11/19/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, Scott Horton Show.
On the line I got Sheldon Richman, he's the vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation and the editor of their journal, The Future Freedom.
Subscribe at fff.org slash subscribe.
It's cheap, 15 bucks a year for the online, 25 dollars a year for the print edition.
And it's really great, there's some really great stuff in that thing, man, it's really worth reading.
Hey, welcome back to the show, how are you doing Sheldon?
I'm doing fine, always glad to be with you Scott, thanks for inviting me back.
Happy to have you.
Alright, so, this jerk Henry Kissinger, why he wrote a thing he did again, this time it's called World Order and Hillary Clinton wrote a review of it for the Washington Post.
But before we get into your review of her review of Kissinger's book here Sheldon, let me ask you, what your problem is?
Because you know, this Hillary Clinton, she has checked all the boxes and she has done all the right things, she was married to a president, she was a senator for a while, she was on the Foreign Services Committee, started a couple of wars when she was Secretary of State, and then, so now, she has the right to be president.
And we all have the duty to support her destiny.
And so, how dare you get in her way, jerk?
I mean that seriously.
She deserves this, just ask her, she'll tell you.
Yeah, I guess I'm thinking of what I think was the unofficial motto of the Bob Dole campaign, it's my turn.
Right.
Which is always very persuasive, you know, just the President Dole, you know.
Name a war that President Dole got us into, okay?
Anyway, yeah, you're right, I mean Hillary has it all.
She's the candidate of Wall Street and she's the candidate of War Street and she's managed to combine neoconservatism and neoliberalism, and by neoliberalism I mean the IMF, the Washington Consensus approach to rebuilding the world, so she's put it all together.
And I think that just means she's a consistent person, we can't accuse her of really contradictions.
I think her program is quite consistent, it's pro-empire, it's pro-corporatism, she's got it all.
And she's got the NPR crowd locked up too, the whole outlaw your size soda and outlaw cigarettes faction, the busybody won't leave anybody else alone faction, they all just love her.
And plus, whatever, just sort of institutional feminism and the kind of washout from that where women by the millions across America just have the impression that they're just supposed to support this lady because she's a lady.
Yeah, the only thing she doesn't have going for her is she's a terribly rotten candidate.
It's amazing that someone with so few political skills could be married to someone whose political skills are so great.
I mean, you know, people talk about Clinton being, Bill Clinton being the best politician of, I don't know, some people say, you know, the post-Reagan era.
He certainly had the political skills, he could look you in the eye, they say, and make you believe to him you're the most important person in the world.
She doesn't have any of those skills.
She seems to have a tin ear, you know, she tried to, you know, she was so overtly playing up to the Elizabeth Warren crowd when she said, you know, there's a mistaken notion out there that corporations create jobs.
She never even explained what she meant by that.
And then she had to back away and say, well, that was just a shorthand.
And she ended up basically dumping the view.
It was such a clumsy attempt to say to her left flank, hey, I'm with you, you know, don't make any rumblings about finding a candidate like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
I'm your person, I'm your woman, your candidate.
But I think you're right, a lot of people are going to find it irresistible to favor her simply because, you know, she's got, I guess, got the best shot at being the first woman president.
And that's a pretty sorry way to pick a president, because I don't want anybody to be president.
Nobody's qualified because, you know, government has assigned itself an impossible job, planning society.
Nobody can do that.
So therefore, nobody's qualified.
Right.
You know, I just, there was an article the other day, just yesterday, I meant to get to this on the show and didn't, in McClatchy about how Obama, the waning days of Obama's presidency and his legacy is such a damn disappointment.
And I was saying, this could be the exact same thing about George W. Bush by the end of his terms, by the same thing about Bill Clinton by the end of his, George Bush senior, people are over him in four.
I remember at the end of the Reagan years, it was like, oh, corruption and Iran-Contra and a $4 trillion debt.
Can you believe that?
He wasted all on MX missiles and all this crap.
Like people were completely fed up with Reagan.
He had a low approval rating by the time he left power, despite all the mythology of him now.
And just like you're saying, it's the presidency that's the problem, you know, even if you had somebody decent in there.
Right.
And of course, you know, I agree with Lord Acton that power corrupts, tends to corrupt.
In fact, I would take Lord Acton an extra step, which is something that Bob Higgs likes to say.
And power doesn't just corrupt, it attracts the, it attracts the already corrupt.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think that that's the least attractive thing about Hillary Clinton is just the way that she wears her ambition on her sleeve so badly.
Rand Paul, the very same thing where the ultimate motivation of their best interest is not disguised.
The rest of them pretend all day that they love you and it's for you.
But with these people, it's just gimme, gimme, gimme.
I want the power.
