Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, introducing Tom Edlum.
You might have read a thing or two he's written for the Libertarian Institute.
He's the former research director at the New American and a freelance writer and apparently a fan of the show because he heard my Dan McAdams and Greg Palast interviews about Venezuela and I don't know if he got to the Max Blumenthal one yet, but you wrote me a thing saying, man, you got a lot of things to learn about Venezuela.
Well, I'm willing to hear them from you, Tom.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Hey Scott, I am a fan of the show and you know, I can't help it.
I just can't help it.
I'm always like the turd in the punch bowl.
I mean, I've always been that person.
I got put on a jury once.
It was actually a mafia drug trial, got kicked off the jury.
You know, even back going back to 1988, I was in my early 20s.
I went to this young Republican convention and I asked the question of then Secretary of State George Shultz, almost got kicked out of the convention and not because I was wearing a big red not much sign, a button on my lapel.
I'm always that person, but I don't mean to be offensive.
I do want to second what Daniel McAdams and Greg Palast said about American interference.
I mean, you know, clearly that's the case.
And I'll second what they say about we shouldn't be interfering in Venezuela.
It's just that it's not that what they said was wrong.
It's what they said, what they skipped over with regard to Venezuela that I objected to.
So that's where I'm at.
All right.
So let me ask you this first, which is a little bit outside of the lesson you taught me in this email you sent.
But I want to ask, nobody seems to know.
In fact, or I don't know who knows, but I talked to Bob Murphy.
He said he was going to look at it, but he doesn't know the answer.
And I talked to David Stockman and he had quoted a guy about it.
But then when I asked him about it, he was like, yeah, I don't know.
But what I really want to know is how much of the hyperinflation is simply the socialist fault for overpromising during an era of falling oil prices and having bad economic policies?
Obviously, we know the shortages are all because of the price controls.
But how much of the hyperinflation is really Venezuelan fiscal and monetary policy?
And how much of it, or maybe starting when, does the effect kick in of American intervention there?
Because that's another way to destroy a currency is to have the U.S. Treasury Department go to war with you and kick you out of the international monetary systems and this kind of thing.
And so I know that that's been happening too.
And typically, I think you recognize that the people who would really object to what's going on here would tend to be partisan leftists who would tend to excuse the Venezuelan government for all their problems and blame it all on the U.S., whereas people who are biased against socialism say, see, this is what happens when you try to bribe everybody with their own money all day.
Eventually, you just run the country into the ground, printing money and this kind of thing.
But fewer people seem to be interested in the truth rather than confirming their bias.
And so I just really want a timeline of, how badly did they destroy the currency before the sanctions kicked in?
Or was there already intervention going on in the first place?
And to what degree is their responsibility there?
So what do you think?
Well, I do think that American policy had an impact.
And if someone says, and Greg Palast definitely said that U.S. militarism had an economic impact.
That's true, without a doubt.
How much of it was before 2014?
I don't know.
But hyperinflation is defined as more than 10% per year.
And by that standard, going back to the first year of Hugo Chavez's regime, they had hyperinflation.
During Chavez's life, it was over 20% every year but once, that was pretty close to 20%.
And of course, it's gone up geometrically since then.
I believe it was between 1 and 2 million percent last year.
So a million percent.
So think about buying something at the dollar store.
Well, it's $1 million or $2 million at the end of the year.
That's the kind of inflation that took place in 2018.
So it is much worse since the collapse of the Venezuelan dollar.
But the economic policies, if I give you just sort of a brief Venezuelan timeline, Hugo Chavez gets elected at the end of 1998.
In 1999, he drafts this and gets enacted this new constitution.
He creates this National Constituent Assembly to draft a constitution guided by him and his minions.
And we can talk a little bit more about the constitution.
It is a socialist device, and to a certain extent, a fascist device, certainly protectionist.
I mean, there's a lot of elements in it.
He gets that enacted, but he's elected fairly.
The constitution is elected fairly, and Chavez is re-elected in 2000 and again in 2000.
Let me think now.
It's 2006 and 2012.
And then he dies before he can take his oath of office to become president in 2013.
Maduro is the vice president.
He becomes president, then he gets elected in 2013.
Again, it appears like it was a relatively fair election, but then the question is, well, what is the standard of fair?
I believe Greg Palast said that the Carter Center said that the Venezuelan election was as fair as American elections or more fair.
There's no evidence that there was massive cheating at that point.
