All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Kevin Zeese from Voters for Peace and Come Home America.
Of course, he also writes for antiwar.com.
You can find his piece up there right now.
It is a broader peace movement.
Finally here, he asks.
Welcome back to the show, Kevin.
How are you doing?
Good.
You're excited, Scott, right?
Yeah, I think this is a great deal.
It sure seems like it.
Yeah, I was also glad to see Justin Raimondo had an article up today, too, that talked about neocon Max Boot and his ravings and then contrasted that with Come Home America and the across-the-spectrum organizing that we're doing to bring people together to oppose war.
So two articles on antiwar.com today that talk about it.
Yep.
Well, and you know, this is something that you and I've been talking about on the show for years.
It's really this is why I started doing radio back in 1998.
My whole thing was the the good lefties and the good righties really have a lot in common and really it should be us versus them.
And you have these most powerful industries tied in with the state who use it against the rest of us all day and especially against the foreigners.
But the military industrial complex and and well, their ilk are certainly, you know, the worst of them, the vanguard of them.
And for those of us who aren't the receivers of the dividend checks from Northrop Grumman, we're on the receiving end.
It's as simple as that.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
In fact, one of the points I make in my article is that even a couple of years old, this statistic, but so it's even higher now.
But every American from the infant to elderly pays two thousand dollars a year for military spending.
So for a family of five, that's ten thousand dollars a year that they are paying to have these wars put across the country.
And it's becoming more obvious to everybody that war spending is affecting them as we're seeing massive deficits.
We're seeing austerity spending.
We're seeing teachers jobs cut.
Firefighters, police cut cuts.
You know, we're seeing those kind of cuts across the board.
We're seeing infrastructure crumbling.
All the basic requirements of government are not being taken care of because we're spending too much on wars.
And so I think people are trying to come together and wake up about that.
So people want to get involved in this effort.
They should go to come home, America, the U.S. and you can sign the letter with all the others who've already signed it.
It's an amazing list of signers.
We have people from the Reagan administration, the Nixon administration, the George W. Bush, the Bill Clinton administration.
We have a socialist presidential candidate, a libertarian presidential candidate, a green presidential candidate, an independent candidate, Ralph Nader.
And we have all sorts of think tanks from across the spectrum, publications from across the spectrum signing on to this.
So you'll be in good company and you'll be part of, I think, what will be the first effective anti-war movement since before World War II, because that's the last time we've seen an across-the-spectrum movement to oppose war and empire.
Well, it's a great undertaking and it's a hell of a great start that you have going on here.
Everyone, look at comehomeamerica.us and read the letter.
It's Dear President Obama and Members of Congress.
And it's a great letter.
I'll let you talk a little bit about it.
We've focused on both Obama and Congress because this is not just an Obama administration problem.
It definitely is an Obama administration problem.
In fact, in some ways, his going to war in various countries without any congressional approval may be the worst of recent presidents.
At least Bush would get supplemental budgets of all, just spends a billion dollars without even asking for Congress to appropriate the money.
And so we are addressing both Congress and Obama because this is a policy that's embedded in the Congress, embedded in our foreign policy.
And the military-industrial complex, which we were warned about 50 years ago by Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation, has become deeply, deeply rooted in the country.
And for us to respond to it and deal with it, it's going to require us to be united and focused on ending war, ending empire, stopping militarism, cutting the military budget massively, I mean by half.
It's absurd that we spend as much of the whole world combined on weapons and war.
It's just we can't afford it and it shows mistaken priorities when our country is falling apart.
So we really think it's a great opportunity and the time is right.
You look at this kind of a perfect storm of challenges to military spending with the economy in such deep trouble, with the wars that are being fought not being winnable.
We're learning what Great Britain learned in the American Revolution, that people who want to protect their homeland from foreign dominance are stronger than any empire.
We're learning that lesson the hard way that we taught Great Britain.
So from a national security perspective, the war is undermining national security.
It undermines our reputation and the rule of law because we go to war in violation of the Constitution.
We conduct wars in violation of U.S. law and international law.
The torture, the killing of civilians, the raids on civilians at night, this does not make us healthier or safer and does not make us a law-abiding country.
And so we have a lot to undo here and it's time for Americans to look in the mirror, see reality, what the country is doing.
And I thank WikiLeaks, I thank the Clara murder video, the Abu Ghraib photos, the photos of Afghan soldiers, U.S. soldiers with Afghan civilian bodies, showing us reality.
It's time for us to look at reality and do something about it.
We can't ignore it anymore.
It's too costly to us as our national security and our economic security are both risked now by this empire approach to foreign policy.
Well, and now, so there's a couple of parts of this.
I mean, in a way, your mission is to get as many prominent names with prominent institutions behind their names as you can, but we also need the masses, right?
You need a million signatures on this thing, a billion.
Exactly.
The idea of this letter at this first step was to get a broad variety of people so that no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you can see somebody who signed this letter who you are in the philosophical agreement with.
And I think you can do that unless you're a neocon.
I think that's maybe neoliberals also have a problem, but those are the two groups that probably aren't represented.
