04/30/13 – Jim Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

by | Apr 30, 2013 | Interviews | 1 comment

Jim Bovard, author of Public Policy Hooligan, discusses his article “How ‘Food for Peace’ Hurts Foreign Farmers;” how government food subsidies and mandates distort prices and help giant agribusiness; and why corn wouldn’t be mass-converted to ethanol and sugar-substitute in a free economy.

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
The website is scotthorton.org.
You can find all the interview archives there.
Almost 2,800 of them now, going back to 2003.
You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at scotthortonshow.
And, oh yeah, we're here live from 11 to 1 Texas time every weekday, last Thursday on NOAgenda Radio at noagendastream.com.
Next up is my good buddy Jim Bovard.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
Hey, Scott, how you doing?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us.
Hey, everybody, you know Jim Bovard.
He writes, well, they don't let him write anti-war stuff there, I don't guess, but they do let him write at the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
We were just talking with John Basil Utley about how they don't allow anti-war stuff there.
Anyway, you can find him on very important newspapers, editorial pages, and he's also the author of The Fair Trade Fraud and the Farm Fiasco and Feeling Your Pain and Freedom in Chains and, let's see, Terrorism and Tyranny and the Bush Betrayal and Attention Deficit Democracy, which is my favorite.
It's so good.
And then the new one is a memoir, Public Policy Hooligan.
And I know I left out about half of the books that you've written there, Jim, but anyway, that was the best I could do off the top of my head.
It was good.
Good.
And seriously, you guys got to read Attention Deficit Democracy.
I know that's not the one you make the most money off of or anything, but it's so good, though.
Hey, Scott, you make me sound like such a mercenary.
No, I know you mean well.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Not that that isn't true.
Not that that isn't true.
So, you know.
Yeah, all right.
Well, you know, I'm glad that you can make a living doing what you want, which is digging through boxes of files of government departments and busting their chops.
Well, you know, people ask how I make a living.
I just say, you know, I sell drugs on the side.
Yeah, well.
And some people take me seriously and I'm kind of like, oh, somebody else can turn me in the D.E.
A.
Yeah.
I mean, be careful.
Maybe you should.
It's just weed, not coke or heroin.
You know, that way, if you got to pick a fight, let it be with the local cops.
If I was in Colorado or Washington state, I could do that legally.
Yeah, well, for a little while anyway.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I've always been clean.
What can I say?
Yeah.
OK, well.
All right.
Well, anyway, no, what you do, it's good people.
Well, here's what you do to verify whether Jim is any good at being a journalist or not.
You go to his Wikipedia page or I think you can find it all at Jim Bovard dot com as well.
And you will see his collection of denunciations from the different cabinet departments describing what a bastard he is.
And so that is the measure of his greatness.
Obviously, it's a it's a you should really pat yourself on the back for that.
That's quite a collection of denunciations.
I think that's great.
I mean, you know, Scott, people have accused me of a lot of things.
Modesty is not one of them.
Yeah.
Well, good.
No, you shouldn't be.
In fact, you know, one day you're going to have to die.
You should have all that stuff on your tombstone.
I mean, that's just beautiful.
I hope I can own that a little bit.
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, by all means, die in in your 90s of old age, you know.
Well, you know, only if I'm lucky.
We'll see.
But what the hell?
Hey, thanks for having me on the air.
Thanks for your interest in this piece.
I actually.
Yeah, I brought you here for a reason other than just BS and stuff.
Hey, everyone.
Jim, he wrote this thing.
It's at the Wall Street Journal.
I told you about it before.
It's called How Food for Peace Hurts Foreign Farmers.
And by the way, of course, the Wall Street Journal being the enemy of mankind that they are, they won't let you look at this article unless you Google the title in Google News and then click the link from there and then you can look at it.
How Food for Peace Hurts Foreign Farmers, or you can pay them, but you don't want to do that.
OK, so.
Well, what's the deal?
How does Food for Peace Hurt Foreign Farmers?
Well, this is the program that got started under Eisenhower back when the U.S. had all these huge agricultural surpluses because the federal farm programs were paying farmers a lot more than their crops were worth.
So they overproduced.
The government bought up all these stockpiles and they had to find a way to get rid of them.
So what they did was start dumping them on the third world, claiming it was helping our allies and fighting communism.
Sometimes it had some, you know, there were some cases where it didn't do harm, but very often it would just flood in and bankrupt foreign farmers.
And this is this was something which became a scandal early on in the program.