The losing candidate, Enrique Caprias, charged that there was fraud, and the National Election Bureau looked into it, but the Carter Center said, gee, the review was not in any way transparent, so it was useless as a review.
So maybe there was, maybe there wasn't, but at that time in 2013, oil prices were still fairly high.
Inflation was bad.
The Venezuelan economy was not doing well, but the Venezuelans were not worse off than they were in 1999.
Obviously, in 2014, the global oil prices collapsed.
They go from over $100 a barrel to in the $50 range, and the Venezuelan economy is built on oil.
In fact, the Chavistas, Hugo Chavez and Maduro family and friends have enriched themselves.
Hugo Chavez's daughter is reputed to be worth $4 billion.
Four billion, not million, billion.
There's a term in Venezuela called, let's make another name of it here, it's BOLIBORG, which is an acronym for Bolivarian Bourgeoisie.
It's sort of the new class, as my Venezuelan friend said.
He didn't even know, and a Venezuelan friend of mine said, yeah, there's almost like a new class in Venezuela, meaning these privileged families of the leaders of the Socialist Unity Party.
He'd never heard of Milovan Djilas, this communist dissident from Yugoslavia who penned a book called The New Class about the elite in the communist world, that great analogy.
Anyway, as the economy collapses and there are parliamentary elections, there's this thing called the National Assembly, they have elections and it goes exactly as you might think with the economy in the midst of its second straight year of economic decline, more than two thirds of the candidates for the opposition win.
By the opposition, I don't mean there's an opposition party.
We're talking about 18 different parties and a number of different independents win, and the ruling party is cast out.
They have less than a third.
The Chavistas, at this time they're the Maduristas, they're led by Nicolas Maduro, they strategize and they say, okay, well, how are we going to stay in power?
Well, in the lame duck session before the new National Assembly takes power, they fill the Supreme Court, the Supreme Judicial Tribunal, with Socialist Unity Party loyalists.
The Socialist Unity Party members who are now members of the Supreme Court invalidate three of the candidates for one election, so that the new National Assembly does not have the two thirds needed to recall Hugo Chavez.
Now, because three elections have been thrown out, they now have less than two thirds.
They still majority, but they can't kick out Maduro.
They can't call for a new election.
At the same time, Maduro starts calling for what they call a new constituent assembly.
It's basically the equivalent of a constitutional convention in the United States.
The National Constituent Assembly, which should be distinguished from the National Assembly, is sort of this Gaul sovereign power.
It's in the 1999 constitution, but it existed before in Venezuelan history.
In fact, the 1999 constitution was written by a National Constituent Assembly and ratified by the people.
But this new National Constituent Assembly, the elections are called, and before they even have the elections, most of the candidates for the major opposition parties are being harassed, imprisoned.
Let me give you a couple of examples here.
Enrico Capriles, who was the member of Justice First, he was already disqualified from running for office for 15 years.
Antonio Ledesma, I'm butchering his name, was basically put into exile.
He was arrested, and he was basically going to be thrown in prison, so he left the country.
He was part of the original Democratic Action Alliance.
It was sort of an umbrella party.
One of the socialist opposition leaders was a guy named Leopoldo Lopez.
He was part of the original Democratic Action Alliance, and he ended up founding his new independent party that's part of the Socialist International.
He was arrested and thrown in prison, and he's still, even today, under house arrest in his house.
The closest thing there is to a libertarian party in Venezuela is called Vente Venezuela.
The leader of that, a woman in her early 50s named Maria Carina Machado, she had a long history of being harassed by the Chavista government.
It stems back to her acceptance of a small grant from the National Endowment for Humanities.
What happens is the opposition, the lead opposition people are already in prison.
They're in disarray.
They're being harassed.
Whenever they organize in public, they're accused of being rioters and traitors, and they boycott the election.
When the National Constituent Assembly election is held, 100 percent of the seats are given to the Socialist Unity Party of Maduro.
100 percent.
Keep in mind, this election is in 2017, while the country has been undergoing its fourth straight year of negative economic growth.
What happens is the Carter Center, every international observer says, this is a totally failed election.
The other thing is, even if there had been fair elections, the National Constituent Assembly, Maduro had gained that as well.
There's an interesting link with fascism in the Chavista ideology.
It goes back to, Hugo Chavez used to talk about political hegemony.
That was an old communist slogan, Antonio Gramsci.
He was an Italian communist who lost the battle for control of Italy after World War I. He spent the rest of his years in prison saying, this is why we lost to the fascists.
We didn't capture the culture.