But otherwise, you'll find people who you are akin to philosophically, as we want to try to show, was that, you know, libertarians and liberals, progressives and conservatives all have people on this list who represent them.
But it's going to take grassroots, massive grassroots, educated, organized, and mobilized.
And so that's why I wrote a letter to people who have come to comehomeamerica.us and sign on and join us in this effort, because we need you.
We need your participation.
We need your help to lead this.
You know, we want people at the local level leading this, organizing town hall forums in their local community.
We'll try to get speakers out to those and have a couple of national speakers with some local speakers to show the breadth of the opposition.
So don't hesitate to sign on and contact us and tell us you want to get more involved, because we're looking for people to take the lead of this in their local communities.
And look, this is the most important project in America right here, right?
We've had Code Pink.
We've had Antiwar.com.
We've had, you know, different groups that are different levels of antiwar, depending on who's in power a lot of the times and whatever.
But this is the attempt to finally bring everybody together into one big, we've got to knock this off committee, right?
Exactly.
And we do have both Code Pink and Antiwar.com signed onto this, so it gives you a sense of the spectrum of the types that are participating.
Well, people should know too, because there are a lot of people listening to the show, Kevin, who have a pretty hardcore ideological bent one way or the other.
And I would say that, you know, other than the most purist on language, there's very little for anyone to object to about the language in here.
It's not like the right-wingers are going to get to the part where they have to roll their eyes and tolerate all the hippie talk in here, or vice versa either.
The way this is written is, you know, the only anything like that that is really referred to in here is that we're all the sons and daughters of the American Revolution.
And, you know, this is what we're about.
This is what we have in common here.
Well, that's right.
And we drafted this, I did the first draft of this letter, and there was a committee of a couple of us, a libertarian and a kind of Nader progressive, who redrafted it.
Then we shared with a larger group, and they redrafted it.
Then we shared with a few other people, including Ralph Nader, and got his comments and other people's comments.
This went through a drafting process, so that it was not something that would turn people off, but would instead focus our concerns on the impact of militarism and empire on the United States.
And so we tried to really write something that people could be comfortable signing on to.
Right on.
Well, I urge everyone, again, to go look at comehomeamerica.us, comehomeamerica.wordpress.com as well.
We'll be right back with Kevin Zeese for more after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Kevin Zeese about the new realignment, well, the continuing realignment of us versus them, the people versus the war party. comehomeamerica.us is the website.
Dear President Obama and members of Congress, this is the letter for you to sign on to.
And, you know, there's so many different directions we can go with this thing.
I guess I wanted to ask you about the new shakeup in the House of Representatives, if not the Senate, and the turning of so many Republicans against the war.
Many of them, I guess, are freshman congressmen who never had a bad record before because they didn't have a chance to, but some of them actually were pretty bad on the Iraq war, and they're now turning right around with a Democrat in power.
Kevin?
That is exactly right.
And, you know, we're seeing it just yesterday.
You saw that the Senate was unable to muster a majority to authorize the Libyan war, and so Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided not to have a vote on it.
So that is a really interesting development, that the Senate was unable to muster a majority on that after the House had voted to, you know, stop the Libyan war.
So President Obama's on pretty shaky ground.
What those things show, both the House and the Senate, is that the only way we can stop war is a left-to-right coalition.
There are corporatists and militarists who run both parties, and they support war, they support the war for the profits of transnational businesses, and they want the resources for our businesses to profit from, and they want the cheap labor for our businesses to profit from.
But there are also those on the right and left who oppose the war and see the negative impact on our economy and negative impact on our national security.
And if we can create a movement that can add strength to these people, that can bolster these natural views that these folks have, we will be in a position to actually have an impact.
Not just, you know, a protest when George Bush is in power of all the Democrats who oppose war, protesting that Bush will ignore because it's a bunch of Democrats.
If we had a right-left coalition in those days, before the Iraq war, and we had some strong Republican folks speaking out, you know, we have on this, you know, the President Nixon's chief foreign policy advisor.
We have President Reagan's advisors.
We have people who Republicans listen to.
And if we had had those kind of people involved in the anti-war movement in the pre-Iraq war, we may actually have stopped that war from happening.
And so I think this is really what we're seeing is both on the people's level, on the grass tops level, and in the elected officials level, we're seeing the potential power of a right-left coalition.
And I think that's a very exciting thing, that if we can pull this together, that for the first time since before World War II, we will have a coalition of anti-war Americans that represents the full panoply of Americans.
Well, you know, here's the thing.
Americans don't care about foreign policy.
But so we have to use that.
We have to figure out how to, you know, grab their arm and do the judo and emphasize how, you know how you don't care about foreign policy?
Well, then isn't it a shame that half of the money that they're taking from you, which is about half of the money you make, is just going to kill people in places that you never even heard of before, you know?
And, you know, after all, people may be that selfish or whatever, but if it works, it's coalition building.
And believe me, I know because I'm a libertarian.
I have to join coalitions, you know?
Yeah, it's not selfish.
