08/17/10 – Jon Basil Utley – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks for listening.
I appreciate it.
That's very nice of you.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is John Basil Lutley.
He's associate publisher of the American Conservative Magazine.
He is the founder of Americans Against World Empire at againstbombing.org, and is a former South American correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you?
Well, thank you, Scott.
Fine.
Glad to be back.
I'm very happy to have you here, and I'm looking at this article that you have over at Reason.com, Confronting Washington's Job Killers, How Costly and Unnecessary Regulations Cripple the American Economy, which, well, let's just go ahead and why don't you give us the overview here, and then we can talk about some specifics, and don't leave out the Pentagon.
Well, that article isn't really about military waste or budget, although we had nine points, one of which was the foreign wars.
I had links there.
There's a link there about how many bullets are fired for each guerrilla that we kill.
There's a Washington Post article.
It was 250,000, a quarter million bullets.
That's probably including training, and they shoot in every direction for every guerrilla that we've killed.
It's $45 to land a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel in Afghanistan, and getting it up to the front lines, I've seen figures of $400 a gallon.
All of this money doesn't help us, and I point out in the article, look at China.
The last 10 years and what they're doing now is building high-speed rail between every major city.
They're building a whole highway network I understand will be larger than ours, super, super highways, and what are we doing?
Our infrastructure is going to pieces.
The point about war, and coming back to the military-industrial complex, first, I have a page if you search on Google or Yahoo, military-industrial congress complex, or just military-industrial complex for number two in Google search.
It's always on page one, and the point is that it's very profitable for many, many people.
I use one example.
If you build a bridge to nowhere, remember in Alaska, the whole media, everybody jumps on them, and look what they're wasting money like that.
If you build a missile to nowhere, namely, nobody knows if these things really work.
Apparently not as well, but even if they do, building extra missiles and all that, no one questions it because you're defending America, and so it's a very easy source of corruption and paybacks, and that's what happens in the American Congress.
The F-22 was made in 44 states with key factories in key congressional districts, and then those, they're voters, of course, but also that's easy campaign contribution.
Nobody cares what these things cost, and so the money goes out, and then these defense contractors give campaign contribution back to Congress.
It's the easiest money and always unquestioned.
Let me add also, this is not just the leftists.
The first man who brought up the question, there were 15,000 earmarks in the defense budget in 06, I think it was, in the Bush times, was Arnold DeBorshkov of UPI and the Washington Times, a leading conservative.
He brought it up, so it's a question that's not a left and right issue, I think.
Well, you know, one of the more insidious ways that they pay for the wars, is the creation of the bubbles because, you know, of course, when George Bush took office, he was inheriting the Clinton recession or the Greenspan recession from the collapse of the dot-com bubble and all the malinvestment of the bubble there in the 1990s, and then September 11th happened, which, you know, just in real terms cost a lot of wealth and, you know, created uncertainty in ways that were costly to the economy.
And it was, what we needed to do then was go through that.
But, of course, instead, they just turned the money machine on full blast.
They put the interest rates at zero, and they created this giant housing bubble so that everybody would feel rich.
They sent out $300 stimulus checks in the mails, cut taxes, and they told everybody, the war is free, go ahead and cheer, because it's fine, it's not going to cost you at all.
But now, while we're in the unemployment line, because the bubbles have popped, most Americans don't really understand the correlation.
Here we are years and years later, we spent all this money, but it's hard for them to make the connection that the reason you're unemployed is because the wealth that would have employed you got spent killing people.
Well, I mean, that's the point with wars.
You can make a, some people make a point that war brings new technology and advances, which it does to a degree.
But there's limits, and we're, you know, if you're a student of history, it's sort of interesting.
Similarities to the Roman Empire, the corruption that used to be in Rome, we have in Washington.
They can't say no, it's always.
I think the most discouraging factor today is that Obama came in with a massive mandate.
Obviously, people, he was talking against the wars.
People voted for him.
