10/02/07 – Becky Akers – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Introducing our first guest today, Becky Akers from LouRockwell.com.
Welcome back to the show, Becky.
Thanks, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
Well, I'm fine.
I hope you got a nap in today.
Yeah, a little bit.
I got kind of a funny sleep schedule around here.
This lady, she answers my email at 6 o'clock in the morning this morning.
She says, wait a minute, 6 o'clock in the morning, I got this email from you at 3 o'clock in the morning.
When do you sleep?
That's what I want to know.
I want everyone to know you are so fierce a fighter for freedom, you don't even go to bed at night.
Oh, yeah, that's what it was.
It wasn't when I was sitting here getting high watching movies and goofing off.
You like my interpretation much better.
Yeah, oh, yeah, a true champion of liberty, me, yeah.
Hey, you know, I really love it when you write stuff like this article you got on Lew Rockwell today.
You know, I just, well.
It's unbelievable that cops, I don't know if Phoenix's cops are just so stupid, they actually think we will believe a woman strangled herself while she was handcuffed, or if they are so arrogant, they don't care that we see right through it.
I can't decide.
Yeah, well, you know, we even did experiments here in the house.
We didn't have handcuffs, but, you know, we did the hands behind the back, and let's see, if I had handcuffs on, the chain would be maybe this long, and the bracelets allow this much freedom of movement of your wrist, and so I can see maybe your hands getting to here, but not to there, and we're skipping ahead.
What we're talking about here, Carol Ann Gottbaum, apparently murdered by the Transportation Security Administration last Friday at the Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Arizona.
And it's just so transparent.
You had referenced the chain, and let me just backtrack a little bit from that and say that's a new development.
I think it's been put out there because people aren't believing the original story that she was handcuffed and somehow worked the handcuffs up behind her back, brought them overhead.
I mean, there's just no way you can do this.
No.
Physically impossible.
Brought them overhead and somehow strangled herself.
Well, since that story didn't fly, the cops are now telling us, oh, wait, we had a chain on her connecting the handcuffs to a bench, and that's how she did it.
She somehow got that chain up there, and it's like, you know, people, come on.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know about that.
I was just thinking of the two or three links between the bracelets on the cuffs is all I was referring to there.
I hadn't heard that they're now adding a whole new chain to this thing.
There's a whole new chain added, and this is another reason to really sit here and say, well, are you people this arrogant that you don't care that we're seeing through it, or are you just so stupid you can't come up with another lie?
Because the story is changing.
It's changing every couple of hours.
I'd go with the arrogance thing.
Yeah.
That would be my guess.
I think that's what it is.
Okay.
Well, thank God we're on the radio here so everybody can just use their imagination.
Picture a real handsome guy pretending he's got a handcuffs on behind his back.
That's me at my desk here.
Now, there is a way, Becky, and I'm a pretty slim guy.
If your ass ain't too fat, if you have your hands cuffed behind your back, you could slip them below your feet and get them in front of you.
You might.
I'm doing that right now, actually.
Taking my legs.
There you go.
My little experiment.
So I got my hands in front of me now.
If you have your hands cuffed behind your back and you're determined to have them in front of you instead, that's how you do it.
You go below your feet.
But you're not strangling yourself.
You're not strangling yourself.
Right.
Yeah.
I can't figure.
Yeah.
Once you have your hands in front of you, if you do it that way, well, there's nowhere to strangle yourself now.
Precisely.
Right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So now, continuing this, and again, thanking the heavens that this is radio and not television.
Take your hands behind your back and if you just have clasp one wrist with the other hand kind of thing, that basically approximates the position that your arms would be in if you were handcuffed.
Mm-hmm.
And now, there's a certain amount of flexibility, right?
We have at least, what, two or three links of chain between the bracelets.
Right.
When I tried this, I didn't hold my hands together.
I just held them behind a couple inches apart.
Right.
Okay.
Now, I'm kind of flexible and I can at least, I can sort of contort to where the pinky sides of my hands are pushed together in the middle of my back.
Mm-hmm.
So I've kind of, my elbows are basically pointing straight down.
Right.
And I've got my hands between my angel wings here.
Right.
But that's it, lady.
I mean, you'd have to tear my shoulders out of their sockets for me to go anywhere beyond this.
Yes.
And I'm a pretty skinny and pretty flexible guy.
So the idea that somehow, you know, Ripley's Believe It or Not, I could continue to move my arms somewhere over my head to the point where I had the chain of my handcuffs across my throat.
Impossible.
Yes.
It's absolutely impossible.
