(upbeat music) - Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. It is my privilege today to be joined by the multi-award-winning journalist, Jonathan Katz. He is one of the world's leading specialists in US foreign policy and in Haiti in particular, having served as the Associated Press Bureau chief in Port-au-Prince from 2007 to 2011, including during the Haitian earthquake in the aftermath of that earthquake. He exposed a major story that UN peacekeepers had been responsible for the deadly cholera epidemic there that led to at least 6,000 deaths. He has been published in the New York Times, New Republic, foreign policy, the Guardian, New Yorker, Politico. He is also the author of the excellent books, The Big Truck That Went By, How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, and Gangsters of Capitalism, Smedley Butler, The Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire. You can find his work at TheRacket.News. You can also follow him on Blue Sky at Cats on Earth. Jonathan M. Katz, welcome to Cair de France. - Thanks for having me. - Well, you were the number one person I wanted to talk to, having seen the recent eruption of horrendous fake news about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. It is now reported that thanks to Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance spreading the false story that Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets. Don't Trump said this at the debate. They're eating the pets. Now more than half of Trump voters believe Haitians are eating people's pets. But you've even heard people like Marianne Williams said, said, well, we have to take this story seriously because Haitian voodoo was real. And I wanted to talk to you 'cause I thought, I know who's probably having very strong reactions right now for all the people in this Jonathan Katz. Can you tell me first how you have felt, what your immediate reaction to all of this was? - I can't, I mean, what, what, right. It is seconding, it is dispiriting. It is unsurprising in a lot of ways because it's coming from the Marianne Williams said, maybe it's a slight exception to that or the maybe not. But it is coming from people who say and do extremely hateful things on a fairly regular basis. But my God, it's awful. It's sickening and awful. That's my best reaction to it. - There's, I mean, stories about immigrant groups doing myths about them eating people's animals and doing various things, you know. These are very common in England. It's, they're eating the Queen's swans, right? And it's always a different immigrant group. It's not necessarily Haitians. But there is also a Haiti specific element of it that you could hear in what Marianne Williams did there and said, well, well, Haitian voodoo is real. And so I wanted to talk to you because it seems also that there's a particular, a special American ignorance and blindness about Haiti that you have spent a large portion of your career trying to correct, is there not? - Yeah, I mean, you're touching on all of it here with, and there's some other, some even deeper, I think economic things that we can talk about later on. But as you say, okay, so first of all, this is very common. Adject prop against immigrants, whether it was Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century or today, or as you said, in England, there were articles in the Guardian, you know, over the last 20 years, debunking people claiming that like Eastern European refugees were eating all the carp in England and like English fisheries were like more worried about like Eastern Europeans eating all their carp than like the loss of fish populations due to overfishing and climate change. And the thing that you're noting here, which is very correct, is that there's a particularly gross and insidious and pervasive anti-black and anti-hation element to this. It's not an, it's not an accident that they are focusing on Haitians in particular. And part of it is because just in terms of proportions, basically because of a slight tapering of immigration from Central America, from the Northern Triangle over the last three, four years, Haitians, Venezuelans, Cubans, to some extent, are making up a larger proportion of immigrants coming into the United States. So in part, it's a reference to that. But there's also something very specific about Haiti in the American consciousness and the American imagination. - And that goes back a really long way, right? (laughs) - Yeah, I mean, it goes back to the Haitian Revolution, which is 1791 to 1804, which is a seminal event in Western history. It's the only time in the modern world that a country is forged out of a successful revolution by enslaved people against their masters. Haitians rise up, they free themselves from slavery, they free themselves from French colonialism, they win their independence at various points along the way during the Haitian Revolution, they got some help, actually, from John Adams's administration, basically because it was gonna be good for some of, like, Adams's constituents in New England and shipping to continue running their ships to send a man, which is the colony that becomes Haiti. But from the moment that Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner, comes to power in 1800, which is in the middle of this revolution, and Haiti wins his independence while he's president, from that moment, American politics is seized by just terror at the prospect of Haitian Revolution happening in the United States, specifically