So I arranged with my friend Will Grigg to come on the show to discuss America's rapid descent into a fascist police state.
And the headline in the New York Times is that the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has actually commuted the sentence of somebody on death row.
Isn't that, like, impossible or something?
A bit counterintuitive to the topic, but I guess that's the way it is.
You guys know Will Grigg.
He's the editor of The Right Source Online and writes the great blog ProLibertate, which you can find at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Welcome to the show, Will.
Thanks so much, Scott.
It's great to be with you again.
Can you imagine Rick Perry commuting the sentence of a guy on death row?
And he was black!
Well, I saw, wonders never cease.
In this case, I guess it's wonders commencing.
No, I saw that, and I was completely astonished, because as late as yesterday, I among other people thought that there was no possibility that that sort of thing would happen.
Texas is sort of a state that has distinguished itself for the promiscuous use of the death chamber, and there is this folk wisdom about how if you ride with an outlaw, you die with an outlaw, and in this particular case, you're dealing with somebody who obviously had not positively taken a step toward killing somebody, and there was pretty compelling evidence that he wasn't aware that there was going to be lethal violence the night that he was on this ride-along, and from what I understand, I'm not all that conversant with the details of the case.
Apparently, you're dealing with what could be considered an act of whimsical homicide on the part of somebody who was in the car that this fellow was driving, and since there wasn't premeditation involved, you really can't make the case that he was constructively involved in that lethal crime, and that's the sort of case that those of us who are skeptical of the use of the death penalty would mount on behalf of the fellow.
It's just amazing, as you pointed out, Scott, that the governor of Texas, who's a Democrat-turned-Republican of no particular distinction in terms of principle, would commute that sentence.
So that's a cheerful argument, so much gloom.
Right, and you know, especially when, as you say, I guess you call it the promiscuous use of the death penalty here in Texas, I think I read something not too long ago that said Harris County, Houston, just the court system down there has as many people executed as the whole communist state of a billion people in China.
That's amazing.
It's very comparable anyway.
I think China may be ahead of Harris County by just a few, but I know the ranking is it's Harris County, and then Texas, and then the United States, and then I guess China's in there somewhere.
It puts things in a rather ominous perspective.
It really does.
You know, people still get choked up, home of the brave, land of the free.
People tighten their fist and put it up by their heart and get all teary-eyed and all, man, we're so free.
And yet, in a country of 300 million people, we have more people in prison in the state of China where it's just assumed, where the premise of the entire state is that it created you and lets you be relatively free at its whim.
We have more people in prison than them.
How can that be?
Well, that's one element here of this larger story that I wish more people to pay attention to, the fact that we have a larger prison population, you just said, than an overtly communist state.
Probably, if I'm not mistaken, one of the three or four that still lays proud claim, I suppose, to being heirs of Marx and Lenin.
Although, in the case of China, you're dealing with sort of an authoritarian corporate state that's ruled by an oligarchy that's sort of a new class type of group that professes fealty to Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and Deng Xiaoping's thought.
But what they mean basically is, well, the state rules everything, and however we justify that claim in whatever obscure document or doctrine we can define, some purchase on power will lay claim to that.
But apart from that, you can pretty much do what you want as long as you're making money and you obey our dictates.
I mean, there's not really so much ideology behind what China does as pure brute authoritarianism.
But notwithstanding that fact, it is a pretty awful regime, and they have over a billion people under the rule of that tiny oligarchy, and the population of the United States is a rounding error when you're trying to calculate how many Chinese are in the world, and yet we have more people in prisons than the Chinese government does.
That's a very sobering indication of what's really going on.
And furthermore, I believe, and I've not been able to prove this because I'm still crunching the numbers, but probably the number of nonviolent offenders in U.S. prisons outstrips the number of people in prison in China.
I've not been able to confirm that, but I suspect that might be the case.
You're not dealing with people who've committed actual crimes against persons of property.
You're talking about people who are there in large measure because of the so-called war on drugs, which is a prohibitionist policy that, like all prohibitionist policies, is completely illegitimate.
You really should not have the government in the business of criminalizing vices.
That's a really good way to expand the power of the state, a terrific way to destroy individual liberty, and also a pretty good way to abet the growth of vice.
It's really a trifecta there in terms of the pure futility of the policy.
Well, you're just a dope smoking hippie, right?
Well, I must be.
Anybody who's seen a photograph or seen a photograph of me and my family would probably think we're dubious candidates for enrollment in the counterculture.
