Imperialism, Genocide, "Peace," and Sportswashing with Alexander Aviña

Jay: Welcome to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Live. It is good to be with you again today. Shout out to the folks who showed up for the first conversation with Duane Monroe and who are showing up for this one with Alex Avenia. Really excited to get Alex back on the show. We had him on on a couple of like the you know, which we needed to do another fundraiser episode, you know, the Aryan grievances and those kinds of things. But other than that, it had been a little while. We actually hadn't done one, a full one since the anti, you know, the beginning of kind of the, Not the beginning, but the latest iterations of the ICE raids and some of the responses out in LA. And so really glad to have him back on. Also an opportunity to have a guest that my father likes on Democracy Now!, but not on my show. But we'll just... Leave that alone. But Alex is a historian and professor and has done a bunch of work also about a part of the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective, which I definitely encourage people to check out if they are not following that work already. His research focuses on 20th century Mexico with an emphasis on revolutionary movements, the Mexican left, state violence and terrorism, immigration, and the history of narcotics production and trafficking, which of course is relevant to at least part of the discussion or the propaganda around the discussion that we'll have today. Of course, is the author of Specters of Revolution, which is actually behind me this time, unlike in some of our previous discussions. Anyway, without further ado, Alex, it's good to be back with you, my friend. Oh, shoot, you're muted. My bad. I did that. What a rookie mistake. Sorry. Thanks for having me back, Jay. No, it's good to be with you. And let's see. So let's start with, you know, just like... obviously we've had a little, we, it's been a little while since we've done an episode on Venezuela. Right. And on like the, all of these, this, the boat, the ships that are being like all the troops that are being kind of like, um, deployed or I don't even know. They're just like sitting in the Caribbean Ocean, right? Or Caribbean Sea, basically. And, you know, we've had some other conversations. We did have Joe Emersberger on a couple of months ago to talk about, you know, the recent attacks on Venezuela and, you know, Jose Luis Granado Ceja from Venezuela Analysis as well. and then Soviet with Sasson on the Ecuador episode really recently. But there's a lot going on specific to Venezuela, and it really warrants, I think, more attention than we've given it so far. And so, you know, as you're following kind of the developments and, you know, what's going on, I mean, what is your analysis right now of where things stand and where they could be going?

Alexander Aviña: that easy question those those episodes are all really good by the way so uh shout out to all those uh brilliant folks who were on on your show Jay um it's we're in a weird moment I think you know today they tried to present the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado who um U.S. officials and Venezuelan opposition officials had been touting as somehow being able to flee Venezuela in like an Argo-style operation, you know, like the Ben Affleck movie, I'm not even talking about the actual operation, Sina Rahmani's favorite movie. And it doesn't seem like she got out, or she did get out, but she wasn't gonna make it in time to accept the award in Oslo, so I was just watching a little bit of the livestream from her daughter giving, uh some sort of speech um and it's there's there's a lot of things going on that i think are really interesting one is this concerted campaign in uh english english language media in the u.s uh european media led by the venezuelan opposition both you know most of them who are most of whom are in the united states some in mexico maria corina machado obviously somewhere in a basement in venezuela until recently um and just seeing this like the the takes online and the op-eds for weeks now right the the the pushback that this concerted campaign against people who are criticizing potential u.s action in venezuela is it's we should be taking notes um we we should already know this right like a lot of folks have commented on how this is reminds those of us who are old reminds us of early 2000s in the run-up to to iraq So when some people who are skeptical of U.S. intentions in Venezuela started to bring up the Iraq example or the Libya example. Now, for the last few days, we've had a pushback from these scholars and opposition aligned scholars, writers, et cetera, who are engaging that argument and say, no, it's not going to be Iraq. It's not going to be Libya. We may not even need U.S. boots on the ground. We just need to pressure Maduro and get his inner circle to give them an escape route and get them to leave Venezuela and everything's going to be all right. Right. And one of the things that it's really as a historian, one of the insulting things of the narratives that the Venezuelan opposition have been offering um in the past few months is this idea that venezuela was some sort of utopia almost until hugo chavez won the elections in the late 1990s and then it all went to so you know and this is this happens you know for those of for those folks who know a little bit about like revolutions in latin america those are the narratives that all the the objectively defined losers of a revolutionary process will construct whether they're in their country or whether they're outside their country. Everything was great until these evil revolutionaries somehow seized power, tricked everybody, and then poverty ensued and people lost their homes and their fincas, their land, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what we've been seeing. I mean, Maria Corina Machado's daughter, that was a narrative that she was presenting this morning in Oslo, that Venezuela once had a vibrant democracy. And then the evil Hugo Chavez won an election and destroyed it. Obviously, that's a flattening of history. It's leaving out a lot of things. But this is a really compelling narrative for people in Europe and the United States who don't have much of a historical grounding in the history of a place like Venezuela. So that's one thing that's really, I've been trying to track, right? Like really influential think tankers, intellectual scholars, media people in the United States who have been seemingly waging a really highly organized systematic discursive campaign to kind of prepare the ground for some sort of military intervention, US military intervention in Venezuela that hopefully will not happen because that would be a catastrophe on many levels, particularly causing mass human suffering. In terms of the boats, I mean, we've talked about this. I think you've talked about this with some of your guests, and I've talked about this on other platforms. I mean, I think especially with Joe Emersberger, I mean, we think that there's a direct connection between what Israel has been doing in West Asia in the last two years, three years, and with the type of extrajudicial executions that the US has conducted in the Caribbean. Almost 90 people executed now since the attacks began. We're really hearkening to the type of extrajudicial executions that Israel conducted and is still conducting in Gaza as we speak, but also in Lebanon and in Iran and in Yemen. So there's all sorts of ways that we can connect what's going on in the Caribbean with what's going on in West Asia, especially. I, I still find it really difficult to believe that the US is somehow going to engage Venezuela militarily and some sort of like large scale invasion, particularly because we haven't seen the movement of assets that would indicate so maybe that we have, you know, I think the estimate that I saw is 10 to 20% of US naval assets are in the Caribbean right now we had a really close if not an actual violation of Venezuelan airspace yesterday by a couple of US warplanes from the USS Gerald Ford, which is the world's largest aircraft carrier. So obviously I think at this point we should all understand, I'll stop rambling, but at this point we should understand that this has nothing to do with narco trafficking. This has nothing to do with the US trying to stop fentanyl from coming into United States because fentanyl doesn't come to the United States from Venezuela. This is about trying to induce regime change or regime collapse on the cheap. Right, because to actually accomplish this, I think would still require some sort of large scale U.S. military intervention that fortunately, to this point, we don't see that level of commitment being expressed by by the the Orange Klansman himself.

Jay: Yeah, I mean, there's a there's a first of all, you weren't rambling. That was great. Appreciate it as always. I struggle with my thoughts around all of it and what to make of all of it because it seems like some of it is just really trying to put pressure on Maduro to step down and take some kind of deal to whatever, like leave the country for somewhere or to just sort of... They can't win, you know, electorally or through other means. The sanctions have not worked. You know, he's figured out how, you know, not he, but the Venezuelan country is, you know, government has figured out how to basically, you know, last time I talked about to folks from that were like, have been on the ground in Venezuela a while ago was, you know, Sierra Pascual Martina and Chris Gilbert, you know, several months ago. But They really talk about how there's been a significant economic recovery actually in the last few years in Venezuela to the extent that they're really not experiencing the level of hardship, which absolutely was there with the sanctions and at the height of it, probably during the first Trump administration. And so you kind of see this where it feels like the Marco Rubio like you know he hates nobody more than socialists in latin america right and um you know you just have an administration that's really set on trying to get regime change um you know by any means but yeah i mean i guess the question i've always had about invasion i mean invasion i agree seems less likely to me because The amount of defense I think you would have from the Venezuelan people all the way from just, you know, ordinary folks from, you know, because they arm, you know, citizen militias basically within Venezuela to the military, etc. Just would be, you know, to you wouldn't I just don't think that would be likely. I don't know what kind of air defense or how well Venezuela is situated to be able to defend against U.S. military planes and drones and things like that. Do you have any sense of that, Alex?

