05/27/16 – Jim Lobe – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, introducing our good friend Jim Loeb.
He was the Bureau Chief of Interpress Service for a very long time.
And thank goodness he's now only semi-retired and is still writing at loeblog, just like your earlobe, loeblog.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jim?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And hey, listen, it's a real important article that you have here.
I didn't get around to reading the report.
I was going to, I swear, but I didn't.
It's been out for about a week now from the Center for a New American Security called Extending American Power with some very powerful signatories on it, including Edelman, Hadley, Rubin, Kagan, Zoellick, Flournoy.
And you've written this pretty good summary and criticism, valuable criticism here at loeblog.com.
The neocon liberal hawk convergence is worse than I thought.
So it's sort of where PNAC of the neoconservatives comes together with CNAS.
I don't know if Kagan and Rubin and all these guys ever hung out at the Democrats' think tank before, but here they're all like Voltron, come together to fight us, huh?
Well I think that's, yeah, I think that's, to the extent that people were aware of what was being written on their behalf and that they had to sign, it is very worrisome in that respect, yeah.
I mean, particularly if it represents the views of Hillary Clinton and she's elected president.
It doesn't bode particularly well.
Yeah.
And so now it's interesting because there are a lot of people like Robert Zoellick I think is not usually considered a neocon.
Some of these other guys are, you know, come from a little bit broader background.
Some of the names I'm not even, you know, that familiar with.
But as you talk about in your article here, and not that I'm a big fan, but still it's interesting, no talk of the United Nations or really any of the other international institutions as they talk about this whole kind of broad plan for world order as enforced by the United States.
Right.
Well, I think the first thing that, you know, bears remarking on is the fact that this is the first of a number of reports that are going to be directed at whoever it is, or that is directed at whoever is elected president in November.
I mean, all kinds of think tanks are going to put out their recommendations.
And while this one comes from the Center for New American Security, which is pretty bipartisan, but which began its life about 10 years ago, primarily, or was founded primarily by people who served in the Clinton administration.
This still represents a kind of bipartisan effort to achieve a consensus between the two, between the various portions of the foreign policy establishment on both sides of the aisle.
So I think that's, that's the first thing to note.
The second thing to note is the two principal authors are on the one hand, Bob Kagan, who is seen as one, as an ideological powerhouse of the neoconservatives, although I've called him a neocon renegade, because he really has split off from some very important positions or tendencies within the neoconservative movement.
And he himself says he's perfectly happy with being called a liberal internationalist at this point.
He works at the Brookings Institution, which has that kind of reputation.
And the other person who his co author, nonetheless, I should say he's seen as a Republican, even if he is comfortable being called a liberal internationalist.
The second co author is James Rubin or Jamie Rubin, who people will remember as the chief spokesman for Madeleine Albright in the in the second Clinton term.
He lives in London, and in some ways was, I don't know how that has affected him.
But they wrote this document, and then four other Republicans and four other Democrats, or people who have served in Democratic administrations and in Republican administrations signed it.
So this is the first kind of report for whoever's elected president in 2017, or becomes president 2017.
And it's kind of lays out a general grand strategy.
It's not, it's not a global strategy.
It's a strategy, they what they want to talk about primarily is your rate strategy in Eurasia, and dealing with Russia, China, and the Middle East.
And it's a strategy for building up the defense budget a lot more.
And it's an argument for why we should be as confident about being able to control the destiny of Eurasia, as we were in 1947, or 1948, when the Truman when Truman created these various institutions, yeah, in their view, preserve world order.
Yeah, full speed ahead toward a brick wall.
I see.
All right, so now, and and yeah, you say in there that they specifically reject so called offshore balancing, and say that, basically, whatever basis the military is built anywhere in the world, we got to keep all of them, lest we even be seen as retreating at all from our eternal mission to keep the entire rest of the world under our heel.
Pretty much, I mean, they, one of the key arguments that's made throughout the document, which is about runs about 22 pages, is that, essentially, world order, or at least order in Eurasia has rested on American power for ever since, essentially, essentially, World War Two.
And if, if we are seen as retreating from this, the the consequences could be catastrophic.
In fact, in the actual launch of this, of this paper, which I missed, because I was traveling at the time, the Kagan's vocabulary in particular is, is quite dramatic, he uses the word catastrophic.
If the United States is seen as retreating from its benevolent hegemony in the Eurasian region.
Kagan's term there.
That was Kagan and Crystal's term from 1995.
Yeah.