Southern Plan. - Something almost amusing how they're afraid, they're deeply afraid of Haiti. - Yeah, and I mean, you know, with reason, to some extent, because Haiti was, at the beginning of Haitian history, it was trying to export to the extent that it could. It didn't really have the capability of doing much, but to the extent that it could, it was trying to export its brand of freedom to other parts of the Americas. Most notably, Simone Wollivar, you know, in some ways the George Washington, or the Tucson-Lovitzure of the revolutions in Spanish America against the bourbon Spanish, he went to Haiti, he got training, he got arms, he sewed his flag of Columbia, was now known as the flag of ground Columbia, in Jockmell Haiti. In the United States, there were a number of uprisings by enslaved people that were directly inspired by events in Sandomang in Haiti, when John Brown was in prison waiting to be executed, his jailer reported that he was reading a biography of Tucson-Lovitzure, who was one of the leaders of the Haitian abolition. So like, there was reason for them to think this, but it was obviously the politics of it works extremely bad. This then feeds into U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century, and the U.S. occupies Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and then continues, roiling and underwriting who's and invading Haiti, ever since, up until the present day, right now, there is another sort of doubly outsourced mini invasion of Haiti. It's actually Kenyan soldiers on the ground, but they're financed by, the idea for this was raised by the United States, which then went to the UN, to which the U.S. had outsourced its previous intervention in Haiti, the one that you mentioned in, from 2004 until the '20 teens, and then the UN outsourced it further to Kenya. So this idea that Haiti is a source of contagion, that Haiti is a threat, continues to this day, and I should note, we can talk about it more, but Voodoo, which is a real religion, plays a role in the mythological version or the demonized version of Voodoo, plays a major role in American imaginations about the whole thing. - You wanna talk about that? - Yeah, sure, yeah, tell me more. - So Voodoo is a real religion. Generally, it's classed as a syncretic religion, it's basically a religion that combines elements of African worship and African pantheon from West Africa, as well as elements of Roman Catholicism. It comes into being, there's a similar religion in Benin, I'm in West Africa, which is known as Bodhun, which shares some elements in common, but in Haiti, it takes on its Haitian form, which is both a remembrance of Africa, right? Also a remembrance of the trauma of forced removal from Africa. So in Voodoo ceremonies, oftentimes the first God who is, or the first spirit, first wah, who is invoked, is Papa Legba, who is the master of the crossroads, who basically travels under the Atlantic Ocean and then unlocks the portal basically between the gods of Africa and the worshipers in Haiti to then come down and be venerated or engage in spirit possession, which is something that you also see in Christian sex, especially Pentecostal. Anyway, all that's to say, there's a lot of different aspects. There's spirituality, ancestor connection with ancestors. What it is not is devil worship. It's not dark magic, and it is nothing involved with stealing people's pets. Americans become aware of the existence of Voodoo throughout the 19th century as Haiti is being demonized. And so you've got this very African form of worship. A lot of the gods in the Voodoo Pantheon come from Africa. The syncretic part is that they're often venerated using like Roman Catholic icons. So you'll have a Roman Catholic icon who has something in common, often I think, for instance, St. Michael, who's an armor is often venerated as the warrior God, Ogu, things like this, right? But Americans become aware of this in the 19th century and then really become extremely aware of it during the US occupation, like I said from 1915 to 1934. And there's a huge insurgency against American effectively colonization of Haiti. And among many of the insurgents, like they practice Voodoo. And a lot of elements of Voodoo, a lot of elements of Haitian religious and folk culture end up getting lifted by the Marines and by American journalists who go to Haiti to cover the invasion of the occupation. And they get marketed back into the United States. One of the most significant ones, by the way, is the zombie. Zombies are a distinctly Haitian creation. It's actually a remembrance of a way of processing the remembrance of slavery because the Haitian zombie is essentially, it's the worst kind of slavery. It's slavery that continues after you died. Like even death doesn't emancipate you. And then Americans take that, they market it, they change it around. For the first couple of decades of zombie literature, it's a very racialized thing. It's like really fear of like Haitian zombies, like black people coming to America to white civilization and doing things. But all of these things are kind of all mixed together. So it isn't surprising to have somebody like Mary Williamson access Voodoo and sort of like American pop culture demonizations of this religion, African, it's foreign and just sort of take aspects of it or just like not even real aspects of it, just imagined aspects of it. I mean, there is animal sacrifice in Voodoo. It's generally goats and chickens and things like that. But you know, animal