Elena Poniatowska, Mexico’s most celebrated journalist and one of the most significant literary voices in the Spanish-speaking world, argues in this conversation that the crisis of contemporary journalism is inseparable from the collapse of critical reading—and that both are symptoms of a deeper cultural abandonment. Born in Paris in 1932 to a French-Polish father and Mexican mother, Poniatowska contends that her formation as a writer was shaped by displacement, by learning to listen to those rendered voiceless by history, and by understanding that journalism must be an act of solidarity before it is anything else. Widely credited with helping to establish the genre of testimonio in Latin American letters, she transformed the voices of the marginalised into literature that forced an entire nation to confront its own silence. She maintains that her landmark work La Noche de Tlatelolco was not a journalistic achievement but a moral obligation, and reflects on her decision to refuse the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, asking who would award the dead. Poniatowska insists that the greatest threat to literature and journalism today is not artificial intelligence but the disappearance of patience—the willingness to sit with a text, a story, or a life long enough for meaning to emerge. At 94, she affirms her belief in the innate goodness of human beings as not a sentiment but a necessity.

Elena Poniatowska, la periodista más célebre de México y una de las voces literarias más significativas del mundo hispanohablante, sostiene en esta conversación que la crisis del periodismo contemporáneo es inseparable del colapso de la lectura crítica—y que ambos son síntomas de un abandono cultural más profundo. Nacida en París en 1932 de padre franco-polaco y madre mexicana, Poniatowska afirma que su formación como escritora estuvo marcada por el desplazamiento, por aprender a escuchar a quienes la historia había silenciado, y por comprender que el periodismo debe ser ante todo un acto de solidaridad. Ampliamente reconocida por haber contribuido a establecer el género del testimonio en las letras latinoamericanas, transformó las voces de los marginados en literatura que obligó a una nación entera a confrontar su propio silencio. Sostiene que su obra emblemática La Noche de Tlatelolco no fue un logro periodístico sino una obligación moral, y reflexiona sobre su decisión de rechazar el Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, preguntando quién iba a premiar a los muertos. Poniatowska insiste en que la mayor amenaza para la literatura y el periodismo hoy no es la inteligencia artificial sino la desaparición de la paciencia—la disposición a permanecer con un texto, una historia o una vida el tiempo suficiente para que emerja el significado. A los 94 años, reafirma su creencia en la bondad innata de los seres humanos no como un sentimiento sino como una necesidad.

English transcript:

SAVAGE MINDS — Elena Poniatowska

Julian Vigo (00:00:15):

Welcome to Savage Minds.

Julian Vigo (00:00:26):

I am your host, Julian Vigo.

Julian Vigo (00:00:30):

Today’s guest is Elena Poniatowska Amor,

Julian Vigo (00:00:33):

daughter of a French father of Polish origin, Jean E.

Julian Vigo (00:00:37):

Poniatowski, and Mexican mother Paula Amor.

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She was born in Paris in 1932.

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She has practiced journalism since 1953 at the newspapers El Día, Excélsior, Novedades, and La Jornada.

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She is the first woman to receive the National Journalism Prize.

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Among her works is La Noche de Tlatelolco,

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a classic since its publication, for which she was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize,

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which she refused, asking who was going to award the dead.

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Her novels and stories include La Flor de Lis,

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De Noche Vienes and Tlapalería,

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Paseo de la Reforma,

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Hasta No Verte Jesús Mío,

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The Life of a Mexican Soldadera,

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Querido Diego Te Abraza Quiela, Tinísima, winner of the Mazatlán Prize in 1992, La Piel del Cielo,

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winner of the Alfaguara Novel Prize in 2001, and El Tren Pasa Primero,

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about the lives of Mexican railway workers,

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winner of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 2007. Leonora won the Premio Biblioteca Breve Seix Barral in 2011. El Universo o Nada (2013) is the biography of

Julian Vigo (00:02:07):

astrophysicist Guillermo Haro. Ondas de la Niña Mala is her first poetry collection, and

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her children’s books include Boda en Chimalistac, La Vendedora de Nubes,

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El Burro que Metió la Pata, Sansimonsi, illustrated by Rafael Barajas el Fisgón, and El

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Niño Estrellero by Fernando Robles, and El Charito Cantor by Osvaldo Hernández.

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Her most recent novel, El Amante Polaco, portrays the last king of Poland, Stanisław August

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Poniatowski. Translated into 20 languages. Gabi Brimmer and Las Mil y Una, the story of

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Paulina,

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address social issues.

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After receiving honorary doctorates from UNAM and UAM,

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she was awarded them from the University of Puebla,

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Sonora, Estado de México,

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Guerrero,

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Chiapas, and Puerto Rico.

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She also received honorary degrees from the New School for Social Research in New York,

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Manhattanville College, and Florida Atlantic University in the United States, and from

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Paris 8,

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La Sorbonne, and Pau-Pyrénées, as well as the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for Journalism at

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Columbia University, New York, in 2004, and from the Universidad Complutense, Madrid, in

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2015.

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She received the French Legion of Honour at the rank of Officer, the Gabriela Mistral Prize from Chile, and in

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2006, the Courage Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

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In 2013 she was awarded

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the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for literature in the Spanish language, and she received the

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Belisario Domínguez Medal in 2022.

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This is the highest honour granted by the Senate of the Mexican Republic, along with the

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Carlos Fuentes International Prize for Literary Creation in the Spanish Language in 2023.

(00:04:12):

I welcome Elena Poniatowska to Savage Minds.

Julian Vigo (00:04:19):

I wanted to begin with a memory I have of you.

Julian Vigo (00:04:22):

In 1993,

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I think,

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or 94 —

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one of those two years —

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I was in Puebla,

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Cholula,

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teaching at the Universidad de las Américas.

Julian Vigo (00:04:35):

Yes.

Julian Vigo (00:04:36):

And you came to give a talk at an observatory — I believe it was Tonantzintla.

Elena Poniatowska (00:04:44):

Yes, of course.

Elena Poniatowska (00:04:46):

Yes, I remember it, and

Julian Vigo (00:04:49):

you made a great impression on me that day. But I must confess that your entire life’s work made a great impression on me — not only on me. I wanted to begin with your formation, your life, because you were born in France and

Julian Vigo (00:05:12):

how do you remember your childhood in France, and what elements of that world did you bring with you when you arrived in Mexico in 1942?

Elena Poniatowska (00:05:21):

Well, thank you very much for your interest.

Elena Poniatowska (00:05:29):

I can tell you that I was born in 1932 in Paris, France, because my mother Paula Amor married

Elena Poniatowska (00:05:42):

Juan Poniatowski, who held a noble title — that of prince —

Elena Poniatowska (00:05:54):

because the last king of Poland was Stanisław Poniatowski, who was, I believe, one of

Elena Poniatowska (00:06:07):

the lovers —

Elena Poniatowska (00:06:09):

one of the younger lovers of the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great.

Elena Poniatowska (00:06:21):

My mother was a woman born also in Paris, of Mexican origin, who left

Elena Poniatowska (00:06:32):

France because of the Mexican Revolution

Elena Poniatowska (00:06:36):

and went to live with her parents — Pablo Amor and Elena Iturbe de Amor — in

Elena Poniatowska (00:06:49):

Biarritz, and they later moved to Paris. My mother always spoke Spanish with a French accent. She had two sisters who also lived in France for a long time,

Elena Poniatowska (00:07:07):

and they were rather Frenchified. She met my father Jean Poniatowski in Paris and

Elena Poniatowska (00:07:20):

married him, and I was born in 1932 in Paris.

Elena Poniatowska (00:07:25):

I would like to know

Julian Vigo (00:07:31):

more about this experience, because as you probably know — especially Americans and Canadians — they think everyone wants to come to their countries. But something they don’t know until they travel is that in Mexico, Honduras, and all of Latin America there is a great deal of immigration, people from every country in the world. Why not?

Elena Poniatowska (00:08:01):

Her mother was in France; my mother was Mexican, born in France. Her family — she had a grandmother, my mother’s great-grandmother, who was Russian, and in general her father was educated in England, so they were

Elena Poniatowska (00:08:29):

Mexicans — Amor is a Mexican surname — but they were very closely tied to Europe. For my mother, living in Europe was very natural because

Elena Poniatowska (00:08:49):

she first attended a boarding school in Switzerland, in Lausanne,

Elena Poniatowska (00:08:56):

and then was in Paris. At a Rothschild ball she met my father Juan

Elena Poniatowska (00:09:07):

Poniatowski and married him in 1931,

Elena Poniatowska (00:09:17):

or perhaps at the beginning of 1932, because I was born on the 19th of May 1932.

Elena Poniatowska (00:09:29):

My sister was born in 1933.

Julian Vigo (00:09:34):

As a child who spoke French and had to learn Spanish, in what way did language become your first tool for survival?

Elena Poniatowska (00:09:47):

Well, I also know English and French. Language, for me — learning Spanish in Mexico — was obviously about communicating with people in the street

Elena Poniatowska (00:09:56):

and with friends at school. But French remained my mother tongue, and

Elena Poniatowska (00:10:03):

later I dedicated myself to speaking Spanish with the people at home, with the Mexicans

Elena Poniatowska (00:10:14):

I met at school.

Elena Poniatowska (00:10:23):

Curiously, I attended an English school called the Windsor School, but I learned Spanish

Julian Vigo (00:10:38):

in the street — one always learns Spanish better in the street. You learn so much from people in Mexico. I found people very warm and open. On the other hand, for Mexicans in my country, it’s not the same at all.

Julian Vigo (00:10:59):

What was the first moment you felt that writing was the only possible way to understand the Mexico around you?

Elena Poniatowska (00:11:11):

Well, I would never say it was the only possible way.

Elena Poniatowska (00:11:17):

I think that at twenty,

Elena Poniatowska (00:11:22):

twenty-one years old, returning from studying at a convent of nuns, I had the

Elena Poniatowska (00:11:30):

good fortune to be able to start writing at a newspaper called, at that time,

Elena Poniatowska (00:11:42):

Excelsior.

Elena Poniatowska (00:11:43):

They asked me to submit a daily article,

Elena Poniatowska (00:11:48):

an interview,

Elena Poniatowska (00:11:51):

a chronicle, and I did so with enormous enthusiasm and great pleasure, because it allowed me

Elena Poniatowska (00:12:00):

to know Mexico much better, and also to meet great figures of Mexico such as

Elena Poniatowska (00:12:09):

Diego Rivera,

Elena Poniatowska (00:12:11):

José Clemente Orozco, actresses like Dolores del Río and María Félix, architects like

Elena Poniatowska (00:12:20):

Luis Barragán, and writers — even writers of my own generation, or slightly

Elena Poniatowska (00:12:31):

older than me — such as Juan Rulfo,

Elena Poniatowska (00:12:38):

Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Fuentes, and of course Octavio Paz.

Julian Vigo (00:12:46):

What a rich life! María Félix — what a figure!

Julian Vigo (00:12:52):

How was your experience beginning in journalism in the early 1950s in a predominantly male environment?

