10/02/08 – Charles Goyette – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, next guest, my hero, Charles Goyette.
Welcome to the show, Charles.
Scott, it's good to talk to you.
It was good to see you do that debate in Austin with that neocon.
You look real good when you're dressed up in a coat and tie like that.
Ah, jeez, well...
Tell me something about that.
I hope people know what we're talking about, but is it true...
I did watch it.
I thought you acquitted yourself wonderfully.
Well, thank you.
You are such a master of the material.
Is it true, though, that at the end of the debate, that your opponent refused to shake your hand and turned his back on you?
Yes, I'm afraid so.
He said, I find your views, it was either abhorrent or despicable.
I find what you said, it was either abhorrent or despicable, I forget which.
But then, to give the guy credit, after, Harvey Kushner is his name, and then after the debate, I basically insisted on a handshake.
A little bit later, in the hallway after that, we started arguing all over again.
Of course, I was whooping him when they finally said, no, okay, everybody be quiet.
Debate two is over now.
Also, everybody line up to take pictures and whatever.
So I got a handshake out of him at the end.
Oh, well, I tell you, it did whet my appetite.
As you know, I've been on something of a vacation here for a while.
I watched that and I thought, maybe he'll come to Phoenix and I can have a piece of him, too.
Yeah, well, I don't know, it was a lot more fun in retrospect at the time.
I was kind of scared to death up there.
It was at Texas A&M, too, right there next to Kyle Field.
But I have to say that the guys at the Young Conservatives of Texas who put it on were really nice.
At least a good, sizable minority of them were Ron Paul types who already understood.
So I wasn't quite alone up there.
I brought a couple of good friends with me, too.
Yeah, good.
What else is going on?
Well, I want to ask you, man, on behalf of the 10,000 different people who have emailed me, where the hell is Charles Goyette, man?
What happened to you?
What happened to the other half of anti-war radio?
Oh, well, you're doing a good job carrying all the weight.
I left the radio in June, in the middle of June, and haven't been back on since except to be guests on other people's radio shows.
I am tied up in a couple of other projects.
One, I have a new book coming out next year about the economy, probably some of the stuff that we'll talk about today.
It's coming out from Portfolio Books, which is the business imprint of Penguin Publishing.
Oh, really?
Great.
Yeah, and I'll certainly tell you a little bit more about that in due time, but it comes out next year.
So I've been working feverishly on that.
And I may end up doing some radio again fairly soon.
I'm hoping to hold off anything like that until after the first of the year so I can enjoy my time off a little more and devote time to some writing between now and then.
But I'm staying busy.
I'm staying in the fight.
I'm doing a lot of public events around here and elsewhere around the country in the meantime.
So I'm still busy.
Well, you know, these things go together, the time off and the book about economics.
Would I be right to hazard to guess that as the stock market lost 777 points the other day that that wasn't you?
That wasn't me.
I'll tell you, a lot of people, in fact, I did a panel discussion about the economy the next day.
A lot of people said, well, what about that?
I'll tell you what I told them.
It's been my impression watching these things over the years that the people that move instantaneously on the moves.
Look, the American public doesn't.
They don't watch every uptick and every downtick, and they're not glued to CNBC every minute.
And it's buy, sell, buy, sell, get in, get out, leverage in, leverage down.
It's not like that with the public.
So these are the institutional people, hedge fund guys, money market guys, floor traders, stuff like that.
And my view, Scott, is that when they see a news event take place, they do not trade on that news event in judgment or evaluation of the economic soundness, the foundational soundness or validity of the economic event, whether it be bullish or bearish.
They try to perceive what the widespread impression will be of the event.
Yeah, they're like a school of fish.
You know what I mean?
They're like a school of fish.
Oh, yeah.
They're trying to assess what everybody else will think that it means, not what it really means.
So it was actually quite a healthy thing when the House found whatever it found when it reached deep down and voted the $700 billion bailout bill down the other day.
And the market reacts negatively.
The market makers are only looking around at other guys and thinking, well, the other institutions are going to think this is bad, so I'm going to think it's bad, so everybody dump everything.
Yeah.
You know, I really wish you were on the radio during this time, at least the people of Phoenix and the audience at antiwar.com and other places on the web would have access to your debunking of the myths that are perpetrated by, well, pretty much everybody else on the radio.
I guess there are a lot of sort of populist right-wingers opposing it.
