11/18/14 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

Hey all, Scott Horton here to let you know Pizza Noir, book one by Denver Day is now available at your local bookstore and amazon.com.
Grab a cold cup of coffee and follow Tacoma, Washington detective Rick Thompson as he investigates the mystery behind the mass murder of dozens of hot young strippers and roller derby girls all across the West while he learns new things about the world and himself.
Pizza Noir, book one by Denver Day.
Normal as we knew it is a thing of the past.
Find it at scotthorton.org slash books or scotthorton.org slash amazon.
Hi y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Hey everybody, Jacob Hornberger, he's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation and he writes there almost every day, every other day or something and the latest is the United States lost the Cold War.
You don't say?
Yeah, I do say.
You know, it's just amusing to see people celebrating, you know, the end of the Cold War and the fall of Berlin Wall and those things are certainly things to celebrate but this notion that the United States won is ridiculous.
The truth is, Scott, that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and so did the United States.
Look what we ended up with as a result of the Cold War.
We ended up with a huge national security state apparatus consisting of a vast military establishment, what President Eisenhower called the military industrial complex.
We ended up with the CIA, an NSA, all the things that are inherent to totalitarian regimes and they were in fact inherent to the Soviet regime.
In fact, when Eisenhower gave his farewell address in 1960, he admitted this.
He says, look, this huge military industrial complex is alien to our form of government.
We've never had it in the history of this country.
He said it was necessary because of the Cold War.
I dispute that.
I don't think it was necessary or beneficial but certainly once the Cold War ended, this whole great big national security state apparatus should have gone with it and it didn't.
It has essentially become, in the eyes of the military and the CIA and the NSA, a permanent part of America's governmental structure.
We've seen all the dark side things that have come with this, invasions, occupations, torture, hiring of Nazi officials, including many who participated in the Holocaust, all operating in secrecy, coups, support of dictatorships.
We end up with all the characteristics of a totalitarian regime, assassination and so forth.
How can that be considered a victory?
It's like we fought the Cold War and we lost.
We became like them.
I'm reminded of a couple of things here.
First of all, Chalmers Johnson was the great anti-war voice of the last decade and he called himself a former spear carrier for empire.
He taught foreign policy at USC and he taught his students for generations that the Cold War is the right thing.
The damn Russkies, you know?
And then, just as you say, the Cold War ended and the American Empire did not.
It only expanded.
And Chalmers Johnson said, whoa, now wait a minute.
What's going on here?
Instead of deciding which would have benefited his own psyche if he had just said, oh well, I guess now it's an empire.
He said, you know what?
I've been wrong my entire career.
He was even a contract analyst for the CIA and said, I've been wrong.
I promoted the Cold War and I believe that it was a defensive measure against communism and I was wrong.
America was the aggressor in this thing all along.
And just as you say, because of this combination between the military and intelligent state and those that produce the tools that they use to spy and kill.
I'm glad you brought up Chalmers Johnson.
As you know, he passed away three or four years ago and he, I think, was a real giant in alerting Americans to the bad direction that the United States took in the Cold War.
His three books, his trilogy of books, starting with Blowback, where he essentially predicted that 9-11 was going to happen as a direct result of foreign interventionism in the Middle East and in Afghanistan, is just awesome.
It's just an absolutely awesome trilogy of books.
I couldn't recommend it more to people.
And if they want to just get a taste of what Chalmers Johnson was writing, all they have to do is just Google Chalmers Johnson.
There's a multiplicity of essays that he wrote that are just absolutely fantastic that are online.
And that's essentially what happened.
You know, instead of fighting communism with freedom, I mean, that's really what we should have done, that our heritage is freedom.
It's free markets.
It's limited government.
And instead of doing that, we adopted the totalitarian model.
And as I pointed out in my blog post today, it's a very interesting admission by the New York Times last week.
They published an article that quoted a high US official.
I forget his name.
I think his last name is Hill, maybe Clark Hill or something like that.
He was an ambassador to some country.
And they were quoting him as saying that North Korea operates under a national security state.
And I found that a startling and surprising revelation that they would be doing this because that's the apparatus that we've been operating under, a national security state.
And people said at the time, Scott, that if you go down this direction, this totalitarian-like direction in the name of fighting totalitarianism, you're going to become like them.
And we can see it all across society, the militarization of American society, you know, the flyovers and praising the troops at big sporting events and in church services and the militarization of the police.
We see that increasingly.
These are all the things that were going on in the Soviet Union.
You know, the big parades in Moscow where the troops would go pass and review and the big tanks would come by and everybody would go gaga.
This is the direction America took to fight the Cold War.