Elena Poniatowska (00:13:05):

Well, I was truly very lucky, because people were very kind and

Elena Poniatowska (00:13:14):

even affectionate towards me. No one ever refused me an interview. I was able to reach Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz,

Elena Poniatowska (00:13:25):

the great architect Luis Barragán, José Vasconcelos the philosopher, and all were very

Elena Poniatowska (00:13:40):

kind and cordial with me, as were important actors like Ignacio López

Elena Poniatowska (00:13:51):

Tarso,

Elena Poniatowska (00:13:52):

and of course those I already mentioned — Dolores del Río, María Félix — and singers, and also many visitors who came from Europe, the United States, or Latin America to perform in Mexico.

Elena Poniatowska (00:14:20):

Did you know El Indio Fernández?

Elena Poniatowska (00:14:23):

Yes,

Elena Poniatowska (00:14:24):

of course —

Elena Poniatowska (00:14:25):

I interviewed him,

Elena Poniatowska (00:14:26):

I knew El Indio Fernández, who by ten in the morning was already offering me a tequila, which

Elena Poniatowska (00:14:35):

I did not drink, as I’m not accustomed to drinking. And also many other

Elena Poniatowska (00:14:47):

famous actors of that era, like the comedian Cantinflas, whose

Julian Vigo (00:14:56):

real name was Mario Moreno. Cantinflas — I know his work. Wow. And you were in Mexico during the same period as Luis Buñuel?

Elena Poniatowska (00:15:06):

Yes, I ended up with Luis Buñuel — yes, we had a great friendship

Elena Poniatowska (00:15:15):

because out of affection he came to have lunch at my house several times, so I saw him on many

Elena Poniatowska (00:15:24):

occasions. We even went together to the prison of Lecumberri to visit, for example, a

Elena Poniatowska (00:15:33):

Colombian who had committed an offence and was imprisoned — his name was

Elena Poniatowska (00:15:42):

Álvaro Mutis.

Julian Vigo (00:15:45):

And you have lived through and narrated great social transformations.

Julian Vigo (00:15:51):

Do you think that today’s digital democratisation of public opinion helps social justice, or does it rather dilute real struggles into mere narratives of identity and likes?

Elena Poniatowska (00:16:08):

Well, I think the Mexican Revolution,

Elena Poniatowska (00:16:15):

led by a man like Emiliano Zapata, was extraordinary in redistributing the lands and haciendas of Mexico and in giving all Mexicans

Elena Poniatowska (00:16:32):

access to better education, better formation, a better life. I consider that

Elena Poniatowska (00:16:46):

Emiliano Zapata was one of the great heroes of Mexico, even though he personally took away the haciendas of my grandparents, the Amors and the Iturbes.

Julian Vigo (00:17:06):

What did you learn from the great intellectuals of your youth?

Julian Vigo (00:17:08):

You mentioned Juan Rulfo, Alfonso Reyes, and many others.

Julian Vigo (00:17:15):

What influenced your decision to dedicate your life to letters?

Elena Poniatowska (00:17:20):

No, they did not influence my decision to dedicate myself to letters.

Elena Poniatowska (00:17:26):

I met them later.

Elena Poniatowska (00:17:30):

I began as a journalist, a modest journalist, at the newspaper Excelsior in 1953 —

Elena Poniatowska (00:17:42):

I think 1952 or 1953. Very young. I had come from an education at a convent of nuns in

Elena Poniatowska (00:17:53):

Philadelphia, and I decided

Elena Poniatowska (00:17:57):

to write chronicles and interviews to get to know Mexico better. I came to know those figures through my work as a journalist, and because I could question them

Elena Poniatowska (00:18:14):

in the language I knew and had learned as a child — at ten years old — which is Spanish. My other languages until then had been

Elena Poniatowska (00:18:22):

English,

Elena Poniatowska (00:18:27):

and French, which is my mother tongue.

Julian Vigo (00:18:32):

You are known for the testimonio.

Julian Vigo (00:18:36):

At what exact point did you feel that traditional fiction was not sufficient to capture Mexican reality?

Elena Poniatowska (00:18:47):

As I mentioned, I began by engaging with many valuable Mexicans

Elena Poniatowska (00:18:54):

who received me in their homes, gave me their opinions. At the same time as I received what they wished to give me,

Elena Poniatowska (00:19:04):

I observed how their homes were, how they treated the people around them — their wives, their children, their servants — and all of that helped me

Elena Poniatowska (00:19:22):

to know Mexico better. I also spent a great deal of time in the streets — that is, with the poorest people, whom I was able to reach

Elena Poniatowska (00:19:34):

through my own nature and also with the help of a great Mexican illustrator, Alberto Beltrán. In the street he made sketches of everything the Mexicans did — the newspaper vendors,

Elena Poniatowska (00:19:59):

the taco sellers,

Elena Poniatowska (00:20:03):

the women making corn tortillas by hand,

Elena Poniatowska (00:20:12):

the bakeries, and then the hardware stores where everything was sold — from nails to

Elena Poniatowska (00:20:22):

cleaning cloths — and all of that was a very vital and

Elena Poniatowska (00:20:32):

generous apprenticeship in learning to see the lives of working Mexicans.

Julian Vigo (00:20:40):

But it is an art — to be able to listen to people, to their voices.

Julian Vigo (00:20:53):

How did you learn to listen to the voice of the other?

Elena Poniatowska (00:20:58):

Well, I think it is a natural inclination.

Elena Poniatowska (00:21:03):

It is not learned.

Elena Poniatowska (00:21:05):

It is not forced.

Elena Poniatowska (00:21:06):

It is a way of being.

Elena Poniatowska (00:21:10):

I am far more interested

Elena Poniatowska (00:21:11):

in speaking of what others do, how they do it, and who they are, than in speaking of myself, my sensations, my emotions. And I have done this from a very young age, so it has become a habit — it is part of my daily life.

Julian Vigo (00:21:36):

Do you believe that the testimonio is essentially an act of political resistance?

Elena Poniatowska (00:21:44):

I think so.

Elena Poniatowska (00:21:45):

It helps enormously to know the thinking of those who have no power, who are not in power, who do not consider themselves political, who are not leaders — although I did have the great privilege of interviewing leaders and very important figures in Mexico,

Elena Poniatowska (00:22:14):

such as, for example, the Spanish refugee of the Civil War, Luis Buñuel.

Julian Vigo (00:22:26):

And how was the process of gathering the voice of Jesusa Palancares?

Julian Vigo (00:22:32):

How long did it take you to absorb her story?

Elena Poniatowska (00:22:38):

Well, it was a privilege. I heard her — she was doing laundry in a popular building, a building where many Mexicans lived who had no

Elena Poniatowska (00:22:56):

economic resources. Everything she said caught my attention enormously. I approached her and asked if I could visit her at her home,

Elena Poniatowska (00:23:13):

which was a very poor house, obviously far from the area where I lived. And so I went to

Elena Poniatowska (00:23:26):

see her once a week. We became friends, and she began telling me her life. And that is how

Elena Poniatowska (00:23:36):

the novel Hasta No Verte Jesús Mío came about. When it was published,

Elena Poniatowska (00:23:43):

she asked me to give her ten copies to give to her friends —

Elena Poniatowska (00:23:52):

the bricklayers or the people she had worked with.

Julian Vigo (00:24:00):

And why did she choose the testimonial genre for Hasta No Verte Jesús Mío?

Julian Vigo (00:24:09):

It is one of the testimonial novels because —

Elena Poniatowska (00:24:16):

She didn’t really choose it — she didn’t. It was I who gathered her words and

Elena Poniatowska (00:24:27):

assembled them in the best way I could. But she did not choose it.

Elena Poniatowska (00:24:34):

She could not read or write. She did not know how to read or write. But she asked for the books, and I — the cover of the book, what goes on the outside, is the Santo Niño de Atocha, a small Christ child that she liked.

Julian Vigo (00:25:08):

And I saw it in the street, and so I put it there so she would be happy. But I was asking you about the testimonial genre — in 1969 it was not a common thing in literature.

Julian Vigo (00:25:26):

How was this novel received?

Julian Vigo (00:25:30):

I wonder if people were confused.

Julian Vigo (00:25:32):

Is it a true story or is it fiction?

Elena Poniatowska (00:25:35):

No, it was very well received. The book was greatly liked.

Elena Poniatowska (00:25:41):

Immediately many editions came out and it was translated into English and French.

Julian Vigo (00:25:51):

And I wonder if at that time — less so today — people were confused because they did not know if it was a completely real story or partly real. Because the novel Hasta No Verte Jesús Mío was categorised as a novel.

Elena Poniatowska (00:26:16):

Yes, that’s right, that is what it was.

Elena Poniatowska (00:26:19):

It is a novel based on a character — a woman who was in the Mexican Revolution, the life of a soldadera. To what extent is Jesusa an invented character or a real woman? I have said it, I have written it many times: Jesusa is a real character. After that I wrote

Elena Poniatowska (00:26:49):

other books about other women who were also real characters. I had the joy of knowing Jesusa in person, but for example Tina Modotti, the main character of

Elena Poniatowska (00:27:08):

the novel Tinísima, I did not know. And other novels about other women and other characters I also did not know.

Julian Vigo (00:27:22):

What lessons about the resilience of Mexican women did you learn from Jesusa that remain relevant today?

Elena Poniatowska (00:27:31):

All the women in Mexico whom I see and engage with and encounter in the street

Elena Poniatowska (00:27:41):

and who come to my house — they are women who have known how to struggle and continue to struggle. For example, one woman, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose son was disappeared, and who searched all of Mexico — she is obviously one of the heroines who has most caught my attention.

Julian Vigo (00:28:10):

And especially in recent years — almost thirty years — the femicides and the disappearances of men and women. You are still fighting for your society, and I think literary words have the power to carry reality forward. I am thinking of La Noche de Tlatelolco — that was the first book of yours I read. It is incredible. I have no words. Thank you. It is one of the best books of the twentieth century, and I teach it. It is astonishing. Can you speak about why you began that work, and also for those listening now who do not know the history of what happened in Mexico?

Elena Poniatowska (00:29:03):

Well, in general I can tell you that I received letters from a prisoner in the jail — Jesús Sánchez García — and I began going to Lecumberri, which was called the Black Palace of Lecumberri. It was no palace — it was a prison with bars and cells. I asked permission from the prison director — I believe his name was Martín del Campo — and he gave it to me. That is how I went to gather life stories from men, and later, at the women’s prison, from women who had nothing to do with my own life, who bore no resemblance to what I had

Elena Poniatowska (00:30:03):

lived or what I would go on to live.

Elena Poniatowska (00:30:16):

That was an enormous enrichment for me, and a knowledge of an unknown Mexico that also helped me understand Mexico

Elena Poniatowska (00:30:31):

— a Mexico to which I owe a great deal.