And the other thing to stress about this is there's now a lot of focus on whether the cops quote, followed procedure.
Okay.
Apparently, if you are jumping on a woman and knocking her to the ground and handcuffing her, procedure says you then have to check on her every 15 minutes when you've thrown her in a cell still handcuffed.
I want to back up from that and ask, why do we have holding cells at airports?
Okay.
When were these built into airports?
And what are they doing there?
Why do we have cops patrolling airports?
What is going on in this country that men can jump a lone woman in an airport, knock her to the ground, and people just pass by as though this is normal?
Now, I don't know that they did, in fact, obviously, there were eyewitnesses because a lot of the accounts are quoting eyewitnesses who are telling us, yeah, they jumped on her.
One guy kneeled on her back while other cops grabbed her flailing arms.
But again, this is like something you would read from the Siberian gulag or Nazi Germany.
What is going on that this is happening in the United States?
Well, the answer to that is for the people walking by, and I've got to admit, I very well might come to the same conclusion.
Some guy is walking by, he sees cops beating some lady up and arresting her.
Oh, absolutely.
I'm not faulting them, Scott, because let's remember, every single person in that airport but the cops is completely disarmed.
Cops are packing all this firepower.
We are helpless.
Once you enter an airport, you are absolutely helpless to defend yourself.
Everything you could possibly use as a weapon is taken from you.
Well, and the thing is, though, I think out of the average crowd of people standing around at the airport, if they knew that the cops were going to take this lady in the back and execute her, they might even risk their own life to try to protect her.
But the assumption is that, well, she'll have her phone call and a lawyer, and at worst she'll be prosecuted in a civilian criminal trial, and that things are basically going to go according to the Bill of Rights, not she's going to be executed when they take her into the back room.
Right.
Right.
And to be somewhat fair, I'm not sure fairness is called for here, so people just bear with me, but to be fair, it's possible there's some kind of underlying medical condition that strictly speaking the cops didn't kill her, it's possible she had a heart attack brought on by their abuse, brought on by the extreme panic she was feeling.
So it's very possible the autopsy will show that, that she in fact didn't suffocate, that the cops didn't break her neck, that they didn't break her back or something like that.
So possibly they are not, strictly speaking, in a legal sense responsible for murder, but we all know that's what happened.
She would not have had the heart attack if she had not been scared to death, you know, which is absolutely hysterical.
So again, we have to ask, what is going on in this country that we have allowed the federal government to instill this kind of climate at airports where beating up women is accepted and normal?
Where shooting a man because he changes his mind and wants to get off an airplane is somehow a criminal act and it's okay for two air marshals to follow him off the plane and shoot him in the jetway as they did with Rigoberio Albezar in December of 2005.
And quite frankly, I'm surprised this isn't happening more often.
I do think we are going to see an acceleration of this over the next decade or so if the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security and the various other police departments that patrol airports, if these people are not reined in.
Actually I think you're going to have to see the TSA and DHS abolished before this kind of abuse stops.
In this particular case, Becky, has the coroner put out his official statement yet?
No.
As far as I know, there has not been an official statement from anyone except the cops and Mrs. Gottbaum's family.
And I assume that the autopsy was supposed to have been done yesterday because the family wants to have an independent observer present that they are sending out to Arizona.
They have managed to put the autopsy off.
I believe I read it was now for today.
But then again, once you do an autopsy, it does take several weeks to get the results back.
So I imagine it will be a while before we find out what really happened.
If we ever do, let's remember that we are dealing with a politician here in the deceased woman's family.
Betsy Gottbaum is the public advocate of New York City.
You don't get to be, basically what the public advocate is, is kind of like a vice mayor.
If Bloomberg were to die or be incapacitated or whatever, she will take over as the mayor of New York City.
She is a dedicated statist, loves government.
In fact, her website as public advocate says that she's here to help government help people or words to that effect.
I don't remember the exact quote, but if you want to have nightmares, go read her website.
We don't have somebody here who's out for blood.
We have somebody here who believes in the procedures, believes in government.
Yes, the cops probably did something wrong to hurt my stepdaughter-in-law, but we want to reserve judgment.
We want to wait until all the facts are in.
Lay your daughter dead.
Your stepdaughter-in-law is dead.
I would not be as willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if I were in that situation.
Yeah, it's so hard to choose between the state and your own family.
You want to give the state the benefit of the doubt when your family is dead.
That is an interesting wrinkle in this case.