sacrifice was historically part of Judaism as well. And I'm Jewish and we still talk about animal sacrifice. We don't do it because the temple was destroyed. But we talk about animal sacrifice and the memory of animal sacrifice in, you know, reading the Torah and then Jewish religious services. The difference is in Haiti, they still do it. But again, it is not stealing people's pets to do. So it's you're sort of, you know, what you're doing there is you're taking a sensationalized and demonized and stigmatized understanding of a religion. You're applying it to all and not all Haitians practice Voodoo. In fact, some Haitians are adamantly anti-Voodoo, especially people who are evangelical Christians and sort of mixing it all together and then using that as an excuse for racism. Which again, that's a very, you know, talk about anti-Semitism in Europe. It's also, that's also a very old story with Jews as well, taking elements of Judaism and using it to demonize or fearmonger about Jewish people, about Muslims, about Christians in many parts of the world. Like this is a thing that happens a lot but it also happens with Haiti. - Yeah. Well, you've talked about one sort of variety of American ignorance of Haiti and its people that is, you know, existing as this terrifying dark place that threatens to, you know, infect the United States and this sort of bundle of stereotypes that we have. Another part of the ignorance is you've mentioned there the various ways in which the United States and US foreign policy has affected Haiti's destiny and things that we just have no awareness of. You've mentioned the occupation in Gactus of capitalism, you have the vivid recounting of the robbery of Haiti's bank where they just land and steal all the money, things we don't know. And I think up until the New York Times did that big thing on it a couple of years ago, I think that was almost no knowledge of the massive debt. I think a lot of people when they read about the debt that Haiti owed to France went, Haiti owed France money for having liberated. What? Yeah. And then US banks basically took on the debt, which was part of the cause of the invasion of 1915 was to ensure debt repayment at the behest of city banks, specifically. So tell us about how we've affected Haiti. Oh, yeah, that would take-- I'm sorry. Well, people should read your books, obviously. Exactly. I mean, to use a much more recent example, the earthquake that struck in Port of Prince in January of 2010, the aftermath of that, I mean, the response was led by the United States, the US military in the initial stages. But the response was effectively-- it was geared not really toward reconstruction of people's homes in Port of Prince. Not a-- people talked about it at the time. Perhaps this could be a macabre opportunity for-- Build back better. Yeah, exactly. Literally Build back better. That's literally where it came from. That's literally where it came from. That's where Build Clinton started using it. He had been using it before that in Atcha in Indonesia. But he really made it his motto in Haiti, which really that drove me crazy when Biden adopted that as-- I was like, have you not know how this crisis come to you? But yeah, so it could have been an opportunity to actually build back better, to do improved urban design, to do improved earthquake safe homes and things like this. But instead, almost all of the money and almost all of the effort was put into building garment factories. Basically, trying to-- it's this very neoliberal theory proposed by Paul Collier, the economist in particular, championed by people like Nick Kristoff, that basically the way to save Haiti-- people are always trying to save Haiti. There's a saying that Haiti's chief export is redemption. The way to save Haiti is to put Haitians to work in garment factories, because we can't-- it's very hard for the outside world to see Haitians still 220 years after their ultimate self-liberation as anything other than labor. A cheap, low-skilled labor. They could do things for us for the, quote, productive global economy. And so this hundreds of millions of dollars are poured into a garment factory, like industrial park, in the north of Haiti, far from the quake zone. And in order to get that project moving, there's an election in 2010 in the aftermath of the earthquake. And the way that that election worked was there were like 18, 19 candidates. And the top two, assuming nobody got 50% in the first round, would go to a runoff. And the two who were going to a runoff were basically the candidate of the then-presidents party, a guy named Renee Pravall was the then president of Haiti. And a former first lady of a former briefly serving puppet president of sort of a US-backed coup government. And the US, Obama was president at the time. And Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. And they were really pissed at the president of Haiti and Renee Pravall because they blamed him for the slow pace, as the saying went, of reconstruction up until this point. And they thought he was making them look bad. Because he was slow playing a lot of these projects. He wasn't really-- he's a nationalist. He's somewhat left-leaning. He was a former ally of Jean Brchette and Aristide, who is a slightly more, at least redistribution as pro-poor president, who'd been overthrown twice and once restored, all three by the US, effectively. And Pravall is-- he's slow playing these plans. And the US is not-- and the Obama administration are pissed at him. And