All right, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos, streaming live worldwide on the Internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, the author of Is it and?
No, I think it's just Enemy of the State, The Life of Marianne Rothbard and Reclaiming the Right, the Lost Legacy of America's Conservative Movement.
Welcome back to the show, Justin.
Great to be here.
And you got a very interesting article here.
Beware the new globalism.
Yeah.
At Antiwar.com slash Justin this morning.
What is the new globalism, Justin?
Well, it's kind of like the old globalism, except now a lot of these people are in power.
So they can start implementing their program.
And so I guess really the eight years of the Bush Jr.administration has really been a break from the policy of strengthening all the international institutions, you think?
Well, I mean, the interest and there's there's two views about how to impose a world government on on the world.
And one is the Bushian neocon strategy, which is unilateralism, which means that we're going to do it all by our lonesome selves.
And if you look at Iraq, for example, there's a perfect model for the neocon Bush strategy, which is invade.
Do it pretty much by yourself.
And then the torpedoes.
And now we have a new multilateral strategy, which is, yeah, those horrible Republicans, they were alienating all of our allies.
And now we have to use NATO and the EU and all these other preexisting globalist structures to impose our will.
So, I mean, you know, it's basically the same program, only it's just different means.
Well, I'm quite different.
It's it's interesting, you know, I was actually really surprised because I thought that Bush would, you know, use kind of right wing rhetoric, but really pursue the same policy when he gave all his speeches in 2002 to the U.N. saying, I'm trying to get you to live up to your mandate to declare war and and all these things that he really meant that, he would eventually do whatever it took if it if it meant even, you know, sharing the oil fields of the northern part of Iraq with Russia and China to get it through the Security Council to make the Iraq war a U.N. war.
And then really, I had to sort of learn.
I guess it took me a couple of months till after the war had even started before I really realized that they only went to the U.N. at all because Powell said you just absolutely have to.
Otherwise they would probably invade in the summer of 2002.
They really did not care about empowering the U.N. and doing the war in the name of the U.N. at all.
Right.
I mean, it's just a propaganda thing where they say, yes, you know, we have U.N. authorization.
So it's, quote unquote, legal.
And of course, it's not legal by any law of morality or international law that anybody rational recognizes.
But, you know, just because the U.N. says it's OK, then that gives us this sort of a number of, you know, holiness.
Right.
Which is absurd because, of course, the U.N., as Lennon pointed out, is a den of thieves.
It's just all these governments and they all, of course, have the same interest.
Well, at least they share the same interest in waging war against their own populations and looting their own populations by one means or another.
Staying in power.
No doubt about that.
Yeah.
Well, now, do you remember Richard Pearl's essay that he wrote in The Guardian?
And I guess it was right at the height of the triumph of, you know, the fall of Baghdad and all these things, I guess, in April of 2003.
It was called Thank God for the Death of the United Nations.
And and he really attacked not just, you know, ha ha, our faction won, but really went straight for the heart of the very idea of collective security under the United Nations Security Council as the way to solve problems in the future.
That he called this the liberal conceit that is now shipwrecked and crashed this this bogus New World Order plan that never was going to work anyway and is really kind of rubbing their face in it, I think.
Right.
Well, I mean, he does have a point in that, you know, of course, all these countries do not have the same international interests like Russia and China, for example, didn't want us to invade.
And of course, if it had come to a vote in the U.N., you know, they would have voted no.
So, you know, from from his point of view, which is that America ought to just conquer the world, you know, the U.N. is is not a good idea.
But of course, the U.N. is not a good idea from my point of view, because, you know, you can conquer the world with the cooperation of the U.N.
And that's not a good thing either.
Well, I wonder how much damage has been done to the legacy of those in the establishment who have attempted to build up the doctrine of collective security.
I mean, it seems like the last eight years have really been a major setback.
I mean, if you think about some of the larger building blocks, they were supposed to have the free trade area of the Americas was supposed to be a finished project by the end of 2005.
And that thing's dead in the water.
They'll be lucky if they get it done by 2015.
Yeah, well, you know, the whole idea of collective security is, you know, of course, you know, alive and well in the Obama administration.
And that's what we have to look at, because that's what we're dealing with now.