You point out in your article that's running today at LouRockwell.com that Rigoberto Alpazar, the guy that you mentioned who basically had some kind of panic attack, anxiety attack and wanted to get off the airplane and was gunned down by TSA goons.
He was a nobody.
But in this case, this lady's mother-in-law is the head smithers up there in New York City.
Right.
Right.
And I will be very interested to see how this investigation proceeds.
Does she push full throttle for it?
Or as a politician, if somebody from the federal government wanted to dangle an office in front of her to shut her up, will she take it?
Again, we're dealing with politicians.
These are not good people.
These are people who have spent their entire lives intimidating the rest of this.
It's because of people like Betsy Gottbaum, not her specifically, but people like her who share her ideology that we have the TSA in the first place, that we have the DHS, that cops are patrolling airports.
It's because of her and people like her that this whole situation exists.
So there's always been cops at airports.
So you're talking about these new federal goons, am I right?
No, I am talking about just standard cops.
Why are they patrolling airports?
When you go into your favorite restaurant, you don't sit down at the table and then a cop walks you to the door and starts looking around the restaurant.
Well, the difference is almost all the airports are government owned facilities.
Exactly.
Why?
Why should our taxes be paying for these businesses?
And then why are our taxes being taken from us further to patrol these businesses?
An airport is simply a business like any other.
There is no reason that any city or state should be owning an airport.
You should be in the hands of private entrepreneurs who are interested in attracting customers and who would not treat their customers as criminals and have cops patrolling the premises.
This is just a prescription for disaster.
Then on top of that, you add the airline abuse of customers and the airline's confusion of customers with criminals, you're going to have situations like what sets this poor woman off every single day, where people are just endlessly frustrated.
You go to the airport, the airline has told you it will fly you from point A to point B in so many hours.
Now weather is one thing, and I think any rational human being understands an airplane can't take off if a thunderstorm rolls in.
But at the same point, that's not what is happening in most instances of delays.
And you add the TSA in on top of this, delaying passengers so they can't get to their gate on time, you've just got endless frustration, endless rage.
And yet passengers are simply supposed to stand there and say, okay, Massey, you say I can't get on the plane, that's just fine, I'll wait and take one when you tell me I can.
This is a prescription for much more mayhem than we've seen currently.
And as I said, I think this is going to increase in the future and we're going to see this more and more.
As you point out in your article, it's this civility that's absolutely required.
You walk into the airport, look at your shoes, don't say nothing, hands by your sides, don't cause any trouble, don't make eye contact with the sixth grade dropout who has police power over you.
Exactly, exactly.
And I put myself in that situation of a bystander watching this woman get beat up.
And I think I wouldn't have had the courage to do anything.
What could I do?
Whatever I said, whatever I did, they would have jumped me next.
And this is terrifying to think that in a supposedly free country, this is what people are thinking.
I don't want to stick my neck out because I'll be next.
That is the kind of mentality you have in slave labor camps.
And what kind of people are we becoming when able-bodied men can simply walk past a woman getting beaten up by goons, you know, a single woman on her own, not to the ground.
And yet, again, I don't blame them, because I know I wouldn't have done anything either.
I would have stood there thinking, I don't have a gun, I don't have a knife, I've got my fingernails, and there's not going to be much use against the cops bullets.
So aside from all the other damage that the TSA and the police state mentality at airports has done to freedom, we should also be concerned about what it's doing to civility.
We are losing the vestiges of civilization.
This is how savages treat each other, where women are jumped by multiple men.
This does not go on in civilized society, or it should not go on in civilized society.
And it's government leading us down this path.
Absolutely.
They're the leaders of the debauchery.
Absolutely.
Everybody follow me.
Yes.
The government has always turned people into barbarians, and it always will.
And you know, this is another reason if you care, you know, a lot of people don't care about politics.
Okay, fine.
But if you care about just having a civilized world in which to live in which to raise your children, you've got to protest stuff like this, this can't go on, you need to call for the abolition of the TSA of municipal owned airports, they need to be turned into private companies that will run them to attract customers, you need to call for the abolition of the Department of Homeland Security, which is making war on American citizens, and labeling it a war on terrorism.
You know, I think really one of the big things here is, well, the desensitization, I remember the first time I played Grand Theft Auto, it took me five minutes or something to stop freaking out.
I just can't believe, whoa, he tracks blood across the street after he kills you.
It was very shocking.
Wow.
Yes.
And that went away pretty quick.
You know, I remember back when I was in ninth grade, The Simpsons was the edgiest thing in American culture, you know?
Right, right.
And this is that same sort of desensitization.