Alexander Aviña: No, I am not a military expert by any means of the imagination. But no, I think we can safely assume that there would be some level of defense, but I mean, it'd be asymmetrical. And there's people within the Trump administration that have discussed this possibility, right? And this is something... this is part of the maddening part, right? That we're just seeing the repetition of processes that we've witnessed before. I mean, like, so just going back into history, right? Like the US effort to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban revolutionary government began like the same year that they took power from Batista in 1950, like by September of 1959, you have, we have declassified US government documents talking about how, you know what, it's probably not a good thing that this guy Fidel is emerging, not just as a Cuban leader, but as a regional leader. So we need to, we, the US, we need to decide whether he should stay in power. And if you look at declassified stuff up to the run-up to the Bay of Pigs intervention in the spring, April of 1961, a lot of that operation is premised on the idea that as soon as he's like, Cuban paramilitaries are able to and their CIA assets are able to successfully establish a beachhead that like the Cuban people yearning for freedom were going to flock to them and overthrow what we now know was a popularly supported revolutionary process. And you see kind of like, I know it's obviously it's dangerous to make historical analogies and comparisons in this way. It's a different context, especially. But again, a lot of that, like there's a New York Times op-ed this morning that is talking about how more or less how easy it would be to get Maduro to leave power. and then have some sort of democratic transition without an overt U.S. military intervention. So anytime we hear these claims, we should be highly skeptical, no matter what the country, no matter what the context, right? It's a lot messier, man. And You know, Venezuela has been experiencing economic warfare for nearly a decade. You know, Obama left office designating Venezuela as somehow as constituted a national security threat to the United States. The situation has been catastrophic as a consequence of this economic war by some of the studies that have been done by like CIPER and other scholars. But that shouldn't translate into any sort of understanding that says, yes, achieving any sort of a regime change in Venezuela is going to be this easy thing. But again, it's because this campaign is being... organized and designed and propagated by a very particular segment of the Venezuelan society, which is the opposition. They're just throwing different arguments to convince both Americans and the Trump administration that one, we should engage in military-induced regime change in Venezuela, and two, that it's not gonna be Libya, it's not gonna be Iraq, and it's gonna be something different. um we should remain highly skeptical of this we should always be skeptical of this and there's a broader picture and we see this now with what happened in ecuador recently where the referendum and what is ongoing right now in honduras with their elect their electoral mess that has obviously involves u.s meddling and intervention um in ways that we've seen publicly and probably in clandestine ways that we will have to wait a bit to to find out about it's a broader push right and this has to do with You know, this goes back to the spring when someone like so-called Secretary of War Pete Hegseth went to the Panama and said, like, to be America, you know, America first means America's first. And we've talked about this on this show, right? U.S. anytime a U.S. president or political politician is talking about U.S. isolationism, what that means is a retrenchment of the Monroe Doctrine and U.S. empire in the Americas. And we just saw that formalized in written form a couple of days ago with this new national security strategy that the Trump administration put out, which is all about the Trump administration withdrawing. Well, on the one hand, recognizing that China is a much more potent near peer adversary that they had anticipated. They see that the tariffs that they were implementing wildly earlier this year are not working. So instead of confronting China head on, they're going to, quote unquote, come home and reassert the Monroe Doctrine, reassert the Roosevelt corollary. And they added their own Trump corollary, which is also like really ill-defined. Like we kind of don't know what that is other than like sheer violence and revanchism over the region. They're treating Europe in a really particular way that we can talk about. But a lot of this has to do, again, they're trying to reassert control over Latin America and the Caribbean in light of China. And I think this is something that we have to keep repeating and we sometimes some analysts miss out. I just watched the recent video that Ben Norton posted that I thought was really useful. If people want to check it out on his channel, he makes a really good he makes good connections between this national security program just, you know, just written out by Trump administration as almost like an acceptance of defeat. or realism vis-a-vis the power of China. And this is why the US is quote unquote coming home and reasserting its dominance over the region. And part of reasserting that dominance is to get right wing rulers into power and to get rid of the last vestiges of the pink tide and social democracy that much of the region had accomplished beginning in the early 2000s.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it involves rigging elections and everything else, right? Because it's just, this is not, you know, I mean, it changes from context to context, but in a lot of countries, you know, they're asking, they're trying to get people who are unpopular elected, basically, or, you know, don't represent a majority of folks' views, for sure. Generally, that's the rule.

Alexander Aviña: Yeah, generally, like that's the rule, like actually the US, especially since World War Two, like the US actually sending military forces into a Latin American country to achieve regime change. It's it's it's hasn't happened very many times. We have the Dominican Republic in the mid 1960s. We have Grenada in the early 1980s. We have Panama in 1989. Panama is another analogy that's been invoked by some of the regime changers, which I think is interesting. But that's about it. Right. The rest is CIA shenanigans, election meddling, assassinations, et cetera, et cetera. And part of the reason why that's the M.O. or economic warfare to not to forget that one, like what they did to Chile in the early 1970s. One of the reasons that this becomes the rule for US intervention in Latin America is it's cheaper politically and materially and economically, one. And two, this allows them to exacerbate already existing internal divisions and conflict and polarization that exists within these Latin American societies. I think it's the declassified CIA document that I use for one of my classes from the late 60s where the analyst who's writing the report says, look, there's already like fires in some of these Latin American countries. We just have to kind of pour a little gasoline on the fire. And this is why it works, right? It's not this unilateral imposition of US power on these, you know, poor victim countries. No, it's that there's already internal political, social and economic conflicts that then the CIA uses with the help of local proxies and allies and elites to foment social divisions, social, in some instances, civil war and coup d'etats. And it's during the Cold War, it's always like the military, a Latin American military, Latin American landed elite, parts of the bourgeoisie and like the institutional Catholic church. And those become the allies for what the US is trying to do. And I think we have, to a certain extent, we have a return to that in a place like Honduras. Just by releasing this narco president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, on the eve of the election is a way of electoral meddling. The guy who was convicted in US court of trafficking 400 tons of cocaine, who is caught on record saying, we are gonna shove up all these drugs up the noses of gringos. Trump releases him at the same time that he says he's he's waging war against drugs in the Caribbean by blowing up these boats that most likely have nothing to do with, you know, drug running coming out of Venezuela. Part of this just also just we've said this a lot, but definitely the mask is off. And this is one of the. things I think we can think Trump for is that there is no effort to there's a, it's a really poor, uh, sometimes contradictory effort to kind of legitimize what they're doing in the Americas, but it's pretty obvious. And that, that, that contrast between what they're doing in the Caribbean with extra digitally executing people on boats and then releasing like a narco president. I mean, like what else can you say at that point?