The point here is that if you examine this policy in terms of what it does to individual freedom and what it does to public morality as well, meaning this case, the central morality of the Christian tradition, which has to do with two great commandments, and that resonates with the policy of non-aggression, the non-aggression principle of libertarianism.
You don't transgress against the rights of your neighbor.
That's, I think, the paramount public moral question.
The central question of public morality is, does it encourage or does it discourage aggression against the rights of your neighbor?
And measured from that perspective, morality of the drug war is just a horrible failure, and it's an outrage, a screaming atrocity.
But the thing I find really interesting in the context of this discussion, Scott, is the news item that was in World Met Daily this morning about the fact that there was a regulation enacted back on the 14th of February 2005 that permits, once again, the creation of civilian inmate labor camps on military bases, or at least military-owned assets.
And the thing that I'm thinking as I look at this story is that you're dealing here with something that in principle is not all that different from the notorious logi inmate labor camps that are run by the Chinese military, where you have people who have been found guilty of committing various offenses that would not be considered crimes against persons and property, just crimes against what that government is pleased to call public order, who are taken into the Chinese gulag and then used to manufacture products that are marketed on behalf of the so-called People's Liberation Army, in this instance the U.S. version would allow civilian inmate labor to be building facilities, including other prisons or military assets, and probably in the long run, given the fact that we have this blending of these large politically connected corporations and this large omnivorous government, you're probably going to have them manufacturing something that would be sold for profit, most likely by military contractors like KBR or Halliburton.
You know the constellation as well as I do.
But you have really a huge instance of moral hazard here when you have a nonviolent inmate labor program.
That's why I'm emphasizing the fact that we have such a huge population of nonviolent offenders who are behind bars, who would be used as uncompensated labor on behalf of what we now have to call the military industrial national security and prison complex.
And that's the same kind of an arrangement they have in China, it's just China is more forthright about what they're doing, rulers are.
And now when you talk about these new camps being set up and so forth, we've heard about this kind of thing for years, and I don't know if anybody's really keeping count, but I guess at this point I'm under the impression that there are already a lot of empty prisons sitting basically in waiting around this country.
That's the thing that really gets me is, here you have Supermax facility here and Supermax facility there, and yet they're sitting empty and they're building more and more of these.
That's the thing that I think most people would find properly unsettling, is the fact that when the government is building empty prisons, it obviously intends to fill them, and it's anticipating demand.
I mean, you're building excess capacity into a system on the assumption that these things are not going to be lying fallow.
I keep adverting to a story that's in a Monta Valladares memoir, Against All Hope.
Mr. Valladares was a Cuban poet who was thrown in prison when he was working for the post office in Cuba.
Way back in the early 1960s, just after the revolution, he happened to make some kind of uncored remark about Fidel Castro and the wisdom of the communist revolution in Cuba, and so he ended up spending over 20 years in the filthiest and most despicable dungeons of the Cuban communist regime.
But one of the points he made was that before Castro, one of the previous rulers of Cuba – I can't remember which, I don't think it was Batista, I think it was somebody who predated him – had built this ridiculously huge prison complex, and nobody could understand why he did so.
And so somebody, one of his advisors, ginned up the courage to ask the dictator why he'd done this.
He said, well, don't worry, someone will come along, we'll fill it up.
And that someone, of course, was Fidel Castro, and that's where Valladares spent 20 years of the prime of his life, paying the political penalty for speaking out very quietly against the regime.
Now, when you see a government, any government, building empty prisons, it's not because they're going to demolish those prisons or convert them to a more suitable use, it's because they're anticipating their own policies will eventually bring in a windfall of inmates.
And when I say windfall, I mean that in light of what we learned this morning, in a literal sense.
You're talking about uncompensated labor that would be used on behalf not only of the government and its entities and the pertinences like the Pentagon, for instance, but also on behalf of any of the corporations who are contractors or subcontractors working on behalf of the government.
And that's the sort of thing, the latter relationship, that has really grown and proliferated under the Bush-Cheney administration.
Well, you know, it seems like with fascism, you get the worst of both worlds.
You have the coercive power of the state, and you also have businessmen who are willing, I mean, let's face it, from an amoral or an immoral point of view, a congressman is the best investment that a businessman can make.
Certainly.
And if you're in the steel bar or concrete manufacturing business, you're part of this prison industrial complex, well, you're just going to keep buying congressmen and keep lobbying them to support the worst wars.
And so you have this personal private profit motive with government taxation power and ultimately prison at the other end of it.
And all of us are, I guess, just stuck either in the cages or emptying our wallet for them for somebody else.
Exactly.
