The cost of open defiance, which, Ali pointed out, is our only escape route from corporate tyranny, will at least at first be painful. Our corporate masters do not intend to release their death grip without a brutal fight.

Ali recalled that even his late friend Hugo Chavez, the firebrand socialist president of Venezuela, was not untouched by intimidation from Establishment forces. “I remember talking to Chavez many times and saying, ‘Comandante, why do you stop there?’ ” Ali said. “He said it is not realistic to do it at the present time. We can regulate them, make life difficult for capitalism, use oil money for the poor, but we can’t topple the system.”

Ali added, “The Greeks and the Spanish are saying the same.”

“I don’t know what Syriza thought,” he said. “If it thought we can divide the European elite, we can make a big propaganda campaign in Europe and they will be forced to make concessions, that was foolish. This European elite, led by the Germans, doesn’t crack easily. They have walked all over the Greeks. The Greek leaders should have said to their own people, ‘We are going to try and get the best possible conditions—if not we will report to you what has happened and what we need to do.’ Instead, they fell into the European trap. The Europeans made virtually no concessions that mattered.”

The clash between the Greeks and the corporate elites that dominate Europe, Ali said, is “not economic.”

The European Union is “prepared to pour billions into fighting Russians in the Ukraine,” he said. “It’s not a question of the money. They can throw away the bloody money, as they are preparing to do and are doing in the Ukraine. With the Greeks they pretend it is economic, but it’s political. They are fearful that if the Greeks pull it off, the disease will spread. There are elections in December in Spain. If Podemos [Spain’s left-wing party] wins with Greece already having won and proceeding, however modestly, on a different path, the Spanish will say the Greeks have done it. And then there is the Irish waiting patiently with their progressive parties, saying, ‘Why can’t we do what Syriza has done? Why can’t we unite and take on our extreme center?’ ”

Ali said he was “shocked and angry about all the hopes that were invested in Obama by the left.” He lambasted what he called the American “obsession with identity.” Barack Obama, he said, “is an imperial president and behaves like one, regardless of the color of his skin.” Ali despaired of the gender politics that are fueling a possible run for the White House by Hillary Clinton, who would be the first woman president.

“My reply is, ‘So bloody what?’ ” he said. “If she is going to bomb countries and put drones over whole continents, what difference does her gender make if her politics are the same? That is the key. The political has been devalued and debased under neoliberalism. People retreat into religion or identity. It’s disastrous. I wonder if it is even possible to create something on a national scale in the United States. I wonder if it would be better to concentrate on big cities and states to develop some movements where they can have an influence in Los Angeles, New York or in states such as Vermont. It may be wiser to concentrate on three or four things to show that it can be done. I can’t see the old way of reproducing a political party of the left, modeled on the Republican and Democratic structures, as working. These people only work with money. They do not even speak with very many ordinary people. It is credit-card democracy. The left cannot and should not emulate this. America is the hardest nut to crack, but unless it is cracked we are doomed.”

Ali said he fears that should Americans become politically conscious and resist, the corporate state will impose naked forms of militarized repression. Government’s reaction to the 2013 bombings at the Boston Marathon stunned him. Authorities “closed down an entire city with the support of the population.” He said that the virtual declaration of martial law in Boston was “a dress rehearsal.”

“If they can do it in Boston they can do it in other cities,” he said. “They needed to try it on in Boston to see if it would work. That frightened me.”

“The manufacturing of threats manufactures fear,” he said. “It creates sleepwalking citizens. They [officials] never tried to do this on this scale when they were fighting the Soviet Union and the communist enemy, which was supposed to be the worst, most dangerous threat ever. Now they do it over a handful of bloody terrorists.”

Groups such as Black Lives Matter, he said, offer some hope.

“Just as the traditional left parties have been wiped out all over the world, so has the radical segment of the African-American population and their organizations,” he said. “They were physically wiped out. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, some of the most gifted leaders, were assassinated. The Black Panthers were destroyed. Areas where blacks lived on the West Coast were flooded with drugs. It was a well-planned assault. But the young people who came out in Black Lives Matter have this older spirit. When Jesse Jackson went to Ferguson and engaged in demagogy he was heckled. They did the same on the East Coast with [Al] Sharpton. These black leaders, bought off, are being seen for what they are.”