And of course, they're talking about how, you know, Afghanistan's security is tied to ours, which is one of the more absurd assertions that I've heard lately.
You know, I mean, just because the Taliban is in control of Afghanistan, it means that we are threatened here on the streets of Toledo, Ohio, which is nonsense.
You know, they're always coming up with new rationalizations as to why we ought to intervene.
So you had the hard rationalization, you know, like with the Republicans.
Now you have the soft rationalization with the Democrats.
But it's basically the same.
Same argument, that is, that no stone can go unturned, you know, we must intervene everywhere to secure our security here in this country.
You know, especially after 9-11, which somehow proves that, you know, interventionism is an absolute necessity.
Well, it sort of makes me wonder whether the promise of world government is sort of kind of just a ruse from inside the establishment to get all the liberal internationalists on board, whether empowering the U.N. and all those kinds of things really is just a fig leaf for American empire.
I mean, after all, the U.S.
Army is the world army, as you're saying.
Well, I actually don't think that's true.
I mean, if you look at the history of this whole idea, it goes back to the League to Enforce Peace, which was an actual organization which they tried to launch prior to the League of Nations.
And of course, the League to Enforce Peace, what a sinister name.
They let you tell you everything about the idea right there is the name.
And what they wanted to do was, you know, enforce this Wolfsonian principle of spreading goodness and democracy everywhere by force.
And so, you know, it's an idea that is just not going to die.
And in fact, it's going to get much stronger because, of course, this whole thing about Obama being, you know, the great uniter and now that he's president, you know, other nations are going to love us.
And they're going to go along with our plans is is just another argument for this liberal internationalism, which is just as deadly and just as aggressive as the Bush version.
Just a matter of style.
Well, but the thing is, I mean, it really seems like you can't have it both ways.
I mean, if there's to be any kind of real world federalism where the center of power is moved out of Washington, D.C., and and is somehow spread more around the world and to the detriment of American independence, then it's kind of hard to reconcile that with America, Britain and Israel versus the world, which is basically what's going on now.
Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's true.
There is a difference in their vision in that it wouldn't be so Western oriented, but I mean, let's look at the new rationalization now for globalism, which is economic.
So we're talking about how we can't solve, you know, the great big crisis which is supposedly happening and all the markets are melting down and we need international regulation.
You know, we need like bureaucrats in charge to stem the tide of the great meltdown and it has to be international.
Well, yeah.
And even worse than that, I mean, it's as Ron Paul has been saying, it looks to him like the breakdown of the Bretton Woods to system where the US dollar is no longer really in a position or at least will no longer for very long be in a position to be the reserve currency of the world.
And that then they're going these bureaucrats are going to get together to try to create a new global currency to, you know, good luck with that.
I mean, you know, good luck with getting the five and dime down the store to take what do they call their money?
He coos or what's the name of the name for the global currency already?
I don't know.
I mean, you know, you wouldn't probably know more about this than me, actually.
Maybe we should ask Ron Paul.
But, you know, like no matter what name they give it, it's not going to work and it's just going to make things worse.
It's just another fiat currency paper money.
But well, and thank God for that.
I mean, I think that's really the best thing that we have going for us.
And, you know, I think, you know, back in the 90s, I was a kid still.
So it's all right.
I was a lot more worried about this kind of thing than I am now, because now I just see how completely unable these giant national governments.
Are to to tackle to accomplish even the goals that they set out to accomplish the way that they want to accomplish them.
I just can't believe for a minute that this really amounts to a threat to American independence at the end of the day, because who's going to enforce it?
Well, this whole global warming thing is another crusade.
And I'm sure I'm going to offend my liberal listeners here, but this is the new religion of the left global warming.
And of course, you're not allowed to challenge it, because if you do, it's heresy.
So they've glommed on to this as being the new rationale for globalism.
Well, of course, it's happening to the whole world.
There's global warming, blah, blah, blah.
So up here in Guerneville, it's it's freezing cold.
So I don't know where this global warming is.
It hasn't reached us yet.
It snowed here in Austin last night.
So there you go.
That just proves it.
There was even a title of a Newsweek cover that said it was about all the blizzards.
I think it was, was it 96 or something when the Northeast had all those blizzards and they said, oh, blizzards everywhere.
