03/21/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Now to our first guest on the show today, Sheldon Richman, he's the Vice President of the Future Freedom Foundation and he's the editor of their monthly journal, The Future of Freedom.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Always great to be with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And you know, I don't ever mention your own website, FreeAssociation at SheldonRichman.com enough, but it's a hell of a great blog.
People like to go back and look through that thing.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, there you go.
All right.
So, lots to talk about here.
I'm not sure which I'll order to take it in.
I guess, first of all, did you see the Robert Kaplan piece in defense of empire in The Atlantic today?
Yes, I did.
I read it.
So, we just talked about this from the exact opposite point of view, of course, a week ago for your last piece about how America's always been an empire.
And I thought, you know, I don't know, man.
In a way, I just completely reject every bit of this, right?
But I want to try to be fair to him, even if he is the devil, and see if you can really, you know, I'll do my best anyway to be the devil's advocate here and make you defend a complete Switzerland foreign policy for America, or even statelessness that couldn't possibly intervene anywhere without a state to intervene for this society when the whole rest of the world is in jeopardy.
For those who haven't seen it, basically, he makes the unapologetic case for the white man's burden.
As he puts it, that the rest of the world is chaos, Stan, and we got to put him in line.
And so, he says if there's one honest criticism about Western imperialism, especially American imperialism, it might be how expensive it is.
And so, we better be really careful how we implement it, because we don't want to spend too much money.
But other than that, you're damn right those foreigners need to do it our way or else.
Because after all, and he sort of has a point, their way sucks, man.
Their way is all tribalism and ethno-nationalism and constant warfare, not like our enlightened kind.
Well, yeah, you know, some years ago there were what we called cheap hawks, Gary Hart was one of them.
Now we have cheap imperialists, because Kaplan is concerned with the cost, and so he wants a more modest empire.
He says we ought to be really careful about where we put troops, and you know, otherwise we should kind of keep things under control, but try to have, you know, we don't have to do it directly where that's possible.
So at least he's a fiscally responsible imperialist, I guess we could say.
Yeah, his thesis, which you also see from Neil Ferguson and Deepak Lal and probably Max Boutin, a whole bunch of them, Weekly Standard Types, is that you do need an empire.
In other words, and when they say empire, they mean like de facto world government, that's what they mean.
Because who's going to keep the sea lanes open and the air space open and make sure trade flows and keep these tribes from fighting each other?
But he left out a whole lot of stuff.
I mean, all the violence perpetrated by the British in taming the heathens, not to mention the Americans when they were building their empire, namely slaughtering Indians and slaughtering Filipinos.
You know, he kind of just sort of let that go, and then also he didn't really spend a whole lot of time reminding us that World War I and World War II occurred during his age of empire.
That doesn't seem to go very well on the empire's resume, right?
The British were dominant when World War I comes along, and still pretty dominant, and the U.S. was rising when World War II comes along.
It certainly didn't prevent world wars, so I'm not persuaded by this argument that we need a big empire, and of course it's the U.S. that he's got in mind, to keep the peace, or else everyone's going to be eating each other's throats.
You know, most of the world is not at war.
There have been arguments from various people.
Jim Payne has a very good book called The History of Force that shows that the warfare, when you really look at the big picture and the long stretch of history, that kind of violence has been diminishing.
I mean, most countries are not at war with each other, and it's not because the U.S. stands ready, you know, between every little state, ready to stop it, or be the referee or the traffic cop.
So it's an unimpressive thesis.
It just seems to me he wants to justify American hegemonic rule, but he's conscious of the fiscal crisis going on, so he's found a way to scale it back a bit.
Well, yeah, I mean, it seems to me too that, and you know, I don't know what the guy's thinking really, but the shallowness of the excuse is revealed by the lies of omission.
I mean, he starts the thing by saying, I admit that, I don't really even know what's his point of bringing this up and framing it this way, but he says, I admit the British should have done a better job of protecting the Iraqi Jews back when they controlled Iraq.