But, you know, I was listening to NPR the other day, and I was just talking with the audience about this before the interview earlier on in the show.
The entire premise of every single thing they said was the bailout is great, you're stupid if you oppose it, the stock market went down because they know how necessary this was, and they never said any of these things.
They certainly never established any of these things to be true.
This was simply the unsaid premise for everything else.
All of their language revolved around the idea that this is from God, you know, this is perfect, and anyone who's against it, well, you just haven't been bribed in the corrupt way yet, but you will.
Listen, Scott, think about the logic that's implicit in that, because it's like you have marched way deep into the big muddy somewhere.
You're lost in a swamp in a quagmire, but you've been faithfully following the map that they sold you, that got you into the middle of that swamp.
And the same geniuses, the cartographers that drew up the map that got you lost in the middle of the swamp, they come up to you, would you like to buy another map for us on how to get out?
No thank you.
I mean, these same economic geniuses that charge an enormous premium for their investment banking advice are the ones that found themselves in deep doo-doo in the mortgage market meltdown, and now, and not the guys that foresaw this event, not the people like, say, Jim Rogers or Ron Paul or any of the people at the Von Mises Institute, not the people that foresaw the event, but the very same guys that sold us the map that got us into this thing now are the guys that say, by the way, we know exactly how to get out of this.
Yeah, and the guy interviewing them are the same people, the guys interviewing them are the same people who for the last eight years have stopped at their break to say, NPR News, all things considered, brought to you by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Yeah, and it's even worse than that, because there is a unanimity of opinion.
I did another event with a reporter from the Arizona Republic, the big Phoenix newspaper, the other day, and somebody in the audience asked him something about media bias, and he protested very vehemently that, no, none of the people he works with are biased, they try to do a great job, but I think you used the term presuppositions, they all walk into these debates with a fixed set of presuppositions that they've been indoctrinated about all of their lives, and during this whole debate, it doesn't matter whether the criticism of the bailout has come from the left or the right, or the champions of the bailout on the left or the right, they have all said this is a failure of regulation, oh my God, that is exactly to miss the point of what happened.
This is the mothership of all regulators.
The Federal Reserve created the entire mess that we're suffering now, and they tell us it's because we had a paucity of regulation.
So I think this is how media bias really works.
The people in the media are, for the most part, not particularly well-educated, or they have very, very conventional educations, but they bring to their work a set of presumptions, a set of presuppositions, about how the world works that they have never had questioned or questioned themselves.
Well, it's just like in Orwell, where the higher level you are in the party, the more you believe in it, and the less ability you have to see how things really are from that deep inside the machine.
And it just seems like, I can tell just from turning on TV, the closer these goofballs are to Washington, D.C., the wronger they are about everything.
And you can tell, it's not that anybody calls them up.
Like, for example, obviously, there's been no industry-wide memo that said, hey, keep Ron Paul off the air.
In fact, they keep bringing him on.
Hey, didn't this guy talk about the dollar and about the housing bubble and stuff?
Let's bring him on.
They bring him on, they interview him for ten minutes, and then they let him go, but they still haven't learned a damn thing.
And even though he explains it real well.
But there is.
Every now and then, I have a smile on my face and a glimmer of hope in my heart.
I mean, I really clearly remember the treatment that Ron Paul got early on in the presidential campaign from the likes of Neil Cavuto, and they marginalized him and they dismissed him as sort of an insignificant upstart.
What are you doing in this campaign?
What are you doing in this debate?
But, you know, you watch him now, and even a guy like Cavuto, I had him on the other day, and he said, well, Congressman, you're much smarter about all these things than anybody else we talked to, or at least he said, I think, than I am.
And he said, well, you clearly understand these things, and you were telling us about this a long time ago.
In fact, you know.
I mean, at least there's reason to think that maybe they'll catch on.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny about that.
He called him a genius, but he did it in interrupting him and not letting him actually finish his point, which he was trying to say, listen, man, all these things you're saying are the problem or the symptoms.
The problem is the easy credit I'm trying to teach you.
It's the artificially low interest rate, the artificially low reserve ratios, the uncontrolled spending in Washington, D.C.
These are the things that cause the problem.
So from now on, Neil, learn that.
And then, you know, maybe use that as the basis for a question for somebody else, something.
He didn't say all that, but this is what he's trying to get to.
And Neil Cavuto's going, shut up, shut up.
Let me tell you how smart I think you are, which basically just says, okay, okay, I admit it.