I don't mean to compare the police state to The Simpsons, it's different, you understand.
But the point being that what's shocking is not all that shocking.
And the civility that we all portray at the airport for these people, eh, once you land in whatever city you're going to, if that's what's expected of you in line queuing for the taxi cab out front of the airport, if that's what's expected of you on your way into the office building where you're going to have your meeting, et cetera, eh, we're getting used to it.
We're kind of taking the police state from our airports and we're bringing it with us when we leave the place.
And Scott, that's an excellent point, and that is precisely what Leviathan is hoping for.
And I think that this is the real purpose of the TSA and of all the government strictures at airports.
It's to get us accustomed to it.
Remember what the most passengers at airports are.
This is pretty much the middle and upper classes that use airports.
Most poor people go on buses.
Poor people are used to cops bursting into their homes since many of them are living in projects, government owned, they are used to cops stopping them on the street since many of them are black or Hispanic and demanding ID from them.
I mean, I would never turn my idea over to a cop on the street.
These people don't understand that they don't have to.
They're conditioned to it from birth.
So the police state already has the lower class, the poorer people in its clutches and they don't question, they know they're outgunned.
Now it's working on the middle and upper classes at airports and it's conditioning people who usually have the resources to respond, the resources to say, hey, wait a minute, you can't do that to me.
It's conditioning these people now to go along with the police state.
When you can stand there and watch an 85-year-old woman being felt up at a checkpoint and you turn away and you don't say anything, you have been conditioned.
And then when you go through and you stand with your arms out and they're wanding you and you don't say anything, you're being conditioned.
When this stuff starts ringing, TSA is threatening to take this out to the streets now.
They're going to be in subways, they're already in bus stations, they've threatened to do it on trains, to Amtrak passengers, it's spreading.
And I would say 10 or 15 years from now, it will not seem unusual to walk out of your house and see a police checkpoint on the corner and you'll have to stand in line to get off your road once you walk through a magnetometer and once you have been patted down to make sure you're not carrying anything that the government doesn't want you to have.
Yeah, and get your eyeballs scanned.
Exactly, exactly.
And you know what's funny about this too, I remember the George Carlin bit from I think 2000 where he talked about what a joke airline security was and how they never found a single bomb ever.
And I guess he kind of felt like he had to eat some crow or something, I don't know if he ever contradicted himself.
He surely doesn't do that bit anymore post September 11th and what have you, but his point still stands.
Absolutely.
I mean, the entire history of all this airport security, have they ever found a single bomb, Becky?
Have they ever stopped a single terrorist?
One?
No, no, they have not.
And they didn't on 9-11 either, because remember, the terrorists got through, they did what they wanted to do.
And actually, many people have pointed out, they didn't violate any laws, they went with existing FAA regulations, box cutters were committed.
Now, you and I know that if all if the FAA didn't exist, if airlines and airports were privatized, they could never have pulled off what they did, because a private entrepreneur would say, hey, wait a minute, these are my customers, it's my property, I don't want to risk it.
It would have been something in place, just like department stores can't tolerate theft.
And so they have safeguards in place that prevent theft, but do not alienate customers.
Airports and airlines would have to do the same thing if they were privatized.
And everybody should understand that while airports are outright owned by governments, in most cases, now sometimes there's this private-public partnership nonsense, but to all intents and purposes, airports are owned by governments, airlines are too.
And we need to understand that.
You need to understand that the person behind the United Airlines desk is not a civilian.
In effect, he or she works for the federal government, because the government so heavily subsidizes and so heavily regulates airlines that they are private corporations in name only.
In other words, basically every interaction, anyone from the airline hands with you is regulated by some kind of federal law, rule, whatever.
And I don't know if any of you ever get on the FAA's website, just take a look.
I mean, I have not even downloaded the rule books because they are so extensive.
It'll take you like three days to download them.
And it's just every single possible scenario you can think of, there's a rule that governs it.
So this is what we're dealing with.
When you go to the airport then and you're dealing with United Airways, understand that you're going to get the same amount of courtesy and consideration from them that you can expect from the cop down in the corner, that you would get from an IRS agent, that you'd get from the FBI if they were checking up on your neighbors.
I mean, this is what you're dealing with.
It's not somebody there for your service, it's somebody there to control you and to spy on you and to get you to do what the government says.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Becky Akers from LouRockwell.com.
And I'm sure you saw in one of the Republican debates, I believe it was the Fox News debate, where Ron Paul talked about the Transportation Security Administration and his belief that basically after September 11th, in the panic of the people and in the plotting of the state, we went the wrong direction.