And then he seems to be saying, but you know, we do a lot better job of things like that, but of course he never gets back to the American occupation of Iraq and the fact that there are now less than a dozen Jews left in the entire country, and that all the Yazidis and the Turkmen and the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians and all of those minority ethnic and religious civilizations have been completely obliterated.
They're all now dying in a Syrian refugee camp somewhere.
Uh, so he knows he's cool with it when he doesn't, he brings up, he brings up minority rights in Baghdad, but then he doesn't dare go back to that subject because what the hell are you talking about, man?
Come on.
America has done the worst for the people of Iraq, for especially the minorities of Iraq than anybody since Genghis Khan.
No, it's a good point.
If he's going to start talking about Baghdad, you think it might've been on his mind that the U.S. basically sponsored the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad in the last decade, so it was.
Completely ridiculous.
It's true, I mean, you know, I did mention things like 9-11, the things when, look, when you're an empire, people resent it, and they often try to do something about it.
Well, we saw what happened.
On 9-11, we saw people annoyed with the U.S. empire and finally trying to get, you know, get a little bit of revenge, so what's he talking about keeping order?
I don't, I just don't see this point, and, you know, better that things be decentralized and if there's going to be wars, let them be isolated and local rather than be expanded by things like NATO.
I mean, that's always, you know, that's always been the big flaw there.
They think that the way to reduce violence is to join in local orgies of violence, which just makes things worse.
Yeah, it's funny, he almost sounds like a utopian one-world commie type like H.G. Wells.
I forget which movie or which book it is where they end up with a one-world air force that just, if anybody makes trouble anywhere in the world, they just bomb them until they stop making trouble, and then everything, everybody lives happily ever after after that.
Remember that one?
The one-world air force of utopians?
Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, America's supposed to be like the school principal, right?
And if he catches a fight in the hallway, he's going to be right there and then disciplining the two punks who are fighting.
You know, it doesn't take into account public choice analysis, which means there's going to be mission creep and, you know, self-serving missions, and, you know, none of that's there.
It's like all this idea, oh, I just have the ideal utopian government in mind that's going to do exactly what I think is right and nothing else.
There's no sense of the real-world dynamic.
It's known as the Nirvana fallacy, right?
Where you think your utopian ideals, what's actually going to obtain in reality if you get your way.
But that's naive, and I'm sure it's not naive, so it's dishonest.
Yeah.
Well, and especially when, you know, you just take account of what's going on in the world right now.
We back military dictatorships and sultans and emirs and kings and revolutions of suicide bombing lunatics and sometimes neo-Nazis across the planet Earth.
I mean, who's being done a favor here?
Backing neo-Nazis, that hasn't happened for a couple of months.
What are you complaining about?
Yeah.
Come on.
Don't dredge up ancient history.
Don't dredge up ancient history.
We're going to bring up old stuff all the time, Scott.
Oh, that guy's the Attorney General of Ukraine now.
Oops.
You've got to look forward.
You know, as Obama says, you have to look ahead.
No recriminations.
Crazy.
All right.
Now, but wait a minute here.
So, there's a guy named Bacevich.
You know him.
Andrew Bacevich writes great anti-imperialist type of stuff a lot of times.
Absolutely.
And he was always my pick for Ron Paul's Secretary of Defense if they hadn't stolen the nomination from Ron Paul.
He would have been a great Secretary of Defense for Ron.
And anyway, so I was interviewing him one time, and I was saying, well, and he's a very pragmatic guy.
I know you're very familiar with him.
He can speak from a very dispassionate, amoral, American national strategist point of view.
And he says, hell yes, we ought to get out of the Middle East.
We're not doing a thing over there but causing trouble.
But no way in the world should we get out of the Far East, because right now, we are what's creating and maintaining that delicate balance of power that keeps Japan and China from going back to war.
These guys got some ancient entities, and they got some border disputes, and we are the superpower.
We're the gorilla in the room that keeps them apart.
And we're the reason our security guarantee is why Japan does not rearm and even go nuclear weapons hot, right?
And we're the reason that the Chinese don't even bother thinking twice about invading Taiwan and taking back Taiwan, because we're there to keep it that way.