Back in 1977, the senator from Oklahoma insisted in the farm bill that the AID and USDA had to certify that the foods they dumped on foreign lands would not wreck the farmers there.
Well, what the USDA and AID did was simply have the foreign governments who were going to get the food certified that it wouldn't hurt their farmers.
And so it wasn't exactly a good check and balance.
So it was it was always a farce.
But it and and the program kept operating that way that they kept dumping the food on.
And it's still going on that way.
There are a lot of cases in which the U.S. has just deluged foreign countries.
Back in the Mozambique a few years ago, the wheat prices nosedived after U.S.
AID and USDA both flooded the market, according to U.S. government's own auditors.
Farmers in Haiti have been whipsawed many times by this program.
Most recently, but the after the 2010 earthquake, when they you know, there was lots of devastation.
But the farmers weren't wiped out until all the free food came in.
So now, wait a minute now, what you're saying is not that no one should ever donate to charity or whatever, because that ruins things.
You're saying that when the government does it, they're not really even trying to help.
They're just getting rid of what they've subsidized the overproduction of and figuring out another government program to somehow, you know, try to hide the consequences of their original bad behavior.
And so, you know, the thing is, Jim, is years and years ago, I've read very do gooder ish liberal NGO types knowing better than this and saying, you know, we actually helped screw up back in 1982 in this or that country.
But we learned that there really is such a thing as supply and demand and that if we come in in an emergency, but we give too much food, it actually destroys the ability of the local farmers to keep farming because they're, you know, like for a liberal who has no understanding of economics at all, they have to see this with their own eyes, but they really had internalized these lessons.
So it's really only the U.S. government representing the the farmer businessmen.
Well, refuse to recognize the consequences.
It's a little more complex than that.
And there are and there have been individuals and even some people in Congress who recognize how this problem does harm.
And they try to rein it in and prevent foreign farmers from being wiped out by this.
And there have been some some of the non-government NGOs who have out there who protested this.
But there's been a lot of others that have kept sucking on the tit.
I mean, there have been so many of these NGOs who have been complicit in the damage this program has done.
And they and they've sometimes make a little bit of protest, but they like to have that U.S. money, U.S. food keep pouring into their coffers so they can keep operating and doing as they please abroad.
And it's unfortunate because going back at least 30 or 40 years, there have been individuals in the NGOs and even in the government who said, you know, look, well, you know, the thing we're doing is morally wrong and it's profoundly destructive.
It's undermining these nation's abilities to ever feed themselves.
However, just the fact that there were some decent folks here and there that that's not been able, that's not been able to curb the onslaught of free food that has continued to disrupt foreign markets.
And it's interesting now because Obama is proposing a few administrative changes to the program.
And the New York Times and places like that are whooping up Obama's proposals like they're going to solve all these problems.
But you're going to the same agencies and the most places, probably the same non-government organizations and the same foreign governments are going to be around these programs.
And these are the same folks who have ignored the profound damage that Food for Peace has done for more than half a century.
Yeah.
You know, it's just like John Basil Utley was talking about the Republicans getting us into the Iraq war.
He called it the children's crusade because it was, oh, yeah, we're going to go in there and it's going to be real easy.
And everyone will live happily ever after.
And no real adult thinking about it at all.
It was just sort of this pie in the sky kind of thing.
I could definitely see that here.
Like, oh, what?
I saw Sally Struthers on TV saying there's some poor brown starving people somewhere.
And I had to do the right thing.
And our government ought to do the right thing and help them.
And everyone will live happily ever after.
And I don't really have to think about could it be counterproductive?
Am I destroying the one profitable farm in the region of whatever country I'm helping, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, it's fascinating to see how sentimental so much of the thinking on these issues is.
One of Obama's big, you know, star issues is something called Feed the Future, where we're trying and where the U.S. government is trying to provide aid to some foreign farmers.
But at the same time, the U.S. government has this ethanol mandate, which has profoundly driven up world food prices much higher than what they otherwise would be.
And same with the European Union and their biofuels mandate.
And that has ravaged the third world.
I mean, it's an absolute it's utter hypocrisy for the U.S. to be sending out this food aid and patting itself on the back at the same time that our ethanol policy has harmed millions of people in the third world.
Well, go into detail about that, because I thought ethanol was just to make my gas cleaner and the environment happier and Earth Day and stuff like that.
Well, there's in the U.S. and Europe, there's been so much food has been diverted into making fuel that it has profoundly affected world prices, world food prices.
