11/04/13 – Michael Swanson – The Scott Horton Show

Today's show is brought to you in part by Audible.com.
You can get a free audiobook download at audibletrial.com slash Scott.
Audible has over 100,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle, or MP3 player.
For Scott Horton Show listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook download with their free 30-day trial.
I personally recommend Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill.
It's great for anyone wanting the inside story on the cruel and counterproductive terror war of the Obama years.
You can sign up for a free 30-day trial and download Dirty Wars at no charge by going to audibletrial.com slash Scott.
That's audibletrial.com slash Scott.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Of course, that was Ike Eisenhower.
What did he know about militarism?
Probably nothing, best I can tell.
Anyway, that is his chance for peace speech.
And on topic, too, because our next guest is Mike Swanson.
Sponsor of this show, Wall Street Window.
You hear the ads all the time.
And also the ads for this great new book, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945-1963.
And this will be, I think, part four of our interview series and probably the last one on the subject of this great book, which I do hope you will get.
It's a great history, a libertarian, revisionist, critical history of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years and the growth of the permanent executive branch, quite outside the White House, as you say in the book.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
Thanks very much for joining us today.
Oh, thanks for having me.
Well, very happy to have you here and very happy to read this book.
It's really good.
Congratulations on it.
I really think it's something else.
I appreciate it.
I've been having all kinds of great feedback.
People can see the reviews on Amazon, for example.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think, you know, when I was much younger, the kind of very basic understanding that, you know, after World War II, oh, World War II was a wonderful, wonderful war.
But the consequence was the permanent arms industry.
And they never went away.
And it's, you know, when I was very young and I learned this, it's still a very opaque subject.
It's still only referring to a bunch of stuff I don't know about kind of a thing, you know.
But I think that this book could really do a lot toward getting, you know, kind of mass consciousness understanding where people.
I don't know.
I think when Eisenhower said that, I wasn't around for his farewell address and his chance for peace speech.
I think most people probably looked at him like, huh, you know, and weren't exactly sure what to make of it.
Weren't exactly sure what he was talking about.
Of course, for a long time, even talk about the military industrial complex at all would be considered conspiracy theory stuff, even though Ike was the guy that coined the phrase.
But anyway, I think that if a lot of people would read this thing and pass it around and leave them around and give them as gifts.
And really just, you know, somehow this should be the book.
This ought to be the chance for even that kind of basic conception of what went wrong with America.
How it was that we got onto the wrong path that everybody seems to agree that we're on.
It seems like this is a good chance.
If it's not the chance, it's a really good chance.
A good opportunity that people have to, well, you know, to help change the conversation.
To change the society.
To change common understanding of what it is that's the problem.
And then that way when Mike Rogers opens his mouth and says, oh, we have to defend the NSA, whatever, whatever.
Everyone just hears military industrial complex, dollars, and military power talking.
We don't hear someone pretending to be our representative.
We all know better than that, you know?
That's the future I want to see.
And I think that this book could help make it that way.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Well, I certainly hope so.
And I hope, you know, more and more people in different ways are asking questions about, you know, the war on terror or our foreign policy and where it's led us.
And my book is really trying to trace the roots of the situation back then.
But, you know, I don't think it's just, you know, hardly political extremists or people that are only libertarians or people on the left.
I think there's actually some people in government that are asking these questions, too.
I mean, even in the military, your last guest is certainly an example of someone who's had a distinguished career and has, you know, seen these things firsthand and learned from them just as Eisenhower did.
And there's no one as intimate with war as Dwight Eisenhower was, you know, in World War II and as president.
And in the speeches he gave warning about the military-industrial complex, it's like he said immediately after he left the presidency, it kind of just disappeared, that the phrase and the idea came out of nowhere and it sort of vanished from national consciousness.
And it wasn't really until the mid-'60s with the rise of the Vietnam War that it really started to become a popular phrase and a way for people to understand what was happening to the country and what direction we're going.
And that's really the goal of my book is to try to under- it's sort of, writing the book was also my process of trying to figure out and understand the history of our country.