And so now, if Ron Paul's in charge, or if you have your way, Sheldon, then that means that possibly could lead to major power conflict in a place where, at least according to Bacevich, we seem to be keeping the warring factions apart.
Maybe throwing the Korean Peninsula there.
I'm not saying you have to agree with the premise of the question, by the way, but it seems like an honest one.
Oh, and crap, now we got to take a break.
And I'll let you answer that when we get back from the break.
It's Sheldon Richman from FFF.org.
Hey, all.
Sky here.
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Enough already.
Okay, so now back to Sheldon Richman.
And the question is, yeah, but Sheldon, collective security is sort of kind of keeping the peace somewhere, possibly.
And so what if we take our finger out of the dike and all hell breaks loose and major powers go to war with each other?
Well, look, aside from the fact that for the U.S. to be the policemen of the Far East, for it to do that, it has to violate the rights of Americans through taxation and other things.
We know what happens when the government has a big military establishment.
It eventually comes home.
And of course, that's already happened.
So it has implications domestically regarding surveillance and other sorts of things, military-industrial complex.
Aside from all those problems, it just presumes that the policymakers, who are mere mortals, let's remember, they're not demigods.
They may be demigods, but they're not demigods.
It presumes they have the knowledge it takes to enter into a complicated situation and manage things.
And more often than not, you've got to expect that that's going to backfire and not only hurt people there, but hurt us as well.
He may be attributing the lack of war between China and Japan to the United States, but I don't know how he can be certain of that.
I think you need to bet that the government, being a bull in the China shop, is going to sooner or later mess things up.
So let's not have blood on our hands.
Well, especially look at that situation in Korea, where the reason that the Chinese are willing to continue propping up that commie dictatorship, the actual commie dictatorship there, land of starvation and darkness, real totalitarianism, is because it keeps the Americans down there at the 38th parallel, man.
And if they reunify Korea, then that'll just bring the Americans that much closer, back up to the Yalu River.
And so they would just as soon keep the North Korean people enslaved under the Kim Jong-un regime, which is, of course, I guess it seems to be fine with the Americans too, because they don't want to see nuclear North Korea combined with capitalist South Korea, or pseudo-capitalist South Korea, in a way that would make the newly recombined Korea an actual Pacific power in its own right, rather than just a satellite of ours.
Well, I've actually read, and this might have come from Doug Bondo, who, of course, is a career watcher from way back, that the Chinese don't want the US to leave the peninsula because they're afraid if there's chaos in the North, the North Koreans will pour into China, which they don't want.
So there are many counterintuitive things going on there.
Well, you know, Fitz in the chat room is saying, you know, if we let Japan build a nuke, then Beijing and Tokyo will be at standoff, and just like every other set of nuclear powers in the world.
I mean, hell, that keeps the peace between India and Pakistan, mostly.
I mean, they have border skirmishes from time to time, but they never go to outright war now that they have nukes.
I mean, so far, cross fingers.
Well, you know, I think there's something to that, and, of course, none of us should be comfortable or sleeping totally sound at night with nukes in the world.
I mean, I was saying earlier in another program that the number one priority regarding Russia and the US, and I've heard you say something like this, it should be dismantling the nuclear arsenal.
I mean, that ought to be the top priority, and I don't know why people are not screaming about that instead of talking about Crimea.
So I just have no confidence in the US.
I mean, another Steve Guttenberg movie, you know, ABC movie of the week about what a nuclear war would look like in your neighborhood.
You know, that was pretty effective propaganda back then.
They say it sort of shocked Ronald Reagan.
He thought, man, that really would be ugly, wouldn't it?
Well, yeah, good point.
And I heard you saying that, and I think this is right, that people seem to think that on the Christmas Day of 1991 when the hammer and sickle came down for the last time, that somehow the nukes just disappeared, just vanished into thin air like that Malaysian airliner.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, they say that they retargeted them away from their targets, but still it's just a matter of punching in the same coordinates from the list again, and it doesn't do much.
