05/19/16 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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I'm him.
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All right, introducing the great James Bovard, investigative columnist and author of a whole bunch of books.
Really, really good ones, mostly from the Clinton years and the Bush years, Feeling Your Pain and Freedom in Chains, and of course, Terrorism and Tyranny.
And I really love this one.
And I don't want to hear complaints from you menarchists.
Yes, we know.
But it's called The Best Democracy.
Wait, no, that's Greg Powell's book.
What the hell is the democracy one?
Oh, Attention Deficit Democracy.
Attention Deficit Democracy.
I thought I'd got to come up with something for you to say to Bovard.
I'm failing miserably.
That's not a good sign here.
Come on now.
And anyway, it's been a while since I could do it all.
But his newest and his latest and greatest is his memoir, which is Public Policy Hooligan.
And seriously, go and look at his page at jimbovard.com.
He has literally been denounced by the leaders of every executive branch of bureaucracy, including, I think, the Pentagon and all of them for his heroic work on the corruption of our horrible government.
Anyway, so welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you doing?
Doing good.
Thanks for your kind words, Scott.
I appreciate that.
I haven't been denounced by the Pentagon, but the FBI did cascade me and the TSA not too long ago.
That's very good.
And seriously, the list of denunciations is really something.
You should get that tattooed on your arm.
Well, I'm not sure my arm is that long.
Yeah.
Well, you got pretty big biceps there, though, man, you know.
Well, well, I still lift weights.
So what the hell?
I learned that in Public Policy Hooligan.
There you go.
You're a weightlifter.
Yeah, I haven't lifted competitively for a long time.
But, you know, I have so many enemies I better keep lifting.
Yeah, there you go.
That way you can punch them hard if you need to.
All right.
Obama.
USA Today.
They let you write in USA Today.
I can't believe it.
Obama's global anti-corruption cops should call Internal Affairs, says James Bovard here.
So this starts with John Kerry.
They actually have something called an anti-corruption summit in London, of all places.
Is that right?
Which is in London is known as the money laundering capital of the world.
There's so much dirty money that's been pulled there like a magnet.
So, yeah, but the I think that the British prime minister was hoping to burnish his credibility.
So it was after the Panama Papers thing from a couple of weeks ago.
Yes.
That's like and there was too soon.
Too soon.
Yeah.
John Kerry's got a bit of a similar trouble.
He's got a number of offshore accounts.
So but they're very opposed to in principle.
So that's the important thing.
Hey, you know what?
Speaking of which, let's go back to that right there.
I had missed about John Kerry's offshore accounts.
I had seen, I guess, one McClatchy story about a lot of Hillary Clinton's friends and associates were in the Panama Papers.
But was Kerry in there?
You know this from something else.
No, it was not.
He was not in there.
It was an article by the Daily Caller.
It was looking at some of his financial disclosure papers that worked that out.
So I see.
Well, he married really rich there.
So he's got to hide his money somewhere.
I don't know.
I kind of.
Well, I begrudge government officials like Kerry, but I don't begrudge anybody else for trying to hide their money from these goons.
Well, I mean, this is what happens when you have very high tax rates that people pay prices to avoid the taxes.
So.
All right.
Anyway, so, yeah, the corruption.
So.
So what's the point?
Are they is there something they're actually pretending to do or they're just talking?
The point of the article is, is that Kerry and a lot of the other maybe a bunch of other leaders of foreign countries got together at this for an anti-corruption summit in London, which they pledged to crack down on corruption.
But mostly what they're focusing on was the kind of corruption that would involve tax evasion.
There was a joint statement at the end which they pledged to drive out those lawyers, real estate agents and accountants who facilitate or are complicit in corruption.
Now, the one group that's left out there is the bureaucrats, political appointees and politicians.
Right.
Because so much of the corruption around the world is fueled by foreign aid.
U.S. government, World Bank, IMF.
You know, it's foreign aid that's helped make governments of thieves around the world.
It sounds like when they say corruption, what they mean is any private citizen in any one of these countries trying to get away with not having to pay back the loans plus interest in these IMF type scams.
Well, I mean, there it's it's unclear as far as what they would mean as far as that goes.
But certainly the World Bank has been has got a horrible record as far as propping up corrupt regimes and not really caring about human rights abuses.
There was an article I recently did for a U.K. college magazine, the Knight's College of London.
Is that it?
And talking about the World Bank corruption.
I wrote a lot about the World Bank in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I had some luck getting some of their confidential documents.
So and I was and I I have heard of that today.
A KCL dialogue is the name of the magazine.
And it's linked in today's USA Today.
So but the point being that you have all these Western governments and these international organizations, there are just feeding pouring gasoline on the fuels of corruption around the world.
And at the same time, you've got Kerry, David Cameron and others pontificating about how bad corruption is.
And there's and there's not really, you know, I think that they were only hoping for a single day's news cycle of, oh, isn't that great?
They're taking a stand against corruption.
There are so many things that U.S. government could have done to crack down corruption, like like in Afghanistan, which is which the the new president there admitted that it's one of the most corrupt nations in the world.
And but the U.S. is pouring money in there.