In order to so-called defeat them, which was really just a process of making them spend more money than the federal government was spending, we essentially became like them.
And now notice that everybody just assumes that this apparatus, which Eisenhower said, was an alien form of government, and which Truman said about the CIA had become a sinister force.
This is as far back as 1963, and I don't even know if he knew that they were hiring Nazis at the time.
Maybe he did.
But, you know, this has become, in their eyes, a permanent part of America's governmental structure.
No constitutional amendment was ever enacted altering our system of government to adopt this, and yet that's their position, that you can't get rid of us because we are an essential and necessary part of the federal government.
Right.
So, man, there's a lot there.
I mean, you called it a totalitarian system, and I think it's really important the way you say that back when they were building it, they admitted that, hey, you know, for the duration of the emergency, we have to accept this totalitarian bureaucracy, even with Truman at the reins of it all, as William F. Buckley put it, but just because of the emergency of world communism.
But other than that, no, of course we would have a limited constitutional republic and all that, and yet now here we are, so many trillions spent, uncounted trillions spent on establishing this thing all along, generations raised up with, I mean, hell, just look at the last generation is raised up at permanent war with, they don't even know what peacetime even means.
You know, the kids growing up now, but generations of this, my whole lifetime and the lifetime of my father before me, right, is basically the entire military industrial complex.
It is normal, and it's, as David Stockman put it, the great deformation.
Think of if it was Ron Paul automatically, just how severe the correction would be.
Oh, man, we got to go to break.
Right back with Jacob Hornberg.
Hey, Al Scott here for Whole Food Multicomplete at WholeFoodComplete.com.
Whole Food Multicomplete is an entire supplement program in one bottle, containing 100% RDA of vitamins and minerals, plus live probiotics, digestive enzymes, antioxidant herbs, energy nutrients, and more.
It's made in America using real foods and live probiotics, no chemical synthetics.
It's soy-free, gluten-free, and independently tested and verified.
They're so sure you'll love it, they're taking 20% off your first order with coupon code Scott Horton.
Satisfaction is guaranteed at WholeFoodComplete.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation there at FFF.org.
He's been really writing up a storm this last week to go and check out his blog there.
He's got one on Max Boot the Coward on Antiwar.com today.
This one is The United States Lost the Cold War.
That's what we're talking about, how they tore down the Berlin Wall and moved it to Washington, D.C. and turned America into the Soviet Union, complete with night raids and bogus trials and bogus elections and everything.
I was told about the evils of communism when I was a kid.
Virtually all of it you could apply to the American system now.
As I was trying to ask, though, is Jacob, it's been generations of this.
The national security budget for the last seven years or so has been a trillion dollars a year when you include VA care and the care and feeding of the hydrogen bombs under the Energy Department here.
It's a trillion dollars a year.
I don't know if it's possible for my little brain to imagine just how distorted the American economy is in favor of this system.
If we did have Ron Paul with his magic force field to protect him, just executive ordered this entire thing right out of existence up there, then just how severe of a shock would that be?
How many people are we talking about thrown out of work?
A hundred million people or something?
Our economy would have to adjust in such a severe way.
There's so many vested interests in it for so much money.
Again, it makes it just seem impossible that this can ever change.
What do we do about it?
This is what Eisenhower was talking about.
Part of what he was talking about, I think one part was when he said this is a danger to our way of life, to our democratic processes.
I think he was referring specifically to the danger of a coup, the same type of thing that we see in Egypt, which of course the U.S. National Security State supports.
They supported the same thing that happened in Chile where the military and intelligence forces remove a president from office on grounds of national security.
He was also saying that the insidious effect that this whole process has on economic activity.
He was saying that you have all these military projects in congressional districts all across America, so that if anybody starts talking like you do and says maybe we ought to get this thing canceled, immediately the whole machine mobilizes within a congressional district, for example, and says, oh, contacts are congressmen.
Don't you dare stop this project here.
We're doing our part.
We're putting together the bolts for this particular military weapon.
You're going to cost us jobs and our community depends on this.
You see it all across America.
You've got cities that live in constant fear of losing their military base.
You're right.
When you put an entire nation of people, or at least a large portion of the nation, dependent on this military largesse, which is really just like welfare, it makes it extremely difficult.
Just like the welfare state, that once you put people on the dole, they're scared to death of losing the dole.
They don't want to lose their dole.
You've got to think of all the people whose lives are being adversely affected, that are paying for this, because let's face it, government has no money of itself.
It has to take money from people in order to fund this gigantic monstrosity.
All those people who are being victimized are the people that are paying exorbitant income taxes, that are funding this machine.
