The independent presidential candidate talks to TRT World about the decline of the American empire, the need to stand up for Gaza and his Muslim running mate.
Independent presidential candidate Cornel West speaks at the University of New Hampshire, Feb. 10, 2020, in Durham, N.H. / Photo: AP
When you actually scratch the surface, I don't think there's going to be any deep differences in regard to policies, both of the imperial policies abroad or the pro-corporate policies within the American empire. Try to preserve your own personal integrity, but you're sullied around the world. But if you look at America solely from the vantage point of the US context, it looks like it's just headed towards self-destruction, headed toward fascism.
And that's part of the economic frustrations of Donald Trump's social base, that they know that the professional-managerial class tied to big money and big military has led toward their economic stagnation.A homeless man sleeps on a discarded mattress in Los Angeles, July 21, 2022. Homeless people in California often struggle with poor health, trauma and deep poverty .
You got 40 percent of the US population in poverty, in low-wage jobs. Some 62 percent of the country lives paycheck to paycheck, in the richest nation in the history of the world.So much of corporate media in the United States is state propaganda. So they won't talk about Gaza, they won't talk about mass incarceration, they won't talk about poverty.
What cause will set in with the new wave of awakening and the new kinds of reckonings? But we know that history has always been this way. I mean, anybody who's been in solidarity with poor people, in solidarity with the vulnerable - kings, queens, monarchs, patriarchs, white supremacists, all these elites who often are unaccountable, every generation.
He had no money flowing in at all. And then, of course, the media, the New York Times and the Washington Post who are just very much state propaganda for what we used to call neoliberals. They turn on him and next thing you know, he's gone. And then finally when he steps back they tell lies about him.
Netanyahu labels American anti-genocide protesters as "useful idiots" and receives a standing ovation.Does that make him progressive in any serious way? Not really. Not one is predicated on apartheid. Not one is predicated on this weaponised hatred and so forth. You can even go back to Hitler. I'm sure he had social democratic projects. There was no unemployment. He made trains run on time.
You think of people who are not just turning a blind eye, but who are aggressively affirming the very agents of genocide, or to put it in philosophical language, we're seeing the worst of the wretchedness of the human species. But the critical scrutiny must proceed. And once you scratch the surface, people are going to see a whole host of things that makes them a little less enthusiastic as opposed to just symbolic moment, because it is important.
Let's look at the role that she plays in terms of imperial policies abroad. Let's look at her relation to corporate elites and economic elites. Let's look at the ways in which her record is tied to criminalising too many parents when their kids didn't show up at school enough, or when she opted for slave labour of the incarcerated, rather than letting them out because she wanted to appear tough on crimes like her career.
We always keep it humanistic and universalist, but it begins on the oppressed side of town. And then our ticket begins on the oppressed and chocolate side of death.TRT World: Why do you think it was necessary to run as a third-party candidate, as an independent candidate? What's problematic for you in the bipartisan US political system?In the American empire, the two dominant parties are both dominated by big money.
Nearly 40 percent of American citizens don't vote at all because they've given up on politics. So much of what my campaign is about is speaking to that 38 percent who give it up, they're disproportionately poor and working class. And yet at the same time, it becomes a question of blaming third-party candidates and third parties.
The lies that conceal the crimes must all be unveiled and revealed. And that's very much what my campaign is about, that my campaign is nothing but a moment in the movement.The lies that conceal the crimes must all be unveiled and revealed. And that's very much what my campaign is about, that my campaign is nothing but a moment in the movement.
But we want to make sure that poor and working people in Brazil have the same kind of attention and spotlight as poor and working people anywhere. But I do believe Russia as a wounded empire deserves security when it comes to its borders. And therefore, I'm against the war in Ukraine. I want to stop that war. I'm in solidarity with the Ukrainians who are suffering. But it was the expansion of NATO that provoked so much of that war when Russia was promised that NATO would not move one inch.
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