And there have been some peaks in the last few years that have just caused a lot of additional fatalities in the third world.
Some of the studies I've seen have estimated that more than 100,000 people have died around the world thanks to the U.S. and European ethanol biofuels policy.
And but don't the subsidies make corn artificially cheap?
How does it drive the cost?
No, no, no.
I mean, absolutely not.
The thing that happens with ethanol is it creates a much stronger demand for corn.
So they subsidize the creation of it.
And that might drive the price down on the market.
But then they also mandate this other use for it.
And that drives the price way back up, even higher.
And and it doesn't just affect corn because there's all these tradeoffs.
And once you throw off the price of that primary feed grain, it just you know, it's like a domino effect on agriculture prices for, you know, poultry, for pork, for other things.
And there's just it's such a huge wrench thrown in the market.
It does not help the environment.
It actually causes more smog in the summer.
A lot of places.
It's bad for car engines.
And yet, thanks to the thanks to the environmentalists and Archer Daniels Midland, you know, ethanol has been sacred.
And yet it's it's fascinating to see how so few people in Washington make it make the connection.
OK, here's Food Aid claiming to help these folks abroad.
And here's biofuels, which is basically kicking poor people out of the market and making them go hungry or starve.
It's always bootleggers and Baptists, right?
Somebody who means well and somebody who's got an authoritarian plan, rent seeking one way or another.
Well, it's just it's just sad that it's so rare for people to add.
Well, there's this program, but there's this program over here and it lets the politicians get away with so much nonsense.
However, I would you know, I would guess that many of the politicians have no are clueless on this are, you know, have no idea what they're doing and they really don't care because it gives them a chance, a chance to give two speeches.
First, they can brag about food for peace and then they can give a different speech bragging about ethanol.
Right.
Yeah, it's well.
And you know what?
If there was a coherent plan up there somewhere, I don't know, the chairman of some Senate committee or whatever had any idea what he was doing and was actually capable of implementing that, then it would probably be worse for everyone anyway.
Right.
Like ad hoc, as bad as it is, is probably better than any five year plan these guys could draw.
Well, you know, there there are some folks who recognize this nonsense when pride who would probably like to see it stop.
But these are not the folks that tend to rise to power in Washington or Congress.
So and it's just it's fascinating.
This food for peace is fascinating because it's a very, you know, econ 101.
You take all this free food, you dump it in a foreign market.
It's obviously going to disrupt things.
And it's been clear that way for more than half a century.
It's a great example of how Washington is unable to correct even its most brazen follies.
Yeah.
Well, and it's the thing, too, where when you look at all the different outrages for people to, you know, all the different government scandals for people to be obsessed over, this kind of ranks down low on the list after all.
It does.
But I mean, if you're in a third world country and you're a farmer and you're being bankrupted for the second or third time in a decade by the free food dumped in your local market at harvest time, you tend to take things personally.
There was a gentleman sent me a email about his experience with food for peace in South Vietnam in the early 1960s.
The South Vietnam was was a rice exporter at that point, and it didn't need free food.
But the but the county administration was hell bent on dumping it on there to help finance the arms build up by the South Vietnamese government.
And it didn't care about the farmers because it saw this as a great photo opportunity.
You know, here's free food from America helping you.
And it helped drive away the peasant support of the Saigon government.
Right.
Well, they were kind of trying to drive all the peasants off of their farms and into the cities anyway.
So, yeah, I'm probably happy to do it.
Yeah.
I'm not sure at what point in 1960s that that became more of the policy.
But I mean, it was you know, the there were folks in the State Department who understood very clearly that if you dump all this free rice on South Vietnam, you are going to ruin the farmers and that would not be a good way to fight the Viet Cong.
But it didn't matter because the folks pulled strings and there the rice went.
All right.
Now you mentioned Archer Daniels Midland.
How powerful is Archer Daniels Midland in Washington, D.C.?
Jim, do you know?
It has been very, very powerful.
I'm not sure how powerful it is at the moment.
I did a policy paper for that back in 1995 that tied in some of the various different windfalls they were getting from the government with the sugar subsidies and stuff like that.
It was a federal sugar program which allowed them to make so much money off of marketing high fructose corn syrup, which has now worked out very well for the people treating diabetes.
So, I mean, there's there's there's all these tie ins.
And yet, you know, there's there is such a low level of policy literacy in Washington as far as looking or being concerned about how these programs interact.
Right.
Yeah, that's really the thing.
That's what I really learned watching C-SPAN over all these years is how mostly and I can understand it, too.