Yeah, whether emptying the wallet directly is through direct taxation or more subtly as through inflation, as government deficit spending is being used to prime the pump of this entire corrupt enterprise, and that steals, of course, from the purchasing power of our dollar and our savings and so forth.
We're seeing a lot of that happen right now.
The subprime mortgages are being bailed out and the lenders are being the beneficiaries of corporate welfare on Wall Street.
But when you talk about the fact that there are so many of these corporate entities that opportunistically attach themselves to this military industrial prison complex, you're talking about something Adam Smith referred to way back in the 18th century as the man of systems, somebody who snuggles up to a ruler so as to protect himself and his interests against competition in the free market.
And Adam Smith, being a cynical and perceptive observer of human behavior, said something to the effect that you cannot have an association of merchants gathered without them hatching some conspiracy against the interests of the public.
And, of course, that's true when they're commingling with the government, the government being, of course, a permanent conspiracy against the interests of the governed.
Just one small example of what we're talking about, Scott, that I came across the other day as I was looking into what's happening in anticipation of Labor Day when we're going to have these federally subsidized DOI patrols and checkpoints pull you late across the countryside like so many noxious weeds.
That happens almost every year at this time, and there's a reason for that.
They're out fishing for revenue.
They have state municipal governments who don't have the luxury of inflating the currency so as to pay off their own constellation of constituents, so they have to send out the revenue farmers wearing the tin badges and other costume jewelry to shake down people on behalf of those governments.
Yeah, it's like the Christmas shopping season for local police departments.
Oh, yeah, you know, Christmas in August, for all of the governments that afflict us.
But one of the things we're talking about we've seen quite frequently in recent years is something called the DUI enforcement trailer, which is sort of a mobile detention center and testing facility.
They'll attach a DUI enforcement trailer to a given roadblock or checkpoint.
It's not like the paddy wagon.
It's not like you're going out and finding people who are obviously drunk and dissolute who have either caused trouble by starting some kind of a violent encounter in a bar or that they're simply strewn in Skid Row where they're a threat to their own welfare, so you have to pick them up and put them in the paddy wagon.
This is something that is used to interrogate people and use some technically and constitutionally dubious means of establishing whether or not they're driving under the influence if they are summarily to detain them there in this trailer.
In doing some research on that subject, I came across an outfit called Universal Trailers.
One of the things that they manufacture is what they call an enforcement trailer, and it's just a standard shell.
It looks like it could be something relatively innocuous like your standard issue camper that you pull behind, for instance, a fifth wheel type of an arrangement.
However, this, of course, is something which is being used here as an inducement to law enforcement agencies, and their sales pitch runs as follows.
Universal makes all kinds of specialty trailers.
All you need to do is tell us what you want.
Below is an example of a DUI trailer for police departments to haul all the gear you may need to set up a DUI checkpoint available in various sizes and equipment configurations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You'll find many options for equipment, such as bench, base cabinets, wall cabinets, 110 volt fluorescent lights, windows, et cetera.
We also offer generators and air conditioners to provide more comfort, for whom they don't say.
And then this is the part that I found really provocative.
For Homeland Security, there are many functions our trailers can help provide, so here they are out pitching to these police departments, which are pretty much now just local affiliates of a centralized Homeland Security entity anyway.
And the Homeland Security system is thoroughly unitary and centralized in a way that our founders never would have put up with for any length of time.
But they know that there's a lot of money being spruced into these supposedly local police departments and sheriff's departments and state police units from the federal government, and so they're trying to get in on the gravy train.
Here, we offer this wonderful multiuse trailer, and here are some of the things that it can provide.
So, one small example of the type of rent-seeking corporatist opportunism that we see characterizing this metastasizing Homeland Security corporatist system we're living under.
Yeah, something on MSNBC just a week or two ago where it was the same thing, and they pointed something to be scared of, in this case, Mexicans, and it was an entire convention center somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico, I think, and it was an entire convention center full of entrepreneurs hawking their gadgets for chasing Mexican people back out of the country again.
And this one guy's giving the lady, the MSNBC lady's walking around, and he's going, yeah, this here's a directed sound gun.
What it does is it blasts holes in their eardrums.
That'll make them run away.
And yeah, and they only cost a few hundred thousand dollars apiece.
I hope you're watching, Congressman.
I hope you're watching Appropriations Committee.
Let's do this thing.
You know, no one, no one is going to spend their own money on something like this.
Only through the course of Power of Taxation is somebody like this scumbag going to make a living doing this kind of stuff.
