08/27/09 – James Ostrowski – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, of course, streaming live worldwide on the Internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's time to bring on our first guest today on the show.
It's Jim Ostrowski.
He's a lawyer in New York featured regularly.
His articles are featured regularly at LewRockwell.com.
And he runs the blog Political Class Dismissed.
Now with a sub-headline, The War Room of the Tea Party Movement.
That's pretty interesting.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you doing?
Real good, Scott.
I really appreciate you coming back on the show with us today.
Now, well, let's just start with that Tea Party Movement thing.
Obviously, I think it would be pretty easy for anyone, especially me, to feel nothing but contempt for a bunch of right-wingers who all of a sudden pretend that they have some skepticism about government power when we all know that they are the most worshipful statists in the country who will abandon any principle that they might be left defending a state of lawless torture around the world.
And so, damn them and how dare they pretend to be the anti-government movement in this country.
You're apparently taking an opposite view, which is, no, we've got to round them up and lead them.
How do you propose to do that?
Lead a bunch of torture-mongering, lunatic, right-wing crazies?
Well, I see your point.
But look, I'm always trying to push the libertarian agenda.
And the Tea Party Movement is either going to be led by the people you talked about, or it's going to be led by libertarians.
I view the movement as a continuation of everything we've been trying to do, culminating in the Ron Paul revolution, the most successful libertarian presidential candidate since Grover Cleveland.
And I don't see any reason why libertarians should take a backseat to conservatives or neocons in claiming their right to lead the Tea Party Movement.
It's basically a libertarian movement.
There's a lot of hypocrisy, but maybe some people have had a change of heart, too.
People can change, and that's basically the spirit in which I'm involved in the Tea Party Movement.
I know up in Buffalo, western New York, it's a heavily libertarian movement, but there are some conservatives who are maybe only recently coming to realize that we libertarians were right all along.
And I say join us, and they're welcome.
Well, that's good.
You're a bigger man than I, by a long shot.
It's clear.
The Tea Party, the first Tea Party, recently it was the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party in 2007, when Ron Paul raised millions and millions of dollars for his anti-state, anti-war pro-market movement.
But the problem is, you've got Dick Armey, and you have all these millionaire republicans, and Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, and all these brown-shirt Nazis coming and taking the thing over.
How do you differentiate yourself from them when they show up at your rally?
Well, I can tell you, first of all, that in western New York, Buffalo, we've had several rallies.
The last one had 700 people, and it was on July 4th at noon.
700 people.
There's no esoteric whatsoever up here.
We're not getting a dollar from those people.
So what you've got is somewhat of a complicated situation.
There are people trying to astroturf the Tea Party movement, but there's also a grassroots Tea Party movement, and I know people like Keith Olbermann are unable to make that distinction.
So there's this march on Washington, I guess, or the rally in Washington, September 12th.
I posted the banner on my site, but then I looked at some of the organizations involved, and they're astroturf organizations, but then there's some good organizations like the Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty, and the, forgive me, the student group, the Young Americans for Liberty.
I'm sorry.
I assume we forget.
Yeah.
There are two good groups, and then there's some astroturf groups, and I just think we just have to say, look, we're not associated with those people, and you're not going to stop them from coming to events, but it is a real grassroots movement, but we also have to point out the phonies and the frogs like Newt Gingrich, and so on, and Dick Armey.
All these people had a chance to prove they were for small government when they were in power, and they failed.
So that's all we can say is make those critical distinctions.
Yeah.
You know, I saw a YouTube of a guy who was pretty, I mean, I don't know who he was, but you could pretty easily guess that he was basically like a local libertarian party type of guy.
Yeah.
He was on the beach and saying, listen, I mean, we're bankrupt because of the war and the world empire, and the audience just shouted him down and heckled him, and I guess he got off lucky if they didn't sing the Pledge of Allegiance at him or something.
Well, you're absolutely right, but I'll tell you, I stood, again, in front of 500 to 700 people at various events, and I denounced the global military empire, and I say quite explicitly, we've got to pull our troops out of these countries and end these ridiculous Asian land wars, and I haven't seen one boo, maybe that's because I'm six-two and kind of mean looking, but no, I haven't been booed at all.
I know there's some people who probably disagree with me, but it's an open dialogue up here in Buffalo, and I hope that that's true.
