Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, Sands High War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and now I'm stoked because I got Sheldon Richman on the line.
Hey Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, how are you Scott?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us today.
My pleasure.
Alright, so everybody you know Sheldon, he's the editor of the Freeman put out by the Foundation for Economic Education at FEE.org and he's also a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation FFF.org.
And you got this latest piece at FFF is 9-11 and the national security scam.
And you say here the headline, sub-line thing is national security is a scam, an 8 trillion dollar scam.
But I want to get right to the heart of the accusation there.
Is it all so deliberate because there's so much BS in the world, I kind of wonder, emanating from DC, I kind of wonder whether they believe their own madness.
For example, I'm sorry this is a lame way to set up the first question, it's so long.
But there's this thing in the Washington Post about an era of perpetual war, the most frank kind of news analysis of the last decade that you could ever hope to see in the Washington Post.
But still the unproven underlying premise of the whole thing was, well it's just going to be like this because what are you going to do?
There are violent Muslims in the world still and the war is just going to have to stay on forever and ever and ever, I guess, as long as people believe in Islam and violence at the same time.
And it just goes without saying that it's all true, that this is as bad as top secret America even portrays it.
It's all necessary.
Shrug.
Well, first of all, let me point out that the column was inspired by your interview with Chris Hellman.
Oh, really?
That's good, yeah, he's a good guy.
That $8 trillion figure comes from him and I read the article that he did and he's made the estimate and then he draws on some other estimates, so I thought that was a great way to talk about, with 9-11 coming up, I thought it was a great way to talk about it.
So ultimately I guess I can credit you with the column too, because of you I knew about the whole subject.
Oh, that's nice.
So anyway, and that estimate, you know, it depends on who we're talking about.
I assume there are some people who believe all this, including even some people in the national security apparatus, but it seems a little hard to believe that they all are fooled by that.
Surely, look, I just read an article, a very good article, by John Mueller and a co-author that was in Slate, I think it's in today's Slate, about how the government constantly overestimates the terrorist threat, because they don't do risk analysis, they just look at the worst case and then they don't relate that to anything else, right?
How likely is it, all that other stuff.
And I can't believe that there are not bright people in the national security apparatus who are not aware of the very things that John Mueller is aware of.
I mean, just to me, that strains credulity.
So I refuse to believe that it's not a scam in the case of each and every person who's making decisions in the government.
Yeah.
Well, now, I mean, there's that whole thing where to a skateboarder, everything is a curb, and to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail, and if you're a CIA agent and what you do is kill people, then your job is, you know, getting people killed, and that's just kind of what you do all day.
And I could see even presidents getting, like George Bush, he was such a small-minded guy in the first place.
And when Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz kind of laid out, here's the doctrine, here's where you fit in it, and this is your greatness part, he was like, all right, let's do it.
Sounds right to me, you know?
Like he didn't, I don't, I mean, he obviously was very deceitful on the minor points, but on the Wolfowitz doctrine, he believed, he was convinced it was a good idea, right?
Well, no, maybe not.
Well, I think you're kind of making my point.
I mean, look, I don't know these guys personally.
George Bush, but judging by their, you know, what we can tell about them to the extent that that's accurate, George Bush may well have believed all the stuff, like, just like you're saying, but I have a hard time believing Cheney and Wolfowitz, Wolfowitz and so many others, simply believed that.
And I have a hard time doing it.
It's hard, like I said, it's hard to tell with any particular person.
I just find it beyond belief that none of those top people realized that this ultimately is a scam, that these were rag, this was a rag tag bunch of people on 9-11 with box cutters who would have been thwarted by locks on cockpit doors and guns in the hands of pilots.
So you know, this was not a sophisticated operation.
It wasn't some, it didn't take some, there wasn't scientific genius or technological, you know, whiz kiddery involved in this.
And like I said, I can't believe they're not aware of the same stuff that John Mueller and people who write in that vein are aware of.
Yeah.
Well, and it's, I guess it's sort of the economics of politics, as Oberon Kenobi calls it, right?
Where you have so many different, you know, because everybody ultimately is just an individual.
They all have their kind of narrow, short term interest, where even if they kind of realize, you know, it's not necessarily their scam, but they're feeding off of it and they might realize that this is not in the best interest of the United States of America over the long term.
