11/19/08 – Joseph Sottile – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos Radio in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our first guest today is J.P.
Sotile, I think I'm saying it right, well, we'll see.
And I guess I should have asked off the air, I forgot to.
The movie is called The Warning, five authors, one warning, a film by truthtopower.tv.
The five authors are RFK Jr., Bobby Kennedy's son, Naomi Wolf, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, and Joe Connison, and the subject is America's rapid descent into fascist dictatorship.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing today, Scott?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
I'm good.
My name is, you can call me Joe, and last name is Sotile, but.
Sotile, okay.
Yeah.
I'm terrible at guessing things like that.
I should have asked, I'm sorry.
So I really like this movie.
It's good.
It could have used maybe a libertarian or something in there instead of Naomi Klein, but anyway.
No, I really like it, and you really cover a lot of ground.
I think, very importantly, toward the beginning of the movie, you focus on the philosophy of the neoconservatives, and this idea, really explained by Chris Hedges, I think, in the film, that these guys really sort of believe in this ancient dictatorial philosopher king's attitude, this thing that they all picked up from Leo Strauss, I guess, that it's perfectly okay to be a liar and a murderer, that the ends really do justify any means, and that they don't mind at all the idea of creating a complete reality of phony BS, as long as they get to do whatever they want, whereas most people, I think, would kind of, you know, that's sort of against our nature to go around deceiving our friends and neighbors all the time, but this is basically their standard operating procedure, is to create an entire phony world of bullshit.
Well, you know, Joe Connison makes this point that if you believe in their elitist view, that the masses should not be trusted with their own governance, and that the elites should actually be in charge, and that the use of noble lies, which is something that comes out of Plato's Republic and the writings of Plato, which Leo Strauss was obsessed with, along with Machiavelli, that you are an enemy of the U.S. Constitution.
And one of the reasons I led the film off with the Unitary Executive, because I think that this is one of the great warnings of the film, is that if we do not apply pressure on this new administration and on Congress to change the Unitary Executive, preemptive war, torture, the terror watch list, that this elite view of power and governance through the executive branch will just become precedent over the next four years.
And so, if Obama lasts four years or not, whoever is president in the future will have this structure in place.
And you know, look, the neocons have been around for a long time.
And I think back to 1976, when Wolfowitz and Perl came in and rewrote the National Intelligence Estimate, which was going to say that the Soviet Union was a power in decline.
Herbert Walker Bush, CIA, brought them in and said, no, let's rewrite the Intelligence Estimate to say that the Soviet Union is four or five years away from invading Western Europe, that they're a world sponsor of terror.
And you know, these guys don't go away.
They came back in Iran-contra.
They were in Herbert Walker Bush's administration.
And if we don't expose this philosophy of governance now, what are they going to do?
They're going to go back to the American Enterprise Institute, they'll go to the Heritage Foundation, they'll go to corporate boards, they'll bide their time.
And let's not forget about Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is one of the lead advisors of Obama, who wrote a book called The Grand Chessboard and said that Central Asia and control of Central Asia is the most important foreign policy initiative that any superpower who governs the world must have in the next century.
And look, what are we doing with Russia right now?
We are encircling Russia, and the neocon philosophy is still there.
Yeah, well, and that's an interesting point, too, about Brzezinski, because, of course, he's not a neocon.
He's, I guess, more closely identified as sort of the Democratic Kissinger, right, sort of the realist, the leader of the realist school on the Democratic left side.
And yet, if you look back a couple of years, the Committee for Peace in Chechnya, you saw an alliance there between Brzezinski and virtually all of the neoconservatives.
And they certainly seem to have this alliance.
It seems like that was really Brzezinski's problem with the war in Iraq, was that, no, the chessboard is in Central Asia.
Well, but you see, the neoconservatives, I would argue that neoconservatives believe that controlling Iraq was part of controlling Central Asia.
And you know, look, has anybody in the mainstream media really exposed the Project for a New American Century and rebuilding America's defenses?
No, they haven't.
And you see, this is really what led me to this film, is I worked in the mainstream media for nearly a decade, and I tried to get stories done on depleted uranium, on the anthrax attack, when we knew four or five years ago where the anthrax came from, on the Project for a New American Century.
And it's very, very difficult to get these stories through the mainstream media.
So you sort of have to go through the web and alternative media, through people like you and your show, to get the word out.
It's very, very tough.
But the Project for a New American Century is one of the most radical departures from American tradition that we've ever seen.
And one of the things that drew me to these authors is that they were saying things that were really radical for mainstream media.
You know, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says, hey, look, this is essentially fascism now.
And that's quite a stunning thing to say publicly two or three years ago.