In fact, I remember they asked Hillary Clinton, why do you want to be president?
And she went, because she couldn't say absolute power.
So she said she finally sputtered something about, well, I just want to give opportunities to people or some crap.
But it took her 15 seconds to even come up with that, you know, because the answer was because I want to control you.
She didn't know how to say that nicely, really.
Well, that problem sunk Ted Kennedy some years ago in a famous interview with Roger Mudd when he was asked, why do you want to be president?
He stammered for about, I don't know.
It seemed like eternity.
It was probably just, you know, 45 seconds, but he could not even get out a coherent sentence about why he wanted to be.
And at least the folklore is that that sunk his chances.
Yeah, I don't think she could give anything that would sound like a, you know, any kind of inspirational statement about what she wanted to be president.
She's a power monger.
She wants power.
I mean, she made you rationalize it herself about how well, but I was doing good for people.
But we know what all that means.
And it comes out in her review of Kissinger's book.
And I think it's pretty significant, you know, if any progressives, good faith progressives and anti-war types are, it's hard to imagine this, who are interested in her candidacy at all, they really need to look at what she has said and written over the years.
And most recently, this review of Kissinger's book last weekend, because it's very revealing.
I mean, she's slobbering all over him.
I know she says, I have, we have some differences.
We have some policy differences.
We have some differences in analyses, but that can't be very important because she, she praises him.
She says that when she was secretary of state that she frequently asked for his counsel.
And then whenever he traveled abroad, he would send her a report about the people he met, you know, the world leaders he talked to and what the situation is.
And she talks about how important that is.
And she says she, she and Obama have no differences, substantial differences about the big picture with Kissinger.
They both believe in, as she puts it, you know, building a global architecture for democracy and liberalism.
And of course, when I hear posers such as, you know, these courtiers and politicians talking about building global architectures, I want to run away because we all know what that means.
You know, most of us are just mere chess pieces on the board, as Adam Smith put it.
You know, they want to move us around because they know what square we ought to be on.
I don't like people like that who talk about building global architectures.
But if Kissinger is her man in some important way, all we need to do is look at Kissinger's record.
I mean, my article links to, by the way, it's at FFF.org and links to the great documentary based on Christopher Hitchens book, The Trials of Henry Kissinger.
Oh, yeah.
Devastating.
This guy has so much blood on his hands, you know, he's got to wear flesh colored gloves to hide it.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I'm kind of glad the commercial is playing now.
That means we get to start fresh on the other side of this with the real history of Henry Kissinger's career, especially for the young who really don't know.
They need to know for a lot of reasons, including the implication for the Hillary campaign.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
Talking with Sheldon Richman about Hillary Clinton and her hero and good friend and mentor, Henry Kissinger.
Yeah, she's the progressive candidate for president next time around, I guess.
Looks like it's going to be.
I did read a thing about how there are no credible Barack Obamas to her left to challenge her in a primary, possibly Warren or Bernie Sanders, as you said there, Sheldon, but not much of that.
And they don't have the kind of support in the Democratic Party that Obama had going into 07 at all.
So she's virtually unopposed, at least for now.
Things can change.
But it looks like she's going to be the Democratic nominee here.
And so where we left off, you were talking about just who this Henry Kissinger is.
And as I'm made aware in my email from time to time, there's a substantial part of this audience that's quite young.
They're really millennial types who don't remember the 20th century much at all, Sheldon.
They don't really know much about this stuff and probably especially the more controversial type history.
But you mentioned Christopher Hitchens' movie and book, The Trials of Henry Kissinger there.
And I think it was a book, too.
I've seen the movie.
But anyway, it's interesting.
It is important, I think, that Henry Kissinger, I mean, pardon me, that Christopher Hitchens sided with the neoconservatives.
He was no anti-interventionist.
He sided with the neocons.
He wanted more war all the time just for moral reasons instead of the cold, calculated, you know, reptilian reasons of that Rockefeller realist Henry Kissinger, who was, you know, so uncaring about the way he went around getting millions of people killed, as Hitchens would help to do when it came to the invasion of Iraq, for example.
But anyway, it seems like the most important story there is the 68 peace talks and the story of Anna Chenault, which is featured in that documentary.
Can you tell him about that?
Well, those I don't have the details on, but, you know, he presided over the war in Vietnam after Nixon became president in 1969.
And he was first he was Nixon's national security adviser, who, you know, completely overshadowed and emasculated the actual secretary of state of record, William Rogers.
The power was all with Kissinger, and then Kissinger actually became secretary of state and helped set up those negotiations with the North Vietnamese, Le Duc Tho.
In fact, he won a Nobel Peace Prize.
But how many people died on his and Nixon's watch?
More than I think died under Johnson during their, you know, secret plan to end the war and the so-called Vietnamization.