But it is good for me because I'm getting my dividend check and I'm providing for my family, my retirement and this and that.
So I'm going to go along for my part.
But maybe it doesn't have to be this way or whatever, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of that.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of other clues, too.
Wolfowitz famously said, it's a good thing we're going into Iraq or we went into Iraq because it lets us take the troops out of Saudi Arabia, which has irritated the radical Muslims so much.
I mean, they know, they read the remarks by bin Laden and other people.
The guy that was one of the guys convicted of the 1993 attempted bombing or the bombing at the World Trade Center and his statement at that sentencing about why they do stuff like this.
They know all that stuff.
So it's not like, oh, you mean, you know, they don't truly believe history began on 9-11.
But they know better than that.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Of course they do.
Well, you know, I was telling Michael Shoyer yesterday, I was suggesting to him that from now on, he really named Bill Clinton a lot.
And if that's what it takes, like, maybe that could help break through into the minds of some Republicans.
They're like, oh, yeah, I remember that.
The 1990s, when the president was a Democrat and I hated his guts, telling me that he did something that caused us to get attacked, like maybe we could sell him that.
It's true.
You know, yeah.
But I think that way, I think most of those Republicans are too far gone.
So that's a big job ahead of you.
But did you see the thing I saw on The Daily Show last night, the clip where they asked Rick Perry about the hundreds of people that he's overseeing their execution?
And the crowd went absolutely wild.
I saw that.
And then it's being...
What is up with that?
And Fox is striking back by saying, what an unfair question, asking if he's lost any sleep and maybe one of those people were innocent.
They thought that was an unfair question.
I don't think it was an unfair question.
Well, of course not, not especially when we know that one of them was convicted on wholly imaginary made up testimony by pretended fire experts and that he did the Saturday night massacre style firing of the people he appointed to investigate it.
And the guy's dead now because they executed him.
You know, they convicted him of killing his own children based on, oh, yeah, the arson experts say this, that and the other thing.
But all the real arson experts said, what?
No.
Yeah.
So, yeah, he's a murderer of innocent man right there.
But oh, well, I guess we'll cheer for that, too, because that just shows toughness and we need if anything, we need toughness up there in the government.
Well, that's what people are looking for.
Toughness.
It doesn't matter who it's directed toward as long as as long as the people sort of have a some kind of hue in their skin that's not flesh, that's not plain, plain white, then we need somebody tough toward those people.
You know, I want to get a job like undercover as a waiter at the country club where all the Lockheed executive vice presidents and board of directors type guys hang out.
I really wonder who are these guys, because, you know, I'm not sure if you ever saw that great piece in Rolling Stone by James Bamford about Robert Jackson, the the Lockheed executive vice president who sponsored the committee to expand NATO in the 90s and the committee to accuse Saddam Hussein of being a bad guy or whatever before the Iraq war and how this guy is a perfect combination of true believer and profiteer in a way where, you know, Bamford says he really put it to him and the guy seems to sincerely believe all the things required that he believed to make the most money that he can selling weapons to the government.
You know, such a funny thing.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Music's playing.
We'll be right back.
Everybody.
Sheldon Richmond, FFF.org.
Just as I got the footnote wrong, there wasn't James Bamford.
I was thinking of his interview with John Rendon in the article, The Man Who Sold the War, and I was confusing that with the great article by Richard Cummings at Playboy dot com.
You can also find at Corp Watch dot org called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
And Robert Jackson and John Rendon are so much alike in my mind, I kind of mix the two articles together.
But anyway.
So one of the things that's going on in the news today, Sheldon, is this.
They're saying they being anonymous administration officials are saying that they have a threat to Washington, D.C. or to New York City, the threat of car bombs or truck bombs that is specific and credible, but unconfirmed basically doesn't sound like at least according to their claim that they know who they're looking for if they're looking for somebody.
And it just reminded me whether they mean this one or not, and I think it's doubtful.
I think you'd probably agree.
It reminded me of all the orange alerts in the early days of this thing when they really wanted Americans to think that there was another 20 man Al Qaeda cell in their neighborhood, you know, all over the place and had these fake terrorist bus and the orange alerts paraded across the screen, all this, whenever Bush got in trouble and especially just in the lead up to the Iraq war, whenever Abu Ghraib came out of the wiretapping came out, there's always a big fake bus and a big fake orange alert, which I think gets right back to the heart of your title here, the scam that every one of these men at the top to a great degree anyway, know that they are guilty as hell, that they are just lying to us and manipulating us with fear.