Yeah.
Well, and it's especially good to hear it coming from people that, you know, I think masses would tend to automatically respect at least somewhat, you know what I mean?
This guy, R.F.
K., we got to at least assume he's got some kind of real education and knows what he's talking about, even though we recognize most of us don't, you know?
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And that's one of the reasons we picked these five authors.
And I know that, I mean, Naomi Klein, and you may disagree with her overall economic philosophy, but one of the things that drew me to her and her book was this idea of the shock doctrine as a mechanism by which crises are used to implement policies.
But I do think that one of the things that's interesting, and it comes out in the film, you know, Chris Hedges says, until we walk away from the Republican and Democratic parties and have a grassroots movement, nothing's going to change.
And you don't get to a position of power in this government without being vetted.
I mean, we hear a lot about vetting processes right now with Hillary Clinton, her Secretary of State.
But, you know, it is a vetting process, and look at what happened to Ron Paul.
I mean, he was totally marginalized during the Republican primary season by the mainstream media, and actually continues to be marginalized by some mainstream media outlets.
But I think we're getting into a point now, because the basic freedoms that are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution have come under such attack, that old left-right paradigm of, you know, there's us and them, us on the right, them on the left, or vice versa, those things really kind of don't matter at this point.
We really need to re-establish our basic constitutional right, because we have a million people on the terror watch list.
Does anybody actually think that there are a million potential terrorists in this country?
Naomi Wolf is on the terror watch list.
And if you think Naomi Wolf is a potential terrorist, well, I've got some land in Florida to sell you.
Yeah, well, and you know, I completely agree with you about the breakdown of left-right and all that as getting in the way, and that's really why I like Naomi Wolf, because I don't think she's dishonest.
And even though she comes from a progressive perspective that is quite different than mine, if you ask her, she's just abruptly honest about what matters most, and what matters most is, for example, the theory that there's such a thing as a law that can bind the power of the government.
There's such a thing as the Bill of Rights that guarantees due process and a right to confront your accusers and not be tortured and sent off to a dungeon in Thailand somewhere.
And she's got her priorities straight, and she's, it seems to me, you know, honest and willing to, you know, as you say, ally with conservatives or libertarians or anybody else who also has their priorities straight.
Well, and I think another thing that's happening, too, is I think it's time for us to start having a debate of, you know, what is free market ideology and what is capitalist ideology?
Because I actually think the two things are in conflict now.
I think what we're seeing with capitalism as it is, is that it's really become socialism in the interest of capital.
Oh, sure.
Well...
I mean, we look at AIG, really, and free market ideology should not exist today, because the punishment side of free market economics has been taken out.
And what happens is that taxpayer dollars, this huge trough that we've established in Washington, D.C.
Because that's really what it is, a trough of money that people feed at, is being used to externalize the cost that corporations and businesses are requiring.
When they have lobbyists and they have politicians in their back pocket, they can basically take my tax dollars, your tax dollars, and use them to get a pass on bad decision-making in the market.
Well, you know, what's funny is that at the time that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, he wasn't refuting socialism.
He was refuting, well, in a sense he was, but he was refuting mercantilism, which is socialism for rich people.
And he was saying, no, you've got to let them fail.
You have to let the invisible hand work it out and not use force to prop up those favored.
You have to go ahead and let people trade in the way that they want to trade, and that's the way to get the most efficient kind of use, the more kind of liberal socialist end came later in the 19th century.
He was refuting the idea of having a British East India Company and a Virginia Company and these things sponsored by the Crown and the British taxpayer.
Well, you know, I think this is interesting to bring it back to the neoconservatives, because as I look at the neoconservatives, you know, the other side of that from the Chicago School would be the neoliberals.
And I was in a discussion about this yesterday, and I said, well, you know, the neoliberals and the neoconservatives are really two sides of the same coin in terms of what they're trying to achieve.
But what's interesting is, is one side calls themselves neoconservatives and other neoliberals, and there is a lot of opposition through language of the real intentions of the people who are implementing these policies.
And it makes it very, very difficult to pin down exactly who they are, what they want to do, and what their intentions are, at least in the mainstream media.
For those of us like your listeners or you and I, we spend a lot of time probably reading about these things, but to really give people a sense of what these people are up to, it's a big challenge.
The problem with that, too, I mean, is that especially because of the media refusing to be honest and break these discussions down, as you said, you try to report on PNAC and they just said, forget it.
And what ends up happening is you have regular, you know, American citizen voters out here, regular American masses who end up deceived.
So you have people who call themselves conservatives and basically, you know, in terms of the country rock and roll split, they're more country or whatever, and they tend to be conservative.