They were killing lots of people.
They went into Cambodia, of course, and lots of people died.
But that's not the only place Kissinger was responsible for deaths or who or where they gave the green light to some U.S.-backed dictator.
It happened in Indonesia, where the East Timorese separatist movement was people were slaughtered by by the Indonesian government that was backed by the U.S.
And then there's a case I'd written about.
There's a book on this, I can't remember the title right now, but about when Pakistan was trying to keep, you know, the Bengali, the Bengali's in East Pakistan from, you know, being separating.
Eventually, we became Bangladesh.
But the ruler of Pakistan, with the green light from from the U.S. and, of course, with equipment and money, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people.
Why?
Because the leader of Pakistan was was dealing with Nixon, was dealing with Mao Zedong on behalf of Nixon and Kissinger.
They desperately wanted to do this opening to China and they needed Pakistan, who was close to China at the time, to help them.
And so therefore, they weren't going to tell, you know, the dictator of Pakistan, hey, cut it out, don't slaughter those innocent Bengalis.
And so they actually winked their eye and kept sending them money and guns.
And it's a terrible story.
There's a book which I have the title at hand.
I linked to it in my my article about this in in the article about Hillary.
And that will lead you to the book written by a former diplomat who was actually posted in Pakistan and was totally appalled by what was going on here under Nixon and Kissinger.
So Kissinger is, you know, had and let's not forget Chile, right?
Let's not forget the CIA inspired coup that overthrew Indy and put it put put Pinochet in power and he slaughtered, you know, thousands of people tortured.
People just disappeared.
That's the blood telegram, by the way, is the footnote you're searching there.
OK, the blood telegram, right.
Excellent book.
And Jacob Hornberger, of course, the president of Future Freedom Foundation, has been writing often about the coup in Chile, the CIA, and you can see how even a devil like Hitchens has plenty, plenty to hate here, you know?
Well, yeah.
You know, we could talk about Hitchens another time.
I mean, I knew Christopher at one point, you know, he really changed after 9-11.
And I think that was a combination of his feeling he was too close to a place that could get bombed.
He lived in D.C. and also his view toward all religion, including Islam, I think really distorted his foreign policy sense.
I mean, if you before 9-11, Hitchens was quite, quite solid on on just about everything.
I'm not sure if there was any gap anywhere, but 9-11 really had a huge impact on him, just to put that on the record.
Sure.
Well, and his movie on Kissinger is absolutely great.
I went and saw it in the theater when it first came out down in the Dobie Mall, and I definitely encourage people to look at it because his history of Kissinger's crimes is pretty comprehensive.
And it's amazing, really, to think that Henry Kissinger is, you know, some kind of leading light.
I remember just, what, four or five days before September 11th.
Oh, no, two days before, or maybe it was a week and two days.
I forget.
It could have been nine days.
It was either two or nine days before September 11th, 60 Minutes did a special about how Henry Kissinger was a war criminal and how he was responsible for getting all those people killed down in Chile because he was a terrorist.
And then a couple of few days later, terrorists attacked America.
And Henry Kissinger was brought on to be the expert to tell us all about terrorism, since he knows the subject so well.
Right.
Now, he was a look, he was in office, a cold blooded, so-called realist.
There's that school of foreign policy thinking, which says, you know, you've got to be a hard headed realist and just do what's in the interest of the United States, as of course, as the particular person, such as Kissinger, sees it.
And so morality has no place.
People are expendable.
And that's, you know, that's why I have to laugh as I put it at the end of my article here.
Hillary praises Kissinger for believing that, you know, when we build this architecture for liberalism, for liberalism and democracy, it's got to not only be just in itself, but the people, the citizens need to understand it, need to recognize it as just.
Kissinger never cared what regular people thought about anything.
Right.
To him, all that matters is the state.
And then then the next question is, are you with us or are you against us?
Meaning, are you with the empire, the indispensable empire, or are you against it?
He doesn't care what people what the people think.
And here's Hillary, like I said, drooling all over the guy, I don't know, trying to score point.
Who's she trying to score points with?
By the way, is why does she think this is good for her political career to be in The Washington Post praising Kissinger up and down?
I guess she wants the foreign policy establishment and he's he's still a darling of the of that establishment.
Sure.
But they already know who she is.
I mean, you're right.
She's already so she's an unknown quantity to anybody at the Council on Foreign Relations or anything.
So you're right.
She's just trying to prove the point of what a fascist she is so that we can all know better than to allow her any more power in another couple of years from now.
Sounds right to me.
We think.
Good idea.
Yeah.
No, I think.
Let's listen to her.
Of course they know her.
Right.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for your time, Sheldon.
Great talk to you again.
OK.
Thanks, Scott.
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