Well, I heard Andrew Mitchell, I think, say today that they're not on hair trigger any longer.
Yeah.
I'm not going to take anyone in her family's word for anything.
Yeah, that's my attitude, too.
And besides, how long does it take to turn a couple of keys anyway, right?
Right.
Well, you know, and anybody can Google this if you want to freak everybody out at dinner tonight or whatever.
Go and look up the 20-something times that there almost was an accidental war between America and Russia based on a misinterpreted satellite launch or some misinterpreted tic-tac-toe results or, you know, whatever kind of thing.
There's about 20 of those over the years.
Yes, I know that's a movie reference, but there's about 20 of those over the years where they almost went to war and then usually it's got some great story like one guy refused to follow the chain of command and his orders because his gut instinct was that this can't be right.
And thank goodness, because if he had passed on the pseudo information, then we'd have lost New York City over it, you know?
Well, yeah, we should be more nervous about that.
I mean, we should be getting much more attention, but people think it went away.
You know, I have to disagree with Professor Bacevich on this, and I just think it's asking for trouble.
Well, yeah, anyway, so there you go.
I'm trying to find some kind of depth here to try to defend or a position to really try to take, but it all just seems kind of ridiculous.
Of course, the whole article here goes, and we're not talking Bacevich, we're talking about Robert Kaplan here in defense of empire in the Atlantic.
The whole thing just ignores the existence of individual human beings and their right to not be murdered whatsoever.
That's just not even part of it at all.
He just talks about, well, you know, after this particular European power conquered that particular group of people somewhere else on the planet, years later they do better or whatever.
You know, these kinds of very broad strokes that deny actual humanity.
And a lot of broad assertions of power, too, well, without the U.S. Navy there could be no globalization.
Well, I mean, really?
Why not?
Which power is going to intercept all shipments on the high seas if the U.S. Navy isn't there to protect them, you know?
Right, besides, let the business companies, you know, the companies that want to ship goods pay for their own protection of their ships or planes.
Why should those costs be socialized?
And that gives unfair advantage to the big global companies versus smaller companies because instead of the price of that security showing up in the price of goods, which put them at some competitive disadvantage to other companies, we pay it as taxpayers.
And so it doesn't show up at the cash register.
That's unfair.
I mean, that's a lot like, you know, government subsidizing railroads, which, of course, the U.S. government did in the 19th century, which allowed the growth of, you know, deliberately engineered national markets and created behemoth countries, companies, that had advantages because of socialized costs over smaller local and regional companies.
I think you just came across a great reason for liberals to oppose Empire even while Democrats are in power, because it's just welfare for Walmart so that they don't have to pay for all their own security costs on the high seas to outsource all those jobs and everything.
Union jobs.
I don't see why that's seen as a government job to keep sea lanes open.
Companies can pay for that if that's what they want to do.
If that means that there's less globalization, okay, so there's less globalization.
It's just like, you know, people argue, well, if you don't have an eminent domain, we won't have such large airports.
And the answer is okay, so we won't have such large airports.
Yeah.
Boy, and don't even get me started on the corporate welfare for the airlines.
You know, like upper middle class and rich people have a right to fly that all working folk have a duty to subsidize.
You know what?
Walk.
I get tired of that, man.
I mean, there are people who never fly in a plane their whole life, but they sure pay for other people's way all day and night.
Right.
Well, that's just like, you know, owners of passenger automobiles pay a disproportionate amount of money to repair the interstate highways, which is a subsidy to the big trucking and shipping shippers that move stuff across the country.
They don't pay the full cost of the damage they do to the roads.
They do most of the damage to the roads, not cars, but we owners of cars pay most of the repair cost.
That's a subsidy.
The state is just a gigantic welfare program for business in this society.
Right, and most of the welfare goes up.
That's right.
All right, now, we're almost out of time for this segment, so I guess I'll ask you if you wouldn't mind hanging through the news and then we could do one segment on Ukraine, or I can let you go depending on your schedule.
I can hang on.
Okay, great.
Well, you can go ahead and take a break, because it's about a six-minute news break coming up here.