I know there's libertarians like me all over the Tea Party movement trying to put their stamp on it and get the conservatives over to the positions we've held for 40 years now, which are now turning out to be, you know, ultimately correct in both domestic and foreign policy, and as you know, I mean, domestic and foreign policy are intimately related.
So what I'm trying to do with this anti-, I mean, there's a lot of things going on with the anti-Obama or Democrat wars movement that I'm trying to get going, and one of them is that maybe these conservatives, now that there's a Democrat, a D in the White House, they might actually realize that war is a bad thing, that war is just another failed government program, and then we try to shame the liberals into joining us, because after all, they spent eight years bashing Bush's wars, and all of a sudden, again, there's a D in the White House, and now war is a good thing, and then, of course, the libertarians have been good on the issues for a while, so time for us to lead both sides and stop all these Democrat wars.
As Bob Dole said, the only good thing he ever did in his whole career, he stood up in that debate and called them a bunch of Democrat wars, and they called it a gaffe, which, of course, is when you inadvertently tell the truth.
Yeah, that was a great clip, in fact, if you'll hang on just a second, I want to cue that one up for the people here to play, because it's really funny, you know, the last person in the world you would expect to talk like this, if I can get this, what, Pentium 2 or whatever to cooperate with me here, maybe I can play it, but, well, anyway, I'll play that clip in a minute.
You brought up an important point there about the anti-war movement on the liberal side, or the progressive side, just going AWOL here, kind of leaving us standing out alone, you know, libertarians stay anti-war when liberals are in power, but, you know, I talked with Cindy Sheehan on the show yesterday, and she said virtually all of her liberal progressive left-wing support has just evaporated, even Code Pink would rather support Barack Obama than the lady that's trying to stop Obama's wars.
Well, totally correct, and let me just tell you a little anecdote about the Tea Party movement.
We've had three or four big events in Buffalo, each have drawn 500 to 700 people, and at one of the events, they announced a counter-protest, so I have spies, you know, I talk to everybody along spectrum, so people feed me information, found out that the email organizing this counter-protest for the Tea Party rally came from the Western New York Peace Center, and I said, what the hell?
The Western New York Peace Center?
Why aren't you all protesting some Obama war?
And I said, you know, here's my speech, I denounced war, I talked about the genetic link between war and big government, and I called for an end to the global military, what are you protesting me for?
You should be cheering me on, but they stood across the street, 12 or 13 people, so that's kind of like the impetus here, I just recently again checked the, so we got into a big battle with the local, you know, tea stick, and I checked their website recently, and I noticed that there's no anti-war event schedule, and I said, well, what the heck, let's schedule an event, and then I said, why not take it nationwide, and by the way, I'm standing right at the spot Goodwill and Elmwood, which is where, in Buffalo, a beautiful Olmstead Parkway, where they usually have the anti-war rallies, so this is why we're having it, in the liberals' own neighborhood, and gee, I wonder if people are starting to gather over there already, but actually it's a week from Saturday, September 5th at noon, so yeah, we're having a lot of fun with it, and somebody said, well, how can you have fun with the war?
I said, well, Jesus, war is mass murder, don't kid me, we're having fun with the liberals' hypocrisy, not that war, we're trying to end the damn war, so, but it is fun to try to tweak both sides, the conservatives and liberals here, and I believe that, and I'm not back.
When you look back at the Clinton years, you see how a big part of the right was pretty anti-government most of the time, until the last couple of years of the Clinton thing, it became, no, they just really didn't like Bill, and it turned out they loved government when George Bush and Dick Cheney were in charge of it, and of course, you had at least a very anti-imperialist kind of feeling on the left during the Bush years, but then by the last couple of years of the Bush administration, no, it was really just George Bush that they didn't like, and they get to love the state again, and they just flip-flop back and forth, the liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, and I guess you and I, and the libertarians, we're here to try to pick off the flotsam and jetsam from all this splashing around and hope that some people notice the hypocrisy in here and, you know, I don't know, maybe give up on the state to do it their way?
You're exactly right.
I think I wrote on Lew Rockwell one time that there really was a vast right-wing conspiracy to get the Clintons, because after all, it wasn't big government they were against, they just didn't like the Clintons personally.
Who cares about the Clintons personally?
As Jim Bovard has documented, what they did during the day was pretty damn bad.
Let's forget about what they did at night, or under the sheet.
But, yeah, in less than the same way, apparently they just disliked Bush personally, not his policies.