And when it comes to the military-industrial complex, you know, it's pretty obvious that it has a huge cost to our society when it comes to spending money and taxes, just as that speech points out.
There's also another element to it that I think people really aren't aware of and Eisenhower didn't exactly warn about it, and that is that an arms race itself can create war or create a temptation to go to war.
And that's something I've seen very few people ever talk about or study.
In fact, the only book I can even think of that applies that concept to the United States is Gareth Porter's book about Vietnam entitled Perils of Dominance, which kind of explains, you know, the whole danger right there.
And if we talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy- during the crisis, Kennedy had a tense meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and basically told them that, you know, he wants to prevent going to war either by escalating into it, by the situation in the crisis getting out of control, or the phrase- the word he used was imbalance, meaning that the mere fact that the United States at the time had an overwhelming advanced nuclear strategic advantage over the Soviet Union could tempt the people to want to go to war.
Right, I mean, that's actually the thing- well, I learned a lot of stuff reading this thing, but I guess one of the things I didn't really understand was, you know, the different nuclear policies before it settled to- you know, it came down eventually to more or less parity and mutually assured destruction.
But back when the Americans were so much better armed, nuclear-wise, nuclear weapons-wise, than the Russians, Truman and Eisenhower both- and I forget about Kennedy, but certainly Truman and Eisenhower both used nukes as their, you know, to hear them tell it, as their poker chips or their, you know, playing cards in the game that they're screwing around with.
And I think the way you write it was, it wasn't until after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when everybody's bluff had been completely called, that that, finally, that era of, you know, real brinksmanship, you know, came to an end.
And it was just sort of the- I mean, even- I think you even say that after the detente of the 70s, and then you had the renewed kind of hawkishness of the early Reagan years, that that still didn't compare to the pre-Cuban Missile Crisis way of doing things.
I guess, you know, I'm not getting to what I mean very well, but you explain it.
Yeah, I know what you're saying.
The situation in the 60s, I would say, was extremely dangerous.
You know, we almost went to war, a nuclear war, two times under the Kennedy administration.
Eisenhower bluffed at it twice.
I don't- I kind of doubt he was very serious about it.
The situations under Kennedy were very serious.
The first one, of course, was a crisis over Berlin.
The Russians in Khrushchev didn't have the Berlin Wall up, and people were leaving from the Eastern Bloc into the West, going through Berlin.
And he wanted to make some sort of deal, and he made a war threat under Eisenhower.
And over this, Eisenhower just ignored him, which was a smart thing to do.
The Kennedy advisors, they, you know, did a bit of a mobilization and made some very delicate speeches.
And that was a very, very tense summer.
It was in 1961.
And after the- even after the Cuban Missile Crisis, they looked back on that in interviews and said they were actually more scared of war those months than during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was really two days in the Cuban Missile Crisis that were the most dangerous.
So that was the day before Kennedy got on TV and made his ultimatum or announced his blockade of Cuba.
There was a space of hours that he knew he was going to make that speech and feared, you know, if the Russians found out he was going to get on TV and do something, that they might start a war before he does in fear that we're just going to attack.
And then the final day of the crisis, where the advisors were drifting in the direction of going to war and seemed to have given up almost on negotiating.
Talk about that a little bit in detail.
But as far as the 80s, you know, there were never any really direct threats or ultimatums given from one side or the other.
Kennedy essentially sent messages to Khrushchev saying, if you don't take these missiles back, you know, we're going to go to war.
That's essentially pointing a gun at the world and being willing to pull the trigger.
Nothing like that happened in the 80s, despite, you know, talk of an evil empire and so forth.
And, you know, of course, Reagan himself, just like Kennedy did, made a move to end the Cold War.
Well now, and then Eisenhower, I didn't realize that Eisenhower had basically threatened to use nukes against North Korea if they didn't come to the table and sign the damn thing right now.
We'll have the country sign it or I'll nuke you, he said.
Yeah, he did that, you know, not directly, but under the table, passing a message to, I think it was the ambassador of India that, you know, we would use any weapon necessary if, you know, this war doesn't end or gets escalated even longer.
And he was hoping they would pass that message on to China.