You're right about this stuff, but you're some kind of genius.
This is untouchable, you know, detailed, specialized knowledge that poor, lowly Neil Cavuto and his, you know, uneducated, layman audience can't understand.
So don't try to teach us, Ron.
We can't understand.
Let's just talk about you.
Well, you can't overcome a lifetime of indoctrination, maybe public school education, in a few short, sound bites on the air.
Give them a little time.
Give them a little time.
If they at least begin to question one or two of their assumptions along the way, or at least now they have a reference point.
Ron Paul did say this back then.
They have a reference point to judge the events as they continue to unfold, the unfortunate events.
That's true.
I am pretty hard on them.
Well, I mean, they certainly deserve it.
Yeah.
And, you know, particularly these guys on Fox News and people like Glenn Beck.
That guy, Glenn Beck, called for the military to round up Ron Paul supporters as traitors and hold them in detention camps, if not execute us all.
And now he's going, well, gee, Ron Paul, you sure are smart.
Well, you know what?
Why is this guy still the one with a show up there, you know?
Yeah, I know.
Well, you know, it's like everybody that was wrong about the war got a promotion.
You know, Paul Wolfowitz got a brief tenure at the World Bank in a chauffeur-driven limousine.
Bolton got a limousine ride to the U.N. headquarters.
Tenet got the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Didn't little Bill Crystal get a column in the New York Times?
I mean, this culture has a way of rewarding people who have been wrong and penalizing those who have been right.
Hey, by the way, you're from Arizona, so I want some insight on John McCain here.
You mentioned limousines there.
Reminded me of this blog entry by Tom DiLorenzo at the LewRockwell.com blog.
I don't know if you saw it, but he says he met a limo driver for NBC News who I guess he's going around promoting his book and such.
And anyway, the limo driver had dropped McCain off at his penthouse apartment one time and sat there and watched John McCain, and obviously this is hearsay and whatever, but what the hell, sat there and watched John McCain scream at the doorman for five minutes, okay, two, three, four, about the fact that the doorman had opened the door too soon for him and that the door is to be opened when he is exactly two steps from it.
You dirty SOB.
John McCain had to say on and on and on like that.
And so I know you know much more about this guy than most of us.
Is he really that much of a petty, vindictive, red-faced, finger-pointing lunatic or what?
No, he's not.
He's not red-faced, Scott.
He's actually purple-faced.
And it gets out of hand.
You see him around town.
I did radio shows with him on a daily basis during the first Iraq war.
We did a radio show together every night during the tenure of that war.
I saw him, by the way, just as a little anecdote during that period, I saw him one time just a little glitch.
Some operator hit the wrong button or it depressed a button to bring in the next phone caller or something and it didn't stay depressed.
You know, you'd just gloss over it and nobody would even notice there was a little mistake.
And McCain goes into this kind of a sputtering thing to make sure that everybody knows it wasn't him that was pushing the button.
I mean, it's very bizarre.
I've seen him.
I saw him one day in one of the bookstores down at the Biltmore and kind of unseemly, just kind of over-the-top behavior.
Everybody around here knows it.
My old friend, talk show host Stan Major down in Florida, the nighttime network talk show host for many years out of Florida, had a tenure here in Phoenix once.
He did a morning show from 9 to noon.
Now, his show was so popular they would tape his show from 9 to noon, the radio station would, and they'd play it back late at night from like 9 to midnight.
And one day they were playing back his show.
It was like 10 o'clock at night.
John McCain hears Stan Major say something he doesn't like.
He calls the radio station hotline and insists they put him on immediately with Stan Major.
And, you know, the technical director, the board operator guy says, well, you know, this is a recorded show.
I don't care.
I want to talk to him right now.
Well, this show is in playback.
This is all like a digital radio show.
It's already been recorded.
It was, I don't care, put me on right now.
I need to have a talk with him.
He's wrong about something.
The very funny thing for a guy who was the, wasn't he the chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Committee?
Well, plus all his experience on North Vietnamese radio, too.
He knows all this stuff about telecommunications to, you know, to regulate other industries around the country.
Anyway, but I'll tell you, I want to tell you something.
All this stuff about his having a short fuse and so on, yes, it is true.
Everybody here in Phoenix that's in the media has had an encounter with him at one time or another in the stories.
You get some guys sitting around over a beer and they tell great stories.