Blame global warming.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, you're how many years younger than me?
What, 10, 15 years, 20 years?
I'm 32.
So whatever that is.
Well, I'm over that.
But let's just say that I, you know, I remember global freezing.
And that was the big thing, global freezing and all these magazine articles and science fiction stories about how the new ice age.
Right, right.
The new ice age is coming.
And what are we going to do?
And blah, blah, blah.
So it's either an ice age or it's global warming or, you know, the triffids are coming.
Yeah, well, or they try to hijack your theme, which is peace.
And this is something I remember.
There's the old United Nations pamphlet that just has an atom bomb exploding on the front and then you open it and it says that's one alternative to the United Nations.
And basically the point is that as long as you have these super armed nation states that were risking, you know, global annihilation, us and the Russians having thousands of missiles point at each other.
We have to have a monopoly on force so that it won't be used all the time.
Right.
And so, though, actually, I should put in a good word for the U.N. here.
You know, the reason that the Bush people hated the U.N. is because at the U.N., you have to start talking and therefore explaining yourself.
And of course, to the neocons who are in charge of the Bush administration's foreign policy, explaining yourself is never a good thing.
So they didn't want to have to do that.
You know, the U.N. could serve a good purpose, though, as it was conceived.
It's not inclined to serve that purpose.
But talking to people is a lot better than bombing the heck out of them.
You know, that said, you know, the whole idea of globalism is just so clueless.
I mean, actually, the trend is the other way.
You know, the modern trend is toward more efficient, decentralized economic units.
And of course, the word economic here is really key because politics is less and less important.
What's important is money and wealth production.
And so how to efficiently produce wealth is, you know, really what what makes a nation or a region powerful.
And so, you know, you can have these huge empires like the old Soviet empire or now the American empire.
And there are these gigantic entities that are totally inefficient and useless and, in fact, are doomed to fail.
They're too big.
They're unmanageable.
Well, and it's true, isn't it, that even during the Cold War and the so-called bipolar world, there still was the entire third world so-called that, you know, there are a lot of proxy fights and that kinds of things and sometimes hot wars like Vietnam and that sort of deal.
But without the Soviet empire on the other side, there's really nothing to make the average citizen in the average, well, former Eastern Bloc country or former third world country think that they need us.
Why would they need a giant mutual defense pact with America when the Soviet threat is gone?
We're the only threat.
So it's when the Soviet Union went away, we didn't go from a bipolar world to to a unipolar world like all the neocons believe it shifted much back to, you know, a multipolar system where you have all kinds of regional powers growing up all over the place that have no reason really to kowtow to America.
Right.
And I think what what you have to start looking at now, this may sound radical and, of course, highly improbable.
But if you start looking at, you know, how these empires break up and then conclude that we are not immune, I think in the future you're going to see regionalist movements in this country.
Well, I just finished interviewing Russell Means all about the Lakota Nation last hour.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
Good old Russell.
How's he doing?
He's doing good.
There you go.
Well, look, I mean, it's you know, it makes economic sense.
And, you know, as far as I'm concerned, you know, let's let's bring back the old California Republic or, you know, what do we need Washington for?
You know, all the money that we are sending to Washington, how much of it do we get back?
I mean, people are going to start asking these questions, especially in a time of economic crisis, you know, and especially when the federal government starts to intervene in a massive way.
I think particularly on the right, you're going to see regionalism rise up, you know, because people don't like to be bossed around by distant rulers, as as anybody in Afghanistan will tell you.
And so, you know, I think that that, you know, like really is the future.
Yeah, well, any libertarian ought to be able to make the case that we'd be much better off under the Articles of Confederation.
We could call it the USA still.
There you go.
You know, France has had how many revolutions?
They're still France.
We still be the USA.
But we don't really need this Washington, D.C. thing at all, do we?
Well, no, no, we don't.
I mean, you know, maybe we could have a mutual defense pact, but I mean, this is the tendency, you know, I don't want to get too improbable here.
But, you know, I think that there's going to be a lot more demands for autonomy, if not independence, at least.
And that this is not just an American thing, but, you know, it's a global thing.
Like, look at the EU.
I mean, look how many elections those guys have lost.