Jay: Yeah, no, absolutely. Um, it, it. hypocrisy doesn't you know never fails um so this is another thing that's happened is you you know we are seeing some people now i think actually including some republicans but you know speak out about um some of the the strikes on the boats and in particular I mean, what I find fascinating is like how, like what parts of it they object to, right? It's not like wholesale, like we can't do this, right? Like it's not, it's not wholesale, like, you know, You can't accuse people of drug trafficking and then assassinate them, right? It's not that. It's basically like, you know, I saw one congressperson, I don't actually know who this was, but I saw a little clip from him and he was like talking about you know what's in the Department of Defense manual and like the first example of what you can't do is that you can't strike a shipwreck and he watched one of the clips which I don't think has been released publicly yet but where um you know there's a first strike on a boat right and then doesn't not everybody dies right and this is part of the controversy too within the military of you know people saying hegseth was the one who ordered like you know hit it again or uh you know kill everybody on board right these kind of you know things and um that they struck the shipwreck right and so you know i don't i have a lot of you know, cynicism about these limited appeals and also just kind of like one referring to DoD doctrine as, you know, something that, you know, is neutral or positive, right? But also just in light of all of what we've seen, you know over the last couple of years you know in gaza in yemen in lebanon you know in syria in iran um this invocation that something is outside of the rules of war or outside of you know international law on how you are supposed to you know conduct things like this when in fact i mean even by engaging in drone strikes against ships in international waters like they're already

Alexander Aviña: carving out new lanes of what is sort of possible within international law um so what do you what do you think about that kind of this discussion I guess it isn't I mean I've been thinking about this Jay like why this particular incident of a double tapping uh a boat has provoked has finally awakened some sort of opposition and and uh Criticism from the Democratic Party. Right. I think one reason is because it's a clearly blatant violation of not just like international law, but like maritime law. Right. Like you can't do that. You're not supposed to do that. I think there's different rules and rules and laws of engagement on land when it comes to a similar situation. But like on in the seas, you're not supposed. This is old. I don't. This is like an old, old, like maritime law. uh standard or law um and this is and it's interesting I think also to think about why this kind of freaked out the Trump administration I mean they've been going to great lengths to try to defend this one where the other ones I don't think they've expended much effort they just say uh there was narcos on there um you know Trump after one of the boats was blown up Trump was like saying things like you could see the drugs the fentanyl floating on the water it's like come on But this one is, it did hit something, right? And this is why even like Heg said through that admiral or commanding officer under the bus, essentially, right? He said, I didn't give the order, I left the room, that military officer did, but we have his back. And you can imagine what kind of impact that's gonna have like in terms of morale within the US military. Like, oh, this guy who said he's all about the troop, he's actually the first instance he gets challenged, he's already throwing people under the bus, which is what he did effectively. And this is why we've seen so much expenditure of efforts to say, well, you know, these two guys who survived the first strike, like they get into the minutia of it to justify why they deserve a double tap, right? That they were trying to call for help or whatever, like just ridiculous argumentation. But for a while, the Democrats were really more or less silent on just the issue of extrajudicial executions of people in the Caribbean. And it was like Rand Paul was one of the only ones actually speaking out against it consistently since these strikes began. Why is that? It's because who handed over this system, both legal and material and infrastructure of drone strikes, who handed that over to the Trump administration? It was Obama and it was Biden. Like it was Obama who ramped up drone strikes, like as a rule, as a form of conducting military warfare, right? Like, you know, it started in the waning days of George W. Bush, but it was really the Obama administration who ramped it up and put it on steroids, both the actual practice of drone strikes and then creating a legal infrastructure to justify the droning of children in parts of Pakistan, in Yemen, in other parts of the world. so just like the deportation machine that obama handed over to trump during the first administration they handed that over in terms of drone strikes and that type of warfare as well so of course democrats if they start speaking out against this then as some right-wingers online and politics have done is to say well you guys did it too And you have this situation where you're like, let them fight, but people are dying. People are being executed without any sort of due process just because the US can do it. And they don't have to offer much more rationale to support it other than to create these fantastical stories about fentanyl and cocaine being placed on these small go boats that somehow are going to traverse the length of the Caribbean to make it into the United States. But I mean, what this shows that this what Trump is doing now in the Caribbean is a thoroughly bipartisan creation because U.S. empire is a bipartisan creation. And this is why Democrats find it really difficult to I think one reason why they find it really difficult to push back. I mean, they're not anti imperialist, obviously, but also I think some of the smarter ones recognize that they had a hand in creating this. I mean, some of them that used to be in the CIA know this, right? They just went from the CIA to the Senate and they know this history. So, you know, I don't, this is why I think that the Democrats are really focusing on like this one strike as opposed to the entire campaign or offering some sort of like large scale critique of the national security plan that Trump has just laid out, right? Like it's, we just don't like that way of doing empire. We like doing a different type of like empire light, which is more, relies on different forms of soft power, of more subtle ways of inducing of managing elections, of kind of, you know, putting, tipping the scale in direction of the US. I mean, to Biden's credit, like he did do a couple of things. I can't believe I'm going to say to Biden's credit, but he did do a couple of things, right? Like, and it's such a low, low baseline, but like in the last Brazilian election between Lula and Bolsonaro, like the fact that Biden and his people came out and said like, we're going to respect the electoral process. If Lula wins, like we're going to back that. It's a totally low baseline that that should be always be like the normal thing. But that made a difference, right? Similarly, something similar happened in the last Guatemalan elections for the presidency. I mean, that was the fact that the U.S. said we're going to, again, low, low baseline. We are not going to meddle and we're going to respect the electoral process. And then when the right wing in Guatemala started to engage in some pretty, you know, overt, you know, techniques and methods of undermining the electoral process, the US actually said very clearly publicly, like, this is not right. Like, we stand with the winner. Arevalo. But all in all, in the end, this is a bipartisan imperial creation, this drone strike plan, and generally how the U.S. deals with Latin America in general. The methods are different, perhaps, but the broader idea that this is the backyard, despite the fact that Biden promoted Latin America for a little bit to the front yard, the idea is that the Americas still belong to the U.S., The US is, there's an op-ed in the New York Times from like the 1850s, where it says, we are already in the 1850s, the US is saying, we are the controlling power on these continents and we're gonna exercise that power. So again, methods differ, but the overall rationale remains the same, that the Americas belong to United States. It's just that Trump, like always, is much more ham-fisted, clear and direct about it. And this is what we're seeing right now in the Caribbean.

Jay: What do you think about, So, I mean, there's kind of two threads on this that I just want to talk about a little bit more. One is obviously like the narco trafficking thing, right? And like what this, I mean, this is a longstanding propaganda project. It's also, you know, connected, of course, to, you know, the war on drugs and how that has been used, you know, in terms of U.S. imperialism in the Americas, right? There's also, of course, the whole anti-immigration deportation politics of this administration. And then on the flip side, it's also like the more chaos that they sow within South America, within Latin America, within the Caribbean, the more flows of migrants you know are going to be created by this like that's this is why we have migration right is because of uh you know us imperialism largely so um so i mean Like the policy seems self-contradictory to me on a lot of levels, you know, and maybe that's fine and they just want to manage that, you know, they just figure, well, we can just keep spinning these narratives and managing these contradictions. But what are your thoughts on that?