Elena Poniatowska (00:30:35):

I think that everything I am I owe to the voice, and to the gift of their voice, that the poorest Mexicans gave me — those I was able to approach over years and years,

Elena Poniatowska (00:30:52):

going to the prison and sometimes going to their own very poor homes, called vecindades, which were located in the very neighbourhoods where the prisons were.

Julian Vigo (00:31:11):

How did you manage the pain and trauma of the testimonies you heard while assembling the book?

Elena Poniatowska (00:31:22):

Pain is not managed. To manage something is to seek something. Pain is simply assumed and lived. So the pain is in the words written in the book.

Julian Vigo (00:31:46):

And why did you choose the technique of a collage of voices rather than a linear, chronological narrative for this book?

Elena Poniatowska (00:31:57):

I have many other books that speak even of personal stories — books that contain much of biography.

Julian Vigo (00:32:13):

Yes, but it is very interesting how you wove those narratives together in this book. It is very beautiful, in fact.

Julian Vigo (00:32:24):

Was there any moment during the writing of La Noche de Tlatelolco when you felt fear or censorship?

Elena Poniatowska (00:32:33):

Well, there was always the dread of entering terrain unknown to me.

Elena Poniatowska (00:32:40):

Ultimately, I was educated —

Elena Poniatowska (00:32:45):

I spent time in the United States at a convent to be educated, not to become a nun — it was called the Sacred Heart Convent.

Elena Poniatowska (00:33:03):

When I came out I was speaking English. My mother tongue is French. And when I left there, my strongest desire was truly to know Mexico — the country I had arrived in at the age of ten, but in which I had received an education

Elena Poniatowska (00:33:30):

in both English and French, not in Spanish.

Julian Vigo (00:33:36):

More than fifty years later, what impact do you think that book has on the collective memory of young Mexicans today?

Elena Poniatowska (00:33:48):

Well, I think that is a question that should be put to them.

Elena Poniatowska (00:33:55):

What I can say is that I have received

Elena Poniatowska (00:33:59):

a great deal of affection from young people — many come to find me at my home, and I give lectures and talks with some frequency. Remember that I am already 94 years old and have lost the use of my left eye, which prevents me from seeing well. So within my limitations,

Elena Poniatowska (00:34:27):

I remain in contact with the people who want to see me, which for me produces great enthusiasm and which I experience as great support.

Julian Vigo (00:34:42):

The book you wrote is something very specific — evidently about Mexico — but it is still a book with which everyone can identify. If we look around today, where there are acts of political repression in almost every country in the world in one form or another — and I know your books are translated into many languages — I wonder whether the power of La Noche de Tlatelolco came from the form of the narration itself, not only from the fact that you confronted the government, the police, and justice. You narrated a story of the people seeking justice, yes, but literature itself was also seeking truth within its pages. There are wars everywhere, there is too much sadness. After the lockdown — which was less bad in Mexico than here in Italy — we are living through a very difficult moment. Do you sometimes think of this book as a model for dialogue, for collaboration, for moving forward together, the people united?

Elena Poniatowska (00:36:09):

Well, what I love about this book is that it has so many voices — many voices gathered from mothers of families, from children of political prisoners. For me it was a great learning experience to go to the prison in Mexico and see a world I did not know, to be accepted in that world, to go frequently to hear and gather the voices of political prisoners and of young people who

Elena Poniatowska (00:36:52):

didn’t even have strong political ideas but were imprisoned because they had stolen something in a market. It meant entering a world I was completely unfamiliar with,

Elena Poniatowska (00:37:13):

to which I did not belong. And it was an enormous lesson — a very generous lesson — in how the lives of others can be. That is what I have dedicated myself to over many years, because I remain a journalist and continue writing about disasters such as

Elena Poniatowska (00:37:39):

not only the massacre of the 2nd of October, but what the earthquake of 1985 meant for Mexico and the loss, for many Mexicans, of their families and their homes.

Julian Vigo (00:37:59):

Yes. You documented the earthquake of ‘85 — a moment when the Mexican government was completely paralysed and it was civil society that took control to rescue the city.

Julian Vigo (00:38:15):

Do you believe that peoples are still alone in the face of tragedy, or is that organic solidarity you described an invincible force?

Elena Poniatowska (00:38:29):

Yes,

Elena Poniatowska (00:38:29):

of course.

Elena Poniatowska (00:38:30):

I believe — that is why I believe in the invincible force of Mexicans, who help and support each other, who run to answer a cry for help. They are the ones who save themselves by saving others. I believe in that truth. It is a truth I lived, that I witnessed,

Elena Poniatowska (00:38:57):

and for me it is a lesson, a way of life.

Julian Vigo (00:39:03):

Does it reflect the structural abandonment of the seamstresses, the inhabitants, those who live in vecindades, and the poorest?

Julian Vigo (00:39:13):

How did you manage, in the midst of the chaos, the dust, and the mourning of those days, to earn the trust of people so that they would share their most painful and raw testimonies?

Elena Poniatowska (00:39:30):

Well, I have two physical advantages.

Elena Poniatowska (00:39:32):

I am small in stature. I frighten no one. No one is afraid of me. I can go anywhere. I am not someone who imposes anything at all, and I know how to listen. So by listening to others’ voices, I gather them, I keep them, I memorise them,

Elena Poniatowska (00:40:03):

and then I put them on paper.

Elena Poniatowska (00:40:06):

That is the most solitary and difficult moment — writing about what happens to others,

Elena Poniatowska (00:40:21):

their sorrows,

Elena Poniatowska (00:40:22):

their joys,

Elena Poniatowska (00:40:24):

their defeats and also their triumphs —

Elena Poniatowska (00:40:28):

and making books and articles from them. Because I am also a journalist since

Elena Poniatowska (00:40:38):

1953. I am now 94 years old.

Julian Vigo (00:40:47):

You’re listening to Savage Minds.

Julian Vigo (00:40:49):

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Julian Vigo (00:40:54):

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Julian Vigo (00:40:59):

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Julian Vigo (00:41:01):

Now, let’s get back to it.

Julian Vigo (00:41:15):

Many consider that the earthquake of ‘85 not only brought down buildings but also toppled the myth of the Mexican State’s absolute control — marking the true birth of modern citizenship in the country.

Julian Vigo (00:41:33):

From your perspective as a chronicler —

Elena Poniatowska (00:41:40):

I think Mexicans have always had enormous character and enormous capacity to defend themselves

Elena Poniatowska (00:41:49):

in spite of their own poverty, or in spite of the total absence of outside help.

Elena Poniatowska (00:42:02):

There was in Mexico a Mexican Revolution,

Elena Poniatowska (00:42:08):

a country conquered by very cruel conquerors, and yet the country has continued to forge ahead and has continued to demonstrate its bravery and courage in all

Elena Poniatowska (00:42:28):

circumstances — one of which was, for example, the earthquake, in which the neighbours themselves

Elena Poniatowska (00:42:37):

helped each other before the State or the so-called government did anything.

Elena Poniatowska (00:42:46):

So I think it is a country with many very brave men, women, and children who save themselves, who know how to look after themselves.

Elena Poniatowska (00:43:03):

Of course there are people who don’t know how to do it, and there are people who sometimes end up

Elena Poniatowska (00:43:12):

in prison or in hospital. But in general Mexico is a country of very solidary people, people who help each other and defend themselves.

Julian Vigo (00:43:31):

What I love about your books in general is that you give voice — you shed light on the lives that are forgotten.

Julian Vigo (00:43:42):

Do you feel that in this book, for example, or in Nadie Me Verá Llorar, the author’s voice becomes more present or closer to her characters than in your earlier works?

Elena Poniatowska (00:43:56):

No,

Elena Poniatowska (00:43:57):

I think that element is present in all my works — in Hasta No Verte Jesús Mío, in the book about the 2nd of October, in the earthquake — and it is always present in everything I still do at the newspaper where I work. I am in a certain way a chronicler and a

Elena Poniatowska (00:44:21):

participant in the lives of other Mexicans.

Julian Vigo (00:44:27):

And I also notice that many of your works are about women — Tinísima, the life of Tina Modotti, a woman who lived so many lives in one. Leonora. And I wanted to ask — before we get to those books — about Querido Diego Te Abraza Quiela. Why did you choose that subject? Not only Diego Rivera but his first wife.

Elena Poniatowska (00:44:59):

I was moved to learn that in Paris, Angelina Beloff had gone to Mexico to see

Elena Poniatowska (00:45:12):

Diego Rivera, whom she had supported in Paris. He had lived with her and had lived

Elena Poniatowska (00:45:22):

off her, because she was the one with a salary. He was a very young painter without

Elena Poniatowska (00:45:33):

money, without resources. She helped him. And when she went to Mexico, she had also had

Elena Poniatowska (00:45:42):

the only male child that Diego Rivera ever had, who died of cold in Paris. And when she decided to go to Mexico — in a sense, to get to know the country of her lover — she decided to go to the Palacio de Bellas Artes because she knew that he

Elena Poniatowska (00:46:11):

would be there. And he walked right past her — past the seat, one of those red velvet seats in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, called butacas, in which she was sitting — he walked past and did not even recognise her.

Elena Poniatowska (00:46:40):

That story struck me deeply, and that is why I decided to write the small book —

Elena Poniatowska (00:46:55):

it is not a very long book —

Elena Poniatowska (00:46:58):

called Querido Diego, Te Abraza Quiela.

Julian Vigo (00:47:00):

In Tinísima, what was it that drew you to the life of Tina Modotti?

Elena Poniatowska (00:47:08):

In reality it came from a request to make a film. The cinematographer

Elena Poniatowska (00:47:17):

Gabriel Figueroa told me that a film was going to be made about Tina Modotti, the Italian woman who had been in Mexico. So I began interviewing all the people who had known

Elena Poniatowska (00:47:38):

Tina Modotti. And even when I was invited to France for a conference, I had the

Elena Poniatowska (00:47:47):

opportunity to go to Udine in Italy to meet and get to know the siblings of Tina Modotti —

Elena Poniatowska (00:48:00):

to see them, interview them, speak with them.

Elena Poniatowska (00:48:05):

Then when I was told that the film about Tina Modotti in Mexico was no longer going to be made because there was no money, I — who had gone at my own expense to that conference in France and another writers’ conference in

Elena Poniatowska (00:48:37):

Italy — decided to launch into writing the novel called Tinísima, because I had

Elena Poniatowska (00:48:48):

interviewed many old communists whom I had gone to visit

Elena Poniatowska (00:48:56):

in their various homes — generally very modest, very poor homes.

Elena Poniatowska (00:49:03):

I did not want to let them down, and so the novel Tinísima was published.

Julian Vigo (00:49:10):

And to what extent does Tina Modotti represent the struggle of the woman artist in the twentieth century?