We should have looked at September 11th and said, well, so much for government.
And instead, we turned to them and said, yeah, let's let you guys control everything.
And I really like the way he made the parallel to armored cars.
We don't have a system in this country where the only people allowed to transport large amounts of cash are government police.
We have private security companies that drive armored cars around.
Apparently, they spend their investors' money and portions of their earnings and so forth on buying the armored cars themselves.
And they hire security guards with guns, and they transport big sacks with dollar signs on them to and fro across every city and every state in this union all day long, every day.
And how often do you hear about an armored car getting hijacked, once every five or ten years?
Something like that.
Yep.
Yep.
And that is an excellent point.
There is no reason whatsoever that the airline industry should be subsidized with our taxes to provide its own security.
You know, first of all, it isn't security.
It's politically driven theater to make passengers think that the government is out there caring and concerned and that it can, in fact, prevent a terrorist attack.
And that's absolutely false on all respects.
The government doesn't care.
It basically is, you know, it's run by people who are very self-interested, who just simply want to get reelected to their positions of authority and power, and then they appoint their buddies to the regulatory position so that their power increases to think that they care.
You know, I mean, look to your family and your friends for caring.
That's where caring should come from.
When you look to the government, your first reaction should be, wait a minute, you people kill each other.
I'm sorry, you kill us.
You want to wear the guns and you prohibit us from wearing guns.
Why?
I mean, why would I trust somebody in that situation?
And you know, this is what's going on at airports.
It's just a federal arm of the federal government that's still called private, which is also, could really upset anyone who loves free markets because airlines, by and large, by the general public are considered to be private corporations and they are not in any way, shape or form.
You know, all of the abuses that you suffer from an airline is because of the federal government's involvement and those of us who love freedom and who love the market need to make this very clear to folks, you know, if you're standing in the security line, make sure you say, this is what government does to us.
When your flight is delayed three hours because of the FAA and its ridiculous regulations and its overcrowding of airline schedules, tell people this is because of the FAA.
You know, we need to free the airline industry from these folks, although actually airline industry doesn't want to be free because of course, the feds protect them from competition and they make it virtually impossible for new carriers to get up and running.
So it's a very, very cozy and incestuous relationship between the airlines and the government.
I was vastly amused a couple days ago, there was, Bush sat down with Mary Peters of the Department of Transportation and one of the airline executives, I think it was James May from the Air Transport Association, which is the airline's lobbying group, but I could be very wrong.
At any rate, they're sitting there deciding what regulations will now be put through and it's like, doesn't this tell people, you know, there's cooperation here, it's not, there's no animosity, they're washing each other's hands and they're washing each other's backs.
Yeah, and you know, for the sake of ease, if people remember the movie The Aviator, with what's-his-name playing Howard Hughes?
Yeah.
Who's that guy, the actor with the blonde hair?
I don't know, I don't know anything about actors, sorry.
Yeah, I don't either.
But it's that movie The Aviator and Alan Alda, Hawkeye from MASH, plays the corrupt senator and it's Pan Am versus TWA in the US Senate.
And they're passing a federal law that only Pan Am can do transnational flights and not TWA or vice versa, whichever it was.
And oh, well, you know, we're just looking out for the best interests of the American people and they think, we think that they'll just be much better served if only one airline is allowed by law to fly to Europe.
Yeah.
I mean, and this was, you know, in that movie, this is taking place right after the Second World War.
This has gone on since the inception of aviation, basically.
It's fascinating to look at aviation history and automobile history, because one of the reasons that we have federal control of our highways is because when cars were first being invented, only rich people could afford them.
And once you bought your car, though, you're now faced with a problem of where do I drive it because there isn't the highway system and there aren't paved roads.
Well, you've already laid out a substantial amount for your new toy.
And do you really want to pay to construct highways as well?
So what you did was you went to your state and federal representatives and you told them you wanted this to be done through taxes.
And that's actually how the feds got involved with, you know, national highways is because the first rich, wealthy folks who bought cars specifically asked that it be taken over by the federal government.
You have kind of the same idea with aviation.
It was aviation had a problem because planes made their debut just around the time of World War One, and they were used primarily to kill people in the war.
Government bought them and, you know, the bombing people with them.
And so when you had civilians back home seeing all this, they were very reluctant to get on the first plane.
Nobody wanted to fly.
And so the federal government was asked by airline executives to step in and start doing things like sending the mail by planes and shipping other things by plane so that the general population would feel, oh, wow, if the federal government is guaranteeing this, it's got to be safe.
