For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Mark Ames is the author of the book Going Postal.
Also, he writes at Exiled Online.
It's The Exile, ExiledOnline.com.
He also writes for The Nation, for Alternet, and you might have seen him on TV, I guess a couple of weeks ago now, with the guy Dylan Rattigan, who seems to actually maybe be a journalist and not just a hairdo, which is strange because he's got a TV show on TV news, you know, MSNBC there.
But anyway, you might have seen Mark Ames on there with Dylan Rattigan talking about what they call corporate communism, which sounds like a lot of fun, I guess, if you're the one benefiting the whole time.
And I want to learn more about what this is all about.
So, welcome to the show.
Welcome to the show.
Mark, how are you doing?
Thanks for having me on.
Always a pleasure.
Well, I appreciate talking to you, and I appreciate you joining us today.
Well, let's start with corporate communism there.
What exactly is that?
Well, I mean, to make it simple, corporate communism is the system we have now.
I mean, this is Dylan Rattigan neologism, but I like it because it sings.
Anything that sings is good.
Where the state has basically just become like a welfare treasury where everybody pays into the state and only the oligarchs and the billionaires and the big banks can constantly take money out and cover their losses.
They can gamble however much they want to, and they'll always be made whole by the taxpayers.
So it's really corporate communism.
It's just for the super rich, and for the rest of us, it's just, you know, kind of economic gulag.
Why not just call it fascism?
Well, you know, fascism is kind of like communism, but especially fascism is one of those words that's really been mangled.
And, you know, what was new about fascism in human history, if you ask me, was basically uniforms and gas chambers.
And these guys don't have uniforms or gas chambers, but they still cause all kinds of destruction and mayhem everywhere anyway.
Well, that's really true, right?
There's not a bunch of soldiers in gray goose-stepping up and down the street.
People can't really see fascism.
You know, my friend Chad always said he hated the Star Wars movies, because he thinks that the American people will never understand that they're an evil empire unless the president actually wears a dark cloak and shoots lightning out of his hands.
That's how it has to be before people will realize.
Yeah, no, there needs to be a word to describe what killing millions of people around the world with a smile on your face and good intentions, there needs to be a new word to really capture that particular kind of evil.
Right.
Well, you know, I was really impressed.
I'm sorry I've been just running around ragged all morning this morning.
I don't think I was able to pull it up here yet.
But, well, this isn't going to run on Antiwar.com anyway, since it's more economics-based.
This is the Scott Horton Show, and it's on chaos now.
So I guess we can say the name of the article was Why You're Fucked.
And it was from, I think, 2006.
And, you know, I've got to tell you, you sound just like Mark Thornton over at the Mises Institute in your description of how the Federal Reserve blows up bubbles and then sets us up for these terrible recessions, the same recessions that, as you just said, the rich are all saved from with the giant bailouts while the rest of us get the shaft.
Yeah, it was weird, you know.
I'm not an economist, but you get a pretty raw perspective.
I was still out in Russia at the time, because they hadn't shut the eggs out of my newspaper down yet.
So whatever's going on in the world, whatever's going on in society and politics and so on, in Russia there aren't all these layers of bullshit over it to hide it so well, the way you can hide it here.
And so with the credit bubble, you could just see it everywhere in Moscow, where there were booths set up in these kind of working-class electronics markets where they sell TVs and microwaves, or in travel agencies where they give out loans to people to buy anything right there on the spot, to buy trips abroad, to buy microwave ovens or nice new big plasma TVs.
And credit was just being handed out all over the place, and at the same time, obviously I keep my eye on America, wherever in the world I am, the same time I was seeing that housing prices were going insane in America.
And so I started doing a bit of research, and it seemed pretty damn obvious that something really bad was about to happen.
And I remember when I wrote that article, Why We're All Fucked, when I wrote that in 2006, saying that there was this giant credit bubble that was going to burst and collapse everything, I took a lot of shit from some local bankers and economists who had generally been friends of mine or kind of supported my newspaper, kind of quietly or on the side, but they said, You have no idea what you're talking about.
This is all too complex.
And I don't know.
So in the end, it was just obvious.
I'm obviously no kind of genius.
Anybody who wasn't drinking the Kool-Aid should have been able to see that.
But unfortunately, seeing that in advance didn't make me rich, and all the people who were telling us how great the system was and how great the American system was and how great Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan was, all those people, they're still employed in the media and they still all have jobs and they're still telling us what's good and right and wrong.
Well, it's very interesting to me that almost nowhere, Mark, is the...