So, as you know better than I do, because you follow these things on a daily basis, you know, Obama's a warmonger, he hasn't ended any wars, he's escalating the number of wars, he's throwing missiles into Pakistan, and they know he wants to get into Africa, or already is, and you know those details better than I do.
I'm just a working class lawyer, libertarian troublemaker in Buffalo.
But I do think it's a perfect time for us to dive in.
I'm an opportunist on strategy, I could dive in where nobody's doing anything.
Where's the anti-war movement?
Well, here it is.
I'm at Bidwell in Elmwood in Buffalo a week from Saturday, and I encourage people to have an event, wherever the liberals usually have their anti-war rally, make it easy on them so they can roll out of bed and join them at the rally.
There you go.
And this is what date again?
September...
Well, we're asking people to do it on Saturday, September 5th at noon to one, just a real simple thing, make a few homemade signs, send out a press release, and go have a beer afterwards and meet your fellow activists.
Or if people think they need more lead time to plan, I frankly think in the digital era you don't need that much time to throw an event together, we've thrown events together in three or four days with the internet.
But have the event on another Saturday.
But we've got to get this anti-war movement going again, because the liberals have abandoned us and the leftists.
Well, you know, I think this is the best way really to spread libertarianism, it's kind of the premise of this show.
I don't really, sometimes I'll have Anthony Gregory on or something, but we don't usually sit around talking about libertarianism as such on this show.
It's more like, hey look, it's supposed to be anyway, the best anti-war guys are libertarians, and why is that?
And so for people who actually put peace first, they're supposed to notice eventually that they're being led by example here, kind of thing.
Well, you know, just some of the sign ideas, you know, war is the health of the state, war is just another failed government program, I love that slogan.
And then the one I came up with myself, war is the price we pay for taxation, which is the response to Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous line about taxes being the price we pay for civilization.
Well, hey, one of the things that taxes pay for is war.
Can you imagine any of these world wars without people being taxed?
Who would pay for the destruction and mass murder of war?
Nobody would voluntarily pay for it, it's all based on taxes.
So it's a great teaching moment to teach liberals that taxes have a downside, too.
Well, you know, I was thinking that maybe one advantage that we have, too, is that, well, you mentioned Newt Gingrich there, he's really the best intellectual leader that the War Party, right, has.
I mean, you've got Newt, I mean, look, check this out, Jim, the Republican Party's number one highest ranking elected official is Mitch McConnell, who couldn't read anything.
I mean, the guy's just walking corruption, he doesn't even know anything to compromise his principle, he's just there to be a prostitute for the military industrial complex and whatever, he's got nothing to say about anything.
Then you've got Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Newt Gingrich, I mean, and then you have Ron Paul.
And it seems like more and more, at least on TV, they're turning to Ron Paul because nobody else can even make a coherent argument.
If they want to interview somebody on the right, they interview him, and of course, no matter what they ask him, he always says, you know, we could save a lot of money, a trillion dollars a year on our empire if we would just get rid of it.
Well, absolutely, and going back to what you said before, the cost of these wars, a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation I made six months ago, the total cost of these recent foreign wars is equal to the total American credit card debt.
So if you're a conservative out there, next time you send in your monthly credit card payment, think, I'm paying for my dumb neoconservative ideology right now, and boy, that really hurts.
If I was a liberal libertarian, I wouldn't know anything on my credit card bill right now.
So we have to make those arguments, we have to tie in domestic and foreign policy.
It can be complicated to do, but Robert Higgs had an article the other day on Mises.org, I think, where he talked about some of the origins of domestic government was war, the veterans' pensions in the Civil War, the GI Bill has led to this enormous federal and state involvement in higher education, which of course you know ultimately how that's going to end up.
We have this whole college bubble now, based on so much money being thrown at colleges.
People come out of college and they've got a ball and chain of a student loan attached to their leg.
The ball came out of the GI Bill.
College is really what high school was like 70 years ago.
They've got so many people going because of the federal money available, they had to water down the standard.
So people are not only getting a watered-down education, they're getting this very expensive education.
They're bankrupting themselves and their parents.
And so again, this all started with the GI Bill.
There are 13 million GIs and we need to figure out how to buy their votes back when they get back to America.
Right, and you think about it this way, too.
When everybody was coming home from World War II, the idea that, hey, we owe it to these young heroes to give them a college education and what have you, seems fair enough.