It's not really clear, though, if that, you know, caused the end of the Korean War or even if they got the message.
And it's a dispute over that among historians.
But he clearly, you know, made public threats to protect two islands off the coast of Taiwan.
And another is that people, it's not in the book and people don't really know, is that when South Vietnam, when Vietnam was divided in two, Diem came over to the United States, who was the leader we were backing in South Vietnam, and met with the Secretary of State and said that he was scared that the United States wouldn't fully support him.
And they told him, well, don't worry, if North Vietnam invades you, we'll just nuke them.
So it was like a common way for these people to talk back then.
But, you know, by the time after the Cuban Missile Crisis, neither side wanted to engage in such talk anymore.
And the problem is, if you keep saying, you know, I'm going to use nuclear weapons or bluff at it, eventually you're either going to have to do it or you're going to lose the credibility of having these weapons.
Alright, now we've got to take a break here in just a sec, but when we come back we're going to talk a little bit more about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Curtis LeMay, holy moly, the argument between Curtis LeMay and John Kennedy during that thing.
And then we've got to talk about the President getting shot in the head and some other things too.
So I don't mean the current one, nobody come to my house, I'm talking about Kennedy back in 1963.
It's Mike Swanson, author of The War State.
Hang tight.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show.
The Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org is my website where I keep all the interviews.
More than 3,000 of them now.
Going back to 2003.
ScottHorton.org.
Also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at Slash Scott Horton Show.
Alright, so we're talking with our good friend Mike Swanson.
He is the author of The War State.
The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and The Power Elite, 1945-1963.
Really good stuff.
And now I learned a little bit about the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was a kid because my dad was at UCLA at the time and one of his professors, I guess his political science professor, somebody rather, whatever his name was, went off to Washington to be an advisor.
I guess probably was not on the EXCOMM, but maybe was advising somebody who was, or something like that.
And when he came back, he told the students, There is no such thing as closer to nuclear war than that.
Without just burning.
That's it.
That is the absolute brink.
Within a hair's breadth.
That's the kind of danger that these maniacs on both sides put the entire world in.
Threatening speciocide.
I mean, I guess humanity would have survived in the Southern Hemisphere somewhere in some form.
But they were literally playing with completely annihilating civilization off the face of the planet.
And then I'm reading your book and they're talking about, Well, you know, we might lose all of our major cities and everything, but our country would survive enough that we could continue pursuing our national goals.
What?
These bureaucrats.
They're just...
That's the best kind of psychopaths is one of these goofballs with a typewriter.
Oh, it's...
It's very...
It's crazy.
It's amazing to try to put yourself in someone's frame of mind that can think like that.
But I think one of the things that makes this human crisis something really fascinating to read is that we have transcripts of almost every single one of the important meetings.
And even meetings that were done separate with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there were notes taken for those.
And...
One of the things that's kind of crazy is that the member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that was the most...
Hesitant isn't really the right word, but the least excited to go to war or the one asking questions at least was the man who headed the Marine Corps.
And of course, you know, he would have had some responsibility if they invaded Cuba.
And with the meeting with Kennedy, he makes a comment at one point that, you know, what's the point of invading Cuba?
It's nothing but sand.
I mean, like, there's nothing we're going to win.
And just ignore the weapons.
But he just kind of mumbles that and he doesn't speak up anymore and comes to agree with the rest of them and does so in their own meetings together.
But the most talkative person was, of course, General Kurzweil and he makes the statement in a meeting...
He's headed the Strategic Air Command, correct?
Yeah, that's right.
The Long Range Bomber Command.
Right, and the nuclear...the man running the nuclear missile Minutemen program, too.
And he tells the Chiefs, you know, the other ones, look, we're spending $50 billion on SAC.
We're spending the military budget.
He says, what good is that?
We're going to use it.
I mean, how can you say something like that?
The original Madeleine Albright.
Yeah, yeah.
And he's kind of...
If you watch the movie, the Stanley Kubrick movie about nuclear war, what's it called?
Oh, Dr. Strangelove.
Yeah, Dr. Strangelove.
He's kind of like that Colonel but he...