there's this other candidate, a guy named Michelle Martelli, Sweet Mickey, a pop star. He's the star of Haitian compound music, which is sort of like good-time dance music. And he has been running. He's a distant cousin of Wyclef Jean. And he is handled in his campaign by this firm Osto Sola, which handles a lot of right-wing presidential candidates all across Latin America. He had some connections to people who had been in John McCain's campaign in 2008. And Mickey is like a-- he's seen as a pro-business president. He's somebody who is willing to sort of say the line, Haiti is open for business now, which was what the Clintons particularly wanted. And Hillary Clinton goes down in early 2011 and says, we think there's been fraud. They can't really specify where the fraud is. But we think there's been some fraud in this election. You have to redo it. You have to take Pravall's candidate out, a guy named Jude Celistan. You have to take him out and put Sweet Mickey in. It's a little unclear whether she thought that Sweet Mickey would ultimately become president or maybe this like former First Lady, Nilam Manigah. But regardless, they didn't want Haitians to have a free choice of who their president would be. And what ends up happening is Mickey wins, Martelli wins. He declares that his investors ceremony, Haiti is open for business now. He says it in English, which is not the language of Haiti. And he greenlights all the projects and spends basically the next five years allowing these projects to continue. The projects go nowhere, which we can talk about the reasons why, but it doesn't even really matter for now. And just being extremely corrupt, like stealing all of this money that has been flowing specifically is actually money from Venezuela that was given as credit on petroleum sales. They were deeply discounted. And that everybody was assuming we're gonna have to get paid back because Ugo Chavez was going to live forever and the money was never gonna be due. And then ultimately it comes due and then there's a bunch of investigations. And it's shown that Mickey has taken a lot of it. And then Mickey taps this nobody, this person who nobody had ever heard of before from the north of Haiti who owned a banana plantain plantation right next to actually where like this large US backed industrial park is. He becomes president, continues the corruption and then is assassinated in 2021. And all of this, all of these things happen together, right? All of these are different explanations about why people are leaving Haiti, right? You've got natural disasters. You have climate changes is affecting agriculture. You have neoliberal American agriculture policies which destroy Haitian agriculture, destroy Haitian agricultural tariffs and dump a bunch of like heavily subsidized American food on to Haiti. And you have all of this political turmoil much of which is being done by the US or by the US to Haiti. Which explains why so many Haitians are trying to get out. And then because the United States is like, it's the place where the money all ended up, they're sort of following the money, they're following the resources here. - You're listening to Current Affairs. Current Affairs is a nonprofit left media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners with no corporate backers or advertising. We depend on your subscriptions and donations. If you're enjoying this program and you're not a monthly subscriber already, please consider becoming one at patreon.com/currentaffairs. And if you are a podcast subscriber, check out everything else Current Affairs offers including our flagship print magazine which comes out six times a year and is loaded with beautiful art and insightful essays. We also offer a twice weekly news briefing service that will keep you up to date on everything happening in the world and the stories you won't find in your morning newspaper. You can sign up for those at currentaffairs.org/subscribe. And if you just want to help us keep building independent progressive media because you understand how vital that project is, go to currentaffairs.org/donate where you can read more about our work and make a monthly or one-off contribution. Current Affairs is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and donations are tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. Now back to the program. (upbeat music) - Well, that's, I mean, one of the things that's so aggravating and perverse and evil about the nastiness towards Haitian immigrants is that why are Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and not in Haiti? Well, one reason for that is that all sorts of things that we have done for several hundred years have contributed to making it incredibly, incredibly difficult. They're surviving Haiti and you point out in your writing, lots of even unintended ways. I think he said like the very fact that so many people were concentrated in the capital city is in some, and that the earthquake was as devastating as it was can also be traced back to policy choices. - Yeah, yeah, during the US occupation, they made Port-au-Prince a locus of control, which was to a much greater degree than it had been before that because if you're trying to run a colonial occupation, it's easier to control a country from a single point instead of having to control the entire thing. - Yeah, that's absolutely true. The other thing is, we're talking about Springfield, Ohio specifically, but also like the American Rust Belt in general in early the