I mean, if you're a congressman or a senator, the ones with the real responsibility, not the staffers, but the ones who are really in charge, they really do have a lot of places to go and people to see and fundraisers and handshaking and whatever.
They don't really have time to sit around reading the Internet all damn day and trying to figure out as much as they can about things.
Or, you know what I mean?
They rely on their staff for some briefings and they become not even really knowledgeable, much less, you know, found some wisdom and great ideas.
They don't even know what the hell they're talking about at all.
Yeah, there was a survey done, I think, in the late 1970s that showed that the average congressman spent 12 minutes a day reading.
And and if you talk to some of them, yeah, you get the impression.
Well, yeah, well, here's someone spent 12 days, 12 minutes a day reading.
I'm not sure how much of that was the comic section of The Washington Post, because they you know, they're they're very often utterly clueless about most public policy issues, which makes them very gullible, which makes it easy for them to be stampeded in this direction or that direction.
Yeah, I mean, and and all political rhetoric comes down to, well, we want to help farmers, this, that or the other thing.
And never is there an examination in those kind of debates about secondary consequences.
And and well, what if we look a couple of years down the line?
What might happen to these people or those people in the next election?
So it doesn't exist.
Yeah.
So but now this has been a problem for a very long time.
As you say, is there any kind of organized opposition at all there?
Is there an interest group against this kind of thing anywhere?
You know, some of the non-government organizations have spoken up in favor of reforming the program and keeping the gravy train flowing, flowing into their coffers as well as other coffers.
There are some good criticism.
The Obama administration is made of this, but they're just basically jiggering the program and keeping it going and not really wanting to admit that you have these agencies that are completely untrustworthy to intervene in foreign markets.
AID, USDA, they have a long history of disastrous interventions and there's there's no reason to trust them to get it right in the future.
Well, now you even say in the article here that they hired some outside consultants to help them estimate how much food is OK to dump without completely destroying these people's food economy.
And then they routinely defy those recommendations from their independent contractors, consultants.
Right.
I mean, there was there was a case in which the USDA staffers gave a recommendation on how much soybean milk be safely sent to our media.
But the agency then sent 30 times as much.
30 times as much.
I wonder if that impacted the market.
It doesn't matter because, you know, these agencies don't look at the post post donation impact.
They don't care.
They simply don't care.
That's amazing.
Now, traditionally, has there been much journalism about this at all?
Because I got to admit, I haven't seen much.
Yeah.
There there hasn't been that much.
I actually wrote a story on this for The Wall Street Journal back in 1984.
Yeah.
So, you know, that was, you know, that was back in your years of innocence.
But otherwise, I mean, every now and then there's a piece about it.
But, folks, the the the vast majority of writing about this is by folks who were invested in the keeping the gravy train going or folks who have faith that giving more food handouts is going to, you know, save the US image or save the world or something or other.
I mean, they but they there's it's very rare for folks to sit down and look at these hard numbers.
The General Accounting Office has done a lot of excellent work on this over the last several decades, but Congress hasn't paid much attention.
Well, now, I know you're an expert in a lot of these different farm programs.
Can you I mean, I guess, as libertarian as you are, Jim, basically, you just want what kind of radical free market reforms?
You want the agricultural business in America to look like what?
Well, I mean, the the thing which I want to see is the government stop intervening in the markets to try to drive prices up or try to drive prices down to, you know, for the politicians.
So you're talking about repeal the 1930s.
You're talking about go all the way back and just completely get the federal government out of agriculture.
Almost almost completely.
I mean, there's there are certain things that the government does.
Some of the research isn't that might be helpful.
There are certain standards which they said if they're kind of acceptable to the market, which would not be disruptive.
But as far as the subsidy programs, as far as the loan programs, as far as any kind of supply controls like they like we have in raisins, you know, let's get rid of all those and do it right now.
Cold turkey.
OK, but now let's see if I'm pretending to be a liberal for a second, then I have to assume that we would immediately see ADM and Monsanto or whatever combined.
Their duopoly would rule us all forever and they would own all the food in your own mitigated free market.
What about that?
Well, the I would think that one of the first impacts would be that if you got rid of the sugar price support and sugar import quotas, that the market for high fructose corn syrup would collapse because people have the choice of drinking Coca-Cola made with sugar or with high fructose corn syrup.
My impression is that almost the vast majority of people would prefer Coke with sugar, but it's a lot more expensive.
So there really doesn't make any sense.