On the final day of the crisis, I didn't put this in the book, but he is so upset because they're not going to war and they're increasing the defenses in Cuba and he tells the other Chiefs he wants to personally go to the White House and challenge Kennedy and I don't know what he was thinking he was going to tell them and they talked him out of doing that.
So, I mean, that's how bellicose he was when the crisis was over he was in the White House and told Kennedy and the Oval Office that they have lost an opportunity and they basically failed.
Yeah, that's the most...
Well, I don't know.
I guess I was going to say the most, but no, there are two equally incredible stories of LeMay in here.
One where he's demanding that the President invade or do airstrikes, start the war and so Kennedy just does the slightest Socrates on him and just says, okay, but then what?
And then what?
Just a couple of times.
And it ends up with him saying, yeah, they'll nuke our guys, but then we'll nuke them back real good and then what?
And then that means general nuclear war with the USSR, at least general on our side and then the best they could do.
But anyway, whatever, that's a price he's perfectly willing to pay because today's his big day.
And then, which at least I like to read that Kennedy's just shaking his head going, this guy, I can't believe.
Thank God for that.
But then, after the whole thing is brilliantly solved by we'll quietly take our missiles out of Turkey and we'll smooth this whole thing over and no one will get hydrogen bombed to death, he goes back to the White House, LeMay does, to scream and yell and punch the table and pound his fist on the table and yell at the president for resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis without a war.
It's amazing.
Well, not only does that happen, but the next, I think it's the very next day, if not that day, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who Robert Kennedy names his son after, this man is the one, one of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Kennedy even gets along with, he sends a memo with all of their signatures on it saying that they still recommend invading Cuba.
And he attaches a note on top of the memo that he signs saying, well, this is what the rest of the chiefs think, but I disagree.
That was Taylor, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Alright, so listen everybody, it's Michael Swanson and he's the sponsor of this show, wallstreetwindow.com he's got investment advice for you there and he's written this magnificent book, The War State.
I really hope you'll read it.
I can't wait to read the sequel about Vietnam that's coming up.
But hang tight through this break, we'll be right back and we've got all kinds more things to talk about.
I've been accused of gatekeeping you from discussing the assassination so we can't let that go on.
Hang tight everybody, this is Michael Swanson, author of The War State on The Scott Horton Show.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Live, 3 to 5 here at Liberty Express Radio No Agenda Radio, ScottHorton.org Anomaly Radio Liberty Movement Radio, Radio, Radio, Radio, Radio.
Hey, if you just listened to the weekday show, then you missed Nima Shirazi was my guest over the weekend on KPFK.
You can find that archive right there at the top of the page at ScottHorton.org, a great one as he debunks lies about Iran.
War Party lies debunked.
Nima Shirazi there, ScottHorton.org.
Alright, we're talking with Mike Swanson, author of The War State and I guess I sort of got a thing here, I should explain myself a little bit, Michael.
The thing of it is that I always just figured that the CIA slash military, whoever in the government probably on behalf of some or other private factions outside of the government, bankers or arms manufacturers or somebody, they killed the president because they didn't like him anymore and so that's what powerful people do to everybody and including each other sometimes.
So, you know, big deal.
These things happen in corrupt world empires.
But so, I also at the same time, even when I was much more of a conspiracy theorist, I never really got into the JFK thing because I figured I don't want to read that many different books about the same thing where I probably still am not going to be able to really know exactly what the case was.
You know, who called which shots and who exactly pulled which triggers and from what angles and whatever.
That's not really the point.
The point is sort of the meta point is, nah, you know it was the bad guys that shot him anyway, whatever.
But so, that's a long way of saying, I don't really care about this issue that much.
I never really liked Jack Kennedy all that much in the first place and, you know, whatever.
I don't really see that much of a difference, especially before I read your book.
I saw much less of a difference between him and Johnson where it comes to the rubber meeting the road on the most horrible things about them.
But you really do make the case that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he really was getting his act together.
He didn't turn full Jacob Hornberger on us or anything, but he did want to start scaling these things back and cool off the tensions with the Soviets, etc.