But I'll tell you something even, you know, that if you don't see him blow up, I mean, I thought Obama almost had him on the verge at least once during the presidential debate last week.
But if you don't see him blow up on national TV, it's only because he's restraining it with a really clenched teeth smile forced upon his face.
But I'll tell you something that people can, anybody can see about John McCain, and it is this, that he is an absolute, complete dilettante.
He was a dilettante in school.
He was a dilettante at West Point.
He brags in a dilettante-ish way about finishing, you know, fifth through the bottom of his class.
How many Navy jets did he crash?
He has been a dilettante in public life.
I mean, you watch him in some of these speeches.
Here's a guy that's been in public life for elected officials since 1982.
He's never bothered to learn.
I mean, a man with his ambition, he's never bothered to learn how to give a decent speech.
It's because he's a dilettante.
He's not serious.
He has been voting on issues of economic importance to this country and the American people and taxpayers since he was sworn in in January of 1983.
And he has never bothered to learn a single thing about the economy.
He is a dilettante.
And he laughs, he chuckles about his economic ignorance.
And then he says, but my friends, I have a whole list of economic advisors, my friends, and you are my friends, that I will be calling upon.
And then he lists a motley assortment of not-so-insightful economists who disagree about things.
So ultimately, in the face of disagreement and economic advice, he's going to have to make a decision.
But he's never bothered in his lifetime to master any of the economic fundamentals.
And all that was broadcast on display for the whole nation to see during that one debate.
I believe it was in an NBC debate, MSNBC debate from Florida, the one in which the other candidates were each allowed to ask their opponents a question.
The one in which Ron Paul asked John McCain for his thoughts on the Plunge Protection Team.
The British press had been talking about how the Plunge Protection Team must have been invoked in the last week.
And everybody was worried about all the stuff that was going on.
There was probably Bear Stearns at the time, and gold was running up over $1,000 an ounce.
And everybody was suspecting the Plunge Protection Team was at work.
And so Congressman Paul chose to ask John McCain about the President's Working Group on Capital Markets.
And we got an answer that was a minute and a half of just pure babbling.
I mean, it was like Miss South Carolina going on about U.S. Americans, the Iraq don't have maps, and so on.
So it was worthy of a teenage beauty pageant contestant, rather than a United States senator.
Because he clearly had no idea what Ron Paul was talking about.
So yeah, he's got a short fuse, and it's very, very dangerous.
But even more so, on display for anybody to see, is that he is a dilettante, and he's never bothered to master anything.
Right, and I mean, that's really the important point.
By the way, was that the same debate where he challenged Ron Paul that maybe Ron ought to read some Adam Smith?
Yeah, I think he came up with something like that, didn't he?
This fucking guy.
Anyway, yeah, the thing is, it isn't just economics.
He doesn't know anything about anything.
I mean, everybody says that he's brilliant about foreign policy, because he was locked in the Hanoi Hilton for five years or whatever.
I don't know how that means he knows anything about foreign policy.
And the last time he was right about something, as far as I can tell, was when he advised Reagan to get the Marines out of Beirut in 1983.
Yep.
Ever since then, he's been wrong about anything.
Tell me about Gulf War I.
During the whole Gulf War I, he was on your show every night?
Yeah.
So I want to know this.
Operation Desert Storm.
That's copyrighted.
Be careful.
I can't remember much of what he said.
It was, you know, people calling in, and he's going, thank you for your service, and da-da-da-da-da, and your sons and daughters who are deployed overseas will be safe.
I don't remember a lot about it.
It was a long time ago.
But you're right.
He didn't say anything about, we've got to exterminate those Iraqis and crush their skulls and those kinds of great things like he likes to say about the North Koreans or his buddy Bill Crystal likes to say about the Serbs.
Actually, I think he was more measured then.
His chief foreign affairs advisor was the fellow that works now as a commentator for ABC.
He was a pretty bright guy.
He was still kind of a warmonger, but a moderate warmonger as compared to a guy like Bill Crystal to the people who surround McCain today.
And I think he was substantially more moderate.
Look, he has stuck a finger in his mouth and tested the winds, and he has discovered he's trying to emulate George Bush in a bomber jacket on the deck of an aircraft carrier when his poll numbers went 20 points up.
And John McCain said, well, I'm the military guy.
I'm the chief warmonger in charge.
I can get a 20-point boost, but I want to be a war president, too.
And so he's stuck in that reinvention of himself.