But it seems like, depending on time or place, they could either agree with Ron Paul or they could agree with Richard Perle, just depending on who did a better job of saying this is what true conservatism is about.
And unfortunately, you have not just neocons, but like when you talk about the unitary executive theory, you have people who are just regular cons, just plain old conservatives who have this idea that to apply a strict construction of the Constitution is to forget every bit of it, except for the commander in chief clause.
And they go along with these neocons who are dishonest, and you have all these honest people end up believing in this stuff.
Definitions are very, very tough.
And I think the unitary executive idea in particular, and this idea that in a time of war, the commander in chief essentially has unlimited power to do whatever the commander in chief wants to, is incredibly dangerous.
And I think we've seen it also with the transformation of the CIA.
You know, one of the untold stories of the last four or five years is that many of the covert functions of the CIA have been moved over to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
And we're spending a lot of time wondering who's going to be in charge of the CIA, who's going to be in charge of intelligence.
But what's been going on over at Defense Intelligence is incredibly important, too.
And one of the reasons they moved a lot of those functions over there, because they knew that there wouldn't be congressional oversight of the DIA under the laws that were passed after all of the CIA shenanigans were exposed in the 70s by Rockefeller Commission and the Church Commission.
You know, these are some of the issues that concern me most.
I mean, obviously, we have a huge economic problem ahead of us.
And we're seeing one of the greatest transfers of wealth from American taxpayers to corporations in this $700 billion bailout.
But there are some of these other issues that if we don't pay attention and know what's happening, these things need to be remediated.
And all of the authors, or most of the authors, call for a truth and reconciliation commission.
I'm not so much for reconciliation.
I'm more for accountability.
You know, we have kind of a secret government in place right now.
And anybody, no matter who they, what party they come from, can take advantage of this secret government and some of these powers.
And this needs to be changed.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, all the press going into the new Obama administration is that, hey, he's promised a new kind of bipartisan politics and he's going to be friends with John McCain again and everything's going to be fine and they're all going to work together.
And oh, gee, you know, putting Dick Cheney and George Bush in the dock is no way to heal bad feelings.
That's right.
And look, let's go back to the beginning of the first Clinton administration.
We had something called a rock gate.
And in a rock gate, basically the scandal was that the, that Poppy Bush's administration was illegally arming Saddam Hussein, I think up to a month before his invasion of Kuwait.
And he, Robert Perry actually wrote about this in secrecy, secrecy and privilege.
And you know, Clinton was approached and said, well, what are you going to do about this investigation?
And Clinton said, well, you know, we're going to shut the investigation down.
It's time for us to move on.
We don't want to live in the past.
Well, a lot of those people who are involved in the illegal arming of Iraq, well, guess what?
They popped up again in this second Bush administration or the son's administration.
And moving on really doesn't get the job done.
I don't think.
I mean, we have to have accountability.
You know, there are a lot of us who may have credit card debt, who would really love to have a bailout and say, hey, can't we just move on?
For the average American, there's not a lot of moving on in the legal system, but it seems to be for the elite in the political system, they, they get a pass and, um, and it just leads to future problems.
Yeah, it's really amazing.
It seems as best I can tell, the only reason that they didn't go ahead and convene impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney was really simply because Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller and a few others in the democratic party in the Congress had been read into the torture programs and didn't say anything or do anything about it.
And so rather than the democratic parties in the house and the Senate going ahead and replacing their leadership and getting gone with the trial, they just went, oh, well, gee, if Nancy Pelosi is guilty of torture too, I guess we just have to let everybody get away with it.
No accountability for anyone.
Hey, look, you know that that is one of the reasons why the Bush administration included them because this is an administration that is now famous for its secrecy and under the unitary executive, they really didn't have to, if they believe this principle, inform Congress, but you inform Congress and, and they sign off on it and you protect yourself.
So, um, it's great to have this feeling of hope and we should give Obama the benefit of the doubt.
And it is historic in terms of America's terrible racial history, but the real nuts and bolts of what has to happen, um, I don't think we should be, uh, feel too confident.
I would go with an old Reagan principle, which is trust, but verify.
And we need to verify that there are going to be executive orders.
There's an executive order sign that says that the president can declare a national emergency for any number of reasons and basically go straight to martial law.
Is that executive order going to be rescinded?
Is there going to be a statement that we are no longer going to have a policy of preemptive war?
Um, is the separation of powers that is guaranteed in the constitution going to be returned to us?
Is the terror watch list going to be reviewed and have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people released from the terror watch list?
Uh, I mean, these are the issues that need to be addressed.
And one fears that this sort of haze of hope and the desire to move on is going to just let these things sort of pass into the ether and become precedent.