Elena Poniatowska (00:49:19):

To the extent that she commits herself —

Elena Poniatowska (00:49:23):

she takes photographs of Mexico alongside Edward Weston, and then goes alongside

Elena Poniatowska (00:49:33):

Commander Carlos of the Fifth Regiment to Spain — she goes to the Spanish Civil War and becomes a nurse, caring even

Elena Poniatowska (00:49:52):

on the ground for the bodies that had fallen on the earth before taking them to the Red Cross — giving them first aid and dedicating herself to saving lives,

Elena Poniatowska (00:50:08):

or helping to save lives. I believe that many soldiers did not die thanks to the care of this woman

Elena Poniatowska (00:50:19):

who was in the trench following the doctors.

Julian Vigo (00:50:25):

You have said that the writer must be a bridge.

Julian Vigo (00:50:29):

Between what worlds do you think it is most necessary to build bridges — or should we be breaking bridges today?

Elena Poniatowska (00:50:38):

No, I think one should never break a bridge, for anything.

Elena Poniatowska (00:50:42):

I think one must

Elena Poniatowska (00:50:45):

communicate — that the most important thing in the life of any human being is dialogue. Peoples too must dialogue with others in order to know each other. I think Mexico must have a dialogue with the United States, and that many Mexicans who have returned from

Elena Poniatowska (00:51:09):

the United States because Trump

Elena Poniatowska (00:51:12):

did not want to receive them, has rejected them — well, they nevertheless had, with another nation or with the inhabitants of another nation, knowledge and dialogue.

Elena Poniatowska (00:51:28):

And that I believe is what is called,

Elena Poniatowska (00:51:34):

within Catholicism if you like, or within any religion by whatever name it may be called — that is human fraternity. The other

Elena Poniatowska (00:51:50):

is the one who exists and who awaits you and whom you must help, because perhaps

Elena Poniatowska (00:51:58):

one day you will need him to extend a hand to you.

Julian Vigo (00:52:05):

Trump is certainly a character, but I see the situation as too tragic for Americans — the United States, still my country — because the reality is that a large part of the Western world has absolutely no idea of the immense cultural, intellectual, and spiritual richness of Mexico.

Julian Vigo (00:52:30):

For me, it’s not only Trump —

Julian Vigo (00:52:32):

but Americans, Canadians, etc.

Julian Vigo (00:52:35):

know nothing about the sharpest chroniclers of this country. If you had to open the eyes of an international audience completely unaware of Mexico’s depth, what would you say is the most valuable treasure of Mexican identity that the rest of the world is missing?

Elena Poniatowska (00:53:01):

Well, I must say that many North Americans have come and written about Mexico — anthropologists and sociologists. We have Oscar Lewis

Elena Poniatowska (00:53:17):

and many others who have written about the poorest Mexicans, starting in Tepoztlán, a city near Mexico City, following them to the vecindades in the city where they took refuge and found very modest work. So yes, there have been North Americans

Elena Poniatowska (00:53:44):

who have written about the richness and beauty of Mexico, and their books are

Elena Poniatowska (00:53:53):

translated into Spanish and are admired and appreciated by Mexicans who are grateful that attention is paid to them. So one cannot say that no one who has come from outside has cared about Mexico — in archaeology, in anthropology, as well as figures like Frances Toor, who was a North American woman who created a magazine

Elena Poniatowska (00:54:39):

called Mexico Today and wrote extensively about Mexican customs and lived in Taxco.

Elena Poniatowska (00:54:41):

For example, a certain William Spratling enriched himself personally but helped many Mexicans in

Elena Poniatowska (00:54:51):

Taxco to learn how to work silver and sell silver. And still today many foreigners and tourists go to buy silver objects

Elena Poniatowska (00:55:10):

that come from a mine discovered by foreigners — and clearly also

Elena Poniatowska (00:55:20):

plundered, one might say, by foreigners.

Julian Vigo (00:55:30):

Because not everything is entirely good or entirely bad. But I was referring to the fact that — as you know, having been in the United States and many other countries — Trump and far too many people insufficiently educated about Mexico think that all Mexicans want to invade the United States. But the reality is otherwise. In Mexico there was a great cinematic tradition, for example. Mexican cinema has greatly influenced Hollywood — not only today but throughout history. The Oscar statuette itself was modelled on the body of El Indio Fernández. People do not know the depth of Mexican philosophy. I am thinking of Sor Juana, who contributed so much to poetry, theatre, even science — if we think of her letter to Sor Filotea, who was actually Manuel Fernández de Puebla. That dialogue was very important. Western feminists know nothing of these exchanges between those two figures. But for me Mexico has an enormous and very important force in the history of philosophy, science, and feminism. And I am thinking of Octavio Paz’s book on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, called Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or The Traps of Faith. You knew Paz closely. Did you have conversations with him about his perspective on this book — especially regarding the power dynamics of the Church and the silencing she suffered as an intellectual woman?

Elena Poniatowska (00:58:09):

No, but I think you are mixing very many topics into one question, and it is

Elena Poniatowska (00:58:18):

difficult to answer you because you are speaking of very diverse things that even

Elena Poniatowska (00:58:27):

happened in different centuries.

Elena Poniatowska (00:58:30):

Sor Juana — there have always been in Mexico,

Elena Poniatowska (00:58:34):

before Octavio Paz, people who dedicated themselves to reading,

Elena Poniatowska (00:58:40):

studying, and getting to know Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Elena Poniatowska (00:58:45):

I will not add more names to those you mentioned, but there are many studies and many Sor Juana scholars in Mexico, as well as at the University of Santa

Elena Poniatowska (00:59:01):

Barbara, California, in Paris, in France —

Elena Poniatowska (00:59:04):

there are many studies on the great figures of Mexico — not only The Traps of Faith by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. So these are studies that will continue and do continue. In California, for example, Sara Poot Herrera

Elena Poniatowska (00:59:32):

is dedicated to studying Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, along with many other scholars — I don’t know if she is still living — whose name was Rivers. All of these are studies that have been carried out in Mexico and outside Mexico.

Julian Vigo (00:59:55):

No, I was asking specifically about Paz’s book because you knew him and —

Elena Poniatowska (01:00:03):

I knew him,

Elena Poniatowska (01:00:04):

I admired him, and I also wrote about him. I have a book about him. I admired him,

Elena Poniatowska (01:00:12):

I knew him, his poetry dazzled me. And he is a man whom I have admired since getting to know him, and whom I also hold with affection.

Julian Vigo (01:00:29):

I asked about your relationship with him because sometimes it happens to me too — with other writers — one asks or someone asks me, “Why did you do that?” It is a dialogue. Because that book, The Traps of Faith, had something very important — not only for Mexico but it placed the image of Sor Juana before the world. Many people began to ask who this nun was because it is very important. I was asking about the presentation Paz gave of her — whether you had any dialogues with Paz from your own perspective.

Elena Poniatowska (01:01:20):

Well, yes, of course. But there were others who also spoke at great length about Sor Juana de la Cruz — other Mexicans before Octavio Paz, other Mexicans who, for example, also concerned themselves with indigenous peoples, such as a priest — Ángel María Garibay — who was also a Sor Juana scholar. So there are many studies on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and there are Sor Juana scholars in Santa Bárbara, for example, such as Doctor Sara Poot Herrera and others — a woman by the name of Rivers and many more.

Julian Vigo (01:02:16):

You have dedicated your life to listening and giving voice to those who have none, through the chronicle and literature.

Julian Vigo (01:02:26):

Today,

Julian Vigo (01:02:27):

with social media,

Julian Vigo (01:02:28):

it seems that everyone has a platform for opinions.

Julian Vigo (01:02:32):

But are we really listening?

Julian Vigo (01:02:36):

What happens to the power of the word when it becomes a constant noise, as in social media?

Elena Poniatowska (01:02:45):

I don’t know.

Elena Poniatowska (01:02:46):

I suppose it loses efficacy.

Elena Poniatowska (01:02:49):

But that depends on the activity of each human being.

Elena Poniatowska (01:02:58):

There are people — elderly people, for example, people already old — for whom life,

Elena Poniatowska (01:03:08):

even in institutions, in care homes, means turning the television on from morning until night and being entertained — that is, entertained without making the least effort of criticism or thought in front of

Elena Poniatowska (01:03:29):

the television.

Elena Poniatowska (01:03:31):

I have seen that this has been very important in keeping the elderly calm and

Elena Poniatowska (01:03:41):

allowing them to die little by little in institutions called health facilities, where they have this

Elena Poniatowska (01:03:52):

constant and rather sad entertainment. But

Elena Poniatowska (01:03:59):

as they say in Mexico: no hay de otra — there is no other option, or no other option has been found, or there are not enough people willing to dedicate themselves to attending to and caring for others. So I see it as an end of life

Elena Poniatowska (01:04:28):

for an individual who was once a thinking individual, who knew how to act,

Elena Poniatowska (01:04:37):

who knew how to elevate himself,

Elena Poniatowska (01:04:41):

to become a better human being. And I find it sad.

Julian Vigo (01:04:46):

Today, and for twenty years now, I have noticed as a university professor that students are reading less and less. Today, with so-called artificial intelligence — so-called because intelligence it is not — students are not reading. How can literature or journalism restore the true value and depth of words when we are in a world full of social media, opinions, and videos of a cat doing something funny?

Elena Poniatowska (01:05:31):

Your question is very difficult because I don’t have the answer.

Elena Poniatowska (01:05:37):

What I can say is that ultimately it depends on the teachers.

Elena Poniatowska (01:05:44):

It depends on students having a good teacher,

Elena Poniatowska (01:05:49):

because even I have seen in classes —

Elena Poniatowska (01:05:54):

in different classes —

Elena Poniatowska (01:05:57):

that many young people continue looking at their phones while the teacher is writing on

Elena Poniatowska (01:06:07):

the board, or speaking, or giving a class.

Elena Poniatowska (01:06:13):

So we shall see whether the destiny of young people will depend on what they

Elena Poniatowska (01:06:21):

learn from their phone. I don’t have a phone —

Elena Poniatowska (01:06:27):

I never bought one,

Elena Poniatowska (01:06:28):

never got one. Or whether they will be able to go beyond themselves

Elena Poniatowska (01:06:37):

and beyond above all what the phone wants to give you or teach you or not teach you

Elena Poniatowska (01:06:46):

or distract you from — because ultimately it is a distraction. Yes.

Julian Vigo (01:06:53):

Writing something to share — in quotation marks — they are sharing nothing in the end. I have noticed that many people are sharing articles they have not read. Young people are embracing identity politics and cancel culture

Julian Vigo (01:07:16):

in the absence of any engagement with material reality today.

Julian Vigo (01:07:21):

That is my fear —

Julian Vigo (01:07:23):

that the millennials,

Julian Vigo (01:07:26):

this generation of thirty-year-olds,

Julian Vigo (01:07:31):

are fixated on pronouns

Julian Vigo (01:07:36):

but do nothing to help their neighbour.

Julian Vigo (01:07:41):

They do nothing to fight for living wages.

Elena Poniatowska (01:07:46):

Well, not all of them.

Elena Poniatowska (01:07:49):

It’s a generalisation, of course.

Elena Poniatowska (01:07:54):

But I think you are right.

Elena Poniatowska (01:07:58):

It is a generalisation, because in any case there are human beings who live for others.