And I don't know how they justify to themselves.
I mean, only a certain proportion of them can really be complete sociopaths, right?
And the rest just go along to be part of the gang, I guess.
I don't know.
Well, there are there are rewards for going along.
Well, look, well, that will probably never know the truth about this, this alert.
But I think it's a safe bet that we I think the safe posture is skepticism on the part of people, because it's happened so many times before, you know, what was that expression that Bush mangled once, once before, you know, fool me once, shame on anyone on me, fool me twice.
You know, you botched it, too.
I'm purposely but it's the other way.
I'm trying to be here.
You fool me, can't get fooled again.
I was doing.
Yeah.
And then let's put food on our families.
You're messing up my Bush impression here.
Right.
So, like I said, we will we will never know.
We probably won't ever know.
Maybe somebody will leak it.
Maybe we could be we can leak to get a hold of the truth.
But but I would I would be skeptical about that.
I mean, sure, it's very convenient.
Of course, they say, well, of course, it's happening now.
You know, they want to do something to time with the anniversary.
The point is, you know, and this this is what bugs me.
Any time someone says, you know, there are people out there who want to kill us.
Any time someone says that without providing a context, I think that's the height of irresponsibility.
And I mean, anybody, any commentator, I don't care who he is.
And it just bugs me when I hear people say that when they're talking generally about Muslims and Arabs, you know, say that the people out there want to kill us.
And if anybody who says that without giving a context like, you know, well, we've been killing them for a generation, a couple of generations, then then I don't want to hear from that person.
Yeah.
No, I'm with you.
I mean, and and who's they?
I mean, what happened?
How come we're individuals here?
But once you're on the other side of water, you're not an individual anymore.
You're just part of some brown blob that we can nuke if we want.
Right.
You know, I want to I want to it was it was kidding, because I don't I don't think I don't like when conservatives and neoconservatives talk about profiling.
But if you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to me the strongest profile would be fine.
If you're going to take profiling seriously in order to stop a terrorist, it seems to find out where we last sent predator drones to bomb, and then watch for people from that country.
If you're going to profile, which like I said, I don't accept, but if you're going to profile, wouldn't that be the thing to do?
Of course, if you do that, you're admitting to the whole game.
Stop the predators.
All right.
Yeah, well, in fact, this threat they're saying emanates from the tribal region of Pakistan.
Oh, my God.
Now, look at those people possibly ever have against us.
Well, I don't know.
I heard some guy, you know, who's got no credibility named Gareth Porter.
You've probably heard of him talk about all this just the other day, and we know darn well what's going on there.
They're bombing like crazy with their video game machines.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was a naturalized American citizen, had a wife and a kid and a really good job and was living the American dream.
And then he went to Pakistan on vacation to visit family.
And while he was there, he saw the results of American droid bombings, you know, controlled from the other side of the planet.
And he said, hey, I can get back into the country.
He decided he made a value judgment.
He was going to sign up for the war on their side and see if he could get one in for their side on our soil.
And there's nothing Islamic about that.
Islam ain't got a thing to do with that freedom either.
Other than, you know, I don't know what, his ability to get back into the country because he's already a naturalized citizen.
That's right.
And that leads to the other irresponsible comment you hear from so many people, that there's some sort of intrinsic clash between Muslims and, you know, quote, the West.
I mean, that needs to be smashed at every opportunity because it just feeds all this bad stuff that we need to give our blind loyalty to the national security state because we have this intrinsic clash of civilizations.
They're out.
They hate us.
You know, as I say in that op-ed that you mentioned, and it's just a recycling of someone else's line.
It's a great line.
You know, if they hated us because our freedom, they must hate us a lot less now because of the Patriot Act.
Right.
Yeah.
We're almost done.
The war on terror will be over any minute now.
All I got to do is declare martial law and we'll never be attacked again.
So, I mean, we can't say this stuff too often.
The big lie is that, as you like to put it, history began on 9-11.
And we need to, you know, root out that myth every chance we get because it's the linchpin.
You pull that out and the whole thing falls, I think.
Right.