And, you know, my column today, I talk about that article by, you know, I think his name is Gerald Rockman in the Financial Times, where he actually, you know, proposes a world government, says, well, you know, here's what's going on.
Here's, you know, here's why we, you know, supposedly need it.
Gideon Rockman is right.
Right.
Yes.
And, you know, of course, it was in Financial Times, which, you know, again, underscores my point that it's the financial crisis that is bringing this question to the fore again, and the need for global economic planning, so-called, which would just mess up things on a global scale instead of a national scale.
But that's neither here nor there.
Well, you know, even back in the year 2000, when they did the giant Millennium Summit and they had almost all the heads of state in the world, a few foreign ministers standing in for prime ministers and that kind of thing.
But almost all the heads of state on Earth came to New York for the big Millennium Summit and they put as one of their goals.
And perhaps this really was just kind of a pie in the sky thing that they said they hope to have one day or something.
But they talk about a permanent standing army, a peace force.
Right.
And in that Financial Times article, there is a mention of a report by the Managing Globalism Initiative or something like that, which is people by, you know, some like John Podesta is involved in that and also Susan Rice and Strobe Talbot of the Brookings Institution.
And so, I mean, you know, it's not just, you know, like the world federalists, you know, or whatever, it's people who have power and influence.
Well, of course, Strobe Talbot, and I think you linked him in your article here, is he's the guy who wrote in June of 1992, The Birth of the Global Nation, was it 93, The Birth of the Global Nation in Time magazine, where he said eventually all states on Earth will recognize a single global authority.
Right.
And, you know, it's an old meme that, you know, stretches back to H.G.
Wells in his in his classic science fiction novel, The Shape of Things to Come, where this group of intrepid technocrats who are the only people on Earth who have air power, you know, go around mashing up these, you know, little warlords and establishing a world state, of course, by force.
And, you know, of course, in the novel, they use sleeping gas to subdue their opponents.
But, of course, in the real world, it's going to be real guns.
So the MGI report talks about a standing army of, I think it was either 90,000 or 50,000 peacekeepers.
But, of course, that's just the embryo.
Like any state apparatus, it would grow and it would accrue to itself more, more power.
And, of course, no state can exist without income.
And how do states get their income?
Taxation.
So I think that, you know, like eventually we'll see some kind of world income tax.
And you can bet that the top rate is going to be fairly high.
So, you know, that's something to look forward to.
But that's the way you want to look at it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I might as well admit what a kook I am.
I actually thought at the dawn of the Bush administration that his purpose would be to deliberately bankrupt the American empire, that the New World Order didn't mean American empire.
It meant what came after it.
That once America is put in a position of weakness, then they would try for more world statism.
But then I ran up against the reality that if you're not going to, if the American people and their army are not the world army, who is?
Because the Europeans aren't conquering the world any time soon.
And the Chinese don't have any troop ships.
And we are the world army.
The Pentagon is the world army.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it pretty much seems like that, especially when you encounter this interesting statistic, which is that our military has more money spent on it than all the other defense budgets in the world combined.
So there must be a reason for that.
I think in a previous article, you talked about the global division of labor, the Chinese are the factory and America's the policeman.
Isn't that nice?
Isn't that supposed to be America's heritage?
It rings right out of the Declaration of Independence, right?
America as the world SWAT team.
Well, right.
And of course, it fits right into the liberal.
And I don't mean classical liberal idea of military, can you think of them?
I mean, now all these liberal economists are saying, well, it doesn't really matter what we spend money on.
It just means that we've got to spend money and create what they call velocity, economic velocity, so that people can be employed again.
And it doesn't really matter.
It's like building roads, you could build pyramids, or you could do what America has been doing, and that is build weapons.
Of course, the problem with that is that weapons are eventually used.
So, well, and they destroy property and wealth in their use.
And of course, lives, right, make matters worse in the aggregate, too, right.
And of course, that's what, you know, got us out of the first Great Depression, which was World War Two.
And my great fear is that, you know, like military can you think of them is going to lead to military intervention in a massive way.
And, you know, because, of course, all these weapons just sitting around are just begging to be used, and they will be.
Well, and of course, Obama and McCain both agreed that there ought to be some sort of national service.
And I don't think it's hard to imagine that the terms will be a lot better if you join the military.