Well, yeah, what you said about this system we're living under right now, which is economically best called corporatism, which was Mussolini's most famous innovation, and actually he gets credit for it, but Lenin pioneered before Mussolini.
The new economic program in the early 20s, the Soviet Union, was corporatism.
The biggest difference was that it was internationally subsidized by Western interests in Washington and London.
Well, you know, Edward Mandel House bragged that, I anticipated Mussolini by several years.
Exactly.
I mean, Philip Drew was basically the template for what you saw in the Soviet Union and later in Italy, and Italy's system didn't come into bad odor until after he had sort of snuggled up to Adolph Hitler in the late 1930s, between the late 20s and, say, 1938 or so.
Mussolini was actually somebody who was in high esteem on the part of opinion makers and academics and even some churchmen here in the United States, and when FDR sat down with his little clique to develop a new deal, they used as their model the writings of Giovanni Gentile and some of the other fascist theoreticians in putting together their own model of the corporate estate.
So this is something we've been dealing with for a long, long time.
You can make a really good case that this actually started to afflict our country back in World War I, but it's now reaching the full malignant flower of the seeds that have been planted over a century ago when we see overtly this union between the worst elements of the coercive state, the military and law enforcement on the one hand, and then, as I said before, people who are in the corporate realm who want profit without risk.
They're not entrepreneurs, really.
Entrepreneurs are risk-takers, by the strict definition of the term.
You minimize risk by becoming a political or economic concubine of the state, and the state's seraglio during the last five or six years has expanded dramatically, not only over here in the United States but over in Iraq as well, where Reconstruction was just one riotous orgy of corporate corruption.
That's pretty much the model for the world that they want to inflict on the rest of us, in the name of global democracy.
It's actually a degenerate form of corporatism with all the overtones and the pertinences of fascism, and economically, it would be of very little use to anybody apart from those who are politically connected.
Hey, you just did such a good job explaining that, it made me think that we ought to take a little bit of extra time to go a little bit further, and maybe, Will, you and I can help convert a left-winger or two to libertarianism.
It occurs to me that basically the case you just made, the libertarian case against corporatism, is by far the best one, that a liberal or leftist case against corporatism can only lead straight to total statism, that the real opposite of this fascist system you describe is a laissez-faire, free-market system, and further, is it not the case, Wilgric, that it was a bunch of sick, evil, conservative, right-wing, corporatist, capitalist scum who created the regulatory and welfare states in America just to bribe and confuse the American people into thinking that the government was somehow protecting the people from the people who created the state in the first place?
Well, Scott, one of the things that we deal with here is the mischievous misidentification of some people as conservatives that's being done primarily right now by people who are in the pay, or at least in the orbit, of the Republican hierarchy.
If you go way back to the founding Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, you had really the embryonic stage of what would be considered now a type of corporatist state.
He was somebody who was an attorney representing railroad interests back in the 1850s before he became a serious candidate for president.
You had a couple of free-market attempts to create railways.
What they would do at the time, as I think we've discussed before, Scott, when they were dealing with the complication of Indians who lived on lands that they wanted to run railroads through, they would make deals with the Indians and buy or trade for the land.
Whereas on the other hand, when you had some of these federally supported railroad initiatives, they would simply send in the army to expropriate the Indians through annihilation if nothing else proved to be availing, which is how you had Sheridan and Sherman and other people whose names I usually pronounce only after spitting, would send in the cavalry saying, the only good Indian is a dead Indian, we have to wipe them out down to the last woman and child.
Yeah, knits make lice.
Exactly.
Knits make lice was one of the refrains.
It was Sherman who wrote, the only good Indian is dead Indian.
They had, of course, sharpened their fangs on the flesh of Southerners during the war between the states.
Then they redirected their efforts on behalf of the same Leviathan, the same emerging corporate estate, by taking after the Plains Indians.
The rest, of course, is really bad and heartbreaking history.
But you go a few decades later and you have the so-called Progressive Movement, which was something that gestated, I think, in equal parts on the movement left, you know, the Bellamy's of the world.
The fellow who composed the Pledge of Allegiance was a brother, Edward Bellamy.
Edward Bellamy was somebody who believed in creating a centralized, what he called nationalist regime in the United States that would be recognizably socialist and utopian in nature.
You know, you have that faction sort of leading into the Progressive Movement.
That's a heritage Hillary Clinton is proud to claim, by the way.
She was asked about her political philosophy in a recent so-called debate and she said, no, I wouldn't call myself a liberal because liberals, historically, are people who believe in minimal government and individual rights, whereas I consider myself more of a progressive.