Julian Vigo (01:08:08):

We are in two camps today, because during the lockdown I noticed that many people — even on the right — were fighting for the poor in the United States, where I published. I could not publish a single article questioning the lockdown. That is when I started Savage Minds, because I was asking: what is happening? I no longer recognise this world in which the left is pushing people not to speak. We weren’t talking about the lockdown, and the right was speaking very openly. And I see that politically, left and right — there is no longer that dichotomy, so to speak.

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:02):

Yes,

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:03):

I thank you greatly for your interest and I thank you enormously for this conversation. I feel animated,

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:11):

I feel glad to hear what you are saying.

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:19):

But I do feel that,

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:22):

as you say,

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:23):

the speed,

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:26):

the pace of all events,

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:29):

the television —

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:32):

it sets critical thinking and reflection on events to one side,

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:41):

because everything must be immediate, mustn’t it?

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:46):

That is to say, everything ends in a second. Even the deepest interests sometimes last only

Elena Poniatowska (01:09:56):

a few — one might even think, as we say in Mexico,

Elena Poniatowska (01:10:01):

un ratito — just a little while. There is no continuity in ideas or

Elena Poniatowska (01:10:12):

even in purposes. There is something we all know called habit, and each person

Elena Poniatowska (01:10:21):

lives according to the habits they have established in order to keep going —

Elena Poniatowska (01:10:28):

to keep existing, if you will. To make it to night, fall asleep, and know that you will wake the following day. Or perhaps you won’t wake, because — well, for example, I

Elena Poniatowska (01:10:45):

am a person of 94 years old and I have no certainty that I will see the following morning. But

Elena Poniatowska (01:10:55):

what I do believe is that

Elena Poniatowska (01:10:58):

I believe in the innate goodness of every human being.

Elena Poniatowska (01:11:03):

I have to believe in it, because I need that hope.

(01:12:02):

Radhika Desai, professor of Political Studies and director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, brings her historical materialist framework to bear on what she calls the “senile” or “moribund phase” of capitalism—marked by deindustrialisation, financialisation, speculative necromancy, ecological destruction, a precipitous decline in political leadership quality, and the imperial wars now ravaging Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. Desai traces the arc from Karl Marx’s monopoly phase thesis through the post-war golden age, the neoliberal turn and its miserly, punitive politics towards working people, to the present moment in which the US-Israeli war on Iran is accelerating the collapse of dollar hegemony and the everything bubble. She connects cultural neoliberalism—identity politics, DEI, pronoun politics—to a deliberate corporate strategy for generating a patina of progressivism while delivering nothing material to working people, with the professional managerial class administering this hypocritical regime. Desai addresses the BRICS question with characteristic nuance, distinguishing between countries that have genuinely rejected neoliberalism and those, like Modi’s India, whose multipolar rhetoric conceals a servile comprador relationship with Washington. Her analysis of the everything bubble, the Triffin dilemma and Iran-driven inflation carries a stark warning—when interest rates rise far enough to contain the oil shock, the dollar system will come down with them.

Olga Cherevko, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza, draws on over twenty years of experience working in conflict zones across Liberia, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen to bear witness to what she describes as a level of destruction without parallel in her career. Beginning with the physical transformation of Gaza since her first deployment there in 2014, Cherevko traces the systematic obliteration of water, sanitation, and healthcare infrastructure, explaining how humanitarian teams are reduced to improvising repairs with the wrong materials because the right ones are blocked at the crossing. Cherevko challenges the public perception that humanitarian assistance is simply about food parcels, arguing that it is fundamentally about restoring dignity, and identifies the dual-use classification system and NGO registration restrictions as among the most consequential obstacles to scaling up the response. Addressing the psychological dimension of the crisis—the dimension she argues receives the least attention—Cherevko describes children who no longer flinch at explosions, parents shattered beyond recovery, and a population whose light of hope she watched dim month by month. She warns that a ceasefire does not end suffering, noting that the moment the world looks away is often the moment conditions deteriorate further, and closes with an appeal to keep Gaza on the global conscience long after the guns fall silent.

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Kit Klarenberg, investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of The Grayzone UK, discusses his detainment by UK counter-terrorism police on 17 May at Luton Airport when he arrived from Belgrade, Serbia. With the threat of arrest held over him if he didn’t comply, Klarenberg was interrogated, had his bank cards, electronic devices and SD cards seized, his fingerprints and photo taken, his shoes removed, his DNA taken and he was subjected to a five-hour interrogation. While all this was ostensibly conducted under Schedule 3 to the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, Klarenberg observes how this law gives British law enforcement wide latitude to detain and harass individuals deemed to be taking part in a “hostile activity” whereby according to this Act an individual “can pose a state threat on behalf of a hostile foreign power without them intending to or the foreign power whose interest they are serving knowing.” Klarenberg contextualises what happened to him in May, elaborating on the bizarre interrogation through which he was subject, placing his experience within the context of recent draconian EU sanctions against state-owned Russian media outlets (RT and Sputnik) and the crackdown on legitimate speech under the aegis of "Russian disinformation." 

Simon Ateba, Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa in Washington, discusses the challenges he has faced at the White House under former Press Secretary Jen Psaki after challenging her over the ban on eight African nations over the Omicron variant of COVID-19 and then more recently with Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, having ignored Ateba’s quesitons for seven months. Ateba also covers the remarkable story of how on 20 March when at the White House for a press briefing, instead of being allowed to ask questions, Ateba and other members of the press found themselves thrown into a political theatre where the cast of Ted Lasso was brought in to derail the White House press briefing (to discuss mental health). Ateba, ready to do his job to ask questions about the news of the day, attempted to ask questions as Jean-Pierre scolded him for engaging in his job as a journalist. Ateba addresses how the role of the White House press secretary has become politicised whereby this role has become a position of curating the news emanating from the White House by answering light-weight questions from legacy media representatives while ignoring the harder questions posed by journalists representing smaller, independent and/or non-western media. These practices, Ateba notes, have become so entrenched within institutions and power centres today that they represent the ethos of what is now known as the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

Exulansic discusses her series, I am Jazz’s Waking Nightmare, wherein she offers social and political commentary on Jazz Jennings’ reality TV show, I am Jazz. Analysing gender ideology’s infiltration in mainstream media, Exulansic delves into the postmodern condition of the Jennings family’s pathological grooming of Jazz Jennings. Analysing the production of I am Jazz, Exulansic examines the reality show and how all reality has been edited out or caught accidentally on camera while Jazz’s persona, crafted for television audiences as he is coached to demonstrate the happy “transgender” subject, morphs between the scripted lines and unscripted moments that allow for the reality and horror of his life to materialise. Historicising how the audience witnesses Jazz being coached for the show’s production and by his own family, Exulansic ironises how despite his ad-libbed performances we still get glimpses of Jazz’s real self through accidental admissions that are not edited out. Demystifying the rhetoric throughout this show’s history—how sic “transgender” people will always be oppressed, Exulansic studies how this show has become a marketing platform for ideological dissemination while locating the mother, Jeanette Jennings, as the primary perpetrator of her son whom she sexually abuses and shatters his psychological development through the pseudo-medical hokum and dangerous medical experimentation, all executed in the name of transgender ideology. 

Transcript

Introduction: Welcome to Savage Minds. I'm your host, Julian Vigo. Today's show marks the launch of our second season with a very special guest: Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson is a financial analyst and president of the Institute for the Study of long term economic trends. He is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, and the professor at the School of Marx studies, Peking University in China. He's also a research fellow at the Levy Institute of Bard College, and he has served as an economic adviser to the US Canadian, Mexican, and Latvian governments. He's also been a consultant to UNITAR, the Institute for Research on Public Policy and the Canadian Science Council, among other organisations. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in economics from New York University. Professor Hudson is the author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy (2015), and most recently, J is for junk economics, a guide to reality in an age of deception. His super imperialism, the economic strategy of the American Empire has just been translated into German after its appearance in Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. He sits on the editorial board of lap times quarterly and has written for the Journal of International Affairs, Commonweal, International Economy, Financial Times, and Harper's, and he's a regular contributor to CounterPunch. I welcome Michael Hudson, to Savage Minds.

Julian Vigo: Class analysis in the United States is rather subterfuge amidst all these other narratives of the American dream as it's framed—that being the right to own one's home. In the UK, that became part of the Trojan horse, that Thatcher built to win her election. It was a very smart move. She won that election—she won her elections—by the reforms in the “right to buy” scheme as I'm sure you know. I t was really clever and disastrous for human rights in the country. I've spent quite a bit of my life in the UK and to see that in 1979 was, I believe, 49% of all residential housing was council housing. And when I wrote a piece on this for the Morning Star about eight, nine years ago, that rate was reduced to under 11%. So we're seeing the haves- and have-nots. And this is where your work really struck a chord for me. And let's kick into the show at this point. I have written over the years, about rentier capitalism, a term that is increasingly used to describe economies dominated by rentier, rents and rent-generating assets. And you discuss this quite a bit in your work, more recently, your article from July, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover.” And in this article, you discuss how today the finance, insurance and real estate sectors have regained control of government creating a “neo-rentier” economy as you put it, while you note—and I quote you: “The aim of this postindustrial finance capitalism is the opposite of industrial capitalism as known to nineteenth-century economists: it seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation.” Unquote. I was wondering if we might begin our talk by branching out from this piece you wrote in July. And if you could explain for our listeners why discerning rentier capitalism is essential for understanding the global push to privatise and financialise those sectors that formerly existed in the public domain such as—and we see this everywhere, including in the EU—transportation, health care, prisons, policing, education, the post office, etc.

Michael Hudson: Well, most textbooks depict a sort of happy world that almost seems to exist in the 1950s. And this “happy world” is when wealthy people get money, they build factories and buy machinery and hire workers to produce more goods and services. But that's not what the credits created for today, it's the textbooks that pick the banks that take in people's deposits and lend them out to people who build industrial production, and you'll have a picture of workers with lunchboxes working in. But actually, banks only lend money against assets. And the main assets do not make a profit by employing people to produce things there. They simply are opportunities to extract rent, like real estate 80% of bank loans are made for real estate. And that means they're made against primarily buildings that are in land that are already there. And the effective more and more bank credit is to raise the price of real estate. And in the United States, in the last year, housing prices have gone up 20%. And typically, in America, if you go to a bank and take out a loan, the government is going to guarantee the bank that you will pay the loan up to the point where it absorbs 43% of your income.

So here's a big chunk of American income going to pay simply for housing, those price increases, not because there's more housing, or better housing. But in fact, the housing is built worse and worse every year, by lowering the standards, but simply inflation. There are other forms of rent, other people pay, for instance, 18% of America's GDP is healthcare, much higher than the percentage in any other country for much lower quality of service. So you know, that's sort of taken out of people's budgets. If you're a worker in the United States, right away, you get your paycheque 15%—a little more, maybe 16% now—is deducted for Social Security and medical care for when you're older. They also need up to maybe 30%, for income tax, federal, state and local income tax before you have anything to spend. And then you have to spend for housing, you have to pay for transportation, you have to pay for your own medical insurance contributions, your own pension contributions.

