happen like that, because protection, as in the infant {industry} protection story, protection only creates this space in which improvement can happen and in order for that to happen, companies need to invest, they need to do research and development to innovate, they need to recreate the skill base of the American workforce and so on. And there's no plan to do it through deliberate industrial policies. 

So, he's basically leaving it to American corporations to do it, but then these corporations are actually not interested in rebuilding the economy because the U.S. now has – yeah, this really started in the '80s, but that really came into full being in the 21st century – the U.S. now has a parasitic financial system, which is not interested in long-term investment. 

In the last 25 years, the American stock market sucked out money from corporations rather than putting money in, which is supposed to be their job. Now these companies, in order to satisfy these short-term-oriented shareholders, have to do huge stock buybacks, sometimes borrowing money to do stock buybacks, because they want to do stock buybacks that are bigger than their profits, giving away huge dividends. So, in the last 25 years, 90% to 95% of U.S. corporate profit has been given back to these shareholders. 

So, these companies are like leaky buckets. You create more water by temporarily protecting your economy from foreign competition. These companies get more resources because of that because now they don't have competition, they can charge higher prices and so on. But this money is going to leak out of these corporations. I mean, look at the way that Boeing has been destroyed, all because of this parasitic financial system. 

So, I'm afraid that it's not going to work. It's not to go back to the infant industry analogy, although in the current U.S. case, it's not an infant, it's the revival of an old person. I mean, it's not enough to go to school, the kid has to study. You have to provide incentives and punishment to the kid so that he puts adequate hours and concentration to study. I mean, what Trump is doing now is sending the kid to school, but letting the kid decide what he wants to do. So, when he goes to school, he will skip classes and not concentrate. So yeah, I mean, good luck with the revival of the U.S. industry. I'm afraid I don't see it happening. 

G. Greenwald: I just have a couple more questions. I want to talk about what you just said and what you talked about before in this comparison to Catholic dogma and theology and the like, which is that if you had a set of pieties or orthodoxies in a particular field that was producing positive outcomes, you could almost understand why there weren't a lot of people questioning it or challenging it because it's working. 

Here in economics, especially international finance, you have not just the destruction of jobs and the middle class throughout the West in the United States, but also the 2008 financial crisis, what you were just alluding to, in a lot of ways, that wrecked the economic security and future of a couple of generations of people and countries all over the world. And you would think it would prompt a reexamination of a lot of these unchallenged premises and yet one of the things you describe is this kind of oligopolistic system of economics to prevent these principles from being challenged, I suppose, because they actually have worked well for a certain group of people who have an interest in perpetuating them. But how does that work, this oligopolistic system to preserve these pieties and make sure there's no challenge to them? 

Ha-Joon Chang: Yeah, so the most shocking is how poorly the neoliberal system has performed. I mean, of course, it benefited hugely a tiny group of people at the top. But, you know, compared to the days of the so-called “mixed economy,” the period between the 1950s and '70s, when there was a lot more government regulation, you know, the U.S. was 92% in those days – and there was a lot of strong state involvement in economic development, industrialization, all over the world, not just in developing countries, in the U.S., in Europe. Compared to those days of the so-called mixed economy, neoliberalism has not only produced higher inequality and more social problems, which even many of the advocates of neoliberalism admitted might happen, but it has produced much less growth. In the earlier period, the world economy was growing at about 2.8%. In the last 40 years of neoliberalism, it has been growing at half the rate – 1.4%, 1.5%, both in per capita terms per year. So, if it cannot even produce growth, why do we have this? That's the biggest mystery. 

Of course, those who benefit from it have all the interest in the world to defend it. So, you know, basically, the kind of politicians who support their agenda is more blatant in the U.S. because there's a lot of money flowing around in the U.S. politics legally. In other countries, it's a bit less, but those who have money have a huge influence on government policy, they control the media and they make sure that people are kind of indoctrinated into believing that this is the best of all possible worlds by making sure that the right kind of economists are given the Nobel Prize, the right kind of economists are given faculty positions in top universities, the right kind of economists that write in the financial press and pontificate on what is a good economic policy. And, yeah, above all, they have basically found a trick in diverting people's attention away from economics by creating all kinds of single-issue debates on gun control and abortion and the culture war and wokeism. 

So, yes, I'm afraid that this is why I have been on a personal mission in the last couple of decades to propagate mass economic literacy because in the kind of society we are living in, without everyone knowing at least some economics, democracy is meaningless. It becomes like voting in a talent show. Oh, I like the look of that guy. I mean, he has a beautiful voice or whatever. I mean, that is not about the substance, because those who have power and money do not want people to think about the substance. 

G. Greenwald: Well, with my last question, I'd love to have you back on, because it's been super enlightening, which I expected it to be, but I want to ask you about China. I remember in the 1980s in the United States, or into the 1990s, the overwhelming economic discourse was about fearmongering about Japan and its rising economic power: they're buying all of our buildings, they're taking over our industries, there's no stopping them. Apparently, there was some stopping them, because none of these scenarios that were depicted really happened. 

But now we're hearing the same thing, the same kind of rhetoric, about China – that they're rapidly growing, so fast that they're going to have parity with the United States in terms of purchasing power, they're going to be this unstoppable economic force. There's a lot of talk about them having to be our implacable enemy and at least a Cold War-type competitor or adversary. What do you think from a Western perspective and an American perspective is the right way to understand what one might call the threats or challenges posed by a rising China? 