Right.
And in fact, a lot of this, as I pointed out in the post I wrote, and I recommend to the readers that they read Steve Waltz post about this in Foreign Policy that was posted last night, Thursday night.
Because his, his critique is much more global, I'm more focused on the Middle East.
But if, yeah, I was reminded quite a bit of the so called defense planning guidance that dates from 1992.
And that was overseen by Paul Wolfowitz and worked on by a number of people who later played key roles in the run up to the war in Iraq and then after 9-11.
In that the United States is seen as truly indispensable to peace and stability in Eurasia and therefore should be able to act if necessary, unilaterally, and should continue to play that role.
So offshore balancing would be seen as retreat, and you can't afford to have retreat.
We've already seen it according to the two authors in the Middle East and in the launch Jamie Rubin even says that, you know, all of the disasters we've seen in the Middle East in the last five years since the Arab Spring are somehow the responsibility of the United States, which is a very strange position for a self-described liberal internationalist.
Right.
Well, there's always a very special spin that they should have done more here and more there and then it wouldn't have been bad.
It's never blame for what they did do, ever.
So now when it comes to China, it's really interesting to me that there's nothing really interesting here, Jim, right?
This is just, you could have written this thing with a neocon cookie cutter and there's not a single bit of insight or introspection or anything that you couldn't have just written their lines for them guessing at what they would say about, well, China is a thing and so we have to contain it.
And so how do we do that?
We ally with every single one of their neighbors, including communist Vietnam, even though we really are upset about their human rights record in their country and nevermind ours.
And then even as you talk about, we need to solidify an alliance with India to contain the rise of China.
Do they ever even say why or what they think will happen if China is not contained?
Or it just kind of goes without saying that, well, whatever, we just have to do this no matter what.
Well, I mean, they're careful not to use the word containment.
In fact, they, they stay explicitly that we don't want China to fall back on its perception that it's, you know, forever being contained.
They, so they, they avoid using that word, but the strategy that's laid out, particularly alliances with the literal states, including India to counterbalance China.
I mean, the, the strategy sounds very much like containment when you add it all together.
And I mean, they do try to, they say we are for the peaceful rise of China.
They say we want to integrate China into what they call a rules-based international order that was created and sustained by US power and so on.
So they try to be reassuring, or they at least give lip service to saying, you know, we have nothing against a powerful China, but they have to basically abide by our rules.
And in the meantime, we are going to show them how serious we are about enforcing our rules by, among other things, increasing our military resources in the region, aligning with nearby states, or that is, and increasing military assistance or sales to, to them by drawing much closer to India, which they see as a, as a major plus in the balance of power against China.
I mean, they depict it that way.
So if I were in China, I, you know, I would say this doesn't, that there's no reason there are professions of not wanting to pursue a containment policy sound a little hollow.
I mean, that said, you know, I mean, China has behaved in a more assertive, some would say more aggressive fashion in the last few years in the South China Sea.
And I should say, they also indicate that they generally approve of the policy that the United States has pursued in general terms toward China over the last 16 years, which some people have described as con-gagement, contraction of containment and engagement.
So it's not like they're setting forth any radical new direction.
But it's the way they kind of argue that if you're looking at it from Beijing's point of view, you would kind of conclude that the overall U.S. strategy is one that sees China as a, definitely as a potential adversary and rival and, and a country that needs to be, a power that needs to be contained.
That's how I would read it from Beijing.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, it seems to me like a lot of the nicer stuff is just in there because they know that people in Beijing are going to read it.
So they kind of say, well, you know, let's tone it down a little bit just because we don't want the news story to be how provocative our article is.
But the doctrine, as you say, doesn't seem much different.
I mean, after all, this is Hillary herself, or I don't know who wrote it, but Hillary published that massive thing in Foreign Policy a few years back about the pivot, well, when she was still Secretary of State, about the pivot to Asia, which wasn't so coy about it really, was it?
That was much more clear about what the task was.
Well, frankly, I think it was more artfully worded.
I mean, it, you know, it made, I mean, in a way it, it made engagement a real policy, but it stressed engagement as much as, at least as much as containment.
You know, it's, as I say, it's more a continuation of, of the trend of U.S. policy over the last 16 years than it is any significant break from it.
But that's very different from the Middle East portion, which is what I concentrated on in my post.
I'm sorry, I wanted to let you get to that too.
Well, no, because on Russia, they just give no quarter.
I mean, they, they, they seem to have given up on Russia as a possible partner in anything.