The great majority of Americans supported him.
And here he comes to Washington, he hasn't cut one of those, I think it's 800 bases we have overseas.
He hasn't cut one.
He's increasing the defense budget aside from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And I guess Obama watches Fox News, you know, and they tell him don't do anything.
But the Democrats or whatever, either they're so intimidated by the war party, the military-industrial complex, or the money is so big.
And the analogy I use is I say it's both parties.
The Kosovo, the war with Kosovo, Serbia, was a Democrat war.
And so many Republicans were opposed to it.
More so, it seems, which party starts the war.
But in any case, there was a very interesting study that Republican congressmen who'd been in Washington more than four years supported the war with Serbia.
The ones who were newer, sophomore and freshman Republican congressmen, opposed it, the majority of the groups.
And that shows how it grows in Washington to spend money and to make wars.
And it's in both parties.
And the Democrats, of course, coming in now.
And what's he doing?
He's sending more to this sink in Afghanistan.
The other point is we have strengths in America.
We know them.
But there are some things we can't do.
And one of them is managing a third world country.
I often use the analogy conservatives used to think that the government could not run a nursery school.
And yet they think it could run the world.
Right.
Yeah, it seems like, I don't know, it's like a whole different section of the mind takes over.
One hemisphere for the other.
And then it's just a matter of patriotism.
And the question of whether the military could really be an effective tool for carrying out, you know, really anything isn't really in question.
You have to wonder even if it can defend us.
Because the way the money is wasted, you know, the series that Washington Post ran, an extraordinary series about the CIA and the intelligence agencies.
There are many more than the CIA today.
Yeah, top secret America.
Yeah.
And that's on our website, Military Industrial Congress Complex.
And just to quote a few of the points there, 854,000 people have top secret clearances.
You know what they say about secrets.
If you tell one person, you can only tell one person.
If you tell three, it's gone.
They occupy space of three pentagons.
50,000 intelligence reports each year are published.
And Gates has discussed the number of reports being written.
And I mean, you know, you wonder if anybody reads them.
1.7 billion emails.
And one of the interesting things reading that study was how the main thing about keeping secrets is keeping the secrets from the American public, from the American people.
Most of their secrets are not going to be some Arab or Muslim fanatic terrorist in Afghanistan.
It's irrelevant to them.
Well, it brings up the question, why are they even so worried that we know the truth?
Because most Americans plainly just don't even care at all.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
I shouldn't insist on getting the last word like that.
But we've got to go out to this break, John.
We'll be right back after this.
It's John Basil Utley, IraqWar.org, Antiwar.com slash Utley.
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It's all a lie from baseball to apple pie to bomb.
Waco, Texas, Heaven's Gate to Oklahoma bomb.
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Inject our own because they probably won't come home anyway.
The Vietnam conflict was a mere experiment.
Soldiers came back from the war, couldn't tell you where they went.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Basil Utley from the American Conservative Magazine, from IraqWar.org, Americans Against World Empire, military, industrial, congressional complex.
And we're talking about the bankruptcy of the American empire.
How long do you think it's going to take this thing to fall apart?
I kind of have a bad feeling that they're going to give up the empire last, John.
That's a very good point.
It's like in the states and cities, if they're trying to cut budgets, what do they cut first?
The police and the fire departments.
So the citizens are totally vulnerable to this.
The first thing they cut is the most necessary aspect.
And it's hard to see how they can reform this.
I guess one way is you cut a straight 25% across-the-board cut.
But with very strict rules, they don't just cut the muscle.
They'll try to cut the muscle first, which we need, obviously, a defense.
But it's, you know, the end.
Niall Ferguson, is it the English historian?
Yeah, the guy who used to be the world's greatest promoter of American empire and now is warning us that it's all falling apart.
Actually, I was rereading his first book, and it wasn't entirely.
That's not quite fair.
Well, he wrote some essays like that anyway.
I know.
But in any case, he changed, and he sort of said, don't worry about all these ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We're going to be forced to pull back with our Social Security and Medicare, you know.