So there's very, very little that is left over in people's budgets to buy goods and services. Not only have real wages in the United States, gone down now for three decades, but the disposable income that people and families get after they meet their sort of monthly “nut,” what they can spend on goods and services is shrunk even more. So while they're getting squeezed, all this money is paid to rentiers as at the top. And because of the miracle of compound interest, the amount that the 1% of the economy has grows exponentially. Any rate of interest is a doubling time. And even though people know that there's only a 0.1% rate of interest, now for the banks, and for large wall firms, it's about 3% if you want to buy a mortgage. and so this, the 0.1% is lent out to large companies like Blackstone that are now buying up almost all of the housing that comes onto the market in the United States. So in 2008, 69% of homeowners of Americans own their own homes. Now it's fallen by more than 10%. It's fallen to about 51%. All this difference has been basically the financial sector funding a transformation away from home ownership into landlordship—into absentee ownership. And so the if you're part of the 1%, the way that you make money is by buying stocks or bonds, or corporate takeovers, or buying real estate and not building factories. And that's why the factories and the industry have been shifting outside of the United States over to China, and other countries.

So, what we're having is a kind of…I won’t say its post-industrial capitalism, because people thought that the what was going to follow industrial capitalism was going to be socialism. They thought that there will be more and more government spending on providing basic needs that people had. And instead of socialism, and a more, egalitarian distribution of wealth and income, you've had a polarization of wealth and income, you've had the wealthy people making money financially, and by real estate, and by rent seeking, and by creating monopolies, but not by building factories, not by producing goods and services. And that is why the economy's polarizing, and so many people are unhappy with their conditions.

Now, they're going further and further into debt and their student debt. Instead of education here being a public utility that's provided freely, it's become privatised at NYU, it's now $50,000 or $60,000 a year. There is no way in which the United States can compete industrially with other countries when they've loaded down new entrants into the labor force with huge housing costs, student debt, huge taxes have been shifted off the 1% onto the 99%. So in the United States, finance capitalism basically is self-terminating. It leads to a polarised economy, it leads to austerity. And it leaves countries looking like Greece looked after 2015, after its debt crisis, it looks like Argentina is trying to struggle to pay its foreign debts. And that seems to be the future in which the US and Europe are moving towards.

Julian Vigo: I posted on my Facebook wall about this about maybe five weeks ago, that the rentier class, I'm not just including the likes of Blackstone, but the middle class that are multiple home dwellers. I noted that during the lockdown, I was reading through accounts on social media of people who were being threatened by landlords, landlords, who actually had no mortgage to pay. And I had to wonder at that point, what is the input of the rentier class by the landowning class who are not necessarily part of the 1%. These are people who, as some of these people came on my wall and said, “I worked hard to buy my second and third houses!” And I thought, “Well, let me pull out my violins.” One thing that really alerted me during lockdown was the lack of sympathy for renters. And I don't just mean in the US, in fact, I think the US had a kinder response to renting in some sectors such as New York state where there has been—and still—is a massive pushback against any form of relaxation of rent forgiveness, since lockdown in the EU and Italy and France. It's appalling the kind of treatment that renters received here. I spoke to people in Bologna, who were doing a rent strike, but fearful of having their name mentioned. I ended up not being able to run the piece because of that. And there are so many people who don't have money to pay their rent in the EU, in the UK, and yet, we're somehow focusing oftentimes on these meta-critical analyses of the bigger corporations, the 1%. But where does the middle class fit into this, Michael, because I do have to wonder if maybe we should be heading towards the model I hold in my mind and heart is St. Ives in Cornwall, which about eight years ago set a moratorium saying no second homes in this city. Now, they didn't do it because of any allegiance to Marxism or socialism. They did it in part because of that, and because of a left-leaning politics, but mostly because they didn't want to have a ghost town that when the summer was over, you had very few people living in town. What are the answers to the rentier class that is also composed of people who consider themselves hard-working people who just want someone else to pay for their house, as one person on Twitter, put it.

Michael Hudson: This is exactly the problem that is plaguing left wing politics, from Europe to America in the last fifty years.

Julian Vigo: Exactly. It's astounding because there was a lot of debate on Twitter around last summer, when one woman wrote, I just did the math, I'm almost 29 years old, and I paid and she listed the amount in rent, I have just bought my landlord a second house. And people are adding it up that we are back to understanding. And I think in terms of the medieval period, remember in high school in the US when you study history, and you learn about feudalism, and the serfs coming in from far afield having to tend to the Masters terrain. And I think, are we heading back to a kind of feudalism under a new name? Because what's dividing those who can afford rents and those who can, it's not only your eligibility to receive a bank loan in this climate, which is quite toxic in London. I know many architects, lawyers, physicians who cannot get bank loans. Ironically, the bar is being raised so high that more and more people in London are moving on to the canal system—they're renting or buying narrowboats. The same is happening in other parts of the world where people are being barred out of home ownership for one reason or another and at the same time, there's a class of people often who got loans in a period when it was quite easy in the 80s and early 90s, let's say and they hold a certain control over who's paying—43% of income of Americans goes on housing. And as you know, in New York City that can be even higher. How can we arrive at a society where there's more equality between these haves and have-nots? Because it seems that the middle class is playing a role in this. They're trying to come off as being the hard-working schmoes, who have just earned their right to own their second or third homes, and then the others who will never have a foot on that ladder, especially given the crash?

Michael Hudson: Well, I think you've put your finger on it. Most people think of economies being all about industry. But as you've just pointed out, for most people, the economy is real estate. And if you want to understand how modern economies work, you really should begin by looking at real estate, which is symbiotic with with banking, because as you pointed out that in a house is worth whatever a bank will lend. And in order to buy a house, unless you have an enormous amount of savings, which hardly anyone has, you'll borrow from a bank and buy the house. And the idea is to use the rent to pay the interest to the bank. And then you end up hoping late hoping with a capital gain, which is really land price gain. You borrow from the bank hoping that the Federal Reserve and the central bank or the Bank of England is going to inflate the economy and inflate asset prices and bank credit is going to push prices further and further up. As the rich get richer, they recycle the money in the banks and banks lend it to real estate. So, the more the economy is polarised between the 1% and the 99%, the more expensive houses get the more absentee landlords are able to buy the houses and outbid the homebuyers, who as you pointed out, can't get loans because they're already loaned up. If they can't get loans in England to buy a house, it's because they already owe so much money for other things. In America, it would be because they own student debt or because they own other bank loans, and they're all loaned up. So the key is people are being squeezed more than anywhere else on housing. In America, it rents care too and on related sort of monopoly goods that yield rent. Now the problem is why isn't this at the centre of politics?

Is it because— and it's ironic that although most people in every country, Europe and America, are still homeowners, or so they only own their own home—they would like to be rentiers in miniature? They would like to live like the billionaires live off the rents. They would like to be able to have enough money without working to get a free lunch and the economy of getting a free lunch. And so somehow, they don't vote for what's good for the wage earners. They vote for…well, if I were to get richer, then I would want to own a house and I would want to get rent. So I'm going to vote in favour of the landlord class. I'm going to vote in favour of banks lending money to increase housing prices because I'd like to borrow money from a bank to get on this treadmill, that's going to be an automatic free lunch. Now, I not only get rent, but I'll get the rising price of the houses as prices continue to rise. So somehow, the idea of class interest, they don't think of themselves as wage earners, they think of themselves as somehow would-be rentiers in miniature without realising that you can't do it in miniature. You really have to have an enormous amount of money to be successful rentier.

So no class consciousness means that the large real estate owners, the big corporations like Blackstone that own huge amounts can sort of trot out a strapped, homeowner and individual, and they will sort of hide behind it and say, “Look at this, poor family, they use their money to buy a house, the sort of rise in the world, and now the tenants have COVID, and they can't pay the rent. Let's not bail out these, these landlords.” So even though they're not getting rent, we have to aid them. And think of them as little people, but they're not little people. They're a trillion dollar, money managers. They're huge companies that are taking over. And people somehow personify the billionaires and the trillion dollar real estate management companies as being small people just like themselves. There's a confusion about the economic identity.

Julian Vigo: Well, certainly in the United States, we are known to have what's called the “American dream.” And it's, it's quite interesting when you start to analyse what that dream has morphed into, from the 1960s to the present, and I even think through popular culture. Remember Alexis, in Dynasty, this was the go-to model for success. So we've got this idea that the super rich are Dallas and Dynasty in the 80s. But 20 years after that, we were facing economic downfalls. We had American graduates having to go to graduate school because they couldn't get a job as anything but a barista. And the model of getting scholarships or fellowships, any kind of bursary to do the Masters and PhD. When I was doing my graduate work, I was lucky enough to have this, but that was quickly disappearing. A lot of my colleagues didn't have it. And I imagine when you went to school, most of your colleagues had it. And today, and in recent years, when I was teaching in academia, most of my students doing advanced degrees had zero funding. So, we've got on the one hand, the student debt, hamster wheel rolling, we have what is, to me one of the biggest human rights issues of the domestic sphere in countries like the US or Great Britain, frankly, everywhere is the ability to live without having to be exploited for the payment of rent. And then we have this class of people, whether they're Blackstone, and huge corporations, making billions, or the middle class saying, “But I'm just living out the American dream.” How do we square the “American dream,” and an era where class consciousness is more invisible than ever has it been?

Michael Hudson: I think the only way you can explain that is to show how different life was back in the 1960s, 1950s. When I went to school, and the college, NYU cost $500 a semester, instead of 50,000, that the price of college has gone up 100 times since I went to college—100 times. I rented a house in a block from NYU at $35 a month on Sullivan Street. And now that same small apartment would go for 100 times that much, $3,500 a month, which is a little below the average rent in Manhattan these days. So, you've had these enormous increases in the cost of getting an education, they cost of rent, and in a society where housing was a public utility, and education was a public utility, education would be provided freely. If the economy wanted to keep down housing prices, as they do in China for instance, then you would be able to work if the kind of wages that Americans are paid today and be able to save. The ideal of China or countries that want to compete industrially is to lower the cost of living so that you don't have to pay a very high wages to cover the inflated cost of housing, the cost of education.