And so then, that is obviously the big question, I guess, is do you think that Curtis LeMay, not necessarily him, maybe him, but whoever, people like him who didn't want to wait until the next election went ahead and had the President shot in Dallas back in 1963?
Well, the whole subject of the Kennedy assassination, it's something I read a lot of when I was, like 20 years ago about the time that JFK movie came out.
And then, you know, I probably read like 30 books of it.
And back then, you know, you could read 30 different theories of who did it or what group did it.
Did the mob do it?
Did the CIA do it?
Did the Russians do it?
And on and on.
And then, I just kind of, you know, got away from reading about the thing.
Like you said, you can only read so many books about something.
But, you know, writing this book, you know, it does make you...
Well, first of all, from reading this stuff a long time ago, I'm pretty convinced that, you know, there's some sort of conspiracy or at least one more person shooting.
I think that's pretty evident.
All you have to do is read some of the testimony in the Warren Commission volumes and compare it to what is in the main book.
For example, the doctor that operated on Governor Connolly took out the bullet fragments from his body.
And in the testimony, he claims that there's too many bullet fragments.
And the magic bullet that supposedly hit both of them is too intact.
Basically, it doesn't make sense to him.
But anyway, as far as who did it, I can't really prove or say who did it without, you know, having some real facts or something to back it up.
There's plenty of people that, you know, will just make claims to get attention or something.
But...
Well, people want...
I think people really see that more than the Second World War.
They see the assassination of the president as the real crossing of the Rubicon here.
And, you know, even as Bill Hicks put it, where you know, wow, you're really just going to lie to us like that and then we're just going to go on.
And then that's it.
And everybody's going to know that they're lying about it.
But we're going to let them lie about it.
And now we're going to live in our society post that one time that they killed the president and lied about it and we all just went along and pretended like it was alright.
I mean, that's a pretty big deal.
That's kind of a watershed for a society to let whoever it was did that get away with that, you know?
Yeah, that's true.
And, you know, one of the things, I guess, that in a certain sense provoked me or made me want to write this book a long time ago was if you take an event like the Kennedy assassination or the Bay of Pigs or the Vietnam War or any of these historical events, by themselves, they don't really tell you that much.
They can give you a snapshot on something.
So people will say this Kennedy assassination thinking it's like the secret thing.
If they unlock it, they can figure something big out.
But in the end, I think what is the important thing about the time period since World War II is, in fact, the changes that occurred in the country from after the war till basically the time Eisenhower gives that speech, which is we transform into what is a permanent state of war in the United States.
We're on a war footing all the time, and we have to have a military-industrial complex to back it up and an actual security state that has to operate in secrecy.
I mean, that's what your last guest was speaking about, too.
And I think the Kennedy assassination, regardless of who did it and it's probably impossible to know for sure, that's just the story of that.
And to cover up for the assassination is actually pretty well documented.
And it's something people kind of don't write about or ignore because everyone wants to focus on who killed them.
But there's presidential tapes of Lyndon Johnson the moment he gets in the White House speaking about the details of the assassination with Hoover and what Hoover has found.
And Hoover says that in the very first conversation that's recorded, that he has evidence that Oswald was being impersonated by somebody in Mexico City.
He took a trip to Mexico City in October of 1963 and went to the Cuban and Soviet embassies and the CIA recorded him calling these embassies.
They supposedly took pictures of them, and Hoover tells them that this information doesn't match at all with Oswald.
So that alone is an indication of something and Lyndon Johnson basically tells Orrin Warren in a meeting, who heads the Warren Commission, that there's too many rumors going around that Oswald met with a Soviet KGB agent and we don't want to have a world war.
So I think in the end, actually that whatever we think today that a lot of the people that were covering this up were motivated for what they thought were good reasons.
Well that's the scene out of JFK 2 where he turns Costner's guy against him.
He says the FBI guy grabs him and pulls him in the alley and says, it was Castro, you dummy, and you're going to start a world war.
So stop getting to the bottom of this, and convinces the guy to turn rad on him and all that, right?
Yeah, and that's exactly what the argument was given to Orrin Warren in a meeting, and it's also you can listen to it on a presidential tape.