And we are a country legally that's based a lot based on precedent.
And four years of these things not being addressed means that they're going to be there in perpetuity.
Yep.
Well, um, I think you're right that that really is the danger is that all the hope and inspiration, all the people who love Barack Obama and have such confidence in him, it's based on his promises specifically on these issues, on torture, on preemptive war, the mindset that gets us into these wars in the first place and all these kinds of things.
This is why they liked him so much.
And yet the danger is that they're liking him so much is going to help paper over the fact that he's not going to do any of these things.
They're not going to mind that he doesn't come through on all this stuff.
Well, I mean, we will, it remains to be seen.
We, of course we have the famous first hundred days.
We'll see what happens there.
We'll see what orders are issued, executive orders are issued, but, um, you know, these are complicated issues as well.
And it's very easy for having worked in the mainstream media.
Look, the mainstream media is going to give him a honeymoon period as well.
And I think one of the things that we have to do, and it's, it's one of the reasons why I put that, that piece on the fourth estate in the film is it's really up to us to apply pressure to the media and apply pressure to our representative.
And if we don't do that, well, you know, we're just going to sort of have this great honeymoon period and a lot of joy and happiness.
But some of these things may never be addressed.
It's just, it's not smart to have confidence in the system to, you know, correct itself.
Well, and that really is the thing.
That's what, uh, something that James Bovard talks about in his book, Attention Deficit Democracy, that we all are taught from such a young age that our constitutional system of checks and balances and so forth is so great that we sort of take for granted that it'll always be there and it'll always work.
And this is something I think Naomi Wolf does a good job of explaining in your film is that, oh no, look, you know, you can take your, just quite a hand or two handfuls of steps in no time flat and find yourself in a dictatorship.
And we're already, you know, headed straight down this path at full speed.
This is not the kind of thing that, as you say, it's just self-correcting and we don't need to worry about it.
What does it take actually writing a letter to your congressman and that kind of thing and organizing with other people to do the same?
And it very well may be way too late for anything like that, even, but, well, it's very easy to be pessimistic.
Um, yeah, it is.
You're right.
Go ahead and go ahead and challenge yourself and be optimistic for us.
Let's hear it.
Well, um, oh boy, that's a, that's quite a throw down.
I'm not sure that I can, I can meet that.
Um, look, what we have to do is be informed.
That's the most important thing.
I mean, I think that that's square one.
The media is not going to do it for you.
You have to go out and do it yourself.
I mean, it's one of the reasons why we're doing this film the way we did it, which is to do it on a shoestring, get it up on the web, not rely on the mainstream media to tell the story and go straight to people.
It's something that guys like Alex Jones did.
It's something that propelled Ron Paul, the reason why he had such a, uh, a strong showing despite the fact that he's often marginalized by the mainstream media is that online, particularly young people organized on Facebook, on my space and they created networks and that's what we have to do.
We have to share information.
We have to get informed.
We have to understand what the issues are.
And uh, if you expect somebody in the mainstream media to tell you what those issues are, it's not going to happen.
So get informed and talk to people and create communities online and share information and listen to anti-war radio and go to anti-war.com.
Um, that's, that's really the starting point.
I mean, to say that there is some mechanism by which we're going to change everything and wave, maybe wave a magic wand and have this dealt with in the next couple of years is not realistic.
But I think number one is the American people are basically, they do believe in the constitution.
They do believe in, in the American, American ideals of, of liberty and democracy.
And those are actually great handles by which you can show people what, what's at stake.
And um, well, and you know, you think about it, if people can send around emails and convince each other that Obama's a secret Osama bin Laden terrorist from Indonesia or whatever the hell, we ought to be able to send out a link to truth to power.tv and get people watching this video that actually has Chris Hedges in it, you know?
That's right.
That's right.
And you know, I think Chris Hedges was, was great in the film.
And one of the things that he talked about, uh, in terms of, just to come back to the neocons, cause I know that that's probably an act that you have to grind is the neocons.
It's certainly, well, it's an act we all have to grind.
I like to think.
Yeah, no, I mean, the neocons are, you know, it, it, what's fascinating about them is their alliance with the evangelicals, right?
And you know, what they've done is basically co-opted a religious idea and they don't believe in the religious idea, but they use it as a political tool.
And you know, of course, look at the Patriot Act.
They like to talk about, uh, talk in terms of, of this sort of patriotic, evocative, evocative, uh, language, um, you know, America, it's tradition, you know, they hate us because we're free.
Well, those are actually the, the terms and the ideas that we can use to counter them.