That's what the IRS is about.
The people are being plundered by the Federal Reserve.
I think if people ever can figure that out, they'll realize that it's in their interest to dismantle this thing.
It's not so much people losing their jobs, as having to move to other jobs in the private sector that are the productive jobs.
Somebody that has a store next to a military base, they may go out of business near that military base, but they simply reopen in a part of town where people now have all the money that they were having taken from them to pay for this military largesse, they're now producing.
By laying off all these people that are on the military largesse, they become productive.
You have a doubly positive effect.
Not only is everybody having their money taken from them to fund this largesse, now you have double the amount of people that are now producing wealth.
It'd be the greatest thing we could ever do by dismantling this and restore our constitutional republic to our land.
That's so well said, and I hope people really understand that, because I was really trying to paint it as the worst case type scenario about just how bad the correction would have to be.
But of course, what you're saying is right, that all the money that right now, again, a trillion dollars a year that's basically just being nuked right out of existence, would be instead generating real wealth.
All those able-bodied males, instead of training how to kill people, would be creating stuff.
All those DARPA engineers, instead of building the latest laser weapon or whatever, could be figuring out how to better and cheaper distribute food to hungry people or whatever the problem is that needs solving.
It could only be a benefit, and I don't know how much time it would take if we could all of a sudden make the whole national security state disappear.
But I don't think it'd be too long.
I don't think we'd see a bunch of people starving.
I think you'd just see a lot more need for a lot of creativity and a lot of newly freed up creativity ready to be deployed to solve the problems, too.
Well, I think it'd be immediate.
I think you would see an immediate outburst of positive, creative economic energy.
It boggles the mind as to what these people have done to our country.
I mean, here's the real irony, is that how did they drive the Soviet Union into bankruptcy?
They made it spend more money than it was bringing in, and this is what the arms race was all about.
The conservatives were largely responsible for this, but what conservatives were ignoring is that our government was spending large quantities of money also.
Now, we had an enormously bigger private sector to fund this, so we could outdo the Soviet Union, but the problem is that the government sector has continued spending ever-increasing amounts of money.
So if that forced the Soviet empire to go bankrupt, why wouldn't the same principle apply to the American empire?
Same thing, and just look at $17 trillion debt.
As an economist, I'm really a great anti-war guy, but I saw David Stockman on Fox News saying, hey, this is just the same as the last bubble.
Of course, newsman, your stock portfolio is doing good.
Now is the upside of the bubble, but it's just a bubble.
Another fake prosperity, just like last time.
It's all driven by paper money, and it's all just going to collapse again at some point in the next couple of years anyway, and it seems pretty obvious that, as even TV will admit, real wages pretty much haven't gone up since 1972.
Why do you think that might be?
Yeah, this is what happens when you have a giant socialist-type apparatus, and we've got a double one.
We've got the welfare state, which is based on the idea of mandatory charity and plundering and looting people that have money in order to give it to people that don't.
Mandatory charity, that's what it is, and then you've got this giant warfare state.
The important thing to recognize, Scott, is that neither one of these huge apparatuses that are really bankrupting America were ever part of America's governmental system or American society for the first 150 years or so of American history, maybe a little bit less, 125 years or so with the welfare state.
These are alien philosophies.
They don't seem alien because they were here during our entire lifetimes, but when you look at American history, they were never part of the founding governmental structure of this country, and that includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Standing Army, CIA, NSA, gun control, the drug war, the whole shebang that we're living under today.
Well, now, they did have that giant so-called return to normalcy even after World War I, but then again, they were kind of always after South America, so it was maybe a much smaller military industrial complex, but when Smedley Butler was rattling off that list of countries he had invaded for the cronies back in New York, there was a bit of a war machine already going, of course, but obviously, yeah, after World War II, they just said, as Senator Vandenberg said, get out there and scare the hell out of them, Harry, to President Truman.
Yeah, you're going to have to make up a big lie that the Soviets are coming for us so the American people go along with us plundering them without limit, and it worked.
They knew they were lying.
They said they were lying.
Absolutely, and you saw a variation of it with the Vietnam War where they said, oh, we've been attacked at the Gulf of Tonkin, and so everybody gets all riled up, and we end up wasting 58,000 American lives there, and it just goes on and on, and when are the American people finally going to say, stop, let's restore our republic to our land?
No time like the present.
Thanks so much for your time again on the show, Jacob.
Good to talk to you.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
That's the great Jacob Hornberg, everybody.
FFF.org.
The U.S. lost the Cold War.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by ScottHorton.org first, and just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
And it's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world, except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government-generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
WallStreetWindow.com.
Thanks for watching.