Yeah, you know, and this whole thing about his ignorance, and it's been on such display when he talks about Iraq, it's clear that he doesn't know anything about Iraq beyond his talking points, and he often gets them so muddled and confused that he makes an absolute fool of himself.
And I think this speaks probably to his choice of Sarah Palin.
When he looked at her, he saw someone who was completely qualified in the very same way that he is.
She's ambitious as hell.
What else do you need?
Say what now?
I said it makes him look capable by contrast.
Well, yeah, there's that, but also I think that it didn't even probably occur to him that, wow, this lady doesn't know anything about anything, because for him that's never been a qualification.
Yeah, no, I think you're right about that.
Here's what I wonder about the ongoing presidential campaign.
Why, for example, aren't we seeing commercials out of Barack Obama about these faux pas and these slips of John McCain?
I mean, why do you suppose they're holding back?
Why aren't we seeing John McCain talking about being in Iraq for 100 years or maybe 1,000 years, and then how it's safe to go in downtown Baghdad and have a double latte at Starbucks and then a cutaway shot of the helicopters hovering overhead while he says it's safe to stroll through the neighborhood?
I mean, why aren't we seeing any of this?
Well, I'll tell you why.
It's because Obama's already on the record as saying the surge has succeeded beyond all of his dreams.
And to disagree with that is to hate the future, I'm worried, some kind of weird co-president to McCain, David Petraeus, who can do no wrong and was sent here by the Christ to save us all.
There is that, isn't there?
And, you know, I am worried about that aspect of Palin, and I understand I'm a bit more paranoid than the average bear around here or whatever, but if he actually does get elected, I'm going to become her biggest fan and talk about how wonderful and competent and credible she is all day because I'm worried that McCain is the kind of guy who will say, well, I'm sick and dying, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to appoint David Petraeus to take over the government, he's going to keep his uniform on, and that will be the end of the republic right there.
When I die, I'll be the last president and Sarah Palin can go home and be the regional governor of her new military district up there in Alaska.
And I think he is the kind of guy who will do that.
Why not?
Well, the end of the republic is already at hand.
You don't have to wait for that.
I mean, you have watched in pretty fast motion here before your very eyes the complete nationalization of the finance industry in America.
I mean, you know, we used to wonder about foreign governments that would nationalize their railroads or their airlines or something, or Putin nationalizes oil.
Mexico sent Mexico next door to us here in Arizona.
We watched them nationalize all the banks in Mexico in 1982.
Here in slow motion, you get the entire financial industry of America being nationalized all at once.
You know, it's $29 billion for Bear Stearns so J.P. Morgan can buy them, and then you've got $150 for the Bush stimulus, $85 billion for AIG, $150 for the Bush stimulus.
You've got at least $300 billion up front for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
You've got money market funds nationalized.
The entire finance industry of this country is being nationalized, and there goes the republic.
Well, Charles, let me ask you more about that, because that seems to be the part of this that people notice the least or even cheer on and say, well, we shouldn't give them this money and then let them keep their companies.
They should all become owned by America now, or we the people by way of our government, that kind of thing.
And yet I'm curious.
Do you think that this is going to be the permanent structure now, that the U.S., the national government, will simply be the biggest shareholder on Wall Street, that this is an indefinite situation?
They're not going to sell this stock back on the market in any kind of sense?
There's just been a revolution within the form, and it's a done deal now, or what?
Well, let me turn the question back to you.
Do you think that our immediate economic future is bright or dim?
Because if it's bright and an amazing new level of prosperity breaks out and American manufacturing returns to our shores and American families are one income earning families again, and all is well again, then the federal beast's tentacles will be removed from the financial institutions.
But if we continue to spiral down in the way that is clearly inevitable, in my view, in a way that's already baked into the cake, then, of course, the federal presence as chief shareholder of AIG, for example, is going to continue.
I mean, look, just the other day, I have on my webpage, it's charlescoyette.com, I have on my webpage a link, a little like that rolling odometer of the national debt, right?
And, you know, watch it, it's $9.6 trillion, $9.7 trillion, $9.7 trillion.
I just hadn't paid any attention to it, and I just noticed it rolled over.
This is the official debt number.
It just rolled over the other day, maybe in the middle of the night, but since I looked at it in the last day or two, to over $10 trillion.
But, Scott, as they say in the infomercials, that's only part of the story.
You know, David Walker was running around with his hair on fire last year.