There was a story, a good story in The Washington Post last couple of weeks about how the Afghan army is practically bootless because of crooked contracts.
The footwear that they pay for is so bad that it practically falls apart the first time soldiers wear them.
Another and even worse example of corruption in Afghanistan.
There is that there is the top military hospital there was so riddled by corruption that wounded soldiers would actually starve to death if they were not able to pay bribes to the hospital staff for food.
Yeah, amazing.
That was that Wall Street Journal story, right?
Yeah, it was a great Wall Street Journal story, which launched that launch that there were other investigations since then, which confirmed it or gave further details.
But that's a great example of how, you know, U.S. intervenes and not really keeping a close eye on the details.
Yeah.
Well, in Afghanistan, it's the worst because there is a country that, you know, is already as corrupt as could be.
And Lord knows the real number.
Do you have any kind of ballpark of the amount of money that they've spent on, you know, rather than Pentagon, but State Department and NGO type projects and so-called aid to the people of Afghanistan and to their government over these 15 years, Jim?
I don't have a hard number on that, but it's probably well over 100 billion dollars, which has worked out very well for the banks, banks in Dubai.
So, right.
There have been so many stories of how this practically plane loads full of money will be flown out of the Afghan air at the Kabul airport.
So, yeah, it's just amazing.
All right.
And now, yeah.
And it sounds like, you know, when they say corruption, what you're saying here, I think, is where you quote them saying everybody but the bureaucrats.
Really, what they mean is the they're tired of any taxpayers getting away with not paying taxes.
They want to go after them so that they want to help the national governments on in, you know, so-called third world countries where go after their own citizens so that they can pay up to the higher level corruption, you know, on the imperial New York, D.C. level.
Well, the fundamental farce of all this is that they're talking about corruption as far as tax evasion and stuff like this.
But so many of the governments in the world are fundamentally corrupt because they've got far too much power and they're out of control and they're trampling the people who are underneath their boot.
And that's not a problem unless there's tax evasion.
So there are much worse issues, which they just kind of swept under the carpet here simply because it did not fit the theme of their London anti-corruption summit.
All right.
Now, I've got to blame Bernie Sanders for this, along with a lot of other things.
But this one is.
Wow.
What a failure to make a political issue out of the Clinton Foundation.
And maybe Trump will.
Oh, my goodness.
There's a lot of gee, I tell you, folks, lines just waiting right there for him to pick them up and use them.
But this is something that has just got I think a lot of people have heard of it, but it's gotten very little in-depth coverage of who paid what and got what in return for that.
Can you tell us about that at all?
Well, I mean, basically what I know on that is probably the same article as you read the paper, which, as you say, has gotten very little attention thus far in the presidential race.
But, yeah, the Clinton Foundation has collected billions of dollars from some of the beneficiaries of Hillary Clinton's action as secretary of state.
And my understanding was that Hillary Clinton signed an agreement prior to taking the job that there would be like some kind of firewall basically between what she did and what the foundation did.
And from what I've heard, that firewall was not maintained.
Certainly as far as the foundation getting money from some of the beneficiaries of Hillary's actions.
So and there are rumors that the FBI is investigating this.
I've always had great faith in FBI investigations.
So we'll see what plays out on that.
But no, I mean, this is something, as you said, this is something that Bernie Sanders could have gone after and could have drawn a lot of, you know, had a huge impact on that.
However, I mean, maybe, you know, that works out better for Trump.
So because it's like a fresher issue, but the news media has mostly American media has avoided the issue.
But it's going to be it's going to come back.
All right now.
So talk to us a little bit about Egypt here, too, because here's another one that TV would never explain.
But it's really important.
Well, I mean, there's there's there's a lot of things.
You know, I think back to 2011, when the first uprisings were occurring in Egypt, the people, you know, finally fed up with the decades of dictatorship by the current ruler then and going back to the 1950s.
And it was encouraging.
And for the first time ever, there was an open election in Egypt and the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood won.
So the U.S. government was unhappy with that.
In 2013, the Egyptian military had a coup and overthrew him.
And John Kerry came out and said that the military coup praise it for having for having restored democracy.
Now, this is an unusual definition of a coup.
And the Obama folks are in violation of federal law because the law that Senator Leahy passed on the books got through the books was prohibited to U.S. government from giving military aid to governments, to military governments that have overthrown democratically elected governments.
But what the Obama folks have done is pretend it wasn't a coup.
So but there are so many ways that the U.S. government has kowtowed to the Egyptian military.
There was a general government accountability office report came out in the same day as Kerry's speech in London, which said that the U.S. State Department is violating federal law by providing that military equipment.
And it is ignoring the gross human rights.
It's not even keeping track of them.
You know, you can pick up half the newspapers in the world and they have stories of the atrocities committed by the Egyptian government.
You won't find them in the State Department.
Right.
Yes.
Starting with a massacre of a thousand people in the street on the day of the coup or the days after.
Yeah, there was there was an awful lot of bloodshed and the court system has been utterly corrupt.
There was there was a case that was decided, I think, in 2014.