Okay.
I guess I started saying that a little bit early, but anyway, it's Sheldon Richman.
He's the vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation, and he is the editor of their monthly journal, The Future of Freedom, and he's got two great articles here.
Today's is The American Disease.
We've got to talk about that, which goes along with what we've been talking about a little bit.
And then also he's got this great one about Ukraine and just how accidentally on purpose the Democrats' big blunder there is.
So we're going to find out all about that on the other side of this break.
It's the Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org, libertyexpressradio.com.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's the vice president there and the editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom.
His website is sheldonrichman.com.
Free Association is the blog there.
Aye, free, free as a tethered ass.
That's the slogan over there at Free Association.
And now, before we move on to the Ukraine rundown here, because you've got a great write-up on what's going on over there for the FFF, but you also have this thing that's out today, The American Disease, and this goes along with the hypocrisy of all that white man's burden crap we were just talking about, Robert Kaplan's article in The Atlanta about all of that.
And this is about, well, you focus mostly on something that really caught my attention, too, when I read this interview with Stephen F. Cohen in Newsweek.
He's the guy who, I believe he's married to the editor of The Nation, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, or however you say it.
And he is, as they call him in Newsweek, the man who dared to defend Putin, which means who dared to tell the truth about what was going on in Ukraine lately, rather than just toeing the party line.
And because it was such a contentious interview, he does really well because he's pushing back hard against the guy interviewing him, accusing him, basically.
And so he, therefore, is quite energetic and is pretty broad-ranging in his thinking and the examples that he brought up and all this and that.
But the part that I'm talking about, of course, is the blowback for homosexuals in Russia, since the American government especially, but American society really decided that they're our pets to defend from their evil tyrant, Vladimir Putin.
Well, that's right.
The general point, and what I mean by the disease, is the people who catch the disease are opposition movements in foreign countries that are not allies of the United States.
So when a movement arises to oppose an authoritarian government in a country that is not an ally of the U.S., in other words, a government that the U.S. might want to see disappear or replaced, given America's history, the opposition movement is immediately going to be tarred as agents of the CIA or the National Endowment for Democracy, in other words, of America.
And that's not an unreasonable assumption, given America's history.
Certainly since World War II, it's always had covert operations.
These days it's by a nongovernment organization that gets tons of taxpayer money, but that goes in there and gives advice on how to do regime change or how to have street mobs or whatever, just like it occurred in Ukraine and probably what was going on in Egypt.
And it goes back to 1953, right in the overthrow of Moses to restore the Shah.
So the disease is, the U.S., by its history and activity, infects even genuine opposition movements against genuinely odious governments.
And it just lets the odious government use the nationalist club against them by telling their people, you know, the population, look, that group there, that opposition group, they're just fronts for American agents and American interests and the IMF and neoliberalism and capitalism.
So this history and this policy has done a disservice to the cause of liberty worldwide.
Not anything in their favor.
And what grabbed me about Cohen's point was, like you said, I'm sure American officials thought they were doing the gaze of Russia a great favor by standing up and condemning that law that Putin signed that says you can't distribute, what is it, information about the nontraditional sexual lives to minors.
It was a vague law that could probably capture a lot of people who weren't doing anything regarding minors.
It might have felt good to stand up and condemn that and snub Putin regarding the Olympics, but what it did was hurt the Russian gaze.
And that's what Cohen was pointing out.
I mean, he's lived there, he knows lots of people, he has friends, he knows Russian gays, and they were telling him this is bad.
Shut up already.
He has one quote, I won't give it verbatim, but a friend of his said that before all this, we were homosexuals.
Now we're American homosexuals.
And he even knows of legislators who said, I would have voted to get rid of this law, but I can't do it now because America has weighed in.
So it hurts the very cause we say, when I say we, the government says, it's attempting to advance.
It hurts, it sets it back.
And I don't think that was their aim anyway, they just wanted to club Putin over the head.
I don't think they cared what the consequences were going to be.
They just wanted to club Putin over the head and win some public relations campaign against them.
That's it.