I had him on my show, I think, in the spring.
He was the head of the General Accounting Office, or the Congressional Budget Office, or one of those.
Yeah, controller of the United States.
And that doesn't mean controller like the world controller in Brave New World.
It means, you know, the chief accountant in charge.
And he would say, oh, you know, the unfunded liabilities, they're $54 trillion.
And then, back in May, down in your neck of the woods, the president of the Dallas Fed gave a speech in San Francisco.
And he said, look, I'm not here.
I don't want to scare anybody, but we have kind of a problem, and it's really, it's not $10 trillion.
And hats off to David Walker, but it's really not $54 trillion.
He said, you know, if you want to really pencil it out, here's the way it looks to me.
It's $99.2 trillion.
Scott, that was, you know, and that was before Bear Stearns and AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and money market funds and $700 billion presumably approved by the House on Friday.
That was before all of that.
By the way, you know, in all this debate about the $700 billion, you know, Bush signed a continuing resolution or continued spending authority the other day that was $630 billion.
Right.
It represented $5 billion in earmarks, $25 billion in loans to auto manufacturers, including foreign manufacturers, a 6% increase in the defense budget.
I mean, so this week you could have like a $1.3 trillion week just this week.
Wow.
Well, so, but I mean, when we talk about $100 trillion worth of debt, that didn't all come and do it once kind of thing or anything where they got to, you know, turn over every bit of property in the country to foreigners or anything like that.
No, that's good.
They can just bleed it out over the course of our lifetimes.
Well, that's obviously preferable.
You know, I used to do that.
I used to do that with my kids.
I thought I was teaching them an economic lesson at play Monopoly with them.
And, you know, they didn't know the game as well as I did because they're kids and I'm an adult.
So I'm trading properties with them and I end up getting hotels on all the expensive properties.
And then they are debt slaves for the rest of their lives.
They go around the board, collect $200 and pay me.
Go around the board, collect $200, pay me.
Go around the board, collect.
And after, you know, an hour or two of that, they start wising up.
Hey, why are we even playing?
All we do is go around the board, collect $200 and then pay dad.
But, I mean, you know, you've got the kids and grandkids.
Anybody listening to the show has kids or the prospect of having kids someday.
That's good.
You just drive by the public schools of the nation now today and look at the little kids on the playgrounds.
You point your finger at them, honk your horn and laugh because they are bearing the burden of all of this nonsense, the central bank monopoly on money expansion and credit expansion to fund, well, to fund things like, you know, foreign wars in the American empire.
Well, if I can be so bold as to be a collectivist and assign guilt here, it's all you baby boomers who've done this, you self-indulgent bastards.
I mean, what can I tell you?
You want me to tell you no?
But, I mean, you know, before us it was the greatest generation and before the greatest generation it was those other guys.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I mean, it's just...
The crazies have preceded the loonies.
Yeah, it's just, it's something in the American character, you know, the sort of the DNA code that made America great of self-reliance and freedom of liberty.
All of that has slowly been lost.
Yeah, well, maybe not all that slowly.
Well, and so speaking of the wars, we got, well, we have a world empire.
It's different kind of than most empires in the world where we kind of bribe these guys with Swiss bank account and then get, quote unquote, invited to set up station in their countries and that kind of thing.
And yet we have bases in, what, it's over 130 countries, which there's only like 191 in the world.
We got bases in like 130 of them.
Depending on how you count them, there are at least hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bases.
We have, of course, our new expanded footprint in the Middle East.
So, beyond the obvious fact that this is part of what's destroying our economy is paying for all this because it's, of course, you know, like Gary Garrett said, everything goes out, nothing comes back, except hatred, I guess.
So, as far as the economic meltdown goes, what effect do you think that that might have on the empire?
Just make it worse or are they actually going to have to start bringing people in?
Yeah, you know what actually happens?
I mean, frequently, not always, but when the governing classes, when the political authorities get in a really, really deep economic doo-doo, they try to find somebody that they can go kill, take the rabble's mind off of their own problems and make it the evil devil foreign enemies.
I mean, oftentimes, it's a really convenient distraction to go start a war somewhere.
So, I'm not real optimistic.
I think the economic crisis is very real.
But this kind of ties the whole conversation together because none of this empire business, none of this presence in 130 nations around the globe and 700 military outposts of one kind or another, none of this would be possible without a powerful central bank.
That's what makes the whole thing possible.