Well, you know, Glenn Greenwald pointed to this new Pew study that says 43 percent, and check this out even, Sheldon, the phrasing of the question was, is it possible that American wrongdoing, as if there could be such a thing in the Middle East, could have led to, not even just American policies that they might happen to have disagreed with and tough for them, but no, wrongdoing.
Is it possible that that is what led to 9-11 in the first place?
And the answer from 43 percent was, yeah, that might have something to do with it.
Well, that's interesting.
First of all, I'm fascinated that they asked the question.
That's some progress.
I mean, I'm amazed that they even asked that question.
I thought that's only the kind of question, you know, that we'd ask.
I know.
My eyebrows are like halfway up my forehead right now.
I have a really tall forehead.
43 is not that far from 50.
Yeah.
So, I don't know, maybe you just cheered me up.
I'll have to think about it, I'll have to think about it before I slip back into my characteristic pessimism, but I think you cheered me up for a moment.
Yeah, well, as George Bush used to, like, say, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
I guess.
Well, and no doubt because of you.
Well, yeah, I don't know so much about that.
You know what it is, of course, it's Ron Paul.
Ever since he was willing to squabble with Rudy Giuliani about this four years ago.
And he's the only one.
And the way he says it is just so matter-of-fact.
Come on.
Is that why they made sure not to ask him any questions about foreign policy at the last debate?
That must have been the reason.
Is that unbelievable?
Yeah.
It is crazy.
Well, you know, here's the thing that gets me, too.
I mean, I'm lucky on this one.
I'm at least a couple degrees of separation from anybody who died on September 11th.
But my now wife lived in the neighborhood then.
She wasn't in town that day.
But she had friends and neighbors who died in that thing.
And there's a whole lot of people.
I figure 3,000 people, almost 3,000 people were killed.
That means tens of thousands of people who, like, directly were connected to those people, cared about those people, you know, knew them well or whatever.
And I just, I hate to invoke the families because typically I don't like sentimental things in general.
And everybody always just invokes the families for their argument and whatever.
But to me, I can't imagine anything that would make me more angry than someone exploiting the death of my loved one in that attack in order to go and do more of what caused it in the first place.
I agree.
My wife, my kid, my next-door neighbor, like, their life was just the cost of doing business for these Republicans and Democrats.
And Tom Englehart brought that out so well the other day in this piece, what do we call it, about Scrap It or something like that.
He was absolutely right.
I mean, you're right.
We can't forget real people lost their lives and that affected many other people, friends and family.
And they should be allowed to have their quiet grief.
But the networks want to make us relive the day, of course, without any context.
Those planes came out of the blue.
It was the first day of history.
And then all the national security types and all the contractors who are making such big bucks, billions of dollars off this stuff, use those people.
And it's just disgraceful.
And someday we'll wake up, the rest of the country will wake up to realize how disgraceful it's been.
Yep.
All right.
Well, I don't really know what to add to that or which way to take it from there.
I think you summed it up well.
Now, you've got this very important article, Depression, War, and Recovery, the way not to go, which, you know, in terms of our economic problems, I don't know, you know, history began in September 2008 on that one, right?
We're headed the wrong path.
It must be because despite whatever propaganda they said about green shoots and the end of the recession, it still seems like the recession to everybody right now.
What are they doing wrong, Sheldon?
Well, I mean, why is the economy not coming out of this?
Yeah.
And why are we likely to go into a double dip?
Well, I'll try to make it really simple.
I mean, it's a bit of an evolved story.
But we had an artificial boom that was channeled mostly into housing and, therefore, finance related to housing because the Fed induced low interest rates, this was in the early 2000s.
And then all the policies which tried to make it almost costless for people to buy homes, the diminishing of lending standards, all the push, Fannie and Freddie being willing to buy up all mortgages, bundle them together, get them marked AAA by Standard & Poor's and the other two licensed members of the ratings cartel and all that stuff, all that stuff, implicit promises of bailouts to banks and other institutions.
So you get this whole bubble built on, artificially built, artificially inflated.
It then comes to an end.
It has to come to an end.
And so the economy is now totally misshaped by, and this is the view that the Austrians bring to it that the Keynesians totally missed it.
The economy is completely misshaped by all these policies.
And the only way for the economy to sort of regain health or establish health is to work out all the distortions.
Assets have to be rearranged, revalued.
Resources have to be moved out of housing into places where consumers really wanted to go without an artificial boost.