And the argument seems to be, you just have to confront these people, you know, at every, at every front.
You can't, I mean, it is a policy of containment.
It's pretty clear.
And militarization.
So, in other words, in the way they put it, they're much harsher toward the future of American relations with Russia than with China at this point.
Yeah, there isn't much nuance there.
There isn't much suggestion that, well, we may have some common interests.
And the same goes for Iran, I would say, in spades.
The whole section on the Middle East is, is really disturbing, I think.
I mean, part of it is devoted to ISIS, and it doesn't go much beyond what the United States is already doing, although it says it calls for significant increases in in our military contribution and participation.
And on Syria, it's very, very strange approach.
They want a no fly zone set up.
They want to create a what they call a quote, Sunni force that that can be an alternative to ISIS and, and Assad government without making any distinction, say, between al-Nusra, which is an al-Qaeda Sunni force, and what we used to call moderate, you know, opposition.
To me, the Syria section seems incoherent, or just think about it.
Here we are two years, two years since the Islamic State went from the name of a group to the name of a place.
And the policy still hasn't changed.
And the advisors haven't changed their view on what must be done either.
You know, and I never, of course, would never say we should back Assad, but for God's sake, backing any force against him, when the real alternative, as you say, is the unmentioned al-Nusra front or the Islamic State, there is no third force, you know, who are al-Sham.
What are they talking about?
Well, no, they probably are talking about al-Sham, which, which has not divorced itself from al-Nusra.
I mean, his fighters continue to fight with al-Nusra.
So it's very vague.
I mean, I don't see I don't see anything here that you can build a practical policy on, because they're too many.
They just raise too many questions.
They talk about.
Sounds like an argument for getting a Kagan committed to me.
Well, no, I wouldn't go that far.
He's a sensible neocon.
But they say it's also essential to, relatively speaking, it's also essential to assist in the formation of a Sunni alternative to ISIS and the Assad regime.
What does that mean?
A Sunni alternative?
I mean, you're sectarianizing even more what is a terrible sectarian conflict.
And how are minorities like Christians and Alawites and Shia going to react to the U.S. creating a, quote, Sunni alternative?
I mean, to me, it just doesn't sound very persuasive.
Especially when large numbers, you know, maybe not a majority, but at least a good plurality of Syrian Sunnis still support the regime rather than, you know, any group of jihadists.
Well, I wouldn't I wouldn't be in a position to say one way or another because I haven't been to Syria.
Well, me either.
But I mean, there are obviously large numbers of their officers in their military are made up of Sunnis.
So that it's not quite as sectarian as they would lead us to believe a lot of times, I could be.
I mean, not that I'm not saying that there are a bunch of Alawites fighting on the side of the jihadists, but I'm just saying it's not like all the Sunnis are with them or anything like that.
Right.
I think that part you can say quite safely.
But the Iran part is is truly discouraging when you consider that, you know, the JCPOA, the nuclear deal is still a fairly fragile flower.
And these people, the people who are responsible for this report are into containment plus, basically.
They don't want to tear up the agreement, but they want to add sanctions for any number of things, including ballistic missiles, even though that's virtually entirely what Iran's defense is based around.
They want and I mean, and the funniest and to me, not funniest, but the most curious, you know, line in here where they basically take a Saudi point of view.
They just accuse Iran of being involved everywhere where there's instability and that somehow they're responsible that they being Iran is entirely responsible for all of the instability in the in the Middle East.
And they at one point they say, you know, we cannot we cannot, you know, stand the notion that Iran is somehow is demonizing poor Saudi Arabia.
And that while Saudi Arabia, sure, you know, they've done some things that we don't like.
That's mainly in the past.
And we applaud their law enforcement and intelligence work that's been directed against ISIS and al Qaeda.
I mean, there's no mention of the Saudi campaign in Yemen.
There's no mention of the repression that they've supported in Bahrain.
And the assumption is just that Iran is responsible for all of this instability and violence.
And and the Sunni Gulf states are are relatively blameless.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We also reject Iran's attempt to blame others for regional tensions is aggravating, as well as its public campaign to demonize the government of Saudi Arabia.
Well, I'm Iran hasn't helped in some ways.
But if anybody's been demonizing anybody, Riyadh's been added against Tehran now since since Rouhani was elected president in Iran.
I mean, they've they've rebuffed every every diplomatic gesture on the part of Rouhani since he became president and their propaganda against Iran, blaming Iran for everything that's going bad in the Middle East has been like unceasing.