Because if they're going to start talking about America as this great beacon of freedom and democracy, well, that's something that we should reclaim and use as a weapon against them.
Right.
Yeah.
And you know, I think I, I really like how he explains, and this sort of goes back to the Straussian philosopher King kind of attitude, um, reminds me of the Sith Lords from Star Wars.
Yeah.
I was born in the late seventies.
So you got to understand.
Did you, did you realize, Scott, that the last eight years has just been one big Jedi mind trick?
Yeah, it's sort of seems like it, but they don't work on the, they don't work on the strong willed like me, you know, this is the thing.
Uh, so it's been kind of frustrating, but, uh, no, one of the things that he talks about there is in this alliance between the neoconservatives and the Christian right, the neoconservatives have nothing but the most dripping content for what they see as their, you know, tools.
They have, they don't care about the Christian right at all.
They're using them in the most cynical fashion.
I think that that's one of the most telling parts of this, of this film and this neocon, um, ideology or philosophy is that they really do believe that they have a special, um, enlightened hold on the truth of how humanity should organize itself.
And all of us are basically just tools that they could use at will and discard at will to achieve their purposes.
And look, uh, David Kuo, who was in the religious initiative, uh, Bush's, Bush's religious initiative left and said, hey, you know, these people had no respect for me or the Christians I was liaisoning with.
And I think that that's one of the pressure points that I would love to do some work on in my next film is to expose this neocon philosophy to the people who are being used by it.
And I guarantee you that if evangelicals had read Rebuilding America's Defenses and read that they sort of celebrated the fact that biological weapons could become a politically useful tool in the future, which they say in black and white, it's just sort of stunning that they would, they might abandon the neocon masters.
And um, well, and you know, you think about, it's the kind of thing where like, you know, you find out you're a significant other's been cheating on you or something like that.
You're like, wait a minute, you hate me and think I'm an idiot and you've been lying to me this whole time.
I mean, to me, uh, especially not just saying, okay, we need to target this demographic or that demographic, but exploiting people's most sincere religious beliefs, exploiting their belief in their afterlife and their savior and their conscience and using that to create a, a empire and a police state.
It's audacious to say, believe.
Yeah.
Hey, you know what I really like about this movie?
Uh, you talk about something that's so important to me and yet it never comes up on this show and you've given me an opportunity to ask you about it now.
And that is the scapegoating of the Mexicans.
You know, that clip of Ron Paul that we just played, um, the, uh, the lady, what's her name?
Jane something or other on CNN.
She made the great point about how subsidies to agribusiness have, and then with, uh, NAFTA and all that have driven all the local farmers in Mexico and in South America and in Africa out of business.
Their markets are being flooded with artificially cheap grain from America and it's bankrupting these people's ability to sustain themselves.
They don't have anything else to trade and make money off of to buy the new grain or whatever.
So we cause all this starvation and so forth.
And then the Mexicans come over because we bankrupted them all and driven them all off of their farms.
They come say, well, you guys are having a housing bubble.
Look, I guess we'll build some houses.
And meanwhile, these people in certain segments of our society are basically, although not necessarily treated this badly, but they're kind of like the Jews in Germany in the thirties or something.
They're this kind of evil alien force among us.
The Mexican invasion, this terrible, they're changing our culture.
They're taking our jobs.
This war against these people who, the only reason they're here is because of our government's economic policies in the first place.
Well, and not just our government's economic policies, and let's not forget NAFTA was the engine that started this and who shepherded NAFTA through.
That would be Bill Clinton.
When you talk about left versus right, it gets really, really blurry when you start talking about policymaking at the top.
But look, it's not just the fact that we destroyed their ability, the ability of the small farmer and particularly Central America and in Mexico over the last 20 years.
But it's also the fact, as you say, we had this housing bubble and how are you going to build all of these houses for this new ownership society, as it was called by the Bush administration, at a cheap rate and maximized profit?
Well, you're going to bring in Mexican laborers who will work for $10 an hour or less on these job sites.
They're illegal.
So let's just say they get injured on the job.
Well, they're not going to be able to sue their employer, not going to be able to go and file a claim because they're illegal and they're afraid that they're going to be deported.
So this massive illegal labor pool, it's really sort of disheartening to see this because they're so easily controlled and they really have no right.
And then really the same mechanism that displaced them from their homes in Mexico is the mechanism of globalization that has Detroit and the manufacturing base of this country, which sustained us after World War II and created the greatest middle class in the history of the world.
Well, that thing was dismantled in much the same way as the Mexican farmer's livelihood was dismantled.
So now you have all of these displaced manufacturing workers in this country, in the Rust Belt, who their primary target now, thanks to the media, is the Mexican laborers coming in to do the work that they could no longer do in their own country.