And each year the control over the air aviation industry grew.
Until now, it is so deeply entrenched with the feds that you'd almost have to just annihilate everything at the federal level before you could free, you know, the airline industry.
And, you know, people don't have to be an anarcho capitalist who favors completely abolishing the state as I do in order to just see that the nature of the problem is the combination of the public and private power together.
When your boss is a cop, I mean, other than you work for the state, but you work for a factory or whatever, and the boss is a cop, you're living in slavery.
You know, that's what we learned.
That's our simple definition that we learn at communism and fascism are basically for intents and purposes the same when we're kids is, well, ultimately what you have is government control over the means of production and for that matter, whatever goods and services.
So it's not, you know, the problem isn't that the government has police forces in order to protect private property owners from force, theft, fraud and arson and crimes, it's that they're buddies.
They all work together to protect each other, to protect the businesses from competition, to protect them from failure.
After September 11th, of course, many of the major air carriers would have gone out of business except for the fact that the Federal Reserve created a bunch of money out of nothing and dumped it in their bank accounts.
That's right.
And so that's the problem here.
It's the combination of the two.
Nothing wrong with planes.
If you love government, fine.
Nothing wrong with government.
Just don't let them have anything to do with each other.
That's the thing that always amazes me, Scott, because the free market, and I mean now a totally free unregulated market, one of the most powerful things on earth, it gives food to people that don't have any.
It takes resources from one area of the country and transports it to another.
It's just incredibly powerful.
You know, Leonard Reed with his iPencil essay, how do you get all these people who have nothing in common to cooperate each other on a worldwide scale except for the free market?
Why in the world would anyone want to harness that power and give it to the state which kills people, impoverishes people, hurts, maims, steals, rapes, pillages?
Why would we turn such an important and powerful tool as the market over to government?
So anytime you see one of these public-private partnerships, remember that and think, do I want government having this powerful tool to use against me?
Because that's really what's going on.
You are simply a pawn.
And the corporations and government, when they get in bed together, all they're interested in is themselves and their profits and their power.
And you're a pawn in that equation.
And, you know, corporations do all kinds of terrible things, too.
It's a matter of impunity.
You know, a cop, again, can just kill you and say, yeah, but I was on the clock and I have sovereign immunity.
The corporate guy shoots you, he might get in trouble himself.
Yes, but if he's protected by the government, which most corporations are, I mean, I won't make a blanket statement because I haven't researched enough to do that, but most corporations are so cozy with both state and federal governments that, you know, I mean, that's the point.
That's, you know, it's a mutually beneficial relationship.
The corporations are protected from competition and they get tax breaks and they get lots and lots of power.
Meanwhile, the politicians know that they have a very loyal base out there because the most powerful people in the private sector are supporting them.
They have a vested interest in making sure that the government can do that.
And this goes clear back to Alexander Hamilton.
That was his whole point, is that you enlist the businessmen on the government side and this gives, you know, the businessmen then have a very vested interest since their money is involved in supporting the new national government.
So, I mean, this idea is very, very old and you're absolutely right.
Corporations do heinous, horrible things at the behest of government and to keep government's goodwill so that their profits keep rolling in.
All right, now, when it comes to the beat level cop going around killing people, seems like the fact that everybody's got a camcorder built into their cell phone nowadays is beginning not necessarily to turn the tide on these events.
They seem to happen more and more, but maybe actually that itself is an effect of the ubiquitous video camera.
Big Brother is watching us, but all those little brothers are all watching too.
That is a wonderful thought and, in fact, I'm anxious to see, because that is the one thing I've thought, you know, again, putting myself into a bystander's position while Carol Gottbaum is being beaten up by cops at an airport.
What would I have done?
That's the one answer I do come up with.
I would have pulled out my video phone and, you know, started taping.
And I'm going to be very curious to see in a couple of days if something pops up on YouTube from somebody who is there, somebody who thought, somebody who taped it like they did the Rodney King beating.
And, yes, you're absolutely right, it's time we turned the tables on these people.
They tape us constantly.
Let's tape them and let's show their brutality for what it is.
And, you know, the left radicals have for a long time had a thing called Cop Watch all over the country where, you know, they make a point of doing stuff like this and I don't know all their details, but I think it's pretty heroic really to say, hey, look, there's six cops arresting some guy.
Stop the car.
Let me out.
I'm going to go get right in their face and document the whole thing.
That takes courage and that's what those guys do.
I agree.
With the everybody having a video camera in their pocket, I wonder whether, and especially with places like YouTube for people to post those videos, I wonder whether we're looking at a force for liberty that will be impossible to resist.