Well, I got to tell you, your article was the first time that I ever read someone explain that the bubble was being caused by the introduction of massive amounts of new credit being created by the Federal Reserve that was not someone who is a self-described Austrian in economics.
I mean, virtually, you can find ten different theories of the business cycle and they all have to do with greed and rapaciousness and too much freedom and all kinds of things.
But it seems like there's the Mises Institute and you who say, no, it's the Fed who dumped all this new credit into the market.
So then, of course, there's nothing but a bunch of bad loans made because otherwise they would have already been making the loans.
You know what I mean?
They have to lower their standards all of a sudden because it's a bunch of new money.
They're going to be making loans that they wouldn't have been making before.
Simple as that.
Yeah, I agree.
I don't know why more people are saying that because the Fed was...
The Fed had acquired this kind of quasi-godlike status that everybody's down to.
So maybe that's why nobody else was criticizing the Fed at that time except for really kind of radical free market types.
But I would separate myself from these people, from the audience, from all of these people, in the sense that I don't think it was just that the Fed, you know, in a vacuum, in some kind of ideological vacuum, issued all this easy credit.
Issued credit...
I mean, the larger context in which all of this was happening was this kind of Ayn Rand fuel ideology that there are these kind of, you know, rich ubermenschen who really know what's right and we should worship the rich and anybody who doesn't get rich is some kind of unzermensch and eventually, like, nothing they can do can possibly be wrong.
Everything they do should be rewarded.
And so if you ask me, I think the way the Fed was issuing all this credit, I mean, as I looked into all this more, I was shocked to see how much influence Ayn Rand, who's a real second-rate kind of, you know, supermarket Nietzschean for sorority girls or something.
I don't know.
It's something you're into when you're young.
But my God, these people from Greenspan, all across the board, Wall Street and everything.
Well, a couple things here.
Let me stop you there for just a second.
One thing that's really important here is that there was a war and they were trying to make it free because they wanted to have more war than they were going to be able to justify with the September 11th attack.
They wanted to go into Iraq and they had to tell the American people that it's going to be free and that we can actually cut your taxes while we're waging these wars.
And it was really a war bubble in a sense.
That was the overriding priority, right?
And then all the bankers and all these criminals on Wall Street, of course, all figure out all these different derivatives and schemes in order to divert all that wealth to themselves, of course, all that new wealth to themselves and leave us holding the empty bag.
But basically, it did its purpose, which was allowed George Bush to...
He almost got away with it, wasn't he?
He had, what, two months, three months left in his term before the thing crashed, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, the war, but also before the war, the collapse of the previous bubble.
I mean, they got out of that bubble by borrowing twice as much or ten times as much to get out of the bubble that was just popping in 2000-2001, which also had a lot to do with the Fed.
But again, I think if you pull the camera back, you know, there's this ideology that Greenspan was very instrumental in pushing, which was that...
I don't know if you watched the show on Frontline or last week or the week before.
Basically, he believed that government should not be policing fraud, that Superman, John Galt-type, and the market should police their own fraud amongst each other because that would be a much more...
Yeah, but here's the thing about that, dude.
Here's the thing about that.
It's all his fault.
You already just said it.
He's the guy who was dumping all this new credit into circulation.
So to say that the Soviet Commissar of the American currency had a free market ideology is that's just a scheme to come up with more powers for the Federal Reserve so they can do a better job of regulating and sticking it to us the next time.
I mean, the Libertarians, Marty, are the only ones who think there shouldn't be a central bank.
You know, this guy hung out with Ayn Rand for a little while in the 60s and all of a sudden it's Libertarianism's fault that he was in charge of the inflation machine, the government's inflation machine.
Look, Greenspan deserves to be in jail.
There's no doubt about it.
And he's one of the biggest, I mean, maybe the biggest, but certainly one of the biggest, you know, perpetrators of the current crisis.
I completely agree.
But he was one of many people all across the elite who were all in on the same game and they were all guided by this warped version of Libertarianism.
I mean, I think it's a very warped...
Well, I agree with that.
In fact, I've never even read Ayn Rand.
I've never been interested in that kind of thing.
And I think, I don't know if you know, but like if you go and spend some time at the Mises Institute website or at LewRockwell.com, obviously at AntiWar.com, we all hate all the very same corporations you do.
We all, you know, we consider this ideology, like you said, of basically they're the Uber men and they get to do whatever they want to the rest of us and, you know, never mind what they do to the poor people of Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Somalia.