So, all of our economic woes are authored by the Federal Reserve and all of our empire woes are the enablement of the Federal Reserve as well.
And you know, it's really good to see at least some liberals and leftists catching on.
Dennis Kucinich has been talking about this a bit and something that I think I need to focus on more, two of what I think, two or three really, are the biggest pet peeves of liberals and leftists, four of them really, directly attributable to the central bank.
Obviously, first of all, the wars that they oppose, at least when conservatives are in power.
But then, you know, the McMansions that they hate so much.
There's, you know, some nice old neighborhoods in Austin where people are tearing down old houses and then building these three-story square weird things that then everybody hates and tries to hire the government to forbid them and that kind of thing.
They hate freaking Walmart and they hate the, and I have to agree with this, there's a great George Carlin bit about it even, how we've turned this country into nothing but a line of strip malls.
It's just like Bill Hicks said back in like 1989 or something.
He said he realized by the year 2000 all malls in America will be connected and we'll have a subclass of mall people who've never seen daylight and walk around at 73 degrees.
All these people, all this stuff, the McMansions, the wars, the endless list of Bed Bath and Beyonds and old navies up and down every highway and every freeway homogenizing the society from Maine to San Diego.
It's all because of the funny money and the artificial booms created by the central bank.
Your mall complex may be a self-liquidating problem because if you go around the malls, the ones under construction, they know that they're in big, big trouble trying to find tenants and the existing malls, you go around the strip centers, even in the really pricey neighborhoods, one storefront vacancy pops up after another.
I wonder what they're going to do with all these giant ugly boxes.
Maybe they'll let the homeless move in.
Make skate parks out of them.
That would be cool.
Here in Austin, there used to be the Robert Mueller Airport.
It was pretty much in the middle of town, right off I-35.
They moved it out to the old Bergstrom Air Force Base, out to the southeast end of town.
They've been debating for decades.
Since I was in junior high school or something, they've been arguing about what they're going to do with this airport.
Then what they did, they built a bunch of giant square old navies all over the damn thing.
After a generation of screaming back and forth about what they're going to do with it and all their wonderful central planning, they built a Bed, Bath & Beyond.
I've never understood what the liberals' problem is with Walmart, though.
I really have never understood that.
Do they think that poor people should have to spend more money on the daily necessities of life?
Do they think that they should pay $3.19 for a tube of toothpaste instead of $2.79 at Walmart?
Is there some reason they don't want poor people able to pinch a few pennies and maybe get their kids a better education or violin lessons or take care of their elderly parents or something?
What is this hatred they have for poor people that they don't want them to get the lowest possible prices?
I don't understand.
I really don't understand it, either.
I have my problems with Walmart, but they all revolve around how Walmart, as a corporation, uses state power to gangsterize people, basically steal their land from them and have it turned over to them for free, and tax-free, too, the way they use our Navy to provide free socialist security for all their shipments across the oceans, the way that they always pay their employees a little bit more than minimum wage and then always lobby for the minimum wage to be raised in order to bankrupt their competition.
I mean, they're sick, evil bastards who use the state against everybody as often as they can.
I don't mind the low prices and the trade with foreign nations, but forcing everybody else for them to get their way is where I draw my line.
But in answer to your question, what's the liberals' problem?
I really don't know.
I think it might be the cheap toothpaste.
I don't know what that is.
I think it is the cheap toothpaste.
I don't know, man.
All right.
So this war, I really like your story, too, about how you were on the Clear Channel station down there in Phoenix, right?
And you kept telling them the truth about the war and interviewing the people who knew the truth about the war, and they got rid of you.
And then you moved over and you were on the Air America station there for a while, and the liberals tolerated you and your Walmart-loving nonsense as long as you were a good anti-war guy, right?
I guess it was under the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
But I will tell you something.
I had some of the best radio of my lifetime.
I've been doing this since I was a teenager in one form or another.
I had some of the best radio of my lifetime when I was doing the morning show on the Phoenix Air America station.
I had more interesting conversations, better quality of callers, and I focused my attention.
I was like a laser beam on the Bush administration and foreign policy and the Patriot Act, all this police state business and Alberto Gonzales and so on and so forth.
And I just stayed focused on that stuff completely, and I had a really good radio experience.
And I think that people that share some of the philosophical outlook that you and I share, Scott, people who actually believe in this human experiment called liberty, should look to the left, and I believe that to be the happy hunting grounds.