That was a very important admission by Hillary Clinton to the plain claim to this element of our political establishment heritage.
It's amazing when they talk that way, isn't it?
I just love it.
It really is.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
No, that's okay.
On the other head of this hydra, if you will, this creature was represented by Teddy Roosevelt, who I think was certifiably insane.
He's somebody the Republicans like to claim as their own.
He was, of course, kindred to FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he believed in busting the trust on the assumption that, once again, these large private corporate entities have too much power and they're able to create dislocations in the market.
So obviously the thing to do is to use that element of society that is completely immune to the market, which is the government, and bust up these private entities, thereby creating a larger and more monopolistic government.
I don't know how the logic makes any sense, but that more or less was the position that Teddy Roosevelt espoused.
Well here's the logic.
The logic is, and that government monopoly is controlled by the people in the democracy through our vote.
Yes, better living through coercion.
I mean, that more or less is the unfortunate credo of the statist left.
I'm still looking for an anti-statist left.
I don't know if such a thing can exist, but if it can exist, I'd sure like to find it.
People on the left generally seem to think that in this corrupt fusion of corporations with government power, it is the former that is the senior partner and the corrupting element.
The problem is that a corporation, absent the cooperation of government in some way, cannot compel anybody to do anything.
It certainly cannot compel people to consume their products or to take their services or to pay to capitalize their undertakings.
This has to be done through coercion.
Coercion is the defining attribute of government.
I remember about 13 years ago, 12 years ago, I was at Copenhagen covering a UN conference, and I had the opportunity very briefly to corner and question Bella Abzug, the late unlamented grande dame of the most Marxist element of the feminist movement.
She was giving forth in her lecture about how we needed some kind of an international version of what had happened under the progressives of the United States back in the early 20th and early 19th century in order to combat today's economic royalists.
The question I had of Abzug was, does your foundation get any money from economic royalists?
She said, no, we get our money from foundations in the government.
I said, how are these not economic royalists?
The people who built the foundations are those corporate interests that had cuddled up to the government on the one hand, and of course the government is nothing if not royalist unless, of course, it's outright authoritarian or dictatorial.
Our royalist government is actually a more innocuous form of that affliction than a dictatorship or even a mass democracy where there is no limit through the law to what government can do.
But that, I think, represents the type of myopia you're describing here, Scott, in that as long as this was funneled through some kind of a certifiably left-wing institution like Bella Abzug, I think it was called WE-DO, the Women's Economic Development Organization, and if things funneled through that kind of an entity, it really shouldn't be considered the product of economic royalism when actually it is, I think, the purest form of what they're talking about here in terms of the corruption that is attendant to politicized corporate wealth.
But, unfortunately, once again, the assumption on the part of many leftists, the basic premise, the first term of their worldview is that somehow if the state is involved to that extent — if the state is involved in some kind of an enterprise, to that extent, that enterprise is sanctified because the state represents something which is better and purer than private undertakings.
And the only magical element I can isolate here that would distinguish the state is coercion.
So really, when you think about it, once again, their worldview is that coercion is the key to better living.
And, you know, for the leftists who mean well, which I guess is 99% of them, but the ones who are on the far left who actually tend toward Marxism and so forth, I mean, the whole theory there is that the only reason that we have the tyranny of private property is because of the socialist state that everyone's forced to pay for that protects the private property tyranny of the evil patriarchs and yada yada like that.
But you know, my argument is, if that's really the case, if you really believe that, well then what you really want is to wither away the state so that it can no longer prop up that private property.
The idea that somehow creating a dictatorship of the right people means that the next step after that dictatorship will be a communist paradise without a state doesn't make any sense at all.
If you really want to wither the state away, wither the state away.
Stop asking them to be your best friend, for Christ's sake!
Exactly.
I think that one of the problems here, and this is something that you run into, of course, and you've run into it and I've run into it, anybody who discusses politics with people who start from a left-wing perspective on these issues, is that they assume that they will be among the anointed few, or at least people who are very close to them and solicitous of their specific interests will be among the anointed few, who will manage our affairs during that supposedly brief interregnum between things as they are right now and the prelapsarian communist paradise that's going to be restored at some time in the indefinite future.
Every entrenchment of the state, and this is something, of course, Orville and Animal Farm satirizes brilliantly, every entrenchment of the state, every enrichment of its powers to coerce and to immiserate others is seen as a temporary expedient, and there is nothing more permanent than a temporary accumulation of power by government, and it doesn't matter whether you're talking about a Marxist regime or the type of robber state that you have in post-Soviet Russia right now, where you have the same people, the same nomenclatura running things, divested of the ideology and the language and ritual of the Soviet states, the same people who are still running things in Russia, or whether you're talking about the Homeland Security regime that's being fastened down on us right now here in the United States, all these things are merely temporary expedients, like the telephone tax that went into effect in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, which was repealed, what was it, three or four years ago, and then mutated into something else.