You know, I guess the only difference is we think that fighting the state at all costs is the way to reduce the power of those corporations because I guess we figure, you know, cart-horse order maybe comes different, but we figure that the reason that these evil corporations get away with all the evil things they get away with is because they own the Congress, which of course, you know, as everyone knows, is run by a congressman for a dime a dozen.
Senators are two bits.
Yeah, I agree with everything you're saying there.
And their version of libertarianism, this Ayn Rand version, it's some kind of, like I said, like an elitist, you know, quasi-fascist version of libertarianism, and that sounds almost like a contradiction, but, you know, you can warp anything.
You can warp any idea or any ideology.
What's so strange to me is how it took hold.
Because it wound up being an ideology, like pure libertarianism obviously should level the playing field and make for perhaps the perfect meritocracy if it could operate.
But Ayn Rand's type of libertarianism is really meant to kind of create this Death Star type of culture where these people at the top never can do wrong and never go wrong.
And in fact, when you look at what happened to the, you know, this country was much more of a meritocracy by statistics and so on, you know, 30 years ago.
And today, I mean, there was a study done just last year.
America is one of the least levels of social mobility in the developed world, where it's us and then the UK.
And then, you know, higher up at the top are these kind of social democracies, oddly enough, like Sweden and Denmark actually have a lot more social mobility than we do here.
I find that really disturbing and sickening.
But when you look around, you open up your eyes, you see it.
Look, there are all these CEOs who failed, who destroyed their companies and took taxpayer bailouts, and they still walk away with tens or hundreds of millions or they get promoted.
Or, you know, both Cheney and Bush left behind just nothing but destruction in their working lives and in the corporate world.
And yet they wound up running the country and they destroyed the entire country and the military and everything else with it.
And something really warped happened, as I said.
And I think Greenspan is just a perfect sort of man to hold the printing presses, like in this period of this incredibly warped and rammed version of the experience.
Yeah, well, you know, this is always a problem for libertarianism.
I think that, well, you know, for example, we support kind of by definition, I think, completely free and open trade.
But our wonderful arguments for completely free and open trade end up being used as pressure from below to justify things like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, all these things that are very top-down regulatory control.
And sometimes they regulate more in favor of free trade, but it's always about politically connected interests.
It's not about real Misesian-style libertarianism in any sense.
And so when we destroy the state, we've got to destroy the part that provides all the welfare to the billionaires first and destroy the warfare state first and make sure that people understand that not all libertarianism is Randian.
I mean, I wouldn't want to change your mind on it, Mark.
I don't think I could, but I just wanted to make sure that it's clear to you that what Ron Paul stands for and what Alan Greenspan stands for are, in fact, exact opposite things.
I mean, Alan Greenspan might as well be a communist or, you know, Benito Mussolini compared to what Ron Paul is.
Yeah, a corporate communist.
I agree.
I know.
And, you know, Ron Paul has been, I mean, it's kind of the only place where there's some sort of real people's populist democracy.
Now there are parts of the left that are kind of starting to get courage as well.
But really, so far, Ron Paul is the only one who has been effectively arguing, you know, to open up the Fed, question the Fed.
I mean, this was heresy until six months ago.
So I think he needs to be, I mean, I support him for that.
He was the only one really going out there and right from within the Republican Party and saying these wars are wrong and corrupt and destroying this country.
I think that's really cool.
You know, my problem with libertarianism is that I think it's a great idea in general and I think it's closer to what this country was founded on, the ideas of what the country was founded on.
But things have just changed so much that, you know, it's much easier to warp libertarian ideas in the service of the super rich and super powerful than it is to actually create a much more real, pure libertarian state.
And that's why I think, you know, it's kind of too late.
That's kind of how I look at it.
What we need to do is protect ourselves from these vampires and predators and parasites.
And I'm not, you know, part of that is from the Ron Paul side.
I'm part of it from the Alan Grayson left side.
I think there's a lot in common.
The main thing is to have to be aggressive and confrontational and above and not this sort of, you know, wishy-washy corrupt way that the Democrats have been for the last 20 years or so.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know, this is what I think is the most important thing.
My friend Rick says that, you know, the way he phrased it, is to change the political conversation in America.
And what that means to me is that, well, for example, right now the moderates, the centrists, they're really the extremists.
They're the most terrible people in the whole world, in fact.
Like, say, for example, John McCain, right?
The conservatives don't like him.
He's a leftist to them or whatever.
He's that centrist kind of guy.
Joe Lieberman and the other parties, another perfect example, another clone of McCain.
And what they are for is government doing everything evil to everyone all the time with no exceptions.
That's what makes them moderates, is that they agree on completely looting all of us for any purpose you could come up with.