It's I think it's people need to really realize, recognize how, despite the fact that it's a volunteer military and only a small percentage of people fight these wars, we're all affected by them.
Even though the president's both, you know, try to show that there's no pain in these wars, encourage you to go out and buy crap and, you know, encourage you to live their lives without, as if the wars aren't happening.
The truth is the wars affect us.
$10,000 per household in the United States paid each year to fight wars.
If you're an environmentalist and you see the cuts going to environmental protection, that's because of the war buckets.
If you're a libertarian concerned about deficit spending, you see deficits rising, that's the war funding.
If you're concerned about, you know, jobs and the economy not being stimulated, that's the lack of the lack of dollars because of war funding.
All this stuff comes back to war funding.
And so it does affect you, affects you no matter where you stand on the other issues.
It's a very impactful budget.
And both the Republicans and Democrats, President Obama's budget and the Republicans' budget take off the table for cuts.
The security budget, that's war, that's intelligence, that's homeland security, that's 66% of discretionary spending is taken off the table.
And that means more deficits, that means more cuts to everything else.
So no matter what you care about, war affects you.
Right.
That means elderly dependents get it first, is what that means.
Exactly.
Instead of Dave Petraeus.
Exactly.
And so it's a major, impactful budget item.
And now it's been expanded, not just to weapons of war, but expanded to include, you know, intelligence and homeland security.
And so it's 66% of the discretionary spending taken off the table because of, and I have an article about that that I linked to in the anti-war article, antiwar.com article I have out today.
There's a link to an article I wrote about Obama's budget and how he took 66% off the table for cuts.
And as a result, we're all going to suffer.
Right.
Well, you know, I think it was Confucius, Condoleezza Rice and Rahm Emanuel who all said in every crisis, there's an opportunity.
And I mean, that's really where we're at here is, as you said, in the first segment there, our basic services are being cut at every level.
Now I'm not mourning the closing of any police departments or whatever, but we're talking about roads aren't being paved, street lights are being turned off.
You know, bus lines are being closed, bridges are not being repaired when 25% of the bridges are unsafe, according to the civil engineers.
So we had to get really bad.
You know, we had to have our dollar falling in value.
We had to have this many people killed, this many liberties stomped on.
But now finally, I think that people are really starting to get it, even if look at people, as you said, if people in Congress are starting to get it, that means that people in the country are really getting it now.
And if we put some pressure on it for the people that we can organize and mobilize and educate, get active, we can really add to that congressional power.
If we're seeing Congress not refusing to authorize a war, when we have our battleships and our Air Force over there bombing and patrolling and our CIA on the ground in Libya, if they're not willing to say yes to that war, despite it already ongoing, that's very powerful.
That shows a lot.
And so the next war that comes along, and there will be a next war, the next war that comes along, if we're organized with and across the partisan divides movement, we can have an impact and stop that next war.
We will not be able to do it if we're just one wing, if we're just the left wing or just the right wing.
We've got to bring people together who oppose one empire for whatever reason they do and get them all fighting together to end war.
Well, you know, I interviewed a professor who did a study of Democratic and liberal activists and trying to find out how come they don't protest the wars anymore.
And what he found out was they're not happy with Obama's foreign policy at all, but George Bush scared them.
George Bush made them fear for the future, their children's future, that kind of thing.
Barack Obama, they still really like him and would like to have a beer with him.
And that's what makes the difference between whether they'll come out and protest or not.
And also you see that the people on the conservative side are afraid of Barack Obama.
But that to me is just all fake democracy.
That's all a mirage democracy.
And that was my July 4th message.
You can Google Zeast July 4th to find articles about it.
I was asking, are we a real democracy or a mirage democracy?
I see us as a mirage democracy.
And I think that those divides between Bush and Obama, the people who are afraid of the other candidate, is a false divide.
Because in the end, Bush and Obama agree on the basic structure, which is corporatism and militarism, crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and wars for empire, wars for profits of transnational corporations.
And that's what they agree on.
And that's much bigger than their differences.
And so people are fooled.
They agree on that too.
They agree on Australian Bill of Rights.
And that's the other thing.
We're seeing that more and more come home.
We're seeing more and more of the intrusive, groping TSA pat-downs.
We're seeing video cameras all over the country.
We probably have millions of video cameras.
No one's ever given a full account.
We're starting to see drones now being used in U.S. cities.
We see the largest prison population on the planet.
One out of four of the world's prisoners reside in the land of the free, despite us being only 5% of the population.
We're 25% of the prisoners.
We have seen a security state develop with the Patriot Act and so many other abuses because of this war mentality.
And the reality is we're not going to be safe until we stop threatening other countries and cultures.
We need to recognize we have to work with these countries.
We have to work with these people.
We can't be out there droning them, killing civilians at wedding parties, doing midnight raids on people's houses, holding people without charges that we're doing with thousands of people right now.
We have to recognize that our actions are making us less safe.
You know, whoever you can think of to get on board for this thing, comehomeamerica.us.
Thanks, Kevin.
Thanks a lot.
That's Kevin Zeese, everybody.
Voters for peace.
Come home, America.