If you privatise education in America, and if you increase the housing prices, then either you're going to have to pay labor, much higher rates that will price it out of world markets, at least for industrial goods, or you'll have to squeeze budgets. So yes, people can pay for housing, and education, but they're not going to buy the goods and services they produce. And that's one of the reasons why America is not producing industrial manufacturers. It's importing it all abroad. So the result of this finance capitalism that we have the result of the rent squeeze, that you depict, and the result of voters not realising that this is economic suicide for them is that the economy is shrinking and leaving people basically out in the street. And of course, all of this is exacerbated by the COVID crisis right now. Where, right now you have, especially in New York City, many people are laid off, as in Europe, they're not getting an income. Well, if your job has been closed down as a result of COVID, in Germany, for instance, you're still given something like 80% of your normal salary, because they realise that they have to keep you solvent and living. In the United States, there's been a moratorium on rents, they realise that, well, if you've lost your job, you can't pay the rent. There's a moratorium on evictions, there's a moratorium on bank foreclosures on landlords that can't pay their mortgage to the bank, because their tenants are not paying rent. All of that is going to expire in February, that’s just in a few months.  So they're saying, “OK, in New York City, 50,000 tenants are going to be thrown out onto the street, thousands of homes are going to be foreclosed on.” All over the country, millions of Americans are going to be subject now to be evicted. You can see all of the Wall Street companies are raising private capital funds to say, “We're going to be waiting for all this housing to come onto the market. We're going to be waiting for all of these renovations to take place. We're going to swoop in and pick it up.” This is going to be the big grab bag that is going to shape the whole coming generation and do to America really what Margaret Thatcher did to England when she got rid of—when she shifted from housing, the council housing that you mentioned, was about half the population now dow to about 1/10 of the population today.

Julian Vigo: This is what I wonder is not being circulated within the media more frequently. We know that major media is not...[laughts] They like to call themselves left-of-centre but they're neoliberal which I don't look at anything in the liberal, the neoliberal sphere, as “left.” I look at it as a sort of strain of conservatism, frankly. But when you were speaking about paying $35 a month for an apartment on Sullivan Street, get me a time machine! What year was that? Michael?

Michael Hudson: That was 1962.

Julian Vigo: 1962 And roughly, the minimum wage in New York was just over $1 an hour if I'm not mistaken.

Michael Hudson: I don't remember. I was making I think my first job on Wall Street was 50 to $100. A year $100 a week.

Julian Vigo: So yes, I looked it up because I was curious when you said 100 times certainly we see that. If the tuition at New York when and New York University when I left was $50,000 a year you were paying $500 a semester. This is incredible inflation.

Michael Hudson: And I took out a student loan from the state because I wanted to buy economic books. I was studying the history of economic thought and so I borrowed, you know, I was able to take out a loan that I repaid in three years as I sort of moved up the ladder and got better paying jobs. But that was the Golden Age, the 1960s because in that generation there was the baby boom that just came online. There were jobs for everybody. There was a labor shortage. And everybody was trying to hire—anyone could get a job. I got to New York and I had $15 in my pocket in 1960. I'd shared a ride with someone, [I] didn't know what to do. We stayed in a sort of fleabag hotel on Bleecker Street that was torn down by the time you got there. But I,  took a walk around and who should I run into that Gerde's Folk City, but a friend of mine had stayed at my house in Chicago once and he let me stay at his apartment for a few weeks till I can look around, find a place to live and got the place for $35 a month,

Julian Vigo: When there was that debate on Twitter—there were many debates actually about renting on Twitter—and there were a few landlords who took to Twitter angry that they learned that their renters had received subsidies in various countries to pay their rent. And instead of paying their rent, the people use this to up and buy a downpayment on a home. And they got very upset. And there was a bit of shadow on Friday there with people saying, “Well, it's exactly what you've done.” And I find this quite fascinating, because I've always said that the age of COVID has made a huge Xray of our society economically speaking. And it's also telling to me that in countries that I would assume to be more socialist leaning, if not socialist absolutely, in the EU, we saw very few movements against rent. Very few people or groups were calling for a moratorium on rent. It's ironic, but it was in the US where we saw more moratoria happen. What is happening where—and this reaches to larger issues, even outside of your specialty of economics and finance—but why on earth has it come to be that the left is looking a lot more like the right? And, don't shoot me, but you know, I've been watching some of Tucker Carlson over the past few years, someone who I could not stand after 9/11. And he has had more concern and more investigations of the poor and the working class than MSBC or Rachel Maddow in the biggest of hissy fits. What is going on politically that the valences of economic concern are shifting—and radically so?

Michael Hudson: Well, the political situation in America is very different from every other country. In the Democratic Party, in order to run for a position, you have to spend most of your time raising money, and the party will support whatever candidates can raise the most money. And whoever raises the largest amount of money gets to be head of a congressional committee dealing with whatever it is their campaign donors give. So basically, the nomination of candidates in the United States, certainly in the Democratic Party, is based on how much money you can raise to finance your election campaign, because you're supposed to turn half of what you raised over to the party apparatus. Well, if you have to run for an office, and someone explained to me in in the sixties, if I wanted to go into politics, I had to find someone to back up my campaign. And they said, “Well, you have to go to the oil industry or the tobacco industry.” And you go to these people and say, “Will you back my campaign?” And they say, Well, sure, what's your position going to be on on smoking on oil and the the tax position on oil, go to the real estate interest, because all local politics and basically real estate promotion projects run by the local landlords and you go to the real estate people and you say, “Okay, I'm going to make sure that we have public improvements that will make your land more valuable, but you won't have to pay taxes on them.” So, if you have people running for office, proportional to the money they can make by the special interests, that means that all the politicians here are representing the special interests that pay them and their job as politicians is to deliver a constituency to their campaign contributors. And so the campaign contributors are going to say, “Well, here's somebody who could make it appear as if they're supporting their particular constituency.” And so ever since the 60s, certainly in America, the parties divided Americans into Irish Americans, Italian Americans, black Americans, Hispanic Americans. They will have all sorts of identity politics that they will run politicians on. But there's one identity that they don't have—and that's the identity of being a wage earner. That's the common identity that all these hyphenated Americans have in common. They all have to work for a living and get wages, they're all subject to, they have to get housing, they have to get more and more bank credit, if they want to buy housing so that all of the added income they get is paid to the banks as mortgage interest to get a home that used to be much less expensive for them. So basically, all of the increase in national income ends up being paid to the campaign contributors, the real estate contributors, the oil industry, the tobacco industry, the pharmaceuticals industry, that back the politicians. And essentially, you have politics for sale in the United States. So we're really not in a democracy anymore—we're in an oligarchy. And people don't realise that without changing this, this consciousness, you're not going to have anything like the left-wing party.

And so you have most Americans out wanting to be friendly with other Americans, you know, why can't everybody just compromise and be in the centre? Well, there's no such thing as a centrist. Because you'll have an economy that's polarising, you have the 1% getting richer and richer and richer by getting the 99% further and further in debt. So the 99% are getting poorer and poor after paying their debts. And to be in the centre to say, and to be say, only changes should be marginal, that means—a centrist is someone who lets this continue. With that we're not going to make a structural change, that's radical, we're not going to change the dynamic that is polarising the economy, between creditors at the top and debtors is at the bottom, between landlords at the top and renters at the bottom between monopolists and the top and the consumers who have to pay monopoly prices for pharmaceuticals, for cable TV, for almost everything they get. And none of this is taught in the economics courses. Because you take an  economics course, they say, “There's no such thing as unearned income. Everybody earns whatever they can get.” And the American consciousness is shaped by this failure to distinguish between earned income and unearned income and a failure to see that dynamic is impoverishing them. It's like the proverbial frog that's been boiled slowly in water. So, with this false consciousness people have—if only they can save enough and borrow from a bank—they can become a rentier in Miniature. They're just tricked into a false dream.

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Julian Vigo: I don't know if you saw the movie called Queen of Versailles. It was about this very bizarre effort to construct a very ugly Las Vegas-style type of Versailles by a couple that was economically failing. And it spoke to me a lot about the failings of the quote unquote, “American dream.” And I don't mean that dream, per se. I mean, the aspiration to have the dream, because that is, as you just pointed out, unearned income, that is the elephant in the room. And it almost seems to be the elephant maybe to keep using that metaphor, that the blind Sufi tale: everyone's feeling a different part of it, but no one is naming it. And I find this really shocking, that we can't speak of unearned income and look at the differences as to which country's tax inheritance and which do not—this idea that one is entitled to wealth. Meanwhile, a lot of US institutions are academically, now formally, being captured by the identity lobbies and there are many lobbies out there—it's a gift to them. They don't have to work on the minimum wage, they don't have to work on public housing, they don't have to work on housing.

They can just worry about, “Do we have enough pronoun badges printed out?” And I find this really daunting as someone who is firmly of the left and who has seen some kind of recognition have this problem bizarrely, from the right. We seem to have a blind spot where we're more caught up in how people see us, rather than the material reality upon which unearned and earned income is based. Why is it that today people are living far worse than their grandparents and parents especially?

Michael Hudson: Well, I think we've been talking about that, because they have to pay expenses as their parents and grandparents didn't have to pay, they have to pay much higher rent. Everybody used to be able to afford to buy a house, that was the definition of “middle class” in America was to be a homeowner. And when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, everybody on the salary they were getting could afford to buy their house. And that's why so many people bought the houses with working class sell rates. As I told you, I was getting $100 a week. At least if you were quiet you could do it. If you were black, you couldn't do it. The blacks were redlined. But the white people could buy the houses. And that's why today, the white population has so much more wealth than the black population, because the white families would leave the house to the children and housing prices have gone up 100 times. And because they've gone up 100 times, this is endowed with a whole white hereditary class of kids whose family own their own homes, send them to schools. But America was redlined. Now Chicago was redlined, blacks were redlined. In New York City, the banks would not lend money to black neighbourhoods or to black borrowers. I was at Chase Manhattan and they made it very clear: they will not make a loan to a mortgage if they're black people living in my block. And they told me that when I was on Second Street and Avenue B. I won't repeat the epithet racist epithets they used. But what has caused the racial disparity today is what we've been talking about: the fact that whites could buy their own homes, blacks could not.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is that if—we're working toward a society where white people are now going to be reduced to the position that black people are in today: of not having their own homes, of not being able to get bank credit. One friend of mine at the Hudson Institute, a black economist, wanted to—we were thinking of cowriting a book, The Blackening of America. The state of, well, the future of the whites, is to become blacks if you don't solve this situation. And I've been unable to convince many black leaders about reparations—that the reparations, very hard to get reparations for slavery, which was to their grandparents, their reparations are due to the blacks today who do not have housing, their own homes, because of the redlining that they have been experiencing right down to today.

So, you have this, you do have a separation in this country. But this is not the kind of hyphenated politics that the politicians talk about. Not even the black politicians, the fact that if you're going to hyphenated American, how did this hyphenisation affect the real opportunities for real estate, for homeownership, for education, and all of these other things. I think maybe if people begin to think as to how there is a convergence of what was diverging before—now you're having the middle class pushed down into its real identity which was a dependent wage-earning class all along—you're going to have a change of consciousness. But we're still not to that. People don't realise this difference.

And at the top of the pyramid, at New York University, for instance, where we both went to school, I have professor friends there and there was recently an argument about getting more salaries for professors, because they're hiring adjunct professors at very low prices instead of appointing them full time. And one professor turned to my friend and said, “They’re treating us like wage earners.” And my friend said, “Yes, you are a wage earner. You’re dependent on the wage you get from New York University.” And he said, “But I’m a professor,” as if somehow being a professor doesn't mean that you're not a wage earner, you're not dependent on salary, you're not being exploited by your employer who's in it to make money at your expense.