And it seems to me like the real moderate center, well, it seems to me that's not moderate.
That's extreme.
The moderate center is where you and I meet.
The moderate center is Chomsky, you know, on one side, and, you know, I don't know, Ron Paul on the other, and you and me somewhere in the middle there.
And what we agree about is peace, the Bill of Rights, an end to this inflationary destruction of the, you know, the average guy.
I mean, we're going to have, you know, every 100,000 air in this society is going to be completely ruined through this inflation.
You know, if we can put our priorities straight, peace and liberty and, you know, something along the lines of sound money, something, then it seems like that's where the future of the debate should be anyway, is kind of get rid of this old left-right stuff and all this conservatism and liberalism that has all this kind of ridiculous baggage on it and figure out how to make, you know, where you and I see eye to eye the kind of compromise position, the real moderate center in America.
Stop looting the American people.
Stop murdering Somalis.
Stop destroying my Bill of Rights.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you.
I mean, what a weird fucking time and country we live in where the reasonable centrist composition is, you know, occupying, invading, destroying countries, plundering American wealth, you know, generations of it backward and going forward and handing it over to people who are already billionaires because they ruined us and they ruined everything with their reckless gambling.
That's all totally reasonable and sane.
And what's crazy is, you know, talking to withdrawing from that crazy and peacenik and marginal way out there.
It's the center, you know, what's considered the center in this country is in such bizarre, insane territory right now.
And I agree.
I agree.
But I think, you know, this financial crisis, I mean, the Obama administration, Larry Summers, they want us to all kind of think like we're over the, like we've moved on and we're thinking about other things already.
But this thing is going to be with us for a long time.
The country is going into real decline.
And, you know, that's an opportunity, hopefully, to regain sanity here.
But it's also a danger.
I mean, as I wrote about what happened, what's happening in Alabama and how these counties are being just decimated by these Wall Street banker derivatives that were sold via bribes to local councilmen and they're getting away with it completely.
And, you know, in Birmingham County now, there are people who they pay.
Well, wait, stop right there because I want to set this up a second here, Mark.
You've written about this.
I've got a new article here at Alternet, and it's called After the Billionaires Plundered Alabama Town, Troops Were Called In Illegally.
It's at alternet.org right now.
And you know what it is?
Here's what you're describing here, and I think maybe you can see this so well because, like you said, you lived in Russia.
You're looking from the outside for a little while.
Americans, we have a real problem with seeing ourselves, I think.
But what you're witnessing here, what you're describing here, is the confessions of an economic hitman.
This is how the American empire goes around to third world countries.
This is what they do to little counties in Alabama.
This is what they're doing to the USA in general right now is like what the Russian oligarchs did in the 1990s.
They liquidate everything and then flee.
Yeah, they plunder, or they don't even flee.
They actually, this county, Jefferson County, where Birmingham is, they can't get out of these, even though these weird derivatives, these interest rate swaps, everybody agrees they were a trap.
It was all some fraud, and now they owe billions, millions, and billions of dollars on the insurance they didn't need.
Even though everybody agrees on that, the banks, JPMorgan, Lehman, these other banks, they're not going to be prosecuted, and the county has to pay up.
This is just like Russia, and this is just like the third world.
What happened was, and again, a lot of this happened with Larry Summers and Steven Teichenberg overseeing all of this during the 1990s.
They go into a place that's maybe more gullible, more impressed by these New York bankers, and maybe some local politicians would be susceptible to corruption.
They pay them off.
They get them hooked into these contracts, which are going to just decimate and impoverish the place, but the thing is, they can't get out of paying off these debts, because if they break, if Jefferson County, for example, decides we're declining bankruptcy and we're just reneging on these contracts because they were done in fraud, then their costs of borrowing, they still need to borrow money, they still need to finance teachers and policemen and firemen, their costs are going to go up even more.
So, you know, they're screwed either way already.
And yes, this is happening all over America.
In fact, today in Bloomberg, there's a big story about the exact same kind of interest rate swap corrupt deal is now destroying a county in Pennsylvania, and I think this happened with state pension funds all across America.
It's happening with counties, cities, state bonds, everything.
Things that most of us don't think about, these really arcane financial instruments.
And basically what's happening is the billionaires in Wall Street, they do look at the rest of America the way they look at anywhere in the world, a place to make a quick profit, and they have a model, which is corruption, buying off politicians, buying off, you know, Congress in order to control sort of the most powerful body on Earth, and then buying off some local stooge, suckering them into a deal that's terrible, and just sucking out the wealth.
They don't care.
These people, they're not human like we are, man.