What Mussolini had done was he brought all of the constituent interest groups into the government.
Mussolini's grand council of fascism included labor unions and businessmen and different interest groups.
This is exactly what the National Constituent Assembly did.
It brought in a third of the seats were bureaucrats who are government leaders, pensioners who are relying on government salaries, union leaders who are captured by the unions.
They're run by the government because many of them are government employees.
A third of these seats are preordained to go to the National Socialist Unity Party.
Even if the opposition wins two-thirds like it did in 2014 in a completely fair election, they're still not going to have a majority, because 33% of the seats are already set for the Socialist Unity Party.
Then Chavez decides he's going to have his own election, and basically the opposition says, well, we're going to have the same issue again that we had in 2017 with the constituent assembly election, so they boycotted that as well.
Anyway, that's the history.
From the perspective of a socialist left, and certainly from the perspective of the Chavistas, you have this American connection with a lot of the opposition parties.
Enrique Cabrillas was educated at Columbia.
Leopoldo Lopez went to Princeton for undergrad and Harvard Kennedy School for his graduate school.
Thus, he would be a member of the Socialist International.
That's almost cause and effect there.
The other guy, Antonio Ledesma, he won a national endowment for the humanities award in 2015.
I already mentioned that Maria Karina Machado, her group is a private group called Join Up.
They had started a petition to recall Chavez back in 2004.
It didn't work.
They had won $31,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy.
If you're Chavez or Maduro, looking at this, the CIA has already plotted a coup against you.
What are you going to do?
Well, gee, National Endowment for Humanities is a great working ground for- You mean the National Endowment for Democracy?
The NED?
I'm sorry.
Did I say the humanities?
I meant democracy.
Yes, yes.
It's my mistake.
Okay.
One is subsidizing art.
The other is subsidizing coup d'etats.
Well, that's exactly my point.
It's linked to the CIA.
Of course, the CIA has always recruited very heavily in the Ivy League schools as well.
From Maduro's perspective, or before that, Chavez, gee, they're planning coups.
What am I going to do?
Well, I'm going to go after people with American connections, and I'm going to find someone who has been successful in stopping American coups.
Gee, the Castro brothers have done pretty well in Cuba stopping coups.
That's what they do.
There are now several tens of thousands of Cuban military attaches, experts melded in with the Venezuelan military.
The military is, in part, influenced by the Cuban influence.
The options right now are not that great for the Venezuelans.
The foreign policy options, I don't think, are clear-cut for Americans either.
I think Greg Dallas had said, well, we shouldn't recognize the head of the National Assembly as the new legitimate president.
We shouldn't take the resources of Citgo and the other assets of the Venezuelans and take them from Maduro and give them to Guaido.
Maybe we shouldn't.
It's hard to say.
Either way, it's not good, because if we create this constitutional crisis, this improves Maduro's internal polling.
He's only polling at 20%, but it goes up to close to 30% when the United States takes action against him.
At the same time, if we continue to assume, gee, all the money goes to the dictator, even though he was elected relatively fairly in 2013, he's become a dictator, just as every bit as much as Adolf Hitler, who was legitimately elected in 1933, became a dictator.
I'm not saying that there's an easy option here, but I just wanted to try to bring nuance into the discussion.
Yeah.
Well, as you said at the beginning, you agree with Palestinian McAdams both, and obviously the party line on this show is against all intervention at all times.
That's the thing of it, right, is that from here, we don't really know, or maybe you got really good poll results or what.
I don't have a real good understanding of what kind of numbers, of how big of majorities would like to see a change from this guy to somebody else.
What I do see is a bunch of foreign powers trying to dictate a conclusion here.
I was just reading the thing in the Wall Street Journal this morning about how even within the opposition, it was only four guys who decided to make this announcement, and they didn't do it until the vice president of the United States told them, do it, we'll back you up.
The thing is, they forgot to get the military on board for the right-wing push, so it didn't really go anywhere.
Now the question is, what are they going to do about that?
Right.
And the media, it's pretty easy to get the media on the side of war with Venezuela.
Maduro even looks like Saddam Hussein.
I mean, you put the two, all you have to do is hoist an ancient rifle and- He's got biological weapons.
What?
I said, he's got biological weapons.
I was just anticipating John Bolton next week or something.
Right.
But as far as the polling numbers, the UN High Commission for Human Rights certified that there were over 3 million Venezuelan refugees last year.
That's 10% of the country's population.