Alexander Aviña: Yeah, I think, yeah, there's obvious contradictions, but in a way they're also like productive contradictions, right? So if they... they i think the trump administration and we've seen this in other parts of the world like regime change they don't really need regime change they just need regime collapse And that is a productive thing, like what we see in the Sudan, what we see in other parts of the world where you can have regime or Libya, you can have regime collapse, but you still have political and economic interests that these different imperial powers can still exercise as long as they have control over certain parts of these countries. They don't need the whole thing. They don't need a stable government to be exercising control over the entire geography of a particular nation. This is why I think an entity like the RSF in Sudan is like a model for now and for the future, right? Like, which is really scary to think about. So you don't need, the UAE doesn't need the RSF to control all of the Sudan. They just need it to cause chaos and to control certain aspects of it that are in line with the UAE's economic and political dictates. And I think, I think we may be, we've, we see something similar perhaps in Latin America where the, if they continue to cause chaos or induce even more chaos in Venezuela and we have more migrants and refugees leaving that country, we've already seen that for the last 10 years. And what has been one of the results? It's been politically productive for the right wing in Latin America and in the United States. The issue of migration and refugees has not just led to a right-wing push in the United States. It's led to a right-wing push in other Latin American countries, like in Chile. In Chile, we're gonna have presidential elections pretty soon, and the son of a Nazi is going to win. Hopefully, I'm hoping for an upset, but it looks like Kast is going to win. He's like, his dad was a Nazi, right? This is like a Roberto Bolaño novel, like playing out before our eyes. One of the issues is migration, right? Venezuelan refugees and refugees from other countries coming into Chile and then the right wing using that issue and tagging it to questions of crime, questions of the exhaustion of social safety, etc. Things that we've seen in the US. So in that sense, it's a productive the chaos that then distributes refugees and migrate migrants throughout the Americas is a productive thing for the right wing. And you see it in a place like like in Chile. And we obviously have seen it in a place like, like the United States. So I think these people, the Trump and Trump and his people, I don't know about Trump, but his people know that their policies toward Venezuela and other Latin American countries generate the very contradictions that they say they're fighting against at home. But it's a productive thing. I think, right? Like that's, they, they want to be able to say that they, their southern border wall that they're creating and their deployment of the u.s military to the southern border is something that's actually working right so they don't give a shit if migrants are showing up to the border as long as they don't get to the u.s that does something for them politically um it shows them it's being hard and and effective against migrants which is again like such a it's the core it's at the core of trumpism if there is such a thing as trumpism is is It's revanchist politics towards migrants and people of color, but particularly migrants and refugees. So yeah, I think this is such an obvious thing that people like Marco Rubio, who right now is both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. I think the only other time that that's actually been a thing in US history is with Henry Kissinger, so not good. But they must realize that On the one hand, their economic and military policies generate the very things that they say they're against domestically. But again, for them, that's just a way to connect their domestic politics versus foreign politics. And there is actually no border, right? Like it's the same thing to them. And this is why I keep going back to that Hegseth speech in Panama, where he's like, it's America's first. It's not just America, it's America's first. And again, there's a long history of that. The US, because it sees the region as its backyard, as its own territory, it doesn't count as foreign. So that's why someone like Trump or Hegseth or other people can go and say, well, we are still isolationists. We don't do foreign wars. This isn't a foreign war. This is just part of our backyard. It's a counter-narco terrorist operation. It doesn't count as a foreign war. Think about the legitimating premises of all this. There's a connection between the war on terror, the war on migrants, and the war on drugs. These things have to operate at the same time to legitimize what Trump is doing in the Caribbean. So he's attacking these boats because they're accusing Venezuela of being a narco-terrorist state. but at the same time, Venezuelan refugees and migrants that have left their country as a consequence of U.S. economic war, then all of them are tagged as narco-terrorists as well, right? Like their anti-immigrant policies are dictated on them being, that Tren de Aragua is invading the United States, and then that therefore justifies the deployment of ICE and the Border Patrol throughout the United States. And then all this comes within the confines of the war on terror. Right. Like the fact that they can launch these attacks on Venezuela. Well, if they're narco terrorists, they don't need to go to Congress. Right. Because they're still operating on that authorization, the use of force that goes back to like 9-11 and that Obama also used repeatedly to justify all the drone strikes that they launched throughout large parts of the world. So that's how these three things are working together to justify what we're seeing in the Caribbean. And again, if that's the case, then what leg do the Democrats have to stand on? Because they participated in making this triad of US imperial terror. So to be an effective opposition, they would have to break that. And I don't see many Democrats trying to break it. If anything, what you see is even Democrats who identify as left as, you know, resorting to just the old, oh, well, there's these dictators in Latin America and I'm against them, but I'm against what Trump is doing against them. Like no one gives a shit of trying to thread that needle, right? I won't name any names about who was doing that, but we all know, yeah, who's doing this.

Jay: Wow, I'll say, yeah, Mamdani, others, yes. It's, I don't know why, I mean, yeah. That is really specifically frustrating, actually, to me, you know, is just like the the need for these kind of social democratic politicians to participate in this in this way. I mean, it's very similar, actually, in the way that a lot of them, you know, honestly handled the Gaza war where they would say, you know. well, first of all, I'm against October 7th and against Hamas and against... Start with all the condemnations, right? And then you go to but you know we need to respect international law and you know maybe we should send a few less you know bombs if you know Israel isn't going to you know is going to violate whatever you know like these kind of things of and it took a very long time for a lot of those people to even you know utter the word genocide in a lot of you know cases so yeah um so this is going to seem like a really sharp pivot, I think, to people. Alex and I have been talking for a while about having a conversation about sports washing. First of all, I did want to get you on to talk about everything that just talked about but i also did want to talk about this concept of sports washing and just i mean what we have there's a few different questions i have around it but maybe we could just start by talking about what it is and say a little bit about the work of sports scholars for palestine as well

Alexander Aviña: Yeah, so I would encourage people to look up and to follow on social media platforms this organization called Sports Scholars for Justice in Palestine who are doing some really important work in trying to, you know, they were trying to organize, one of their earliest campaigns was to organize a fundraising campaign for a Gaza, a guys, a cycling team. Right now they are a signatory to a, you know, brief that will, a legal brief that will be submitted to the International Criminal Court on behalf of Palestinian athletes that have been, well, it specifically deals with Israel using occupied territories for athletic activities, particularly football Trump said we should call it football. So we are calling it football now, not soccer. So it's just again, this organization is doing really important work to try to highlight how Israel and its backers are using sports. um one for sports washing right this deployment of of soft power to erase what they're actually doing in terms of like furthering genocide but then also how sports functions as a structural element in the oppression of palestinians in the occupied territories right so it's not so when we and we can think about this as we expand our conversation it's not that sports are some sort of like epiphenomenal distraction to the quote unquote real hard imperialist things, genocidal things that are going on. But an organization like the Sports Scholars for Justice in Palestine would say that sports is actually a structural element within that broader process, particularly if we see the economics of it or in a place like Israel setting up professional football clubs in the occupied territories and using and taking West Bank lands to further those efforts. And obviously, and then, you know, actually executing and killing hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian footballers and athletes and coaches and trainers and, you know, using, you know, earlier on in the genocide, you know, using football stadiums in Gaza as torture centers, which evoked some of the worst, one of the worst, some of the worst memories of state terrorism in Cold War Latin America, like what Pinochet did with the national stadium in Chile after the coup in September 11th, 1973. So the hard pivot, it might seem like a hard pivot, Jay, I guess, because we go from what we just described to sports. But I guess our thesis or argument would be that sports is actually a structural feature of everything that we've just described in a variety of different ways. It's not just this simple distraction or bread and circus effort. There is some to that, but it is something. I think it's a way to kind of track power. in the world today and actually track power in a way that just doesn't focus or concentrate on the United States, but allows us to kind of track the operation of imperialist power to its proxies and to its allies, particularly with Israel and these entities like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Jay: Yeah. No, and we're going to get into all of that. I mean, this last week, you had FIFA give Trump a peace award, right? Because he didn't he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize this last time around. I think, unfortunately, he probably will get it next year unless they can find someone that needs as much of an imperial glow up as Maria Machado did. But she dedicated it to him, though, to be fair. So she tried. She's trying to give it to him, I think. So I mean, what You know, we could talk about what you made of this, but also, you know, FIFA is a big, you know, obviously it's been a target of people's organizing. And, you know, it's obviously because of its role within soccer and within, you know, football and the World Cup, you know, it's a big and important entity within, you know, this analysis. So talk a little bit about it. Oh, man.