You can go to YouTube, if you type in LBJ, Richard Russell, Warren Commission, there's several tapes on there where you can hear him very clearly talking about this and Richard Russell tells him, who was the senator, and he tells Johnson, I don't want to get on this war commission.
I hate world war, and he's from the south, and he doesn't support the civil rights movement, and Johnson basically tells him I need you on there.
If you don't get on there, you don't know what could happen.
The FBI is out here and the IRS, and I can't tell you I'm going to use them or anything like that, but the country needs you and there's a lot more words to use.
There's a lot more on the surface, and we don't want a war.
But if you go to the Oswald being in first aid in Mexico City, I mean, that's that would seem to suggest the Soviets weren't involved in it, and someone somewhere in the government had some sort of hand in it.
Who knows who they were working for, but I think that's the basic story.
That's kind of where we started there.
We're still stuck with best guesses and speculations and whatever.
I know somebody, I know some old Texans, and I guess I've kind of heard my whole life that everybody in Texas knew LBJ did it as soon as it happened.
Not that they were too upset about it, really, but LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, LBJ, L LBJ, LBJ LBJ, LBJ, and LBJ LBJ, LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ, LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ, and lobbyist LBJ, LBJ, and LBJ, and lobbyist LBJ, LBJ, and LBJ LBJ, and LBJ, and lobbyist LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ LBJ, and LBJ, and LBJ you know, was kind of a cowardly person.
To give you two examples, when Kenny was president, he asked him to go to Germany and drive up to Autobahn after this Berlin crisis was settled, and he asked him to go to Vietnam to take a trip.
And both times, Johnson told him, I'm afraid that I'd be killed, you know, it's like a world start or something.
And he also had a habit of liking to manipulate people and make them feel sorry for him, or else either try to intimidate him, one or the other.
And I would guess that conversation would begin trying to play that sort of game.
Yeah, who knows?
I don't know.
There are a lot of people who know a hell of a lot more about LBJ than I do, that's for sure.
But anyway, I mean, that's sort of my point anyway, is that, you know, it could have been Oswald, it could have been the CIA or the military or the oil guys or the Lockheed guys or the whoever guys.
But I mean, anyway, to me, it doesn't make all that much difference.
So let's just pretend Nixon won in 60.
What difference does it make?
You know?
Well, all that said, I think one thing that, you know, historical understanding and interpretation and knowledge changes over time and hopefully improves over time.
And when the JFK movie came out, the Congress authorized the release of secret documents related to the assassination.
Not all of them have been released.
There's a whole batch of them supposed to be released by the CIA in 2017.
But one thing that has happened is the release of new information by the government since that movie came out has enabled anyone who's researching this time period to have a better understanding, not simply of the details of the assassination.
And there's, you know, plenty of people reading that stuff and writing about it and planning to write more books about it and so forth.
And hopefully they'll come up with more information.
But it also is leading to a greater understanding of, you know, what was actually going on during his presidency and also Lyndon Johnson's presidency and the whole era.
And that's stuff that I'm trying to work on putting these books for now, basically.
All right.
Now we got to talk about money.
You cite foreign affairs here saying that, listen, the empire's broke.
And so the American people are going to have to cut back, not the empire.
And I wonder if you could explain from your view just how broke is America and just how much of that is because of the militarism and just how different might it be if we abandon the empire and made our government mind nobody's business and just had a normal country in a normal time?
Well, we're spending close to 40 percent of the entire federal budget on either military spending or debts piled up due to it.
And this could be from wars or just buying these weapons systems and whatever.
And I mean, I think it's hard to argue against the idea of cutting the military budget, even if you want to accept the premise of the need to defend the country from terrorism.
We certainly I don't see any usage of these F-22 fighters and all these aircraft carriers to fight terrorists.
But so I think the war on terror could be fought smartly.
And, you know, in the end, it's probably better to pull a lot more stuff back and get rid of this empire regardless.
But you could do a better way, a cheaper way.
But more important, though, is the drain on the national wealth.
You know, so much of our tax dollars are going to this.