That's the equivalent of 30 million Americans leaving and voting with their feet against the leader.
I mean, that's a pretty strong vote against.
Of course, right now Venezuela is going through its seventh straight year of negative economic growth, even while population is increasing.
So the Venezuelans are in very serious financial straits.
So I don't want the United States to tighten the screws, because that's going to cost lives.
That's going to cause real harm.
But I also don't want to perpetuate the dictatorship indefinitely.
So I don't say that there's an easy option.
Property should go to the owner, and that's kind of a tough call.
Guaido was at least voted- The people voted for him to be a member of the National Assembly, and then the National Assembly voted him as the leader.
He's the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi for Venezuela right now.
So he has some credentials.
Well, I mean, that answers your question right there, though.
Regardless if it was McCain or Obama or Hillary or the worst president you could possibly think of, for all the foreign governments to start recognizing Nancy Pelosi as- Look at the common hatred for Donald Trump right now.
Foreign governments start recognizing the American Speaker of the House as the legitimate president because they say so.
I mean, that would be ridiculous.
And we would call that a foreign intervention and a coup, and we'd fight it.
Even if it was in support of the conservative Republican Dennis Hastert against some terrible Democrat like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, right?
Yes, but what if Bill Clinton were to continue on doing his third term that he was not allowed to do?
That's basically where Venezuela is at, and it makes for a tough call as far as, well, who is in charge and who should be in charge?
I mean, right now, I do think that- Yeah, but whose call is it to make is what the question is.
It's not the American's call to make, right?
Or is it?
No, but it's our call to make as far as when they're our assets and both sides claim them, well, who did it really belong to?
My point is not that, oh, well, we should obviously give it to Chavez or even that we should give it to Guaido.
My point is it's a tough call right now because they both have some claim.
Yeah, I don't really see how the new government has a claim at all or that the Americans, that would be anything other than perpetuating what we can already tell is a US government-led mission here, or at least, I don't know if you call it a 50-50 split or what.
We're not talking about making those decisions in a vacuum at all.
We're talking about making those decisions in the midst of a regime change.
I mean, I don't know.
Your point is well taken, that the motives for the American government are, to say they're not pure is the understatement of the year.
They are the very worst- Even if they meant very well, this is still part of a package deal of a foreign regime change.
So, forget how big their smile is while they do it or whatever.
I'm not sure what's the measure of meaning well or having nefarious motives.
I mean, if you ask John Bolton, it's perfectly proper that their oil supply has been run down by price controls and inflation and problems there.
And so, American companies should go in there and they should own that oil and they should fix that equipment and they should get the oil and the money too.
And even though this is somebody else's country we're talking about, right?
This is plain old American right-wing militarist imperialism in Latin America, same as always, regardless of whether Maduro is an angel or a devil.
It seems to have nothing to do with it really, right?
It's about American control over those resources.
Oh, it is.
And the prospects for the Venezuelan people of taking the reigns out of Maduro are almost nil, with the Cuban troops there.
The Venezuelan constitution has an anti-second amendment type of rule that says civilians can't own weapons.
So, there's no chance of...
And as you said, American intervention is only boosting Maduro's numbers in the polls, right?
Which is as you would expect.
Absolutely.
It's not boosting them anywhere near to real popularity, but he has a 10-point bump every time we make a move, for the very reason that Greg Palast described last week, absolutely, or the week before last.
Right.
In other words, where he made the comparison that if you asked American generals to cross the river and go change the government in the White House, they would just laugh in your face.
That's never going to happen.
No, but there's a long tradition of that actually happening in Venezuela.
I mean, Chávez himself was involved in two military coup attempts before he got actually elected.
So, there is a tradition of the military acting independently, or at least acting, maybe not independently, but acting against the interests of the civilian government.
Yeah, I guess that tradition is newer there, not as tried and true as on this side.
But, yeah, I see what you mean.
So, yeah, but of course, you know, with the foreign intervention just makes the internal regime change that much less likely as far as that goes.
Well, I agree.
If we get involved, especially if we get involved militarily, the Venezuelans aren't going to rally around Chávez.
Not Chávez, Maduro.
Absolutely.
It's only going to create more misery.
And any kind of economic sanctions, general economic sanctions, are only going to increase the suffering of the Venezuelan people, which is already, I wouldn't say, you know, unmeasurably high because it's worse than Yemen and one or two other places.
But it's pretty bad in Venezuela right now.
Sorry, just one second.
Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
This is where you buy gold, silver, platinum, palladium.
Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
They've been around longer than me since the mid-1970s.
They have a great reputation.
And if you buy with Bitcoin, they charge no premium at all.
It's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc., rrbi.co, rrbi.co.
Well, now, OK, so these, going back to the elections here, you know, obviously you've been paying attention to this all along, the way you hammered out this email to me showing, you know, how all this happened.
But when it comes to all the boycotts, obviously it makes sense for one side to say that this election is illegitimate sometimes, but also sometimes that's a real bad idea.
And I wonder if you think that maybe that has been a real bad idea for the opposition to throw up their hands and refuse to participate at all.
And they end up that much further on the outs than they would have been before.
Maybe they could have won.
Or maybe the fraud necessary to prevent them from claiming a real victory would have been so blatant that they would have had a much more legitimate claim on power now than they do.
Yeah, well, the fraud is pretty blatant.
Even, I mean, one of the things that came out of the presidential election was that the Venezuelan government is socialized up and down.
I mean, the phone company, lots of companies.
In fact, my brother-in-law is Venezuelan.
He came over in the late 80s and he remarked to me in about 1990, he says, oh yeah, everyone in Venezuela has a cell phone.
I said, what do you mean?
Those are expensive.
How do they all have it?
It's a poor country.
He says, well, it's six months to a year wait to get a phone installed in your home by the state phone company.
So Venezuelans just have cell phones.
So this socialism, well, what I was going to say is the presidential election of 2018, they had a private company run the actual physical election machines and it's centralized into the state election or national government board.
Well, the private company at the end of the presidential election certified that the election board had created a million votes in favor of Maduro, even when running, because they wanted to show enough turnout to make it appear that there was enough people going to the polls.
They officially recorded a 42% participation rate, which was lower than average, but opposition leaders say it was more like 20% participation in the election.
And naturally subsequent to that press release, the private company was banned from using in Venezuela.
They were basically kicked out of the country and they're now in exile.
So they don't run the election machines in Venezuela anymore.
So with 1 million votes, they could do 2 million.
I don't know.
It is pretty blatant right now where the election fraud is going on.
So I mean, how blatant can it get?
I don't know what the path for Venezuelans is to free themselves of Maduro.
Maduro controls the bureaucracy, controls the Supreme Court.
He controls the election board.
He controls the military, all the people with the guns.
The opposition controls this legislature that is declared non-existent by the National Constituent Assembly, but that's it.
So they have paper, they have real support, but it's not supported by any actual instruments of power.
Yeah.
Hey, this may be a completely naive question, but as far as the total destruction of the currency, is there any kind of widespread move to use foreign currencies and or cryptocurrencies and this kind of thing and find alternatives?
Because this level of inflation and then price controls just means that essentially exchange is canceled other than smuggling and black market stuff.
Yeah, I don't know to what extent it is used.
You know, when the currency collapsed in Zimbabwe back in 2008, 2009, they used a combination of foreign currencies, barter, and I would imagine that some of that has emerged in Venezuela, but it's still the legal currency.
They haven't, like Zimbabwe, abandoned the Bolivar.
So it still exists.
They've printed extra zeros on the bills, but it is still required.
So I would imagine I'd have to ask some of my Venezuelan friends.
I'd imagine that it's still mostly in use.
Yeah.
I do have a $100 trillion bill from Zimbabwe here.
I used to give away when I was a high school history teacher, our economics class would have a stock market game and the winner who increased the most would get a $100 trillion Zimbabwe bill as the prize.
Mine's signed by Ron Paul.
Oh, well, I can't beat that.
All right.
Hey, listen, man, Tom, so before we go real quick here, let me just say that Will Griggs' book is coming out real soon here.
The Libertarian Institute is publishing it.
It's called No Quarter.
It's awesome.
Yeah.
And it includes a great introduction by you telling the story of William Norman Griggs that is really just invaluable there.
So that'll be coming out.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Within some single digit number of weeks from the time people hear me saying this, I guess that's as good as I'll promise, but I think it'll be pretty soon.
So really excited about that.
And then we'll have you on to talk all about Will and to talk all about the book and we'll make a thing of it, Tom.
Great.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
All right.
Thank you, man.
All right.
All right, you guys, that's Tom Edlum and he's going back to school, so I'm not going to refer you to his website, but he's a freelance writer now and used to be, really was, I think it's fair to say, William Griggs' protege at the New American Magazine back when.
So you guys are really going to enjoy reading his introduction to Will's book.
It's really great.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