So you're pitting labor versus labor, and it's really, really easy for people at the top to point to a scapegoat and not have them look at the people who are really causing the problems, which would be the policymakers in Washington, D.C.
Right.
You know, I'm a real hands-off kind of guy, and I think we could both agree, whether exactly our opinion on how industrialized America ought to be or otherwise, we can certainly agree that we have no idea what the market would decide about whether there ought to be three automakers, three big automakers in Detroit or not, because we're so far from a free market in all the different subsidies and bailouts and overregulation and all different things that we don't really know whether in a free market the natural division of labor would have gone ahead and outsourced all these factories or not.
And you can subsidize it one way or another.
You know, Bush will put tariffs on steel to help steel manufacturers, you know, right before an election or something.
It's all kind of a haphazard thing, and we don't even really know how it would be, because we have this $3 trillion empire that controls all these markets.
Well, and let's not forget you have things like the Export-Import Bank.
So there was a point in the 90s where taxpayers were paying to help McDonald's advertise in China, and I just don't think that American people really want to do that, but they don't know about that.
They also don't realize that a lot of our military spending and a lot of this empire, as you call it, is really to protect the investments and assets of multinational corporations around the world.
You know, Smedley, Darlington, Butler, are you familiar with Smedley?
Sure.
War is a racket.
That's right.
And, you know, still the most decorated Marine in the history of the Marine Corps.
And he identified this a long time ago, and it's a process that hasn't ended.
And what's fascinating, too, about Smedley's story, which comes up in our film, is that he exposed the first attempt at a fascist takeover in this country, which was in the 1930s, and one of the people who was behind that attempt by industrialists to have a march on Washington and install a fascist dictatorship was Prescott Bush.
So it's funny how the same people keep popping up over and over again, and these same ideas keep going.
But I think you're right.
We don't have a free market in this country, and we haven't.
And I mean, really, should Chrysler exist?
I think Chrysler was on its way out, what, in 1979?
Right, yeah.
How many times has it been propped up?
It could have been taken over by people who knew what they were doing a long time ago if they'd just been allowed to go bankrupt.
Or maybe all their machine tools would just be sold to some factory overseas.
But still, you know, using force to make it one way or the other doesn't really help anybody.
It only prolongs whatever the difficulty's going to be and makes it worse, usually.
Yeah, well, I mean, we obviously have a system that's designed to eliminate the market discipline.
There's no doubt about that.
Well, and you know, this is the thing about, and this is Smedley Butler's point, is that we're not talking about America and the national interests.
We're talking about the interests of certain politically connected private interests inside the country who might make hundreds of billions of dollars, but it's at the expense of the rest of us.
We could have a net loss of 5,000% to send the Marine Corps to save some property in Central America for some banker in Connecticut or something like that.
And it's fine, because, you know, again, the cost is being socialized onto everybody else.
Well, and, you know, to bring it back to the Mexican immigrant, and I don't mean to plug her, because I know that you're not that big of a fan, but Naomi Klein talks about how- No, it's all right.
There's a lot of great stuff in that book.
I'm just frustrated about the terminology, but no, no.
She's a great writer.
So the fence that Boeing is building, this virtual fence, which is such a great name for a government project, isn't it?
This virtual fence that's being built to keep out immigrants, which really, if corporations want to keep out immigrants, they love having immigrants come in, because it destabilizes labor prices and allows them to drive down the cost of labor.
They're building this fence.
They're getting billions of dollars to build this fence.
It's a market opportunity.
What we see is, is you have the media scapegoating, or you have people scapegoating Mexican immigrants that creates a rationale for building this fence to keep out these waves of Mexican immigrants who are going to destroy our way of life and our culture, and we'll all be speaking Spanish someday.
Oh, no.
I mean, I was born and raised in California, so I've never really had a problem with people speaking Spanish, but- Yeah, I don't get that either.
I'm from Texas, and what's wrong with Mexicans?
I don't care.
That's stupid.
Yeah, I think that people need to get a good chili relleno, and it might change their mind.
Right, yeah, exactly.
Feed them some good chili enchiladas.
That's right.
It's a market opportunity for corporations, and what we find over and over again, and this is actually another disheartening thing to me, is that the military-industrial complex is really expanding, and the Department of Homeland Security has become the largest federal government bureau, the largest government bureaucracy in the history of mankind, I think now.
Is that true?
Well, it's certainly getting there, beginning to rival the Pentagon in size, which I think the Pentagon is like the fifth biggest country in the world, or something like that, at this point.
That's right.