United States in general, is a lot of these forces that are acting on Haiti are also acting in different ways on the US. So you look at why Springfield needed a bunch of labor, right? Springfield was the economy of Springfield, Ohio throughout the 20th century was industrial and it was based on two major factories, one of which like made magazines and that magazine, Collier's Magazine and other magazines. That went out of business in 1957. So the major employer up through the early 80s is International Harvester, the big farm equipment company, right? And International Harvester goes belly up in the early 80s, largely because of mismanagement, but another way to put it is just corporate greed. The heads of International Harvester are just trying to, they're trying to squeeze their workers, they're trying to squeeze their customers, most of whom are farmers, right? And also like, you know, dealers, you know, equipment dealers. And sort of the last straw is they try to claw back benefits from their workers that the unions had already fought successfully to have. And then this creates a conditions for a major labor stoppage, which effectively International Harvester doesn't recover from. And so Springfield has like a symbol of like the death of the American dream, right? And there's an interesting tie in here, right? Because like as I said before, part of the reason why so many people are leaving Haiti, part of the reason why people fled the Haitian countryside, went to the Capitol and were there overcrowded when the earthquake struck in 2010. And why so many people are leaving Haiti now is because of trade policies, which were imposed on Haiti by the United States, by the Reagan, Bush, and then Clinton administrations, in particular, which bottomed out rice tariffs and flooded the Haitian market with cheap, you know, U.S. government subsidized grain. Springfield in the 20 teens, the Chamber of Commerce and the mayor launched a big program to try to bring industrial jobs back to this town in Ohio. But there aren't enough people to take the jobs. For whatever reason, I don't know the exact reasons. But for whatever reason, pay is too low, the prestige is too low, whatever it is, people in southwestern Ohio don't want these jobs. So they need immigrants to do them or people from other parts of the country, whatever. And what happens is, and this happens, this happens all over the country, it happens throughout history, it's not a new phenomenon. Somebody hears that there's jobs open, they're good jobs, they pay better than either they can get in their home country or they're available to them or whatever, you know, housing is affordable, seems like a nice climate. And so, you know, a couple, you know, Haitians get hired, they tell their friends who tell their cousins, who tell their cousins friends and a bunch of people move in. And this is a boom for Springfield, Ohio. It's reviving what had been declining population. It is keeping new businesses in business. It's creating new jobs around it, right? Because then restaurants open, you have to healthcare jobs open. And also Haitians are taking these and they're working in the hospitals and they're caring for people who've already been in Springfield, et cetera. And what you sort of have to do, if you kind of zoom out to this like, you know, 30,000 foot level, you sort of see, it's like, well, industrial decline in Springfield and agricultural decline in Haiti and sort of the misfocus in Haiti of basically trying to take industrial jobs that would have been done in places like the Rust Belt and put them in Haiti because you can pay the people less. All of these things are intimately connected. So it kind of, there's a kind of poetic symmetry to Haitians coming and filling these jobs and then helping kind of float this town again that had been underwater for so many decades. But to understand that, it requires like having a larger view and it requires sort of understanding the pernicious ways in which corporate greed and American policy has negatively affected both people in Springfield, Ohio and Haiti. You can't have that. So what's the solution? Pit everybody against each other, right? Just say, you know, well, you know, you guys might have come together and looked at the things that you actually have in common, but look at these people. They've got a different skin color than you and they speak a different language than you and they have different religious practices than you and they're eating your pets. That's the answer, like, it's all right, your pets. Well, but Trump advance is supposed to be the anti-corporate populist Republicans. Yeah, unfortunately, yeah, they keep missing that memo. Yeah, now, you know, one might tell you that the first thing we owe Haiti is perhaps an apology for a couple of hundred years of meddling. The Biden's, it was interesting to take Joe Biden's envoy to Haiti ambassador Dan Foot came in a couple of years ago and said that the unspoken US policy that has been going on for 200 plus years. And he says, I've heard this in the hushed tones of the back quarters of the State Department is what drives our Haiti policy is this unspoken belief that these dumb black people can't govern themselves. That's a direct quote from the, you know, from someone who's the US official. And so let me ask you this to sort of close out. If we hadn't had the racist philosophy and, you know, in gangsters of capitalists, you got direct racist outright racist quotes from the period of the occupation