We're just draining everything away.
Even people, if you want to think, well, you know, it's providing jobs and whatnot.
There's statistics that show that it costs about a hundred thousand dollars worth of government spending to create one job in the defense industry.
So that doesn't seem like a cost effective way to use stimulus spending.
But as far as how close we are to being broke, that's a fascinating, crazy, interesting question, because the CBOE projections that Congress have and uses in most mainstream economists and articles like that one will say that we're on a path to go broke, the whole country to go broke, or the federal government by 2030, 2028, 2030, unless government spending is drastically cut and taxes are raised and social spending is put under control.
So that Ford Affairs article says basically that's what we need to do, and everyone's living standards would just have to fall in order to maintain defense spending.
However, there's an article I read in February written by a man named Fred Michigan, who used to be on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.
In 2007, he wrote an article predicting real estate declining and everything essentially that happened afterwards, interest rates going to zero, the economy slowing down.
Well, in February, he wrote an article, and these are articles for the Federal Reserve, not newspapers and stuff.
It's titled Crunch Time.
So anyone can do a Google search and see this for themselves.
Just type Fred Michigan Crunch Time.
And he says the CBOE projections are totally incorrect because they're based on the assumption that interest rates will stay at their current really low levels basically forever.
And he claims if they go up, the 10-year treasury bond yields five and a quarter percent or higher than it's at two something now, that the cost of financing the debt will skyrocket and the United States will go through some sort of currency crisis and serious problems.
So he claims this could happen by 2018.
That's pretty crazy.
Yeah, it's a lot of money when you start counting up all of the different kinds of debt, not just the national debt.
And you know, I don't know, it's all over time.
But then again, every time they say that they're going to scale back on the expansion of the money supply, they end up not scaling back on it, right?
Well, yeah.
Well, his argument is that they will have to increase it to keep it.
What happens is bonds, if interest rates go up, bonds fall in value.
And he claims the Fed will just have to print an enormous amount of money to keep that from happening, which would cause a lot of inflation in the economy.
But my second, you know, to tie that into the book is, you know, after I read it, I looked back on my own life.
And, you know, I'm really a product.
I'm 38 years old.
And my father, he was in the military, born around the end of World War Two, right before it.
And I'm a product of this war system, you know, we all are.
I was a kid watching Star Trek was my favorite show.
And that show is all tied into this.
You know, the whole idea of it's kind of an idealized version of the military in the American empire and liberal ideals and so forth.
Well, the whole system is based on this Federal Reserve debt system and the dollar being the reserve currency of the world.
And it wasn't that before World War Two, we weren't the reserve currency.
And if that all comes to an end one day, and I think it probably will in a lifetime, then this whole system that's in this book will, I think, will be changed or something.
We will be living in a drastically different type of world, or country at least.
Yeah, you know, Chalmers Johnson used to always say that you either have to give up your empire, you're going to live under it.
And, of course, I think he also predicted just as well as anybody could have that.
If you ask DC, the empire is what they'll give up last.
They'll get rid of Social Security.
They won't just privatize it, so-called privatize it or whatever.
They'll abolish it before they abolish the empire if we let them choose.
You know, they'll get rid of every last bit of food stamps or anything like that in order to, you know, balance the budget on the back of the poor so they can continue killing poor people in other countries too.
Well, that may be true.
The Ford Affairs article certainly seems to suggest that.
And right after that article, there's one advocating for new Ford defense spending, so there you go.
Yeah, usable nuclear weapons.
Yeah, it's too bad that we've got our- these nukes are too big to use.
We need a new generation of tactical nukes that we can deploy all over the place at a moment's notice.
That's how to roll the world on the cheap there.
Call it the new mill for the new century.
But I don't- anyway, but yeah, would people really put up with that?
I think at some point, you know, that's the most amazing thing to me that since 2008 is there haven't been, you know, any real movements to do anything, you know, except this Tea Party, which I don't know if that's even a real movement.
I mean, there's no real movement of any sort.
Kind of like there was in the 60s or the 30s or dozens of other times in American history.
But well, if things really get worse again or something and people are forced to make a choice, then I think they will start making choices that are different.