I mean, the state, you know, don't get me wrong, I know we live in a $3 trillion a year empire, the biggest government in the history of the solar system and everything, but if every single average doofus out there has a video camera in his pocket, how much tyranny are they really going to be able to get away with when they're being thrown in our face all day?
At some point, there's got to be a line where we're not going to take this anymore.
I hope and pray that we are living on the cusp, that we have seen the tyranny go about as far as it's going to go, that after Ron Paul is elected, he is able to start scaling this back, that he has the full-fledged support of many people in this country who are empowered by his election, have been silent heretofore, now think, you know what, there's a chance.
And they come out and they start turning this stuff back.
So it may be that we are living in the darkest hour and that morning is about to break.
I think that on my more optimistic days, but usually I'm not nearly that optimistic, I'm usually very pessimistic and think, you know what, if people sat and watched them slaughter families at Waco, they will sit and watch almost anything.
So then I don't know.
And it's very, very scary, Scott, I don't know if you had a chance to read any of the reader comments on various news sites that featured this story on Carol Gottbaum, but they are chilling.
It's things like, you know, rich white B word, I'm glad she got it, she had what was coming to her.
How dare she?
She thinks she can come to the airport any old time and just get on her plane.
You know, that's how rich people are.
I'm just thinking, oh my goodness, do you read this back before you pose it?
Are you this brutal that you're glad a woman is dead just because she got to the airport late?
So I don't know that's what we're dealing with.
Yeah, it's a toughie.
I don't know what the percentages of people who could ever care.
It's funny that you bring up Waco, you know, that was it for me.
I was 15 and I just assumed that the government started the fire that day.
And of course, the facts prove that my guess was 100% correct later.
And you know, I probably already hated the state before that.
But that was it for me in 1993 when I was a kid.
These guys are liars and murderers in the words of the great Bill Hicks.
And you know, I'm not going to grant them the slightest bit of legitimacy, not after this bloodbath 100 miles from my doorstep.
And I know people who looked at that and said, gee, that's too bad.
But then in the run up to the Iraq war, they said, wait a minute, this guy Saddam Hussein is a secularist.
He's the most Western of all the leaders in the whole place.
He's not tired.
What's going on here?
Why are we?
Wait a minute.
If they can lie us into a war, something's wrong here.
So there are people who, Waco, no big deal, bug on the windshield.
But then the Iraq war, that was it.
Ding, ding, ding, and they snapped right out of it.
And so who knows what it takes?
You know, maybe it's, it's this one murder of this innocent woman at the Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix.
That's, you know, going to turn over a new leaf for another few thousand people out there.
I agree with you.
It seems like anybody who could be woken up would have already, but you never know.
You and I just have to keep hoping for more and more horrible murders like this to help wake people up.
Well, you know, we may not need to be that drastic because I was just reading this morning about the TSA's new policy that children carrying remote control toys will be pulled aside for secondary screening, which of course means they're going to be feeling up mommy's little darling.
So I'm wondering now, will this finally motivate parents to start really getting on the war path and saying, you can't do that to my child?
OK.
Well, apparently there was a video posted on YouTube by an Egyptian college student in Florida demonstrating how to turn a remote control toy car into a detonation device.
And that has the FBI and the DHS and the TSA just horrified.
And you know, again, since I've read only the government's quotes on this and I haven't read much from the students and because there isn't much out there from the students that are supposedly behind this, you know, I turn a real John to sign this.
It's like, well, the students confessed and I think, yeah, and we know how the questioning was done, don't we?
You know, you better sign this confession, like we said, or you'll never see the light of day again.
So even if all of this is true, though, even if it happened exactly the way a lying, thieving, stealing, murdering government says it did, is that any reason to feel up a 12 year old girl when she's going through the security thing because she's got, you know, a remote control toy car she's taking to her cousin for his birthday party.
Here's the thing, too, is you're never going to run out of new and ingenious ways to take people's lives if that's what you want to do.
Yes.
Any idiot can drive up to any airport in America right now, take their AK-47, walk in the front door and kill everyone on this side of the metal detectors.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, remote control cars next, it'll be, you know, poisonous peanut butter or whatever it is.
And this is a fundamental point, that's a fundamental point as to why the Transportation Security Administration will never work and never succeed because a private entrepreneur running an airport would sit there and say, this is a realistic threat.
This is not.
Here's another realistic threat.
This one isn't.
I will screen against only the realistic threats because it's costing me money.