Yet this group of Democrats and Republicans are essentially taking the entirely the Saudi position uncritically.
And it's pretty shocking, especially when you consider that the day before this came out, The New York Times had a front page article on how the Saudis are exporting and they included the Saudi government are exporting Wahhabism and and and its implications into Kosovo, even while the US military is sitting in Kosovo with a considerable success.
And that Kosovars, you know, are now being recruited into ISIS and into al Qaeda at a pretty astonishing rate.
And that this is mainly due to to Saudi Arabian efforts.
Yeah, they trained some Free Syrian Army people there in Kosovo back a couple of years ago.
So there's it's kind of been going on.
Well, let me ask you this.
Did they mention Iran's nefarious role in Iraq?
Because like you, I'm a I'm a willing and happy defender of the truth about Iran's nuclear program at the drop of a hat.
I'll take all comers.
But when it comes to Iran and Iraq, I'm an accuser.
Everything they do there is wrong.
But I guess Kagan probably didn't want to focus too much on how it got that way, huh?
Yeah, apparently.
I mean, they do complain about Iran's role in Syria and Iran's role in Iraq.
It maintains strong ties with the Shiite led government in Iraq, as if that were a bad thing.
But what's really, again, remarkable is there's no recognition of one, that the US and Iran may have certain common interests in the region.
And two, there's no recognition of the importance and the urgency of creating of trying to create at least a new security structure in the Gulf, especially, but the wider Middle East that includes both Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Every prime minister since Jafari has been a compromise between the Americans and the Iranians about who the Dawa Party prime minister of Iraq is going to be.
We've been fighting their war for them over there for 13 years now, Jim.
Well, yeah.
No, I mean, to a great extent, I think that we work for them, not with them.
Well, I don't know, but there was a possibility of, at least in some areas, kind of working with them toward common interests.
But this paper just dismisses that possibility and takes the Saudi view that there's no real role for Iran.
And this is very contrary to, I think, what Obama has been trying to do in Obama's own words, which is Iran and Saudi Arabia have to learn to share the neighborhood.
This paper, it doesn't even suggest that that's a good idea.
Instead, it takes the Saudi position and you have to, the deal is you have to, or at least my kind of conclusion for these extraordinary recommendations is that CNAS depends heavily for its financial support on military contractors, contributions by military contractors.
And the fact is, military contractors make a heck of a lot of money out of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.
And I think, I think this is an example of where the donors really, really influence the work of a think tank, because this is, on Iran and the Gulf, this is real old think.
I mean, I don't think any serious, really serious independent foreign policy analyst in the establishment, apart from neoconservatives, is thinking seriously that Iran has to be entirely isolated and we have to take on, we have to take Saudi Arabia's side on all of this and that there can be no new security structure in which Iran plays a role.
And so you have to ask yourself, why are they taking such a hardline position?
And my only explanation is their budget depends heavily on the defense companies who know they cannot sell to Iran, even though there's a lot of demand there because Congress will oppose it, but they sure can sell a lot of weapons to the Gulf states.
And I think, I think somehow that's maybe what is behind this, unless the neocons ran the board on Iran or they made some kind of deal, we'll accept the JCPOA and we won't, you know, attack it, but we're going to be hostile to Iran and every other front because that's what's suggested in the paper.
All right.
Dare I ask real quick here, what they say about Israel and Palestine?
Oh, it's all boilerplate stuff that Netanyahu would be very pleased with.
It's very short.
It just says it's important for the new administration to make absolutely clear that the U.S. commitment to the security of the state of Israel is unshakable now and in the future.
Then you can put in brackets and even if the country moves ever further to the right and becomes ever more oppressive towards its Palestinian minority and the people it occupies, but that's the end of the bracket.
It says in light of Iran's growing influence and the increase in regional tensions, it is necessary and appropriate to support the most modern ballistic missile defense systems for Israel as well as to provide other defense and intelligence capabilities to ensure Israel's qualitative edge in conventional arms.
Well, that's all boilerplate.
And with respect to U.S. diplomatic efforts, we continue to believe that a two-state solution remains the best and safest outcome for both Israelis and Palestinians and also the best hope for greater stability in the region.
Also boilerplate.
The United States can play an important role in assisting the two parties to move forward towards such an agreement, but only when both sides are ready, willing and able to negotiate in good faith and to make and abide by the necessary compromises.
That's the boilerplate part where, got my fingers crossed, don't really mean it ever.