Alexander Aviña: Well, let's just say, I guess we can start by this stating that football is the most popular sport in the world, right? It commands the loyalty and the love and the affinity of billions of people across the globe, myself included, even though I'm horribly, you know, I have internal feelings about it. But, you know, I played, you know, I played football growing up. I played football in college. My kids play it. I watch it. I watch probably too much of it. But And that puts me in line with billions of people. Right. And this is what makes it a powerful force in the everyday lives of people across the globe. And FIFA is the international organization that allegedly manages football on a global scale. And they're like, you know, one of the most corrupt, one of the most horrific entities that exist. I mean, I think and we saw it on display at the most recent event. at the world cup draw last week where you had the president of FIFA Gianni Infantino, just, I mean, he's been despicable. He's been such a bootlicker to Trump for the last few months, because again, his, his incentive is to make sure that the world cup next year in 2026, which will be hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada will unfold without a hitch. And he knows that Trump is a potentially big roadblock and factor in preventing the successful unfolding of the world cup that, you know, I don't know how detailed we have to go. I don't know. I'm going to assume that everyone knows that every four years is a World Cup and it changes venues. So Infantino for months now has been really courting Trump. And I think in There was an incident earlier this year where Infantino went to the Oval Office and actually, I think, took the World Cup trophy, which is this really historic trophy given to the winner, the national team winner of the World Cup. And Trump didn't want to let go of it or wanted it to stay in the White House during the duration until after the World Cup was over. There you go. Yeah, it's like right there, actually. So Infantino's response was to develop, particularly after the Nobel Peace Prize was announced and Machado won and Trump didn't, despite the fact that Trump says he's brought peace to what, eight or nine different armed conflicts. Infantino's solution was to develop... Oh, I know how to get him. I'm going to develop my own FIFA Peace Prize. And then I think they created a trophy that's kind of similar to the World Cup trophy and gave that to Trump. And they presented it to Trump at the World Cup draw festival that was last Friday, which was just too... It was an awful... I think people who are actual fans of the sport can pan this thing. I mean, it was two hours of just... It's horrific. It took a long time to get to the actual World Cup draw. The people who were involved were, I think, pretty awful. The fact that Infantino, the president of FIFA, gave Trump this consolation peace prize, and then Trump was actually there and gave a speech. It's just a mess, right? It's a spectacle. It's a spectacle of powerful people and how they are... you know, pretty cynically using a sport that billions of people around the world enjoy and follow and support as a way to kind of, you know, to advance certain political agendas. And that's what leads us to this World Cup draw last Friday. I think it was pretty embarrassing, I think. It's what happens when you have, I would say, an event run by Americans who know very little about the sport, but then you give them the full... I mean, you had an instance where Wayne Gretzky couldn't read the names of countries. So when the draw is happening and you're pulling out the little piece of paper and saying, oh, this country goes in group whatever, uh when north macedonia came up he said something like north macadamia when curacao came up which is the smallest country in the world cup he called them caracao i mean it's like come on man like at least get someone who can read right like poor wayne gretzky's just looking like an idiot up there but it's just that that spectacle i think encompasses a lot of the um A lot of what FIFA is, but a lot of what FIFA has become and is acting like under Trump. If the U.S. wasn't hosting, co-hosting the World Cup, I don't think we would see this perhaps. But, you know, Infantino is kissing the ring because he knows he has to to get this World Cup to proceed smoothly next summer.

Jay: I don't usually do anything to defend the honor of Americans, but I will say that Wayne Gretzky is Canadian.

Alexander Aviña: And so, you know, that's actually some... Yeah, Shaquille O'Neal and Tom Brady were able to read their little slips of paper. And Aaron Judge, they were able to read theirs just fine. I don't know. So maybe the Canadian public education system has failed for Wayne Gretzky. So who knows?

Jay: Yeah. So, I mean, I think... One of the things I did want to talk a little bit more with you about, you've already kind of alluded to it in a couple of examples. We did do an episode about a week ago. I don't remember exactly a week, maybe a week and a half ago about Sudan. And, you know, there are, you know, a lot of campaigns now similar, kind of evolving, similar to like BDS, right, with respect to UAE. because of the backing of the RSF and also I mean UAE has been involved as a proxy uh in backing you know forces in Syria and other places as well right um and they play this you know sub-imperial role or this kind of Western proxy war in the Middle East or role in the Middle East um and so that there's the you know that's one example there is obviously saudi arabia which is also you know a very much a western proxy or has like strong relationships client state whatever people want to use as their kind of descriptor of their role regionally um but they also you know have been you know like creating golf leagues and you know buying up you know uh different teams and things like this right and i mean this a lot of this is getting actually kind of interesting because in some of the sports for instance there are rules about like what percentage of a team can be actually owned internationally um you know and they're trying to figure out ways sort of to like well how can we do this to get more of this money from you know other countries actually in and of course it's not you know these are all countries that have this wealth partly because of their relationships as well as like their resources um So maybe talk, and then Israel, of course, you talked a little bit about it already, but it has its own kind of sports washing. And so the reason I bring up these three examples, right, is that they are all examples of, you know, countries who are engaged in a lot of things that, you know, people would consider human rights abuses or, you know, war crimes or things like this, right? And yet one of the ways that they, you know, kind of continue to promote their image is through sports, which is part of why also there were all of these efforts to, you know, make sure that, well, I mean, Israel didn't make the World Cup, right? But it was like, if they make it, then they wanted FIFA to ban them. And Jared Ball actually said, I think on a recent live, I heard him say that he actually wanted them to make it so that then there would be, you know,

Alexander Aviña: pressure and movement to make them you know not participate or whatever but yeah anyway that's a big risk i'm glad we didn't have to take that risk um because no i think there's been it for a long time now for years now there's been a red card israel campaign um that has been trying to push Definitely UEFA. So FIFA is like an international organizing body for soccer. But then there's like regions, right? And each region of the world has their own governing body. So UEFA is the European one. And Israel has been a part of... So Israel is part of the European... Football Confederation, which I think is interesting.

Jay: They're in all of the European stuff. They're Euro Cup, Euro League, Euro... What is it? Their pop star? I forget what it's called. Eurovision.