where people are saying using slurs exactly what Dan Foot is saying here. Now, if we hadn't had that, what could Haiti, I mean, obviously it's a kind of counterfactual hypothetical, but there are ways in which we have screwed up Haiti and treated its people really deeply cruelly. And, you know, you talk about the disaster recovery from the earthquake and you say in your book, but that could have gone differently if it hadn't been done in accordance with this philosophy. What could be different or could have been different? - Oh, everything. I mean, if John Adams wins the election of 1800 and recognizes Haitian independence immediately, instead of taking, you know, 60 years almost for the US to recognize it as effectively an act of war against the Confederacy, it's only once the Southern senators are out of the Senate that Abraham Lincoln is able to belatedly recognize Haiti. I mean, at the very beginning, when Haiti wins its independence in 1804, there are two independent republics in the Western Hemisphere, the United States and Haiti, and they could have allied with each other. They could have helped each other grow. Instead, the US demonized Haiti from the beginning, and then once the US is a powerful, 'cause it's not really powerful enough at the beginning to have any effect on most other countries in the world, but by the beginning of the 20th century and then throughout the 20th century, once the United States becomes a world power, it continues carrying those notions and those ways of looking at Haiti as a place to extract resources, as a place to, you know, extract cheap labor, and as a people who effectively are, as you say, like they're just, you know, effectively just inferior, like there's, they're too dumb, they're too corrupt, they don't know how to take care of themselves. If things had been different, things would be different. If Haiti had been, you know, an equal partner to the United States from the beginning, and of course, I mean, you know, you're a place in an enormous role in this as well. I'm not trying to take, and France especially, I'm not trying to take them off the hook. But yeah, I mean, like, there's no reason why, you know, coming out of the revolution, Haiti couldn't have been a prosperous, powerful country with ample resources to take care of its own people. There are, you know, Barbados, Cuba, which has its own long history of US interference and imperialism, but has, you know, significantly higher literacy rates and health outcomes and things like this. Like, there are examples in the Caribbean of places that Haiti could have followed the lead up, and then in a world without imperialism entirely, like, who knows? Like, maybe, you know, a lot of the problems that exist in Haiti wouldn't exist, is what I'm trying to say. And, you know, just like everything else in life, like, the best time to have done this would have been, you know, 220-some years ago, but the second best time is now, or the 50th best time is now. But to change our policies, to look at Haiti as a partner, as a place worthy of respect and admiration, you know, yeah, things could be different. The problem is that Haiti is just a, certainly not the only, but it's a classic example of how much easier it is to destroy things than it is to build things. And the problem is that, you know, Haiti's government effectively doesn't exist now. Again, largely because of foreign intervention. I mean, there are plenty of Haitians who bear responsibility for this, most notoriously the Duvalier dictatorship, which rules from 1957 and 1986. - Which we supported. - Right, but with, often with US support, the device were the US, a US partner in the Cold War. All of this is to say that, not using Haiti as a laboratory for, you know, silly ideas, not just trying to exploit Haiti, not just trying to dump problems onto Haiti, not trying to demonize Haiti. I don't like to like, you know, essentialize peoples, right? But as a people, Haitians tend to be extremely, extremely proud of being Haitian. And they love Haiti. And most Haitians that I've met in my life, including ones who now live in the United States, would love nothing better than to live, you know, fulfilling, enriching, safe, happy lives in Haiti, in a country that they love. And they haven't been really given the chance. And treating them as, you know, invaders who are just trying to, you know, take our stuff, it just gets it entirely backwards, it gets entirely backwards. We're the ones who've been taking their stuff. They want to be happy in their homes. They want to be left alone, but the world is made impossible. - Well, for intelligent analysis of Haiti, as well as US politics and US foreign policy, I would recommend that all of our listeners follow the work of Jonathan M. Katz, he could be found at the racquet dot news and for important background on Haiti, on the post-earth wake bus recovery. You can pick up the big truck that went by. And for a broader look, the American Empire across the globe, I pick up Kankster's capitalism. Jonathan Katz, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs today. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - The Current Affairs podcast is a product of Current Affairs magazine. If you are not subscribed to Current Affairs magazine, visit currentaffairs.org/subscribe today and get our glorious print edition. The Current Affairs podcast is released regularly every week on patreon.com/currentaffairs. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