I mean, that's the sort of thing that achieves, as Ronald Reagan once famously said, oh, that he had been faithful to his professed convictions.
Ronald Reagan once said that the closest thing to immortality is a temporary government program.
Look at the withholding tax that began as a wartime expedient in World War II.
The idea is that these things are all temporary, and that at some unspecified time, either normalcy will be restored, or something much better will be given to us.
I mean, George W. Bush professes to believe, who knows whether he actually believes it or not, that by this strenuous exertion of generational war, we're going to rid the world of evil, in this case, the unspecified, conveniently non-denominational scourge of terrorism, which Bush wants us to believe is something that we can defeat through the use of terror, through the use of such things as dropping 10,000-pound bombs on residential neighborhoods in Baghdad, which is a pretty good definition of terror.
Or Dick Cheney would have us believe that the key to fighting terror is to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on Tehran.
By doing this, by this one grand exception to what it is that we seek to create, we can create this beautiful, paradisiacal world, which of course is not going to happen, because as, I believe, as Huxley once said, the means that we employ are, give me the ends that we employ, I've got that backwards twice, the means we employ are the ends in the making, and if you use terror, what you end up with is terror, you know, Orwell said the same thing, you know, the purpose of terror is terror, the purpose of torture is torture.
Well, and it seems like that fascist state that we started the interview describing is really mostly a result of the foreign policy coming home, right?
That's what they call it, the war at home.
I can't get the image out of my head, I don't know if you saw Spike Lee's documentary that he did for HBO about Hurricane Katrina, but there's this great clip of the guys patrolling around New Orleans, just fresh back from Iraq, with their M16s hanging out and all that, and there's this, there's a general, I believe he was a general, an old black guy, probably 50, 60 years old, and he's standing in the middle of the street, and he's screaming at these guardsmen, you put those rifles down, you point those rifles at the ground, son, what the hell do you think you're doing?
And these soldiers, for all they know, they're still in Fallujah, there's no difference to them, they can't do the differentiation, and it's this one sober-minded commander, because of his personality and his one case, he's saying, hey, hey, hey, what, no, stop your aggressive posture right now, but, you know, these are guys, again, these are guys just back from the foreign war that we shouldn't be fighting.
We know it's even more sobering.
You probably read that book, whose name escapes me right now, that was written by an embedded reporter from Rolling Stone, who spent quite a time over in combat with a Marine combat unit in Iraq, and one of the things that he pointed out, it'll come to me in a second, I can't remember, the name of the book had Captain America in the title, but it was about these people who had enlisted in the Marines, most of them from very troubled backgrounds, broken homes, some of them had problems with drug use and alcohol use and things like this as teenagers, but they were very, very efficient in what they did.
They were very good when, oh, it's called Generation Kill, that's the name of the book, but he, in that book, recounts an encounter between this Marine detachment and a detachment of reserves, and these reservists had been drawn from, guess what, state police, local National Guard units, people who had been in the local National Guard, gone into the local police, and then from there gone into the reserves and gotten sent to combat duty overseas, but by and large, they're taken from the same people who are patrolling the streets of the United States in peacetime, and what they found out, this Marine unit and this reporter, was that this particular unit of reservists had gone completely nuts.
They were shooting up people with gleeful abandon, they were bombing around very conspicuously in large vehicles that had been disfigured with all kinds of aggressive graffiti that evince their determination basically to impose their will by terrorizing people into submission, that made all kinds of trouble for the people who were the professional military in that region of Iraq, precisely because they were more aggressive and they were less discriminating when they would mount a combat operation, they would kill civilians with impunity and without so much as a second thought.
These are people who, in peacetime, here in the United States, are law enforcement officers.
That's the type of attitude they took to the battlefield with them, they took it to Iraq from the United States.
Once again, it's a really sobering indication of just how low we have descended here in our course into abject despotism, the professional military, the people who come back with all kinds of problematic attitudes that they were sending to a post-Katrina type situation, were actually more restrained and rational than the law enforcement officers who, in the context of the battlefield, were given free reign to express their violent impulses.
That's a scary thing.
I said it before and I'll say it again, at least for this generation, it was Waco that opened the gate.