Julian Vigo: Oh, absolutely. We've got the push from NYU in the 1990s by adjunct professors to get health insurance, and to have a certain modicum of earnings that would allow them to pay rent in an extremely expensive city. I find it amazing how many of my students at the time had no idea how much I was being exploited at the time, I was at lunch after the graduation of two of my students, they invited me to lunch, and they were having a discussion about how well we must be paid. And I laughed. I didn't go into the details of my salary. But later in later years, they came to understand from other sources, how exploitation functions within the university where they were paying almost quarter of a million to go to school, and graduate school, and so forth. So it's quite shocking that even though we have the internet and all the information is there, anyone can see precisely how much NYU or Columbia cost today, or how much the cost of living is, as opposed to 1961, for instance, that people are still not putting together that when you have housing, that is like income. For most of us, if housing is affordable, the way one lives, the efficiency to live, the ease, the mental health, and physical health improves. And it's fascinating to me that during lockdown, people were told, just to bite the bullet, stay inside, and how many publications, how much of the media went out to discover the many people being locked down in extremely small hovels? Multiple families living in three bedroom houses, even smaller. And I just kept thinking throughout these past 20 months or so that the media has become complicit in everything you've discussed, we've seen an extra tack added on where the media is another arm of industry and the 1% they are able sell lockdown stories: stars singing, Spaniards singing, accordionists from Neapolitan balconies, everyone's happy. But that was a lie. And that was a lie being sold conveniently.

I regularly post stories from CNN, where their recent yacht story—they love yachts—their recent yacht story from about five or six days ago was how the super-rich are “saving” the world's ecology. And it was a paid advertisement of a very expensive yacht that uses nuclear power, what you and I hope: that all the rich people are running around with little mini nuclear reactors on the seas. And I keep thinking: what has happened that you mentioned campaign financing? Remember what happened to Hillary Clinton when she suggested campaign finance reform? That went over like a lead balloon. And then we've got CNN, Forbes, all these major publications that run paid sponsored news articles as news. It's all paid for, they legally have to see it as but you have to find the fine print. And we're being sold the 1% as the class that's going to save the planet with this very bizarre looking yacht with a big ball on it. And another another CNN article about yacht owners was about how it's hard for them to pay for maintenance or something and  we're pulling out our tiny violins.

And I keep wondering, why is the media pushing on this? We can see where MSNBC and CNN and USA today are heading in a lot of their coverage over class issues. They would much rather cover Felicity Huffman, and all those other stars’ children's cheating to get into a California University scandal which is itself its own scandal, of course. That gets so covered, but you rarely see class issues in any of these publications unless it refers to the favelas of Brazil or the shanty towns of Delhi. So, we're sold: poverty isn't here, it's over there. And over here, mask mandates, lock up, shut your doors stay inside do your part clap for the cares and class has been cleared. Cut out. Even in the UK, where class consciousness has a much more deeply ingrained fermentation, let's say within the culture, it's gone. Now the BBC. Similarly, nightly videos at the initial part of lockdown with people clapping for the cares. Little was said about the salaries that some of these carriers were getting, I don't mean just junior doctors there, but the people who are cleaning the hallways. So, our attention has been pushed by the media away from class, not just the politicians doing the dirty work, or not just the nasty finance campaign funding that is well known in the US. What are some of the responses to this, Michael, that we might advance some solutions here? Because my worry, as a person living on this planet is enough is enough: Why can't we just try a new system? Is it that the fall of the Berlin Wall left a permanent divide in terms of what we can experiment with? Or is there something else at play?

Michael Hudson: Well, recently, Ukraine passed a law about oligarchs, and they define an oligarchy as not only owning a big company, but also owning one of the big media outlets. And the oligarchy in every country owns the media. So, of course, CNN, and The New York Times and The Washington Post, are owned by the billionaire class representing the real estate interests and the rentier interests. They're essentially the indoctrination agencies. And so of course, in the media, what you get is a combination of a fantasy world and Schadenfreude—Schadenfreude, when something goes wrong with people you don't like, like the scandal. But apart from that, it's promoting a fantasy, about a kind of parallel universe about how a nice world would work, if everybody earned the money that they had, and the wealth they had by being productive and helping society. All of a sudden, that's reversed and [they] say, “Well, they made a lot of fortune, they must have made it by being productive and helping society.” So, everybody deserves the celebrity, deserves the wealth they have. And if you don't have wealth, you're undeserving and you haven't made a productivity contribution. And all you need is to be more educated, managerial and intelligent, and you can do it. And it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. As soon as you inherit a lot of money, your intelligence, your IQ drops 10%. As soon as you don't have to work for a living and just clip coupons, you write us down another 30%. The stupidest people I've met in my life are millionaires who don't want to think about how they get their money. They just, they're just greedy. And I was told 50 years ago, “You don't need to go to business school to learn how to do business. All you need is greed.” So what are all these business schools for? All they're doing is saying greed is good and giving you a patter talk to say, “Well, yeah, sure, I'm greedy. But that's why I'm productive.” And somehow they conflate all of these ideas.

So, you have the media, and the educational system, all sort of combined into a fantasy, a fantasy world that is to displace your own consciousness about what's happening right around you. The idea of the media is that you don't look at your own position, you imagine other people's position in another world and see that you're somehow left out. So, you can say that the working class in America are very much like the teenage girls using Facebook, who use it and they have a bad self image once they use Facebook and think everybody else is doing better. That's the story in Congress this week. Well, you can say that the whole wage earning class once they actually see how awful the situation is they think, “Well, gee, other people are getting rich. Other people have yard spots, why don't I have my own house? Why am I struggling?” And they think that they're only struggling alone, and that everybody else is somehow surviving when other people are struggling just the way they are. That's what we call losing class consciousness.

Julian Vigo: Yes, well, we're back to Crystal and Alexis wrestling and Dynasty’s fountain. Everyone wants to be like them. Everyone wants a car. You know, I'll never forget when I lived in Mexico City. One of the first things I learned when you jumped into one of those taxis were Volkswagen beetles,  Mexicans would call their driver “Jaime.” And I said to them, why are you guys calling the taxi drivers here “Jaime”? And they said, “We get it from you.” And I said, “What do you mean you get it from us? We don't call our taxi drivers Jaime.”And then I thought and I paused, I said,  “James!” Remember the Grey Poupon commercials? That's what we do—we have James as the driver in a lot of these films that we produced in the 1970s and 80s. And the idea became co-opted within Mexico as if everyone has a British driver named James.

Now, what we have turned into from this serialised, filmic version of ourselves to the present is dystopic. Again, you talked about the percentage of rent that people are paying in the US, the way in which people are living quite worse than their parents. And this is related to student debt, bank debt, credit card debt, we've had scandals directly related to the housing market. We saw that when there were people to be bailed out, they had to be of the wealthy class and companies to be bailed out. There was no bailout for the poor, of course. I was in London during the Occupy Wall Street. In London, it was “occupy the London Stock Exchange” (Occupy LSX) right outside of not even the London Stock Exchange. It was outside of St. Paul's Cathedral. And there was a tent city, and people were fighting ideological warfare from within their tents. There wasn't much organising on the ground. It was disassembled months later. But I wonder why Americans, even with what is called Obamacare, are still not pushing for further measures, why Hillary Clinton's push for or suggestion merely of finance reform within the campaigning system, all of this has sort of been pushed aside.

Are there actors who are able to advance these issues within our current political system in the United States? Or will it take people getting on the streets protesting, to get housing lowered to maybe have national rent controls, not just of the form that we have in New York, which, before I got to New York in the late 80s, everyone was telling me how great rent control was. Now it's all but disappeared? What is the answer? Is it the expropriation of houses? Is it the Cornwall style, no owning more than one house type of moratorium on homeownership? What are the solutions to this, Michael?

Michael Hudson: There is no practical solution that I can suggest. Because the, you're not going to have universal medical care, as long as you have the pharmaceuticals. funding the campaign's of the leading politicians, as long as you have a political system that is funded by campaign contributors, you're going to have the wealthiest classes, and decide who gets nominated and who gets promoted. So, I don't see any line of reform, given the dysfunctional political system that the United States is in. If this were Europe, we could have a third party. And if we had an actual third party, the democratic party would sort of be like the social democratic parties in Europe, it would fall about 8% of the electorate, and a third party would completely take over. But in America, it's a two-party system, which is really one party with different constituencies for each wing of that party, and that one party, the same campaign contributors funds, both the Republicans and the Democrats. So it's possible that you can think of America as a failed state, as a failed economy. I don't see any means of practical going forward, just as you're seeing in the Congress today, when they're unwilling to pass an infrastructure act, there's a paralysis of change. I don't see any way in which a structural change can take place. And if you're having the dynamics that are polarising, only a structural change can reverse this trend. And nobody that I know, no politician that I know, sees any way of the trends being reversed.

Julian Vigo: The funny thing is that scandal, quote-unquote, scandal over Ocasio Cortez's dress at the Met Gala was quite performative to me. It's typical that the media does. “Tax the rich,” as she sits at a function that I believe cost $35,000 to enter. And she socialised the entire night even if she allegedly did not pay either for her dress nor for the entrance. And I'm thinking, isn't this part of the problem: that we have so much of our socio-cultural discourse wrapped up in politics in the same way that Clinton's suggestion that campaign finance reform disappeared quite quickly? Is there any hope of getting campaign finance reform passed in the States?

Michael Hudson: No. Because if you had campaign finance reform, that's how the wealthy people control politics. If you didn't, if you didn't have the wealthy, wealthy people deciding who gets nominated, you would have people get nominated by who wanted to do what the public ones, Bernie Sanders says, “Look, most of them are all the polls show that what democracy, if this were a democracy, we would have socialised medicine, we'd have public health care, we would have free education, we would have progressive taxation.” And yet no party is representing what the bulk of people have. So by definition, we're not a democracy. We're an oligarchy, and the oligarchy controls. I mean, you could say that the media play the role today that the church and religion played in the past to divert attention away from worldly issues towards other worldly issues. That's part of the problem.

But not only the pharmaceutical industries are against public health care, but the whole corporate sector, the employer sector, are against socialised medicine, because right now workers are dependent for their health insurance on their employers. That means Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Chairman said, this is causing a traumatised workers syndrome, the workers are afraid to quit, they're afraid to go on strike. They're afraid of getting fired because if they get fired, first of all, if they're a homeowner they lose their home because they can't pay their mortgage, but most importantly, they lose their health care. And if they get sick, it wipes them out. And they go broke and they lose their home and all the assets.

Making workers depend on the employer, instead of on the government means you're locked into their job. They have to work for a living for an employer, just in order to survive in terms of health care alone. So the idea of the system is to degrade a dependent, wage-earning class and keeping privatising health care, privatising education, and moving towards absentee landlordship is the way to traumatise and keep a population on the road to serfdom.

Also, mentioned in this episode are Michael Bigg’s resarch, “The Tavistock’s Experimentation with Puberty Blockers” and Rachel Rooney’s book, My Body is Me!

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