No, I'm with you on that.
I think that's true.
And from what I've understood, even from the people who created the Federal Reserve in the first place, I mean, for intents and purposes, they might as well have been a bunch of devil worshippers or something.
I mean, their idea of making their way in the world is killing millions of people.
They don't care.
And these are the world warriors, these guys.
Yeah, and that's why, because, you know, in my heart, and certainly where I began in life, whatever, I would be much more on the libertarian side, but I don't see how libertarianism would protect people from these predators and these parasites.
Well, we wouldn't allow them to create all this money out of nothing in the first place.
It's the state power that allows them in the first place, and provides them the impunity and the bailout.
You know, there's a great book about the Fed called The Creature from Jekyll Island by J. Edward Griffin, and I think it's chapter three in there.
He says the name of the game is bailout.
That's what it's always been about, is that they know that they are creating a giant bubble and that when it collapses, everybody else is going to be hurt.
Then they get to buy up everything for pennies on the dollar.
They get saved by the state, no matter what, and then they move on and do it again.
And if they're lucky, they can have a big war, too.
Lou Rockwell likes to joke, we don't know at this point, whether they inflate to have war, or whether they have war to inflate.
That's the big riddle, but it's always one or the other in both with these guys.
Yeah, I mean, at the very least, well, the good thing is, it looks like there is, I mean, this is what I mean, maybe the crisis might change things, but it looks like the Ron Paul bill to open up the Fed, we can have a chance.
I'm not sure how much Shining the Light, I'm not sure I believe in it as much as I used to, that if the truth is kind of exposed, that there will be this radical change in behavior.
It might be some kind of 20th century Freudian thing, but definitely they want the high end in the dark, and they want all this crap to go on in the dark, so it does scare them, at least.
Yeah, well, I've got to tell you, if they're able to get the audit, and we're able to find out the real truth of how many trillions they created and who they gave them to, if that's not enough to bring an end to this corruption, then we're done.
And I kind of agree with you, I'm cynical enough at this point that I don't think it's guaranteed that even if they got the audit, that the American people would even react.
I mean, oh, look at the Sabell Edmonds story, you know what I mean?
Oh yeah, that's interesting, and then they forget it the next day, big deal.
I know, it's an amazing story, and even when I blogged it on my site once or twice, half of the responses were even very hostile.
They don't even want to hear it, even when it's shoved right in front of their faces, you know?
And they don't, and so at some point, you've got to say, maybe we deserve what we're getting, like Bertrand Russell said, you know, every people deserves the leaders they get.
People are very cynical.
In fact, there's this kind of, there's almost this sort of cynical resignation here that, again, I kind of saw in Russia in the 90s, where people had all pretty much given up and said, well, you know, everything's corrupt, everything always has been and always will be, people are always powerless, and they just let, you know, the oligarchs walk all over them, and so the oligarchs devoured each other.
Then once they devoured each other, that's when Putin came in, and, you know, the sad thing is they had to be saved by a KGB dictator, and Putin's definitely much better than Yeltsin, if you ask me, and again, I take a lot of shit for saying that, but he is, from the point of view of most Russians, but my God, does that mean that, you know, if we're going to be passive and we're not going to fight when corruption is exposed and when we're getting ruined, does that mean we're just going to throw all of our support behind our version of a Putin, some kind of a CIA dictator?
Well, that's my fear, yeah, it's going to be General Petraeus or something, but, you know, the thing is, too, like, I can relate, Mark, I mean, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that, you know, once a week or more, I feel like giving up, dude.
I mean, what is the point?
What is the point?
And don't the American people deserve it?
You know, 33% want a full-scale land invasion of Iran, so why shouldn't people hijack their planes and crash them into things?
You know what I mean?
The American people are beasts.
Yeah, I know, I know, they're butt-ignorant, mean, nasty, I agree, it's hard to feel sorry for them, it's hard to empathize with the victims, it's a very bizarre situation.
Yeah, you and me are two of them, that's the holy thing.
I know.
All right, hey, listen, I've got to cut you off, we're way over time here, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Mark.
Thanks for having me on.
And one more thing, too, is you're right up there at the top of my list of favorite writers, man, I love your stuff, it's great stuff.
Well, thanks a lot, not to, you know, do the old reach-around, but I listen to your show, it's the only show I regularly, you know, download your podcast and all that, and I really appreciate it.
Right on.
All right, cool, man, a little mutual respect, not so bad.
See you soon.
Thanks a lot.
All right, but that's Mark Ames from ExiledOnline.com, you can also find him at The Nation and at Alternet.