The American people loved the Waco massacre.
They thought it was the coolest thing that finally the government went and killed all those people so they didn't have to have their soap operas interrupted anymore and let them all burn in hell too.
When the police across the country and the military, especially the federal police, when they saw that, good.
The American people love it.
It's been a steady dose of nothing but Memphis SWAT and Dallas SWAT on A&E ever since.
The American people love it.
The toys at the store, the Cobra Commander guy is now the local sheriff.
I know.
Did you happen to see Rush Limbaugh's reaction to Waco?
Actually, no.
He had one reaction to Waco of which I am aware and that was on his short live television program the evening of the final massacre, April 19, 1993, when he was looking at what happened, he played the clips, the infamous clips of that church.
It wasn't a compound, it was a church, it was a sanctuary in a residential building on fire.
Rush Limbaugh reacted by putting up what we now call a photoshopped picture of Janet Reno in a tank wearing a combat helmet saying, why doesn't Bill Clinton deploy her to solve the best in Bosnia?
That was Rush Limbaugh's reaction.
His reaction was not...
Celebrate Reno.
Exactly.
Celebrate Reno.
To that extent anyway, obviously, she's somebody who has this to commend her.
She's very good at killing civilians, so let's use her to solve the mess in the Balkans.
See, I would like to think that that's just George Carlin pretend nihilism, but nah, he really meant it.
Yeah.
You remember the famous line that Gary Trudeau got off of Rush Limbaugh's expense about what's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and Hindenburg.
You know, one's a flaming Nazi gas bag and the other's a blimp.
Yes, that would probably be the best thing Trudeau ever wrote that I've ever heard of.
Oh man, so we don't have enough time for this at all, but I'm going to ask you anyway.
I don't know anything about this, and I'm sure that you do.
Tell me about the North American Union.
Is this a real deal that they're trying to push for Continental Union?
Hey, I'll tell you a funny anecdote, Will, before you answer.
Let's see, it's 2007, so I guess it was about ten years ago, I saw Mikhail Gorbachev give a speech at George Washington University, and they loved him a lot more than George Washington, no doubt about that, little commie grad students there.
But the speech was, of course through his translator, about how, well, we're going to have world federalism one way or another, but unfortunately there are a lot of reactionary types around the world, and so there are going to be difficulties.
But as we move toward world federalism, there are a few different options we could take, and one of them would be Continental Union first, into larger and larger regional groups, and then merge those together.
But I have to say, as I've seen this policy laid out, at least to be planned, I've also seen it thwarted.
The free trade of the Americas was supposed to be done all the way down to the tip of Argentina by 2005, and that surely hasn't happened, although it seems like they're moving towards Continental Union and Latin America anyway, apart from the North American Union.
But the reason I'm so curious about this is because it seems like Dick Cheney's policy has really been against what the typical so-called realist, liberal internationalist council on foreign relations crowd would want, and I wonder if you think he and George Bush, his junior, are actually pushing toward literally erasing the borders between Canada and Mexico that keep their governments out of our territory and our government out of theirs.
Yeah, I do think that what we're seeing on the part of the Bush administration's policy does envision the consolidation of at least some elements of the executive branch of the United States government with its counterparts in Mexico and in Canada, and they're already treating the border between the United States and Mexico as fiction for the purpose of the government policy, if not necessarily for the purposes of the free movement of good services and people.
The latter is always the bait that's put on the hook of political consolidation.
The examples we saw, for instance, in Europe during the buildup to the creation of the European Union always involved the redefinition of national boundaries and other elements of national sovereignty as impediments to free trade, when the people who were involved in this don't believe in free trade to begin with.
They do not believe in the mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services between people without government intervention, which is what free trade is, whether you're talking about free trade within a community or free trade internationally.
It's an economic exchange that's not filtered through government, and government only serves as an umpire to make sure that neither force nor fraud is used in that transaction.
What's happening with North American integration, there's no way of getting away from it if you read the actual literature that's put out by people like Robert Pastor and people like Dick Cheney, who has been very candid in some circumstances talking about promoting this agenda of political integration.
There's just no way of getting away from the fact that we're seeing in our hemisphere something that parallels what happened in Europe.
In South America, it's run into some obstruction because Mercosur is pursuing its own agenda, which is more overtly socialist than the corporatist elements that we're seeing drive the process from North America and Central America as well.
Presumably the only thing that really is throwing up much of an obstruction to the consolidation of the hemisphere would be this dissonance between two brands of collectivism.
You've got the corporatist, more fascist elements here in North America, and you've got the more populist Marxist version that you're seeing in South America.