They don't care what the real facts are on the ground, how it hurt real people.
They don't care about that, they don't think about that.
After all, Barack Obama has only been politically correct on the gay marriage issue since after he was re-elected.
His whole first term he was against gay marriage, for example.
And I think the way Cohen says it is like, yeah, Russia, it's really backwards on this issue.
It reminds me of where I grew up just a generation and a half ago.
So yeah, they definitely have a lot of progress to make, but they got to make it.
And by the way, just for the context, the quote was that yesterday I was the F-word slang for homosexual, so not just homosexual, but the terrible dehumanizing slang for it.
And now I'm an American one of those, meaning even that much lower because now I'm a traitor too.
Now I'm a fifth column working for the CIA.
That's the point.
And we saw that same thing, of course, in Iran with the whole Green Revolution.
And really before the Green Revolution, any kind of student group that says we'd like less law and more representation, that kind of thing, personal restrictions, whatever, immediately they're labeled tools of the Westerners, tools of the CIA especially.
Right, and the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, is a neocon and theft organization.
It's run by Carl Gershman, who's tied in with Robert Kagan, all these people, and cheered on by Victoria Nuland and the State Department.
And they're in there meddling and doing all kinds of stuff to bring the neoliberal program, which means IMF recommending higher taxes on real people.
So it automatically taints any opposition movement.
That's the disease.
We infect them with this disease, and it's not right.
We're hurting the very people.
Again, I'm repeating myself.
We say we want to help.
It doesn't help them.
And often they tell us, thanks, but no thanks, or do me a favor.
Don't do me any favors.
Right, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's not just that the Americans are hypocrites, but they are dragging down and back any movement that they claim to be trying to support there, like you said, even when they do mean well, which is probably part of the time or something.
All right, now anyway, I'm sorry because this segment is so short, and now we only have like a couple and a half minutes for you to talk about this piece about Ukraine.
But it's the perennial question here on this show anyway, stupidity or the plan, overall and in any specific circumstances.
Is it a stupid plan?
Did the Obama team blunder or conspire in Ukraine, Sheldon?
Well, I think they could have blundered by conspiring, but I think they conspired.
I mean, I don't think it was a good conspiracy.
And by that I don't mean any kind of conspiracy theorist.
That's not the point.
I think they knew exactly what Putin was going to do, or let's say approximately what Putin was going to do by engineering regime change in Ukraine.
Newland and Ambassador Pyatt, you know, we all know about the tele, you've played the tape of the telephone conversation, you know, picking out Yats of the guy and how we're going to mid-wipe this, or we need somebody to mid-wipe this.
And so it taints any real opposition.
You know, the former president, I'm not saying, I'm not saying he was a good guy.
I don't know anybody who thinks he was a good guy.
But he was at least being somewhat accommodating, right?
He was talking about early elections and stuff like that.
Right, yeah, they made a deal.
That's right.
That did not deter the American side from ousting the guy, even Fareed Zakaria, who's hardly some radical libertarian, called it an extra-constitutional ouster.
All right, but what kind of blowback?
So you're saying they were willing even to lose Ukraine as a pawn on the chessboard to what end?
I mean, not Ukraine, I'm sorry, Crimea.
But to what end?
No, well, I think that they gained a lot of things.
First of all, they gained public relations, right?
The U.S. has not been held in high esteem around the world, and so this is a chance to demonize Putin.
There are business interests involved, not just the military-industrial complex, but places, you know, things like cargo.
You know, if you're reading Robert Parry and other people over at the Consortium News, you can see who's gaining.
But a bigger thing, and maybe Obama didn't even want this to happen, is that it drives a wedge between Russia and the U.S. on Syria and Iran, and we know who wants to see that wedge, the neoconservatives and, I have to say, the Israel lobby.
And Newland is in that camp.
That's right, Kagan's wife.
All right, thanks, Sheldon, appreciate it.
FFF.org, everybody, for Sheldon Richman.
Thanks.
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On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first-ever National Summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Geraldine McGovern, Kutowsky, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research, Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Friday, March 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
NatSummit.org