Alexander Aviña: That's having some issues too. Israel's Football Federation was a part of the Asian Football Confederation from the early 1950s up until 1974 when they're expelled in... after the the 1973 war um and they're kind of like they don't they're not the football federation isn't aligned with any regional uh organization until the early 90s when the european um governing body waifa accepts them and this is why israel does Their national team, when they try to qualify for a World Cup, they're playing in the European qualifiers. Their horrible club teams will play. Their horrible hooligans will play in European club competitions. So teams like Maccabee Tel Aviv, who... Famous infamously last November went to play a game in Amsterdam against Ajax of Amsterdam, one of the more famous teams in Holland. And they were going around, you know, chanting things like no children left in Gaza and tearing down Palestinian Palestinian flags outside of homes. And, you know, local communities decided to give them a little rinsing and some of them ended up getting pushed into canals. And then the story that emerged from that was like anti-Semitism, all these like horrifically anti-Semitic Netherlands people just attacked these innocent Maccabee Tel Aviv soccer hooligans. when we now know that it was we know who started it and this is part of a you know this is part of a long-standing thing where any time uh almost any time that an israeli club goes to play particularly since 2023 when they go to a european capital they they're known for their horrific chance i mean you can find this stuff online you uh Beitar Jerusalem is probably the worst offender of this. They have a fan group called La Familia, and their chant is like death to Arabs. But since October of 2023, they've added even more horrific chants that they will chant when they go to these European cities. And if they encounter any sort of pushback, then... I guess since we're talking about soccer, we can use the analogy of they take a dive, you know, they take a dive and then it creates a whole narrative that justifies them. So, Yeah, and we've seen actually when the IDF invaded Gaza and took over parts of Han Yunis and other cities, you have individual IDF soldiers put soccer banners, their favorite club banners over the ruins of an apartment or of a home in Han Yunis or other places of Gaza, right? So it's like, or they would post a picture of the rubble and then would like underneath it would do like the slogan of their favorite club team in Israel, right? So- um it's just a very direct uh connection between sport and football and in the genocide in gaza that idf soldiers themselves have have articulated and some of these football hooligans that travel from israel to different european capitals when when their club teams travel as well i think i can't remember the name of the israeli club that went to greece last year where they some of the hooligans of this club team nearly beat to death um a protester uh who was you know trying to challenge their their use of these horrifically genocidal slogans um so there's so that red card campaign has been around for a while and you know since october of 2023 it's gay it's gained renewed attention and momentum and part of what and this is kind of the I think one of the things that sport can do is to expose the hypocrisy, the imperial hypocrisies of governing bodies like UEFA and the countries that are running it. So what gave, since October 2023, this campaign to get UEFA and FIFA to expel Israel from football because they've killed, they're conducting a genocide. They've killed hundreds and not thousands of athletes and footballers in the West Bank and especially in Gaza. And UEFA has more or less just keeps punting this. They say they're gonna have a vote and then they just push it down and push it down and push it down. And, you know, particularly since Trump came into office, it's looked like it's not gonna be a thing that happens, particularly now that we see Infantino, the president of FIFA, like really, you know, being close to Trump. but what offers the contrast is what wefa did to russia uh when it when it invaded ukraine in what 2022 like within a week waifu had expelled russia from its football federation it had expelled its club teams from playing in european competitions it forced the russian owner of a premier league an english premier league club chelsea it forced them to sell the club because of the war in Ukraine. So the organizers of the Red Card Israel campaign and other similar efforts have constantly pointed to that. And UEFA and FIFA just come back and they'll say it's a different situation. It's a different situation. It's not the same thing. But for an average person who's watching this, they see the contradiction. They see that in almost every European league when they broadcast their games, they'd have for a while, for at least a year or two in the upper right hand or left hand corner of the TV, there was like a Ukraine flag. At the same time that there's a genocide being committed in Palestine and UEFA is being silent. You had a couple of European professional footballers fired from their teams because they had the temerity to speak out against the genocide in Gaza, particularly a player, Anwar El Ghazi, who was fired from his German club. And I think now he's playing in West Asia somewhere in some West Asian league. um which is another thing to think about there's been very few professional athletes in the us or europe that have actually spoken out against the genocide in west asia which is which is a shame right because we know from history that um you know very prominent public figure professional athletes their voice matters in speaking out against you know, imperialism against war, against genocide. But we've seen almost none of that since since October of 2023, which which is a real shame. So we're left with these grassroots campaigns that are constantly confronted with entities that don't really give a shit about them and they don't mind being hypocritical and they'll just keep punting the issue down the road.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. So that was I might mispronounce it, but Maccabee Tel Aviv was the Israeli team that was in Greece with their hooligans. Yeah, and also just wanted to shout out Claudia in the chat from Black Alliance for Peace. They have a movement. Oh, first of all, she yelled at Infantino a couple months ago. And there's a clip of that. It's pretty good. That's awesome. Good. But Black Alliance for Peace's North-South Project has a petition and a campaign to move the games out of the U.S. and build a grassroots response to these games happening in the U.S. I will also say somebody brought up that the World Cup tickets... Yeah, so I went to look at this because there's games that are going to be in Philly and it was like $1,500, $1,600 to start. And we were like, who can afford this? And the answer is the dentists. The dentists. We are not dentists.

Alexander Aviña: I am the useless doctor who can't afford the tickets. Oh, damn it. As my parents would say, I became the wrong type of doctor. Yeah, no, I mean, we can talk. I mean, in general, people like great journalist and writer Dave Zirin, when they've written about the World Cup or the Olympics, they talk about them as being just giant. Obviously, they're huge engines of capital accumulation, but they're also engines of gentrification, broadly defined. I just saw this morning that a report from The Athletic that ticket prices in Mexico City have gone up almost 1,000% for next summer. I mean, so who can actually travel to Mexico City and stay in Mexico City and then afford a game? I mean, it's... this might be like the most privatized, the most exclusionary world cup that we've seen. And this has been a trend, right? Like this has been particularly after the 1994 world cup in the U S where I feel like that's when the world cup became, um, fully neoliberal because of the United States, but because of broader global economic processes. And that trend of exclusion, I think, has continuously been mounting. There's been some exception. I think... The last World Cup in Qatar, I think one of the ways that it was a bit more inclusionary was the fact that it was in a part of the world that had never hosted a World Cup and people who live in that part of the world could travel. If you had the means, you could travel to go to a game. And it was a different type of World Cup relative to the ones that had been held in South Africa or in different parts of the Americas, different parts of Europe or North America. But I mean, it's becoming an extremely exclusionary exercise, right? And this is part, at least within the US, I think it's matching some like writings and reports that have talked about how the things that are being bought in the US today are all luxury goods by like people who have like millionaires essentially, right? So is that what the economy, the consumption economy is moving toward? And I think maybe the World Cup as the games are hosted in the US is gonna be a reflection of like, who can actually afford to go to a game? Who can afford to go to Disney World? Who can afford to go to these, these spaces of consumption and enjoyment that used to be a little bit more inclusionary or affordable, let's say it that way, that now are just becoming less and less accessible to the vast majority of Americans. And definitely in a place like Mexico, those ticket prices are going to be insane. And that was always an internal contradiction of hosting the World Cup in North America across these three countries. How were you going to have any sort of parity economic when it came to ticket prices or hotel prices comparing Mexico City to Toronto to Philly? It was not a possibility. But what was going to be on par was going to be the prices going up and the ability to go to a game and to be able to travel was going to become much more exclusionary. And that's without even before talking about ICE, talking about Border Patrol, talking about the inability of most people to get into the United States. You know, I saw a report I got to. follow up on this to see how factual this is but there are i saw a report online about um one or two players on the iranian national team who had done their mandatory military service that may not be allowed to come into the united states because of the way that they are irgc or different components of the iranian military considered terrorists by the united states so like so the us is gonna Is the U.S. going to prevent players themselves from coming to compete in the World Cup in addition to people from certain countries that are designated as enemies or as to use Trump's term, shithole or and even Europeans? I saw this morning The Athletic, I think it was also reporting that even for European tourists who have been coming into the U.S. this year, like ICE and different, not ICE, but different customs officials have been checking like years of their social media activity to determine whether they're allowed in the US or not. So how is that big contradiction going to be resolved? How are you, the World Cup is supposed to be a time when people from around the world can travel to the host sites, enjoy this spectacle, enjoy this game, But they're coming to a country, the United States, that is waging a war against large segments of its own population and a war against what they define as foreigners or foreign enemies. I don't know how that's going to be resolved. We know that there's going to be ice stationed outside of certain stadiums. I don't know. How are they going to resolve that? What's going to happen? I think this is going to be... for for all these reasons as someone who again knowing all the contradictions i love this game i look forward to the world cup every four years this is the world cup that i've i'm just not in it i'm just i um well i can't afford to go to those games anyway but like we had planned my kids wanted to go catch a game but like at these prices but in in addition to that it's just something seems really wrong more than in the past and and um it's it's a shame i think