And that's not been allowed to happen.
And the government ever since has been trying to restore the housing bubble to the pre-bust period.
You know, where they keep talking about how are we going to actually breathe life into housing and what are we going to do to breathe life into housing.
And then you have other things on top of it which create what Robert Higgs calls regime uncertainty.
In other words, investors don't know what's happening next, what's coming down the pike from Washington next that passed Dodd-Frank, the big financial overhaul.
That means that hundreds of new sets of rules are going to be written, yet to be written by bureaucracies.
Who's going to invest or lend or borrow when you don't know what the rules are going to be?
It could totally screw up your plans.
You know, the economy is basically a set of plans by lots of different people.
And if people don't know what to expect, they don't do a lot of elaborate planning way into the future.
You also have Obamacare, and those rules aren't all written yet, so no one knows what the impact is going to be on when you hire people because of how much we're going to have to spend on the health insurance and all the stuff that comply with all the mandates.
So people are just, you know, running in place and not wanting to go into any huge ventures.
And so people don't want to lend and people don't want to borrow.
That's why nothing's happening.
Obama's answer to this is, oh, we'll do stimulus or, you know, government spending.
But as Russ Roberts so brilliantly put it back when Obama first started talking about stimulus, stimulus, the word implies that something coming from outside the system, right?
If you put the paddles on the chest of the, you know, defibrillator paddles on a person's chest who's having a heart attack, you're stimulating the heart with some outside energy.
But that's not what happens when you try to stimulate an economy.
According to him, it's like taking a bucket and going to the deep end of a pool, filling the bucket and then going to the shallow end of pouring the water in.
In other words, the government takes the money out of the private sector and then some way or one way or another puts it back in after taking its own cut, puts it back in and then, and then it says, voila, a stimulus.
It's not, it can't be a stimulus at all.
It all originated in the private economy.
It's just been filtered through the bureaucracy.
And then some of it's put back in and then you, and then you call that a stimulus.
So that's why nothing's happening.
There's hardly any growth and unemployment is stuck at, you know, over 9%.
And it's more of the same.
What he could talk about last night, what Obama called for last night is more of the same.
And the funny thing is the Republicans are also as much Keynesians as the Democrats.
You know, they like the idea of cutting the payroll tax and ordinarily I'm for cutting all taxes.
But if you don't cut spending with the, with the tax cut, all you're doing is changing the form of the tax because the money's got to come from somewhere.
So it's still a tax.
So no wonder nothing comes out of this.
It's a big joke.
It's not the great line that Obama had yesterday was we, we should stop the political circus.
But you know, he's a little bit like a paraphrase, a St.
Augustine.
Yes.
Stop the political circus, but not yet.
In other words, this is a political circus.
This speech is political circus.
So let's stop it after I make my speech.
I mean, it's, it's the whole thing is just ridiculous.
And if people weren't brought up to be Keynesians and, you know, everybody's a Keynesian economist and non-economist alike, except for, you know, a few, a few people who understand what's going on, they wouldn't buy this stuff.
It's, I mean, the moment you break it down and put it into clear language, you see how ridiculous it is because that's the key.
Don't put it in clear language.
So no one will understand what, no one understands what's going on.
Right.
Of course, we're all brought up to believe that all that stuff, maybe some really rich people are going to spend the time to figure out what it all means.
But for you, you don't even need to worry about it.
It's just thinking and all this, that's complicated, man.
That's somebody else's thing.
And, and of course the way that they speak, like when Alan Greenspan go testify before the Congress, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about.
Not even the Congressman knew what he was saying, but it all sounded really scientific and stuff.
Well, he was the wizard.
You can't, don't, don't look at that puny little guy behind the curtain.
Right.
Just be in awe of the wizard.
That's the whole, yeah, that's the whole thing.
So same question.
Is this a scam?
It's one of those stupid things that can destroy a $15 trillion economy.
I mean, come on, you know, I have to, I guess I have to give you the same answer.
Some of them, I guess believe it, but I can't, it just seems hard to believe that they all believe it because it's just so stupid.
Once you, once you actually look at what's going on, it's ridiculous.
So, you know, the article that you just alluded to of mine was about the claim that you hear more and more now that the world war two, it was world war two spending that big stimulus that got us out of the depression.
Now, on the one hand, I, there's a little bit of progress there.