Yeah, it just says, well, we hope someday, you know, somehow the two parties will agree on something that they can call a two-state solution, but we're not going to press anybody to do that.
We'll just urge them to do that.
The Chelsea Clinton administration figured out.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is the 20 years of failed policy.
They would, this group of 10 Republicans and Democrats would like to continue.
And it's very interesting to know because they had in putting this report together, in addition to their own deliberations, they held five or six dinners on various issue in regional areas and the experts they invited on the Middle East to brief them on their positions included Martin Indyk, who was the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross, who has a longtime association with the Washington Institute and who's kind of the ultimate peace processor and Israel's lawyer, as he's been called by his colleagues who have worked on peace negotiations between Israel and Palestinians.
And Elliott Abrams, who was George W. Bush's top Mideast advisor and who's been a disaster in so many respects on so many things.
And finally, the only other person who isn't directly or very closely identified with an Israeli point of view on the Middle East is Vali Nasser, who's the dean of the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins.
He's an Iranian American and he's a very reasonable guy.
But I mean, it's like, you know, most of the region consists of people whose first language is Arabic.
And I don't think there are any, there's certainly no first language Arabic speakers among that group of briefers.
Yeah.
Maybe even, you know, at all.
Well, yeah.
So now it's interesting because on one hand, it's like, yeah, well, maybe, you know, you and Steve Waltz are the only ones who actually read this thing and maybe we shouldn't be too worried about it.
But then on the other hand, it seems like, you know, if there's a consensus, it sure doesn't reach too far beyond, you know, what we have here in this, you know, PNAC-CNAS collaboration.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a pretty reactionary document.
But how representative, though, of, I guess you said on Iran that they're overreaching on Iran compared to the, I guess, the typical establishment view.
But is that about it?
Or you know what I mean?
How far outside are the lines?
Well, I think to some extent on Russia, too, they're, I mean, they're certainly representing establishment views.
But I think there are a lot of establishment dissenters on Russia that are not represented here at all, because, you know, there's still various establishment voices who can make themselves heard who say the way we've treated Russia since the end of the Cold War explains a great deal about how aggressive Putin has been behaving vis-a-vis Ukraine and Syria or whatever, that we've effectively humiliated them.
And we haven't taken into serious account what their legitimate and what their legitimate interests might be, or at least how they see their legitimate interests, that we've tried to humiliate them and shown great disrespect.
You can still hear those voices in the establishment.
There aren't very many of them, but you can still hear them.
But they're not represented here in this report.
I mean, I would say, I would think that it was Kagan who's the main intellectual author of this thing, in part because he has always been quite anti-Russian, as his spouse is Victoria Nuland, and she briefed, she was one of the briefers at one of the dinner sections.
He's always kind of divided the world between authoritarian states and democratic states.
Some of that language appears here, but his notion of the U.S. exercising benevolent hegemony over the world since 1945 comes through pretty strongly in the paper.
And so I think his is the dominant voice in this paper.
And he's someone who does bridge the gap between a neoconservative vision and liberal internationalist vision.
Well, that's the interesting thing about the neocons, right, is because they're former Democrats and many of them are still kind of Democrats, as you talked about, Kagan sort of waffles back and forth on what to call him and that kind of thing.
They really own the center, the so-called moderate center to a great degree of the foreign policy consensus, even though there's nothing moderate about them at all.
They're the extremists, but they're a little bit liberal and a little bit conservative.
And and they make nice with all sides.
And so they occupy that space in order to push these policies.
Yeah, I think that's true.
I mean, I mean, neoconservatives have been very agile in terms of forming strategic alliances and or tactical alliances, for that matter.
I mean, in the 90s, they lined up behind Clinton when the Republican Party really didn't want to get involved in the Balkans.
And and they they did and they campaigned for involving for intervening in the Balkans.
And they did so with a lot of Democratic, you know, people, allies, including many in the Clinton administration, obviously.
Well, you mentioned Victoria Nuland, the audience Google all in the neocon family by Jim Loeb and read Thanksgiving dinner.
And there's the entire neocon conspiracy all all together in one place.
And Victoria Nuland is another one of these Dick Cheney.
She's she's with Robert Kagan, obviously married to Robert Kagan, he said, but worked for Dick Cheney, but also worked for Hillary Clinton, obviously, as you know, on tape, as we all know, plotting the Ukraine coup of 2014 and all that.