You'll get more money, and you'll have less time that you owe than if they make you work at an old folks home or that kind of thing.
And we could be entering a brave new era of conscription as well.
Right.
And, you know, I think, I mean, this is not all pie in the sky.
I mean, I think that there are people in the Obama administration, or in and around it, who are committed liberal internationalists, and they would love to see the UN empowered in this way.
And, you know, think of the propaganda, you know, like benefits.
Well, it's not America that's intervening here.
It's the world.
It's the world versus Iran.
It's the world versus China.
So it's more of a touchy-feely kind of a thing.
And it makes the interventionists, at least of the so-called left, feel better about it.
Well, and the war in China is going to be more subtle than that.
It's going to be a war for dominance in Africa, in the name of helping the poor people there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
In fact, if the Obama administration intervenes anywhere, anytime soon, I would look at Africa right there.
And, you know, what's her name?
Samantha Power is a big advocate of that.
You know, she can't wait to go into Darfur.
Well, you know, Obama, when he gave that giant speech in Berlin during the campaign, invoked never again, invoked the Holocaust and the promise at the end of World War II that the West would invade any power that was bent on destruction of any one people, in their way of phrasing it, I guess, and invoked that.
And in the same breath, invoked Darfur.
And, of course, George Bush and Dick Cheney have just lost their third war in Somalia as well.
So that's another place for America to clean up the mess that they made.
Right.
All those pirates.
Yeah, something's got to be done about them.
I mean, that is a very fallible war.
And yeah, we have to stop the pirates.
It's all very colorful.
You know, I am waiting for the made for TV movie about that one.
Yeah.
Well, Bill Kristol, I'm sure you saw, is promoting this right now.
No, no, I didn't see that.
Yeah.
In fact, I think he even attempts to speak for the Marines and talk about how eager they must be to go reenact the battle against the Barbary pirates and the Jefferson administration.
Well, you know, these people are living in a dream world and they're so removed from reality, that is economic reality, that it just defies all logic and all sense.
I mean, we don't have the means to do this anymore.
You know, all these grandiose plans.
Yes, we're going to have a new world order and blah, blah, blah.
I have news for you guys.
The world is collapsing and there isn't any order.
And all your attempts to bring order are only going to bring about the exact opposite, which is chaos.
I mean, we are in the midst of a major economic meltdown, a day of reckoning, and all the spending, all the grandiose plans, all the nonsense that we've heard since the end of World War II is going to be coming to an end.
You know, the empire is truly finished.
And all this stuff is totally counterintuitive.
I mean, here they're talking about a world government when their national governments can barely keep order.
It's just absurd.
And it's just so typical of these people who live and work in Washington, D.C., that it's just a joke.
Well, and you know, with the economic crisis, which of course is driven by governments, and as you identify in your article here, the popping of the Greenspan bubble, which is a global bubble since the dollar is the reserve currency, and all the economic crises that that entails, it seems to really, probably, and I guess I don't know the extent to which this is going to take root, but it seems like this would really threaten the good part of globalism, which is the division of labor and the expansion of trade, which is what breeds peace and friendliness and happiness.
Like, for example, the reason George Bush never bombed China is because there are a lot of billionaires in the Republican Party who made it clear that that one was off limits.
Go kill Arabs.
Yeah.
You know, everything is shifting in a very fundamental way.
Politics is less important than economics.
And, you know, it's very interesting.
This is a little off topic, but I was watching, I think, MSNBC, and they were talking about the auto bailout.
And there's this one Congresswoman, a Democrat, of course, who was talking about, yes, you know, we're not going to just hand them this money.
They're going to have to produce good cars, because we're going to force them to.
And I thought, you are?
How are you going to do that?
Yeah, what does she know about good cars?
They produce products that people want to buy, really, by pointing a gun at their head, by threatening them with jail.
I mean, these people are unrealistic, totally.
And it's just, I mean, the people in Washington are just headed for a cliff.
Yeah, that's the thing.
They think that they're going to establish a new world order or whatever, or a global government.
They are very much mistaken.
Yeah, they can certainly succeed in destroying our economy further, but not much better than that.
Right.
I mean, you know, the world's problems are economic in nature.
It's not a question of, you know, a political organization.
It's a question of survival, of, you know, how to create things so that we can live on this earth.