Jay: yeah it agreed i mean so one of the things that i mean first of all shout out to lara shihai for for watching um from wherever you are in the world um but uh good opportunity for a grassroots boycott campaign against the us more broadly i mean this is one of the things that i do find a little bit I don't know quite how to wrestle with intellectually. It somewhat comes up even with regards to BDS, of why don't we have a BDS against the United States? And I want to be clear on my position here. I am not against, you know, obviously the boycotts of, of Israel or the UAE or Saudi Arabia, right? Like, I think that these are good organizing campaigns and, you know, I appreciate people who are doing them. You know, I support that work. The, the question always is like, why are, why is there not more organized and maybe there are efforts and I don't know about them as much. I mean, I appreciate. know cloud talking about the the effort to move the games out of the united states but like um you know what do you think about this in terms of the fact that like a lot of the sort of campaigns might be focused on something that's like uh i mean as we've talked about over the last couple years like israel is not just a simple proxy of the united states like it is it is a more complicated sort of relationship is not just that the that israel does everything that the united states says to do right um but nonetheless like you know u.s imperialism is is the big beasts, you know, I think in all of this, and sometimes it's, I don't know quite how to think about the fact that there are efforts to boycott, you know, sort of sub imperial, you know, proxies or clients of the United States, and yet there's less attention, it seems like on the United States as well, which maybe just is a reflection of how much money the United States has, right. So then, you know, people are Like, oh, that's a daunting task or how many people are in the United States or, you know, just that also the the effectiveness of U.S. sports washing. I don't I don't know. You know. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?

Alexander Aviña: I think it's all that. I mean, I think, you know, I'll I can't wait to see you boycott your Portland Trailblazers, Jay. So, you know, maybe you should, you know, put the example for all of us. But no, I think it I think your question highlights, again, the power of sports and not as not as an epiphenomenal thing, but as like a really constitutive element of. legitimizing US empire domestically and abroad. I mean, I think it's also a reflection of the economic and military and cultural power that the US wields, right? And I think this is, you see it with, you know, the NFL taking games abroad. I mean, and the stadiums fill up, right? I mean, there's no way the NFL will, I don't think it would be a capable of like establishing, like, let's say subsidiary leagues in other parts of the world. But when they just host a game in Mexico city, in Sao Paulo, in Madrid and Berlin or London, like you can see it's able to attract a lot of, of, of enthusiastic following. Right. So there is something there. Um, I think. Yeah, I think a potentially more fruitful venue is what Claudia described in terms of grassroots campaign to exercise that type of pressure. I know we have the Olympics coming up in Los Angeles in 2028, and there's been a years-long effort to... to undermine that right because again to go back to like zyron and other writers like we know that these these spectacles accumulate a lot of money a lot of capital that doesn't stay in the cities that are that are hosting these areas like you have uh countries and cities that have hosted previous international athletic events where like the stadiums that were built the stadiums that in in you know in a place like guitar that that required the deaths of thousands of workers may or may not even be used nowadays, right? So these were vehicles of capital accumulation for a very small group of individuals and groups that then just move on, right? They just move on and they do the same thing to other cities and other countries. And what they leave behind is a lot of gentrification, a lot of unused infrastructure. lot of exploitation um you know it's a lot of different forms of exploitation right there's every time there's a super bowl right what's one of the discussions like the the exploitation of of of whatever like children or supposed human trafficking there's there's It's all to say that these international events are not beneficial to the local communities that are hosting them. They're not even for them, right? So perhaps then those localized grassroots campaigns can exercise some level of power and influence. I would love to see the World Cup for next year be moved like i would i would completely support it take it to canada and take it to mexico even then again it's not going to solve the issue locally we're going to have a lot of the same dynamics but at the very least it would be a strike at the like the political and cultural legitimacy of the united states and you can imagine how someone like trump would react to that I mean, he would probably be willing to go to war over it, which was kind of crazy to think about. But again, these things matter to a lot of people and that heightens their importance. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know how to answer your question. I think you answered your own question. I mean, I think it reflects the power of the United States. And maybe that's why, you know, one way to get at a powerful empire is to start with his tentacles, right? Like you don't start at the heart, but you start kind of chipping away at it. So maybe that's another way to think about how to proceed. But I think also, and I'll stop rambling, but also, so sports, Sports offers the opportunity for sports washing, for legitimizing power, for legitimizing empire. The question for us is then, how do we accomplish the opposite? Because sports can also do the work of undermining those things, of furthering anti-imperialist critiques, of advancing more egalitarian, radical politics in ways of organizing communities and organizing the world. That is there. That exists within sport as well. Um, the, the, the issue is like, how do we organize that and make it into an effective challenge to those who want to use sports just for profit, but also to sports wash. Yeah, appreciate it.

Jay: And I, I mean that your answer did help me think about it a little bit more too, because it's like, you know if if you're opposed to us imperialism right then like also understanding it not just as strictly like what the us does right but also understand like how it exercises its own interests through um other places you know other nation states other proxies etc right so in that sense like you know, if you are able to expose, you know, what Israel is and what it does and expose what the UAE is and what it does, right, then that actually does cause harm also to imperialism, right, in its own way. So, yeah, that's helpful. I mean, the one thing that we didn't touch on too much is the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, you know, which are... like it's i mean we're in the middle of the in the nba it's the emirates world cup and the mba the nba is interesting because also i mean yeah you talk about my blazers i you know you they suck so bad that they don't need to be boycotted right now but um but also that's what they get for having their their best player be an israeli so um anyway uh on the side of the nba yeah like it's a fascinating League I mean it's not as big or as you know as wealthy as like the NFL and even in even like baseball which feels like a declining sport to me in a lot of ways but I think it's because it's well both the NBA and baseball are fairly International at this point but um know it it still does better like the world series does way better than the nba finals right just like from a strict like viewership level and all of that and some of the hits that the nba has taken is because like the right hates it because of its dei or whatever else right like this kind of crap Yeah. But they're they are trying to start a league in Europe, like, like, NBA Europe, basically, I think part of it is they may be trying to buy the EuroLeague out, right? It's not really clear, like what their strategy is there. um but yeah it's very interested and it does the same kind of thing that you're talking about in terms of um you know doing these individual games in other countries and stuff like that um and has a g league team in mexico now uh mexico city but um the the emirates cup right now which is a stupid in-season tournament thing that the nba does now which was just first called the nba cup but then they just gave the whole naming rights to you know to Emirates, which Emirates is an airline, obviously, but it is owned by a small collective of the rulers of the UAE, basically. and they also have like heavy investments into i think there's multiple emirates cups in like in europe like in and i think in one in the uk and then one maybe in euro league or something like that um and then yes saudi arabia with like the golf stuff and everything else i mean one thing that i heard about this that i found interesting was specifically with the uae they talked about it as also you know that there there's a lot of money in the uae um but it was a way of them diversifying their economic interests which is which is interesting in some way um because sports may not always be that profitable but it's an accumulating asset right so you buy a team or you buy a thing and you sell it like you you know you make money off of that um but In addition to that, there's all the branding stuff, right? It's just like you see it on these jerseys and on these tournaments and you may not know what it means at all. And yet it has an effect on us where it's a normalizing thing in a lot of ways. So yeah, I don't know if you have any responses on that.