Ha-Joon Chang: I must declare at the beginning that I'm not a fan of any country. I'm a citizen of South Korea. Korea has been bullied by everyone around us for the last few thousand years, Chinese, Japanese, the Mongols, the Manchus, the Huns, and later Russians and Americans. So, whatever I say about Japan, China, and so on, it's not because I'm particularly fond of or hate that particular country. I hate all the countries equally if you want me to put it that way. (laughter)

The rise of Japan was halted partly because Japan got bullied into opening the financial market and accepting a huge revaluation of the currency in the 1985 Plaza Accord. Once that happened, there was a huge financial bubble, it burst, the Japanese didn't manage the aftermath very well and then the economy went into a permanent kind of depression, and it was seen off in that way. And that happened, well, maybe mainly, if not even partly, because Japan was dependent on the U.S., on the military. When they lost the Pacific War, they were forced to sign this constitution which prevented it from having a sizable army and then the U.S. military is stationed in Japan. 

So, in that sense, even though it was rising economically, [Japan’s] political position was subordinate to that of the U.S. China doesn't have that problem. And actually, from China's point of view, the U.S. is the aggressor because basically China is surrounded by U.S. navy and army bases, almost all across this South border, except the one they did with Russia. You have the U.S. army stationed in South Korea, as well as the air forces; the South China Sea is kind of covered with U.S. Navy presence and you name it. 

So, China is not going to play that game that Japan had to play. So, it's not going to accept financial liberalization, which is the easiest way to undermine the rising economy because China does not have the kind of financial power, and I'm not just talking about money, but the financial institutions and the skills that people who work in the financial industry has and so on, that you can mobilize to fight the American financial power. Whereas you can and it is fighting the American power in terms of production and international trade and so on. 

My prediction is that China will not play that game, which means a big problem for the U.S. because first of all, it's not as if this is, as some people argue, the second Cold War. In the real Cold War, there was no real economic relationship between the Soviet bloc and the U.S. bloc. This time, China and the U.S., these economies are deeply intertwined. China is the biggest trading partner with the U.S. after the EU and the NAFTA countries. I mean, it owns 13% of the U.S. Treasury bills. As I mentioned earlier, the role as a source of affordable, good-quality consumer goods is very, very critical to the American political economy. 

So, the U.S. cannot push it around in the way that it could with Japan. More importantly, what the U.S. has been doing in the last several years – and this is not just Trump, I mean, even from the days of Obama, but more clearly, Biden – it has been actually pushing China into catching up faster. With all these restrictions on the high-grade microchips and key technologies, China – they say this is the model of invention – China has come up with these ways of doing the same things with less resources and lower technologies. 

So, when Biden made the Dutch companies and German companies export lithographic machines that make the circuit board for semiconductors, Americans thought, well, now this will make it impossible for the Chinese to have the latest microchips but, lo and behold, within a couple of years, it found a way to make the latest seven-nanometer chips without using the latest machines from the Dutch and the Germans. I mean, lately, this Chinese AI company DeepSeek has kind of created an economic earthquake by creating an AI with a fraction of the cost that American companies are using. 

So, I mean, if the U.S. really wanted to push back China, it should have started 20 years ago. Now it's too close. Putting more pressure on China will – not necessarily, but most likely – bring forward a day when it catches up with the United States and the rest of the world. This is why the U.S. and the EU are panicking and breaking all the rules of the WTO and other international institutions that they were so insistent on upholding because now they are desperate to [ ] China. But without a coherent industrial strategy and without reforming the leaky parasitic financial system, I'm afraid that they are not going to be able to do that. 

G. Greenwald: All right, Professor Chang, it's always good to have one's economic literacy raised and in the spirit of doing that we will show everybody who's watching where they can follow your work. We really appreciate you're taking the time to talk to us. We'd love to have you back on as well. Thank you so much.

Ha-Joon Chang: Thank you.

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

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There were two main segments on this episode:

First, we discussed the lawsuit filed by Donald Trump’s media company – which owns his social media site Truth Social – jointly with this platform, Rumble, against Brazil’s notorious chief censor, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. 

We were the ones who broke this story on the front page of Brazil’s largest newspaper this morning – Folha de São Paulo – and we’ll explain the story’s significance and its implications for a free internet. 

Tthen: President Trump significantly escalated his rhetoric against the West’s long-time darling – Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy – after Zelenskyy made critical comments about Trump, which in turn followed Trump's endorsement of the need for elections in Ukraine. After all, if you're fighting a war in defense of democracy, that country you're defending probably should have elections. Instead, Trump slammed Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian” who “talked the U.S. into spending $350 billion for a war that couldn’t be won,”. He also accused Zelenskyy of presiding over missing money in Kiev and suffering from deep disapproval among his own people, labeling him, “a dictator without elections.” All of that was in the context of Trump's arguing that the war must end – not only for the sake of the United States but also for the Ukrainian people. 

We have reported many times on the increasingly repressive censorship regime imposed by not just the Brazilian government, but more so by a single judge on the Brazilian court. It’s something we've covered for lots of different reasons, including the fact that your free speech rights, if you're in the United States, are absolutely affected and threatened whenever censorship regimes are imposed and accepted in parts of the democratic world. They become the new bar that other countries can then hurdle over. We've seen that many times. There have been extreme examples of this in Brazil, including the banning of X, forcing them to comply with and obey every censorship order issued by a single judge. And it's just so extreme. 

Now, as you probably know, Rumble had operated in Brazil for a long time and began receiving this tsunami of censorship orders demanding that they close the accounts or block accounts of a whole long list of people, one after the next, always in secret court orders with no due process, no trial, no notice to the other person being censored. Rumble began complying but then got to the point where they said, “We created our site to be a site that defends free speech. We're not going to sit here and unjustly censor” and so Rumble decided that they would not be available in Brazil rather than comply with unjust censorship orders.