But, you know, again, they're that kind of bipartisan, moderate center owned by a pretty, as you said, good guy, bad guy view.
And especially it's most important when it comes to Russia, since whatever D.C. thinks of them, they still got 10,000 nukes.
That's true, we sometimes forget that, I think.
Yeah.
And, you know, they build up Putin to be this great threat.
But then I was reading the other day that Russia's GDP is the same as the Netherlands.
And so I already wasn't scared.
But then I became even less scared, you know.
But you know what?
It's really big on a map.
If you look at it, it looks like it could bite you.
And of course, they do have the nukes.
But other than that, they couldn't possibly be a threat.
I don't know if these guys really believe any of their own nonsense or not, Jim.
But, you know, I talked with Mark Perry on the show.
I know you're familiar with him.
Great reporter.
And he was reporting.
And I asked him about the guys at the Pentagon, the generals at the Pentagon, debating this Russia policy.
And he says they really believe their own story about the rise of Russian imperialism and the threat to Eastern Europe and all of this stuff.
You could never shake them from it.
You know, they should know better.
You know, they're the empire, but they really believe it.
So I don't know.
Oh, dear.
Is that is that more surprising to you?
What do you think of that?
Because isn't it pretty obvious that, you know, even George Kennan mourned, hey, if you expand NATO too much, you're going to anger the Russians.
Yeah, it's pretty obvious, right?
Well, look, I'm not a Russian.
I don't purport to be a Russian expert.
No, no, no.
But you're a D.C. wonk expert is what you are, though.
So I just wanted a long standing dislike or hostility by neoconservatives and frankly, much of the American Jewish community against Russia or the Soviet Union in any form.
It's taken it dates back more than 100 years, in part because many of the initial diplomatic contacts between Russia and the United States had to do with Russia, with with Jews who were born in Russia, who came to the United States, then returned to Russia for business or for something else.
And then were were were either drafted into the czarist army or or thrown in prison.
And then most of the American diplomatic contacts were trying to get people out of the army or out of prison, get them back to the United States.
And so, I mean, the image of Russia in the American Jewish community has always been, by and large, very negative, in part because of these very early, very early impressions that were established back under the czar even.
So in other words, they're they're prepared to believe the worst in any case.
I mean, generally speaking, that's true.
And, you know, there's some justification, at least on the American Jewish side.
I mean, and, you know, neoconservatism got a big boost in the early 70s, you know, with with the the question of Soviet Jews trying to immigrate to either to Israel, the United States or to emigrate out of the Soviet Union.
I mean, that was a big booster for the neoconservative movement because people felt they would probably end up probably with a great deal of justification that Jews suffered a degree of discrimination, if not racism, in the Soviet Union.
And if they wanted to leave, they should be allowed to leave.
Yeah.
Hey, my wife got out of the Soviet Union in 1978.
I don't know if it was part of that deal or not, but her Jewish family was allowed to emigrate.
Yeah, ultimately.
God, I think I have Richard Perle to thank for that, you know.
Well, yeah.
Now you have Lieberman as foreign minister, as a former Soviet Jew.
What a compromise.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, I've taken up your whole Friday afternoon here.
Thank you so much for putting up with me and doing my show, Jim.
You're great.
Sure, Scott.
My pleasure.
I really appreciate it.
Not at all.
All right, so that's the heroic Jim Loeb for many, many years.
Twenty five years, something more.
He was from Interpret Service.
Now he's semi-retired, but you can still find him in writing there at Loeblog.com, just like your earlobe.
Loeblog.com.
This one is called the neocon liberal hawk convergence is worse than I thought.
And thanks, y'all, for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
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You hate government.
One of them libertarian types.
Maybe you just can't stand the president.
Gun grabbers are warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented Liberty Stickers dot com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around, I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are.
There's only one place to go.
Liberty Stickers dot com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right.
Libertarian empire.
Police state founders quote central banking.
Yes.
Bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And well, everything that matters.
Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
Ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time?
Well, a friend of mine, libertarian activist Arlo Pignotti, has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all.
QR silver commodity discs.
The first ever QR code.
One ounce silver pieces.
Just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price.
They're perfect for saving or spending at the market.
And anyone who donates one hundred dollars or more to the Scott Horton Show at Scott Horton dot org slash donate gets one.
That's Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at Commodity Discs dot com or check them out on Facebook at slash Commodity Discs.
And thanks.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for Wall Street Window dot com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all the stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at Wall Street Window dot com and get real time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Wall Street Window dot com.