But I'm not sure.
One, don't underestimate the ability of the government to keep going.
One of the big things that's probably coming is a VAT tax.
And the VAT is hidden.
It's the way one of the points in America is that most people don't pay much income tax.
It's a wealthy, etc., high income.
The VAT hides the tax.
Governments find it ideal because the VAT tax is hidden.
It's a tax on turnover.
And so it's a way of putting it on to everybody.
Take where you are out west.
Half the land in America is owned by the government.
Half the land west of the Rockies, isn't it, is owned, or in the Rockies is owned by the U.S. government.
They could sell off some of that.
So don't underestimate.
This can keep going a lot longer than we might think.
Well, you know, I saw a thing just last week.
Glenn Greenwald actually had a piece called This is What Imperial Collapse Looks Like or something like that.
And he was talking about in some places, I think particularly Hawaii but other places, they're cutting off the lights.
Rather than repairing the asphalt road, they're digging up the asphalt and replacing it with just gravel.
I mean, this is what Charles Goyette said on the show a year ago or something, where he said, you know, you're up in a plane, and you see where the American road meets the Mexican road at the border and where it's paved on this side and dirt on that side.
Well, welcome to the United States of Mexico, y'all, because this is how it's going to be for a while now.
The analogy.
Where Americans give up their paved roads, John.
Well, it takes a while.
They're not quite, but the big analogy is China, where they're building fantastic superhighways, and our roads are bridges, you know.
But in any case, you know, we do have democracy.
You can vote out these people.
One theory is to vote out almost all the congressmen, except Ron Paul, maybe.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
But it's impossible to do, of course, because of the gerrymandering and the TV, and so we're done for.
It's already like that.
Yeah, and it's not.
You know, America has tremendous strength as well, but the Republicans are pretty hopeless, and you see now they're running off on the immigration of babies being born here, of non-residents, and now the mosque in New York.
And the real issues, for example, these intelligence reports from the Washington Post about the CIA, I go to a lot of meetings in Washington of conservatives.
I have not.
I might add I'm the only one over the years that talks about waste and cutting the defense budget.
And another aside to that is very few have been in the military, certainly on the left, the neoconservatives, but also on the right.
Sometimes people make a mistake of asking who's raised your hand if you've been in the service.
It's embarrassing how few have been.
And this is both sides.
The Washington establishment is its own world, and they're constantly moving between the Congress, perhaps the university or think tank, et cetera, working or media.
And it's another world, and it doesn't really respond to the needs of the country.
You see that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I appreciate how you point out that America does have a lot of strengths, and, you know, I guess this is ultimately ridiculous, but I could imagine a situation pretty easily where, for example, Ron Paul was the president, and he just said, Look, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Everything's going to be fine.
We need to have our terrible recession and let the prices fall where they may, and then all we need to do is just legalize freedom and get our navy away from the coast of Chile, which, after all, is not an enemy of ours.
We have no right to occupy those islands or any of the other 800-something bases in the world.
All we've got to do is just start acting constitutional, which, you know, at this point is like 90 percent of the way to anarcho-capitalism, it seems like to me.
If we would just go by the rule of law that we pretend is the law anyway, we'd be fine, John.
I don't think we have to go through a vast recession to reach that, but certainly just paying some of our debts or living within our means, just that.
Actually, if we didn't have the deficits, we would eventually grow ourselves enough to pay the debt.
It doesn't have to be that.
But it will be if we don't do something.
The other point I'd like to remind people is the term welfare-warfare or warfare-welfare state.
Remember, it goes together.
One of the things about military spending is when they're spending a billion a day or whatever it is on the wars, they can't then say, well, we're not having health care for poor children or for old people.
That's only a billion compared to 10 billion that's in an unnecessary war.
And it's also a bribe for those of us on the receiving end, too.
Exactly.
Since Bismarck, and that came with Bismarck, the warfare-welfare state from Germany, then by giving welfare they got support for the warfare.