Alexander Aviña: yeah i mean i think an interesting question is to think about why you know some why these entities engage in sports washing to begin with right so i think on the one you know they are responding to public relations problems right so especially like the emirate the united uae qatar saudi arabia there is that aspect to it um but yeah the other aspect of it is and it's not contradictory to the pr it's it's a it's it's a form of um investing you know they need to invest their their their gains somehow right and it's in in european football for instance that's been one of the most profitable uh perhaps more politically and PR-wise than actually economically, but they are completely changing the dynamics of European football, right? Like you have clubs who have older style of ownership models in place saying that they can't compete with European clubs that are backed by sovereign funds. So the Newcastle Club in England is owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. manchester city is owned by abu dhabi you know by the brother of mbz i think and then the paris saint germain club in paris it's owned by qatar and the rest of these older european clubs are saying look we can't compete with this model we can't compete right like the a team the most valuable football club in the world i think is real madrid but they have like an older ownership style and their owner now who the owner has to be elected as president um And to run as president, you have to be really rich and there's all sorts of things. But whatever, it's still a different, older ownership model. And he's come out and said, look, we're going to have to open the club for private investment for the first time because we can't compete with other European clubs that have the backing of an entire nation. So that's really interesting to see that kind of how... in my view, I think it's probably detrimental to the quality of the product that they're trying to put on the pitch because it's led to a crazy arms race and prices for buying players, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't know if the quality of the game has actually improved. If anything, what we're seeing now is if we're thinking about it as these players from like a labor perspective, there's been an ongoing discussion of the injuries and the recurrence of injuries and what happens when a professional footballer is playing 60, 70 games, matches a year. um that that's connected again to the place that european football holds economically and politically uh not just within europe but i think globally as well although i i would love to see like the public investment fund by like the dallas cowboys one day like i actually would be i would be really supportive of the dallas cowboys being owned by saudi arabia i think that would be kind of funny And that would be but the NFL ownership. I mean, that's a really close group of who can actually be an owner. And that that is an interesting place to see the mixing of like nationalism and patriotism with just like the richest people in the United States and very self-consciously, they will say only Americans can own NFL ownership. NFL teams, which are also really profitable. I think the Dallas Cowboys is the most profitable one, and I can't remember if it's worth more than Real Madrid, probably, which also is kind of interesting to think about. And it reflects US economic and cultural power as well. If we think about it again, but another way to think about it from a labor perspective, what type of labor capital model exists within these professional sports? In the NBA, famously, they do have a pretty effective labor union that could have brought down the league for a little bit had Obama not stepped in and convinced some of these famous players to not go on strike. And when was it, 2020, right? Summer of 2020. Can you imagine the power that that would have? I mean, that would have been a really powerful thing for the NBA players to have gone on strike in solidarity and in working with the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. I think that would have, this shows the fact that an ex-president had to step in and be like, hey, chill out. It may perhaps suggest a little bit of the power that these professional athletes, political power that they have and that they decide not to exercise.

Jay: So I think that's one. Well, they did. They did exercise that. They just got education reform on the back of their jerseys instead of their favorite causes on shoes and shoes.

Alexander Aviña: Favorite charities on their jerseys. But that's another way to think. It's kind of... I mean, it's... On the one hand, it's kind of funny to think about these professional athletes as labor, right? Because they're making tons of money. But... It's really uneven, particularly in a league like the NFL, right, where there is I mean, their union is basically company union. They don't have guaranteed contracts. An average career is maybe three to five years. Your body is completely broken down at the end of it, and you may have not come out with a lot of money. That labor model is a reflection of what we see more broadly within and outside the United States. It's thoroughly neoliberal. Whereas you see other athletic leagues, they have a better union. But they still aren't able to determine some of the bigger questions, some of the bigger political and economic prerogatives that exist within their league. But we'll see. I mean, I think professional baseball has union collective bargaining agreement stuff coming up more soon. And that union has demonstrated in the past that it's willing to stop play. if they don't get what they want. The problem is what they want is just generally circumscribed to like, you know, their existence as baseball players. But again, imagining, you know, it would imagine what could be if you, if you organize professional athletes in a more politically and socially conscious way, like they do have a certain level because of who they are, and what they do, they have a form of power that other individuals and entities don't have.

Jay: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, thank you, Alex. This has been great. It's been really good to catch up with you. Let's see, was there anything else? The chat's been great today. I haven't caught everything in the chat.

Alexander Aviña: um is there anything else that you wanted to say or shout out or just like bring up yeah let me so let me say the palestinian national football team is playing right now in the arab cup and they play tomorrow again saudi arabia in the quarterfinals which would be kind of cool there's a An account I really like on Substack called Football Palestine. I can't remember the guy's name, but it's an excellent account if you're interested in. It's a really interesting account because it mixes the politics with the sports in a really effective way. Palestine's national team actually got relatively close to qualifying for this World Cup. And they were robbed in the last minute of a match against Oman, which was really disastrous. But the fact that these guys are still able to play, they've played in the Asian Cup of 2023. They had the World Cup qualifying campaign of 2024, 2025. And they're playing right now in the Arab Cup. And How they are able to play, you know, check out some of the videos of their national team coach and the speeches that this guy is giving to his players like they know that they're playing for something much more than that particular athletic contest or or something related to football. Like they know that they're playing for something much bigger. And for me, it's unbelievable that they're even able to play with what their family members are. are experiencing right now in, in, in occupied Palestine. So I would just shut out to, uh, football Palestine. Um, the other, only other thing is, um, you know, I'll probably still watch the world cup. I will root for Mexico and I will be heartbroken just like I am every world cup. Um, but you know, here we, we, we got, we got to root for, uh, for you know the team that we feel in our hearts so um but as i said before um i don't think i'll be participating in much and actually going to some of the matches because again i think this is going to be a show particularly in the us i think it'll unfold fine in canada and mexico city in terms of just like the actual like sporting spectacle and event but it's going to be a show in the united states yeah

Jay: I'm sure it will be, and it's going to be in my backyard along with a lot of other folks here in the Philly area. Yeah, and I just wanted to say, too, for the audience that, you know, especially on the Everything Else with Jay platform, which we've been co-streaming on today, you know, me and some friends, I think we're going to do... some episodes where we like focus on sports owners and just like dig into like who these people are right because I think that's one of the things too that happens within sports is they just talk about the owners as if it's like oh you know it's just this like good businessman who owns this team right and it's like no these are the worst people in the world usually like it's so bad And so, yeah, I mean, the first one I want to do is the Adelsons who own the Dallas Mavericks, you know, who are, you know, got the Trump shout out in the kind of set.

Alexander Aviña: They're great at trading players, though, so I support how they trade players. Especially when they trade players to the Lakers, I'm all for that. Obviously, they're pieces of genocidal shit on every other level, but if they feel like they want to trade their best players to the Lakers, I fully support that. For nothing in return, I fully support that.

Jay: Right on. Well, thank you, man. It's good to connect with you. We'll have to have you back on again soon. Maybe we could do a fundraiser later this month or something like that. But yeah, man, always good to connect.

Alexander Aviña: Yeah, same here. And I'm always happy to join you, Jay. And yeah, I'll look forward to the next time. All right.