HUDSON: Well, the terms on which the IMF make loans, first of all, are based on austerity. The terms require more austerity and a withdrawal of all the public subsidies. Now you have Ukrainian population absolutely devastated. The only result of the IMF's austerity a program that--the conditions that it's laying down for making loans to Ukraine is you have to repay the debts. But you don't have the ability to repay their debts. So there's only one way to do it, and that's the way that we've told Greece and other countries to do: you have to begin selling off whatever you have left of your public domain, or you have to have your meeting oligarchs take on partnerships with American or European investors, so that they can buy out into the monopolies in the Ukraine. So, essentially, the IMF has a two-stage one-two punch. The punch number one is: here's the money; now you have to repay us after cutting back public spending and causing a depression. The two punch is: oh, you can't pay us? I'm sorry that all of our projections are wrong. And the IMF has been wrong on Ukraine year after year, almost as much as it's been wrong on Ireland and on Greece.

So now the real problem is: what is Ukraine going to have to sell off to pay the foreign debts that it gets for having waged the war that's devastated the economy? Well, the main things that the foreign investors want are Ukrainian farmland. Monsanto has been buying into Ukraine. But Ukraine has a law against alienating its farmland and agricultural land to foreigners. And a matter of fact, its law is very much the same as what the Financial Times reports that Australia is wanting to do today, to block Chinese and American purchase of farmlands. The IMF's position is you have to dismantle public regulations against foreign investment and you have to dismantle consumer production and environmental protection regulations. So, in other words, what is in store for Ukraine is a neoliberal policy that's guaranteed to actually make it even worse. And in that sense, finance is war, finance is the new kind of warfare using finance and forced selloffs in the IMF is a new kind of battlefield. So I'm not sure how all of this is going to really help Ukraine, and it promises to lead to yet another crisis down the road very, very quickly.

PERIES: Michael, let's unpack the debt of this crisis. Now, the war has led Ukraine into a deeper crisis. Talk about the devastation that has caused and what they have to manage in addition to what the IMF is trying to impose on it.

HUDSON: Well, when Kiev went to war against Eastern Ukraine, it fought primarily the coal mining region and the export region. Thirty-eight percent of Ukraine's exports are to Russia. And yet this was the--the export capacity has been bombed out of existence. And, in fact, the electric companies that fuel the electricity to the coal mines been bombed out. So Ukraine can't even supply itself with coal.

Now, that's very--what is so striking about all this is that just a few weeks ago, on January 28, Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, said the IMF does not make loans to countries that are engaged in war. That would be funding one side or another. And yet Ukraine is involved in a civil war.

And also the IMF articles of agreement say that it cannot make loans to an insolvent country. So how on earth can the IMF be part of a loan bailout for the Ukraine if, number one, it's at war, the war has to stop totally; number two, it's insolvent? The only solution is that Ukraine will somehow scale back its debts to private investors. And that means a lot of contrary hedge funds investors.

So, again, the Financial Times today has an article showing that an American investor has $7 billion of Ukraine debts and wants to speculate in it. How is Ukraine going to treat the speculators? And then, finally, how is the IMF going to treat the fact that Russia's sovereign fund lent 3 billion euros to the Ukraine on harsh terms through the London agreement terms that can't be written down? Is the IMF going to insist that Russia take the same haircut that it's imposing on the hedge funds? All of this is going to be the kind of conflict that's going to take much more effort than even the solutions that we've seen over the last few days have taken on the military battlefront.

PERIES: And so how could Ukraine imagine getting out of this crisis?

HUDSON: It imagines it'll get out of the crisis by the West giving it $50 billion and saying, here's all the money you need, spend it as you want. That's the extent of its imagination. This is fantasy. It's living in a dream world, except that a few weeks ago, George Soros came out in The New York Review of Books and said, give Ukraine $50 billion and look at it as a down payment on military or with Russia. Well, immediately Kiev said, yes, we will only spend them on defensive arms. We will defend Ukraine all the way up to Siberia as we wipe out the Russians.

Today, yet another Financial Times article said, yes, give Ukraine the 50 billion that George Soros asked for. We've got to enable it to have enough money that it can fight America's war against Russia. And the Europeans are saying, wait a minute, not only at the end of this, but there'll be no more Ukrainians to fight, but the war is going to spread into Poland and into elsewhere, because if the money that's given to Ukraine is really for what the Obama administration and Hillary and Soros are all pressing for to go to war with Russia, then Russia's going to say, okay, if we're being attacked by foreign troops, we're going to have to not only bomb the troops, but the airports are coming in, the railway stations are coming in. We're going to extended towards Europe. And apparently there are reports that Putin told Europe, look, you have two choices before you. The one choice: Europe, Germany, and Russia can be a very prosperous area. With Russia's raw materials and European technology, we can be the most prosperous area in the world. Or you can go to war with us and you can be wiped out. Take your choice.

there'll be no more Ukrainians to fight, but the war is going to spread into Poland and into elsewhere