There's you know, there'll be lots of losers from from getting rid of these price supports and it'd be a whole different, whole different world in the agricultural markets a year from now.
We don't know who would benefit and who would lose.
But there are corporations that have prospered primarily because of their government ties and they would they would take a beating.
Now, back in 1984, when you first wrote about this and I was an innocent young kid, I remember it may not have been 84, but right around then I remember Willie Nelson and John Cougar Mellencamp and all those guys.
They did Farm Aid.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The giant concerts Farm Aid to save the American farm.
And then later on, I read about the Federal Reserve.
And in fact, I read Secrets of the Temple, which is sort of the Washington Post version of the creature from Jekyll Island, if you get what I mean there.
And of course, inflation is our friend and high interest rates are the enemy in that telling of the story.
But they have a good point.
Right.
Which is I think it's William Greer who wrote it.
And the point is that that terrible shock in the 1980s where so many people lost their family farms, it was because the artificially government mandated low interest rates of the 70s encouraged them all.
And they were propagandized to like you have to invest now in new and better tractors and computers and modernize and all this stuff.
And then, oops, in comes Paul Volcker and he crakes interest rates up to 20 something percent.
And they throw an entire generation or two off of their great grandfather's farms all the way across the Midwest.
And, well, you know, that's the story.
I mean, it really you know, it wasn't quite like that because a huge problem was you had all the government subsidized loans to farmers from the Farmers Home Administration as well as some other subsidized loans for farmers.
But there were a huge number of prudent farmers who saw what was going on and said, look, it'd be stupid to expand and buy up all this land at such high prices.
Lots of farmers recognize it, recognize a bubble in the farmland values.
And the bubble went up and the bubble came down.
The same thing happened after World War One when the U.S.
Then it drove up wheat prices way through the ceiling.
Farmland values skyrocketed.
Then after the war, the prices collapsed.
So farmers overall weren't doing that bad in the 1980s.
I mean, there were a couple of rough years, but, you know, the farmers farmers as a class thrived, especially by the mid late 1980s.
So but the it's funny, though, there was farm aid concerts, something which which really exasperated me about that was a major activity there was to encourage people to write letters to Congress to urge Congress to give more money to farmers.
Hmm.
Well, yeah, to help them and we'll all live happily ever after.
Well, we live a lot better if the subsidies, if the farm subsidies ended.
Yeah.
Well, you know, for those of us who don't farm, it's pretty it's pretty easy to imagine farmers as being pretty broke and wearing overalls and being dirty and working really hard.
And probably, you know, with the labor theory of value that most Americans believe in, not really getting what they deserve in this terrible upside down system of ours.
Right.
So helping anyone always sounds like a good idea.
Well, if you look at the thing I tried to point out when I wrote about this in the 1980s was look at the net worth of farmers, because it was vastly higher than that of the average American family by a factor of 10, 20 or 30 fold.
And farm income fluctuated.
But that's how it is when you're a businessman.
You know, there are there's years of high cotton and there's years of when the cotton doesn't do very well.
But farmers, you know, year by year, decade by decade, they've done very well in their net worth.
And that's that's a much better index of their well-being, financial well-being than their one year income.
Cool.
Well, you know what?
I think in this conversation, I'm probably a pretty good index of what most people think about that kind of thing.
You know, my questions obviously are based in total ignorance of the issue, just kind of broad strokes and general knowledge.
And then you really go to show your end of this, your index here is that you actually went through the index.
You actually know the numbers and have for decades on end looked at the numbers and how these broken systems work.
And you really show just how wrong, if I'm right, that I represent conventional wisdom at all on this of the non-farmer population of America or whatever.
You really show just how wrong we all are about it.
Yeah, I mean, it's you know, it was as much of the media seemed invested in portraying these, you know, nonsensical stereotypes of farming.
I mean, Hollywood's probably to blame on this as well in the John Mellencamp.
But if you look at the hard numbers, I mean, it's fascinating.
The Farmers Home Administration was under all this pressure from Congress to give loans to farmers that weren't very credit worthy.
And as a result, the General Accounting Office found a quarter of the bankruptcies among the farmers home borrowers were because they got too many subsidized loans.
I mean, so the government was destroying the people it was trying to help.
Right.
And this is the same thing.
Tell me, which year was Attention Deficit Democracy published, Jim?
2006.
2006.
See, that's what I thought.
And you have a whole giant section in there, don't you, about the government funneling a bunch of funny money and artificially low interest rates into the housing market and how that's going to create a giant bubble which is going to pop and it's going to be a bad deal?