If I can look for a silver lining for a moment, cause they used to say the new deal did it.
I, I, I, I, when I was in school growing up, we were taught the new deal got out of the depression, but now I got the halfway point.
I got the new deal was doing great, but it was world war two.
That really sealed the deal.
Okay.
If you were in the transition, you were in the transition period.
Yeah.
But the, I think it's progress.
Cause if you say it was the war, it couldn't have been the new deal.
So now we have finally come to the realization that the, the new deal didn't do it.
However, the dark side is we don't, it's bad if people believe war did it because they may say, well, I guess we need another war.
Now, you know, Krugman and Paul Krugman and those guys don't quite say, yes, let's have another war.
But what they do say is, isn't it a shame that it takes a big war to get everybody on board for the big spending that we need to get the economy.
You know, what did Krugman say recently?
If only we could make people believe there was an alien invasion, then they'd go for all the spending that we need according to him.
Well, it's ridiculous.
I mean, as Robert Higgs has shown, and I, I, I have links in my article, but I have also tried to explain it.
So that if you don't want to follow the links and just read my article, you'll have a, you'll have a good idea what went on.
The war did not, the war spending did not end the depression.
First of all, what does it mean to end the depression?
It doesn't.
The Keynesians think, oh, I know what that means.
It means a rise in GDP and a fall in the unemployment rate.
Nonsense.
That doesn't tell us what's really happening with people's lives.
You can raise GDP by massive government spending on bombs and tanks and bullets and military uniforms and all the stuff that goes to, uh, into destruction, namely war.
Okay.
That's a rise in GDP.
Is that a rise in wealth?
No, it isn't.
You can lower, uh, unemployment by drafting 11 million men.
Yeah, that ends, that ends unemployment real fast.
We can end unemployment tomorrow by starting a major pyramid building scheme.
I don't mean a pyramid scheme.
I mean, a literal pyramid building scheme and conscript everybody to build pyramids.
No more unemployment, zero.
And the Keynesians like stuff like that.
They may not go for the conscription, but they, you know, but maybe they would too.
So in other words, those macro aggregates, GDP, unemployment, they, they don't tell us what's happening on the ground.
The question is what I mean by ending the depression.
And I think what any reasonable person would mean, I mean, you know, non, non-economist, just a reasonable person would say, Oh, and depression means prosperity.
In other words, people have wealth.
They can, they can buy consumption goods.
They have leisure.
That's what I would mean by a return to prosperity and end of the depression.
Well, did you think people were prosperous during world war two?
Of course not.
They were under rations.
They couldn't buy anything.
They wanted, even if they had the money, they were under rations.
So how do we, how can we possibly say speaking English that the war ended the depression?
It did not.
And, and it's very dangerous for people to believe that war spending and depressions or recessions, because they'll be tempted to think, well, I guess we ought to have a few more wars, a couple more wars, and we'll finally get out of this thing.
We don't want people thinking that.
And it's just wrong.
Yeah.
And you know, it really is a problem.
I think that I've heard just, you know, regular everyday people, regular everyday people say that it's so ingrained that, well, you know, war is good for the economy.
And I think it kind of, I've heard it said in the sense that like, well, you know, I don't approve of these Republicans doing what they're doing and, and attacking the countries they're attacking and all of that.
But this is why they do it, you know, kind of thing, you know, not really like they like it and want the benefits of it, but that it just goes without saying it's true.
That wars make us rich, not them, but, but we have a lab.
We have a laboratory experiment of that.
First of all, prosperity did not come back during world war two.
And as the war was winding down and hell we're broke right now.
We've been at war for 10 years.
That's right.
That's right.
That's right.
I ought to be filthy rich.
I'm not at all.
I'm counting nickels for Paul malls over here.
All right.
Hang tight, everybody.
We're going to do one more segment here.
I think with Sheldon Richman from the Freeman online.org and FFF.org.
And free association.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
So, um, well, what do you think, Sheldon?
We're 10 years out from the terror war.
In some ways we're making progress as far as what people understand about it.
But then again, it's getting harder and harder for us to, um, really be able to do anything about it.
And of course, more and more, the government seems like they're perfectly comfortable using their, uh, you know, national security apparatus against people who would dare oppose them.
If you look at, uh, even, uh, not just FBI, but even military investigations of peace groups.