They've not been able to reconcile those two versions, and that's what's holding up the grand design.
But there really aren't impediments of that sort on a similar level between the United States and Mexico.
Interestingly enough, Canada has started to get cross-wise with Washington over claims to Arctic sea lanes.
You see where there's this resource rush underway where the United States and Canada, Greenland, I believe Denmark, and of course Russia are all trying to lay claims to some of the mineral-rich elements of the Arctic, and this has created some tension between Ottawa and Washington because this is sort of ironic.
There's a particular sea lane, I can't remember where it's located exactly, it's up in the Arctic waters, that Canada claims is its own territory, and it has a pretty convincing claim to it.
The Bush administration, on the other hand, is saying we need to internationalize that particular channel, that particular waterway, and any time the Bush administration is invoking international standards, of course, it's seeking to use them to advance the interests of its own clique.
I mean, that's what happened with the war in Iraq.
Suddenly, the Bush administration is talking about the sanctity of UN Security Council resolutions that are supposedly being violated by Saddam Hussein, and because these are supposedly being violated by Saddam Hussein, Bush has the solemn responsibility to use our military to carry out these covenantal decrees by the Security Council.
Of course, when there are other resolutions the Bush administration doesn't like, they're not nearly as diligent in carrying them out, but the fact is, you've got a similar situation here.
Suddenly, the Bush administration is speaking the language of internationalism, not all that different from what you find in the so-called Law of the Sea Convention.
We want to internationalize these waterways as a way, presumably, of making them available to the same corporatist interests here in the United States that have been benefiting from so many other things that the Bush administration has done.
We have Canada talking the language of territorial integrity, and that is one of the type of issues, that's a representative of the type of issues that might throw some sand into the gears of consolidation between the United States and Canada.
There are other issues, of course, outstanding between Washington and Mexico City, but any way you look at it, if you take away some of what I consider to be exaggerated concerns, for instance, about the type of highways being constructed.
My problem is not that there are highways being constructed, my problem is that they're all part of the same corporatist structure we're talking about.
You're talking about something which is being politicized, that's my concern.
Take that out of the equation, you still have an unmistakable drive to amalgamate the worst element of these three governments, which is the executive branch of all three of them, and from that arrangement, no good can come.
I guess when you talk about that example in Canada, it makes me think that a lot of the hype on the right, that this is the New World Order takeover of America, they really kind of got it inside out.
This is America's takeover of Canada and Mexico.
Yeah, this is the American political elite takeover of the hemisphere.
I mean, the same people that have been causing unfiltered misery for decades are now expanding their reach in ways that are going to have a really bad impact on people outside of our borders.
I mean, if you want to see the benevolent handiwork of the American political elite, go to an Indian reservation sometime and take a look at how those conquered peoples have been treated.
You know, that's more or less the life that they have envisioned for the rest of us.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
I'll tell you, there's one kind of shining silver lining to all this, and that is that you know, I guess like Princess Leia said it, the more you tighten your grip, the more will slip through your fingers, and this whole Ron Paul revolution thing is taking off, and even if he gets last place in all the primaries, which I know he won't, this will still be the most people to learn about the dangers of this corporatist fascist structure that you're talking about from a free market point of view, from the real opposite point of view of fascism.
Exactly, and the really glorious thing about it is that it's trans-ideological.
You've got people who have been involved in utterly disparate political undertakings who are uniting behind this campaign, and as Ron Paul says, it's not about him.
He just happens to be somebody who has embraced these principles, the principles that matter.
He takes himself almost entirely out of the story, which is how a statesman would handle this.
I mean, he's somebody who's inexplicable in contemporary terms because he's an actual statesman.
He wants to submerge himself in the actual principles of the issues that matter here, but a lot of people who had nothing to do with each other are being brought together on the common ground of freedom, which is probably the most encouraging and hopeful development that I've seen in my lifetime.
Yup, I'm really enjoying it down here, I'll tell you, and especially as we march to war with Iran, which will be the topic of our next guest, Wayne White, here after this short break, I'm just damn near despair knowing how powerless I am to do anything about the march toward disaster going on, and yet every day I can click on the Lew Rockwell blog and see something to give me some hope.
Exactly.
All right, William Norman Grigg, you're awesome.
Thank you, sir.
The website is TheRightSourceOnline.com Yeah, TheRightSourceOnline.com, not TheRightSourceOnline.com.
Always screw that up.
And I know this one, it's FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com, pro-libertate.
Thanks very much for your time, Will.
Thanks so much, Scott.