And so they go together.
And the point is you can't cut one without the other.
The Democrats just want to cut some, well, very few.
Hardly any Democrats want to cut military spending either, for that matter.
Republicans are happy to cut some of the social spending.
But, of course, when you ask these congressmen on an interview, what would you cut?
I tried that in question there.
They talk about the waste in the government.
When I ask what would you cut, they clam up.
Well, John, I'm sorry because time really is limited here.
Actually, would it be okay if I kept you for a third segment?
Yeah, let me just quickly say that military-industrial-congress complex, we've been number one high up on Google for years, five, six, seven years, and there's lots of links there that people would find very interesting.
Yeah, absolutely.
The exact address is IraqWar.org and high complex.
Yeah, or search Google for military-industrial complex.
Right.
Okay, so you can't say another segment you said?
Oh, yeah, okay.
Okay, wonderful.
Thanks, John.
Hang on the line.
Everybody, it's John Baines-Lotley, Anti-War Radio.
Thank you.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with John Baines-Lotley from American, no, well, there's a lot of Americans against world empire, I think, against bombing, IraqWar.org, Reason, the American Conservative, AntiWar.com, and military-industrial-congressional complex.
If you Google that, or the exact address is IraqWar.org slash MI complex.
And, you know, John, I want to ask you about something that you kind of alluded to there, this kind of lowest common palinometer, whatever it is, that is the problem with conservatism these days.
I mean, I was never a fan of Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley or the conservative movement in general, whatever.
I guess Reagan's a bad example.
But I guess, I mean, the theory was that people like Buckley and the people that surrounded him at the National Review, for example, that, you know, they liked reading things and stuff.
They were interested in knowledge.
They were wrong about a great many things, but they weren't prejudiced against the idea of literacy.
And, you know, it seems like right now conservatism in general is going through a crisis of stupidity, and it's tearing this country apart.
I mean, look at the fight over this mosque.
I can't believe we're going into, what, is it week three of this thing, John?
It's just madness, is it not?
Well, of course I agree with you.
It's partly they don't want to face the issues.
If you're going to cut waste in the government, you've got to start saying, well, perhaps in the military, industrial complex, certain aspects of social security.
You know, in the fight for the Medicare extensions, the Republicans ended up opposing cuts in the waste in Medicare.
You know, you would think they're the responsible ones, right, or whatever.
And the proposal now are to change the few.
There are, in the reform bill, there are a few areas where they're trying to save on costs, and the Republicans want to change, eject those.
I mean, I think, come back, David Frum, who I don't always quote, but he had an article when the Republicans first lost and Democrats came in, it would take the Republicans years to get away from their base, because right now they're using the same arguments that they lost with the last time, and thinking, you know, there's an argument, should they have a program or just criticize Obama and the Democrats?
And the people who win is just criticize Obama and Democrats.
Don't have a program, because you'll step on someone's toes.
But it's very discouraging.
The whole country, the government, you know, I mean, I come from the right wing, from the anti-communists in the old days.
And, of course, National Review was very, and Buckley were very erudite people.
And it is missing, but part of that is the war.
In going for the war, Republicans just appeal to their base, which is very simplistic, you know, very nationalistic.
Well, and the lies have to be very simplistic, too.
Well, they are, they are.
I mean, and all this anti-foreign stuff that many of the Republicans, the base, that is trying to appeal to the base as being anti-immigrant.
Immigrants create jobs in America.
Google half of the companies, the high tech in Silicon Valley is foreigners.
Foreign-born people started those.
I mean, that's what, I was an immigrant myself once.
Well, you know, the Independent Institute actually did a big study all about that, too, where even if, you know, immigrant just means the Mexicans and Hondurans or whatever, they still are by far a net plus to the state as far as tax revenues and all those things, which is how people, you know, complain.
The schooling and the health care.
If you don't have them doing jobs in the ultimate, the simplest sense was picking crops, where it all started.