And of course, uh, the recent deal with, uh, the FBI looking at us at anti-war.com.
See, to see if we're agents of a foreign power, uh, things like this.
Uh, I don't know.
On, in, as far as our uphill battle goes and, and winning the war of ideas here and getting our way, uh, how far uphill are we, man?
How much more do we have to go?
Well, I think we have a long way to go.
I mean, I, I was, you know, somewhat cheered, as I said, by your informing me that, uh, Pew, uh, about whether our policies could have had something to do with the attacks on a, on a survey.
That's pretty interesting.
And that 40% said, uh, what?
Yes.
Or maybe, uh, 43% said, yeah, well, the way it was questioned, the way the question was worded, it had might in the questions.
Okay.
Well, okay.
That, that seems like a bit of progress, but then I have to compare that to, you know, uh, I watch a lot of cable news and, um, much more than I should.
I'm sure.
I don't know if it's a 12 step program or something, but I don't see any of that filtering onto cable TV news.
And I'm talking about MSNBC, uh, CNN, Fox.
I mean, I don't see, I don't remember seeing that poll, uh, reported on, and I don't see them bringing on guests to Syria, serious guests to ask them about that, you know, things like that.
So it's not making it where it needs to go.
Cause that's where people tend to get, you know, assume people get that type of information from those programs.
I mean, I guess not many people watch MSNBC really, but, uh, you're not going to see that on Fox and Fox is the one that has the big cable audience.
Right.
But I don't, you don't see that on, uh, you know, I can see it on O'Reilly or Hannity.
Uh, you may see it come up on Stossel's show, but you know, Stossel's on Fox business, which is not as many people, but, uh, until I start, until I start seeing it there, where I see a guest included in these panel discussions, that is going to be bringing that up.
Then I'm, then I'm not going to be terribly cheered.
I mean, still, you only hear it from Ron Paul.
I mean, it's during a debate.
That's the only time.
And of course the other night, they didn't give him a chance to say that.
How they did not ask him a question about his signature issue is, you know, I can't believe that was just, uh, just an oversight, an innocent oversight.
I find that hard to believe.
Yeah.
Well, uh, it's, what's funny is, back to the stupidity or the plan, uh, you know, ignorance or the scam, uh, with those Fox News hairdo guys, or what was it, Brian Williams?
I mean, you never can tell.
That guy, if you've ever read any of his opinion pieces, which, or seen him on, like, Morning Joe, talking about what he thinks, or whatever, boy, that guy is an idiot, dude.
He's like, just, he sounds like he flunked out of junior college, man.
He doesn't know nothing.
Wait, I sound like I flunked out of junior college.
He sounds like he went to some fancy schmancy school where they told him to have high self-esteem, regardless of whether he's good at his job or not.
You know, but, uh, take a show like, uh, you know, Joe Scarborough's show.
When does he have somebody on, a serious, uh, person who's, uh, you know, the caliber that you bring on your show every day?
It's not like he doesn't know who these people are.
They could easily find out.
Where's Gareth Porter on these programs?
Where's any of the, uh, great people that you have on, on a regular basis?
I mean, he claims he wants a balanced show, and that he's, he's skeptical, you know, he's a conservative-leaning, independent type of guy.
Uh, you know, what is he doing today?
Singing some folk song he wrote about 9-11.
Happiest thing you ever saw.
Are you kidding?
Could have been spending that time with some serious discussion about why that all happened.
Yeah.
So, of course, he has Zbysku, his big new, Brzezinski's daughter on there, and he, and, and Brzezinski's one of the people who's ultimately responsible for all this.
You want to blame Clinton?
Let's go back to Carter.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I don't, it's funny, you know, I mean, does anybody, and, and she seems like a decent enough person or whatever, but does anybody think she's going to sit there and explain how, well, you know, this is, this is, uh, well, you know, so my father wrote this note to, uh, vice pre, or to President Carter saying, now we're going to give them their own Vietnam, and that's now what we're doing to ourselves there.
Hey, she brings, they bring them, they bring Mr. Zbyg on the show, and she interviews, interviews him, calling him dad.
What do you think is going to happen?
Come on.
Well, you know, the silver lining, though, is Ron Paul, right?
Because, uh, this is my hope for the future is that, you know, he'll continue to run for president for another year, which means he's got to get into this fight with you.
They're going to have to try to attack him on this.