Who could argue with that?
And yet, as you and I both know, on September 10, 2001, probably 80% of the guys in the military joined just so they could go to college.
It wasn't the reward for their service anyway as an extra bonus.
This is the whole point of the warfare state, is this is how you can go to college if your dad ain't rich.
Well, and then what you do is you build up these constituencies.
I mean, how many college professors are Republicans or Libertarians?
90% or 80% of them are Democrats.
You create these permanent constituencies by creating these programs and you create a permanent sort of infrastructure for big government.
And again, all roads lead back to war.
Even if you look at it historically, when did spending permanently increase in the United States?
1917.
Well, that's World War I. It's America getting involved in World War I. Spending shot up.
It went back down in the Higgs Ratchet effect that he described in his book.
But it never got back to the original point.
It was always bigger after the war.
World War II, same thing, bigger after the war than before.
So again, war causes big government domestically and of course in and of itself.
Well, and you know, one of the consequences, the major consequences that we're dealing with from this war on terror is the almost outright, you know, straight-faced abandonment of any pretense that the law can bind the actions of the executive branch.
I mean, we have this torture regime where, you know, as you know, I'm sure you saw all the headlines, they've appointed a prosecutor to investigate the guys who may have gone beyond what they were allowed to do in the obviously illegal memos that authorize them to do things that it could not, the Office of Legal Counsel cannot authorize breaking the law and torturing people.
They can't do that.
And so they've already basically just said to the American people outright, George Bush, Dick Cheney, the entire cabinet and all their lawyers are beyond the reach of the law.
They can do whatever they want and the same goes for Obama and his team and the next president after that too.
I mean, how do you go back from that?
Well, and the precedent that they all cite was Lincoln during the Civil War who did all sorts of illegal things, jailing 13,000 political prisoners, sending one congressman out of the country.
Tom DiLorenzo has documented a lot of that stuff.
So again, where does big government come from?
It comes from war.
It comes from the creation of these false emergencies.
You know, you have to give up your liberty during an emergency.
So why?
If liberty is good, you think I'd need it most in an emergency.
That's what F. A. Harper's argument was, which is still good.
I remember it 30 years later.
So again, you know, it's a holistic approach.
You cannot divide civil liberties, domestic policy and foreign policy.
It's all one policy.
And that's one of the teaching points, I think, on September 5th.
Well, and from here on out too, and I really wish you luck with that.
I very much like the idea of the libertarian movement in this country really being able to lead the, you know, well, the parts of the right that are angry enough to go outside and yell about it and whatever, rather than letting them all, you know, get diverted off onto this Glenn Beckian 9-12 movement BS, you know?
Yeah, well, look, we really are at our blog, The War Room.
And the reason I say that is I really feel that libertarians have a great philosophy, but the strategy and tactics for 30, 40 years have been subpar.
So we're trying to bring professional grade, and I am a professional consultant, by the way, political consultant and lawyer, and I try to bring a professional grade view of tactics and strategy to the blog at politicalclassdismissed.com.
And we've got some very interesting tactics, you know, for the Tea Party movement, a plan for direct citizen action, and all that's sort of on the banner for the Tea Party movement if people go to the site.
And then we'll try to keep everybody posted on the blog as to the progress of this movement.
Again, the blog is politicalclassdismissed, and just my little personal thing, for people out there who are participating in these Tea Parties, hey, do your best to bring up empire, would you?
And make that a central feature of this.
After all, now the right's out of power, they might be willing to listen to you for a second, right, Jim?
Absolutely.
It's amazing how good Republicans sound when they're out of power, and will sound like us.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and on that note, here's that clip of Bob Dole, and I thank you very much for your time on the show today, Jim.
Everybody, that's Jim Ostrowski from politicalclassdismissed.com, the war room of the Tea Party movement, regular writer at lourockwell.com, and we'll be right back.
Senator Dole, two years ago, when you were running for the Senate, you said that the pardon was prematurely granted, and that it was a mistake.
Do you approve of it now, and if the issue was fair game in your 1974 campaign in Kansas, why is it not an appropriate topic now?
It is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it's not a very good issue any more than the war in Vietnam would be, or World War II, or World War I, or the war in Korea, all Democrat wars, all in this century.
I figured out the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded, Democrat wars in this century would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.
If we want to go back and rate that over and over and over, we can do that.