And I bet on the other hand, I want to make sure that I'm not leaving anything out that's a realistic threat because that'll cost me customers.
TSA isn't bound by any of those considerations.
TSA simply goes out there and says, you know what?
A feather could blow into an engine and therefore we have to put up concrete burials so birds can't get onto the airfield and they will spend eight billion dollars doing that.
Never sitting there and saying, this is an unrealistic threat.
No way in 100 million years will this ever happen.
But because it possibly might, they will spend millions of our tax dollars and take away all our freedom.
And this is why it's so very important to get rid of the TSA.
You're right.
When you're dealing with a private interest, they have all these ratios, basically whether they're expressed in actual numbers or not, but it's all no matter weighing risk benefit and how high would we have to build a wall to keep the birds out and will we be able to take off our jets over that wall and questions like that.
And the thing is when you're dealing with government, I'm reminded of just elementary school or something.
When you're dealing with a government employee who doesn't have any of those things to measure, all you got is hope that they're going to apply reason and say, well, this might be the rule but it really doesn't apply in this circumstance, right?
Everybody and everybody shrugs and everybody goes about their day.
That's the way things are supposed to work is somewhere there's a default where a responsible person says, eh, letter of the law be damned, this is not right.
We always remember that government employees are drunk on power and a drunk person doesn't reason.
And so therefore TSA looks at the airport situation with totally different objectives than you or I would.
TSA looks at it and says, how can we get more power?
How can I get a bigger budget next year?
How can I get more press time and more favorable press time?
And the last they're concerned about is security or accommodating passengers.
You and I go through the same kind of ratios every day.
You have a lock on the door to your house.
You don't have a moat and crocodiles and guys standing up on the roof with AK-47s and fortress built around your house because even though that might keep you perfectly secure, you realize that the odds of somebody breaking into your house are not enough to justify the expense of hiring full-time guards and feeding the crocodiles and digging the moat and everything else.
Well, I don't have my own army of tax collectors to go and generate all the revenue for me either.
There you go.
Now, okay, one more issue here before I let you go is racial profiling.
You know, when you talk about mommy's little sweetheart is now going to get felt up by the goons because she's got a remote control car and that kind of thing, eh, I think probably the image in most people's mind is of an American little girl, whether a little white girl or a little black girl or a little Korean ancestry American, someone who is certainly not a terrorist but just one of us getting victimized at the airport.
And you know, a lot of people will tell you, Becky, that that is the really ridiculous part, that if you really want to have airport security, you concentrate on Arabs particularly, Muslims in general, or people from Muslim countries in general, and first them and leave us the hell alone.
What do you say about that, public or private?
Well, I'll tell you what, that really irritates me because first of all, it is so antithetical to freedom.
And let's be real clear about this, a government strong enough to harass an Arabic person is strong enough to harass you, and the government never stops with just the group it first goes after it always expands.
So okay, even if you could scale the TSA back, even if you had some foolproof method for determining whether each person walking through the airport is Arabic or not, and what ratio are we going to frisk the half Arabs as well?
How about that?
I mean, this is going back to slavery days where an octoroon, an eighth of a black person was considered a slave.
I mean, you know, they had the slave dealers and slave laws had these ratios with that do we want to descend to that again, so that's your first problem is that it is so antithetical to freedom.
And the second problem is it doesn't work.
And many people have pointed this out, I don't need to spend a whole lot of time on it.
But you know, once you have identified a group that's going to be frisked, you simply recruit that, you know, the terrorists simply recruit people from other groups.
It is so illogical that again, my main objection to it is not that it doesn't work.
My main objection is this is one of the surest roads to destroying freedom.
And I do get lots of email from readers who say, you know, the other day at the airport, I saw him harassing this elderly grandmother who was white, and they let a Middle Eastern guy just walk in.
It's like, that's not your objection.
Your objection should be, why isn't the elderly grandmother being left alone too?
Not, why isn't the Middle Eastern guy getting searched?
This is an incredibly important point to think about.
And it's also a wedge that government uses by pitting groups of people against each other.
Don't let them do that to you.
If any of you out there think this is the way to go, frisk Middle Easterners, don't fall for this kind of propaganda from Leviathan who wants to make us hate each other so that we will turn to government to protect us.
One more question, Becky Akers from LouRockwell.com whose article is posted up there today.
It's called The Killing of Carol Ann Gottbaum.
When's the book coming out?
Well, once I get off the radio, I'm going to start writing again.
Yeah, you do that.
Becky Akers, everybody.
LouRockwell.com.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye-bye.