Basically, the core of all this is that empire, and this is the thing in antiwar.com, is that we're all pretty much plumb line libertarians, and want very, very little state, if any at all, and it's based on the recognition that you have to end the empire first.
There's no way we're ever going to be able to really repeal all the precedents of the Unitary Executive, of all the expansions of power, the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, data mining, every webpage we've ever looked at in our life, and every text message we've ever sent, and all these things.
We're never going to be able to stop this as long as we're at war.
That's the deal.
War is the health of the state.
That's the real shock doctrine.
It's state power that increases every single time.
It's not about capitalism.
It's about the power of the central state in D.C., and really, that's why the priority to me has always been foreign policy and our relationship with the rest of the world, because how could we ever have a limited constitutional republic, or even a true democracy, or whatever you think is the great end state, when we have a perpetual state of warfare, an open-ended declared war on terrorism that will never end?
I think this is one of the most important points.
The Cold War was the gift that kept on giving, and unfortunately, Russia could not sustain its end of the bargain.
It collapsed.
And we had sort of ten years in the wilderness, while Al-Qaeda began to develop into a viable enemy.
And the thing about the global war on terror, as the point is made in the film, and you just made, is it's against an invisible enemy, and it's something that will never end.
Will we ever get rid of terrorism?
No.
We will never get rid of terrorism.
There will always be one person somewhere who will be willing to instigate an act of terrorism.
And I actually think what's very interesting is the language has not been a war on terrorism, it's a war on terror, which is even more open-ended.
So I'm not going to have a war on scary films now.
So with this thing lurking out there, and this fear in place, this war is perpetual.
It will never end.
And I think that's one of the reasons why in the film I put Unitary Executive right up against perpetual war, because to make one work, you have to have the other.
And is Obama going to be willing to say we're ending the war on terror?
I mean, that would be the first order of business, it seems to me.
One of the fascinating things in the last couple of years, this political campaign that went on forever, was that during the primary season, Ron Paul received more contributions from active-duty military personnel than any other candidate.
All of the rest of them combined.
That is so fascinating to me, because I think a lot of people, particularly on the left, tend to think that there's this sort of militarism that feeds the military, but I think what you find is for active-duty military personnel, who actually have been the foot soldiers unwillingly sometimes in this empire, that they were the ones that reacted positively to Ron Paul saying the first thing we're going to do is we're going to pull out of Korea.
We're going to pull out of bases all around the world, and we're going to come home.
And we're going to restore the Constitution, which they all swear an oath to, and which many of them take very seriously.
That's right.
So, you know, you asked, we talked about hope earlier.
I think that that's where the hope lies, is that particularly among active-duty military personnel, that there is this sense of belief and commitment to the Constitution, that they did respond positively to Ron Paul, and I actually think the American people in general don't want to be an empire.
I agree with that, and that's why they always have to lie to us from dawn till dusk.
That's right.
That's right.
Real quickly, because we're already over time, so I'm going to try to twist your arm and keep you on here another couple of minutes.
This is something else that's extremely important that you cover so well in this movie.
Again, it's The Warning, five authors, one warning, truth2power.tv, and you talk about torture and how, I believe it's Joe Connison explains that the tortures as instituted under the Bush regime were copied from an American manual about what they learned from North Koreans.
Yeah, it's not the most amazing thing.
And for the purpose of, for the purpose of not interrogation, but for the same purpose that the North Koreans used it, which was?
That's right.
To create false confessions.
It was actually Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained this, and it was a story that appeared one day in the New York Times, I think it was page six, and then it went away.
But it was a torture manual that we captured from the North Koreans.
They were using during the Korean War, the Red Chinese War as well.
And it was designed to create, there is a film made about this, Manchurian Candidates, people that you could brainwash through interrogation into saying and doing things that they would not otherwise do.
And it has fed Guantanamo, it has fed the fear, and it feeds the war on terror, as it's called.
And all those orange alerts, if everybody thinks back to 2002, 2003, orange alert, orange alert, all that was Sheikh Alibi and Hamdan and Binyam Mohamed, and all these guys who were being tortured into making up lies.
That's right.
That's right.
And it is, I think the other frightening thing, and I don't mean to be overly paranoid about this, but, is that it breaks down human psychology.
And we saw it with Jose Padilla, which is another one of the most amazing crimes of the last four to six years.
These guys, they're psychologically broken.
And a lot of these people, it never gets played in the media, but hundreds of these people have been released back to their home countries over the last few years.
And are these ticking time bombs that are out there now?
Well, you know, there's actually a new report that just came out about them, and most of them are just ruined, broken people, and everywhere they go, they're considered either a terrorist or a spy, and many of them are completely ruined, and that was only a small sample.