Then there's no jobs for American truck drivers and building trucks and transport and selling and sales and finance and all that.
I mean, it all goes together.
And now one of the real tragedies of 9-11, I wrote an article called How Bin Laden Bankrupted America, and one of my points was this anti-foreign stuff, all these superb foreign students who come to the best universities in the world in America, and then we kick them out.
They want to stay here.
And in the sciences, I might add, in the engineering sciences, they want to stay in America.
No, we kick them out of the country after they, I mean, the whole thing, the HB2 visa, you know, that Google and Microsoft built their biggest new factories in British Columbia and Canada.
The reason was that they could bring in foreign engineers because there are not enough Americans doing the basic engineering stuff.
Right, because they went to American government schools K through 12, and they can't get into a good engineering college.
I mean, they're lucky to read and write.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, man, well, it sure is a riddle.
But, you know, it is, I think the worst part of it is seeing the demagoguing against the voiceless and the powerless, like the American Muslims and the illegal Mexican immigrants somehow are the giant fifth column that are destroying America.
I mean, come on, it's D.C. and New York that are destroying America, and everybody knows that, don't they?
Amen, I agree 100 percent.
And they talk about the, you know, illegal immigrants getting free medical care.
Well, usually if they go it's because they've been beaten up and robbed or something.
They don't go unless they really are desperate.
But when they go to an emergency room in a hospital, the doctors, the hospital, the nurses, they're all being paid with government money partly with tremendous waste in the health care process.
The illegal immigrant isn't getting this money.
The money's going into the system, you know, et cetera.
And it's really kicking these poor people who worked often two or three jobs and trying to send money back to their families.
They're decent.
I mean, there are some gangs and gangsters in there, but it's a small fraction.
Most of them are decent, hardworking people.
Yeah, of course.
In fact, on that point I read something funny by Nick Gillespie from Reason, were you right?
He talked about how his grandfather came to America from Italy and he spent his life with a shovel in his hands digging basements so that his family could, you know, survive and thrive in America and that he never really did learn English.
And Gillespie said he resented that because he never got a chance to tell his grandfather how un-American he was for not coming in here and making speaking English his first priority when in fact, of course, it's the most beautiful story of a hopeless person who left the old world to come to America, be free, and it wasn't easy, but he did it, and his heirs lived better than he did, and it was exactly what he wanted and was working for.
And it's supposed to be what we all, I think, it's where we all come from in the first place here.
It's not like we're all a bunch of Indians, you know what I mean?
We're all the children of immigrants.
I mean, I really am revolted by some of the stuff that so-called conservatives spout out, you know, this guy Hayworth in Arizona and stuff.
And this isn't, they're not defending America.
I mean, they were bankrupting America.
Hayworth was a big war supporter.
I mean, they're bankrupting America.
And, well, we can go on with that, but I do think that the fact, I was listening to one of your commercials during the break about a guy trying to have a job with Air Invented Shoes.
Right, right.
What a fantastic little thing.
And I was thinking, you know, people like that, whoever wrote that text, and yourself, we're not lost yet, you know?
There's a lot going for us.
Oh, well, yeah, that's good.
I like to wrap up on a hopeful point there.
It does seem, even if the strength of the conviction seems kind of weak, the American people are against all the wars in general, you know?
You just need to really mean it a little bit more, John.
I mean, you've got to face up to this.
As I say, when Obama came in with all the support of the anti-war and this empire building, and he's still afraid to do anything, and he caves in completely to the war party, we call it.
It's another website page I run, the warparty.com, which has some interesting links.
Right on.
Everybody, again, that is John Basil Utley.
He's the associate publisher of the American Conservative magazine.
Of course, Americans Against World Empire, antiwar.com, Iraqwar.org, Military Industrial Congressional Complex, and on and on.
Please Google him.
He's got a very interesting personal story as well.
Thank you, John, very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Scott.
It's great you do this program.
It's great.
Appreciate it.