Yeah, I think you're really right.
When you look at the new realignment going on, there is quality on the paleoconservative side, but really it's the best of the left and the libertarians coming together.
And I guess we'll see.
It's going to get more difficult if Obama wins.
But Murray Rothbard always argued that libertarianism has nothing to do with the right.
It really isn't the right, even though he called it the betrayal of the old right, and all those terms get all mixed up.
But that really, well, maybe the right counts, but conservatism is certainly something that is not a part of libertarianism.
We're not some kind of offspring of the conservative movement.
We're really, you know, I guess what Anthony Gregory calls the paleoliberals, and it's these crazy evil neoliberals who've adopted all this Marxism and socialism, but what we represent is the true liberalism of the Declaration of Independence.
Well, we keep being victims of our success because we keep having insurgents and usurpers come in and take over what we're doing.
I mean, it is true, you know, we were originally liberals.
People that believed in freedom, believed in liberty, were originally liberals, and because it was such a popular idea and concept, all kinds of statists come in and try to slide in and hide under the banner of being liberals themselves, and we lost that term.
We lost the word liberal to the statists.
And so a lot of people with those libertarian views began in reaction to find themselves in the camp of the statists, liberals, enemies, in the camp of conservatives, and for many years they were happy to call themselves conservatives, and they lost that label, too, to the neocon, imperialist, warmonger, national security state people that are fiscally irresponsible at that, that run the Republican Party today.
And so beginning sometime in the 70s, it became kind of popular for guys like us to start calling ourselves libertarians, but honest to goodness, Scott, I'm beginning to worry that that term is being taken from us, too.
It's because of the moderate successes we have had in convincing people that it's very, very hip and sexy to be a libertarian, and oh my God, these guys are ahead of the curve and they know what they're talking about.
And now you've got all kinds of people with all kinds of statist views and empire supporters and warmongers and police state supporters and so on trying to don the libertarian cap themselves.
I'm afraid we're going to lose that term and have to come up with a new name.
Yeah, very well may be true.
I mean, I don't know.
To me, I guess the only thing we can do really is just try to lead them by example and just, you know, be the loudest voice and deny these people are libertarians.
That's really a lot of what I like about Anthony Gregory's writing, as it's all about, well, what exactly does it mean to be a libertarian and do these people count or not?
And, you know, I think that's got to be our role is to announce who ain't a libertarian, particularly to them.
I mean, for example, Lou Rockwell pointed out the other day that the Reason Foundation is giving some libertarian award to Rick Perry.
The fascist for stealing land from the people of Texas at gunpoint, forcing them at gunpoint through taxation to build all these new freeways and then turning around and handing them over to these foreign companies, which I don't really care where they are, that's not really the point, to collect, you know, mandatory tolls on these roads for 75 years.
The worst fascist project in Texas since, you know, the Rangers finished clearing out the Indians around here or something.
And they gave them a libertarian award for it and call it privatization.
Listen, this goes on all the time.
Congressman here in Arizona, John Shattuck, was a member, I think, of Ron Paul's Liberty Caucus.
A number of libertarian or self-described libertarians here in town are participants in a fundraiser for him.
So help me, I expect that John Shattuck is, you know, in whatever his leadership role is in the House, is going to be one of the guys that rams the reluctant House members into voting for the $700 billion bill on Friday night.
You know, this is where we are.
There are a lot of people already trying to travel under the name libertarian.
And I don't think calling them out is going to stop them.
Yeah, well, we'll just have to be louder.
And we'll just have to make the point, you know, I mean, that's kind of what I try to do on this show, is not talk about libertarianism itself too much, but just be the best anti-war guy I can be.
And then let people know that this is where the best anti-war stuff is.
It's the individualist libertarians.
We're the ones who oppose war even when liberals are in power.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
We'll see how it goes.
You do good work.
We'll keep working on it.
Get back on the radio soon, would you?
Buy my book.
I just realized we're 11 minutes over time.
Yeah, figures.
I should have been paying attention, but I wasn't.
I was having such a great time talking with you, man.
But now it's over.
Let's speak again soon.
I sure hope we will.
Okay, bud.
All right, folks.
That's the great Charles Goyette.
The website is charlesgoyette.com.
And he is still America's most independent talk show host.
And I look forward very much to his new book about the economic crisis.
It should be coming out the beginning of the year.
I'll leave you guys with some wasted youth here, and then we'll be back here tomorrow.