And government has never been good at that.
So, you know, all these gigantic, supranational, you know, like, bureaucracies and structures are just mythical.
I mean, they don't really exist, and they won't exist either.
But of course, they can cause a lot of problems, you know, in the interim.
Yes.
So, I mean, that's what we have to watch out for.
Like, for example, Obama is going to go straight to the UN.
As soon as he gets in office, he's going to go straight to the UN, and this whole let's negotiate with Iran charade is going to take place.
And they're going to go to the UN, you know, they're going to try and get China and Russia to agree, you know, to flap on really heavy sanctions, which would really damage the Iranian people and hurt them.
So, I mean, that's where it can cause problems.
You know, like, the new multilateralism is even more dangerous than the old Bush let's go it alone strategy.
It'll take longer, but once they get going, there'll be no stopping them.
Because, you know, they will have, you know, like what they consider to be legitimacy.
You know, it'll be hard to dissuade them.
Well, that's the thing.
You talk about the collapse of the empire.
It's not going to happen tomorrow.
I mean, it may have begun, but when you talk about hundreds of bases around the world, it's not like Ron Paul just won and is going to bring them home.
You have people who are absolutely determined to see all of this through.
And that's really why Obama's there, is to shore up the empire.
That's his job.
He promised to do it better than Bush.
Right.
And so now they're putting a new face on the empire, a much more benevolent, ostensibly, face.
And, you know, they're going to try and do it that way.
You know, I think it's really a race between economic meltdown on the home front and the drive to war overseas.
And so whichever happens first.
And, of course, with Hillary Clinton in charge of our foreign policy, it's going to be kind of a hairy ride there, because, of course, Obama is going to be focused on the economy here.
And the people that he's put in charge of his foreign policy are going to be relatively free to do whatever they want.
Well, if there's anything that will, I mean, I don't really know all these charts and graphs and which tipping point represents what, Justin, but if there's a final destruction of the American economy, it seems like bombing Iran is a pretty good way to cause it.
Yeah, yeah.
It would actually drive up oil prices and maybe set off an inflationary spiral.
Plus reaction all across the Middle East, all across the Middle East.
You'd have more fighting in Palestine and Lebanon and Pakistan and Afghanistan and everywhere else.
Right.
I mean, minus that dramatic action, I think that this whole interventionist thing is going to wind down, because the United States just doesn't have the power anymore.
I mean, we're a waning superpower.
You know, the trend, as I said, is in the other direction toward decentralism, toward smaller units which are more efficient.
And, you know, these huge megastructures are increasingly irrelevant.
Well, but the more they grasp to what power they have left and lash out at what they see as the threats to it, the more dangerous position we're put in here in America.
I guess, you know, the way Thomas Johnson phrases it is you have to either give up your empire or live under it.
And so if these people are really going to continue to try to, you know, manage our wealth to the degree that they can continue to wage their wars overseas, we're going to end up seeing much more real imperial police state type activity here at home in terms of centralizing our police forces and homeland security and the Northern Command.
And I'm sure you've read about the active duty troops now at the ready for deployment inside the United States.
Yeah, like what?
Like 50,000 of them?
Well, it's supposed to be 20,000 by 2011.
But, of course, it'll be twice that by then.
Who knows?
Assuming they can bring enough guys home from Iraq to staff the thing.
What is the rationalization for that?
I mean, it's not that they are...
Biological weapons.
Dirty bombs and biological attacks.
When it blows up a city, the army is going to have to be able to be at the ready to come in.
Never mind the National Guard.
They're all busy occupying other people's countries overseas.
We need the U.S. Army here.
Ah, interesting.
Well, I mean, obviously they're looking forward to or anticipating rather, you know, like domestic internal disorder here.
Probably because of a result of economic conditions.
You know, worsening economic conditions.
And I wouldn't be surprised, you know, if that happened.
But, you know, back to the globalism thing.
You know, I think that the real project that the globalists have and have had for quite a long time is a world central bank.
And what they want to do is, you know, have the central bank set it up.
And, of course, they have, you know, the core institutions anyway.
They have the International Monetary Fund.
They have the World Bank.
And they want to make these institutions more pervasive and more powerful.
And so I think that they will take these existing structures.