And, right.
And I think, and I think he should talk about nothing but this.
Even when he's given a question on the minimum wage, he should, he should be really artful at immediately turning it to this.
Because, you know, what they asked him about the other night, the minimum wage, and what about if you're against the government, what about food inspection?
I would find an excuse to change, to turn everything to empire.
Just, you know, to be single-minded.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
He'd be a one issue guy.
Because we all know him now, you know, nobody can deny how into waging war he is.
And of course, the rest of the Republicans are horrible.
You can have Michelle Bachmann as opposed to the war in Libya, but only because Frank Gaffney told her that it would help Al Qaeda, you know, so she's actually probably right.
And she's, you know, in a month from now, we won't even remember her name.
She's gone.
I believe she's gone.
You know, she's...
I hope so.
She's now, to me, just almost a carbon copy of Sarah Palin.
I used to think she had a little more gravitas than Palin, but she's lost that.
So forget about her.
Yeah, I think Ron has to make it a point to goad the other candidates, particularly Romney and Perry, and every one of these things.
Just keep being a thorn in their side about war and empire and civil liberties.
Just goad them, goad them, goad them.
Smoke them out.
Make them make their statements.
And have those confrontations, because the best segment of the first debate was his conflict with Santorum over Iran.
It was fantastic.
He just needs to make sure he does that every time, even if the moderators aren't going to let him do it.
Find a way to do it.
That's what his advisers ought to be saying.
That exchange certainly proved how completely devoid of information these people are.
You know, I was looking at this Michelle Malkin thing earlier I found from Lawrence Vance blog where these people have had it for so long where it just goes without saying that they hate us because they're Muslims and whatever, and that we're on the defensive here and all this, that they haven't even tried very hard to come up with their B.S. like with any solid detail or in any substantial talking points or articles that they could really share with each other.
All they have is just everybody knows that, basically.
And you know, Santorum proved, you know, the complete vapid nature, the emptiness of all of these guys, and none of them are any different than him as far as their information on these topics.
They know what they've been told and they haven't read a thing about it.
They don't know a thing about it.
I mean, he even, Santorum even said in that debate that Iran has killed more Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan than the Iraqis or Afghans have.
Really?
After seven years of everybody in Iraq is a member of Sunni al-Qaeda who would dare to resist us, now it was the Iranians the whole time?
Really?
How could he, he was in the Senate then, this is a war he voted for, and all he did was just prove that he doesn't know the first thing about what's going on over there.
Look, the, I think Ron Paul can gauge his progress by the amount of time that the other candidates spend claiming that he's to the left of Obama on foreign policy.
That would, to the extent they're doing that, he is making a dent.
And just to bring in another idiotic statement, Ann Coulter was on Stossel the other night discussing this with Matt Welch of Reason Magazine, and she claimed that, you know, Matt was saying Iraq was stupid, we shouldn't have gone to Iraq.
She said, no, Iraq was great because we need, we need, and we have it in Iraq, an Arab Israel.
Now, is she a demagogue?
Totally ignorant, or I guess she can be both, but it seems to me a demagogue knows that he's demagoguing, or else he's not really a demagogue.
How can anybody, even a neocon, argue that we've turned Iraq into an Arab Israel when Iraq is, you know, is Shiite, and close to Iran, and all that?
I mean, how could she possibly say that with a straight face?
And then she'll turn around and say, oh no, Iran somehow has gained influence in Iraq.
I'm sure that had nothing to do with us overthrowing the Ba'athists in that war I supported and denounced you for opposing, but now we better intervene over there to keep the Iranians out.
Well, that's right, it's not even coherent.
It's not even coherent, and yet she gets away with stuff like this.
It's just ridiculous.
I mean, she thinks it's the greatest thing, because now we have an Arab Israel.
All right, yeah, I really noticed, but first of all, I don't think we need another Israel.
One is quite enough, and it's not wrong.
It's wrong at every level, right on the face of it.
Anybody should be able to see it's wrong, once you remember, oh yeah, Iran, I forgot about Iran.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, she might as well be the best of them, because none of them are any better than her with any of this stuff.
It's all just make-believe and nonsense.
All right, thanks very much, Sheldon.
Really appreciate it, as always.
Anytime, Scott.
Thank you.
That's Sheldon Richman, everybody, FFF.org.