There was a clash in which a single policeman had been killed and a judge sentenced more than 500 people to death for that one policeman killing.
So, I mean, you know, it's efficient.
I mean, it saves paperwork.
Yeah, but but this is what U.S. foreign aid is financing in Egypt.
All right.
Now, I like the way you bring up civil forfeiture here.
It's it reminds me of actually the discussion I was just having with Mark Perry about corruption at the Pentagon, where, you know, if an officer actually steals a little bit of money, he can get in real trouble for that.
The corruption is the system itself.
You don't go outside that and break the rules kind of a thing.
And it's the same thing here where it's pretty unlikely in most counties in America.
There's a couple of ten thousand of them that a sheriff deputy is going to say, give me one hundred dollars.
Right.
That's not going to happen.
He'll give you the ticket.
There's the corruption that pulls you over because he has to make his quota and all those things.
But as far as just pay him off like in Mexico, not so much.
Right.
But then again, he can just take your car as long as he fills out the proper forms.
It's not stealing at all.
It has a fancy legal name.
And they're in a damn thing that you can do about it.
It's not considered corruption at all.
That's just the system.
If you don't like it, run for Congress.
Well, there is.
Yeah, the something Kerry boasted about money.
The U.S. government is going to give 70 million dollars to help boost foreign police training to avoid the cutback on opportunities for bribery and graft.
But back in March, the Obama Justice Department started up again with an asset forfeiture program, which basically basically encourages local and state law enforcement to seize property, which they share a little bit with the feds in order as a way to get it around local state laws.
And then the feds give most of it back to them.
And often the money is actually used for paying bonuses to some of the same policemen who plundered private citizens.
This has been widely condemned in the American media.
It's one of the most brazen examples of conflict of interest.
Unfortunately, it was not included in Mr. Kerry's list of things he wants to finance reform of.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm still I guess I'm pleased that it still generates outrage because this kind of thing has been going on for so long now that I'm pleasantly surprised that people don't just take it for granted that.
Yeah, of course, that's how it is.
Instead, when people learn about civil forfeiture, they think you can't do that.
That's unfair.
It's un-American.
And how can they do that?
And they're just outraged by it.
It just sounds absolutely nonsensical that they could get away with doing that in what people still tend to consider a free society with these self-correcting legal mechanisms of checks and balances and all these things.
Well, you know, people are outraged when they hear about it and say, well, you know, this has got to stop.
And then Eric Holder made a few gestures.
And, you know, I was very skeptical that it would make any real difference.
And then his successors started it up again.
So and even though it's been hammered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, a lot of other places, something libertarians have been great on forever.
But I heard the same kind of thing in the mid-late 1990s.
There was all this outrage over the horrendous abuses.
And, you know, Congress has got to do something.
Congress finally got around to it.
And then the Justice Department pulled strings on Capitol Hill.
And in some ways, they actually made the law worse.
So I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Well, wasn't there – didn't Nebraska outlaw it?
I think so, yeah.
And there was a recently – a recent case in Oklahoma that the Institute for Justice, Dan Alban, helped nail.
The Oklahoma authorities had confiscated a bunch of money from some groups who were doing some work overseas.
And on – there was no justification at all for confiscating it.
And the Institute for Justice filed lawsuits in Oklahoma quickly back down.
All right.
Well, man, I really appreciate you writing this stuff.
Of course, I always love everything that you write, Jim.
But I'm especially pleased to see this in USA Today and to imagine how many people read this because I think, of course, it's very fact-filled as always, including stories that you've broken yourself and that kind of thing, which is very nice.
But I think this is the kind of article that can really shock the conscience, so to speak, of the average person.
Hey, look at our government's war crime-level corruption.
And it is all intertwined with their war crimes too, as you were talking about in Afghanistan.
This is a real hell of a thing, man.
It's the kind of thing that I think will really blow people's minds and really change the way that they look at things.
I really hope so.
Well, Scott, thanks so much for giving me the chance to talk about this story.
I hope you're right.
The older I've gotten, the less confidence I have that anything will shock the conscience enough to make a difference as far as American politics.
Well, that's the whole thing.
You may not notice yourself nudging the course of history, but you're certainly changing some minds and helping some people no matter what.
Well, I hope you're right, and I hope that enough minds can be changed in time that we can roll back this huge amount of federal power that's messing up so many people's lives.
Well, you read this thing, you can see how far down the slippery slope we are right now, so it's certainly time for people to get it together.
Hey, thanks again, Jim.
I really appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for your kind words, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is the great James Bovard.
He writes for USA Today, I think still for the Wall Street Journal from time to time.
You can find him at jimbovard.com, and check him out on Amazon.com.
He really wrote a ton of great books.
I used to be able to recite them all off the top of my head.
I'm slipping in my old age.
But he's written a lot of great stuff, and his most recent book is a lot of fun.
It's this great memoir, Public Policy Hooligan.
You'll really like it.
It's the adventures of Jim Bovard.
That's fun.
So, thanks again for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
Sign up for the RSS, iTunes Stitcher, and all that stuff at scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show, and help support, if you like, at scotthorton.org slash donate.
Thanks, y'all.
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