Well, it's, I mean, there again, what an amazing crime has been committed.
And you know, one positive, one upside of the Obama election, is that the world has sort of given us a path for the moment.
We really, we're not highly thought of around the world.
Whether this gets used for good or for ill, who knows?
But yeah, this torture manual thing is absolutely stunning, and you know, I grew up in the Cold War, I expect you grew up in the Cold War, and to actually have these Cold War techniques of our enemies being used by our government is actually, is stunning.
And R.F.
K.
Jr. in the film, you could see it on his face.
He, you know, his father was part of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
To see that these communist techniques were being used, and this manual being distributed, with only the title of the manual basically being changed, is, it sort of tells you how far we've fallen away from our American principles and ideals.
Well, and you know, when you talk about getting a pass by the election of Obama, this is why I thought it was so important that George Bush lose in 2004, so that, you know, really we're all, I know we can be jerky, but we really didn't mean this.
These guys that started Florida, they did all these crazy things, but we're, you know, making that right, and we didn't make that right.
And now, I think, really primarily because Obama's a black man, that's kind of given us a little bit of extra credit points, and people really, I think, as far as I can tell, people around the world really are bending over backwards to want to give America a second chance.
And on one hand, I fear that that's really the biggest problem with Obama, is what if he does a good job at that, and he actually, you know, really helps shore up the American empire by putting a nicer face on it, rather than, you know, continuing to be as much of a clown as George Bush or John McCain, and making it more difficult to maintain that empire.
On the other hand, I also think, if he maintains the empire, that they're not going to buy it, and that our past that we've earned, that you described, is going to wear out within, you know, the first hundred days.
Well, look, people around the world know a lot more about American history than most Americans do.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, people in South America know, and people in Central America know, and people in Central Asia know, and the Middle East know.
People kind of know what we've been up to since the beginning of the Cold War.
They're going to give us a pass for a while, and, I mean, I would love nothing more than four years from now to be on the phone with you again, and be on your show, and say, wow, isn't it great that Obama pulled up stakes on all of these bases, that we actually did come and pull out of Iraq, that we did not continue to encircle Russia, that the neocons have been discredited, that their ideology has been discredited, and, you know, we could And I'll come down to Austin, we can have a beer and listen to some of the best live music you can find in the country.
Oh, there you go.
I hope we don't have to wait four years.
But let's not take that for granted, you know.
I don't think the rest of the world is going to take it for granted.
I mean, they're just...
It's sort of like Daniel and the Lion's Den.
I think right now we've just had the thorn pulled out of our paw, and we're just happy to have the pain coming to an end of the last seven to eight years.
But these problems are still there, and that's the warning of the film, is don't be complacent, stay informed, and, you know, we haven't even talked about what's happened with our election system.
It looks like we had a fairly solid election this last time.
But elections since 2000 have been, I wouldn't say, trustworthy.
Oh, no, I totally agree with that.
I've got to say, you know, as much as I'm kind of over democracy anyway, but I really do appreciate the Bradblogs of the world and the people who really keep such a sharp eye on that.
Because, I mean, boy, talk about making a fool out of ourselves in front of the rest of the world, as far as that counts, having fraudulent elections as we bomb them and set them on fire and call it democracy.
Boy, you know, we ought to at least be able to count our ballots straight, if nothing else.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And look, after the Florida debacle, it turned into a market opportunity for companies like Choice Point and Diebold to come in with this new, you know, safe election system.
And obviously, 2004, you know, you talk about 2004, I think the sad fact of it, the matter is that we actually didn't reelect George Bush, but that that election was stolen.
Yeah, I think, well, I don't know all about it, but that seems to be what Greg Pallast and them think.
Yeah, well, Mark A. Jr. has spent a lot of time on this issue.
Yeah.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
All right.
Hey, listen, I hope I don't have to wait four years to talk to you again.
I hope I don't have to wait four years to see another movie by you.
What's next?
You said you're working on one, particularly about the neocons and the Christian right?
Yeah, well, actually, I want to focus specifically on the neocons.
I want to do a point by point on rebuilding America's defenses.
I've spent a lot of time on that.
And this film, The Warning, I'll shamelessly plug, at TruthToPower.tv, is successful on this web distribution model works.
I want to do a film called The No Exit Strategy about the neocon philosophy of governance and particularly its culmination in the Project for a New American Century and Rebuilding America's Defenses, where they say some very interesting and actually stunning things about their plans for the next hundred years for America and the world.
All right.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's Joseph.
And finally, the movie is called The Warning.
Five authors.
One warning.
RFK Jr., Naomi Wolf, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Joe Connison.
The website is TruthToPower.tv.