You know, like Obama will probably convene an international economic summit.
You know, and try and put this together, at least from the ground up.
But then they can, you know, inflate the currency or, you know, do it all together.
You know, like get all the currencies together.
Get all the, you know, like central bankers together in a single room.
And, you know, like determine on a policy, a common policy.
And that this will be seen as a great step forward.
Because, of course, big, you know, it's interesting.
You know, all these future scenarios.
You know, like the Star Trek scenario of, yes, you know, we're all one big globe.
And that is always seen as progress.
Big is always better.
It's more modern.
Smaller is primitive.
But, in fact, the actual opposite is true.
And if you look at, you know, like computer technology, for example.
You know, computers got smaller.
And small decentralized units were seen as more efficient.
You know, and that goes for the computer industry also.
And industry in general.
So, they're taking this political model of, you know, like gigantism equals progress.
When, in fact, it's just the opposite.
That decentralized units are much more efficient and work better and are more human.
So, we have a hell of a battle in front of us.
You know, I read a quote on Lew Rockwell's blog about Rahm Emanuel saying, you don't ever want to let a crisis go by without taking the opportunity to get done what you want to get done.
And that kind of thing.
And it seems like, you know, I don't really know how to measure in my own mind how bad this economic meltdown already is or promises to be and those kinds of things.
But if it's as bad as everybody's saying it is, I don't know if you saw that article in the Telegraph where they had a quote from, I think, the CEO of Citigroup saying, you know, our only choices are an inflationary shock, which would be the success, creating enough money to bail out all of these banks and all their bad debts that they owe to each other, which would be untold trillions of dollars.
Or, if that doesn't work, if we create all that money and it still doesn't work, then we're going to have war and revolution and all this internal strife and that kind of thing.
Seems like our job is clear.
We have to keep making the point that it was where we abandoned decentralist principles, where we abandoned libertarian principles and turned our economy over to our governments, is what caused this problem in the first place.
And it seems like we've probably been set back quite a bit as all the media blames capitalism for all this.
We have quite a long road ahead of us.
Oh, yeah.
And, I mean, I don't think we're going to really have much success against this whole idea that laissez-faire was tried and it didn't work and blah, blah, blah.
And I think that you're going to see this convergence of the so-called left and the so-called right on, you know, the whole idea of the government stepping in and bailing out practically everyone, of course, the rich people first.
You know, the banks have to get bailed.
You know, you'll notice that, you know, all these bailouts, they started with the banks and nobody questioned it.
And it was just like the 9-11 thing.
Well, don't ask any questions because if you do, we're just, you know, wasting time.
You know, like this is an emergency and we have to act now.
So no questions, just give us, you know, hand over the money.
Then as you got down the food chain, you know, down to the GM workers, right, you know, the common ordinary people, they had to crawl to Washington literally on their hands and knees and beg for this money.
And, of course, there's all kinds of, you know, conditions attached to it and this and that and the other things.
You know, like when you get down to it, it's what we have now is plutocratic socialism.
That is socialism for the rich.
Well, that $700 billion that Congress originally passed is now $8 trillion.
Right.
I mean, I don't know how that happened.
If there's even a law that they're pretending to cite or what.
They've been created or pledged in taxpayer-guaranteed loans, which means we will guarantee them.
$8 trillion plus for this.
Yeah.
I mean, look, if libertarians ever came into power, the first thing that we would have to do is repudiate the national debt.
That's it.
And say, screw you guys.
Screw the banks, number one, which are the most statist institutions on Earth.
And say, you know what?
We're not paying.
We can't pay.
We won't pay.
And that's the title of a play, by the way, by the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
They're a leftist commie organization, and it's about rent control and rent.
But it's actually a great slogan.
We can't pay.
We won't pay.
And we ain't paying.
Sounds good to me.
You know, Russell Means was talking about going on the gold standard up there in Lakota country.
Well, good luck with that, Russell.
All right, Justin, we're actually over time here, not even all out of it.
So thanks very much for coming on the show today.
Appreciate it.
Anytime.
All right, everybody, that's Justin Armando, antiwar.com slash Justin.
That's it for Antiwar Radio.
See you here tomorrow, 11 to 1 Texas time on Chaos in Austin.