Yeah.
Well, look, I mean, there's just nothing more wasteful than American militarism.
And just think of what it costs to fill up an Abrams tank and drive it for a little while.
I mean, you know what I mean?
Just the Pentagon, just in terms of oil consumption, they're what the eighth biggest nation in the world or something, just the Pentagon.
Maybe it's the fourth, something like that.
It's ridiculous.
You know, it seems to me no matter what your issue is, at the end of the day, it's environmentalism for one.
At the end of the day, the military is the worst offender at whatever you're angry about, including breaking up families and all of those kinds of conservative issues and obviously spending issues.
And it just it's the root of everything that's wrong.
And anyway, I wish people get it through their head.
Although, you know, here's a little bit of irony for the end of the show here.
It seems like it was the military that said no to the war on Syria as much as the American people said no.
I don't know if they were refusing, but they made it known that they did not want to get bogged down in that thing.
What do you think that represents when they're telling the human rights activists in the State Department to cool it?
Yeah, the same thing evidently happened in Iran when Bush was president.
One of the regional commanders said, you know, he would protest if they wanted him to start a war there.
That's pretty strange.
Good old standing army, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, right now, really, I do think it is kind of ironic that people in general aren't doing anything.
And it is people in the government that are the ones, you know, speaking out and resisting or whatever.
And they don't necessarily all have to be leaking out information.
But that's what's going on.
Well, you know, I get emails from people all the time who say, you know, they're former military, former military contractors, even who say, you know, I've been listening to your show, working at Raytheon all day, and I decided that one of these things had to give.
So I left and got a real job.
That's pretty nice, you know?
Because I think, yeah, you got a front row seat to the way it works and shouldn't be working, then, you know, you got a choice to make.
Anyway, so we're out of time.
Thanks very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you, Mike.
Yeah, thank you.
All right, everybody, that's the great Michael Swanson, wallstreetwindow.com and writermichaelswanson.com.
The book is The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945 through 1963.
Just look in the right-hand margin at scotthorton.org.
Thanks for listening.
See you tomorrow.
Hey, Scott Horton here to talk to you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
In the book, Swanson explains what the revolution was, the rise of empire and the permanent military economy, and all from a free market libertarian perspective.
Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation, says the book is absolutely awesome and that Swanson's perspectives on the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis are among the best I've read.
The poll numbers state that people agree on one thing.
It's that America is on the wrong track.
In The War State, Swanson gets to the bottom of what's ailing our society.
Empire, the permanent national security bureaucracy that runs it and the mountain of debt that has enabled our descent down this dark road.
The War State could well be the book that finally brings this reality to the level of mainstream consensus.
America can be saved from its government and its arms dealers.
First, get the facts.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson, available at your local bookseller and at amazon.com, or just click on the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org.
Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
Sick of it yet?
It's time to put America first.
Support the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and push back against the Israel lobby and their sock puppets in Washington, D.C.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
Man, I had a chance to have an essay published in the book Why Peace, edited by Mark Gutman, but I didn't understand what an opportunity it was.
Boy, do I regret I didn't take it.
This compendium of thoughts by the greatest anti-war writers and activists of our generation will be remembered and studied long into the future.
You've got to get Why Peace.
You've got to read Why Peace.
It features articles by Harry Brown, Robert Naaman, Fred Bronfman, Dahlia Wasfy, Richard Cummings, Karen Gutowski, Butler Schaefer, Kathy Kelly, Robert Higgs, Anthony Gregory, and so many more.
Why Peace?
Because war is the health of everything wrong with our society.
Get Why Peace down at the bookshop or amazon.com.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for the Future Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation.
As you may already be aware, Jacob Hornberger, Sheldon Richman, and James Bovard are awesome.
They're also in every issue of the Future Freedom, and they're joined by others of the best of the libertarian movement.
People like Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, Lawrence Vance, Joe Stromberg, and many more.
Even me.
Sign up for the Future Freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, $15 to read it online.
That's the Future Freedom, edited by Sheldon Richman at fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them you heard it here.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas.
So Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money and then be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
See what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.