That might have been Bush Betrayal in 2004.
Oh, OK.
Oh, that would be even better.
Yeah, there was a thing that George W. was pushing, the American Dream down payment, which they were giving five or ten thousand dollar grants to people to buy their first home.
OK, good.
Thanks for correcting me on that, because I've been telling people the wrong book when we talk about libertarians who called the bubble and the consequences of the bubble back when it was still a bubble.
I like to mention you, even though it's not like you're a regular blogger at the Mises Institute or whatever.
So they don't not everybody knows that.
But so I like to point it out.
But thanks for correcting my footnote.
I was telling them the wrong book, which is OK, because I want them to read Attention Deficit Democracy anyway, because that one's the best.
It's so good.
I'm sorry.
Well, you know, maybe one day I'll write one that's as good as that, Scott.
We'll see.
I hope so.
I mean, man, that thing's incredible.
It's not obsolete or anything, either.
It's still as timely as could be.
Unfortunately, that's true.
Yeah, no, it's man, it's good in the torture section in there.
I don't want to ruin it for anybody.
Well, it's always bad to ruin torture.
Yeah, it is.
Americans like torture.
Yeah, some do.
Many don't.
At least vicariously, I think most people.
Well, I don't I don't think that's the case about most people.
But anyhow.
Well, you know what?
You're an optimist compared to me.
You know, people always say that about me, you know.
I guess I'm you know, I'm like a Stanley Milgram experiment guy where I figure anybody can be made to actually participate in torture if you just influence them subtly enough for five minutes.
So they don't have to be for it in general to actually even participate in it in specific.
You know what I mean?
Well, I mean, there are folks there are a lot of folks who would do that.
But I think there's there's some folks with that whose principles would kick in.
So, I mean, if you look at most members of Congress, I'm sure they're decent folks.
Yeah, in some circumstances.
This is supposed to be a laugh line, Scott.
Come on.
I was goddamn chat room was talking to me and I spaced out for like just the last part.
You know, the punch line.
Sorry.
OK, well, I got to go anyway, man.
We got Israel, Palestine coming up with Phyllis Bennis here in a second.
OK, hey, well, thanks so much for having me on, Scott.
And thanks for the chance to read along about that story.
Hey, listen, it's a great story.
It's called How Food for Peace Hurts Foreign Farmers.
I'm sorry I did such a terrible job interviewing you about it.
You know, I was trying, but let's see.
But anyway, thanks a lot.
And everyone, please go and check out Jim's new memoir.
It's called Public Policy Hooligan.
And it really is great.
You'll you'll read it to the end in an evening or two.
And you'll like it a lot.
I promise.
Thanks again, Jim.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
And also, oh, yeah, Jim Bovard dot com, of course, is his Web site.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
Like I told you before, the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF dot org represents the best of the libertarian movement.
Led by the fearless Jacob Hornberger, FFF writers James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory and many more.
Write the op eds in the books, host the events and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better.
Help support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom.
Or to contribute, just look for the big red donate button at the top of FFF dot org.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org.
CNI stands against America's negative role in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The war party's relentless push to bomb Iran and the roles played by twisted Christian Zionism and neocon engineered Islamophobia and justifying it all.
The Council for the National Interest works tirelessly to expose and oppose our government's most destructive policies.
But they can't do it without you.
Support CNI's push to straighten out America's crooked course.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org.
And click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's Council for the National Interest dot org.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
First of all, thanks to the show's sponsors and donors who make it possible for me to do this.
Secondly, I need more sponsors and more donors if the show is to continue.
Scott Horton.org/donate has all the links to use PayPal, Give.org, Google Wallet, WePay.com and even Bitcoins to make a donation in any amount.
You can also sign up for monthly donations of small and medium sized amounts through PayPal and Give.org.
Again, that's Scott Horton.org/donate for all the links.
To advertise on the site or the show, email me, Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
And thanks.
Man, you need some Liberty Stickers for the back of your truck.
At Liberty Stickers dot com, they've got great state hate.
Like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army, die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
At government school, why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at Liberty Stickers dot com.
And of course, they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at the bumper sticker dot com.
That's Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Oh man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights.
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card size copy of the Bill of Rights from security edition dot com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights security edition from security edition dot com.
It's the size of a business card so it fits right in your wallet.
And it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's security edition dot com.
And don't forget their great fourth amendment socks.
Hey guys, I got his laptop.

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